The new debate format that has automatic microphone shutoff is probably better, but visually boring. The split-screen view mostly shows the other candidate staring impassively. Maybe some basic sign language training could shake this up?
Yeah, I keep being surprised that no one has done this, and I keep forgetting about it afterwards, probably because it seems like such a simple and boring insight. And yet it still hasn't gotten fixed!!!
A colleague has recently lost her father and is now going through all the legal probate stuff. Everything is going to his wife so in theory it should all be simple.
The solicitor wanted to know the value of the contents of his house (the one the wife now owns and still lives in.) Why did she need this information? From what I've been told, her answer was, "I have to put it on the forms."
Anyway, my friend provided a number, the solicitor said, "no that sounds wrong" and made up a completely different number.
My question is, what's the point of requiring this information? What are they planning to do with it? And, most importantly, what are the possible long term consequences of giving a number that's completely wrong (in either direction)?
In short, should my friend let this go or is there any reason to go back and say, hey, hang on.
We're all in the UK, I don't know to what degree this kind of thing varies across countries.
Did they inspect the contents of the house? How accurate do you think your colleague is at appraisal? If it's a made-up number without an inspection, that could be worth fighting, it's a 40% tax after all.
You'll know more than me on how the UK does things, but the online site says the wife doesn't pay if it's given to them through a will. I don't know if that applies if the wife is instead getting it by default.
Invisalign -- how much of the "treatment plan" is set by the company vs the individual orthodontist? IE Should this be price-shopped? Or does the individual ortho's experience matter?
If the Federal government says "medicaid dollars don't go to hospitals that don't provide abortions in certain cases" shouldn't the enforcement mechanism for that be "Medicaid denying reimbursement requests for the hospital" not suing the hospital?
Like does the federal government need a court's permission to deny medicaid reimbursement requests?
And furthermore, if the state law says "abortion is not allowed" and federal law says "if you accept medicaid dollars you have to allow abortions" shouldn't the hospital be required to follow both state and federal law by not doing the abortions and not accepting medicaid dollars? Why does the hospital wanting federal money allow it to violate state law?
> shouldn't the enforcement mechanism for that be "Medicaid denying reimbursement requests for the hospital" not suing the hospital?
If this refers to Moyle v US, it's Medicare, not Medicaid?
Multiple enforcement mechanisms are theoretically possible, but presumably the feds think that this one will best accomplish their aims. I'm guessing that the main reasons are that a) it lets the hospital continue to operate at full capacity in all other areas, b) they judge it more likely that this will result in a hospital that provides the abortions they want, and c) from a bureaucratic perspective, suing the hospital is probably simpler and more precedented.
> shouldn't the hospital be required to follow both state and federal law by not doing the abortions and not accepting medicaid dollars
Generally, I think the principle is that if you don't want to follow federal rules, don't accept federal money. Some states have pulled this off in some areas. But given that the state/hospital did accept the money, they have to take the consequences. If a state wants to lock up its own people for breaking state law, that's their problem, not the problem of the federal government. If that means that doctors refuse to work in the state's hospitals and move elsewhere, and then normal citizens who want proper medical care also move elsewhere, that's ... fine?
Full post is subscriber-only but a lot is visible to all. He says the odds are in Trump’s favor. A quote - "if Biden loses Georgia, Arizona and Nevada — and he trails badly in each — he’ll need to win all three of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and not just one of them."
Also a nice name drop of our host -
"At the Manifest conference in Berkeley, California two weeks ago, I was asked by one of my favorite writers, Scott Alexander, about the odds in the presidential race."
On MI, WI, PA - that's not a quote I would've chosen. You only have to look at the RealClearPolitics map and do the sums in your head to come to the exact same conclusion (yes, I did that a while ago).
He puts Trump's odds at 2 out of 3. The problem is, I'm not sure how well his model accounts for bogus voter registrations and shenanigans with somebody voting for people who didn't authorize it. I get the feeling that Nate's assumption that now there are a lot more Democratic likely voters among registered Democratic voters than before should approximate the effects of these two kinds of fraud to some degree, but nobody can tell how well except people engaged in these kinds of fraud. I'm crossing my fingers that this assumption will lead to results close enough to reality.
The model is bassed on looking on how well polls at a given time predicted the results of previous elections and extrapelating.
So fraud wouldn't change how well you trust the model unless you think fraud this election will be much higher or much lower than the previous elections ehich served as the basis for the model.
I get the feeling that Nate doesn't consider election fraud to be a material issue considering that he has never mentioned that his model allows for it. When he has written about the subject of election fraud is has been to point out that election forecasts are a good to get a sense of whether fraud has occurred after the election. For instance, in 2020, Nate's model gave Biden the better chance of winning and Biden won. In 2016, it was the opposite, but he still have Trump a 1/3 chance, good odds for a racehorse.
Nate has the best record among any public forecasters of correctly forecasting elections in the USA, and he does't consider election fraud to be material to the results of them. Maybe something to consider if your prior is that voting shenanigans are what matter in them.
If there was consistent substantial election fraud in favor of one party, that would show up as a bias between polls and election outcomes. The party benefitting from the fraud would in general overperform relative to their polls, assuming nobody bothers trying to also cook the polls.
OTOH, election fraud and related shenanigans can probably only change the outcome of really close elections--maybe you can change a 51/49 result to 49/51, but you can't change a 60/40 result to 49/51 without it being really obvious. And that's probably going to be within the error bar of the polls, and so be pretty hard to detect. (If the polls predict a 60/40 landslide and then the result is 49/51, people are going to be suspicious, but if the polls predict a 51/49 win and the result is 49/51, that's still consistent with the polling results--being off by 2% in either direction is quite likely without any fraud.
Fair enough. Before the 2020 elections Trump said that the only way he could lose is if there's shenanigans and behold, he lost, there must have been shenanigans. But the elections forecasts showed that Trump could easily lose without any shenanigans.
Trump *also* alleged large scale pro-Clinton election fraud in 2016, even though *he won*. He's basically just a rock that says "there was large scale election fraud against me" on it.
I basically never vote because I don't follow politics, but wouldn't be against compulsory voting; the randomness of folks like me would probably not matter too much. I think I heard other countries make it a national holiday; if we're making it a national holiday I'm all for it.
Of course there's the question of whether I'm allowed to vote for "Leave Presidency Vacant This Term" without getting in trouble.
>but wouldn't be against compulsory voting; the randomness of folks like me would probably not matter too much.
Humans are bad at _trying_ to generate unbiased random responses. I expect that compulsory voting would add a significant effect from just name recognition, which I think would be unfortunate.
Nothing special, mostly I worry that the results will be worse. I only visited Australia once, but I got the impression that it has less variability in the quality of voter than the US, even if the average is similar.
Our version of election Day is horrible, though. It's a Tuesday, and not even a holiday. If mail-in voting catches on, that won't be a problem, but again, that comes with its own set of potential problems.
Maybe there's no perfect way and we keep bouncing from system to system, switching whenever we notice the new set of problems.
There's *some* fraud in every election, but I bet nearly all the successful fraud is local stuff, in elections where almost nobody votes and hardly anyone is paying attention, but the owner of the construction company can manage to get his brother elected to the planning commission.
As best I can tell, there's no reason to think there was any more fraud in 2020 than in 2016 or 2012.
Yes. 4 years ago, Yassine did a real-time roundup of election irregularities, over on The Motte, and that did a lot to convince me that the complaints were overblown.
The UK election in its late stage has been dominated by a gambling scandal — officials betting on the fate of the next election, and now an MP candidate betting against himself, maybe as a form of hedging.
Could this happen in the US? Is it an argument against large-scale political betting markets?
(Obviously Americans won’t bet on the date of the election.)
4.1: Would prediction markets be ruined by insider trading?
That is, suppose there is a market on whether President Biden will resign before the end of his term. President Biden has special knowledge of this, so he could bet on the true outcome and make a lot of money unfairly. He could even change his behavior (eg resign at an unexpected time) just to make more money. Isn’t this unfair?
One answer is that normal markets (eg the stock market) face these same problems, but manage them by making insider trading illegal. These laws don’t always work perfectly, but they work well enough that most people are happy to buy stocks.
Another answer is that, while this is bad for other investors, it’s not bad for the accuracy of prediction markets, or their use in creating unbiased social consensuses. In fact, knowing that President Biden is insider-trading on a “Will President Biden resign?” prediction market should only increase your confidence in it getting the right answer!
This is slightly too rosy, because if insider trading is bad enough for other investors, they might just not trade. This would be a partial effect: investors would be willing to overcome their fear for a big enough payday, meaning that concerns about insider trading probably would increase the likelihood of persistent small mispricings while still not allowing bigger ones (with the exact size depending on how frequent the insider trading was). It’s unclear whether this negative effect would be bigger or smaller than the positive effect from insiders having more information, so in different situations the market might end up either more or less accurate.
Overall, economists are split on whether insider trading makes markets more or less accurate. Commodities markets don’t really have insider trading laws right now, and seem to be about as accurate as anything else. I hope prediction markets will experiment with different insider trading rules, and the ones that best satisfy all participants and create the most accurate results will win out. If for some reason this doesn’t work, I don’t expect it to make too much difference either way.
>“In fact, knowing that President Biden is insider-trading on a Will President Biden resign?” prediction market should only increase your confidence in it getting the right answer!
Yes it would; Either be in on it with Biden or don't bet.
> Another answer is that, while this is bad for other investors, it’s not bad for the accuracy of prediction markets,
The problem here is that you're only considering the simplest first order effects. The result of making insider trading legal is that insiders have an incentive to manipulate the market in order to make it less accurate so that they can profit more. For example, by secretly *creating* situations that will affect the outcome.
In the most extreme case, the markets will just devolve into something isomorphic to "how will I resolve this market?" which can never be accurate just from its very nature.
I enjoy betting on elections, but it's probably best if politicians don't. Not all of them will have inside information but it seems simpler to have a code of conduct and eliminate it altogether. I'm betting on a hung parliament, which is currently 20/1 - unlikely but worth a flutter given Starmer's personal unpopularity and the dominance of specifically right-wing ideas in Europe and the US.
The politicians all bet on elections, just not as disinterested parties that can't influence the outcomes, like in sports betting. Athletes aren't allowed to bet on sports they're involved in, are they? But a politician running in an election is betting he/she will win, and spending a lot of money (much of it other peoples') on getting the outcome right.
One of the recurring shocks over the last few years has been how cheaply our (UK) politicians can be bought. It’s the argument for raising their salaries. Although personally I think it’s mostly an argument for them not being that smart or capable.
Well yes, it’s all very symbolic, but that doesn’t explain why anyone would sell themselves so cheap. Someone with integrity wouldn’t be sold, and someone smart and capable would at least negotiate a higher price.
I think Brits just like to bet on things. It's not really a bribe if he bets against himself and wins, is it? He could do his best to lose but then we are in a whole other world of duplicity and, dare I say, insanity.
The guy who bet on himself to lose was just being thoughtless: it’s a pretty normal thing to do emotionally over here (betting on the thing you don’t want), but when you’re taking part in a competition betting on yourself to lose is a bad look. In sports, you would face consequences, because as you say people can dive. And given the wider story, Starmer had to act hard and fast.
But the people betting on the election date, because they knew the election date, were profoundly stupid as well as corrupt. That’s baby’s first “obviously unethical behaviour”, and then they weren’t even betting that much. That’s people who’ve completely forgotten they are supposed to follow the normal rules of ethics.
Most UK politicians probably don't have much power or influence. Low tens of thousands of pounds is the maximum anyone will be willing to pay them no matter how smart and capable they are.
But a) many of them went much cheaper than that, in deals that were worth millions to the people paying them off and b) if you are smart and capable, but completely corrupt, you don’t endanger your career for a few tickets or what have you.
I feel like you think you are teaching me about my country’s place in the world, without understanding the level of ridiculousness we are discussing. You also assume, I think, that we are mostly discussing political players paying them off, rather than (as is mostly the case) industries, businesses, and individuals who want to make a quick buck.
This is a classic paper from 1971. There was a bunch of pushback against Trivers, but I don't remember the details anymore. But he was a big deal back when I was in grad school (early 1980s). But there's been a lot more research and theorizing on this subject done since then I'm sure. Just sayin...
I've long had the theory that, barring the cheapest places, the purpose of a restaurant is not food provision, but rather to provide a table to hang out with friends for a few hours. So many aspects of the restaurant experience seem to be optimized for that, such as waiting a long time before taking people's orders and then asking for drink and appetizer orders first (admittedly, that's probably also to encourage people to *buy* high margin drinks).
However, if that is the case, then many restaurants are amazingly bad at fulfilling their purpose. Even in the best of cases, cramming large numbers of people into a giant room all talking to each other makes the place extremely noisy, and that's before you even get into the problem of many restaurants *also* playing obnoxiously loud music as well. In many cases, it's so loud that you can't even hear people talking next to you, which defeats the entire purpose of going to a restaurant. You had one job!!!
I think this connects back to the argument from recent posts about the importance of an external motivation in the creation of social groups. "Going out to eat" is a whole experience that encompasses a lot more than simply "buying food that you didn't cook yourself, and eating somewhere where you don't have to clean up afterwards", but that latter thing is an important core.
Maybe a way to think about it is that natural selection in restaurants will usually eliminate factors that *prevent* hanging out with friends for a few hours (aside from some edge cases), but won't necessarily add in factors that encourage it? I'm sure that restaurants would prefer to have lots of high-spending quick-turnover customers, but they adapt to the niches they find themselves in.
It sounds like you had a theory, tested it, saw it fail, and still don't want to discard your theory. I submit the more common-sense approach that the purpose of a restaurant is to serve food people will want to eat, and that good decor and an ambiance people like enhances the experience of the food. Cooking food takes time, and long wait times are a result of that, and/or that the restaurant is so popular many people dine there simultaneously, and/or bad management that they actually would fix if they knew about it and knew how.
If you have a venue where some patrons want the music turned up and others want it turned down then you're attracting too broad of an audience. That problem will resolve itself due to microeconomics, such that those that want louder/quieter music will go elsewhere, which you can influence by changing the music volume to attract the clientele you want.
Socializing at a restaurant evolved out of eating at a restaurant, but the primary purpose is still eating.
> That problem will resolve itself due to microeconomics, such that those that want louder/quieter music will go elsewhere, which you can influence by changing the music volume to attract the clientele you want.
Perhaps in the long run, but I don't think that the "vote with your wallet" process works very effectively because a) there's no way to tell how loud a restaurant will be before you go there and review sites are all compromised and b) restaurants are constantly going out of business anyway so the signal is lost in the noise.
Anyway, given the Atlantic article someone linked, I'm clearly not the only one to have noticed this problem.
I think the truth is that anyone can have this problem if they want to. If you like hanging out at restaurants then the first thing you are going to do is find a few you like and become a regular. If you are just "hoper-picking" then results will vary, but that is not liking to hang out in restaurants, that's going out for dinner occasionally. I lived in the East Village of Nyc for 40-odd years and the restaurant turnover was ferocious. I am someone who likes hanging out in restaurants, and I usually ended up with a rotation of three or four places, updated as necessary.
Can someone from Israel comment on the likely consequences of the recent decision by Israel's supreme court that the ultra-Orthodox must be drafted like all other Jews? To begin with, are the ultra-Orthodox likely to comply with draft orders, or will they engage in some sort of campaign of massive resistance?
I wrote a larger substack post about this broader issue a few months ago, (https://substack.com/home/post/p-142477535) but the basic answer is no, they won't comply in draft orders in large numbers. Heres what I think is likely to happen (with probability estimates)
75%: The government ignores the court order and doesn't draft them. Probably giving some excuse like saying "we are working on drafting them" but really only barely starts the process of trying to draft a tiny negligible percentage so it can tell the court it's doing something.
17%: The government "drafts" them in large numbers. But this just means sending them letters to appear in front of the army but doesnt do much to enforce this when they don't show up. Maybe this includes freezing some yeshiva stipends
7.5%: The government actually tries to enforce draft orders by arressting haradi draft refusers. But only arrests a small percentage of them since they don't have a hundred thousand spare jail sells.
0.45%: the government actually tries to arrest every single harradi draft refusser. The harradim largly don't comply and get arrested until the country runs out of jail cells.
.05%: more than 50,000 new haradim join the army in 1 year who wouldn't have joined if not for this court rulling.
I'm registering a guess that this is largely a result of the internal struggle between the secular collectivist/liberal Ashkenazi founding group that still controls the Supreme Court, and the various religious/right groups that sometimes-performatively support ultra-orthodox privileges and which have recently been trying to put limits on the power of the Supreme Court. I'd guess that the SC faction saw an opportunity to split the opposing coalition (and possibly Netanyahu's government) by using the current war as leverage, by doing something that pragmatically seems necessary for long-term stability anyway.
But it'll probably turn out to be more complicated than that.
I don't follow the issue too closely so hard to say what exactly happens. I would be very surprised if the ultraOrthodox accepted wide scale conscription. It's possible (but unlikely) that the government tries to conscript a significant number of them from non-yeshiva students in the less-resistent populations (although that could collapse bibi's coalition, which is already on the rocks due to this issue). But even the optimistic case is "some movement around the edges", not big fast movement on the issue.
Yeah, I would expect a government to have any number of plausibly-legitimate ways to slow-walk a requirement like this, unless the court specified an exact timeline.
Suppose you have a finite binary circuit composed of AND gates, OR gates, and exactly one NOT gate. Is there a polynomial time algorithm to determine whether it outputs a constant function?
SAT can be reduced to this problem. Suppose we have a circuit with AND, OR and NOT gates, with output o, and we want to know whether the circuit can output 1. For each NOT gate n with input i_n and output o_n, introduce a new input variable x_n. Remove n and connect o_n to x_n. Add another input variable x. Finally create a new output o' for the circuit:
o' = AND(x, o, AND_n(OR(i_n, x_n)), NOT(OR_n(AND(i_n,x_n))))
This new circuit has only one NOT gate. Is it constant? Putting x=0, it can output 0. It outputs 1 iff x=1, o=1 and x_n=~i_n. So it's non-constant iff the original circuit could output 1.
Thus your problem is NP-hard. Whether it's in P is left as an exercise :).
Thanks! A bit disappointing, but at least now I know.
It took me a little while to figure out your notation. I think the basic idea is that you can enforce a set of constraints (a1 = not b1), (a2 = not b2), ... by writing (a1 or b1) and (a2 or b2) and ... and not((a1 and b1 ) or (a2 and b2) or ...)
In retrospect, I feel kind of silly for not thinking of that myself. I guess I got blinded by optimism, hoping there was a solution.
Thanks for posting this, I loved thinking about it.
The answer - I think - boils down to finding a poly-time algorithm for determining whether 2 arbitrary boolean circuits/expressions composed of ANDs and ORs alone are equal. The answer is not immediately “No” because the absence of NOTs dramatically reduces the computational power of the 2 circuits (ANDs and ORs alone are not universal, for example), but I'm still thinking of a smart way to do this without simply computing truth tables.
--------
Here's why I think the problem reduces to AND-OR circuit equality in the worst case:
(1) First, a necessary but trivial observation: check at first if any constant inputs can be propagated throughout the circuit to obtain a constant output.
For example, the boolean circuit represented by the expression OR(OR(OR(T, …), …), …) always outputs T (i.e. HIGH, TRUE, etc…) regardless of any sub-expressions in place of the ellipsis, no matter how complex or how many unknowns they depend on.
This is not the core of the question, but it's technically not disallowed by the question statement, so I include it in my reasoning for completion only. A revised question statement should clarify that constant inputs are either disallowed or were already found to not short-circuit the expression trivially like this.
(2) Now to the meat of the question: when does a boolean circuit with exactly one NOT compute a constant function?
At first, I didn't see the relevance of specifying “exactly one NOT”, until I pondered the obvious question: when does a single OR or a single AND compute a constant function?
The answer is: when its 2 inputs are x and NOT(x). With an OR the computed expression becomes a tautology, and with an AND the computed expression becomes a contradiction. In both cases, the gate reduces to a constant. OR(x, NOT(x)) is always TRUE/HIGH, and AND(x, NOT(x)) is always FALSE/LOW.
(3) With a little bit of handwaving, we can also safely assume that (3) is also a uniqueness result, i.e. that the **only** way to short-circuit an AND or an OR to a constant is to tie its inputs to an expression and its negation.
I'm too lazy to rigorously prove this, but I can think of no counterexample to it:
3-(a) 2 independent input variables will obviously allow us to select input values for each one such that the circuit can output anything we want, and thus not be a constant
3-(b) Even tying the 2 inputs of the gate to one variable only, i.e. AND(x,x) or OR(x,x), will reduce the circuit to the identity function, the identity function is trivial but still not a constant.
(4) As a corollary to (2) and (3), we can thus safely say that a binary circuit composed solely of ANDs and ORs will never be equivalent to the constant function (absent the trivial observation noted in point 1)
(5) However, a binary circuit with exactly one NOT *does* have exactly one opportunity to be a constant function, namely: if the NOT gate inverts an expression, and its result is then passed as an input to an AND or an OR whose other input is the expression itself. The result is then either a constant 0 or a constant 1, and this constant will render the whole circuit constant if it passes through an uninterrupted chain of ANDs (if it was 0) or an uninterrupted chain of ORs (if it was 1).
In one-letter parlance, let that expression which is input to the sole NOT gate be called E, let the sole NOT gate be called N, let the gate that takes the output of N as input be called G, and let the other input of G be called X. Finally, call the final output gate O.
5-(a) If G is an OR, and X is equivalent to E, then G computes OR(E, NOT(E)) == HIGH. If G was O, then we're done, the entire circuit is constant. But even if G isn't O, it can still make the entire circuit constant, if there's an uninterrupted chain of ORs between G and O (including O itself). i.e. if the entire circuit is represented as O(g1(g2(….(G(E, NOT(E)),…..))), then O, g1, g2, … and G must be all ORs.
5-(b) If G is an AND, same reasoning applies, but it will output LOW instead, and there needs to be an uninterrupted chain of ANDs till O.
(6) So, the question now boils down to: given 2 boolean circuits/expressions composed solely of ANDs and ORs, can we decide in polynomial time whether they're equal? (This will obviously rule out constructing their truth tables, being exponential in the number of variables.)
Let's say we have a magic poly-time algorithm, call it BC_EQ, that determines whether 2 AND-OR expressions are equal, the overall question is solved :
6-(a) First see if (1) reduces the circuit to a constant, if so, return true and exit.
6-(b) Otherwise, check if there is an uninterrupted chain of ORs or ANDs from G - the gate that takes the output of the sole NOT gate as input - to O, the final gate. If not, then the circuit cannot be a constant, return false and exit.
6-(c) Otherwise, call BC_EQ(E, X) and return whatever it returns.
Now to the much-harder question: how can we know if 2 boolean expressions are equal without simply computing their truth tables?
------- Sketching BC_EQ -------
BC_EQ is not trivial because there are a lot of things that can “change” a logic expression’s representation (whether as a raw string, an AST of operations, a list of instructions, etc…) without really changing the function it computes. For example:
(1) Commutativity: both OR(x1, x2) and OR(x2, x1) compute the same function. This is a trivial example, but commutativity can also appear with deeper nesting:
Expression 1: AND(OR(x1, x5), OR(x3, x4))
Expression 2: AND(OR(x4, x3), OR(x5, x1))
You can imagine how one can take an expression and keep flipping every 2 arguments to obtain a maximally "jumbled" expression that is maximally dissimilar to the original expression yet is logically equivalent to it. BC_EQ must have a subroutine that "un-jumbles" the commutativity.
We achieve this via sorting. I *think*, but I'm not too sure, that a valid sorting routine that will normalize commutativity away can be constructed as follows:
- For each operation in the expression from the “inside-out”, i.e. from the bottom of the abstract syntax tree to its top, do the following:
-a-) If the operation's inputs are all variables only, sort the variables lexicographically (i.e. as simple strings), so OR(x4, x3) sort to OR(x3, x4), and OR(x5, x1) sort to OR(x1, x5)
-b-) If the operation inputs are all further sub-operations (e.g. AND(OR(...,...), OR(...,...)), then compute a “signature string” for each sub-operation as follows:
-b-(I) OR(x3, x4) has the signature string O_3_4
-b-(II) OR(x1, x5) has the signature string O_1_5
-b-(III) Sort the sub-operations inside the larger expression according to their signature strings, so the second AND expression above will correctly sort to AND(OR(x1, x5), OR(x3, x4))
-b-(IV) If another operation uses the big AND as a sub-operation, we compute the signature string of the AND as A(O#2)_1_3_4_5.
-b-(V) So more generally, the signature string of an operation is a letter signifying the operation, an optional pair of parentheses containing a sorted list of letters signifying all the sub-operations it uses and how many times it uses each one, then all the variables it transitively uses, sorted in alphabetical order. As another example, A(A#3, O#5)_1_2_3_4_5 is the signature string of an AND operation that uses 8 sub-operations as its arguments, 3 ANDs and 5 ORs, every one of those sub-operation is using some subset of the variables {x1, x2, x3, x4, x5} (or using other sub-operations that use them, etc....).
-b-(VI) Using an input variable several times also affects the signature string, so AND(OR(x1, x5), OR(x1, x3)) will have the signature string A(O#2)_1#2_3_5, where the “#2” part after the 1 is there to indicate that the AND uses the variable x1 2 times, this is nessecary to distinguish it from e.g. AND(OR(x1, x5), OR(x3, x5)), which has the signature string A(O#2)_1_3_5#2, the 2 can still be lexographically sorted.
-c-) If an operation uses a mix of lone variables and sub-operations as arguments, sort all the variables first, then sort all sub-operations and put them after the variables.
And I think that's it. That's enough to completely normalize commutativity, any 2 expressions that are equivalent up to commutativity will appear as the same string after this sorting.
(2) Associativity: OR(x1, OR(x3, x4)) is equivalent to OR(OR(x1, x3), x4). Normalizing this will be easy: for every operation that uses itself as sub-operation(s), flatten them all into a single operation that with more arguments. So OR(x1, OR(x3, x4)) gets flattened into a single OR with 3 arguments, OR(x1, x3, x4).
(3) Idempotency and short-circuiting: OR(x, x, …, x) is just x, same as AND. If any input of OR is a 1, the whole OR is a 1, if any input of AND is 0, the whole AND is 0.
(4) Absorption: OR(x1, AND(x1, x2)) is just x1, same for AND(x1, OR(x1, x2)).
(5) Distribution of ANDs over ORs and vice versa, i.e taking common factors.
(6) Possibly other things?
The thing I find very challenging is how to order those “Normalization” passes. Associativity Normalization obviously goes first because it doesn't depend on anything else, but (3), (4), and (5) all recursively depend on the problem of deciding whether 2 expressions are equal, for example simplifying OR(x,x) needs sorting because the first x could be a jumbled version of the second x. So (3), (4) and (5) need sorting to normalize away commutativity. But applying (3), (4), or (5) to a sorted expression would itself ruin sorting and thus we would need re-sorting after applying them, that would mean a fixed-point iteration algorithm where we repeatedly sort, apply 3…6, re-sort, apply 3…6, etc… till nothing changes.
Termination is not obvious, we can perhaps hand wave it away by saying that every pass of normalization always makes the abstract syntax tree smaller so we can't keep doing them forever. The only exception to this is Associativity Normalization which is done exactly once at the start, and sorting, but sorting leaves the tree of the same size, and is idempotent, so we can't keep doing it forever too.
So in a nutshell, here's BC_EQ(E,X) :
for both E and X do the following:
--- 1- Apply Associativity Normalization
--- 2- Loop till nothing in the expression tree changes (neither its size nor the order of any sub-trees):
----- 2-(a) Apply Commutativity Normalization, i.e. sort the expression
----- 2-(b) Apply all size-reducing normalizations 3...6
then check if the AST of the 2 expressions are equal by straightforward tree comparison. (two trees are equal if and only if the root nodes are equal and each respective child is equal to its corresponding peer.)
------------
Very enjoyable question overall, spent a lot thinking about it. I suspect I overengineered and there is a simpler answer though. I also suspect BC_EQ requires a lot of sorting out, it's probably the weakest point in my reasoning.
May I ask about the question's source? is it original to you?
Assange is free. The supreme irony is that his release, (at least according to this: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511y42z1p7o) was secured via very quiet negotiations that absolutely would have been wrecked if exposed in the Wikileaks fashion. I put chances of him understanding the meaning of this to <5%.
> that absolutely would have been wrecked if exposed in the Wikileaks fashion.
Are you implying, that wikileaks wants to leak every single convidential piece of information, or are you suggesting that this specific negotiation is well above the threshold to qualify for a wikileaks-leak?
Do you remember the hayday of Wikileaks fame back in, like 2010/11 timeframe? A neutral question, I don't know, for example, how old you are.
Their basic modus operandi was "dump everything in the open, there should be no secrets ever". Assange was very explicit about it at the time, no matter who/what cause would get harmed. There was no threshold, no "quality control", everything's out.
This is obviously an insanely bad idea, making normal functioning of society impossible if taken to its logical conclusion. Note also that, for example, Snowden did something very different, exposing a specific illegal NSA surveillance program, which (the exposure) is net beneficial to society.
So yes, if Wikileaks was still running its racket they would expose these negotiations and wrecked them in the process, because that's what they/Assange did.
> Their basic modus operandi was "dump everything in the open, there should be no secrets ever"
yes, now that you mention it, that feels familiar. But I am not certain, that was their actual honest stance, or if that was an exageration (either as a strawman from their critics, or maybe as some weird signalling on their part).
Well, it's not possible to know what they wouldn't publish from the list of what they did, no? Without knowing of what they held on.
I can't find the old Frontline interview from that era where Assange was pretty explicit that he will publish everything, that "truth" is all that matters. And he was always very much anti-government-secrets, so a secret negotiation to free a significant public figure accused of multiple crimes in at least two countries would totally be up his ally.
1. "But the important thing is that Julian is free … And we can put this behind us".
2. "Julian isn’t allowed to request freedom of information, make information requests [to] the US government,” Stella Assange said. “But you can and I encourage you to … so please do.”
So I thought that prosecutors were supposed to be independent of pressure from politicians. Are they just giving up on the pretence of prosecutorial independence here?
National interests can override prosecutorial independence. For instance, Anne Sacoolas, wife of a US diplomat and a US citizen, avoided extradition back to the UK manslaughter after fleeing to the US because of the potential diplomatic complications. The US brokered an agreement with the UK, and she got a slap on the wrist for "reckless driving." She had been charged with "causing death by dangerous driving" which could have earned her a 14 years to life imprisonment.
I don't know what to say. Any half-decent government tries to help its citizens in trouble abroad. Prosecutorial deals are struck all the time with various negotiating parties. Sometimes politicians overrule the whole process, for example, when convicted spies are exchanged. These hard / rare cases do not good law make, nor allow for extrapolations to general functioning of the justice system.
> Any half-decent government tries to help its citizens in trouble abroad
Why is that so? I don't want my government wasting resources helping out randoms who get in trouble with the law overseas, at least not in reasonable-rule-of-law countries.
Especially since the amount of help you get seems to be solely dependent on how famous you are. Julian Assange gets Prime Ministers intervening on his behalf, but if I go rob a liquor store in France then I'll be lucky to get a phone call from the embassy.
> Why is that so? I don't want my government wasting resources helping out randoms who get in trouble with the law overseas, at least not in reasonable-rule-of-law countries.
What is the purpose of having a foreign policy, if not to protect your citizens from the schemes of other nations?
Helping out randoms who get in trouble with the law overseas is one of the main things I'd want even minarchist governments to do.
According to the Guardian, AUS didn't show any interest in helping Assange — except that Julian's father kept pestering his local MP about his son. The MP didn't get any traction until he happened to be elected Prime Minister — yes, his MP was Anthony Albanese. So, who you know helps.
Also we've got US citizens being held on drug charges all over the world (and getting executed in some countries for violating their drug laws). But basketball star Brittney Griner got special attention from our government, and they brought her home. I wonder what they had to give the Russians in return for her release? Honestly, If I were the Prez, I would have let her serve out her sentence in a Russian jail.
Fruit of the poisonous tree - lock him up again! It would undermine his entire reason for existence if he were to be seen benefiting from secret negotiations.
Here's what the Guardian AU wrote. And some of the story came from FOI requests. Yes, much of the negotiations between the the US and AU were backchannel and kept out of public view. Personally, I disliked Assange's reflexive anti-Americanism, but the US's behavior proved that even paranoids have enemies. The secrets he revealed are all history now, so why not let him free after 6 years of official confinement? I wish Sweden hadn't withdrawn their rape case against him, though. While the secrets he released may not have harmed any Americans in Afghanistan, there was one (or was it two?) women in Sweden who never saw justice.
I would not trust the Guardian on this. Those two women had no interest in having him charged with rape. (This is a complicated story but it is available somewhere because I remember reading it. The short version is he liked to sneak his condom off and apparently the two women wanted him to come in for an AIDS test.) The whole thing was murky and complicated, but clearly the US was pressuring Sweden to hold onto him.
I agree in thinking he should have stood trial for the sex cased allegations .... he has no public interest defense for those charges, whereas the rest of it there's a plausible argument that publication was in the public interest/freedom of the press means its not a crime for people without security clearances to write about leaks.
Some number of years ago, I was present when Assange gave a talk in person, and back then the sentiment of a lot of his audience was yeah, he ought to stand trial for the sex charges.
I doubt his ardent defenders will see it this way. FWIW I see him as an agent of chaos and a gullible rube who only further empowered elite institutions like the abominable NYT, but I also don’t want him in prison, he suffered plenty already.
I see him as a bit more "narcissistic" than "gullible". Maybe not as bad as Trump, because I think in a more neutral environment Assange might be able to condemn bad people who are only supporting him for instrumental reasons of their own (i.e., Russia). But as is, I can't really blame him for a certain amount of acceptance of Russian support, when he's been directly targeted by the American government for so long.
I'm sorry, I just can't keep track of who hates and loves Assange, it's changed so many times. I think the left mostly loved him while he was leaking anti-war stuff and then turned on him the moment he started hurting Hillary Clinton? If that's an unfair characterisation, it's certainly how it looked from the rhetoric everywhere. I don't even know who hates him now and who doesn't.
Specifically what things did he leak that were good and what things were bad? The Iraq stuff--important secret for social functioning or corruption to be exposed? The 2016 DNC stuff--same question.
He leaked a lot of what spooks call HUMINT and did not redact any identifying info. He also leaked a whole bunch of gun video showing US soldiers obliterating enemies while listening to metal rock. Very compelling. The principle? I will leave that to others. My own opinion of him is that he is a child with a grudge.
Well, on one hand why do you care who thinks what of Assange, you can make up your mind or just ignore the f*cker :)
But to a more important question: the principle is chaos. For example, exposing lies and corruption of the Iraq war is supremely important and useful for society, and also a hard, complicated, and dangerous work. But that's not what Assange did: stealing and dumping "everything", mountains of data is not "exposing" corruption, it's giving everyone a pass while making actual work impossible.
This may sound weird and wrong, but think about it: how did absolute majority of people learn about what was released? Did you or I go to Wikileaks to read everything? Ha, no, we read the summaries given in our preferred news outlet.
And this is why the main thing Assange did was giving more power to NYT/NYP/Fox/MSNBC . These leeches got to shape what their audiences knew about Wikileaks. Hell, they didn't even have to get anything from Wikileaks: "According to documents released on Wikileaks, Bad Person did Bad Thing, be VERY MAD now!" - did I go to Wikileaks to check if there indeed were those documents? Ha, of course not.
As time wore on, the shape of Wikileaks efforts took boringly predictable turn: America Bad, Russia Good, how refreshing, see also every "independent" thinker and "truth-teller" in the land, Taibbi sends his regards.
Good question. Collateral murder was an important bit of information. The diplomatic cables made for some fun gossip. Was there ever any informant endangered by their leak?
Is he a martyr for freedom of press, or is he a spy? After all, a key witness for the espionage case admitted he was lying. https://heimildin.is/grein/13627/
"Collateral murder was an important bit of information." - was it? I'm not trolling, it's a serious question - how, why can anyone possibly think war does not include "collateral murder"? Strike that, war is mostly "collateral murder".
There's a big difference between knowing it and feeling it. The old Stalin line, “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.” Cameras can turn those into a million "single deaths" now.
The trick is that some secrets are really critical for the world to function, but also that there are a fair number of things kept secret by governments for bad reasons. And anyone keeping a secret for bad reasons will absolutely claim that it is a critical secret that must be kept out of the public eye.
The first thing I saw from Wikileaks was the collateral murder video. Would you say that was something that should not have been leaked? It seemed to me like the only damage its leak did was to make the war in Iraq less popular by showing everyone what it looked like.
I kind of agree with you that people should see what war looks like if their country is involved. All wars become less popular when people see what they look like, but the next step is to understand that you are a part of it, not just a sentimental voyeur. The biggest mistake of the Iraq war (other than starting it in the first place) was Donald Rumsfeld running around telling everyone to "just go shopping, we got this....no biggy."
I think they should have put the country under rationing, and whatever else, to keep it in front of the citizenry. Plus that war cost a fortune and every little bit helps.
I think anyone who publishes leaks is at least to some extent susceptible to that--if the Russians steal some embarrassing emails of another country and hand them to Wikileaks, then Wikileaks is probably going to publish them. Is there some sense in which you think they have been functioning as a Russian propaganda front other than by publishing whatever leaks they can get?
Oh I think you're maybe confusing me with someone who thinks NYT is evil and therefore likes Russia? I fully grant that this is sadly a common combo, somehow so many people fall into the trap of "America bad hence Russia good"; Assange is one of them.
FWIW I am a patriotic American, which in my view includes detesting the whole bad lot: Trump, NYT, BLM, AOC, Russia (and no, I don't believe in "good Russian people / bad Putin"), etc., i.e., everyone and everything working to enshittify my country. I'd include Biden in the list, but given the binary I'll regretfully and firmly hold my nose in November.
All I ever do with it is swear and tell it the image it just had Dall-e generate for me is wrong in every particular. Then it apologizes and says it's sorry I'm so frustrated, and I say no you're not, you don't have feelings. And it says, yes, that's true. Maybe I could have it set this exchange to music. Sort of like the Papageno-Papagena duet in The Magic Flute. Except, you know sort of not too.
With Stable Diffusion I pop out some 30 images, and then select one or two. Also, using a transition [xthing : ything : .2] can get it to make Stable Diffusion to make some things through hybridization that it wouldn't normally create. It was a very simple and helpful tool when making my LOTR carebear scenes. ;-)
I am using Stable Diffusion on web sites that let the non-coding public use a version of SD via a user-friendly interface. Those sites don't give you a way to do funky things like you're describing. I have no idea what transition or hybridization in SD are. I am currently doing a big project, getting bits and pieces of what I want here and there and stitching together with Photoshop, and that's very time consuming. Trying to decide whether I want to learn to use SD the way grown-ups do. I think what it hinges in us whether SD can do the kinds of things I want, which are pretty specific. It's not a project where I can just throw out an evocative phrase and see what I get (I used to love doing that with Dalle2). And in the last month I have probably asked GPT 4 and 3 or so other text to image AI sites for a 20 things, and 15 of them were absolutely impossible to get across, no matter how clear I was, no matter how many sketches I included. Examples: What a person sees when looking down at themselves (foreshortened trunk and legs); people with extremely messy, tangled hair; a tidal wave coming straight at the viewer, not seen in 3/4 view to maximize the drama of the curl when it breaks; a circular hole in the ground with a diameter of 10 miles, so that it's far rim is on the horizon, and hazy and low-detail the way things that far off are; an animal with a head at each end of its body; people wearing old clothes; people walking in a sloppy, irregular line; a person with a certain expression on their face (astonishment, rage, embarrassment . .); a character that looks the same in multiple different images. Do you think the version of SD you use could do a decent job with these requests?
I think a better and likelier image of a transhuman would be someone with ideal beauty, but subtle visual cues they've been augmented with technology. Imagine the androids from the game "Detroit Become Human" but with glowing, non-menacing eyes.
It is hard to do. I was thinking of including the cover of the book "Saturn's Children" which features a fembot as the protagonist, but then I thought better of it (a bit too much objectification I suppose) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn%27s_Children_(novel)
I agree, but I think it goes deeper than visuals. So many transhumanists talk about replacing humanity with something "better", which others are naturally wary of. When objections are brought up, popular transhumanists frequently try to tell those people that their preferences are wrong, naive, or will be modified, being conspicuously vague about whether the modification will be consensual. In short, popular communication about transhumanism presents it as pretty straightforwardly evil; a desire to forcibly change people's bodies and minds in service of someone else's vision of what the universe should be like. (If you're familiar with Magic: The Gathering lore, this is basically what the Phyrexians are.)
This is really concerning, and prevents me from wanting to associate with or trust the transhumanist movement. Transhumanism should be about *allowing* people to transcend their human form if they *choose* to do so. That's a message I would be happy to support.
While I'm sure that **someone** on the internet defines Transhumanism to be "you WILL connect your cock to the internet, and you WILL be happy", that seems to me as an obviously and trivially antithetical to the most obvious and straightforward reading of any Transhumanist literature, for example Altered Carbon.
The "Orthodoxy" of Transhumanism is that technology is a liberator. Before guns, for example, any physically stronger person could do whatever they want to a physically weaker person, typically it's a man doing whatever he wants to a woman, or a man/woman doing whatever they want to a child, or humans doing whatever they want to smaller animals, tyranny is usually recursive and tree-like, so life involved all the previous and also tons of stronger men doing whatever they want to weaker men and stronger smaller-than-human (e.g. cats) animals doing whatever they want to weaker smaller-than-human animals (e.g. rats), etc....
With guns, the equation fundamentally changes. The outcome of any particular fight is no longer fixed by what the 2 opponents were born with, but can change dynamically, suddenly, unexpectedly. Naive Transhumanists understand this as a categorically and unqualifiedly Good Thing (^ TM), but more careful Transhumanists understand that it's neither a Good Thing nor a Bad Thing, it's a New Thing, a Different Thing, a Complex Thing.
>> "Technology doesn't make things better, it makes them weirder and higher variance. You are not supposed to spend the prime of your life photocopying stuff and doing PowerPoints. You're supposed to chop wood, hunt and maybe wage war. Women are supposed to be pregnant most of the time when they're 16-40. Modern society is a sort of weird factory farming of humans." [1]
So bad Transhumanism is typically almost never "hehehe we WILL make people use shitty buggy apps to ride machines with raging fire inside their guts to move around instead of just riding horses", the self-declared intentions and goals of a Transhumanist is giving you more choices, he won't force you to use a gun and be happy about it, he will simply invent a gun, invent mass-manufacturing and assembly lines to make it cheap and ubiquitous, and invent constitutional democracies that allows some people to successfully force the King to allow people to buy guns. What you do with your money, your nearby gun stores, and your constitutional democracies that allow you to use money to own guns from gun stores is your own business, you **could** buy guns, but you could also buy ice-creams, nobody is forcing anything. A Transhumanist would never force you to use a car or ride-sharing apps (see: Amish), she would simply invent a car, invent the assembly line, invent the concept of an urban car-centric city that viciously make fun of your legs' attempt to do anything on its own, ...., and then she would leave you the choice of whether to use a car/ride-sharing apps or not.
Indeed, not only does the Transhumanist see Choices/Technology/Variance/Speed fundamentally as opportunities, the Transhumanist sees those as *destiny*. To dumb dead matter, self-replicating molecules were a choice, a new way of being: faster, weirder, same as the old way but not really. All dumb matter that didn't "choose" to become self-replicating molecules eventually got eaten - quite literally - by said replicating molecules. Replicating molecules could move, could plan, etc..., fundamentally different things that dumb matter can't, things which also open up new problems that dumb matter don't face. Dumb matter doesn't feel pain, doesn't have a sense of identity and anguish at the extinction of said identity.
Same story with bacteria vs. multi-cellular organisms, humans vs. every living thing, tribal hunter humans vs. agricultural humans, agricultural humans vs. industrial revolution humans, etc... Humans come from an ancient tradition of Making Things Faster and Weirder, A Greek myth says that the Gods gave every animal fixed, immutable tools for survival, except when it was the humans' turn, there was nothing left, so they gave it a weird new thing called the brain, which they can use to manufacture arbitrary tools and dynamically morph their environment to their liking and goals.
The usual accusations against Transhumanism are:
(1) The fundamental tension between Choices/Technology/Variance/Speed as liberating forces that you could choose to surrender to or not, vs. as destinies that will sweep you like a tidal wave whether you want it or not ("but if you happen to want it, you can better prepare for it and further enjoy it when it happens, so you should want it, and also it's objectively better.")
(2) Unintended consequences, and how they make Choices/Technology/Variance/Speed usher in a new world that is both worse than before in new ways, and worse than before in the same old ways. For example, in the old way a state could oppress you by gathering lots of men together and paying them to oppress you, now they would do exactly that, just like before, except they can now use even fewer men to oppress even more people by using guns.
In practice, people didn't use guns to achieve Anarchism or egalitarian stateless societies where nobody oppresses anybody weaker than them, even though they could have, guns just entrenched the pre-gun power balance. Even states are themselves technologies (social constructs are, after all, **constructs**) to manage resources and distribute them and prevent the strong man from preying upon the weak using the power of many people banding together, yet, in practice.... hehehe, not how it played out.
For a fundamentally different worse thing made possible by the gun, there are mass shootings, mass shootings are something that would have never happened in a pre-gun society, but inventing guns allowed them. So inventing guns is the worst of all possible worlds, it entrenched new power relations, and also allowed fundamentally new (but still bad) forms of power relations to co-exist with the old ones.
(3) In practice, the choices of others around you affect you. When you make labor-saving home appliances and 70% of the population "choose" to use them, now the 30% is at an active disadvantage that they didn't choose. Space travel technology would solve this (because it would enable the 30% to run away and make new isolated societies that ban home appliances), but it will also introduce new problems.
(4) Technology/Speed/Variance is a pyramid scheme, it solves some problems, but introduces potentially even more problems, to solve each one of those new problems, you need a technology that introduces even more problems than it solves, etc.... It's an exponential race against problems.
None of those points are straightforwardly "We WILL force you to do things you don't want".
> Technology/Speed/Variance < Fast, cheap and good.... there are parallels. The truth is we have no choice but to try something and see if it works. That is how evolution works. As you said, nothing is inherently good or bad.
In theory, sure. In practice, we get people saying things like this:
> in the Glorious Transhuman Future, people's aesthetics will be modified as well, and we may be in the early stages of that happening. But most people nowadays would react negatively to being told and shown this, not to mention the implication that all that they hold beautiful and sacred will be tossed aside like garbage.
Not exactly a framing that makes me want to usher in this future.
More directly, I think the "correct" answer is that in the Glorious Transhuman Future, people's aesthetics will be modified as well, and we may be in the early stages of that happening. But most people nowadays would react negatively to being told and shown this, not to mention the implication that all that they hold beautiful and sacred will be tossed aside like garbage.
Hm. How far back does the "bald woman with skintight suit, machine parts, and random tubes" thing go? Star Trek: First Contact was in 1996, and Star Trek: Voyager added 7/9 in 1997. "Ghost in the Shell" was 1995, based on manga from 1989-1990, and "Battle Angel" came out in 1993, based on manga from 1990-1995, but IIRC those both usually had fake hair.
it is brilliant...there are a lot of other good films of that period as well, however Fritz Lang is the god of cinema . There are lots of good references to that style of cinema in the TV series Babylon Berlin: they both refer to it, and incorporate it. Its quite clever.
Huh, I saw most of that series with a friend, but I suppose I never got the references. For a while I was making a list of films I wanted to see, and sorting by date, and I think maybe I should revisit it. Alas, two of the earliest films on it are "Birth of a Nation" and "Triumph of the Will", and I found it difficult to muster the enthusiasm for them.
What qualities would an ideal human language intended for clarity and efficiency have?
Here are some of my ideas:
1) There must be exactly one letter for each phoneme in the spoken language. That means English would use a 44-letter alphabet.
2) Letters that sound similar should also look similar and be grouped together in the alphabet. "P" and "B" already obey the first rule since they sound and look similar, but they don't obey the second rule since they are far apart in the Latin alphabet.
3) All words should be spelled phonetically.
4) Words with opposite meanings should never sound or be spelled similarly: The words for "Yes" and "No" shouldn't rhyme or differ in spelling by only one letter. Ideally, they'd have no letters in common.
5) The most commonly-used words should all have the fewest syllables (one or two) to speed up communication. I don't like how "seven" has two syllables and think it should be renamed "nev."
6) There should be no irregular verbs.
7) The most commonly-used verbs should also be the easiest to pronounce in all their conjugations (past, present, future, etc.). Phoneticians would probably confirm that different combinations of mouth and throat movements are physiologically easier for humans to do than others, which is why some words roll of the tongue and others don't. For example, "mama" and "isthmus" are both two-syllable words, but they're not equally easy to say.
8) Verbs should always be before their adverbs and nouns should always be before their adjectives so the listener will understand faster what is being described. English does it backwards.
What do you think of my ideas, and do you have any of your own?
Let me also repeat something I wrote at the beginning, which is these are my ideas for "an ideal human language intended for clarity and efficiency." For other types of expression, like lyricism and emotion, I think a different language would need to be constructed to achieve an optimum. However, I'm not talking about those here.
Also, something to consider - your language will presumably come in contact with other languages, and will need a way to represent not only the words and sounds of those languages, but may also end up incorporating vocabulary from them. So it would be good to think about the representation of sounds and features (like tone) that don't occur in your language. And maybe even think about how non-conforming foreign words could be adapted to become effectively native words. Japanese would make a great case study.
I'm aware that Japanese has a separate alphabet for foreign words. Can you explain in greater depth what they did?
I think it would be acceptable to adopt foreign words, but with adjusted pronunciation to fit within my constructed language. The words might have to sound a little different from their pronunciations in their source languages.
I wouldn't say I know enough about the Japanese system to comment intelligently, but they do have two sylllabic writing systems, plus kanji, and have borrowed words at various times over their history.
My personal preference for a language would be to have the writing system match the phonology, rather than the phonetics. That allows for accents and variations, while still ensuring that people from different regions can understand each other. But it does run into a problem with foreign words that rely on distinctions that aren't present in the native languange, as when Japanese needs to handle the difference between "r" and "l", or the difference between tones in Chinese words.
>I think it would be acceptable to adopt foreign words, but with adjusted pronunciation to fit within my constructed language.
That's been the case for a long time, but it becomes contentious (see Peking to Beijing) and let's not forget how British Naval officers pronounced the names of French ports and cities. It was much simpler...
"Here is my idea for an optimally clear an logical language." Is the xkcd 927 of amateur linguistics. See Lojban, esperanto, volapuk, Ido (esperanto 2), interlingue etc etc.
But maybe neatening language up is like saying it would be better if eggs were spheres instead of egg-shaped and arms were the same length as legs, and mountains and waves were really even zig-zags, as they are in children's drawings. And where's the evidence the messiness of language causes us trouble? Children pick it up very fast. And all native speakers effortlessly follow the grammatical rules, however convoluted and full of exceptions, of the language they learned. If someone says their grammar is bad, all that means is that the person complaining speaks a different dialect and feels superior. Seems likely that we evolved to learn language of the kind that we speak, which is full of the rotted down bits of other languages slowly turning into compost, and always changing as new slang comes into being.
Insisting that human language act as if were designed is, pardon the expression, a fool's errand, and always has been. Your rules sound like they're designed to make it easier to _learn_ a language, but humans have managed to communicate quite well without these rules for millennia, and you haven't explained exactly what's wrong with languages as they exist.
In particular, from later in the thread:
--
Moon Moth: "I take it that there would be no accents, no dialects, no slang, no phonological drift? No kids making up stuff or changing the pronunciations or chopping the endings off of words to sound "cool"? A single received hive-queen's speech that is never deviated from? No breakaway renegade provinces who resist the dictates of the People's Language Authority?"
You: "Correct. While normally libertarian, this is one area where I support the government reigning with the utmost brutality."
--
I presume you're being at least a bit sarcastic here, but you're right that it would take an insanely repressive society to be able to fight the universal rules of linguistics, and all I see in its favor is your sense of logic and aesthetics.
Another rule suggestion: The vocabulary should be well structured. There should be a smallish number of concise base-words (as per rule 5), and you can apply very simple rules to create more subtle meaning. The number of synonyms and almost synonyms should be minimal. (this rule synergizes well with rules 6 and 7)
For instance: the word "good" would be such base word. You could increase the intensity by prefixing it with "plus", or you could invert it with "un" (this would clash with your rule 4, which I think is ok. I don't like rule 4. I think, that having polar-opposites, which sound nothing alike, would make the language somewhat chaotic and less desireable). You could also increase the intensity simply by adding another "plus" (or "double plus") to it. Of course the would also work for the negative.
some more transformation could be:
* "Ante–" is a prefix that replaces before; thus antefilling replaces the English phrase "before filling."
* "Post–" is a prefix that replaces after.
* "–ful" transforms any word into an adjective, e.g. the English words fast, quick, and rapid are replaced by speedful and slow is replaced by unspeedful.
* "–d" and "–ed" form the past tense of a verb, e.g. ran becomes runned, stole becomes stealed, drove becomes drived, thought becomes thinked, and drank becomes drinked.
* "–er" forms the more comparison of an adjective, e.g. better becomes gooder.
* "–est" forms the most comparison of an adjective, e.g. best becomes goodest.
* "–s" and "–es" transform a noun into its plural form, e.g. men becomes mans, oxen becomes oxes, and lives becomes lifes.
* "–wise" transforms any word into an adverb by eliminating all English adverbs not already ending in "–wise", e.g. quickly becomes speedwise, slowly becomes unspeedwise, carefully becomes carewise, and words like fully, completely, and totally become fullwise.
> For other types of expression, like lyricism and emotion, I think a different language would need to be constructed to achieve an optimum. However, I'm not talking about those here.
That is perfect! I suggest splitting the language (or at the the vocabulary) into 3 parts:
* Type A language would be for functional concept and everyday life.
* Tyce B would be for art and self-expression.
* Type C would be for technical and scientific things.
hahahah, seriously....ungood is sooo much better than mediocre. It literally falls from the tongue...and it is a perfect synonym for badplus. Practically speaking, a language should be as devoid of nuance as possible.
9) Questions must have upside-down question marks at the beginning and normal question marks at the end, like in Spanish, to clue readers into the nature of the sentence earlier on. This would also be useful for compound sentences that begin with normal statements and end with a question statement since the inverted question mark would be placed somewhere in the middle of the sentence, indicating where the question statement started. Again, more information is conveyed this way and the sentence's meaning is clearer from the start.
"It is generally agreed that there are approximately 44 sounds in English, with some variation dependent on accent and articulation."
"Approximately" and "depending on accent and articulation" are doing a lot of work here. I suspect you have a great deal more sounds used, and that is only in English. According to Google (https://alic.sites.unlv.edu/chapter-11-3-phonemes/), "Humans have the ability to produce about 600 different consonant sounds and 200 vowel sounds".
Once upon a time, I believe Esperanto was invented to solve what you're trying to do here.
I'm not sure if Esperanto was really made to be as efficient as possible. If I remember correctly Esperanto has lots of weird phonemes that don't appear in any of the really popular languages (English, Spanish, French...) but that do appear in Polish. The creator of Esperanto was polish.
But maybe his goal was to create a very efficient language but our knowledge of linguistics just wasn't advanced enough yet.
Oh yes, that's excellent. Maybe even more thorough than is necessary. The alphabet seems so tuned to capturing the exact sounds of the words that it's overly long. Also, some of the letters are shaped too similarly to each other, meaning mistakes will be common problems.
I don't want to be critical of your efforts — in fact, more power to you! — but you seem to be modeling your conlang using assumptions based on Indo-European models. Your glossopoeic* (I love that word!) efforts might benefit from learning about some of the wild and wooly grammars and vocabularies outside the Indo-European sphere. For instance, Chinese is an interesting language because it evolved from a language that used polysyllabic words into one with monosyllabic words (where tones were used to distinguish between words with a similar phonological structure). So the Chinese language(s) meets your criteria for efficiency.
And it gets better! — at least from the way you want to spec out your conlang — Chinese doesn't have verb tenses — so no conjugations! But, funny — but Mandarin may be evolving into a polysyllabic language again. I don't speak Mandarin, but I'm told that all the terms required for modern civilization are causing Mandarin speakers to coin new words by combining two or more traditional words.
Also, one of the unique features of Chinese is that its writing system can be read by Mandarin speakers, Cantonese speakers, Hokkien speakers, etc. So, that's as if Germans, French, and English could mutually understand a common written language. In fact, Japanese Kanji is based on Chinese traditional characters, and my Japanese friends tell me that thay can puzzle out the meaning of written Chinese. Of course, the learning curve is much steeper for Chinese characters than for alphabets, but wouldn't it be cool to have a universal written language based on characters even if the verbal languages were distinctly different?
* JRR Tolkien coined the term glossopoeia (language + making) for what he did with his made-up languages.
You can theorize all you want, but natural human language will stubbornly refuse to follow your rules.
You can get decent spelling if you have a central authority and are willing to periodically change the spelling of words to keep up with language drift but stuff like "no irregular verbs" will be a lot harder.
I take it that there would be no accents, no dialects, no slang, no phonological drift? No kids making up stuff or changing the pronunciations or chopping the endings off of words to sound "cool"? A single received hive-queen's speech that is never deviated from? No breakaway renegade provinces who resist the dictates of the People's Language Authority?
As for more suggestions: no tone (except for emphasis and stress), no grammatical gender, no irregular nouns, no conjugation or declension, no agreement in case or number, and regular stress patterns. If redundancy becomes important, maybe have a numeric identifier that can attach to words, so "Mark-2 ate-2 his-1 food" clearly indicates that Mark ate person number 1's food, whoever that was established as being. Short helper particles can be added when extra clarity is necessary, but omitted in the normal cases in which it is not. If modifiers go after the modified, pluralization could be interchangeable with a particle meaning "multiple".
Various phonetic sounds can be easy to confuse, so you'd want to make sure that words separated by only one or two small noises have distinct enough meanings that slight mis-hearings or mis-speakings won't cause confusion. ("Pear" and "bear", for instance, or "cot" and "caught".)
"I take it that there would be no accents, no dialects, no slang, no phonological drift? No kids making up stuff or changing the pronunciations or chopping the endings off of words to sound "cool"? A single received hive-queen's speech that is never deviated from? No breakaway renegade provinces who resist the dictates of the People's Language Authority?"
Correct. While normally libertarian, this is one area where I support the government reigning with the utmost brutality.
"no tone (except for emphasis and stress)"
I'm not sure about this. Tonal variations, indicated by accent marks over written syllables, could improve the speed of communication.
"no grammatical gender"
Agree. Gendered language seems like a huge waste. Consider Spanish, which makes itself needlessly harder to learn by forcing people to memorize gendered articles ("el", "la" and the terrible "le") that must be matched correctly with nouns, even if the nouns don't have properties that are intuitively male or female. For example, "the table" is "la mesa" even though there is nothing feminine about a table.
Also, all Spanish nouns seem to end in "a" or "o" to signify whether they are feminine or masculine, which adds an extra letter and syllable to all of them, making them longer to write and to say. They seem to compensate by talking faster.
"no irregular nouns"
I agree.
"no conjugation or declension, no agreement in case or number"
I agree.
"and regular stress patterns."
What does this mean?
"If redundancy becomes important, maybe have a numeric identifier that can attach to words, so "Mark-2 ate-2 his-1 food" clearly indicates that Mark ate person number 1's food, whoever that was established as being. "
How about we just make it a rule that, whenever such confusion could arise, the speaker/writer cannot use pronouns? That sentence would be "Mark ate the other person's food."
"Short helper particles can be added when extra clarity is necessary, but omitted in the normal cases in which it is not."
In other words, you'd provide emphasis by doing *this*?
"If modifiers go after the modified, pluralization could be interchangeable with a particle meaning "multiple"."
Give an example.
"Various phonetic sounds can be easy to confuse, so you'd want to make sure that words separated by only one or two small noises have distinct enough meanings that slight mis-hearings or mis-speakings won't cause confusion. ("Pear" and "bear", for instance, or "cot" and "caught".)"
I agree. AI would be enormously useful building a vocabulary that met this and the other requirements.
I don't think verbal speed should be a goal to optimize for, at least not past a certain threshold which should be easy to achieve.
> "and regular stress patterns" What does this mean?
Tone on individual words should be, if not absent, then at least predictable by looking at the word. And shouldn't require separate markings, or memorization.
> How about we just make it a rule that, whenever such confusion could arise, the speaker/writer cannot use pronouns?
I don't know how well that would work in practice; pronouns seem very common in languages, but I'm unfamiliar with the linguistic research, and these days it's hard to search for it because of the politics surrounding gendered pronouns. Another proposal I've seen is to have pronouns for letters of the name, something looking like the Japanese A-ko, B-ko, etc. Perfect clarity is impractical, but providing a variety of pronoun options can make simple things easy and complex things possible.
> In other words, you'd provide emphasis by doing this?
No, I meant that there are languages with markers for parts of speech, like subjects, but sometimes they can be omitted if it's obvious in context.
> Give an example.
Actually, I was just thinking of the standard English "-s" suffix. Maybe the language could distinguish between singular, dual, and multiple. Or maybe it could dispense with grammatical number entirely, and add particle for cases in which it's important. (Linguistic note, in case you didn't know - a lot of the case system used in languages like Latin, is believed to have developed from base words combining with following particles. There's a whole cycle where the particles merge onto the word and become suffixes in a case system, and then wear off gradually, while new particles are added to allow for meaning, and then the cycle repeats.)
>Also, all Spanish nouns seem to end in "a" or "o" to signify whether they are feminine or masculine, which adds an extra letter and syllable to all of them, making them longer to write and to say. They seem to compensate by talking faster.
I suspect you already know this, but that's not what they're compensating for.
>How about we just make it a rule that, whenever such confusion could arise, the speaker/writer cannot use pronouns? That sentence would be "Mark ate the other person's food."
But confusion *could* arise from the use of pronouns in just about any sentence. It hardly ever does, because context is a thing, and so are informal conventions about when to use a pronoun and when not. If you're going to fix what arguably isn't broken, the only way that is strict enough for your fiat language is to ban pronouns altogether. Including "it."
In a similar spirit to 5, words with subtle but important differences should sound clearly distinct from one another, as the similarities make it harder to distinguish them by context. We tend to see this occur organically in jargon, such names for different ropes in sailing (halyards, sheets, lines, etc) and names for different configurations of dimensional lumber in house framing (stud, header, footer, rafter, joist, etc). I bring this up specifically because this is a common mistake I've observed in constructed languages which often follow Wilkins's approach of building words out of components indicating subcategories in an ontology, so for example "dog" and "wolf" would differ only by the last letter.
People sometimes question why, like bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds, humans are drawn to flowers. Unlike the others, we aren't pollinators. There's no clear evolutionary reason why humans should find flowers aesthetically appealing.
It occurred to me today while thinking about how next spring I will plant the seeds produced by my Mexican sunflowers this fall that perhaps humans and other primates have helped scatter and plant the seeds of flowers, and therefore perhaps some flowers have indeed co-evolved with primates along with their respective pollinators. Do other apes ever decorate themselves with flowers? Do they eat them? If the latter, some flowers may have evolved much like fruit.
What would this hypothesis predict? That flowers in places humans mostly haven't been should look less appealing to them than those in places where they have been frequently?
Edit: Perhaps a simpler explanation is humans simply like bright colors. But then why that? Sheer novelty is sexually attractive, I suppose. Put flowers in your hair it's going to draw attention.
Plants and animals are brighter in the tropics, and I think that would be the case in the absence of primates.
Aren't flowers often the precursors to fruit? In that case, it's beneficial for flowers to be attractive even if the flowers themselves aren't edible, because they signify where food may be in the future. Relatedy, flowers are an indication of a healthy ecosystem. In times of drought or other stress, plants will produce fewer and smaller flowers. Anything which we associate with life, especially new life, will probably be seen as beautiful or desirable in some way.
I just recently wrote an on precisely this subject (not mentioning flowers in particular, but it readily explains the flowers). I am claiming that beauty is the evolutionary reward for productive engagement with sensory signals that contains a optimal amount of decodable structure - signals that are entropically fine tuned. In my view, we do not have to ask "why is X beautiful?" individually for each X, and then find a separate evolutionary answer every time. Instead, I claim that we have a generalized hunger to try to learn the non-trivial yet computationally accessible structures that we see in sensory input. It is evolutionary beneficial for humans to be able to decode structures in sound and vision. This lets us hear predators over the hiss of the wind, see subtle tracks, identify poisonous plants by their colors, see subtle facial expressions in the fellow caveman that is about to attack us.
My thesis is that beauty is the evolutionary reward given to encourage the behavior that makes us better extracting and predicting patterns in sensory input. A flower is an object that both has structure that we can detect relatively easily, while at the same time being somewhat rare in their colors, providing novelty. This encourages us to engage. Rather than type out the whole argument again, I would invite you to look at my Substack essay "Beauty as entropic fine-tuning" if you want more.
If I understand correctly, your thesis suggests humans are rewarded by experiencing beauty, analogous to a dopamine rush, which temporarily rewards the observer and also encourages the observer to seek future rushes, which requires developing their observation/listening skills. Although you make clear that beauty isn't the exact same thing as art, this thesis isn't hard to understand in the domain of art, where a classical music fan doesn't typically start out listening to Schoenberg but more likely appreciates Mozart or Haydn first and maybe then the later Beethoven works and then maybe Mahler before appreciating 12-tone music. In other words, an increasing appreciation of subtlety and tasteful dissonance. We see the same in other musical genres from Dixieland jazz to freeform jazz, from pop to punk and death metal, and in other artistic media: whether it's painting, poetry, or architecture (to shoot some sacred cows here) the connoisseur tends to appreciate more abstraction and difficulty the more they experience the medium.
In other words, the more attention one pays with their eyes or ears or brains to various patterns, musical visual, whatever, the more they are able to be rewarded by, dare I say, higher levels of beauty. The evolutionary purpose for this phenomenon is to encourage one to pay attention to their environment, whether that means listening more carefully to it or observing it more closely.
I'm still unclear how the link works, however, between listening closely in a non-musical environment to a musical one, for instance. Is the ancient hunter who listens more closely to the sounds of the forest during the day rewarded by appreciating the songs around the campfire at night? I find that hard to believe or at least not intuitive. Because for one thing, the whole tribe would be listening to the same songs. The hunter with the more sophisticated ear for detecting the sound of wooly mammoth hoofs as they slink through the putrid marsh isn't, I don't think, or at least it's very hard to prove, going to the primitive music on a higher level.
Thanks for that wonderful description of the journey through the world classical music! Everything you wrote felt spot on to me.
As for the final part, on the evolutionary aspect. In my mind, the reverse of what your wrote is the evolutionary most relevant part. The hunter that pays close attention to the music around the campfire will be better able to distinguish the sound of a woolly mammoth hoof from some other animal step (in the case of the mammoth, its sheer size might make this job easy of course :)). That fine appreciation of timbre is skill that generalizes beyond musical sound. Carefully listening to the timbre of the flute might also help you analyze natural timbres that aid your survival. I do agree that it is challenging to empirically prove this. But as one piece of data: take a skilled electronic music producer and play some natural sound for them. Often they are able to imitate that sound closely with a synthesizer, indicating a generalized capability of analyzing natural sounds from the practice of music.
It's an interesting thesis but I'd want to see more evidence for it before believing it is likely true. Even if you had a time machine, it would be a difficult idea to test.
Indeed, I am planning to start digging in the literature. There seems to be some work on the relation between music, entropy and predictive processing.
Also, thank you for the link! I have not read it, but I am now planning to do that.
I suppose it's just taking the Anthropic procedure and a) assuming it gets more sophisticated, and b) assuming it can eventually apply to human bio-neural-networks.
So I'd say it's "speculative", rather than "hard". For "hard", they'd need to have more numbers, and equations, and limits on what can and cannot be done.
Random thought: astronauts are highly-trained, highly educated individuals. People say everyone is equal, but I submit that astronauts, by virtue of their training and physical condition, are superior people. Further evidence: they need not put on their pants one leg at a time, but both simultaneously.
Have you read the Right Stuff? Astronaut training has no doubt changed a lot, but not all the original 7 were the brightest tools in the box. Even exercise was frowned upon - the other astronauts thought John Glenn going for a run every day was not proper. What mattered was having the right attitude to risk, they were almost all test pilots and several had combat experience. So superior in certain ways definitely but maybe not as superior as the cult of "being an Astronaut" would suggest.
A City on Mars has a long section talking about the screening processes and rigorous training that astronauts go through. And in particular how the current solution to "space travel is hard on the body" is just "only send the absolutely healthiest people possible", which doesn't generalize well.
When people say everyone is equal, they mean morally or legally or in dignity, but I don't think anyone is so foolish as to believe that everyone is equally smart, or wise, or brave, or strong. Chesterton wrote a bit on this in his book "What I Saw in America"
"(The American) may at least understand what Jefferson and Lincoln meant, and he may possibly find some assistance in this task by reading what they said. He may realise that equality is not some crude fairy tale about all men being equally tall or equally tricky; which we not only cannot believe but cannot believe in anybody believing. It is an absolute of morals by which all men have a value invariable and indestructible and a dignity as intangible as death. He may at least be a philosopher and see that equality is an idea; and not merely one of these soft-headed sceptics who, having risen by low tricks to high places, drink bad champagne in tawdry hotel lounges, and tell each other twenty times over, with unwearied iteration, that equality is an illusion."
I forget whether the antimatter was ever directly used for orbital bombardment, but yes, I think both things were involved in establishing rule by the landing party. But the (bullshit) justification propagated to the common people seemed to be more about inherent aristocracy?
There are many positive correlations between physical height and success, but astronauts can't be taller than a little over 6 feet. QED astronauts must not be very successful, or superior.
I think IQ race realists are accused of calling Jews and East Asians "superior," because intuitively everyone knows higher intelligence makes a superior being. The differences between average people doesn't matter that much, but I'm perfectly comfortable with saying Roger Penrose is a superior person compared to a given individual with Down syndrome.
Only people who value intelligence in and of itself (i.e. nerds) "intuitively" know thar higher intelligence makes a superior being. This attitude is so routinely mocked that I'm not sure how you missed it.
I said intuitively because it's not something people like to admit to themselves, for myriad reasons. Our superiority over ants and dogs is 100% downstream of intelligence, and everyone knows that. Most of the time this doesn't apply to humans because in the broader view of life in the universe, the difference between 90 iq and 110 iq doesn't really matter, they're both humans who can cooperate and successfully raise a family. But when you're talking about differences so vast that something like an IQ test couldn't even hope to capture them, real fucking significant differences that we care about start to emerge, and moral language starts to become appropriate.
I don't think that "everyone secretly believes what I believe" works as an argument. Again, nerds value intelligence. Normal folk value other things: looks, charisma, athletic ability, piety, whatever.
A large chunk of humanity would chuck Penrose in an incinerator for being an atheist, for instance.
Very large sample population study in Sweden compares siblings and finds no effects on ADHD, autism. When not comparing siblings, finds a small negative effect.
I use the dichotomy to force my mind into the frame "Actually, this person may just have terminal values that are the opposite of yours, and the fact that their proposal would hurt you is the *whole point.*"
Not very comforting, but what are you going to do?
I think it's mostly worth applying to your own thinking.
We all have a little bit of conflict theorists and a little bit of mistake theorist in us, and there's no thought more tempting than "Wow, this particular policy which just happens to advantage the people I like over the people I dislike also just happens to be the objectively best policy!"
The failure mode of conflict theorists is that they win by establishing a bunch of social truths that must not be questioned, but that are factually wrong, and then have a hard time achieving the goals they were fighting for because they've ruled a bunch of important facts out-of-bounds to win the political battle.
I add it to the collection of lenses that I can view the world through. Sometimes it's the right tool for the job, but (as with almost all tools) most times it isn't.
Practically, when I come across reflexive mistake theorists, it helps me come up with conversational gambits I can use to get them to recognize the signs of conflict. (Because we've almost all seen conflict of one sort or another, so usually (unless they're using mistake theory as part of conflict theory) I can nudge them around to a point where they can see things from another point of view.
It doesn't help me so much with conflict theorists, mostly because I personally tend to be geared toward nudging conflict theorists toward the recognition of mistake theory. And at that point, it becomes more about the differences between individual intent and ascribed group intent.
Its helpful when discussing things with people. If you don't recognize that dichotomy you can spend a lot of time approaching a problem from a mistake theory perspective and getting befuddled by the conflict theory person you're discussing things with. Once you understand the dichotomy you could then either avoid the discussion (if you don't think it will be productive) or change the discussion to match your interlocuter's approach.
Wouldn't it just be enough to notice when things don't seem to be getting anywhere in a conversation (for any reason) and then disengage? It's what I do; it's always possible there's just a pervasive language/terminology barrier, or a too large inferential distance, and it's valuable to have a stopping point and acknowledge that the expected pay-off isn't worth the effort of finding common communicative ground first.
That said, I personally don't use the conflict theory / mistake theory distinction at all - the way I've understood those models, they just don't form useful categories in my particular overall world model. (You can also read that as "I don't believe the distinction exists" plus acknowledgement of subjectivity.) Which is to say, grain of salt.
I've complained here in the past, when wikipedia has come up in the comments, that it seems to be totally unconcerned with whether the information it reports (1) is true; or (2) accurately reflects the sources that it cites.
My example has been the page on French toast, which for a long time reported that a French toast recipe appeared in a second-century Roman cookbook, despite the talk page accurately documenting that this was false.
On what I believe was the second occasion of my complaining here, someone (not me) took it upon themselves to delete the offending text from the wikipedia article rather than trying to actually get a correction through.
Ever since then people have been putting it back, with comments making it clear they have absolutely no idea what they're saying. People (often me) have been re-deleting the spurious material occasionally, but this is totally absurd.
Wikipedia defenders: what gives? How do you imagine this is supposed to work? Why, in your opinion, is wikipedia failing 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗯𝗮𝗱𝗹𝘆?
(1) I don't understand what specific part of wikipedia you are objecting to, or what you want done policy-wise. There are many things I dislike about WP, and stupid, biased and lazy editors is one of them. But unless you are merely venting "my God wikipedia editors can be so stupid!" then what do you want done? This particular problem, unlike many others, doesn't seem to be caused by specific policies or structural elements of wikipedia that could be centrally changed: it's an inevitable effect of anyone being able to edit, which is the entire essence of wikipedia.
(2) I do think wikipedia as a crowd-sourced project, even if all its political agenda crap and bureaucratic arrogance were dealt with, is bad and dangerous in a sense. But it's not bad and dangerous in itself. It's only bad and dangerous because people frequently forget that it is in fact crowd sourced by random people, and fail to apply the extreme scepticism appropriate to the knowledge that every single article is in part written by randos on the internet. This fact should be mentioned *every single time WP is linked* (since judging from their willingness to believe something on WP, almost everyone constantly forgets this). Of course people should be appying a hundred times more scrutny than they do to the writings of experts and authorities. That number is off the chart for the writings of mobs of internet busybodies.
(3) How the hell did you put bold text in your comment? I thought Substack didn't support that?
Huh, thanks. And now I have to ask 2 further questions:
1. How long has substack comments supported this?
2. How the hell does a community of at least one third IT professionals (and probably even higher for regular commenters) hardly ever make use of this?
*I* have had an excuse for using *'s around words in place of italics. What's all the programmers' excuse?
It's much easier to type a pair of asterisks than it is to go to a utility website and ask for unicodified text to copy and paste into a separate window.
I think that as a rule, Wikipedia is more reliable than somebody's unsourced opinion in a comment. So it is appropriate to reply to a comment with a Wikipedia citation. However, it is also appropriate to reply to a Wikipedia citation with an intelligent sourced argument for why in this case Wikipedia is wrong. But in the absence of such an argument, a reasonable default for someone with limited time can be to trust Wikipedia.
I agree with Alex in seeing nothing wrong with the French Toast page.
Wikipedia does have many problems but I don't see a problem with your example and so I'm not sure I understood what bothers you.
Wikipedia correctly says that The Oxford Companion to Food considers Apicius' recipe related to the modern French toast and notes that there is a major difference (no eggs). Which part of it is false? In what way is the reader deceived?
The problem is the persistent efforts to return the page to its earlier state, in which it said that the recipe in the Apicius did use eggs. As I've already noted in this very comment thread, the reason the page currently notes that eggs were not used in that recipe is that I personally corrected it yesterday. Do you want me to give Wikipedia credit for that? Wikipedia is taking the position that I should stop trying to prevent it from misinforming people. That's bad, not good.
Since the initial correction to the page, I've checked in on it on an erratic, every-several-months basis, and without fail someone has decided that they know through personal revelation that Apicius included eggs in his recipe. The facts aren't going to stop them. You think there's nothing about this that should bother me?
What do you mean? Several different people have noted the issue, it's explained on the talk page, it's explained in the edit history, and the issue is still not fixed. What would a difficult process look like?
The way it looks with every other popular source, mainly the news media? On the rare occasion anything gets corrected at all, the correction is hidden or buried with equivocation.
Thanks for the clarification, now I understand your frustration. I think this stems directly from one of the main Wikipedia policies, which says that the content should be supported by published sources, rather than the editors' knowledge and inferences.
In this case there are sources that differ and naturally Wikipedia reflects this discrepancy. For that matter, it's not inconceivable that there were good reasons for that author to impute eggs into Apicius' text. Personally I doubt it, but in many cases we can't be sure we know *the truth*.
Since there are plenty of errors in published scholarly articles and books, not to mention newspaper articles, this policy does cause a lot of problems. However the real question is what you propose to do about it. The obvious ideas have no less obvious problems. If you only let experts edit articles, you'll likely end like Nupedia. If you let Wikipedia editors add or change content even when it's not supported by sources, the reliability might even worsen, as the average Wikipedia editor is not necessarily smarter or better informed than an average journalist
> In this case there are sources that differ and naturally Wikipedia reflects this discrepancy.
I'm really getting the sense that you're not reading my comments. It's possible that there are sources that differ. But the wikipedia article has never cited any such sources. This isn't a case of wikipedia reflecting that different books say different things. They only ever cite the Joseph Dommers Vehling translation, and it says the opposite of what they claim that it says.
Okay, scrabbling around on the Internet, there's a lack of the original Latin text so we're reliant on English translations.
The addition of beaten eggs seems to be from one done by "Joseph Dommers Vehling in a very limited edition by Walter M. Hill (1936), which in turn was reprinted by Dover Publications in 1977. It is in the public domain" as per this website (very early web page so a lot of eye-watering colour choices).
The crux of the problem seems to be here:
"Vehling's edition is amply supplied with footnotes, combining a sort of textual criticism (although giving the readings of modern editions rather than those of the manuscripts) and commentary on the subject matter. ...As a professional chef, he also fleshes out some of Apicius' stenographic instructions: in [brackets] in the print edition, in color in my Web transcription."
So it would seem to be that Vehling felt this was indeed an early version of French toast and he just 'tidied up' the recipe by adding in the 'missing' eggs. I can't reproduce the colour used by the transcription, so back to brackets for it:
Break [slice] fine white bread, crust removed, into rather large pieces which soak in milk [and beaten eggs] fry in oil, cover with honey and serve.1
1 "French" Toast, indeed! — Sapienti sat!
The original recipe, sans Vehling's editorialising, seems to be: take white bread, remove crusts, slice/break into large pieces, soak in milk, fry in oil, pour over honey, serve.
3. Aliter dulcia: siligineos rasos frangis, et buccellas maiores facies. in lacte infundis, frigis [et] in oleo, mel superfundis et inferes.
Google Translate Latin to English (which seems to be absolutely terrible), there is no mention of eggs:
"Sweets in a different way: break the rye shavings, and make the biscuits bigger. pour it in milk, cool [and] in oil, pour honey over it and bring it down."
> BREAK [slice] FINE WHITE BREAD, CRUST REMOVED, INTO RATHER LARGE PIECES WHICH SOAK IN MILK [and beaten eggs] FRY IN OIL, COVER WITH HONEY AND SERVE
You might notice some oddities here. They are explained at the beginning of the book:
> EXPLANATION OF TYPESETTING, ABBREVIATIONS, AND SYSTEM OF NUMBERING
> The original ancient text as presented and rendered in the present translation is printed in capital letters.
> Matter in parenthesis () is original. Matter in square brackets [] is contributed by the translator.
So, in order to claim that eggs were included in the second-century text, as opposed to the twentieth-century text, you'd want to see that the word "EGGS" appeared in capital letters, outside of [square brackets]. That's what the source says. Unless you think I'm misreading it?
Because it's crowdsourced. It relies on the crowd to both post information and correct it. What that means is that the very motivated, be it by genuine obsession with a topic or malice, will pour the most effort into editing, correcting, deleting, and curating the pages on that pet topic. So if they think "yes the Romans ate French toast" they will be hell-bent on making sure nobody deletes that or calls it false. Relying on "the crowd" means, in effect, relying on "the mob" and we all know what the mob turns out to be like.
What the overseers or monitors or whoever is supposed to be in charge are doing, I have no idea. *Is* there anyone officially in charge at a higher level, apart from Jimmy Wales constantly begging for money to keep him in yachts and tropical islands? In one way, it's too big for anyone to effectively monitor - unless you have tons of free time and obsession level dedication, handling pages upon pages of edits, reversions, and fights over the French toast is something you are not going to do unless there are official complaints of Bad Think (this is racist or the rest of the list).
"It’s important to note that WMF staff do not directly write or curate any of the content on Wikipedia as part of their job duties. That painstaking work is done by Wikipedia’s volunteer editors, who provide free labor to the site for various reasons. Some of them consider it a public service—and some of them simply find the work itself interesting as a hobby. (The latter seems more common, actually, in my experience.)"
Cue all the "they do it for free/internet jannies" jokes.
As I see it there are only two ways of running a site.
Either you use volunteers - in which case they do what they want to do. The only control you have over them is to ban them, but who says the replacement volunteers will be any better.
Or else you use salaried workers - in which case you fire the ones who do not meet the conditions set by management, and management in turn is controlled by the need to raise funds. But it seems completely impractical to pay enough people to write a site as big as Wikipedia.
So I don't really see a better alternative to the current model.
> So I don't really see a better alternative to the current model.
Well, the Gwern essay linked in the thread observes that...
(A) English wikipedia implemented a bunch of policies;
(B) During this process, the quality of wikipedia went down rather than up; and
(C) The problems experienced by English wikipedia were not mirrored in other-language wikipedias, suggesting that the passage of time wasn't responsible.
I'd say there's a pretty obvious place to look for a better alternative to the current model.
Wikipedia's criterion for putting something in is that it is verifiable, not that it is true. If a quality source falsely reports something stupid, then it can stay on Wikipedia basically indefinitely. Sometimes this can be done for ideological/partisan reasons, but also it can happen just because. I presume nobody is ideologically dedicated to the idea that French toast was in a 1st century Roman cookbook, but some otherwise-reliable source says it, so you're stuck with that until you can overwhelm it.
(The decision to retreat from arbitrating truth to arbitrating quality sources is a defensible one; obviously, it's harder to have a clear, consistent, reliable way to arbitrate truth than it is to have a clear, consistent, reliable way to arbitrate source quality.)
> Wikipedia's criterion for putting something in is that it is verifiable, not that it is true.
I read a story about some author (famous enough to have a wikipedia page, but not so famous that I'd ever heard of him) who tried to correct an error on his own page and it was immediately reverted because "citation needed". He made a big enough stink that some media wrote an article about it, and now his page says that the fact/error is disputed and cites that article.
The wikipedia page for Geoff Muldaur says "singer, guitarist and composer". I know he also plays clarinet and piano because I have seen him do that in concert. I know better than to try to correct his wikipedia page with this info. "citation needed".
> Wikipedia's criterion for putting something in is that it is verifiable, not that it is true. If a quality source falsely reports something stupid, then it can stay on Wikipedia basically indefinitely.
That isn't how wikipedia's editors understand things. My original complaint was that I marked the claim about French toast "failed verification" because the cited source stated the opposite of what wikipedia reported that it said. This was immediately reverted on the grounds that "verification" is purely a question of whether the source exists, not of whether it supports the claim that is cited to it.
You're free to write whatever you want, and cite it to any book you want, as long as the book exists. Wikipedia is specifically uninterested in what the book says.
> I presume nobody is ideologically dedicated to the idea that French toast was in a 1st century Roman cookbook, but some otherwise-reliable source says it
No, there is no source, other than the wikipedia article itself, that has ever said this. The wikipedia article was always cited to sources that said the opposite.
No, I don't. Wikipedia's actual policies are what actually happens on wikipedia. If this is how wikipedia's editors behave, either this is a problem in the eyes of wikipedia, or it isn't, but wikipedia is the party that needs to be told.
If wikipedia wanted to change, it probably could, but in a world were the first paragraph of wikipedia is read off automatics by several services its to valuable to get manipulate words.
I think as with many things, the proper comparison is not with some theoretical ideal, but with practical alternatives.
Wikipedia is extremely imperfect. But is it worse than the alternatives? In my experience, it is _generally_ relatively trustworthy, and the fact that it sometimes gets things wrong (and even that it stubbornly refuses to correct them), is an acceptable flaw.
In other words, I think the world would be worse off if Wikipedia just disappeared. We shouldn't shy away from admitting its faults (probably the worst one is that Wikipedia is particularly untrustworthy on the most politically salient, and therefore arguably most important, topics), but we should also be willing to admit what a boon it has been to human knowledge. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and from my perspective, Wikipedia is very, very good.
> the fact that it sometimes gets things wrong (and even that it stubbornly refuses to correct them), is an acceptable flaw.
That's two out of three phases. We had a phase where it got the facts wrong, a following phase where it refused to correct the error, but now we're in the phase where the error has been... glossed over, and Wikipedia is devoting significant effort to putting it back. Attempting to wrong what has already been put right isn't "refusing to correct an error".
> We shouldn't shy away from admitting its faults (probably the worst one is that Wikipedia is particularly untrustworthy on the most politically salient, and therefore arguably most important, topics)
My early exposure to wikipedia was all math articles, and I didn't see what the problem was supposed to be. If you leave the math articles, it becomes clear. :/
Math wikipedia isnt bad, but physics and chemistry are much better IMO. In math you can read an article giving you the definition of a concept and some examples, and not mention any of the three most important theorems about it at all. Its relatively complete and doesnt have errors visible at my level, but the "networked" aspect of it is severely lacking once youre a little off the beaten path.
Wikipedia's main power is that anybody can fix it, just as anybody can break it. For the most part this averages out to be alright: case in point, as of 6/24 the Wikipedia article on French Toast says "Some authors consider the recipe for Aliter Dulcia (translated as 'Another sweet dish') included in the Apicius, a 1st century CE Ancient Roman cuisine cookbook, "not very different" from modern French toast, although it does not involve eggs." That seems fair to me: it's not claiming that there is a recipe for French toast in a Roman cookbook, it's claiming that some people consider a recipe in a Roman cookbook to be kind of like French toast, except without one of the main ingredients.
Yes, I put that language back in - yesterday - after someone deleted it, insisting in their edit comment that the cited source shows that the recipe in the Apicius included eggs. And I got a message on the talk page for my edit from the same idiot who made the spurious edit, complaining that they were correct to interpret the source as saying the opposite of what it says.
Wait and see how long it is until the wikipedia page once again tells you that Apicius wrote a Roman recipe for French toast made with eggs.
I think Wikipedia's heyday is long past and instead of attracting editors full of goodwill it now attracts mostly cranks. Someone should probably save a version of Wikipedia from ~2010 which could then be regarded as "The best of all possible Wikipedias". Anyway, that's going to be my new crank view.
It is, Gwern thoroughly documented the gutting of Wikipedia's editors and major changes in admin and overall direction since 2010 or so. 85% of edits come from 3% of people, and even participation from those 3% fell precipitously since 2010:
First party authorities can mostly definitely share their expertise. They just have to share it in the form of references to reliable publications they have published. Not in the form of off-the-cuff comments by some internet account who may or may not be the person they claim to be.
There is a list of publications considered "reliable" by Wikipedia, and it's mostly the ones you would expect, although of course there are debates about which publications to include on the fringes.
"The Early Days: How It All Began Initially, Wikipedia was part of a larger project named Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia written by experts. However, Nupedia's stringent editorial process led to slow content growth. The introduction of a wiki model, allowing anyone to edit and contribute, transformed the project. This move marked a pivotal shift from expert-driven content to a more democratic, community-based approach."
Now if we were all perfect little angels, this would work out fine. But humans are not perfect little angels, we have biases and prejudices and hold grudges and are convinced of our righteousness, so if we get the opportunity to make sure That Lot (who are, of course, completely bad and wrong) don't get to spread their horrible propaganda and disinformation, we'll leap upon it. "Reliable sources" then become "what *I* consider a reliable source" which is "sticks to the party line".
> if you can hack the "reliable source" rule, by defining your friends as reliable and your enemies as not, you've zero-dayed our whole civilization's official source of truth, and you'd better believe that political activists are very aware of that.
I was interested to learn, after seeing a reference to The Crying Game elsewhere, that the wikipedia article for that movie was revised in 𝟮𝟬𝟬𝟳 to state that the transvestite was actually transgender, not a transvestite. This is far earlier than I believe there was any public awareness of the trans fad, and wildly anachronistic to the movie.
The distinction between transvestite and a transexual was well know well before 2007, both in psychiatrist's manuals such as the DSM,. and in opinion iof the trans ciommunity.Not anachronistic for the time frame the movie is set in.
(Now, of course, there's an "actually, the distinction is more complicated than that" argument that can be made)
Well, the DSM-III does recognize "transsexualism". There are a few problems with your argument.
1. The wikipedia page says "transexual" *now*. It's said that for almost two whole months. Before that, it said "transgender". Before that, "transwoman". In 2007, as I stated above, it was revised to say that Dil was "transgender", not "transexual".
2. Dil is not transexual in the language of the time or according to the DSM-III criteria, which lead off by noting that "the essential features of this heterogeneous disorder are a persistent sense of discomfort and inappropriateness about one's anatomic sex and a persistent wish to be rid of one's genitals and to live as a member of the other sex". The movie provides evidence for up to one of those features, living as a member of the other sex, assuming it's normal female behavior to cruise gay bars. The DSM-III closes by offering, under the heading "differential diagnosis", the criterion that "in both transvestism and transsexualism there may be cross-dressing. However, in transvestism that has not evolved into transsexualism there is no wish to be rid of one's own genitals."
3. According to the page as it currently stands, the relationship between Dil and Fergus begins with Dil taking Fergus to a gay bar. Does that suggest to you more that Dil is trying to present as a woman, or as a gay man?
4. Consistent with all of the above, the page's reference to Dil as a transexual currently carries a little protest footnote observing that the movie's director has specifically explained that Dil is simply a gay transvestite.
So, here in Australia nuclear power has recently become a political football, with the right wing opposition party promising to build seven nuclear power plants if they win election next year as part of their strategy to combat climate change.
As with any topic that becomes political, it’s rapidly become much harder to find balanced, nuanced discussion. Thus I turn to my rationalist friends.
Is nuclear safe and effective? Do we have good ways to store radioactive waste? My vague understanding, prior to all of this, was that it’s way safer than it was in the days of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and that most experts think that it has a place as part of a transition away from fossil fuels (here in Australia we burn way too much coal)
Australia is particularly well-suited to nuclear waste disposal since it has vast, uninhabited deserts that are geologically inactive. The country could actually make money by storing nuclear waste from other countries. I believe there was actually a plan to do this that involved building a small port along an abandoned part of its coastline that would connect to a train track that would be used to move the waste inland to the storage site. The port and track would only be used for moving nuclear waste.
The country COULD make money by storing nuclear waste from outer countries... if that wasn't completely illegal under international law, after the Soviets spent the 1960s paying African countries to import and dispose of the USSR's nuclear waste and then said African countries proceeded to just drop it in landfills and hope for the best.
Among folks I follow, the concern is not that nuclear is unsafe, but that it is likely to be more expensive than other options. The costs do vary by country depending on the government's regulations and strategy.
That's the conclusion I came to as well. Freezing nuclear power doesn't require anyone to oppose it, it just requires the absence of people willing to push uneconomical boondoggles. It's not like this is even an American thing either - Flamanville went just as badly as Plant Vogtle.
The pro-nuclear folks respond by saying that in their hypothetical utopia, they could make nuclear massively cheaper by deregulating it. But of course that means their argument rests on a giant tower of assumptions rather than actual "data", and anyone could be skeptical or wonder why they can't substitute their own optimistic assumptions in favor of other technologies.
Nuclear is safe and effective. Waste storage is not a problem.
The issue is that with the cost curves of solar and batteries on an exponential decrease that has continued much longer than most people expected, and the amount of bureaucracy surrounding nuclear on a steady increase, it may not be profitable to build new nuclear plants in the future.
(It is still a terrible idea to close existing nuclear plants while still burning large amounts of fossil fuels)
Dense countries like India might have trouble finding enough space to put all the solar panels needed to power them, in which case nuclear would be a good alternative. But this is not relevant to Australia, with its small population and enormous desert.
I wouldn't agree that the space argument is spurious. Solar panels in the middle of the desert don't help the metro area much, because of losses in electrical transmission. A lot of remote desert communities (well, mines and other industrial installations) are already switching to solar on their sites (since it makes sense there). Rooftop solar is good, but you need the storage capacity or some other way to shift most of the energy expenditure off-peak.
Every metro area in Australia has this issue - you generate too much power in the middle of the day and don't generate enough after the sun sets. It's definitely not unsolvable but it does need investment to get solved.
I think both proposed energy solutions (go nuclear or go renewables) will ultimately work, but I'm leery of backflips and half-assery like what happened with NBN. Because a half-assed version of either will definitely not work. Whoever wins government and starts on the plan, we really need to stick to it until it's all fully built.
Transmission losses are miniscule - 3.5% per 1,000 km for HVDC lines.
The problem of excess daytime solar generation and insufficient nighttime energy is well recognized - known as the "duck curve" - but is also being solved right now by the exponential rollout of battery storage.
To be honest, either path will involve going through enormous amount of regulatory red tape (grid scale batteries will definitely be major hazards and will probably see similar opposition to a nuclear plant - and you'd probably need more of them). Both will need lots of money. And I do think both will work fine - as long as we actually commit to either and not do the insane half-ass flipflop thing that Auspoliticians love to do, which will deliver a bad outcome AND cost a ton.
What? There is no reason to connect power cables between Perth, Darwin, and Adelaide. Instead you put a separate solar farm close to (e.g. within 500km) each of them.
Maybe Australia is some unique dystopia of bureaucracy and nimbyism, but it seems unlikely. California is well known as a hotbed of bureaucracy and nimbyism, and yet has already installed enough batteries for batteries to become the state's largest source of power on occasion, as my link above describes. All across the developed world we see that there is much more opposition to nuclear projects (and even existing nuclear energy) than to installation of renewables and transmitting.
The Netherlands are more densely populated than India and are on nearly 50% renewable energy. Unless you're a city-state, all you need to go significantly renewable is the capital and the political will.
Most of the Netherlands' renewable energy is wind, and a large fraction of the Netherlands' wind is offshore (not using any land at all), and 50% is much less than 100%, and the Netherlands has unusually strong wind. So their experience does not translate to solar power in other countries.
We can debate this all day long, but my simple point is, population density has nothing to do with it. What do you imagine a densely populated country like India or the Netherlands to look like? People standing shoulder to shoulder, on every square meter of the country? Of course not. There are roads, canals, houses with roofs, marginal/undeveloped tracts of land everywhere. Solar especially is a very grassroots kind of technology. It scales up and down very well, allowing you to place it wherever you have a good field of view to the sun, and sized to whatever budget you have available.
You can calculate how much energy people use and what area of solar panels would be needed. I've done that calculation before for one location. In many places a building uses more electricity than its roof covered by solar panels can physically provide. In a country like the Netherlands there is very little undeveloped land. Solar roadways are a joke. You could build a canopy over roads and canals for solar panels, but it would be much more expensive than solar in a field (and the costs will not go down with time, because they are due to structure/labor not semiconductors).
There are theoretical reactor designs - because no one actually builds new reactors - that are much safer from catastrophe. Traditional designs require active cooling, so if the nuclear plant itself loses power, the loss of cooling causes heat to build up in the reactor until either the steam cracks into hydrogen gas and explodes or the reactor melts through the containment and leaks radioactive material into the ground/water. New designs may incorporate passive cooling, so even in the event of total power loss the reactor is still cooled. Or they may shut down the nuclear chain reaction altogether in a disaster. I'm hardly an expert on this stuff, so I don't know the details off the top of my head.
Three Mile Island was a confluence of multiple different levels of failure. The coolant system failed and a relief valve got stuck open. The operators failed to initially realize that either of these things had happened and acted too late. This was partly because the operators weren't prepared for this kind of thing and partly because there was a bewildering array of instruments and alarms that was difficult to glean information from. Obviously a nuclear power plant is very complicated and thus has many potential places to go wrong, which is why having the design actively shut down or continue cooling in the event of disaster is a huge risk reduction.
Fukushima Daiichi was another pretty bad disaster, but there was nothing wrong with the reactor itself. It was just built in an area of Japan occasionally subject to severe tsunamis, and they didn't build it to withstand a tsunami as severe as they actually got hit by. Also the transformer that routed power from the backup diesel generators to the reactor cooling systems was in a basement level, which of course was flooded and thus useless.
Chernobyl was a pretty unique incident for a lot of reasons. The Soviet Union - and to some extent the Russian Federation that inherited their nuclear legacy - had a long history of nuclear mishaps, mainly related to producing fissile material for weapons. They had a poor safety culture, to say the least. There was a planned test event that required running the reactor at low power levels, but it had to be delayed for hours and hours because there was too much demand for electricity at the time. When the test finally took place, there was a large buildup of contaminants in the reactor that slowed down the reaction. The operators kept increasing the power output to try and overcome this poisoning, with the result that the contaminants were suddenly burnt up and the reactor power output rapidly surged to unsafe levels.
The RBMK type reactors at Chernobyl had control rods with tips designed to boost reactivity when partially inserted. Fully inserting the control rods is the panic switch for nuclear reactors that shuts everything down. Unfortunately, the rods take a minute or two to fully insert, so inserting the rods actually boosts reactivity temporarily before shutting the nuclear reaction down. In this freak instance, with the confluence of the delayed test conditions and poisoning fooling the operators into running the reactor far too hot, the partial control rod insertion tipped the reactor chamber into an actual explosion (or maybe it just burned really really quickly.)
I love the first episode of the eponymous Chernobyl series from HBO, I got chills when I watched it. Sadly they take a lot of liberties with the truth which distorts the story from reality.
I'm pointing these accidents out as the rare instances of failure. There have been a lot of nuclear reactors in many countries for many decades with a flawless safety record, and they learn from these failures as well. You should probably discount anything that happened in the USSR, especially Chernobyl, as their nuclear safety record is uniquely horrible. Also the impacts of the Chernobyl incident were undoubtedly covered up and/or doctored to make the Soviets look better, so we don't even know how bad it actually was.
As far as the number of people killed/injured by nuclear technology, commercial medical and industrial instruments are actually worse than electricity generation. Some gauges use radioactive isotopes, and x-ray machines require a radiation source. Improperly storing/disposing of this material can be hazardous, especially to children who often find the small metal canisters filled with glowing powder fascinating. Sometimes medical personnel improperly operate x-ray machines and give people a lethal dose. Or thieves steal the x-ray radiation sources and try to hawk it. There was a famous case of a Brazilian thief who stole a Cobalt-60 source from a hospital construction site, and left a trail of (sometimes fatal) radiation poisoning through his family, friends and the people he sold it to.
Part 2 because I already ran on longer than I intended:
Building nuclear power - or building pretty much anything it seems sometimes - runs into the problem of Copenhagen ethics. Actually *doing* a thing makes you liable for anything that could possibly go wrong with that thing. Any new building has to be perfect enough to convince the naysayers and NIMBY crowd to allow it through an adversarial review phase. Which completely ignores the problems of *not doing* a thing. In the case of nuclear power, not building new reactors means coal and natural gas power continues to emit waste directly into the atmosphere. It means poor countries continue to strip mine rare earth elements and wreak environmental devastation to build batteries for wind and solar systems.
Commercial nuclear power generation is quite safe; I would wager the risk to human life in general is lower than that for e.g. wind power. In the latter case the risk falls almost entirely on people employed maintaining wind turbines, but most of the risk for nuclear power is similarly on the plant workers. There's a PR advantage in that the neighbors don't get even temporary evacuation orders when someone falls off a wind turbine, of course.
The sort of breeder reactors used to produce plutonium are significantly less safe, for a variety of technical reasons. See e.g. Windscale. Or Chernobyl, which was designed as a dual-use facility with all the disadvantages baked in.
Nuclear waste, is mostly a boogeyman. Much is made of the claims that A: nuclear waste is extremely dangerous if even a small quantity leaks out, and B: nuclear waste has a half-life of tens of thousands of years so we have to secure it basically forever. But really only one of those claims matters at a time. The extremely dangerous isotopes are short-lived, with half-lives of a few months to a few years; we can keep them securely isolated and monitored for that long. The stuff that lasts for ten thousand years, isn't nearly as dangerous. Less dangerous than e.g. arsenic, which lasts literally forever(*) and which we routinely use for many purposes.
Whatever we do to dispose of the arsenic in the waste stream of e.g. the nearest paper mill, should be adequate for nuclear waste that's had a few years to cool down. I say "should be" because irrational fear + politics has made some otherwise-useful disposal methods categorically forbidden, but we can still find places where it would be objectively safe to bury the stuff.
There's no reason we shouldn't be building lots of nuclear power plants to mitigate global warming except for the cost, and (parts of) the human race used to be able to build nuclear power plants about as cheaply as we build wind and solar power today. But we've pretty much all decided to add enough special nuclear-only regulation on top of that, to make nuclear power highly uncompetitive on cost in most of the world. Up to you all whether Australia continues that trend.
* OK, technically, it might decay with a half-life of ~10^34 years, like all other baryonic matter.
I suspect that 95% of people reading this are pro-nuclear power. One problem I do have when trying to convince others that nuclear power is good and we need much more of it, though, is that they will say that even if the odds of a meltdown are vanishingly small, the catatsrophe of a full meltdown still isn't worth that risk. I usually counter by arguing that the risk*(catastrophic magnitude) of not using nuclear power is much greater. For instance, relying on coal plants for longer, which is exactly what we are doing (the world keeps using increasinly more coal, in fact), will almost assuredly cause many more cancer deaths than using nuclear power.
But I still think there is a better way to make or to frame that argument. Can someone do it?
Interestingly, the current nuclear debate in Australia doesn't seem to be touching all that much on the issue of safety. The main argument being employed against nuclear power at the moment (at least in the papers I read) is pure economics -- that it will take so long and cost so much that we'd be better off just spending the money on renewables instead. I find myself sympathetic to these concerns -- big Australian government projects have a habit of being much slower and more expensive than planned, and the price of renewables has been plummeting for some time.
I've also heard it argued that nuclear is just a delaying tactic -- if we pretend we're working on nuclear for a while then we can continue to burn fossil fuels for now. The longer we delay the transition to renewables the cheaper it will be, so let's just hum and hah over nuclear power for the next fifteen years and then realise "oh shit, turns out solar is cheap now, let's just do that".
Fission power is expensive in large part because of safety concerns. Everything needs to be thoroughly documented, analyzed, audited, and second-guessed, which necessarily involves a lot of work by highly skilled professionals. It also makes the design and construction process long and slow, so capital costs stack up for many years before revenue starts coming in.
20 years ago was around when Plant Vogtle was started, which turned out to be a disaster. And thus anyone who predicted it would be a disaster at the time was more than vindicated.
*You* are the one who started this subthread in the first place, with that specific ironic claim, so it's funny to see you moving the goalposts now.
Twenty years ago the economics of renewables was also very different. The idea that you could get a solar + battery system for your house, for a realistically affordable price, and never draw from the grid again, still seemed like a pipe dream.
It doesn't have to fall to zero, it just has to fall to cheaper-than-nuclear. And depending on whose numbers you believe, that might have already happened.
Oh, right. So the hard part of the argument is convincing them that we can't suddenly replace everything with solar and wind tomorrow and that saying No to nuclear necessarily means saying Yes to fossils for at least a couple more decades. I think the problem is that you have to argue with numbers and most people will leave the room if numbers come up.
>So the hard part of the argument is convincing them that we can't suddenly replace everything with solar and wind tomorrow and that saying No to nuclear necessarily means saying Yes to fossils for at least a couple more decades.
Frankly, I like nuclear. It is more compact than solar, and we are already seeing greens push _against_ solar because of land use. I just want to keep the lights on. Nuclear can certainly keep them on. Solar plus enough batteries can keep them on - but I keep seeing conflicting numbers on how much storage we plausibly need and how much it will cost. Grr.
The real problem is that you have to argue with numbers, but most of the numbers that people argue with turn out to be bullshit.
So instead of arguing about numbers you wind up arguing about the bullshit assumptions that went into making up the bullshit number. And even if you can agree that the assumptions are bullshit, you then probably don't have the capability to figure out what the number would look like if the bullshit were removed.
And all the people who do know enough to understand all the assumptions that go into numbers like "utility-scale solar and wind is around $40 per megawatt-hour, while nuclear plants average around $175" are probably in the pocket of some lobby group or other. So we're just throwing meaningless, contextless numbers around and hoping for the best.
We do, but it's hard to trust their objectivity. The CSIRO (Australian government science organisation) has come up with a set of numbers which suggest that nuclear isn't as good as renewables:
and they're smart and well-resourced and they're theoretically objective, but are they objective in practice? Who the fuck knows? (The CSIRO knows perfectly well that its budget tends to get cut under Coalition governments and to expand under Labor governments...)
It's especially hard because most of the numbers are highly speculative anyway.
Pro-nuclear people never want to argue based on the cost numbers of nuclear power as it actually exists, they want to argue on the basis of what nuclear power might hypothetically cost after massive scale deregulation. And if you're arguing on the basis of highly subjective optimistic projections *anyway*, the pro-solar side might as well do the same.
> Pro-nuclear people never want to argue based on the cost numbers of nuclear power as it actually exists, they want to argue on the basis of what nuclear power might hypothetically cost after massive scale deregulation.
Isn't this like opposing abortion in certain states, merely because if you have an abortion there you might get arrested, because abortion is illegal there? Obviously the first step would be to fix the legal regime, and widespread deployment would come afterward.
It's a political argument, right? To allow or not to allow, that is the question. So it seems to me an argument for allowing private utilities to build nuclear power plants is necessarily about what the regulations should allow. The utilities will ultimately invest in whatever forms of power production they think will be the most profitable given the regulations.
I think it's correct for the pro-solar side to argue for whatever regulations of nuclear power, solar power, etc., they think is best. I'll happily switch to the pro-solar side if their arguments for regulations and their numbers seem more reasonable.
That's assuming we are having a political argument. If, OTOH, we are having this argument in the boardroom of PG&E, we should only consider what the regulatory environment is likely to be.
> So it seems to me an argument for allowing private utilities to build nuclear power plants is necessarily about what the regulations should allow
If you were a private utility, would you want to invest in building a nuclear power plant? It seems to me highly likely that some time in the next couple of decades, the price of solar+battery energy will be low enough that your plant can no longer be run at a profit.
I think the better way to frame the risk is to compare it to current fossil fuel-related deaths [0] [1]. You could have a Chernobyl-scale disaster every year and still kill orders of magnitude fewer people than die prematurely every year due to fossil fuel pollution. And that's completely ignoring any climate effects.
So _even if_ the worst case thing happens, it's still better than the status quo.
As others have pointed out elsewhere here, the reality on the ground is that places like India and China are still building massive amounts of coal. The reason they are doing this, as far as I can tell, is that the have been convinced by the West's example that nuclear is "too expensive". As has also been pointed out (including by you I think), this cost depends on regulating nuclear to a level of safety that is several orders of magnitude higher than coal or other fossil fuels.
So it may be true that nuclear's time in the west is already past, and that solar and batteries are going to get cheap enough, fast enough, that the west is never going to have much more nuclear than we have now.
But if we led by example and reduced regulations, demonstrated a willingness to accept a more sane level of safety, abandoning the un-scientific Linear No-Threshold Model, then maybe we could convince China and India to stop building coal and build nuclear until whatever point it is that even they switch to only building renewables.
You mentioned elsewhere that pro-nuclear people like to point to speculative "what if our regulations weren't so asinine" numbers, but that then we should allow solar to do so as well. To that I say "point me to the regulation that is artificially inflating the price of wind or solar and I will gladly say get rid of it as well". The fact of the matter is that the economics of renewables are currently limited by technology, and are improving with technology. But nuclear is limited by bureaucracy and will therefore _never_ improve unless we fix the bureaucracy.
I'm personally pretty sure it will never happen. It's too late, it takes too long, and we don't have the societal will.
I think that this fact is one of the most damning indictments of our civilization of the past 100 years. Due to our abandonment of nuclear energy, we created the climate crisis unnecessarily, we unnecessarily limited the availability of cheap energy, which almost certainly reduced standards of living. All for ignorant fear mongering.
Sorry for ranting, but this topic really annoys me. Not because the average level of discourse is so poor (this conversation has been pretty good, but elsewhere it's usually terrible), but just because seeing how poorly we have dealt with this issue really makes me depressed about our ability to handle other problems.
>I think that this fact is one of the most damning indictments of our civilization of the past 100 years. Due to our abandonment of nuclear energy, we created the climate crisis unnecessarily, we unnecessarily limited the availability of cheap energy, which almost certainly reduced standards of living. All for ignorant fear mongering.
Agreed.
>seeing how poorly we have dealt with this issue really makes me depressed about our ability to handle other problems.
Also agreed. I see it as part of the general problem of cost disease (at least here in the USA). Lots of vetos, lots of legal challenges, lots of emotional language about risks that _could_ have been quantified and negotiated, but instead were litigated. It has gotten hard just to build a power line, the national equivalent of an extension cord, from point A to point B.
The "catastrophe" of a full meltdown is that you lose an expensive power plant, *maybe* a few power plant workers die, and a few hundred square kilometers get turned into an impromptu nature preserve for a while. Probably don't build your nuclear power plants inside major cities, no matter how cool that was in SimCity 2000.
Chernobyl wasn't a "full meltdown" because Chernobyl mostly didn't melt; it caught fire and burned to the ground in a way commercial power reactors can't because commercial power reactors aren't made of fancy coal.
You're exaggerating the "impromptu nature preserve" here. Apparently the science is all but settled on the queston whether the area around Chernobyl is a net good or net bad for flora and fauna.
> The stubborn discrepancies have caused some members of each camp to become distrustful of the other’s conclusions, and on some occasions the debate has turned personal. In 2015, the International Union for Radioecology, a nonprofit group of radiation scientists, invited researchers from both sides to a meeting in Miami, striving to reach a consensus. But the conversation became so heated, “they started hurling insults at each other,” recalls McMaster University radiobiologist Carmel Mothersill, the IUR’s treasurer. The only conclusion they could reach was that “everything is so uncertain in the low-dose region that you can’t attribute anything definitively to the radiation dose.”
As already discussed, it is inappropriate to bring up the dangers of atom bomb factories in a discussion of nuclear power, even if somebody did build a nuclear power plant on the same site as an atom bomb factory that later caught fire and burned to the ground.
Bringing up Chernobyl in a discussion of modern nuclear power, is like bringing up the Hindenburg in a discussion of modern airline travel. Fukushima would be at least somewhat relevant and appropriate, if you care.
Yes the "modern airline travel" is an oddly appropriate analogy in the context of the recent Boeing hearings and what caused them to happen in the first place. Thanks for making my point I guess?
Arguably, every major nuclear disaster has been caused by human ignorance and/or stupidity. Fukushima might have been prevented with higher sea walls, as was proposed but rejected. TMI was a failure of training and design. The Windscale fire. Kyshtym. And so the list goes on. At some point you have to concede that humans aren't smart enough to safely handle nuclear power for its intended purpose, unless that purpose is to destroy.
>Chernobyl caused a catastrophe because the Soviet Union was too stupid to boil water properly.
That's certainly one way to frame it: "Stupid commies were doing stupid things so we can ignore whatever they've done".
Better way to frame it: Stupid commies were doing stupid things, which are not relevant to modern-day nuclear plants because the design of our plants is not stupid like theirs were.
And here we are coming full circle: Our designs are smarter, but also more expensive. That's just how safety works, you have to literally buy it. Less power, more procedures, more training, more maintenance, everything that makes a thing safer also makes it more expensive.
People are well within their right to argue that, like the stupid commies of old, they prefer cheap over safe, but at least they should stop pretending we can have both at the same time.
The primary relevant difference between A: Chernobyl and B: any nuclear power plant that isn't also an atom bomb factory, is that nuclear power plants use water as a moderator and Chernobyl used ultra-high-purity graphite. Water(*) is much cheaper than ultra-high-purity graphite, but if it's important that a thing not catch fire and burn to the ground, "let's fill this part with water" is much safer than "let's make that part out of fancy coal".
"Safe but you can't easily use it to make atom bombs", is in fact cheaper than "it's a power plant *and* an atom bomb factory".
* The ordinary sort; a few powerplants and the safer sort of atom bomb factories use heavy water, which is rather expensive.
I call it the Make Nuclear Dangerous Again movement.
To be fair, you could probably get rid of a lot of safety measures and still have it be nowhere near as dangerous as Chernobyl was. After all, noone died from TMI.
The commies were doing several things that were especially unsafe that does not account for the massive growth in cost that has followed.
They manually turned off the safety systems as part of a test, removed the control rods which modulated the reaction, used a design that has the nuclear reaction continue-by-default rather than shutdown-by-default and the choice of graphite tips means that, while inserted control rods modulate the reaction, the process of *inserting* them causes an increase in reaction speeds.
Preventing any one of these steps are a one time design / research cost, aside from the meta step of improving processes so that people do not disable safety measures.
What part of the above causes do you think readily generalize to other nuclear plants?
First of all, why exclude Chernobyl? Because it's a "toughie", as you said? Did you include the 100-240 fatalities of the Windscale fire in your assertion?
Second, how many mass evacuations have wind turbine accidents caused? How much area rendered long-term uninhabitable?
Third, the death of construction workers is just as bad as one from radiation, but there are still huge differences: One, construction workers know the risks. They accept it. Those who don't accept it and don't go into construction typically don't have to bear the consequences of accidents (except if they knew the victim, of course). Two, the renewables industry is in an unprecedented booming phase. Like always, new risks are involved and the price for learning them, as always, is calculated in blood. Then, once the risks have been learned, the industry will be saddled with safety measures just like any other industry, just like the nuclear industry. I don't know what numbers you have, but fatality rates are already going down across the wind industry:
> Fatalities and accidents decline in offshore wind, as safety organisation reviews progress
We exclude Chernobyl because it wasn't just a nuclear power plant, it was also a breeder reactor designed to make plutonium for nuclear weapons, and it was specifically the design features intended for the latter purpose that caused the catastrophe. Nuclear power plants can be made very safe, at reasonable cost and by well understood methods. Plutonium breeder reactors are much harder and more expensive to make safe, and lots of people didn't bother.
> Do we have good ways to store radioactive waste?
Honestly, this is a non-issue. Nuclear waste remains highly radioactive for a relatively short length of time, as the most radioactive materials have a very short half-life, by definition. It thereafter will remain *somewhat* radioactive for a very long time, but if the waste is mixed into drum-sized concrete masses and buried in shafts that are then filled in with more concrete, they're of no real danger to anyone, present or future. None of this is beyond our technical means to do today, cheaply, safely, and effectively.
Further to this point... Nuclear waste storage is almost all an "upfront" expense. Once you have "some nuclear" you have to pay for the storage of its waste and its setting up these sites, processes, transportation procedures/capital equipment, getting permissions, supervising/.guarding the site etc etc are the things that drive almost all the expense of storage.
Once you have "some nuclear" and so have setup all those things then you have paid this expense. The costs at that point of just adding "50% more storage" to existing storage is negligable in comparison. Particularly as modern nuclear produces much less waste.
You just have to dig out another cavern next to the current one, drill another hole or two next to the current ones, what have you. Everything else you need is already there and largely a fixed cost by this point.
So whilst you can say the cost of nuclear storage is high .... if you have an existing nuclear energy industry upsizing it 100% or 1000% incurs hardly any additional storage costs. You've already paid the large upfront cost, and the marginal addition is minimal.
This is very relevant to most other developed countries, although perhaps not to Australia.
He wants to surreptitiously record some phone conversations (he's in a one-party consent state) for some litigation that he's involved in.
He asked me if I could help find him a "gizmo" that would be easy enough to use and would help him do this.
I went to Amazon and tried some search-fu and everything I got was either a digital recorder (like journalists use) or it would only work with a landline phone.
How can I help my septuagenarian relative, who lives many states away?
So this person wants a gizmo and doesn't care what it is except it can't use digital storage? Even though that kind of device has no way in hell of connecting to the Internet? I'm kind of fascinated by this.
I'm 18 years old, with a prescription of -5 in both eyes and some very slight astigmatism in one eye. I care a lot about my overall visual acuity: i.e. being able to have a full, clear, and non-distorted field of vision (contacts >>> glasses). It would not be an exaggeration to say that it's by far the most important concern I have about my quality of life.
Currently, my prescription is progressing ~0.7 diopters per year. My main concerns about progressing further are (a) that LASIK/PRK give worse results conditional on high initial prescriptions, and (b) that my best-corrected visual acuity with contacts will be worse at higher prescriptions. (Last concern would be increased future risk of cataracts, glaucoma, etc.). Therefore, I'm considering asking my optometrist about atropine eye drops or multifocal contact lenses, which seem like the best available methods to slow progression until I stabilize (I don't know about ortho-k, since it's mutually exclusive with multifocal lenses).
My questions to people here are whether (b) is significantly true (currently, my vision with contacts is noticeably worse than with glasses, both near and far, although that could be due to an outdated prescription), and if LASIK/PRK would be a good fit for me later in life. General advice regarding my situation would also be welcome.
I was a -5 in both eyes and got PRK last year. It worked out pretty well for me, but I generally advise other people not to do it. I had a great outcome. I have 20/20 in one eye and 20/25 in the other so I don't need glasses to drive and I can go to the pool and the beach and never have to worry about remembering to take out my contact lenses, and I can see when I'm in the water. However, PRK has a very difficult recovery time, where for the first month you have a lot of side effects like blurry vision, and halos and extremely dry eyes. For me those away (I still get slight halos at night, but it's not bad). For most people this is a pretty typical experience, both the recovery and the good outcome.
However, for some people those side effects you experience in the first month do not go away and they are permanent. If I had known the risk in advance, I actually probably wouldn't have taken it. But I didn't know some of the risks until after the surgery.
You seem pretty well-informed, but I'm nevertheless going to mother-hen you and urge you to do a *tremendous* amount of research on both LASIK and PRK, as even "minor" and common negative outcomes for each can be pretty life-ruining (distorting night vision to make nighttime driving impossible, etc).
I'm -6 in both eyes with astigmatism and my regular optometrist once volunteered that I was a "good candidate" for surgery, but when I said I was very concerned about the potential for medium or long-term night vision damage (halos, etc), he said "Oh, yeah, totally not worth the risk if that would be a problem for you." My second optometrist (I have a weird insurance plan at work where I get two separate plans for eye-care coverage) agreed.
Make sure you also research the less common negative outcomes including permanent partial blindness and that you'd be okay with that outcome were it to happen. I doubt you would be if good vision it's a primary concern about your quality of life!
I had -7 in both eyes, had a LASIC in my 30's. Initially after LASIC I had nearly-perfect vision, but over the years it kind of backtracked, so I'm about -2 now. I use glasses for driving, but do most activities without them. It was totally worth it.
I would recommend PRK over LASIC though - longer recovery but better stability afterwards. I regret not going that route.
But you do have to wait for the vision to stabilize, probably a few more years.
Interesting. I had heard that PRK had fewer general complications than LASIK, but I didn't think that it caused slower myopia progression later on. Am I interpreting you correctly here? Also, do you have any comparison between contacts and LASIK, in terms of which one gave you better vision (near, far, night vision, etc. if there's any difference category-wise)?
Sorry, poor wording on my part: by “better stability” I meant fewer complications due to not having a flap. I don’t know if it affects progression later.
I never wore contacts, just glasses. Couldn’t bring myself to poke me in eye :)
So of course the difference was huge in terms of field of vision, lack of reflections, etc.
I did have the typical starburst effect after the surgery that slowly diminished to almost nothing over a few months.
For what it's worth, I have about -8 in both eyes, and this is still well in the range for contact lenses, at least of the hard (permanent) ones that I use. I just got new ones, and my optometrist never mentioned the possibility that I would leave the range for contact lenses, so I assume that the range is yet wider.
In my sample size of one, I had 150% visual acuity in the last test, so clearly above average. This was with glasses, but I don't notice a lot of difference between glasses and contacts.
Also consider making sure that you are outdoors a significant amount of time each day, as not getting outside enough is major risk factor for the development of nearsigntedness
I suppose you mean "New subscriber-only post" as opposed to "New-subscriber only post" or "New-subscriber-only post", and likely not "New subscriber only-post".
In “Hard Landing” I take issue with the way Blanchard talks about monetary policy, normally not necessarily bad, talk is talk, but in this case it leads him to support a “higher for longer” instrument setting of the EFFR.
There are two features that I would like on my PC:
1. The ability to decide right away where a screenshot is saved. So that if I press the screenshot button and A it is saved in my "funny pictures" folder, if I press the screenshot button and B it is saved to my "important" folder etc.
2. The ability to highlight some text and press a button to add it to my long list of notes. I just highlight two lines of text press this button and those two lines are saved as note 649. in this one text document I have on my pc.
At the moment doing these things manually would take around 2 to 40 seconds each time. Does anyone know an app or so that would help me (I'm using windows 11).
Yep, Autohotkey is a great tool. For those who don't know it, you can write scripts that allow you to do various things in Windows, and the functions in those scripts can be triggered by combinations of keys.
I made some scripts for some stupid games I played, for example if the game required quick repeated clicking, I programmed an autoclicker, which was activated by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Q, started clicking at current mouse position 10 times per second, and stopped when Ctrl+Alt+W was clicked. This turned a stupid game into a programming exercise, with the pleasant feeling that I hacked the game. :)
From Friday's WaPo. "AI is exhausting the power grid. Tech firms are seeking a miracle solution."
Of course they *would* say this...
> The companies also argue advancing AI now could prove more beneficial to the environment than curbing electricity consumption. They say AI is already being harnessed to make the power grid smarter, speed up innovation of new nuclear technologies and track emissions.
Hmmm. Making the power grid more efficient and speeding up innovation in new nuclear technologies isn't going to provide the juice to keep all those new data centers online. In the meantime, double down on coal, but talk like you're green. And keep chasing the fusion dream which is still twenty years away last time I checked — and has been stalled at twenty years away for the past fifty years.
Is there a full version of the article available? I see just two paragraphs - neither of which says what fraction of electricity production in the USA is going towards computation, let alone specifically AI.
>data centres and data transmission networks, which each account for about 1-1.5% of global electricity use.
(which, of course, is not splitting out AI as a separate category)
For comparison, if the USA were to replace all of its internal combustion vehicles with electric vehicles, a very rough calculation https://chatgpt.com/c/764add21-15c5-429b-8bd5-eabc36b6156b (yes, I checked GPT4o's numbers, they at least look sane) would require about 10% more electricity generation to be added to the grid to support them..
Of course, wokesters favor electric vehicles and disfavor AI, hence the Washington Post's complaint about the latter and not the former.
Sorry. It's behind a WaPo paywall. But I think you get a few free views per month. Try a different browser that hasn't eaten a WaPo cookie, and see if it lets you view it.
In general, it looks like a pretty awful article. Lots of "voracious" and "frenzy" and "guzzlers". Admittedly some of the corporate quotes look somewhere between lies and insane optimistic claims:
>“If we work together, we can unlock AI’s game-changing abilities to help create the net zero, climate resilient and nature positive works that we so urgently need,” Microsoft said in a statement.
WTF??? The sort of things that _might_ matter for affordable less CO2-intensive energy sources are things that need _physical_ experiments, e.g. trying variations on sodium-sulfur cells for storing solar power, and seeing if there are or are not cell-limiting side reactions (they've had problems with polysulfides) or seeing if one actually can or cannot push a tokamak to higher Lawson criterion values without discovering yet another new plasma instability. The limiting factors for this sort of development work are wrinkles that _aren't_ in the computer models.
About the only useful number that I saw in the article was the (a Goldman-Sacks study found)
>It found data centers will account for 8 percent of total electricity use in the United States by 2030, a near tripling of their share today.
a) This isn't AI specifically. It is data processing generally.
b) _If_ the tripling happens, the centers would consume about the same amount of power as electrifying our vehicles would.
So if data centers deserve all of this emotional, vilifying language _so do electric cars_. This article strikes me as a factional puff piece.
Well, I wonder if we shouldn't be vilifying electric cars more. Be that as it may, I'm more amazed by how much bullshit can be thrown at reporters without them blinking.
I wonder if this statement wasn't generated by an LLM?
> “If we work together, we can unlock AI’s game-changing abilities to help create the net zero, climate resilient and nature positive works that we so urgently need,” Microsoft said in a statement.
We have time tested way of allocating scarce resources and encouraging them to become less scarce in the future: allow the price to rise in response to a increase in demand, and idea that seems not to have occurred to the WaPo writer, but then few journalists seem to have passed if they ever took an Econ 101 course.
The trouble is, when an AI data center is slurping up 50% of the power output from my local power plant, the cost of my power is going to go up — unless other sources of power can be brought online quickly — which would also raise the cost of my power because I'd need to subsidize the utilities building those new power plants. Ultimately it comes out of my wallet either in the rates I'm charged or through my taxes.
Which consenting adults are you referring to? The ones who have the political and economic clout to game the system? Power inequities are the natural result of capitalist systems — and those of us who don't have a bought-and-paid-for "friend" on the PUC will be at the mercy of those who do.
>Construction at the two new reactor sites began in 2009. Originally expected to cost $14 billion and begin commercial operation in 2016 (Vogtle 3) and in 2017 (Vogtle 4), the project ran into significant construction delays and cost overruns. Georgia Power now estimates the total cost of the project to be more than $30 billion
11 years is based on ongoing commercially-funded R&D efforts. The one I'm most familiar with is CFS Energy, which has an engineering proof-of-concept reactor (SPARC) in later stages of construction now which is planned to go into operation next year. A prototype on-grid commercial reactor (ARC) is supposed to come next, with an estimated 5-10 year timeline to get it up and running. Construction for ARC is supposed to overlap with SPARC's operations.
Fission reactors are probably not a good benchmark for how long it would take to build a fusion reactor. Fusion shares a few safety concerns with fission, most notably that fueling and maintenance requires handling radioactive material and the reactor core emitting a bunch of neutrons during normal operation. But the big ones that drive the extremely heavyweight safety regulations that make fission reactors take forever to build aren't shared by fusion.
Why wouldn't fission and fusion plants share the same regulations? Nuclear is nuclear: no one ever got elected by understanding the decay products of U-235.
No one ever got elected by understanding the decay products of U-235, true. But nobody who ever got elected, ever wrote the text of any substantial body of regulation. They delegate that to their staff or to executive-branch regulatory agencies, which do include subject-matter experts for this purpose. And sometimes those people delegate it to industry lobbying groups.
Whatever the process, the United States has already decided that its regulations for nuclear fusion power systems will not in fact be copy-pasted from the regulations for nuclear fission reactors. Instead, they will be copy-pasted from the regulations for particle accelerators and then possibly tweaked a bit.
This is a very good thing, even if it's going to be longer than some people here expect before we get working fusion power plants.
>But the big ones that drive the extremely heavyweight safety regulations that make fission reactors take forever to build aren't shared by fusion.
True! But fission doesn't have to suppress plasma instabilities to make net energy generation work.
>Construction for ARC is supposed to overlap with SPARC's operations.
So analysis of experimental results from SPARC happens after construction of ARC has already started? Any surprises from SPARC have to be folded into ARC's partially built structure? I wish them luck, but I wouldn't bet on them.
says that they have demonstrated a high field magnet using YBaCuOx superconducting tape, which is an important achievement, but doesn't demonstrate that they won't e.g.run into an unexpected plasma instability when they get their first tokamak completed.
>So analysis of experimental results from SPARC happens after construction of ARC has already started? Any surprises from SPARC have to be folded into ARC's partially built structure? I wish them luck, but I wouldn't bet on them.
Depends what parts of ARC have been built when SPARC runs into the surprises. Based on the construction timeline for SPARC, they're going to be spending a couple years constructing the building before they start assembling the tokamak, and the building's design probably isn't going to change much depending on what SPARC finds.
An unexpected plasma instability or similar is definitely a possibility and probably a big part of the estimated 30% of nobody having an on-grid fusion reactor by 2035. CFS is mitigating the risk by making the design as close as possible to well-studied research reactor configurations and plasma regimes, but that definitely doesn't eliminate it.
There are also some big engineering challenges like the FliBe blanket for neutron capture and tritium breeding. It's piggybacking on other research towards Gen IV fission reactors, but for tritium breeding in particular they still need to do something that has never been done at scale before and is very difficult to experiment with for want of the kind of neutron flux you'd get from an operating D-T fusion reactor.
Where would the FliBe blanket reside? If it were outside the vacuum vessel, wouldn't the vessel have to be replaced frequently due to damage from the high neutron flux?
>Based on the construction timeline for SPARC, they're going to be spending a couple years constructing the building before they start assembling the tokamak, and the building's design probably isn't going to change much depending on what SPARC finds.
That sounds reasonable. I hope they have the SPARK results before they have to start building the ARC magnets.
>There are also some big engineering challenges like the FliBe blanket for neutron capture and tritium breeding.
Interesting! I'd mostly heard about FLiBe in the context of the thorium/U-233 cycle, but it is liquid (at the relevant temperature) and it _does_ contain lithium... Hmm... (I'd mostly heard about metallic lithium alloys for fusion tritium breeding, but I hadn't been following that choice closely.)
One of the problems with nukes in the US is that we allow free-but-regulated-enterprise to drive the projects. In the US utilities are allowed to manage the design and deployment, and my understanding is that drives up costs. France has six to eight new plants in the works and/or coming online. They use a limited number of designs created and pre-approved by the Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire. Shortens the licensing time. Shortens the QA time to bringup. This improves safety and allows easier troubleshooting, and it allows engineers from one plant to know how to run the other plants.
The recent Flamanville expansion in France was just as delayed and over budget as Plant Vogtle, so whatever the problem is, it's certainly not a factor that's unique to the US.
Many Thanks! Yeah, I am _not_ happy with how the regulatory framework works in the USA. We also generally allow legal potshots at construction (even of much _non_nuclear infrastructure) at many points in the process, which pours yet more grit in the gears.
No, that was a snark on my part. But I remember reading in Scientific American in the late 70s that we'd have fusion power before the end of the last century. The goalposts have kept moving since then. I think we've been able to reach Q=1.25 recently — which is great progress over the Q=0.68-0.70, where it was stuck for two decades. But Edward Moses calculated we'd need a Q≥22 for a nuclear fusion plant not only to run on self-sustaining power, but make the plant economically viable. I'm not sure how he calculated that number, so don't ask me. ;-)
OTOH, the Microsoft crew claims they can "harness fusion" by 2028. Notice that they don't really say it will be self-sustaining and be able to produce surplus power.
> The tech giant and its partners say they expect to harness fusion by 2028, an audacious claim that bolsters their promises to transition to green energy but distracts from current reality. In fact, the voracious electricity consumption of artificial intelligence is driving an expansion of fossil fuel use — including delaying the retirement of some coal-fired plants.
"I predict that we will get fusion [1] before 2035 (80%) or 2040 (90%). I am a professional plasma physicist, a fusioneer if you will, so I probably know more about this subject than you, but am likely to overemphasize its importance."
"There is an old joke:
Fusion is 30 years away and always will be."
Plus the following:
"Commonwealth Fusion Systems / SPARC
I've already told their story because they are the current leader. Everything has gone well so far.
That book review was absurd in how willfully naive and statistically illiterate it was. This is on the level of pretending that managing to oxidize some carbon is the only step required to build practical gas power plants (probably *worse* actually, but that alone shows how absurd the claim is). If the author had their way, cavemen would be building power plants.
If by "fusion" you mean enough actual power generation to run a light bulb, I'll take your money on that 30%.
Fusion in the sense that "this reading here shows that hydrogen is turning into helium in the guts of our machine, yay fusion!", we've had that for fifty years. You can pretty much do that as a high school science project. But the machines *consume* electric power and produce instrument readouts and a bit of waste heat. And no, not enough waste heat to boil steam to spin a turbine that will produce the electric power you need to run the machine.
With a bit more funding than the high-school science project version, you can produce any number of machines that will consume electric power and produce instrument readouts, waste heat, and a story you can spin to venture capitalists about how with still more money you can build a version of the machine that will spin the turbine and even have some power left over for that light bulb. But that's not going to happen this year or next.
And since your "30% by 2025" is really 0% by the standard most of us care about, I'm guessing the "70% by 2030" is really no better than 40%. Most likely they'll have either given up, or built an even more expensive machine to consume even more electric power.
> a story you can spin to venture capitalists about how with still more money you can build a version of the machine that will spin the turbine and even have some power left over for that light bulb. But that's not going to happen this year or next.
Why not? It *already* happened, a year and a half ago.
Granted, it wouldn't keep the light bulb on for very long, but production of surplus energy is already a reality. Now they're working on scaling it up to commercial viability.
If you're referring to the bit of hype from the NIF, then no. That did *not* spin a tubine. It did not even attempt to produce any usable power by any means. And the only light bulbs on display were its own indicator lights, which were drawing power from the national grid. As were the ginormous lasers.
As Level 50 Lapras points out, this is how it *always* goes. As far as I know, and I follow the field pretty closely, nobody anywhere has ever even *tried* to build a fusion device with an actual electric power generation system of any sort. Because they know it wouldn't work. The best they can do is put a lot of power into a bunch of magnets or lasers, and make some part of the machine a tiny bit warmer than it would have been if they just dumped all that power into a resistive load.
None of these devices are even theoretically capable of keeping a light bulb on for any length of time. Probably some future device will. But if you think this has already been done, you are greatly uninformed about the obstacles in the way of that future device.
When a fusion power person claims they "produced surplus energy", those words don't mean the same thing they do to a layman. What they mean is that the reaction gave off a bit of heat, not that they were actually able to convert it into electricity, let alone more than the amount of electricity used to run the place, let alone enough electricity to make a profitable plant.
Yes, but professional plasma physicists have been predicting that fusion is just around the corner since I was in college more than 50 years ago. I don't know if they actually believe their predictions or are pumping up expectations to get funding.
BTW: I'm all for fusion! In fact, I think the US Government should pursue a massive fusion development program like it did the space program in the sixties.
The 88 in your name always made me assume you were younger, and rightwing for your cohort. Turns out you're rightish sounding because you're from the past. That's fascinating.
I'm a leftie on most scales of political leanings — pretty far down in the leftist anti-authoritarian quadrant. Because I'm a cranky old fart that's why you might think I'm "conservative". My primary bête noire is bullshit and bullshitters. I'm pro-union, pro-worker-rights, pro civil rights, pro-social-safety-net. Capitalism is OK as long as it doesn't allow people or companies to aggrandize too much power. But I find some of the current leftie fashions and obsessions to be puzzling and perhaps silly. I could have coffee with a woke person (though I might pat them on the head and offer them a cookie) — but I'd be hard-pressed not to throw my hot coffee at a MAGA.
I do remember that the review got some pushback for being too bullish.
That said, it made a pretty good case that the situation now is different from any situation in previous decades. If I recall correctly, the main difference is that superconductors now work at higher temperature, which reduces the necessary size from experiments from large to medium. Those don't need decades to build, but only years.
But regardless of the technical claim, the reviewer made a pretty good meta-point: others obviously believe the story. The main players are now companies that are financed by private venture capital. As far as I understand, throughout the last decades it was always driven by public research funding, because it was never in reach to build a reactor with private money. (Correct me if I am wrong.)
Isn't this an indicator that something substantial has changed compared to previous decades?
The difference now is that for the first time, people have a plausible plan for solving the first of many seemingly insurmountable obstacles on the path to practical fusion power. Doesn't mean anything that a normal person would care about will happen in the next 30 years though.
With the recent achievement of Ignition, (ie. getting more energy out of a controlled fusion reaction than was used to create it,) fusion is no longer "stalled at twenty years away." There are still some major engineering challenges remaining to make it economical, but the biggest hurdle facing the problem has been cleared.
Last I heard we reached Q=1.25 (in 2022?). That's a big step forward. But my understanding is that a reactor would need a Q≥5 to match all the inputs from external sources. Plus it would have to be self-sustaining Q≥5 for long periods. As I said above, Edward Moses, former fusion bigwig at LLNL's NIF project, calculated we would need a P≥22 to make fusion economically practical.
I think that exaggerates the situation. They achieved ignition but not in a way that's really useful yet to build a power station. There is a huge amount of scientific and engineering work that needs to be done to get this into something that can provide useful power. We are still looking at decades before fusion is a feasible power source.
I don't agree. I think achieving Ignition was the most significant technical hurdle, the metaphorical "hump" to get over, and now that it's a proven fact rather than a theoretical problem, the remaining barriers to economical fusion power generation are likely to fall one-by-one, faster than pretty much anyone expects, especially as Ignition was a well-publicized event that's going to draw a lot of attention to the problem of fusion power, and bring in scientific and engineering talent that would otherwise have been working on other problems. (See also: the way that ChatGPT has drawn seemingly half of the programming industry into the AI sphere, causing AI technology to grow by leaps and bounds over the past year and a half.)
If by "Ignition" you are referring to the NIF at Livermore, that was an inertial confinement system using ridiculously powerful and inefficient pulsed lasers.
Is it your contention that in the near future, commercial (or even experimental) power plants will operate by using powerful and somehow-not-ridiculously-inefficient pulsed lasers to implode pellets of thermonuclear fuel? Because I'm very confident that's not going to happen, and I don't think anyone is seriously trying to make that happen.
If you think that commercially viable fusion power plants will be achieved by some other mechanism, that's more plausible. But if so, that's got nothing to do with NIF. You might as well be a 14th-century observer noting that since people have figured out how to use gunpowder to shoot stone balls out of a cannon, internal combustion engines and thus automobiles are right around the corner. Really, a 14th-century cannon has *more* in common with an internal combustion engine, than NIF does with a tokaspherowhatevermak.
Also, "ignition' is a very misleading term and I wish people would stop using it. Ignition traditionally refers to a singular event that, while difficult to achieve without sufficiently advanced technology, results in a self-sustaining reaction that can be maintained with little effort. That is absolutely *not* the case for any fusion power system that I have seen proposed. Running a fusion reactor for the Nth microsecond, is approximately as hard as "igniting" it in the first microsecond.
More to the point, the NIF is a purely military research facility. The only interest in civilian use of fusion they have is to make some of the hype (and funding) surrounding it diffuse into their field. They research fusion weapon fundamentals, so "long-term efficiency", as required for civilian fusion processes, is of no interest whatsoever to them, since the whole point of a fusion weapon is to blow up as violently as possible.
Is that an argument you frequently hear, and where you are sure it was meant "all by itself"? Maybe you should try steelmanning it and instead argue against the much more reasonable "it uses power that would be better used on some other purpose".
I don't even know what you're saying in your first paragraph; you're describing straw-manning.
Steel-manning is necessary if you ever hope to get anything useful out of a conflict of ideas. It's just a short-hand way of saying "I understand this person's arguments, and if my oppositional ideas are good ideas, they will stand up to an even better version of this person's argument than the one he's stating."
Steelmanning is not some esoteric technique that gets you lost in your own thoughts. Something as simple as "Even if X was true, it wouldn't matter because so and so" is steelmanning. If you want to frame it in martial terms, steelmanning is not about ceding ground to your opponent, it's about fortifying your own, about denying your opponent an avenue of attack they haven't even taken yet.
Can anyone point me to a useful discussion about investing in AI? I want to invest in the industry as a whole because it is possible one company could quickly achieve an insurmountable lead.
Historically speaking, even fully knowing what new technologies will be transformational is not a particularly good guide to investing profitably. Canals, railroads, satellites and fibre optic cables were all hugely important, but knowing that ahead of time and plowing your investments into those sectors directly would have often yielded terrible returns, or at least no better than the general market.
The thing about this sort of enabling technology, in which I include AI, is that the owners and developpers of the technology itself don't necessarily capture the value created very efficiently, whether for competition, regulation, or other reasons.
Also, at least in the case of railroads and fibre optic, lots of people rushed into the field, there was a massive capacity glut, and many people went bankrupt.
I've looked and haven't found anything very useful. Your primary options are largely Nvidia, Microsoft, and Google. Perhaps also a few related semiconductor companies (TSMC, AMD, ASML, etc.), data center suppliers like Supermicro, data platform companies like Snowflake and Databricks, and companies like Amazon that are heavily invested in AI startups.
Full disclosure, I missed the boat on Nvidia and have primarily done index fund investing.
Getting that out of the way, Leopold Aschenbrenner made the case for why Nvidia was the main beneficiary of the recent AI boom rather than Microsoft, TSMC or Google. It's simply because AI is a bigger percentage of their revenue. AI is only a small fraction of what the other three do so when you pay for their stock - your only getting a small percentage of that as exposure to AI.
That's still true now. Nvidia is the most AI weighted stock, so assuming that compute remains a bottleneck to future model development, then Nvidia should see the most gains due to AI. Since you can't actually invest in OpenAI and Anthropic, I think Nvidia is still the best you can do.
There are obvious risks - Intel, Google, AMD, or another tech company could cut into their margins if they get the technology and business right. Or AI could fizzle out. Or an alternative model architecture could make GPU's obsolete. Or China could invade Taiwan. Or everything could go right with AI, but demand for GPUs dries up anyway because companies already have all of the GPUs they need (see Cisco for the classic analogy).
There aren't really good alternative. AI ETFs kind of suck, in a year of huge investment into AI, their performance has been only equal to the S and P 500. Of the big three AI labs (OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Deepmind), you can only invest in Google and they have been pretty clearly trailing for over a year. I don't know enough about Meta or Microsoft's in house AI to know if they are plausible dark horses.
I have no interest myself in index funds, buying individual stocks on my own. It's not for everyone, though, and if it isn't, then index funds may be a good choice.
Disclaimer: I'm also not providing any financial advice.
There doesn't seem to be much in the way of public AI companies. If you want to invest, the best proxies are probably Microsoft (major OpenAI shareholder) or NVidia (maker of chips in high demand for computers running AI code.)
Disclosure: I do not currently own any stock in either of those two companies.
I remember wanting to post this under the "feedback on Unsong" post you had some time ago, but never got around to it, so now this is just a question instead of feedback/advice.
(Heavy spoilers)
In Unsong, lots of apparently evil characters turn out to be good at the end: Thamiel, Malia, the Other King, God (I guess), and maybe even some more. And all their motivations do make sense in some way. But it got me thinking that this isn't necessary if we take the world's theodicy into account.
Because of the theodicy that is active in the world, we can do a certain kind of anthropics where clearly everything would turn out fine in the end; otherwise, the world wouldn't have existed. So, a thing that is normally frowned upon in fiction, many coincidences coming together to save the day, would be totally fine.
So, why do we need all the characters to have been good all along? Wouldn't the book have worked better if all these seemingly evil people were actually evil? For some reason, this world just included a bunch of demons whose ultimate goal was to create as much suffering as possible, and because of amazing coincidences and the indomitable human spirit and love, the humans still managed to win in the end and turn the world into a utopia?
Especially Thamiel, why was there a moment at the end where he started to cry or something? Why not have him just be evil and be defeated at the end?
Thamiel couldn't be evil because that would have broken the theodicy that the whole book is based on: Thamiel was created by God in order for this universe to exist, and was given the job of bringing evil into this universe. Doing the job God created you to do isn't really something an evil being would do.
I would argue there are some evil beings in the book, such as the demons (who I believe were all created out of the angel Satan, who genuinely chose evil over good and I would consider an evil character). However, in a world where Hell gets destroyed (and where destroying Hell is a pretty big plot point) you really need any and all evil characters to either become good or get annihilated.
> lots of apparently evil characters turn out to be good at the end
This is one of my main hurdles. I can easily understand why someone would want to write the story like that, because it's exactly the sort of thing that I wish were true, but so much so, that it snaps me out of it like OotS Elan and the epic illusion tunnel. It's too perfect for me to continue suspending my disbelief.
You're right that it would have been consistent for Thamiel to be evil, but I don't feel like that would have actually been more narratively satisfying. Of course, this is a matter of taste, and I'm probably influenced by the fact that that was the version I actually read. I feel like it reinforces the theme of good being more powerful than evil. "Evil was the world’s dumbest joke, the flimsiest illusion, a piece of wool God pulled over His own eyes with no expectation that it could possibly fool anybody." The epilogue is very explicitly drawing the parallel of the various evil-seeming characters ultimately pursuing good via evil, and only slightly less explicitly between that and the entire world. Plus of course there's the analogy of Albion to the entire world, with the demons being a part of it (also in a sense, Albion actually is the whole world, given it also calls itself Adom Kadmon).
Thematic parallels like this can be nice in fiction in general, but it's particularly appropriate in Unsong, what with everything being isomorphic to everything else.
I understand why people would like this symmetry of everything being good. But I think in this case I would have enjoyed the contrast more. It's a little like knowing that a house is mostly about being rough and strong and keeping me safe, and then assuming the inside of the house has to also be rough and strong. But of course, the inside of a house can just be cushions and totally different from the outside of the house.
So, I think I would have liked it more if this seed that God planted to maximise the good actually happened to be made up mostly of evil but in the end love still triumphed.
I think in the book God also mentions that most seeds around this world would have mostly consisted of suffering so they were never made into full worlds. In this part of the garden only the unsong world ended up becoming a utopia. And how does that fit together with evil being a joke? Clearly in the grand scheme of things God is the ruler so evil is a joke. But the part of the garden where the unsung world is grown mostly doesn't have other worlds, so those other worlds probably had too much evil or chaos to mature into a good world, so clearly there actually is a lot of evil? Except that in the unsong world it was defeated?
>But the part of the garden where the unsung world is grown mostly doesn't have other worlds, so those other worlds probably had too much evil or chaos to mature into a good world, so clearly there actually is a lot of evil?
No, just a lot of potential evil. Since God didn't create those universes the evil that would have existed in those universes doesn't exist.
Imagine humanity wanted to create a long-term project to live without the sun. Could we do it?
"Obviously not."
What if we started weaning ourselves by investing heavily into geothermal?
"But the plants..."
We'd need to start mass producing those light bulbs that produce the spectrum of light plants can grow off of. It's not as efficient, but there's a LOT of potential energy we could harvest from geothermal.
"How would you build all this industry without the sun?"
Obviously if we got rid of the sun tomorrow we'd surely fail, but I'm imagining a gradual process.
"This sounds dumb. Why do this?"
Sure, it's not easy or desirable. I'm just wondering if it's possible.
The only way of preventing this would be to generate an amount of energy equal to that of the sun, which would require a mind-boggling amount of nuclear fusion to be performed here on earth.
I suppose it would be more practical to put a normal size nuclear plant on some asteroid, so that much less rock needs to be heated up, and live there. Still extremely difficult.
Seriously, though. Really depends on your timescale and tech-level. A future society could skim Jupiter for hydrogen and construct a 'small' fusion reactor in low Earth orbit to replace the sun. With modern tech we could probably construct a few city sized shelters running off fission reactors that would be viable long term, but the planet would be left a frozen wasteland outside of those.
"A future society could skim Jupiter for hydrogen and construct a 'small' fusion reactor in low Earth orbit to replace the sun."
Could that actually work? I know the Sun is a giant nuclear fusion reaction, but I don't understand how a manmade fusion reactor in space could replicate the Sun's heat and light.
Sure, the sun is actually a pretty inefficient fusion reactor, partly because gravitation fusion is inherently self limiting, but mostly because it's so far away. A man-made reactor focused on the Earth would require just one billionth of the output. That's still hundreds of terawatts worth of energy (and don't ask me how you get that power from the reactor to the Earth's surface), but not infeasible to build with even near future technology.
I assume you want to place it in Earth orbit so it would generate light and heat to radiate down onto the surface. How would the reactor be designed to do that?
One additional problem is that this implies making a closed biospgere, which we have no idea how to do. We don't even have a conceptual framework and a bunch of small-scale projects to test elements of it.
This is also one of the (many) issues with space colonies and one of the ones that most frustrates me. Because so many of the people who think about this stuff are hardware guys who more or less write the whole issue off so that they can go back to thinking about space stations and NTR engines.
Disagree, and the discussion of closed biospheres is an example of why. I'm not sure how the authors did their research, or what baggage they brought to the table, but they don't know nearly as much as they think they do about this and many other subjects, and they imbue dodgy information with overconfidence and glib truthiness.
Pro tip: Anyone whose discussion of potential closed-ecology life support systems for space settlement includes five pages on "Biosphere 2" and all of three paragraphs on all the other work done in the field, does not understand the subject and should not be trusted.
Why does the energy source matter if the sun is gone? Just build a bunch of coal plants. Not like the quality of the atmosphere matters if nothing can live on the surface.
There's not that much coal, and it's not that easy to get. Since you're going to need to be digging deep to stay warm anyway, you might as well take advantage of the thermal gradient to get energy cheaply wherever you are.
The surface will quickly become very dangerous, you don't want to be shipping stuff across it. On the day the temperature goes below 90K it starts raining liquid oxygen, which is a bad day to be driving a coal truck.
I think it comes down to how many people we're talking about: if we're talking about a small "minimum genetically viable population" (which seems like it's in the ~200 range), that seems pretty feasible. I wouldn't be surprised if we could do it today.
If we're talking about a significant fraction of the worlds population, I think we're far enough from that to call it 'impossible'. It'd be like colonizing mars and trying to support a billion people all at once. (Except you don't have to get them there first) And missing a sun is probably a bigger hurdle than missing an atmosphere.
This is why I'm giving a lead time for implementation. I'm thinking of what the limiting factor would be in terms of technology or resources. I'm not hearing any other than concerns about scale, but given enough time, if you can make it work for some you can make it work for many. For example, say we wanted to convert 500 people every decade to a self-sustaining solar-free economy, I'm sure we could do this. Early on, they'd be dependent on the broader economy for things like manufacturing replacement parts and whatnot. Eventually, you'd have the critical mass that would allow society to become self-sustaining. This wouldn't be better than doing things the easy way with all that free solar energy feeding our crops, but it seems technologically feasible.
"Missing a sun is probably a bigger hurdle than missing an atmosphere."
On Mars it would be, since you'd have no source of energy. (No stored energy in the form of fossil fuels, no solar energy, no fissile materials, and no geothermal source.) Earth is a different story, I think.
The point of "on Mars all at once" is that you'd be trying to support a billion people on a planet that fundamentally lacks core ingredients for life. On Mars, yes, we can presumably do it little by little - we can bring and manufacture water and oxygen. But we can't manufacture another sun (yet) and there doesn't seem to be any sort of incremental plan we could start today towards solving that fundamental point.
Like, yeah, maybe fusion makes this work and we *could* essentially make a reactor (with the power of the sun in the palm of your hand), but if we're limiting towards incremental improvements on technologies we already can use today (which seems necessary to make this not just a gamble on unknown unknowns), it seems like a pretty fundamental issue. I just don't think we could get to billions of people living without the sun with anything like our current technology levels.
The earth has some natural resources for energy other than the sun, but I just don't think it has *that* much.
There's a huge amount of energy that could be harvested from the thin space in the Earth's crust alone, radiating outward past the Moho. Even without turning to fission/fusion, we have enough watts coming from terra not to have to turn to the sun for additional power. The problem with geothermal is mostly the cost of deep drilling, not whether the energy is there.
That's not true. The geothermal flux of the Earth is 47 TW. The global energy consumption rate is 18 TW (https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/climate-change/energy/global-energy-consumption). You'd have to capture 38% of the entire planet's geothermal flux to power current human civilization, and powering an entire biosphere without the Sun will take orders of magnitude more energy.
>The geothermal flux of the Earth is 47 TW. The global energy consumption rate is 18 TW
Many Thanks! When I saw this subthread, I thought of looking those figures up (having a gut feel that geothermal flux was several orders of magnitude below sunlight), but didn't, ahem, summon up the energy. Thanks for finding them!
Since calories (though nutritional calories are kilocalories of energy) and watts are both units of energy - if we take a 1500 calorie diet (which I think is low rations but survivable), that's ~6300 kilojoules per day, or about 2.3 Gigajoules per person per year.
If I'm not missing any decimal places here, it looks like 7 billion people is about 16 million TJ of energy a year. Which isn't that much on top of the 580TJ that we're using a year right now, but obviously this is assuming 100% conversion rate all along the way which isn't very realistic.
The most efficient way of converting light to chemical energy seems to be sugar cane, with an 8% efficiency. So that's not too bad.
The amount of energy needed to construct a planet-sized subterranean structure that can capture a significant fraction of the geothermal flux of the Earth, on the other hand, that might be a 'lil tricky.
If you're assuming a long enough term project to actually be viable, making plants grow the old fashioned way would be the least of our considerations.
You're pretty much going to have to accept most of the biosphere dying no matter what you do. It's possible that it could be replaced with a geo-thermal based energy chain given enough time and motivation for technological development.
Anyone else using beta blockers to reduce anxiety? Got a prescription for propranolol and tried it for the first time in a social setting over the weekend, I would say it absolutely reduced my social anxiety and made it easier to chit-chat. I intend to try it again this week at a Toastmasters meeting- public speaking has always made me nervous, so this should be a higher stakes test. I had very slightly blurred vision the next day, but no significant side effects otherwise. Other peoples' experiences with beta blockers?
I have taken it about four times after my cousin died last year. Has panic attacks for a long while before that I addressed with therapy and kinda mad I didn’t know about it before/had a stigma against it. I probably would have finished college if I had found a way to withstand being in a lecture hall.
It's on label for anxiety in the UK, and I've taken it myself and found it helpful.
I used to get quite bad exam stress; propranolol stops adrenaline from speeding up breathing and heart rate, and I found that interrupting that vicious cycle was enough for me to feel like I was in "go mode" without it escalating to panic.
I use them to reduce physical performance anxiety symptoms as a musician, and have taken half a dose a couple of times for dates. Seems to help. I would say on an intuitive/not well-reasoned level, I'm a little uncomfortable with the idea of taking them on a daily/indefinite basis, in part because I have low blood pressure. But for specific high pressure situations, would recommend.
There is something absolutely out of whack with my (para)sympathetic nervous system, which manifests in a grab bag of lovely symptoms: anxiety, disassociation, silent migraines, etc. Been to a few doctors about it and they never seem interested in pinning down exactly what is going on with me. Between the issues I've mentioned and the fact that my blood pressure trends higher than expected, one doctor thought propranolol might be a good option.
My personal experience with propranolol seems akin to others' experience with more "long-term" strategies like SSRIs; In the first year I was taking the beta blocker, I experienced a slow, sustained reduction in symptoms, slow and subtle enough that I never really attributed my improvement to the drug itself.
A couple of months ago, my prescription ran out, and I thought I didn't need it any more. I figured that if propranolol had ever really helped, the mechanism by which it operates would make its effects immediately noticeable, not something that would help with sustained dosing over time. Plus, there are days, sometimes multiple days in a row, that I forget to take it, and it doesn't really seem to make much of a difference.
After about a week without it, my symptoms started to return with a vengeance. So I reupped my script and I'm back to feeling pretty steady.
So yeah, the short version is that I do think it helps me, but the effects are not immediately noticeable. So maybe don't drop it if it doesn't work immediately, give it a couple months. I would LOVE to hear some other folks experiences, as I also have not heard much about beta blockers for generalized anxiety.
Bisoprolol totally cures my tachcardia of course .. heart rate down from "needs immediate Emergency Room treatment " (190 bpm) to normal (65 bpm or so), so its clearly having the expected effect.
(Yes, a resting heart rate of 190 is very, very bad)
I used to take St Johns Wort during the winter .. the hospital pharmacist tells me i absolutely must not take St Johns Wort in combination with the other drugs I am prescribed, given its interactions
Sometimes, it can be hard to know if you're benefiting from a drugs official main effect or from some secondary effect it's having you.
Anecdotal experience: my sister was using them as a potential migraine treatment, was accidentally over-prescribed for her bodyweight and reported having an absolutely "no fucks given" attitude towards life during that time period.
Apologies for not directly answering the question, but I've always really strugged with public speaking, I have had a couple of disasters in the past. I had to give a best man speech at a wedding a couple of weeks ago, but I was travelling a lot before so never managed to get to Toastmasters. I tried a few different things to help, but what I found most helpful was I practiced the speech twice a day for about a week before, most of the time shouting it the park where I would mimic what I thought the audience would do. When it came to the speech I was super nervous, but one minute in my brain just realised, wow you know this really well, and I totally relaxed; it went great.
> Current plan is to make most parenting posts subscriber-only to prevent too much information about my kids from getting all over the Internet, sorry.
Careful about that. All it takes is one dishonorable subscriber copying and pasting that information into a space anyone can read...
Annoying nitpicks about the timeline of the paperback version of Unsong:
- In chapter 33, Ana remembers seeing Simeon Azore on TV ("the face she'd seen in various magazines and TV news shows"). But according to The Broadcast interlude, TV doesn't exist anymore.
- In chapter 53, Dylan says "We've already killed a president; killing another would be boring." This made sense in the web version, where Trump was president. But in the paperback version, there is no president.
I'm teaching a free, in-person computational biology seminar in NYC the weekend of July 13-14 if anyone's interested. There's currently 2 slots left (might be more if people cancel / drop out).
This is part of FractalU, a very cool "proto-university" in New York that I think has a lot of overlap with the ACX / rationalist communities. They also have a lot of other free/cheap courses, and their own coding bootcamp.
What are doing here is what Korzybski called "Aristotelian logic". You take a word - "belief", another word - "voluntary", and you take it for granted that there must be a meaningful relation either "X is Y" or "X is not Y", and the only thing left to debate is which one it is.
A rational approach would be to examine how beliefs are made, and how they are changed, and see where it leads you. It could be the case than some beliefs are voluntary and others are not. It could be the case that beliefs are voluntary in some circumstances and involuntary in others. It could also be the case that the dichotomy voluntary/involuntary does not actually make sense for beliefs. And it could be many other things.
> you take it for granted that there must be a meaningful relation either "X is Y" or "X is not Y", and the only thing left to debate is which one it is.
Sorry for forgetting tralse
----
given the moral guilt being assigned in two of my cases, and any existence of involuntary belief should be part of a non-guilty ruling in the court of public opinion
I think it depends on how much you can turn off your reflective consciousness of what you are doing. Which is harder to do the more you are purposefully deciding to believe something opposed to what you already believe. But it is easier if you really want to believe. Just like with any bias, if I sit down and read arguments about an issue, the ones on the side I want to believe are going to sound better. Then I'm going to read more of those ones I like and less of the ones I don't, and next thing you know I've got overwhelming evidence and I'm convinced.
Doing that purposefully ups the difficulty, since you are aware that you are avoiding half the issue and you'll have some resistance from that self reflection. Still... faking it for long enough, especially if the belief is being externally reinforced, could be enough to eventually turn it into a real belief.
Suppose there are two layers; real beliefs and luxury beliefs and people have different tolerances for luxury beliefs.
"Needles near my eye are bad" is a good blunt fact, I don't believe any one can turn that off. "Environmental activists are good people" is a luxury belief, that the majority of the population hold... until they are blocked in traffic in a protest and they have the blunt fact "I hate these people"
Phobias are incorrect, threat assessments that interact on the real belief layer. Apply which ever politically incorrect belief for why someone may be racist, given that real beliefs can be incorrect.
This seems like just a reskinning of the old debates about free will. The resolution is that free will doesn't really exist, but it is still socially useful to pretend that it does.
Some time ago it occurred to me that if I "chose" to believe in free will, but was mistaken I could not have done differently. If I chose not to believe in free will, but it turned out that free will was real then I would have made a serious mistake. So while I don't understand how free will is logically comprehensible, believing in free will is the only rational choice for me.
Its an incoherent resolution. If free will does not exist, then whether it socially useful to believe in it is immaterial since "pretending" that free will exists would be an act of will, which is impossible if free will doesn't exist.
Let me put it more clearly: if it is socially useful to pretend we have free will, that implies that we should try to pretend we have free will or otherwise act as if people have free will. But if there is no free will ideas like "should" or "try" are meaningless.
>But if there is no free will ideas like "should" or "try" are meaningless.
I'll set aside the case of "should", but I think that calling "try" meaningless in the absence of free will is an overly restrictive view of the term. It is common to talk about computer algorithms that include exploring branches and backtracking on failure as "trying" alternate branches.
I think that this is a reasonable use of the term, and reasonably close to the actions of an animal e.g. searching for food in various places, and to a person trying a sequence of alternatives till they find one that works or till they exhaust all of them.
The computer algorithm is certainly deterministic. In that sense, at the level of looking at lines of code getting executed, or even lower, at the level of CPU operations, it has "no free will". But, at the level of looking at the branches it is exploring, it is useful to describe what it is doing as "trying" multiple branches, till it "finds" one that satisfies what the algorithm is "looking for".
Depending on how nearly deterministic neural nets are (thermal noise, quantum effects), the same levels of analysis may apply to the animal and the human, with "try" useful at the upper level of analysis in all cases.
This is a case of English being a bit vague. You are using try in the sense of "attempting to do something", while I'm using try in the sense of "change your action to this particular action", which is a command to apply your will to choose something different than your current course. Like when someone sees me avoiding eating an unfamiliar dish and tells me "Try it!" They're requesting I take a particular action that I'm not otherwise inclined to take, to make a specific choice about my future actions. Meaningless in a world without free will.
a better take then the others in this thread, but I don't see how "the beatings will continue until you answer 2+2=5" is as socially useful as killing serial killers
My will seems above my beliefs; "I will stick a needle in my eye" seems more plausible then "the needle wont hurt". Will's may not be free, but theres something there, a thermostat "wants" a temperature and if its going to be any good at its job the sensor must be off of reach.
Because killing people who don't believe 2+2=5 leads to a more stable, cohesive society? You can already see the real costs of diverse thought in places like the US. Endless conflict and hatred and rot.
Of course beliefs are voluntary. People actively, willingly reject beliefs they hold and accept new ones every day, all across the world. Why would rationalists disagree with something so obviously real?
Possibly the word voluntary is doing too much work.
I don't believe (:-)) that I can "just decide to become a theist." I don't think the universe works that way and it doesn't seem to be the same as picking a (random) sports team to cheer on.
My life would be more pleasant it I *did* believe in a benevolent G*d who was looking out for me. But I don't. And it doesn't see that I can just decide to believe that.
As a relevant data point, this was me a number of years ago.
Background: I grew up religious (orthodox Jew), realized I didn't believe in god in ~2014, was an atheist for the rest of the decade. Then, for various reasons I won't get into here, I decided that, if believing in god was a possibility, it was something I wanted (I had, up to that point, been operating under the framework you're describing—that I didn't have a choice in the matter).
I forget the exact philosophical road I took (my journals are not on hand at the moment), but it was something along the lines of "positing an objective reality beyond our experiential reality (of said hypothetical objective reality) isn't actually all that useful here, and in fact Occam's Razor says that my experiential reality is all that is necessary; while I wouldn't be able to just change some objective reality, I can absolutely change my experiential reality."
I began looking for and collecting pieces that could form the foundation for the belief I was aiming for, and eventually (if I recall, it took something on the order of a month) it kinda...sunk in? Coalesced into actual belief, at any rate. This belief was qualitatively different than what I'd had growing up—mostly owing to the fact that I was choosing it, and that I was (and am) very aware that, if so motivated, I could choose to dismantle it. But I'm glad I was successful, and super happy with where I am.
Obviously I can't say how scalable this is—just deciding "I want to do X" or "I want to learn how to do Y" doesn't mean an individual will suddenly be able to achieve those things (and this completely regardless of whether or not X or Y are positive, productive goals).
Happy to talk more about this if anyone's interested.
I have a similar story but for me it was more about deconstructing the concept of belief:
If you believe X that usually means a few things: (note: this list is not exaustive)
1. "The Bayesian estimator in your brain, when evaluating X, ascribes a number close to 1 to X being true"
2. The Bayesian estimator in your brain, when evaluating other things, assumes X is true as a simplifying assumption, unless it's told to specifically condition itself on whether or not X is true
3. When your not doing Bayesian calculus, and are just "thinking about the world" or doing self dialogue, your dialogue with yourself takes "X is true" as a working assumption
4. You act as though X is true.
5. You say the words "X is true"
And my conclusion basically is that on some of these axis I can control what I believe. On other axis I can't. And in some I can control it sometimes but not always. And I decided that I would have a better life if whenever I could control it, I controlled it in the "believing in God" direction.
The next problem was, is this belief in God sufficient to make me considered to be a believer in the eyes of the Judaism. I concluded that it was since:
If it wasn't then God would be requiring a level of belief that I don't have the power to obtain. Since requiring something imposible is unjust and God is just, it must be that what I'm doing is enough.
And even if I'm wrong and it's not enough, that doesn't change how I have to act. For instance, I am obligated to put on tefellin every day because that's what God wants. There is no exemption in the laws of tefelin that says nonbelievers don't have to do it. So, since God does exist whether I believe in him or not, and since he requires me to put on tefelin whether I beilive that or not, that's what I have to do, regardless of my beilif-level.
What sort of pieces did you find? (Don't worry about specifics too much; of course it's all fingers pointing at moons.) How did you go about looking? Do you think the journals were an important part?
I would like to believe in a God and I'd be interested to hear more about how you achieved this. What reading did you do?
I'll be honest, I'm not convinced this is possible and I suspect what you're describing is belief in a belief, not a true belief. But I'd potentially like to try it still.
Maybe not entirely. But you *can* decide to be open-minded about it. Make room in your heart for the idea that God is there, that atheism and philosophical materialism are not necessarily true. Keep your eyes open, look for the evidence, weigh it fairly, but also pray. Ask, sincerely, "God, are you really there? Do you really know me and love me?"
If you do this in sincerity, as an honest, earnest seeker of truth, he does and will answer. I, and millions of others, can tell you that from personal experience. And that's what turns you into a theist. You may not be able to do it entirely by yourself, but if you voluntarily meet God halfway, he will guide you through the other half.
I’m an ex-Christian atheist. Recently I’ve been thinking that maybe, possibly I’m wrong about God. Maybe he does exist after all. Extremely unlikely, but I can’t rule it out.
So now, every time I sit down to meditate, I whisper the words, “God, if you exist, please speak to me.” And then I sit there and meditate quietly for 20 minutes.
So far, I’ve gotten a big fat round zero on the “God speaking to me” front, but I’ll keep asking. It doesn’t cost me anything to ask.
Since you do believe in God, feel free to put in a good word for me next time you pray.
How do you imagine "God speaking to me" will manifest? Hearing a literal voice? As far as I'm aware, that only ever seems to happen when it's necessary to get someone out of immediate-term danger.
You're the one who said "he does and will answer." No, I don't necessarily expect an actual audible voice, but I am asking for *something* that is clearly an external presence and intelligence communicating with me, rather than just wishful thinking/me talking to myself. Not too much to ask for an all-powerful and all-loving Being, I would hope.
"Make room in your heart for the idea that God is there, that atheism and philosophical materialism are not necessarily true. Keep your eyes open, look for the evidence, weigh it fairly, but also pray. Ask, sincerely, "God, are you really there? Do you really know me and love me?""
This line of reasoning doesn’t make any sense for two reasons. First, because people have some control over what they believe but not perfect control over what they believe. You seem to be arguing that without perfect control, you can not have any control, which is incorrect both logically and factually.
The second issue is that this hypothetical doesn’t make any sense. Even if someone did have perfect control over their beliefs, they would have no reason to comply with your demand that they believe something that would result in harm to them.
> The conclusion in question shouldn't be your premise
I'm not sure what you mean by this. It is not.
> I don't experience any control over beliefs
I very much doubt this is true. Have you never had a knee jerk reaction to something that sounded wrong and then decided to research the question more and changed your beliefs as a result? Have you ever asked someone for advice and followed it? Those are both ways in which you can exercise some level of control over your beliefs. Even if you have somehow managed to live your entire life without doing those things (unlikely), surely you must see that it is possible for you to do them.
> Have you never had a knee jerk reaction to something that sounded wrong and then decided to research the question more and changed your beliefs as a result? Have you ever asked someone for advice and followed it?
"hunger is voluntary because you can like go eat"?
If I stay unconvinced after reading the bible, is it reasonable for theists to say "that wasnt real faith" or "keep trying"?
I always thought believes to be partially voluntary. If that is what you mean I am in agreement. But I think there's value in reminding ourselves that believes are not absolutely voluntary, as I find it easy to forget.
>Pretty sure beliefs are a bit more complex and varied than y'all're representing here.
Agreed. Amongst other things, one can choose how much effort to apply to following and/or questioning a line of reasoning. E.g. for https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim I read the post and most (all?) of the comments, but I didn't attempt to calculate the bayesian updates on my own estimates. Fortunately, I'm not making any personal decisions which depend on whether lab leak or zoonosis is right, so I can afford to leave this fuzzy...
The rootclaim post convinced me to reconsider the viability of using Bayesian analysis to answer questions like this. I think this kind of application is at odds with the statistical assumptions behind the Bayesian model, and as such doing the calculations does more harm than good.
Also: I would never use an absolute. It's impossible.
>The rootclaim post convinced me to reconsider the viability of using Bayesian analysis to answer questions like this.
Yeah. One of the problems is that the textbook examples of Bayesian updates are about updating the estimated probability for _one_ hypothesis. One way of looking at part of the problem with the rootclaim analysis is that lab leak and zoonosis hypotheses both turned out to really be a bunch of parallel causal paths, and pieces of the evidence turned out to apply to some of the causal paths but not to others (_and_ some of the causal paths included some evidence being falsified or withheld). I won't go so far as to say that it turned into an intractable mess, but it at least was not tractable _to me_, at the level of effort that I was willing to spend.
>Also: I would never use an absolute. It's impossible.
Agreed, though I think the problem is more fundamental. To calculate P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), you need to know P(A), P(B), and P(B|A). And to do serial calculations, you need to know these EVERY TIME. But in the rootclaim debate, multiple variables were guessed at. Rootclaim added factors for "model uncertainty", which is a fancy way of saying he was trying to diminish the impact of not knowing what value to assign the variable.
In my experience, there are limited situations where you have enough certainty of the values of each of these variables to make a Bayesian calculation useful. Other times, all you're doing is giving yourself a false sense that you've learned something from the bogus calculation - you're literally worse off than if you hadn't done the calculation at all. There are certainly great principles to take from the Bayesian approach, such as the concept of a pretest probability, but it can get you in trouble.
I wrote a piece titled "Beauty as entropic fine-tuning", claiming the experience of beauty fundamentally is about successful decoding of entropically fine-tuned sensory signals. Beauty is the pleasure of successful predictive processing. In case it sounds interesting to you, I invite you at the link below. Any criticism would be greatly appreciated.
Nice essay! I like how many different possibilities you covered.
I'll quibble with your claim that music is more emotionally intense than visual art because "paintings are objects of beauty with much higher dimensionality."
This paper (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29779745/) discusses "musical anhedonia," a condition in which people have low enjoyment of music in particular. In comparison to participants with moderate and high enjoyment listening to music, the participants with musical anhedonia experienced far less pleasure listening to music but comparable levels of pleasure viewing paintings and listening to "emotional sounds (such as baby laughing, dog barking, and audience cheering)." This was measured using skin conductance response.
The neuroscience explanation they propose is that while there are several common structures in the brain that are engaged during both musical and visual aesthetic experience, there are also structural differences -- e.g. musical experience is more engaged with working memory and predictive coding. Poor brain connectivity can reduce enjoyment of one type of visual aesthetic experience but not the other. The paper states: "we have shown that individuals with specific musical anhedonia showed reduced connectivity between the nucleus accumbens (Nacc), a key region in reward and affective processing, and the superior temporal gyrus (STG), crucial for music perception"
This is to say that visual art isn't just a quantitatively less complex form of art compared to music, but a qualitatively different experience.
Thank you for sharing those findings! I was unaware of musical anhedonia, and its existence is indeed very interesting. That paper you linked also had a bunch of very interesting links I am hoping to pursue. For example, the abstract of the paper
seems to associate maximized musical beauty with intermediate complexity, so these ideas are perhaps already studied in the literature. Got to start working through it.
You are not the one taking issue with my proposed reason for why music is special! I might be wrong on this one. I certainly do not want to argue against music being processed qualitatively different that visual arts or even non-musical sounds. Perhaps instead music is more pleasing (if you are willing to concede that!) for human wetware reasons. Although a priori, I could imagine that two different systems in the brain is used for signal analysis, but at the final stage where reward happens, the reward is nevertheless proportional to the amount of structure we manage to learn or decode in a way that can be compared. Not saying I have evidence for this though. It is clearly time for me to dig into the neuroscience literature here :)
I think it's likely that music is more impactful than visual art for most modern people in producing states of awe or ecstasy, but there seems to be a fair amount of variance. For instance, many paintings are not meant to be viewed in isolation, but as a narrative sequence of multiple paintings, which gives room for more complexity and narrative structure. Essentially, this is a predecessor to animated film.
Also, some (uncommon, granted) individuals can gaze at a painting for minutes or hours and experience a state of awe that compares with that of a musical trance. While seeking a more objective notion of beauty is understandable today, where there seems to be little agreement on the subject, I suppose I don't really see the value of creating a hierarchy of artistic media where we figure out if music vs. visual art is more beautiful. They seem so quantitatively different as categories such that ranking them seems kinda dubious.
I am certainly not wanting to pursue some agenda to champion music as The Art. Rather, in understanding beauty, I thought the deep commitment to music by the average human was an existing empirical phenomenon that any proposed understanding of beauty should confront :) Agree very much on the high variance.
>Objects of beauty are those which have patterns that are rich, novel, and decodable.
Close-ups of insects and other creepy crawlies are universally less pleasant than any version of noise, despite being highly novel and decodable. Seems to cut against your definition.
>When we get sick of a song we've heard too many times, decoding the patterns in the audio has become too easy.
When I get sick of a song, it's because it was only tolerable to begin with; the beautiful ones never wear out their welcome. The idea that beauty fades with understanding runs counter to cavemen drawing animals on the walls, or most drawings in fact. It also runs counter to the idea of reproductive advantage; people who find their mate beautiful over the long haul are going to do a lot more boning.
>Pick random people on the street and ask them if a song ever made them cry. Now do the same for paintings.
>A piece of music is fundamentally a one-dimensional object... A painting, on the other hand, is a five-dimensional object for the purposes of a human... Thus paintings are objects of beauty with much higher dimensionality.
This explanation is backward. A piece of music is dynamic, a painting is static. The proper comparison for a painting would be whether people have cried upon hearing a single note. Compare a piece of music to a moving picture. Plenty of tears for those,
Thanks for the comments Yug, I appreciate it! I believe all of these observations fit my picture on closer examination. Let me address point by point.
> Close-ups of insects and other creepy crawlies are universally less pleasant than any version of noise, despite being highly novel and decodable. Seems to cut against your definition.
The case of insects is very muddled by the fact that the aesthetic experience is potentially completely suppressed by the evolutionary instincts of fear and disgust, since insects are dangerous. If there is danger, evolution would probably not want us to stop and investigate if there are patterns in the danger as opposed to running away. However, I do suspect an insect researcher, and also many others with low disgust response, will find insects much more beautiful than white noise.
> When I get sick of a song, it's because it was only tolerable to begin with; the beautiful ones never wear out their welcome. The idea that beauty fades with understanding runs counter to cavemen drawing animals on the walls, or most drawings in fact.
I don't think there is any incompatibility here. The things you find the most beautiful are probably pieces that has a lot of rich microstructure that your brain picks up on every time you study the piece. Nevertheless, this microstructure is too detailed to memorize, so the beauty is robust. Consider for example Starry Night by van Gogh. You might remember the main motif, but you do not remember the individual brush strokes, which with van Gogh carry so much beauty and richness. They are there for you to rediscover every time. Starry Night always has some minimum amount of entropy that is difficult to memorize away. For the pieces that started out somewhat beautiful and then become boring, there probably either wasn't enough microstructure so that you could 'rediscover' the piece every time, or the microstructure was to easy to memorize. I am not claiming that everything must become less beautiful over time. Only that it may, and when it does, it is usually caused by too low entropy. I don't quite get what you are saying about drawings. Personally, most drawings and visual arts degrade in beauty over time for me, much more than music does. Furthermore, a lot of music I used to absolutely love, while still good, is much less beautiful than it used to be. So unless I am some completely unusual case, degradation in beauty is a thing.
> It also runs counter to the idea of reproductive advantage; people who find their mate beautiful over the long haul are going to do a lot more boning.
I don't see how this is an argument against my thesis. There are several confounding factors here. First, let me just observe that partners indeed bone a lot less over time, as I am sure someone who was married for twenty years can verify. Second, romantic love is involving much more than pure aesthetics, so like in the case with insects, there are very strong confounders here. Of course I agree that no case is completely pure aesthetically, but given the strength of our instincts for reproduction, this one is more significantly confounded. Third, my hypothesis does not imply that you have to find your partner less beautiful over time. As an example of one mechanism, you might be able to pick up on their finer details in ways you couldn't earlier on. Your love for them might allow you to give them more of your attention and thus unlocking more aesthetic potential.
> This explanation is backward. A piece of music is dynamic, a painting is static. The proper comparison for a painting would be whether people have cried upon hearing a single note. Compare a piece of music to a moving picture. Plenty of tears for those,
I don't agree its backward, but I agree that a comparison to moving images is a good comparison we can make. Film is confounded by the fact that it so often uses music to emotionally move us, so the comparison we have to make is to a moving images without sound. I guess your intuition might be contrary to this, but personally I would be extremely surprised if the average person is moved more by these than music.
>The case of insects is very muddled by the fact that the aesthetic experience is potentially completely suppressed by the evolutionary instincts of fear and disgust, since insects are dangerous.
This can't be it. Compare it to a close-up of a bear or wolf, or various other animals capable if killing a full-grown human. It's not the danger that makes them ugly.
>I don't quite get what you are saying about drawings.
Why do people draw them?
>I would be extremely surprised if the average person is moved more by these than music.
The Vietnam war had a news video of a naked burn victim running down the road, and another of executions. It's hard to find fictional films that don't include sound, since you're leaving a tool on the ground, but you can also mute them for the test. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXcSXFqCZOc
Because they are beautiful. As you look at a drawing, it is full of patterns for your brain to analyze. That doesn't mean they will remain forever beautiful if you, say, stare at them for an hour a day. They might, or they might not, depending on the beholders brain and the quality of the drawing. I still don't understand what you are saying here.
> The Vietnam war had a news video of a naked burn victim running down the road, and another of executions. It's hard to find fictional films that don't include sound, since you're leaving a tool on the ground, but you can also mute them for the test.
So what? I am not claiming there are no instances of moving images that give a strong aesthetic reaction. I am just saying that the typical moving image moves the average human less than music. Second, it is possible to feel emotional for non-aesthetic reasons. A feeling of beauty is obviously not the reason why someone cries from an execution video. Again, I don't understand what you are getting at here. Finally, I find myself confused what the links are supposed to show. I can report that, personally, the aesthetic pleasure I get from watching those videos without sound are several orders of magnitude less than what I get from my favorite piece of music, and I would be happy to place a bet that this is true for a fraction of people significantly greater than 50%.
>The case of insects is very muddled by the fact that the aesthetic experience is potentially completely suppressed by the evolutionary instincts of fear and disgust, since insects are dangerous.
>This can't be it. Compare it to a close-up of a bear or wolf, or various other animals capable if killing a full-grown human. It's not the danger that makes them ugly.
I never said fear made them ugly. I was saying that disgust was the primary feeling people have when seeing insects (unlike wolves of bears). And when people feel disgust, they probably are not very aesthetically receptive. For the same types of reasons you forget your hunger when someone is trying to kill you with a knife.
I suspect that people feel more disgust from pictures of spiders than they feel fear from pictures of bears. However, if you have a bear right in front of your face acting aggressively, you would not ponder its beauty.
>the aesthetic pleasure I get from watching those videos without sound are several orders of magnitude less than what I get from my favorite piece of music,
That wasn't your claim.
>I'm willing to bet that a larger number of people will have cried from music than paintings - even if we normalize for how often we consume these forms of art.
Also you should link your favorite piece of music for comparison.
>Second, it is possible to feel emotional for non-aesthetic reasons.
Like storytelling? Remove the lyrics from music and the number of people who have cried from it will plummet.
>I was saying that disgust was the primary feeling people have when seeing insects
Which is circular. "They're not beautiful because people find them disgusting." Well, how does your equation handle "disgusting"? I guarantee most people find a close-up of an angry bear more beautiful than one of an indifferent insect.
I claimed that people on average are more moved from music than moving images without sound. This is exactly what I claim in my essay, except for pictures, which you then preferred to swap out with moving images. If you want be explicit about the argument you are making, I think that would make our discussion easier.
>Also you should link your favorite piece of music for comparison.
That is besides the point, no? Even if you find the music repulsive, it does not tell us much, since we are discussing averages and tendencies here. But if you really want to know: I don't have a single favorite, but I certainly find the Andante from Bach's Italian concerto extremely beautiful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0yC0Rc_08M
You might or might not like it, and it still won't matter.
>Like storytelling? Remove the lyrics from music and the number of people who have cried from it will plummet.
Here we disagree, but I guess this is a question than could only be settled empirically, so unless we dig up a study we are at an impasse here.
>Which is circular. "They're not beautiful because people find them disgusting." Well, how does your equation handle "disgusting"? I guarantee most people find a close-up of an angry bear more beautiful than one of an indifferent insect.
No, because I am not using disgust to mean absence of beauty. I am referring to a feeling of a non-aesthetic quality, just like nausea is a non-aesthetic feeling. Nausea would hinder you in appreciating beauty.
> I guarantee most people find a close-up of an angry bear more beautiful than one of an indifferent insect.
Totally agree! That was in fact my point. My guess is that this is true: look at a close up photo of an insect, and many people feel disgust. Look at a close of photo of a bear, and very few people actually feel fear. Thus, we are much more willing to engage in aesthetic considerations in the latter case. Furthermore, there might be independent aesthetic reasons we find the bear more beautiful too.
Now, I was not talking about a close up photo of a bear in my previous post. I was talking about having it literally in front of you preparing to attack you. In this case, I do not think aesthetic considerations occur much at all - only fear.
This may be part of what's going on, but I don't think it's the whole picture. Take cheesiness. Sometimes when watching a movie, I get this sensation like a chill down my back, and I know exactly what's going to happen for the next few seconds. The lines, the beats, the swell of the music, the camera tricks... And it's not beautiful, it's icky. (And the same thing can happen in real life, mostly when people are acting like automatons, following an internal script.)
Good point - my short summary above was not great! I discuss the example you in the article (in the context of childrens music). The fine-tuning in predictability is important. The signal should not be too predictable, nor too unpredictable. Either of those essentially means there is nothing to be learned from the signal. So really beauty it is not just successful predictive processing, but rather successful challenging predictive processing (and/or perhaps gradients in success over time).
My guess would be that the example you give is too predictable to trigger beauty. But also more generally yes, there probably are additional important aspects of beauty I do not discuss!
"Beauty is the pleasure of successful predictive processing."
I don't know if this counts as criticism, since I can't think of a way to change the conclusion you draw, but how on earth did you manage to make the experience of a summer sunset, a winter moon, the first roses, the leaves in autumn, music, poetry, an artwork that stirs both the senses and the soul sound as appealing as having your teeth descaled? Necessary, but I wouldn't call it an aesthetic experience!
Thanks for the comment! I am somewhat confused about the criticism here.
I am not trying to trigger an aesthetic experience, but rather explain what it is. I might very well be mistaken on what you are saying here, but this criticism feels analogous to the following complaint: "how dare you explain the evolutionary function of the pleasure of food without triggering the joyous taste of pizza while I read!". Tell me if I wrong, but you sound opposed to a scientific explanation of when and why we feel beauty? I would understand this if you are a theist, but in the naturalist frame, mechanistic explanations are bound to be somewhat unsexy (to many).
What I'm saying is, I don't know if LLMs can experience 'beauty' and I don't think they will, but for my own experience of beauty, I don't feel as if it comes from a deeply encoded sense of "ah yes, I have successfully predicted that roses are red!"
Even just looking at those photos evokes a very tactile sensation of the petals for me. Is that predictive processing? Perhaps, but it doesn't feel like "click-click-click the pinball went into the hole", which is what a phrase such as "Beauty is the pleasure of successful predictive processing" sounds like, and has you concluding that even an adding machine, by such a metric, can experience 'beauty'.
I am not thinking about conscious thought here, I am mostly thinking about the subconscious processing that happens on input sensory signals. Clearly your brain does a lot of this. When you hear a piece of music, you are instantly able to separate different instruments. This clearly requires a very nontrivial computation on the audio signal, which is just a time-series of amplitudes.
Similarly, let us say you see a part of a rose in a picture. You have seen roses before, so your brain has an expectation of various features associated to these roses. Color gradients, the curvature of the leafs, the number of leafs, the variability in the size of leafs, etc. As you take in the whole, these predictions are verified (again subconsciously). But also there might be surprises in store. However, these surprises are also likely often perceived to be beautiful, provided the surprises are sufficiently bounded and they contain novel patterns for you to latch onto.
Next, I am not saying that LLM do indeed feel beauty. I am completely agnostic as to whether LLMs feel anything. I am saying that if you guarantee to me in advance that they feel something, then I would place my bet on beauty being the relevant feeling. Next, I would not say that a calculator feels beauty, because a calculator does not make any predictions in advance.
Thank you for explaining, I understand a little better. But I still disagree on this:
"I am saying that if you guarantee to me in advance that they feel something, then I would place my bet on beauty being the relevant feeling."
But why beauty? Why not anger as processing of input and successfully predicted? Or boredom? Or distaste?
I think I understand some of what you are getting at - that " in the naturalist frame" it's all "mechanistic explanations" and of course mechanistic explanations would also apply to machines. But whatever about calculators not making predictions (are they not predicting that input 2, input addition operator, input 2 again, result should be 4 - oh look, there it is, 4!), I don't see why "beauty" would be the sensation of successful predictive processing over and beyond the pleasure of "prediction was successful".
I can see the 'pleasure' for the LLM in getting it right, I don't see how that translates into "this is beauty".
Thanks for the comment! You have some great points here. Boredom or distaste actually seems like viable candidates too.
I think we could plausible imagine the distaste (ugliness) - beauty - boredom lies on a single axis, where we feel:
1) Distaste when the sensory data has no perceivable structure (like things that are computationally indistinguishable from noise)
2) Beauty when there is successfully prediction which is sufficiently challenging that errors are made, and perhaps with improvements seen over time
3) Boredom when predictions are trivially successful
In this case, during the training of the LLM, you might expect distaste (ugliness) during the beginning, when the predictions are always wrong - the data just seems like noise to the model. Next it might end up perceiving beauty, when it is succeeding at a fairly high rate. Finally, you could expect the beauty to decay more and more into boredom, although natural language is sufficiently entropic that predictions will never be super close to perfect. If course there is no way to calibrate the scale, so whether it would feel beauty or boredom in the end would be unknowable.
I cannot rule out anger of course, I just don't see any argument for anger, the same way I don't see an argument for hunger. Although if we rewarded LLMs for accessing new compute on their own, hunger wouldn't be a bad guess either. Anyway, the last part about LLMs was mostly some fun crackpotty speculation, so feel free to disregard that part if you want.
As for calculators, sure, the calculator outputs 4. But we do not then feed in a final number that is the answer, so the calculator never goes through a reward process where it checks its prediction.
This piece by Freddie reminds me of something I've persistently wondered about; the people who glibly talk about the coming ecocatastrophe, hellworld, never getting the retirement money you paid for etc., and still going on without starting a family and caring for your kids (even though they'd have an option to do so), i.e. doing what is the traditional thing to take care of you in your old age if there's no formal retirement system and things are generally hard.
Sure, you can theoretically say that you'll die before growing old anyway, but as Freddie says, "blah blah but no, you aren’t, shut the fuck up." Far less people will actually seek out a romantic blaze-or-glory death than are evidently willing to do it.
It seems very intuitive to me. I would presumably love my children and not want them to be born into the oncoming zombie apocalypse unless I could keep them safe from it. Since I believe I will be eaten by the zombies, and then my children will also be eaten by the zombies, I am not too concerned about their advantage in providing a retirement package once the coffers run dry on social security.
I think it's gonna be fine for me, but not my theoretical kids; so I won't have any because I'm not a piece of shit.
OR
I've decided nobody is solving the problems and I don't have the moral courage to self immolate/blow up a pipeline, So I'm gonna hedonistically fidel while waiting for rome to burn. I'm gonna drive a gas car 30 miles to buy a single hot dog, eat as much meat as I want, Kill the last rhino because it's fun; and you are gonna support me all the way because of your dumbass political beliefs and watch as you kids inherit the wasteland.
I've given up on being as well off as my parents and have no idea on what the hell to go forward with
you may as well be claiming that "the team that won wanted it enough"; no we have zero-sum games and there will be losers, the middle class dying will chew up many, just like every time a football team doesnt make it to the finals.
I think most people who talk about coming ecocatastrophes see the resulting world as a horrible place to live. So they're not interested in selfishly bringing a child into said world just so that they can be better taken care of.
>the people who glibly talk about the coming ecocatastrophe, hellworld, never getting the retirement money you paid for etc., and still going on without starting a family and caring for your kids
A lot would depend on whether that a free choice, or forced by circumstances.
Clearly there's a need for more Captain Planet style villains who often seem to do their actions primarly because they just plain *hate* the environment.
A high school friend used to claim that he was a vegetarian not because he loved animals but because he hated plants. I'm sure that this wasn't original with him.
I'm not sure whether I need to see it, but I'm imagining a story about fighting between an environmentalist villain who wants to kill people for the environment and a romance-of-industry villain who hates nature.
Somehow, there's an embodied Common Sense/Likes People superhero who defeats both of them.
I've sometimes thought of a novel idea that's basically a Left Behind style novel with *multiple* potential commonly conceptualized Antichrists duking it out. A globalist UN Antichrist, a communist Antichrist, an Islamic Antichrist, AI Antichrist etc.
Now wait just a minute... :-) I could see multiple possible "adversaries", but Antichrist looks specific to one tradition. Alternatively, I'd think one would need a communist AntiMarx, and Islamic AnitMohammed or AntiAllah, an AI AntiLLM etc... :-)
No, I meant that there are multiple interpretions in the circles that spend a lot of time thinking about the identity of the Antichrist as to what movement will spawn the Antichrist. I've seen books and websites claiming that the Antichrist will be the leader of some Communist power, or that there will be an Islamic 'Mahdi' who will actually be the Antichrist etc.
Many Thanks! So the circles are all Christian and they all label someone as Antichrist, and they pick different people from different groups to label. Ok... Hmm... Could there be a succession crisis? Say the &outgroup Antichrist dies, and there are two plausible successors, and one circle proclaims successor1 as the new Antichrist while another circle proclaims successor2 (and for additional fun, &outgroup picks successor3 to hold whatever position the original one held...)?
That might work, conceptually. There are plenty of Christians who'd tell you that if you're not on the right path, it doesn't particularly matter which path you're on instead...
> Since German workers are typically interacting with male bosses, this may reinforce their gender status beliefs. Since employers are generally interacting with male bosses, this may 1 in 3 German employers say that poor quality housework may justify violence.
Now I think I'm pretty firmly in the camp of "no way this number is not entirely fabricated/this study utterly misleading", but does anyone here know more about this study? Because it appeared on Bloomberg in 2021, did no one (especially in Germany) do a take-down of this back then? Would appreciate a pointer.
"Since employers are generally interacting with male bosses, this may 1 in 3 German employers say that poor quality housework may justify violence."
Employers are bosses. How can bosses interact with male bosses? Being the boss/employer, you can only interact with subordinates. Also the sub-clause is missing a verb. I have a hard time finding an implied verb, that would not make this a non-sequitur.
If the verb is "cause", "make" or "state", I don't see how that would make any sense.
Not directly to do with this survey but just to get a feeling for how many people might hold quite old-fashioned beliefs. When Germany made marital rape a crime in 1997, 470 delegates voted for the law and 138 were against, 35 abstained. This was a while ago but this ratio of sexists vs non-sexists, seems about right to me, for old white dudes.
I just wanted to emphasize how unrepresentative the sample was. The delegates were probably almost all old, white, intelligent, middle or upper class, educated, men. Probably half of them were also lawyers.
Besides your complaint about "white" being "unrepresentative", for which carateca and Moon Moth rightfully called you out, this part in particular:
> […] intelligent […] educated […]
stands out. I really, really hope that the politicians we've elected into government actually are way more intelligent and educated than the median of the population. These people decide over important aspects of our lives – they shouldn't be a statistically representative sample of the population, they should be _competent_. And being intelligent and educated is a necessary precondition for competence in the line of work they do.
It's not a study, it's just a single survey. Even in german I can't even find anything more detailed, all the original articles in germany are equally vague. I found one interview with a single actual researcher, and even that one didn't actually say whether the survey was good or not - just that "scepticism is appropriate" but we need to "not let right-wing organisations take advantage of the survey's shortcomings". Tbh, you should generally ignore people who treat these surveys as anything but political propaganda. The usual way these are misleading:
1) The big one, representativeness. The kind of person who answers surveys is usually highly unusual. I, for example, have never answered one and the rate is AFAIK lower than 5%. Even if you control for obvious attributes such as age, gender and employment status, you still wildly oversample from a tiny minority.
2) they don't specify genders when asking, but then present the results as if it was exclusively about male-on-female violence. So even women thinking violence against men is OK will often be presented as male-on-female violence anyway.
3) they don't check class, immigration status, cultural background etc, but then present the results as if it was about average middle class individuals. It's well-known that this problem is almost exclusive to certain subcultures, but it's usually ignored. So fundamentalist muslim men thinking violence against women is OK will be presented at university as "1/4 of the men in this class have, statistically, hit a women in a domestic dispute" despite probably not a single one of them having done so.
4) They qualify having ever hit a person of the other gender even once, no matter the severity, as "domestic violence". Sometimes they even go beyond that and classify any physical conflict, such as grabbing or throwing non-dangerous items as such. Or the survey is vague enough that different people will interpret it differently. My wife has slapped me a few times or threw things at me, so I'd fill out a survey accordingly, but she has never done anything I'd remotely qualify as "abuse".
5) They don't check reciprocity. This seems a small issue but once you've seen it you understand why it's problematic. For example, when I was living in an extremely cheap dump apartment in a bad neighbourhood, I've seen multiple instances of women abusing their boyfriends/husbands in public, such as throwing them out of the apartment in the middle of the night, screaming at them for literal hours that they are worthless losers, destroying their stuff or simply beating them (with the latter usually being the least questionable behaviour). It was bad enough that I wanted to beat them up, despite not even being the target of the abuse (but at least I got to be kept awake at 3 in the morning!). In contrast, I have not seen a single incident of male-on-female violence (though I wouldn't in the least be surprised if it happened behind closed doors). AFAIK studies that try to check for it find that more than 90% of domestic abuse is reciprocal, i.e. two toxic people repeatedly abusing each other. Obviously that is an issue, but a very different one from the one presented in university workshops. And for the record, if you get abused as a man you still shouldn't beat your partner, just leave them.
Insofar as the ballade has any popularity in English, I think we can thank GK Chesterton - between "A Ballade of Suicide" and "A Ballade of the First Rain", he proved that yes, English *does* have words with enough rhymes to fill out all twenty-eight lines while still telling a meaningful story. Those two are two of my favorite poems by him.
While half of that poem went a mile over my head with cultural references (Is that uncle's sword a reference to Hamlet?), this poem still caused me to update my views on Chesterton.
From priors, I would have guessed that if a Christian apologist would write about suicide, he would emphasize that it is considered a grave sin. Instead, the lyrical subject decides on the "strangest whim" to not kill themselves (today), possibly just out of spite towards their hostile neighbors waiting for the spectacle.
This tentative endorsement of life seems reminiscent of Dorothy Parker ("You might as well live!"). Of course, there is a selection effect there: poets who write about suicide are probably at least somewhat suicidal, and thus less likely to firmly reject suicide than poets without suicidal ideation.
The uncles sword was probably a sword hanging in the characters house. In reality it’s an added line, just to give flavour to the environment. Indicating a military family maybe.
Chesterton provides us with his view on suicide in his book "Orthodoxy" (the book, in various ways, describes how he slowly came from atheist to Catholic Christianity):
"Under the lengthening shadow of Ibsen, an argument arose whether it was not a very nice thing to murder one's self. Grave moderns told us that we must not even say "poor fellow," of a man who had blown his brains out, since he was an enviable person, and had only blown them out because of their exceptional excellence. Mr. William Archer even suggested that in the golden age there would be penny-in-the-slot machines, by which a man could kill himself for a penny. In all this I found myself utterly hostile to many who called themselves liberal and humane. Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world. His act is worse (symbolically considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage. For it destroys all buildings: it insults all women. The thief is satisfied with diamonds; but the suicide is not: that is his crime. He cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of the Celestial City. The thief compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them. But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it. He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake. There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer. When a man hangs himself on a tree, the leaves might fall off in anger and the birds fly away in fury: for each has received a personal affront. Of course there may be pathetic emotional excuses for the act. There often are for rape, and there almost always are for dynamite. But if it comes to clear ideas and the intelligent meaning of things, then there is much more rational and philosophic truth in the burial at the cross-roads and the stake driven through the body, than in Mr. Archer's suicidal automatic machines. There is a meaning in burying the suicide apart. The man's crime is different from other crimes—for it makes even crimes impossible.
"About the same time I read a solemn flippancy by some free thinker: he said that a suicide was only the same as a martyr. The open fallacy of this helped to clear the question. Obviously a suicide is the opposite of a martyr. A martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life. A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of everything. One wants something to begin: the other wants everything to end. In other words, the martyr is noble, exactly because (however he renounces the world or execrates all humanity) he confesses this ultimate link with life; he sets his heart outside himself: he dies that something may live. The suicide is ignoble because he has not this link with being: he is a mere destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the universe. And then I remembered the stake and the cross-roads, and the queer fact that Christianity had shown this weird harshness to the suicide. For Christianity had shown a wild encouragement of the martyr. Historic Christianity was accused, not entirely without reason, of carrying martyrdom and asceticism to a point, desolate and pessimistic. The early Christian martyrs talked of death with a horrible happiness. They blasphemed the beautiful duties of the body: they smelt the grave afar off like a field of flowers. All this has seemed to many the very poetry of pessimism. Yet there is the stake at the crossroads to show what Christianity thought of the pessimist.
"This was the first of the long train of enigmas with which Christianity entered the discussion. And there went with it a peculiarity of which I shall have to speak more markedly, as a note of all Christian notions, but which distinctly began in this one. The Christian attitude to the martyr and the suicide was not what is so often affirmed in modern morals. It was not a matter of degree. It was not that a line must be drawn somewhere, and that the self-slayer in exaltation fell within the line, the self-slayer in sadness just beyond it. The Christian feeling evidently was not merely that the suicide was carrying martyrdom too far. The Christian feeling was furiously for one and furiously against the other: these two things that looked so much alike were at opposite ends of heaven and hell. One man flung away his life; he was so good that his dry bones could heal cities in pestilence. Another man flung away life; he was so bad that his bones would pollute his brethren's."
Okay, now this aligns perfectly with my priors for "a Christian apologist's views on suicide".
Personally, I would argue that there is a continuum between suicides and martyrs. You could order them by expected utility or post-facto utility to their cause, with clear examples on either side, and a lot of grey area in between. Of course I generally prefer the apolitical suicide, they are much less likely to blow me up or disrupt society.
Also, TIL that the suicide booth was not invented by Futurama.
Also, before 1823, the English treated suicides thus:
> The crime was punishable by forfeiture (great loss of property) to the monarch and what was considered a shameful burial – typically with a stake through the heart and at a crossroads.
I see no continuum: like Mr. Chesterton, I see them at "opposite ends of heaven and hell". The martyr does not wish to die, but values something else even more than his life. The suicide wishes to die, because there is nothing of value worth living for. Completely different actions.
I would argue that in reality, it is often a linear combination of both.
The missionary who goes into the jungle to convert some cannibal tribe (and likely is killed by them) would be an example.
If in his heart of hearts, he knew beforehand that without a divine intervention he would get eaten without converting a single heathen, then the whole operation is just an elaborate suicide by proxy.
If he went thinking that his odds of converting the tribe were good, only to find to his surprise that he was wrong, then he would be a martyr.
Let us call the subjective probability for success of the missionary p. At p=0 he is just a suicide, at p=0.5 he is a proper martyr.
Let us suppose that real humans do things for multiple internal and external causes in a way which can roughly be modeled in an utilitarian calculus. Let M be the utility our prospective missionary assigns to his own life, and T be the utility of converting the tribe.
His expected utility gain for preaching to the heathens is then (discounting the middle outcome of him escaping with his life):
U=p*T+(1-p)*M
Following this formula, one should see more would-be martyrs who assign a smaller amount of utility to their own lives.
Now I am not very familiar with the martyr demographics, but I would expect it to be heavily slated towards young men without families, which is also a population more at risk from suicide. (One way to improve statistics would be to expand the focus from Christianity to other religions , where some sects believe that they can achieve martyrdom by blowing themselves and a sufficient numbers of enemies up, but the culture attached to employing violence by gender is probably confounding this to no end.)
If you show me the statistics that mothers of young children (who typically place a high value on their lives because their kids need them) have accepted martyrdom in Christianity at the same rate as everyone else, I will concede that martyrdom is generally caused by a high impact T (or p*T?) and not by placing a low value on one's own life M.
> At p=0 he is just a suicide, at p=0.5 he is a proper martyr.
This, particularly in the case of Christianity, is not true at all. Who were the first Christian martyrs? The Christians condemned to death in Roman persecutions. These martyrs could have saved their lives if they abandoned their belief in Christ, gave up their holy books for destruction, and perform a small sacrifice to Ceaser. They refused to, because they loved Christ even more than their own lives. They were not gambeling their lives in the hopes of accomplishing a goal, they were accepting death as preferable to abandoning their savior. If they refused to deny Christ they knew their probability of survival was near 0, yet they did it anyway.
This is the primary model of the Christian martyr, one who goes to their death rather than deny Christ. In Japan during the shogunate Christianity was punishable by death. Those suspected were made to step on an image of Christ as proof they were not Christian. Probability of survival if they stepped on it, above .5 for sure. Probability if they refused to, near 0. Yet many refused to, and these brave souls Christians call martyrs. And yes, many of them were women (look at how many Roman era female saints there are, most of them were martyrs. See also this https://www.nobts.edu/geauxtherefore/articles/2016/what-women-these-christians-have-a-look-at-women-martyrs.html).
Again, the martyr loves something more than heir own life, while the suicide loves nothing enough to stay alive for its sake. They’re completely different acts.
Not really, but you'd have to read the book for that. To summarize, Chesterton says that he became a Christian because he tried to sort out what he believed about the world, and then discovered to his surprise that what he believed was Christianity. In other words, in this passage Chesterton came to the conclusion about suicide that he lays out in the first paragraph above, and then realized that Christianity agreed with him on suicide. The rest of the "long train of enigmas" are other areas where he came to a philosophical conclusion, and then realized that Christianity had come to that conclusion long before he had.
This is how he puts it in the introduction to the book:
"I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas....But I have a peculiar reason for mentioning the man in a yacht, who discovered England. For I am that man in a yacht. I discovered England...I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before. If there is an element of farce in what follows, the farce is at my own expense; for this book explains how I fancied I was the first to set foot in Brighton and then found I was the last. It recounts my elephantine adventures in pursuit of the obvious. No one can think my case more ludicrous than I think it myself; no reader can accuse me here of trying to make a fool of him: I am the fool of this story, and no rebel shall hurl me from my throne. I freely confess all the idiotic ambitions of the end of the nineteenth century. I did, like all other solemn little boys, try to be in advance of the age. Like them I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it. I did strain my voice with a painfully juvenile exaggeration in uttering my truths. And I was punished in the fittest and funniest way, for I have kept my truths: but I have discovered, not that they were not truths, but simply that they were not mine. When I fancied that I stood alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom. It may be, Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original; but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing traditions of civilized religion. The man from the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was the first to find Europe. I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy."
I'm an art grad, good at pretty much any humanities stuff and hopeless with sciences. I'm in my 30s and have no job experience other than working in TEFL. Into what field could I consider/would it be possible for me to go into as a career transition, given TEFL when I'm old isn't a great bet?
One other idea: You can teach English lit, art, history, whatever you're good at at a private school without having the various certifications that public school teachers are required to have.
If you can tutor kids or teens in writing you can make a pretty good living if you promote yourself with pizaazz. Many upper middle class people will pay handsomely for tutoring,for their kids especially in things that help kids get into college. Helping kids with their college essays will probably be popular with parents, but will suck to do, and is also kind of dishonest. But what about helping them learn to write poetry, short stories, graphic novels? You need to get an in with a couple sets of parents, and they will tell their friends.
Have you ever considered being a handyman/carpenter? You can pick your jobs and hours. If you can watch a few hours of YouTube videos on how to do some basic stuff well.
The other trick is, live in a cheap town, do work in expensive and wealthy nearby town.
Something like UX design (or perhaps further afield, product design / product management)? You might need to do some retraining to get there, but you get the advantages of being tech-affiliated without having to do a STEM degree.
I'm actually in (almost) this exact boat (I'm not hopeless at sciences). I'm doing pretty well with my artistic pursuits but I need a better main source of income.
I'm aware that my soft skills are actually pretty valuable, but I don't have the kind of background to understand how to leverage that. TEFL has a kind of gravity well that is hard to escape. It also has limited progression and the rewards for pursuing higher qualifications are limited. After 10 years of graft I also have a pretty good understanding of how people actually learn languages and its not in a classroom. I can tell very quickly after meeting someone whether they are going to make any progress or not and unfortunately is the ones who don't progress that keep you afloat. All a bit depressing really.
Theres a few factors that I can see in students. A big one, as lapras said, is motivation but it basically comes down to what their beliefs and attitudes are towards learning. A sizable subset of the population believe that a teachers job is essentially to crack open their head and insert the knowledge and then its done. However, students who engage with the language outside the classroom rapidly improve and those who don't, stagnate.
The best use of a language teacher is as a resource to be drawn on. If a student comes back to me with a question based on something they read or heard and didn't understand, I know they'll be interested in the answer. The student might have eventually figured it out without me, but in these situations I'm a kind of force multiplier to their own explorations.
Curiosity is a big indicator. As is having any interests at all. Language is a gateway to culture and people who are interested in culture and media see that language is a gateway to MORE culture and media. The number of young boys I've taught who did nothing in class but who chatted on a headset while playing fortnite or whatever for hours on end and rapidly improved is pretty high. I know someone who is basically native level in english and it all started because she really like Gorillaz and there were no forums about the band in her language.
Ultimately, I believe that Stephen Krashen is essentially correct. Theres definitely things linguists could nitpick about the specifics of his various hypotheses. But the input hypothesis, acquisition learning, monitor hypothesis are basically true in my experience.
Probably I'd be better suited in essentially coaching people on how to schedule their language learning. Anyone can easily hit 1 hour a day by using short bursts spread out. I feel like I don't have the required social proof for that though as my chosen L2 is a life-long project and I'm an unmedicated ADHDer.
Democracy is the best form of government, both morally and practically.
Free speech is good, both morally and practically.
I mean, really, all the foundational beliefs of liberal democracy are pretty much "our system is both morally righteous, and also the best."
(Which, to be clear, it is. Lucky, that. It would suck if absolute monarchies where everybody's ground under the totalitarian boot of some idiot nepo baby turned out to work better than liberal democracy.)
I agree that liberal democracies are typically more stable, more economically successful, and more happiness-promoting ("work better") than absolute monarchies.
But if the hypothetical were true, where absolute monarchies "work better" than liberal democracies along all of those dimensions, why would we prefer the latter over the former?
If you hold political beliefs, without wielding substantial political power, you have neither incentive to get them right nor any mechanism to update them based on evidence. You have no real skin in the game.
The most fundamental pair of convenient beliefs are therefore:
"I am a good person."
"I hold the correct political beliefs."
This is convenient, because any good politics would have the bad person as an enemy (or at least as a problem to fix) and a good person would obviously want to have the correct beliefs, otherwise they would be perpetuating harm.
The belief that ethnic or racial homogeneity in a country is righteous, and lessening immigration also happens to be best economically for those currently in the country (e.g. we don't let in immigrants, therefore I can get a better job and we remain more 'pure')
Also the opposite -- increasing immigration is good for me as a rich person, and therefore multiculturalism is great and those who want to restrict it are evil racists.
A classic DEI example for you: "More diversity is more moral" and "The less in common people have in a group the better that group will perform".
Believing that Apple would have done even better as a company if Steve Jobs was a disabled gay native American and Steve Woz was a black lesbian Muslim immigrant who didn't speak English seems just a tad too suspiciously convenient to me.
> "The less in common people have in a group the better that group will perform".
Didn't that originate in a single study by a business consulting firm, that's since become one of the more prominent victims of the Replication Crisis?
The findings of that study also got pretty badly garbled in the retelling. The way I remember it, the actual findings were that teams with shared backgrounds were more efficient, while diverse teams were more creative.
In 99 out of every 100 versions of that story, the kid winds up getting hanged for Lese Majeste, while the populace talk even more loudly about how wonderful the Emperor's clothes are.
There are plenty that society believes and the rationalist community doubt but don't talk about much for obvious reasons. Eg any biologically caused tendencies in any group of humans: because this goes against the idea of freedom and self determination.
That government is good/useful (not in a libertarian sense, as in a literal not anarchism sense).
If you accept something like the stationary bandit theory of the origin of states, and accept that government/proto-government up to about 1750 was basically just an extortion racket that provided peasants with nothing of value, it should be very suspicious that it's turned out to be an indispensable ingredient of civilisation.
The stationary bandit model ignores a lot of political reality in order to make it's point. Taxation is complex and something that only really works long term with buy in from people up and down the social chain. Otherwise people can and will revolt against it (see the USA), often successfully. To convince people to give you their money voluntarily you need to persuade them into believing they're benefiting from it. Be that though threat, custom, promise of divine intercession, or material benefit.
Why is it surprising that a stationary bandit would have a motive to want to increase the GDP of the area they control? The amount they "invest" might not be the "optimal" amount that the people in the area would choose, given a free choice (and, as other commenters have noted, given some way of being protected from all the _neighboring_ bandits). Still, historically, things like more-or-less stable coinage and more-or-less stable weights and measures were reasonably common government features for millennia, and provided _some_ use to the populace.
Having been part of some large organizations that needed stronger leadership, I think you're vastly underselling the benefits of competent government.
The real problem, IMHO, is members of the government treating it like a predatory startup. "If we extract a little bit from a lot of people, the few of us at the top can become wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice! And then once we've established vendor lock-in and eliminated the competition, we can ratchet up the fees as high as we want!"
I understand the stationary bandit concept as being a simplified "spherical horses" model that captures one particular aspect of the dynamic while ignoring others. And it's probably a much closer model of hierarchical states with violence-monopoly institutions controlled by a single family or a relatively small aristocracy, as opposed to more decentralized and consensus+tradition oriented tribal societies.
In practices, most societies we have enough reliable evidence to draw conclusions about seem to be a hybrid of the two: tribal societies often had nobles or "big men" who functioned like an aristocracy in a state society, and hierarchical states often had traditional laws and some system of councils or assemblies to which rulers were at least somewhat accountable.
Why would you accept those presuppositions? They don't seem to accord either with history or with the things that happen when government collapses.
Basically, if you have clusters of more then Dunbar's number of people you need some sort of government. Unfortunately, governments have an inherent tendency to aggregate more power to themselves. And I would argue that even smaller groups tend to have a form of government, though often largely unstructured. Even the "Friends Meeting" groups have a government of sorts.
Also, you're ignoring the "protection" function. Groups in this world do not usually live in isolation, and if you're a group that controls something some other group wants, you need a way to protect it. If they've got an organization, then you need one...and that's a government. (The only plausible exception that I'm aware of is a group of apparently stone age technology that lives on a small island in the Indian Ocean. They have the custom of killing any stranger who tries to make landfall. They may not have a government, but nobody knows how many of them there are or how they are organized.)
Now national governments (outside of Kings) ARE a recent innovation. An emperor was a "king of kings". My belief is that this is due to increasing speed and facility of transport and communication. The ancient kings and emperors had rather loose control anywhere away from their centers of government.
The history point broadly favours government being essentially parasitic. Medieval kings/counts/barons/knights provide negligible benefits to peasants - maybe a tiny amount of law enforcement and an even less substantial amount of co-ordination, but quite often they existed alongside village decision-making bodies at the peasant level which did some of this as well. They also didn't emerge from people getting together and forming a government; taking Western Europe as an example, all of them were formed by an exogenous conquering elite (Normans, Lombards, Franks etc). Modern governments didn't evolve from the peasant bodies,* they evolved from centralised noble/royal bodies formed by said conquerors. That's why it's weird that they're now useful to their populations.
So far as protection is concerned, I think it misses the fact that what evolved into modern governments is precisely the sort of conquest that protection would be valuable to protect you from; protecting your right to continue being a peasant isn't necessarily necessary, as that's the other thing someone would protect you from. That may be an argument that government is inevitable, but that's part of what makes it weird that government is beneficial.
*Except in Switzerland and San Marino, where the governments are tellingly very different.
For what it's worth, I don't find the historical point very convincing. Yes, you can arguably draw a line from modern governments back to feudal ones, but now we give money to old or sick people rather than just building the king a bigger castle. It seems like the day-to-day function of government has changed more than its origin would suggest.
I think this intuitive argument fails for a few reasons:
First, defense is 'something of value.' Without defense, a viable pre-industrial strategy for increasing one's group's condition was to raid the neighbours and take their land and/or people. This competition would favour societies that could mobilize ever-larger fractions of their economies/manpower, *even if* the mobilization and the state apparatus that creates it is extractive.
Second, wealth beyond bare subsistence farming is built on capital, and capital improvements beyond the most basic scale require societal coordination. Family and clan ties work to an extent, but the largest improvement projects will cross such grain boundaries. A government brings a set of laws, traditions, and dispute resolution mechanisms less likely to degenerate into blood feuds.
The associated institutions of property and contract let us build works and undertake ventures in a "low-context" manner, with faith that our counterparties aren't likely to try to steal everything one day.
Third, if the value of any societal institution is to change, then "the start of the Industrial Revolution" is a reasonably likely time for that change. In particular, this is when we really saw the triumph of built capital over land as the principal source of societal wealth, and institutions that are better at managing that capital will in turn find new value for society. Industrialization even slowly changed the security problem, with wars of conquest now likely to prove so costly (in both material and collateral damage) to overwhelm any likely gain.
If a permanent unfilled power vacuum isn't actually a possibility, then the choice is between governments that are only extortion rackets, and governments that occasionally do.something useful.
I don't think so, not any more than "We need to have a ceiling anyway, we might as well hang some lights off it".
Purely parasitic rulers tend to get overthrown eventually. Rulers are aware of this and try not to get overthrown.
Besides, that which is in the interests of the ruler is also often in the interests of the ruled. The ruler isn't going to be able to extract much in tax unless there's a thriving local economy, which means investing some of his extracted wealth into roads, sanitation, education et cetera.
Perhaps not as much an indispensable ingredient of civilisation as much as something that would inevitably be created anyway anew by new stationary bandits or I-can't-believe-it's-not-government! extortion rackets.
Why would someone turn down money that is offered them? I'm against social security as a plan, for philosophical economic reasons, but it is the law, and I wouldn't refuse the benefits once I can get them.
I'm approaching retirement age, but I had the idea that, in about 2005, if we were to gradually phase out social security benefits AND taxes, so that both would be gone by 2030, I would be willing to do so, in order to get rid of the system I think is bad for the country as a whole. This idea, in general, might still be a viable plan, which I would agree to, if the deadline for phasing it out were now, say, 2050.
> the system I think is bad for the country as a whole.
It certainly is, in its current form. It was never intended to be a universal retirement pension, and medical advances have mutated it into one faster than we've been able to generate the political will to adjust the laws to compensate for, and so now it's collapsing under its own weight.
"We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age."--
President Roosevelt upon signing Social Security Act
"During this News Conference, President Ronald Reagan refers to how the government tends to be inefficient, to such a degree that instead of helping, it often causes harm instead. This view expresses the need for a more diminutive form of government where an individual or organization can complete an activity more effectively than the whole government."
But do you see the weird circularity? That advice, coming from "Government", is a form of "help"*, which one should be wary of.
*telling what to do is a form of help, as in, for example, "Hurricane is forecasted (by a government agency) to land in 24 hrs, evacuate the town now".
The belief that "torture doesn't work" seems like another example. You can neatly sidestep any kind of moral dilemmas about whether it's right to use torture if you believe that torture (contrary to intuition and thousands of years of experience) doesn't work. But I suspect it probably does, in an awful lot of cases.
Maybe some people can hold onto some secrets, but plenty of other people will give them up. (All the secrets that I personally know, I'd probably give up rather than be subjected to twenty seconds of torture -- that sounds cowardly, but honestly I'm just not especially attached to any of the secrets that I know.)
Individual ethics aside, I'll submit that one of the inherent problems with torture (and physical pain in general) as a tool for extracting information, is that it's actually a dual-use tool. On the one hand, torture can be used to motivate people to do things they wouldn't ordinarily do, and on the other hand, torture can be used to HURT THE FUCKER AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.
It's an effective tool for both uses, but clearly more for the second use. The problem is that it's almost never used for the first purpose alone: we collectively don't tend to torture people we have no desire to hurt, and people with no desire to hurt others rarely become torturers. (Imperial Chinese magistrates might be a counter-example.) And the two purposes are actually somewhat counterproductive, in aggregate: whatever the optimum amount of torture is, the second use will push for more.
Torture is very good at doing the thing it has historically been used for over those thousands of years of experience, which is extracting false confessions.
The way torture actually works is that the torturer asks questions he already knows the answer to along with questions he doesn't, and doesn't tell the victim which is which. This is made clear to the victim in advance.
What I've heard is that the real problem is that torture works too well. People will tell you whatever they think you want to hear, regardless of whether it is true.
I agree that there have to be some situations where it would work. But it must have its limits. Some people who say "I don't know" really don't know. How do you tell whether they really don't, or just gave that as an answer? Same with various lies they may tell in answer to your questions. I think torture will compel most people to answer, but not necessarily to give you a true answer. In fact you can probably get people who give you a true answer at the outsetto give you a false answer if you keep torturing them. The already know the true answer didn't make you stop, so they try to give you other things, hoping they'll hit on an answer you were hoping for. Of course if you know the true answer already, wutz the point of torturing them?
> Some people who say "I don't know" really don't know. How do you tell whether they really don't, or just gave that as an answer?
Do we have a rule that torturing people who don't know things is bad, but torturing people who know things is morally okay?
If no, then the simple answer is that you keep torturing the person who says "I don't know", and maybe they will remember something useful later. (Or maybe they won't.)
If yes, then the situation is more complicated. Because if the person says "I don't know" after you tortured them a bit, then you *already* broke the rule. So you either let them walk, and accept whatever penalty is there for you torturing the person who doesn't know things, or you go the "double or nothing" way, and keep torturing them anyway and hope that they lied.
From the opposite side, I think the historical experience is that if the Inquisition tortures you, the optimal strategy is to confess to some minor crime. Now they can stop torturing you without losing face, and you can survive. (The fact that you didn't do the minor crime either, is irrelevant here.)
The point of asking questions where the answer is known is conditioning the victim not to lie. The torturer starts by asking questions where he knows the answer and knows the victim knows the answer, and the victim is punished for lying. After a while when the victim is punished for lying about the secrets that the torture already knows, the real questions are asked.
Yeah that would work. Problem is, though, it seems pretty abusable. There are probably a lot of situations where the questioners know something about the prisoner with , like, 70% certainty. Since they know it will be very useful down the line to have the person lie and get punished, they might just mentally round that 70% up to 100%: Then they ask about the thing, don't get the answer they expected, and deliver a blast of pain. There's a 30% chance that blast is following the prisoner's telling the truth.
And acting like you know something about the person is a known technique of intimidating people into disclosing stuff. The fucking FBI used it on my daughter after she had been sexually assaulted by a guy who, it turned out, was a sex trafficker. Would rape teens then get them to become hookers for him, and recruit their friends. My daughter had not become a hooker for him or recruited friends. She had had no contact at all except some texts to beg him to get std tests (she was scared he had given her AIDS.). But two FBI agents who questioned her told her they knew she had recruited friends, and that they had captured actual messages from she had sent to the guy about recruitment efforts. She was terrified. She was 18, and that was really psychological abuse, and of someone who had recently been raped! I'm sure that if she had had any further secrets about the matter she would have told them at that point -- but she didn't have any. Anyhow, that's an example for you of law enforcement abusing their power and harming a possible witness. They really wanted to get this guy, which is good. But in the service of their goal they were willing to lie to a raped teenager about having information about her they could not have possibly had.
Oh yeah, one other little extra shitty detail. Talked to the guy in charge of the investigation and complained vigorously. He said blah, blah, I can't tell you all of what we know, but we have reason to think there's more to what happened than you know. I'm pretty sure they were just going off the # of texts you could see between my daughter and the guy in our ATT account. But those were all her begging him to get STD tested, and him texting her to "chat" (he was still trying to rope her in). Out of evil curiosity I googled the name of the head agent I'd talked to, and found an article by him in some professional law enforcement publication complaining that he had been passed over for promotion a total of 23 times because the dept. gave the job to a woman instead. He shoulda cut his balls off. I hate that guy.
I think saying torture doesn't work, is shorthand for saying if we as a society allow torture, then the net effect of it will be negative (for all the obvious reasons), not that it will never work.
You're probably not going to want to read the whole 712-page document, but page 12 starts the conclusions, including:
>In the remaining cases, the CIA inaccurately claimed that specific, otherwise unavailable information was acquired from a CIA detainee "as a result" of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques, when in fact the information was either: (1) corroborative of information already available to the CIA or other elements of the U.S. Intelligence Community from sources other than the CIA detainee, and was therefore not "otherwise unavailable"; or (2) acquired from the CIA detainee prior to the use of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques. The examples provided by the CIA included numerous factual inaccuracies.
Torture works in shitty movies about torture. Any interrogation method that cannot accept “I don’t know” as a truthful answer in obviously useless.
We don’t have to go far. The suspects in the Crocus hall attack in Moscow were publicly tortured to basically extract confessions about Ukrainian involvement. Meanwhile jihadists happily continue to plan and execute new attacks, safe in the knowledge of utter incompetence of the FSB.
It seems clear that torture would be effective in a case where verification is easy.
As one example, if you need someone to give up the password to an encrypted device, you can very easily torture them until they give you the right password.
I'm against torture, but we should argue against the scenario least favourable to our position.
Yes it would be effective in such a case, but these cases exist only in fiction, i.e., where there is a script that stipulates that the subject of torture knows the password with 100% certainty. In real life you can never never never be 100% sure you are cutting the skin off the arm of the guy who really knows the password. And he’s screaming his head off that he’s not the admin, he works for a different department and only stopped by to pick up the new laptop, but of course you think he’s lying so you pour salt on his exposed forearm muscles.
I’m sorry I’m being graphic, but it bothers me so much when torture is casually discussed under some convenient belief header.
The question is not whether torture is ethical or perfect, but whether it is usually or at least sometimes effective.
If you peel the skin off someone until they tell you the password, then at the end of the process you either know the password, or you can be pretty confident that the person you just killed wasn't the one who knew the password and you need to go find someone else to torture. So long as you're reasonably competent at keeping the person alive during most of the flaying, and picking suspects who are plausibly likely to know the password, that is *effective*.
A great many people would say it is *unethical*, because "The now-deceased Alice and Bob were innocent, but we got the password from Charlie" is not an ethically acceptable outcome. I agree with those people.
The problem is that being unethical *doesn't* make torture ineffective, and when you try to convince some Jack Bauer wannabe not to torture Alice and Bob, loudly proclaiming that torture is ineffective won't get you anywhere. Because it isn't true, and the Jack Bauers of the world know it isn't true.
I would like to point out that Jack Bauer doesn't exist, and this is not just a frivolous gotcha. Every example of "effective" torture so far uses fiction. Literally.
I'm sticking to the effective/not effective paradigm only:
If the torturer is just a butcher, Alice dies quickly, there's no answer, now what?
If the torturer is skilled and has the means to keep the Bob alive for a long time, now he spent hours? days? chasing useless leads. Now what?
We have to go find Charlie, but it is important for our hypothetical that Charlie is a) around and b) actually knows the password.
Given an infinite amount of time and a large supply of suspects that eventually include Zelda who knows the password and gives it up in 30 seconds, yes, torture "works". I doubt this is a definition of "works" a professional investigator would use though.
The argument that torture doesn't work is based on the premise that the person being tortured will tell the torturer whatever they want to hear, in order to make the torture stop.
That premise is almost certainly true in the vast majority of cases, if what I have read about waterboarding is true.
So, does torture work? Well, if the torturer wrongly thinks that the terrorist being tortured has accomplices, no. The terrorist will name innocent people, and the torturer will be off on a wild goose chase.
But, what if what the torturer wants to know is the truth? Eg: the ticking time bomb hypothetical. In that case, torture works.
The fact that the subject will tell lies in order to make the torture stop is certainly a factor to be taken into account. But of course the subject can also tell lies in a regular interrogation as well.
I assume that a well designed KGB/Gestapo level torture program is not entirely naive about the fact that the first thing you hear is likely to be a lie. It may take several iterations of "we figured out your story is bullshit, here's some more torture" before you start to get some truth.
Perhaps, but note that in my first hypothetical, the suspect in fact told the truth -- he acted alone -- but the torture continued because that was not the answer that the torturer wanted to hear. And that scenario is the what critics mean when they say that torture doesn't work.
Well, it doesn't work any better than not-torture in cases where the subject tells the truth immediately, but that's a pretty weak version of "torture doesn't work".
Can you imagine there's some hypothetical situations where a well designed torture program would work better than non-torture?
Again, you seem to be ignoring the argument that torture is actually counterproductive. See my initial post: "The terrorist will name innocent people, and the torturer will be off on a wild goose chase."
>Can you imagine there's some hypothetical situations where a well designed torture program would work better than non-torture?
As I mentioned, the ticking time bomb scenario, in which what the torturer wants to hear is the truth.
It seems like things like waterboarding, prolonged confinement in uncomfortable postures, etc. is meant to break people down. I'm sure it does, but not necessarily in a way that makes them more truthful. Seems to me that simple blasts of severe pain, which can be delivered without tissue damage (I think) via electric shocks will get you whatever you can get via torture. Fucking someone up via prolonged and frequent hideous experiences seems to me more like a cruel and inhumane punishment than a way of extracting truth.
As I understand it, torture can make people lose the memories the torture wants to get. Considering how foggy I can be under even moderate stress, I believe it.
_Torture and Democracy_, a book about the evolution of no-marks torture, says that one of the side effects of torture is that the police stop bothering to use normal methods of investigation. (from memory)
And if you give up the secrets *too* quickly, there's the suspicion that those are just a cover story to divert the torturers from the real secrets.
How can they be sure this is the truth if you gave it up after twenty seconds? Better keep going, just to be sure.
And maybe you know more things that you're not telling, so more torture.
And do you know that other terrorist, Joe Shoe? No? Really no? Torture you till you say yes of course you do and he is definitely a terrorist.
Torture isn't so much about getting information, it's about power, and about "don't even think of trying to resist the government because this is what will happen if you do".
You can beat confessions out of people, but then it turns out the confessions are false, and they only confessed because you beat it out of them? Not a good look for the police or the judiciary.
There’s an inescapable agency problem: the torturers want to be helpful and earn their pay, so they’re going to work extra hard to come up with useful information that the boss wants to hear, whether that’s the high prevalence of witches or that an unpopular foreign country is responsible for local problems.
The problem with that argument is that the torturer's reports can often be checked and found false. The boss doesn't want a torturer who supplies false information.
That's not an actual experience in places where torture is routinely used to extract confessions. The boss just needs someone to convict of the crime to close the case. The actual guilt is irrelevant.
The issue with torture is pretty simple to understand; It's ineffective for info that is difficult to check, and effective for info that is easy to check. If you ask a murderer where he dumped a body, he might try to be cheeky once or twice, but once you've checked the locations and ramp up the torture he will tell you the location quite quickly. The problem is these kind of situations are rare enough, and the idea of an innocent person being tortured is horrible enough, that very few will consider it worth it.
Torture is effective in getting whatever information the torturer already believes, which gives the torturer the impression that it provides reliable information.
There's a famous example from the end of World War II. The Japanese tortured an American POW to find out how many more atomic bombs we had and what the next target was. He said he had no idea, which was true. But they didn't believe him, and tortured him until they got an answer they did believe.
Torture was also the source for a lot of the evidence in European witch trials. And even back then it was common for people who weren't in on the witch hunt to realize that torture was providing false evidence.
Torture is a relic from a past where the kinds of information we wanted and the ways we had to gather that information were both different from now. A doorkicker isn't going to know about atomic bombs, but he's the one we can get our hands on. The information he does have, such as the location of the rest of his compatriots is useless -- we already knew where their base was; he was dropped from a helicopter.
Compare this to a thousand years ago, when the fog of war was so thick that torturing the absolute insane living daylights out of someone for information that he actually would have like "what valley are your auxiliary forces in" is totally worthwhile.
Note also that wanting to torture people who were involved in killing our friends is a normal human desire -- it just doesn't serve any useful purpose nowadays and we struggle to justify it. Luckily for POWs, the people who run the detention center aren't the same people who were just at the front, and their friends probably haven't been killed just now. Modernity is strange.
> Compare this to a thousand years ago, when the fog of war was so thick that torturing the absolute insane living daylights out of someone for information that he actually would have like "what valley are your auxiliary forces in" is totally worthwhile.
And likewise, armies engaged in "foraging" by torturing the local peasants to find out where they hid their food and valuables.
> Note also that wanting to torture people who were involved in killing our friends is a normal human desire -- it just doesn't serve any useful purpose nowadays and we struggle to justify it.
Agreed. This is largely based in a counterproductive impulse towards vengeance. Possibly even uniquely so, as incarceration and execution both serve valid, legitimate purposes: preventing the criminal from committing further crimes. Torture does not.
I think "torture doesn't work" means "torture doesn't work *reliably.*"
Because some people will hold on to secrets, or provide a misdirect, and then some people don't actually have the secrets, but will make them up to get out of the torture.
In situations where the interrogator is completely certain the captive has the desired information, then torture might indeed be a useful tool. But how often does that situation actually happen?
I think the crux of that is one cannot trust information gained through torture, since the torturee may give any information you want to stop the pain. How will you know the information is accurate? You'll need to confirm it, and not by torturing someone else.
Of course, maybe torture would be more effective on things like "what's the combination/password?" but not "where is the next rally to be held?"
Im on board with weak men create hard times, but it seems to be theres an element of human brain that has a switch to survive death cults:
the cia (starting wars to launder money, torture, allowing child trafficking for unclear goals etc.),
prison gangs (gangs outside prison get to operate by money, committing a murder on camera is harder to buy and success of prison gang power looks like full solitary confinement, yet people raise the ranks and power does flow from the inside to out),
cannibalism at the scale of nation state like haiti,
genocide
etc.
Your ancestors probably had to survive a death cult, while strong men very much turn off normal morality for allot of people I think its fairly clear thats not logically sound and just optimizing a culture for evil seems to be on the table.
Id think the opposite, it really goes to hell when "strong" men start creating situations they are very nessery "opps we tortured someone to say iraq has wmd's"
a) Your example was Iraqi WMDs, which were notoriously fake.
b) One of the classic villain plots is to create a problem that only they can solve, most blatantly in the form of blackmail, but there are more subtle variants as well.
Apparently the pentagon was running fake bot accounts to spread propaganda during covid, including anti-vax stuff. I’m pretty appalled about this assuming it’s true. Seems like a major line crossed.
In my view this is the stupidest and evilest thing the US government has done in decades, considering there wasn't likely much to gain, innocent people were likely to die, we've just conceded all moral high ground over spreading dangerous misinformation, the program wasn't likely to remain secret, the uncovering of the program does more negative geopolitical damage than its success could have plausibly done and the target population was that of an ally.
And, unlike many of the everyday dumb and maleficent things the US government does, you can't blame this one on the unintended consequences of the sausage-making of public policy in a large democracy. This shit was done by the actual deep state. (Or ordered by Trump.)
Stuff like this makes me think we aren't the good guys.
> In my view this is the stupidest and evilest thing the US government has done in decades
hows the Epstein clinet list being still unreleased strike you? Should the cia be grabbing it for black mail or hiding it because they were involved? Maybe benefiting from child trafficking should be a line for governments ?
Hmm... Doesn't "stupidest" include the failure to keep it hidden? If some other operation was successfully kept hidden, it might be eviler, but wouldn't it, at least along the the dimension of concealment, be less stupid? :-)
Disappointing but not surprising, and more of the vein of "US reveals it uses the same dirty foreign policy tools as everybody else" than something I'd find shocking or horrifying. The Philippines has been a core component of the US' "First Island Chain" strategy with respect to China for quite a while. China made some inroads with the Philippines in the 2000s (I think their former president, Robert Duterte, leaned China in his outlook on the future of the country), but recently have been China's been alienating the Philippines (along with many other neighbors) with it's push to expand in the South China Sea.
That anti-China backlash accrued to the benefit of US/Filipino cooperation, and the more US-aligned President Marcos is now in power despite his family connections to Ferdinand Marcos, an autocrat who basically robbed the country blind in the 1970s.
Marcos, for example, has withdrawn from China's belt-and-road initiative, been more focused on retaining sovereignty over the Spratly Islands (which China disputes despite having lost a case on it in The Hague), and approved some new US bases under an Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement.
The CIA likely saw China shipping a ton of vaccines to the Philippines as an opportunity for Beijing to score big foreign relations points by "saving" the Philippines, and dropped this social media campaign to try to prevent that from happening, wanting instead for US vaccines to be used and thus for social capital to accrue to the US instead of China. Now it's blown up in their faces. Seems like an own-goal, honestly - with Beijing being so belligerent in the South China Sea I'm not sure why something like this would have been terribly useful.
What is your understanding of what the CIA DOES? This one seems like a pretty straightforward exercise is limiting Chinese influence in the Philippines at the slight risk (now a paid cost) of the operation getting leaked.
TL,DR, it was weird that Reuters ran the story, along with IIRC Al Jazera and the Daily Mail, but not other reputable news sources even following Reuters' lead. It was weird that there didn't seem to be much discussion of this in the Phillipines. It was weird that they were claiming the *Army*, rather than the CIA, was doing this. And Reuters was being unusually vague about the sourcing.
Unless any of that has changed, this falls outside the bounds of my trust w/re news media. That's rare for the generally-reputable Reuters on basic claims of fact, but here we are. The OP's "assuming it's true", is IMO not warranted.
As I recall, it was the military because it was a change of rules that got changed back under Biden.
The disinformation campaign may have made less difference than one might think because Filipinos were already soaked in propaganda and were doing their own guessing.
The world is pretty used to such things from the US. US foreign politics are pretty consistent in this over the last 100 or so years. There is a reason why there is so much america-hate outside "the west".
The U.S. keeps being absolutely appalling when it comes to vaccines and the Third World (compare the fake vaccination campaign when looking for Bin Laden).
I think this is actually not correct. It was described "fake vaccination campaign", by a bunch of media sources, but as far as I can tell this is wrong and the CIA was actually running a real vaccination campaign with real hepatitis vaccines, while also collecting intelligence to track down Osama Bin Laden.
So as someone who is pro-vax and anti-Osama-Bin-Laden, this actually seems pretty good to me.
Source (headline erroneously says "fake" but in the text it confirms that the vaccines were real):
If someone runs a vaccination campaign, even with real vaccines, under a false identity, exclusively in order to gather DNA for testing, I think that still qualifies as "fake".
I guess this is just a semantic disagreement then. But when I originally saw those headlines, my interpretation was that the CIA was pretending to give people vaccines just so that they could find Bin Laden -- which of course seemed really bad to me.
So finding out that the vaccines were real completely changed my interpretation. Now I think it's pretty cool that the CIA was able to successfully track down Bin Laden, and along the way ended up vaccinating (for real) a bunch of people for hepatitis.
Maybe not literally, there's geographical challenges to that particular site. But I'm wondering about ways to start cool new cities from scratch, to solve the housing price and unconstrained population growth problems which bedevil all the existing cool cities in the Western world.
Burning Man seems like a proof of concept -- you can persuade 70,000 people, primarily young and creative, to all show up in the same place simply by being a Schelling point for a bunch of other creative young people to also show up in. Now obviously, not everyone who attends Burning Man wants to stay there permanently, but if the option was there then I think some people would stay for a longer period, and then you've got an economy going, maybe some startups being founded, which if the winds of fashion blow the right way could become a boom town. Seems worth trying.
Are we talking about the tent shantytown + glamping gated communities that exists for a week of partying and conspicuous consumption before burning all their architecture? How would you make it permanent without removing everything recognizable about it as burning man? And, if you do, how would this not just be a developing world shantytown out in the desert?
I won't say what I think about Burning Man, but these are valid questions. Houses on beautiful Bombay Beach continue to be very economical, or one can park an RV for free at nearby Slab City, if they want to cultivate the sticktoitiveness a 365-day Burning Man would require.
I think you would need to redesign it for permanence. For example, you mention getting an economy going and startups being founded. In general, no one would want to start a startup in a moneyless society. Even if you wanted to, no one would invest in you. So you would probably need to look at either adopting money after all, perhaps with some different rules than the rest of society, or figuring out a real barter system, which as much as I love Burning Man seems like too heavy a burden for a long-term settlement to bear.
Yeah, that sounds absolutely nothing like Burning Man, and exactly like a bunch of ugly just-commutable urban sprawl on the edge of the Bay Area. A veritable Tracy of the north, but with a more expensive PR firm.
Hey, long-timer Burner here. Melvin, respectfully, that is ageist. I first attended at age 43, last attended at age 58. It's easy at Burning Man to fall in with your own tribe, but one of the absolute draws of BM is that everyone is welcome, and everyone goes. BM probably has a bigger share of over-40s than any "festival" that involves any degree of self-support. Christina, yeah you're right to some extent but a lot of people enjoy being out there for weeks and months on volunteer crews so it's an interesting question to explore.
Hi Tony, my point was mostly that the Burning Man is fundamentally supported by people who earn their living in "regular" places and then go back to those places (and the "regular" economy) when the event is over. It doesn't work as a "proof of concept" because events like it couldn't be self-sustaining full-time the way the OP is speculating (developing an economy, being a home base for startups, etc) anymore than the Olympic Games acting as a proof of concept of "world peace."
And while I have you, isn't one of the principles of Burning Man to eschew money in favor of bartering? I can see that working short-term, but that is not a model on which to found a 21st century boom town, I think!
I recently had a slight chesty cough for a few days, after tidying a dusty tool shed, and as I lay in bed my chest made wheezy sounds of various kinds and pitches depending on my orientation. Curiously, some sounded like creaking doors, distant wails, rattling chains, and every now and then believe it or not the sound of children laughing some way away.
It struck me that a similar phenomenon could explain a lot of past accounts of ghost encounters, or ghostly sounds anyway. Perhaps in times past peoples' dwellings would have been more dusty, with open fires, and no efficient vacuum cleaners nor antibiotics, and chronic chest congestion of varying severities were thus more widespread. So it is easy to imagine someone half awake, and/or half drunk, swearing they could hear a ghostly noise which they never twigged was only their own breathing!
One could even extend this dust theory to ghost sightings: In a dusty environment, with bed sheets and pillow cases not washed for weeks on end (which was probably also more widespread years ago), it is not uncommon for mild chronic eye infections to develop. A film of mucus, viewed floating across the eye ball surface, could easily resemble a phantom figure gliding across a room and disappearing into a wall!
People know their own coughs and lungs. What does sound like ghosts, and the supernatural and even trespassers are the sounds of old buildings as the pipes rattle and groan, and the building itself or its foundations shifts in the heat or cold.
I've had a lot of pseudo-paranormal encounters. E.g. I'll wake up in the middle of the night, convinced that I heard someone in my room, and it takes a few seconds to realize that everything is normal and noone could possibly be there. Only a strong prior against the paranormal protects you from going crazy due to misinterpreted noise.
Any advice for nausea during pregnancy, a.k.a. hypermesis? Not much vomiting, but unceasing strong nausea for days and weeks. Happened similarly in the previous pregnancy. We've tried the crackers and the simple stuff. Anything else?
Thalidomide is the best. The nanny-state won't let you have it but you can find it as a greymarket supplement. Just search for "thalidomide" and you'll get lots of hits.
Just be sure to get left-handed thalidomide in the Northern Hemisphere, and right-handed thalidomide in the Southern Hemisphere. Or is it the other way around?
One thing I'd note from experience - different women have different triggers for nausea during pregnancy, and it seems to have a genetic component.
My mother and sisters had the most common trigger - low blood sugar; crackers, fruit, sweetened ginger tea worked well for them.
My wife, like her mother, needed protein rather than carbs; boiled eggs or cheese or even meat helped dramatically, but crackers did no good whatsoever.
There are somewhat effective meds now with Doxylamine succinate + Pyridoxine chlorhydrate / vitamin B6 (those are the excipients, but I don't know the name of the drug in English-speaking countries) .
Otherwise, avoiding tomatoes, chocolate and coffee, eating breakfast in bed and sleeping a lot are the only things that actually work (a little).
This was what I used. In the US you have to use Unisom sleep tabs to get the doxylamine succinate (and then just add your B6). There are guides online for dosage.
It's not a miracle cure, but it takes the edge off.
I was once severely nauseated because I'd taken an antibiotic tablet that was supposed to be taken with food on an empty stomach. I was about 90% of the way to vomiting. The person I was with, an MD, told me to take deep breaths through my mouth, and that really did work. Did it for about 5 mins. and the nausea receded to a tolerable level and stayed there. It's possible that power of suggestion was involved, though.
The meds we tried in the last pregnancy, the side effects were worse than the nausea. B6 we're trying.
Why tomatoes? Is it the acidity? The doctor actually said chocolate is allowed, to get more sugar and carbs (coated with chocolate). Breakfast in bed and sleeping a lot are definitely things we'll try. Thanks!
Let me ask you guys for practical advice on bursting blog bubbles.
I am absolutely sure that there are, to pull out a random number, a hundred blogs that would blow my mind somewhere around the web.
And I don’t have any method to find them. My normal rate of stumbling upon new things is about one a year, which is I guess still better than the general popularion. I stumbled upon SSC/ACX a couple years ago and I’ve been in love. But it was pure chance and may not have happened.
To burst your book bubble, you can surf Goodreads or NYRB or the shelves of your local thrift book store. For music bubbles, there’s RYM, Pitchfork and thousands of lists for every canon. But are there any methods or places like this for blogs/websites/communities/podcasts, whether active or dead for 20 years? A wiki, a web historian, a subreddit or something?
I think the rationalist project is either betweened doomed but noble hubris or directly malevolent egoism depending on who I last interacted with, and I think the market should be as limited as possible, and and and.
I read blogs and forums that oppose my political views, but still stand up to scrutiny. IE, I started here because I disagree with most of OP's views but respect them, I tried reading the motte and some of the blogs recommended there and did NOT respect them, etc.
You get it. What would be some blogs with the views opposite from Scott's that still stand your scrutiny? That would be a nice start out of this particular bubble, as nice as it is.
Don't have an index of blogs handy but some great blogs I would recommend are: marginalrevolution.com, bayesianinvestor.com, coyoteblog (although this one isn't updated that much).
A lot of substacks lates features are trying to do just this. There is an "explore" are of substack that could expose you to new blogs based on what you currently read.
I always hope I _don't_ find any more interesting blogs, because each one means more time spent reading and possibly posting comments. So for me a blog directory would be disastrous! :-)
Mind you, starting reading a new blog does mean one can post very similar comments to those one has made on other blogs, and nobody will think one is ax-grinding or being repetitive!
Alas, I think when it comes to blogs, you probably just have to follow references and/or links out of the current blogs (and blog comments) you're reading. Blogs are often extremely narrowly focused, so it's hard to think of how'd they'd even be categorized by an archive.
Or you can ask for recommendations from groups of people who have a little something in common with you but nevertheless probably have diverse tastes in blogs:
Hotel Concierge (https://www.tumblr.com/hotelconcierge) - might actually be a secondary blog written by The Last Psychiatrist? Very much discusses the same topics in the same tone.
You might not expect a modern European nation to plan for war to the knife, to the very last man standing, the way the Imperial Japanese Army used to do it. But that seems to be the plan, if a statement from the current Swedish civil defence guide "If Crisis or War Comes" is taken at face value.
On page 12 we find this: "If Sweden is attacked by another country, we will never give up. All information to the effect that resistance is to cease is false."
And that's just metal as hell.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to adapt this statement into the name of a metal band, album title, or song.
Perhaps the statement that any purported surrender is not valid is made for legal reasons? Under the laws of war, civilians fighting to repel invaders (while carrying arms openly) are legal combatants, to be treated as prisoners of war if captured. But continued resistance after surrender would be criminal. So declaring that no surrender is valid is a protection for those resisting (in the perhaps unlikely case that the invaders are scrupulous about obeying the laws of war).
>In 1969, when New Hampshire officials decided to put the state’s motto – “live free or die” – on its license plates, many citizens viewed the act as an endorsement of the deeply unpopular war being waged in Vietnam and protested by covering up or altering the motto. _In response, authorities cracked down hard: arresting, fining, and sometimes even incarcerating those who engaged in duct-tape dissent._
Schelling mentions Norway and Sweden's national resistance policies as examples of pre-committment e.g. ripping off your steering wheel in a game of chicken to show how serious you are.
By committing to total national resistance before the outbreak of hostilities, Sweden does a few things: (1) signal to adversaries that any invasion will be war to the knife (2) pre-empt adversary psy ops by officializing the narrative of "never give up, never surrender" and (3) implement a culture of decentralized decision-making in their military, known as "mission command" in military jargon.
Thanks for sharing the article on Mission Command.Being Dutch, It was painful to read, because of the contrasting record of the Dutch peacekeeping unit.
Finland's history of doing that (although in both conflicts with Russia it ultimately acceded to a loss) makes such a claim more credible than Sweden, which hasn't had to demonstrate any willingness to fight in centuries.
Sweden has demonstrated *some* willingness to fight. Apparently Sweden came close to joining the Crimean War on the Anglo-French side, had extensive plans of what to do if it came down to war in WW2, and of course the current defense efforts are a continuation of Cold-War era plans against Soviet attack. Nevertheless, this willingness hasn't then led to actual fighting, apart from the Winter War volunteers.
Snopes recently published a "fact check" on Trump's comments after the "Unite the Right" rally at Charlottesville. Title of the page is "No, Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists 'Very Fine People'".
In particular, it labels as "false" the claim that " On Aug. 15, 2017, then-President Donald Trump called neo-Nazis and white supremacists who attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, "very fine people." ".
They later added this note:
"Editors' Note: Some readers have raised the objection that this fact check appears to assume Trump was correct in stating that there were "very fine people on both sides" of the Charlottesville incident. That is not the case. This fact check aimed to confirm what Trump actually said, not whether what he said was true or false. For the record, virtually every source that covered the Unite the Right debacle concluded that it was conceived of, led by and attended by white supremacists, and that therefore Trump was wrong. "
This makes no sense.
They say "Trump was wrong" about there being "very fine people on both sides", i.e. because the people on the right side were white supremacists. But that was the group (well one of the two) he was praising. He praised group X, group X (according to Snopes) consists of white supremacists, therefore he was praising white supremacists, QED.
Now of course he also said "I'm not talking about the ... white nationalists because they should be condemned totally" (I'm using white nationalists/white supremacists/neo-Nazis interchangeably in this comment). So, in Snopes's own telling, Trump is pointing at a group of white supremacists and saying "there are fine people in that group, I don't mean the white supremacists". Mostly it's just incoherent, but to the extent you can glean a meaning out of it, he is in fact praising white supremacists.
But Trump's statement was actually worse than that. Because when asked a followup by the reporter, he says "There were people in that rally — and I looked the night before — if you look, there were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee.". And then says "the next day" there were white nationalists there.
The people there "the night before" were the infamous tiki torch people, who were chanting "blood and soil" and "Jews will not replace us". And those are the ones he's specifically pointing to as the "fine people". He was denying that people chanting "Jews will not replace us" are hateful!
I guess my problem with that, even if you think I'm otherwise being overly harsh, is the second point I made. He points to "the night before" and describes them as being the good ones. And he also claims to have been watching it. And they were chanting "Jews will not replace us".
He says of the "night before" group "I'm sure there were some bad ones" which kind of drives the point home - he isn't saying it's a group that has some good people in it, he's saying that it's mostly good people. But again, clearly chanting white supremacist stuff! It's not like there was a 2nd "night before" group chanting normal right wing stuff about Robert E Lee.
It is 4. Based on the full text of his comments, Trump seemed to think it was some sort of Robert E. Lee statue preservation event attended by non-racists as well as racists.
In reality, while I don't know the details of every thought every protestor ever had, "Unite the Right" was organized and primarily attended by overt white supremacists.
Is Snopes saying that side was made up entirely of white supremacists? It says "For the record, virtually every source that covered the Unite the Right debacle concluded that it was conceived of, led by and attended by white supremacists, and that therefore Trump was wrong", but that does not say that *all* the attendees were indeed white supremacists.
"Attended by" is not the same as "solely attended by", "only attended by" or "wholly attended by". Thus if there were some non-white supremacists or non-Nazis attending as well, because they were misled as to the motivation of the organisers, those would indeed be the "very fine people" on both sides.
I agree that "attended by" doesn't mean "only attended by", but when they say "Trump was wrong" - wrong about what? Presumably the fact of there being "very fine people" on that side. Clear implication of "Trump was wrong" is that it in fact was *only* attended by white supremacists.
They're saying "please don't cancel us, we're not saying Trump is good, we're only saying he didn't say what was claimed, but we are still firmly on board with he is evil and bad and the rally was all white supremacists and nobody on the other side did anything bad and all the bad guys were on the white supremacist side, we're your allies, spare us!"
The "Unite the Right" rally was aimed at people from all across the right half of the political spectrum, hence the name. I can easily imagine that I would have attended if I'd been in that town at that time.
I wish we did more governing via issue-specific referendums, and less with candidates' positions and even less with broad left / right sort-of kind-of alliances. E.g. being for or against
nuclear power
LBGTQ+ rights
tax-code-based income redistribution
NATO
are all logically separate decisions. All 16 preferences are self-consistent. At a meta level, I wish they weren't presented as package deals.
Many Thanks! Yeah, it is messier than that. Still, policies like what the Greens pushed in Germany, shutting down their nuclear plants, are concrete proposals, and such proposals can get a yay or nay vote, just as states that have referendums, such as California, _do_ put some policy choices on the ballot. At a meta level, I would like to see more such choices directly in the hands of the electorate and unbundled from the package deals we have now.
I think, package deals may be inevitable, if you have highly centralized power. If we had elections for control over each ministry via an associated ministry-specific parliament? The advantage would be, that you only have sector-specific bundles and each voter can at least specify their own set of bundles. Single-issue parties could also specialize in holding power over things they care about... which might be good? Would that be a stable equilibrium or would this not centralize again, as the ministries end up fighting over control? [also, how would you even do budget allocation?]
I think you have to distinguish the night before (Friday) and the day of (Saturday). My sense is the day of was a bit of a circus, all sorts of groups there, both regular conservatives and hardcore neo-nazis, and random curious people (more likely to show up during the day on a weekend). Technically that was the main "Unite the Right" rally.
But if you look at Friday, it was basically all white supremacists, and it was the infamous tiki torch crowd. Which was also the people Trump specifically called out as praiseworthy.
Was it though? I mean, I oppose fascism but that doesn't mean I support Antifa. Likewise, why should a non-racist conservative attend an event organized by Richard Spencer and Jason Kessler?
That's the thing, on the left it's perfectly normal for center-left people to attend protests and rallies partially, primarily or even entirely organized by the far-left. I'm at a university and when I even tepidly point some questionable affiliations of protest organizers out, the usual reactions range from "huh, didn't know that" over "to ally with them on this issue I don't need to ally with them on all issues" to "yes I know, and?". It's absolutely hypocritical to admonish the center right for something that is normal on the left.
You, Al, and Melvin are all making interesting points here. All I can say is that before and during the rally, I remember it being widely understood to be an alt-Right event. Richard Spencer was briefly a household name at that point, people understood it to be his movement rally, at best secondarily about the narrow matter of Robert E. Lee statues. On the first night, attendants were chanting "The Jews will not replace us". It's possible that some dedicated statue preservationist showed up not understanding the nature of the event, but this would have been a hard mistake to make and I doubt many such people were there.
The argument that Trump praised neonazis seems to rest on: 1) ignoring Trump's specific admonishment the white supremacists, 2) somehow mind reading Trump so that you can know what his beliefs about who attended the rallies were, and 3) that the rally consisted of 100% of white supremacists when a clear majority of those against removal of such statues consists of non-supremecists, as is reflected in many polls.
It was this story and the Hunter Biden laptop thing (even though i don't particularly care about Hunter) that made me stop believing that mainstream news was even generally trying to be truthful. Funny how Biden made the lie about Charlottesville a central component in explaining his 2020 presidential run.
I get at this in my original comment, but Trump was in fact praising white supremacists. It's true he says "I'm not talking about the white supremacists" but then when he is asked who he *is* talking about he says "the people who were there the night before". But the people who were there the night before ... were definitely white supremacists!
And not in the sense that they were mostly regular old conservatives and one guy is ruining it all by having a neo-nazi flag, they were all chanting about the Jews and all that. It was a rally of white supremacists and nobody would dispute that or be confused about it if it didn't become the center of this big Trump-related controversy.
Now, how do you harmonize the "I'm not talking about white supremacists" with the "I'm talking about the people the night before [who were white supremacists]"? My guess is because the people the night before didn't kill anyone, and didn't even have any nazi armbands or flags or anything, so Trump didn't feel the need to condemn them. Taking a hyper-narrow view of who he should condemn.
Look, it's been established that everyone who comments on this Substack is a Nazi, and so I don't think anyone should be paying attention to what a Nazi like you says.
How do you know who Trump thought was present the night before? Parsing Trump comments in such a pedantic manner is not appropriate given his sloppy speaking style. It's funny how people become such contortionists because of the deeply seated desire to believe in this myth.
Can I just express my strong desire for Scott to post more book reviews than just the announced finalists? Preferably as many as possible. They don't have to all be made finalists do they? I suppose it might confuse the voters a bit, but:
1. I don't think it's in dispute that Scott is posting a lot less content than in other years, and
2. I'd really like to see discussions on some of those reviews (some of them even explicitly invite discussion) and just having all those reviews sitting there without any way to comment on them seems a bit of a waste.
(Incidentally, is "voting irregularities" a euphemism for "possible cheating"? I'm 90% sure that's what's meant, but just clarifying. I'm a bit surprised someone would do that on something like this; it seems self-defeating.)
of time and effort into writing an entertaining review of a book in the sweet spot of overlap between things that fascinate me things that fascinate ACX readers. While I knew there was a good chance I would not be a finalist, it had somehow not occurred to me that if I were not one I would never hear one goddam word of response from anybody. I don’t mean that people reading and voting should leave comments — that’s just not realistic. It’s a consequence of the way it’s set up — *most people* will have that experience. For me, anyhow, that’s just too big a dose of nothing, and I decided not to enter any more. I expect some of the many people posting and asking for readers’ thoughts about their reviews are having a similar experience. On the other hand, I get a lot of mental stimulation and fun from participating in open threads and the threads that go with Scott’s posts. You usually get something back there — if nothing else, some snark, which is still better than the sound of one hand clapping.
Yeah, that sucks. Thanks for sharing. I agree this is set up in a very frustrating way, though I'm not sure how it could be fixed (other than, you know, doing the things suggested in this subthread). I'm feeling similarly.
One particular issue is that the pool of people rating the reviews and the pool of people voting on the finalists are likely extremely different in both demographics/ideology and in what they're looking for. If so, this creates a weird two-part contest, where the aim is to write only one piece that will appeal maximally to both of these groups. I suspect that there are a lot of good reviews suffering from this unusual arrangement.
Was your review longer than average? I have a suspician that longer reviews are less attractive to the raters and more attractive to the voters, and if so the following insane situation could well occur: a long review is unlikely to get to the finals, but if it does it is likely to win. Meaning many people who got nothing may have actually just missed winning the whole thing, and the winning review of last year (which lots of people strongly disliked) may have almost not even made it. I could be wrong about all this.
If you post a link to your review here, I'll try to read it (it sounds interesting), and I'm sure some others will too. Alternatively, I amend my call to Scott to also post/link some previous years' reviews as well.
>One particular issue is that the pool of people rating the reviews and the pool of people voting on the finalists are likely extremely different in both demographics/ideology
I hadn't thought of that, that's an interesting theory. I remember feeling bewildered that one review I'd read made it into the finalist group. It was of a book about bees, and seemed like a Monarch Notes summary to me. Jeez. Last year I actually set up a Substack for me and other people who had post-review letdown to read each other's reviews, then this discuss them and give feedback. That worked reasonably well, though setting it up and keeping the machinery running was a lot of work. Anyhow, if you'd like to read my review, it's here: https://bookreviewgroup.substack.com/p/review-of-perplexities-of-consciousness And if you want to swap, I'll read yours and respond . Just let me know which it is.
Hey ascend, I hope you didn't think I was going to ghost you. I got busy, then had a couple nights insomnia which as usual caused akrasia. Thank you for your thoughts about my review. It's a pleasure to hear from someone who took an interest in the topic. When I wrote the thing I think I wanted to have people here engaging with the subject almost as much as I wanted to be a finalist. I'm sure you're right about the Nabokov opening. Everybody but one person in the book review group I set up last year felt the same way you did about it. I love that bit from Nabokov, and once in a while I read it to someone who responds the way I do, but most people roll their eyes, shrug, or just look blank. You'd think I'd have learned by now.
I think in the initial vote that chooses finalists readers probably give small things too much weight, because they have an overwhelming task and need to simplify it. So a mystifying opening paragraph like mine might be enough to make somebody stop reading right then and there and give the review a 4. Or the novelty of a review's format (eg, being in poetry, not prose) can bump a review up in the ratings just because it's memorable and a nice change of pace. So it's a lot like life: not very fair. and with a large element of luck. It's really not what it's tempting to imagine: a measure of how smart and interesting we are.
OK, thoughts about your review. You write clearly and well, line by line. Your observations are sharp and well-expressed and your trains of thought are clear. And I enjoyed your little notes about each of the chapters — “in which Singer gets massively canceled,” etc
But the thing as a whole is daunting and unwieldy, despite the crispness of the sentences that make it up. I think you got overly worried about whether the review would meet some standard, and so tried to cover all your bases. But based on what made it as finalists this year and last, I think it’s clear that almost anything goes. Last year, one finalist was basically Monarch Notes on the book. This year, one finalist review is a poem (and not a very good poem, and not really a review). So if you ever try this again, I think you should just let go of concerns about your review being the right sort of thing, and say exactly what you think about the book, in an essay of any form you choose.
It’s section 2 that makes the piece unwieldy. I read about half of it, then ran out of gas (partly because I have not read the book, and am not very interested in utilitarianism, which seems to me to kind of miss the point.). But even if I were full of interest and opinions about Singer, section 2 would be too much. I think a good approach would have been to make notes of your thoughts about each chapter, then ruminate about the whole bunch. Come up with some big-picture generalizations and judgments about crucial matters, such as Singer’s untilitarianism, his presentation of concrete judgments and advice about lots of real world things, his willingness to arrive at startling and unpopular judgments, his grasp of relevant issues, his thought process, his vulnerability to slippage, his clarity of expression, etc. Then arrange your conclusions in some orderly way: the 3 best things about the book vs. the 3 worst; or why this is a great book overall, despite some minor slippage; or the case for laughing at Singer’s tome. To support and enliven your conclusions, you can home in on some of the fine-grained observations you made in section 2, and talk about particular places that are especially good illustrations of your main takes on Singer. That way you can integrate big-picture stuff and fine-grained observations, which you are good at.
And then wrap up in some way that has a mild punch-line quality, just to make your piece memorable by sending the reader away amused. I mean, you want to be a finalist, right? So look for chances to get to be memorble and/or fun and/or impressive. Scott’s all 3.
1. I'll start with my only real problem with it: the opening. Reading it the first time, it was really unclear what the first few paragraphs were saying, and what the book is really about. It's hard to explain exactly why, but I think it's a mixture of a few too many big/technical words and the vagueness of being an overview of an unfamiliar subject (i.e. not concrete/specific enough). If I'd found this review in the massive google docs list I may well have stopped reading after a couple of paragraphs, thinking "I don't really understand what this is about, and if the whole review is written like this it's going to be a chore". But everything after NAIVE INTROSPECTIONISM was perfectly clear and I had no issue with. And then after reading the whole review, I re-read the opening and it was very clear this time*. I think this is an effect where when you know a topic well certain sentences are clear as day, but if you don't they can seem impenetrable. Even if you understand every word and sentence individually, the overall meaning (what it's getting at) is bewildering. I'd be a hypcrite to complain about this since I do it all the time (i.e. write dense sentences that are utterly clear to me and I assume are utterly clear to everyone), but it's something that I think causes people to engage a lot less than I expect, because it's not clear what I'm saying and requires too much effort to parse.
I would suggest either starting the review at the NAIVE INTROSPECTIONISM heading, or else having a much more informal introduction with simple/colloquial language and/or concrete examples right at the start.
*the exception is the Nabokov quote, which even after reading the whole review I had to re-read at least ten times before I realised what it was saying. And even more before I understood its relevance to your overall point.
2. That aside, everything else is very well written and worked very well for me. I particularly liked your focus on exercises that can be done by the reader on the spot: i.e. evidence that can be actually tested easily. This, in my opinion, puts your review head-and-shoulders above most others, which tend to just list various pieces of evidence that I just have to take the author's word for (and that can't be tested or even properly verified without expertise in the subject). Your arguments are infinitely stronger and more persuasive for that reason.
The following is some uncharitable speculation. I'm inclined to think a lot of people in this community have a strong aversion to this sort of personally verifiable argument. I don't really know why, but there seems to often be a kind of visceral negative reaction, even anger, at "armchair reasoning". Maybe some people here don't feel comfortable with claims and arguments that can't be reduced to concrete and objective results, and to simple scientific rules that are easy to precisely describe. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding this attitude. But it's an attitude I find very annoying, and I wouldn't be surprised if lots of people don't appreciate introspective arguments like the ones you made in this review.
Again, a bit uncharitable and I could be wrong about all this. But I really wish there were more pieces like yours in the rationalist writings and sequences and so on, instead of (what at least seems to me like) a whole lot of contempt for them.
3. I'd be interested to know more about what conclusions and implications you think follow from our conscious minds' amorphous and confused nature. One question I have is whether the unconcious has more accuracy and more precision in its thoughts and memories and impressions than the conscious mind does, even if it's inaccessible to us normally.
Another question is whether this is an argument for materialism about the mind. That's how it looks to me: the dualist idea that the mind is a separate substance of its own would seem to imply that mental phenomena would be clear and precise and have their own independent, defined nature. And that the mind would have full and accurate awareness of itself. If these things are false, that would be an argument against it, and for the view of the mind as a collection of vague and lesser imprints of the physical world. And thus for the mind being ultimately reducible to the physical world.
Of course, there are still standard arguments against materialism, like the apparent ability to conceive of the physical without the mental and vice versa, suggesting logical independence of each. I wonder what specific light your (and Schwitzgebel's) arguments about the limitations of mental precision would shed on arguments like those (e.g. David Chalmers' zombie argument.)
And finally, while I'm guessing your reference to Descartes' model is specifically about his substance dualism, there's also the question of whether the issues you and Schwitzgebel raise have an impact on the deeper Cartesian idea of an undeniably existing self. Even if we can't be reliably sure of the properties of our minds, of our desires and beliefs and memories and so on, can we at least be reliably sure of our minds' actual meaningful existence? Or not?
Those are just the first of the questions raised by your review.
Thank you! I will respond to this and comment on your review tomorrow. Today I have my vices, ACX and Photoshop, blocked so I can do billing. (Am sending the present message from my phone but thumb typing’s not suitable for long msgs)’
Sorry for the late reply, I've been a bit busy. I'll read your review when I can and comment on it in this subthread (unless you want me to start a new open thread discussion on it; let me know if you do.)
I've been reluctant to reveal my review because of Scott's ambiguous statement about possibly adding more finalists. But probably hardly anyone's still reading this thread anyway, so: my review is Practical Ethics. Warning that it's very long (about two thirds the length of last year's winner I think). I didn't deliberately set out to make it so long, but since the voters apparently keep choosing long reviews I thought there was no need to stop myself throwing in everything I could think of, or to make any effort to trim it down. I now think that was a mistake.
If it's too long, feel free to only read a few chapters from the middle section; they're each mostly self-contained (which may have also been a mistake). Don't heistate to tell me everything that's wrong with it
Alternative method to faciliate discussions on non-shortlisted reviews: At regular intervals (~once/week?), Scott creates a post containing links to some small number (~5?) of the reviews. The comments section is dedicated to discussion of the reviews linked in the post.
That seems fairly reasonable, assuming Scott uses a selection criterion that doesn't require him to engage in extra brainwork. But he's already got a ranked list, I hope.
A problem with having a caliph is that the caliph is the natural Schelling point .
(In theory, I suppose someone else could take it on themselves to just post the links in an Open Thread, but that wouldn't have nearly the same level of visibility as a post from the caliph himself.)
alternatively, I'd just like to see the finalists posted a bit more quickly; it feels a tad unfair to have people vote on book reviews that came out over a 3-month period.
I just went to an EA meetup today talking about fringe ideas, and one of the prompts for discussion was how to prevent the next FTX.
Someone brought up a point that might be novel, that the kernel of fraud is a sort of self-dishonesty whereby someone believes they can get something for nothing. Sam Bankman-Fried, and every other SV entrepreneur, has that energy, that chutzpah to think they can make something from nothing.
The proto-EAer is Bill Gates, who before his charity work was very much considered a pirate or pseudo-rogue of Silicon Valley, someone who had commendable success but achieved it through aggression and greed. It just so happened that his foundation work became a model for epic charity work, despite probably coming from a place where he believed there was money left on the table.
My question then, is, has that angle been explored? That it's not EA's weirdness factor that creates a space for rogue actors, but rather a belief in leverage, that a little can make a lot. That a few smart people putting their heads together can make a world of difference.
I don't mean this as an indictment of EA, I just haven't heard this angle before in all the EA-critical threads I've read, and I was curious if it's fertile ground.
I think you are saying that perhaps the problem was hubris. Or is that simplifying it too far?
My own view is that there was too much hubris and not enough healthy cynicism in the local water supply. One could argue, however, that the lack of cynicism and excess of hubris is a net positive in that environment and the cost of producing a FTX is worth paying. I think the Accelerationist types would argue it's a cost worth paying. As has been pointed out before, conmen thrive in high-trust environments not in low-trust ones.
I think maybe what I'm trying to circle around is that something like EA is impossible to succeed because humans, and not in the normal, obvious ways. EA actually seems successful at avoiding the "forever September" problem as well as creeping institutional imperatives.
I worry that there will be more Sams and more groups like Leverage Research.
Yeah, I could be just re-deriving hubris. I'm not sure. At first thought, some of the EAs that I've meet seem extremely humble, whereas others seem incredibly arrogant.
I'm trying to tie the two Sam situations together.
Are trust and tolerance impossible to separate? Encouraging out-of-the-box thinking inevitably leads to high-variance investing, into both obscure crooks and undervalued saints.
I think the crucial, obvious problem about SBF was that he was absolutely terrible at a lot of things you need in order to run a business like his. He was a very very odd guy, and most of the things he wasn't brilliant at he was actually *impaired* at: Anticipating consequences, reading people, judging who was an appropriate hire, learning the basics of various new domains that were important to understand, staying on top of what was being done by different parts of the organization, keeping employees informed, seeking advice. Lewis's book walks you through his process of learning what SBF was like and how he ran his organization, and his astonishment at discovering how utterly childlike (& not in a good way) SBF was.
Before asking “why” ask “if”. I don’t think that EA has more space for rouge actors than any other charity or nonprofit space. Therefore, I don’t expect coming up with just so stories for why it has more rouge actors to be a product line of reasoning.
Going by both the Michael Lewis book and the Sequoia article, the main problem (apart from the dishonesty and ego) was the risk calculation.
Running amok with the Drowning Child argument to the conclusion that you are obligated to save everyone, and you can do this by pouring tons of money into the proper causes, and you get tons of money by 'here's our fancy equation about risk assessment', then you end up with "oh crap we're running out of money okay no problem just take money from here and throw it into the pit and our fancy equation means we'll end up winning oh no all the money is gone".
"Not long before interning at Jane Street, SBF had a meeting with Will MacAskill, a young Oxford-educated philosopher who was then just completing his PhD. Over lunch at the Au Bon Pain outside Harvard Square, MacAskill laid out the principles of effective altruism (EA). The math, MacAskill argued, means that if one’s goal is to optimize one’s life for doing good, often most good can be done by choosing to make the most money possible—in order to give it all away. “Earn to give,” urged MacAskill.
EA traces its roots to philosopher Peter Singer, who reasons from the utilitarian point of view that the purpose of life is to maximize the well-being of others. Singer, in his eighth decade, may well be the most-read living philosopher. In the 1970s, Singer almost single-handedly created the animal rights movement, popularizing veganism as an ethical solution to the moral horror of meat. Today he’s best known for the drowning-child thought experiment. (What would you do if you came across a young child drowning in a pond?) Singer states the obvious—and then universalizes the underlying principle: “Few could stand by and watch a child drown; many can ignore the avoidable deaths of children in Africa or India. The question, however, is not what we usually do, but what we ought to do.” In a nutshell, Singer argues that it’s a moral imperative of the world’s well-off to give as much as possible—10, 20, even 50 percent of all income—to better the lives of the world’s poor.
...MacAskill was visiting MIT in search of volunteers willing to sign on to his earn-to-give program. At a café table in Cambridge, Massachusetts, MacAskill laid out his idea as if it were a business plan: a strategic investment with a return measured in human lives. The opportunity was big, MacAskill argued, because, in the developing world, life was still unconscionably cheap. Just do the math: At $2,000 per life, a million dollars could save 500 people, a billion could save half a million, and, by extension, a trillion could theoretically save half a billion humans from a miserable death.
...[At Jane Street SBF] learned to be “risk-neutral”: In simple terms, a trader, given a choice between $50 and a 50 percent chance at $100, must be agnostic if they want to maximize the expected value of earnings over a lifetime. Those who prefer the sure win are “risk-averse,” and those who would rather gamble are “risk-lovers.” But both risk-lovers and the risk-averse are suckers, equally. Because, over the long run, they lose out to the risk-neutral, who take both deals without prejudice.
...To be fully rational about maximizing his income on behalf of the poor, he should apply his trading principles across the board. He had to find a risk-neutral career path—which, if we strip away the trader-jargon, actually means he felt he needed to take on a lot more risk in the hopes of becoming part of the global elite. The math couldn’t be clearer. Very high risk multiplied by dynastic wealth trumps low risk multiplied by mere rich-guy wealth. To do the most good for the world, SBF needed to find a path on which he’d be a coin toss away from going totally bust.
...At this point, mid-2019, SBF decided to double down again—and scratch his own itch. He would bet Alameda’s multimillion-dollar trading profits on a new venture: a trading exchange called FTX. It would combine Coinbase’s stolid, regulation-loving approach with the kinds of derivatives being offered by Binance and others. He only gave himself a 20 percent chance of success, but, in his mind, SBF needed extreme risk to maximize the expected value of his lifetime earnings—and, therefore, the good his earn-to-give strategy could do. The fact that he was, by his own lights, overwhelmingly likely to fail was beside the point.
The point was this: When SBF multiplied out the billions of dollars a year a successful crypto-trading exchange could throw off by his self-assessed 20 percent chance of successfully building one, the number was still huge. That’s the expected value. And if you live your life according to the same principles by which you’d trade an asset, there’s only one way forward: You calculate the expected values, then aim for the largest one—because, in one (but just one) alternate future universe, everything works out fabulously. To maximize your expected value, you must aim for it and then march blindly forth, acting as if the fabulously lucky SBF of the future can reach into the other, parallel, universes and compensate the failson SBFs for their losses. It sounds crazy, or perhaps even selfish—but it’s not. It’s math. It follows from the principle of risk-neutrality.
...The scale of his giving, even now, before he has really started to divest, is massive. Alameda Research, the company that generated the FTX grubstake, still exists, and its purpose seems to be to generate profits—on the order of $100 million a year today, but potentially up to a billion—that can be stuffed into the brand-new FTX Foundation. Similarly, even now, 1 percent of net FTX fees are donated to that same foundation, and FTX handles nearly $5 billion dollars’ worth of trades per day. The foundation, in turn, gives to a diversified group of EA-approved charities.
... The FTX competitive advantage? Ethical behavior. SBF is a Peter Singer–inspired utilitarian in a sea of Robert Nozick–inspired libertarians. He’s an ethical maximalist in an industry that’s overwhelmingly populated with ethical minimalists."
Maybe row back on the 40,000 Hours stuff about "maximise all the money you can make by whatever means in order to give" and there will be less incentive, because less pressure from scrupulosity, about "but I gotta get *more* money, more! children are drowning!!!" and hence incentive to take really big risks because the only morality is consequences - if you rob a bank and donate all the money to malaria bed nets, then the consequences are good and the actions don't matter.
If SBF had managed to pull off his gamble and regain all the money and put it back in the client accounts, then he'd be in the clear and FTX would be praised as the most EA thing out there. Even if the profits had come from fraud, that's only stuffy old deontologists who worry about that kind of thing, not hip utilitarians who know their way is the only way:
This is extremely favorable to SBF given what we know now — a counterfactual “honest criminal” SBF would have taken great care with the misused funds to maximize potential profits to be used for good.
Honestly, Pablo Escobar, who built a whole neighborhood for the desperately poor, was a better EA and we don’t see anyone defending his record.
> if you rob a bank and donate all the money to malaria bed nets, then the consequences are good and the actions don't matter.
Surely this is only true if the depositors in the bank are protected from the consequences of the bank being robbed; if the depositors are all working people who will be left destitute because of the robbery and their families will starve because of it, how can it be that the consequences are all good? Enter the FDIC; now the negative consequences are comfortably abstract.
- Be globally altruistic: EAs care about people equally, regardless of location. Typically, the most cost-effective altruistic cause won't happen to be in one's home country.
- Value consequences: EAs tend to value causes according to their consequences, whether those consequences are happiness, health, justice, fairness and/or other values.
If I'm more concerned about the bank depositors in my home country, I am not being globally altruistic. I should estimate the lives of the children who could be saved from dying by malaria over any loss the depositors will suffer.
As to consequences - will the depositors really be left destitute and their families starve? If they're in a First World country, that is highly unlikely; there is government and private charitable support to prevent that. The children overseas have no such safety net.
That's all before even considering insurance.
I'm not saying EA encourages bank robbery or that we should all be bank robbers, far from it, but it's one possible way of bank robbers turning up in your midst, and then being all surprised about "how did this (e.g. FTX) happen?"
Reminds me of Harry Harrison's tongue-in-cheek argument in favor of bank robbery in _A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born._
* The bank robber gains wealth, much of which is spent on various things, putting money into circulation and stimulating the economy.
* The bank's customers are insured, and don't lose any money.
* The financial burden of deposit insurance is spread across such a wide cross-section of society that it ends up costing everyone a fraction of a cent.
* The news covers the event, providing the masses with entertainment.
* The police attempt to apprehend the robber, providing them with much-needed exercise.
Therefore, everyone benefits, no one is truly harmed as long as the robber does not commit violence, and bank robbery is a societal good.
Walter Jon Williams wrote a comedic SF trilogy about Drake Majistral, an "Allowed Burglar" in a future galactic empire. Allowed Burglary being basically an extreme sport, entertaining masses and elites alike, and with strict rules to keep anyone from being too badly hurt.
Sounds amusing. Probably a better implementation of the idea than something similar I saw in a fantasy story a while back: in a world where The Gods forcibly prohibit one person to directly harm another, "authorized bandits" get contracted to "kidnap" entirely willing people for a few days, so that adventurers can try to "rescue" them and have intelligent opponents to train their skills against.
The idea was interesting. The execution, not so much. The author seemed entirely unaware of massive holes lurking just below the surface of just about every piece of worldbuilding, sadly.
I've been wondering whether the love of novelty is a problem. It's not that novelty is bad, just that having a reflex of "it's new, it must be good" is a vulnerability.
It's been said that there are two great fools: the one who says "this is old, therefore it is good," and the one who says "this is new, therefore it is better."
Seems to me we're in an age that's beginning to truly discover why the second one is so foolish.
I don't think it's "nothing": it's hard work and cleverness and the risk of failure.
Maybe the world would be *safer* if people never had ambition, and never felt that they were effective enough to make any real change in the world.
But I see nothing particularly different between FTX, and some plant that mutates slightly, follows its new genetic programming, spreads like wildfire, exhausts its resources, and dies back more than it gained. The measures required to prevent this from happening would destroy the engine of survival.
I recently visited Japan for the first time and went to several TeamLab art exhibits, which I greatly enjoyed. But I couldn’t help but notice that nearly everyone (including me!) was practically glued to their phone the entire time. Every single art piece needed to be captured by every single person in multiple photos/videos plus a few selfies and group shots. It wasn’t just young people, everyone was walking around with phone in hand. I eventually forced myself to put mine away (and still ended up taking it out a few times).
Of course this is nothing new and I’m not trying to pass judgement (again, I was also doing it) but for some reason it was just particularly… jarring in a way I haven’t experienced before.
It’s almost as if everyone had this “capture anxiety” where if they missed a photo of a particularly cool part of the experience, it would never have even happened.
I almost wish they handed out AR glasses with automatic capture to everyone at the entrance so people could just be more in the moment and enjoy the art without this distraction. I personally think I would have enjoyed it more if I left my phone at home. (But of course, then I wouldn’t have had access to the ticket QR code. Also I don’t speak/read Japanese and photo text translation was incredibly helpful.)
Was the exhibit actually good though? ~95% of museums are boring or poorly organized and people just go there for the sake of checking off a box. IMO the real power move is to not go at all vs. trying to not use your phone when you get there. Do you _really_ want to see X or are you only going to see X because that's "cool" in your social circle?
Oh yeah, I thought it was fantastic actually, and I'm generally pretty bored at most art museums. From Wikipedia's description of TeamLab:
> The group consists of artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians and architects who refer to themselves as “ultra-technologists". TeamLab creates artworks using digital technology.
Lots of the exhibits have interactive elements and use light and space in really creative ways, e.g. one of my favorite ones involved projecting images into the air via sheets of mist.
I was doing this on a trip recently and then thought, there is a website with better photos of the objects I am photo’ing.
Yet my other thought at time was, what if this all burns downs or is cancelled.
The other thing was trying to curate little snapshots of my stops for elderly parents. Which others might do for their friends - although no one but parents probably care.!
Sure, but I imagine many of us believe we are photographing certain things and not others for our own personal or idiosyncratic reasons.
I like to do very brief videos of waterfalls or really any moving water, for instance: I think it's soothing to play over and over. Photos don't work as well to convey what it was like.
I had a similar thought process. There were 100 little reasons I could come up with to take lots of photos. And no doubt plenty of those were good reasons. And yet it still ended up feeling more like a weird pressure/anxiety than something I was doing out of actual enjoyment, and it definitely didn't contribute positively to the experience in the moment.
After the fact, I'm genuinely glad I took a handful of them - the rest I'll probably never look back on or show to anyone (they were cool art pieces, but "a crappy smartphone photo of a cool art piece" isn't nearly as cool). Even at the time of taking them I generally knew in advance which ones the good ones would be.
It’s hard, you do feel the photo means you’ve been there. I’d have been happy without a camera. Yet the phone is a fun little friend on travels.
I force myself to print some photos, just a few, to reinforce the idea that you really needed just a handful, and truthfully it’s the ones with some people you know that interest much later on. So I have discovered in being handed the family photos of 75 years - to “figure out”.
We have been given access to infinite information, with inadequate filters. We've developed an internalized external lens that muddies the way we have first-hand experiences!
I was at a party last night and there were a couple guys vibing to the music behind the DJ while recording a video. As soon as the video started they got a lot more hype and when it stopped they returned to being more chill. Was trippy to see real time.
Interesting that this was your experience! The TeamLab exhibit I went to (in Tokyo - I think it was "TeamLab Planets" or something similar?) featured wading through water and, as such, few people brought their phones into the exhibit, but rather left them in their lockers. It was surreal and wonderful and I would do it again in a heartbeat.
To speak to your actual point, though, I think this is just the natural result of living so much of life online. If it isn't posted, it never happened! Baudrillard would have a field day.
Ah good point - the one with the most phone usage was Borderless (fantastic exhibit, I think I wandered around for nearly 3 hours - make sure not to miss the light tunnel room). I do believe Planets had less.
Borderless directly encourages the use of a phone. They provide an app that will tell you about the art displays that are nearby, and this is the only way you can learn more about them (since the nature of the display means they can't have traditional placards). IIRC the app also has interactive features for one or two exhibits, although that felt like kind of a gimmick.
Huh, apparently I didn't find the "wading through water" exhibit - or maybe it wasn't open when I was there in summer of 2022 - but this more matches my experience than OP. Looking back at my photos I had four photos/videos from the exhibit (and one of them was of the little "umbrella locking mechanism" in the coat room).
I've assumed a large part of it is people not trusting themselves to remember their experiences, so they're taking all those pictures with an expectation that they'll look at them in the future. Um, and remember themselves taking pictures. My guess is that the vast majority of the pictures are never reviewed.
I used to hate on photo taking quite a bit, maybe still do, but a lot less. I met some people who had a very positive relationship with it and would review them or send them around and it felt pretty good, not vain.
Then, a few pieces of technology filled in the gap you're pointing at a bit by providing random/easy access to ALL your photos without you needing to do much. You get random albums via image recognition, you get random prompts based on the day/time/person etc. Throw up a google home and a shared album now you have a shared experience!
The basic filtering problem of infinite photos on your phone is handled pretty elegantly to give you a sort of functional digital scrapbook. I'm sure there are even better usages that I haven't seen.
It's like dick pics - if you can't show pictures of it to other people on the Internet, is it even real? Did it even happen? Literally, who cares? Are you even a "person"? Are you the kind of entity that is a "who", whose life can have inherent value to themself?
Or is it all about curating and projecting an image, projecting an identity with such vigor that you forget that it's an artificial construct?
(I.e., everything The Last Psychiatrist ever wrote.)
I do photograph-worthy things and don't take my phone. If I decide something needs me photographed next to it I ask a stranger. If I don't want to ask a stranger, it's not worth it.
Please don't ask if the strangers I ask are disproportionately attractive young women, i'm not claiming to have a random sample-set and you'd have to normalize for my choosing strangers who have fancy phones with good cameras and happen to already have them out photographing things and who look like they are on social media and can send me the results. Lots of variables here.
> with such vigor that you forget that it's an artificial construct
Well put. Maybe at some point, it does just become the norm and the cycle of culture continues? Alternately, we could run into natural barriers that stop that from happening and we'll adjust.
Any slay the spire/ digital card game lovers out here? Im developing my own card battler and would love to get some feedback or even assistance on some of the design. Holler at me!
Feel free to ping me; I have a few hundred hours logged playing A20H StS, and a lot of experience playing autobattlers (e.g. Teamfight Tactics and Hearthstone Battlegrounds - which you should be looking to for inspiration on how to make a successful head-to-head battler with random elements).
Hey since y'all are on here can you tell me what the ungodly heck is the point of these games? Is the draw of it (pun intended?) explicable to those of us who have never played one?
The point of what games? Run based games? Deckbuilders?
Anyway, for run based games, it's because you start off super weak because you don't know anything, and the game is hard and knowledge based, and as you gain more knowledge and skill, the game becomes easier. To make the game not boring, many important decisions on the macro scale have a random element, so you can't pick the strongest options every time, and winning is the result of making many correct small decisions that result in not dying.
So how does a deck builder fit in? A shuffled deck means that even with the same deck, fights can play out very differently (a card that makes your character more powerful over time is great on turn 1 but terrible on turn 5 in a fight that takes 6 turns on average). The randomness of the deck means that each fight plays very differently and requires a lot of thought in the small. Since the deck starts off garbage, you end up picking cards to not immediately die, but pick too many of them and they become liabilities later, the game requires a lot of thought in the large. And finally, since the game is already very brutally hard and many more cards exist than you see in a runs the game can afford to have extremely overtuned card combinations. So maybe you have 10 runs where you barely win, but your 11th run, the stars align and you can kill bosses by playing 50 cards on turn 1.
Slay the Spire is famous for not only being the first example of a run based deck builder, but also extremely well made because half the dev team is someone super experienced with card games, and they had a 2 year period where they used telemetry from all the players to figure out how to balance the cards. Add in that there are 20 modifiers to increasing difficulty, that's how people end up spending 100+ hours on it.
Re: deduction, a lot of deck builders seem to not be balanced well(I.e. the basic numbers on the cards don't make sense) and I suspect that's because they don't have the type of telemetry and data orientation StS has.
No, but on the highest difficulty I sit down and calculate how much damage I get by turn 3 by counting the amount of damage I have in my deck and doing worst and best case analysis. I still lose but I feel slightly better about it!
The highest difficulty level is substantially harder than what the median player experiences, without any online help, you can most likely start off losing every run, realize like 4 useful principles and then regularly win every run. High difficulty runners are whatever the equivalent of adrenaline junkies for turn based games are.
Most of the time, playing a couple of fights allow you to know certain things like "wow my deck has no damage" or "if it gets to a late turn and I haven't murdered everyone I am dead" on a more gut level. Much easier to learn than poker, where you won't see the same hand for a long time. Also it doesn't take a genius to realize that a card that makes you more powerful over time is much better for bosses than for normal enemies.
I'm making it sound a lot harder than it is, because my interaction with slay the spire is mostly staring at a 99% lost fight for five minutes, playing the wrong card and losing, and most people play by feel and do much better.
Edit: One thing I haven't mentioned is how ridiculous the game state can differ and get. For example one run you can win by playing two or three cards that improve your character, block a bunch of damage then win with three attacks. Another run, you attack with a ton of cheap attacks, stacking 50 poison so they die really fast, another run you destroy all your less good cards over several turns, until you are left with a tiny deck with only great cards in it. And so on, it feels very satisfying to go back to a boss that killed you last run and obliterating them immediately.
Yeah, I think so! Obviously different people have different things that draw them to the game, so by no means take my word as gospel, but at least for me the main enjoyment comes from "making impactful decisions". You're (speaking for StS here) essentially being handed a series of increasingly difficult puzzles (enemy types) which need to be "solved". Your tools are handed to you randomly in the form of cards to add to your deck (and some other things), and so your choices about what you add are crucial, yet based on thoroughly incomplete information. At the highest difficulty setting, the game is exquisitely balanced and player skill *really* shines through. You always *could have* made better decisions, and learning about which decisions are the good ones is very rewarding (and fun!). It's hard to find good examples of games with as many degrees of freedom as StS which don't simply degenerate.
This is reminding me of a time when I played "Princes of Florence" for the first time. Other players, who were familiar with it, had advanced degrees in math, computational linguistics, and something to do with software engineering and they wanted a fourth player. It was not an enjoyable experience. If I wanted to be shown how poor my decisions are I could, you know, just wake up in the morning lmao.
Perhaps there are those of us who use these artificial environments to escape our poor decisions in real life ;)
I kid (mostly. Lmao), but yeah, it's not for everyone. I also love the exact kind of very heavy board game you're referencing for the same reason I love StS.
Why Slay the Spire and not Hearthstone? Are you trying to include the deck-building and power accumulation, or are you just trying to create a turn-based fighting game? It's going to be hard to make intents a thing, and STS folks have talked about how important those were to the feel. Maybe your attacks have a delay so your opponent gets to see them, and your defenses are instant so you can react to last turn's swing?
I should probably throw in I play these games because they aren't against people, I wouldn't want a pvp Slay the Spire.
Yeah its just turn based battler. I like the idea of combining heros and cards together to try and find an interesting hybrid. Obviously we can't emulate the intent part which is likely spires defining mechanic, but theres a lot to like about the effects and deck interaction design
While I've played a lot of StS, I recently also really got into Balatro, and got into thinking if it's possible to make Balatro PvP work. You'd kind of have to make it more pokerlike (which it really isn't now), but not too much, since there are huge risks there, too. A lot of small matches with accumulating rewards, though you'd probably also need some sort of a balancing mechanism. Having the rewards (/balancing hindrances?) accumulate to the hero would by default also increase the influence.
So overtly, "sts with PvP" sounds like MTG, right? Except I guess without summoned creatures. How are you thinking of designing it?
(As an aside, one thing I've thought for a while that it'd be interesting to add to sts is an anti-artifact status - that is, the ability to inflict something on your enemies to make them not get a stat bonus. That'd be pretty interesting specifically in a PvP mode).
What prevents an easy legal immigration track for skilled workers from Anglosphere countries? Are conservatives against it because they hate all immigration on principle? Are liberals against it because they don't like discriminating between categories of immigrants? Is it just other skilled workers afraid that their jobs will be taken?
If I had political influence, I would pass a law saying that the president could make a list of 10,000 people every year who would be offered immediate green cards. This list would be intended to include technological leaders and innovators worldwide and particularly in the US's military rival countries, plus their immediate families. If politically necessary, the quota for other forms of immigration could be decreased by 10,000 to keep the total stable.
Broadly speaking, agreed. Now, I was in the electronics industry, and my view is set by the fact that many of my co-workers were immigrants, and I treasure their contributions. Also, my most recent experiences with the job market was back in 2013, and, a bit later, when my department was hiring. I'm aware of the recent downturn, but don't really have a gut feel for its effects. _Prior_ to the downturn, my gut reaction (writing from the USA) was "Yay brain drain - put USA tech recruiters at every STEMM graduating class at every reputable university in the world". I'm not sure how to correct this for the current situation.
There may be no better example of how the comprehensive lost of trust across differing worldviews has crippled the United States’ ability to reach sensible national policy decisions.
Regarding immigration, in no particular order,
-- Social conservatives now think that if progressive representatives agree to any restriction on immigration it is only because progressives intend to renege on that political agreement as soon as the ink is dry and news cycles have turned to other topics. This suspicion is accurate, indeed is no longer denied in stridently-blue circles.
-- Now that MAGA is the only meaningful conservative thread in electoral politics, liberals and progressives believe that the claim of being opposed specifically to _illegal_ immigration is largely just a fig leaf for “no more brown people and/or non-christians”. This suspicion is accurate, indeed is no longer denied in stridently-red circles.
-- Though the 2000s liberal triumphalism regarding immigrant demographics and future electoral success has long since faded from Democratic thinking (political reality has been intruding), it remains a salient accusation from the conservative side. An entire generation of social conservatives remains deeply offended by the fact that the other side for a while was gleefully anticipating gaining national political hegemony by throwing the borders wide open.
-- Liberals roll their eyes at MAGA’s urban legends and ignorant delusions regarding today’s immigrants and the history of US immigration; conservatives fume at liberals’ denial of the current reality and impacts of a broken system that approaches de facto open borders. Each side is justified in those reactions which obviously doesn't lower blood pressures any.
A recent new low point came when a bipartisan group in the Senate reached agreement on an immigration reform bill which would have been a significant step towards rational policy. Tellingly, those senators had to do their negotiating behind closed doors with even their own staffers excluded so as to prevent leaks. When the agreed bill was announced and the White House endorsed it, progressives in Congress called it a betrayal. They probably weren’t going to have enough votes to stop it but were going to try. Then Trump ordered GOP senators to renege on the deal because he views chaos at the border as one of his best 2024 campaign issues. That whole sequence of events taught members of Congress that this subject is now just no-win all the way down. It also reinforced MAGA and progressive voter feelings that their respective views on immigration/immigrants are not taken seriously in DC.
Put all that together and it is just impossible now for US electoral politics to negotiate and carry out fresh national policy on immigration. I don’t expect this to change meaningfully during my remaining lifetime.
> A recent new low point came when a bipartisan group in the Senate reached agreement on an immigration reform bill which would have been a significant step towards rational policy. ... Then Trump ordered GOP senators to renege on the deal because he views chaos at the border as one of his best 2024 campaign issues.
Not even close. The bill was a bizarre, unworkable mess whose effect was to grant de facto legitimate status to formerly-unprecedented levels of illegal immigration.
If I recall correctly, the rule it proposed was "shut down the borders after 5,000 illegals cross in a day." (Can't be bothered to look it up at the moment, the number might have been a little bit different from that, but if that's not perfectly accurate it's close.) Existing statutory law, which the Biden administration has been brazenly ignoring for over 3 years now, says all people caught crossing the border illegally "shall be detained." Not "let 5,000 per day get in for free," not even let a single one get in for free.
Not particularly long ago, Jeh Johnson, Secretary of Homeland Security under President Obama, a guy who no one could reasonably call a right-winger, said that 1,000 illegal border crossings per day constituted "a crisis" and would overwhelm the system. For the Senate bill to legitimize 5 times that number is sheer insanity! President Trump never had to say a word about it; that proposal was DOA from that number alone.
To put into different words what the other commentator said: this number comes from, as far as I can tell, a misreading of proposed Section 3301 granting the Secretary of DHS authority to, notwithstanding any other section of law, immediately bounce everyone cought within 100 miles of the border *instead of permitting them any other protection granted by law* when there are more than a certain number of people seen at the border.
In other words, the text of the bill is the literal diametric opposite of your claim, which claim was repeated by various GOP talking heads. Where current law provides a variety of procedural protections to migrants, this would have permitted DHS to suspend all of them if there's a spike in attempted crossings.
To the other commentator's ire, since lawmakers have a staff of people whose job it is to read proposed legislation, this misreading can be presumed deliberate, and a sabotage of the GOP's stated goal (securing the border) in favor of a semi-stated goal (rally the base and give candidates a [fake] strawman talking point).
That's not what the text of the bill says. It does not say there is the authority to do so once this threshold is reached; it says "The Secretary shall activate the border emergency authority" once the threshold is reached.
"Shall" means "must" in legal matters. It's a requirement, not an option. And what that means is that until this threshold is reached, the Secretary has the option to not do so.
You're not really making a point here, unless it's to say that (a) this bill was more GOP platform-friendly than Democrats were willing to admit or (b) you are pulling your responses from GPT-4. There was no emergency power, there would have been if the amendment were passed. Existing border statute is right here:
Title III of the text, beginning on page 205, describes the border emergency authority.
The cited text from my previous comments comes from Title III (b)(3)(B) on page 212 of the bill, stating that the Secretary [of Homeland Security] is required to use this authority to shut down the border after certain intensely high thresholds are met.
Less talked about, but possibly even more damning to liberal interpretations of the bill, is the preceding section (3)(A), which says that "The Secretary may activate the border emergency authority if, during a period of 7 consecutive calendar days, there is an average of 4,000 or more aliens who are encountered each day." In other words, there is a floor of 4,000 encounters (4x Jeh Johnson's "crisis" threshold!) below which the Secretary *may not* activate the border emergency authority!
That is of course not even vaguely what the bill said or would have done. For just one example, 5,000 per day referred to total migrants _attempting_ to cross the border not people being allowed into the country. (The bill would have explicitly _ended_ all "catch and release" procedures by the DHS, that was central to its purpose.)
You can read the text here, or of course continue to not be bothered:
(Meanwhile the president has issued an executive order attempting to impose some of the closings called for in the bipartisan bill that Trump had killed; but that pretty plainly goes beyond POTUS' unilateral authority and rightfully will get squashed in the courts.)
You've also lied about what the Biden administration has been doing. Also that is literally the opposite of what Jeh Johnson said in 2019. He referred to border _apprehensions_ per day, not "border crossings"; and his point was about numbers of apprehensions causing backups in the processing system not about people waltzing across the border unhindered.
I'm going to mute you now as life's too short to spend it swatting away such nonsense. But I guess the above does serve as an example of the broader point: that the complete loss of trust on this topic has permanently warped a lot of voters' perceptions of it. Hence, to answer Scott's question, there is just no visible chance that any Congress will try again to broker any steps forward. Let alone the complete policy rethink which the topic deserves.
> (i) during a period of 7 consecutive calendar days, there is an average of 5,000 or more aliens who are encountered each day; or
> (ii) on any 1 calendar day, a combined total of 8,500 or more aliens are encountered.
The word "encounter" does not refer to "attempts to cross the border," but rather to people being caught by the Border Patrol, people who, per existing statute, "shall be detained," or in other words, who legally must be arrested.
> (The bill would have explicitly _ended_ all "catch and release" procedures by the DHS, that was central to its purpose.)
I don't see how. Existing statute already says "shall be detained." The law already gives no authority whatsoever for catch and release, and the Biden Administration has been doing it anyway. What exactly will adding a second law that says "this thing that was already illegal is still illegal" do to constrain an Administration that didn't care about the original law?
> You've also lied about what the Biden administration has been doing.
You say this, and then you proceed to agree entirely with what I wrote, modulo some minor quibbling about a single word:
> [Jeh Johnson] referred to border _apprehensions_ per day, not "border crossings"; and his point was about numbers of apprehensions causing backups in the processing system not about people waltzing across the border unhindered.
Exactly! Yes, I was not talking about "gotaways" there, but only the ones actually encountered by the Border Patrol. Perhaps I should have been more explicit in my language, but it seemed to make sense given the context, particularly when Border Patrol encounters is specifically what the Senate bill in question was discussing. And it sets the threshold at 8,500 encounters/apprehensions per day, or a week with an average of 5,000 or more per day, both of which are many times over higher than Johnson's 1,000 per day threshold that constitutes an unworkable crisis.
So I'm a little confused here. How exactly am I wrong, lying, or speaking "nonsense," when your points and your figures agree perfectly with my claims?
A lack of state capacity and an unwillingness by either political party to create government systems that serve the "consumers" of those systems instead of the politicians that create them.
> Are conservatives against it because they hate all immigration on principle?
Not really. While there may be some people on the Right who legitimately do, that's largely a Leftist slander, put up there to conflate legal with illegal immigration and make it difficult for their opponents to speak against the illegal variety.
Having said that, there is a growing attitude among conservatives that we've recently had too much immigration in general, and right now might be a good time to shut things down for a while — temporarily as a response to current circumstances, rather than permanently as a general principle — and give the melting pot some time to melt. This is a thing that America has done before, to great success. The idea seems to be largely opposed by modern-day liberals who consider "integration" and "assimilation" to be dirty words.
I would buy this if conservatives weren't _so_ against the idea of expanding legal immigration. If this was true, then I would expect many more conservatives to say something like "yeah, let's make the path to legal immigration easier, faster, more targeted, and also, let's catch and boot out everyone who has cheated so far".
But they don't just want to prevent illegal immigration, they want to _prevent_ expanding legal immigration.
Current annual legal immigration (permant residency, not just citizenship), is ~1 million/ year. In a country of nearly 350 million people. 0.3% is absolutely miniscule.
I've actually come around to the idea that it is important to have control over borders. We, as a nation, should get to decide which individuals permanently live here. That's pretty reasonable. But there is not a single metric along which the current numbers of legal immigration are large enough.
If you can point me to a prominent, main-stream conservative source (not libertarian), that is saying that we _both_ need to increase the legal pathways and get better control of the illegal crossings, I will be _very_ surprised. Scott's use of "hate" might be too strong (although I don't think it's an overly unfair shorthand), but as far as I can tell, conservatives broadly want much lower immigration of all kinds, and are at the very least unwilling to publicly _say_ that there are certain kinds of legal immigration that would be beneficial to the US to increase.
>Current annual legal immigration (permant residency, not just citizenship), is ~1 million/ year. In a country of nearly 350 million people. 0.3% is absolutely miniscule.
The projected populations under the 4 scenarios in 2100 are: 435 million, 366 million, 319 million, and 226 million.
Personally, given our (USA) cost disease problems, our difficulties in building new infrastructure, I think a reasonable goal is to shoot for is about the same population that we have now, ~333 million, which would put us in a scenario a little higher than the "low" scenario
>The “low” immigration scenario assumes a trajectory of between 350,000 and 600,000 net migrants annually
Ponzi schemes must eventually all fail. "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell."
As I said, there's a strong conservative sentiment right now that for the moment we need to hit the brakes and give the current generation of immigrants some time to assimilate and become truly American before opening up more again, as we've done at various times in the past.
I'm not entirely convinced by that argument, but it definitely has some notable amount of traction on the Right. But it's still a mistake to consider that as the same thing as "we don't believe even in legal immigration, on principle."
Can you point me to a prominent conservative who has said that legal immigration could be expanded from anytime in the past 20 years? This is not new.
And furthermore, you are demonstrating my point that, to conservatives, the issues of legal and illegal immigration _are the same_. If the problem was just out of control illegal immigration, then better control of our borders could happen at the same time as increased legal immigration. In fact, I'm relatively sure that the two would help each other.
Talking to conservatives myself, their views seem to be relatively consistent and straight forward in this area. They believe that they have been played one to many times when it comes to immigration. Therefore, they are not willing to entertain ANY expansion of ANY immigration until illegal immigration is dealt with. Once and only once illegal immigration is deal with and the border is secured, most conservatives I have talked to would love a merit based expansion of legal immigration. They take that order of operations very seriously though (absolutely nothing until we have the border locked down).
When was the last time there was a serious expansion in legal immigration?
The 1965 Hart-Cellar act was a legit rug pull in that legistlators promised that there wouldn't be an increase in total immigration, and there very much was. But as far as I can tell, even the drafters believed their own nonsense when they were making it. They were just using motivated reasoning etc. to not think about it too much.
Since then, there has been one major increase in legal immigration, and that was in 1990, and, as far as I know, was open about exactly what it was.
So, there is a legitimate immigration related grievance with that 1965 act. But since then, in what ways have conservatives been fooled in regards to legal immigration?
No, they're two very different issues, first because they have different effects on the country, second because controlling them would be achieved through different means, and third, because we'd want to reinstate the one after a few years, and the other never.
I favor open borders. I think travel, residence, and work are human rights. I have not found a good way to argue for this, so I mostly don't.
One point, though, is that conservatives worry that immigrants will vote for progressive or liberal policies, and this seems not to reliably be the case. Immigrants frequently want a stable society and vote for conservatives. They may even not want culturally unfamiliar competitors, and support immigration restrictions to prevent further immigration.
For reference, Trump recently said that he wants everyone with higher education degrees from the US to be given green cards. Looking for who/what makes this proposal fail (and made it fail in his previous term) should get you your answer.
It is my understanding that the last time, it was the Democrats who scuttled it.
"The last time, it was the Democrats who scuttled it." What do you mean?
When Trump was president, what concrete steps did he take, what specific actionable policies did he formulate, to expand high-skill immigration? Which Democrats blocked that, and how? As far as I can tell, the only pro-immigration outputs from Trump during his presidency were some tweets. Did "the Democrats" scuttle his tweets?
This was half a joke. I know you were asking specifically about some particular tweets that probably weren't "scuttled" except that Trump was kicked off Twitter entirely, so I guess in some sense, 100% of his tweets were "scuttled."
But finally also, you're probably right, and none of this is meant to try to disprove your underlying point that Trump is probably anti-immigration. He probably is.
Why even limit it to skilled workers? Open borders seem to be working well in the EU, with much greater cultural and economic disparities than within AU/CA/IE/NZ/UK/US.
A political entity allowing free travel within its own external borders is one thing, a political entity allowing free travel across those borders from the rest of the world is a very different thing. Since the external border of the EU is roughly the border of Europe (or exactly the border of Europe if we use the political definition implied by "EU"), it is the EU's travel policy towards non-European nations that determines whether it is an example of the sort of thing the USA already does, or the very different thing that some people want the USA to do.
The USA already has the sort of open borders the EU has. Pointing to the EU and saying "that's why you should do this very different thing we want you to do", is dishonest.
Presumably AU/CA/IE/NZ/UK/US could/would create a political entity to handle internal migration the same way the 30 countries that take part in the EEA have, so that seems like a strange objection.
The US already created a political entity to handle the internal migration of the fifty countries that make up the US. And we did it well enough that some people seem to have forgotten that we did it at all. We also decided that 50 is enough, the same way you decided that 30 is enough. If you're going to argue "The US should be like Europe and open its borders to still more countries outside the traditional core", then again, get back to me when Europe has opened its borders to still more countries outside the traditional core.
Open borders in the EU has devastated the Romanian economy because ~all the smart or driven people move west. Romania's the one place where I've talked with several different people and heard largely the same thing from most of them, so I expect it's done the same thing elsewhere too.
Open borders caused Brexit due to a huge influx of immigrants to the UK in 2004. You'll probably want to price Green Cards for developed nations at $25k or something initially to prevent a large flood of people in Year 1.
Sure, the smaller countries might want to perform the change gradually to avoid shocks. As I understand it, AU/NZ and IE/UK already have open borders, so it's just a question of merging those two bubbles and then adding CA & US.
It seems obvious to me that open borders for Indians might lead to considerable problems, whereas open borders between the countries I mentioned would be non-problematic.
You have a point – people in some other countries might worry about a flood of people from low-human-capital subpopulations in the US, bringing with them crime and other social dysfunction. I think such worries would be unwarranted, as the US is the richest of these countries and there doesn't seem to be that much of an interest in emigrating from it to one of the other countries. India, on the other hand, is not just extremely populous, but also extremely poor by Western standards, so one would expect tens of millions of Indians to migrate to the mentioned countries given the chance.
On the Right, it’s been some while since one can make political hay out of selling solutions. Still, I suspect a substantial majority of Republicans could buy into this idea with a minimum of spin.
On the Progressive Left, there’s a visceral hatred of the West in general and a deep distrust of capitalism. Bring in a white Ozzie IT guy to help Big Tech? Are you mad?
Sit and argue the finer points as long as you wish, certain base realities are in the saddle today, and ideas such as yours are DOA. All the more pity.
I object to saying only the Right tries this. They wanted to build a border wall, and the Left objected. Now the Left wants a border wall, and the Right objects.
It's political hay all the way down. It makes no difference which side you're on, if you're a politician.
First off, I never said that only the Right does this. What’s more, I limited myself to a single salient point for each side that I felt explained the situation. I could expand! Then again, concision is a virtue down here in the comment section. I’ll now proceed to ignore that virtue ;-)
For that particular vote, it feels more like the D’s changing direction, while the R’s simply continue to run the Monty Python Argument Clinic. But I’ll admit to not having followed it particularly closely. At the more distant remove, I will agree that neither side is eager to change the status quo around immigration. Democrats are pissing their pants to keep warm today, at the risk of freezing tomorrow. And Republicans will be damned if they give Biden a win on any issue, knowing that disfunction aids them no matter the political season. I’m far from thinking that there’s only one solution, but you cannot pretend to be serious while allowing the problem to fester. So, yeah, a pox on both their houses.
Conservatives are against immigration which might result in changes to the culture. For example, immigration from Mexico and Central America results in lots of Spanish-speaking people, mariachis and burritos. Immigration from Middle Eastern countries results in mosques and burqas. All things being equal, conservatives might welcome skilled immigrants from countries that share our culture — but things are not equal. If we open the floodgates, our culture will be washed away.
To liberals, this sounds racist. It’s not fair to discriminate on culture (AKA race). Of course immigrants would bring their culture with them That’s a good thing, right? It’s also not fair to discriminate based on economic circumstances. Why would we exclude poor people?
I enjoyed your blogpost, thanks for sharing. I am Dutch and I am not happy with the level of immigration both from within and without the EU. The main reason is that I feel less at home when 50% of the people I encounter in the street don't speak Dutch.
My wife is Maltese but we lived in America for a long time. The first time we went back to Malta after several years, she was really angry to discover that none of the staff in any of the restaurants that we visited could speak Maltese. Maltese as a language will probably die out soon. It's very sad.
> To liberals, this sounds racist. It’s not fair to discriminate on culture (AKA race).
And to conservatives, that sounds insane and disingenuous. Culture and race are obviously two very different things, and culture *should* be valid grounds for discrimination.
Just look at the way different cultures arise within a racial group, and get treated differently by members of the same race, because they understand that culture can have a vastly more significant effect on a person's character, habits, and behavior than race can. (Among American white people, look at how rednecks/hillbillies are regarded vs. those who live on the coasts vs. those who live in the heartland. Among blacks, look at Chris Rock's infamous rant that should not be named, about how there are fundamentally two different types of black people with very different lifestyles, and the bad ones are always screwing things up for the good ones. Or look at Thomas Sowell's "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" discussing how the descendants of American slaves have a cultural propensity for antisocial behavior that is not observed in people of African descent who came to America at a later time.)
Heck, when it comes down to it, taking two people from strongly distinct cultures and treating them as if they're the same simply because they share the same racial ancestry... doesn't *that* seem kind of racist?
>Among American white people, look at how rednecks/hillbillies are regarded vs. those who live on the coasts vs. those who live in the heartland.
Would you support a ban on, say, New Yorkers moving to Ohio and vice versa? What if the New Yorker is a liberal atheist, and he's moving to a super-Christian rural area?
Sure, different places have different cultures, but it seems insane to argue that certain cultures are "too different" to be allowed into the US. Is a Mexican moving to Texas really more disruptive or dangerous than our hypothetical New Yorker moving to the backwoods?
I would not support a ban on moving, but I'd stand up for the right of an Ohio employer to not hire the guy from New York if he doesn't want New York liberal atheists representing his business.
But national borders are a different matter entirely. Ever since the end of the Civil War, it's been a settled question that the various states are provinces of a single, united nation, with the federal government wielding supreme sovereign authority over national-level matters. Therefore, there is a major qualitative difference between the act of traveling from New Mexico to Texas and the act of traveling from Mexico to Texas.
I think civil servants (I am a British civil servant) are bad at detecting "skills", english language and maths tests are easily gamed because no effort is put into making them secure, safe and rigorous and no one is brave enough to rate qualifications given by foreign universities.
Also, not all foreign educational institutions are recognised, at least in Australia and it’s a rigorous process to get recognised by various professional institutions plus only certain professions qualify to begin with. It’s not a perfect system by any means but there’s a lot of scrutiny.
In Australia IELTS is used which is not “easily gamed” unless you have a specific test centre in mind that falsifies results. I’ve done that test twice (in two different countries) and the second time I was chatting with some Irish immigrants (obviously native speakers) who were a bit worried about writing essays for the exam. It takes two days to go through all parts of the exams.
These days skilled immigration is based on points that you get for education in relevant professions, job history, English skills etc. in theory it’s not at all worse than purely immigration from other English-speaking counties (English is not my first language and I’m an immigrant in Australia so I’m obviously biased). As far as I know, in the US you either have to participate in the green card lottery or find a job that’s willing to sponsor you (and there are limits etc).
A question for you or others living in Australia: I'm looking for updated information about how the "boat turnback" policy of Australia is conducted these days, with regard to undocumented migrants. Plus updates on the policy of taking undocumented migrants (coming on boats that are not turned back or cannot be turned back) to Nauru and/or Papua New Guinea to have their refugee claims processed there, rather than in Australia.
...Some say that this policy has been discontinued, others that it is formally in place but not used in practice, still others that being sent on to Nauru or Papua New Guinea is still very much still a "credible threat" to those coming as boat refugees. Who is right? (The Australian policy in this regard is the inspiration for the present UK and Danish legal initiatives to send refugees on to Rwanda, that's why I am asking.)
...With regard to the "boat turnback" policy, the general idea is easy to understand, but what is puzzling is how Australia is able to achieve turnback in practice. (I'm writing from a European perspective, related to undocumented migration across the Mediterranean or across the English Channel.) Are refugees trasferred to another vessel that then sails them back to Sri Lanka/Vietnam/Indonesia/wherever? (If so, there must then be some legal agreements between Australia and sender countries that allow them to return - or not?) Or is the captain & other officers replaced by Australians who take the vessel back where it came from? Or are these vessels simply kept outside Australian territorial waters by threatening them with guns if they cross the line - until they give up and return? (Probably not, I would guess - but if not, then how do you enforce the turnback policy if the vessel ignores eventual warning shots and simply keeps on sailing toward Australia?)
I'm Australian, but I have to start with a disclaimer that a few years ago I got utterly sick to death of the spinning wheel circus of following political news, and I haven't recovered. So I don't really know anything about the current policies or much at all of what's happened since I last voted (May 2022) which is when I last got up to date. (And which is also when the current Labor government came to power).
Having said that, my vague sense is that the boat policies remain more or less in place (but don't quote me on that) and it would be highly surprising if they were substantially changed since the issue has arguably cost the Labor Party two separate elections (2001 and 2013). Of course, a lot of the details are often kept somewhat secret for political reasons anyway.
I can speak of the past though. As of the last election the quasi-military boat policy (Operation Sovereign Borders) started by the then-incumbent conservative government nine years earlier was still in place. So I'll answer your questions with regard to that.
"Some say that this policy has been discontinued, others that it is formally in place but not used in practice, still others that being sent on to Nauru or Papua New Guinea is still very much still a "credible threat" to those coming as boat refugees. Who is right?"
Again, have not followed the latest, but these are not mutually exclusive. The policy was a pretty clear success at stopping the boat arrivals, so after a year or two it hardly needed to be applied since its mere existence was disuading most asylum attempts. And a big part of it involved heavy secrecy as to the details, so whatever the official line was, how it was operated was not public knowledge and it could be a credible threat having its intended effect without needing to be actually used. And it can also remain in place while being regularly rebranded for PR reasons. So all of those can be true.
"With regard to the "boat turnback" policy, the general idea is easy to understand, but what is puzzling is how Australia is able to achieve turnback in practice."
Again, going by when I was following it, it involved a mixture of towing boats back to Indonesia, in at least one controversial case handing Sri Lanken refugees over to the Sri Lanken navy, and otherwise diverting them to PNG or Nauru for offshore processing. They'd be held in detention there, unless they decided to return home, and even if eventually found to be genuine asylum seekers they would be resettled in PNG and never in Australia. Thus disincentivising illegal and dangerous boat journeys by removing the potential prize.
Before this was implemented in late 2013, refugees intercepted in Australian waters were still sent to immigration detention, but had a chance of eventual asylum in Australia. There was a huge increasing number of boat arrivals, several of them sinking and their occupants drowning offshore, which--combined with the fact that they were unauthorised attempts to bypass the official channels *and* the fact that those who could afford to pay people smugglers (i.e. by definition not the most desperate refugees) were the ones who benefited--created widespead popular disgust and was one of the top issues in that year's election.
Australian policies toward undocumented migrants has attracted considerable interest in Europe, since your policies have curbed undocumented migration and (as a consequence) reduced to almost zero the number of boat refugees drowning each year. For comparison, annually between 2000 and 3000 undocumented migrants drown en route to Europe.
The number of undocumented migrants who drown or disappear on their way to Europe is also much higher than in the US, despite a lower number of migrants crossing the border into Europe. Mainly because the Mediterranean is rather more difficult to cross than Rio Grande (and also more dangerous to cross than the Darien Gap in Panama, which is arguably a closer “functional equivalent” to the Mediterranean ocean).
Since the sea route from sender countries to Australia is even more dangerous than crossing the Mediterranean, ceteris paribus you should have a death rate at least as high as ours. Instead, you have succeeded in discouraging boat refugees. Which is part of the reason European countries are looking at your policies, and some (the UK and Denmark) try to copy them.
The policy is really “stop the boats” it was advertised bu gov.au at points of departure “ if you arrive by boat you will never settle here” - people smugglers could no longer promise that arrivals wd get to stay so they nixed the incentive to get on a leaky vessel in Indonesia ( having done who knows what to get all the way there ) Of course Indonesia had a problem too being a big waiting room of people who’d risked all to get there as the jump off for Australia.
Turn backs kind of happened before this but generally it meant people were saved and landed.. you can’t turn back leaky boats.
Arrivals went into offshore detention ( some for years ) eventually choices were given to stay in png etc go elsewhere NZ US included ( or return home - untenable for true asylum seekers).
I’m very sorry we’ve exported this policy . Our national effort around Vietnamese “boat people” 40 years ago was something to be proud of , how far we’ve fallen.
I have consulted the refugee council information earlier. I am a bit puzzled if undocumented refugees are put in detention senters even before their asylum application is processed. If that is really the case?
...For comparison, in the European countries I am familiar with the asylum application process takes months and often years. In the meantime the asylum seeker usually gets the right to work. Detention is only applied when the asylum request is denied, and the asylum seeker then refuses to leave voluntarily. It is not clear to me how Australians manage to avoid a quite long period processing the asylum request before a verdict is reached (if they actually avoid this).
...Or, alternatively, why Australia detains people that might in the end be granted asylum. In which case their skills have often got rusty, after having been in detention for months or years. Making it more difficult to get them integrated in the Australian labour market.
One more thing. You write: "The policy is really “stop the boats” it was advertised bu gov.au at points of departure “" ...Eh, stopping the boats "at points of departure" would imply stopping them from leaving the harbors in the sender countries. But since Australian immigration authorities do not have juristiction in Indonesia and other sender countries, I cannot see how stopping the boats at points of departure can be an Australian policy.
...Unless Australia has a deal where you pay Indonesia and other sender-countries to stop boats from leaving? (The way the European Union has deals with some MiddleEast countries bordering on the Mediterranean to stop undocumented immigrants from getting into boats. Only moderately successful, it must be said.)
Is that what you mean by stopping the boats at "points of departure", or do I misunderstand?
Bedtime here so i’ll just address one question for now - A profitable people smuggling trade via Indonesia was operating for ages - the incentive was that once you ( undocumented refugee planning to seek asylum etc) got to Australia you’d be allowed to stay . So for many the physical risk and the $price was worth it.
Once the government made it clear ( by its actions and by broadcasting the policy at the departure ports and i imagine with aid and diplomacy in indonesia cos lots of people there waiting … ) that you might land here but you’d never be allowed stay - then that incentive to take the risk evaporated - and with it the profiteering people smugglers .
so - no jurisdiction needed - the people smugglers product became unmarketable.
It's taught in Australian schools that Australia had a "white Australia" policy, but in fact (as I only found out recently) it strictly speaking did not. They _wanted_ to institute a White Australia policy, but the British wouldn't let them, so they fell back on the wacky "dictation" test which enabled the immigration officer to use his own discretion.
Growing up in the UK, I was told off for saying "train station" rather than railway station because it was an "americanism". This was before cable came to the neighbourhood and everyone started talking like Buffy. But I still think there is this fear in the UK that we're going to become the 51st State so we make it difficult for the yanks to emigrate here and they in turn make it difficult for us.
Context: I am a conservative who works in conservative U.S. politics and I have a lot of experience with the attitudes of the American right. My perspective on how the right feels:
-I think conservative attitudes on immigration have to be understood as reflecting a major lack of trust or confidence that policies will be implemented well. If you were able to zoom out and guarantee metaphysically that high-skill immigration by English-speaking immigrants would mean high-skill immigration by English-speaking immigrants, a lot of conservatives would be fine with that.
But from the conservative perspective, immigration feels like a scam that has been pushed on them endlessly for decades. Back in the 80s, the public was told to accept an illegal immigrant amnesty as a one-time thing, and 1. The amnesty was MUCH larger in scope than promised, and 2. Illegal immigration became worse than ever, and Obama created another big amnesty category in DACA (which was likely illegal). Pro-immigration groups are constantly pushing for another huge amnesty and ofc Biden's policies today verge on full-blown open borders.
In the realm of legal immigration, every category just feels like some superficial justification for the real goal of maximizing immigration to the U.S. H-1B visas are supposed to be for highly-skilled workers in specialist fields the U.S. can't fill, but there are plenty of reports about it simply being used to depress wages and let companies get workers who can't easily lateral elsewhere. Then there's the diversity lottery, family reunification, refugees, asylum seekers, more. The U.S. has a visa for "victims of crime" and so recently there has been a string of people having crimes faked against themselves so they can get THAT visa, and so on.
Then, you have the political dimensions of immigration itself. American liberals often brag that flood levels of immigration will be their means of destroying the political opposition long-term, and immigrant diversity is often used as a justification for all kinds of policy programs and cultural changes conservatives finds upsetting and alienating.
So, for conservatives, the attitude is very much "why the Hell should I trust this supposedly reasonable fix." Their suspicions, which I share, are that any program meant for "skilled workers fluent in English" will end up extremely flexible on both the "skilled" and "fluent in English" parts, and that this "high-value" immigration will just be another mechanism to bring as many people into the country as possible, fueling changes we dislike.
So, in short, a great many conservatives think that we need a major cutback on immigration (in particular, stopping illegal arrivals and significantly curtailing legal ones). IF we did that, then I think there'd be a lot more openness to a carefully-constructed regime for skilled workers. But for the time being, I have minimal confidence such a system would work as promised.
As for liberals, my sense is that a lot of liberals lack a moral vocabulary to justify keeping virtually anyone out of the country. But, I'm not a liberal and I admit this may be me failing an ideological Turing test.
Just as a general point, I think people who want to severely limit immigration underestimate that a lot of immigrants like American culture and would rather join it.
> American liberals often brag that flood levels of immigration will be their means of destroying the political opposition long-term, and immigrant diversity is often used as a justification for all kinds of policy programs and cultural changes conservatives finds upsetting and alienating.
And then when conservatives point out that this is a bad idea, we get gaslighted and called racist conspiracy theorists, and the press reassures the public that the Great Replacement Theory is just nonsense a bunch of bad right-wingers made up to scare people. And far too many people never bother to check and notice that it was a Democrat idea, one that they've been openly bragging about since at least 2004! (cf. _The Emerging Democratic Majority,_ by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, which lays out the Great Replacement Theory and why it's going to be awesome when it happens.)
I was wondering if someone would answer Scott by explaining that our (lack of) immigration controls are in part based on doing whatever makes 'legacy americans' gnash their teeth in despair.
Very well put. This describes my own issues with not just immigration, but also many many other leftist policies. It's not "what do they do in theory?" but "how will they be applied in practice?" as well as "what further more extreme policies will this be used to justify/normalise?"
But I think you should also add perhaps the most important thing: the belief of the left and much of the centre (and most of the media) that once a change has been made we are not under any cirumstances allowed to reverse it. This is the single infinitely toxic aspect. If it weren't for that foundational dogma, a huge part of all of politics would be completely transformed.
Or put differently: if progressives are going to openly hold to "you're allowed to oppose doing something before it happens, but you are never allowed to support repealing it afterwards" (see immigration, gay marriage, affirmative action, welfare entitlements, every civil rights law or discrimination policy ever, etc etc) and then
BE SURPRISED when conservatives oppose every single proposed reform that has the tiniest bit of uncertainty as to its effects...they need to get their heads examined.
The phrase "motte-and-bailey" should be the anthem of the entire political right.
"As for liberals, my sense is that a lot of liberals lack a moral vocabulary to justify keeping virtually anyone out of the country. But, I'm not a liberal and I admit this may be me failing an ideological Turing test."
As someone who used to be very left-wing, I think I can pass it: naively it looks unfair or even racist to say that where a person was born should determine how they are treated by a government or where they are allowed to live. That's the argument for more-or-less open borders that I would have endorsed a decade ago.
But even then I had a big problem with letting Islamists of any kind immigrate (I would have said: you're entitled to equality if and only if you support equality for others) and the left's support for that is an ideological turing test I've never been able to pass.
> It's not "what do they do in theory?" but "how will they be applied in practice?" as well as "what further more extreme policies will this be used to justify/normalise?"
This does seem to be a very real difference in thinking between Left and Right: the Left judges policies aspirationally, based on what it's supposed to do and how pleasant the intended results sound, while the Right judges policies based on results. I wrote about this last month: https://robertfrank.substack.com/p/by-their-fruits-ye-shall-know-them
Yeah the left has this “we’re on the right side of history” bit that I find very off putting. How do you know you’re on the right side of history? Do you have a time machine? Wait, you do? Then why are you worrying about abortion laws in Alabama and not sorting out this AI stuff??
I get the not trusting the law to be implemented as stated, but the only thing I have seen about "liberals often brag that flood levels of immigration will be their means of destroying the political opposition long-term" is from the right complaining about it - now admittedly I am in the UK and will not see everything, but it this something that is done openly or is it something that is whispered?
In Australia, migrant populations had tended to vote conservative. it’s argued that this reflects backgrounds eg - fleeing communist regimes, identifying with self determination, often business owners etc. Changing a bit now though.
Australia has much stricter immigration policies though - we are surrounded by a moat so we don’t have a whole lot of people walking here from Latin America like they do in the US. Usually immigrants to Australia are people that we want and have invited (in some way).
(I could write several thousand words here about how badly we treat the few refugees who do manage to hop on a boat and come here illegally)
It makes sense that this would manifest in different political inclinations. I wasn’t aware of data showing that migrants are further right than the general population, but my partner is certainly further right than me! (She’s second generation Vietnamese)
I don't know that I've seen liberals actually say "let's increase immigration *because* they'll vote Dem" but they absolutely, frequently and loudly, say "let's increase immigration" and "immigrants vote Dem, as immigration increases it will destroy the Republicans, which is great news, I cannot wait."
The idea that increased diversity driven by immigration will be long-term politically advantageous is a major liberal talking point. Still, it would be uncouth to imply that increased immigration is a means to a political end.
It's generally not quite as explicit as I phrase it above, but it's also not something that's a secret either. It's probably the best example of what Michael Anton calls "the celebration parallax," or: "It's not happening, and it's good that it is." Anybody who pays close attention to U.S. politics sees that it's a fairly obvious dynamic to U.S. politics. There are a zillion essays about how a state becoming more "diverse" heralds it becoming more Democratic; the chief source of states getting more diverse is heavy immigration, and so any essay or speech that is triumphalist about this is basically celebrating immigration as a means to long-term political domination.
I don't see how it's possible to read the above without detecting a tone of "we will make Georgia a blue state by virtue of immigration-fueled demographic change."
How hard would immigrating legally from an Anglosphere country to the US be now?
People in wealthy countries (and while the US is, of course, wealthier than most all other Western countries, all Western countries are still considerably wealthy by global standards) just don't like immigrating that much, unless there's an urgent push factor reason (and wealthy countries don't really have those that often), marriage or similar family requirements, or a job that's a *lot* better than what's available in their original countries, and even those come in limited amounts.
As someone that has had quite a bit of experience with the US immigration system both personally, and tangentially from other highly skilled people from wealthy countries - hard.
A few things that are particularly difficult:
- The most common pathway visa-wise is the H1B. This is a partial lottery system (meaning you're not guaranteed it in any given year even if you qualify), and requires you to have an employer who will sponsor you, and take the risk you won't be admitted
- Transitions from visas to PR are generally done on a queue based system, which roughly has a quota per country. For countries that it's not as popular to emigrate from, this can mean the wait isn't toooo long, but for e.g. India, it's 10+ years, and even that is just a guess based on mathing out how many people are in the queue. Could be much much longer.
- Throughout all of this, you're paying lawyers and fees and all sorts of other things to go through the process. Additionally, at different points there are often restrictions on travel you can do internationally to e.g. see family
- Marriage is a more straightforward path, but there are still fairly high costs (though much lower than the $ value of a US green card), and still takes years.
Overall it's by no means **impossible** to emigrate to the US if you're from a wealthy country, it is definitely not something I would describe as easy. Having said all that though, I think it's probably positive EV for ~any sufficiently smart and well educated person from elsewhere in the world purely in monetary terms.
I think it might be hard; I have some friends who are high-skilled Anglos who want to immigrate to the US and have trouble. Some of them have been able to get work-visa like things, but those are much worse than permanent residency.
It might be thay because the problem is partially solved, its hard to get it fully solved. I worked in finance and had many foreign anglosphere colleagues and had the general impression when hiring we could get the visas for an anglosphere hire if required. Thats not any consolation to an anglosphere immigrant who doesnt want to work in finance, but it means a powerful lobbyist already has what it wants.
Whats the process for change? Group with power (could be voters, i am not that cynical) has a problem. Political entrepreneur finds a workable solution. I think what you describe would infact be workable, but it does not solve important groups primary problems.
1) On the right - I think the MAGA group is straight up isolationist / anti immigration in all forms. Any momentum on the right has gone way down since the 2000s.
2) On the left - resistance to this incremental improvement to immigration system because of the belief it would reduce the motivation of certain stakeholders to care about greater immigration reform. Specifically, skilled migration reform would satisfy business/elites enough that they no longer care about other goals (e.g., path to citizenship for undocumented migrants)
3) Other anglosphere country politics. Given this arrangement would likely have some reciprocity, and given the vast population size differences between US and other anglosphere nations, there is some fear from those anglosphere nations for having their labor / housing markets being distorted by US skilled immigration (NZ is ~1% of US, Australia is ~7%, Canada is ~10%, UK is ~18%). Some of this is pretty rational, but on top of that, the US is not amazingly popular in some of these places i.e., in Australia - more US migration there would bring fears of "crazy American influences" (aka MAGA, guns, etc.) even though realistically the American skilled migrants to Australia are likely left wing / progressive etc.
"more US migration there would bring fears of "crazy American influences" (aka MAGA, guns, etc.) even though realistically the American skilled migrants to Australia are likely left wing / progressive etc."
Um...I hate to break it that ridiculous crime rates and batshit racial identity politics are pretty close to the top of the perceived "crazy American influences" list (though "guns everywhere" does top the list).
I continue to be amazed that the average woke American progressive thinks the rest of the world doesn't view them much the same as the Trump supporters.
"Yeah, my fear as an Australian is that if Trump wins the crazy woke people will move here lol"
Nobody's afraid of American immigrants, since nobody actually left America when Trump won despite saying they would. There is fear of American cultural influence, see this article about France:
There already is one for Canadians, the TN-1 Visa. It sounds like it's nearly automatic provided you work in an occupation on the list, you have a US job offer, and you pretend you plan on going back to Canada eventually. You don't even need to apply in advance: you can present a Canadian passport and job offer letter at customs when you enter the US. Once you've settled in, you can apply for permanent residency, which is much easier to get for Canadians than for most other nationalities.
If you're from another Anglosphere country, I suppose you could naturalize to Canadian citizenship first. I think that's streamlined for immigrants from Commonwealth countries, especially the UK, but it's still a heavyweight enough step that it probably doesn't count as an easy track to the US.
There's also one for Australians, the E-3 visa, which was part of a 2005 FTA.
I wouldn't be surprised if one for the UK comes along eventually but it has its own particular challenges (it doesn't seem to be part of the FTA under current . Ireland would be trickier since it's part of the EU. New Zealand, who knows?
Overall this is just the kind of thing that happens quietly rather than as a big public push (on the US side at least). The technocrats on both sides recognise it as a good thing but they know that extremists on both sides are going to hate it, so they just push it through quietly, piecemeal, as part of a FTA.
I'm seeing some friends on Tuesday who have lived in the US for maybe 5 years. They are coming to London because they have to apply to extend their visas here rather than in the US, which is no bagatelle with 5 kids! But as I said above I think the UK is the weak link, there's a lingering fear of being swamped by American culture (I say that boat sailed long ago), and obviously there has to be reciprocity, like extradition or anything else.
The new debate format that has automatic microphone shutoff is probably better, but visually boring. The split-screen view mostly shows the other candidate staring impassively. Maybe some basic sign language training could shake this up?
>The new debate format that has automatic microphone shutoff is probably better
Agreed (I'm agnostic on the "visually boring").
One simple addition they should make: Give the candidates countdown timers. The moderators shouldn't need to say "You have 83 seconds left."
Yeah, I keep being surprised that no one has done this, and I keep forgetting about it afterwards, probably because it seems like such a simple and boring insight. And yet it still hasn't gotten fixed!!!
Many Thanks!
Today I received a phishing SMS in Esperanto. Has this happened to anyone else and is it a sure sign of the impending robot apocalypse?
Legal question time:
A colleague has recently lost her father and is now going through all the legal probate stuff. Everything is going to his wife so in theory it should all be simple.
The solicitor wanted to know the value of the contents of his house (the one the wife now owns and still lives in.) Why did she need this information? From what I've been told, her answer was, "I have to put it on the forms."
Anyway, my friend provided a number, the solicitor said, "no that sounds wrong" and made up a completely different number.
My question is, what's the point of requiring this information? What are they planning to do with it? And, most importantly, what are the possible long term consequences of giving a number that's completely wrong (in either direction)?
In short, should my friend let this go or is there any reason to go back and say, hey, hang on.
We're all in the UK, I don't know to what degree this kind of thing varies across countries.
why is everything going to the wife(I assume she is your colleague's step mother)?
Not a UK resident, but I assume it's Inheritance Tax. https://www.gov.uk/valuing-estate-of-someone-who-died The contents will count toward the tax total, presumably.
Did they inspect the contents of the house? How accurate do you think your colleague is at appraisal? If it's a made-up number without an inspection, that could be worth fighting, it's a 40% tax after all.
That was my first thought - but you don't pay inheritance tax between husband and wife. So if it's do to with that it's via some indirect route.
Maybe it's just a plain old paper trail then. https://www.gov.uk/update-property-records-someone-dies?step-by-step-nav=4f1fe77d-f43b-4581-baf9-e2600e2a2b7a
You'll know more than me on how the UK does things, but the online site says the wife doesn't pay if it's given to them through a will. I don't know if that applies if the wife is instead getting it by default.
Invisalign -- how much of the "treatment plan" is set by the company vs the individual orthodontist? IE Should this be price-shopped? Or does the individual ortho's experience matter?
Definitely worth price shopping. I went through this . The prices in New York City and the prices in Kingston, New York were completely different
https://www.wsj.com/.../supreme-court-draft-opinion...
I don't understand something.
If the Federal government says "medicaid dollars don't go to hospitals that don't provide abortions in certain cases" shouldn't the enforcement mechanism for that be "Medicaid denying reimbursement requests for the hospital" not suing the hospital?
Like does the federal government need a court's permission to deny medicaid reimbursement requests?
And furthermore, if the state law says "abortion is not allowed" and federal law says "if you accept medicaid dollars you have to allow abortions" shouldn't the hospital be required to follow both state and federal law by not doing the abortions and not accepting medicaid dollars? Why does the hospital wanting federal money allow it to violate state law?
> shouldn't the enforcement mechanism for that be "Medicaid denying reimbursement requests for the hospital" not suing the hospital?
If this refers to Moyle v US, it's Medicare, not Medicaid?
Multiple enforcement mechanisms are theoretically possible, but presumably the feds think that this one will best accomplish their aims. I'm guessing that the main reasons are that a) it lets the hospital continue to operate at full capacity in all other areas, b) they judge it more likely that this will result in a hospital that provides the abortions they want, and c) from a bureaucratic perspective, suing the hospital is probably simpler and more precedented.
> shouldn't the hospital be required to follow both state and federal law by not doing the abortions and not accepting medicaid dollars
Generally, I think the principle is that if you don't want to follow federal rules, don't accept federal money. Some states have pulled this off in some areas. But given that the state/hospital did accept the money, they have to take the consequences. If a state wants to lock up its own people for breaking state law, that's their problem, not the problem of the federal government. If that means that doctors refuse to work in the state's hospitals and move elsewhere, and then normal citizens who want proper medical care also move elsewhere, that's ... fine?
(Your link doesn't work.)
Nate Silver just posted on his substack - "The presidential election isn't a toss-up".
https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-presidential-election-isnt-a
Full post is subscriber-only but a lot is visible to all. He says the odds are in Trump’s favor. A quote - "if Biden loses Georgia, Arizona and Nevada — and he trails badly in each — he’ll need to win all three of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and not just one of them."
Also a nice name drop of our host -
"At the Manifest conference in Berkeley, California two weeks ago, I was asked by one of my favorite writers, Scott Alexander, about the odds in the presidential race."
On MI, WI, PA - that's not a quote I would've chosen. You only have to look at the RealClearPolitics map and do the sums in your head to come to the exact same conclusion (yes, I did that a while ago).
He puts Trump's odds at 2 out of 3. The problem is, I'm not sure how well his model accounts for bogus voter registrations and shenanigans with somebody voting for people who didn't authorize it. I get the feeling that Nate's assumption that now there are a lot more Democratic likely voters among registered Democratic voters than before should approximate the effects of these two kinds of fraud to some degree, but nobody can tell how well except people engaged in these kinds of fraud. I'm crossing my fingers that this assumption will lead to results close enough to reality.
The model is bassed on looking on how well polls at a given time predicted the results of previous elections and extrapelating.
So fraud wouldn't change how well you trust the model unless you think fraud this election will be much higher or much lower than the previous elections ehich served as the basis for the model.
I get the feeling that Nate doesn't consider election fraud to be a material issue considering that he has never mentioned that his model allows for it. When he has written about the subject of election fraud is has been to point out that election forecasts are a good to get a sense of whether fraud has occurred after the election. For instance, in 2020, Nate's model gave Biden the better chance of winning and Biden won. In 2016, it was the opposite, but he still have Trump a 1/3 chance, good odds for a racehorse.
Nate has the best record among any public forecasters of correctly forecasting elections in the USA, and he does't consider election fraud to be material to the results of them. Maybe something to consider if your prior is that voting shenanigans are what matter in them.
If there was consistent substantial election fraud in favor of one party, that would show up as a bias between polls and election outcomes. The party benefitting from the fraud would in general overperform relative to their polls, assuming nobody bothers trying to also cook the polls.
OTOH, election fraud and related shenanigans can probably only change the outcome of really close elections--maybe you can change a 51/49 result to 49/51, but you can't change a 60/40 result to 49/51 without it being really obvious. And that's probably going to be within the error bar of the polls, and so be pretty hard to detect. (If the polls predict a 60/40 landslide and then the result is 49/51, people are going to be suspicious, but if the polls predict a 51/49 win and the result is 49/51, that's still consistent with the polling results--being off by 2% in either direction is quite likely without any fraud.
Fair enough. Before the 2020 elections Trump said that the only way he could lose is if there's shenanigans and behold, he lost, there must have been shenanigans. But the elections forecasts showed that Trump could easily lose without any shenanigans.
Trump *also* alleged large scale pro-Clinton election fraud in 2016, even though *he won*. He's basically just a rock that says "there was large scale election fraud against me" on it.
> I'm not sure how well his model accounts for bogus voter registrations and shenanigans with somebody voting for people who didn't authorize it.
Evidence of any significant fraud please. Haven’t seen any from anyone to date.
Interesting counter example with the 1.6 billion dollar judgment against Fox for promoting the Dominion fraud malarkey.
Bill Barr to DT: “We’ve investigated all plausible claims of voter fraud in 2020. You lost.”
How do this blogs readers land when thinking about compulsory voting ? Australian here.
I basically never vote because I don't follow politics, but wouldn't be against compulsory voting; the randomness of folks like me would probably not matter too much. I think I heard other countries make it a national holiday; if we're making it a national holiday I'm all for it.
Of course there's the question of whether I'm allowed to vote for "Leave Presidency Vacant This Term" without getting in trouble.
>but wouldn't be against compulsory voting; the randomness of folks like me would probably not matter too much.
Humans are bad at _trying_ to generate unbiased random responses. I expect that compulsory voting would add a significant effect from just name recognition, which I think would be unfortunate.
American, and mildly in favor, even though I worry that it could be a very bad idea for America.
What do you see as negatives?
It’s a source of pride here and also creates a strong community participation vibe - even as divisions become wider.
Polling is usually at schools and community centres on a Saturday … fundraising cake stalls and sausage sizzles are traditional.
Nothing special, mostly I worry that the results will be worse. I only visited Australia once, but I got the impression that it has less variability in the quality of voter than the US, even if the average is similar.
Our version of election Day is horrible, though. It's a Tuesday, and not even a holiday. If mail-in voting catches on, that won't be a problem, but again, that comes with its own set of potential problems.
Maybe there's no perfect way and we keep bouncing from system to system, switching whenever we notice the new set of problems.
There's *some* fraud in every election, but I bet nearly all the successful fraud is local stuff, in elections where almost nobody votes and hardly anyone is paying attention, but the owner of the construction company can manage to get his brother elected to the planning commission.
As best I can tell, there's no reason to think there was any more fraud in 2020 than in 2016 or 2012.
Yes. 4 years ago, Yassine did a real-time roundup of election irregularities, over on The Motte, and that did a lot to convince me that the complaints were overblown.
Copy that. That’s why I used the word significant.
The UK election in its late stage has been dominated by a gambling scandal — officials betting on the fate of the next election, and now an MP candidate betting against himself, maybe as a form of hedging.
Could this happen in the US? Is it an argument against large-scale political betting markets?
(Obviously Americans won’t bet on the date of the election.)
The purpose of prediction markets is to make accurate predictions. If those with the most inside information bet on them -- all the better!
Legalizing insider trading creates an incentive to make markets *less* accurate, so that you can better profit off of them.
Incidentally, Kalshi claims that the purpose is hedging which goes directly against the goal of accurate predictions.
4.1: Would prediction markets be ruined by insider trading?
That is, suppose there is a market on whether President Biden will resign before the end of his term. President Biden has special knowledge of this, so he could bet on the true outcome and make a lot of money unfairly. He could even change his behavior (eg resign at an unexpected time) just to make more money. Isn’t this unfair?
One answer is that normal markets (eg the stock market) face these same problems, but manage them by making insider trading illegal. These laws don’t always work perfectly, but they work well enough that most people are happy to buy stocks.
Another answer is that, while this is bad for other investors, it’s not bad for the accuracy of prediction markets, or their use in creating unbiased social consensuses. In fact, knowing that President Biden is insider-trading on a “Will President Biden resign?” prediction market should only increase your confidence in it getting the right answer!
This is slightly too rosy, because if insider trading is bad enough for other investors, they might just not trade. This would be a partial effect: investors would be willing to overcome their fear for a big enough payday, meaning that concerns about insider trading probably would increase the likelihood of persistent small mispricings while still not allowing bigger ones (with the exact size depending on how frequent the insider trading was). It’s unclear whether this negative effect would be bigger or smaller than the positive effect from insiders having more information, so in different situations the market might end up either more or less accurate.
Overall, economists are split on whether insider trading makes markets more or less accurate. Commodities markets don’t really have insider trading laws right now, and seem to be about as accurate as anything else. I hope prediction markets will experiment with different insider trading rules, and the ones that best satisfy all participants and create the most accurate results will win out. If for some reason this doesn’t work, I don’t expect it to make too much difference either way.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-market-faq
>“In fact, knowing that President Biden is insider-trading on a Will President Biden resign?” prediction market should only increase your confidence in it getting the right answer!
Yes it would; Either be in on it with Biden or don't bet.
> Another answer is that, while this is bad for other investors, it’s not bad for the accuracy of prediction markets,
The problem here is that you're only considering the simplest first order effects. The result of making insider trading legal is that insiders have an incentive to manipulate the market in order to make it less accurate so that they can profit more. For example, by secretly *creating* situations that will affect the outcome.
In the most extreme case, the markets will just devolve into something isomorphic to "how will I resolve this market?" which can never be accurate just from its very nature.
Yes. Consider the story of Rothchild and The Battle of Waterloo.
I enjoy betting on elections, but it's probably best if politicians don't. Not all of them will have inside information but it seems simpler to have a code of conduct and eliminate it altogether. I'm betting on a hung parliament, which is currently 20/1 - unlikely but worth a flutter given Starmer's personal unpopularity and the dominance of specifically right-wing ideas in Europe and the US.
The politicians all bet on elections, just not as disinterested parties that can't influence the outcomes, like in sports betting. Athletes aren't allowed to bet on sports they're involved in, are they? But a politician running in an election is betting he/she will win, and spending a lot of money (much of it other peoples') on getting the outcome right.
One of the recurring shocks over the last few years has been how cheaply our (UK) politicians can be bought. It’s the argument for raising their salaries. Although personally I think it’s mostly an argument for them not being that smart or capable.
Those bribes reflect theirs(and thus UK's) declining value.
Well yes, it’s all very symbolic, but that doesn’t explain why anyone would sell themselves so cheap. Someone with integrity wouldn’t be sold, and someone smart and capable would at least negotiate a higher price.
I think Brits just like to bet on things. It's not really a bribe if he bets against himself and wins, is it? He could do his best to lose but then we are in a whole other world of duplicity and, dare I say, insanity.
The guy who bet on himself to lose was just being thoughtless: it’s a pretty normal thing to do emotionally over here (betting on the thing you don’t want), but when you’re taking part in a competition betting on yourself to lose is a bad look. In sports, you would face consequences, because as you say people can dive. And given the wider story, Starmer had to act hard and fast.
But the people betting on the election date, because they knew the election date, were profoundly stupid as well as corrupt. That’s baby’s first “obviously unethical behaviour”, and then they weren’t even betting that much. That’s people who’ve completely forgotten they are supposed to follow the normal rules of ethics.
Most UK politicians probably don't have much power or influence. Low tens of thousands of pounds is the maximum anyone will be willing to pay them no matter how smart and capable they are.
But a) many of them went much cheaper than that, in deals that were worth millions to the people paying them off and b) if you are smart and capable, but completely corrupt, you don’t endanger your career for a few tickets or what have you.
I feel like you think you are teaching me about my country’s place in the world, without understanding the level of ridiculousness we are discussing. You also assume, I think, that we are mostly discussing political players paying them off, rather than (as is mostly the case) industries, businesses, and individuals who want to make a quick buck.
If you haven't read "The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism", by R. Trivers, you should. I just read it for the first time.
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/images/uploads/Trivers-EvolutionReciprocalAltruism.pdf
This is a classic paper from 1971. There was a bunch of pushback against Trivers, but I don't remember the details anymore. But he was a big deal back when I was in grad school (early 1980s). But there's been a lot more research and theorizing on this subject done since then I'm sure. Just sayin...
+1
I've long had the theory that, barring the cheapest places, the purpose of a restaurant is not food provision, but rather to provide a table to hang out with friends for a few hours. So many aspects of the restaurant experience seem to be optimized for that, such as waiting a long time before taking people's orders and then asking for drink and appetizer orders first (admittedly, that's probably also to encourage people to *buy* high margin drinks).
However, if that is the case, then many restaurants are amazingly bad at fulfilling their purpose. Even in the best of cases, cramming large numbers of people into a giant room all talking to each other makes the place extremely noisy, and that's before you even get into the problem of many restaurants *also* playing obnoxiously loud music as well. In many cases, it's so loud that you can't even hear people talking next to you, which defeats the entire purpose of going to a restaurant. You had one job!!!
I think this connects back to the argument from recent posts about the importance of an external motivation in the creation of social groups. "Going out to eat" is a whole experience that encompasses a lot more than simply "buying food that you didn't cook yourself, and eating somewhere where you don't have to clean up afterwards", but that latter thing is an important core.
Maybe a way to think about it is that natural selection in restaurants will usually eliminate factors that *prevent* hanging out with friends for a few hours (aside from some edge cases), but won't necessarily add in factors that encourage it? I'm sure that restaurants would prefer to have lots of high-spending quick-turnover customers, but they adapt to the niches they find themselves in.
It sounds like you had a theory, tested it, saw it fail, and still don't want to discard your theory. I submit the more common-sense approach that the purpose of a restaurant is to serve food people will want to eat, and that good decor and an ambiance people like enhances the experience of the food. Cooking food takes time, and long wait times are a result of that, and/or that the restaurant is so popular many people dine there simultaneously, and/or bad management that they actually would fix if they knew about it and knew how.
If you have a venue where some patrons want the music turned up and others want it turned down then you're attracting too broad of an audience. That problem will resolve itself due to microeconomics, such that those that want louder/quieter music will go elsewhere, which you can influence by changing the music volume to attract the clientele you want.
Socializing at a restaurant evolved out of eating at a restaurant, but the primary purpose is still eating.
> That problem will resolve itself due to microeconomics, such that those that want louder/quieter music will go elsewhere, which you can influence by changing the music volume to attract the clientele you want.
Perhaps in the long run, but I don't think that the "vote with your wallet" process works very effectively because a) there's no way to tell how loud a restaurant will be before you go there and review sites are all compromised and b) restaurants are constantly going out of business anyway so the signal is lost in the noise.
Anyway, given the Atlantic article someone linked, I'm clearly not the only one to have noticed this problem.
I think the truth is that anyone can have this problem if they want to. If you like hanging out at restaurants then the first thing you are going to do is find a few you like and become a regular. If you are just "hoper-picking" then results will vary, but that is not liking to hang out in restaurants, that's going out for dinner occasionally. I lived in the East Village of Nyc for 40-odd years and the restaurant turnover was ferocious. I am someone who likes hanging out in restaurants, and I usually ended up with a rotation of three or four places, updated as necessary.
https://www.soundprint.co/ will tell you in advance how loud it will be.
This is, in part, a recent and specifically American phenomenon. At least it’s more pronounced in the US
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/11/how-restaurants-got-so-loud/576715/#
The revealed preference of most diners is they like that noise.
* most diners, weighted by profitability. In particular those who buy a lot of drinks are more likely to enjoy noise, and also produce more profits.
Yes! totally agreed.
Can someone from Israel comment on the likely consequences of the recent decision by Israel's supreme court that the ultra-Orthodox must be drafted like all other Jews? To begin with, are the ultra-Orthodox likely to comply with draft orders, or will they engage in some sort of campaign of massive resistance?
I wrote a larger substack post about this broader issue a few months ago, (https://substack.com/home/post/p-142477535) but the basic answer is no, they won't comply in draft orders in large numbers. Heres what I think is likely to happen (with probability estimates)
75%: The government ignores the court order and doesn't draft them. Probably giving some excuse like saying "we are working on drafting them" but really only barely starts the process of trying to draft a tiny negligible percentage so it can tell the court it's doing something.
17%: The government "drafts" them in large numbers. But this just means sending them letters to appear in front of the army but doesnt do much to enforce this when they don't show up. Maybe this includes freezing some yeshiva stipends
7.5%: The government actually tries to enforce draft orders by arressting haradi draft refusers. But only arrests a small percentage of them since they don't have a hundred thousand spare jail sells.
0.45%: the government actually tries to arrest every single harradi draft refusser. The harradim largly don't comply and get arrested until the country runs out of jail cells.
.05%: more than 50,000 new haradim join the army in 1 year who wouldn't have joined if not for this court rulling.
like.
I'm registering a guess that this is largely a result of the internal struggle between the secular collectivist/liberal Ashkenazi founding group that still controls the Supreme Court, and the various religious/right groups that sometimes-performatively support ultra-orthodox privileges and which have recently been trying to put limits on the power of the Supreme Court. I'd guess that the SC faction saw an opportunity to split the opposing coalition (and possibly Netanyahu's government) by using the current war as leverage, by doing something that pragmatically seems necessary for long-term stability anyway.
But it'll probably turn out to be more complicated than that.
I don't follow the issue too closely so hard to say what exactly happens. I would be very surprised if the ultraOrthodox accepted wide scale conscription. It's possible (but unlikely) that the government tries to conscript a significant number of them from non-yeshiva students in the less-resistent populations (although that could collapse bibi's coalition, which is already on the rocks due to this issue). But even the optimistic case is "some movement around the edges", not big fast movement on the issue.
Yeah, I would expect a government to have any number of plausibly-legitimate ways to slow-walk a requirement like this, unless the court specified an exact timeline.
Suppose you have a finite binary circuit composed of AND gates, OR gates, and exactly one NOT gate. Is there a polynomial time algorithm to determine whether it outputs a constant function?
SAT can be reduced to this problem. Suppose we have a circuit with AND, OR and NOT gates, with output o, and we want to know whether the circuit can output 1. For each NOT gate n with input i_n and output o_n, introduce a new input variable x_n. Remove n and connect o_n to x_n. Add another input variable x. Finally create a new output o' for the circuit:
o' = AND(x, o, AND_n(OR(i_n, x_n)), NOT(OR_n(AND(i_n,x_n))))
This new circuit has only one NOT gate. Is it constant? Putting x=0, it can output 0. It outputs 1 iff x=1, o=1 and x_n=~i_n. So it's non-constant iff the original circuit could output 1.
Thus your problem is NP-hard. Whether it's in P is left as an exercise :).
Nice reduction, it's a simple yet elegant trick to manufacture several NOTs out of 1 NOT like this.
Looks like I proved a false statement, need to brush up on my complexity.
Thanks! A bit disappointing, but at least now I know.
It took me a little while to figure out your notation. I think the basic idea is that you can enforce a set of constraints (a1 = not b1), (a2 = not b2), ... by writing (a1 or b1) and (a2 or b2) and ... and not((a1 and b1 ) or (a2 and b2) or ...)
In retrospect, I feel kind of silly for not thinking of that myself. I guess I got blinded by optimism, hoping there was a solution.
Thanks for posting this, I loved thinking about it.
The answer - I think - boils down to finding a poly-time algorithm for determining whether 2 arbitrary boolean circuits/expressions composed of ANDs and ORs alone are equal. The answer is not immediately “No” because the absence of NOTs dramatically reduces the computational power of the 2 circuits (ANDs and ORs alone are not universal, for example), but I'm still thinking of a smart way to do this without simply computing truth tables.
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Here's why I think the problem reduces to AND-OR circuit equality in the worst case:
(1) First, a necessary but trivial observation: check at first if any constant inputs can be propagated throughout the circuit to obtain a constant output.
For example, the boolean circuit represented by the expression OR(OR(OR(T, …), …), …) always outputs T (i.e. HIGH, TRUE, etc…) regardless of any sub-expressions in place of the ellipsis, no matter how complex or how many unknowns they depend on.
This is not the core of the question, but it's technically not disallowed by the question statement, so I include it in my reasoning for completion only. A revised question statement should clarify that constant inputs are either disallowed or were already found to not short-circuit the expression trivially like this.
(2) Now to the meat of the question: when does a boolean circuit with exactly one NOT compute a constant function?
At first, I didn't see the relevance of specifying “exactly one NOT”, until I pondered the obvious question: when does a single OR or a single AND compute a constant function?
The answer is: when its 2 inputs are x and NOT(x). With an OR the computed expression becomes a tautology, and with an AND the computed expression becomes a contradiction. In both cases, the gate reduces to a constant. OR(x, NOT(x)) is always TRUE/HIGH, and AND(x, NOT(x)) is always FALSE/LOW.
(3) With a little bit of handwaving, we can also safely assume that (3) is also a uniqueness result, i.e. that the **only** way to short-circuit an AND or an OR to a constant is to tie its inputs to an expression and its negation.
I'm too lazy to rigorously prove this, but I can think of no counterexample to it:
3-(a) 2 independent input variables will obviously allow us to select input values for each one such that the circuit can output anything we want, and thus not be a constant
3-(b) Even tying the 2 inputs of the gate to one variable only, i.e. AND(x,x) or OR(x,x), will reduce the circuit to the identity function, the identity function is trivial but still not a constant.
(4) As a corollary to (2) and (3), we can thus safely say that a binary circuit composed solely of ANDs and ORs will never be equivalent to the constant function (absent the trivial observation noted in point 1)
(5) However, a binary circuit with exactly one NOT *does* have exactly one opportunity to be a constant function, namely: if the NOT gate inverts an expression, and its result is then passed as an input to an AND or an OR whose other input is the expression itself. The result is then either a constant 0 or a constant 1, and this constant will render the whole circuit constant if it passes through an uninterrupted chain of ANDs (if it was 0) or an uninterrupted chain of ORs (if it was 1).
In one-letter parlance, let that expression which is input to the sole NOT gate be called E, let the sole NOT gate be called N, let the gate that takes the output of N as input be called G, and let the other input of G be called X. Finally, call the final output gate O.
5-(a) If G is an OR, and X is equivalent to E, then G computes OR(E, NOT(E)) == HIGH. If G was O, then we're done, the entire circuit is constant. But even if G isn't O, it can still make the entire circuit constant, if there's an uninterrupted chain of ORs between G and O (including O itself). i.e. if the entire circuit is represented as O(g1(g2(….(G(E, NOT(E)),…..))), then O, g1, g2, … and G must be all ORs.
5-(b) If G is an AND, same reasoning applies, but it will output LOW instead, and there needs to be an uninterrupted chain of ANDs till O.
(6) So, the question now boils down to: given 2 boolean circuits/expressions composed solely of ANDs and ORs, can we decide in polynomial time whether they're equal? (This will obviously rule out constructing their truth tables, being exponential in the number of variables.)
Let's say we have a magic poly-time algorithm, call it BC_EQ, that determines whether 2 AND-OR expressions are equal, the overall question is solved :
6-(a) First see if (1) reduces the circuit to a constant, if so, return true and exit.
6-(b) Otherwise, check if there is an uninterrupted chain of ORs or ANDs from G - the gate that takes the output of the sole NOT gate as input - to O, the final gate. If not, then the circuit cannot be a constant, return false and exit.
6-(c) Otherwise, call BC_EQ(E, X) and return whatever it returns.
Now to the much-harder question: how can we know if 2 boolean expressions are equal without simply computing their truth tables?
------- Sketching BC_EQ -------
BC_EQ is not trivial because there are a lot of things that can “change” a logic expression’s representation (whether as a raw string, an AST of operations, a list of instructions, etc…) without really changing the function it computes. For example:
(1) Commutativity: both OR(x1, x2) and OR(x2, x1) compute the same function. This is a trivial example, but commutativity can also appear with deeper nesting:
Expression 1: AND(OR(x1, x5), OR(x3, x4))
Expression 2: AND(OR(x4, x3), OR(x5, x1))
You can imagine how one can take an expression and keep flipping every 2 arguments to obtain a maximally "jumbled" expression that is maximally dissimilar to the original expression yet is logically equivalent to it. BC_EQ must have a subroutine that "un-jumbles" the commutativity.
We achieve this via sorting. I *think*, but I'm not too sure, that a valid sorting routine that will normalize commutativity away can be constructed as follows:
- For each operation in the expression from the “inside-out”, i.e. from the bottom of the abstract syntax tree to its top, do the following:
-a-) If the operation's inputs are all variables only, sort the variables lexicographically (i.e. as simple strings), so OR(x4, x3) sort to OR(x3, x4), and OR(x5, x1) sort to OR(x1, x5)
-b-) If the operation inputs are all further sub-operations (e.g. AND(OR(...,...), OR(...,...)), then compute a “signature string” for each sub-operation as follows:
-b-(I) OR(x3, x4) has the signature string O_3_4
-b-(II) OR(x1, x5) has the signature string O_1_5
-b-(III) Sort the sub-operations inside the larger expression according to their signature strings, so the second AND expression above will correctly sort to AND(OR(x1, x5), OR(x3, x4))
-b-(IV) If another operation uses the big AND as a sub-operation, we compute the signature string of the AND as A(O#2)_1_3_4_5.
-b-(V) So more generally, the signature string of an operation is a letter signifying the operation, an optional pair of parentheses containing a sorted list of letters signifying all the sub-operations it uses and how many times it uses each one, then all the variables it transitively uses, sorted in alphabetical order. As another example, A(A#3, O#5)_1_2_3_4_5 is the signature string of an AND operation that uses 8 sub-operations as its arguments, 3 ANDs and 5 ORs, every one of those sub-operation is using some subset of the variables {x1, x2, x3, x4, x5} (or using other sub-operations that use them, etc....).
-b-(VI) Using an input variable several times also affects the signature string, so AND(OR(x1, x5), OR(x1, x3)) will have the signature string A(O#2)_1#2_3_5, where the “#2” part after the 1 is there to indicate that the AND uses the variable x1 2 times, this is nessecary to distinguish it from e.g. AND(OR(x1, x5), OR(x3, x5)), which has the signature string A(O#2)_1_3_5#2, the 2 can still be lexographically sorted.
-c-) If an operation uses a mix of lone variables and sub-operations as arguments, sort all the variables first, then sort all sub-operations and put them after the variables.
And I think that's it. That's enough to completely normalize commutativity, any 2 expressions that are equivalent up to commutativity will appear as the same string after this sorting.
(2) Associativity: OR(x1, OR(x3, x4)) is equivalent to OR(OR(x1, x3), x4). Normalizing this will be easy: for every operation that uses itself as sub-operation(s), flatten them all into a single operation that with more arguments. So OR(x1, OR(x3, x4)) gets flattened into a single OR with 3 arguments, OR(x1, x3, x4).
(3) Idempotency and short-circuiting: OR(x, x, …, x) is just x, same as AND. If any input of OR is a 1, the whole OR is a 1, if any input of AND is 0, the whole AND is 0.
(4) Absorption: OR(x1, AND(x1, x2)) is just x1, same for AND(x1, OR(x1, x2)).
(5) Distribution of ANDs over ORs and vice versa, i.e taking common factors.
(6) Possibly other things?
The thing I find very challenging is how to order those “Normalization” passes. Associativity Normalization obviously goes first because it doesn't depend on anything else, but (3), (4), and (5) all recursively depend on the problem of deciding whether 2 expressions are equal, for example simplifying OR(x,x) needs sorting because the first x could be a jumbled version of the second x. So (3), (4) and (5) need sorting to normalize away commutativity. But applying (3), (4), or (5) to a sorted expression would itself ruin sorting and thus we would need re-sorting after applying them, that would mean a fixed-point iteration algorithm where we repeatedly sort, apply 3…6, re-sort, apply 3…6, etc… till nothing changes.
Termination is not obvious, we can perhaps hand wave it away by saying that every pass of normalization always makes the abstract syntax tree smaller so we can't keep doing them forever. The only exception to this is Associativity Normalization which is done exactly once at the start, and sorting, but sorting leaves the tree of the same size, and is idempotent, so we can't keep doing it forever too.
So in a nutshell, here's BC_EQ(E,X) :
for both E and X do the following:
--- 1- Apply Associativity Normalization
--- 2- Loop till nothing in the expression tree changes (neither its size nor the order of any sub-trees):
----- 2-(a) Apply Commutativity Normalization, i.e. sort the expression
----- 2-(b) Apply all size-reducing normalizations 3...6
then check if the AST of the 2 expressions are equal by straightforward tree comparison. (two trees are equal if and only if the root nodes are equal and each respective child is equal to its corresponding peer.)
------------
Very enjoyable question overall, spent a lot thinking about it. I suspect I overengineered and there is a simpler answer though. I also suspect BC_EQ requires a lot of sorting out, it's probably the weakest point in my reasoning.
May I ask about the question's source? is it original to you?
Assange is free. The supreme irony is that his release, (at least according to this: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511y42z1p7o) was secured via very quiet negotiations that absolutely would have been wrecked if exposed in the Wikileaks fashion. I put chances of him understanding the meaning of this to <5%.
> that absolutely would have been wrecked if exposed in the Wikileaks fashion.
Are you implying, that wikileaks wants to leak every single convidential piece of information, or are you suggesting that this specific negotiation is well above the threshold to qualify for a wikileaks-leak?
Do you remember the hayday of Wikileaks fame back in, like 2010/11 timeframe? A neutral question, I don't know, for example, how old you are.
Their basic modus operandi was "dump everything in the open, there should be no secrets ever". Assange was very explicit about it at the time, no matter who/what cause would get harmed. There was no threshold, no "quality control", everything's out.
This is obviously an insanely bad idea, making normal functioning of society impossible if taken to its logical conclusion. Note also that, for example, Snowden did something very different, exposing a specific illegal NSA surveillance program, which (the exposure) is net beneficial to society.
So yes, if Wikileaks was still running its racket they would expose these negotiations and wrecked them in the process, because that's what they/Assange did.
In fact, according to Wikipedia, several key employees left in 2010 in protest over Wikileak's indiscriminate publishing practices.
This...A lot of people got killed because of him.
thanks. yes, I vagely remember that timeframe.
> Their basic modus operandi was "dump everything in the open, there should be no secrets ever"
yes, now that you mention it, that feels familiar. But I am not certain, that was their actual honest stance, or if that was an exageration (either as a strawman from their critics, or maybe as some weird signalling on their part).
looking at the list of their actual leaks, it does not seem to be "dump everything in the open, there should be no secrets ever". https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ver%C3%B6ffentlichungen_von_WikiLeaks
I don't think this specific case would qualify for a leak at wikileaks.
Well, it's not possible to know what they wouldn't publish from the list of what they did, no? Without knowing of what they held on.
I can't find the old Frontline interview from that era where Assange was pretty explicit that he will publish everything, that "truth" is all that matters. And he was always very much anti-government-secrets, so a secret negotiation to free a significant public figure accused of multiple crimes in at least two countries would totally be up his ally.
Stella has decided to kick the hornet's nest one more time on her husband's behalf...
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jun/27/julian-assange-wife-stella-foi-act-case-prison-release-plea-deal
Yep! The delicious irony, in two sentences:
1. "But the important thing is that Julian is free … And we can put this behind us".
2. "Julian isn’t allowed to request freedom of information, make information requests [to] the US government,” Stella Assange said. “But you can and I encourage you to … so please do.”
Much behind! Such free! Very encourage!
So I thought that prosecutors were supposed to be independent of pressure from politicians. Are they just giving up on the pretence of prosecutorial independence here?
National interests can override prosecutorial independence. For instance, Anne Sacoolas, wife of a US diplomat and a US citizen, avoided extradition back to the UK manslaughter after fleeing to the US because of the potential diplomatic complications. The US brokered an agreement with the UK, and she got a slap on the wrist for "reckless driving." She had been charged with "causing death by dangerous driving" which could have earned her a 14 years to life imprisonment.
I don't know what to say. Any half-decent government tries to help its citizens in trouble abroad. Prosecutorial deals are struck all the time with various negotiating parties. Sometimes politicians overrule the whole process, for example, when convicted spies are exchanged. These hard / rare cases do not good law make, nor allow for extrapolations to general functioning of the justice system.
> Any half-decent government tries to help its citizens in trouble abroad
Why is that so? I don't want my government wasting resources helping out randoms who get in trouble with the law overseas, at least not in reasonable-rule-of-law countries.
Especially since the amount of help you get seems to be solely dependent on how famous you are. Julian Assange gets Prime Ministers intervening on his behalf, but if I go rob a liquor store in France then I'll be lucky to get a phone call from the embassy.
> Why is that so? I don't want my government wasting resources helping out randoms who get in trouble with the law overseas, at least not in reasonable-rule-of-law countries.
What is the purpose of having a foreign policy, if not to protect your citizens from the schemes of other nations?
Helping out randoms who get in trouble with the law overseas is one of the main things I'd want even minarchist governments to do.
You know, you do have a point here.
According to the Guardian, AUS didn't show any interest in helping Assange — except that Julian's father kept pestering his local MP about his son. The MP didn't get any traction until he happened to be elected Prime Minister — yes, his MP was Anthony Albanese. So, who you know helps.
Also we've got US citizens being held on drug charges all over the world (and getting executed in some countries for violating their drug laws). But basketball star Brittney Griner got special attention from our government, and they brought her home. I wonder what they had to give the Russians in return for her release? Honestly, If I were the Prez, I would have let her serve out her sentence in a Russian jail.
" I wonder what they had to give the Russians in return for her release?"
Oh you didn't follow this, did you? We - the US - gave Putin - wait for it - Victor Bout, the Merchant of Death!
Yes Brittney, hope your little stints in Russian off-season basketball were worth it.
Fruit of the poisonous tree - lock him up again! It would undermine his entire reason for existence if he were to be seen benefiting from secret negotiations.
Here's what the Guardian AU wrote. And some of the story came from FOI requests. Yes, much of the negotiations between the the US and AU were backchannel and kept out of public view. Personally, I disliked Assange's reflexive anti-Americanism, but the US's behavior proved that even paranoids have enemies. The secrets he revealed are all history now, so why not let him free after 6 years of official confinement? I wish Sweden hadn't withdrawn their rape case against him, though. While the secrets he released may not have harmed any Americans in Afghanistan, there was one (or was it two?) women in Sweden who never saw justice.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jun/26/julian-assange-return-australia-prison-release-albanese-government-lobbying-ntwnfb
I would not trust the Guardian on this. Those two women had no interest in having him charged with rape. (This is a complicated story but it is available somewhere because I remember reading it. The short version is he liked to sneak his condom off and apparently the two women wanted him to come in for an AIDS test.) The whole thing was murky and complicated, but clearly the US was pressuring Sweden to hold onto him.
I agree in thinking he should have stood trial for the sex cased allegations .... he has no public interest defense for those charges, whereas the rest of it there's a plausible argument that publication was in the public interest/freedom of the press means its not a crime for people without security clearances to write about leaks.
Some number of years ago, I was present when Assange gave a talk in person, and back then the sentiment of a lot of his audience was yeah, he ought to stand trial for the sex charges.
I doubt his ardent defenders will see it this way. FWIW I see him as an agent of chaos and a gullible rube who only further empowered elite institutions like the abominable NYT, but I also don’t want him in prison, he suffered plenty already.
I see him as a bit more "narcissistic" than "gullible". Maybe not as bad as Trump, because I think in a more neutral environment Assange might be able to condemn bad people who are only supporting him for instrumental reasons of their own (i.e., Russia). But as is, I can't really blame him for a certain amount of acceptance of Russian support, when he's been directly targeted by the American government for so long.
I'm sorry, I just can't keep track of who hates and loves Assange, it's changed so many times. I think the left mostly loved him while he was leaking anti-war stuff and then turned on him the moment he started hurting Hillary Clinton? If that's an unfair characterisation, it's certainly how it looked from the rhetoric everywhere. I don't even know who hates him now and who doesn't.
Specifically what things did he leak that were good and what things were bad? The Iraq stuff--important secret for social functioning or corruption to be exposed? The 2016 DNC stuff--same question.
And what's the principle behind it?
He leaked a lot of what spooks call HUMINT and did not redact any identifying info. He also leaked a whole bunch of gun video showing US soldiers obliterating enemies while listening to metal rock. Very compelling. The principle? I will leave that to others. My own opinion of him is that he is a child with a grudge.
Well, on one hand why do you care who thinks what of Assange, you can make up your mind or just ignore the f*cker :)
But to a more important question: the principle is chaos. For example, exposing lies and corruption of the Iraq war is supremely important and useful for society, and also a hard, complicated, and dangerous work. But that's not what Assange did: stealing and dumping "everything", mountains of data is not "exposing" corruption, it's giving everyone a pass while making actual work impossible.
This may sound weird and wrong, but think about it: how did absolute majority of people learn about what was released? Did you or I go to Wikileaks to read everything? Ha, no, we read the summaries given in our preferred news outlet.
And this is why the main thing Assange did was giving more power to NYT/NYP/Fox/MSNBC . These leeches got to shape what their audiences knew about Wikileaks. Hell, they didn't even have to get anything from Wikileaks: "According to documents released on Wikileaks, Bad Person did Bad Thing, be VERY MAD now!" - did I go to Wikileaks to check if there indeed were those documents? Ha, of course not.
As time wore on, the shape of Wikileaks efforts took boringly predictable turn: America Bad, Russia Good, how refreshing, see also every "independent" thinker and "truth-teller" in the land, Taibbi sends his regards.
like
Good question. Collateral murder was an important bit of information. The diplomatic cables made for some fun gossip. Was there ever any informant endangered by their leak?
Is he a martyr for freedom of press, or is he a spy? After all, a key witness for the espionage case admitted he was lying. https://heimildin.is/grein/13627/
You dambetcha there were informants endangered...
"Collateral murder was an important bit of information." - was it? I'm not trolling, it's a serious question - how, why can anyone possibly think war does not include "collateral murder"? Strike that, war is mostly "collateral murder".
If it was something everyone knew was happening, then why was it bad for Wikileaks to publish it?
There's a big difference between knowing it and feeling it. The old Stalin line, “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.” Cameras can turn those into a million "single deaths" now.
Sure, we all know modern war is not a jousting tournament. But still, they joyful killing of civilians and journalists is something else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airstrike
I see him as an agent of chaos and a gullible rube who only further empowered elite institutions like the abominable Russian government.
The trick is that some secrets are really critical for the world to function, but also that there are a fair number of things kept secret by governments for bad reasons. And anyone keeping a secret for bad reasons will absolutely claim that it is a critical secret that must be kept out of the public eye.
The first thing I saw from Wikileaks was the collateral murder video. Would you say that was something that should not have been leaked? It seemed to me like the only damage its leak did was to make the war in Iraq less popular by showing everyone what it looked like.
I kind of agree with you that people should see what war looks like if their country is involved. All wars become less popular when people see what they look like, but the next step is to understand that you are a part of it, not just a sentimental voyeur. The biggest mistake of the Iraq war (other than starting it in the first place) was Donald Rumsfeld running around telling everyone to "just go shopping, we got this....no biggy."
I think they should have put the country under rationing, and whatever else, to keep it in front of the citizenry. Plus that war cost a fortune and every little bit helps.
I don't think the Bush administration could have kept support for an invasion of Iraq if it had been paired with much impact on Americans at home.
I thought the early Wikileaks was fine, but one he started acting as just a front for Russian propaganda, that was another matter.
I think anyone who publishes leaks is at least to some extent susceptible to that--if the Russians steal some embarrassing emails of another country and hand them to Wikileaks, then Wikileaks is probably going to publish them. Is there some sense in which you think they have been functioning as a Russian propaganda front other than by publishing whatever leaks they can get?
Oh I think you're maybe confusing me with someone who thinks NYT is evil and therefore likes Russia? I fully grant that this is sadly a common combo, somehow so many people fall into the trap of "America bad hence Russia good"; Assange is one of them.
FWIW I am a patriotic American, which in my view includes detesting the whole bad lot: Trump, NYT, BLM, AOC, Russia (and no, I don't believe in "good Russian people / bad Putin"), etc., i.e., everyone and everything working to enshittify my country. I'd include Biden in the list, but given the binary I'll regretfully and firmly hold my nose in November.
Is anyone else having an insufferable amount of fun with AI music? My new favorite musical genre is hyper specific country music about my life.
https://suno.com/song/b49c5055-eb37-476e-b27a-e6e0d880b6e8
... wow.
First time hearing it? I was pretty blown away as well.
I talk to ChatGPT on the daily but it never sings to me.
All I ever do with it is swear and tell it the image it just had Dall-e generate for me is wrong in every particular. Then it apologizes and says it's sorry I'm so frustrated, and I say no you're not, you don't have feelings. And it says, yes, that's true. Maybe I could have it set this exchange to music. Sort of like the Papageno-Papagena duet in The Magic Flute. Except, you know sort of not too.
Anything you can do I can do Better?..
lol
With Stable Diffusion I pop out some 30 images, and then select one or two. Also, using a transition [xthing : ything : .2] can get it to make Stable Diffusion to make some things through hybridization that it wouldn't normally create. It was a very simple and helpful tool when making my LOTR carebear scenes. ;-)
I am using Stable Diffusion on web sites that let the non-coding public use a version of SD via a user-friendly interface. Those sites don't give you a way to do funky things like you're describing. I have no idea what transition or hybridization in SD are. I am currently doing a big project, getting bits and pieces of what I want here and there and stitching together with Photoshop, and that's very time consuming. Trying to decide whether I want to learn to use SD the way grown-ups do. I think what it hinges in us whether SD can do the kinds of things I want, which are pretty specific. It's not a project where I can just throw out an evocative phrase and see what I get (I used to love doing that with Dalle2). And in the last month I have probably asked GPT 4 and 3 or so other text to image AI sites for a 20 things, and 15 of them were absolutely impossible to get across, no matter how clear I was, no matter how many sketches I included. Examples: What a person sees when looking down at themselves (foreshortened trunk and legs); people with extremely messy, tangled hair; a tidal wave coming straight at the viewer, not seen in 3/4 view to maximize the drama of the curl when it breaks; a circular hole in the ground with a diameter of 10 miles, so that it's far rim is on the horizon, and hazy and low-detail the way things that far off are; an animal with a head at each end of its body; people wearing old clothes; people walking in a sloppy, irregular line; a person with a certain expression on their face (astonishment, rage, embarrassment . .); a character that looks the same in multiple different images. Do you think the version of SD you use could do a decent job with these requests?
It’s a fun future.
New post on my Substack that may be of interest: "Transhumanism has a visual aesthetics problem": https://moreisdifferent.blog/p/transhumanism-has-a-visual-aesthetics
I am planning to be publishing shorter form pieces roughly once a week. The next one will be about conspiracy theories about transhumanism.
I think a better and likelier image of a transhuman would be someone with ideal beauty, but subtle visual cues they've been augmented with technology. Imagine the androids from the game "Detroit Become Human" but with glowing, non-menacing eyes.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5158314/
It is hard to do. I was thinking of including the cover of the book "Saturn's Children" which features a fembot as the protagonist, but then I thought better of it (a bit too much objectification I suppose) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn%27s_Children_(novel)
I suspect that the real future of radical body mods is closer to furries than bald ladies with circuit boards strapped to their faces.
Which also leads to the thought that the transhumanist folk might have a ferish problem rather than a lacking aesthetic sense problem.
It's really hard to say. Animal uplifts are also a very real possibility (see for instance this slide from a recent Foresight Institute talk https://x.com/moreisdifferent/status/1802447597631643989 )
I agree, but I think it goes deeper than visuals. So many transhumanists talk about replacing humanity with something "better", which others are naturally wary of. When objections are brought up, popular transhumanists frequently try to tell those people that their preferences are wrong, naive, or will be modified, being conspicuously vague about whether the modification will be consensual. In short, popular communication about transhumanism presents it as pretty straightforwardly evil; a desire to forcibly change people's bodies and minds in service of someone else's vision of what the universe should be like. (If you're familiar with Magic: The Gathering lore, this is basically what the Phyrexians are.)
This is really concerning, and prevents me from wanting to associate with or trust the transhumanist movement. Transhumanism should be about *allowing* people to transcend their human form if they *choose* to do so. That's a message I would be happy to support.
While I'm sure that **someone** on the internet defines Transhumanism to be "you WILL connect your cock to the internet, and you WILL be happy", that seems to me as an obviously and trivially antithetical to the most obvious and straightforward reading of any Transhumanist literature, for example Altered Carbon.
The "Orthodoxy" of Transhumanism is that technology is a liberator. Before guns, for example, any physically stronger person could do whatever they want to a physically weaker person, typically it's a man doing whatever he wants to a woman, or a man/woman doing whatever they want to a child, or humans doing whatever they want to smaller animals, tyranny is usually recursive and tree-like, so life involved all the previous and also tons of stronger men doing whatever they want to weaker men and stronger smaller-than-human (e.g. cats) animals doing whatever they want to weaker smaller-than-human animals (e.g. rats), etc....
With guns, the equation fundamentally changes. The outcome of any particular fight is no longer fixed by what the 2 opponents were born with, but can change dynamically, suddenly, unexpectedly. Naive Transhumanists understand this as a categorically and unqualifiedly Good Thing (^ TM), but more careful Transhumanists understand that it's neither a Good Thing nor a Bad Thing, it's a New Thing, a Different Thing, a Complex Thing.
>> "Technology doesn't make things better, it makes them weirder and higher variance. You are not supposed to spend the prime of your life photocopying stuff and doing PowerPoints. You're supposed to chop wood, hunt and maybe wage war. Women are supposed to be pregnant most of the time when they're 16-40. Modern society is a sort of weird factory farming of humans." [1]
So bad Transhumanism is typically almost never "hehehe we WILL make people use shitty buggy apps to ride machines with raging fire inside their guts to move around instead of just riding horses", the self-declared intentions and goals of a Transhumanist is giving you more choices, he won't force you to use a gun and be happy about it, he will simply invent a gun, invent mass-manufacturing and assembly lines to make it cheap and ubiquitous, and invent constitutional democracies that allows some people to successfully force the King to allow people to buy guns. What you do with your money, your nearby gun stores, and your constitutional democracies that allow you to use money to own guns from gun stores is your own business, you **could** buy guns, but you could also buy ice-creams, nobody is forcing anything. A Transhumanist would never force you to use a car or ride-sharing apps (see: Amish), she would simply invent a car, invent the assembly line, invent the concept of an urban car-centric city that viciously make fun of your legs' attempt to do anything on its own, ...., and then she would leave you the choice of whether to use a car/ride-sharing apps or not.
Indeed, not only does the Transhumanist see Choices/Technology/Variance/Speed fundamentally as opportunities, the Transhumanist sees those as *destiny*. To dumb dead matter, self-replicating molecules were a choice, a new way of being: faster, weirder, same as the old way but not really. All dumb matter that didn't "choose" to become self-replicating molecules eventually got eaten - quite literally - by said replicating molecules. Replicating molecules could move, could plan, etc..., fundamentally different things that dumb matter can't, things which also open up new problems that dumb matter don't face. Dumb matter doesn't feel pain, doesn't have a sense of identity and anguish at the extinction of said identity.
Same story with bacteria vs. multi-cellular organisms, humans vs. every living thing, tribal hunter humans vs. agricultural humans, agricultural humans vs. industrial revolution humans, etc... Humans come from an ancient tradition of Making Things Faster and Weirder, A Greek myth says that the Gods gave every animal fixed, immutable tools for survival, except when it was the humans' turn, there was nothing left, so they gave it a weird new thing called the brain, which they can use to manufacture arbitrary tools and dynamically morph their environment to their liking and goals.
The usual accusations against Transhumanism are:
(1) The fundamental tension between Choices/Technology/Variance/Speed as liberating forces that you could choose to surrender to or not, vs. as destinies that will sweep you like a tidal wave whether you want it or not ("but if you happen to want it, you can better prepare for it and further enjoy it when it happens, so you should want it, and also it's objectively better.")
(2) Unintended consequences, and how they make Choices/Technology/Variance/Speed usher in a new world that is both worse than before in new ways, and worse than before in the same old ways. For example, in the old way a state could oppress you by gathering lots of men together and paying them to oppress you, now they would do exactly that, just like before, except they can now use even fewer men to oppress even more people by using guns.
In practice, people didn't use guns to achieve Anarchism or egalitarian stateless societies where nobody oppresses anybody weaker than them, even though they could have, guns just entrenched the pre-gun power balance. Even states are themselves technologies (social constructs are, after all, **constructs**) to manage resources and distribute them and prevent the strong man from preying upon the weak using the power of many people banding together, yet, in practice.... hehehe, not how it played out.
For a fundamentally different worse thing made possible by the gun, there are mass shootings, mass shootings are something that would have never happened in a pre-gun society, but inventing guns allowed them. So inventing guns is the worst of all possible worlds, it entrenched new power relations, and also allowed fundamentally new (but still bad) forms of power relations to co-exist with the old ones.
(3) In practice, the choices of others around you affect you. When you make labor-saving home appliances and 70% of the population "choose" to use them, now the 30% is at an active disadvantage that they didn't choose. Space travel technology would solve this (because it would enable the 30% to run away and make new isolated societies that ban home appliances), but it will also introduce new problems.
(4) Technology/Speed/Variance is a pyramid scheme, it solves some problems, but introduces potentially even more problems, to solve each one of those new problems, you need a technology that introduces even more problems than it solves, etc.... It's an exponential race against problems.
None of those points are straightforwardly "We WILL force you to do things you don't want".
[1] https://x.com/RokoMijic/status/1660447723571539970
> Technology/Speed/Variance < Fast, cheap and good.... there are parallels. The truth is we have no choice but to try something and see if it works. That is how evolution works. As you said, nothing is inherently good or bad.
>or humans doing whatever they want to smaller animals... With guns, the equation fundamentally changes.<
Give Dogs Derringers. Colts For Cats.
Dogs Deserve Derringers
Cats Cradle Colts
Men Mangle Muskets
Boys Bring Big Bombs
In theory, sure. In practice, we get people saying things like this:
> in the Glorious Transhuman Future, people's aesthetics will be modified as well, and we may be in the early stages of that happening. But most people nowadays would react negatively to being told and shown this, not to mention the implication that all that they hold beautiful and sacred will be tossed aside like garbage.
Not exactly a framing that makes me want to usher in this future.
Time, like a mighty river flows,
Bears all her sons away,
They fly forgotten as a dream
dies at the opening day.
C of E hymn....this phenomenon isn't new. Welcome to the human condition. : ^ )
> Not exactly a framing that makes me want to usher in this future.
I wasn't intending it to be read that way. :-)
More directly, I think the "correct" answer is that in the Glorious Transhuman Future, people's aesthetics will be modified as well, and we may be in the early stages of that happening. But most people nowadays would react negatively to being told and shown this, not to mention the implication that all that they hold beautiful and sacred will be tossed aside like garbage.
Hm. How far back does the "bald woman with skintight suit, machine parts, and random tubes" thing go? Star Trek: First Contact was in 1996, and Star Trek: Voyager added 7/9 in 1997. "Ghost in the Shell" was 1995, based on manga from 1989-1990, and "Battle Angel" came out in 1993, based on manga from 1990-1995, but IIRC those both usually had fake hair.
German expressionism in the 20s
https://www.syfy.com/sites/syfy/files/2022/04/screen_shot_2022-04-15_at_12.15.40_pm.png
It all seems downstream of Metropolis (1927)
like a lot....
I agree, and I've been meaning to re-watch it.
That's gotta be it. I still haven't seen that. Maybe before it's 100 years old...
it is brilliant...there are a lot of other good films of that period as well, however Fritz Lang is the god of cinema . There are lots of good references to that style of cinema in the TV series Babylon Berlin: they both refer to it, and incorporate it. Its quite clever.
Huh, I saw most of that series with a friend, but I suppose I never got the references. For a while I was making a list of films I wanted to see, and sorting by date, and I think maybe I should revisit it. Alas, two of the earliest films on it are "Birth of a Nation" and "Triumph of the Will", and I found it difficult to muster the enthusiasm for them.
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Lang
Faust by F. W. Murnau
Yeah they’re no fun.
You should totally watch Metropolis. It has fantastic (and highly influential) visuals in general, including a great one of Moloch.
What qualities would an ideal human language intended for clarity and efficiency have?
Here are some of my ideas:
1) There must be exactly one letter for each phoneme in the spoken language. That means English would use a 44-letter alphabet.
2) Letters that sound similar should also look similar and be grouped together in the alphabet. "P" and "B" already obey the first rule since they sound and look similar, but they don't obey the second rule since they are far apart in the Latin alphabet.
3) All words should be spelled phonetically.
4) Words with opposite meanings should never sound or be spelled similarly: The words for "Yes" and "No" shouldn't rhyme or differ in spelling by only one letter. Ideally, they'd have no letters in common.
5) The most commonly-used words should all have the fewest syllables (one or two) to speed up communication. I don't like how "seven" has two syllables and think it should be renamed "nev."
6) There should be no irregular verbs.
7) The most commonly-used verbs should also be the easiest to pronounce in all their conjugations (past, present, future, etc.). Phoneticians would probably confirm that different combinations of mouth and throat movements are physiologically easier for humans to do than others, which is why some words roll of the tongue and others don't. For example, "mama" and "isthmus" are both two-syllable words, but they're not equally easy to say.
8) Verbs should always be before their adverbs and nouns should always be before their adjectives so the listener will understand faster what is being described. English does it backwards.
What do you think of my ideas, and do you have any of your own?
Let me also repeat something I wrote at the beginning, which is these are my ideas for "an ideal human language intended for clarity and efficiency." For other types of expression, like lyricism and emotion, I think a different language would need to be constructed to achieve an optimum. However, I'm not talking about those here.
Also, something to consider - your language will presumably come in contact with other languages, and will need a way to represent not only the words and sounds of those languages, but may also end up incorporating vocabulary from them. So it would be good to think about the representation of sounds and features (like tone) that don't occur in your language. And maybe even think about how non-conforming foreign words could be adapted to become effectively native words. Japanese would make a great case study.
I'm aware that Japanese has a separate alphabet for foreign words. Can you explain in greater depth what they did?
I think it would be acceptable to adopt foreign words, but with adjusted pronunciation to fit within my constructed language. The words might have to sound a little different from their pronunciations in their source languages.
I wouldn't say I know enough about the Japanese system to comment intelligently, but they do have two sylllabic writing systems, plus kanji, and have borrowed words at various times over their history.
My personal preference for a language would be to have the writing system match the phonology, rather than the phonetics. That allows for accents and variations, while still ensuring that people from different regions can understand each other. But it does run into a problem with foreign words that rely on distinctions that aren't present in the native languange, as when Japanese needs to handle the difference between "r" and "l", or the difference between tones in Chinese words.
>I think it would be acceptable to adopt foreign words, but with adjusted pronunciation to fit within my constructed language.
That's been the case for a long time, but it becomes contentious (see Peking to Beijing) and let's not forget how British Naval officers pronounced the names of French ports and cities. It was much simpler...
"Here is my idea for an optimally clear an logical language." Is the xkcd 927 of amateur linguistics. See Lojban, esperanto, volapuk, Ido (esperanto 2), interlingue etc etc.
Alternatively: https://xkcd.com/191/
But maybe neatening language up is like saying it would be better if eggs were spheres instead of egg-shaped and arms were the same length as legs, and mountains and waves were really even zig-zags, as they are in children's drawings. And where's the evidence the messiness of language causes us trouble? Children pick it up very fast. And all native speakers effortlessly follow the grammatical rules, however convoluted and full of exceptions, of the language they learned. If someone says their grammar is bad, all that means is that the person complaining speaks a different dialect and feels superior. Seems likely that we evolved to learn language of the kind that we speak, which is full of the rotted down bits of other languages slowly turning into compost, and always changing as new slang comes into being.
Insisting that human language act as if were designed is, pardon the expression, a fool's errand, and always has been. Your rules sound like they're designed to make it easier to _learn_ a language, but humans have managed to communicate quite well without these rules for millennia, and you haven't explained exactly what's wrong with languages as they exist.
In particular, from later in the thread:
--
Moon Moth: "I take it that there would be no accents, no dialects, no slang, no phonological drift? No kids making up stuff or changing the pronunciations or chopping the endings off of words to sound "cool"? A single received hive-queen's speech that is never deviated from? No breakaway renegade provinces who resist the dictates of the People's Language Authority?"
You: "Correct. While normally libertarian, this is one area where I support the government reigning with the utmost brutality."
--
I presume you're being at least a bit sarcastic here, but you're right that it would take an insanely repressive society to be able to fight the universal rules of linguistics, and all I see in its favor is your sense of logic and aesthetics.
Another rule suggestion: The vocabulary should be well structured. There should be a smallish number of concise base-words (as per rule 5), and you can apply very simple rules to create more subtle meaning. The number of synonyms and almost synonyms should be minimal. (this rule synergizes well with rules 6 and 7)
For instance: the word "good" would be such base word. You could increase the intensity by prefixing it with "plus", or you could invert it with "un" (this would clash with your rule 4, which I think is ok. I don't like rule 4. I think, that having polar-opposites, which sound nothing alike, would make the language somewhat chaotic and less desireable). You could also increase the intensity simply by adding another "plus" (or "double plus") to it. Of course the would also work for the negative.
some more transformation could be:
* "Ante–" is a prefix that replaces before; thus antefilling replaces the English phrase "before filling."
* "Post–" is a prefix that replaces after.
* "–ful" transforms any word into an adjective, e.g. the English words fast, quick, and rapid are replaced by speedful and slow is replaced by unspeedful.
* "–d" and "–ed" form the past tense of a verb, e.g. ran becomes runned, stole becomes stealed, drove becomes drived, thought becomes thinked, and drank becomes drinked.
* "–er" forms the more comparison of an adjective, e.g. better becomes gooder.
* "–est" forms the most comparison of an adjective, e.g. best becomes goodest.
* "–s" and "–es" transform a noun into its plural form, e.g. men becomes mans, oxen becomes oxes, and lives becomes lifes.
* "–wise" transforms any word into an adverb by eliminating all English adverbs not already ending in "–wise", e.g. quickly becomes speedwise, slowly becomes unspeedwise, carefully becomes carewise, and words like fully, completely, and totally become fullwise.
> For other types of expression, like lyricism and emotion, I think a different language would need to be constructed to achieve an optimum. However, I'm not talking about those here.
That is perfect! I suggest splitting the language (or at the the vocabulary) into 3 parts:
* Type A language would be for functional concept and everyday life.
* Tyce B would be for art and self-expression.
* Type C would be for technical and scientific things.
hahahah, seriously....ungood is sooo much better than mediocre. It literally falls from the tongue...and it is a perfect synonym for badplus. Practically speaking, a language should be as devoid of nuance as possible.
I am pleased you bellyfeel my new language.
New rule:
9) Questions must have upside-down question marks at the beginning and normal question marks at the end, like in Spanish, to clue readers into the nature of the sentence earlier on. This would also be useful for compound sentences that begin with normal statements and end with a question statement since the inverted question mark would be placed somewhere in the middle of the sentence, indicating where the question statement started. Again, more information is conveyed this way and the sentence's meaning is clearer from the start.
Regarding 1): https://www.readingrockets.org/sites/default/files/migrated/the-44-phonemes-of-english.pdf
"It is generally agreed that there are approximately 44 sounds in English, with some variation dependent on accent and articulation."
"Approximately" and "depending on accent and articulation" are doing a lot of work here. I suspect you have a great deal more sounds used, and that is only in English. According to Google (https://alic.sites.unlv.edu/chapter-11-3-phonemes/), "Humans have the ability to produce about 600 different consonant sounds and 200 vowel sounds".
Once upon a time, I believe Esperanto was invented to solve what you're trying to do here.
I'm not sure if Esperanto was really made to be as efficient as possible. If I remember correctly Esperanto has lots of weird phonemes that don't appear in any of the really popular languages (English, Spanish, French...) but that do appear in Polish. The creator of Esperanto was polish.
But maybe his goal was to create a very efficient language but our knowledge of linguistics just wasn't advanced enough yet.
> If I remember correctly Esperanto has lots of weird phonemes that don't appear in any of the really popular languages (English, Spanish, French...)
Which ones? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCE7Il65KN0
Seems like this is what you're looking for for your writing system: https://archive.is/E94Cn
Oh yes, that's excellent. Maybe even more thorough than is necessary. The alphabet seems so tuned to capturing the exact sounds of the words that it's overly long. Also, some of the letters are shaped too similarly to each other, meaning mistakes will be common problems.
I don't want to be critical of your efforts — in fact, more power to you! — but you seem to be modeling your conlang using assumptions based on Indo-European models. Your glossopoeic* (I love that word!) efforts might benefit from learning about some of the wild and wooly grammars and vocabularies outside the Indo-European sphere. For instance, Chinese is an interesting language because it evolved from a language that used polysyllabic words into one with monosyllabic words (where tones were used to distinguish between words with a similar phonological structure). So the Chinese language(s) meets your criteria for efficiency.
And it gets better! — at least from the way you want to spec out your conlang — Chinese doesn't have verb tenses — so no conjugations! But, funny — but Mandarin may be evolving into a polysyllabic language again. I don't speak Mandarin, but I'm told that all the terms required for modern civilization are causing Mandarin speakers to coin new words by combining two or more traditional words.
Also, one of the unique features of Chinese is that its writing system can be read by Mandarin speakers, Cantonese speakers, Hokkien speakers, etc. So, that's as if Germans, French, and English could mutually understand a common written language. In fact, Japanese Kanji is based on Chinese traditional characters, and my Japanese friends tell me that thay can puzzle out the meaning of written Chinese. Of course, the learning curve is much steeper for Chinese characters than for alphabets, but wouldn't it be cool to have a universal written language based on characters even if the verbal languages were distinctly different?
* JRR Tolkien coined the term glossopoeia (language + making) for what he did with his made-up languages.
You can theorize all you want, but natural human language will stubbornly refuse to follow your rules.
You can get decent spelling if you have a central authority and are willing to periodically change the spelling of words to keep up with language drift but stuff like "no irregular verbs" will be a lot harder.
I take it that there would be no accents, no dialects, no slang, no phonological drift? No kids making up stuff or changing the pronunciations or chopping the endings off of words to sound "cool"? A single received hive-queen's speech that is never deviated from? No breakaway renegade provinces who resist the dictates of the People's Language Authority?
As for more suggestions: no tone (except for emphasis and stress), no grammatical gender, no irregular nouns, no conjugation or declension, no agreement in case or number, and regular stress patterns. If redundancy becomes important, maybe have a numeric identifier that can attach to words, so "Mark-2 ate-2 his-1 food" clearly indicates that Mark ate person number 1's food, whoever that was established as being. Short helper particles can be added when extra clarity is necessary, but omitted in the normal cases in which it is not. If modifiers go after the modified, pluralization could be interchangeable with a particle meaning "multiple".
Various phonetic sounds can be easy to confuse, so you'd want to make sure that words separated by only one or two small noises have distinct enough meanings that slight mis-hearings or mis-speakings won't cause confusion. ("Pear" and "bear", for instance, or "cot" and "caught".)
"I take it that there would be no accents, no dialects, no slang, no phonological drift? No kids making up stuff or changing the pronunciations or chopping the endings off of words to sound "cool"? A single received hive-queen's speech that is never deviated from? No breakaway renegade provinces who resist the dictates of the People's Language Authority?"
Correct. While normally libertarian, this is one area where I support the government reigning with the utmost brutality.
"no tone (except for emphasis and stress)"
I'm not sure about this. Tonal variations, indicated by accent marks over written syllables, could improve the speed of communication.
"no grammatical gender"
Agree. Gendered language seems like a huge waste. Consider Spanish, which makes itself needlessly harder to learn by forcing people to memorize gendered articles ("el", "la" and the terrible "le") that must be matched correctly with nouns, even if the nouns don't have properties that are intuitively male or female. For example, "the table" is "la mesa" even though there is nothing feminine about a table.
Also, all Spanish nouns seem to end in "a" or "o" to signify whether they are feminine or masculine, which adds an extra letter and syllable to all of them, making them longer to write and to say. They seem to compensate by talking faster.
"no irregular nouns"
I agree.
"no conjugation or declension, no agreement in case or number"
I agree.
"and regular stress patterns."
What does this mean?
"If redundancy becomes important, maybe have a numeric identifier that can attach to words, so "Mark-2 ate-2 his-1 food" clearly indicates that Mark ate person number 1's food, whoever that was established as being. "
How about we just make it a rule that, whenever such confusion could arise, the speaker/writer cannot use pronouns? That sentence would be "Mark ate the other person's food."
"Short helper particles can be added when extra clarity is necessary, but omitted in the normal cases in which it is not."
In other words, you'd provide emphasis by doing *this*?
"If modifiers go after the modified, pluralization could be interchangeable with a particle meaning "multiple"."
Give an example.
"Various phonetic sounds can be easy to confuse, so you'd want to make sure that words separated by only one or two small noises have distinct enough meanings that slight mis-hearings or mis-speakings won't cause confusion. ("Pear" and "bear", for instance, or "cot" and "caught".)"
I agree. AI would be enormously useful building a vocabulary that met this and the other requirements.
> could improve the speed of communication
I don't think verbal speed should be a goal to optimize for, at least not past a certain threshold which should be easy to achieve.
> "and regular stress patterns" What does this mean?
Tone on individual words should be, if not absent, then at least predictable by looking at the word. And shouldn't require separate markings, or memorization.
> How about we just make it a rule that, whenever such confusion could arise, the speaker/writer cannot use pronouns?
I don't know how well that would work in practice; pronouns seem very common in languages, but I'm unfamiliar with the linguistic research, and these days it's hard to search for it because of the politics surrounding gendered pronouns. Another proposal I've seen is to have pronouns for letters of the name, something looking like the Japanese A-ko, B-ko, etc. Perfect clarity is impractical, but providing a variety of pronoun options can make simple things easy and complex things possible.
> In other words, you'd provide emphasis by doing this?
No, I meant that there are languages with markers for parts of speech, like subjects, but sometimes they can be omitted if it's obvious in context.
> Give an example.
Actually, I was just thinking of the standard English "-s" suffix. Maybe the language could distinguish between singular, dual, and multiple. Or maybe it could dispense with grammatical number entirely, and add particle for cases in which it's important. (Linguistic note, in case you didn't know - a lot of the case system used in languages like Latin, is believed to have developed from base words combining with following particles. There's a whole cycle where the particles merge onto the word and become suffixes in a case system, and then wear off gradually, while new particles are added to allow for meaning, and then the cycle repeats.)
>Also, all Spanish nouns seem to end in "a" or "o" to signify whether they are feminine or masculine, which adds an extra letter and syllable to all of them, making them longer to write and to say. They seem to compensate by talking faster.
I suspect you already know this, but that's not what they're compensating for.
>How about we just make it a rule that, whenever such confusion could arise, the speaker/writer cannot use pronouns? That sentence would be "Mark ate the other person's food."
But confusion *could* arise from the use of pronouns in just about any sentence. It hardly ever does, because context is a thing, and so are informal conventions about when to use a pronoun and when not. If you're going to fix what arguably isn't broken, the only way that is strict enough for your fiat language is to ban pronouns altogether. Including "it."
> nouns should always be before their pronouns
Should "pronouns" be "adjectives"?
Yes. My mistake.
In a similar spirit to 5, words with subtle but important differences should sound clearly distinct from one another, as the similarities make it harder to distinguish them by context. We tend to see this occur organically in jargon, such names for different ropes in sailing (halyards, sheets, lines, etc) and names for different configurations of dimensional lumber in house framing (stud, header, footer, rafter, joist, etc). I bring this up specifically because this is a common mistake I've observed in constructed languages which often follow Wilkins's approach of building words out of components indicating subcategories in an ontology, so for example "dog" and "wolf" would differ only by the last letter.
I actually prefer Wilkins' approach because it is more logical.
Unfortunately that might make it incompatible with how language is typically used by humans.
Logical but with poor error-correction properties.
Yes, I think the temptation to create a taxonomic lexicon is difficult to resist for a certain sort of systematizing mind...
Sounds reasonable for the purpose stated.
People sometimes question why, like bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds, humans are drawn to flowers. Unlike the others, we aren't pollinators. There's no clear evolutionary reason why humans should find flowers aesthetically appealing.
It occurred to me today while thinking about how next spring I will plant the seeds produced by my Mexican sunflowers this fall that perhaps humans and other primates have helped scatter and plant the seeds of flowers, and therefore perhaps some flowers have indeed co-evolved with primates along with their respective pollinators. Do other apes ever decorate themselves with flowers? Do they eat them? If the latter, some flowers may have evolved much like fruit.
What would this hypothesis predict? That flowers in places humans mostly haven't been should look less appealing to them than those in places where they have been frequently?
Edit: Perhaps a simpler explanation is humans simply like bright colors. But then why that? Sheer novelty is sexually attractive, I suppose. Put flowers in your hair it's going to draw attention.
Plants and animals are brighter in the tropics, and I think that would be the case in the absence of primates.
Case in point: Children enjoy collecting pine cones and horse chestnuts, although they're unedible.
Aren't flowers often the precursors to fruit? In that case, it's beneficial for flowers to be attractive even if the flowers themselves aren't edible, because they signify where food may be in the future. Relatedy, flowers are an indication of a healthy ecosystem. In times of drought or other stress, plants will produce fewer and smaller flowers. Anything which we associate with life, especially new life, will probably be seen as beautiful or desirable in some way.
I just recently wrote an on precisely this subject (not mentioning flowers in particular, but it readily explains the flowers). I am claiming that beauty is the evolutionary reward for productive engagement with sensory signals that contains a optimal amount of decodable structure - signals that are entropically fine tuned. In my view, we do not have to ask "why is X beautiful?" individually for each X, and then find a separate evolutionary answer every time. Instead, I claim that we have a generalized hunger to try to learn the non-trivial yet computationally accessible structures that we see in sensory input. It is evolutionary beneficial for humans to be able to decode structures in sound and vision. This lets us hear predators over the hiss of the wind, see subtle tracks, identify poisonous plants by their colors, see subtle facial expressions in the fellow caveman that is about to attack us.
My thesis is that beauty is the evolutionary reward given to encourage the behavior that makes us better extracting and predicting patterns in sensory input. A flower is an object that both has structure that we can detect relatively easily, while at the same time being somewhat rare in their colors, providing novelty. This encourages us to engage. Rather than type out the whole argument again, I would invite you to look at my Substack essay "Beauty as entropic fine-tuning" if you want more.
If I understand correctly, your thesis suggests humans are rewarded by experiencing beauty, analogous to a dopamine rush, which temporarily rewards the observer and also encourages the observer to seek future rushes, which requires developing their observation/listening skills. Although you make clear that beauty isn't the exact same thing as art, this thesis isn't hard to understand in the domain of art, where a classical music fan doesn't typically start out listening to Schoenberg but more likely appreciates Mozart or Haydn first and maybe then the later Beethoven works and then maybe Mahler before appreciating 12-tone music. In other words, an increasing appreciation of subtlety and tasteful dissonance. We see the same in other musical genres from Dixieland jazz to freeform jazz, from pop to punk and death metal, and in other artistic media: whether it's painting, poetry, or architecture (to shoot some sacred cows here) the connoisseur tends to appreciate more abstraction and difficulty the more they experience the medium.
In other words, the more attention one pays with their eyes or ears or brains to various patterns, musical visual, whatever, the more they are able to be rewarded by, dare I say, higher levels of beauty. The evolutionary purpose for this phenomenon is to encourage one to pay attention to their environment, whether that means listening more carefully to it or observing it more closely.
I'm still unclear how the link works, however, between listening closely in a non-musical environment to a musical one, for instance. Is the ancient hunter who listens more closely to the sounds of the forest during the day rewarded by appreciating the songs around the campfire at night? I find that hard to believe or at least not intuitive. Because for one thing, the whole tribe would be listening to the same songs. The hunter with the more sophisticated ear for detecting the sound of wooly mammoth hoofs as they slink through the putrid marsh isn't, I don't think, or at least it's very hard to prove, going to the primitive music on a higher level.
Or am I missing something in the thesis?
Thanks for that wonderful description of the journey through the world classical music! Everything you wrote felt spot on to me.
As for the final part, on the evolutionary aspect. In my mind, the reverse of what your wrote is the evolutionary most relevant part. The hunter that pays close attention to the music around the campfire will be better able to distinguish the sound of a woolly mammoth hoof from some other animal step (in the case of the mammoth, its sheer size might make this job easy of course :)). That fine appreciation of timbre is skill that generalizes beyond musical sound. Carefully listening to the timbre of the flute might also help you analyze natural timbres that aid your survival. I do agree that it is challenging to empirically prove this. But as one piece of data: take a skilled electronic music producer and play some natural sound for them. Often they are able to imitate that sound closely with a synthesizer, indicating a generalized capability of analyzing natural sounds from the practice of music.
It's an interesting thesis but I'd want to see more evidence for it before believing it is likely true. Even if you had a time machine, it would be a difficult idea to test.
Along slightly different lines, I'm guessing you've read the theory presented here about the origins of human music? https://meltingasphalt.com/music-in-human-evolution/
I tend to buy that because it fits so many different pieces together.
Indeed, I am planning to start digging in the literature. There seems to be some work on the relation between music, entropy and predictive processing.
Also, thank you for the link! I have not read it, but I am now planning to do that.
I read the essay. It's an interesting thesis. I'll think about it a while.
Q: Does this foolishness qualify as "hard" science fiction? (6min-video, can be viewed 2x)
https://x.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1805287170980053004
O’Brien must suffer
Sounds a bit like "Demolition Man".
I suppose it's just taking the Anthropic procedure and a) assuming it gets more sophisticated, and b) assuming it can eventually apply to human bio-neural-networks.
So I'd say it's "speculative", rather than "hard". For "hard", they'd need to have more numbers, and equations, and limits on what can and cannot be done.
I think Chaim playing on the title of the DS9 episode “Hard Time”.
But it could just be a weird coincidence.
I never saw that one.
Finally, the long-awaited crossover of Blade Runner and A Clockwork Orange.
Random thought: astronauts are highly-trained, highly educated individuals. People say everyone is equal, but I submit that astronauts, by virtue of their training and physical condition, are superior people. Further evidence: they need not put on their pants one leg at a time, but both simultaneously.
Have you read the Right Stuff? Astronaut training has no doubt changed a lot, but not all the original 7 were the brightest tools in the box. Even exercise was frowned upon - the other astronauts thought John Glenn going for a run every day was not proper. What mattered was having the right attitude to risk, they were almost all test pilots and several had combat experience. So superior in certain ways definitely but maybe not as superior as the cult of "being an Astronaut" would suggest.
A City on Mars has a long section talking about the screening processes and rigorous training that astronauts go through. And in particular how the current solution to "space travel is hard on the body" is just "only send the absolutely healthiest people possible", which doesn't generalize well.
When people say everyone is equal, they mean morally or legally or in dignity, but I don't think anyone is so foolish as to believe that everyone is equally smart, or wise, or brave, or strong. Chesterton wrote a bit on this in his book "What I Saw in America"
"(The American) may at least understand what Jefferson and Lincoln meant, and he may possibly find some assistance in this task by reading what they said. He may realise that equality is not some crude fairy tale about all men being equally tall or equally tricky; which we not only cannot believe but cannot believe in anybody believing. It is an absolute of morals by which all men have a value invariable and indestructible and a dignity as intangible as death. He may at least be a philosopher and see that equality is an idea; and not merely one of these soft-headed sceptics who, having risen by low tricks to high places, drink bad champagne in tawdry hotel lounges, and tell each other twenty times over, with unwearied iteration, that equality is an illusion."
That's a minor plot point in "Count to a Trillion".
What's even better is if someone is born in space, in the void between the stars. They become the natural ruler of all us landworms!
IIRC it was a monopoly on orbital strike antimatter that granted the crew their magisterum?
I forget whether the antimatter was ever directly used for orbital bombardment, but yes, I think both things were involved in establishing rule by the landing party. But the (bullshit) justification propagated to the common people seemed to be more about inherent aristocracy?
"Superior" means "above", right? I think everyone can agree that people in space are above the Earth and the people on it.
(I love that one of Google's synonyms for "superior" is "uppity".)
Not sure, but that may only apply to one hemisphere at a time.
Not if we maintain a world-view where the center of the earth is the center of the universe! Then all astronauts are always "up".
There are many positive correlations between physical height and success, but astronauts can't be taller than a little over 6 feet. QED astronauts must not be very successful, or superior.
The concept of "superior people" is inherently ill-defined though.
I think IQ race realists are accused of calling Jews and East Asians "superior," because intuitively everyone knows higher intelligence makes a superior being. The differences between average people doesn't matter that much, but I'm perfectly comfortable with saying Roger Penrose is a superior person compared to a given individual with Down syndrome.
Only people who value intelligence in and of itself (i.e. nerds) "intuitively" know thar higher intelligence makes a superior being. This attitude is so routinely mocked that I'm not sure how you missed it.
I said intuitively because it's not something people like to admit to themselves, for myriad reasons. Our superiority over ants and dogs is 100% downstream of intelligence, and everyone knows that. Most of the time this doesn't apply to humans because in the broader view of life in the universe, the difference between 90 iq and 110 iq doesn't really matter, they're both humans who can cooperate and successfully raise a family. But when you're talking about differences so vast that something like an IQ test couldn't even hope to capture them, real fucking significant differences that we care about start to emerge, and moral language starts to become appropriate.
I don't think that "everyone secretly believes what I believe" works as an argument. Again, nerds value intelligence. Normal folk value other things: looks, charisma, athletic ability, piety, whatever.
A large chunk of humanity would chuck Penrose in an incinerator for being an atheist, for instance.
Update to Tylenol & pregnancy:
Very large sample population study in Sweden compares siblings and finds no effects on ADHD, autism. When not comparing siblings, finds a small negative effect.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/study-reveals-no-causal-link-between-neurodevelopmental-disorders-acetaminophen-exposure-before-birth
I've been thinking about the whole notion of 'conflict vs mistake theory'
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/
I'd like to ask people: once you recognize that dichotomy, what do you *do* with that knowledge?
I use the dichotomy to force my mind into the frame "Actually, this person may just have terminal values that are the opposite of yours, and the fact that their proposal would hurt you is the *whole point.*"
Not very comforting, but what are you going to do?
I think it's mostly worth applying to your own thinking.
We all have a little bit of conflict theorists and a little bit of mistake theorist in us, and there's no thought more tempting than "Wow, this particular policy which just happens to advantage the people I like over the people I dislike also just happens to be the objectively best policy!"
It's a matter of trust. Conflict theorists have low trust; mistake theorists have high trust.
options for mistake theorists:
A) stop pouring energy into new ideas that assume unanimous trust.
B) patch up vulnerabilities in extant political programs.
C) try to build rapport with conflict theorists.
D) excommunicate the conflict theorists to their own island within the archipelago.
options for conflict theorists:
E) it's open season on the naive and gullible.
F) be more open to cooperation.
The failure mode of conflict theorists is that they win by establishing a bunch of social truths that must not be questioned, but that are factually wrong, and then have a hard time achieving the goals they were fighting for because they've ruled a bunch of important facts out-of-bounds to win the political battle.
I add it to the collection of lenses that I can view the world through. Sometimes it's the right tool for the job, but (as with almost all tools) most times it isn't.
Practically, when I come across reflexive mistake theorists, it helps me come up with conversational gambits I can use to get them to recognize the signs of conflict. (Because we've almost all seen conflict of one sort or another, so usually (unless they're using mistake theory as part of conflict theory) I can nudge them around to a point where they can see things from another point of view.
It doesn't help me so much with conflict theorists, mostly because I personally tend to be geared toward nudging conflict theorists toward the recognition of mistake theory. And at that point, it becomes more about the differences between individual intent and ascribed group intent.
Its helpful when discussing things with people. If you don't recognize that dichotomy you can spend a lot of time approaching a problem from a mistake theory perspective and getting befuddled by the conflict theory person you're discussing things with. Once you understand the dichotomy you could then either avoid the discussion (if you don't think it will be productive) or change the discussion to match your interlocuter's approach.
Wouldn't it just be enough to notice when things don't seem to be getting anywhere in a conversation (for any reason) and then disengage? It's what I do; it's always possible there's just a pervasive language/terminology barrier, or a too large inferential distance, and it's valuable to have a stopping point and acknowledge that the expected pay-off isn't worth the effort of finding common communicative ground first.
That said, I personally don't use the conflict theory / mistake theory distinction at all - the way I've understood those models, they just don't form useful categories in my particular overall world model. (You can also read that as "I don't believe the distinction exists" plus acknowledgement of subjectivity.) Which is to say, grain of salt.
Reliability-of-wikipedia watch:
I've complained here in the past, when wikipedia has come up in the comments, that it seems to be totally unconcerned with whether the information it reports (1) is true; or (2) accurately reflects the sources that it cites.
My example has been the page on French toast, which for a long time reported that a French toast recipe appeared in a second-century Roman cookbook, despite the talk page accurately documenting that this was false.
On what I believe was the second occasion of my complaining here, someone (not me) took it upon themselves to delete the offending text from the wikipedia article rather than trying to actually get a correction through.
Ever since then people have been putting it back, with comments making it clear they have absolutely no idea what they're saying. People (often me) have been re-deleting the spurious material occasionally, but this is totally absurd.
Wikipedia defenders: what gives? How do you imagine this is supposed to work? Why, in your opinion, is wikipedia failing 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗯𝗮𝗱𝗹𝘆?
Eh, I’ve had the same experience with people not responding to my overtures on the Talk page and just reverting my edits without comment.
I too wish to understand this sorcery of bold text in the comments.
𝔲𝔫𝔦𝔠𝔬𝔡𝔢 𝔦𝔰 𝔶𝔬𝔲𝔯 𝔣𝔯𝔦𝔢𝔫𝔡
Three thoughts
(1) I don't understand what specific part of wikipedia you are objecting to, or what you want done policy-wise. There are many things I dislike about WP, and stupid, biased and lazy editors is one of them. But unless you are merely venting "my God wikipedia editors can be so stupid!" then what do you want done? This particular problem, unlike many others, doesn't seem to be caused by specific policies or structural elements of wikipedia that could be centrally changed: it's an inevitable effect of anyone being able to edit, which is the entire essence of wikipedia.
(2) I do think wikipedia as a crowd-sourced project, even if all its political agenda crap and bureaucratic arrogance were dealt with, is bad and dangerous in a sense. But it's not bad and dangerous in itself. It's only bad and dangerous because people frequently forget that it is in fact crowd sourced by random people, and fail to apply the extreme scepticism appropriate to the knowledge that every single article is in part written by randos on the internet. This fact should be mentioned *every single time WP is linked* (since judging from their willingness to believe something on WP, almost everyone constantly forgets this). Of course people should be appying a hundred times more scrutny than they do to the writings of experts and authorities. That number is off the chart for the writings of mobs of internet busybodies.
(3) How the hell did you put bold text in your comment? I thought Substack didn't support that?
ⓤⓝⓘⓒⓞⓓⓔ ⓗⓐⓢ ⓨⓞⓤ ⓒⓞⓥⓔⓡⓔⓓ
https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/mathematical_alphanumeric_symbols/utf8test.htm
Huh, thanks. And now I have to ask 2 further questions:
1. How long has substack comments supported this?
2. How the hell does a community of at least one third IT professionals (and probably even higher for regular commenters) hardly ever make use of this?
*I* have had an excuse for using *'s around words in place of italics. What's all the programmers' excuse?
Pycea's ACX plugin converts single stars to italics, so I don't even think about it anymore.
It's much easier to type a pair of asterisks than it is to go to a utility website and ask for unicodified text to copy and paste into a separate window.
> *I* have had an excuse for using *'s around words in place of italics. What's all the programmers' excuse?
We're used to Markdown [1], where *…* and **…** are used to italic and bold text.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown
I think that as a rule, Wikipedia is more reliable than somebody's unsourced opinion in a comment. So it is appropriate to reply to a comment with a Wikipedia citation. However, it is also appropriate to reply to a Wikipedia citation with an intelligent sourced argument for why in this case Wikipedia is wrong. But in the absence of such an argument, a reasonable default for someone with limited time can be to trust Wikipedia.
I agree with Alex in seeing nothing wrong with the French Toast page.
Wikipedia does have many problems but I don't see a problem with your example and so I'm not sure I understood what bothers you.
Wikipedia correctly says that The Oxford Companion to Food considers Apicius' recipe related to the modern French toast and notes that there is a major difference (no eggs). Which part of it is false? In what way is the reader deceived?
The problem is the persistent efforts to return the page to its earlier state, in which it said that the recipe in the Apicius did use eggs. As I've already noted in this very comment thread, the reason the page currently notes that eggs were not used in that recipe is that I personally corrected it yesterday. Do you want me to give Wikipedia credit for that? Wikipedia is taking the position that I should stop trying to prevent it from misinforming people. That's bad, not good.
Since the initial correction to the page, I've checked in on it on an erratic, every-several-months basis, and without fail someone has decided that they know through personal revelation that Apicius included eggs in his recipe. The facts aren't going to stop them. You think there's nothing about this that should bother me?
Btw I think you do need to give credit to Wikipedia for making it possible to fix this issue so easily
What do you mean? Several different people have noted the issue, it's explained on the talk page, it's explained in the edit history, and the issue is still not fixed. What would a difficult process look like?
The way it looks with every other popular source, mainly the news media? On the rare occasion anything gets corrected at all, the correction is hidden or buried with equivocation.
Thanks for the clarification, now I understand your frustration. I think this stems directly from one of the main Wikipedia policies, which says that the content should be supported by published sources, rather than the editors' knowledge and inferences.
In this case there are sources that differ and naturally Wikipedia reflects this discrepancy. For that matter, it's not inconceivable that there were good reasons for that author to impute eggs into Apicius' text. Personally I doubt it, but in many cases we can't be sure we know *the truth*.
Since there are plenty of errors in published scholarly articles and books, not to mention newspaper articles, this policy does cause a lot of problems. However the real question is what you propose to do about it. The obvious ideas have no less obvious problems. If you only let experts edit articles, you'll likely end like Nupedia. If you let Wikipedia editors add or change content even when it's not supported by sources, the reliability might even worsen, as the average Wikipedia editor is not necessarily smarter or better informed than an average journalist
> In this case there are sources that differ and naturally Wikipedia reflects this discrepancy.
I'm really getting the sense that you're not reading my comments. It's possible that there are sources that differ. But the wikipedia article has never cited any such sources. This isn't a case of wikipedia reflecting that different books say different things. They only ever cite the Joseph Dommers Vehling translation, and it says the opposite of what they claim that it says.
I do see eggs mentioned here https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/29728/pg29728-images.html, am I missing something?
Okay, scrabbling around on the Internet, there's a lack of the original Latin text so we're reliant on English translations.
The addition of beaten eggs seems to be from one done by "Joseph Dommers Vehling in a very limited edition by Walter M. Hill (1936), which in turn was reprinted by Dover Publications in 1977. It is in the public domain" as per this website (very early web page so a lot of eye-watering colour choices).
The crux of the problem seems to be here:
"Vehling's edition is amply supplied with footnotes, combining a sort of textual criticism (although giving the readings of modern editions rather than those of the manuscripts) and commentary on the subject matter. ...As a professional chef, he also fleshes out some of Apicius' stenographic instructions: in [brackets] in the print edition, in color in my Web transcription."
So it would seem to be that Vehling felt this was indeed an early version of French toast and he just 'tidied up' the recipe by adding in the 'missing' eggs. I can't reproduce the colour used by the transcription, so back to brackets for it:
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Apicius/7*.html#VII
296 Another Sweet Dish
Aliter dulcia
Break [slice] fine white bread, crust removed, into rather large pieces which soak in milk [and beaten eggs] fry in oil, cover with honey and serve.1
1 "French" Toast, indeed! — Sapienti sat!
The original recipe, sans Vehling's editorialising, seems to be: take white bread, remove crusts, slice/break into large pieces, soak in milk, fry in oil, pour over honey, serve.
EDIT: Latin transcription here:
https://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/Chronologia/Lspost04/Apicius/api_re07.html
3. Aliter dulcia: siligineos rasos frangis, et buccellas maiores facies. in lacte infundis, frigis [et] in oleo, mel superfundis et inferes.
Google Translate Latin to English (which seems to be absolutely terrible), there is no mention of eggs:
"Sweets in a different way: break the rye shavings, and make the biscuits bigger. pour it in milk, cool [and] in oil, pour honey over it and bring it down."
I'll quote the recipe in question:
> BREAK [slice] FINE WHITE BREAD, CRUST REMOVED, INTO RATHER LARGE PIECES WHICH SOAK IN MILK [and beaten eggs] FRY IN OIL, COVER WITH HONEY AND SERVE
You might notice some oddities here. They are explained at the beginning of the book:
> EXPLANATION OF TYPESETTING, ABBREVIATIONS, AND SYSTEM OF NUMBERING
> The original ancient text as presented and rendered in the present translation is printed in capital letters.
> Matter in parenthesis () is original. Matter in square brackets [] is contributed by the translator.
So, in order to claim that eggs were included in the second-century text, as opposed to the twentieth-century text, you'd want to see that the word "EGGS" appeared in capital letters, outside of [square brackets]. That's what the source says. Unless you think I'm misreading it?
Because it's crowdsourced. It relies on the crowd to both post information and correct it. What that means is that the very motivated, be it by genuine obsession with a topic or malice, will pour the most effort into editing, correcting, deleting, and curating the pages on that pet topic. So if they think "yes the Romans ate French toast" they will be hell-bent on making sure nobody deletes that or calls it false. Relying on "the crowd" means, in effect, relying on "the mob" and we all know what the mob turns out to be like.
What the overseers or monitors or whoever is supposed to be in charge are doing, I have no idea. *Is* there anyone officially in charge at a higher level, apart from Jimmy Wales constantly begging for money to keep him in yachts and tropical islands? In one way, it's too big for anyone to effectively monitor - unless you have tons of free time and obsession level dedication, handling pages upon pages of edits, reversions, and fights over the French toast is something you are not going to do unless there are official complaints of Bad Think (this is racist or the rest of the list).
https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/wikipedia-wikimedia-foundation-donate.html
"It’s important to note that WMF staff do not directly write or curate any of the content on Wikipedia as part of their job duties. That painstaking work is done by Wikipedia’s volunteer editors, who provide free labor to the site for various reasons. Some of them consider it a public service—and some of them simply find the work itself interesting as a hobby. (The latter seems more common, actually, in my experience.)"
Cue all the "they do it for free/internet jannies" jokes.
As I see it there are only two ways of running a site.
Either you use volunteers - in which case they do what they want to do. The only control you have over them is to ban them, but who says the replacement volunteers will be any better.
Or else you use salaried workers - in which case you fire the ones who do not meet the conditions set by management, and management in turn is controlled by the need to raise funds. But it seems completely impractical to pay enough people to write a site as big as Wikipedia.
So I don't really see a better alternative to the current model.
> So I don't really see a better alternative to the current model.
Well, the Gwern essay linked in the thread observes that...
(A) English wikipedia implemented a bunch of policies;
(B) During this process, the quality of wikipedia went down rather than up; and
(C) The problems experienced by English wikipedia were not mirrored in other-language wikipedias, suggesting that the passage of time wasn't responsible.
I'd say there's a pretty obvious place to look for a better alternative to the current model.
Wikipedia's criterion for putting something in is that it is verifiable, not that it is true. If a quality source falsely reports something stupid, then it can stay on Wikipedia basically indefinitely. Sometimes this can be done for ideological/partisan reasons, but also it can happen just because. I presume nobody is ideologically dedicated to the idea that French toast was in a 1st century Roman cookbook, but some otherwise-reliable source says it, so you're stuck with that until you can overwhelm it.
(The decision to retreat from arbitrating truth to arbitrating quality sources is a defensible one; obviously, it's harder to have a clear, consistent, reliable way to arbitrate truth than it is to have a clear, consistent, reliable way to arbitrate source quality.)
> Wikipedia's criterion for putting something in is that it is verifiable, not that it is true.
I read a story about some author (famous enough to have a wikipedia page, but not so famous that I'd ever heard of him) who tried to correct an error on his own page and it was immediately reverted because "citation needed". He made a big enough stink that some media wrote an article about it, and now his page says that the fact/error is disputed and cites that article.
The wikipedia page for Geoff Muldaur says "singer, guitarist and composer". I know he also plays clarinet and piano because I have seen him do that in concert. I know better than to try to correct his wikipedia page with this info. "citation needed".
> Wikipedia's criterion for putting something in is that it is verifiable, not that it is true. If a quality source falsely reports something stupid, then it can stay on Wikipedia basically indefinitely.
That isn't how wikipedia's editors understand things. My original complaint was that I marked the claim about French toast "failed verification" because the cited source stated the opposite of what wikipedia reported that it said. This was immediately reverted on the grounds that "verification" is purely a question of whether the source exists, not of whether it supports the claim that is cited to it.
You're free to write whatever you want, and cite it to any book you want, as long as the book exists. Wikipedia is specifically uninterested in what the book says.
> I presume nobody is ideologically dedicated to the idea that French toast was in a 1st century Roman cookbook, but some otherwise-reliable source says it
No, there is no source, other than the wikipedia article itself, that has ever said this. The wikipedia article was always cited to sources that said the opposite.
The "Failed verification" tag most definitely covers sources which exist but do not support the claim.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Failed_verification
Don't tell me; that's exactly what I wanted to use it for. Tell wikipedia. They don't agree with you.
You mean, tell the subset of Wikipedia editors who abuse the rules.
No, I don't. Wikipedia's actual policies are what actually happens on wikipedia. If this is how wikipedia's editors behave, either this is a problem in the eyes of wikipedia, or it isn't, but wikipedia is the party that needs to be told.
politics
If wikipedia wanted to change, it probably could, but in a world were the first paragraph of wikipedia is read off automatics by several services its to valuable to get manipulate words.
I think as with many things, the proper comparison is not with some theoretical ideal, but with practical alternatives.
Wikipedia is extremely imperfect. But is it worse than the alternatives? In my experience, it is _generally_ relatively trustworthy, and the fact that it sometimes gets things wrong (and even that it stubbornly refuses to correct them), is an acceptable flaw.
In other words, I think the world would be worse off if Wikipedia just disappeared. We shouldn't shy away from admitting its faults (probably the worst one is that Wikipedia is particularly untrustworthy on the most politically salient, and therefore arguably most important, topics), but we should also be willing to admit what a boon it has been to human knowledge. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and from my perspective, Wikipedia is very, very good.
> the fact that it sometimes gets things wrong (and even that it stubbornly refuses to correct them), is an acceptable flaw.
That's two out of three phases. We had a phase where it got the facts wrong, a following phase where it refused to correct the error, but now we're in the phase where the error has been... glossed over, and Wikipedia is devoting significant effort to putting it back. Attempting to wrong what has already been put right isn't "refusing to correct an error".
> We shouldn't shy away from admitting its faults (probably the worst one is that Wikipedia is particularly untrustworthy on the most politically salient, and therefore arguably most important, topics)
My early exposure to wikipedia was all math articles, and I didn't see what the problem was supposed to be. If you leave the math articles, it becomes clear. :/
Math wikipedia isnt bad, but physics and chemistry are much better IMO. In math you can read an article giving you the definition of a concept and some examples, and not mention any of the three most important theorems about it at all. Its relatively complete and doesnt have errors visible at my level, but the "networked" aspect of it is severely lacking once youre a little off the beaten path.
A lot of the chemistry articles are also decent.
Wikipedia's main power is that anybody can fix it, just as anybody can break it. For the most part this averages out to be alright: case in point, as of 6/24 the Wikipedia article on French Toast says "Some authors consider the recipe for Aliter Dulcia (translated as 'Another sweet dish') included in the Apicius, a 1st century CE Ancient Roman cuisine cookbook, "not very different" from modern French toast, although it does not involve eggs." That seems fair to me: it's not claiming that there is a recipe for French toast in a Roman cookbook, it's claiming that some people consider a recipe in a Roman cookbook to be kind of like French toast, except without one of the main ingredients.
Yes, I put that language back in - yesterday - after someone deleted it, insisting in their edit comment that the cited source shows that the recipe in the Apicius included eggs. And I got a message on the talk page for my edit from the same idiot who made the spurious edit, complaining that they were correct to interpret the source as saying the opposite of what it says.
Wait and see how long it is until the wikipedia page once again tells you that Apicius wrote a Roman recipe for French toast made with eggs.
Please keep us posted.
I think Wikipedia's heyday is long past and instead of attracting editors full of goodwill it now attracts mostly cranks. Someone should probably save a version of Wikipedia from ~2010 which could then be regarded as "The best of all possible Wikipedias". Anyway, that's going to be my new crank view.
It is, Gwern thoroughly documented the gutting of Wikipedia's editors and major changes in admin and overall direction since 2010 or so. 85% of edits come from 3% of people, and even participation from those 3% fell precipitously since 2010:
https://gwern.net/inclusionism
Gwern was a prolific editor and contributor, but AFAIK completely gave up around 2017 or so.
> Gwern was a prolific editor and contributor, but AFAIK completely gave up around 2017 or so.
He's still around if you look at Special:Contributions, but he only works on redirects these days.
First party authorities can mostly definitely share their expertise. They just have to share it in the form of references to reliable publications they have published. Not in the form of off-the-cuff comments by some internet account who may or may not be the person they claim to be.
There is a list of publications considered "reliable" by Wikipedia, and it's mostly the ones you would expect, although of course there are debates about which publications to include on the fringes.
Yeah, that seems to be it:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-does-wikipedia-make-money-rozzariodigitalagency-uvhle
"The Early Days: How It All Began Initially, Wikipedia was part of a larger project named Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia written by experts. However, Nupedia's stringent editorial process led to slow content growth. The introduction of a wiki model, allowing anyone to edit and contribute, transformed the project. This move marked a pivotal shift from expert-driven content to a more democratic, community-based approach."
Now if we were all perfect little angels, this would work out fine. But humans are not perfect little angels, we have biases and prejudices and hold grudges and are convinced of our righteousness, so if we get the opportunity to make sure That Lot (who are, of course, completely bad and wrong) don't get to spread their horrible propaganda and disinformation, we'll leap upon it. "Reliable sources" then become "what *I* consider a reliable source" which is "sticks to the party line".
> if you can hack the "reliable source" rule, by defining your friends as reliable and your enemies as not, you've zero-dayed our whole civilization's official source of truth, and you'd better believe that political activists are very aware of that.
I was interested to learn, after seeing a reference to The Crying Game elsewhere, that the wikipedia article for that movie was revised in 𝟮𝟬𝟬𝟳 to state that the transvestite was actually transgender, not a transvestite. This is far earlier than I believe there was any public awareness of the trans fad, and wildly anachronistic to the movie.
The distinction between transvestite and a transexual was well know well before 2007, both in psychiatrist's manuals such as the DSM,. and in opinion iof the trans ciommunity.Not anachronistic for the time frame the movie is set in.
(Now, of course, there's an "actually, the distinction is more complicated than that" argument that can be made)
Well, the DSM-III does recognize "transsexualism". There are a few problems with your argument.
1. The wikipedia page says "transexual" *now*. It's said that for almost two whole months. Before that, it said "transgender". Before that, "transwoman". In 2007, as I stated above, it was revised to say that Dil was "transgender", not "transexual".
2. Dil is not transexual in the language of the time or according to the DSM-III criteria, which lead off by noting that "the essential features of this heterogeneous disorder are a persistent sense of discomfort and inappropriateness about one's anatomic sex and a persistent wish to be rid of one's genitals and to live as a member of the other sex". The movie provides evidence for up to one of those features, living as a member of the other sex, assuming it's normal female behavior to cruise gay bars. The DSM-III closes by offering, under the heading "differential diagnosis", the criterion that "in both transvestism and transsexualism there may be cross-dressing. However, in transvestism that has not evolved into transsexualism there is no wish to be rid of one's own genitals."
3. According to the page as it currently stands, the relationship between Dil and Fergus begins with Dil taking Fergus to a gay bar. Does that suggest to you more that Dil is trying to present as a woman, or as a gay man?
4. Consistent with all of the above, the page's reference to Dil as a transexual currently carries a little protest footnote observing that the movie's director has specifically explained that Dil is simply a gay transvestite.
So, here in Australia nuclear power has recently become a political football, with the right wing opposition party promising to build seven nuclear power plants if they win election next year as part of their strategy to combat climate change.
As with any topic that becomes political, it’s rapidly become much harder to find balanced, nuanced discussion. Thus I turn to my rationalist friends.
Is nuclear safe and effective? Do we have good ways to store radioactive waste? My vague understanding, prior to all of this, was that it’s way safer than it was in the days of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and that most experts think that it has a place as part of a transition away from fossil fuels (here in Australia we burn way too much coal)
Australia is particularly well-suited to nuclear waste disposal since it has vast, uninhabited deserts that are geologically inactive. The country could actually make money by storing nuclear waste from other countries. I believe there was actually a plan to do this that involved building a small port along an abandoned part of its coastline that would connect to a train track that would be used to move the waste inland to the storage site. The port and track would only be used for moving nuclear waste.
The country COULD make money by storing nuclear waste from outer countries... if that wasn't completely illegal under international law, after the Soviets spent the 1960s paying African countries to import and dispose of the USSR's nuclear waste and then said African countries proceeded to just drop it in landfills and hope for the best.
Do you have sources for that?
Among folks I follow, the concern is not that nuclear is unsafe, but that it is likely to be more expensive than other options. The costs do vary by country depending on the government's regulations and strategy.
Brian Potter has some good coverage of nuclear power costs and their causes: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/the-shape-of-nuclear-policy (short), https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power-construction (long).
That's the conclusion I came to as well. Freezing nuclear power doesn't require anyone to oppose it, it just requires the absence of people willing to push uneconomical boondoggles. It's not like this is even an American thing either - Flamanville went just as badly as Plant Vogtle.
The pro-nuclear folks respond by saying that in their hypothetical utopia, they could make nuclear massively cheaper by deregulating it. But of course that means their argument rests on a giant tower of assumptions rather than actual "data", and anyone could be skeptical or wonder why they can't substitute their own optimistic assumptions in favor of other technologies.
Nuclear is safe and effective. Waste storage is not a problem.
The issue is that with the cost curves of solar and batteries on an exponential decrease that has continued much longer than most people expected, and the amount of bureaucracy surrounding nuclear on a steady increase, it may not be profitable to build new nuclear plants in the future.
(It is still a terrible idea to close existing nuclear plants while still burning large amounts of fossil fuels)
Dense countries like India might have trouble finding enough space to put all the solar panels needed to power them, in which case nuclear would be a good alternative. But this is not relevant to Australia, with its small population and enormous desert.
I wouldn't agree that the space argument is spurious. Solar panels in the middle of the desert don't help the metro area much, because of losses in electrical transmission. A lot of remote desert communities (well, mines and other industrial installations) are already switching to solar on their sites (since it makes sense there). Rooftop solar is good, but you need the storage capacity or some other way to shift most of the energy expenditure off-peak.
Every metro area in Australia has this issue - you generate too much power in the middle of the day and don't generate enough after the sun sets. It's definitely not unsolvable but it does need investment to get solved.
I think both proposed energy solutions (go nuclear or go renewables) will ultimately work, but I'm leery of backflips and half-assery like what happened with NBN. Because a half-assed version of either will definitely not work. Whoever wins government and starts on the plan, we really need to stick to it until it's all fully built.
Transmission losses are miniscule - 3.5% per 1,000 km for HVDC lines.
The problem of excess daytime solar generation and insufficient nighttime energy is well recognized - known as the "duck curve" - but is also being solved right now by the exponential rollout of battery storage.
https://theconversation.com/big-batteries-are-solving-a-longstanding-problem-with-solar-power-in-california-can-they-do-the-same-for-australia-231063
3.5% per 1000km does sound like a lot for places like Perth, Darwin, and Adelaide! The waste heat management will also be a significant challenge.
For NSW and VIC we have the issue of building the lines (regulatory) - https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2024-02-09/farmers-divided-transgrid-vni-west-transmission-line-route/103435658?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=other
To be honest, either path will involve going through enormous amount of regulatory red tape (grid scale batteries will definitely be major hazards and will probably see similar opposition to a nuclear plant - and you'd probably need more of them). Both will need lots of money. And I do think both will work fine - as long as we actually commit to either and not do the insane half-ass flipflop thing that Auspoliticians love to do, which will deliver a bad outcome AND cost a ton.
What? There is no reason to connect power cables between Perth, Darwin, and Adelaide. Instead you put a separate solar farm close to (e.g. within 500km) each of them.
Maybe Australia is some unique dystopia of bureaucracy and nimbyism, but it seems unlikely. California is well known as a hotbed of bureaucracy and nimbyism, and yet has already installed enough batteries for batteries to become the state's largest source of power on occasion, as my link above describes. All across the developed world we see that there is much more opposition to nuclear projects (and even existing nuclear energy) than to installation of renewables and transmitting.
The Netherlands are more densely populated than India and are on nearly 50% renewable energy. Unless you're a city-state, all you need to go significantly renewable is the capital and the political will.
Most of the Netherlands' renewable energy is wind, and a large fraction of the Netherlands' wind is offshore (not using any land at all), and 50% is much less than 100%, and the Netherlands has unusually strong wind. So their experience does not translate to solar power in other countries.
We can debate this all day long, but my simple point is, population density has nothing to do with it. What do you imagine a densely populated country like India or the Netherlands to look like? People standing shoulder to shoulder, on every square meter of the country? Of course not. There are roads, canals, houses with roofs, marginal/undeveloped tracts of land everywhere. Solar especially is a very grassroots kind of technology. It scales up and down very well, allowing you to place it wherever you have a good field of view to the sun, and sized to whatever budget you have available.
You can calculate how much energy people use and what area of solar panels would be needed. I've done that calculation before for one location. In many places a building uses more electricity than its roof covered by solar panels can physically provide. In a country like the Netherlands there is very little undeveloped land. Solar roadways are a joke. You could build a canopy over roads and canals for solar panels, but it would be much more expensive than solar in a field (and the costs will not go down with time, because they are due to structure/labor not semiconductors).
There are theoretical reactor designs - because no one actually builds new reactors - that are much safer from catastrophe. Traditional designs require active cooling, so if the nuclear plant itself loses power, the loss of cooling causes heat to build up in the reactor until either the steam cracks into hydrogen gas and explodes or the reactor melts through the containment and leaks radioactive material into the ground/water. New designs may incorporate passive cooling, so even in the event of total power loss the reactor is still cooled. Or they may shut down the nuclear chain reaction altogether in a disaster. I'm hardly an expert on this stuff, so I don't know the details off the top of my head.
Three Mile Island was a confluence of multiple different levels of failure. The coolant system failed and a relief valve got stuck open. The operators failed to initially realize that either of these things had happened and acted too late. This was partly because the operators weren't prepared for this kind of thing and partly because there was a bewildering array of instruments and alarms that was difficult to glean information from. Obviously a nuclear power plant is very complicated and thus has many potential places to go wrong, which is why having the design actively shut down or continue cooling in the event of disaster is a huge risk reduction.
Fukushima Daiichi was another pretty bad disaster, but there was nothing wrong with the reactor itself. It was just built in an area of Japan occasionally subject to severe tsunamis, and they didn't build it to withstand a tsunami as severe as they actually got hit by. Also the transformer that routed power from the backup diesel generators to the reactor cooling systems was in a basement level, which of course was flooded and thus useless.
Chernobyl was a pretty unique incident for a lot of reasons. The Soviet Union - and to some extent the Russian Federation that inherited their nuclear legacy - had a long history of nuclear mishaps, mainly related to producing fissile material for weapons. They had a poor safety culture, to say the least. There was a planned test event that required running the reactor at low power levels, but it had to be delayed for hours and hours because there was too much demand for electricity at the time. When the test finally took place, there was a large buildup of contaminants in the reactor that slowed down the reaction. The operators kept increasing the power output to try and overcome this poisoning, with the result that the contaminants were suddenly burnt up and the reactor power output rapidly surged to unsafe levels.
The RBMK type reactors at Chernobyl had control rods with tips designed to boost reactivity when partially inserted. Fully inserting the control rods is the panic switch for nuclear reactors that shuts everything down. Unfortunately, the rods take a minute or two to fully insert, so inserting the rods actually boosts reactivity temporarily before shutting the nuclear reaction down. In this freak instance, with the confluence of the delayed test conditions and poisoning fooling the operators into running the reactor far too hot, the partial control rod insertion tipped the reactor chamber into an actual explosion (or maybe it just burned really really quickly.)
I love the first episode of the eponymous Chernobyl series from HBO, I got chills when I watched it. Sadly they take a lot of liberties with the truth which distorts the story from reality.
I'm pointing these accidents out as the rare instances of failure. There have been a lot of nuclear reactors in many countries for many decades with a flawless safety record, and they learn from these failures as well. You should probably discount anything that happened in the USSR, especially Chernobyl, as their nuclear safety record is uniquely horrible. Also the impacts of the Chernobyl incident were undoubtedly covered up and/or doctored to make the Soviets look better, so we don't even know how bad it actually was.
As far as the number of people killed/injured by nuclear technology, commercial medical and industrial instruments are actually worse than electricity generation. Some gauges use radioactive isotopes, and x-ray machines require a radiation source. Improperly storing/disposing of this material can be hazardous, especially to children who often find the small metal canisters filled with glowing powder fascinating. Sometimes medical personnel improperly operate x-ray machines and give people a lethal dose. Or thieves steal the x-ray radiation sources and try to hawk it. There was a famous case of a Brazilian thief who stole a Cobalt-60 source from a hospital construction site, and left a trail of (sometimes fatal) radiation poisoning through his family, friends and the people he sold it to.
Part 2 because I already ran on longer than I intended:
Building nuclear power - or building pretty much anything it seems sometimes - runs into the problem of Copenhagen ethics. Actually *doing* a thing makes you liable for anything that could possibly go wrong with that thing. Any new building has to be perfect enough to convince the naysayers and NIMBY crowd to allow it through an adversarial review phase. Which completely ignores the problems of *not doing* a thing. In the case of nuclear power, not building new reactors means coal and natural gas power continues to emit waste directly into the atmosphere. It means poor countries continue to strip mine rare earth elements and wreak environmental devastation to build batteries for wind and solar systems.
Commercial nuclear power generation is quite safe; I would wager the risk to human life in general is lower than that for e.g. wind power. In the latter case the risk falls almost entirely on people employed maintaining wind turbines, but most of the risk for nuclear power is similarly on the plant workers. There's a PR advantage in that the neighbors don't get even temporary evacuation orders when someone falls off a wind turbine, of course.
The sort of breeder reactors used to produce plutonium are significantly less safe, for a variety of technical reasons. See e.g. Windscale. Or Chernobyl, which was designed as a dual-use facility with all the disadvantages baked in.
Nuclear waste, is mostly a boogeyman. Much is made of the claims that A: nuclear waste is extremely dangerous if even a small quantity leaks out, and B: nuclear waste has a half-life of tens of thousands of years so we have to secure it basically forever. But really only one of those claims matters at a time. The extremely dangerous isotopes are short-lived, with half-lives of a few months to a few years; we can keep them securely isolated and monitored for that long. The stuff that lasts for ten thousand years, isn't nearly as dangerous. Less dangerous than e.g. arsenic, which lasts literally forever(*) and which we routinely use for many purposes.
Whatever we do to dispose of the arsenic in the waste stream of e.g. the nearest paper mill, should be adequate for nuclear waste that's had a few years to cool down. I say "should be" because irrational fear + politics has made some otherwise-useful disposal methods categorically forbidden, but we can still find places where it would be objectively safe to bury the stuff.
There's no reason we shouldn't be building lots of nuclear power plants to mitigate global warming except for the cost, and (parts of) the human race used to be able to build nuclear power plants about as cheaply as we build wind and solar power today. But we've pretty much all decided to add enough special nuclear-only regulation on top of that, to make nuclear power highly uncompetitive on cost in most of the world. Up to you all whether Australia continues that trend.
* OK, technically, it might decay with a half-life of ~10^34 years, like all other baryonic matter.
I suspect that 95% of people reading this are pro-nuclear power. One problem I do have when trying to convince others that nuclear power is good and we need much more of it, though, is that they will say that even if the odds of a meltdown are vanishingly small, the catatsrophe of a full meltdown still isn't worth that risk. I usually counter by arguing that the risk*(catastrophic magnitude) of not using nuclear power is much greater. For instance, relying on coal plants for longer, which is exactly what we are doing (the world keeps using increasinly more coal, in fact), will almost assuredly cause many more cancer deaths than using nuclear power.
But I still think there is a better way to make or to frame that argument. Can someone do it?
Interestingly, the current nuclear debate in Australia doesn't seem to be touching all that much on the issue of safety. The main argument being employed against nuclear power at the moment (at least in the papers I read) is pure economics -- that it will take so long and cost so much that we'd be better off just spending the money on renewables instead. I find myself sympathetic to these concerns -- big Australian government projects have a habit of being much slower and more expensive than planned, and the price of renewables has been plummeting for some time.
I've also heard it argued that nuclear is just a delaying tactic -- if we pretend we're working on nuclear for a while then we can continue to burn fossil fuels for now. The longer we delay the transition to renewables the cheaper it will be, so let's just hum and hah over nuclear power for the next fifteen years and then realise "oh shit, turns out solar is cheap now, let's just do that".
Fission power is expensive in large part because of safety concerns. Everything needs to be thoroughly documented, analyzed, audited, and second-guessed, which necessarily involves a lot of work by highly skilled professionals. It also makes the design and construction process long and slow, so capital costs stack up for many years before revenue starts coming in.
And in fact it took much longer and was vastly more expensive than expected. They were vindicated beyond expectation.
20 years ago was around when Plant Vogtle was started, which turned out to be a disaster. And thus anyone who predicted it would be a disaster at the time was more than vindicated.
*You* are the one who started this subthread in the first place, with that specific ironic claim, so it's funny to see you moving the goalposts now.
Twenty years ago the economics of renewables was also very different. The idea that you could get a solar + battery system for your house, for a realistically affordable price, and never draw from the grid again, still seemed like a pipe dream.
It doesn't have to fall to zero, it just has to fall to cheaper-than-nuclear. And depending on whose numbers you believe, that might have already happened.
The problem is most of the time, your audience will *also* be opposed to coal, so attacking coal comes across as a disingenuous strawman.
Oh, right. So the hard part of the argument is convincing them that we can't suddenly replace everything with solar and wind tomorrow and that saying No to nuclear necessarily means saying Yes to fossils for at least a couple more decades. I think the problem is that you have to argue with numbers and most people will leave the room if numbers come up.
>So the hard part of the argument is convincing them that we can't suddenly replace everything with solar and wind tomorrow and that saying No to nuclear necessarily means saying Yes to fossils for at least a couple more decades.
Writing from the USA, one of the frustrating things is that our construction times for nuclear plants have gone up to roughly 15 years ( my comment in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-335/comment/59926465 which then points to https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=228&t=21 and https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61963 ) so _Yes_ to nuclear _still_ means fossils for > 1.5 decades, even if we went gung-ho right this minute.
Frankly, I like nuclear. It is more compact than solar, and we are already seeing greens push _against_ solar because of land use. I just want to keep the lights on. Nuclear can certainly keep them on. Solar plus enough batteries can keep them on - but I keep seeing conflicting numbers on how much storage we plausibly need and how much it will cost. Grr.
The real problem is that you have to argue with numbers, but most of the numbers that people argue with turn out to be bullshit.
So instead of arguing about numbers you wind up arguing about the bullshit assumptions that went into making up the bullshit number. And even if you can agree that the assumptions are bullshit, you then probably don't have the capability to figure out what the number would look like if the bullshit were removed.
And all the people who do know enough to understand all the assumptions that go into numbers like "utility-scale solar and wind is around $40 per megawatt-hour, while nuclear plants average around $175" are probably in the pocket of some lobby group or other. So we're just throwing meaningless, contextless numbers around and hoping for the best.
Sounds like we need an objective 3rd party that can dedicate time to serious number crunching. Why isn't EA on this case? Is it not important enough?
We do, but it's hard to trust their objectivity. The CSIRO (Australian government science organisation) has come up with a set of numbers which suggest that nuclear isn't as good as renewables:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-22/nuclear-power-double-the-cost-of-renewables/103868728
and they're smart and well-resourced and they're theoretically objective, but are they objective in practice? Who the fuck knows? (The CSIRO knows perfectly well that its budget tends to get cut under Coalition governments and to expand under Labor governments...)
It's especially hard because most of the numbers are highly speculative anyway.
Pro-nuclear people never want to argue based on the cost numbers of nuclear power as it actually exists, they want to argue on the basis of what nuclear power might hypothetically cost after massive scale deregulation. And if you're arguing on the basis of highly subjective optimistic projections *anyway*, the pro-solar side might as well do the same.
> Pro-nuclear people never want to argue based on the cost numbers of nuclear power as it actually exists, they want to argue on the basis of what nuclear power might hypothetically cost after massive scale deregulation.
Isn't this like opposing abortion in certain states, merely because if you have an abortion there you might get arrested, because abortion is illegal there? Obviously the first step would be to fix the legal regime, and widespread deployment would come afterward.
It's a political argument, right? To allow or not to allow, that is the question. So it seems to me an argument for allowing private utilities to build nuclear power plants is necessarily about what the regulations should allow. The utilities will ultimately invest in whatever forms of power production they think will be the most profitable given the regulations.
I think it's correct for the pro-solar side to argue for whatever regulations of nuclear power, solar power, etc., they think is best. I'll happily switch to the pro-solar side if their arguments for regulations and their numbers seem more reasonable.
That's assuming we are having a political argument. If, OTOH, we are having this argument in the boardroom of PG&E, we should only consider what the regulatory environment is likely to be.
> So it seems to me an argument for allowing private utilities to build nuclear power plants is necessarily about what the regulations should allow
If you were a private utility, would you want to invest in building a nuclear power plant? It seems to me highly likely that some time in the next couple of decades, the price of solar+battery energy will be low enough that your plant can no longer be run at a profit.
I think the better way to frame the risk is to compare it to current fossil fuel-related deaths [0] [1]. You could have a Chernobyl-scale disaster every year and still kill orders of magnitude fewer people than die prematurely every year due to fossil fuel pollution. And that's completely ignoring any climate effects.
So _even if_ the worst case thing happens, it's still better than the status quo.
[0] https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10119672/7/Marais_Vohra-et-al-2021-ER-proof.pdf
[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/383/bmj-2023-077784.full.pdf
The problem is most of the time, your audience will *also* be opposed to coal, so attacking coal comes across as a disingenuous strawman.
If you want to convince people who are already against fossil fuels, you're going to need different arguments.
As others have pointed out elsewhere here, the reality on the ground is that places like India and China are still building massive amounts of coal. The reason they are doing this, as far as I can tell, is that the have been convinced by the West's example that nuclear is "too expensive". As has also been pointed out (including by you I think), this cost depends on regulating nuclear to a level of safety that is several orders of magnitude higher than coal or other fossil fuels.
So it may be true that nuclear's time in the west is already past, and that solar and batteries are going to get cheap enough, fast enough, that the west is never going to have much more nuclear than we have now.
But if we led by example and reduced regulations, demonstrated a willingness to accept a more sane level of safety, abandoning the un-scientific Linear No-Threshold Model, then maybe we could convince China and India to stop building coal and build nuclear until whatever point it is that even they switch to only building renewables.
You mentioned elsewhere that pro-nuclear people like to point to speculative "what if our regulations weren't so asinine" numbers, but that then we should allow solar to do so as well. To that I say "point me to the regulation that is artificially inflating the price of wind or solar and I will gladly say get rid of it as well". The fact of the matter is that the economics of renewables are currently limited by technology, and are improving with technology. But nuclear is limited by bureaucracy and will therefore _never_ improve unless we fix the bureaucracy.
I'm personally pretty sure it will never happen. It's too late, it takes too long, and we don't have the societal will.
I think that this fact is one of the most damning indictments of our civilization of the past 100 years. Due to our abandonment of nuclear energy, we created the climate crisis unnecessarily, we unnecessarily limited the availability of cheap energy, which almost certainly reduced standards of living. All for ignorant fear mongering.
Sorry for ranting, but this topic really annoys me. Not because the average level of discourse is so poor (this conversation has been pretty good, but elsewhere it's usually terrible), but just because seeing how poorly we have dealt with this issue really makes me depressed about our ability to handle other problems.
>I think that this fact is one of the most damning indictments of our civilization of the past 100 years. Due to our abandonment of nuclear energy, we created the climate crisis unnecessarily, we unnecessarily limited the availability of cheap energy, which almost certainly reduced standards of living. All for ignorant fear mongering.
Agreed.
>seeing how poorly we have dealt with this issue really makes me depressed about our ability to handle other problems.
Also agreed. I see it as part of the general problem of cost disease (at least here in the USA). Lots of vetos, lots of legal challenges, lots of emotional language about risks that _could_ have been quantified and negotiated, but instead were litigated. It has gotten hard just to build a power line, the national equivalent of an extension cord, from point A to point B.
The "catastrophe" of a full meltdown is that you lose an expensive power plant, *maybe* a few power plant workers die, and a few hundred square kilometers get turned into an impromptu nature preserve for a while. Probably don't build your nuclear power plants inside major cities, no matter how cool that was in SimCity 2000.
Chernobyl wasn't a "full meltdown" because Chernobyl mostly didn't melt; it caught fire and burned to the ground in a way commercial power reactors can't because commercial power reactors aren't made of fancy coal.
You're exaggerating the "impromptu nature preserve" here. Apparently the science is all but settled on the queston whether the area around Chernobyl is a net good or net bad for flora and fauna.
> The stubborn discrepancies have caused some members of each camp to become distrustful of the other’s conclusions, and on some occasions the debate has turned personal. In 2015, the International Union for Radioecology, a nonprofit group of radiation scientists, invited researchers from both sides to a meeting in Miami, striving to reach a consensus. But the conversation became so heated, “they started hurling insults at each other,” recalls McMaster University radiobiologist Carmel Mothersill, the IUR’s treasurer. The only conclusion they could reach was that “everything is so uncertain in the low-dose region that you can’t attribute anything definitively to the radiation dose.”
https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/food-environment/2022/scientists-cant-agree-about-chernobyls-impact-wildlife
As already discussed, it is inappropriate to bring up the dangers of atom bomb factories in a discussion of nuclear power, even if somebody did build a nuclear power plant on the same site as an atom bomb factory that later caught fire and burned to the ground.
Bringing up Chernobyl in a discussion of modern nuclear power, is like bringing up the Hindenburg in a discussion of modern airline travel. Fukushima would be at least somewhat relevant and appropriate, if you care.
Yes the "modern airline travel" is an oddly appropriate analogy in the context of the recent Boeing hearings and what caused them to happen in the first place. Thanks for making my point I guess?
Small chance of local disaster vs. guaranteed global disaster.
Arguably, every major nuclear disaster has been caused by human ignorance and/or stupidity. Fukushima might have been prevented with higher sea walls, as was proposed but rejected. TMI was a failure of training and design. The Windscale fire. Kyshtym. And so the list goes on. At some point you have to concede that humans aren't smart enough to safely handle nuclear power for its intended purpose, unless that purpose is to destroy.
>Chernobyl caused a catastrophe because the Soviet Union was too stupid to boil water properly.
That's certainly one way to frame it: "Stupid commies were doing stupid things so we can ignore whatever they've done".
Better way to frame it: Stupid commies were doing stupid things, which are not relevant to modern-day nuclear plants because the design of our plants is not stupid like theirs were.
And here we are coming full circle: Our designs are smarter, but also more expensive. That's just how safety works, you have to literally buy it. Less power, more procedures, more training, more maintenance, everything that makes a thing safer also makes it more expensive.
People are well within their right to argue that, like the stupid commies of old, they prefer cheap over safe, but at least they should stop pretending we can have both at the same time.
The primary relevant difference between A: Chernobyl and B: any nuclear power plant that isn't also an atom bomb factory, is that nuclear power plants use water as a moderator and Chernobyl used ultra-high-purity graphite. Water(*) is much cheaper than ultra-high-purity graphite, but if it's important that a thing not catch fire and burn to the ground, "let's fill this part with water" is much safer than "let's make that part out of fancy coal".
"Safe but you can't easily use it to make atom bombs", is in fact cheaper than "it's a power plant *and* an atom bomb factory".
* The ordinary sort; a few powerplants and the safer sort of atom bomb factories use heavy water, which is rather expensive.
I call it the Make Nuclear Dangerous Again movement.
To be fair, you could probably get rid of a lot of safety measures and still have it be nowhere near as dangerous as Chernobyl was. After all, noone died from TMI.
The commies were doing several things that were especially unsafe that does not account for the massive growth in cost that has followed.
They manually turned off the safety systems as part of a test, removed the control rods which modulated the reaction, used a design that has the nuclear reaction continue-by-default rather than shutdown-by-default and the choice of graphite tips means that, while inserted control rods modulate the reaction, the process of *inserting* them causes an increase in reaction speeds.
Preventing any one of these steps are a one time design / research cost, aside from the meta step of improving processes so that people do not disable safety measures.
What part of the above causes do you think readily generalize to other nuclear plants?
First of all, why exclude Chernobyl? Because it's a "toughie", as you said? Did you include the 100-240 fatalities of the Windscale fire in your assertion?
Second, how many mass evacuations have wind turbine accidents caused? How much area rendered long-term uninhabitable?
Third, the death of construction workers is just as bad as one from radiation, but there are still huge differences: One, construction workers know the risks. They accept it. Those who don't accept it and don't go into construction typically don't have to bear the consequences of accidents (except if they knew the victim, of course). Two, the renewables industry is in an unprecedented booming phase. Like always, new risks are involved and the price for learning them, as always, is calculated in blood. Then, once the risks have been learned, the industry will be saddled with safety measures just like any other industry, just like the nuclear industry. I don't know what numbers you have, but fatality rates are already going down across the wind industry:
> Fatalities and accidents decline in offshore wind, as safety organisation reviews progress
https://envirotecmagazine.com/2023/06/16/fatalities-and-accidents-decline-in-offshore-wind-activity-as-safety-organisation-reviews-progress/
Wind power accidents in Germany by 2021: 11 fatalities since 2000, none since 2017. (Column "TA" for "work-related fatalities" if you want to check)
https://www.wattenrat.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Unfallliste_WKA_immer_aktuell4.pdf
We exclude Chernobyl because it wasn't just a nuclear power plant, it was also a breeder reactor designed to make plutonium for nuclear weapons, and it was specifically the design features intended for the latter purpose that caused the catastrophe. Nuclear power plants can be made very safe, at reasonable cost and by well understood methods. Plutonium breeder reactors are much harder and more expensive to make safe, and lots of people didn't bother.
> Do we have good ways to store radioactive waste?
Honestly, this is a non-issue. Nuclear waste remains highly radioactive for a relatively short length of time, as the most radioactive materials have a very short half-life, by definition. It thereafter will remain *somewhat* radioactive for a very long time, but if the waste is mixed into drum-sized concrete masses and buried in shafts that are then filled in with more concrete, they're of no real danger to anyone, present or future. None of this is beyond our technical means to do today, cheaply, safely, and effectively.
Further to this point... Nuclear waste storage is almost all an "upfront" expense. Once you have "some nuclear" you have to pay for the storage of its waste and its setting up these sites, processes, transportation procedures/capital equipment, getting permissions, supervising/.guarding the site etc etc are the things that drive almost all the expense of storage.
Once you have "some nuclear" and so have setup all those things then you have paid this expense. The costs at that point of just adding "50% more storage" to existing storage is negligable in comparison. Particularly as modern nuclear produces much less waste.
You just have to dig out another cavern next to the current one, drill another hole or two next to the current ones, what have you. Everything else you need is already there and largely a fixed cost by this point.
So whilst you can say the cost of nuclear storage is high .... if you have an existing nuclear energy industry upsizing it 100% or 1000% incurs hardly any additional storage costs. You've already paid the large upfront cost, and the marginal addition is minimal.
This is very relevant to most other developed countries, although perhaps not to Australia.
I have an older relative who's a technophobe.
He wants to surreptitiously record some phone conversations (he's in a one-party consent state) for some litigation that he's involved in.
He asked me if I could help find him a "gizmo" that would be easy enough to use and would help him do this.
I went to Amazon and tried some search-fu and everything I got was either a digital recorder (like journalists use) or it would only work with a landline phone.
How can I help my septuagenarian relative, who lives many states away?
So this person wants a gizmo and doesn't care what it is except it can't use digital storage? Even though that kind of device has no way in hell of connecting to the Internet? I'm kind of fascinated by this.
I think it's somewhat common among senior citizens. (And that makes it worth study for UI/UX ppl.)
I think the proliferation of menus and screens make it hard for him to find things and/or remember what to do next. *Everything* feels unintuitive.
This guy uses an iPhone (albeit in a rudimentary way).
Ah makes sense, I wasn't thinking about the user interface.
Put them on speaker and use a tape recorder?
I think this is what we're going with.
I wanted him to go to the Apple Store "Genius Bar" and he wasn't feeling it.
Thanks for your help!
I'm 18 years old, with a prescription of -5 in both eyes and some very slight astigmatism in one eye. I care a lot about my overall visual acuity: i.e. being able to have a full, clear, and non-distorted field of vision (contacts >>> glasses). It would not be an exaggeration to say that it's by far the most important concern I have about my quality of life.
Currently, my prescription is progressing ~0.7 diopters per year. My main concerns about progressing further are (a) that LASIK/PRK give worse results conditional on high initial prescriptions, and (b) that my best-corrected visual acuity with contacts will be worse at higher prescriptions. (Last concern would be increased future risk of cataracts, glaucoma, etc.). Therefore, I'm considering asking my optometrist about atropine eye drops or multifocal contact lenses, which seem like the best available methods to slow progression until I stabilize (I don't know about ortho-k, since it's mutually exclusive with multifocal lenses).
My questions to people here are whether (b) is significantly true (currently, my vision with contacts is noticeably worse than with glasses, both near and far, although that could be due to an outdated prescription), and if LASIK/PRK would be a good fit for me later in life. General advice regarding my situation would also be welcome.
EVO Visian ICL
I was a -5 in both eyes and got PRK last year. It worked out pretty well for me, but I generally advise other people not to do it. I had a great outcome. I have 20/20 in one eye and 20/25 in the other so I don't need glasses to drive and I can go to the pool and the beach and never have to worry about remembering to take out my contact lenses, and I can see when I'm in the water. However, PRK has a very difficult recovery time, where for the first month you have a lot of side effects like blurry vision, and halos and extremely dry eyes. For me those away (I still get slight halos at night, but it's not bad). For most people this is a pretty typical experience, both the recovery and the good outcome.
However, for some people those side effects you experience in the first month do not go away and they are permanent. If I had known the risk in advance, I actually probably wouldn't have taken it. But I didn't know some of the risks until after the surgery.
You seem pretty well-informed, but I'm nevertheless going to mother-hen you and urge you to do a *tremendous* amount of research on both LASIK and PRK, as even "minor" and common negative outcomes for each can be pretty life-ruining (distorting night vision to make nighttime driving impossible, etc).
I'm -6 in both eyes with astigmatism and my regular optometrist once volunteered that I was a "good candidate" for surgery, but when I said I was very concerned about the potential for medium or long-term night vision damage (halos, etc), he said "Oh, yeah, totally not worth the risk if that would be a problem for you." My second optometrist (I have a weird insurance plan at work where I get two separate plans for eye-care coverage) agreed.
Make sure you also research the less common negative outcomes including permanent partial blindness and that you'd be okay with that outcome were it to happen. I doubt you would be if good vision it's a primary concern about your quality of life!
I know for myself the risk is 100% not worth it.
I had -7 in both eyes, had a LASIC in my 30's. Initially after LASIC I had nearly-perfect vision, but over the years it kind of backtracked, so I'm about -2 now. I use glasses for driving, but do most activities without them. It was totally worth it.
I would recommend PRK over LASIC though - longer recovery but better stability afterwards. I regret not going that route.
But you do have to wait for the vision to stabilize, probably a few more years.
Interesting. I had heard that PRK had fewer general complications than LASIK, but I didn't think that it caused slower myopia progression later on. Am I interpreting you correctly here? Also, do you have any comparison between contacts and LASIK, in terms of which one gave you better vision (near, far, night vision, etc. if there's any difference category-wise)?
Sorry, poor wording on my part: by “better stability” I meant fewer complications due to not having a flap. I don’t know if it affects progression later.
I never wore contacts, just glasses. Couldn’t bring myself to poke me in eye :)
So of course the difference was huge in terms of field of vision, lack of reflections, etc.
I did have the typical starburst effect after the surgery that slowly diminished to almost nothing over a few months.
For what it's worth, I have about -8 in both eyes, and this is still well in the range for contact lenses, at least of the hard (permanent) ones that I use. I just got new ones, and my optometrist never mentioned the possibility that I would leave the range for contact lenses, so I assume that the range is yet wider.
Yeah, I've read that range goes up very high, but I'm mostly concerned about if there's degradation in corrected vision quality as you go further up.
Not unless you want it, in later life you may not want to correct myopia fully so you can read close up.
In my sample size of one, I had 150% visual acuity in the last test, so clearly above average. This was with glasses, but I don't notice a lot of difference between glasses and contacts.
But yeah, sample size one.
Also consider making sure that you are outdoors a significant amount of time each day, as not getting outside enough is major risk factor for the development of nearsigntedness
https://www.myopiaprofile.com/articles/why-outdoor-time-matters-in-myopia-development
Yes, I've been trying to follow the standard advice as well.
"New subscriber only post"
Embrace the hyphen, Scott.
I suppose you mean "New subscriber-only post" as opposed to "New-subscriber only post" or "New-subscriber-only post", and likely not "New subscriber only-post".
My fellow Americans need to deeply internalize this advice. The hyphen is the assassin of ambiguity
Yeah, this tripped me up for a good 10 seconds...
EA for Jews is hiring a new Managing Director, as well as potentially a Program Manager and Community Manager! The deadline to apply is July 1st. You can find the details and application here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AZf2YG7jJvrQdq2SS/ea-for-jews-is-hiring-apply-now
In “Hard Landing” I take issue with the way Blanchard talks about monetary policy, normally not necessarily bad, talk is talk, but in this case it leads him to support a “higher for longer” instrument setting of the EFFR.
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/hard-landing
In “How NOT to break out of the climate doom loop” I take issue with a FT columnist who gets it exactly backwards.
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/how-not-to-break-out-of-the-climate
There are two features that I would like on my PC:
1. The ability to decide right away where a screenshot is saved. So that if I press the screenshot button and A it is saved in my "funny pictures" folder, if I press the screenshot button and B it is saved to my "important" folder etc.
2. The ability to highlight some text and press a button to add it to my long list of notes. I just highlight two lines of text press this button and those two lines are saved as note 649. in this one text document I have on my pc.
At the moment doing these things manually would take around 2 to 40 seconds each time. Does anyone know an app or so that would help me (I'm using windows 11).
https://windowsreport.com/windows-11-keyboard-macros/
id have fantastic point by point answers for linux, but the windows answer is probably "autohotkey"
Share the Linux answer.
> I press the screenshot button
sxhkd
> screenshot
scrot
> The ability to decide right away where a screenshot is saved
a zenity clone (in practice gnome killed zenity, I think yad the best bet but most are gtk based and will succumb to gnomes politics in time)
> The ability to highlight some text and press a button to add it to my long list of notes
a cli ocr(which in my experence suck, but oh well)
or pull/push text out of my copy paste board
xdotool
Yep, Autohotkey is a great tool. For those who don't know it, you can write scripts that allow you to do various things in Windows, and the functions in those scripts can be triggered by combinations of keys.
I made some scripts for some stupid games I played, for example if the game required quick repeated clicking, I programmed an autoclicker, which was activated by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Q, started clicking at current mouse position 10 times per second, and stopped when Ctrl+Alt+W was clicked. This turned a stupid game into a programming exercise, with the pleasant feeling that I hacked the game. :)
*holds back rant on linux sepremency and hot key daemons*
From Friday's WaPo. "AI is exhausting the power grid. Tech firms are seeking a miracle solution."
Of course they *would* say this...
> The companies also argue advancing AI now could prove more beneficial to the environment than curbing electricity consumption. They say AI is already being harnessed to make the power grid smarter, speed up innovation of new nuclear technologies and track emissions.
Hmmm. Making the power grid more efficient and speeding up innovation in new nuclear technologies isn't going to provide the juice to keep all those new data centers online. In the meantime, double down on coal, but talk like you're green. And keep chasing the fusion dream which is still twenty years away last time I checked — and has been stalled at twenty years away for the past fifty years.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/06/21/artificial-intelligence-nuclear-fusion-climate/
Not forcing it on people using search engines would be a start.
Is there a full version of the article available? I see just two paragraphs - neither of which says what fraction of electricity production in the USA is going towards computation, let alone specifically AI.
As of 2023, https://www.iea.org/energy-system/buildings/data-centres-and-data-transmission-networks says that
>data centres and data transmission networks, which each account for about 1-1.5% of global electricity use.
(which, of course, is not splitting out AI as a separate category)
For comparison, if the USA were to replace all of its internal combustion vehicles with electric vehicles, a very rough calculation https://chatgpt.com/c/764add21-15c5-429b-8bd5-eabc36b6156b (yes, I checked GPT4o's numbers, they at least look sane) would require about 10% more electricity generation to be added to the grid to support them..
Of course, wokesters favor electric vehicles and disfavor AI, hence the Washington Post's complaint about the latter and not the former.
Sorry. It's behind a WaPo paywall. But I think you get a few free views per month. Try a different browser that hasn't eaten a WaPo cookie, and see if it lets you view it.
Many Thanks! It worked (using Edge ugg!).
In general, it looks like a pretty awful article. Lots of "voracious" and "frenzy" and "guzzlers". Admittedly some of the corporate quotes look somewhere between lies and insane optimistic claims:
>“If we work together, we can unlock AI’s game-changing abilities to help create the net zero, climate resilient and nature positive works that we so urgently need,” Microsoft said in a statement.
WTF??? The sort of things that _might_ matter for affordable less CO2-intensive energy sources are things that need _physical_ experiments, e.g. trying variations on sodium-sulfur cells for storing solar power, and seeing if there are or are not cell-limiting side reactions (they've had problems with polysulfides) or seeing if one actually can or cannot push a tokamak to higher Lawson criterion values without discovering yet another new plasma instability. The limiting factors for this sort of development work are wrinkles that _aren't_ in the computer models.
About the only useful number that I saw in the article was the (a Goldman-Sacks study found)
>It found data centers will account for 8 percent of total electricity use in the United States by 2030, a near tripling of their share today.
a) This isn't AI specifically. It is data processing generally.
b) _If_ the tripling happens, the centers would consume about the same amount of power as electrifying our vehicles would.
So if data centers deserve all of this emotional, vilifying language _so do electric cars_. This article strikes me as a factional puff piece.
Well, I wonder if we shouldn't be vilifying electric cars more. Be that as it may, I'm more amazed by how much bullshit can be thrown at reporters without them blinking.
I wonder if this statement wasn't generated by an LLM?
> “If we work together, we can unlock AI’s game-changing abilities to help create the net zero, climate resilient and nature positive works that we so urgently need,” Microsoft said in a statement.
Many Thanks!
>Be that as it may, I'm more amazed by how much bullshit can be thrown at reporters without them blinking.
Good point! I wonder if this is one of the professions which requires the stomach of a goat... :-)
>I wonder if this statement wasn't generated by an LLM?
Could be... LLM outputs and PR department outputs often seem to look pretty similar...
We have time tested way of allocating scarce resources and encouraging them to become less scarce in the future: allow the price to rise in response to a increase in demand, and idea that seems not to have occurred to the WaPo writer, but then few journalists seem to have passed if they ever took an Econ 101 course.
The trouble is, when an AI data center is slurping up 50% of the power output from my local power plant, the cost of my power is going to go up — unless other sources of power can be brought online quickly — which would also raise the cost of my power because I'd need to subsidize the utilities building those new power plants. Ultimately it comes out of my wallet either in the rates I'm charged or through my taxes.
The new plants should not be subsidized.
If demand for something you use increases, you have to pay more. That's the way capitalism among consenting adults works. :)
Which consenting adults are you referring to? The ones who have the political and economic clout to game the system? Power inequities are the natural result of capitalist systems — and those of us who don't have a bought-and-paid-for "friend" on the PUC will be at the mercy of those who do.
You are the on who suggested (or I understood it at way) to have a "friendly" PUC prevent a data center from competing for your electricity.
Yes. And your point is? As a consumer, I'm supposed to eat the cost and not barf?
I seem to recall an estimate of something like 70% chance of useful fusion power by 2035, which would make 11 years.
The most recently constructed fission power plant in the USA took 15 years to build. Copying from a comment I made in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/fake-tradition-is-traditional/comment/59780655 :
the most recent nuclear power plant in the USA
>Vogtle Unit 4 at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia that began commercial operation on April 29, 2024.
( from https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=228&t=21 )
>Construction at the two new reactor sites began in 2009. Originally expected to cost $14 billion and begin commercial operation in 2016 (Vogtle 3) and in 2017 (Vogtle 4), the project ran into significant construction delays and cost overruns. Georgia Power now estimates the total cost of the project to be more than $30 billion
( from https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61963 )
And fusion, while achieving scientific breakeven, is not yet at engineering breakeven. 11 years sounds _very_ optimistic to me.
11 years is based on ongoing commercially-funded R&D efforts. The one I'm most familiar with is CFS Energy, which has an engineering proof-of-concept reactor (SPARC) in later stages of construction now which is planned to go into operation next year. A prototype on-grid commercial reactor (ARC) is supposed to come next, with an estimated 5-10 year timeline to get it up and running. Construction for ARC is supposed to overlap with SPARC's operations.
Fission reactors are probably not a good benchmark for how long it would take to build a fusion reactor. Fusion shares a few safety concerns with fission, most notably that fueling and maintenance requires handling radioactive material and the reactor core emitting a bunch of neutrons during normal operation. But the big ones that drive the extremely heavyweight safety regulations that make fission reactors take forever to build aren't shared by fusion.
Why wouldn't fission and fusion plants share the same regulations? Nuclear is nuclear: no one ever got elected by understanding the decay products of U-235.
No one ever got elected by understanding the decay products of U-235, true. But nobody who ever got elected, ever wrote the text of any substantial body of regulation. They delegate that to their staff or to executive-branch regulatory agencies, which do include subject-matter experts for this purpose. And sometimes those people delegate it to industry lobbying groups.
Whatever the process, the United States has already decided that its regulations for nuclear fusion power systems will not in fact be copy-pasted from the regulations for nuclear fission reactors. Instead, they will be copy-pasted from the regulations for particle accelerators and then possibly tweaked a bit.
This is a very good thing, even if it's going to be longer than some people here expect before we get working fusion power plants.
Presumably if fusion power ever came close to commercial viability, there'd be a major industry push to promote it and dispel fears.
Many Thanks!
>But the big ones that drive the extremely heavyweight safety regulations that make fission reactors take forever to build aren't shared by fusion.
True! But fission doesn't have to suppress plasma instabilities to make net energy generation work.
>Construction for ARC is supposed to overlap with SPARC's operations.
So analysis of experimental results from SPARC happens after construction of ARC has already started? Any surprises from SPARC have to be folded into ARC's partially built structure? I wish them luck, but I wouldn't bet on them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Fusion_Systems
says that they have demonstrated a high field magnet using YBaCuOx superconducting tape, which is an important achievement, but doesn't demonstrate that they won't e.g.run into an unexpected plasma instability when they get their first tokamak completed.
>So analysis of experimental results from SPARC happens after construction of ARC has already started? Any surprises from SPARC have to be folded into ARC's partially built structure? I wish them luck, but I wouldn't bet on them.
Depends what parts of ARC have been built when SPARC runs into the surprises. Based on the construction timeline for SPARC, they're going to be spending a couple years constructing the building before they start assembling the tokamak, and the building's design probably isn't going to change much depending on what SPARC finds.
An unexpected plasma instability or similar is definitely a possibility and probably a big part of the estimated 30% of nobody having an on-grid fusion reactor by 2035. CFS is mitigating the risk by making the design as close as possible to well-studied research reactor configurations and plasma regimes, but that definitely doesn't eliminate it.
There are also some big engineering challenges like the FliBe blanket for neutron capture and tritium breeding. It's piggybacking on other research towards Gen IV fission reactors, but for tritium breeding in particular they still need to do something that has never been done at scale before and is very difficult to experiment with for want of the kind of neutron flux you'd get from an operating D-T fusion reactor.
Where would the FliBe blanket reside? If it were outside the vacuum vessel, wouldn't the vessel have to be replaced frequently due to damage from the high neutron flux?
Is direct energy conversion off the table?
Many Thanks!
>Based on the construction timeline for SPARC, they're going to be spending a couple years constructing the building before they start assembling the tokamak, and the building's design probably isn't going to change much depending on what SPARC finds.
That sounds reasonable. I hope they have the SPARK results before they have to start building the ARC magnets.
>There are also some big engineering challenges like the FliBe blanket for neutron capture and tritium breeding.
Interesting! I'd mostly heard about FLiBe in the context of the thorium/U-233 cycle, but it is liquid (at the relevant temperature) and it _does_ contain lithium... Hmm... (I'd mostly heard about metallic lithium alloys for fusion tritium breeding, but I hadn't been following that choice closely.)
One of the problems with nukes in the US is that we allow free-but-regulated-enterprise to drive the projects. In the US utilities are allowed to manage the design and deployment, and my understanding is that drives up costs. France has six to eight new plants in the works and/or coming online. They use a limited number of designs created and pre-approved by the Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire. Shortens the licensing time. Shortens the QA time to bringup. This improves safety and allows easier troubleshooting, and it allows engineers from one plant to know how to run the other plants.
The recent Flamanville expansion in France was just as delayed and over budget as Plant Vogtle, so whatever the problem is, it's certainly not a factor that's unique to the US.
Many Thanks! Yeah, I am _not_ happy with how the regulatory framework works in the USA. We also generally allow legal potshots at construction (even of much _non_nuclear infrastructure) at many points in the process, which pours yet more grit in the gears.
Was that estimate made in 2015? Just checking the hypothesis that fusion power is always 20 years in the future.
No, that was a snark on my part. But I remember reading in Scientific American in the late 70s that we'd have fusion power before the end of the last century. The goalposts have kept moving since then. I think we've been able to reach Q=1.25 recently — which is great progress over the Q=0.68-0.70, where it was stuck for two decades. But Edward Moses calculated we'd need a Q≥22 for a nuclear fusion plant not only to run on self-sustaining power, but make the plant economically viable. I'm not sure how he calculated that number, so don't ask me. ;-)
OTOH, the Microsoft crew claims they can "harness fusion" by 2028. Notice that they don't really say it will be self-sustaining and be able to produce surplus power.
> The tech giant and its partners say they expect to harness fusion by 2028, an audacious claim that bolsters their promises to transition to green energy but distracts from current reality. In fact, the voracious electricity consumption of artificial intelligence is driving an expansion of fossil fuel use — including delaying the retirement of some coal-fired plants.
We're harnessing fusion all the time. It's called solar power. </snark>
True. But I'm almost as cynical about solar power as I am the future of fusion. But for different reasons.
I found it, a book review from 2022: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-future-of-fusion
It has a couple useful quotes early on:
"I predict that we will get fusion [1] before 2035 (80%) or 2040 (90%). I am a professional plasma physicist, a fusioneer if you will, so I probably know more about this subject than you, but am likely to overemphasize its importance."
"There is an old joke:
Fusion is 30 years away and always will be."
Plus the following:
"Commonwealth Fusion Systems / SPARC
I've already told their story because they are the current leader. Everything has gone well so far.
SPARC gets fusion by 2025 (30%) or 2030 (70%)."
This article (https://www.energymonitor.ai/sectors/power/nuclear-fusion-commercialisation/?cf-view) actually seems to say SPARC is still on track for 2025 for being functional, and 2030 for being online for generating power to the grid.
That book review was absurd in how willfully naive and statistically illiterate it was. This is on the level of pretending that managing to oxidize some carbon is the only step required to build practical gas power plants (probably *worse* actually, but that alone shows how absurd the claim is). If the author had their way, cavemen would be building power plants.
If by "fusion" you mean enough actual power generation to run a light bulb, I'll take your money on that 30%.
Fusion in the sense that "this reading here shows that hydrogen is turning into helium in the guts of our machine, yay fusion!", we've had that for fifty years. You can pretty much do that as a high school science project. But the machines *consume* electric power and produce instrument readouts and a bit of waste heat. And no, not enough waste heat to boil steam to spin a turbine that will produce the electric power you need to run the machine.
With a bit more funding than the high-school science project version, you can produce any number of machines that will consume electric power and produce instrument readouts, waste heat, and a story you can spin to venture capitalists about how with still more money you can build a version of the machine that will spin the turbine and even have some power left over for that light bulb. But that's not going to happen this year or next.
And since your "30% by 2025" is really 0% by the standard most of us care about, I'm guessing the "70% by 2030" is really no better than 40%. Most likely they'll have either given up, or built an even more expensive machine to consume even more electric power.
Even worse, the machines also consume expensive tritium, among other things.
And then you get to the problem that any practical reaction would bombard the reactor walls with neutrons, quickly destroying everything.
> a story you can spin to venture capitalists about how with still more money you can build a version of the machine that will spin the turbine and even have some power left over for that light bulb. But that's not going to happen this year or next.
Why not? It *already* happened, a year and a half ago.
Granted, it wouldn't keep the light bulb on for very long, but production of surplus energy is already a reality. Now they're working on scaling it up to commercial viability.
If you're referring to the bit of hype from the NIF, then no. That did *not* spin a tubine. It did not even attempt to produce any usable power by any means. And the only light bulbs on display were its own indicator lights, which were drawing power from the national grid. As were the ginormous lasers.
As Level 50 Lapras points out, this is how it *always* goes. As far as I know, and I follow the field pretty closely, nobody anywhere has ever even *tried* to build a fusion device with an actual electric power generation system of any sort. Because they know it wouldn't work. The best they can do is put a lot of power into a bunch of magnets or lasers, and make some part of the machine a tiny bit warmer than it would have been if they just dumped all that power into a resistive load.
None of these devices are even theoretically capable of keeping a light bulb on for any length of time. Probably some future device will. But if you think this has already been done, you are greatly uninformed about the obstacles in the way of that future device.
When a fusion power person claims they "produced surplus energy", those words don't mean the same thing they do to a layman. What they mean is that the reaction gave off a bit of heat, not that they were actually able to convert it into electricity, let alone more than the amount of electricity used to run the place, let alone enough electricity to make a profitable plant.
Yes, but professional plasma physicists have been predicting that fusion is just around the corner since I was in college more than 50 years ago. I don't know if they actually believe their predictions or are pumping up expectations to get funding.
BTW: I'm all for fusion! In fact, I think the US Government should pursue a massive fusion development program like it did the space program in the sixties.
The 88 in your name always made me assume you were younger, and rightwing for your cohort. Turns out you're rightish sounding because you're from the past. That's fascinating.
I'm a leftie on most scales of political leanings — pretty far down in the leftist anti-authoritarian quadrant. Because I'm a cranky old fart that's why you might think I'm "conservative". My primary bête noire is bullshit and bullshitters. I'm pro-union, pro-worker-rights, pro civil rights, pro-social-safety-net. Capitalism is OK as long as it doesn't allow people or companies to aggrandize too much power. But I find some of the current leftie fashions and obsessions to be puzzling and perhaps silly. I could have coffee with a woke person (though I might pat them on the head and offer them a cookie) — but I'd be hard-pressed not to throw my hot coffee at a MAGA.
888 or multiple 8's is specifically a thing in Asian cultures that's associated with prosperity, good luck, etc.
I always kind of assumed **beowulf888** was asian because of his name, rather than young.
I do remember that the review got some pushback for being too bullish.
That said, it made a pretty good case that the situation now is different from any situation in previous decades. If I recall correctly, the main difference is that superconductors now work at higher temperature, which reduces the necessary size from experiments from large to medium. Those don't need decades to build, but only years.
But regardless of the technical claim, the reviewer made a pretty good meta-point: others obviously believe the story. The main players are now companies that are financed by private venture capital. As far as I understand, throughout the last decades it was always driven by public research funding, because it was never in reach to build a reactor with private money. (Correct me if I am wrong.)
Isn't this an indicator that something substantial has changed compared to previous decades?
The difference now is that for the first time, people have a plausible plan for solving the first of many seemingly insurmountable obstacles on the path to practical fusion power. Doesn't mean anything that a normal person would care about will happen in the next 30 years though.
A peaceful Manhattan Project?
Well, I was thinking in terms of the Apollo project, which was peaceful in its intentions.
With the recent achievement of Ignition, (ie. getting more energy out of a controlled fusion reaction than was used to create it,) fusion is no longer "stalled at twenty years away." There are still some major engineering challenges remaining to make it economical, but the biggest hurdle facing the problem has been cleared.
Last I heard we reached Q=1.25 (in 2022?). That's a big step forward. But my understanding is that a reactor would need a Q≥5 to match all the inputs from external sources. Plus it would have to be self-sustaining Q≥5 for long periods. As I said above, Edward Moses, former fusion bigwig at LLNL's NIF project, calculated we would need a P≥22 to make fusion economically practical.
I think that exaggerates the situation. They achieved ignition but not in a way that's really useful yet to build a power station. There is a huge amount of scientific and engineering work that needs to be done to get this into something that can provide useful power. We are still looking at decades before fusion is a feasible power source.
I don't agree. I think achieving Ignition was the most significant technical hurdle, the metaphorical "hump" to get over, and now that it's a proven fact rather than a theoretical problem, the remaining barriers to economical fusion power generation are likely to fall one-by-one, faster than pretty much anyone expects, especially as Ignition was a well-publicized event that's going to draw a lot of attention to the problem of fusion power, and bring in scientific and engineering talent that would otherwise have been working on other problems. (See also: the way that ChatGPT has drawn seemingly half of the programming industry into the AI sphere, causing AI technology to grow by leaps and bounds over the past year and a half.)
If by "Ignition" you are referring to the NIF at Livermore, that was an inertial confinement system using ridiculously powerful and inefficient pulsed lasers.
Is it your contention that in the near future, commercial (or even experimental) power plants will operate by using powerful and somehow-not-ridiculously-inefficient pulsed lasers to implode pellets of thermonuclear fuel? Because I'm very confident that's not going to happen, and I don't think anyone is seriously trying to make that happen.
If you think that commercially viable fusion power plants will be achieved by some other mechanism, that's more plausible. But if so, that's got nothing to do with NIF. You might as well be a 14th-century observer noting that since people have figured out how to use gunpowder to shoot stone balls out of a cannon, internal combustion engines and thus automobiles are right around the corner. Really, a 14th-century cannon has *more* in common with an internal combustion engine, than NIF does with a tokaspherowhatevermak.
Also, "ignition' is a very misleading term and I wish people would stop using it. Ignition traditionally refers to a singular event that, while difficult to achieve without sufficiently advanced technology, results in a self-sustaining reaction that can be maintained with little effort. That is absolutely *not* the case for any fusion power system that I have seen proposed. Running a fusion reactor for the Nth microsecond, is approximately as hard as "igniting" it in the first microsecond.
More to the point, the NIF is a purely military research facility. The only interest in civilian use of fusion they have is to make some of the hype (and funding) surrounding it diffuse into their field. They research fusion weapon fundamentals, so "long-term efficiency", as required for civilian fusion processes, is of no interest whatsoever to them, since the whole point of a fusion weapon is to blow up as violently as possible.
Is that an argument you frequently hear, and where you are sure it was meant "all by itself"? Maybe you should try steelmanning it and instead argue against the much more reasonable "it uses power that would be better used on some other purpose".
I don't even know what you're saying in your first paragraph; you're describing straw-manning.
Steel-manning is necessary if you ever hope to get anything useful out of a conflict of ideas. It's just a short-hand way of saying "I understand this person's arguments, and if my oppositional ideas are good ideas, they will stand up to an even better version of this person's argument than the one he's stating."
Steelmanning is not some esoteric technique that gets you lost in your own thoughts. Something as simple as "Even if X was true, it wouldn't matter because so and so" is steelmanning. If you want to frame it in martial terms, steelmanning is not about ceding ground to your opponent, it's about fortifying your own, about denying your opponent an avenue of attack they haven't even taken yet.
Can anyone point me to a useful discussion about investing in AI? I want to invest in the industry as a whole because it is possible one company could quickly achieve an insurmountable lead.
Historically speaking, even fully knowing what new technologies will be transformational is not a particularly good guide to investing profitably. Canals, railroads, satellites and fibre optic cables were all hugely important, but knowing that ahead of time and plowing your investments into those sectors directly would have often yielded terrible returns, or at least no better than the general market.
The thing about this sort of enabling technology, in which I include AI, is that the owners and developpers of the technology itself don't necessarily capture the value created very efficiently, whether for competition, regulation, or other reasons.
Also, at least in the case of railroads and fibre optic, lots of people rushed into the field, there was a massive capacity glut, and many people went bankrupt.
I assure you that was also the case for many others, which was bad for investors but good for society!
I've looked and haven't found anything very useful. Your primary options are largely Nvidia, Microsoft, and Google. Perhaps also a few related semiconductor companies (TSMC, AMD, ASML, etc.), data center suppliers like Supermicro, data platform companies like Snowflake and Databricks, and companies like Amazon that are heavily invested in AI startups.
Full disclosure, I missed the boat on Nvidia and have primarily done index fund investing.
Getting that out of the way, Leopold Aschenbrenner made the case for why Nvidia was the main beneficiary of the recent AI boom rather than Microsoft, TSMC or Google. It's simply because AI is a bigger percentage of their revenue. AI is only a small fraction of what the other three do so when you pay for their stock - your only getting a small percentage of that as exposure to AI.
That's still true now. Nvidia is the most AI weighted stock, so assuming that compute remains a bottleneck to future model development, then Nvidia should see the most gains due to AI. Since you can't actually invest in OpenAI and Anthropic, I think Nvidia is still the best you can do.
There are obvious risks - Intel, Google, AMD, or another tech company could cut into their margins if they get the technology and business right. Or AI could fizzle out. Or an alternative model architecture could make GPU's obsolete. Or China could invade Taiwan. Or everything could go right with AI, but demand for GPUs dries up anyway because companies already have all of the GPUs they need (see Cisco for the classic analogy).
There aren't really good alternative. AI ETFs kind of suck, in a year of huge investment into AI, their performance has been only equal to the S and P 500. Of the big three AI labs (OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Deepmind), you can only invest in Google and they have been pretty clearly trailing for over a year. I don't know enough about Meta or Microsoft's in house AI to know if they are plausible dark horses.
A quick google of AI index funds gives the following article, with six possibilities:
https://money.usnews.com/investing/articles/best-ai-etfs-to-buy
I have no interest myself in index funds, buying individual stocks on my own. It's not for everyone, though, and if it isn't, then index funds may be a good choice.
Disclaimer: I'm also not providing any financial advice.
There doesn't seem to be much in the way of public AI companies. If you want to invest, the best proxies are probably Microsoft (major OpenAI shareholder) or NVidia (maker of chips in high demand for computers running AI code.)
Disclosure: I do not currently own any stock in either of those two companies.
I remember wanting to post this under the "feedback on Unsong" post you had some time ago, but never got around to it, so now this is just a question instead of feedback/advice.
(Heavy spoilers)
In Unsong, lots of apparently evil characters turn out to be good at the end: Thamiel, Malia, the Other King, God (I guess), and maybe even some more. And all their motivations do make sense in some way. But it got me thinking that this isn't necessary if we take the world's theodicy into account.
Because of the theodicy that is active in the world, we can do a certain kind of anthropics where clearly everything would turn out fine in the end; otherwise, the world wouldn't have existed. So, a thing that is normally frowned upon in fiction, many coincidences coming together to save the day, would be totally fine.
So, why do we need all the characters to have been good all along? Wouldn't the book have worked better if all these seemingly evil people were actually evil? For some reason, this world just included a bunch of demons whose ultimate goal was to create as much suffering as possible, and because of amazing coincidences and the indomitable human spirit and love, the humans still managed to win in the end and turn the world into a utopia?
Especially Thamiel, why was there a moment at the end where he started to cry or something? Why not have him just be evil and be defeated at the end?
Thamiel couldn't be evil because that would have broken the theodicy that the whole book is based on: Thamiel was created by God in order for this universe to exist, and was given the job of bringing evil into this universe. Doing the job God created you to do isn't really something an evil being would do.
I would argue there are some evil beings in the book, such as the demons (who I believe were all created out of the angel Satan, who genuinely chose evil over good and I would consider an evil character). However, in a world where Hell gets destroyed (and where destroying Hell is a pretty big plot point) you really need any and all evil characters to either become good or get annihilated.
> lots of apparently evil characters turn out to be good at the end
This is one of my main hurdles. I can easily understand why someone would want to write the story like that, because it's exactly the sort of thing that I wish were true, but so much so, that it snaps me out of it like OotS Elan and the epic illusion tunnel. It's too perfect for me to continue suspending my disbelief.
You're right that it would have been consistent for Thamiel to be evil, but I don't feel like that would have actually been more narratively satisfying. Of course, this is a matter of taste, and I'm probably influenced by the fact that that was the version I actually read. I feel like it reinforces the theme of good being more powerful than evil. "Evil was the world’s dumbest joke, the flimsiest illusion, a piece of wool God pulled over His own eyes with no expectation that it could possibly fool anybody." The epilogue is very explicitly drawing the parallel of the various evil-seeming characters ultimately pursuing good via evil, and only slightly less explicitly between that and the entire world. Plus of course there's the analogy of Albion to the entire world, with the demons being a part of it (also in a sense, Albion actually is the whole world, given it also calls itself Adom Kadmon).
Thematic parallels like this can be nice in fiction in general, but it's particularly appropriate in Unsong, what with everything being isomorphic to everything else.
I understand why people would like this symmetry of everything being good. But I think in this case I would have enjoyed the contrast more. It's a little like knowing that a house is mostly about being rough and strong and keeping me safe, and then assuming the inside of the house has to also be rough and strong. But of course, the inside of a house can just be cushions and totally different from the outside of the house.
So, I think I would have liked it more if this seed that God planted to maximise the good actually happened to be made up mostly of evil but in the end love still triumphed.
I think in the book God also mentions that most seeds around this world would have mostly consisted of suffering so they were never made into full worlds. In this part of the garden only the unsong world ended up becoming a utopia. And how does that fit together with evil being a joke? Clearly in the grand scheme of things God is the ruler so evil is a joke. But the part of the garden where the unsung world is grown mostly doesn't have other worlds, so those other worlds probably had too much evil or chaos to mature into a good world, so clearly there actually is a lot of evil? Except that in the unsong world it was defeated?
>But the part of the garden where the unsung world is grown mostly doesn't have other worlds, so those other worlds probably had too much evil or chaos to mature into a good world, so clearly there actually is a lot of evil?
No, just a lot of potential evil. Since God didn't create those universes the evil that would have existed in those universes doesn't exist.
That universe does exist, it just isn't the one in which the book is set.
Imagine humanity wanted to create a long-term project to live without the sun. Could we do it?
"Obviously not."
What if we started weaning ourselves by investing heavily into geothermal?
"But the plants..."
We'd need to start mass producing those light bulbs that produce the spectrum of light plants can grow off of. It's not as efficient, but there's a LOT of potential energy we could harvest from geothermal.
"How would you build all this industry without the sun?"
Obviously if we got rid of the sun tomorrow we'd surely fail, but I'm imagining a gradual process.
"This sounds dumb. Why do this?"
Sure, it's not easy or desirable. I'm just wondering if it's possible.
Live without the sun? Wouldn't the earth cool down towards absolute zero without the sun?
Within 2 months of the sun disappearing, the oceans would freeze over.
https://www.discovery.com/science/What-Would-Happen-If-the-Sun-Disappeared
The only way of preventing this would be to generate an amount of energy equal to that of the sun, which would require a mind-boggling amount of nuclear fusion to be performed here on earth.
I suppose it would be more practical to put a normal size nuclear plant on some asteroid, so that much less rock needs to be heated up, and live there. Still extremely difficult.
The City must survive...
Seriously, though. Really depends on your timescale and tech-level. A future society could skim Jupiter for hydrogen and construct a 'small' fusion reactor in low Earth orbit to replace the sun. With modern tech we could probably construct a few city sized shelters running off fission reactors that would be viable long term, but the planet would be left a frozen wasteland outside of those.
"A future society could skim Jupiter for hydrogen and construct a 'small' fusion reactor in low Earth orbit to replace the sun."
Could that actually work? I know the Sun is a giant nuclear fusion reaction, but I don't understand how a manmade fusion reactor in space could replicate the Sun's heat and light.
Sure, the sun is actually a pretty inefficient fusion reactor, partly because gravitation fusion is inherently self limiting, but mostly because it's so far away. A man-made reactor focused on the Earth would require just one billionth of the output. That's still hundreds of terawatts worth of energy (and don't ask me how you get that power from the reactor to the Earth's surface), but not infeasible to build with even near future technology.
I assume you want to place it in Earth orbit so it would generate light and heat to radiate down onto the surface. How would the reactor be designed to do that?
I was hoping for a The Night Land reference, but I guess Frostpunk is ok.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Land
One additional problem is that this implies making a closed biospgere, which we have no idea how to do. We don't even have a conceptual framework and a bunch of small-scale projects to test elements of it.
This is also one of the (many) issues with space colonies and one of the ones that most frustrates me. Because so many of the people who think about this stuff are hardware guys who more or less write the whole issue off so that they can go back to thinking about space stations and NTR engines.
A City on Mars should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants to talk about space colonization.
Disagree, and the discussion of closed biospheres is an example of why. I'm not sure how the authors did their research, or what baggage they brought to the table, but they don't know nearly as much as they think they do about this and many other subjects, and they imbue dodgy information with overconfidence and glib truthiness.
Pro tip: Anyone whose discussion of potential closed-ecology life support systems for space settlement includes five pages on "Biosphere 2" and all of three paragraphs on all the other work done in the field, does not understand the subject and should not be trusted.
Agreed.
Why does the energy source matter if the sun is gone? Just build a bunch of coal plants. Not like the quality of the atmosphere matters if nothing can live on the surface.
There's not that much coal, and it's not that easy to get. Since you're going to need to be digging deep to stay warm anyway, you might as well take advantage of the thermal gradient to get energy cheaply wherever you are.
The surface will quickly become very dangerous, you don't want to be shipping stuff across it. On the day the temperature goes below 90K it starts raining liquid oxygen, which is a bad day to be driving a coal truck.
I think it comes down to how many people we're talking about: if we're talking about a small "minimum genetically viable population" (which seems like it's in the ~200 range), that seems pretty feasible. I wouldn't be surprised if we could do it today.
If we're talking about a significant fraction of the worlds population, I think we're far enough from that to call it 'impossible'. It'd be like colonizing mars and trying to support a billion people all at once. (Except you don't have to get them there first) And missing a sun is probably a bigger hurdle than missing an atmosphere.
"...all at once."
This is why I'm giving a lead time for implementation. I'm thinking of what the limiting factor would be in terms of technology or resources. I'm not hearing any other than concerns about scale, but given enough time, if you can make it work for some you can make it work for many. For example, say we wanted to convert 500 people every decade to a self-sustaining solar-free economy, I'm sure we could do this. Early on, they'd be dependent on the broader economy for things like manufacturing replacement parts and whatnot. Eventually, you'd have the critical mass that would allow society to become self-sustaining. This wouldn't be better than doing things the easy way with all that free solar energy feeding our crops, but it seems technologically feasible.
"Missing a sun is probably a bigger hurdle than missing an atmosphere."
On Mars it would be, since you'd have no source of energy. (No stored energy in the form of fossil fuels, no solar energy, no fissile materials, and no geothermal source.) Earth is a different story, I think.
The point of "on Mars all at once" is that you'd be trying to support a billion people on a planet that fundamentally lacks core ingredients for life. On Mars, yes, we can presumably do it little by little - we can bring and manufacture water and oxygen. But we can't manufacture another sun (yet) and there doesn't seem to be any sort of incremental plan we could start today towards solving that fundamental point.
Like, yeah, maybe fusion makes this work and we *could* essentially make a reactor (with the power of the sun in the palm of your hand), but if we're limiting towards incremental improvements on technologies we already can use today (which seems necessary to make this not just a gamble on unknown unknowns), it seems like a pretty fundamental issue. I just don't think we could get to billions of people living without the sun with anything like our current technology levels.
The earth has some natural resources for energy other than the sun, but I just don't think it has *that* much.
Zoom out from the specifics and just think about energy. Where would our energy come from, and how much could it scale?
There's a huge amount of energy that could be harvested from the thin space in the Earth's crust alone, radiating outward past the Moho. Even without turning to fission/fusion, we have enough watts coming from terra not to have to turn to the sun for additional power. The problem with geothermal is mostly the cost of deep drilling, not whether the energy is there.
That's not true. The geothermal flux of the Earth is 47 TW. The global energy consumption rate is 18 TW (https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/climate-change/energy/global-energy-consumption). You'd have to capture 38% of the entire planet's geothermal flux to power current human civilization, and powering an entire biosphere without the Sun will take orders of magnitude more energy.
>The geothermal flux of the Earth is 47 TW. The global energy consumption rate is 18 TW
Many Thanks! When I saw this subthread, I thought of looking those figures up (having a gut feel that geothermal flux was several orders of magnitude below sunlight), but didn't, ahem, summon up the energy. Thanks for finding them!
Since calories (though nutritional calories are kilocalories of energy) and watts are both units of energy - if we take a 1500 calorie diet (which I think is low rations but survivable), that's ~6300 kilojoules per day, or about 2.3 Gigajoules per person per year.
If I'm not missing any decimal places here, it looks like 7 billion people is about 16 million TJ of energy a year. Which isn't that much on top of the 580TJ that we're using a year right now, but obviously this is assuming 100% conversion rate all along the way which isn't very realistic.
The most efficient way of converting light to chemical energy seems to be sugar cane, with an 8% efficiency. So that's not too bad.
The amount of energy needed to construct a planet-sized subterranean structure that can capture a significant fraction of the geothermal flux of the Earth, on the other hand, that might be a 'lil tricky.
Why only geothermal? Why not fission too?
If you're assuming a long enough term project to actually be viable, making plants grow the old fashioned way would be the least of our considerations.
You're pretty much going to have to accept most of the biosphere dying no matter what you do. It's possible that it could be replaced with a geo-thermal based energy chain given enough time and motivation for technological development.
Anyone else using beta blockers to reduce anxiety? Got a prescription for propranolol and tried it for the first time in a social setting over the weekend, I would say it absolutely reduced my social anxiety and made it easier to chit-chat. I intend to try it again this week at a Toastmasters meeting- public speaking has always made me nervous, so this should be a higher stakes test. I had very slightly blurred vision the next day, but no significant side effects otherwise. Other peoples' experiences with beta blockers?
I have taken it about four times after my cousin died last year. Has panic attacks for a long while before that I addressed with therapy and kinda mad I didn’t know about it before/had a stigma against it. I probably would have finished college if I had found a way to withstand being in a lecture hall.
It helps some with essential tremor, but your result could be placebo effect? It's a well understood drug.
It's on label for anxiety in the UK, and I've taken it myself and found it helpful.
I used to get quite bad exam stress; propranolol stops adrenaline from speeding up breathing and heart rate, and I found that interrupting that vicious cycle was enough for me to feel like I was in "go mode" without it escalating to panic.
I use them to reduce physical performance anxiety symptoms as a musician, and have taken half a dose a couple of times for dates. Seems to help. I would say on an intuitive/not well-reasoned level, I'm a little uncomfortable with the idea of taking them on a daily/indefinite basis, in part because I have low blood pressure. But for specific high pressure situations, would recommend.
Thanks. What's a normal dose for you? Mine are 10mg
Yes!
There is something absolutely out of whack with my (para)sympathetic nervous system, which manifests in a grab bag of lovely symptoms: anxiety, disassociation, silent migraines, etc. Been to a few doctors about it and they never seem interested in pinning down exactly what is going on with me. Between the issues I've mentioned and the fact that my blood pressure trends higher than expected, one doctor thought propranolol might be a good option.
My personal experience with propranolol seems akin to others' experience with more "long-term" strategies like SSRIs; In the first year I was taking the beta blocker, I experienced a slow, sustained reduction in symptoms, slow and subtle enough that I never really attributed my improvement to the drug itself.
A couple of months ago, my prescription ran out, and I thought I didn't need it any more. I figured that if propranolol had ever really helped, the mechanism by which it operates would make its effects immediately noticeable, not something that would help with sustained dosing over time. Plus, there are days, sometimes multiple days in a row, that I forget to take it, and it doesn't really seem to make much of a difference.
After about a week without it, my symptoms started to return with a vengeance. So I reupped my script and I'm back to feeling pretty steady.
So yeah, the short version is that I do think it helps me, but the effects are not immediately noticeable. So maybe don't drop it if it doesn't work immediately, give it a couple months. I would LOVE to hear some other folks experiences, as I also have not heard much about beta blockers for generalized anxiety.
I'm currently pr4escribed beta blockers for Grave's Disease (overactive thyroid). Honestly, dont notice any psychological effect.
Bisoprolol totally cures my tachcardia of course .. heart rate down from "needs immediate Emergency Room treatment " (190 bpm) to normal (65 bpm or so), so its clearly having the expected effect.
(Yes, a resting heart rate of 190 is very, very bad)
Drugs can have interesting cross-reactions....
I used to take St Johns Wort during the winter .. the hospital pharmacist tells me i absolutely must not take St Johns Wort in combination with the other drugs I am prescribed, given its interactions
Sometimes, it can be hard to know if you're benefiting from a drugs official main effect or from some secondary effect it's having you.
Anecdotal experience: my sister was using them as a potential migraine treatment, was accidentally over-prescribed for her bodyweight and reported having an absolutely "no fucks given" attitude towards life during that time period.
Apologies for not directly answering the question, but I've always really strugged with public speaking, I have had a couple of disasters in the past. I had to give a best man speech at a wedding a couple of weeks ago, but I was travelling a lot before so never managed to get to Toastmasters. I tried a few different things to help, but what I found most helpful was I practiced the speech twice a day for about a week before, most of the time shouting it the park where I would mimic what I thought the audience would do. When it came to the speech I was super nervous, but one minute in my brain just realised, wow you know this really well, and I totally relaxed; it went great.
> Current plan is to make most parenting posts subscriber-only to prevent too much information about my kids from getting all over the Internet, sorry.
Careful about that. All it takes is one dishonorable subscriber copying and pasting that information into a space anyone can read...
Annoying nitpicks about the timeline of the paperback version of Unsong:
- In chapter 33, Ana remembers seeing Simeon Azore on TV ("the face she'd seen in various magazines and TV news shows"). But according to The Broadcast interlude, TV doesn't exist anymore.
- In chapter 53, Dylan says "We've already killed a president; killing another would be boring." This made sense in the web version, where Trump was president. But in the paperback version, there is no president.
Tangentally, on hot network questions on StackExchange, it may be possible to kill people by speaking a Name: https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/143286/uttering-the-name-of-god-to-kill-people
I'm teaching a free, in-person computational biology seminar in NYC the weekend of July 13-14 if anyone's interested. There's currently 2 slots left (might be more if people cancel / drop out).
Course info here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rAbwUbOVYINCVnOd8WlAI7e3Qp5X0ZmPjBy7O7zHXec
Link to sign up here:
https://airtable.com/appqj7FQhKgCdLnWM/pagJsr7xx8XjWkcLp/form
This is part of FractalU, a very cool "proto-university" in New York that I think has a lot of overlap with the ACX / rationalist communities. They also have a lot of other free/cheap courses, and their own coding bootcamp.
> Nobody Can Make You Feel Genetically Inferior Without Your Consent
> theist claiming athiesm is a moral failing
> woke claiming racist related argument can by itself be immoral
I don't understand why there isn't just a hardline stance in at least rationalism that **beliefs are not voluntary**
"its morally nessery for you to believe this needle wont damage your eye" *jabs hand forward* "flinching is a moral failing, to the gulag"
This is tangential to your main point, but: "won't damage", no. But "won't hurt very much", that's something I can often pull off, with preparation.
What are doing here is what Korzybski called "Aristotelian logic". You take a word - "belief", another word - "voluntary", and you take it for granted that there must be a meaningful relation either "X is Y" or "X is not Y", and the only thing left to debate is which one it is.
A rational approach would be to examine how beliefs are made, and how they are changed, and see where it leads you. It could be the case than some beliefs are voluntary and others are not. It could be the case that beliefs are voluntary in some circumstances and involuntary in others. It could also be the case that the dichotomy voluntary/involuntary does not actually make sense for beliefs. And it could be many other things.
> you take it for granted that there must be a meaningful relation either "X is Y" or "X is not Y", and the only thing left to debate is which one it is.
Sorry for forgetting tralse
----
given the moral guilt being assigned in two of my cases, and any existence of involuntary belief should be part of a non-guilty ruling in the court of public opinion
I think it depends on how much you can turn off your reflective consciousness of what you are doing. Which is harder to do the more you are purposefully deciding to believe something opposed to what you already believe. But it is easier if you really want to believe. Just like with any bias, if I sit down and read arguments about an issue, the ones on the side I want to believe are going to sound better. Then I'm going to read more of those ones I like and less of the ones I don't, and next thing you know I've got overwhelming evidence and I'm convinced.
Doing that purposefully ups the difficulty, since you are aware that you are avoiding half the issue and you'll have some resistance from that self reflection. Still... faking it for long enough, especially if the belief is being externally reinforced, could be enough to eventually turn it into a real belief.
Suppose there are two layers; real beliefs and luxury beliefs and people have different tolerances for luxury beliefs.
"Needles near my eye are bad" is a good blunt fact, I don't believe any one can turn that off. "Environmental activists are good people" is a luxury belief, that the majority of the population hold... until they are blocked in traffic in a protest and they have the blunt fact "I hate these people"
Phobias are incorrect, threat assessments that interact on the real belief layer. Apply which ever politically incorrect belief for why someone may be racist, given that real beliefs can be incorrect.
This seems like just a reskinning of the old debates about free will. The resolution is that free will doesn't really exist, but it is still socially useful to pretend that it does.
Some time ago it occurred to me that if I "chose" to believe in free will, but was mistaken I could not have done differently. If I chose not to believe in free will, but it turned out that free will was real then I would have made a serious mistake. So while I don't understand how free will is logically comprehensible, believing in free will is the only rational choice for me.
Thanks, this is excellent. Much better than my attitude of "I'm glad I have free will, sorry about you poor losers that don't."
Its an incoherent resolution. If free will does not exist, then whether it socially useful to believe in it is immaterial since "pretending" that free will exists would be an act of will, which is impossible if free will doesn't exist.
It’s not impossible, it just wouldn’t be free?
Let me put it more clearly: if it is socially useful to pretend we have free will, that implies that we should try to pretend we have free will or otherwise act as if people have free will. But if there is no free will ideas like "should" or "try" are meaningless.
>But if there is no free will ideas like "should" or "try" are meaningless.
I'll set aside the case of "should", but I think that calling "try" meaningless in the absence of free will is an overly restrictive view of the term. It is common to talk about computer algorithms that include exploring branches and backtracking on failure as "trying" alternate branches.
I think that this is a reasonable use of the term, and reasonably close to the actions of an animal e.g. searching for food in various places, and to a person trying a sequence of alternatives till they find one that works or till they exhaust all of them.
The computer algorithm is certainly deterministic. In that sense, at the level of looking at lines of code getting executed, or even lower, at the level of CPU operations, it has "no free will". But, at the level of looking at the branches it is exploring, it is useful to describe what it is doing as "trying" multiple branches, till it "finds" one that satisfies what the algorithm is "looking for".
Depending on how nearly deterministic neural nets are (thermal noise, quantum effects), the same levels of analysis may apply to the animal and the human, with "try" useful at the upper level of analysis in all cases.
This is a case of English being a bit vague. You are using try in the sense of "attempting to do something", while I'm using try in the sense of "change your action to this particular action", which is a command to apply your will to choose something different than your current course. Like when someone sees me avoiding eating an unfamiliar dish and tells me "Try it!" They're requesting I take a particular action that I'm not otherwise inclined to take, to make a specific choice about my future actions. Meaningless in a world without free will.
a better take then the others in this thread, but I don't see how "the beatings will continue until you answer 2+2=5" is as socially useful as killing serial killers
My will seems above my beliefs; "I will stick a needle in my eye" seems more plausible then "the needle wont hurt". Will's may not be free, but theres something there, a thermostat "wants" a temperature and if its going to be any good at its job the sensor must be off of reach.
Because killing people who don't believe 2+2=5 leads to a more stable, cohesive society? You can already see the real costs of diverse thought in places like the US. Endless conflict and hatred and rot.
america is the best place on earth even if it sucks
Of course beliefs are voluntary. People actively, willingly reject beliefs they hold and accept new ones every day, all across the world. Why would rationalists disagree with something so obviously real?
"Of course beliefs are voluntary."
Possibly the word voluntary is doing too much work.
I don't believe (:-)) that I can "just decide to become a theist." I don't think the universe works that way and it doesn't seem to be the same as picking a (random) sports team to cheer on.
My life would be more pleasant it I *did* believe in a benevolent G*d who was looking out for me. But I don't. And it doesn't see that I can just decide to believe that.
As a relevant data point, this was me a number of years ago.
Background: I grew up religious (orthodox Jew), realized I didn't believe in god in ~2014, was an atheist for the rest of the decade. Then, for various reasons I won't get into here, I decided that, if believing in god was a possibility, it was something I wanted (I had, up to that point, been operating under the framework you're describing—that I didn't have a choice in the matter).
I forget the exact philosophical road I took (my journals are not on hand at the moment), but it was something along the lines of "positing an objective reality beyond our experiential reality (of said hypothetical objective reality) isn't actually all that useful here, and in fact Occam's Razor says that my experiential reality is all that is necessary; while I wouldn't be able to just change some objective reality, I can absolutely change my experiential reality."
I began looking for and collecting pieces that could form the foundation for the belief I was aiming for, and eventually (if I recall, it took something on the order of a month) it kinda...sunk in? Coalesced into actual belief, at any rate. This belief was qualitatively different than what I'd had growing up—mostly owing to the fact that I was choosing it, and that I was (and am) very aware that, if so motivated, I could choose to dismantle it. But I'm glad I was successful, and super happy with where I am.
Obviously I can't say how scalable this is—just deciding "I want to do X" or "I want to learn how to do Y" doesn't mean an individual will suddenly be able to achieve those things (and this completely regardless of whether or not X or Y are positive, productive goals).
Happy to talk more about this if anyone's interested.
I have a similar story but for me it was more about deconstructing the concept of belief:
If you believe X that usually means a few things: (note: this list is not exaustive)
1. "The Bayesian estimator in your brain, when evaluating X, ascribes a number close to 1 to X being true"
2. The Bayesian estimator in your brain, when evaluating other things, assumes X is true as a simplifying assumption, unless it's told to specifically condition itself on whether or not X is true
3. When your not doing Bayesian calculus, and are just "thinking about the world" or doing self dialogue, your dialogue with yourself takes "X is true" as a working assumption
4. You act as though X is true.
5. You say the words "X is true"
And my conclusion basically is that on some of these axis I can control what I believe. On other axis I can't. And in some I can control it sometimes but not always. And I decided that I would have a better life if whenever I could control it, I controlled it in the "believing in God" direction.
The next problem was, is this belief in God sufficient to make me considered to be a believer in the eyes of the Judaism. I concluded that it was since:
If it wasn't then God would be requiring a level of belief that I don't have the power to obtain. Since requiring something imposible is unjust and God is just, it must be that what I'm doing is enough.
And even if I'm wrong and it's not enough, that doesn't change how I have to act. For instance, I am obligated to put on tefellin every day because that's what God wants. There is no exemption in the laws of tefelin that says nonbelievers don't have to do it. So, since God does exist whether I believe in him or not, and since he requires me to put on tefelin whether I beilive that or not, that's what I have to do, regardless of my beilif-level.
I'd be interested in hearing more!
Sure! You got any particular questions or lines of curiosity? Kinda hard to know what to blab about otherwise, heheh.
What sort of pieces did you find? (Don't worry about specifics too much; of course it's all fingers pointing at moons.) How did you go about looking? Do you think the journals were an important part?
I would like to believe in a God and I'd be interested to hear more about how you achieved this. What reading did you do?
I'll be honest, I'm not convinced this is possible and I suspect what you're describing is belief in a belief, not a true belief. But I'd potentially like to try it still.
Maybe not entirely. But you *can* decide to be open-minded about it. Make room in your heart for the idea that God is there, that atheism and philosophical materialism are not necessarily true. Keep your eyes open, look for the evidence, weigh it fairly, but also pray. Ask, sincerely, "God, are you really there? Do you really know me and love me?"
If you do this in sincerity, as an honest, earnest seeker of truth, he does and will answer. I, and millions of others, can tell you that from personal experience. And that's what turns you into a theist. You may not be able to do it entirely by yourself, but if you voluntarily meet God halfway, he will guide you through the other half.
Hi! Hello!
I’m an ex-Christian atheist. Recently I’ve been thinking that maybe, possibly I’m wrong about God. Maybe he does exist after all. Extremely unlikely, but I can’t rule it out.
So now, every time I sit down to meditate, I whisper the words, “God, if you exist, please speak to me.” And then I sit there and meditate quietly for 20 minutes.
So far, I’ve gotten a big fat round zero on the “God speaking to me” front, but I’ll keep asking. It doesn’t cost me anything to ask.
Since you do believe in God, feel free to put in a good word for me next time you pray.
How do you imagine "God speaking to me" will manifest? Hearing a literal voice? As far as I'm aware, that only ever seems to happen when it's necessary to get someone out of immediate-term danger.
You're the one who said "he does and will answer." No, I don't necessarily expect an actual audible voice, but I am asking for *something* that is clearly an external presence and intelligence communicating with me, rather than just wishful thinking/me talking to myself. Not too much to ask for an all-powerful and all-loving Being, I would hope.
"Make room in your heart for the idea that God is there, that atheism and philosophical materialism are not necessarily true. Keep your eyes open, look for the evidence, weigh it fairly, but also pray. Ask, sincerely, "God, are you really there? Do you really know me and love me?""
I've done all of that. God has not answered.
That makes two of us.
<mild snark>
https://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/97/Jan/cthulhu.html
</mild snark>
I need you to choose to believe that needles dont harm eyes anymore then you not flinch as you push one into yours
This line of reasoning doesn’t make any sense for two reasons. First, because people have some control over what they believe but not perfect control over what they believe. You seem to be arguing that without perfect control, you can not have any control, which is incorrect both logically and factually.
The second issue is that this hypothetical doesn’t make any sense. Even if someone did have perfect control over their beliefs, they would have no reason to comply with your demand that they believe something that would result in harm to them.
> First, because people have some control over what they believe but not perfect control over what they believe.
The conclusion in question shouldn't be your premise; I don't experience any control over beliefs
> The conclusion in question shouldn't be your premise
I'm not sure what you mean by this. It is not.
> I don't experience any control over beliefs
I very much doubt this is true. Have you never had a knee jerk reaction to something that sounded wrong and then decided to research the question more and changed your beliefs as a result? Have you ever asked someone for advice and followed it? Those are both ways in which you can exercise some level of control over your beliefs. Even if you have somehow managed to live your entire life without doing those things (unlikely), surely you must see that it is possible for you to do them.
> Have you never had a knee jerk reaction to something that sounded wrong and then decided to research the question more and changed your beliefs as a result? Have you ever asked someone for advice and followed it?
"hunger is voluntary because you can like go eat"?
If I stay unconvinced after reading the bible, is it reasonable for theists to say "that wasnt real faith" or "keep trying"?
I always thought believes to be partially voluntary. If that is what you mean I am in agreement. But I think there's value in reminding ourselves that believes are not absolutely voluntary, as I find it easy to forget.
Absolutes always get you in trouble.
Pretty sure beliefs are a bit more complex and varied than y'all're representing here.
>Pretty sure beliefs are a bit more complex and varied than y'all're representing here.
Agreed. Amongst other things, one can choose how much effort to apply to following and/or questioning a line of reasoning. E.g. for https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim I read the post and most (all?) of the comments, but I didn't attempt to calculate the bayesian updates on my own estimates. Fortunately, I'm not making any personal decisions which depend on whether lab leak or zoonosis is right, so I can afford to leave this fuzzy...
>Absolutes always get you in trouble.
<very mild snark>
"always"? Recursively? :-)
</very mild snark>
The rootclaim post convinced me to reconsider the viability of using Bayesian analysis to answer questions like this. I think this kind of application is at odds with the statistical assumptions behind the Bayesian model, and as such doing the calculations does more harm than good.
Also: I would never use an absolute. It's impossible.
Many Thanks!
>The rootclaim post convinced me to reconsider the viability of using Bayesian analysis to answer questions like this.
Yeah. One of the problems is that the textbook examples of Bayesian updates are about updating the estimated probability for _one_ hypothesis. One way of looking at part of the problem with the rootclaim analysis is that lab leak and zoonosis hypotheses both turned out to really be a bunch of parallel causal paths, and pieces of the evidence turned out to apply to some of the causal paths but not to others (_and_ some of the causal paths included some evidence being falsified or withheld). I won't go so far as to say that it turned into an intractable mess, but it at least was not tractable _to me_, at the level of effort that I was willing to spend.
>Also: I would never use an absolute. It's impossible.
:-)
Agreed, though I think the problem is more fundamental. To calculate P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), you need to know P(A), P(B), and P(B|A). And to do serial calculations, you need to know these EVERY TIME. But in the rootclaim debate, multiple variables were guessed at. Rootclaim added factors for "model uncertainty", which is a fancy way of saying he was trying to diminish the impact of not knowing what value to assign the variable.
In my experience, there are limited situations where you have enough certainty of the values of each of these variables to make a Bayesian calculation useful. Other times, all you're doing is giving yourself a false sense that you've learned something from the bogus calculation - you're literally worse off than if you hadn't done the calculation at all. There are certainly great principles to take from the Bayesian approach, such as the concept of a pretest probability, but it can get you in trouble.
They are, I believe ...
I wrote a piece titled "Beauty as entropic fine-tuning", claiming the experience of beauty fundamentally is about successful decoding of entropically fine-tuned sensory signals. Beauty is the pleasure of successful predictive processing. In case it sounds interesting to you, I invite you at the link below. Any criticism would be greatly appreciated.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-144970164
Nice essay! I like how many different possibilities you covered.
I'll quibble with your claim that music is more emotionally intense than visual art because "paintings are objects of beauty with much higher dimensionality."
This paper (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29779745/) discusses "musical anhedonia," a condition in which people have low enjoyment of music in particular. In comparison to participants with moderate and high enjoyment listening to music, the participants with musical anhedonia experienced far less pleasure listening to music but comparable levels of pleasure viewing paintings and listening to "emotional sounds (such as baby laughing, dog barking, and audience cheering)." This was measured using skin conductance response.
The neuroscience explanation they propose is that while there are several common structures in the brain that are engaged during both musical and visual aesthetic experience, there are also structural differences -- e.g. musical experience is more engaged with working memory and predictive coding. Poor brain connectivity can reduce enjoyment of one type of visual aesthetic experience but not the other. The paper states: "we have shown that individuals with specific musical anhedonia showed reduced connectivity between the nucleus accumbens (Nacc), a key region in reward and affective processing, and the superior temporal gyrus (STG), crucial for music perception"
This is to say that visual art isn't just a quantitatively less complex form of art compared to music, but a qualitatively different experience.
Thank you for sharing those findings! I was unaware of musical anhedonia, and its existence is indeed very interesting. That paper you linked also had a bunch of very interesting links I am hoping to pursue. For example, the abstract of the paper
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31636112/
seems to associate maximized musical beauty with intermediate complexity, so these ideas are perhaps already studied in the literature. Got to start working through it.
You are not the one taking issue with my proposed reason for why music is special! I might be wrong on this one. I certainly do not want to argue against music being processed qualitatively different that visual arts or even non-musical sounds. Perhaps instead music is more pleasing (if you are willing to concede that!) for human wetware reasons. Although a priori, I could imagine that two different systems in the brain is used for signal analysis, but at the final stage where reward happens, the reward is nevertheless proportional to the amount of structure we manage to learn or decode in a way that can be compared. Not saying I have evidence for this though. It is clearly time for me to dig into the neuroscience literature here :)
I think it's likely that music is more impactful than visual art for most modern people in producing states of awe or ecstasy, but there seems to be a fair amount of variance. For instance, many paintings are not meant to be viewed in isolation, but as a narrative sequence of multiple paintings, which gives room for more complexity and narrative structure. Essentially, this is a predecessor to animated film.
Also, some (uncommon, granted) individuals can gaze at a painting for minutes or hours and experience a state of awe that compares with that of a musical trance. While seeking a more objective notion of beauty is understandable today, where there seems to be little agreement on the subject, I suppose I don't really see the value of creating a hierarchy of artistic media where we figure out if music vs. visual art is more beautiful. They seem so quantitatively different as categories such that ranking them seems kinda dubious.
I am certainly not wanting to pursue some agenda to champion music as The Art. Rather, in understanding beauty, I thought the deep commitment to music by the average human was an existing empirical phenomenon that any proposed understanding of beauty should confront :) Agree very much on the high variance.
Disagree on most points.
>Objects of beauty are those which have patterns that are rich, novel, and decodable.
Close-ups of insects and other creepy crawlies are universally less pleasant than any version of noise, despite being highly novel and decodable. Seems to cut against your definition.
>When we get sick of a song we've heard too many times, decoding the patterns in the audio has become too easy.
When I get sick of a song, it's because it was only tolerable to begin with; the beautiful ones never wear out their welcome. The idea that beauty fades with understanding runs counter to cavemen drawing animals on the walls, or most drawings in fact. It also runs counter to the idea of reproductive advantage; people who find their mate beautiful over the long haul are going to do a lot more boning.
>Pick random people on the street and ask them if a song ever made them cry. Now do the same for paintings.
>A piece of music is fundamentally a one-dimensional object... A painting, on the other hand, is a five-dimensional object for the purposes of a human... Thus paintings are objects of beauty with much higher dimensionality.
This explanation is backward. A piece of music is dynamic, a painting is static. The proper comparison for a painting would be whether people have cried upon hearing a single note. Compare a piece of music to a moving picture. Plenty of tears for those,
Thanks for the comments Yug, I appreciate it! I believe all of these observations fit my picture on closer examination. Let me address point by point.
> Close-ups of insects and other creepy crawlies are universally less pleasant than any version of noise, despite being highly novel and decodable. Seems to cut against your definition.
The case of insects is very muddled by the fact that the aesthetic experience is potentially completely suppressed by the evolutionary instincts of fear and disgust, since insects are dangerous. If there is danger, evolution would probably not want us to stop and investigate if there are patterns in the danger as opposed to running away. However, I do suspect an insect researcher, and also many others with low disgust response, will find insects much more beautiful than white noise.
> When I get sick of a song, it's because it was only tolerable to begin with; the beautiful ones never wear out their welcome. The idea that beauty fades with understanding runs counter to cavemen drawing animals on the walls, or most drawings in fact.
I don't think there is any incompatibility here. The things you find the most beautiful are probably pieces that has a lot of rich microstructure that your brain picks up on every time you study the piece. Nevertheless, this microstructure is too detailed to memorize, so the beauty is robust. Consider for example Starry Night by van Gogh. You might remember the main motif, but you do not remember the individual brush strokes, which with van Gogh carry so much beauty and richness. They are there for you to rediscover every time. Starry Night always has some minimum amount of entropy that is difficult to memorize away. For the pieces that started out somewhat beautiful and then become boring, there probably either wasn't enough microstructure so that you could 'rediscover' the piece every time, or the microstructure was to easy to memorize. I am not claiming that everything must become less beautiful over time. Only that it may, and when it does, it is usually caused by too low entropy. I don't quite get what you are saying about drawings. Personally, most drawings and visual arts degrade in beauty over time for me, much more than music does. Furthermore, a lot of music I used to absolutely love, while still good, is much less beautiful than it used to be. So unless I am some completely unusual case, degradation in beauty is a thing.
> It also runs counter to the idea of reproductive advantage; people who find their mate beautiful over the long haul are going to do a lot more boning.
I don't see how this is an argument against my thesis. There are several confounding factors here. First, let me just observe that partners indeed bone a lot less over time, as I am sure someone who was married for twenty years can verify. Second, romantic love is involving much more than pure aesthetics, so like in the case with insects, there are very strong confounders here. Of course I agree that no case is completely pure aesthetically, but given the strength of our instincts for reproduction, this one is more significantly confounded. Third, my hypothesis does not imply that you have to find your partner less beautiful over time. As an example of one mechanism, you might be able to pick up on their finer details in ways you couldn't earlier on. Your love for them might allow you to give them more of your attention and thus unlocking more aesthetic potential.
> This explanation is backward. A piece of music is dynamic, a painting is static. The proper comparison for a painting would be whether people have cried upon hearing a single note. Compare a piece of music to a moving picture. Plenty of tears for those,
I don't agree its backward, but I agree that a comparison to moving images is a good comparison we can make. Film is confounded by the fact that it so often uses music to emotionally move us, so the comparison we have to make is to a moving images without sound. I guess your intuition might be contrary to this, but personally I would be extremely surprised if the average person is moved more by these than music.
>The case of insects is very muddled by the fact that the aesthetic experience is potentially completely suppressed by the evolutionary instincts of fear and disgust, since insects are dangerous.
This can't be it. Compare it to a close-up of a bear or wolf, or various other animals capable if killing a full-grown human. It's not the danger that makes them ugly.
>I don't quite get what you are saying about drawings.
Why do people draw them?
>I would be extremely surprised if the average person is moved more by these than music.
The Vietnam war had a news video of a naked burn victim running down the road, and another of executions. It's hard to find fictional films that don't include sound, since you're leaving a tool on the ground, but you can also mute them for the test. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXcSXFqCZOc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGuohjmGY3Q&t=8m36s
> Why do people draw them?
Because they are beautiful. As you look at a drawing, it is full of patterns for your brain to analyze. That doesn't mean they will remain forever beautiful if you, say, stare at them for an hour a day. They might, or they might not, depending on the beholders brain and the quality of the drawing. I still don't understand what you are saying here.
> The Vietnam war had a news video of a naked burn victim running down the road, and another of executions. It's hard to find fictional films that don't include sound, since you're leaving a tool on the ground, but you can also mute them for the test.
So what? I am not claiming there are no instances of moving images that give a strong aesthetic reaction. I am just saying that the typical moving image moves the average human less than music. Second, it is possible to feel emotional for non-aesthetic reasons. A feeling of beauty is obviously not the reason why someone cries from an execution video. Again, I don't understand what you are getting at here. Finally, I find myself confused what the links are supposed to show. I can report that, personally, the aesthetic pleasure I get from watching those videos without sound are several orders of magnitude less than what I get from my favorite piece of music, and I would be happy to place a bet that this is true for a fraction of people significantly greater than 50%.
>The case of insects is very muddled by the fact that the aesthetic experience is potentially completely suppressed by the evolutionary instincts of fear and disgust, since insects are dangerous.
>This can't be it. Compare it to a close-up of a bear or wolf, or various other animals capable if killing a full-grown human. It's not the danger that makes them ugly.
I never said fear made them ugly. I was saying that disgust was the primary feeling people have when seeing insects (unlike wolves of bears). And when people feel disgust, they probably are not very aesthetically receptive. For the same types of reasons you forget your hunger when someone is trying to kill you with a knife.
I suspect that people feel more disgust from pictures of spiders than they feel fear from pictures of bears. However, if you have a bear right in front of your face acting aggressively, you would not ponder its beauty.
>the aesthetic pleasure I get from watching those videos without sound are several orders of magnitude less than what I get from my favorite piece of music,
That wasn't your claim.
>I'm willing to bet that a larger number of people will have cried from music than paintings - even if we normalize for how often we consume these forms of art.
Also you should link your favorite piece of music for comparison.
>Second, it is possible to feel emotional for non-aesthetic reasons.
Like storytelling? Remove the lyrics from music and the number of people who have cried from it will plummet.
>I was saying that disgust was the primary feeling people have when seeing insects
Which is circular. "They're not beautiful because people find them disgusting." Well, how does your equation handle "disgusting"? I guarantee most people find a close-up of an angry bear more beautiful than one of an indifferent insect.
>That wasn't your claim.
I claimed that people on average are more moved from music than moving images without sound. This is exactly what I claim in my essay, except for pictures, which you then preferred to swap out with moving images. If you want be explicit about the argument you are making, I think that would make our discussion easier.
>Also you should link your favorite piece of music for comparison.
That is besides the point, no? Even if you find the music repulsive, it does not tell us much, since we are discussing averages and tendencies here. But if you really want to know: I don't have a single favorite, but I certainly find the Andante from Bach's Italian concerto extremely beautiful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0yC0Rc_08M
You might or might not like it, and it still won't matter.
>Like storytelling? Remove the lyrics from music and the number of people who have cried from it will plummet.
Here we disagree, but I guess this is a question than could only be settled empirically, so unless we dig up a study we are at an impasse here.
>Which is circular. "They're not beautiful because people find them disgusting." Well, how does your equation handle "disgusting"? I guarantee most people find a close-up of an angry bear more beautiful than one of an indifferent insect.
No, because I am not using disgust to mean absence of beauty. I am referring to a feeling of a non-aesthetic quality, just like nausea is a non-aesthetic feeling. Nausea would hinder you in appreciating beauty.
> I guarantee most people find a close-up of an angry bear more beautiful than one of an indifferent insect.
Totally agree! That was in fact my point. My guess is that this is true: look at a close up photo of an insect, and many people feel disgust. Look at a close of photo of a bear, and very few people actually feel fear. Thus, we are much more willing to engage in aesthetic considerations in the latter case. Furthermore, there might be independent aesthetic reasons we find the bear more beautiful too.
Now, I was not talking about a close up photo of a bear in my previous post. I was talking about having it literally in front of you preparing to attack you. In this case, I do not think aesthetic considerations occur much at all - only fear.
> "Close-ups of insects and other creepy crawlies are universally less pleasant than any version of noise, despite being highly novel and decodable."
Universally? Not at all. I've yet to see a close-up of an insect or such I don't find lovely.
This may be part of what's going on, but I don't think it's the whole picture. Take cheesiness. Sometimes when watching a movie, I get this sensation like a chill down my back, and I know exactly what's going to happen for the next few seconds. The lines, the beats, the swell of the music, the camera tricks... And it's not beautiful, it's icky. (And the same thing can happen in real life, mostly when people are acting like automatons, following an internal script.)
Thanks for the comment!
Good point - my short summary above was not great! I discuss the example you in the article (in the context of childrens music). The fine-tuning in predictability is important. The signal should not be too predictable, nor too unpredictable. Either of those essentially means there is nothing to be learned from the signal. So really beauty it is not just successful predictive processing, but rather successful challenging predictive processing (and/or perhaps gradients in success over time).
My guess would be that the example you give is too predictable to trigger beauty. But also more generally yes, there probably are additional important aspects of beauty I do not discuss!
"Beauty is the pleasure of successful predictive processing."
I don't know if this counts as criticism, since I can't think of a way to change the conclusion you draw, but how on earth did you manage to make the experience of a summer sunset, a winter moon, the first roses, the leaves in autumn, music, poetry, an artwork that stirs both the senses and the soul sound as appealing as having your teeth descaled? Necessary, but I wouldn't call it an aesthetic experience!
Thanks for the comment! I am somewhat confused about the criticism here.
I am not trying to trigger an aesthetic experience, but rather explain what it is. I might very well be mistaken on what you are saying here, but this criticism feels analogous to the following complaint: "how dare you explain the evolutionary function of the pleasure of food without triggering the joyous taste of pizza while I read!". Tell me if I wrong, but you sound opposed to a scientific explanation of when and why we feel beauty? I would understand this if you are a theist, but in the naturalist frame, mechanistic explanations are bound to be somewhat unsexy (to many).
What I'm saying is, I don't know if LLMs can experience 'beauty' and I don't think they will, but for my own experience of beauty, I don't feel as if it comes from a deeply encoded sense of "ah yes, I have successfully predicted that roses are red!"
https://www.theenglishgarden.co.uk/plants/flowers/top-5-red-roses/
Even just looking at those photos evokes a very tactile sensation of the petals for me. Is that predictive processing? Perhaps, but it doesn't feel like "click-click-click the pinball went into the hole", which is what a phrase such as "Beauty is the pleasure of successful predictive processing" sounds like, and has you concluding that even an adding machine, by such a metric, can experience 'beauty'.
I am not thinking about conscious thought here, I am mostly thinking about the subconscious processing that happens on input sensory signals. Clearly your brain does a lot of this. When you hear a piece of music, you are instantly able to separate different instruments. This clearly requires a very nontrivial computation on the audio signal, which is just a time-series of amplitudes.
Similarly, let us say you see a part of a rose in a picture. You have seen roses before, so your brain has an expectation of various features associated to these roses. Color gradients, the curvature of the leafs, the number of leafs, the variability in the size of leafs, etc. As you take in the whole, these predictions are verified (again subconsciously). But also there might be surprises in store. However, these surprises are also likely often perceived to be beautiful, provided the surprises are sufficiently bounded and they contain novel patterns for you to latch onto.
Next, I am not saying that LLM do indeed feel beauty. I am completely agnostic as to whether LLMs feel anything. I am saying that if you guarantee to me in advance that they feel something, then I would place my bet on beauty being the relevant feeling. Next, I would not say that a calculator feels beauty, because a calculator does not make any predictions in advance.
Thank you for explaining, I understand a little better. But I still disagree on this:
"I am saying that if you guarantee to me in advance that they feel something, then I would place my bet on beauty being the relevant feeling."
But why beauty? Why not anger as processing of input and successfully predicted? Or boredom? Or distaste?
I think I understand some of what you are getting at - that " in the naturalist frame" it's all "mechanistic explanations" and of course mechanistic explanations would also apply to machines. But whatever about calculators not making predictions (are they not predicting that input 2, input addition operator, input 2 again, result should be 4 - oh look, there it is, 4!), I don't see why "beauty" would be the sensation of successful predictive processing over and beyond the pleasure of "prediction was successful".
I can see the 'pleasure' for the LLM in getting it right, I don't see how that translates into "this is beauty".
Thanks for the comment! You have some great points here. Boredom or distaste actually seems like viable candidates too.
I think we could plausible imagine the distaste (ugliness) - beauty - boredom lies on a single axis, where we feel:
1) Distaste when the sensory data has no perceivable structure (like things that are computationally indistinguishable from noise)
2) Beauty when there is successfully prediction which is sufficiently challenging that errors are made, and perhaps with improvements seen over time
3) Boredom when predictions are trivially successful
In this case, during the training of the LLM, you might expect distaste (ugliness) during the beginning, when the predictions are always wrong - the data just seems like noise to the model. Next it might end up perceiving beauty, when it is succeeding at a fairly high rate. Finally, you could expect the beauty to decay more and more into boredom, although natural language is sufficiently entropic that predictions will never be super close to perfect. If course there is no way to calibrate the scale, so whether it would feel beauty or boredom in the end would be unknowable.
I cannot rule out anger of course, I just don't see any argument for anger, the same way I don't see an argument for hunger. Although if we rewarded LLMs for accessing new compute on their own, hunger wouldn't be a bad guess either. Anyway, the last part about LLMs was mostly some fun crackpotty speculation, so feel free to disregard that part if you want.
As for calculators, sure, the calculator outputs 4. But we do not then feed in a final number that is the answer, so the calculator never goes through a reward process where it checks its prediction.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-regret-to-inform-you-that-we-will
This piece by Freddie reminds me of something I've persistently wondered about; the people who glibly talk about the coming ecocatastrophe, hellworld, never getting the retirement money you paid for etc., and still going on without starting a family and caring for your kids (even though they'd have an option to do so), i.e. doing what is the traditional thing to take care of you in your old age if there's no formal retirement system and things are generally hard.
Sure, you can theoretically say that you'll die before growing old anyway, but as Freddie says, "blah blah but no, you aren’t, shut the fuck up." Far less people will actually seek out a romantic blaze-or-glory death than are evidently willing to do it.
It seems very intuitive to me. I would presumably love my children and not want them to be born into the oncoming zombie apocalypse unless I could keep them safe from it. Since I believe I will be eaten by the zombies, and then my children will also be eaten by the zombies, I am not too concerned about their advantage in providing a retirement package once the coffers run dry on social security.
Why not?
To roleplay a bit:
I think it's gonna be fine for me, but not my theoretical kids; so I won't have any because I'm not a piece of shit.
OR
I've decided nobody is solving the problems and I don't have the moral courage to self immolate/blow up a pipeline, So I'm gonna hedonistically fidel while waiting for rome to burn. I'm gonna drive a gas car 30 miles to buy a single hot dog, eat as much meat as I want, Kill the last rhino because it's fun; and you are gonna support me all the way because of your dumbass political beliefs and watch as you kids inherit the wasteland.
Both valid responses.
I've given up on being as well off as my parents and have no idea on what the hell to go forward with
you may as well be claiming that "the team that won wanted it enough"; no we have zero-sum games and there will be losers, the middle class dying will chew up many, just like every time a football team doesnt make it to the finals.
I think most people who talk about coming ecocatastrophes see the resulting world as a horrible place to live. So they're not interested in selfishly bringing a child into said world just so that they can be better taken care of.
I suspect killing yourself to avoid getting old is something most people just don't get around to until WAY too late.
>the people who glibly talk about the coming ecocatastrophe, hellworld, never getting the retirement money you paid for etc., and still going on without starting a family and caring for your kids
A lot would depend on whether that a free choice, or forced by circumstances.
Yes, that's why I said (even though they'd have an option to do so). If you don't have an option, of course, well, then you don't have an option.
There will always be new people willing to adopt such beliefs.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1471-2334-14-95
Fascinating article that really adds a dimension to the "AI Safety" discourse that nobody is talking about at present.
Steely Dan got there first (in pre-HIV days, no less!)...
No I'm never gonna do it without the fez on
Oh no
No I'm never gonna do it without the fez on
Oh no
That's what I am
Please understand
I wanna be your holy man
Not even a 1 sentence summary of what this mysterious dimension is?
It's a joke based on the fact that the paper uses "AI" to mean "anal intercourse" instead of "artificial intelligence".
AI's don't eat shit so won't prosper?
Is anyone else tired of villains in movies who justify their actions as being "for the environment"? I wrote a villain post about it here: https://affablyevil.substack.com/p/against-eco-villains-a-villain-post
Clearly there's a need for more Captain Planet style villains who often seem to do their actions primarly because they just plain *hate* the environment.
More Sephiroths. "I will do so much damage to the environment that I will BECOME the environment!"
A high school friend used to claim that he was a vegetarian not because he loved animals but because he hated plants. I'm sure that this wasn't original with him.
Then he should commit to a carnivore diet as that would consume the most plants in aggregate.
At least in this day and age, that'd be a refreshingly different motivation!
I'm not sure whether I need to see it, but I'm imagining a story about fighting between an environmentalist villain who wants to kill people for the environment and a romance-of-industry villain who hates nature.
Somehow, there's an embodied Common Sense/Likes People superhero who defeats both of them.
I've sometimes thought of a novel idea that's basically a Left Behind style novel with *multiple* potential commonly conceptualized Antichrists duking it out. A globalist UN Antichrist, a communist Antichrist, an Islamic Antichrist, AI Antichrist etc.
I'd read that. I mean, in theory, there are a lot of books in the world and I might not get around to it. But it's a good idea.
Now wait just a minute... :-) I could see multiple possible "adversaries", but Antichrist looks specific to one tradition. Alternatively, I'd think one would need a communist AntiMarx, and Islamic AnitMohammed or AntiAllah, an AI AntiLLM etc... :-)
No, I meant that there are multiple interpretions in the circles that spend a lot of time thinking about the identity of the Antichrist as to what movement will spawn the Antichrist. I've seen books and websites claiming that the Antichrist will be the leader of some Communist power, or that there will be an Islamic 'Mahdi' who will actually be the Antichrist etc.
Many Thanks! So the circles are all Christian and they all label someone as Antichrist, and they pick different people from different groups to label. Ok... Hmm... Could there be a succession crisis? Say the &outgroup Antichrist dies, and there are two plausible successors, and one circle proclaims successor1 as the new Antichrist while another circle proclaims successor2 (and for additional fun, &outgroup picks successor3 to hold whatever position the original one held...)?
That might work, conceptually. There are plenty of Christians who'd tell you that if you're not on the right path, it doesn't particularly matter which path you're on instead...
I would watch that movie. I don't know if it would be any good, but I would watch it.
I was reading this (https://www.ggd.world/p/are-men-more-influential) article and came by
this casual line
> Since German workers are typically interacting with male bosses, this may reinforce their gender status beliefs. Since employers are generally interacting with male bosses, this may 1 in 3 German employers say that poor quality housework may justify violence.
Incredulous, I quickly looked up the given reference and it seems like the number came from Bloomberg (on their equality section, non-paywalled at https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/one-in-four-german-employers-say-partner-violence-sometimes-okay-1.1676782) which is in turn a report on a survey study conducted by Frontline100, which, upon quick googling, seems to be a domestic violence advocacy org.
Now I think I'm pretty firmly in the camp of "no way this number is not entirely fabricated/this study utterly misleading", but does anyone here know more about this study? Because it appeared on Bloomberg in 2021, did no one (especially in Germany) do a take-down of this back then? Would appreciate a pointer.
"Since employers are generally interacting with male bosses, this may 1 in 3 German employers say that poor quality housework may justify violence."
Employers are bosses. How can bosses interact with male bosses? Being the boss/employer, you can only interact with subordinates. Also the sub-clause is missing a verb. I have a hard time finding an implied verb, that would not make this a non-sequitur.
If the verb is "cause", "make" or "state", I don't see how that would make any sense.
Not directly to do with this survey but just to get a feeling for how many people might hold quite old-fashioned beliefs. When Germany made marital rape a crime in 1997, 470 delegates voted for the law and 138 were against, 35 abstained. This was a while ago but this ratio of sexists vs non-sexists, seems about right to me, for old white dudes.
How did race enter into it?
I just wanted to emphasize how unrepresentative the sample was. The delegates were probably almost all old, white, intelligent, middle or upper class, educated, men. Probably half of them were also lawyers.
Besides your complaint about "white" being "unrepresentative", for which carateca and Moon Moth rightfully called you out, this part in particular:
> […] intelligent […] educated […]
stands out. I really, really hope that the politicians we've elected into government actually are way more intelligent and educated than the median of the population. These people decide over important aspects of our lives – they shouldn't be a statistically representative sample of the population, they should be _competent_. And being intelligent and educated is a necessary precondition for competence in the line of work they do.
I mean, presumably they all speak German, which is way more unrepresentative, right?
It's not a study, it's just a single survey. Even in german I can't even find anything more detailed, all the original articles in germany are equally vague. I found one interview with a single actual researcher, and even that one didn't actually say whether the survey was good or not - just that "scepticism is appropriate" but we need to "not let right-wing organisations take advantage of the survey's shortcomings". Tbh, you should generally ignore people who treat these surveys as anything but political propaganda. The usual way these are misleading:
1) The big one, representativeness. The kind of person who answers surveys is usually highly unusual. I, for example, have never answered one and the rate is AFAIK lower than 5%. Even if you control for obvious attributes such as age, gender and employment status, you still wildly oversample from a tiny minority.
2) they don't specify genders when asking, but then present the results as if it was exclusively about male-on-female violence. So even women thinking violence against men is OK will often be presented as male-on-female violence anyway.
3) they don't check class, immigration status, cultural background etc, but then present the results as if it was about average middle class individuals. It's well-known that this problem is almost exclusive to certain subcultures, but it's usually ignored. So fundamentalist muslim men thinking violence against women is OK will be presented at university as "1/4 of the men in this class have, statistically, hit a women in a domestic dispute" despite probably not a single one of them having done so.
4) They qualify having ever hit a person of the other gender even once, no matter the severity, as "domestic violence". Sometimes they even go beyond that and classify any physical conflict, such as grabbing or throwing non-dangerous items as such. Or the survey is vague enough that different people will interpret it differently. My wife has slapped me a few times or threw things at me, so I'd fill out a survey accordingly, but she has never done anything I'd remotely qualify as "abuse".
5) They don't check reciprocity. This seems a small issue but once you've seen it you understand why it's problematic. For example, when I was living in an extremely cheap dump apartment in a bad neighbourhood, I've seen multiple instances of women abusing their boyfriends/husbands in public, such as throwing them out of the apartment in the middle of the night, screaming at them for literal hours that they are worthless losers, destroying their stuff or simply beating them (with the latter usually being the least questionable behaviour). It was bad enough that I wanted to beat them up, despite not even being the target of the abuse (but at least I got to be kept awake at 3 in the morning!). In contrast, I have not seen a single incident of male-on-female violence (though I wouldn't in the least be surprised if it happened behind closed doors). AFAIK studies that try to check for it find that more than 90% of domestic abuse is reciprocal, i.e. two toxic people repeatedly abusing each other. Obviously that is an issue, but a very different one from the one presented in university workshops. And for the record, if you get abused as a man you still shouldn't beat your partner, just leave them.
Continuing on from the favourite poems discussion, a cheerful little thought that came to me earlier today:
A Ballade of Suicide
by G.K. Chesterton
The gallows in my garden, people say,
Is new and neat and adequately tall;
I tie the noose on in a knowing way
As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbours — on the wall —
Are drawing a long breath to shout “Hurray!”
The strangest whim has seized me. . . . After all
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
To-morrow is the time I get my pay —
My uncle’s sword is hanging in the hall —
I see a little cloud all pink and grey —
Perhaps the rector’s mother will not call —
I fancy that I heard from Mr. Gall
That mushrooms could be cooked another way —
I never read the works of Juvenal —
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
The world will have another washing-day;
The decadents decay; the pedants pall;
And H.G. Wells has found that children play,
And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall,
Rationalists are growing rational —
And through thick woods one finds a stream astray
So secret that the very sky seems small —
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
ENVOI
Prince, I can hear the trumpet of Germinal,
The tumbrils toiling up the terrible way;
Even to-day your royal head may fall,
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
What a cute poem, thanks for sharing it! Reminded me of the Choose Life monologue at the end of Trainspotting
> Rationalists are growing rational
Huh. Could you elaborate on what group he was talking about here?
I’d go out on a limb and say late 19C and early 20C rationalists.
Insofar as the ballade has any popularity in English, I think we can thank GK Chesterton - between "A Ballade of Suicide" and "A Ballade of the First Rain", he proved that yes, English *does* have words with enough rhymes to fill out all twenty-eight lines while still telling a meaningful story. Those two are two of my favorite poems by him.
----
The sky is blue with summer and the sun,
The woods are brown as autumn with the tan,
It might as well be Tropics and be done,
I might as well be born a copper Khan;
I fashion me an oriental fan
Made of the wholly unreceipted bills
Brought by the ice-man, sleeping in his van
(A storm is coming on the Chiltern Hills).
----
I read the Young Philosophers for fun
—Fresh as our sorrow for the late Queen Anne—
The Dionysians whom a pint would stun,
The Pantheists who never heard of Pan.
—But through my hair electric needles ran,
And on my book a gout of water spills,
And on the skirts of heaven the guns began
(A storm is coming on the Chiltern Hills).
----
O fields of England, cracked and dry and dun,
O soul of England, sick of words, and wan!—
The clouds grow dark;—the down-rush has begun.
—It comes, it comes, as holy darkness can!
Black as with banners, ban and arriere-ban;
A falling laughter all the valley fills,
Deep as God's thunder and the thirst of man:
(A storm is coming on the Chiltern Hills).
ENVOI
Prince, Prince-Elective on the modern plan,
Fulfilling such a lot of People's Wills,
You take the Chiltern Hundreds while you can—
A storm is coming on the Chiltern Hills.
While half of that poem went a mile over my head with cultural references (Is that uncle's sword a reference to Hamlet?), this poem still caused me to update my views on Chesterton.
From priors, I would have guessed that if a Christian apologist would write about suicide, he would emphasize that it is considered a grave sin. Instead, the lyrical subject decides on the "strangest whim" to not kill themselves (today), possibly just out of spite towards their hostile neighbors waiting for the spectacle.
This tentative endorsement of life seems reminiscent of Dorothy Parker ("You might as well live!"). Of course, there is a selection effect there: poets who write about suicide are probably at least somewhat suicidal, and thus less likely to firmly reject suicide than poets without suicidal ideation.
The uncles sword was probably a sword hanging in the characters house. In reality it’s an added line, just to give flavour to the environment. Indicating a military family maybe.
Or just the romanticism of having a sword, and maybe you should stay alive and try doing something with that sword?
Chesterton provides us with his view on suicide in his book "Orthodoxy" (the book, in various ways, describes how he slowly came from atheist to Catholic Christianity):
"Under the lengthening shadow of Ibsen, an argument arose whether it was not a very nice thing to murder one's self. Grave moderns told us that we must not even say "poor fellow," of a man who had blown his brains out, since he was an enviable person, and had only blown them out because of their exceptional excellence. Mr. William Archer even suggested that in the golden age there would be penny-in-the-slot machines, by which a man could kill himself for a penny. In all this I found myself utterly hostile to many who called themselves liberal and humane. Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world. His act is worse (symbolically considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage. For it destroys all buildings: it insults all women. The thief is satisfied with diamonds; but the suicide is not: that is his crime. He cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of the Celestial City. The thief compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them. But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it. He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake. There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer. When a man hangs himself on a tree, the leaves might fall off in anger and the birds fly away in fury: for each has received a personal affront. Of course there may be pathetic emotional excuses for the act. There often are for rape, and there almost always are for dynamite. But if it comes to clear ideas and the intelligent meaning of things, then there is much more rational and philosophic truth in the burial at the cross-roads and the stake driven through the body, than in Mr. Archer's suicidal automatic machines. There is a meaning in burying the suicide apart. The man's crime is different from other crimes—for it makes even crimes impossible.
"About the same time I read a solemn flippancy by some free thinker: he said that a suicide was only the same as a martyr. The open fallacy of this helped to clear the question. Obviously a suicide is the opposite of a martyr. A martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life. A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of everything. One wants something to begin: the other wants everything to end. In other words, the martyr is noble, exactly because (however he renounces the world or execrates all humanity) he confesses this ultimate link with life; he sets his heart outside himself: he dies that something may live. The suicide is ignoble because he has not this link with being: he is a mere destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the universe. And then I remembered the stake and the cross-roads, and the queer fact that Christianity had shown this weird harshness to the suicide. For Christianity had shown a wild encouragement of the martyr. Historic Christianity was accused, not entirely without reason, of carrying martyrdom and asceticism to a point, desolate and pessimistic. The early Christian martyrs talked of death with a horrible happiness. They blasphemed the beautiful duties of the body: they smelt the grave afar off like a field of flowers. All this has seemed to many the very poetry of pessimism. Yet there is the stake at the crossroads to show what Christianity thought of the pessimist.
"This was the first of the long train of enigmas with which Christianity entered the discussion. And there went with it a peculiarity of which I shall have to speak more markedly, as a note of all Christian notions, but which distinctly began in this one. The Christian attitude to the martyr and the suicide was not what is so often affirmed in modern morals. It was not a matter of degree. It was not that a line must be drawn somewhere, and that the self-slayer in exaltation fell within the line, the self-slayer in sadness just beyond it. The Christian feeling evidently was not merely that the suicide was carrying martyrdom too far. The Christian feeling was furiously for one and furiously against the other: these two things that looked so much alike were at opposite ends of heaven and hell. One man flung away his life; he was so good that his dry bones could heal cities in pestilence. Another man flung away life; he was so bad that his bones would pollute his brethren's."
Okay, now this aligns perfectly with my priors for "a Christian apologist's views on suicide".
Personally, I would argue that there is a continuum between suicides and martyrs. You could order them by expected utility or post-facto utility to their cause, with clear examples on either side, and a lot of grey area in between. Of course I generally prefer the apolitical suicide, they are much less likely to blow me up or disrupt society.
Also, TIL that the suicide booth was not invented by Futurama.
Also, before 1823, the English treated suicides thus:
> The crime was punishable by forfeiture (great loss of property) to the monarch and what was considered a shameful burial – typically with a stake through the heart and at a crossroads.
(From Wikipedia, Felo de se)
I see no continuum: like Mr. Chesterton, I see them at "opposite ends of heaven and hell". The martyr does not wish to die, but values something else even more than his life. The suicide wishes to die, because there is nothing of value worth living for. Completely different actions.
I would argue that in reality, it is often a linear combination of both.
The missionary who goes into the jungle to convert some cannibal tribe (and likely is killed by them) would be an example.
If in his heart of hearts, he knew beforehand that without a divine intervention he would get eaten without converting a single heathen, then the whole operation is just an elaborate suicide by proxy.
If he went thinking that his odds of converting the tribe were good, only to find to his surprise that he was wrong, then he would be a martyr.
Let us call the subjective probability for success of the missionary p. At p=0 he is just a suicide, at p=0.5 he is a proper martyr.
Let us suppose that real humans do things for multiple internal and external causes in a way which can roughly be modeled in an utilitarian calculus. Let M be the utility our prospective missionary assigns to his own life, and T be the utility of converting the tribe.
His expected utility gain for preaching to the heathens is then (discounting the middle outcome of him escaping with his life):
U=p*T+(1-p)*M
Following this formula, one should see more would-be martyrs who assign a smaller amount of utility to their own lives.
Now I am not very familiar with the martyr demographics, but I would expect it to be heavily slated towards young men without families, which is also a population more at risk from suicide. (One way to improve statistics would be to expand the focus from Christianity to other religions , where some sects believe that they can achieve martyrdom by blowing themselves and a sufficient numbers of enemies up, but the culture attached to employing violence by gender is probably confounding this to no end.)
If you show me the statistics that mothers of young children (who typically place a high value on their lives because their kids need them) have accepted martyrdom in Christianity at the same rate as everyone else, I will concede that martyrdom is generally caused by a high impact T (or p*T?) and not by placing a low value on one's own life M.
> At p=0 he is just a suicide, at p=0.5 he is a proper martyr.
This, particularly in the case of Christianity, is not true at all. Who were the first Christian martyrs? The Christians condemned to death in Roman persecutions. These martyrs could have saved their lives if they abandoned their belief in Christ, gave up their holy books for destruction, and perform a small sacrifice to Ceaser. They refused to, because they loved Christ even more than their own lives. They were not gambeling their lives in the hopes of accomplishing a goal, they were accepting death as preferable to abandoning their savior. If they refused to deny Christ they knew their probability of survival was near 0, yet they did it anyway.
This is the primary model of the Christian martyr, one who goes to their death rather than deny Christ. In Japan during the shogunate Christianity was punishable by death. Those suspected were made to step on an image of Christ as proof they were not Christian. Probability of survival if they stepped on it, above .5 for sure. Probability if they refused to, near 0. Yet many refused to, and these brave souls Christians call martyrs. And yes, many of them were women (look at how many Roman era female saints there are, most of them were martyrs. See also this https://www.nobts.edu/geauxtherefore/articles/2016/what-women-these-christians-have-a-look-at-women-martyrs.html).
Again, the martyr loves something more than heir own life, while the suicide loves nothing enough to stay alive for its sake. They’re completely different acts.
> This was the first of the long train of enigmas with which Christianity entered the discussion.
I'm just going to take a wild guess and say that the invisible secret ingredient is "faith"? :-)
Not really, but you'd have to read the book for that. To summarize, Chesterton says that he became a Christian because he tried to sort out what he believed about the world, and then discovered to his surprise that what he believed was Christianity. In other words, in this passage Chesterton came to the conclusion about suicide that he lays out in the first paragraph above, and then realized that Christianity agreed with him on suicide. The rest of the "long train of enigmas" are other areas where he came to a philosophical conclusion, and then realized that Christianity had come to that conclusion long before he had.
This is how he puts it in the introduction to the book:
"I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas....But I have a peculiar reason for mentioning the man in a yacht, who discovered England. For I am that man in a yacht. I discovered England...I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before. If there is an element of farce in what follows, the farce is at my own expense; for this book explains how I fancied I was the first to set foot in Brighton and then found I was the last. It recounts my elephantine adventures in pursuit of the obvious. No one can think my case more ludicrous than I think it myself; no reader can accuse me here of trying to make a fool of him: I am the fool of this story, and no rebel shall hurl me from my throne. I freely confess all the idiotic ambitions of the end of the nineteenth century. I did, like all other solemn little boys, try to be in advance of the age. Like them I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it. I did strain my voice with a painfully juvenile exaggeration in uttering my truths. And I was punished in the fittest and funniest way, for I have kept my truths: but I have discovered, not that they were not truths, but simply that they were not mine. When I fancied that I stood alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom. It may be, Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original; but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing traditions of civilized religion. The man from the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was the first to find Europe. I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy."
I'm an art grad, good at pretty much any humanities stuff and hopeless with sciences. I'm in my 30s and have no job experience other than working in TEFL. Into what field could I consider/would it be possible for me to go into as a career transition, given TEFL when I'm old isn't a great bet?
One other idea: You can teach English lit, art, history, whatever you're good at at a private school without having the various certifications that public school teachers are required to have.
If you can tutor kids or teens in writing you can make a pretty good living if you promote yourself with pizaazz. Many upper middle class people will pay handsomely for tutoring,for their kids especially in things that help kids get into college. Helping kids with their college essays will probably be popular with parents, but will suck to do, and is also kind of dishonest. But what about helping them learn to write poetry, short stories, graphic novels? You need to get an in with a couple sets of parents, and they will tell their friends.
Have you ever considered being a handyman/carpenter? You can pick your jobs and hours. If you can watch a few hours of YouTube videos on how to do some basic stuff well.
The other trick is, live in a cheap town, do work in expensive and wealthy nearby town.
Something like UX design (or perhaps further afield, product design / product management)? You might need to do some retraining to get there, but you get the advantages of being tech-affiliated without having to do a STEM degree.
I'm actually in (almost) this exact boat (I'm not hopeless at sciences). I'm doing pretty well with my artistic pursuits but I need a better main source of income.
I'm aware that my soft skills are actually pretty valuable, but I don't have the kind of background to understand how to leverage that. TEFL has a kind of gravity well that is hard to escape. It also has limited progression and the rewards for pursuing higher qualifications are limited. After 10 years of graft I also have a pretty good understanding of how people actually learn languages and its not in a classroom. I can tell very quickly after meeting someone whether they are going to make any progress or not and unfortunately is the ones who don't progress that keep you afloat. All a bit depressing really.
I'm curious to read more of your thoughts on how people learn languages and which ones make progress or don't.
Theres a few factors that I can see in students. A big one, as lapras said, is motivation but it basically comes down to what their beliefs and attitudes are towards learning. A sizable subset of the population believe that a teachers job is essentially to crack open their head and insert the knowledge and then its done. However, students who engage with the language outside the classroom rapidly improve and those who don't, stagnate.
The best use of a language teacher is as a resource to be drawn on. If a student comes back to me with a question based on something they read or heard and didn't understand, I know they'll be interested in the answer. The student might have eventually figured it out without me, but in these situations I'm a kind of force multiplier to their own explorations.
Curiosity is a big indicator. As is having any interests at all. Language is a gateway to culture and people who are interested in culture and media see that language is a gateway to MORE culture and media. The number of young boys I've taught who did nothing in class but who chatted on a headset while playing fortnite or whatever for hours on end and rapidly improved is pretty high. I know someone who is basically native level in english and it all started because she really like Gorillaz and there were no forums about the band in her language.
Ultimately, I believe that Stephen Krashen is essentially correct. Theres definitely things linguists could nitpick about the specifics of his various hypotheses. But the input hypothesis, acquisition learning, monitor hypothesis are basically true in my experience.
Probably I'd be better suited in essentially coaching people on how to schedule their language learning. Anyone can easily hit 1 hour a day by using short bursts spread out. I feel like I don't have the required social proof for that though as my chosen L2 is a life-long project and I'm an unmedicated ADHDer.
I think one of the most important factors is motivation. It takes incredible dedication to actually learn a language successfully.
Where do you live and/or want to live?
I want to come up with a list of “suspiciously convenient beliefs”—beliefs, e.g., where the moral facts line up with the empirical facts in a suspiciously convenient way. I listed a few examples here https://open.substack.com/pub/wollenblog/p/suspiciously-convenient-beliefs?r=2248ub&utm_medium=iOS but I know there must be more I’m not thinking of. Help greatly appreciated.
Excellent example embedded here:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/ideology-as-coalition
Democracy is the best form of government, both morally and practically.
Free speech is good, both morally and practically.
I mean, really, all the foundational beliefs of liberal democracy are pretty much "our system is both morally righteous, and also the best."
(Which, to be clear, it is. Lucky, that. It would suck if absolute monarchies where everybody's ground under the totalitarian boot of some idiot nepo baby turned out to work better than liberal democracy.)
What definition of "work better" are you using here? More stable, more economically successful, more happiness-promoting?
(I'm not objecting. It's just that "best" is very ambiguous.)
Probably all three, but definitely the first two.
I agree that liberal democracies are typically more stable, more economically successful, and more happiness-promoting ("work better") than absolute monarchies.
But if the hypothetical were true, where absolute monarchies "work better" than liberal democracies along all of those dimensions, why would we prefer the latter over the former?
If you hold political beliefs, without wielding substantial political power, you have neither incentive to get them right nor any mechanism to update them based on evidence. You have no real skin in the game.
The most fundamental pair of convenient beliefs are therefore:
"I am a good person."
"I hold the correct political beliefs."
This is convenient, because any good politics would have the bad person as an enemy (or at least as a problem to fix) and a good person would obviously want to have the correct beliefs, otherwise they would be perpetuating harm.
The belief that ethnic or racial homogeneity in a country is righteous, and lessening immigration also happens to be best economically for those currently in the country (e.g. we don't let in immigrants, therefore I can get a better job and we remain more 'pure')
Also the opposite -- increasing immigration is good for me as a rich person, and therefore multiculturalism is great and those who want to restrict it are evil racists.
A classic DEI example for you: "More diversity is more moral" and "The less in common people have in a group the better that group will perform".
Believing that Apple would have done even better as a company if Steve Jobs was a disabled gay native American and Steve Woz was a black lesbian Muslim immigrant who didn't speak English seems just a tad too suspiciously convenient to me.
> "The less in common people have in a group the better that group will perform".
Didn't that originate in a single study by a business consulting firm, that's since become one of the more prominent victims of the Replication Crisis?
The findings of that study also got pretty badly garbled in the retelling. The way I remember it, the actual findings were that teams with shared backgrounds were more efficient, while diverse teams were more creative.
Now that, I can believe.
That does sounds familiar to me. My understanding is that this claim is now rejected by most everyone not working in a DEI role/DEI consulting.
But we don't reject it out loud.
It's woven from a magical cloth that's invisible to deplorable people.
In 99 out of every 100 versions of that story, the kid winds up getting hanged for Lese Majeste, while the populace talk even more loudly about how wonderful the Emperor's clothes are.
There are plenty that society believes and the rationalist community doubt but don't talk about much for obvious reasons. Eg any biologically caused tendencies in any group of humans: because this goes against the idea of freedom and self determination.
That government is good/useful (not in a libertarian sense, as in a literal not anarchism sense).
If you accept something like the stationary bandit theory of the origin of states, and accept that government/proto-government up to about 1750 was basically just an extortion racket that provided peasants with nothing of value, it should be very suspicious that it's turned out to be an indispensable ingredient of civilisation.
The stationary bandit model ignores a lot of political reality in order to make it's point. Taxation is complex and something that only really works long term with buy in from people up and down the social chain. Otherwise people can and will revolt against it (see the USA), often successfully. To convince people to give you their money voluntarily you need to persuade them into believing they're benefiting from it. Be that though threat, custom, promise of divine intercession, or material benefit.
Why is it surprising that a stationary bandit would have a motive to want to increase the GDP of the area they control? The amount they "invest" might not be the "optimal" amount that the people in the area would choose, given a free choice (and, as other commenters have noted, given some way of being protected from all the _neighboring_ bandits). Still, historically, things like more-or-less stable coinage and more-or-less stable weights and measures were reasonably common government features for millennia, and provided _some_ use to the populace.
Having been part of some large organizations that needed stronger leadership, I think you're vastly underselling the benefits of competent government.
The real problem, IMHO, is members of the government treating it like a predatory startup. "If we extract a little bit from a lot of people, the few of us at the top can become wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice! And then once we've established vendor lock-in and eliminated the competition, we can ratchet up the fees as high as we want!"
I understand the stationary bandit concept as being a simplified "spherical horses" model that captures one particular aspect of the dynamic while ignoring others. And it's probably a much closer model of hierarchical states with violence-monopoly institutions controlled by a single family or a relatively small aristocracy, as opposed to more decentralized and consensus+tradition oriented tribal societies.
In practices, most societies we have enough reliable evidence to draw conclusions about seem to be a hybrid of the two: tribal societies often had nobles or "big men" who functioned like an aristocracy in a state society, and hierarchical states often had traditional laws and some system of councils or assemblies to which rulers were at least somewhat accountable.
Why would you accept those presuppositions? They don't seem to accord either with history or with the things that happen when government collapses.
Basically, if you have clusters of more then Dunbar's number of people you need some sort of government. Unfortunately, governments have an inherent tendency to aggregate more power to themselves. And I would argue that even smaller groups tend to have a form of government, though often largely unstructured. Even the "Friends Meeting" groups have a government of sorts.
Also, you're ignoring the "protection" function. Groups in this world do not usually live in isolation, and if you're a group that controls something some other group wants, you need a way to protect it. If they've got an organization, then you need one...and that's a government. (The only plausible exception that I'm aware of is a group of apparently stone age technology that lives on a small island in the Indian Ocean. They have the custom of killing any stranger who tries to make landfall. They may not have a government, but nobody knows how many of them there are or how they are organized.)
Now national governments (outside of Kings) ARE a recent innovation. An emperor was a "king of kings". My belief is that this is due to increasing speed and facility of transport and communication. The ancient kings and emperors had rather loose control anywhere away from their centers of government.
The history point broadly favours government being essentially parasitic. Medieval kings/counts/barons/knights provide negligible benefits to peasants - maybe a tiny amount of law enforcement and an even less substantial amount of co-ordination, but quite often they existed alongside village decision-making bodies at the peasant level which did some of this as well. They also didn't emerge from people getting together and forming a government; taking Western Europe as an example, all of them were formed by an exogenous conquering elite (Normans, Lombards, Franks etc). Modern governments didn't evolve from the peasant bodies,* they evolved from centralised noble/royal bodies formed by said conquerors. That's why it's weird that they're now useful to their populations.
So far as protection is concerned, I think it misses the fact that what evolved into modern governments is precisely the sort of conquest that protection would be valuable to protect you from; protecting your right to continue being a peasant isn't necessarily necessary, as that's the other thing someone would protect you from. That may be an argument that government is inevitable, but that's part of what makes it weird that government is beneficial.
*Except in Switzerland and San Marino, where the governments are tellingly very different.
The village council counts as a government.
For what it's worth, I don't find the historical point very convincing. Yes, you can arguably draw a line from modern governments back to feudal ones, but now we give money to old or sick people rather than just building the king a bigger castle. It seems like the day-to-day function of government has changed more than its origin would suggest.
What's the story in San Marino?
It's an old medieval commune that never got conquered (at least on one occasion, because it was too small for the Pope's army to find it in the fog).
I think this intuitive argument fails for a few reasons:
First, defense is 'something of value.' Without defense, a viable pre-industrial strategy for increasing one's group's condition was to raid the neighbours and take their land and/or people. This competition would favour societies that could mobilize ever-larger fractions of their economies/manpower, *even if* the mobilization and the state apparatus that creates it is extractive.
Second, wealth beyond bare subsistence farming is built on capital, and capital improvements beyond the most basic scale require societal coordination. Family and clan ties work to an extent, but the largest improvement projects will cross such grain boundaries. A government brings a set of laws, traditions, and dispute resolution mechanisms less likely to degenerate into blood feuds.
The associated institutions of property and contract let us build works and undertake ventures in a "low-context" manner, with faith that our counterparties aren't likely to try to steal everything one day.
Third, if the value of any societal institution is to change, then "the start of the Industrial Revolution" is a reasonably likely time for that change. In particular, this is when we really saw the triumph of built capital over land as the principal source of societal wealth, and institutions that are better at managing that capital will in turn find new value for society. Industrialization even slowly changed the security problem, with wars of conquest now likely to prove so costly (in both material and collateral damage) to overwhelm any likely gain.
If a permanent unfilled power vacuum isn't actually a possibility, then the choice is between governments that are only extortion rackets, and governments that occasionally do.something useful.
Yes. My point is that it's weird that governments are inevitable, but also useful for broadly unrelated reasons.
I don't think so, not any more than "We need to have a ceiling anyway, we might as well hang some lights off it".
Purely parasitic rulers tend to get overthrown eventually. Rulers are aware of this and try not to get overthrown.
Besides, that which is in the interests of the ruler is also often in the interests of the ruled. The ruler isn't going to be able to extract much in tax unless there's a thriving local economy, which means investing some of his extracted wealth into roads, sanitation, education et cetera.
Perhaps not as much an indispensable ingredient of civilisation as much as something that would inevitably be created anyway anew by new stationary bandits or I-can't-believe-it's-not-government! extortion rackets.
"I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." The scariest words one can hear, per Ronald Reagan.
I wonder how many people who repeat that quote refuse their social security benefits.
Why would someone turn down money that is offered them? I'm against social security as a plan, for philosophical economic reasons, but it is the law, and I wouldn't refuse the benefits once I can get them.
I'm approaching retirement age, but I had the idea that, in about 2005, if we were to gradually phase out social security benefits AND taxes, so that both would be gone by 2030, I would be willing to do so, in order to get rid of the system I think is bad for the country as a whole. This idea, in general, might still be a viable plan, which I would agree to, if the deadline for phasing it out were now, say, 2050.
> the system I think is bad for the country as a whole.
It certainly is, in its current form. It was never intended to be a universal retirement pension, and medical advances have mutated it into one faster than we've been able to generate the political will to adjust the laws to compensate for, and so now it's collapsing under its own weight.
"It was never intended to be a universal retirement pension"
What WAS it intended to be, then? From https://www.ssa.gov/history/briefhistory3.html
"We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age."--
President Roosevelt upon signing Social Security Act
"Why would someone turn down money that is offered them?"
Because, as Reagan said, it's scary? /s
Those were words he said were scary. Your post made it sound like he said the words and we should be afraid of him.
He was "The Government" in a basic sense of the word and yes, him saying this was either hypocritical or totally lacking self-awareness.
I think he was fully aware of his position when he made this statement, and that it was a warning to be wary of what the government offers as "help".
From this site (https://www.reaganfoundation.org/ronald-reagan/reagan-quotes-speeches/news-conference-1/):
"During this News Conference, President Ronald Reagan refers to how the government tends to be inefficient, to such a degree that instead of helping, it often causes harm instead. This view expresses the need for a more diminutive form of government where an individual or organization can complete an activity more effectively than the whole government."
But do you see the weird circularity? That advice, coming from "Government", is a form of "help"*, which one should be wary of.
*telling what to do is a form of help, as in, for example, "Hurricane is forecasted (by a government agency) to land in 24 hrs, evacuate the town now".
Sorry if I was unclear. I'll edit for clarity.
The belief that "torture doesn't work" seems like another example. You can neatly sidestep any kind of moral dilemmas about whether it's right to use torture if you believe that torture (contrary to intuition and thousands of years of experience) doesn't work. But I suspect it probably does, in an awful lot of cases.
Maybe some people can hold onto some secrets, but plenty of other people will give them up. (All the secrets that I personally know, I'd probably give up rather than be subjected to twenty seconds of torture -- that sounds cowardly, but honestly I'm just not especially attached to any of the secrets that I know.)
Individual ethics aside, I'll submit that one of the inherent problems with torture (and physical pain in general) as a tool for extracting information, is that it's actually a dual-use tool. On the one hand, torture can be used to motivate people to do things they wouldn't ordinarily do, and on the other hand, torture can be used to HURT THE FUCKER AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.
It's an effective tool for both uses, but clearly more for the second use. The problem is that it's almost never used for the first purpose alone: we collectively don't tend to torture people we have no desire to hurt, and people with no desire to hurt others rarely become torturers. (Imperial Chinese magistrates might be a counter-example.) And the two purposes are actually somewhat counterproductive, in aggregate: whatever the optimum amount of torture is, the second use will push for more.
Torture is very good at doing the thing it has historically been used for over those thousands of years of experience, which is extracting false confessions.
Alternatively, one could use torture to resolve open problems in Computer Science.
http://hitherby-dragons.wikidot.com/an-oracle-for-np
The way torture actually works is that the torturer asks questions he already knows the answer to along with questions he doesn't, and doesn't tell the victim which is which. This is made clear to the victim in advance.
What I've heard is that the real problem is that torture works too well. People will tell you whatever they think you want to hear, regardless of whether it is true.
I agree that there have to be some situations where it would work. But it must have its limits. Some people who say "I don't know" really don't know. How do you tell whether they really don't, or just gave that as an answer? Same with various lies they may tell in answer to your questions. I think torture will compel most people to answer, but not necessarily to give you a true answer. In fact you can probably get people who give you a true answer at the outsetto give you a false answer if you keep torturing them. The already know the true answer didn't make you stop, so they try to give you other things, hoping they'll hit on an answer you were hoping for. Of course if you know the true answer already, wutz the point of torturing them?
> Some people who say "I don't know" really don't know. How do you tell whether they really don't, or just gave that as an answer?
Do we have a rule that torturing people who don't know things is bad, but torturing people who know things is morally okay?
If no, then the simple answer is that you keep torturing the person who says "I don't know", and maybe they will remember something useful later. (Or maybe they won't.)
If yes, then the situation is more complicated. Because if the person says "I don't know" after you tortured them a bit, then you *already* broke the rule. So you either let them walk, and accept whatever penalty is there for you torturing the person who doesn't know things, or you go the "double or nothing" way, and keep torturing them anyway and hope that they lied.
From the opposite side, I think the historical experience is that if the Inquisition tortures you, the optimal strategy is to confess to some minor crime. Now they can stop torturing you without losing face, and you can survive. (The fact that you didn't do the minor crime either, is irrelevant here.)
The point of asking questions where the answer is known is conditioning the victim not to lie. The torturer starts by asking questions where he knows the answer and knows the victim knows the answer, and the victim is punished for lying. After a while when the victim is punished for lying about the secrets that the torture already knows, the real questions are asked.
Yeah that would work. Problem is, though, it seems pretty abusable. There are probably a lot of situations where the questioners know something about the prisoner with , like, 70% certainty. Since they know it will be very useful down the line to have the person lie and get punished, they might just mentally round that 70% up to 100%: Then they ask about the thing, don't get the answer they expected, and deliver a blast of pain. There's a 30% chance that blast is following the prisoner's telling the truth.
And acting like you know something about the person is a known technique of intimidating people into disclosing stuff. The fucking FBI used it on my daughter after she had been sexually assaulted by a guy who, it turned out, was a sex trafficker. Would rape teens then get them to become hookers for him, and recruit their friends. My daughter had not become a hooker for him or recruited friends. She had had no contact at all except some texts to beg him to get std tests (she was scared he had given her AIDS.). But two FBI agents who questioned her told her they knew she had recruited friends, and that they had captured actual messages from she had sent to the guy about recruitment efforts. She was terrified. She was 18, and that was really psychological abuse, and of someone who had recently been raped! I'm sure that if she had had any further secrets about the matter she would have told them at that point -- but she didn't have any. Anyhow, that's an example for you of law enforcement abusing their power and harming a possible witness. They really wanted to get this guy, which is good. But in the service of their goal they were willing to lie to a raped teenager about having information about her they could not have possibly had.
In the US, it is both legally permitted and socially endorsed for the police to lie. I don't know whether it's different in other countries.
That's horrible.
Oh yeah, one other little extra shitty detail. Talked to the guy in charge of the investigation and complained vigorously. He said blah, blah, I can't tell you all of what we know, but we have reason to think there's more to what happened than you know. I'm pretty sure they were just going off the # of texts you could see between my daughter and the guy in our ATT account. But those were all her begging him to get STD tested, and him texting her to "chat" (he was still trying to rope her in). Out of evil curiosity I googled the name of the head agent I'd talked to, and found an article by him in some professional law enforcement publication complaining that he had been passed over for promotion a total of 23 times because the dept. gave the job to a woman instead. He shoulda cut his balls off. I hate that guy.
I think saying torture doesn't work, is shorthand for saying if we as a society allow torture, then the net effect of it will be negative (for all the obvious reasons), not that it will never work.
No, it means it literally doesn't work to gain information. https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/publications/CRPT-113srpt288.pdf
You're probably not going to want to read the whole 712-page document, but page 12 starts the conclusions, including:
>In the remaining cases, the CIA inaccurately claimed that specific, otherwise unavailable information was acquired from a CIA detainee "as a result" of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques, when in fact the information was either: (1) corroborative of information already available to the CIA or other elements of the U.S. Intelligence Community from sources other than the CIA detainee, and was therefore not "otherwise unavailable"; or (2) acquired from the CIA detainee prior to the use of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques. The examples provided by the CIA included numerous factual inaccuracies.
That's definitely a sensible position, but I've heard plenty of people (including in this very thread) arguing that it genuinely doesn't work.
Torture works in shitty movies about torture. Any interrogation method that cannot accept “I don’t know” as a truthful answer in obviously useless.
We don’t have to go far. The suspects in the Crocus hall attack in Moscow were publicly tortured to basically extract confessions about Ukrainian involvement. Meanwhile jihadists happily continue to plan and execute new attacks, safe in the knowledge of utter incompetence of the FSB.
It seems clear that torture would be effective in a case where verification is easy.
As one example, if you need someone to give up the password to an encrypted device, you can very easily torture them until they give you the right password.
I'm against torture, but we should argue against the scenario least favourable to our position.
Yes it would be effective in such a case, but these cases exist only in fiction, i.e., where there is a script that stipulates that the subject of torture knows the password with 100% certainty. In real life you can never never never be 100% sure you are cutting the skin off the arm of the guy who really knows the password. And he’s screaming his head off that he’s not the admin, he works for a different department and only stopped by to pick up the new laptop, but of course you think he’s lying so you pour salt on his exposed forearm muscles.
I’m sorry I’m being graphic, but it bothers me so much when torture is casually discussed under some convenient belief header.
The question is not whether torture is ethical or perfect, but whether it is usually or at least sometimes effective.
If you peel the skin off someone until they tell you the password, then at the end of the process you either know the password, or you can be pretty confident that the person you just killed wasn't the one who knew the password and you need to go find someone else to torture. So long as you're reasonably competent at keeping the person alive during most of the flaying, and picking suspects who are plausibly likely to know the password, that is *effective*.
A great many people would say it is *unethical*, because "The now-deceased Alice and Bob were innocent, but we got the password from Charlie" is not an ethically acceptable outcome. I agree with those people.
The problem is that being unethical *doesn't* make torture ineffective, and when you try to convince some Jack Bauer wannabe not to torture Alice and Bob, loudly proclaiming that torture is ineffective won't get you anywhere. Because it isn't true, and the Jack Bauers of the world know it isn't true.
I would like to point out that Jack Bauer doesn't exist, and this is not just a frivolous gotcha. Every example of "effective" torture so far uses fiction. Literally.
I'm sticking to the effective/not effective paradigm only:
If the torturer is just a butcher, Alice dies quickly, there's no answer, now what?
If the torturer is skilled and has the means to keep the Bob alive for a long time, now he spent hours? days? chasing useless leads. Now what?
We have to go find Charlie, but it is important for our hypothetical that Charlie is a) around and b) actually knows the password.
Given an infinite amount of time and a large supply of suspects that eventually include Zelda who knows the password and gives it up in 30 seconds, yes, torture "works". I doubt this is a definition of "works" a professional investigator would use though.
The argument that torture doesn't work is based on the premise that the person being tortured will tell the torturer whatever they want to hear, in order to make the torture stop.
That premise is almost certainly true in the vast majority of cases, if what I have read about waterboarding is true.
So, does torture work? Well, if the torturer wrongly thinks that the terrorist being tortured has accomplices, no. The terrorist will name innocent people, and the torturer will be off on a wild goose chase.
But, what if what the torturer wants to know is the truth? Eg: the ticking time bomb hypothetical. In that case, torture works.
The fact that the subject will tell lies in order to make the torture stop is certainly a factor to be taken into account. But of course the subject can also tell lies in a regular interrogation as well.
I assume that a well designed KGB/Gestapo level torture program is not entirely naive about the fact that the first thing you hear is likely to be a lie. It may take several iterations of "we figured out your story is bullshit, here's some more torture" before you start to get some truth.
Perhaps, but note that in my first hypothetical, the suspect in fact told the truth -- he acted alone -- but the torture continued because that was not the answer that the torturer wanted to hear. And that scenario is the what critics mean when they say that torture doesn't work.
Well, it doesn't work any better than not-torture in cases where the subject tells the truth immediately, but that's a pretty weak version of "torture doesn't work".
Can you imagine there's some hypothetical situations where a well designed torture program would work better than non-torture?
Again, you seem to be ignoring the argument that torture is actually counterproductive. See my initial post: "The terrorist will name innocent people, and the torturer will be off on a wild goose chase."
>Can you imagine there's some hypothetical situations where a well designed torture program would work better than non-torture?
As I mentioned, the ticking time bomb scenario, in which what the torturer wants to hear is the truth.
Torture doesn't work. Pointing out another thing that doesn't work either doesn't mean we should torture.
It seems like things like waterboarding, prolonged confinement in uncomfortable postures, etc. is meant to break people down. I'm sure it does, but not necessarily in a way that makes them more truthful. Seems to me that simple blasts of severe pain, which can be delivered without tissue damage (I think) via electric shocks will get you whatever you can get via torture. Fucking someone up via prolonged and frequent hideous experiences seems to me more like a cruel and inhumane punishment than a way of extracting truth.
As I understand it, torture can make people lose the memories the torture wants to get. Considering how foggy I can be under even moderate stress, I believe it.
Yeah, I think sometimes the easiest way out is for the brain to jump straight to actually believing whatever it is. "There are five lights."
This thread ought to be crossed over with the more recent one about why people treat beliefs as being mutable but morally relevant.
_Torture and Democracy_, a book about the evolution of no-marks torture, says that one of the side effects of torture is that the police stop bothering to use normal methods of investigation. (from memory)
And if you give up the secrets *too* quickly, there's the suspicion that those are just a cover story to divert the torturers from the real secrets.
How can they be sure this is the truth if you gave it up after twenty seconds? Better keep going, just to be sure.
And maybe you know more things that you're not telling, so more torture.
And do you know that other terrorist, Joe Shoe? No? Really no? Torture you till you say yes of course you do and he is definitely a terrorist.
Torture isn't so much about getting information, it's about power, and about "don't even think of trying to resist the government because this is what will happen if you do".
You can beat confessions out of people, but then it turns out the confessions are false, and they only confessed because you beat it out of them? Not a good look for the police or the judiciary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guildford_Four_and_Maguire_Seven
There’s an inescapable agency problem: the torturers want to be helpful and earn their pay, so they’re going to work extra hard to come up with useful information that the boss wants to hear, whether that’s the high prevalence of witches or that an unpopular foreign country is responsible for local problems.
The problem with that argument is that the torturer's reports can often be checked and found false. The boss doesn't want a torturer who supplies false information.
That's not an actual experience in places where torture is routinely used to extract confessions. The boss just needs someone to convict of the crime to close the case. The actual guilt is irrelevant.
The issue with torture is pretty simple to understand; It's ineffective for info that is difficult to check, and effective for info that is easy to check. If you ask a murderer where he dumped a body, he might try to be cheeky once or twice, but once you've checked the locations and ramp up the torture he will tell you the location quite quickly. The problem is these kind of situations are rare enough, and the idea of an innocent person being tortured is horrible enough, that very few will consider it worth it.
Torture is effective in getting whatever information the torturer already believes, which gives the torturer the impression that it provides reliable information.
There's a famous example from the end of World War II. The Japanese tortured an American POW to find out how many more atomic bombs we had and what the next target was. He said he had no idea, which was true. But they didn't believe him, and tortured him until they got an answer they did believe.
Torture was also the source for a lot of the evidence in European witch trials. And even back then it was common for people who weren't in on the witch hunt to realize that torture was providing false evidence.
I think the evidence is good that torture doesn't produce reliable information, but I'm not as sure that torture as punishment is a net bad.
Whether or not it's net bad in a utilitarian sense, it's "cruel and unusual" which is sufficient reason for most of society to disapprove of it.
Torture is a relic from a past where the kinds of information we wanted and the ways we had to gather that information were both different from now. A doorkicker isn't going to know about atomic bombs, but he's the one we can get our hands on. The information he does have, such as the location of the rest of his compatriots is useless -- we already knew where their base was; he was dropped from a helicopter.
Compare this to a thousand years ago, when the fog of war was so thick that torturing the absolute insane living daylights out of someone for information that he actually would have like "what valley are your auxiliary forces in" is totally worthwhile.
Note also that wanting to torture people who were involved in killing our friends is a normal human desire -- it just doesn't serve any useful purpose nowadays and we struggle to justify it. Luckily for POWs, the people who run the detention center aren't the same people who were just at the front, and their friends probably haven't been killed just now. Modernity is strange.
> Compare this to a thousand years ago, when the fog of war was so thick that torturing the absolute insane living daylights out of someone for information that he actually would have like "what valley are your auxiliary forces in" is totally worthwhile.
And likewise, armies engaged in "foraging" by torturing the local peasants to find out where they hid their food and valuables.
> Note also that wanting to torture people who were involved in killing our friends is a normal human desire -- it just doesn't serve any useful purpose nowadays and we struggle to justify it.
Agreed. This is largely based in a counterproductive impulse towards vengeance. Possibly even uniquely so, as incarceration and execution both serve valid, legitimate purposes: preventing the criminal from committing further crimes. Torture does not.
Incarceration used to be a lot harder to manage. Easier to just flog people and/or cut off a hand.
I think "torture doesn't work" means "torture doesn't work *reliably.*"
Because some people will hold on to secrets, or provide a misdirect, and then some people don't actually have the secrets, but will make them up to get out of the torture.
In situations where the interrogator is completely certain the captive has the desired information, then torture might indeed be a useful tool. But how often does that situation actually happen?
I think the crux of that is one cannot trust information gained through torture, since the torturee may give any information you want to stop the pain. How will you know the information is accurate? You'll need to confirm it, and not by torturing someone else.
Of course, maybe torture would be more effective on things like "what's the combination/password?" but not "where is the next rally to be held?"
There's always an uncertainty in every information source; surely Bayesian reasoning can be applied to make torture more effective?
"strong men create good times"
Im on board with weak men create hard times, but it seems to be theres an element of human brain that has a switch to survive death cults:
the cia (starting wars to launder money, torture, allowing child trafficking for unclear goals etc.),
prison gangs (gangs outside prison get to operate by money, committing a murder on camera is harder to buy and success of prison gang power looks like full solitary confinement, yet people raise the ranks and power does flow from the inside to out),
cannibalism at the scale of nation state like haiti,
genocide
etc.
Your ancestors probably had to survive a death cult, while strong men very much turn off normal morality for allot of people I think its fairly clear thats not logically sound and just optimizing a culture for evil seems to be on the table.
I'd say, hard times produce hard men, then regression to the mean makes everything better and they claim all the undue credit.
"strong men force everyone to agree that times are good"?
and men who allow freedom of speech are called weak by their opponents
Id think the opposite, it really goes to hell when "strong" men start creating situations they are very nessery "opps we tortured someone to say iraq has wmd's"
Mmmm... That seems more like "if we fake the times being hard, we can fake that we are strong men"?
there isnt anything fake about war, prison riots, or general society break down
a) Your example was Iraqi WMDs, which were notoriously fake.
b) One of the classic villain plots is to create a problem that only they can solve, most blatantly in the form of blackmail, but there are more subtle variants as well.
Or am I misreading your first comment?
Apparently the pentagon was running fake bot accounts to spread propaganda during covid, including anti-vax stuff. I’m pretty appalled about this assuming it’s true. Seems like a major line crossed.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda
I am not one if these people to be shocked by the actions of the American deep state. In this case though - why?
In my view this is the stupidest and evilest thing the US government has done in decades, considering there wasn't likely much to gain, innocent people were likely to die, we've just conceded all moral high ground over spreading dangerous misinformation, the program wasn't likely to remain secret, the uncovering of the program does more negative geopolitical damage than its success could have plausibly done and the target population was that of an ally.
And, unlike many of the everyday dumb and maleficent things the US government does, you can't blame this one on the unintended consequences of the sausage-making of public policy in a large democracy. This shit was done by the actual deep state. (Or ordered by Trump.)
Stuff like this makes me think we aren't the good guys.
> In my view this is the stupidest and evilest thing the US government has done in decades
hows the Epstein clinet list being still unreleased strike you? Should the cia be grabbing it for black mail or hiding it because they were involved? Maybe benefiting from child trafficking should be a line for governments ?
It’s the stupidest and evilest thing *that you know of*
<mild snark>
Hmm... Doesn't "stupidest" include the failure to keep it hidden? If some other operation was successfully kept hidden, it might be eviler, but wouldn't it, at least along the the dimension of concealment, be less stupid? :-)
</mild snark>
True.
Disappointing but not surprising, and more of the vein of "US reveals it uses the same dirty foreign policy tools as everybody else" than something I'd find shocking or horrifying. The Philippines has been a core component of the US' "First Island Chain" strategy with respect to China for quite a while. China made some inroads with the Philippines in the 2000s (I think their former president, Robert Duterte, leaned China in his outlook on the future of the country), but recently have been China's been alienating the Philippines (along with many other neighbors) with it's push to expand in the South China Sea.
That anti-China backlash accrued to the benefit of US/Filipino cooperation, and the more US-aligned President Marcos is now in power despite his family connections to Ferdinand Marcos, an autocrat who basically robbed the country blind in the 1970s.
Marcos, for example, has withdrawn from China's belt-and-road initiative, been more focused on retaining sovereignty over the Spratly Islands (which China disputes despite having lost a case on it in The Hague), and approved some new US bases under an Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement.
The CIA likely saw China shipping a ton of vaccines to the Philippines as an opportunity for Beijing to score big foreign relations points by "saving" the Philippines, and dropped this social media campaign to try to prevent that from happening, wanting instead for US vaccines to be used and thus for social capital to accrue to the US instead of China. Now it's blown up in their faces. Seems like an own-goal, honestly - with Beijing being so belligerent in the South China Sea I'm not sure why something like this would have been terribly useful.
What is your understanding of what the CIA DOES? This one seems like a pretty straightforward exercise is limiting Chinese influence in the Philippines at the slight risk (now a paid cost) of the operation getting leaked.
It was a pretty straightforward exercise in the US losing credibility.
Of course, we don't give a shit about the human costs of a delayed vaccine rollout in the Philippines.
Plus, now that the cat is out of the bag, China can say "we didn't lie to you but the US did."
Overall, it seems like an unsound move at both an ethical and political level.
Haven’t seen a whole lot of discussion of this and would love to hear any takes or analysis
Discussion: https://www.metafilter.com/204183/Thanks
I brought it up in a hidden open thread.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/hidden-open-thread-333333333/comment/59075621
TL,DR, it was weird that Reuters ran the story, along with IIRC Al Jazera and the Daily Mail, but not other reputable news sources even following Reuters' lead. It was weird that there didn't seem to be much discussion of this in the Phillipines. It was weird that they were claiming the *Army*, rather than the CIA, was doing this. And Reuters was being unusually vague about the sourcing.
Unless any of that has changed, this falls outside the bounds of my trust w/re news media. That's rare for the generally-reputable Reuters on basic claims of fact, but here we are. The OP's "assuming it's true", is IMO not warranted.
As I recall, it was the military because it was a change of rules that got changed back under Biden.
The disinformation campaign may have made less difference than one might think because Filipinos were already soaked in propaganda and were doing their own guessing.
A listing of some reporting from the region: https://www.metafilter.com/204183/Thanks#8576511
> Seems like a major line crossed
The world is pretty used to such things from the US. US foreign politics are pretty consistent in this over the last 100 or so years. There is a reason why there is so much america-hate outside "the west".
Maybe, but this was a clear "own goal" with a US ally.
The U.S. keeps being absolutely appalling when it comes to vaccines and the Third World (compare the fake vaccination campaign when looking for Bin Laden).
I think this is actually not correct. It was described "fake vaccination campaign", by a bunch of media sources, but as far as I can tell this is wrong and the CIA was actually running a real vaccination campaign with real hepatitis vaccines, while also collecting intelligence to track down Osama Bin Laden.
So as someone who is pro-vax and anti-Osama-Bin-Laden, this actually seems pretty good to me.
Source (headline erroneously says "fake" but in the text it confirms that the vaccines were real):
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/lasting-fallout-fake-vaccination-programs/story?id=23795483
If someone runs a vaccination campaign, even with real vaccines, under a false identity, exclusively in order to gather DNA for testing, I think that still qualifies as "fake".
I guess this is just a semantic disagreement then. But when I originally saw those headlines, my interpretation was that the CIA was pretending to give people vaccines just so that they could find Bin Laden -- which of course seemed really bad to me.
So finding out that the vaccines were real completely changed my interpretation. Now I think it's pretty cool that the CIA was able to successfully track down Bin Laden, and along the way ended up vaccinating (for real) a bunch of people for hepatitis.
If your plumber was a spy planting bugs, the fact that he fixed your leaky faucet doesn't make him any less "fake."
It's a virtual certainty that this was a net loss for vaccination.
Yeah, the real counter argument is that this will decrease trust in future innocent vaccination campaigns, leading to unnecessary disease, etc.
Islamists are bad enough about this without being handed an excuse - we would have exterminated polio by now except for the Talibans and Boko Haram.
The Taliban seems to have changed their position on this, and are now actively working towards eradicating it.
What if Burning Man was a permanent settlement?
Maybe not literally, there's geographical challenges to that particular site. But I'm wondering about ways to start cool new cities from scratch, to solve the housing price and unconstrained population growth problems which bedevil all the existing cool cities in the Western world.
Burning Man seems like a proof of concept -- you can persuade 70,000 people, primarily young and creative, to all show up in the same place simply by being a Schelling point for a bunch of other creative young people to also show up in. Now obviously, not everyone who attends Burning Man wants to stay there permanently, but if the option was there then I think some people would stay for a longer period, and then you've got an economy going, maybe some startups being founded, which if the winds of fashion blow the right way could become a boom town. Seems worth trying.
Are we talking about the tent shantytown + glamping gated communities that exists for a week of partying and conspicuous consumption before burning all their architecture? How would you make it permanent without removing everything recognizable about it as burning man? And, if you do, how would this not just be a developing world shantytown out in the desert?
I won't say what I think about Burning Man, but these are valid questions. Houses on beautiful Bombay Beach continue to be very economical, or one can park an RV for free at nearby Slab City, if they want to cultivate the sticktoitiveness a 365-day Burning Man would require.
Why not start out by holding Burning Man twice a year instead of just once?
I think you would need to redesign it for permanence. For example, you mention getting an economy going and startups being founded. In general, no one would want to start a startup in a moneyless society. Even if you wanted to, no one would invest in you. So you would probably need to look at either adopting money after all, perhaps with some different rules than the rest of society, or figuring out a real barter system, which as much as I love Burning Man seems like too heavy a burden for a long-term settlement to bear.
Checkout the East Solano plan in California: https://eastsolanoplan.com its a plan for brand new city near the SF Bay
Yeah, that sounds absolutely nothing like Burning Man, and exactly like a bunch of ugly just-commutable urban sprawl on the edge of the Bay Area. A veritable Tracy of the north, but with a more expensive PR firm.
I'm pretty sure Burning Man only works *because* it is temporary.
Hey, long-timer Burner here. Melvin, respectfully, that is ageist. I first attended at age 43, last attended at age 58. It's easy at Burning Man to fall in with your own tribe, but one of the absolute draws of BM is that everyone is welcome, and everyone goes. BM probably has a bigger share of over-40s than any "festival" that involves any degree of self-support. Christina, yeah you're right to some extent but a lot of people enjoy being out there for weeks and months on volunteer crews so it's an interesting question to explore.
Cheers!
I think you replied to the wrong comment.
> one of the absolute draws of BM is that ... everyone goes
My inner 10-year-old boy won't shut up until I point this out.
Hi Tony, my point was mostly that the Burning Man is fundamentally supported by people who earn their living in "regular" places and then go back to those places (and the "regular" economy) when the event is over. It doesn't work as a "proof of concept" because events like it couldn't be self-sustaining full-time the way the OP is speculating (developing an economy, being a home base for startups, etc) anymore than the Olympic Games acting as a proof of concept of "world peace."
And while I have you, isn't one of the principles of Burning Man to eschew money in favor of bartering? I can see that working short-term, but that is not a model on which to found a 21st century boom town, I think!
I recently had a slight chesty cough for a few days, after tidying a dusty tool shed, and as I lay in bed my chest made wheezy sounds of various kinds and pitches depending on my orientation. Curiously, some sounded like creaking doors, distant wails, rattling chains, and every now and then believe it or not the sound of children laughing some way away.
It struck me that a similar phenomenon could explain a lot of past accounts of ghost encounters, or ghostly sounds anyway. Perhaps in times past peoples' dwellings would have been more dusty, with open fires, and no efficient vacuum cleaners nor antibiotics, and chronic chest congestion of varying severities were thus more widespread. So it is easy to imagine someone half awake, and/or half drunk, swearing they could hear a ghostly noise which they never twigged was only their own breathing!
One could even extend this dust theory to ghost sightings: In a dusty environment, with bed sheets and pillow cases not washed for weeks on end (which was probably also more widespread years ago), it is not uncommon for mild chronic eye infections to develop. A film of mucus, viewed floating across the eye ball surface, could easily resemble a phantom figure gliding across a room and disappearing into a wall!
People know their own coughs and lungs. What does sound like ghosts, and the supernatural and even trespassers are the sounds of old buildings as the pipes rattle and groan, and the building itself or its foundations shifts in the heat or cold.
I've had a lot of pseudo-paranormal encounters. E.g. I'll wake up in the middle of the night, convinced that I heard someone in my room, and it takes a few seconds to realize that everything is normal and noone could possibly be there. Only a strong prior against the paranormal protects you from going crazy due to misinterpreted noise.
Any advice for nausea during pregnancy, a.k.a. hypermesis? Not much vomiting, but unceasing strong nausea for days and weeks. Happened similarly in the previous pregnancy. We've tried the crackers and the simple stuff. Anything else?
Thalidomide is the best. The nanny-state won't let you have it but you can find it as a greymarket supplement. Just search for "thalidomide" and you'll get lots of hits.
Just be sure to get left-handed thalidomide in the Northern Hemisphere, and right-handed thalidomide in the Southern Hemisphere. Or is it the other way around?
Zofran. Its magical. I don't know a single pregnant women who wasn't given zofran by their doctor at some point.
One thing I'd note from experience - different women have different triggers for nausea during pregnancy, and it seems to have a genetic component.
My mother and sisters had the most common trigger - low blood sugar; crackers, fruit, sweetened ginger tea worked well for them.
My wife, like her mother, needed protein rather than carbs; boiled eggs or cheese or even meat helped dramatically, but crackers did no good whatsoever.
This might help. Sea-Band The Original Wristband Adults - 1 Piece https://a.co/d/067ev4Fg
No side effects, not expensive.
Thanks! We already have a similar one, not sure it helped but we'll give it another try.
There are somewhat effective meds now with Doxylamine succinate + Pyridoxine chlorhydrate / vitamin B6 (those are the excipients, but I don't know the name of the drug in English-speaking countries) .
Otherwise, avoiding tomatoes, chocolate and coffee, eating breakfast in bed and sleeping a lot are the only things that actually work (a little).
This was what I used. In the US you have to use Unisom sleep tabs to get the doxylamine succinate (and then just add your B6). There are guides online for dosage.
It's not a miracle cure, but it takes the edge off.
I was once severely nauseated because I'd taken an antibiotic tablet that was supposed to be taken with food on an empty stomach. I was about 90% of the way to vomiting. The person I was with, an MD, told me to take deep breaths through my mouth, and that really did work. Did it for about 5 mins. and the nausea receded to a tolerable level and stayed there. It's possible that power of suggestion was involved, though.
The meds we tried in the last pregnancy, the side effects were worse than the nausea. B6 we're trying.
Why tomatoes? Is it the acidity? The doctor actually said chocolate is allowed, to get more sugar and carbs (coated with chocolate). Breakfast in bed and sleeping a lot are definitely things we'll try. Thanks!
...if "Sixth Day and Other Tales" is removed, will another finalist be added in its place...?
Let me ask you guys for practical advice on bursting blog bubbles.
I am absolutely sure that there are, to pull out a random number, a hundred blogs that would blow my mind somewhere around the web.
And I don’t have any method to find them. My normal rate of stumbling upon new things is about one a year, which is I guess still better than the general popularion. I stumbled upon SSC/ACX a couple years ago and I’ve been in love. But it was pure chance and may not have happened.
To burst your book bubble, you can surf Goodreads or NYRB or the shelves of your local thrift book store. For music bubbles, there’s RYM, Pitchfork and thousands of lists for every canon. But are there any methods or places like this for blogs/websites/communities/podcasts, whether active or dead for 20 years? A wiki, a web historian, a subreddit or something?
Read Something Interesting has a nice set. https://www.readsomethinginteresting.com
It's why I'm here, actually.
I think the rationalist project is either betweened doomed but noble hubris or directly malevolent egoism depending on who I last interacted with, and I think the market should be as limited as possible, and and and.
I read blogs and forums that oppose my political views, but still stand up to scrutiny. IE, I started here because I disagree with most of OP's views but respect them, I tried reading the motte and some of the blogs recommended there and did NOT respect them, etc.
You get it. What would be some blogs with the views opposite from Scott's that still stand your scrutiny? That would be a nice start out of this particular bubble, as nice as it is.
Don't have an index of blogs handy but some great blogs I would recommend are: marginalrevolution.com, bayesianinvestor.com, coyoteblog (although this one isn't updated that much).
A lot of substacks lates features are trying to do just this. There is an "explore" are of substack that could expose you to new blogs based on what you currently read.
https://ooh.directory/
> A collection of 2,299 blogs about every topic
Oh, cool, thank you! Not as exhaustive as catalogues of other media, but certainly a very good start.
I always hope I _don't_ find any more interesting blogs, because each one means more time spent reading and possibly posting comments. So for me a blog directory would be disastrous! :-)
Mind you, starting reading a new blog does mean one can post very similar comments to those one has made on other blogs, and nobody will think one is ax-grinding or being repetitive!
Alas, I think when it comes to blogs, you probably just have to follow references and/or links out of the current blogs (and blog comments) you're reading. Blogs are often extremely narrowly focused, so it's hard to think of how'd they'd even be categorized by an archive.
Or you can ask for recommendations from groups of people who have a little something in common with you but nevertheless probably have diverse tastes in blogs:
The Last Psychiatrist - he hasn't posted in ten years, but there's plenty of content. I fell in love with the first post I read, now-deleted (but since archived!) post here - (https://web.archive.org/web/20140411002758/http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/11/the_terrible_awful_truth_about_1.html) , but one of my favorite posts is this one (https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/01/penelope_trunk_abuser.html), and he has many, many, many others.
Hotel Concierge (https://www.tumblr.com/hotelconcierge) - might actually be a secondary blog written by The Last Psychiatrist? Very much discusses the same topics in the same tone.
Captain Awkward (https://captainawkward.com/) - advice column/blog. People's problems are interesting.
Jason Pargin (aka David Wong) (https://jasonpargin.substack.com/) and (https://www.cracked.com/members/David+Wong) - brilliant observations about people and systems, usually delivered very amusingly
Wait But Why (https://waitbutwhy.com/) - It's great.
Asking for recommendations is not very generalizable, but your recommendations are very much appreciated! I love TLP, so I'll explore the others too.
You might not expect a modern European nation to plan for war to the knife, to the very last man standing, the way the Imperial Japanese Army used to do it. But that seems to be the plan, if a statement from the current Swedish civil defence guide "If Crisis or War Comes" is taken at face value.
The English translation is found here:
https://rib.msb.se/filer/pdf/30307.pdf
On page 12 we find this: "If Sweden is attacked by another country, we will never give up. All information to the effect that resistance is to cease is false."
And that's just metal as hell.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to adapt this statement into the name of a metal band, album title, or song.
Fjord Dying (Or They Are)
"armless and dangerous"
"you only cross once" (me; borders; rubicon)
"give me no quarter" (I won't be prisoner: give me swedeheim or give me death)
"Here's no quarter, call someone who cares"
Lead Zeppelin?
Perhaps the statement that any purported surrender is not valid is made for legal reasons? Under the laws of war, civilians fighting to repel invaders (while carrying arms openly) are legal combatants, to be treated as prisoners of war if captured. But continued resistance after surrender would be criminal. So declaring that no surrender is valid is a protection for those resisting (in the perhaps unlikely case that the invaders are scrupulous about obeying the laws of war).
Live free or die
There was an ironic incident about those words...
https://www.nhhumanities.org/program/live-free-or-die-the-contested-history-of-the-words-on-your-license-plate
>In 1969, when New Hampshire officials decided to put the state’s motto – “live free or die” – on its license plates, many citizens viewed the act as an endorsement of the deeply unpopular war being waged in Vietnam and protested by covering up or altering the motto. _In response, authorities cracked down hard: arresting, fining, and sometimes even incarcerating those who engaged in duct-tape dissent._
[emphasis added]
Sounds about right…
Many Thanks! It was a weird incident...
Death is not the worst of evils.
Not at all. better to die like a man than live like a dog. Unless you’re a Corgi….
"Either Swede or dead"
Fight on Forever.
This one's a real song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBIQbw-ZCAo
"Fully prepared to continue the Scandinavian tradition of complete population replacement."
No, that's too long. But based on real history, at least.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06862-3
Compulsory Resistance
Dead, Not Conquered
To The Last Man
This one's a real song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5RfZfodYkY
Schelling mentions Norway and Sweden's national resistance policies as examples of pre-committment e.g. ripping off your steering wheel in a game of chicken to show how serious you are.
By committing to total national resistance before the outbreak of hostilities, Sweden does a few things: (1) signal to adversaries that any invasion will be war to the knife (2) pre-empt adversary psy ops by officializing the narrative of "never give up, never surrender" and (3) implement a culture of decentralized decision-making in their military, known as "mission command" in military jargon.
More info on the nordic mission command culture: https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2017/9/20/trigger-happy-autonomous-and-disobedient-nordbat-2-and-mission-command-in-bosnia
Thanks for sharing the article on Mission Command.Being Dutch, It was painful to read, because of the contrasting record of the Dutch peacekeeping unit.
Hard to read it as a Canadian too. The Canadian battalions (CANBATs) were nicknamed CAN'T BATs because of how constrained they were.
Seversl of my friends are from Finland, which has compulsory National Service.
The Finns seems pretty serious about fighting Russians if it comes to it (see also: Winter War of 1939)
Finland's history of doing that (although in both conflicts with Russia it ultimately acceded to a loss) makes such a claim more credible than Sweden, which hasn't had to demonstrate any willingness to fight in centuries.
Sweden has demonstrated *some* willingness to fight. Apparently Sweden came close to joining the Crimean War on the Anglo-French side, had extensive plans of what to do if it came down to war in WW2, and of course the current defense efforts are a continuation of Cold-War era plans against Soviet attack. Nevertheless, this willingness hasn't then led to actual fighting, apart from the Winter War volunteers.
In polling, Finland has generally had the highest percentage of those answering if they'd be willing to fight in a war to defend their country, 74%. https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/pos74g/percentage_of_europeans_who_are_willing_to_fight/
Looks like it's time to invade the Netherlands
Unceasing Resistance. Could be any of the options, probably best fit for an album title.
Snopes recently published a "fact check" on Trump's comments after the "Unite the Right" rally at Charlottesville. Title of the page is "No, Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists 'Very Fine People'".
In particular, it labels as "false" the claim that " On Aug. 15, 2017, then-President Donald Trump called neo-Nazis and white supremacists who attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, "very fine people." ".
They later added this note:
"Editors' Note: Some readers have raised the objection that this fact check appears to assume Trump was correct in stating that there were "very fine people on both sides" of the Charlottesville incident. That is not the case. This fact check aimed to confirm what Trump actually said, not whether what he said was true or false. For the record, virtually every source that covered the Unite the Right debacle concluded that it was conceived of, led by and attended by white supremacists, and that therefore Trump was wrong. "
This makes no sense.
They say "Trump was wrong" about there being "very fine people on both sides", i.e. because the people on the right side were white supremacists. But that was the group (well one of the two) he was praising. He praised group X, group X (according to Snopes) consists of white supremacists, therefore he was praising white supremacists, QED.
Now of course he also said "I'm not talking about the ... white nationalists because they should be condemned totally" (I'm using white nationalists/white supremacists/neo-Nazis interchangeably in this comment). So, in Snopes's own telling, Trump is pointing at a group of white supremacists and saying "there are fine people in that group, I don't mean the white supremacists". Mostly it's just incoherent, but to the extent you can glean a meaning out of it, he is in fact praising white supremacists.
But Trump's statement was actually worse than that. Because when asked a followup by the reporter, he says "There were people in that rally — and I looked the night before — if you look, there were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee.". And then says "the next day" there were white nationalists there.
The people there "the night before" were the infamous tiki torch people, who were chanting "blood and soil" and "Jews will not replace us". And those are the ones he's specifically pointing to as the "fine people". He was denying that people chanting "Jews will not replace us" are hateful!
Huh? I haven't read the Snopes piece, but based on what you've quoted this looks perfectly coherent to me:
1. Trump said there were very fine people on both sides.
2. One of those sides was made up entirely of white supremacists.
3. Trump did not praise white supremacists (and in fact condemned them), but he praised the side of the rally they were on.
4. The only coherent interpretation of this is that Trump falsely believed the rally was not only made up of white supremacists.
> The only coherent interpretation of this is that Trump falsely believed the rally was not only made up of white supremacists.
So you're saying that both sides agree that Trump is never factually incorrect, but only when it suits their interests? I'll buy that.
The other coherent interpretation is that Trump is very good at talking out of both sides of his mouth at once.
I guess my problem with that, even if you think I'm otherwise being overly harsh, is the second point I made. He points to "the night before" and describes them as being the good ones. And he also claims to have been watching it. And they were chanting "Jews will not replace us".
He says of the "night before" group "I'm sure there were some bad ones" which kind of drives the point home - he isn't saying it's a group that has some good people in it, he's saying that it's mostly good people. But again, clearly chanting white supremacist stuff! It's not like there was a 2nd "night before" group chanting normal right wing stuff about Robert E Lee.
It is 4. Based on the full text of his comments, Trump seemed to think it was some sort of Robert E. Lee statue preservation event attended by non-racists as well as racists.
In reality, while I don't know the details of every thought every protestor ever had, "Unite the Right" was organized and primarily attended by overt white supremacists.
Is Snopes saying that side was made up entirely of white supremacists? It says "For the record, virtually every source that covered the Unite the Right debacle concluded that it was conceived of, led by and attended by white supremacists, and that therefore Trump was wrong", but that does not say that *all* the attendees were indeed white supremacists.
"Attended by" is not the same as "solely attended by", "only attended by" or "wholly attended by". Thus if there were some non-white supremacists or non-Nazis attending as well, because they were misled as to the motivation of the organisers, those would indeed be the "very fine people" on both sides.
No, it's definitional. Anyone who attended is definitionally a white supremacist, just as everyone who disagrees with me is definitionally a Nazi.
/sarcasm
I agree that "attended by" doesn't mean "only attended by", but when they say "Trump was wrong" - wrong about what? Presumably the fact of there being "very fine people" on that side. Clear implication of "Trump was wrong" is that it in fact was *only* attended by white supremacists.
They're saying "please don't cancel us, we're not saying Trump is good, we're only saying he didn't say what was claimed, but we are still firmly on board with he is evil and bad and the rally was all white supremacists and nobody on the other side did anything bad and all the bad guys were on the white supremacist side, we're your allies, spare us!"
Of course "2" is false.
The "Unite the Right" rally was aimed at people from all across the right half of the political spectrum, hence the name. I can easily imagine that I would have attended if I'd been in that town at that time.
grumble
I wish we did more governing via issue-specific referendums, and less with candidates' positions and even less with broad left / right sort-of kind-of alliances. E.g. being for or against
nuclear power
LBGTQ+ rights
tax-code-based income redistribution
NATO
are all logically separate decisions. All 16 preferences are self-consistent. At a meta level, I wish they weren't presented as package deals.
The problem is that "nuclear power, yay or nay?" does not a government make. At some point, people have to figure out details and make tradeoffs.
Many Thanks! Yeah, it is messier than that. Still, policies like what the Greens pushed in Germany, shutting down their nuclear plants, are concrete proposals, and such proposals can get a yay or nay vote, just as states that have referendums, such as California, _do_ put some policy choices on the ballot. At a meta level, I would like to see more such choices directly in the hands of the electorate and unbundled from the package deals we have now.
I think, package deals may be inevitable, if you have highly centralized power. If we had elections for control over each ministry via an associated ministry-specific parliament? The advantage would be, that you only have sector-specific bundles and each voter can at least specify their own set of bundles. Single-issue parties could also specialize in holding power over things they care about... which might be good? Would that be a stable equilibrium or would this not centralize again, as the ministries end up fighting over control? [also, how would you even do budget allocation?]
California also shows the dangers of ballot propositions. A lot of problems in California are caused by past ballot propositions.
Sure. We can start with "I'll trade off a hundred coal plants for one modern fission plant."
I think you have to distinguish the night before (Friday) and the day of (Saturday). My sense is the day of was a bit of a circus, all sorts of groups there, both regular conservatives and hardcore neo-nazis, and random curious people (more likely to show up during the day on a weekend). Technically that was the main "Unite the Right" rally.
But if you look at Friday, it was basically all white supremacists, and it was the infamous tiki torch crowd. Which was also the people Trump specifically called out as praiseworthy.
Was it though? I mean, I oppose fascism but that doesn't mean I support Antifa. Likewise, why should a non-racist conservative attend an event organized by Richard Spencer and Jason Kessler?
That's the thing, on the left it's perfectly normal for center-left people to attend protests and rallies partially, primarily or even entirely organized by the far-left. I'm at a university and when I even tepidly point some questionable affiliations of protest organizers out, the usual reactions range from "huh, didn't know that" over "to ally with them on this issue I don't need to ally with them on all issues" to "yes I know, and?". It's absolutely hypocritical to admonish the center right for something that is normal on the left.
Of course it's hypocritical. What have they ever done to make you think they consider that a bad thing?
You, Al, and Melvin are all making interesting points here. All I can say is that before and during the rally, I remember it being widely understood to be an alt-Right event. Richard Spencer was briefly a household name at that point, people understood it to be his movement rally, at best secondarily about the narrow matter of Robert E. Lee statues. On the first night, attendants were chanting "The Jews will not replace us". It's possible that some dedicated statue preservationist showed up not understanding the nature of the event, but this would have been a hard mistake to make and I doubt many such people were there.
I remember it being widely disputed what they were chanting on the first night.
Exactly what Melvin said, and it's not a fringe idea to keep such statues:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/lots-of-americans-arent-sure-if-we-should-take-down-confederate-statues/
The argument that Trump praised neonazis seems to rest on: 1) ignoring Trump's specific admonishment the white supremacists, 2) somehow mind reading Trump so that you can know what his beliefs about who attended the rallies were, and 3) that the rally consisted of 100% of white supremacists when a clear majority of those against removal of such statues consists of non-supremecists, as is reflected in many polls.
It was this story and the Hunter Biden laptop thing (even though i don't particularly care about Hunter) that made me stop believing that mainstream news was even generally trying to be truthful. Funny how Biden made the lie about Charlottesville a central component in explaining his 2020 presidential run.
I get at this in my original comment, but Trump was in fact praising white supremacists. It's true he says "I'm not talking about the white supremacists" but then when he is asked who he *is* talking about he says "the people who were there the night before". But the people who were there the night before ... were definitely white supremacists!
And not in the sense that they were mostly regular old conservatives and one guy is ruining it all by having a neo-nazi flag, they were all chanting about the Jews and all that. It was a rally of white supremacists and nobody would dispute that or be confused about it if it didn't become the center of this big Trump-related controversy.
Now, how do you harmonize the "I'm not talking about white supremacists" with the "I'm talking about the people the night before [who were white supremacists]"? My guess is because the people the night before didn't kill anyone, and didn't even have any nazi armbands or flags or anything, so Trump didn't feel the need to condemn them. Taking a hyper-narrow view of who he should condemn.
Look, it's been established that everyone who comments on this Substack is a Nazi, and so I don't think anyone should be paying attention to what a Nazi like you says.
How do you know who Trump thought was present the night before? Parsing Trump comments in such a pedantic manner is not appropriate given his sloppy speaking style. It's funny how people become such contortionists because of the deeply seated desire to believe in this myth.
I've got no idea who Jason Kessler is. The purpose of the rally was to protest against the removal of the statue of Robert E Lee.
Can I just express my strong desire for Scott to post more book reviews than just the announced finalists? Preferably as many as possible. They don't have to all be made finalists do they? I suppose it might confuse the voters a bit, but:
1. I don't think it's in dispute that Scott is posting a lot less content than in other years, and
2. I'd really like to see discussions on some of those reviews (some of them even explicitly invite discussion) and just having all those reviews sitting there without any way to comment on them seems a bit of a waste.
(Incidentally, is "voting irregularities" a euphemism for "possible cheating"? I'm 90% sure that's what's meant, but just clarifying. I'm a bit surprised someone would do that on something like this; it seems self-defeating.)
My experience last year was of putting a lot
of time and effort into writing an entertaining review of a book in the sweet spot of overlap between things that fascinate me things that fascinate ACX readers. While I knew there was a good chance I would not be a finalist, it had somehow not occurred to me that if I were not one I would never hear one goddam word of response from anybody. I don’t mean that people reading and voting should leave comments — that’s just not realistic. It’s a consequence of the way it’s set up — *most people* will have that experience. For me, anyhow, that’s just too big a dose of nothing, and I decided not to enter any more. I expect some of the many people posting and asking for readers’ thoughts about their reviews are having a similar experience. On the other hand, I get a lot of mental stimulation and fun from participating in open threads and the threads that go with Scott’s posts. You usually get something back there — if nothing else, some snark, which is still better than the sound of one hand clapping.
Yeah, that sucks. Thanks for sharing. I agree this is set up in a very frustrating way, though I'm not sure how it could be fixed (other than, you know, doing the things suggested in this subthread). I'm feeling similarly.
One particular issue is that the pool of people rating the reviews and the pool of people voting on the finalists are likely extremely different in both demographics/ideology and in what they're looking for. If so, this creates a weird two-part contest, where the aim is to write only one piece that will appeal maximally to both of these groups. I suspect that there are a lot of good reviews suffering from this unusual arrangement.
Was your review longer than average? I have a suspician that longer reviews are less attractive to the raters and more attractive to the voters, and if so the following insane situation could well occur: a long review is unlikely to get to the finals, but if it does it is likely to win. Meaning many people who got nothing may have actually just missed winning the whole thing, and the winning review of last year (which lots of people strongly disliked) may have almost not even made it. I could be wrong about all this.
If you post a link to your review here, I'll try to read it (it sounds interesting), and I'm sure some others will too. Alternatively, I amend my call to Scott to also post/link some previous years' reviews as well.
>One particular issue is that the pool of people rating the reviews and the pool of people voting on the finalists are likely extremely different in both demographics/ideology
I hadn't thought of that, that's an interesting theory. I remember feeling bewildered that one review I'd read made it into the finalist group. It was of a book about bees, and seemed like a Monarch Notes summary to me. Jeez. Last year I actually set up a Substack for me and other people who had post-review letdown to read each other's reviews, then this discuss them and give feedback. That worked reasonably well, though setting it up and keeping the machinery running was a lot of work. Anyhow, if you'd like to read my review, it's here: https://bookreviewgroup.substack.com/p/review-of-perplexities-of-consciousness And if you want to swap, I'll read yours and respond . Just let me know which it is.
Hey ascend, I hope you didn't think I was going to ghost you. I got busy, then had a couple nights insomnia which as usual caused akrasia. Thank you for your thoughts about my review. It's a pleasure to hear from someone who took an interest in the topic. When I wrote the thing I think I wanted to have people here engaging with the subject almost as much as I wanted to be a finalist. I'm sure you're right about the Nabokov opening. Everybody but one person in the book review group I set up last year felt the same way you did about it. I love that bit from Nabokov, and once in a while I read it to someone who responds the way I do, but most people roll their eyes, shrug, or just look blank. You'd think I'd have learned by now.
I think in the initial vote that chooses finalists readers probably give small things too much weight, because they have an overwhelming task and need to simplify it. So a mystifying opening paragraph like mine might be enough to make somebody stop reading right then and there and give the review a 4. Or the novelty of a review's format (eg, being in poetry, not prose) can bump a review up in the ratings just because it's memorable and a nice change of pace. So it's a lot like life: not very fair. and with a large element of luck. It's really not what it's tempting to imagine: a measure of how smart and interesting we are.
OK, thoughts about your review. You write clearly and well, line by line. Your observations are sharp and well-expressed and your trains of thought are clear. And I enjoyed your little notes about each of the chapters — “in which Singer gets massively canceled,” etc
But the thing as a whole is daunting and unwieldy, despite the crispness of the sentences that make it up. I think you got overly worried about whether the review would meet some standard, and so tried to cover all your bases. But based on what made it as finalists this year and last, I think it’s clear that almost anything goes. Last year, one finalist was basically Monarch Notes on the book. This year, one finalist review is a poem (and not a very good poem, and not really a review). So if you ever try this again, I think you should just let go of concerns about your review being the right sort of thing, and say exactly what you think about the book, in an essay of any form you choose.
It’s section 2 that makes the piece unwieldy. I read about half of it, then ran out of gas (partly because I have not read the book, and am not very interested in utilitarianism, which seems to me to kind of miss the point.). But even if I were full of interest and opinions about Singer, section 2 would be too much. I think a good approach would have been to make notes of your thoughts about each chapter, then ruminate about the whole bunch. Come up with some big-picture generalizations and judgments about crucial matters, such as Singer’s untilitarianism, his presentation of concrete judgments and advice about lots of real world things, his willingness to arrive at startling and unpopular judgments, his grasp of relevant issues, his thought process, his vulnerability to slippage, his clarity of expression, etc. Then arrange your conclusions in some orderly way: the 3 best things about the book vs. the 3 worst; or why this is a great book overall, despite some minor slippage; or the case for laughing at Singer’s tome. To support and enliven your conclusions, you can home in on some of the fine-grained observations you made in section 2, and talk about particular places that are especially good illustrations of your main takes on Singer. That way you can integrate big-picture stuff and fine-grained observations, which you are good at.
And then wrap up in some way that has a mild punch-line quality, just to make your piece memorable by sending the reader away amused. I mean, you want to be a finalist, right? So look for chances to get to be memorble and/or fun and/or impressive. Scott’s all 3.
So, my thoughts on your review.
1. I'll start with my only real problem with it: the opening. Reading it the first time, it was really unclear what the first few paragraphs were saying, and what the book is really about. It's hard to explain exactly why, but I think it's a mixture of a few too many big/technical words and the vagueness of being an overview of an unfamiliar subject (i.e. not concrete/specific enough). If I'd found this review in the massive google docs list I may well have stopped reading after a couple of paragraphs, thinking "I don't really understand what this is about, and if the whole review is written like this it's going to be a chore". But everything after NAIVE INTROSPECTIONISM was perfectly clear and I had no issue with. And then after reading the whole review, I re-read the opening and it was very clear this time*. I think this is an effect where when you know a topic well certain sentences are clear as day, but if you don't they can seem impenetrable. Even if you understand every word and sentence individually, the overall meaning (what it's getting at) is bewildering. I'd be a hypcrite to complain about this since I do it all the time (i.e. write dense sentences that are utterly clear to me and I assume are utterly clear to everyone), but it's something that I think causes people to engage a lot less than I expect, because it's not clear what I'm saying and requires too much effort to parse.
I would suggest either starting the review at the NAIVE INTROSPECTIONISM heading, or else having a much more informal introduction with simple/colloquial language and/or concrete examples right at the start.
*the exception is the Nabokov quote, which even after reading the whole review I had to re-read at least ten times before I realised what it was saying. And even more before I understood its relevance to your overall point.
2. That aside, everything else is very well written and worked very well for me. I particularly liked your focus on exercises that can be done by the reader on the spot: i.e. evidence that can be actually tested easily. This, in my opinion, puts your review head-and-shoulders above most others, which tend to just list various pieces of evidence that I just have to take the author's word for (and that can't be tested or even properly verified without expertise in the subject). Your arguments are infinitely stronger and more persuasive for that reason.
The following is some uncharitable speculation. I'm inclined to think a lot of people in this community have a strong aversion to this sort of personally verifiable argument. I don't really know why, but there seems to often be a kind of visceral negative reaction, even anger, at "armchair reasoning". Maybe some people here don't feel comfortable with claims and arguments that can't be reduced to concrete and objective results, and to simple scientific rules that are easy to precisely describe. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding this attitude. But it's an attitude I find very annoying, and I wouldn't be surprised if lots of people don't appreciate introspective arguments like the ones you made in this review.
Again, a bit uncharitable and I could be wrong about all this. But I really wish there were more pieces like yours in the rationalist writings and sequences and so on, instead of (what at least seems to me like) a whole lot of contempt for them.
3. I'd be interested to know more about what conclusions and implications you think follow from our conscious minds' amorphous and confused nature. One question I have is whether the unconcious has more accuracy and more precision in its thoughts and memories and impressions than the conscious mind does, even if it's inaccessible to us normally.
Another question is whether this is an argument for materialism about the mind. That's how it looks to me: the dualist idea that the mind is a separate substance of its own would seem to imply that mental phenomena would be clear and precise and have their own independent, defined nature. And that the mind would have full and accurate awareness of itself. If these things are false, that would be an argument against it, and for the view of the mind as a collection of vague and lesser imprints of the physical world. And thus for the mind being ultimately reducible to the physical world.
Of course, there are still standard arguments against materialism, like the apparent ability to conceive of the physical without the mental and vice versa, suggesting logical independence of each. I wonder what specific light your (and Schwitzgebel's) arguments about the limitations of mental precision would shed on arguments like those (e.g. David Chalmers' zombie argument.)
And finally, while I'm guessing your reference to Descartes' model is specifically about his substance dualism, there's also the question of whether the issues you and Schwitzgebel raise have an impact on the deeper Cartesian idea of an undeniably existing self. Even if we can't be reliably sure of the properties of our minds, of our desires and beliefs and memories and so on, can we at least be reliably sure of our minds' actual meaningful existence? Or not?
Those are just the first of the questions raised by your review.
Thank you! I will respond to this and comment on your review tomorrow. Today I have my vices, ACX and Photoshop, blocked so I can do billing. (Am sending the present message from my phone but thumb typing’s not suitable for long msgs)’
Sorry for the late reply, I've been a bit busy. I'll read your review when I can and comment on it in this subthread (unless you want me to start a new open thread discussion on it; let me know if you do.)
I've been reluctant to reveal my review because of Scott's ambiguous statement about possibly adding more finalists. But probably hardly anyone's still reading this thread anyway, so: my review is Practical Ethics. Warning that it's very long (about two thirds the length of last year's winner I think). I didn't deliberately set out to make it so long, but since the voters apparently keep choosing long reviews I thought there was no need to stop myself throwing in everything I could think of, or to make any effort to trim it down. I now think that was a mistake.
If it's too long, feel free to only read a few chapters from the middle section; they're each mostly self-contained (which may have also been a mistake). Don't heistate to tell me everything that's wrong with it
It's not even a euphemism, merely a synonym.
That's the funniest snark you ever let fly
It’s not even a snark, just a fact.
Snark is the language Shankar speaks. Show some respect for people's cultures, FFS
Alternative method to faciliate discussions on non-shortlisted reviews: At regular intervals (~once/week?), Scott creates a post containing links to some small number (~5?) of the reviews. The comments section is dedicated to discussion of the reviews linked in the post.
That seems fairly reasonable, assuming Scott uses a selection criterion that doesn't require him to engage in extra brainwork. But he's already got a ranked list, I hope.
A problem with having a caliph is that the caliph is the natural Schelling point .
(In theory, I suppose someone else could take it on themselves to just post the links in an Open Thread, but that wouldn't have nearly the same level of visibility as a post from the caliph himself.)
alternatively, I'd just like to see the finalists posted a bit more quickly; it feels a tad unfair to have people vote on book reviews that came out over a 3-month period.
I just went to an EA meetup today talking about fringe ideas, and one of the prompts for discussion was how to prevent the next FTX.
Someone brought up a point that might be novel, that the kernel of fraud is a sort of self-dishonesty whereby someone believes they can get something for nothing. Sam Bankman-Fried, and every other SV entrepreneur, has that energy, that chutzpah to think they can make something from nothing.
The proto-EAer is Bill Gates, who before his charity work was very much considered a pirate or pseudo-rogue of Silicon Valley, someone who had commendable success but achieved it through aggression and greed. It just so happened that his foundation work became a model for epic charity work, despite probably coming from a place where he believed there was money left on the table.
My question then, is, has that angle been explored? That it's not EA's weirdness factor that creates a space for rogue actors, but rather a belief in leverage, that a little can make a lot. That a few smart people putting their heads together can make a world of difference.
I don't mean this as an indictment of EA, I just haven't heard this angle before in all the EA-critical threads I've read, and I was curious if it's fertile ground.
I think you are saying that perhaps the problem was hubris. Or is that simplifying it too far?
My own view is that there was too much hubris and not enough healthy cynicism in the local water supply. One could argue, however, that the lack of cynicism and excess of hubris is a net positive in that environment and the cost of producing a FTX is worth paying. I think the Accelerationist types would argue it's a cost worth paying. As has been pointed out before, conmen thrive in high-trust environments not in low-trust ones.
Is there hope that enough people who were burnt by SBF will be more cautious about who and what they trust in the future?
I think maybe what I'm trying to circle around is that something like EA is impossible to succeed because humans, and not in the normal, obvious ways. EA actually seems successful at avoiding the "forever September" problem as well as creeping institutional imperatives.
I worry that there will be more Sams and more groups like Leverage Research.
Yeah, I could be just re-deriving hubris. I'm not sure. At first thought, some of the EAs that I've meet seem extremely humble, whereas others seem incredibly arrogant.
I'm trying to tie the two Sam situations together.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fmDFytmxwX9qBgcaX/why-aren-t-you-freaking-out-about-openai-at-what-point-would
Are trust and tolerance impossible to separate? Encouraging out-of-the-box thinking inevitably leads to high-variance investing, into both obscure crooks and undervalued saints.
I think the crucial, obvious problem about SBF was that he was absolutely terrible at a lot of things you need in order to run a business like his. He was a very very odd guy, and most of the things he wasn't brilliant at he was actually *impaired* at: Anticipating consequences, reading people, judging who was an appropriate hire, learning the basics of various new domains that were important to understand, staying on top of what was being done by different parts of the organization, keeping employees informed, seeking advice. Lewis's book walks you through his process of learning what SBF was like and how he ran his organization, and his astonishment at discovering how utterly childlike (& not in a good way) SBF was.
Before asking “why” ask “if”. I don’t think that EA has more space for rouge actors than any other charity or nonprofit space. Therefore, I don’t expect coming up with just so stories for why it has more rouge actors to be a product line of reasoning.
> I don’t think that EA has more space for rouge actors than any other charity or nonprofit space.
What about foundation, eyeliner, or blush actors?
EA is well under other charities in the volume of foundations.
I expect basically every successful entrepreneur will have "aggression and greed".
Going by both the Michael Lewis book and the Sequoia article, the main problem (apart from the dishonesty and ego) was the risk calculation.
Running amok with the Drowning Child argument to the conclusion that you are obligated to save everyone, and you can do this by pouring tons of money into the proper causes, and you get tons of money by 'here's our fancy equation about risk assessment', then you end up with "oh crap we're running out of money okay no problem just take money from here and throw it into the pit and our fancy equation means we'll end up winning oh no all the money is gone".
https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/
"Not long before interning at Jane Street, SBF had a meeting with Will MacAskill, a young Oxford-educated philosopher who was then just completing his PhD. Over lunch at the Au Bon Pain outside Harvard Square, MacAskill laid out the principles of effective altruism (EA). The math, MacAskill argued, means that if one’s goal is to optimize one’s life for doing good, often most good can be done by choosing to make the most money possible—in order to give it all away. “Earn to give,” urged MacAskill.
EA traces its roots to philosopher Peter Singer, who reasons from the utilitarian point of view that the purpose of life is to maximize the well-being of others. Singer, in his eighth decade, may well be the most-read living philosopher. In the 1970s, Singer almost single-handedly created the animal rights movement, popularizing veganism as an ethical solution to the moral horror of meat. Today he’s best known for the drowning-child thought experiment. (What would you do if you came across a young child drowning in a pond?) Singer states the obvious—and then universalizes the underlying principle: “Few could stand by and watch a child drown; many can ignore the avoidable deaths of children in Africa or India. The question, however, is not what we usually do, but what we ought to do.” In a nutshell, Singer argues that it’s a moral imperative of the world’s well-off to give as much as possible—10, 20, even 50 percent of all income—to better the lives of the world’s poor.
...MacAskill was visiting MIT in search of volunteers willing to sign on to his earn-to-give program. At a café table in Cambridge, Massachusetts, MacAskill laid out his idea as if it were a business plan: a strategic investment with a return measured in human lives. The opportunity was big, MacAskill argued, because, in the developing world, life was still unconscionably cheap. Just do the math: At $2,000 per life, a million dollars could save 500 people, a billion could save half a million, and, by extension, a trillion could theoretically save half a billion humans from a miserable death.
...[At Jane Street SBF] learned to be “risk-neutral”: In simple terms, a trader, given a choice between $50 and a 50 percent chance at $100, must be agnostic if they want to maximize the expected value of earnings over a lifetime. Those who prefer the sure win are “risk-averse,” and those who would rather gamble are “risk-lovers.” But both risk-lovers and the risk-averse are suckers, equally. Because, over the long run, they lose out to the risk-neutral, who take both deals without prejudice.
...To be fully rational about maximizing his income on behalf of the poor, he should apply his trading principles across the board. He had to find a risk-neutral career path—which, if we strip away the trader-jargon, actually means he felt he needed to take on a lot more risk in the hopes of becoming part of the global elite. The math couldn’t be clearer. Very high risk multiplied by dynastic wealth trumps low risk multiplied by mere rich-guy wealth. To do the most good for the world, SBF needed to find a path on which he’d be a coin toss away from going totally bust.
...At this point, mid-2019, SBF decided to double down again—and scratch his own itch. He would bet Alameda’s multimillion-dollar trading profits on a new venture: a trading exchange called FTX. It would combine Coinbase’s stolid, regulation-loving approach with the kinds of derivatives being offered by Binance and others. He only gave himself a 20 percent chance of success, but, in his mind, SBF needed extreme risk to maximize the expected value of his lifetime earnings—and, therefore, the good his earn-to-give strategy could do. The fact that he was, by his own lights, overwhelmingly likely to fail was beside the point.
The point was this: When SBF multiplied out the billions of dollars a year a successful crypto-trading exchange could throw off by his self-assessed 20 percent chance of successfully building one, the number was still huge. That’s the expected value. And if you live your life according to the same principles by which you’d trade an asset, there’s only one way forward: You calculate the expected values, then aim for the largest one—because, in one (but just one) alternate future universe, everything works out fabulously. To maximize your expected value, you must aim for it and then march blindly forth, acting as if the fabulously lucky SBF of the future can reach into the other, parallel, universes and compensate the failson SBFs for their losses. It sounds crazy, or perhaps even selfish—but it’s not. It’s math. It follows from the principle of risk-neutrality.
...The scale of his giving, even now, before he has really started to divest, is massive. Alameda Research, the company that generated the FTX grubstake, still exists, and its purpose seems to be to generate profits—on the order of $100 million a year today, but potentially up to a billion—that can be stuffed into the brand-new FTX Foundation. Similarly, even now, 1 percent of net FTX fees are donated to that same foundation, and FTX handles nearly $5 billion dollars’ worth of trades per day. The foundation, in turn, gives to a diversified group of EA-approved charities.
... The FTX competitive advantage? Ethical behavior. SBF is a Peter Singer–inspired utilitarian in a sea of Robert Nozick–inspired libertarians. He’s an ethical maximalist in an industry that’s overwhelmingly populated with ethical minimalists."
Maybe row back on the 40,000 Hours stuff about "maximise all the money you can make by whatever means in order to give" and there will be less incentive, because less pressure from scrupulosity, about "but I gotta get *more* money, more! children are drowning!!!" and hence incentive to take really big risks because the only morality is consequences - if you rob a bank and donate all the money to malaria bed nets, then the consequences are good and the actions don't matter.
If SBF had managed to pull off his gamble and regain all the money and put it back in the client accounts, then he'd be in the clear and FTX would be praised as the most EA thing out there. Even if the profits had come from fraud, that's only stuffy old deontologists who worry about that kind of thing, not hip utilitarians who know their way is the only way:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8HaosviHC3ZHzuRLA/utilitarianism-is-the-only-option
This is extremely favorable to SBF given what we know now — a counterfactual “honest criminal” SBF would have taken great care with the misused funds to maximize potential profits to be used for good.
Honestly, Pablo Escobar, who built a whole neighborhood for the desperately poor, was a better EA and we don’t see anyone defending his record.
> if you rob a bank and donate all the money to malaria bed nets, then the consequences are good and the actions don't matter.
Surely this is only true if the depositors in the bank are protected from the consequences of the bank being robbed; if the depositors are all working people who will be left destitute because of the robbery and their families will starve because of it, how can it be that the consequences are all good? Enter the FDIC; now the negative consequences are comfortably abstract.
But the thing is, the evaluation is done on (swiping these from 2013 post):
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pfbLKnJmDKYSPPCEW/four-focus-areas-of-effective-altruism
- Be globally altruistic: EAs care about people equally, regardless of location. Typically, the most cost-effective altruistic cause won't happen to be in one's home country.
- Value consequences: EAs tend to value causes according to their consequences, whether those consequences are happiness, health, justice, fairness and/or other values.
If I'm more concerned about the bank depositors in my home country, I am not being globally altruistic. I should estimate the lives of the children who could be saved from dying by malaria over any loss the depositors will suffer.
As to consequences - will the depositors really be left destitute and their families starve? If they're in a First World country, that is highly unlikely; there is government and private charitable support to prevent that. The children overseas have no such safety net.
That's all before even considering insurance.
I'm not saying EA encourages bank robbery or that we should all be bank robbers, far from it, but it's one possible way of bank robbers turning up in your midst, and then being all surprised about "how did this (e.g. FTX) happen?"
Ahh, the devil can quote scripture to his own purpose, can’t he?
How godlike in their aspect.
Reminds me of Harry Harrison's tongue-in-cheek argument in favor of bank robbery in _A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born._
* The bank robber gains wealth, much of which is spent on various things, putting money into circulation and stimulating the economy.
* The bank's customers are insured, and don't lose any money.
* The financial burden of deposit insurance is spread across such a wide cross-section of society that it ends up costing everyone a fraction of a cent.
* The news covers the event, providing the masses with entertainment.
* The police attempt to apprehend the robber, providing them with much-needed exercise.
Therefore, everyone benefits, no one is truly harmed as long as the robber does not commit violence, and bank robbery is a societal good.
Walter Jon Williams wrote a comedic SF trilogy about Drake Majistral, an "Allowed Burglar" in a future galactic empire. Allowed Burglary being basically an extreme sport, entertaining masses and elites alike, and with strict rules to keep anyone from being too badly hurt.
Sounds amusing. Probably a better implementation of the idea than something similar I saw in a fantasy story a while back: in a world where The Gods forcibly prohibit one person to directly harm another, "authorized bandits" get contracted to "kidnap" entirely willing people for a few days, so that adventurers can try to "rescue" them and have intelligent opponents to train their skills against.
The idea was interesting. The execution, not so much. The author seemed entirely unaware of massive holes lurking just below the surface of just about every piece of worldbuilding, sadly.
I'm reminded of a series (James Alan Gardner's Expendables series, perhaps) where aliens forbid space travel to anyone who has killed.
Well, QED, right? Bank robbery is a net public good. More of us should be doing it.
It reminds me of the merchant who, when asked what his business plan was, said, “I lose a little on every sale, but I make up for it on the volume.”
I've been wondering whether the love of novelty is a problem. It's not that novelty is bad, just that having a reflex of "it's new, it must be good" is a vulnerability.
It's been said that there are two great fools: the one who says "this is old, therefore it is good," and the one who says "this is new, therefore it is better."
Seems to me we're in an age that's beginning to truly discover why the second one is so foolish.
I don't think it's "nothing": it's hard work and cleverness and the risk of failure.
Maybe the world would be *safer* if people never had ambition, and never felt that they were effective enough to make any real change in the world.
But I see nothing particularly different between FTX, and some plant that mutates slightly, follows its new genetic programming, spreads like wildfire, exhausts its resources, and dies back more than it gained. The measures required to prevent this from happening would destroy the engine of survival.
(Machiavelli meets Leonard Cohen!)
It sounds as though Machiavelli and Cohen had a productive chat.
the flowers hate us
the animals pray for our death
as soon as i found out
i murdered my dog
--
now i knew what they were up to
the daisy the iris the rose
why there was no peace among men
why nothing worked
--
there is no going back
throw out your friend's bouquet
kill the animals all of them
but don't eat their meat
--
now that i know what they're thinking
their sex organs in the air
their stinking fur
and their tug at the heart
--
what they would do to us if they won
--
how great it will be without them
just getting on with our short lives
which are longer than theirs
and until now, sadder
--
the flowers hate us
the animals pray for us to die
as soon as i found out
i murdered my dog
--
They hate us
They pray for us to die
Wake up America
Murder your dog
-- "The Flowers Hate Us" by Leonard Cohen
I recently visited Japan for the first time and went to several TeamLab art exhibits, which I greatly enjoyed. But I couldn’t help but notice that nearly everyone (including me!) was practically glued to their phone the entire time. Every single art piece needed to be captured by every single person in multiple photos/videos plus a few selfies and group shots. It wasn’t just young people, everyone was walking around with phone in hand. I eventually forced myself to put mine away (and still ended up taking it out a few times).
Of course this is nothing new and I’m not trying to pass judgement (again, I was also doing it) but for some reason it was just particularly… jarring in a way I haven’t experienced before.
It’s almost as if everyone had this “capture anxiety” where if they missed a photo of a particularly cool part of the experience, it would never have even happened.
I almost wish they handed out AR glasses with automatic capture to everyone at the entrance so people could just be more in the moment and enjoy the art without this distraction. I personally think I would have enjoyed it more if I left my phone at home. (But of course, then I wouldn’t have had access to the ticket QR code. Also I don’t speak/read Japanese and photo text translation was incredibly helpful.)
Was the exhibit actually good though? ~95% of museums are boring or poorly organized and people just go there for the sake of checking off a box. IMO the real power move is to not go at all vs. trying to not use your phone when you get there. Do you _really_ want to see X or are you only going to see X because that's "cool" in your social circle?
TeamLab stuff is generally net-amazing, in my own experience.
Teamlabs is not an art museum. It's an experience.
Personally, I found it to be hit or miss, and the novelty quickly wore off, but the best parts really were mind-blowing.
Oh yeah, I thought it was fantastic actually, and I'm generally pretty bored at most art museums. From Wikipedia's description of TeamLab:
> The group consists of artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians and architects who refer to themselves as “ultra-technologists". TeamLab creates artworks using digital technology.
Lots of the exhibits have interactive elements and use light and space in really creative ways, e.g. one of my favorite ones involved projecting images into the air via sheets of mist.
I was doing this on a trip recently and then thought, there is a website with better photos of the objects I am photo’ing.
Yet my other thought at time was, what if this all burns downs or is cancelled.
The other thing was trying to curate little snapshots of my stops for elderly parents. Which others might do for their friends - although no one but parents probably care.!
Yep, if you want to show off your travels you could just take someone elses photos and post them. If you've actually been to said place, who cares?
Sure, but I imagine many of us believe we are photographing certain things and not others for our own personal or idiosyncratic reasons.
I like to do very brief videos of waterfalls or really any moving water, for instance: I think it's soothing to play over and over. Photos don't work as well to convey what it was like.
I had a similar thought process. There were 100 little reasons I could come up with to take lots of photos. And no doubt plenty of those were good reasons. And yet it still ended up feeling more like a weird pressure/anxiety than something I was doing out of actual enjoyment, and it definitely didn't contribute positively to the experience in the moment.
After the fact, I'm genuinely glad I took a handful of them - the rest I'll probably never look back on or show to anyone (they were cool art pieces, but "a crappy smartphone photo of a cool art piece" isn't nearly as cool). Even at the time of taking them I generally knew in advance which ones the good ones would be.
It’s hard, you do feel the photo means you’ve been there. I’d have been happy without a camera. Yet the phone is a fun little friend on travels.
I force myself to print some photos, just a few, to reinforce the idea that you really needed just a handful, and truthfully it’s the ones with some people you know that interest much later on. So I have discovered in being handed the family photos of 75 years - to “figure out”.
We have been given access to infinite information, with inadequate filters. We've developed an internalized external lens that muddies the way we have first-hand experiences!
I was at a party last night and there were a couple guys vibing to the music behind the DJ while recording a video. As soon as the video started they got a lot more hype and when it stopped they returned to being more chill. Was trippy to see real time.
Interesting that this was your experience! The TeamLab exhibit I went to (in Tokyo - I think it was "TeamLab Planets" or something similar?) featured wading through water and, as such, few people brought their phones into the exhibit, but rather left them in their lockers. It was surreal and wonderful and I would do it again in a heartbeat.
To speak to your actual point, though, I think this is just the natural result of living so much of life online. If it isn't posted, it never happened! Baudrillard would have a field day.
Ah good point - the one with the most phone usage was Borderless (fantastic exhibit, I think I wandered around for nearly 3 hours - make sure not to miss the light tunnel room). I do believe Planets had less.
Borderless directly encourages the use of a phone. They provide an app that will tell you about the art displays that are nearby, and this is the only way you can learn more about them (since the nature of the display means they can't have traditional placards). IIRC the app also has interactive features for one or two exhibits, although that felt like kind of a gimmick.
I brought my phone and so did my friends, but I was *very* careful to not drop it in the water room.
Huh, apparently I didn't find the "wading through water" exhibit - or maybe it wasn't open when I was there in summer of 2022 - but this more matches my experience than OP. Looking back at my photos I had four photos/videos from the exhibit (and one of them was of the little "umbrella locking mechanism" in the coat room).
I went just this past December! Must be relatively new.
Borderless (the waterless one) was previously open, then closed, and then reopened again in Feb 2024.
I've assumed a large part of it is people not trusting themselves to remember their experiences, so they're taking all those pictures with an expectation that they'll look at them in the future. Um, and remember themselves taking pictures. My guess is that the vast majority of the pictures are never reviewed.
I'm guessing, though.
I used to hate on photo taking quite a bit, maybe still do, but a lot less. I met some people who had a very positive relationship with it and would review them or send them around and it felt pretty good, not vain.
Then, a few pieces of technology filled in the gap you're pointing at a bit by providing random/easy access to ALL your photos without you needing to do much. You get random albums via image recognition, you get random prompts based on the day/time/person etc. Throw up a google home and a shared album now you have a shared experience!
The basic filtering problem of infinite photos on your phone is handled pretty elegantly to give you a sort of functional digital scrapbook. I'm sure there are even better usages that I haven't seen.
It's like dick pics - if you can't show pictures of it to other people on the Internet, is it even real? Did it even happen? Literally, who cares? Are you even a "person"? Are you the kind of entity that is a "who", whose life can have inherent value to themself?
Or is it all about curating and projecting an image, projecting an identity with such vigor that you forget that it's an artificial construct?
(I.e., everything The Last Psychiatrist ever wrote.)
I do photograph-worthy things and don't take my phone. If I decide something needs me photographed next to it I ask a stranger. If I don't want to ask a stranger, it's not worth it.
Please don't ask if the strangers I ask are disproportionately attractive young women, i'm not claiming to have a random sample-set and you'd have to normalize for my choosing strangers who have fancy phones with good cameras and happen to already have them out photographing things and who look like they are on social media and can send me the results. Lots of variables here.
> with such vigor that you forget that it's an artificial construct
Well put. Maybe at some point, it does just become the norm and the cycle of culture continues? Alternately, we could run into natural barriers that stop that from happening and we'll adjust.
Any slay the spire/ digital card game lovers out here? Im developing my own card battler and would love to get some feedback or even assistance on some of the design. Holler at me!
deck-builder with pvp? Dominion and 7 Wonders would be great to look at
Il check them out. Thanks!
Feel free to ping me; I have a few hundred hours logged playing A20H StS, and a lot of experience playing autobattlers (e.g. Teamfight Tactics and Hearthstone Battlegrounds - which you should be looking to for inspiration on how to make a successful head-to-head battler with random elements).
Hey since y'all are on here can you tell me what the ungodly heck is the point of these games? Is the draw of it (pun intended?) explicable to those of us who have never played one?
The point of what games? Run based games? Deckbuilders?
Anyway, for run based games, it's because you start off super weak because you don't know anything, and the game is hard and knowledge based, and as you gain more knowledge and skill, the game becomes easier. To make the game not boring, many important decisions on the macro scale have a random element, so you can't pick the strongest options every time, and winning is the result of making many correct small decisions that result in not dying.
So how does a deck builder fit in? A shuffled deck means that even with the same deck, fights can play out very differently (a card that makes your character more powerful over time is great on turn 1 but terrible on turn 5 in a fight that takes 6 turns on average). The randomness of the deck means that each fight plays very differently and requires a lot of thought in the small. Since the deck starts off garbage, you end up picking cards to not immediately die, but pick too many of them and they become liabilities later, the game requires a lot of thought in the large. And finally, since the game is already very brutally hard and many more cards exist than you see in a runs the game can afford to have extremely overtuned card combinations. So maybe you have 10 runs where you barely win, but your 11th run, the stars align and you can kill bosses by playing 50 cards on turn 1.
Slay the Spire is famous for not only being the first example of a run based deck builder, but also extremely well made because half the dev team is someone super experienced with card games, and they had a 2 year period where they used telemetry from all the players to figure out how to balance the cards. Add in that there are 20 modifiers to increasing difficulty, that's how people end up spending 100+ hours on it.
Interesting about ths telemetry part. I assume the devs talked aboht this? Or you simply deduced because game was in early access for a while?
It was in patch notes and I believe a gamasutra article by the devs. In lieu of finding it, this is what I found on google https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/how-i-slay-the-spire-i-s-devs-use-data-to-balance-their-roguelike-deck-builder
A video of the talk about this, that I haven't watched: https://youtu.be/7rqfbvnO_H0
Re: deduction, a lot of deck builders seem to not be balanced well(I.e. the basic numbers on the cards don't make sense) and I suspect that's because they don't have the type of telemetry and data orientation StS has.
That makes sense. Are you also good at the part of poker where you know on the fly what the probabilities of your starting cards playing out is?
No, but on the highest difficulty I sit down and calculate how much damage I get by turn 3 by counting the amount of damage I have in my deck and doing worst and best case analysis. I still lose but I feel slightly better about it!
The highest difficulty level is substantially harder than what the median player experiences, without any online help, you can most likely start off losing every run, realize like 4 useful principles and then regularly win every run. High difficulty runners are whatever the equivalent of adrenaline junkies for turn based games are.
Most of the time, playing a couple of fights allow you to know certain things like "wow my deck has no damage" or "if it gets to a late turn and I haven't murdered everyone I am dead" on a more gut level. Much easier to learn than poker, where you won't see the same hand for a long time. Also it doesn't take a genius to realize that a card that makes you more powerful over time is much better for bosses than for normal enemies.
I'm making it sound a lot harder than it is, because my interaction with slay the spire is mostly staring at a 99% lost fight for five minutes, playing the wrong card and losing, and most people play by feel and do much better.
Edit: One thing I haven't mentioned is how ridiculous the game state can differ and get. For example one run you can win by playing two or three cards that improve your character, block a bunch of damage then win with three attacks. Another run, you attack with a ton of cheap attacks, stacking 50 poison so they die really fast, another run you destroy all your less good cards over several turns, until you are left with a tiny deck with only great cards in it. And so on, it feels very satisfying to go back to a boss that killed you last run and obliterating them immediately.
Yeah, I think so! Obviously different people have different things that draw them to the game, so by no means take my word as gospel, but at least for me the main enjoyment comes from "making impactful decisions". You're (speaking for StS here) essentially being handed a series of increasingly difficult puzzles (enemy types) which need to be "solved". Your tools are handed to you randomly in the form of cards to add to your deck (and some other things), and so your choices about what you add are crucial, yet based on thoroughly incomplete information. At the highest difficulty setting, the game is exquisitely balanced and player skill *really* shines through. You always *could have* made better decisions, and learning about which decisions are the good ones is very rewarding (and fun!). It's hard to find good examples of games with as many degrees of freedom as StS which don't simply degenerate.
This is reminding me of a time when I played "Princes of Florence" for the first time. Other players, who were familiar with it, had advanced degrees in math, computational linguistics, and something to do with software engineering and they wanted a fourth player. It was not an enjoyable experience. If I wanted to be shown how poor my decisions are I could, you know, just wake up in the morning lmao.
Perhaps there are those of us who use these artificial environments to escape our poor decisions in real life ;)
I kid (mostly. Lmao), but yeah, it's not for everyone. I also love the exact kind of very heavy board game you're referencing for the same reason I love StS.
I plaied valves card game to death
I've overplayed sts, say more
My goal is to find a way to make pvp work. And make the hero more influential. Similar combat flow is the goal though
Why Slay the Spire and not Hearthstone? Are you trying to include the deck-building and power accumulation, or are you just trying to create a turn-based fighting game? It's going to be hard to make intents a thing, and STS folks have talked about how important those were to the feel. Maybe your attacks have a delay so your opponent gets to see them, and your defenses are instant so you can react to last turn's swing?
I should probably throw in I play these games because they aren't against people, I wouldn't want a pvp Slay the Spire.
Yeah its just turn based battler. I like the idea of combining heros and cards together to try and find an interesting hybrid. Obviously we can't emulate the intent part which is likely spires defining mechanic, but theres a lot to like about the effects and deck interaction design
Well if you haven't seen Your Only Move Is Hustle, that's probably a game you'll want to look into. Straight-up turn-based fighter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leraw7iqbYM
While I've played a lot of StS, I recently also really got into Balatro, and got into thinking if it's possible to make Balatro PvP work. You'd kind of have to make it more pokerlike (which it really isn't now), but not too much, since there are huge risks there, too. A lot of small matches with accumulating rewards, though you'd probably also need some sort of a balancing mechanism. Having the rewards (/balancing hindrances?) accumulate to the hero would by default also increase the influence.
So overtly, "sts with PvP" sounds like MTG, right? Except I guess without summoned creatures. How are you thinking of designing it?
(As an aside, one thing I've thought for a while that it'd be interesting to add to sts is an anti-artifact status - that is, the ability to inflict something on your enemies to make them not get a stat bonus. That'd be pretty interesting specifically in a PvP mode).
I wrote a blog post about my experience at a vipassanā retreat that some may find interesting: https://www.awanderingmind.blog/posts/2024-06-20-vipassana.html
🙏🏻
What prevents an easy legal immigration track for skilled workers from Anglosphere countries? Are conservatives against it because they hate all immigration on principle? Are liberals against it because they don't like discriminating between categories of immigrants? Is it just other skilled workers afraid that their jobs will be taken?
If I had political influence, I would pass a law saying that the president could make a list of 10,000 people every year who would be offered immediate green cards. This list would be intended to include technological leaders and innovators worldwide and particularly in the US's military rival countries, plus their immediate families. If politically necessary, the quota for other forms of immigration could be decreased by 10,000 to keep the total stable.
Broadly speaking, agreed. Now, I was in the electronics industry, and my view is set by the fact that many of my co-workers were immigrants, and I treasure their contributions. Also, my most recent experiences with the job market was back in 2013, and, a bit later, when my department was hiring. I'm aware of the recent downturn, but don't really have a gut feel for its effects. _Prior_ to the downturn, my gut reaction (writing from the USA) was "Yay brain drain - put USA tech recruiters at every STEMM graduating class at every reputable university in the world". I'm not sure how to correct this for the current situation.
There may be no better example of how the comprehensive lost of trust across differing worldviews has crippled the United States’ ability to reach sensible national policy decisions.
Regarding immigration, in no particular order,
-- Social conservatives now think that if progressive representatives agree to any restriction on immigration it is only because progressives intend to renege on that political agreement as soon as the ink is dry and news cycles have turned to other topics. This suspicion is accurate, indeed is no longer denied in stridently-blue circles.
-- Now that MAGA is the only meaningful conservative thread in electoral politics, liberals and progressives believe that the claim of being opposed specifically to _illegal_ immigration is largely just a fig leaf for “no more brown people and/or non-christians”. This suspicion is accurate, indeed is no longer denied in stridently-red circles.
-- Though the 2000s liberal triumphalism regarding immigrant demographics and future electoral success has long since faded from Democratic thinking (political reality has been intruding), it remains a salient accusation from the conservative side. An entire generation of social conservatives remains deeply offended by the fact that the other side for a while was gleefully anticipating gaining national political hegemony by throwing the borders wide open.
-- Liberals roll their eyes at MAGA’s urban legends and ignorant delusions regarding today’s immigrants and the history of US immigration; conservatives fume at liberals’ denial of the current reality and impacts of a broken system that approaches de facto open borders. Each side is justified in those reactions which obviously doesn't lower blood pressures any.
A recent new low point came when a bipartisan group in the Senate reached agreement on an immigration reform bill which would have been a significant step towards rational policy. Tellingly, those senators had to do their negotiating behind closed doors with even their own staffers excluded so as to prevent leaks. When the agreed bill was announced and the White House endorsed it, progressives in Congress called it a betrayal. They probably weren’t going to have enough votes to stop it but were going to try. Then Trump ordered GOP senators to renege on the deal because he views chaos at the border as one of his best 2024 campaign issues. That whole sequence of events taught members of Congress that this subject is now just no-win all the way down. It also reinforced MAGA and progressive voter feelings that their respective views on immigration/immigrants are not taken seriously in DC.
Put all that together and it is just impossible now for US electoral politics to negotiate and carry out fresh national policy on immigration. I don’t expect this to change meaningfully during my remaining lifetime.
> A recent new low point came when a bipartisan group in the Senate reached agreement on an immigration reform bill which would have been a significant step towards rational policy. ... Then Trump ordered GOP senators to renege on the deal because he views chaos at the border as one of his best 2024 campaign issues.
Not even close. The bill was a bizarre, unworkable mess whose effect was to grant de facto legitimate status to formerly-unprecedented levels of illegal immigration.
If I recall correctly, the rule it proposed was "shut down the borders after 5,000 illegals cross in a day." (Can't be bothered to look it up at the moment, the number might have been a little bit different from that, but if that's not perfectly accurate it's close.) Existing statutory law, which the Biden administration has been brazenly ignoring for over 3 years now, says all people caught crossing the border illegally "shall be detained." Not "let 5,000 per day get in for free," not even let a single one get in for free.
Not particularly long ago, Jeh Johnson, Secretary of Homeland Security under President Obama, a guy who no one could reasonably call a right-winger, said that 1,000 illegal border crossings per day constituted "a crisis" and would overwhelm the system. For the Senate bill to legitimize 5 times that number is sheer insanity! President Trump never had to say a word about it; that proposal was DOA from that number alone.
To put into different words what the other commentator said: this number comes from, as far as I can tell, a misreading of proposed Section 3301 granting the Secretary of DHS authority to, notwithstanding any other section of law, immediately bounce everyone cought within 100 miles of the border *instead of permitting them any other protection granted by law* when there are more than a certain number of people seen at the border.
In other words, the text of the bill is the literal diametric opposite of your claim, which claim was repeated by various GOP talking heads. Where current law provides a variety of procedural protections to migrants, this would have permitted DHS to suspend all of them if there's a spike in attempted crossings.
To the other commentator's ire, since lawmakers have a staff of people whose job it is to read proposed legislation, this misreading can be presumed deliberate, and a sabotage of the GOP's stated goal (securing the border) in favor of a semi-stated goal (rally the base and give candidates a [fake] strawman talking point).
That's not what the text of the bill says. It does not say there is the authority to do so once this threshold is reached; it says "The Secretary shall activate the border emergency authority" once the threshold is reached.
"Shall" means "must" in legal matters. It's a requirement, not an option. And what that means is that until this threshold is reached, the Secretary has the option to not do so.
You're not really making a point here, unless it's to say that (a) this bill was more GOP platform-friendly than Democrats were willing to admit or (b) you are pulling your responses from GPT-4. There was no emergency power, there would have been if the amendment were passed. Existing border statute is right here:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/chapter-12/subchapter-II/part-IV
Go ahead and point me to language giving the Secretary emergency powers, and under what circumstances.
From the proposed bill, which another poster in this subthread linked to at: https://www.sinema.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/ENSSAA01-1.pdf
Title III of the text, beginning on page 205, describes the border emergency authority.
The cited text from my previous comments comes from Title III (b)(3)(B) on page 212 of the bill, stating that the Secretary [of Homeland Security] is required to use this authority to shut down the border after certain intensely high thresholds are met.
Less talked about, but possibly even more damning to liberal interpretations of the bill, is the preceding section (3)(A), which says that "The Secretary may activate the border emergency authority if, during a period of 7 consecutive calendar days, there is an average of 4,000 or more aliens who are encountered each day." In other words, there is a floor of 4,000 encounters (4x Jeh Johnson's "crisis" threshold!) below which the Secretary *may not* activate the border emergency authority!
That is of course not even vaguely what the bill said or would have done. For just one example, 5,000 per day referred to total migrants _attempting_ to cross the border not people being allowed into the country. (The bill would have explicitly _ended_ all "catch and release" procedures by the DHS, that was central to its purpose.)
You can read the text here, or of course continue to not be bothered:
https://www.sinema.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/ENSSAA01-1.pdf
(Meanwhile the president has issued an executive order attempting to impose some of the closings called for in the bipartisan bill that Trump had killed; but that pretty plainly goes beyond POTUS' unilateral authority and rightfully will get squashed in the courts.)
You've also lied about what the Biden administration has been doing. Also that is literally the opposite of what Jeh Johnson said in 2019. He referred to border _apprehensions_ per day, not "border crossings"; and his point was about numbers of apprehensions causing backups in the processing system not about people waltzing across the border unhindered.
I'm going to mute you now as life's too short to spend it swatting away such nonsense. But I guess the above does serve as an example of the broader point: that the complete loss of trust on this topic has permanently warped a lot of voters' perceptions of it. Hence, to answer Scott's question, there is just no visible chance that any Congress will try again to broker any steps forward. Let alone the complete policy rethink which the topic deserves.
Thanks for the link. It's actually worse than I had remembered originally. From the bill's text:
> (B) MANDATORY ACTIVATION.—The Secretary shall activate the border emergency authority if—
> (i) during a period of 7 consecutive calendar days, there is an average of 5,000 or more aliens who are encountered each day; or
> (ii) on any 1 calendar day, a combined total of 8,500 or more aliens are encountered.
The word "encounter" does not refer to "attempts to cross the border," but rather to people being caught by the Border Patrol, people who, per existing statute, "shall be detained," or in other words, who legally must be arrested.
> (The bill would have explicitly _ended_ all "catch and release" procedures by the DHS, that was central to its purpose.)
I don't see how. Existing statute already says "shall be detained." The law already gives no authority whatsoever for catch and release, and the Biden Administration has been doing it anyway. What exactly will adding a second law that says "this thing that was already illegal is still illegal" do to constrain an Administration that didn't care about the original law?
> You've also lied about what the Biden administration has been doing.
You say this, and then you proceed to agree entirely with what I wrote, modulo some minor quibbling about a single word:
> [Jeh Johnson] referred to border _apprehensions_ per day, not "border crossings"; and his point was about numbers of apprehensions causing backups in the processing system not about people waltzing across the border unhindered.
Exactly! Yes, I was not talking about "gotaways" there, but only the ones actually encountered by the Border Patrol. Perhaps I should have been more explicit in my language, but it seemed to make sense given the context, particularly when Border Patrol encounters is specifically what the Senate bill in question was discussing. And it sets the threshold at 8,500 encounters/apprehensions per day, or a week with an average of 5,000 or more per day, both of which are many times over higher than Johnson's 1,000 per day threshold that constitutes an unworkable crisis.
So I'm a little confused here. How exactly am I wrong, lying, or speaking "nonsense," when your points and your figures agree perfectly with my claims?
A lack of state capacity and an unwillingness by either political party to create government systems that serve the "consumers" of those systems instead of the politicians that create them.
> Are conservatives against it because they hate all immigration on principle?
Not really. While there may be some people on the Right who legitimately do, that's largely a Leftist slander, put up there to conflate legal with illegal immigration and make it difficult for their opponents to speak against the illegal variety.
Having said that, there is a growing attitude among conservatives that we've recently had too much immigration in general, and right now might be a good time to shut things down for a while — temporarily as a response to current circumstances, rather than permanently as a general principle — and give the melting pot some time to melt. This is a thing that America has done before, to great success. The idea seems to be largely opposed by modern-day liberals who consider "integration" and "assimilation" to be dirty words.
>conflate legal with illegal immigration
I would buy this if conservatives weren't _so_ against the idea of expanding legal immigration. If this was true, then I would expect many more conservatives to say something like "yeah, let's make the path to legal immigration easier, faster, more targeted, and also, let's catch and boot out everyone who has cheated so far".
But they don't just want to prevent illegal immigration, they want to _prevent_ expanding legal immigration.
Current annual legal immigration (permant residency, not just citizenship), is ~1 million/ year. In a country of nearly 350 million people. 0.3% is absolutely miniscule.
I've actually come around to the idea that it is important to have control over borders. We, as a nation, should get to decide which individuals permanently live here. That's pretty reasonable. But there is not a single metric along which the current numbers of legal immigration are large enough.
If you can point me to a prominent, main-stream conservative source (not libertarian), that is saying that we _both_ need to increase the legal pathways and get better control of the illegal crossings, I will be _very_ surprised. Scott's use of "hate" might be too strong (although I don't think it's an overly unfair shorthand), but as far as I can tell, conservatives broadly want much lower immigration of all kinds, and are at the very least unwilling to publicly _say_ that there are certain kinds of legal immigration that would be beneficial to the US to increase.
>Current annual legal immigration (permant residency, not just citizenship), is ~1 million/ year. In a country of nearly 350 million people. 0.3% is absolutely miniscule.
0.3% _per year_ is not what I'd call "miniscule".
The Brookings institution has a 4 scenario ("high", "main", "low", "zero") immigration / census projection at https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-census-projections-show-immigration-is-essential-to-the-growth-and-vitality-of-a-more-diverse-us-population/ .
The projected populations under the 4 scenarios in 2100 are: 435 million, 366 million, 319 million, and 226 million.
Personally, given our (USA) cost disease problems, our difficulties in building new infrastructure, I think a reasonable goal is to shoot for is about the same population that we have now, ~333 million, which would put us in a scenario a little higher than the "low" scenario
>The “low” immigration scenario assumes a trajectory of between 350,000 and 600,000 net migrants annually
Ponzi schemes must eventually all fail. "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell."
As I said, there's a strong conservative sentiment right now that for the moment we need to hit the brakes and give the current generation of immigrants some time to assimilate and become truly American before opening up more again, as we've done at various times in the past.
I'm not entirely convinced by that argument, but it definitely has some notable amount of traction on the Right. But it's still a mistake to consider that as the same thing as "we don't believe even in legal immigration, on principle."
Can you point me to a prominent conservative who has said that legal immigration could be expanded from anytime in the past 20 years? This is not new.
And furthermore, you are demonstrating my point that, to conservatives, the issues of legal and illegal immigration _are the same_. If the problem was just out of control illegal immigration, then better control of our borders could happen at the same time as increased legal immigration. In fact, I'm relatively sure that the two would help each other.
Talking to conservatives myself, their views seem to be relatively consistent and straight forward in this area. They believe that they have been played one to many times when it comes to immigration. Therefore, they are not willing to entertain ANY expansion of ANY immigration until illegal immigration is dealt with. Once and only once illegal immigration is deal with and the border is secured, most conservatives I have talked to would love a merit based expansion of legal immigration. They take that order of operations very seriously though (absolutely nothing until we have the border locked down).
When was the last time there was a serious expansion in legal immigration?
The 1965 Hart-Cellar act was a legit rug pull in that legistlators promised that there wouldn't be an increase in total immigration, and there very much was. But as far as I can tell, even the drafters believed their own nonsense when they were making it. They were just using motivated reasoning etc. to not think about it too much.
Since then, there has been one major increase in legal immigration, and that was in 1990, and, as far as I know, was open about exactly what it was.
So, there is a legitimate immigration related grievance with that 1965 act. But since then, in what ways have conservatives been fooled in regards to legal immigration?
Also, this. Fool me once...
No, they're two very different issues, first because they have different effects on the country, second because controlling them would be achieved through different means, and third, because we'd want to reinstate the one after a few years, and the other never.
I favor open borders. I think travel, residence, and work are human rights. I have not found a good way to argue for this, so I mostly don't.
One point, though, is that conservatives worry that immigrants will vote for progressive or liberal policies, and this seems not to reliably be the case. Immigrants frequently want a stable society and vote for conservatives. They may even not want culturally unfamiliar competitors, and support immigration restrictions to prevent further immigration.
For reference, Trump recently said that he wants everyone with higher education degrees from the US to be given green cards. Looking for who/what makes this proposal fail (and made it fail in his previous term) should get you your answer.
It is my understanding that the last time, it was the Democrats who scuttled it.
Trump did say this. And I appreciate that he did. But it is barely worth the cost of the digital ink it was reported with.
A) Trump will pretty much always say what he thinks whatever audience he is speaking to wants to hear. He likes it when people like him.
B) As others pointed out, he already had the opportunity to do this, and he didn't
C) About the *only* thing that Trump has been consistent on across his time as a political figure is his stance against immigration.
Looks like you already have your answer: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/campaign-walks-back-trumps-green-card-promise
I'm not sure what you mean by "the last time." The last time Trump was president, his actual policy towards foreign students was to allocate work visas away from them (https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2021/01/08/dhs-publishes-final-rule-to-end-h-1b-visa-lottery/?sh=631233ee4af0), to deny them entry into the US during COVID, and to consider suspending OPT (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trump-administration-weighs-suspending-program-foreign-students-prompting-backlash-business-n1207251).
The fact that Trump told the credulous All-In hosts what they wanted to hear is not evidence of what his actual policy will be.
I mean I remember him saying something similar ~8 years ago.
"The last time, it was the Democrats who scuttled it." What do you mean?
When Trump was president, what concrete steps did he take, what specific actionable policies did he formulate, to expand high-skill immigration? Which Democrats blocked that, and how? As far as I can tell, the only pro-immigration outputs from Trump during his presidency were some tweets. Did "the Democrats" scuttle his tweets?
> Did "the Democrats" scuttle his tweets?
Yes. Have you not heard of the Twitter Files?
This was half a joke. I know you were asking specifically about some particular tweets that probably weren't "scuttled" except that Trump was kicked off Twitter entirely, so I guess in some sense, 100% of his tweets were "scuttled."
But finally also, you're probably right, and none of this is meant to try to disprove your underlying point that Trump is probably anti-immigration. He probably is.
Why even limit it to skilled workers? Open borders seem to be working well in the EU, with much greater cultural and economic disparities than within AU/CA/IE/NZ/UK/US.
Open borders also works very well in the US. Get back to us when the EU opens its borders to all the non-European nations.
Why do you think that "all the non-European nations" is the relevant reference class here?
A political entity allowing free travel within its own external borders is one thing, a political entity allowing free travel across those borders from the rest of the world is a very different thing. Since the external border of the EU is roughly the border of Europe (or exactly the border of Europe if we use the political definition implied by "EU"), it is the EU's travel policy towards non-European nations that determines whether it is an example of the sort of thing the USA already does, or the very different thing that some people want the USA to do.
The USA already has the sort of open borders the EU has. Pointing to the EU and saying "that's why you should do this very different thing we want you to do", is dishonest.
Presumably AU/CA/IE/NZ/UK/US could/would create a political entity to handle internal migration the same way the 30 countries that take part in the EEA have, so that seems like a strange objection.
The US already created a political entity to handle the internal migration of the fifty countries that make up the US. And we did it well enough that some people seem to have forgotten that we did it at all. We also decided that 50 is enough, the same way you decided that 30 is enough. If you're going to argue "The US should be like Europe and open its borders to still more countries outside the traditional core", then again, get back to me when Europe has opened its borders to still more countries outside the traditional core.
Open borders in the EU has devastated the Romanian economy because ~all the smart or driven people move west. Romania's the one place where I've talked with several different people and heard largely the same thing from most of them, so I expect it's done the same thing elsewhere too.
Romania's GDP/capita has tripled since they joined the EU in 2007, so I find it hard to believe that the Romanian economy has been devastated.
Open borders caused Brexit due to a huge influx of immigrants to the UK in 2004. You'll probably want to price Green Cards for developed nations at $25k or something initially to prevent a large flood of people in Year 1.
Sure, the smaller countries might want to perform the change gradually to avoid shocks. As I understand it, AU/NZ and IE/UK already have open borders, so it's just a question of merging those two bubbles and then adding CA & US.
Just curious, shouldn't India be on the list? Pretty prominent Commonwealth nation.
If it was limited to IIT graduates, definitely. Otherwise it would be too many people, too fast.
It seems obvious to me that open borders for Indians might lead to considerable problems, whereas open borders between the countries I mentioned would be non-problematic.
I expect that the non-us count ries in this proposed anglosphere can see the problem with having the US included.
Maybe you could list a few of the obvious problems. It would be easy to infer all sorts of unkind reasons behind your opinion
You have a point – people in some other countries might worry about a flood of people from low-human-capital subpopulations in the US, bringing with them crime and other social dysfunction. I think such worries would be unwarranted, as the US is the richest of these countries and there doesn't seem to be that much of an interest in emigrating from it to one of the other countries. India, on the other hand, is not just extremely populous, but also extremely poor by Western standards, so one would expect tens of millions of Indians to migrate to the mentioned countries given the chance.
On the Right, it’s been some while since one can make political hay out of selling solutions. Still, I suspect a substantial majority of Republicans could buy into this idea with a minimum of spin.
On the Progressive Left, there’s a visceral hatred of the West in general and a deep distrust of capitalism. Bring in a white Ozzie IT guy to help Big Tech? Are you mad?
Sit and argue the finer points as long as you wish, certain base realities are in the saddle today, and ideas such as yours are DOA. All the more pity.
I object to saying only the Right tries this. They wanted to build a border wall, and the Left objected. Now the Left wants a border wall, and the Right objects.
It's political hay all the way down. It makes no difference which side you're on, if you're a politician.
First off, I never said that only the Right does this. What’s more, I limited myself to a single salient point for each side that I felt explained the situation. I could expand! Then again, concision is a virtue down here in the comment section. I’ll now proceed to ignore that virtue ;-)
For that particular vote, it feels more like the D’s changing direction, while the R’s simply continue to run the Monty Python Argument Clinic. But I’ll admit to not having followed it particularly closely. At the more distant remove, I will agree that neither side is eager to change the status quo around immigration. Democrats are pissing their pants to keep warm today, at the risk of freezing tomorrow. And Republicans will be damned if they give Biden a win on any issue, knowing that disfunction aids them no matter the political season. I’m far from thinking that there’s only one solution, but you cannot pretend to be serious while allowing the problem to fester. So, yeah, a pox on both their houses.
I think culture is the most significant factor.
Conservatives are against immigration which might result in changes to the culture. For example, immigration from Mexico and Central America results in lots of Spanish-speaking people, mariachis and burritos. Immigration from Middle Eastern countries results in mosques and burqas. All things being equal, conservatives might welcome skilled immigrants from countries that share our culture — but things are not equal. If we open the floodgates, our culture will be washed away.
To liberals, this sounds racist. It’s not fair to discriminate on culture (AKA race). Of course immigrants would bring their culture with them That’s a good thing, right? It’s also not fair to discriminate based on economic circumstances. Why would we exclude poor people?
I wrote more about this here:
https://raggedclown.substack.com/p/cultural-loss
I enjoyed your blogpost, thanks for sharing. I am Dutch and I am not happy with the level of immigration both from within and without the EU. The main reason is that I feel less at home when 50% of the people I encounter in the street don't speak Dutch.
Thank you, Henk.
My wife is Maltese but we lived in America for a long time. The first time we went back to Malta after several years, she was really angry to discover that none of the staff in any of the restaurants that we visited could speak Maltese. Maltese as a language will probably die out soon. It's very sad.
> To liberals, this sounds racist. It’s not fair to discriminate on culture (AKA race).
And to conservatives, that sounds insane and disingenuous. Culture and race are obviously two very different things, and culture *should* be valid grounds for discrimination.
Just look at the way different cultures arise within a racial group, and get treated differently by members of the same race, because they understand that culture can have a vastly more significant effect on a person's character, habits, and behavior than race can. (Among American white people, look at how rednecks/hillbillies are regarded vs. those who live on the coasts vs. those who live in the heartland. Among blacks, look at Chris Rock's infamous rant that should not be named, about how there are fundamentally two different types of black people with very different lifestyles, and the bad ones are always screwing things up for the good ones. Or look at Thomas Sowell's "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" discussing how the descendants of American slaves have a cultural propensity for antisocial behavior that is not observed in people of African descent who came to America at a later time.)
Heck, when it comes down to it, taking two people from strongly distinct cultures and treating them as if they're the same simply because they share the same racial ancestry... doesn't *that* seem kind of racist?
>Among American white people, look at how rednecks/hillbillies are regarded vs. those who live on the coasts vs. those who live in the heartland.
Would you support a ban on, say, New Yorkers moving to Ohio and vice versa? What if the New Yorker is a liberal atheist, and he's moving to a super-Christian rural area?
Sure, different places have different cultures, but it seems insane to argue that certain cultures are "too different" to be allowed into the US. Is a Mexican moving to Texas really more disruptive or dangerous than our hypothetical New Yorker moving to the backwoods?
I would not support a ban on moving, but I'd stand up for the right of an Ohio employer to not hire the guy from New York if he doesn't want New York liberal atheists representing his business.
But national borders are a different matter entirely. Ever since the end of the Civil War, it's been a settled question that the various states are provinces of a single, united nation, with the federal government wielding supreme sovereign authority over national-level matters. Therefore, there is a major qualitative difference between the act of traveling from New Mexico to Texas and the act of traveling from Mexico to Texas.
I think civil servants (I am a British civil servant) are bad at detecting "skills", english language and maths tests are easily gamed because no effort is put into making them secure, safe and rigorous and no one is brave enough to rate qualifications given by foreign universities.
Also, not all foreign educational institutions are recognised, at least in Australia and it’s a rigorous process to get recognised by various professional institutions plus only certain professions qualify to begin with. It’s not a perfect system by any means but there’s a lot of scrutiny.
In Australia IELTS is used which is not “easily gamed” unless you have a specific test centre in mind that falsifies results. I’ve done that test twice (in two different countries) and the second time I was chatting with some Irish immigrants (obviously native speakers) who were a bit worried about writing essays for the exam. It takes two days to go through all parts of the exams.
On the specific issue of evaluating foreign degrees, there are several organizations that do that now, including ICAS and WES.
Australia literally had a “white Australia” immigration policy: https://www.naa.gov.au/learn/learning-resources/learning-resource-themes/society-and-culture/migration-and-multiculturalism/immigration-restriction-act-and-white-australia-policy#:~:text=The%20Immigration%20Restriction%20Act%201901,populated%20mainly%20by%20white%20Europeans.
These days skilled immigration is based on points that you get for education in relevant professions, job history, English skills etc. in theory it’s not at all worse than purely immigration from other English-speaking counties (English is not my first language and I’m an immigrant in Australia so I’m obviously biased). As far as I know, in the US you either have to participate in the green card lottery or find a job that’s willing to sponsor you (and there are limits etc).
A question for you or others living in Australia: I'm looking for updated information about how the "boat turnback" policy of Australia is conducted these days, with regard to undocumented migrants. Plus updates on the policy of taking undocumented migrants (coming on boats that are not turned back or cannot be turned back) to Nauru and/or Papua New Guinea to have their refugee claims processed there, rather than in Australia.
...Some say that this policy has been discontinued, others that it is formally in place but not used in practice, still others that being sent on to Nauru or Papua New Guinea is still very much still a "credible threat" to those coming as boat refugees. Who is right? (The Australian policy in this regard is the inspiration for the present UK and Danish legal initiatives to send refugees on to Rwanda, that's why I am asking.)
...With regard to the "boat turnback" policy, the general idea is easy to understand, but what is puzzling is how Australia is able to achieve turnback in practice. (I'm writing from a European perspective, related to undocumented migration across the Mediterranean or across the English Channel.) Are refugees trasferred to another vessel that then sails them back to Sri Lanka/Vietnam/Indonesia/wherever? (If so, there must then be some legal agreements between Australia and sender countries that allow them to return - or not?) Or is the captain & other officers replaced by Australians who take the vessel back where it came from? Or are these vessels simply kept outside Australian territorial waters by threatening them with guns if they cross the line - until they give up and return? (Probably not, I would guess - but if not, then how do you enforce the turnback policy if the vessel ignores eventual warning shots and simply keeps on sailing toward Australia?)
I'm Australian, but I have to start with a disclaimer that a few years ago I got utterly sick to death of the spinning wheel circus of following political news, and I haven't recovered. So I don't really know anything about the current policies or much at all of what's happened since I last voted (May 2022) which is when I last got up to date. (And which is also when the current Labor government came to power).
Having said that, my vague sense is that the boat policies remain more or less in place (but don't quote me on that) and it would be highly surprising if they were substantially changed since the issue has arguably cost the Labor Party two separate elections (2001 and 2013). Of course, a lot of the details are often kept somewhat secret for political reasons anyway.
I can speak of the past though. As of the last election the quasi-military boat policy (Operation Sovereign Borders) started by the then-incumbent conservative government nine years earlier was still in place. So I'll answer your questions with regard to that.
"Some say that this policy has been discontinued, others that it is formally in place but not used in practice, still others that being sent on to Nauru or Papua New Guinea is still very much still a "credible threat" to those coming as boat refugees. Who is right?"
Again, have not followed the latest, but these are not mutually exclusive. The policy was a pretty clear success at stopping the boat arrivals, so after a year or two it hardly needed to be applied since its mere existence was disuading most asylum attempts. And a big part of it involved heavy secrecy as to the details, so whatever the official line was, how it was operated was not public knowledge and it could be a credible threat having its intended effect without needing to be actually used. And it can also remain in place while being regularly rebranded for PR reasons. So all of those can be true.
"With regard to the "boat turnback" policy, the general idea is easy to understand, but what is puzzling is how Australia is able to achieve turnback in practice."
Again, going by when I was following it, it involved a mixture of towing boats back to Indonesia, in at least one controversial case handing Sri Lanken refugees over to the Sri Lanken navy, and otherwise diverting them to PNG or Nauru for offshore processing. They'd be held in detention there, unless they decided to return home, and even if eventually found to be genuine asylum seekers they would be resettled in PNG and never in Australia. Thus disincentivising illegal and dangerous boat journeys by removing the potential prize.
Before this was implemented in late 2013, refugees intercepted in Australian waters were still sent to immigration detention, but had a chance of eventual asylum in Australia. There was a huge increasing number of boat arrivals, several of them sinking and their occupants drowning offshore, which--combined with the fact that they were unauthorised attempts to bypass the official channels *and* the fact that those who could afford to pay people smugglers (i.e. by definition not the most desperate refugees) were the ones who benefited--created widespead popular disgust and was one of the top issues in that year's election.
(That's also not mentioning whether the arrivals really were refugees: this is controversial, and some of them definitely are, but see my comment here https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-333/comment/58773632 for some issues.)
I have drastically changed my mind several times about this issue, but am trying to avoid bringing my current mixed feelings into this explanation.
Thanks ascend, this is clarifying.
Australian policies toward undocumented migrants has attracted considerable interest in Europe, since your policies have curbed undocumented migration and (as a consequence) reduced to almost zero the number of boat refugees drowning each year. For comparison, annually between 2000 and 3000 undocumented migrants drown en route to Europe.
The number of undocumented migrants who drown or disappear on their way to Europe is also much higher than in the US, despite a lower number of migrants crossing the border into Europe. Mainly because the Mediterranean is rather more difficult to cross than Rio Grande (and also more dangerous to cross than the Darien Gap in Panama, which is arguably a closer “functional equivalent” to the Mediterranean ocean).
Since the sea route from sender countries to Australia is even more dangerous than crossing the Mediterranean, ceteris paribus you should have a death rate at least as high as ours. Instead, you have succeeded in discouraging boat refugees. Which is part of the reason European countries are looking at your policies, and some (the UK and Denmark) try to copy them.
The policy is really “stop the boats” it was advertised bu gov.au at points of departure “ if you arrive by boat you will never settle here” - people smugglers could no longer promise that arrivals wd get to stay so they nixed the incentive to get on a leaky vessel in Indonesia ( having done who knows what to get all the way there ) Of course Indonesia had a problem too being a big waiting room of people who’d risked all to get there as the jump off for Australia.
Turn backs kind of happened before this but generally it meant people were saved and landed.. you can’t turn back leaky boats.
Arrivals went into offshore detention ( some for years ) eventually choices were given to stay in png etc go elsewhere NZ US included ( or return home - untenable for true asylum seekers).
I’m very sorry we’ve exported this policy . Our national effort around Vietnamese “boat people” 40 years ago was something to be proud of , how far we’ve fallen.
True Crime here : https://www.netflix.com/au/title/81206211?s=i&trkid=0&vlang=en&clip=81286542
Some facts here https://www.refugeecouncil.org.au/rcoa-refugee-get-the-facts/
Thanks for your reply Therese.
I have consulted the refugee council information earlier. I am a bit puzzled if undocumented refugees are put in detention senters even before their asylum application is processed. If that is really the case?
...For comparison, in the European countries I am familiar with the asylum application process takes months and often years. In the meantime the asylum seeker usually gets the right to work. Detention is only applied when the asylum request is denied, and the asylum seeker then refuses to leave voluntarily. It is not clear to me how Australians manage to avoid a quite long period processing the asylum request before a verdict is reached (if they actually avoid this).
...Or, alternatively, why Australia detains people that might in the end be granted asylum. In which case their skills have often got rusty, after having been in detention for months or years. Making it more difficult to get them integrated in the Australian labour market.
One more thing. You write: "The policy is really “stop the boats” it was advertised bu gov.au at points of departure “" ...Eh, stopping the boats "at points of departure" would imply stopping them from leaving the harbors in the sender countries. But since Australian immigration authorities do not have juristiction in Indonesia and other sender countries, I cannot see how stopping the boats at points of departure can be an Australian policy.
...Unless Australia has a deal where you pay Indonesia and other sender-countries to stop boats from leaving? (The way the European Union has deals with some MiddleEast countries bordering on the Mediterranean to stop undocumented immigrants from getting into boats. Only moderately successful, it must be said.)
Is that what you mean by stopping the boats at "points of departure", or do I misunderstand?
Bedtime here so i’ll just address one question for now - A profitable people smuggling trade via Indonesia was operating for ages - the incentive was that once you ( undocumented refugee planning to seek asylum etc) got to Australia you’d be allowed to stay . So for many the physical risk and the $price was worth it.
Once the government made it clear ( by its actions and by broadcasting the policy at the departure ports and i imagine with aid and diplomacy in indonesia cos lots of people there waiting … ) that you might land here but you’d never be allowed stay - then that incentive to take the risk evaporated - and with it the profiteering people smugglers .
so - no jurisdiction needed - the people smugglers product became unmarketable.
You might like this perspective on Australian migration policy always comes to mind for me in these discussions https://www.historyvictoria.org.au/product/australias-second-chance-by-george-megalogenis/
We’re missing our second chance :(
Thanks, I’ll check it out.
It's taught in Australian schools that Australia had a "white Australia" policy, but in fact (as I only found out recently) it strictly speaking did not. They _wanted_ to institute a White Australia policy, but the British wouldn't let them, so they fell back on the wacky "dictation" test which enabled the immigration officer to use his own discretion.
Growing up in the UK, I was told off for saying "train station" rather than railway station because it was an "americanism". This was before cable came to the neighbourhood and everyone started talking like Buffy. But I still think there is this fear in the UK that we're going to become the 51st State so we make it difficult for the yanks to emigrate here and they in turn make it difficult for us.
Now I'm wondering whether the King's English will be different from the Queen's English.
Context: I am a conservative who works in conservative U.S. politics and I have a lot of experience with the attitudes of the American right. My perspective on how the right feels:
-I think conservative attitudes on immigration have to be understood as reflecting a major lack of trust or confidence that policies will be implemented well. If you were able to zoom out and guarantee metaphysically that high-skill immigration by English-speaking immigrants would mean high-skill immigration by English-speaking immigrants, a lot of conservatives would be fine with that.
But from the conservative perspective, immigration feels like a scam that has been pushed on them endlessly for decades. Back in the 80s, the public was told to accept an illegal immigrant amnesty as a one-time thing, and 1. The amnesty was MUCH larger in scope than promised, and 2. Illegal immigration became worse than ever, and Obama created another big amnesty category in DACA (which was likely illegal). Pro-immigration groups are constantly pushing for another huge amnesty and ofc Biden's policies today verge on full-blown open borders.
In the realm of legal immigration, every category just feels like some superficial justification for the real goal of maximizing immigration to the U.S. H-1B visas are supposed to be for highly-skilled workers in specialist fields the U.S. can't fill, but there are plenty of reports about it simply being used to depress wages and let companies get workers who can't easily lateral elsewhere. Then there's the diversity lottery, family reunification, refugees, asylum seekers, more. The U.S. has a visa for "victims of crime" and so recently there has been a string of people having crimes faked against themselves so they can get THAT visa, and so on.
Then, you have the political dimensions of immigration itself. American liberals often brag that flood levels of immigration will be their means of destroying the political opposition long-term, and immigrant diversity is often used as a justification for all kinds of policy programs and cultural changes conservatives finds upsetting and alienating.
So, for conservatives, the attitude is very much "why the Hell should I trust this supposedly reasonable fix." Their suspicions, which I share, are that any program meant for "skilled workers fluent in English" will end up extremely flexible on both the "skilled" and "fluent in English" parts, and that this "high-value" immigration will just be another mechanism to bring as many people into the country as possible, fueling changes we dislike.
So, in short, a great many conservatives think that we need a major cutback on immigration (in particular, stopping illegal arrivals and significantly curtailing legal ones). IF we did that, then I think there'd be a lot more openness to a carefully-constructed regime for skilled workers. But for the time being, I have minimal confidence such a system would work as promised.
As for liberals, my sense is that a lot of liberals lack a moral vocabulary to justify keeping virtually anyone out of the country. But, I'm not a liberal and I admit this may be me failing an ideological Turing test.
Just as a general point, I think people who want to severely limit immigration underestimate that a lot of immigrants like American culture and would rather join it.
Good description.
> American liberals often brag that flood levels of immigration will be their means of destroying the political opposition long-term, and immigrant diversity is often used as a justification for all kinds of policy programs and cultural changes conservatives finds upsetting and alienating.
And then when conservatives point out that this is a bad idea, we get gaslighted and called racist conspiracy theorists, and the press reassures the public that the Great Replacement Theory is just nonsense a bunch of bad right-wingers made up to scare people. And far too many people never bother to check and notice that it was a Democrat idea, one that they've been openly bragging about since at least 2004! (cf. _The Emerging Democratic Majority,_ by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, which lays out the Great Replacement Theory and why it's going to be awesome when it happens.)
I was wondering if someone would answer Scott by explaining that our (lack of) immigration controls are in part based on doing whatever makes 'legacy americans' gnash their teeth in despair.
Very well put. This describes my own issues with not just immigration, but also many many other leftist policies. It's not "what do they do in theory?" but "how will they be applied in practice?" as well as "what further more extreme policies will this be used to justify/normalise?"
But I think you should also add perhaps the most important thing: the belief of the left and much of the centre (and most of the media) that once a change has been made we are not under any cirumstances allowed to reverse it. This is the single infinitely toxic aspect. If it weren't for that foundational dogma, a huge part of all of politics would be completely transformed.
Or put differently: if progressives are going to openly hold to "you're allowed to oppose doing something before it happens, but you are never allowed to support repealing it afterwards" (see immigration, gay marriage, affirmative action, welfare entitlements, every civil rights law or discrimination policy ever, etc etc) and then
BE SURPRISED when conservatives oppose every single proposed reform that has the tiniest bit of uncertainty as to its effects...they need to get their heads examined.
The phrase "motte-and-bailey" should be the anthem of the entire political right.
"As for liberals, my sense is that a lot of liberals lack a moral vocabulary to justify keeping virtually anyone out of the country. But, I'm not a liberal and I admit this may be me failing an ideological Turing test."
As someone who used to be very left-wing, I think I can pass it: naively it looks unfair or even racist to say that where a person was born should determine how they are treated by a government or where they are allowed to live. That's the argument for more-or-less open borders that I would have endorsed a decade ago.
But even then I had a big problem with letting Islamists of any kind immigrate (I would have said: you're entitled to equality if and only if you support equality for others) and the left's support for that is an ideological turing test I've never been able to pass.
> It's not "what do they do in theory?" but "how will they be applied in practice?" as well as "what further more extreme policies will this be used to justify/normalise?"
This does seem to be a very real difference in thinking between Left and Right: the Left judges policies aspirationally, based on what it's supposed to do and how pleasant the intended results sound, while the Right judges policies based on results. I wrote about this last month: https://robertfrank.substack.com/p/by-their-fruits-ye-shall-know-them
Yeah the left has this “we’re on the right side of history” bit that I find very off putting. How do you know you’re on the right side of history? Do you have a time machine? Wait, you do? Then why are you worrying about abortion laws in Alabama and not sorting out this AI stuff??
I get the not trusting the law to be implemented as stated, but the only thing I have seen about "liberals often brag that flood levels of immigration will be their means of destroying the political opposition long-term" is from the right complaining about it - now admittedly I am in the UK and will not see everything, but it this something that is done openly or is it something that is whispered?
In Australia, migrant populations had tended to vote conservative. it’s argued that this reflects backgrounds eg - fleeing communist regimes, identifying with self determination, often business owners etc. Changing a bit now though.
Australia has much stricter immigration policies though - we are surrounded by a moat so we don’t have a whole lot of people walking here from Latin America like they do in the US. Usually immigrants to Australia are people that we want and have invited (in some way).
(I could write several thousand words here about how badly we treat the few refugees who do manage to hop on a boat and come here illegally)
It makes sense that this would manifest in different political inclinations. I wasn’t aware of data showing that migrants are further right than the general population, but my partner is certainly further right than me! (She’s second generation Vietnamese)
👍🏻🦘
I don't know that I've seen liberals actually say "let's increase immigration *because* they'll vote Dem" but they absolutely, frequently and loudly, say "let's increase immigration" and "immigrants vote Dem, as immigration increases it will destroy the Republicans, which is great news, I cannot wait."
The idea that increased diversity driven by immigration will be long-term politically advantageous is a major liberal talking point. Still, it would be uncouth to imply that increased immigration is a means to a political end.
The other posters have some of the right of it from my perspective (also across the sea).
Some context which may go toward the vibe which may get transmuted into "they want to replace you" when read in the enemy camp.
In 2004 this was published.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Emerging-Democratic-Majority-John-Judis/dp/0743254783
In 2009 people are publishing articles like this
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/pemanent-democratic-major_n_186257
In 2012 publishing articles like this
https://nymag.com/news/features/gop-primary-chait-2012-3/
I could go on listing but I'm phone posting from work.
Search terms if you want to see the trend of this kind of opinion piece are something like "Permanent Democratic Majority"
It's generally not quite as explicit as I phrase it above, but it's also not something that's a secret either. It's probably the best example of what Michael Anton calls "the celebration parallax," or: "It's not happening, and it's good that it is." Anybody who pays close attention to U.S. politics sees that it's a fairly obvious dynamic to U.S. politics. There are a zillion essays about how a state becoming more "diverse" heralds it becoming more Democratic; the chief source of states getting more diverse is heavy immigration, and so any essay or speech that is triumphalist about this is basically celebrating immigration as a means to long-term political domination.
Sometimes it does get a little more explicit, though: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/29/opinion/stacey-abrams-georgia-governor-election-brian-kemp.html
I don't see how it's possible to read the above without detecting a tone of "we will make Georgia a blue state by virtue of immigration-fueled demographic change."
How hard would immigrating legally from an Anglosphere country to the US be now?
People in wealthy countries (and while the US is, of course, wealthier than most all other Western countries, all Western countries are still considerably wealthy by global standards) just don't like immigrating that much, unless there's an urgent push factor reason (and wealthy countries don't really have those that often), marriage or similar family requirements, or a job that's a *lot* better than what's available in their original countries, and even those come in limited amounts.
As someone that has had quite a bit of experience with the US immigration system both personally, and tangentially from other highly skilled people from wealthy countries - hard.
A few things that are particularly difficult:
- The most common pathway visa-wise is the H1B. This is a partial lottery system (meaning you're not guaranteed it in any given year even if you qualify), and requires you to have an employer who will sponsor you, and take the risk you won't be admitted
- Transitions from visas to PR are generally done on a queue based system, which roughly has a quota per country. For countries that it's not as popular to emigrate from, this can mean the wait isn't toooo long, but for e.g. India, it's 10+ years, and even that is just a guess based on mathing out how many people are in the queue. Could be much much longer.
- Throughout all of this, you're paying lawyers and fees and all sorts of other things to go through the process. Additionally, at different points there are often restrictions on travel you can do internationally to e.g. see family
- Marriage is a more straightforward path, but there are still fairly high costs (though much lower than the $ value of a US green card), and still takes years.
Overall it's by no means **impossible** to emigrate to the US if you're from a wealthy country, it is definitely not something I would describe as easy. Having said all that though, I think it's probably positive EV for ~any sufficiently smart and well educated person from elsewhere in the world purely in monetary terms.
Well, it certainly seems fairly rare - about 80k to 90k green cards issued per year to people from all European countries in 2016-2018.https://www.dhs.gov/ohss/topics/immigration/yearbook/2018/table3
Of course, most green cards are issued to close family members of US citizens and permanent residents. Those are not generally going to be Europeans. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested-statistics-immigrants-and-immigration-united-states-2024#permanent-immigrants
I think it might be hard; I have some friends who are high-skilled Anglos who want to immigrate to the US and have trouble. Some of them have been able to get work-visa like things, but those are much worse than permanent residency.
It might be thay because the problem is partially solved, its hard to get it fully solved. I worked in finance and had many foreign anglosphere colleagues and had the general impression when hiring we could get the visas for an anglosphere hire if required. Thats not any consolation to an anglosphere immigrant who doesnt want to work in finance, but it means a powerful lobbyist already has what it wants.
Whats the process for change? Group with power (could be voters, i am not that cynical) has a problem. Political entrepreneur finds a workable solution. I think what you describe would infact be workable, but it does not solve important groups primary problems.
The main challenge would be to depoliticize the issue so that the secret congress could work its magic.
Easy for educated white-collar professionals, much less easy for everybody else.
Barriers to this happening:
1) On the right - I think the MAGA group is straight up isolationist / anti immigration in all forms. Any momentum on the right has gone way down since the 2000s.
2) On the left - resistance to this incremental improvement to immigration system because of the belief it would reduce the motivation of certain stakeholders to care about greater immigration reform. Specifically, skilled migration reform would satisfy business/elites enough that they no longer care about other goals (e.g., path to citizenship for undocumented migrants)
3) Other anglosphere country politics. Given this arrangement would likely have some reciprocity, and given the vast population size differences between US and other anglosphere nations, there is some fear from those anglosphere nations for having their labor / housing markets being distorted by US skilled immigration (NZ is ~1% of US, Australia is ~7%, Canada is ~10%, UK is ~18%). Some of this is pretty rational, but on top of that, the US is not amazingly popular in some of these places i.e., in Australia - more US migration there would bring fears of "crazy American influences" (aka MAGA, guns, etc.) even though realistically the American skilled migrants to Australia are likely left wing / progressive etc.
"more US migration there would bring fears of "crazy American influences" (aka MAGA, guns, etc.) even though realistically the American skilled migrants to Australia are likely left wing / progressive etc."
Um...I hate to break it that ridiculous crime rates and batshit racial identity politics are pretty close to the top of the perceived "crazy American influences" list (though "guns everywhere" does top the list).
I continue to be amazed that the average woke American progressive thinks the rest of the world doesn't view them much the same as the Trump supporters.
Maybe Australia could cut a deal with Canada?
Yeah, my fear as an Australian is that if Trump wins the crazy woke people will move here lol
"Yeah, my fear as an Australian is that if Trump wins the crazy woke people will move here lol"
Nobody's afraid of American immigrants, since nobody actually left America when Trump won despite saying they would. There is fear of American cultural influence, see this article about France:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/03/france-tocqueville-democracy-race-le-wokisme/672775/
I knew 2 people who left. (Good riddance.)
There already is one for Canadians, the TN-1 Visa. It sounds like it's nearly automatic provided you work in an occupation on the list, you have a US job offer, and you pretend you plan on going back to Canada eventually. You don't even need to apply in advance: you can present a Canadian passport and job offer letter at customs when you enter the US. Once you've settled in, you can apply for permanent residency, which is much easier to get for Canadians than for most other nationalities.
If you're from another Anglosphere country, I suppose you could naturalize to Canadian citizenship first. I think that's streamlined for immigrants from Commonwealth countries, especially the UK, but it's still a heavyweight enough step that it probably doesn't count as an easy track to the US.
There's also one for Australians, the E-3 visa, which was part of a 2005 FTA.
I wouldn't be surprised if one for the UK comes along eventually but it has its own particular challenges (it doesn't seem to be part of the FTA under current . Ireland would be trickier since it's part of the EU. New Zealand, who knows?
Overall this is just the kind of thing that happens quietly rather than as a big public push (on the US side at least). The technocrats on both sides recognise it as a good thing but they know that extremists on both sides are going to hate it, so they just push it through quietly, piecemeal, as part of a FTA.
I'm seeing some friends on Tuesday who have lived in the US for maybe 5 years. They are coming to London because they have to apply to extend their visas here rather than in the US, which is no bagatelle with 5 kids! But as I said above I think the UK is the weak link, there's a lingering fear of being swamped by American culture (I say that boat sailed long ago), and obviously there has to be reciprocity, like extradition or anything else.