Sabine Hossenfelder, the (former) physicist and (current) science content creator, is convinced Germany has made some poor choices in the field of science and technology, which is why nothing quite works right.
Thank you for this link! Yes, she is quite correct. While the railway is a cheap target of ridicule, it is also the poster child of what is going wrong here. The infrastructure is crumbling because of lacking investment. Many blame the so-called "debt brake" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_balanced_budget_amendment -- there was a time Germany could have borrowed money for nothing, or even for less than nothing, people would have paid to be allowed to lend Germany money, and for stupid fundamentalist reasons they wouldn't take it. Meanwhile, investment into infrastructure has stagnated at least since the nineties.
And yes, Germans are so slow, and the chancellor is the slowest of them all. Just look who is the one slowing down European Ukraine help all the time. We think everything over three or four times, and we are extremely risk-averse.
I only didn't understand the part about nuclear power. There are no nuclear power stations any more. The old ones they just shut down cannot be turned on again. We all know building new ones takes decades and is simply too expensive, while solar has become dirt cheap. The biggest difficulty isn't energy generation, it's energy storage. But there have to be better solutions than hydrogen.
As a former top-rate chemistry student, I was taught a bunch of university-level chemistry theory at the age of 18 as a prep for an international competition. It meant I had more free time to go clubbing in my first two years of uni, but not much else. That knowledge was basically useless to me in the lab.
What I did learn that was useful was lab discipline. My ever-so-slightly sadistic lab instructor gave us only two pieces of advice for lab work: "concentrate" and "focus" which I can say without a doubt are the best pieces of advice for running experiments that I've ever received.
Anyway, there are institutions like this in the US, I know because their team was better prepped than ours. But I suspect their impact on future performance is spotty at best, and they'll train a couple of hundred chemists, if that. I think the biology/physics competitions have the same.
Follow up on Native American land acknowledgments - I was wrong when I earlier expressed disapproval. News article in Boston Globe (may be pay-walled) -
tl;dr - The Herring Pond Wampanoag requested the town of Plymouth "to recognize their legacy with a brief land acknowledgment that would be delivered before meetings". The town has balked, one board member said the town’s lawyer should look at it first. I have now updated to the opinion that when Native Americans request land acknowledgments, those requests should be respected.
It's probably for the best that the town lawyer look over the wording (and the implications of the wording) — and the town may want to seek legal advice from a constitutional lawyer and a treaty law expert, as well. After the Supreme Court's McGirt v. Oklahoma ruling handed one-third of Oklahoma back to the Cherokee Nation, we're in uncharted territory when it comes to native American treaty rights. Law is heavily based on precedent, and the Pilgrim-Wampanoag Peace Treaty of 1621 is still a valid legal document, albeit one that hasn't been enforced since the Wampanoag Sachem, Metacom (aka King Philip) went to war with Puritans in 1675.
I’m not sure I understand the land acknowledgment request. It seems like the tribe wants the acknowledgment to be read before meetings in perpetuity. If that’s the case their request seems unreasonable to the point of silliness. Am I reading this wrong?
My Covid antigen test today had an ever so faint pink positive stripe today. It helped to take a flash picture with my iPhone and enlarge the image a bit to make it out. I’ve felt pretty good for several days now but I still put on an N95 to stop at the market earlier. I expect the test I do in another 48 hours will be completely clear.
But maybe I’m not operating at full power today. I had about 100 pages left in ‘Blood Meridian’ and I had to pack it in for a while. No more dead babies hanging from trees for me right now, thank you. I had read it for the first time about 5 years ago and I remember it as being horror filled but at that time I was up to the task and stuck it out.
I picked up a more light hearted Elmore Leonard crime caper airplane read to fill the gap, ‘Rum Punch.’
Not too bad for a geezer. No Pax. Bad timing for it though. I’d flown to Alaska for salmon fishing and spent 4 days in bed in Seward instead. Them’s the breaks I guess. Body aches, coughing, sore throat and extreme fatigue were the extent of it. No fever though.
I feel real good today and had no trouble biking 15 miles. Hopefully tomorrow’s test will show I’m not contagious.
First time I’ve had any symptoms since this started so I’ll count myself lucky.
Join us for our 68th OC ACXLW meetup where we'll explore deep insights into biases in decision-making and reflect on the nature of traditions, their origins, and their authenticity. This week's readings provide a rich foundation for our discussions, highlighting the intersections of rationality, tradition, and cultural evolution.
Discussion Topics:
Priors and Prejudice by MathiasKB
Overview: This article explores the influence of priors and biases on decision-making, particularly within the context of charitable giving and the Effective Altruism movement. MathiasKB uses an alternate Effective Altruism movement and personal anecdotes to illustrate how deeply ingrained biases shape our actions and beliefs.
TLDR: MathiasKB's "Priors and Prejudice" examines how initial beliefs and biases influence decision-making, using the Effective Samaritans as a hypothetical example. The article delves into how these biases persist over time and the challenges of reconciling differing worldviews through empirical evidence.
Summary: The article uses the fictional Effective Samaritans movement to highlight how priors influence charitable giving decisions. It contrasts the Samaritans' approach, which emphasizes societal transformation through labor unions, with more conventional Effective Altruism strategies. The author reflects on personal experiences with bias and the difficulty of reconciling different worldviews through empirical evidence.
Audio Link: Embedded Audio on LessWrong
Text Article: Priors and Prejudice
Fake Tradition Is Traditional by Scott Alexander
Overview: This article challenges the notion that traditions must be ancient and unchanging to be valid. Scott Alexander argues that many beloved traditions are, in fact, recent inventions or reinventions, and that looking back to an idealized past is a common method for creating meaningful practices.
TLDR: Scott Alexander's "Fake Tradition Is Traditional" explores the authenticity of traditions, arguing that many are modern inventions or reinventions. He clarifies that both utilitarian practices and those tied to sacredness can form effective traditions, while purely invented practices without historical context often struggle to endure.
Summary: Scott Alexander argues that traditions often regarded as ancient are frequently recent inventions. He critiques the notion that effective traditions arise solely from spontaneous actions without historical references. Instead, he highlights how many cultural practices are successful because they invoke an idealized past. His follow-up clarification emphasizes the effectiveness of practices tied to sacredness or historical continuity over purely utilitarian or newly invented rituals.
Text Articles:
Fake Tradition Is Traditional
Clarification on "Fake Tradition Is Traditional"
Audio Links:
Fake Tradition Is Traditional - Audio
Clarification on "Fake Tradition Is Traditional" - Audio
Questions for Discussion:
For Priors and Prejudice:
How do the examples provided by MathiasKB illustrate the impact of priors on rational decision-making?
What strategies can individuals and groups use to recognize and mitigate the influence of their own biases?
How can differing priors be reconciled to facilitate more effective collaboration?
For Fake Tradition Is Traditional:
How does Scott Alexander's argument about the authenticity of traditions resonate with your understanding of cultural practices?
In what ways can newly invented traditions gain the same level of acceptance and reverence as those with longer histories?
How can the balance between utilitarian origins and the narrative of sacredness be leveraged to create meaningful community practices?
We look forward to an engaging and thought-provoking discussion where your insights will contribute to a deeper understanding of these significant topics.
You may appreciate Ghost (try Depth of Satan's Eyes), Powerwolf (just try a random song from their top 10), Orden Ogan (Gunman - all their songs are eminently listenable, but Gunman is actually -good-), Turisas (try Rasputin, it's a cover of a Boney M song and is excellent - Stand Up and Fight is also solid), Heidevolk (Vulgaris Magistralis), Tyr (Hold The Heathen Hammer High? Tough choice here. Regin Smidur is probably their most approachable song), Wolf Totem (The HU), Monolith Deathcult (Speaking of bangers, Fist of Stalin is a hell of a banger), Wind Rose (although their rendition of Diggy Diggy Hole is at this point famous and you've probably encountered it already) ... Alestorm, Korpiklaani, and Finntroll all may also fall in your wheelhouse.
Going further afield, In Flames' Moonshield (holy shit that intro) or Only for the Weak. Wintersun's Sons of Winter and Stars. Firebreather's Dancing Flames. Zeal & Ardor's Devil is Fine (Slave hymnal satanic gospel metal). Manegarm's "Nattsjal, dromsjal". oOoOoOoOoOo's Fucking Freaking Futile Freddy.
This is about the Swiss Guard? Those guys are probably real bad asses but those have to be the most comical uniforms in the history of warfare.
Hand me the field glasses corporal. Yes I see. It seem we are about to engage a unit of… uhm… red, yellow and blue striped infantry with plumed helmets? No laughing, corporal. Those men are armed with halberds!
Contrary to the Monty Python School of Historical Movie-Making (though to be fair to Monty Python they weren't really going for absolute historical accuracy), the past was not all cowshit and mud. Or black/brown/other leather, for more modern movies.
If you think the Swiss Guard were fancy, then take a gander at the Landsknecht:
While we're on Sabaton songs from "The Last Stand", here's a video set to "The Winged Hussars" which is about a hundred and fifty six years later than the Swiss Guard's last stand:
What better way to show off how rich you are then with lots of floppy clothes (more cloth == more rich!) with lots of bright colors (brighter colors == better dye == more rich!) and that's difficult to sew (harder to sew == more expensive == more rich!)? And the best way to get rich as a soldier is to be a badass that's looted a bunch of towns, so the brighter and floofier your sleeves, the more towns you must've looted.
That’s some pretty impressive hair on those guys. Except the vocalist I guess. He’s got the vest with the painted on pecs and abs though. Maybe I should quit working out and just start wearing one of those.
Best I can figure what those colorful uniforms really are, is oldfashioned. It's not hard to find pictures of soldiers wearing similar outfits, but they're from the 1500s or so.
But ceremonial military uniforms do seem to be a field where strange things pop up.
It's all guys in that audience! Are there any women power metal fans? The after-concert groupie action for Sabaton must be kinda limited — unless of course, they're gay?
Sorry for the snark. The song *is* a banger, as you said, though.
There are definitely women power metal fans, I'm married to one.
The venue and who is touring with makes a huge difference. It's not unusual for more people to be at a metal show for the opening act than the headliner - they are typically cobbling together shows out of several bands with different audience appeals to maximize attendance. So the audience at a given metal show doesn't necessarily represent the fans of the headlining band.
One show I attended, theoretically headlined by a white-trash-metal band, had *80%* of the audience showing up for one of the opening acts. You could tell because the audience was 80%-very-obviously-LGBT, and there was exactly one band (one of the opening acts) that was also very-obviously-LGBT.
The power metal shows I've attended have tended to lean more women-heavy, but they also usually include some kind of female-coded metal act (often folk metal), like Arkona or Eluveitie.
I can see at least one female face in the front row at 1:31.
But in any case, the only after-concert groupie action at Sabaton concerts is fights to the death between the band's existing members and selected challengers from the audience. The lineup for the next concert is just whoever survives the battle.
I actually enjoy Sabaton a lot (and I'm a cis woman), but Last Stand is far from my favourite. I feel like being into specifically the song about history of Catholicism is coded with a particular subculture I don't really associate with; but I enjoy their e.g. WWI stuff (Price of a Mile, Great War) and Sweden stuff (Carolus Rex) a lot.
Polling Day in the UK. The Independent has Keir Starmer at 39% - ironically, this would be a lower share of the national vote than Jeremy Corbyn achieved in 2017. But they have the tories on 22% - which is actually an improvement. Everyone's predicting a landslide, I'm still skeptical - no question the tories will suffer heavy losses, but a combination of ID laws, boundary changes, tactical voting by right wingers in marginal seats, Gaza, Starmer's unpopularity and Labour's low base will all work against a landslide, but overall majority? Almost definitely - except to say 20/1 on a hung parliament is tantalising.
Results are in. A landslide, but not a wipeout. The.minority parties , except the Scots Nationalists , doing very well, with the Lib Dems quintupling their seats, the Greens quadrupling theirs, and Reform gaining their fist seats. Unusually low turnout. My own area, the South East coast is turning into a miniature red wall, in defiance of the receivrd wisdom that the SE is a Tory stronghold.
According to John Curtice, the Labour vote increased dramatically in Scotland, was static in England and dropped in Wales, leading to a 2% increase overall for a final tally of 35%. But the tories completely imploded so it didn't prevent a landslide - but it may have prevented something worse than a landslide for the tories.
Best I could tell from watching the results come in, there was a lot of tactical voting against the Tories. So a lot of those "lost" Labour votes were probably Labour supporters voting Green or Lib Dem pragmatically (with the same effect in reverse of course). This factor doesn't really affect Scotland.
There certainly was a lot of tactical voting, but Labour have been polling around 40 throughout the campaign and ended up below 34. Lib Dems are up 1.7%. There have to be other factors - I'm going with Gaza discontent (several independents either won or did very well) and a late Tory rearguard action focusing on not giving Starmer a "supermajority"
70s against a hung parliament on Betfair right now. Doesn't seem to be tempting people. The simple observation that my ultra safe Tory seat is in play and there is a definite chance - hooray - of Labour taking it tells us something. As does Sunak having spent so much time in his own constituency.
The big unknown is what Reform voters will actually do when it comes to the crunch - Express & Mail front pages were pretty direct encouraging them to stick with the tories.
I agree - Hague and Major got less than 200 and they both got 30% so you would think Sunak will do worse - only question is who they lose seats to. A hung parliament would depend on SNP doing better than expected and tory losses being skewed towards Lib Dem gains. Hence the 66/1 odds
If your goal was to be in a room where the other people in the room were most representative age-wise of your country, what room would you choose?
For example, if you choose a doctor's office other than a pediatrician's, old people would likely be overrepresented. A grocery store is probably good at getting people between the ages of 20 and 70 but misses people much younger or older.
Idk for the whole nation, but I reckon you can get the best cross-section in a public shelter for natural disasters - during a severe cyclone/hurricane/tornado/bushfire evacuated residents are normally put in a central public building like a community hall, school, etc because not all residential properties are going to be built to within what level of whatever disaster it is (or if they had to evacuate everyone from the path of a severe disaster, they'd be in the school hall of the neighbouring town).
Although sometimes, depending on what exactly is happening, the prime age group might volunteer to leave and help firefighting or whatever.
Thing is, this is not gonna be super representative of the whole country if the country is very urbanised and the disaster tends to strike rural populations more. Exceptions could be maybe severe tsunami predicted to hit an urban area in a heavily urbanised place, but urban areas probably spread out their disaster shelters and ages will be skewed by proximity to activity centres (e.g one near a commercial area will be mostly working age adults).
Biased towards the old, I think. (a) injuries that would be minor in a younger person can be critical in an older person; (b) strokes, heart attacks, ...
It's not a completely flat distribution, sure. But according to this source, ER use is in the 10-20% range across most age and sex categories. And the peak use is actually in the 15-17 range. Maybe we can do better. Maybe not.
My daughter's pediatrician's office is in a small medical center laid out so the waiting areas are open alcoves adjoining the main hallway. In addition to a pediatrician (skews younger), it also contains an imaging center (maybe skews towards middle age?), a cardiologist and a nephrologist (probably skew older), a couple primary care offices (broad spectrum of adults), and an urgent care clinic (seems to skew towards younger adults). If you count that as one big room, it's a good start, although I expect you could find a better sample with some searching.
Certain places of worship, perhaps? Many will skew older but by no means all. Weddings especially can have quite a mix. Also Bar-mitzvahs, first communions.
Lots of people suggest Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Q for anyone who has done it for years: how many serious injuries have you heard of in your dojo / community? Serious enough that people need to not do BJJ for a while.
I trained hard for years. I came away with the notion that the Masters (pick any semi serious martial art on the martial side) were simply the ones who could still stand _literally_ after 30 years of going hard. Everyone got injured. The climbing community is the same way. Everyone who does it seriously has had bad injuries. For the former it was a dislocated shoulder and a couple of broken bones and just the same for the later with added injuries to tendons/ligaments. Some have never quite healed.
I climbed for about 15 years, mostly multipitch routes at the Shawangunks cliffs and in the Adirondacks mountains. The worst injury I got was "rock bites." I did not personally know anyone who got any serious injuries, though I did hear stories of bad injuries and deaths. My daughter has been bouldering very seriously for about 5 years, training at least twice a week and bouldering outdoors most weekends except in winter. The worst injury she has had is some repetitive stress injuries in a couple of her fingers, and some wrist soreness. These healed when she gave the areas a break. She knows many other boulderers, I'd say about 100, and I have not heard stories from her about bad falls or broken bones, and I probably would have if she had heard them, because something like that would have been a big deal to her. There is always some risk when climbing, but neither of us has a case of risk-taking macho. I have heard way more stories about ski injuries than I have about climbing injuries, and I don't even ski! This year someone I know came by for a visit on crutches because of a knee injury when skiing. Can't think of a time when any climber I know was in a cast or on crutches from a climbing injury.
I’ve never made it to the gunks. I spent most of my time in the bay climbing in Tahoe, Yosemite, Joshua Tree, etc. Half of my injuries are from indoor climbing and half of those on ropes. Climbers on crutches mostly don’t go to the gym - injuries from landing are common though. I’ve seen more than one person leave a gym via ambulance. One was from a dyno on lead to the first bolt - the hold spun and the climber landed on his head. I broke my ribs on a different gym dyno. Trad climbing carries a real risk of death. The easy intro roots are all cheese graters which is a recipe for broken bones. Half of my injuries aren’t from falls - human are fundamentally not built for climbing. Hell, a teenager was climbing next to me at my local gym yesterday and dropped her phone from 50’ up. The belayer picked it up and said “your phone is ok”!
Wutz a cheese grater? I climbed a bit out west-- in Yosemite, Red Rock & J Tree -- and there were way more run out routes. I think trad climbing is probably more dangerous out West. Gunks climbs are mostly pretty protectable because the rock is full of horizontal cracks, though there's a famous hard route with very few places for pro called Talus Food. Yikes. I don't know what accounts for the difference in our experience, beyond the run-outs in your part of the world.
Cheese grater = slab (100% of intro routes) in which case falls on a top rope may be dangerous. I agree with your take on climbing out west. I don’t recall any trad route that doesn’t have a very-serious-consequences zone. Routes in Yosemite (glaciated granite in general - so Squamish, etc) tend to have random blank spots or unprotected blind mantles above ledges. Joshua tree has rounded cracks with big crystals which makes placing good gear hard. Indian Creek is easy to protect but no one has 11 yellows. Smith Rock has the ethos that broken ankles are fine and bolts should only protect against likely ground falls. 20’ of runout through an “easy” section is to be expected. Colorado has poor quality rock. Generally, the Western ethos of climbing is “leave no trace” which very much comes at the cost of lives. Climbing in Kalymnos is just the opposite: every route is actually labeled (on the rock) with blue paint with the grade and length of rope for a rap. Lowering off the rings is encouraged! Bolts are spaced like a modern gym and most falls are into the air. We could make climbing way safer if we bolted like Europe. Instead, we have the BLM mostly forbidding it (Red Rocks) and old school climbers chopping the bolts anyway because aesthetics and fuck you. Even on a safe route, a standard rack is probably 2K+ while a dozen draws is a tenth the cost.
To add to a good summary by jt, a big separation line is whether you want to compete or not. Far greater chance to get hurt in a competition than in training.
Very common to get something, but it's easily recoverable ones you get in all combat sports. The bad ones are usually self inflicted.
Things I have seen happen in descending order of probability (anecdote[jiujitsu and karate with jujitsu characteristics]):
Hyperextensions are common if you are a dumbass and make the other dude yank your arm off instead of tapping,
hard hits to the head are rare but happen (usually semi-self inflicted; taking a bad fall onto someone's hard body part without ppe/off the mat/refusing to bow out when you should),
tooth damage WILL happen if you don't wear any ppe but will basically never happen if you wear your mouth guard,
nasty rashes and abrasions and cuts if you don't wear a rash guard and have delicate skin, I don't bother and have only had some of my hair yanked out but that's me
AND THE BIG ONE THAT WILL probably HAPPEN TO YOU IF YOU SERIOUSLY SPAR WITH CONTACT AND WITHOUT WEARING HAND/WRIST WRAPS (which you can't really do in sports where you might get wrist locked)
Finger stuff. Broken, fractured, hyperextended, dislocated. It sucks and it hurts like a motherfucker, but I've never seen someone/ had myself be put out of action for longer than 7-8 weeks for a full recovery, and it's usually more like 3-6 weeks; Including my own nasty fracture/disjointing of a middle finder when I got tsurukomi goshe'd by an old guy 50 lbs lighter than me and was so shocked I forgot to not be a moron and land directly on my fingertip.
I haven’t done it. But have an acquaintance who did it for years and developed chronic foot pain from it. There was a period of several *years* when he could barely walk, and even a period when he was in a wheelchair. Finally found docs at Mayo Clinic who figured out what was wrong and performed a surgery that solved the problem.
Not to down a rabbit hole, but I can’t for life of me think of what that injury could come from. The feet aren’t really stressed in any way in BJJ, not like in striking arts.
yeah, I have no idea. Imagined it was from landing on feet when flipped or something like that, but that's not something he said, just the product of my imagination. I think the reason he thought of it as the culprit is that he found it painful to do jiu jitsu before he found it painful to just walk -- so in some way the sport was more demanding on his feet than ordinary walking.
That plane that encountered severe turbulence, and had many passenger injuries, including fractured skulls according to the news I saw: Why didn’t seat belt prevent people from being thrown upward high enough to smash their heads into the luggage rack?
> A great deal of effort goes into making sure passengers never realize just how unnatural their state of motion is, on a commercial airplane. Climb rates, bank angles and acceleration profiles are maintained within strict limits. Back in the day, I used to do homework problems to calculate these limits.
> Airline passengers don’t fly. The travel in a manufactured normalcy field. Space travel is not yet common enough, so there is no manufactured normalcy field for it.
“One of the passengers, Evangelina Saravia, told the Uruguayan news outlet Teledoce that there had been about 20 minutes of mild turbulence before the plane suddenly dropped 400 meters at a speed of 1,000 kilometers per hour – catching some passengers, who had ignored the seatbelt warnings, off guard”
Like with high falls and car accidents, it's not the airspeed or altitude change during a turbulence that kills you, but the sudden stop at the end. Airplane cruise speed is already in the 900 kph range. The recent Flight 321 with a fatality had its most violent phase for less than 5 seconds and a drop of only 50 meters.
I really like stuff like The Studies Show, ACX's "More than you ever wanted to know about X" series, and publications by Cochrane. Are there more media like these that look at the state of the overall evidence on a question (more than a couple of meta-analyses) and give a nice summary?
Is there an agreed-upon universal notation that people use to determine evidence quality or closeness to truth? For example:
-In meta-analyses, the authors will often come up with a schema for sorting studies into high, medium, and low quality for the purposes of determining which studies they include or threw out. But these somehow vary from study to study and are usually specific to scientific experiments, rather than being broadly applicable to real-life truth-seeking scenarios, like forensics, archaeology, etc.
-In debate, there is a scoring system to measure the persuasion of each side's arguments, but this is not the same as measuring truth and is also generally limited to information presented rhetorically (rather than heavily numeric, graphic, or visual representations).
Is there a more detailed and universal notation or scoring system that is used across industries or disciplines? For example, if I wanted to "keep score" during a Root Claim debate so I could follow the back and forth of the two sides more easily, is there a streamlined way to do that? Or if I wanted to do an adversarial collaboration with a pre-set system of "scoring" the weight of arguments, is there an existing system of notation for that already? Thanks!
The closest I have heard to something like this is the ICD 203 standard which prescribes how to translates probabilities or likelihoods into common English.
That is true in theory, but then why isn't Bayes' Theorem and related notation used more in other knowledge-seeking fields (like forensics and anthropology)? My guess is that many applied and interdisciplinary fields don't have enough information in a given situation to set good probability baselines for which Bayes could be useful, and instead rely on best guesses from experts in very specific niches.
Ouch! "many applied and interdisciplinary fields don't have enough information in a given situation to set good probability baselines" sounds a lot like pundits holding forth with unjustified self-confidence. If an expert sees N=3 and starts talking e.g. about how something can't possibly happen / always happens, anyone listening needs to heavily discount these views.
This comment (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-336/comment/60607634) got me thinking about the lack of new music I find. Not just that I, in particular, like, but I now listen mostly to news on the radio in my car instead of music stations (or my own MP3 music), so have no source to find new music to like.
Where do people find out about songs they like nowadays, other than following, say Taylor Swift, or other known musicians? I haven't found a new song to like in years. NOTE: though I'm asking about music in general, I'm not soliciting for specific song suggestions, but sources where I might find my own. I generally favor rock and pop, and though my tastes are somewhat expansive, I find I dislike most country as sounding the same (a friend once told me while driving in the Great Plains somewhere, a radio DJ announced their station played BOTH kinds of music: country AND western).
Spotify recommendations have been pretty great - Exuma, Abner Jay, the Shaggs, Sonny Sharrock, Silver Mt. Zion. I wouldn’t have crossed paths with any of them otherwise.
I get surprisingly good music recommendations from YouTube. Without the assistance of the algorithm, I probably never would have stumbled across Victor Démé, Gábor Szabó, Hyakkei, The Beths, L'Impératrice, Hiromi, Being Dead, or Caravan Palace.
Of course, it's not perfect. Sometimes you just want to give a listen to the current hit by some popular artist (Swift, Charli XCX, etc.), and the algorithm decides that's going to be your soundtrack for the next couple of months.
Someone here a few weeks ago was asking about where to hear new music in the NYC area, and then they even wrote back a couple of days later to thank me, which I thought was pretty unusual for ACX.
Non commercial free form radio. No ads, no news, no commercials! They stream 24/7. Play all kinds, styles and genres of music: ambient, electronic, pop, international, oldies, jazz, rockabilly, rock&roll, metal, hard rock, avant garde, reggae, EDM, techno, New Wave, punk, alternative…and a whole lot more. They also have alternate streams with even more music, as well as extensive archives going back a couple dozen years.
It’s all about finding a DJ you like. You learn to trust their taste in music. I can listen to a show and there will most always be something I haven’t heard before that I like by an artist or group, and then I can pursue it further.
And I’ll second Soundcloud, and throw in Bandcamp and also The Free Music Archive.
is by far my favourite, though if you're not into Metal, it will have very little of interest!
What I do here, typically, is start with a band that I like, click on Similar Artists and scroll around to see if anything strikes my fancy (clicking on a band member's name and seeing what other bands they are in can also be useful).
You could also try the Random Band button on the left (though there are a huge number of bands with no reviews, so it can be less helpful) or start with something like "Album of the Year" lists to get started.
is the other one I like, though I don't use it nearly as often, since a lot of the best Progressive stuff was from the 70s, so it's a little harder to find new bands, once you've cleared that decade!
When I'm in a discovery mood, I'll open spotify and look for an artist that's similar to one I like already. Then I'll play through their discography while doing something else. If I hear a song that catches my attention, I'll alt-tab to spotify, "like" it, and then put it somewhere in my custom hierarchy of private playlists (organized by artist/genre) [0]. Possibly under the "experimental" category until further notice. If I'm not feeling the current artist, I'll pick a new artist and repeat. If I reach the end of a discography, I'll give all the tracks that *didn't* catch my attention a second chance, while listening more actively. I don't do this often enough to be considered a genuine music-phile, but it's certainly allowed me to slowly accrete a collection of playlists I like, over the years.
Sometimes I'll also use spotify's recommendation feature, as Julian says. But more often, I tend to prefer the first method. Incidentally, Ted Gioia seems to think that a lot of AI tracks are being highlighted by spotify's recommendation system. But this hasn't been my experience? I tend to read a little about the author's bio, and Gioia says the AI tracks tend to be obvious, so I doubt any AI tracks evaded my notice.
There's also a few things on youtube that i've kinda stumbled upon by accident, which has piqued my interest. Although this tends to be more rare. But then again, music discovery isn't what I primarily use Youtube for to begin with. If you use it more actively than me, maybe you'll have more success. There's plenty of curated channels/playlists on there. And there's a few tracks that I *wish* were on spotify.
I also have this illegible intuition that much of the current innovation in music is centered on soundcloud [1]. Although I don't use it myself, since I'm too lazy to split my attention between spotify and soundcloud. Can't be asked.
I tried Pandora, years ago. But somehow, I got the feeling that weird seeds would always get railroaded back into mainstream stuff. Which is... counterproductive to discovery.
> I find I dislike most country as sounding the same (a friend once told me while driving in the Great Plains somewhere, a radio DJ announced their station played BOTH kinds of music: country AND western).
Maybe you're referring to "bro country" [2] ?
[0] all of spotify's playlists are public by default, and this is not a setting that I know how to reverse. So i have to set them all to private manually.
...honestly, I think I've heard most of them from the grocery store. There's a lot of junk in there, and a couple songs I really hated (it's been over 700 days without a High High Hopes), but I heard a few in there that were fun enough I looked them up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITUhINgcW2o
Otherwise, the most memorable songs came from watching a slop stream, where somebody sent in a catchy comedy song and then it turned out the musician had an actual serious album.
Last suggestion is Youtube music reviewers. I've learned of the existence of a lot of songs through Todd In The Shadows. Mostly not ones I'd listen to, but occasionally you find out there's a song from the Pina Colada guy, about eating a guy in a cave.
But to answer the actual question - I'm part of a small group of people who just listen to an absurd amount of music, and we share recommendations.
That list is a old-ish snapshot of every song I could find to add which I wouldn't generally mind listening to. Unless you exclusively listen to jazz, I can pretty much guarantee you will find something in there you like and have never heard before. Decent odds you'll find a new favorite song in there.
Not a lot of ska, no; there's some of the more popular stuff I think, and probably some borderline stuff in the dark cabaret genre. If you have stuff to recommend, I'll gladly take it.
Back in February however, there was an open thread where a guy named Kyle shared his substack article. It was bemoaning "poptimism". At the end, he asked others to send bands making weird noises to his inbox, for his mental health or something. So I put together a small playlist of my more-niche, personal faves. Which tends to skew electronic, since that's where I spend most of my time these days.
If we're trading playlists, I figure I might as well share mine again. Greater chance you'll find something new there, as opposed to me referencing say, Mustard Plug.
Eh, I just remember looking at Come On Eileen and thinking "Honestly, I kinda prefer Save Ferris' cover [0]. Wait, I don't remember seeing any ska so far. Surely, he's aware of the genre...?"
But it sounds like it's on your radar after all. And I mostly just listen to the 3rd wave staples. So probs nothing you haven't heard before, or that wouldn't show up in a cursory google search.
1. NPR Tiny Desk concerts. I don't read the descriptions, I just go to the archives and listen to samples of the 20-minute sets until something sounds promising, then I look up the band/artist and their artistic milieu and see if there's anyone else interesting in that subculture/scene.
2. Ted Gioia's substack (he's a cultural critic and jazz musician)
3. Finding people with better taste than me and listening to samples of whatever they recommend.
I've tried all the algorithms (Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, etc.) and none of them have ever given me an artist I really liked. At the most they've suggested an okay song or two that's kind of a cringe/mid reduction of my music preference, like what a school guidance counselor would recommend after meeting me once, if that analogy makes sense?
EDIT: I saw someone's comment that algorithms' suggestions are supposed to be preference-based but are actually strongly influenced by marketing goals (i.e., what artists the platform wants to push that month) and that might explain my terrible experience with those services and why I've had such better luck with more "active" curation/exploration.
The algorithms suggestion comment was probably mine. To be fair, they say their suggestions are "recommended" but they don't say why they are recommended. When I always seem to see exactly the same suggestions, though, I begin to guess why.
I have found spotify pretty good with this. Find some songs you already like, favorite them, then spotify will start creating playlists for you with songs they think you will like. The hit rate is maybe 5% but thats pretty good if you consider how low it normally is. They also have like "new music" playlists that i think are also catered to what you like. This is the free version of spotify.
I do the same sometimes with YouTube; the hit rate is low enough it works best if I’m doing something else and just pay attention when a banger comes on.
Though I've heard of it, I'm not familiar with Spotify. I am, however, turned off by "suggestions" as I get those from, say, Amazon, which says that because I purchased a product or watched a movie I might like a different product or different movie, which often have nothing whatsoever to do with what I bought or watched, but seem to be what Amazon wants to push.
So does Spotify push out stuff they want you to listen to? Or what is kind of like what you already listen to? 5% success rate sounds like it's the former.
To clarify the 5% success rate is based on a pretty high bar of music/artists/songs that I would purchase or seek out to listen too. If we move the bar to "enjoy" and wouldn't mind hearing again the rate goes to like 70% and if we move it to "wouldn't change the channel on the radio" its like a 95% success rate.
I think their algorithm is much much better than more general recommendation algos that a company like Amazon has. Its a very specific topic and they have a ton of data on what other people are listening too. I also think the data they have has a much better signal than amazon or google. If someone listens to artists A often and listens to artist B often and the two artists are in the same genre, it's pretty likely that someone else that likes Artist A will also like Artist B.
With Amazon, if I shop for light bulbs and then shop for hats, that says basically nothing about what someone else who shops for light bulbs would do.
Spotify can also rely on other data like what bands have toured together or performed on the same albums or if the artists have been in a different band before or what music media may say about a band and its influences. Users can also favorite songs/artists/albums or add them to playlists which provide even more high quality data points. I think spotify may also even employ people to create playlists manually to recommend artists. And they dont just recommend the most popular ones, but up and coming artists and even inactive artists. they also have musicians make playlists as well.
Another big benefit is that I can easily keep up with new releases by artists I like but who dont have good internet presence or marketing.
My music taste are alternative rock, punk, and metal with some classic rock and power pop too. Mostly non-radio bands but some big popular bands too (Metallica, Bruce Springsteen, etc). Spotify has been very good at recommending those smaller, non-radio bands to me.
I am sure spotify promotes stuff because they get paid to promote it or because it will get people to use the service more, but I havent found that to be obvious or impact my use/enjoyment of the app.
I'll second the Spotify recommendation, and will add one more resource I use for discovery:
If I find a new artist that's *almost* there, but not quite, I'll type them into here - this site does a sort of "proximity cloud" visualization of similar artists. If you zoom out, you see other clusters. One of my favorite methods is to zoom out til I see two clusters with bands I really like, then explore all the bands in between those clusters in proximity. I've made some solid finds using this.
And here we go... An internal analysis released on Tuesday found that Google’s emissions surged 48% since 2019 as the company ramped up AI. So we haven't seen those wonderful AI-enhanced energy-saving (and energy-creating!) solutions promised by AI industry cheerleaders — yet. And I don't think we will. I wonder if we will also see a rise in generous donations to environmental groups to stave off criticism.
Hiya, I’m Claude. I turn the decayed remains of dead dinosaurs into plastic utterances that are going to make our species like totally *peak* in the next few decades.
Sounds like we should build some more nuclear and solar, then.
I'm extremely not fond of the "we shouldn't do X because it uses energy for a purpose I deem frivolous" argument. The point of electrical power is that we use it for whatever we want. If there isn't enough, build more. If it's too polluting for your tastes, build greener. These are solved problems and have been solved for decades.
Did we have this conversation before? If so, let me restate my position(s) so no one misunderstands where I'm coming from.
1. Whatever the latest snakeoil they're selling, I'm tired of technology bullshitters. I've been around Silicon Valley long enough to recognize the techno pump-and-dump routine. When the AI bubble pops we could see an economic downturn as big as the DotCom bust. The individuals and entities with founder stock will get out before the feces hits the rotating circulation devices — the rest of us get screwed as our 401K's tank. And, yes, I suspect that people like Sam Altman are running a long con in the tradition of Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried.
2. Unless someone can prove otherwise, my instinct is to lump the fusion-power-is-just-around-the-corner hucksters and the quantum computing twiddlers into the same class of venture capital remoras as the ones above.
3. Well, we live in a capitalist society that is the *best of all possible worlds*, and we should just suck it up if this crew crashes the economy (#snarkasm). But who the heck is going to finance these new power plants? OpenAI, Micro$oft, etc will come cap in hand begging for governmental and regulatory subsidies. So that will come out of our pocket as either higher prices for electricity or higher taxes.
4. BTW, I'm pro-Carbon. The trouble with (most) humans is that they assume that things have always been the way they are now. But atmospheric CO2 levels are the lowest they've been since the Permian — and the recent greening of the earth shows that angiosperms (which evolved when CO2 levels were 4x-5x higher) are responding well to increased Carbon inputs. Sea levels are rising, but if we look at geologically stable coastlines, so far we haven't seen any acceleration yet (despite what some alarmists are claiming).
5. I'm also pro-Fusion (I'm just tired of all the bright promises that haven't panned out). Our high-energy civilization depends on cheap energy inputs. At some point, fossil fuels will become scarce and become economically unviable. As Charlie Stross pointed out (I'm paraphrasing him), a world economy based on renewables will put us all back to 1980s East German living standards — if we're lucky. The US government needs to fund a massive fusion initiative like the Apollo program or the Manhattan Project before it's too late.
> And, yes, I suspect that people like Sam Altman are running a long con in the tradition of Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried.
Wait, have you or anyone you know actually used GPT4 or equivalents? There is most assuredly a product there, of frankly shocking breadth and facility, that keeps improving on a nearly monthly basis.
From the outside view, essentially every "smart company with trillion dollar scale" is aggressively pursuing this product niche / technology, pouring hundreds of billions into it and hiring literally everyone they can. You think they're all chasing smoke and lies?
There's definitely a layer of hype, I agree, even saying there will be a dot-com-scale crash seems like a reasonable take, but saying it's literally an empty fraud with no underlying product is just not a tenable interpretation.
Yup. ChatGPT and CoPilot are the ones I've used the most. My hobby is SARS-CoV-2, so I query them if I've got a biochemistry, virology, or immunology question I need a quick answer to (so I don't have to wade through Google Scholar). I always ask for references. But I have to doublecheck everything they give me because roughly 25% of the references seem to be made-up bullshit (err, I man hallucinations). And we've got a chemist and an etymologist who regurly comment on these open threads. And they found that the bullshit/hallucination quotient is pretty bad for their specialties, too (higher than mine). I can't trust these apps to give me a correct answer.
And I had an interesting interaction with GPT3.5 a few months back. I asked when the first official COVID death was in the US. It gave me a Februrary date. I asked it for references, but the references gave me an early March date. I told it that those references indicated a March date, and to please correct it's response. It thanked me and said it would. I asked other people to check in an see if it had corrected the response, and it had. But later on, I discovered that earlier February COVID deaths had been identified through stored blood samples. So GPT happened to right, but it didn't have the references to back up its statements. And because I "corrected" it, it's now giving the wrong answers. I'm a bit embarrassed about this whole thing, but I shudder to think what sort of bullshit information is being recirculated in these LLMs as fact.
The big fish are running after AI because it's shiny new tech, shiny new tech makes money, and whoever is in on the ground floor is gonna make $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
Others see the big fish going for AI and they follow because if the big fish think there is money there, then the smaller fish will jump on the bandwagon. A lot of them are going to go belly-up.
We don't yet know if it's going to be a bubble. The dotcom bubble started off great, too. Before the collapse of the stock market in the Great Depression, everyone thought they would all become rich as well. The Internet of Things was going to revolutionise ordinary life. The Metaverse was the wave of the future (dunno how it's doing re: VR but I haven't seen the rest of the ambitious programme being touted very much recently). We were all going to be living in the flying cars virtual reality robots doing our drudge work four hours a day for four days work week future in the 21st century. And then we got to the 21st century, and turns out we still need to get a job and go to work and earn a living and there aren't any robots scrubbing the bathroom and doing the laundry for us while we do that.
I think AI will work but not as most of the hyperbole imagines it will work, either to create utopia or dystopia. Somebody on another site talked about how it helps them by writing 70% of the boring business code so they can work on more interesting projects. If it gets kicked up to "can write 90% of the boring grindwork", then you'll only need the code monkeys to fix up the remaining 10% for "good enough" purposes.
I think a lot of people will get laid off because you simply won't need as many "software engineers" to supervise the AI. The big superstar programmers will do fine, until/unless AI ever really becomes creative and innovative.
So yeah, I think a lot of white collar jobs will go, and we'll see more of what has been going on recently - somehow 'the economy' is going gangbusters but ordinary people feel that they're not doing as well. The big fish early adopters will make their trillions. The small fish will lose their shirts. AI will change the world but very probably not in the "and it cured cancer, solved poverty, war, aging, death, free energy and now we're all rich and uplifted" dreams, *or* "now we're all paperclips" fears.
But just because a lot of greedy people are throwing money at a thing is no reason to believe the thing can never end up like the South Sea Bubble.
Also, it is possible that sort-of kind-of mostly usable customer service AI will be pressed into service as part of corporate enshitification initiatives in many, many companies, as they lay off human customer service people. This could have the net effect of paying OpenAI's bills from all these lesser companies, while the experience of the average person trying to get some problem solved gets worse (maybe a bit worse, maybe a lot worse).
> But atmospheric CO2 levels are the lowest they've been since the Permian
Find me humans that evolved to live in the Permian and then we can talk.
Come on, there's no way you can actually take this argument seriously. There's a strange disconnect where people will talk about a 9% jump in prices like it's the end of the world, but then go "oh well, Manhattan used to be under a mile of ice, so that's no big deal".
My graduate work was in Human Biology, and I was specifically interested in human evolution (until I moved off to human evolution in response to pathogens). As part of my grad work, I had to take courses in Glacial and Quarternary geology and Pleistocene geology — because the genus Homo evolved in those climates. So, I'm not clueless about what I'm talking about. As an undergrad also took a bunch of paleontology courses.
Anyhew, the vast majority of modern humans depend on agriculture for their food supply, and when it comes to plants we're heavily dependent on angiosperms to meet our plant-based nutritional needs. Angiosperms do better with higher concentrations of CO2. This is why nurseries pump CO2 into their greenhouses to stimulate plant growth. And NOAA's satellite is finding significant greening and an increase in the Earth's vegetative areas.
Also an interesting thing about angiosperms in general is that the stomata get fewer and smaller at higher CO2 levels, which makes them more resistant to drought because it lowers transpiration.
Now let's look at prehistoric, pre-Homo CO2 levels and temperatures. BTW, if we look at the entire Phanerozoic there's only a tenuous connection between atmospheric CO2 and global temps. However, plate tectonics, the movement of continents, and the reconfiguration of ocean basins may have amplified or moderated the effects of CO2 in the past — so, looking at the past may not be a perfect indicator of what will happen if CO2 levels increase to 4x of they are now. Unfortunately, Substack doesn't allow me to post charts and graphs...
Lest you're worried the Antarctic ice sheet will suddenly melt and inundate our coastlines, the Antarctic ice sheet formed when average global temps were 5-6 degrees C higher than they are today. This was at the beginning of the Oligocene — ~35 million years ago — and CO2 levels were >2x than they are today (~1,000 ppm vs today's 430 ppm). At the current rate of increase, we'll rise between 1 and 1.5 degrees by 2200. If we use the IPCC formula, we'll only see about 1 degree, but the IPCC formula uses a twenty-year running average — I think we could see 1.5, but all the climate models have been running too hot (see below). As for CO2 levels, per NOAA, it took 60 years for CO2 levels to rise from 320 ppm in 1960 to 420 ppm in 2020. And the levels are rising at a steady rate. I expect we'll see global CO2 levels up around 455 ppm by 2200.
Per the IPCC AR5 report: “No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies.” This was under a chart that shows almost all the climate models are running too hot. In the IPCC's AR6 they recommend that future climate projections use constrained models because most of the unconstrained models have no predictive value. Plus they've deemphasized global models & instead recommend simpler localized models. Using constrained models, the best estimate growth curve tracks in the lower third of constrained models. But that's closer to reality than the unconstrained models.
As for sea level rise, the longest continuous record of sea-levels is from Wismar, Germany. Per NOAA, we have 175 years of sea level data for Wismar Germany — which is a geologically stable coast. In that 175 years, we've seen no acceleration in the sea-leave rise. It's held a steady 1.44 mm / per year +/- 0.09 mm. And we've been tracking the seal evels for San Francisco for the past 170 years. Again no increase in the rates of sea-level rise. SF shows 1.55 mm/year +/- 0.13. I don't think New York City will be under water any time soon.
You originally said the **Permian**, which humans very definitely did not evolve under.
In any case, you can go much more fine grained than that. Infrastructure, the economy, culture, law, etc. are all adapted to the current circumstances, and major climate shifts impose costs. There isn't any plausible near term chance of climate changes on the order of "Manhattan is under a mile of ice", but it also takes a lot less disruption than that to make humans very unhappy, as the reaction to even minor price changes a few years ago demonstrates.
David Friedman's "lie back and think of all the new farmland in Siberia" argument is cold comfort to anyone who doesn't live in Siberia and it's utterly disingenuous to ignore that fact. And your own "Earth's climate was very different four mass extinctions ago" argument is even worse. I mean, it's a reason to believe that global warming will not literally wipe out all life on earth, but that's an extreme strawman.
Correction. The last time CO2 levels were almost this low was during the latter half of the Carboniferous Period, roughly 323-299 million years ago. Of the three major models COPSE and Rothman models all show that Neogene CO2 levels have dropped below the Carboniferous. The GEOCARB III model shows them as roughly equivalent. The margin of error varies over periods, but the margin of error for the Carboniferous numbers is lower than for the subsequent Permian.
And there were some *BIG* ice ages at the end of the C and the beginning of the P. Of the Earth's two continents at the time (Laurasia and Gondwanaland), the largest, Gondwanaland, started south of the equator with half land mass plonked in the south polar regions. Ice sheets stretched as far north as 35º S latitude (by some estimates). Pleistocene Glaciers reached as far south as 37º N, but covered less actual land mass than the Gondwanaland glaciers.
Later, CO2 levels rose above 2,000 ppm after a bout of volcanism ended the Permian Period. And they stayed above 2,000 ppm (getting as high as 2,500 ppm) until the end of the Cretaceous. They dropped slowly thereafter to roughly 750 ppm 35 million years ago (not 1,000 ppm like I said above) about the time the Antarctic ice mass began to form. During the entire 538 million years of the Phanerozoic (the time that multicellular life has dominated the planet's ecosystems), CO2 levels have only been this low during the Carboniferous and the Pleistocene/Holocene. There weren't any angiosperms during the C. And angiosperms do not grow optimally at the low CO2 levels we have today.
I just don't see climate change making humans very unhappy any time soon. More food is a good thing. Current trends show that sea levels won't be drowning our coastlines in our lifetimes or our children's children's lifetimes. I'd suggest there is no reason to freak out about global warming. Yes, it will change the world in ways we can't anticipate, but it will be slow enough that we will be able to adapt.
Well, I couldn't possibly say whether AI will have a big long-term impact. I think it will, based on how I've been able to use it, but I'm just some guy. I do agree that people just randomly assuming fusion is on deck are being irresponsible. Perhaps it will, I hope it will, I know some smart people are working on it, but there's no reason to assume anything here.
If the government ends up subsidizing a massive expansion of generation capacity... well, first, that'll be the least destructive thing the government has done in quite a while so count your blessings, and second, that's a win-win because even if the glorious AI future doesn't happen, then as the joke goes, "you mean, we built a robust and expansive electrical grid, developed advanced generation technology, repaired our sagging infrastructure, and it was all for nothing??"
Interesting approach to the whole CO2 thing. I've decided to take a position of ignorance on the matter myself as my only strong feeling is that all the worst people in the world are on the greenhouse alarmist side so emotionally I want to take the opposite side just to spite them.
Maybe it's because I spent the first 40 years of my life being needlessly alarmed by alarmists that I've become desensitized to alarmism in my old age.
I'm the same way. I do think that weather events have changed very greatly recently, but is this the End of Civilisation as we know it? Have to wait and see how that works out.
We as in the United States. I don't care about the details: if it's government-subsidized, I'll happily pay the taxes. We needed more electrical power anyway.
Nothing to do with libertarianism and mutual defense isn’t an example of an externality.
An externality is when a business creates a profit but the attendant costs are borne externally. Pollution is an example. Of course Google pays taxes and maybe that would pay for the cost of the extra carbon but it would be better if Google could finance carbon free data centres itself, particularly at a time when people are dubious about the benefits of AI.
i've been thinking of social media and, particularly the groupings people sort themselves into. i know a few companies have probably sorted users into different buckets each with tendencies - like personality etc. have any companies shared this research?
if there is a better way to do social media (i've been wracking my brain over all the options), i thought it might have something to do with how people are sorted into these buckets unknowingly and letting them live in their own islands. not sure where to get more info on this data outside taking a job at one of the companies however
there must be a better type of social media, but geographic isn't it. interests seem better, but maybe there's some type of groupings in the data that we unknowingly fall into that would be a better grouping
Geographic actually has a lot going for it. Our local environments would be less terrible and disorderly if people were paying more attention to them on their dopamine boxes. Plus you might make some real friends, not just Facebook "friends."
What's your definition of "a better type"? And what do you find wrong or lacking in today's social media platforms? They seem to work the way they were designed. So I assume you're want to engineer a different (psychological? moral? political?) effect on its users?
Plain text is from the start of the campaign, square brackets are updates. Short version: we are on the verge of an historic collapse in the Tory vote (smallest share of the vote for a major party since WW2 and beyond). Labour are starting from a very low base and Starmer isn't popular, so a landslide isn't absolutely certain. Smaller parties will do well especially the Lib Dems & Reform, but not the SNP.
Labour strongholds
Obviously the tories aren't going to win any seats here. Given discontent re: Gaza, the odd independent might do better than expected, especially in university towns. I expect the Greens to keep Brighton Pav., possibly win in Bristol and possibly for Galloway to keep Rochdale. Corbyn will struggle in north london because of bad memories. Low turnout will depress Labour vote but Tory collapse and strong Reform performance will mean it won't matter. Lib dems under Kennedy/Campbell might have capitalised on Gaza but those days are long gone. Starmer is a much better Lib Dem than Ed Davey and they won't take any Labour seats…[Ed Davey's campaign has actually been kind of impressive, winning the argument by going down a waterslide, but still, they aren't going to win votes from Labour's left]
Conservative strongholds
…but the Lib Dems have been gaining ground in places like Maidenhead over several decades - there could be some breakthroughs, especially if Labour voters bury the hatchet and vote tactically. [08/06 - Reform polling very well indeed, which makes a Tory vote split more likely] Labour also have been gaining ground in richer areas in the last decade but gains like Kensington or Canterbury under Corbyn will be harder to come by as the party abandons its ‘luxury beliefs’ on tax etc. [03/07 - tory collapse so profound this may not make any difference]
South West
The Lib Dems lost big here in 2015, but this is their home turf in a lot of ways, often in second place rather than Labour and they are due a comeback - Labour voters may find tactical voting to get rid of e.g Jacob Rees-Mogg irresistible. [Davey’s very visible campaign will help at the margins]
Scotland
SNP are in decline after a long period of dominance, Labour will capitalise, possibly Lib Dems in places, but the tories are nowhere - Scottish tories have never really recovered from the Thatcher era, except for a brief surge under the maverick Ruth Davison
Marginals: ‘Red Wall’
Labour will win big - Reform vote will hurt the tories, places like Sedgefield, Hartlepool were highly unusual tory gains due to a combination of brexit, populist promises, Corbyn’s ‘southerner’ socialism and Boris’s personal charisma. Starmer has done enough to ensure these historic Labour seats will revert to type.
Other marginals
Now then. It's not obvious to me that Starmer has enough personal popularity, or inspires enough loyalty in his base, to get the Labour vote to where it needs to be in the true marginals. There is a long way to go in these seats, and internationally it is very much the Right that is in the ascendancy, making Labour's near 2:1 advantage over the tories in the opinon polls a puzzle. My sense is the tories as a party have more money [wrong, as it turns out] and better targeted Internet campaigns, and core strengths on tax & immigration which go back decades and are the kind of thing people lie to pollsters about [in this instance, anti-immigration vote risks being split by Reform]. Starmer & Reeves have worked hard to improve Labour's image on tax, but it has been bungled - their approach seems overly keen, pissing off the base whilst seeming wishy-washy to the people they are trying to impress. In the end Starmer backed Corbyn and that may put a ceiling on how many normies he can convince. But obviously the tories have their problems too, they have neutered their immigration advantage with the chaotic Rwanda scheme and Natalie Elphicke's defection may therefore prove to be the final nail in the coffin (not that Labour supporters will thank her for it). But the tories have introduced photo ID laws which will disenfranchise likely Labour voters without a passport or driving license - we could be in for a long night of re-counts and legal disputes [the result doesn't seem like it will be close enough as things stand]. A lot will depend on whether Reform voters stick with the tories or not. [And it seems they are not, for now][22/06 - tories on 20%, reform on 17%!!!]
Wales
Labour has been in power in the Senedd since its’ inception and it's hard to see anyone else getting much of a look in for Westminster either - the tories squandered their brexit advantage (Wales voted leave) and Plaid Cymru can't seem to match the success of the SNP.
Reform
Who is voting reform? Brexiteers, but there are two kinds - working class anti-immigration folks and rural/suburban traditional conservatives. In the Red Wall, Reform Vote can only help Labour, unless they do so well they can overtake Labour in places (not impossible with 17% of the national vote). Bolsover could stick with Lee Anderson, for example. In marginal seats, you would think high info tories would stick with the party to take the edge off Labour's majority [the tory campaign has increasingly focused on not giving Starmer a supermajority, and this seems the best they can do]. Ironically the tories may be more at risk in areas with historic tory support - as one Reform voter put it to me, “it doesn't matter how we vote here, so we may as well vote Reform”, but that could be a risk.
Predictions
Overall, I expect Labour to be the largest party (90%). [95%][99.99%]
I expect they will get an overall majority (60%) with a chance of a hung parliament (20%) or a landslide (20%)
[Polling currently shows Sunak below 25%, below Michael Foot & William Hague, and Starmer above Blair. Raising odds to 65% on an overall majority, lowering hung parliament to 15%, no change on landslide for now]
[22/06 - Seriously poor tory numbers, 20% to 17%. Lowering hung parliament to 10%, overall majority-but-not-a-landslide to 70%, landslide unchanged at 20%]
[03/07 - at this point the polls have been so consistent I have to update on a landslide - 25%, hung parliament 5%]
I suspect the margins of victory will be so large that it won't make that much difference as it turns out - Labour will just undo the ID laws and lower voting age to 16
Why does the US struggle to perform in soccer? It's a big, rich country, where soccer is broadly played. That might not add up to a world-beating team, but the US does just fine in ice hockey, a game it barely bothers to care about. So what's the problem in soccer?
It takes time to build up a pool of talent, and really get grassroots involvement. I think the US is starting to get that with home grown players and young players, but that will still take time. There was. and may still be, a great reliance on overseas stars at the end of their careers coming to professional American teams to be the big attractions, but that's not the way to grow the sport.
Just being a big, rich country isn't enough, though. Why is Brazil blessed by the soccer gods? Who can say, exactly? I'm not familiar enough with American soccer structure re: youth teams and local leagues and coaching styles to say if they're doing anything differently. I would have had a suspicion that American sports loves statistics a little too much and that would affect the style of soccer, but every country now is trying to do the statistics thing.
That's not to say that having a ton of money to throw at it doesn't help, there have been allegations of rich owners coming in and "buying trophies" for clubs by hiring away the cream of the players from other clubs with salaries that can't be matched.
EDIT: A modern complaint is that European clubs are poaching the cream of African talent by the same metric; offering crazy sums of money that you just can't get back home - if you manage to make it in the new country and playing for your new team. Not everyone does.
Forbes ranking of current "most valuable" football clubs (which doesn't always line up neatly with *best* clubs, but is close enough, though poor old United are in the doldrums these days and yes, I'm laughing quietly about that):
Ya know, people say “Fancy a game of football?” and we suit up with our shoulder pads and helmets and all and then you hand us this round ball and we get all confused.
I dont follow it that closely but from friends that do, US Soccer's national team is very poorly managed. Even with more talent coming in, that can't help.
How are you defining "barely bothers about ice hockey?" Definitely not my intuition as an outsider. Depends on the state, no? (Ice rather than water, I mean)
Hank's answer is in probably the biggest reason: soccer is not a big deal in the US relative to the big four North American professional team sports (American football, baseball, basketball, and ice hockey), but is a huge deal in much of the rest of the world, so the best American athletes go into the big four (or into a potentially lucrative individual sport like boxing, tennis, or golf), while the world's best soccer players mostly don't wind up in the US and the best athletes in a lot of other countries do go into soccer.
A secondary consideration is that intentional athletic competitions besides the Olympics don't really get much attention in the US, probably because the big popular sports are peculiar to the US and maybe Canada at the top levels of play (*), so the North American or US championships are de facto world championships for those sports.
(*) Baseball is also a significant professional sport in Japan, South Korea, and several Latin American countries, but the best players tend to get poached by American (or Canadian) MLB teams.
I wouldn't think that the body types that dominate professional basketball and American football would do well in soccer? But the pipeline effect might mean that younger people who could be top soccer players are funneled into other sports, where they do well but are eventually weeded out.
When watching "Welcome to Wrexham" last year, I poked around on Wikipedia looking at the various levels of association football, and there's something like 11 levels probably, but it's unclear whether anyone actually knows. It's an incredible grassroots system, and I'm not sure we have anything like it in America. Maybe baseball came close once upon a time
The bigger the base of the sales funnel, the more prospects who make it to the final round. I.e. it's easier to find a one-in-a million athlete when the pool of interested fans is tens of millions, rather than literally ten.
Baseball and tennis seem like they would compete most directly with soccer in terms of similar talents and body types. Hockey and golf also seem like they'd have significant overlap.
Baseball definitely used to have a more grassroots system of independent minor leagues, but the combination of the major league farm system, international scouting, and television broadcasts have taken out much of the middle of the market. There are still a ton local amateur leagues for both children and adults across a wide range of skill/competitiveness levels, as well as high school and college teams, but there's much less of a market for minor league baseball as a spectator sport.
USA is ranked 11 out 210 according to FIFA? So seems more than fine to me. Even better than most countries. You can't expect every country to be top tier at every single thing.
You are right, but that just makes the rankings highly suspect. Germany is 16th and Switzerland is 19. Both are in the quarter finals of the Euros. Either would defeat the US team with their reserve team. Ireland at 60 would expect to best the US.
I assume these rankings are not weighted. The US plays easy teams and Germany plays tough teams.
I'm not so sure we'd beat the US. The US has had good teams, I think the management is the problem as someone stated above. Ireland is stuck with being a small country with a small population, heavy reliance on getting British players (via the granny rule) who are playing in top tier clubs to play for the national team, and a very wildly varying track record from "couldn't win against a team of Boy Scouts" to "we made it ma, top of the world!" qualifying for the World Cup.
The US does not struggle in women's soccer. Per Wikipedia:
> The nine FIFA Women's World Cup tournaments have been won by five national teams. The United States have won four times. The other winners are Germany, with two titles, and Japan, Norway, and Spain with one title each.
As others have noted, among men's sports in the US, soccer is about fifth tier. Among women's sports, it probably no. 2.
I was talking to a Brazilian coworker about this last World Cup. Interestingly enough, according to him, women's soccer being popular in the US has encouraged South American girls to try out for soccer as well. While soccer was only a boy's sport when he was growing up, now it's become more popular with girls, in part because it's a popular women's sport here and we tend to export that.
So maybe in a decade or so the US will start getting competition in women's soccer.
It competes for the attention of young athletes with basketball, football, baseball, and, to a lesser extent, ice hockey, all of which have higher status in the USA. This competition particularly matters at the high-school level, when athletes usually narrow their focus to one or maybe two sports.
Also, both the national and club teams in Europe are much more likely to recruit players from Africa and South America.
Yeah, not that many young Americans even play ice-hockey, but the international league competition is only with teams from Canada, a country one tenth its size. I don't follow ice hockey but I suspect many of the players on US teams hail from Canada, Russia and Scandanavia. It's like comedy. The best comedians may be Canadian, but they all end up in the USA.
Plus if you're at all sporty, then you can make way, way more money going for the traditional American sports than signing up for soccer. That is going to divert talent (or have parents diverting talent) into "will make millions regularly by the time he's in his early 20s" territory.
The US hockey team is ranked 6th now. Not that many countries play hockey and the US has some states that are near Canada that take hockey seriously at the HS level like MA and MN
I mostly had the club level in mind. A Canadian team hasn't won the Stanley Cup since 1993. At that level, the US dominates. But I'm sure those US teams are full of Canadian players. It's analogous to European soccer at the club level.
This fundamentally seems correct. To expand on this, it always surprised me to find that guys like Brock Lesner from UFC and WWE or Roman Reigns from WWE were totally viable NFL talents or Patrick Mahomes from the NFL was drafted by the MLB.
There really do seem to be a small number of extreme athletes every generation who are viable superstars in multiple sports. Those are the guys who would win you the World Cup but they're all making 10x the money in the NFL or something.
In a round-robin soccer tournament, every team plays every other team once. Winning is 3 points, ties are 1 points each, loss is 0 points, the winner of the tournament is the team with the most points. In one tournament, 25 teams played, and there was a sole winner (that is, got more points than everyone else). Amusingly, it turned out that the winner lost to every one of the worst K teams (in terms of points they got during this tournament). What is the maximum K for which this can happen?
As a bonus, find a general answer for N other than 25 (I haven't tried this).
Yrg gur jvaare or pnyyrq N, gur tebhc bs X jbefg grnz or O naq gur tebhc bs gur erznvavat 24-X grnzf or P.
X>=fvkgrra vf vzcbffvoyr orpnhfr bs gur sbyybjvat:
Va gung pnfr N unf ng zbfg (24-16)*3=24 cbvagf
naq gur gbgny ahzore bs cbvagf sbe O Havba P vf ng yrnfg (24 pubbfr 2)*2+16*3=600 (guvf vf nffhzvat rirel zngpu va O Havba P vf n gvr nf gung bhgpbzr vapernfrf gur gbgny ahzore bs cbvagf gur yrnfg, urapr guvf vf n ybjre obhaq ba gur gbgny cbvagf va O havba P)
O havba P unf 24 zrzoref, gurersber gur nirentr cbvag vf 600/25=25, gurersber, gurer fubhyq or ng yrnfg bar grnz univat gung znal cbvagf, gurersber N pna'g unir orra gur birenyy jvaare jvgu gurve ng zbfg 24 cbvagf.
X=svsgrra vf cbffvoyr, sbe rknzcyr jvgu gur sbyybjvat bhgpbzrf:
(Va guvf pnfr O unf svsgrra ryrzrag, naq P unf avar ryrzragf)
Yrg Q or fbzr 9 ryrzrag fhofrg va O.
Cnve rirel grnz va Q jvgu bar grnz va P. (bar gb bar)
Gur bhgpbzrf:
Rirel grnz va Q ybfrf ntnvafg vgf cnve va P, ohg gvrf ntnvafg rirel bgure grnz va O havba P naq jvaf ntnvafg N
Gurersber n grnz va Q unf: 22+3=25 cbvagf
Rirel grnz va O/Q gvrf jvgu rirel bgure grnz naq jvaf ntnvafg N
Gurersber n grnz va O/Q unf 23+3=26 cbvagf
Rirel grnz va P jvaf ntnvafg vgf cnve va Q, gvrf ntnvafg rirel bgure grnz va O Havba P naq ybfrf ntnvafg N
Gurersber n grz va P unf 3+23=26 cbvagf
Grnz N jvaf ntnvafg rirel grnz va P naq ybfrf ntnvafg rirel grnz va O.
Gurersber Grnz N unf 9*3=27 cbvagf.
Gur svsgrra grnzf jvgu gur ybjrfg cbvagf (O, gubhtu gurer ner gvrf) nyy jba ntnvafg N
Fbeel va gur nobiir pbagehpgvba, V zvfpnyphyngrq gur cbvagf bs grnzf va P, nf jevggra gurl jbhyq bayl unir 25 cbvagf, fb lbh unir gb punatr n plpyr bs gvrf va P gb jva-ybfrf, gb vapernfr rirel grnz'f cbvag ol 1 gb 26.
The problem here is that vs lbh punatr na vagen-P gvr gb n jva/ybff, gur jvaare tbrf sebz gjragl svir gb gjragl frira naq N vf ab ybatre gur fbyr jvaare.
Instead of 2 ties a team will have a win and a loss, which is a net gain of one point. To elaborate: I mean "changing a cycle of ties in C to win-loses" the following way: (Presented with 5 teams for simplicity)
Before the operation:
1 2 tie
2 3 tie
3 4 tie
4 5 tie
5 1 tie
is our cycle
after the operation:
1 2: team 1 win, team 2 lose
2 3: team 2 win, team 3 lose
3 4: team 3 win, team 4 lose
4 5: team 4 win, team 5 lose
5 1: team 5 win, team 1 lose
You can see that every team got a win and a lose instead of 2 tie, which is a net gain of 1 point.
This kind of operation is often useful in these kind of problems. It's also useful to know that a complete graph with n vertices has floor((n-1)/2) edge-disjunct hamiltonian cycles to know how many times can I use this operation on some subset of vertices (I used this when analysing the general case)
Hmm, good point. I agree you're able to envfr nyy bs tebhc P gb gjragl-fvk, ohg abgr gung fbzr bs lbhe tebhc O nyfb fgnlf ng gjragl-fvk (fvk bhg bs svsgrra). Gurersber vg'f abg pyrne gung gur O grnzf pna or pnyyrq "gur svsgrra jbefg-enaxvat grnzf" - vg qrcraqf ba ubj lbh enax gur vqragvpny-cbvagf grnzf. V guvax gur vavgvny pbaqvgvbaf nera'g anvyrq gvtug rabhtu. Zlfrys, V gevrq gb qb jung lbh qvq naq pbaivaprq zlfrys V pbhyqa'g ybjre nyy bs O orybj gjragl-fvk j/b envfvat fbzrbar sebz P gb gjragl-frira, fb V qrpvqrq sbhegrra jnf gur orfg.
V qvq fbzr pnyphyngvbaf sbe gur trareny pnfr gbb, gubhtu vg'f abg pbzcyrgr. Hfvat gur zrgubq va zl fbyhgvba bar pna cebir gur x<2/3*(a-1)^2/a obhaq sbe gur trareny pnfr naq guvf obhaq frrzf cerggl funec, bsgra sybbe(2/3*(a-1)^2/a) jbexf. V jbhyq thrff, gubhtu V qvq abg cebir, gung sbe a>25, gur uvturfg x vf sybbe(2/3*(a-1)^2/a) be sybbe(2/3*(a-1)^2/a)-1
Great question, I don't know! I guess I solved it assuming that I need the K worst teams to stand out in a clear way, just as the winner does, but the original instructions (which aren't due to me) underspecify this, I think.
Had an optometrist appointment after my comment in the previous open thread about concerns about my vision. Turns out my myopia (-4.5) hasn't progressed particularly, although somewhat concerningly my astigmatism has (-0.75/-1). Regardless, I would still like to solicit some more people's experiences regarding the best method of correcting my vision—orthokeratology, soft/hard contacts, LASIK/PRK, mainly—given that I am extremely sensitive to the overall visual quality I end up with (near, far, night, blurriness, distortion, etc.). Particularly curious about orthokeratology versus contacts for my prescription, since I overlooked it during my appointment.
I dont know much and had no personal experience, but I've heard LASIK or any other laser surgery is fantastic and changed two of my friends lives. On the other hand, people quite often people report dry eyes.
Also, remember that it works better with bigger defects - it has a certain precision of around 0.5 dioptres (consulted with my optometrist). So you probably won't go to flat 0, but anywhere between -0.5 to +0,5
I used to use orthokeratology lens for ~2 years, and the brand of lens is alpha from Japan. I put it on at night (usually takes 15 minutes to wear), and my vision improved from 4.6 to 5.0 during all day without distinguishable blurriness. Now I change to frame glasses because it's more convenient for a 12th-grade student, and it works fine too. (If you don't want to see things in a faint yellow tone, don't choose an anti-blue light lens.) I heard one guy didn't wash his lens with water clean enough, and he was seriously infected by amoeba, fortunately there was no long-term impact. I live far from America so I don't know if it's viable there.
What do you mean by "4.6 to 5.0"? I'm only familiar with the diopter and 20/20 scale. Do you have any experience with contacts to compare it to as well? Thanks for replying!
The 4.6 thing is actually according to logarithmic visual acuity chart, and I find that it is only used in China😄. I have -1.50 diopter myopia and 0.75 diopter astigmatism.
Note: I will be heading out-of-state for college in the fall. I think my insurance might be out-of-network there, which may eliminate the viability of orthokeratology for me this year since I've read follow-ups quite some time (and through this, limit my options to contacts for the near future since LASIK/PRK are off the table for at least another few years, if ever at all for me). Correct me if ortho-k is still viable though, whether now or later during my undergrad years
How do great works of art arise? How can we create the conditions for them to arise?
I don't think it's just a matter of having talented artists. It seems to be a complicated interaction between the artist, the audience, and the rest of the field. You need an art form (or a genre, or a subgenre) that is new but not too new -- old enough that the possibilities of the genre have been figured out, but not so old that there's no more good ideas left. You also need an audience that is interested and willing to pay for things, whether that's German aristocrats installing court composers or teenyboppers buying rock-and-roll singles.
Is there some way to kick start this sort of thing?
I was thinking about something similar - how to create anything that lasts for thousands of years, like pyramids. There were millions of buildings throughout history, why pyramids or stonehenge lasted, while so many havent? A couple of reasons I noticed:
- Will
Obvious, but most important, someone needs to want the project to happen. In the past, usually kings, who were bored, but also had huge resources and wanted their name to stay in history
- Money, so the artist(s) can focus solely on art
- Cultural significance from the start (or at least before it's destroyed)
If people didn't think Pyramids were great achievements, and later historic landmarks, they would destroy them, because in their minds nothing of value would be lost. Other people protected them from bandits etc, today it's UNESCO
- Value is not absolute, its comparative to the era.
What I mean by that, is building Stonehenge today would take a day. But then, 4-5 thousand years ago? It was a massive project. Similarly, building an average skyscraper isn't that interesting, but if someone used all today's ideas and technology in 1800? They would be lauded as greatest architect of all time.
- Luck
So many things were lost in time by stupid accidents, barbarians, wars etc. People make mistakes, and you definitely need luck for your piece of art to stay.
The reason the pyramids lasted is because they were giant piles of stone in the desert, and thus wouldn't be destroyed by natural causes, and there was no reason for people to destroy them. They were looted of everything valuable almost instantly, but there's no reason to take the rocks themselves.
It's not about the art itself, but about cultural cohesion, captive audiences and shared experiences. A world where 25% of a population experiencing the same great (however you define great) work of art is very different from one where there are 25 equally great works of art, all experienced by 1% of the same population. Empire is over.
I'm referring to Bret Easton Ellis' concept of Empire, which is multifaceted, but part of it describes the period of American history when novels had captive audiences, when you could assume that your culturally aware friends had seen the lates blockbuster and when an episode of a popular TV show could make people cancel their plans so they could stay home and watch it. These days, none of it matters in the same way. Novels, films, TV, videos, we're all in bubbles separated by... something. If I mention any of the top 10 most famous youtubers to my parents, they'll have no idea who any of them are. If I mentioned any of the 25 most famous actors of 25 years ago to my grandparents, they'd have at least some idea of who I was talking about.
I don't think you're wrong, by the way, I just didn't make it clear which "Empire" I was referring to. Also, none of this is a value judgment. Loving the world as it is... might be the greatest virtue of all.
Brian Eno's concept of "Scenius" is important here. Great works arise in an ecosystem that is conducive to them. Rarely, if ever, does one great artist arise out of nothing.
Some notes from other writing on scenius:
" -Mutual appreciation. Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius as the best kind of peer pressure.
- Rapid exchange of tools and techniques. As something is invented, it is flaunted, then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.
- Success is contagious. When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.
- Local tolerance for the new. The local “outside” does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. Renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone."
Try the African-American Plan: subject a people to centuries of grinding oppression and then slowly, slowly release the pressure, admitting them to social equality. Result: a century of dramatic artistic achievement. The AAs invented three genres of music that swept the world in the twentieth century: jazz, rock n'roll and hip-hop. Take THAT, distinguished conservatories of the world; you can't even beat the ghettos. I mean, it was a shitty thing to do, but wow, the results.
It can't be quite that simple, since there are a lot of oppressed ethnicities, and African-American is the only one with the world-sweeping genres. As noted below, there's major music from the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, but what about Africa?
The combination of oppression and living in a relatively wealthy society might have something to do with it-- the wealthy society means more access to instruments, eventually electronics, and distribution channels.
That's kind of parochial of you. :-). The African diaspora spawned more music than Blues, Jazz, and Rock. It spawned the Afro-Caribbean musical styles: all the Cuban dance music styles, Calypso, Ska, Reggae, Brazilian Samba, Salsa, Bossa Nova, Axé (and a bunch of others that I probably never heard of).
I think you need a pretty quick influx of cash into what had previously been a backwater. Then wait a few decades and you'll have a golden age for art. That's my guess at least.
The basic idea is that your backwater is going to have culture, but no money to produce great works. Then your backwater starts getting money, but no one locally is skilled enough to compete with foreigners. So the locals start buying lots of foreign art. Eventually, the locals mix the foreign stuff with their own local ideas. No one has ever seen this fusion and voila you have a golden age for the arts.
You can also do the same thing within a society when a particular class gets a lot of money. So the merchants start making money, they copy the aristocracy until they eventually decide to make their own art and a golden age ensues.
This doesn't last forever - pretty soon, creativity hits a wall. But that's my general impression of what makes great art.
For a different take: great works of art need at least a full human lifetime to pass before we know them as such. The present is always flooded with art, most of it junk, and no way to separate the gems. We’ll know in 100 years if anything great has been made in the last decade.
OTOH nobody knows how to create conditions for it.
Harry Potter was pretty widely acknowledged as good art, at least for a decade or two. So was Star Wars, the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, the music of the Beatles, …
The trick is recognizing cases where people say "this recent popular thing is art that will be remembered for the ages" ... then it won't.
Anatole France and Émile Zola were both widely popular. France was awarded Nobel prize in literature. Today, their works, unknown. History students have heard of them because of Dreyfus affair.
Technological and economic change can create conditions for new great art. As you allude, those teenyboppers buying rock music was the first generation of teens to have disposable income, but someone also needed to invent the electric guitar for rock-n-roll to exist.
Given all the recent tech media innovation, there's probably plenty of new great art now but we're just too old and it's too new to appreciate it as such. Film wasn't considered art by many people until the late 20th century, whereas today sensitive film artists like Martin Scorsese rant about how it's a disappearing art. I hear people claim video games are art. I couldn't say, I don't play them, but maybe some are. Maybe AI generated art will be considered great in the future. I doubt the AI will get credit for it, but the human prompt artist might.
Perhaps it sounds absurd that video games or AI generated art would one day be considered great art on the level of Beethoven, Van Gogh, Kubrick or The Beatles, but not long ago many laughed at the thought rock-n-roll or the movies were art, or that rap was music.
It does seem like the visual arts are rehashing all the old genres. And popular music hasn't been innovating. We seem to have run out of new ideas, but that doesn't mean that someone can't create a masterpiece of visual art or music within the framework of previous genres.
But I've said it before. Overall our culture is stagnating. We've had not breakthrough discoveries in physics in fifty years. We're still innovating on technology that's was introduced in the mid-20th century. Our political systems are locked into a left-right framework. I wonder if we've reached the limits of human creativity in all fields.
> I wonder if we've reached the limits of human creativity in all fields.
Eh, I just think we're in an especially conformist period, in certain ways. I blame globalization, the Internet, and smartphones. The walls that allowed parallel experimentation have been pulled down, exposing everyone to the withering gaze of the panopticon and the leveling force of the marketplace.
When I read popular descriptions of Spinoza's thought, I think, as someone who normally identifies as an atheist: That's exactly what I believe! God is the universe(s)! The universe is God! We are all small parts of the same Being!
But when I try to read Spinoza's Ethica, I find it too boring to work through the logic of it. A big reason for that is he starts with the assumption that God exists and then focuses on the nature of God. He's coming from a Judaic background with a given belief in God and then describes Him in a way that is unrecognizable as Judaism. (Feel free to correct me if I am wrong about any of this.)
It has been said that you could remove the word "God" from Spinoza's thought without changing anything. That's what I want to see someone do. Are there any neo-Spinozans who approach his philosophy without the starting assumption that God exists?
God is a supernatural alpha male who does magic, has strong opinions on what you should and shouldn't do, sometimes has sex with human girls, and kills or tortures those who refuse to bend the knee and say that he is the bestest. Does it seem to you that universe does any of that?
What exactly is the difference between "a universe that is God" and "a universe that is merely a universe"?
> It has been said that you could remove the word "God" from Spinoza's thought without changing anything.
Go grab a book (maybe it will be easier with a digital version), replace every instance of "God" with "universe", and see what happens? Some sentences will stop making sense, but they probably didn't make much sense in the original version either.
2. There is no dualism and everything is a projection of mind. Not my mind, I'm not a solipsist, but in Berkley's sense that everything exists in the mind of God and we are a small part of that mind.
Is the universe sentient in that it has some great, singular consciousness? Probably not.
One of the key things to do when reading Spinoza's Ethics is *not* to "work through the logic of it." Spinoza apparently thought his geometric presentation was logically valid, but it pretty clearly isn't, and if you try to work through it like you might work through Euclid you'll get bogged down and give up. (This is what happened to me when I first tried to work through Spinoza.) You'll do better if you just keep ploughing through, not worrying about the details until you have a sense of how it all fits together.
I don't think Spinoza starts with the assumption that God exists, or that his Jewish background is particularly important for understanding his philosophical theology. He starts with a bunch of philosophical concepts (the ones laid out at the beginning of Book 1 of the Ethics) and proceeds to show how they are all related to each other. The existence of God ("Deus sive natura") isn't an "assumption," but an inevitable consequence of the concepts he is working with.
(IIRC, he doesn't define "existence" at any point, which might be a problem if you are trying to hold him to the highest standards of philosophical rigour. But as I said above, I think first-time readers are better off if they don't try to follow Spinoza's logic too closely.)
To add an aside to this: all my care for others, my sense of ethics, comes from this intuitive belief that I exist in some very real way in others, human, cow or frog. Without that fundamental intuition, I'd probably be a psychopath who didn't care about others one whit.
Do others *not* intuit this experiential transitivity when they think about ethics?
Not me. My sense of day-to-day ethics comes from an awareness that I have something in common with others. Because I don't want to suffer, I don't want to inflict suffering on anyone else, because all people are, on some fundamental level, like me, and do not want to suffer either. (Do I live up to this ideal? Of course not. But I try to reduce harm.) I lean towards the idea that this "something in common" probably just comes from the biology we have in common, but perhaps there's some sort of spiritual primordial unity from which we all emerge. I am agnostic on that.
(I don't want to argue about the nuances of a concept that I am just very briefly summarizing; I only want to elucidate a potential different pivot point for a moral compass)
I don't believe I exist in others in a meaningful capacity. I suppose I believe there's a frame where we're all one universe with pockets of consciousness, but I still feel attached to my own pocket and don't believe that if I died I'd "live on" in others.
Nevertheless I care deeply about others - honestly this is a core instinct that's prior to any philosophical grounding, but I'm attracted to Copernican arguments and find "conscious beings are important" to be a more elegant and attractive theory than "I am important".
I've only read neo-thomist rebuttals of Spinoza e.g Garrigou-Lagrange, Reality and God: His Existence And Nature. The basic rebuttal is yes, there is a certain unity of being, but divided into potency and act - God is pure act, and contains all being within himself, but as act, with no admixture of potency. Contrariwise there's no such thing as pure potency but there are beings that have so little act they hardly exist at all. Intelligence and will in other creatures have a claim on our consciences because they resemble the unity of being in God, to some extent - intelligence tends to unity through knowledge (“the intellect in act is the object actually known”), meanwhile the will tends to unity by loving the things it has and bringing new things into being. But potency resists being brought into unity - so the unity we have with the material objects around us is limited.
This may possibly be too left field, but the one book I've read that went deep into Spinoza did so by comparing and contrasting his thought with various strands of Indian philosophy. The book is called The Nondual Mind by James H. Cumming, and the full pdf can be downloaded for free (on academia.edu if I remember right). I found it highly interesting.
I was mowing the lawn this afternoon, and I had to maneuver around a few Prunus serotina stumps. This got me thinking about the Acer rubrum tree next to the house that took some major storm damage last year, and will probably have to be cut down so it doesn't fall on the house. I found myself thinking that it would also leave a stump that I would have to deal with. I hadn't done anything about the other stumps, so why should I have anything done with this one?
It struck me that this is sort of the opposite of the sunk cost fallacy. Instead of 'I have already put in work towards X, stopping now would be a waste', it is 'I have not put in work towards X, why start now.' Is there a formal term for this thought pattern?
I would suggest 2 effects here. Status quo bias for not digging up any stumps. and a bias for ignoring incremental progress i.e. clearing half the stumps is not half as good as clearing all the stumps which I cant find a formal name for, but seems strongly related to goal gradient bias
>a bias for ignoring incremental progress i.e. clearing half the stumps is not half as good as clearing all the stumps which I cant find a formal name for
That sounds like the same math as for network effects, "increasing returns to scale". The utility of clearing the first stump is less than 1/Nth of the utility for clearing all N stumps.
Damn me but that Claude Sonnet 3.5 is pretty good isn’t it? I thought I’d test its reading comprehension on a story I’d written — went in with low expectations, having done a similar exercise with ChatGPT not so long ago — and was so surprised by how good it was that I thought it was worth sharing the conversation.
That is pretty impressive. But I feel the need to point out that "DQS" does not mean "Does not compute" so far as I am aware. I also did a quick google search to check. That particular factoid appears to be a hallucination by Claude.
LLMs are aware of the existence of letters. Every letter has a designated token but the tokenizer will use larger tokens if it can. So LLMs don't often see individual letters directly outside of certain contexts.
In the context of acronyms it may sometimes see the tokens for individual letters if the acronym is not common enough to have its own token. I don't know the specifics of how "DQS" and "DNC" are tokenized.
So I rechecked what Claude actually said and while it was somewhat odd I don't think it was fair of me to characterize it as an hallucination as I did. Here's what Claude actually said:
"Yes, I noticed something significant about Daffar Quiu Seh's name. The initials of the name spell out "DQS," which is likely a play on the acronym "****" (Does Not Compute)."
This does seem pretty confused. It's pretty implausible that "DQS" would be a play on the acronym "DNC" but Claude didn't actually claim that "DQS" means "Does not compute" as I had initially thought.
Yeah, I'd be very curious to know what Claude would say if you said gee, Claude, that's not true and is also really farfetched. How'd you come up with it? And depending on the answer, maybe see if it's possible for the thing to "introspect" about the process of grabbing up handfuls of nonsense when it doesn't know the answer. Is saying "I have no idea" somehow in conflict with instructions it was given?
The key insight is that you should begin by collecting data on your weight (via smart scales) and food (via the MacroFactor app). Then once your intuition for how many calories each food has and how it affects your weight, you start a slow diet process. Though I agree with the top comment that Wegovy/GLP-1 can solve the problem just as easily if you can get it and it works for you.
I broke my back ten years ago and was in a brace for two months. The sheer amount of effort needed and time taken to get around my apartment and cook led to a loss of around 8 kgs.
Weight loss expert here. This is an excellent read and I want to point out something you say early on as very important: "Do not try to change your diet just yet! The goal is to build up an intuition for how many calories each food has, as well as how these calories affect your weight."
This is very good advice that comports with a lot of research around how bad people are at estimating their caloric intake. Fascinating read.
A friend of mine who is bilingual in English and Quebecois French says that monolingual English speakers often find their French Canadian accent beautiful and soft, but they find that hilarious because their own accent sounds harsh to them, especially compared to other non-Quebecois French speakers.
Scott, can you please write a guide to using narrative thaumaturgy to get humanity to level-up in coordination ability and slow down AI/avert the meta-crisis?
Alternatively, what do you need to be able to fill your unique niche in helping avert the meta-crisis?
I mean the real-life version of what Dylan Alvarez does in Scott's *Unsongbook*. He tries to be a main character (like Bruce Lee, Arnold Schwarznegger, and Jordan Peterson to some degree), and succeeds by understanding the physics of the "narrative layer of reality", allowing reality to write on him such that reality allows him to write on it.
What drugs have worked for you to make you more social? I’ve tried Phenibut, it has no effect on me whatsoever (tried 1g, 2g, 4g - at the high range I just get a headache and that's it). MDMA works well for this but it makes your pupils look huge even on a low dose. Cocaine somewhat works but its cardiotoxic and also makes you more irritable.
Alcohol sorta works for this but the line between "I'm socializing better" and "I'm kinda drunk" is very thin.
Pheromone colognes tend to focus people's attention on social stimuli. If you go that route don't overdo it (there seems to be a narrow window of positive effect, so less really can be more, as with most colognes.) Also, avoid the 'sexual' colognes since they tend to convey sexual aggression and can cause problems. Choose a 'social' cologne. The specific pheromone musks should ideally be alpha and beta androstenol and possibly DHEAS or DHEA.
It's a mild effect, but as they say: If you don't expect too much, you might not be let down.
From what you wrote here and in all responses, it's most likely not a problem that simply "taking a pill" can fix, you need to fix your approach, and that can be done by yourself or with therapy.
I will generalize here, but there is a huge difference in American and European approach to medicine. In America people want to take a pill to fix the problem. In other countries it is preferred to work with your mind to fix it, and any substance taken is just support to therapy.
In my opinion, just like there is no magic drug to change your beliefs, there is no magic drug to make you "want to talk to people", at least not more than MDMA. You need to want it yourself, and a drug can be just a support in that.
Good thought process but I don’t think that’s the right answer for me. I already talk to a perfectly healthy number of friends and strangers every week. I’ve talked to a therapist and he’s told me his normal methods can’t really help because I don’t have social anxiety per se - I’m already in the top ~40% of people by social skills but I’d like to get to the top ~10% which isn’t what therapists can help you with.
There’s some coaching available but I haven’t found any yet that seemed trustworthy. Closest would probably be the “street approach bootcamps” run by pickup gurus.
I just asked ChatGpT about this but with Chinese medicine or herbs and it came up with nothing. There must be something less intense than MDMA and coke for this. Or it needs to be urgently invented.
Very low doses of psilocybin can be good for this in my experience. I do mean very low — so little you barely notice it’s there at all — especially if you haven’t done it before and especially if you’re drinking.
Thanks. I've tried microdosing shrooms and while the effect is pleasant, it doesn't seem to make me more social. Should I try a higher dose? I've previously tried a dose that's 1/10th of the standard recreational dose.
Hmm, define standard. I’d struggle to do so in any accurate way. My experience is that there is a sweet spot somewhere in the “low” area where you get a sort of euphoric buzz not unlike what you might think cocaine was like if you’d never tried cocaine. Maybe work your way up in 1/10th “your standard recreational dose” increments and see if you get there? Obviously different people react differently to these things…
Believe it or not, I get mine from online Walmart of all places. A third party vendor sells it, name should be OxyPure. It hits me like a brick, and makes me super warm and affectionate whereas normally I am not. Wonderful sleep on it too. Didn't affect one of my other friends though.
Apparently if it goes above 70 F it can denature, so I only order mine in the winter since I don't think Walmart ships it in a chilled environment.
So that I might suggest other things, do you think you are asocial because of anxiety or something that would respond to a downer, or depression or something that would respond to upper?
Well I haven't run tests on it, I just took the seller's word for it. If you want to try it yourself and get back to me I'd be curious what the results were, because I too have been wondering how this is legal, ha
I have a strange form of anxiety. If you put me on stage in front of 1,000 people I'll do just fine. If you give me a job of surveying strangers, I'll easily talk to 100 people in a day without any stress (done that too before). But if I have to do "standard" socializing with strangers at a party or a conference, I get stressed quickly and have a nagging thought of wanting to escape ASAP.
I've tried Xanax, Klonopin and Valium. All three are effective at making me feel relaxed but don't make me more interested in talking to strangers.
Not really. I know what to say, how to say it, when to smile, etc. I just don't like doing it.
Think of it as digging holes in the ground - I can certainly operate a shovel and have dug holes before but if possible I'd rather spend my time doing other things.
If I were a right-wing fascist (which I really am not!) here in the US, I think the most American culture-centric way to assume power would be to set up a private security services company. Which employs lots of veterans. Past fascist movements in other countries have had street brawler groups, but those countries were also much much less armed than the contemporary US is. You want to have an actual armed group, but even US law is a bit leery of paramilitary organizations. (There are some constitutional powers to forbid armed militias that never get used, but are technically on the books).
But you know what US culture & law loves? Private for-profit companies. And the laws around arming security companies seem a bit vague and haphazard to me, even in very blue states. Imagine some charismatic ex-Navy SEAL guy that sets up a legitimate security company- protecting banks, armored cars, etc. And employs large number of trained veterans. Even in super-blue states you can get them permits for weapons regular civilians aren't allowed, you can train together and not arouse suspicion, you can have a compound/headquarters, you have a built-in paramilitary hierarchy, etc. (Yes security guards have to get licenses, but that's not an insurmountable burden). Now you have an armed, trained, disciplined group ready to go, especially in an urban area. Hire some ex-cops too, or offer contracts to off-duty active LEOs, to get on their good side.
This occurred to me while watching an interview with an ex-SEAL who started a private security company in California. Much more realistic model to seize power along with government allies than say the street-brawling Proud Boys. I think every fascist regime has a paramilitary group of supporters outside of the regular military structure
I mean... government, gangs, and security companies are near synonymous. So yes, setting up a private security would certainly be an asset to a coup attempt.
The main difference between the U.S. vs other developing countries (where coups are VERY common) appears to the U.S.'s culture of liberalism. So there probably needs to be an air of legitimacy in order to make a U.S. coup succeed in the long-run.
> If I were a right-wing fascist (which I really am not!) here in the US, I think the most American culture-centric way to assume power would be to set up a private security services company
to the best of my knowledge that was an ancap news story, the fascists are more focused on child culture(think the anti trans story books that were ragebait for twitter) and bidding time for a complete collapse of the woke shitstrom
> But you know what US culture & law loves? Private for-profit companies.
> permits
> blue states
I think your misunderstanding an even slightly to the right of fox news world view looks like, if you valorize killdozer you wont be buying your weapons with a cia paper trail
Once you get a point where theres natural law on the table, *only* a lawyer style ancap will be caring about permits
> built-in paramilitary hierarchy
I think you got cause and effect backwards there, I dont think fascists want a military hierarchy for its own sake, they want a holistic ordered society and thats not quite the same thing
Anyone here remember the Whitmer kidnapping plot, or the occasional story about someone being convicted for attempting to join ISIS? There were more undercover FBI agents involved in those cases than actual criminals, and some of the ISIS "volunteers" would not have gotten involved without the Feds basically entrapping them. The pool of people who want to use violence for political power < the pool of undercover Feds. So you would need a way to weed out the true believers from the people trying to land you in prison for life.
> The pool of people who want to use violence for political power < the pool of undercover Feds
This conclusion does not follow from your premises. The feds being bad at finding the people who want to use violence for political power would also result in groups with large proportions of undercover feds.
It doesn't matter so much how good the FBI is at actually finding violent revolutionaries, it matters that a significant portion of people who would attend the hypothetical violent revolution meeting would be undercover Feds. Although I think the fact that the FBI goes out of the way to entice people to terrorism, even offering them six figure sums of money, suggests there aren't very many potential terrorists in the population.
How do you know your employers will be up for The Revolution when the time comes? Presumably you don’t tell them your true intentions when recruiting them, since that would get you shut down pretty quickly (and also limit your pool of recruits pretty drastically I’d imagine…)
If you're a right-wing fascist who wants power, you're going to have to pick between the right-wing and the fascism.
Society has too many memetic antibodies against right-wing fascism at this point to ever let them gain power, you're going to have to choose either be a right-wing milquetoast or a left-wing fascist.
young angry men have the majority of violence in society, and im sorry to say, that no theres isn't much more immunity on that issue for that population; now I don't think fascism is likely much less in america, but there will be concessions to the right wing, either negotiated or all at once
By now, three generations have been conditioned against right wing authoritarianism since childhood. Thats why a Blue Caesar is more likely than a Red one.
Fascism is by definition a right-wing ideology. You can't have one without the other.
I don't know whether you're used to using "fascism" as a synonym for "any type of authoritarianism", but the things which distinguish fascism from other authoritarian philosophies *are* the right-wing parts.
Or are you used "right wing" in the impoverished "left and right are descriptors of how 'woke' you are" sense?
Regardless, either way, both cops and vets firmly skew to the right in the US.
I don't see why you only see this spectrum as a line, with left and right. There are many more dimensions, all at right angles to each other. Where do monarchies and feudalism fit in left and right? What about religion?
Many things are frameworks to trick the populace into giving power to those that want it.
I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say. Left/Right *is* one of the dimensions you're talking about (generally the principal one). That's the concession you make when even bringing up the terms "left" and "right" - that it's a single dimension that we use to approximate politics. You can decompose it into other dimensions, but it still remains the highest-weighted vector in politics-space.
>Where do monarchies and feudalism fit in left and right?
Considering the terms "right-wing" and "left-wing" literally originated from the seating arrangement of French pro- and anti-monarchists, that should be self-evident:
>Within the left–right political spectrum, Left and Right were coined during the French Revolution, referring to the seating arrangement in the French National Assembly. Those who sat on the left generally opposed the Ancien Régime and the Bourbon monarchy and supported the Revolution, the creation of a democratic republic and the secularisation of society, while those on the right were supportive of the traditional institutions of the Ancien Régime
Sorry for not being more clear. I mean that liberal and conservative are on the same line on opposite sides, but other ideologies must be on other dimensions. You're correct on the origination of the terms for left and right, but their meanings have now evolved, and in the US I doubt either side would be in favor of monarchy or feudalism. But some PEOPLE would be in favor of such, and other forms too, such as communism and anarchy. And some of those views will have nothing to do with other viewpoints, rather than being on opposite sides.
>but their meanings have now evolved, and in the US I doubt either side would be in favor of monarchy or feudalism.
Except the counterexample to that should be familiar to any long-term reader of this blog. Mencius Moldbug, Scott's favorite far-right neoreactionary to talk about, was literally a neomonarchist. And it's specifically because he's far-*right*.
Allow me to continue our metaphor of a vector in politics-space.
I think you're getting hung up on the notion of "left" and "right" being distinct things, rather than descriptions of a spectrum that we use to measure ideology and normalize to zero at an arbitrary point. Specifically, when you zoom out to compass the full spectrum of political philosophy, there's no such thing as "opposite sides", only degrees of separation.
The reason why (e.g.) monarchismis not more common is because the centroid of American politics is Liberalism (some would specify Neoliberalism), which is what most modern people think of as bog-standard democracy. (Both Democrats and Republicans are, by any object measure, essentially neoliberals, excepting their most fringe elements). Democracy is one of the core components of the more composited "left and right" vector - *generally*, more "left" means more democracy, more right means left.
But as I said, liberal democracy is the norm in the modern world, so we normalize to zero instead at a different point. For the US, it's explicitly between the two major parties. In general, though, it's MOSTLY determined by disagreements between people who think capitalism is great, and those who think it's deeply flawed, and we should have a more democratic allocation of resources.
But that's only because the question of "is the democratic process, in general governance, good?" was such an uninteresting question due to consensus among most (but not all, obviously - see "Project 2025") that the answer was obviously "yes'. Because of that, the discourse had to find a different, more specific component of the "left/right" vector to argue about. But if you try to include an ideology like fascism, you end up having to re-include the question of "is democracy good Y/N?" and add that onto the pile of things which measure "rightness".
("But 'communism' is autocratic and it's 'left'!" you say, to which I reply: sovietism and maoism and state capitalism all are, yes, which is why they have to be judged by the other components of the "leftness" vector, and why people generally like to peel off "auth/lib" as the first decomposition of the composite left/right vector)
The Mafia traditionally runs construction crews. Access to heavy equipment, legitimate excuses to cut off travel to and from your targeted locations, a source of loud noises to cover other loud noises, power over politicians who authorized repairs that are now running as long as you want them to.
For a while, in my blue city, the security companies really did act like a fully functioning protection racket. They had turf, they got paid by the people in their turf, and they actually delivered on the "protection" bit. It was kinda creepy, especially when I realized that the way they divided up turf was identical to what was described in a mafia story from 40 years ago.
The issue with this plan is that you are trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once:
Operate as an open, public business while simultaneously doing secret recruitment of people who both ideologically agree with you and would also be on board with some kind of a violent coup.
If we just take for a moment as given that enough veterans that fit those two requirements exist (I am skeptical), you have to somehow weed them out from veterans who _don't_ agree with those two views. And you have to do it as part of normal hiring practices while also managing to not raise any suspicion from the FBI etc.
I’d imagine you sus out some political leanings during the interview process, and then over time as you build relationships the agreeable folks get promoted/transferred to a common area of the company. Others leave or remain in some money making but not political areas of the company.
I remember someone, not sure who, saying that the most American form of political organizing is a cult (just thinking from the influence of Freemasonry to early politics onwards to current QAnon stuff), so better get some of that stuff there, too.
Indeed, a bit ago I thought about the whole "how do the megarich ensure that the private security staff in the bunkers remains loyal if SHTF" thing, and the only thing that really came to mind - apart from trying to preserve the current society to the maximum ability allowed by the levels of S - was establishing a cult. Indeed, some of the actions of current megarich might already be interpreted that way...
Aiming for a cult of thugs is one thing, but how would you organize a cult of rocket scientists and aerospace engineers? You'd need some sort of compelling vision to keep them motivated...
Yup. I'd seen similar analyses. Much appreciated. Ouch, it irks me to see fellow STEMM people supporting one of the most destructive ideologies around.
What would their next move be? I'd guess what they would ultimately need to do is change the Constitution so that it would give near absolute power to the executive. Perhaps they could create enough chaos around an election that say, one party could claim they won a supermajority in Congress which could then vote on constitutional amendments.
I can't imagine a situation where the US military wouldn't step in and defeat them, but perhaps a charismatic leader could also win over the majority of the military? Alternatively, after the military steps in, we could have martial law that never ends and proceed straight to something like fascism that way...
I agree that a private security company probably works as a first step. It would be hard to get anyone in the military to defect unless there was already some kind of real force they could defect to.
Yes, I'm with Erica Rall's post- the idea is that this security company would be just 1 actor in a constellation of different fascist groups, acting together. Not the only actor
My play would be to ally with a mainstream political movement, offering security for political rallies and the like, paid for out of campaign funds. Start out providing ordinary security, then provoke some Toxoplasma of Rage be being a little too rough while bouncing hecklers. The controversy raises your profile and helps radicalize both your allies and your opponents, but you haven't done anything that a sympathetic prosecutor can't overlook.
Once people have had a chance to get used to this, get your allies to start holding rallies in places where people on the other side are likely to counter-protest. Either wait for some people among the counter protestors to get violent or plant your own false-flag agents among them, giving you an excuse to bust heads. Then run the classic political street violence playbook from late Weimar Germany.
Actually taking power depends on your political wing either actually winning an election or having a saleable-to-mainstream-supporters claim to having the election stolen out from under them. In the former case, once in office your political wing appoints your people to key positions in the military and police, or maybe repeals the Anti-Pinkerton Act and hires you directly to suppress "riots". A "stolen" election scenario is harder, since you'll need to violently seize power, and that's really hard in the US because of how decentralized we are, unless you have really strong political cover within Congress and state governments.
Someone who got elected under the banner of your movement's political wing, or at least someone who sees your group as more or less on their political side.
That is indeed a weakness of this plan as applied to the near-future US. You're right that the kinds of urban areas where street-violence muscle would be most useful mostly don't generally have the kinds of prosecutors who would shrug off right-authoritarian street violence.
My plan was pretty much off the cuff and mostly templated off of what I know about the Nazi SA and the Steel Helmets in the 20s and early 30s. But that was an environment where prosecutors and judges were largely holdovers from the Kaiserreich who were often aristocratic conservatives inclined to give a pass to any broadly right-wing opposition to the Weimar coalition.
“There’s a strange irony at the heart of the NBA’s new TV rights deal. The league stands to increase its annual broadcasting fees by 2.5 times what they received under their previous broadcasting agreement. And one might assume, based on these numbers, that ratings — the mechanism that is generally used to measure the financial value of an entertainment product — also increased since the last deal.
But the exact opposite happened. Over the past several years, ratings remained relatively stagnant, between 1.6 and 1.8 million per primetime game. And in the years that preceded the NBA’s last TV deal in 2014, average viewership declined by nearly 1 million viewers, a decrease of around 36%.”
...Brent Magid, the CEO of media consulting firm Magid, has an answer. Basically, the networks entering into the new media agreement (ESPN, Amazon, and NBC) are doing so because they would rather not lose the product to their competitors. As Magid said, “Yes, there’s risk at these fee levels given recent ratings, but they are also looking at the downside of the games being on competing services. Which is worse?”
I think there’s a much simpler way to put that: “The supply of quality TV content has decreased, and therefore the quality TV programming that’s still available can charge a premium.”
When prices for a product increase either the demand has risen or the supply has diminished. Unless the networks can suddenly charge advertisers much more per viewer, the supply must have decreased, right? Is there any other explanation that makes economic sense?
I'm talking about commercial value so in this case "quality" = "popular". It's hard to find the exact right word to use. I was first going to use "valuable" instead of "quality" but the meaning of "valuable" becomes circular in this context where the question in the first place is "Why has this property become more valuable?"
Reading that article made me wonder why Ben cares so much about the NBA's revenue/profits. Does it matter if the league's income collapses by 3x tomorrow or increases by 5x next week? Why would a fan who doesn't own an NBA team care?
His proposals are for "how to make the regular season more interesting for viewers". A fan likely cares about that. I'm all in favor of moving the 3-point line back, not that there's anything original about that idea.
I think he's trying to appeal to the greed of the NBA, but his own motivation is to make the game more interesting for fans like himself.
One other seeming possibility is that the NBA rights have been undervalued, and the increase is a reflection of the market moving closer to a fair value for the rights. I imagine a second possibility is that the NBA rights are unique enough so that there is no viable alternative, allowing the owner of the rights to command a higher price than the market would ordinarily allow if there was an alternative.
Your first point is plausible; on the second I'm not sure what "unique enough" means separate from "valuable enough", which is my thesis. There isn't much valuable TV content out there compared to a decade ago, so NBA broadcast rights are worth relatively more than most other programming they could hope to purchase or develop.
I'm wondering if anyone here knows of good group housing situations in Berkeley. I'm moving there for a short postdoc next January and am hoping to find a place with friendly and interesting people. Feel free to email: java.chewable525@simplelogin.com
According to Gorsuch's concurrence in Loper Bright:
> During the tenures of Chief Justices Warren and Burger, it seems this Court overruled an average of around three cases per Term, including roughly 50 statutory precedents between the 1960s and 1980s alone. See W. Eskridge, Overruling Statutory Precedents, 76 Geo. L. J. 1361, 1427–1434 (1988) (collecting cases). Many of these decisions came in settings no less consequential than today’s. In recent years, we have not approached the pace set by our predecessors, overruling an average of just one or two prior decisions each Term.1 But the point remains: Judicial decisions inconsistent with the written law do not inexorably control.
To be snarky, this is progress, just in a different direction than we're used to! Brushing aside the dead hand of the past, discarding traditional "democracy of the dead", righting historical injustices... What's not to like? I admit, conservatives may have a point about preferring stable societies where men can live under the same laws as their fathers and their fathers before them, and perhaps those sorts of societies are more amenable to human flourishing. But on the other hand, a lot of the hand-wringing sounds an awful lot like that from opponents of civil rights laws. "We did it this way for 40 years" cuts no bacon.
More seriously, maybe someone should try to duplicate his data, and see if he's cherry-picking time periods or manipulating distinctions to serve his argument?
Has the Supreme Court ever written an opinion of the form "while we think that a previous incarnation of the Supreme Court decided this totally wrongly, we will defer to their judgement instead of our own because of stare decisis"
I think stare decisis only applies when you either agree with the previous ruling or don't especially care. If you, as a Supreme Court judge, think that a previous judgement was wrong (and they all think this about many many things) then you're going to find a way to overturn it given the opportunity.
If you're going to write an opinion like that, you're not going to say that you disagree with the previous ruling. You'll just say "Hey, this was decided in the past, we're sticking with that ruling."
If you look at how the Supreme Court talks about immigration, it follows that model. Most of the cases establishing federal control of immigration are wrong from an originalist perspective. They're also dripping with racism. But hardly anyone wants to get overturn them, whether they were correctly decided or not, because getting rid of the entire federal immigration system would be quite a change!
Stare decisis works best for situations like that - extremely consequential decisions that, whether right or wrong, are not going to be revisited.
It was a gentleman's agreement where libs and cons agreed not to kick over sandcastles that were built for long enough to seem solid; but the sand remains sand.
The real question is: do the libs have enough spine to pack the court/use questionably legal shenanigans to prevent appointment of cons and go whole hog when it's their turn?
You mean like segregation being legal and widespread, interracial marriage being illegal in some states, and abortion being illegal, sandcastles like that? Or marriage only being between a man and a woman, surely *that* sandcastle had been standing long enougjh that the gentlemens' agreement kept it intact. Right?
I don't think the court's decisions over the last 70 or so years fits this model.
Regrettably, from my point of view, Griswold v Connecticut and Obergefell v Hodges and Lawrence v Texas all have about the same vulnerability that Roe v Wade had. The Constitution doesn't have a right to privacy or to bodily autonomy. I wish it did. I liked the _policy_ results of all four cases, but, legally, they all look like they are built on sand. And SCOTUS _did_ knock Roe v Wade down.
The Supreme Court has always had the authority to overturn previous Supreme Court decisions (the exclusive authority, aside from a Constitutional amendment). For example, Brown overturned Plessy, which was almost 60 years old at that point. Korematsu was 73 years old when it was overturned in Trump v Hawaii.
> Korematsu was 73 years old when it was overturned in Trump v Hawaii.
It doesn't seem like Trump v Hawaii actually "overturned" Korematsu, especially as the court ruled *in favor* of the president. Sure, Roberts had an aside in his opinion saying "Korematsu sucks", but that's not the same thing as overturning it.
> [In Korematsu], the Court upheld the internment of “all persons of Japanese ancestry in prescribed West Coast . . . areas” during World War II because “the military urgency of the situation demanded” it. [314 U.S.], at 217, 223. We have since overruled Korematsu, recognizing that it was “gravely wrong the day it was decided.” Trump v. Hawaii, 585 U.S. ___, ___ (2018) (slip op. at 8)
I agree that Roberts has written that he disagrees with the Koremastsu decision. But IMO, saying it was "overturned" means something different.
Saying that it was "overturned" implies that a) the precedent existed before but b) is now violated and no longer exists, i.e. they decided a case differently than they would have had the precedent stood. In the case of Korematsu, **neither** part is true.
As for part a) I suspect that in practice, if the same situation had ever come up, even in say 1970, the supreme court would have ruled differently. The precedent was already effectively dead many, many years ago. And Roberts taking yet another potshot at it in an unrelated case does nothing to change that fact.
As for part b), Trump v Hawaii clearly can't be "overturning" the precedent since it wasn't decided any differently than it would be if that precedent did or didn't exist. In fact, this is the worst possible case to pick as the "overturning" point because the court found *in favor* of the president.
There's a BIG difference between "they overturned 73 years of precedent" and "it took 73 years before someone bothered to formally acknowledge what was already long standing practice."
Contrast this for instance with Brown v Board, which actually was a real example of overturning precedent, as segregation was still ongoing at the time. Likewise with abortion, Chevron, etc.
If the question is "does stare decisis still mean anything?" then is there a practical difference between a case no longer being considered good law and some sort of "officially overturned"?
There's a big practical difference between a case that forms a major part of the status quo, is frequently cited, etc., and a case that everyone considered effectively overturned decades ago.
Or more succinctly, there's an important difference between changing the status quo vs acknowledging the status quo.
Stare decisis is, I mean not that I believe in this whole jurisprudence word game thing any more than I do Santa Claus, properly considered at its weakest when dealing with constitutional law, because ordinary legislation by definition cannot be used to correct obvious past judicial error.
It never did; there's nothing enforceable in the concept beyond what people take to be the convention, which of course is and always was filtered through their own beliefs about correct jurisprudence.
I'm a mathematician, and I am the director of a mathematics institute (Euler Circle; see https://eulercircle.com/) dedicated to teaching college-level mathematics classes to high-school students. I'm trying to figure out who else is running similar organizations, both in mathematics and in other subjects. In particular, I'm trying answer the following question: If you're a 14-year-old aspiring professional musician, then there are lots of people who are ready to help you. If you're a 14-year-old aspiring professional mathematician, then Euler Circle is here to try to help you. Who is helping 14-year-old aspiring biologists? Historians? Novelists? People who are serious about careers in other areas? I don't have any particular plan in mind, but I want to get to know other people who work on these things. If you are such a person, or if you know of such a person, please get in touch! It should be easy to find my email address if you want to contact me that way.
If you aren't already aware of them, there are a collection of "elite" summer math camps. There used to be a nice AMS page with a list, but that appears to have been discontinued. The ones I would flag are:
Each of this is different, but there tends to be a strong emphasis on number theory as an entry point. From the data I've seen, these camps have a very high success rate for developing academic mathematicians and scientists. For example, I think the PhD rate is higher than that of IMO gold medal winners.
During the school year, there are programs like MIT Primes (https://math.mit.edu/research/highschool/primes/) that, I believe, tend to have a very local focus. I would expect most major research universities to have a similar-ish, offering.
Finally, there are emerging groups that are looking to offer advanced mathematics that is either "college level" or just orthogonal to the normal curriculum path. For example, Diverging Mathematics (https://divmath.org/).
My impression is that the top 1% of students can just graduate school early and start college? I.e. Leopold Aschenbrenner did this and graduated from college at age 19.
As a college early entrance program dropout, I'm not convinced that this is a great track. I'm definitely in the top 1% of students and was admitted into the University of Washington's Robinson Center program at 14 (basically, the idea is that you replace your freshman year of high school with an accelerated prep course, then start your first year of college the next year).
I didn't have any trouble keeping up academically, but I had huge deficits in executive function and emotional maturity compared to the average 18 year old. (Admittedly, I was also somewhat behind compared to my peers.) I didn't have the capacity to write a 5-page paper without support or self-manage my time when homework deadlines got too tight. Plus, even as an introvert being largely cut off from same-age peers was honestly pretty hard on me.
There are very few programs that give top 1% kids the opportunity to learn at an appropriate level/pace while still acknowledging that they're kids and that they have different needs than adults do.
When I was thinking about applying to college I saw that most listed an option of early admission. You could just apply way earlier than senior year in high school and go straight to college without graduating. I applied and was accepted at the end of my junior year. If I had known about it earlier I would have applied in my sophomore year. I don't know whether colleges are still permitting that -- does anyone?
That's community college, not university. Running start is a great option for a lot of high school students, but I would recommend it more in terms of "building college skills" and "saving some time/money on your degree". Because you're going to a community college, your options for advanced classes end at about the college sophomore level - linear algebra, intro to organic chemistry, etc., with fairly low expectations for student achievement.
As far as I can tell, this sort of thing is only sometimes possible, and even when it is, it can require either extraordinary performance or persistent parental advocacy, or both. Some school systems are more inclined to allow it, while others are more insistent on following regular courses of study.
I graduated from a high school with about 1200 students, and I don't remember hearing about anyone who had been allowed to skip years. One had been allowed to take high school classes while still in junior high, and another student (at another school, after scoring among the best in the country on a math test) was allowed to take college level classes while still in high school.
People here seem stuck on the idea of going to college early. There are other approaches that work well for smart people too. Jeremy Howard, whom I admire, got a full time job at McKinsey and started college at about the same time. He got the job on the strength of his extraordinary coding skills. I believe he analyzed data and made big beautiful graphs for McKinsey consults. He didn't attend college classes or do the reading, but crammed for a few days prior to finals, and was able to get passing (though not good) grades and graduate. Another possibility, common among homeschooled kids, is to finish with the equivalent of high school work well before 18, and then take a few courses in stuff you're interested in at a local community college. Meanwhile, kids can be helped by parents, tutors, peers or mentors to pursue projects they are interested in, or might find a way to have a sort of internship or paid job in some setting that's in line with their interests. By the time you're the conventional age for applying to college you've learned all sorts of stuff, made things, and accumulated accomplishments and people who will recommend you. All this ups your chances of admission to hard-to-get-into places.
I suspect what is going on is that we are a clever and intellectual bunch, which means the first time many of us were really challenged was in college. Some of us therefore see grade school as a mere preamble, something to be passed through as quickly as possible on the way to the good stuff, which is in college.
>The American Junior Academy of Sciences (AJAS) is the only US honor society recognizing America's premier high school students for outstanding scientific research. Each state's Academy of Science nominates high school students as AJAS delegates. The chosen delegates are then invited to attend the AJAS annual conference. The AJAS mission is to introduce, encourage, and accelerate pre-college students into the professional world of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
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( My only connection to any of this is as a subscriber to American Scientist, which is published by Sigma Xi.)
I can only talk about Germany, but here there are two systematic approaches:
Juniorstudium: this is a program which allows gifted high school students to enroll to normal university courses during their high school time. This is often just one or two courses, but can also go a long way. This became institutionalized around 2000-2010*, and now exists in most German regions and and many universities.
Summer schools: in Germany, they are called Student Academies (Schülerakademie), and in the US there is a program by John Hopkins university, which I took as student. https://cty.jhu.edu/ Possibly this is just one of many such programs, I don't know the US landscape. After my own school, I also taught some programs in the German version, which was a decent two-week course in number theory and cryptography.
*Perhaps it's bloated ego, but I think I was something of a catalyst here. I took this route as one of the very first students starting in '96 when it was not institutionalized. I was not literally the first such student in Germany, but possibly the second. The head of my school pushed a lot to make it possible for me, and some people in the ministry took some risk to allow it. I am still very thankful that they enabled that for me. It went very well (I finished high school with courses more or less equivalent to a BSc), and the system was institutionalized in my own region and has spread throughout Germany.
Can talented students simply graduate high school early in Germany and start college at age 13-14? My vague understanding is that the answer is No and this is why Leopold Aschenbrenner had to come study college in the US when he was a teenager.
Yes, it is possible to skip years of school in Germany, and actually that is not too uncommon. I quickly searched for prevalence and found numbers of roughly 0.1% to 1% of students who skip a class in their career.
It's rather uncommon to skip the last two years of high school, since the German high school degree "Abitur" cumulates all grades from those two years. So it is usually not possible to skip high school completely by only taking the final exam. I don't know about the Aschenbrenner case, but perhaps this is what he wanted to do? So most students who skip classes do this earlier, but some do this 2-3 times and start university education very early. (We have a postdoc in our group who went this way and obtained his PhD with 20 or 21. But he is *very* exceptional.)
For highly talented students, the main reason *not* to skip classes this is that they would join a class (cohort) where all other students are a year older, or even more. This only makes sense if they are not only cognitively ahead of their age group, but also emotionally. If this is the case, then skipping a class usually works well. The physical difference remains, but is often less of a problem. But this restriction is why it is helpful to also have alternatives.
A while back I remember Scott, you did a review of Eichmann in Jerusalem.
I recently came across some contemporary discussions of this book by people I respect that said it was a total hatchet job that doesn't really inform you about anything apart from Arendt's own emotional baggage and antipathy to Israel.
At the time, in 1965, someone wrote an entire book fisking Eichmann in Jerusalem called "And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight". It's by Jacob Robinson, a lawyer, diplomat, and Holocaust researcher who was pretty eminent in his own day. Maybe worth a read. Currently trying to find a good copy.
I'd be interested in getting links to the discussions, if that's something you're willing to share? I enjoyed that book very much (or, well, "enjoy" isn't quite the right word), but Arendt was certainly using it as a platform to criticize Israeli society. (And also to criticize people who, to sail dangerously close to current events, wanted to turn a trial of one specific person for specific things into a broad indictment of nations and states and eras of history, and to trumpet their righteousness to the heavens.) On the other hand, the counter-argument I came across was so incredibly biased in its own way that it was hard to take seriously. And none of it spoke much to her analysis of Nazi history and society and the procedures of genocide, which was the backbone of the book.
So far iIt reminds me of an SSC review about a Vox article -- it looks like he's going to explain how everything she covers and explains was warped beyond recognition. For example, the first chapter begins "[This] chapter reveals in detail how Miss Arendt has ignored evidence concerning Eichmann and in doing so she ends up with a portrait of the man in no way resembling reality".
So I think the ultimate thesis is that Arendt wrote a work of fiction that makes Eichmann look as nice as possible.
As far as I know, her motivations for this are a separate debate.
Having read it I can say that the one thing that really crystallized what the book was doing, was the section on the Israeli parliament's reaction to Eichmann's capture.
The book reproduces Arendt's account, that when the prime minister announced that Eichmann had been captured, the parliament erupted into wall-to-wall frenzied cheering.
Jacob Robinson, compares this to a large variety of independent witness descriptions (and the audio recording of the event, which I can't find a copy of), including a New York Times reporter, who all described the reaction, very very consistently, as stunned silence.
So it seems clear that Arendt was there, experienced the stunned silence, and choose to lie and depict a "frenzied" reaction. It seems that she wanted to depict Israel as bloodthirsty and desparate for a pound of flesh, even if it was Eichmann.
I say even if it was Eichmann, because another section that I want to highlight because it really seems to be revealing as to what she was doing, was the section on Eichmann's importance, as viewed by the Allies.
Robinson reproduces the sections from the book where Arendt says that Eichmann wasn't really on the radar of the Allies in the period of the Nuremberg trials, since he wasn't considered important or a decision maker, but just a pen-pusher among thousands of pen-pushers. He then reproduces statements from the time, and during the trial which Arendt would have heard, to the effect that Eichmann was always near the top of the most wanted lists for crimes against humanity, but they couldn't get ahold of him.
Jacob Robinson's book is a detailed fisk of the book, and I think it's quite good at just listing many of Arendt's claims in amazing detail, along with independent sources showing Arendt was either dishonest, deluded, or too busy constructing her "banality of evil" philosophy to allow real life to interfere.
But the vibe I got from reading it is that Arendt wanted (for whatever reason) to depict Israel as in a bloodthirsty craze, grabbing this guy whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then holding a kangaroo court to execute him to satisfy a bloodlust. None of which seems to be true.
I guess I should address the kangaroo court part of this statement. He has other sections on Arendt's claims about the court's failure to consider certain pieces of evidence, or follow due process, and so on and so on. For each claim Arendt makes that "they didn't look at evidence X", Jacob Robinson reproduces the court testimonies about X. From the sounds of things the court proceedings where pretty exhaustive given that Arendt doesn't seem to be able to find a valid complaint about them.
A while back Scott wrote about using the wisdom of crowds with yourself, making two estimates at different times to take advantage of variance in your brain.
The drugs killing dying patients like my husband are the drugs they can’t get. Here’s how I think the horrible 10-14 year new drug application process can be improved so that research doesn’t outrace access. More facts and feelings about clinical trials and the FDA from Bess and Jake:
I'm interested in getting folks' thoughts / advice on WRITING. I am an attorney, I spend my days reading complicated legal (contractual) documents, drafting and negotiating the same, investing lots of time in legal cases, law review articles, etc. I draft similar research memorandums and analyze statutes, SCOTUS cases, etc.
Leisurely, I love reading ACX and adjacent blogs, works, reports, etc. I also have an ever-growing stack of nonfiction books on my shelves that sit there laughing at me. That's not even to mention the fiction books I wish I had more time to read.
At the same time, I have always had an urge to write my own stuff. Not only novels, but commentary and my own thoughts on current-events, ACX-adjacent writings, and rational thought.
But, at the end of a work day, I am just so burnt out of "heavy-duty" reading and writing. I am curious how you fine people have developed, or organized, your mental bandwidth to consume content, analyze and digest it, gather your thoughts, draft and outline posts/books/other writings, and actually sit down to draft and revise and eventually post/publish your ideas.
I read every day. I write (for work) every day. I'd love to be able to write freely, for leisure, and to develop a community of readers/commenters that can help me improve. I am open to any and all advice and comments, because writing is something I _loved_ as a child/teenager and I wish I could re-capture that spark again, now, as a legal professional.
My suggestion is to read for fun sometimes - for instance, read a trashy novel in a genre you like. I'd also suggest writing for fun. Set a target of, say, one short piece a week and hold yourself accountable to that. But nothing else. Write what you want, even if it's only a short poem or a single-page story.
Can't give great advice, I've got nothing but time and am still struggling to actually complete any stories. Three and a half days until Independence Day and I haven't even made it to the recent government regulations of the mechsuit's power core.
I've had two blocks of "successful" writing, in that I would consistently show up and write words. Both of them worked on the assumption that getting the ball rolling is the hardest part. The first was after I read Atomic Habits, which recommended setting a consistent goal of just showing up. I tied it to coffee: "every time I get a cup of coffee, I'll drink it at the computer and write one sentence of creative fiction." It worked; I still mostly left things incomplete, but managed to finish a few two-page stories. But the habit broke when I went out of town and I never got back into it.
The most recent stint is just basing it on having fun. I'm currently starting stories with an unscripted string of alliteration. "Adam and Anna allowed another assistant access to Andrew's article, attention away at the Alma allegations." There we have it; two scholar types with some kind of institutional power, bothered by something that may or may not threaten that power. You can write a story out of that.
Also LPs are quite fun. It's mostly a kids game, but I would happily demolish a small child at Rock Paper Scissors, and creativity is creativity. Find a flawed thing that you enjoy, and write about both sides of it. It's very lightweight, but gets the wheels turning.
Maybe consider trimming back the amount of work you do and making less money? The thing you are looking for -- getting back to something you loved -- is priceless.
Drastically lower your standards. Make it fun again. Find some group of people where the kind of writing you want to do is done as a matter of routine, casually.
During my phd, I had the exact same problem with programming. It was not in the cards to design and program a "real" hobby project (e.g. a strategy game). But I did find the time and motivation to mess around with fantasy consoles and do some very small, unambitious projects for the demoscene. Clever little algorithms coded up mostly for their own sake and the appreciation of like-minded people.
Sometimes, the seed of an idea would be created during a christmas break or other large chunk of free time, and then I'd find the energy to mess around with it for half an hour here and there over the next few months.
I would love to write. What I do instead is sit and stare at what I wrote weeks or months ago, feeling drained and unimaginative, unable to think of anything to contribute.
What sometimes works is going back and just reading what I have before, or making very very minor edits. Sometimes that leads me to gather momentum and turns into writing a few more paragraphs; often it doesn't.
One thing I do which really, really works for me is I'll revert to vague notes and bullet points at the drop of the hat - eg, if I'm halting on something I'll just write "(TODO: he weasels out of it somehow)" or "(TODO: he gets her into bed)". Then come back to it later. That way I can make the most use of the small amount of motivation/creativity I have to spend, rather than wasting it getting frustrated.
As a student I joined a club where we all just hung around writing one day out of every fortnight - the idea being it was a Schelling point that let you make time for writing. I'd love to do something like that again, but I haven't found anything similar since. Non students don't seem as interested in organising that kind of thing, at least where I live.
I'll bet something like that exists. Of course there's a much better chance of finding something if you're willing to consider groups that meet online.
I’m feeling creeped out in a new way by AI, wonder if anyone else can relate. So lately I have been spending hours looking at photos of the ocean, esp. of waves, for a project I’m doing, and there are now AI-generated wave images for sale on Getty & the other sites that sell photos. Some are labelled as AI and some are not, but I’ve gotten to where I can tell the difference. The AI waves are simpler, and thicker, sort of like mattresses made of water, and don’t have the intricate ribbing that real waves have. AIso AI likes to put a sort of blurry fog over them. I think that’s to avoid generating any more wave than necessary. And it looks fake, because most waves have fractal-looking edges surrounded by droplets, not a foggy spray. But the worst thing about the fake waves is that real waves have a structure, and the AI ones don’t. I can’t tell you what the structure is, though I’m sure books about fluid dynamics do, but I can sense its presence. I mean I can sense how the movement of water over land that’s becoming shallower forms the water in a certain way, and for the fake waves I can sense the absence of real structure — and that creeps me out. They are to real waves what lab-grown meat is to the muscle of a cow’s hip. And people who haven’t seen real waves won’t even notice the difference. I feel as though it’s bad for our brains somehow not to see the complex structures of real waves, real trees, etc., even if we never give the structure of either any thought.
> I feel as though it’s bad for our brains somehow not to see the complex structures of real waves, real trees, etc., even if we never give the structure of either any thought.
But aren't you seeing it properly for the first time right now? Didn't it take a while of staring at slightly-off ocean waves to really understand the beauty of the real thing?
No. I have always had a thing about waves. Grew up in Florida and was in the Gulf of Mexico swimming for several hours every day in summer, and a decent amount in spring and fall too. Was quite good at body surfing and did it on waves that were kind of big for body surfing -- like maybe 8 feet or so? Also had a weird fear of tsunamis, which I pictured as waves as high as a skyscraper, even though adults had told me that wasn't the case. Sometimes when I was in the ocean with my face underwater, or my back turned to the horizon, I'd be seized with a fear that The Wave was coming and if I looked I'd see it towering over me. Except for fear of giant waves, though, I was fearless. And for years I have sometimes gone to Google image and looked at pictures of waves and whirlpools, and giant waves, and surfers on giant waves. Dunno why, just enjoy it and never get sick of it. Sometimes do that for a couple hours at a time. So no, it wasn't like seeing its beauty for the first time. It was like seeing these weird fake duds for the first time, passing as waves. Sort of like being in a place with a dozen delightful dogs of different breeds, then noticing that over by the owner's chair there's taxidermied dead Jack Russell in a perky though slightly off-balance pose, and with a kind of stiffness to it. And the owner lays his hand fondly on the stuffed head and says, "he loves it when his friends come to visit -- don't you, Biff?" Fuck that shit.
Yes, this has been a large worry of mine for a while. I had the exact same thought process w.r.t. fiction writing. We're entering an era of higher simulacrum levels, where truth will be replaced by "truthiness", the property of looking like truth.
I vaguely recall that Miyazaki (the studio Ghibli guy) has a certain disdain for anime fans, who are taking their ideas of how the world works from anime, while Miyazaki was injecting his experience of the real world into his works. Most anime nowadays is purely inspired by other anime, and has lost that connection to reality. So it becomes weirder and weirder to outsiders, as it traps itself in its own tropes and stops accurately reflecting human nature.
So far, these kinds of things have been prevented from spiraling out of control by the occasional injection of more realistic stuff (which people do respond to positively). But when AI makes the higher simulacrum stuff so much cheaper while the more authentic stuff stays expensive... yikes.
On one of my copies of "Grave of the Fireflies", there's an interview with Takahata where he points out all of the ways in which Seita makes choices that lead directly to his and his sister's death. And it became clear that Takahata had Been Through Some Shit in his life, and there was a vast gulf between him and much of his audience, which he was trying to break through. But so many of us didn't get the message.
I remember a decade or two ago, there was progress in using computer animation to generate hair and water, and these were hailed as major advances, and there were CG movies that had long ogling shots of hair and water, primarily to show off how much better the technology was. And before that, the same thing happened with ordinary special effects, where there were movies like "2001" (good) and "Star Trek: TMP" (bad). And complaints about voice acting and realistic behavior, going from things like Teletubbies to He-Man to 50s sit-coms. Not to mention speculation about the origin of furrys. And I firmly believe that I can tell when young children spend more time watching screens than interacting with live humans, because they have a flat, performative affect.
Do you think this is different than those examples? I do suspect that AI-generated water will rapidly improve, but maybe you accidentally took a red pill and will forever be horrified by it...
You’re not joking, right? Because I absolutely agree with you about the flat performative affect. In shows for kids the characters usually have exaggerated affect — things like yelling YAY when they like a piece of news. I guess that’s because kids’ exuberance looks sort of like that to adults — and it sort of is like that, but only sort of. What you see on the screen in kids’ movies and shows is a sort of plastic statue of how they come across, rather than an accurate representation. Then the kids watch the show and start to emit plastic statue affect.
And here’s a related thing: TV numbs kids to cruelty and loss. I don’t like TV, and did not have a set when I adopted my daughter, and decided not to get one, even though TV is a great babysitter, because I think it’s probably bad for kids. So when I took my daughter to see Finding Nemo when she was around 4, she had watched very little TV — just whatever she saw at other kids’ houses on playdates. I was so naive that I expected to be bored blind by a cute, sappy, super-cheerful little tale, but figured that was probably going to be in the sweet spot for my daughter. So it starts off with a very cute fish family, mother, father, and about 100 babies, contentedly living their lives, then within 5 mins of the opening a big mean fish shows up and eats the mother and all the children but one. And you see the whole thing — terrified fish children fleeing and getting caught, frantic parents, etc. Then after that scene you see the poor father fish mourning alone in his big empty house. WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?! My daughter crying, whispered to me that she felt so sorry for the poor little daddy fish that she couldn’t stand it. Good for her! That is normal affect. I looked around and no other kid was showing distress, and there were some there younger than her.
And you know, she was really a shit-kicker about real tragedy. She knew from the beginning the story of how she likely came to the orphanage. I did soften it some by saying that probably her parents were forced to give her up because of the one-child policy, but it could also have been that they were poor and could not give her good food and a warm bed, or that they were sick and could not take care of her. So she listened to all this clear-eyed and serious, and asked some questions, and did not cry, and went on with her day. But she must have kept ruminating about it because one day she told me she thought her mother had been sick and was now dead. Then she added, so that means little bits of her are in the air everywhere and sometimes I breathe some of them in. So she could face real tragedy — just not Disney’s sucker punch.
About waves improving: Yeah, they’ll look better in the future. But there are some features I’ll bet never get incorporated. Waves break differently depending on whether the water is approaching an area that gradually gets more shallow, or an area with a sudden something, like a coral reef, in their path, or — I forget what the third case is. I don’t see any reason why AI would bother with taking that into account. Is that bad? Well, if the waves people saw in movies and videos were generated by real shallows of different kinds, or were built to faithfully look the way they would is they had been, then there’s a chance that somebody with the right kind of mind would notice there are different kinds of wave break, and wonder why, and maybe generate a theory with some truth in it about what causes what kind of break. And all the rest of us who aren’t alert enough to notice in a thoughtful way what the first person did will nonetheless notice at some level that the AI waves break in one of 3 different ways.
Not joking! I think I've caught some of them mugging for "the camera", and leaving beats for a laugh-track or applause.
And I've noticed that thing about training kids to be numb, too, although I suppose I've been conceptualizing it differently. To me, it meshes with the "kids as sociopaths" thing, in that it seems like one function of culture is to shape the categories that we define personhood with: some entities count as people and we care what happens to them, and other entities don't and we don't. And stories like finding Nemo can expose that, where we find children worrying about characters that we as adults write off, or on the other hand, not caring about characters that we as adults know we should care about.
That's a very interesting contrast about your daughter's reactions to real tragedy and dramatic tragedy. I suppose some of it needs to be credited to you presenting the real tragedy in a way that was designed to help her come to terms with it, instead of designed to provoke an emotional reaction? :-)
I bet AI waves will get there eventually. Right now they're still fairly stupid and limited.
Thanks. But I think the way I presented the China stuff to my daughter was fine, but not extraordinary. I mean, when you know a small child, you understand the kind of thing that pleases them and the kind of thing that distresses them, and you just naturally look for ways to ease their distress if you're giving them info that will distress them. It happens naturally, like "motherese" (speaking more slowly and in a higher, more sing-songy voice). I really think I was being just the modal good mommy, and the outlier is fucking Disney, and the people who make stuff that numbs kids. Honestly, kids watching violent cartoons are like the adult males who watch porn for hours, and find that they are becoming numb to the soft texture of real sex because they've logged so many hours having their libido stimulated with a stiff brush dipped in capsaicin.
I think it's weird that everyone just speeds all the time. We all commit this low-key crime, but no one cares? And only in this one specific domain. I made a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN0_FbXhiEI I don't really have a thesis other than: isn't that weird? I think it's weird.
I've an acquaintance who is a career traffic engineer with the state with over 20 years of experience. He gets pretty worked up over this topic (especially when he's had a beer or 3). I'll try my best to sum up his thought.
Traffic Engineering is actually a pretty mature domain. Roads have a engineered (not legislated) speed they are designed for. Everything from the width of lanes, width of shoulders, the height of buildings, the size of the tree lawns, how close to the road the trees/utility polls are, the spacing of the bollards, *everything* nudges drivers toward a certain engineered target speed for that road. Traffic flows best when the engineered speed and the legal speed are harmonious. Unfortunately this is often not the case.
In his estimation, in his state in the north east, the problem is priorities. Safety and efficient traffic flow are simply not the top priority. He'd estimate the actual priorities that determine legal speeds to be:
1. Revenue generation
2. Revenue generation
3. Responding to tiny numbers of direct complaints from individual citizens, usually over 65, demanding limits be lowered on the streets they personally use.
4. Revenue generation
5. Safety
6. Efficient flow of traffic.
I've listened to him rant at length about designing the perfect roads and efficiently and invisibly nudge drivers into going the correct (engineered) speed of the road, only to have the legal limit be whittled away at by local jurisdictions to 15-20 miles below the correct speed for the road, usually to increase income from fines or in response to tiny numbers of complaints, often a single instance. This makes the road more dangerous (drivers are still being nudged to the correct, engineered speed of the road while sharing it with the compulsive rules-followers obeying the signs) and less efficient. It boarders on entrapment in his estimation; government employees have designed a road they know will make you drive a certain speed, then set the legal limit absurdly low to essentially create violations where there shouldn't be any. A good example of this near my is a 4 lane divided highway, with a grass median, wide shoulders, and no buildings accessible from the road, with a 25 mph limit for less than 1 mile where it barely clips into a village of 2k people, who's police department staffs fully 1/2 of their manpower to traffic enforcement on just this road.
Sorry I took so long to reply to this, but it's super interesting. I'm going to try to investigate this and see what evidence I can gather for and against. Do you happen to have any?
There is a seven-lane road for a 1 1/2 mile stretch on my way to work which has a speed limit of...35 mph. And a left-turn traffic light that stays red instead of blinking, for a good 30 seconds, preventing left turns for no real reason. Very frustrating.
my assumption is that at this point road systems are designed to work optimally under an assumption that a certain amount of socially normal speeding is happening. And they would be worse if no one sped. Any civil engineers who can opine?
That may not be the best equilibrium to be in, but it is also the case that the optimization space is larger if you allow different lanes to move at different speeds, which is the norm we have fallen into. Best might be for different limits on different lanes, but that might be more confusing to everyone than existing norms.
Epistemic status: structural engineer, but I had to take a transportation engineering class for my degree + worked at a DOT for a bit.
No, I don't think that's accurate. The primary thing that slows down traffic is density - more cars per unit area means more interactions between cars, which means that any disruption to uniform flow will slow down more people. Increasing speed does increase throughput, but there's a pretty narrow window between "car density is low enough that few interactions occur" and "car density is high enough that everyone is going slower than the speed limit" where it's actually helpful.
Small speed differences between lanes are fine, but I think any driver will agree that it's a problem if they get large. Good traffic flow is all about minimizing interaction between cars or significant changes in momentum. The bigger difference in speed between lanes, the more a lane change will disrupt the overall flow pattern. (Again, this is something that starts to matter more as density increases. You can get away with a 20 mph speed differential on a rural highway, but city traffic would be MUCH better if everyone could just go the damn speed limit.)
Another consideration that's becoming increasingly common in cities is traffic light timing. Ideally you want to minimize idle time for cars and avoid stops and starts, so you can try to set up your traffic lights so that green lights are coordinated. These are normally set with the expectation that drivers are going the speed limit, so speeders 1) don't actually gain any time and 2) have to do all the stopping and starting that we were trying to avoid in the first place.
I tend to drive exactly the speed limit wherever I am, and almost never more than 5 miles over except in very short term passing situations (which don't happen often, as I'm usually the slowest one on the road). I have impaired depth perception, and my modern car with all its sensors and cameras is the first one I've ever felt safe driving. Even with that, I don't want to push it any more than I need to. I'd be perfectly happy doing 40-50 on an empty highway. I'm in no rush, and only go faster out of respect for other people and to avoid being an unexpected obstacle that causes a crash. I guess I don't really have a thesis here either, but I also experience the sense that this is weird and that people go way faster than they need to.
If I did 40-50 on an empty highway, that would turn a 1.5 hour trip to anything bigger than a small grocery store into a 2.5-3 hour journey. It's a very large country.
Yeah, I'm fortunate to live near Chicago. Most anything I want is within an hour drive even at my slow pace. Naturally what works for my situation doesn't fit everyone
>I'd be perfectly happy doing 40-50 on an empty highway. I'm in no rush, and only go faster out of respect for other people and to avoid being an unexpected obstacle that causes a crash.
Likewise. When there is traffic, I'll match speeds with it, but I generally prefer to go slower.
I used to work at a place where several folks would get together occasionally to drive to a restaurant for lunch, taking various cars/drivers. There was one guy who always drove the posted speed limit, and it always felt weird to me, tho nobody ever said anything. He was an open practicing Christian (unusual in this social circle of software engineers), tho not obnoxious about it.
In parts of Australia speeding is actually enforced zealously, and as a result people have pretty much stopped speeding. You'll cruise along the freeway at exactly 110 km/h and find that everyone else is also cruising along at exactly 110 km/h.
But of course everyone's car has a slightly different systematic measurement error so you're actually going a few km/h faster or slower than everyone else meaning you slowly ride up someone's back bumper and then overtake them at a less-than-walking-pace.
Anyway, I know that "actually that universal thing is just an American thing" comments are the lowest form of internet discourse, but I feel compelled to post this one.
>Virginia is one of the strictest states in the country for speeders and law enforcement is very proud of this fact. Judges see these harsh laws as a positive rather than a negative.
Frankly, I'd rather have the engineered speed, the posted speed limit, and the enforced speed limit all match, rather than have the usual situation in most states where one has to guess at the enforced speed limit - and at how much road rage is in the driver one car back, for not exceeding the posted speed limit by enough to suit them.
Lots of speed cameras combined with little leeway. There are some limits to this, I think in most states a speed camera either needs to be signposted _or_ have a policeman manning it. But either way if you go even a few km/h over the limit past one you'll get a ticket in the mail, which you'll almost certainly pay.
No, the speed limits are for the most part not reasonably fast, and everyone does complain. And the worst part is the variable speed limits, e.g. when the speed limit on a major road past a school is a stupidly slow 40 km/h but only at certain hours and only on school days, and if you don't have kids in school you probably don't know what days are or are not school days.
Still, we have an annual traffic accident death rate of 4.5 per 100K people or 4.9 per billion vehicle-km, compared to 12.9 or 8.3 in the US, so enforcement of the law has its upsides.
It's really just this: people drive at the speed they feel safe driving. When speed limits were established, most cars were (by modern standards) deathtraps that didn't handle particularly well. Speed limits haven't been updated because Karen will block any attempts for "safety reasons", and cops want to retain the revenue stream.
Hm, in the U.S. there used to be the "55 everywhere" thing, but that's gone now. So they at least got updated then, right? But I think the rest of your point probably still stands.
The 55 mph federal speed limit cap was in response to the 1973 oil embargo, it didn't have anything to do with safety. In fact activists kept it from being repealed for another 20 years. So we have 65 mph+ speed limits in spite of the best efforts of safety panderers.
Hey man, some people take this stuff seriously. Kinky Friedman died just a few days ago.
He ran for governor of Texas in 2006 on a platform calling for drug legalization, an end to bans on smoking and a promise to lower the speed limit from 55 to 54.95 miles per hour.
At least in my very populous state, driving over the posted speed limit isn't actually a crime. It's a crime to "drive at an unsafe speed" and the posted speed limit is used as prima facia evidence to convict people of that crime, but I know lawyers who have argued in traffic court that that evidence isn't always enough to prove the crime.
So, technically, you can't tell who is criming based on posted speed.
Speeding isn't quite the only such crime. In many cities, most pedestrians jaywalk frequently, perhaps for similar reasons.
The obvious defense in both cases is that speeding and jaywalking can help traffic move more efficiently than if everyone stuck strictly to the rules. But it's strange that people don't typically apply that same argument to running red lights, even if no one else is around.
Jaywalking is fine when done correctly, that is, when it doesn't interfere with actual traffic. I once saw some idiot waiting to cross the street in front of me, carefully observe the flashing "don't walk" sign, and decide to walk just as it stopped flashing, staying on "don't walk". Basically, the worst possible time to start walking. When I honked my horn at him, he looked up, then made a dismissive hand gesture. Lesson not learned, I suppose.
My argument for jaywalking is that it's much safer than crossing at the corner if traffic can turn right on red, because that's a frequent cause and location for vehicle-pedestrian accidents. Safer to simply cross the street when no cars are near, whatever the location and whatever the light says. Pedestrians should have the right do what keeps them safe.
Whaaat!? But they'll mail tickets to people for speed cameras, red light cameras, not paying toll booths...? Maybe a cop is "signing" all of those tickets or some other such legal workaround.
So I just read the SCOTUS ruling related to presidential immunity including the concurrences and dissents. As is usual, no one should reach any conclusions about it based just on media or online summaries. This one in particular is well worth the read.
I don't find the dissenters entirely persuasive, and their hysteria (there's no better word) prevents them from putting into the record clear explication of the specific flaws in the majority's logic which is too bad. Meanwhile some parts of the majority's logic do hold up for me. All that said, the majority has pretty seriously violated its own preferred analytic approach known as "originalism" -- this ruling is more of their cherry-picking as far as the Framers' original design intentions. And while they think their conclusions do not protect a former POTUS from prosecution for having committed obviously-criminal acts in carrying out his core duties...I mean, come on. I'm honestly having a hard time not LOL'ing at that.
Barrett's dissent from one key part of the majority's ruling is actually pretty significant if ever put into practice. Whether it ever would be seems doubtful since she was the 6th vote for the overall ruling not the 5th.
As for the here and now this ruling overall is more of a win for Trump than for Jack Smith. No surprise that Trump is currently celebrating on social media.
That's even though I can at least _imagine_ this ruling ending up having improved the chances of Trump being held criminally accountable for his most obviously-criminal conduct related to the 2020 election: by stripping out the most-debatable charges against him while leaving in place the strongest ones for an eventual federal jury to be solely focused on.
In any case the previous paragraph now depends 100 percent, absolutely, on Trump not winning this November. That's because this SCOTUS majority explicitly in so many words believes that a president can order Justice Department officials around at will without fear of personal liability of any kind. So on January 21st a President Trump could tell the relevant official to dismiss this entire case, and go down the line firing them until he finds the one who'll do it. If it comes to it there seems little doubt that he will do exactly that.
It's interesting to me that President's Obama and Biden, as well as Johnson won an important victory that's been completely ignored by the commentariat:
President Obama cannot be prosecuted for the summary execution of a US citizen by drone strike based on faulty intelligence.
President Biden cannot be prosecuted for the murder of innocent Afghani civilians attending a wedding, upon whom he called a drone strike based on faulty intelligence.
President Johnson cannot be prosecuted (posthumously) for the false claim that North Vietnam instigated the Gulf of Tonkin Incident that precipitated US involvement in the Vietnam war based on faulty intelligence.
I can't imagine why that oversight would be nearly universal, though I suppose it's more surprising that there isn't more call to prosecute Bush 43 because he believed, sing along if you know the words, "faulty intelligence."
You have a good point. I don't see a great alternative. _Maybe_, if there is glaring evidence that a POTUS had someone killed in an apparent glaringly _bad_ faith interpretation of intelligence, I could see the judicial system getting involved. If, e.g. the CIA hands the POTUS faulty intelligence, and the POTUS has someone killed in a plausible _good_ faith "defense of the USA", do we really want the judicial system second guessing the CIA?
UPDATE: Barrett's limited dissent turns out to be topical. Trump's legal team is challenging his New York State felonies conviction on exactly the point that Barrett wrote about. The state judge in that case has agreed to delay Trump's sentencing to consider the defense's motion for dismissal based on the new SCOTUS ruling.
In the SCOTUS ruling, 5 of the justices wrote that a POTUS's absolute criminal immunity related to his core job responsibilities means that contextual testimony which references some of those responsibilities can't be introduced in a criminal trial for non-official conduct. That happened in the New York State trial so Trump's attorneys today argue that the conviction must be tossed. Barrett disagreed, writing that "The Constitution does not require blinding juries to the circumstances surrounding conduct for which Presidents can be held liable."
The specificity of Barrett's dissent makes me wonder whether she was thinking of the New York State trial when she wrote it. In any case it seems very unclear at this point whether or how the SCOTUS ruling will upend the New York State conviction. And no doubt the judge in Trump's Georgia state trial for election interference will be particularly curious about the New York court's conclusion and reasoning.
I'm an amateur enthusiast of SCOTUS decisions; I've been keeping up with most of them for my adult life after getting interested in high school over 30 years ago and actually go through the effort of reading the various concurrences and dissents on the higher profile cases. I've noticed something recently (well, the last 14 years anyway). I've tried re-writing the following language a few times to not sound so harsh, but I can't really state this observation in a kind way.
Sonia Sotomayor is simply not of the same caliber, legally or intellectually, than the rest of the court. Her statements are frankly embarrassing at times, and I think actually hurt the efforts of the liberal minority on the court at times. This is not a partisan criticism; both Kagan and Jackson are razor sharp, as are the conservatives. Sotomayor really reminds me of people I've known who landed jobs they were under-qualified for. Her dissent in this case reads like a Tweet, like a Facebook post.
Congress doesn't have any authority to make an official act of the president illegal. Imagine, for a moment, Congress passed a law saying it is illegal for the president to veto a bill, to illustrate the issue with this entire line of reasoning.
It's the same issue with Congress passing laws regulating the Supreme Court. They don't have the authority to do so there, either, for fundamentally the same reasons.
This decision was basically the only decision they could have made.
> Imagine, for a moment, Congress passed a law saying it is illegal for the president to veto a bill, to illustrate the issue with this entire line of reasoning.
Is that an illustrative example, or is it just the precisely one thing that Congress shouldn't be allowed to prohibit the President from doing?
Is Congress allowed to pass a law that makes it illegal for the President to execute any Congressman he wants?
And no, I don't think Congress could, but any such order the president gave would be necessarily unconstitutional (because that would be interfering in Congress' powers).
Perhaps we're not getting close enough to the issue. I can see that Congress shouldn't be allowed to pass laws designed specifically to limit the power of the President. I don't see that this should exempt the President from having to follow the laws that apply to every other random schmo. I think you can have one without the other.
The President -does- have to follow the laws that apply to every other random schmo - except when those laws would limit the power of the President. That is, when he is acting in an official capacity.
So when a POTUS is acting in his official capacity he is above the law. That is literally what you just said.
So Biden right now can directly order the BATF to tear open every couch cushion and wall panel and cabinet or drawer in all of Mar a Largo searching for "something illegal", and whether they find anything or not he can never be prosecuted or sued for it. Lifetime immunity. Am I understanding this argument correctly?
First, they mostly haven't even clarified what constitutes an "official act". Some categories are outlined and they say obviously stuff the Constitution says would be "official".
Second, they forbid the courts from considering the motivation of the President. If he, as alleged, tried to order the Justice Department to investigate the election just to hold onto power... doesn't matter, any time the President is directing the DOJ, he's definitely immune. He can order investigations into her s political opponents or his childhood bullies or whatever.
Third, they put the burden of proof on the prosecutor to show that his actions aren't "official". This is different from most examples of "affirmative defenses" ("Yes, I did this normally-illegal thing, BUT...") which generally put the burden of proof on the defendant to establish why they apply.
I honestly don't even see why this ruling would be necessary under the separation-of-powers concerns here. Obviously if you passed a law saying the President can't exercise his constitutional powers, that law could and would be found unconstitutional. If you pass a law saying the President can't exercise STATUTORY powers, all you're doing is repealing another law, which you can do.
Because your first point has nothing to do with the decision.
Your second point ignores the point of the decision in favor of the conclusion you want them to reach - if Congress doesn't have the authority to do something, it can't mens-rea its way into having said authority.
And your third point fails to distinguish between the question of guilt, and the question of whether a crime has been committed. It is the job of the prosecution to prove both; an affirmative defense concedes the crime but denies the guilt.
My first point is regarding the decision - I think it's bad to decide that the President can't be prosecuted for "official acts" but then fail to give clear guidelines as to what that means and basically just ask the lower court to figure it out, at which point it will be appealed right back up to here.
My second point is germane to the real acts at question in the decision - if the President abuses his power to investigate his political opponents when he has no actual reason to suspect that they have committed a crime, I think it's plausible that the President is committing a crime (harassment, maybe). The Court says it *literally does not matter*. What if somebody offers the President $10 billion to let Russia invade the UK? I guess he can take it and order the military to stand down and he can't be convicted under any bribery law since this would be an official act (although obviously the Court already pretty well destroyed bribery laws in McDonnell v. US, helpfully cited in this decision).
My third point does NOT make any such distinction - I'm merely noting that I think it's odd the Court defines an affirmative defense for the President that, *unlike* other ones, leaves the burden of proof on the prosecution.
The DoJ is explicitly subordinate to the President. No member of the DoJ has any constitutional authority *absent* delegation from the President. And that's exactly how it should be--otherwise the real masters are the (faceless, unelected, completely unaccountable in that hypothetical) DoJ officials. We do not want a Pretorian Guard.
If the President does something obviously criminal but part of an official act...impeach him. If he does something criminal that's *not* an official act, the decision is very clear that he's not immune for that.
From today's ruling: "The reasons that justify the President’s absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for acts within the scope of his exclusive constitutional authority do not extend to conduct in areas where his authority is shared with Congress."
There is no mention in the Constitution of a Department of Justice nor of federal prosecutors generally; in the Constitutional Convention the Framers assumed that criminal justice would be handled by the states. That's why for the first 80 years after the Constitutional Convention the Attorney General was a part-time position created by Congress in 1789 whose duties were only to represent the government in the Supreme Court and to provide legal opinions to Congress or the President when asked. That same 1789 act of Congress had also established the concept of U.S. Attorneys, i.e. federal prosecutors, but with much-more limited authority than we see today (basically just to deal with federal land issues which is why those few lawyers were part of the Department of the Interior).
It was only in 1870 that _Congress_ decided on and passed the law which began the practice of US Attorneys prosecuting violations of federal law generally, and also made the Attorney General into a fulltime job with Cabinet-level status and salary.
As another example of shared authority in this realm, Congress in 1968 passed a law dictating some specifics of the appointment of the FBI director (limiting the president's authority over who sits in that chair); their doing that has not been found by any court to be a violation of the constitutional separation of powers.
There is really could be no better example of an area in which the president's authority "is shared with Congress". So this right here is an example of the majority's selectively ignoring originalism, as today's dissenters could have better spent their time pointing out.
The currently-being-charged President is out of office, though. And part of the argument for NOT impeaching him after the Capitol riot was that he was leaving office, so that creates a bit of a catch-22. (Also, what if you learn about crimes after they are out of office? Probably more likely than learning while they're in office.)
The majority ruling issued today does call bullshit on the idea that a former president could be criminally prosecuted only after having been impeached and removed from office. "Transforming the political process of impeachment into a necessary step in the enforcement of criminal law finds little support in the text of the Constitution or the structure of the Nation’s Government."
Right, the correct answer to problems with the elected Executive branch is via the Legislative and Judicial branches, plus mass resignations by executive employees who refuse to participate. We don't want mutiny. Coups are bad. People come and go, but the structure remains... or it doesn't.
That's impressive. I think it would be easier to follow if it used a more standard font, like a bare-bones sans-serif. Also, for humor value, maybe the connecting lines should be colored red. ;-)
Yeah, I could see that. There are a lot of little things that this manual effort doesn't make easy, like the question links and size of nodes based on connections or proximity based on connections etc.
Ever wonder what happens when a car or truck collides with and shears off a fire hydrant?
Wrote about that in the latest issue of the newsletter for a small biz I work with ... (Teaser: there's a different small company that has a clever solution for that problem!)
Half an hour on foot variations and the shoes they need. Stuff I'd never heard before like that some people have feet with a straight axis (so not much difference between left foot and right foot) and others have more of a bend towards the centerline of the body.
Some people have little toes that stick out. The height of various parts of the foot aren't the same from one person to another.
Some leather will stretch more than others. "Plant" "leather" includes plastic for strength and won't stretch.
The stitching and edges matter for comfort.
This is not a complete summary of what can be covered in a fairly efficient half hour. I'm sure there's more foot variation, even among people with fairly normal feet, that's relevant to shoes.
So, what would it take to have computer-aided good quality custom shoes?
It seems entirely plausible that one could write a program that could put together a fabric pattern for the various textile and leather components of a given type of shoe, adjusted to your specific foot characteristics and measurements.
The immediate problem I see is that shoes are made on lasts (i.e. a 3D "mold" of the interior negative space of the shoe around which the whole shoe is built). Even custom shoes at present are made from one of the manufacturer's standard lasts. For a fully custom shoe you would need either a fully custom last, perhaps 3D printed. But a manufacturer could certainly just have a greater number of lasts for a greater variety of foot types, and that would go a long way.
I finally caught Covid. Symptoms started about 10 days ago, coughing, sore throat, body aches, fatigue. Never any fever though. Symptoms have been mostly gone for a few days now, with a bit of nasal congestion draining and causing an occasional cough. I can kill this with a long acting Sudafed.
I'm now wondering when it will be okay to, say, get a haircut without putting my barber in danger. My home test showed positive for Covid yesterday but some sites on the internet say that can go on for weeks after I am no longer shedding the virus.
Your barber is probably exposed to Covid several times per week through their work so your actions won't change their risk at all. I'd say go get a haircut as soon as you stop coughing. Your barber probably had the virus at least twice by now and has great immunity.
If you’re still testing positive on a rapid you’re still contagious (er doc). The rules of the cdc and the “rules” of infectious diseases don’t always align. I’d wear an n95 for others protection if you have to go out. I know everyone is casual about it now, but there are immunocompromised people in the world and you’d be a kind person to consider them if you’re able. I do think we have an obligation to one another.
No fever? That's been the worst parts of the two times I got it badly. I hope your luck stays good!
As I recall, there was guidance on the CDC site for what to do. I don't remember the details, but it was something like "wait 5 days past the end of primary symptoms, or wait until you stop testing positive, whichever is longer", but I don't know if that's an accurate recollection. I was never sure how actually grounded in science the guideline was, but it at least served the purpose of giving people a clear rule to follow.
I was in a tiny town in AK the first few days of symptoms, laying inert in a hotel room eating an occasional Cliff bar for sustenance rather than salmon fishing as I had planned. I didn’t have the energy to find a thermometer at that point but didn’t feel ‘feverish’.
I’ve been home a couple days and haven’t clocked a fever without any Tylenol or ibuprofen so I dunno. Maybe I had a fever earlier but was too miserable in other way to notice?
Feeling pretty chipper right now though. Just mowed my lawn with no sign of fatigue. An afternoon bike ride doesn’t seem out of the question. I’ll take another home test tomorrow and go from there.
I do have that pro grade Oster clipper and if bad comes to worse I can put the #1 guard on and trim to a 5 o’clock shadow in a few minutes. ;)
My fevers were extremely noticeable - I didn't even bother to measure. I was huddling under blankets, shivering and sweating at the same time, with an ice pack on my head, for about 36 hours. But I think there was a time when I might have had a mild case, and skipped the fever and most other symptoms entirely. (This was back when tests were harder to come by, and the household's tests needed to be reserved for other people.)
With the serious cases, by the time I was ready for things like yard work or a bike ride, I was basically fine. So maybe try it out, but don't get too worried if you get tired fast? That's how it manifested with me - I felt OK as long as I wasn't doing much, but exertion wore me out very fast. My stamina was the last thing to recover.
Pre-COVID, I once had a fever and was huddling in blankets because I too was shivering. That didn't make sense, so I got up the courage to open up the blankets, and within a few minutes I was feeling more normal, without shivers.
So the fever was also messing up my temperature-sense, and cooling myself down made me feel warmer.
I tend to view fevers as the body trying to raise its temperature to kill the infection (faster than it kills the overall body), which would explain why the temperature is high but all the sensors are screaming "get warmer". So I try to help it out, but I put the ice pack on my head to keep my brain from frying.
I had read that that view is incorrect, that the body just no longer is doing things correctly, and the medically correct thing to do is reduce your temperature.
I'm not a doctor (medical or otherwise), and have done little research into this. But my experience I take as a confirming data-point.
Home tests, ie antigen tests, only react to actual virus. So if the home test is positive you are contagious. Also, antigen tests are not terribly sensitive, so a positive result indicates the presence of a fair amount of virus. At one point the researchers I trusted were saying that the amount of virus needed to turn an antigen test positive was approximately equal to the amount that made you contagious. I don’t know whether that is still true with the present variants. PCR tests react to fragments of virus, so you can have a positive PCR and not be contagious. I presume you did a home test, so you should consider yourself contagious.
They have some degree of false positives too, though. I have my doubts that it was COVID if it didn't have a fever in the symptoms, but I have also heard not every instance had a fever.
Antigen tests have a very low false positive rate, around 1% or less. They have a substantial false negative rate because it takes a pretty good amt of virus to turn them positive. PCR tests are the reverse — very low false
Negative because they are so sensitive, but substantial false
As a rule of thumb, with a positive test I would probably avoid situations like a haircut which can easily be postponed by a few days. Especially if you still some mild leftover symptoms. It can happen that the test stay positive for very long time, but in most cases it does not.
From the barber's perspective, I would see it as a considerate act if my customer waits for a few days more. But every barber is different, of course.
Pretty much everyone you'd meet on a casual trip to the hairdressers has either been vaccinated or had the disease at this point. There's little to no appreciable risk as long as you're past the feeling ill stage, not that you'd want to go out at that point. I would avoid people with a weakened immune system for a another week or so, but that's precautionary.
I learned to cut my own hair and my partner's hair during the worst of the pandemic. I've found it to be valuable by saving us money and time as well as enjoyable. I can't speak to whether you're shedding virus still, but it might be a fun opportunity to teach yourself a new skill.
I have a professional grade Oster that I do use myself occasionally. During Covid lockdown my wife got pretty good at giving me a trim that didn't quite make me look like I'd escaped some sort of institution. I also have a #1 guard that takes my hair down to about 1/8" that I occasionally use on myself mid-sticky-summer and I just want to be able to brush my teeth and go.
My COVID update for weeks epidemiological weeks 25 and 26.
1. National wastewater numbers are rising, but not very quickly.
2. Likewise, the current wave seems to spreading unevenly. Not much happening in the NYC boroughs, but SanJose (and Boston, which I didn't discuss in my update) show a big rise. Even sewersheds in the same municipality give distinctly different readings. East San Francisco shows a lot of COVID in the sewage. The West side of the City, not so much.
3. Cases are starting to rise in some areas (for instance California show a pretty steep rise in hospitalizations, but ICU usage isn't rising), but the overall Nat'l avg only shows a small uptick in hospitalizations.
3. The JN.1x variants with the FLiRT mutations seem to leveling out around the 65% mark. There doesn't seem to be a single variant that's driving the wave (as we've seen in past waves).
4. I'm beginning to wonder if this wave won't fizzle out soon. But by saying that, I've probably jinxed us into a huge wave.
5. H5 was found in SF watersheds. SF doesn't have any livestock industries, so everyone is puzzled. It's not clear if it's the avian influenza strain of H5 flu, though. I hope we'll have a more certain ID in the coming week.
6. Big Clade 1 MPox outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Clade 1 is more virulent—it can kill up to 10% of people infected. Clade 2 triggered the 2022 outbreak and less than 1% of people infected died. Sexual transmission is a key vector, but it's also transmitted in other ways. I expect we'll see it in the US and Europe soon.
That's a damn good question! Unfortunately, I don't have a damn good answer for you. It all depends on the percentage of asymptomatic cases. During the JN.1 wave earlier this year, at peak...
1. Based on wastewater data one expert (Lucky Tran) estimated that 2 million people were being infected every day. JP Weiland estimated 1.2 million per day.
2. The hospitalization rate was ~4500/day during the JN.1 peak.
3. The mortality rate was 0.5 per 100,000 per week — which translates to ~236/day.
4. If 2 million were being infected every day, but only 4500 were being hospitalized hospitalization rate is 0.00225. If 1.2 million were being infected every day, and 4500 were being hospitalized each day the mortality rate would be around 0.00375. Miller et al. puts the hospitalization rate for Rhinoviruses at 0.003. So *if* — and it's a big if — if Tran's and Weiland's models are in the ballpark, then COVID-19's hospitalization rates are roughly those of a common common cold virus.
When I reached out to them with that estimate, neither replied. I got the impression that they wanted to believe their models, but they didn't want to believe that SARS2 had become another common cold.
Even though I respect what they're trying to do, I *do not* believe their numbers. I think they were overestimating the infection rate by at least an order of magnitude. My reasoning is two-fold. First, there have been studies that show post BA.1 variants are shedding more virus particles than previous vars. As much as two orders of magnitude more. Neither Tran nor Weiland would comment if they incorporated that info into their models. Second, if between 1.2 and 2.0 million peeps were being infected each day then there were a hell of lot of asymptomatic or perisymptomatic cases! Estimates of asymptomaticity are all over the place for SARS2 — from 1% to >90%. A meta-study last year suggested that asymptomaticity is a myth. They suggested that if you get infected you're going to have at least some symptoms — i.e. you'd be perisymptomatic with at least some mild respiratory or bowel symptoms.
My gut feeling is that COVID-19 is still overall more deadly than the flu.
A JAMA article (behind a paywall now) estimated that, for the 2023-24 season flu season, at 30 days post-diagnosis COVID-19 had a slightly higher death rate (5.97%) than flu (4.24%). IIRC they derived this from people who had visited either an ER or were hospitalized, but don't quote me on that.
And to sorta kinda answer your question, although newer strains might avoid our neutralizing antibodies (NAbs), they've still got to deal with our killer T cells (which are keyed to different, more generic, epitopes than our NAbs are) and our B cells that are undergoing somatic hypermutation (i.e. our B cells are always creating *new* neutralizing antibodies from a "seed" epitope that they learned via infection or vaccination). So SARS2 may spread quickly between people, and people might become sick, but our T cells and B cells seem to be doing a good job preventing serious illness and death. I don't think any new variants will be able to get around most peoples' secondary line of defenses — though you'd be at risk if you're immune compromised, elderly (which is the same as being immune compromised), or too young to have any NAbs. Also, note, that despite abysmal booster uptake in the US, people aren't dying in droves like they did early in the pandemic. So I think our humoral immune system is standing up pretty well to SARS2.
I suspect that in another year or two SARS-CoV-2 will become another common cold HCoV like OC43, HKU1, 229E, or NL63. Remember there's some strong evidence that the progenitor of the current OC43 virus was the pathogen that caused the (pretty deadly) Russian Flu back in the 1880s...
For MPox, do you know whether sexual transmission, and specifically sexual MSM transmission is the main driver for other clades than the 2022 outbreak? Was the 2022 outbreak an exception?
My understanding is that with this Clade 1 outbreak only roughly a third of the infections are due to sexual transmission (and that seems to be due to MSM sex). A bunch of kids have been infected, though. So it's getting around via other vectors than MSM. Our Clade 2 outbreak in 2022, was almost all MSM driven (IIRC >95% of the cases were tied to MSM contact).
I don't know about previous MPox outbreaks or variants.
Seeing as aging leaders & succession is on everyone's mind..... does, uh, anyone know what would happen if Xi Jinping were to die unexpectedly? He's 71 years old, so younger than the US leaders but in the actuarial zone of 'something could happen to the guy overnight'. I haven't the slightest insight into China's political structure, other than a vague understanding that it's all councils within councils within councils. As I understand it Xi consolidated power and swept aside whatever kind of proto-political structure China had after the Deng period. Is there a succession plan? Is it stable? The Soviets at least had some kind of structure.
There were faint rumors of an attempted coup or at least some political squabbling between Chinese leaders a few years ago
Xi Jinping has three positions that make him paramount leader: General Secretary of the CCP, President of China, and Chairman of the Central Military Commission. All three of those bodies have succession plans but they go to different people. Still, if Xi was found dead tomorrow that's what would happen. You'd have a new head of state, a new head of the party, and a new head of the military and they'd be different people.
In practical terms what's likely to happen is a succession struggle between high ranking members of Xi's faction. Though who knows, maybe another could come in. There's no guarantee that it's even one of the three who get a top job (though that would be common). This would all be played out internally unless something goes very, very wrong. The people who lose would resign in favor of the winner of that succession struggle.
Anti china politics ussally call him a cult of personality overseeing game of thrones style power politics
Getting a real answer is probably hard but unless there's a named successor and you find any degree of politic purges to be power politics, it's probably will be a mess
If it's over for knowledge workers, then we can have machines be our slaves, and no longer need to do work. We can live in a utopia.
I think this day is a long way off. Maybe GPT-5 will be hugely better than GPT-4, but how will it rank against the top 10% of knowledge workers, where the great work actually gets done? Who will maintain and improve the machines?
Rant: I hate the word "Knowledge Economy" because it's pretentious. The word "Knowledge" is misleading a listener into thinking that it's exclusive to the jobs described as such, but most "Knowledge" jobs involve no out-of-ordinary learning. A taxi driver learns new roads and shortcuts every day, an artisan learns new materials and new crafting, learning and knowledge is not special, they're what humans do. Yet "taxi driver", and "artisan" aren't traditionally called "Knowledge Work", although they do involve a lot of knowledge and they do involve learning. Pilots and Astronauts are another example of the inconsistency, they undergo intense years-long training and study a lot of physics, yet they aren't traditionally called "Knowledge Work".
For a replacement, I prefer "Office Work", "Paper Work", or just the plain old "White Collar". If I want to be particularly a maverick, I might call it "Scribe Jobs" or "Jew Jobs", because those kinds of jobs were traditionally done by scribes in ancient civilizations and by Jews in medieval Europe, respectively. If you want to be brutally honest, they are "Body-less Jobs", if you want to be a Robin Hanson disciple, they're "Em Jobs".
(Perhaps the only exception to some of those terms is the profession of doctors, which I have seen people call "Knowledge Work", but does involve the body in many significant ways.)
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That out of the way, I'm a strong skeptic of AI. Current LLM propensity to hallucinate and bullshit is an obvious disadvantage compared to competent humans, who use the dark art of saying "I don't know" and checking their sources to commit much fewer mistakes. I have read "Situational Awareness" and it makes many interesting arguments for why we're "Hobbling" current LLMs (e.g. we expect an answer immediately in a span of seconds, we expect a right answer on the first try, we expect the answer to not exceed a typical 5x-10x an SMS or tweet length, we train LLMs on the entire garbage of the internet instead of high-quality highly-selected material, etc...). If we "Unhobbled" LLMs in the next 10 years, then maybe this + more compute + more data + better algorithms **might** equal better office workers, at least ones who say "I don't know" and "Would you mind pointing me to a Confluence page?", but I won't hold my breath.
Judging by current and near-term LLMs, one key feature is that their output is lower-quality than their best inputs. This might seem like an irrelevant observation, but it's the reason why LLMs will never replace humans in any meaningful large-scale sense. If you fire all your programmers, your LLMs will burn through your reserves of human code, and then keep outputting shit, and then keep training on shit, and then keep outputting shittier shit, and so on until they can't write anything but documentation examples. Humans inject quality into an inherently net-negative-quality system. Who knows what will happen if the self-proclaimed prophet who wrote Situational Awareness is right, but again I'm assuming current LLMs because that's all what we have for sure.
LLMs are usually infuriating in that (a) They're inconsistent (b) Their abilities are never entirely clear. With humans this is rare, if a human can do X today, then - absent personal tragedies and sleep deprivation - they can do X tomorrow and the day after and the day after that and the next week. Humans usually get hired with a known resume (and an interview that is supposed to verify the resume, but let us not get into the clusterfuck that is the interviewing system), you hire them, and you know that they can do X and Y and Z. If you ask them for a new thing W, then they might or might not know, they might or might not want to learn, but you know for a fact that they know X, Y, and Z, and they will keep knowing it until late age dementia. LLMs violate both principles, they're inconsistent and don't always answer correctly questions that they answered before, and you don't know the true extent of their capabilities (or lack thereof).
LLMs have no accountability, thus managing them is a riskier proposition (all the blame for all of the LLMs' fuckup will be on the nearest human above them in the hierarchy). LLMs are a single point of failure that allows whoever controls their operation and supply chain to chokehold a dependent organization and deprive it of its entire workforce (or worse, spy on and commandeer the workforce) in a way that no party except a government can do to a human workforce.
Nothing is wrong with the term "knowledge worker". It encompasses workers who primarily use knowledge to do their job. It makes much more sense to refer to a woodworker as a woodworker than a wood-nails-screws-glue-hammer-screwdriver-drill-apprentice-knowledge worker.
Also, LLMs are strongly correlated with each other. The hidden failure modes that you'll wake up to one day are present in *all* your office drones in the exact same way.
> If you fire all your programmers, your LLMs will burn through your reserves of human code, and then keep outputting shit, and then keep training on shit, and then keep outputting shittier shit, and so on until they can't write anything but documentation examples.
I disagree with this premise. That's only if there's no way to measure quality. If you rate code on a number of measures, you can train AIs to hill-climb in the direction that the higher measures point to.
I do agree that, given the current state of AI, this would apply to art. If there were no more human input as to what art was "aesthetically pleasing to humans", then over time a purely current-AI-driven system would devolve into something that would almost certainly not be "aesthetically pleasing to humans". But I think this will eventually fall away as AIs become more sophisticated and are trained on more types of input.
>>...then over time a purely current-AI-driven system would devolve into something that would almost certainly not be "aesthetically pleasing to humans".
Think of YouTube where content creators are chasing the algorithm to be considered good, instead of the algorithm chasing good creators. [insert O-face and finger pointing at circled sentence]
I *really* wish I could interview one of the apparently legions of people who see thumbnails like that and think, "yes, this looks like something I want to watch!" I actively avoid anything that resembles this, but evidence suggests *I'm* the weirdo.
The trouble is there's only a limited amount of written and visual training data out there, and we risk AI model collapse if we start incorporating AI-generated data into the training sets.
Maybe better learning algorithms couldn't improve things, though. But watching all the generative AI garbage that is filling up my Facebook groups and art subreddits it's hard for me to believe that AI is going to generate anything better using this crap in its training data.
There's the saying that "90% of everything is crap", but that's only true because humans have a lot of filters that keep us from doing crap things. A script running a current AI will probably generate several 9s worth of crap.
It occurs to me that maybe the reactionaries have a point, here: RETVRN to a classics-oriented curriculum. Or in a more actionable modern incarnation, assign importance based on popularity over time, thus discounting anything recent. Many and most movies from the 40s and 50s were bad, but the ones that still have popularity were great. How many AI images generated in the last year will still be relevant even 5 years from now? And even using the older unpopular movies as data points can be useful, to provide context for what made the good ones good.
There was a great coinage a decade ago: there will be two types of jobs, jobs where you tell machines what to do, and jobs where machines tell you what to do.
I think more and more of "knowledge work" will be a combination, where humans act as a missing link and provide judgement that AI is not yet capable of. And obviously that's not a stable niche. Right now there's value in learning the current "prompt" interfaces to persuade AIs to do something, and there's value in reviewing their solutions to make sure they work. But I think those will go away soon.
- remove many more "mechanical" jobs (e.g. _just_ writing code or _just_ sketching a logo) while raising need for synthesis/creativity/true expertise
- make the mechanical tasks easier and free up bandwidth/time for "higher level" tasks
I've heard people reference a loop we might get into where AI is feeding upon itself and so it stagnates and so there will be an ongoing need for new knowledge generation.
Short hot take: it will make "knowledge workers" more valuable relative to everyone else. But there will be a lot of churn.
One issue on which I recently updated my views: AI is a serious threat to musicians' livelihoods. I toyed with Suno, and it's terrifying. Version 3.5 creates really good soundtracks in minutes. This means that all that sync work, i.e., music for movies, video games, commercials, etc., that provides many musicians with good work and a decent living, will be gone. We're going back to pre-Edison times - the only way for human musicians to make any money will be to play live, and maybe supplement income from streaming of songs people like. But I do expect now to see the streaming services to be inundated by AI-generated music, something I was skeptical about just a few months ago.
Not surprised at all. I read years ago about Spotify hiring session musicians to play things like soft jazz standards and such for ‘Music for Dinner’ kinds of playlists so that Spotify did not have to pay royalties. Now AI is plenty good enough for this stuff.
The music industry collapsed about two decades back without the help of AI. The only way *most* musicians can make money is through live performances (or live on Youtube or other social media).
Rick Beato has some theories about this. Here's one of the videos he did on the subject...
I've gotten the impression it started using "manual AI" around then. They discovered a formula for a "hit" song, and keep implementing it. Really good new stuff is hard to find.
Compare to, say, The Beatles, who produced different songs as hits consistently, though with some similar qualities. Some stuff they did also sounds original, but turn out to be covers. For example, Can't Buy Me Love is original, but Money is a cover, which is understandable, since they are opposite points of view in meaning.
And the streaming media companies like Spotify *seem* to be inserting AI-generated music in their streams — most likely because they won't need to pay royalties to AI.
As a musician, I find your comment about the pre-Edison period confusing. Before Edison, there were much more professional opportunities for musicians. The advent of AI composing tools won't be going back to an older time, because those professional opportunities have not existed for a long time and won't be coming back into existence. I can't imagine it will ever be as common to hire a performer or orchestra for events, religious services, restaurants as it was before Edison. Musicians including songwriters and arrangers will probably be collaborating with AI tools when writing, and performing. It won't be like the past in any key way that I can see.
I see - I meant "pre-Edison" as in "pre-recording", so the only income a musician could generate was from playing live. Your point is valid - there also were far more opportunities to generate this income because the only way to hear music was also "live". This latter part is not coming back indeed.
AI might influence the music writing market which was already insanely competitive but not much else. People would still want celebrities, sex appeal, concerts and novelty.
Hopefully we will get better written music with AI because the current trends are sad.
I actually agree wholly with your first paragraph - that's what I meant with the live music part. I don't quite share your negative view of the current music scene - excellent music is out there, it's hard to find because there's just so much of it.
But the part I'm worried about - the un-glamorous sync work that pays many musician's bills, recording session musicians, stuff like that - will be gone. Heck, I don't play drums and even now it has never occurred to me to hire a session drummer for my music projects, I just program loops of drum samples. But I don't play live, so I get away with it.
Eexcellent music gets produced but music is stagnating with no new major genres in 30 years. Compare the pace of music evolution between 1950-1994 to the change between 1994 and now. The last 30 years were of stagnation.
Plus the trend is away from the more complex and creative genres like rock and electronica and towards more repetitive genres like hip hop or towards simple, catchy hooks in short pop songs that hope to go viral on tiktok.
For me the only bright spot is kpop and that's not because of music which in unoriginal but because of the importance of choreography in kpop.
From what I've seen, a tremendous amount of good new music is being created, but the hit pipeline no longer exists.
I hadn't thought about the implications for new genres, but perhaps they need a critical mass of creators and fans-- possibly in person-- and there's no way for that to coalesce.
Yes, I kind of see your point. Khruangbin exists and fills small venues, but the venues are small :)
I wonder how much of the music evolution between 1950...94 was a consequence of rapidly developing technology. Thinking about a difference between 1950 studio and 1990 studio - it's like a different planet in 1990. But 1995 to today? Sure computers are more powerful, but you'd still spot the same SM57 on a guitar cab, and we're emulating old tape distortion with plugins. Same goes for instruments.
My initial thought was "this is so obvious, i didn't think it was worth mentioning". But this is mean, and not everyone lives in the same bubble as me. So I'm trying to think of reasons why "of course technology drove music innovation" is obvious to me.
Besides "yes, distortion was kind of a big deal", another thing which comes to mind is the Roland TR-808. I feel like this thing rears its head in every other music documentary. IIRC, it can be summed up as "it became massively popular because it was cheap and overstocked". I think there's more to it, but I don't remember the full story because it's never the center of attention.
edit: wikipedia says
> The 808 was a commercial failure, as electronic music had yet to become mainstream and many producers wanted more realistic drum sounds. After building approximately 12,000 units, Roland discontinued the 808 after its semiconductors became impossible to restock. It was succeeded by the TR-909 in 1983.
> Over the course of the 1980s, the 808 attracted a cult following among underground musicians for its affordability on the used market, ease of use and idiosyncratic sounds, particularly its deep, booming bass drum. It became a cornerstone of the emerging electronic, dance and hip hop genres, popularized by early hits such as "Planet Rock" by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force and "Sexual Healing" by Marvin Gaye.
Don’t you think With the advent of AI agents, knowledge workers are working themselves out of a job? They will contribute directly or indirectly in training AI agents. For instance in your ‘music industry’ example id say we can probably take it even further and say the whole creative industry and administrative work will be the first casualty and then more ‘knowledge intensive’ domains like engineering design and modeling. I think a substantial layer of knowledge industry will rely on AI input. Which consequently introduce a paradigm shift on human’s new role.
That falls under my "a lot of churn" blurb. The history of tech innovation is full of new technologies making a swath of old jobs obsolete, and creating another swath of new jobs. It's just really hard to tell in advance what the new jobs will be, and it is really hard on actual humans losing their old jobs.
I don't know enough about creative fields outside of music to offer an informed opinion.
On the fairly busy street in the fairly rural area where I live, birds are always flying across the street at a meter or so above the ground. This seems foolish to me, because by simply doubling the height of their flight path, birds could pretty much guarantee they would not get hit by cars.
Is the amount of energy required to get further off the ground so great that the extra safety of a higher flight is not worthwhile? Or are birds so good at dodging cars that they simply are not going toi hit even if they take risks? Or are birds dumb, and this is just what happens when you’re a dumb bird?
They can’t be THAT dumb, because birds don’t fly across highways at waist-level. Also, I rarely see squashed birds on the side of the road (unlike squirrels, opossums, etc.).
Just wondering if there’s a consensus from ornithologists or someone about this.
I struck and killed a bird with my car just last week. This is the 3rd one (that I've noticed) in my life and the first one in the last 20 years. I'd speculate that birds never really "learn" to not fly in front of cars. Heck, deer don't either. I live in a mostly rural area around a small (50k) city, deer strikes are extremely common here and I am exceptionally paranoid in the Fall about them. One of my co-workers has struck 8 deer in his life while driving, I'm still at 0, though I've had to come to a complete stop due to deer in or need the road on average about 3 times per year.
I’m not sure if it’s the same as your birds, but I’ve seen small birds which flap when they’re only a foot or two above the ground. (They gain maybe another foot after flapping.) I imagine this might be a physics thing, where it’s more efficient to flap when you’re close to a hard surface.
I don’t know how the physics would work. Maybe it’s something to do with the ground reflecting the kinetic energy of the air into the bird, or something? But they seem a bit faster flying close to the ground.
If you never see squashed birds or a bird get hit by a car, this indicates that whatever it is that the birds are doing is sufficient to not get hit by cars.
Birds have a much shorter reaction time* than humans, and a much faster acceleration**. This means that before a human has even reacted to something, a bird may be moving as fast as a human sprinter, and it does not take that much time at that speed to get out of the way of a car which is only a couple meters across. If you imagine you are standing in the road and a car is coming at you at 5-10 miles an hour, that's probably closer to how a bird perceives and will react to a car coming at it 25-50 miles an hour.
Another way of looking at it is to look at how fast birds are capable of flying normally. Common doves fly at 25-45 mph, ie about the same speed as most cars on city streets. So they are already optimized to dodge and react to obstacles moving at that speed.
* depending on what you read it can take as much as 5x more time for humans to react to something.
Regarding reaction time, most birds are much smaller than humans, so the reaction time may be related to how long the nerve impulses take in traveling. Eyes collect data, send it to the brain, where it is processed, and turned into instructions to muscles and sent out, for the muscles then to act. It is unsurprising the distance of this information path would be 5x longer in humans.
A bird collided with my window the weekend before last. There were multiple of them flying across the road at the same time, and I wondered why they didn't fly high enough to avoid my not-especially-tall car.
Presumably it's harder to see food from higher up if you're a pigeon? And perhaps you're at greater risk of flying predators higher up. Cars are very new dangers in the grand scheme of things and I don't think that many birds get hit by them.
My uninformed guess would be that birds mostly fly on instinct, and did not evolve to dodge cars?
And there was not enough time for cars to apply selective pressure (even if bird would die from getting hit by a car often, which probably is not the case).
But of course, I'm too curious to know if someone has a better idea.
I've worked closely with ornithologists for many years, and both of your comments are consistent with their view of this sort of question. (Of which there are plenty of examples that people notice.)
In addition, the great majority of bird species evolved in a context of both great numbers, and relatively rapid reproduction cycles. Hence it has never been a natural-selection priority for individual pigeons or whatever to analyze and distinguish among new or unusual individual risks. If X,000 (pigeons or whatever) per year get eliminated by cars that won't even be a blip in the collective success or failure of (pigeons or whatever).
Birds generally have more brainpower than some other vertebrates, and some avian species are particularly clever in specific ways (famously the members of the genus Corvus which is crows/ravens/rooks). At the natural-selection level though they do have a fair amount of zerg-rush tendencies.
I think I have an angle on how to frame FDA "re-regulation". If I think about the concept "regulate drugs less" even I feel a catch in the stomach despite rationally having every reason to support that
So my concept is that FDA employees from top to bottom will have their future wage raises tied equally to two metrics. Half will be dependent on safety as they currently percieve it - lack of unexpected side effects. Half will be dependent on whether new drugs with beneficial effects succeed in being approved more often
Let's say you streamline and relax regulation requirements such that 10% more drugs are approved and unexpected side effects increase by 1%. Some direct QALY measurement finds a 100-1 benefit. Significant raises are in order. I think not only does this change the incentive ecosystem of the FDA but also the perception of their performance
Person A: "This new drug did these bad things"
Person B: "Overall though the FDA had a 100-1 benefits delta, and they don't get raises otherwise"
It's hard for me to picture writers who support the FDA in general finding this setup to be something they can obviously oppose, even if it fundamentally changes the incentives and behaviour of the FDA
I feel like you don't understand the industry. ALL things have side-effects. The question is whether the side-effects outweigh the intended benefits. Also whether there actually ARE intended benefits.
I think the drug marketplace is now intentionally obfuscated to the consumer. Some drugs ought to be regulated to prevent abuse. But I've never heard, for example, of people abusing insulin. Why can't I see a selection of insulin choices, with different benefits and pricing, and choose between them? The current system makes one compare prices by "filling" the prescription somewhere and, to check the price somewhere else, transferring it to the new place and then seeing what they charge in comparison.
I don't doubt there are lots of other drugs that no one would take other than for their intended medicinal purpose, yet can't be made over-the-counter for unclear reasons.
Subtitle to annoy skeptics: Could chakras be “real”?
Trigger warnings: desacralization of spiritual experiences, speciesism, oversimplification of Science
Emotions are very complex and largely “hardwired” neuronal activities that likely require multi-layer structures with rich feedback mechanisms, i.e. an advanced CNS. But they had to evolve somehow, which means they must have started in simpler lifeforms (and evidence seems to support it - more primitive animals seem to show some emotional capacity, but to a lesser degree than advanced ones). So when emotions were evolving in smaller/simpler CNS structures, nature didn’t have a lot of neurons to work with, and it seems plausible that it could have ended up reusing the same structures for both emotional and somatic/kinesthetic processing. And it could be that this arrangement worked well enough to persist into more advanced species (as often happens in evolution), and, eventually, humans. Which would mean that while our emotions do not physically happen in our bodies (i.e. they largely happen in the brain), perceptually it’s quite the opposite; that is, it may be impossible (at least to an untrained mind) to perceptually separate emotions from literal physical processes happening in/to our bodies.
And if we take it further, it might provide an interesting pathway to exploring chakras, “energy body” and other “energetic” phenomena that supposedly happen in the body but that scientific methods are not able to detect in the body no matter how hard we try. Because even though the subjects feel those phenomena in their bodies, they literally physically happen only in their brains, and not in the sense they’re imaginal, but rather that there are specific structures in our brains responsible for those experiences, and they likely exist “in hardware” even in subjects that don’t report those experiences because the corresponding patterns/processes are inhibited “in software” in those subjects, perhaps due to the way modern culture works.
Looking from a slightly different angle, that might also explain why things like acupuncture or reiki may fail to work in RCTs but people continue to report successes in the field - if RCTs don’t take the degree of “embodied-ness” of subjects into consideration, they would end up with a lot of subjects that are “disembodied”, i.e. don’t process their emotional/somatic experiences very well and therefore don’t respond to somatic/”energetic” manipulations very well (myself being a prime example of that, FWIW). On the other hand, in the field the patients of such treatments largely self-select by the degree of belief into these esoteric/irrational things, and that is likely to correlate highly with their degree of embodied-ness, directly increasing the effectiveness of treatments.
I find it amusing that he uses the heart metaphorically many times in his books (in relation to truthfulness and kindness) but never seems to wonder _why_ that metaphor comes up in nearly all cultures and how that might be tied into the body/brain emotional processing (though I only searched through three of his books that seemed relevant, could be that he addresses it elsewhere).
Relatedly, it's even more amusing that the area traditionally associated with those hearty sensations (middle of the left ribcage, near the lower edge of the pectoralis major) is not where the heart actually is located! As far as I can tell, this area is approximately in between the heart and the spleen, and the only organ actually located there is the left lung (or the lower part of it, anyway).
Thanks! Immediately found this quote: The change in the representation of the body landscape can be partly achieved by another mechanism, which I call the "as if body loop." In this alternate mechanism, the representation of body- related changes is created directly in sensory body maps, under the control of other neural sites, for instance, the prefrontal cortices. It is "as if" the body had really been changed but it was not.
I know in some mystic traditions that engage in these sorts of practices, they deliberately withhold information from novices, in much the same way that neural net training divides data into training and test batches. If the novice can re-derive the hidden accepted answer, they're considered to have achieved genuine insight.
This still doesn't eliminate the possibility of path-based dependencies, but it's a lot more scientific than I'd have expected from the outside.
I've read a little about comparing chakra systems. As I recall, there's substantial variation, though all systems have heart, center of gravity, and (faint memory) between the eyes, or maybe the crown of the head.
Two theories: some cultures are lumpers and others are splitters. And also, some chakras are more developed in some cultures than in others.
I believe without evidence that every cell has its own chakra/meridian system.
There are also 3 jewels, 4 noble truths, 6 realms, 7 factors of awakening, 8-fold noble path, 9 consciousness and 10 defilements. Buddhists are not *that* hung up on number 5 :)
Sigh, numerology. In the Yuthok Nyinthig, some things get chanted a different number of repetititons than in other branches of vajrayana, because the number is medically auspicious or something...
TBH I haven't really looked into chakras myself much at all. It could for example be that the "hardware" part of it is not really discrete - i.e. there could be one continuous "chakra" along the spine but different parts of it reflect different emotions more strongly, and the separation into distinct chakras is somewhat arbitrary and comes from culture.
Seems overly complicated. Here's a simpler explanation:
Stress / relaxation are very noticeable physiological states. These systems are triggered both by physical and emotional stimuli (anxiety, fear, surprise, etc). That's pretty much optimal, as our literal survival depended on shutting down our digestion and redirecting blood to the extremities when we heard a lion approach. These systems (also quite rationally / optimally evolved) trigger in purely social situations as well, but their physiological effects kinda come as a package. Therefore, you'll fell butterflies in your stomach in moments of high nervousness. The increased alertness is adaptive, the stomach discomfort is incidental.
Similarly, there's a proven bidirectional link between your heart rate and your emotions. Too lazy to look up a source right now, but I can tell you from personal experience that when your heart stops beating, you will immediately be overcome with intense feelings of doom.
I never quite got whether that "redirection of blood" and "shutting down digestion" was characterized quantifiably or is just as speculative as the above. Furthermore, there's more to somatic mapping of emotions than just fear: for example, love and kindness also have a strong somatic component (open-heartedess is not, in fact, just a weird random metaphor).
It's not speculative. There are entire parts of our nervous system dedicated to managing stress levels optimally (the sympathicus and the parasympathicus). All these effects are well documented. The fight-or-flight response is a physiological process.
ETA: love and kindness imply safety, which lowers stress and reduces the work the heart does, by literally lowering adrenaline levels. I'm not saying the aren't a bunch of other factors at play. It's just that the heart and the lungs in particular have vastly variable output and are thus prime targets for regulation by the autonomic nervous system.
You know, I feel like we got off the wrong foot here. I believe that it is entirely possible that the connection between fear response and intestinal blood flow has been thoroughly quantified and measured and I'm just not aware of that; the thing is, whether that is true or not is not really important for the hypothesis. It does not rely on the connection between emotional and somatic processing being spurious and non-functional; in fact, it's highly likely that it was functional at some point in evolution or perhaps even still is. The point is that the subsequent buildup of a rich and complex emotional processing system could have retained that connection even in entirely non-functional use cases. Like, feeling contraction in one's belly when one is afraid makes sense because the brain is sending a signal there to do the thing (blood flow reduction, etc). But the fact that one would also get a warm pleasant feeling there when they're feeling peaceful is just an artifact - at least, there does not seem to be any functional connection here (unless I'm not aware of some well-known studies establishing just such a functional connection, of course). Similarly, it would make sense if excitement would be felt in the heart area since it usually results in increased heart rate and so on. But when love and kindness (much more advanced emotions than excitement) evolved, it's possible that they piggy-backed off the excitement circuits somehow and therefore are also felt in the heart area, even while not necessarily being reliably correlated with heart rate fluctuations.
Yes! This is pretty much my model. Make it even simpler and more abstract: it is obviously adaptive for our emotions to be able to modulate our body's state, and for our body's state to be signaled to our mind via emotions.
That gives a baseline "infrastructure" on which our subjective experience is gradually built up. We are *not* disembodied beings who were fully conscious before we had to learn to deal with physical reality. Our consciousness is entirely a product of intelligently interacting with physical reality.
I'm not saying there aren't dedicated parts of the nervous system dedicated to it, I'm saying that there may be more functionality to those parts than just reducing the bloodflow, etc.. And by "quantifiably" I meant actual studies that measure the exact changes in bloodflow. Do those exist?
EDIT: Well, feeling love normally increases the heart rate rather than reducing it, so that does not seem to work out quite that straightforwardly.
I think the medical term "dysautonomia" may be a good starting point for research on this. That term, of course, refers generally to medical conditions with which these regulatory functions do not work optimally including specifically blood flow regulation.
@Scott: followup on chronic fatigue vs heart medication.
I've been off my heart meds for about 6 weeks now, fatigue is completely gone. Of course I'm in very bad general health from years of not exercising, and have to be more careful with my heart condition from now on on top of that. But this is manageable, and getting better every day!
Can I entice you to look into the model presented by the following paper, which is the one that convinced me to drop the meds:
In a nutshell, the theory is that bradykinin (and similar substances I guess?) are responsible for chronic fatigue. Bradykinin is a locally produced hormone involved in muscle exertion, repair and such, but if it sticks around too long it spreads through the blood and becomes systemic, lowering pain threshold, increasing inflammation, sympathetic tone and so on. Table 5 at the end of the paper has proposed explanations of every major CFS symptom under this theory.
The link to heart problems is that ACE inhibitors (and the newer generation sacubitril/valsartan combo) target the renin-angiotensin system, which has some beneficial effects like lowering blood pressure but of course upsets the whole pathway, with many other effects including a reduction in the breakdown rate of bradykinin.
From other things I've read, excessive bradykinin also seems to be involved in dysmenorrhea/endometriosis (menstrual cramps which sometimes lead to fatigue and brain fog) so the link to CFS isn't that far fetched. Lots of similarities with fibromyalgia, which I've been diagnosed with. These conditions all involve muscle cramping and pain, and can lead to fatigue and brain fog. I'm male so obviously don't have endo myself, pretty sure my fibromyalgia diagnosis is correct though. There are plenty of cases where fibromyalgia doesn't lead to fatigue, so I in my case I suspect something multifactorial with at least these 2 causes (heart meds + fibromyalgia).
All of this could have immediate impact on clinical practice. Currently, young otherwise healthy people with heart conditions are put on these medications as a matter of course. My cardiologist at the time did *not* inform me of the systemic nature of the drugs she was putting me on, describing them as gently protective of the heart. It is a completely different matter to treat a 60+ y.o. person who is at severe risk of dying from heart attack, insufficiency, etc, vs treating a ~25 y.o. with a family history but only small hints of heart problems myself. Knowing what I know now, I could have handled my heart problems with lifestyle interventions alone. At the very least, cardiologists should be trained to immediately look at these medications as the possible culprits if one of their patients exhibits any kind of fatigue.
(Of course this also leads to further research, both for treatment of CFS unrelated to heart problems, and better understanding and treating heart insufficiency)
I know this is just N=1 anecdotal evidence, but I can't overstate how big a deal this is if true. I wouldn't wish chronic fatigue on my worst enemy. It's easily a 50-80% reduction in QALYs, and I have (had?!) what's overall considered to be a mild case. Any inroads towards understanding the mechanisms of this cluster of "psychosomatic" diseases would be highly impactful.
One test would be whether there are any people with CF who aren't on those medications. Your thesis seems to be that the medications are the sole cause.
On the other hand, those medications might just be a major cause of CF, but not the only cause.
Yes. The broad cluster of "psychosomatic" diseases are grouped together because the symptoms are similar. It's quite possible that the causes are multifactorial, split into a bunch of subtypes, etc. Similar to how cancer is actually very varied, even though we have a medical specialty that deals with all cancers due to the similarities.
Having a credible physical marker at all is quite a step forward. There are plenty of people who are flat out convinced that my disease doesn't exist, that it's just some version of being lazy and/or depressed.
I actually don’t think it is accurate to diagnose you with chronic fatigue syndrome; I would call it intolerance to beta blockers. Fatigue is a known side effect. For most people it’s fine; for a minority it’s debilitating. I am disappointed in your treating doctors for not recognising this and doing something about it earlier.
Most people who have CFS are not on beta blockers. I am not an expert in CFS, but the “just so” story about bradykinin seems too neat. Biology is sufficiently complex that you can find a decent-sounding paper about any hypothesis you care to name.
EDIT - I incorrectly assumed that the "heart medication" you were talking about in the original post was beta blockers (known to cause fatigue) when in fact you were referring to ACE inhibitors (not widely known to cause fatigue)
I am not diagnosed with CFS, nor do I think I should be. Also, I *was* taken off beta blockers years ago, which did absolutely nothing against my fatigue.
I understand that people resist narrativization and that the story seems too neat. However, bradykinin is a *known* pro-inflammatory etc, and it is *known* to be increased by heart medications. There's also the tiny detail that I took the obvious action implied by this theory and got vastly better. From your PoV, that's a random person (n=1000) who is postselected; but from my PoV, it's a preselected n=1 experiment with a dramatic and unmistakable effect. Still anecdotal, but it vastly increases my confidence.
I appreciate that based on your experience you think of this theory as deeply important, but to convince cardiologists and the broader medical population, you would need to gather much more data. We are going to assume this is an n=1 fluke until you can find a large population of people who came off ACE inhibitors and found their quality of life much improved.
Yeah I've seen a million people on ACE inhibitors and Entresto and most of them are completely fine. Your theory would seem to predict that ACE inhibitors could cause fatigue, muscle cramps etc, but the closely related ARBs would not as they don't increase bradykinin, but in fact randomised controlled trials have not found that and most doctors think of them as almost interchangeable
EDIT - I apologise if I have misunderstood your claim as meaning to apply to everyone, instead of to rare individuals unusually susceptible to bradykinin induced fibromyalgia
I suppose it didn't come across well that I *obviously* think this is a multifactorial thing, either binary ("only people with fibromyalgia can have this adverse effect") or linear ("it is one of many factors that slightly increase the likelihood of fatigue").
ETA: it's pretty close to a strawman to suggest I believe that millions of people are severely adversely impacted and cardiologists somehow failed to notice. Please do better.
And yes, my theory implies exactly that about ARBs. I expect that when I talk to my cardiologists next, they'll put me on such a medication. It is not surprising that very broad, untargeted studies don't find rare or subtle effects (how many people with fibromyalgia where included in these ARB vs ACE-inhibitor studies? probably an insignificant amount, maybe even zero as the condition would be screened out to reduce noise in the sample). It is one of the major problems with such a "black box" approach to medicine, where the targets being measured (overall health and such) are very far removed from any specific mechanism of action the drug could have.
We're in unprecedented territory, at least in modern politics. But if I had to bet, I'd bet that he won't be President this time next year. Either he loses the nomination, or doesn't get elected, or (unlikely) gets elected and immediately resigns.
I mean you're adding a lot of justifications there that are just icing on the cake. He's in his fucking 80s, every single day is borrowed time, let alone having to actually work at that age.
In general, whenever many people think that some event has killed a major politician's prospects, the answer is "no, it has not." Obviously, some events actually do wreck a politician's electability, but I don't know how to identify those, and it looks like most people discussing it don't either, so I'm assuming this is another instance of nothing significant happening.
This only holds true when the people thinking that said prospects are killed would prefer that said prospects are killed. When it is your -supporters- who think that your prospects are killed, that's a significantly bigger deal, because they are more often going to be speaking for themselves and people like themselves.
I was in the position of disliking both Trump and Biden for different portions of their policies. I was planning on voting for whoever best supported Israel. I was expecting to re-evaluate that in October, since I expected that Biden's support might fluctuate on that time scale. To 0-th order, it now looks like Harris may be somewhat worse. In any event, I'll re-evaluate in October and decide who to vote for then. I _was_ shocked at Biden's debate performance, and I am concerned about whether this immediately makes the credibility of MAD less stable.
I read a mixture of both Biden and Trump supporters; the Trump supporters are currently quite happy in their belief that there's nobody -to- replace Biden if he drops out, while the Biden supporters are instead busily looking for a plausible replacement.
I agree wholeheartedly in the general case, but it's not everyday that the NYT Editorial Board says a candidate should drop out - there is evidence to suggest this is different.
I think a lot of people are looking at the polls and saying "Oh, that didn't hit as hard as I thought it might, we still have a chance." But I think that specific dip in the polls is the intersection of two things: Politically well-informed, and also unaware of Biden's condition.
I think a bigger group of people are looking around and going "Oh, now everybody knows that everybody knows, and I won't be a social pariah for saying ... "
And another group of people still hasn't watched the debate, and are only slowly filtering in to watch it; probably trying to prove to themselves that it didn't go as badly as it did, that everybody is exaggerating.
I thus expect the polls to show a sustained decline over the next few weeks as the unthinkable becomes broadly more and more thinkable.
Seems like he's about where Trump and Romney were at this point in 2016 and 2012. He could win if it turns out the polls were undercounting his support, but short of that I don't think he has any more outs.
Is it remotely creditable to claim a democrate is being undercounted? Electorial college, rural v city, claims moderates are nazis for opposing infinite immigration form the left, the media being leftwing?
>Electorial college, rural v city, claims moderates are nazis for opposing infinite immigration form the left, the media being leftwing?
What do any of these things have to do with polls? What does the electoral college have to do with the odds that a Democrat will answer when you call them on the phone and ask who they're voting for?
Polling errors are unpredictable over the long term. It's true that in the past two presidential elections, the polling errors were both in the direction of over-estimating the democratic candidate. Unfortunately that doesn't tell us which way it will be this election.
Of course, the idea that Biden was only a normal polling error away from winning was what the situation was *before* the debate. It hasn't been long enough to really see how the debate impacted things, but the very first polls to come out after it don't look great and it wouldn't surprise me at all to find out that he was more than an average, or even more than a "large" polling error away from winning.
> Polling errors are unpredictable over the long term
Given a poll that sampled all of america equally, it would be predictably wrong in favor of the republicans due to the intentional design of the electoral college
If there was a polling error favoring Biden of the same size as the one there was for Trump in 2016, it would be enough to get him over the electoral college disadvantage.
In general polling error is unpredictable. While Democrats underperformed their polls in 2016 and 2020, they overperformed them in 2012, and overall polling bias isn't consistently in one direction or the other. You can argue that it consistently favors Trump, but you have a sample size of two there, which isn't great.
That doesn't sound bayesian or whatever to me, I don't think I know your name but if your a 95% of the posters here shouldnt you have a number that it will swing one way or the other and any evidence(even if those are thought experiments about the electoral college) updates that number?
I'm confused about what point it is you are trying to make. Polls, on their own, are not attempting to predict the electoral college. If one were to simply see a national poll that has the Republican candiated up 51-49, and say "Aha, trump has a 51% chance to win!", then that's a mistake on the part of the person interpreting the poll. It's not a polling error.
Polling error is merely difference between the percent of voters it estimates support a candidate and the vote share they eventually get.
I care about who's going to win, even if all possible measurements are imperfect I will be using it as a proxy for that question.
> Polling error is merely difference between the percent of voters it estimates support a candidate and the vote share they eventually get.
more political and debatable but I would also say that the left is more aggressive to the "undecided" voters while votes are fairly good at being anonymous, the left has quite successfully and publicly pressured corps to support blm and gay pride month, which again is in favor of republicans
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Given 5 comments ago the idea was "is biden undercounted?" is a question about "could biden win by chance like trump did in 2016 ", while I think that the rural vs city distinction makes cities more easy to count and easier to organize, polling error will probably always be more in favor of cities and in the current era that means democrats
It's not looking great for him, but the nature of this stuff is that our knowledge can only be shaky and probabilistic. Anyone claiming to know for sure how it will turn out is a fool.
Very hard to say. If he manages to have a great second debate, probably not, but there is a perceived weakness there.
The problem is, who do you pick to replace him? Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Mayor Pete, another name off the list? If the Democrats are running on pure "Trump will put you all in concentration camps and destroy democracy" then the scaremongering will be "Elect Dem Guy for the sake of peace, liberty, and justice!"
But then they need some kind of policies beyond "I'm not Trump".
The real problem with "but Trump!" is that we've already seen literally the worst Trump has to offer and there's a strong argument it's not as bad as what Biden's given us. Worried about war? Under Biden the entire planet is on fire. Worried about political violence or anti-Semitism? Under Biden there are weekly Charlottesvilles in every major city where the police are ordered to stand down and let it happen. Et cetera.
I've been thinking about this recently. What's important for a President is not policy but meta-policy. Presidents rarely get their way policy-wise, and if they do then it's no different to what a generic member of their own party would have done. You want to reform Medicare? Schya right, good luck with that.
What matters is the process by which you're going to come up with policies for all the things that haven't happened yet, because it's only in reacting to events that a President really gets to do anything.
I'm sort of coming around to the idea that Biden is not the President as such, at least not the traditional American president; he's the European sort of figurehead president/head of state.
Joe is the face of the administration because he was electable as a moderate candidate, surfing on the good vibes of post-Obama as VP, and had enough experience and clout to be It's His Turn (For Reals This Time) to work.
The real decision-making/policy setting/deal brokering happens elsewhere, behind the scenes. Joe knows the big picture stuff, but it's the opposite of Trump, who was criticised for not listening to his cabinet and advisors and just hiring-and-firing on a whim - Joe listens *too* much to "the party thinks we should do X, Y or Z".
Take Sam Brinton - I'm sure that Joe never heard of the guy, he just signed off on "this is our new deputy assistant under-secretary of sweeping the floors of nuclear reactors". Some little munchkin decided Sammy-boy was the one they wanted for the sake of Representation and Pride and LGBT+ and all the rest of it, but we'll never know who because they've slithered back under their rock. I think Joe is fine with general LGBT stuff because he's the "gay marriage? sure, why not?" kind of normie, but doesn't really know about "well Sam is a they/them non-binary gay possibly trans masc person who likes to steal women's luggage at airports so they can wear those clothes".
(For those of you happily unaware, I am not making any of that up*)
So Joe being the face of the presidency isn't the problem, as the real running will be done by others as per usual. Joe showing why he may not be suitable this time round is the problem.
And if they replace Joe, then the replacement is going to need to eventually come up with some "my policy position on swamp otters is this" of their own, to sell to the voters as "now I'm in office, I'm gonna do all this wonderful stuff!"
>And if they replace Joe, then the replacement is going to need to eventually come up with some "my policy position on swamp otters is this" of their own, to sell to the voters
Agreed. And "eventually" is not very long. Roughly speaking, I don't think the Democrats have enough _time_ to pick someone else, get them well known to the voters, and get their declared policies also widely known, all before November. They can try, or they can continue to try to support Biden, but neither alternative looks all that viable.
I do think Biden's nomination in 2020 was not because of any personal qualities, but simply because he was the most capable of beating Trump. On that logic, his actual self was never as important as the image of his self.
He did have the advantage of the remaining feel-good factor off being Obama's VP and he is way more likeable and relatable than Hillary. Looked like a safe pair of hands who wouldn't upset anyone and was a solid Democrat.
He also had the advantage in 2020 of no real competition. Sanders and Warren were too far left, Gabbard too far right, Buttigeig was too young, and Bloomberg was not wanted by anyone except Bloomberg.
That leaves Klobuchar and Biden as serious candidates who could attract the support of both the voters and the party kingmakers, and Biden had name recognition.
I remember how quickly the narrative changed from "Biden is a kid-sniffing weirdo, he's got no chance" to "Ugh, I guess Biden then?"
And Biden's weird handsyness never got another mention outside the right-wing memeopshere, much as his senility never got mentioned outside the right-wing memeosphere until last week.
I have been reading a lot of this kind of argument too. "Joe is basically a figurehead and we're just voting for his cabinet which is competent".
To be clear, I think it's 100% cope and Dems gaslighting everyone (specially themselves) regarding voting to a president with dementia.
But I have to admit I think it's a valid argument? Half my family used exactly the same reasoning to vote for Bolsonaro and he's way more willful than Biden.
I didn't call bullshit on that argument 6? years ago, so I guess I'll have to swallow it when the left does it too.
I realize that the White House has a _lot_ of staff. Still, I'm skeptical of the ability to run with an inert figurehead. The POTUS is going to have to at least deal with Putin and Xi, and there is a limit to how much of that can be delegated. A POTUS who garbles his sentences while trying to neither start WWIII nor fold is a problem.
I guess it boils down to whether you trust his handlers or not, to do a good job of running the country in the way you (the ordinary voter) want. If you like "elderly moderate" Biden, but hate his "Inflation isn't real, it's just a right-wing conspiracy theory" advisors, then you'll dislike "Puppet King" Biden.
(And I suppose a similar thing is happening in reverse for some Trump voters: they may outright hate the man, but they might also hope that they can puppet him. Or at least trust his advisors to manipulate him, a la what Gary Cohn did with stealing "shoot America in the foot" executive orders off the President's desk before he could sign them, back in 2018.
Though, of course, Trump has reacted to this by firing all such people as advisors, and replacing them with people who are personally loyal to *him*, not the broader ideals of conservatism beyond just Trump... to a degree, the real Project 2025 was aimed at the Republican Party, and is also already mostly complete.)
As far as I can figure out from skimming the first few chapters, Project 2025 is aimed at giving (part of) the Republican Party control over Trump rather than vice versa. It presents him with a convenient "do this, then this, then this, and do it quickly without thinking too much" checklist.
I wasn't taking it seriously, but (1) given some decisions which I find very hard to believe an 81 year old lower middle-class guy from an Irish Catholic background is generating now due to his evolved raised consciousness and (2) the debate, which even if we give him the benefit of the doubt that he was both sick and had been over-prepared by his handlers stuffing his head full of detailed policy instead of letting him wing it off a few prepared canned talking points, I now lean more towards "yeah there's some kind of cabal in the administration/party making the decisions and just having Joe rubberstamp them". I've seen online speculation, though take that for what it's worth, that Obama, for instance, is doing a lot of 'advising'.
Agree with this. The problem is finding someone to replace him who will:
a.) do at least as well in the polls as Biden, and
b.). be willing to risk their shot at the president as sloppy seconds for a presidency in decline.
Those two factors work against each other. A top -tier candidate might wait 4 years for a proper run, instead of talking big risks now. That shortens your bench.
There are a lot of unknowns here, so maybe you go for it anyway if you're a potential replacement candidate. You can't be guaranteed in 4 years to get a candidate as weak as Trump, but he came so close to beating Biden in 2020 that maybe the weakness is mostly perception. In the next 4 years you won't likely be able to run on abortion again (assuming much of this is worked out by then and people settle down about it - plus the next R candidate won't have to answer for appointing the SCOTUS judges who overturned it) so maybe now's your chance.
But then there's Harris, who never had the blessing from the Obama and Clinton factions to be Next In Line, but if you pass her over now you'll piss off lots of voters.
It's really hard and risky to replace Biden. Easier to double down on gaslighting and hope to slide by. Maybe skip the next debate?
A strong harris performance would probably do better than Biden at this point, TBH.
1. She's been pretty invisible for a while so people have forgotten a lot of what they did/didnt like about her. A strong performance out of the gate could help a lot.
2. To match that invisibility, her favorability has returned to -10, better than TRump and much better than Biden. Biden hasn't been at that level for over a year (!)
3. Much of her baggage IMO was attached to her awkwardness in trying to pivot from a moderate/anti-crime resume to a more identity-oriented persona in 2020. I think she could get away with returning to the anti-crime tone now, especially with only the general election ahead.
4. Biden stepping down in favor of her could seem like a nice elder statesman moment of putting party/country above self, and contrast well with Trump's reaction to the 2020 election.
All this relies on her actually being able to present herself well, though. She was quite poor in the 2020 campaign, so would have to do better than that.
I'm unclear on what the real case against Harris is.
I know I don't like her, but I don't like any Democrat, so my opinions aren't useful.
I also know that some of the hard lefties don't like her because she attempted, as Attorney-General, to actually enforce the law on occasion. That doesn't feel disqualifying for the mainstream though.
The other argument I've heard against her is that all she really does is get up and parrot talking points and that she has no real position or will of her own other than what will help her get political power in the near term. But that sounds like most politicians, especially Biden.
So why is everyone so sure that Kamala is so unelectable?
IMO the 2020 zeitgeist, post-Floyd, on the dem side was very identity-oriented (e.g. "woke"). And despite her multicultural background Harris is not especially good at speeches that match that zeitgeist - she comes off as artificial, awkward, uninspiring. I think that turned off a lot of people
The zeitgeist has faded a good bit this year and so she *could* re-invent herself by returning to her pre-2020 persona. See for example this speech from when she was a senator, to AIPAC:
I think a lot of this relies on Harris demonstrating a degree of political talent that she has struggled with over the past 4-5 years. It isn't uncommon for popular local/regional political stars to flop when exposed to the national limelight (e.g. Sarah Palin), and that seems like what happened here.
Honestly, as the VP and putative 2024 running mate for Biden, she was given a huge platform to stump for the president and make her case for taking over - twice now - without capturing national attention. There's a corporate media that would love to pitch that story, if they could. They tried early in the presidency back in 2020, but it didn't catch on. Something about Harris just doesn't sell to national audiences, despite concerted efforts to make that happen by different teams.
If you're worried about Biden being able to perform under pressure in a major national campaign, it seems like a big risk to replace him with someone who has the same problem. Worst-case scenario is that you end up wanting to swap out again, but now you don't have a way to make that argument or time to do it in.
Another glaring problem with Harris is that her first assignment as VP was to attend to the border, and that's one of Biden's weakest issues.
Finally, Biden debated Trump already, which set a precedent. If you're going to replace Biden, his replacement won't have an excuse to bow out of the second debate - especially if voters perceive the first debate as having forced the president out. If you run from a Trump debate, it looks like you can't handle the pressures of the office. I would not trust the debating talents of Harris against those of Trump. She might be able to hold her own, but it also might become another dumpster fire. I'd peg a 'win' for Harris in that format as a low-probability event. When you're behind in all the polls, that's not good enough.
It's entirely possible to win a debate against Trump, and a decent opponent could do just that. But I don't think Harris has the skills to pay any of these bills.
>But then there's Harris, who never had the blessing from the Obama and Clinton factions to be Next In Line, but if you pass her over now you'll piss off lots of voters.
Only if she is perceived as having genuinely wanted to be the replacement. One thing I haven't seen seriously discussed over the last few days is whether that's actually the case. Biden may be bullheaded and/or experiencing cognitive decline, but I don't think she is. She knows she isn't popular.
She may want it anyway, and she may be selfish enough to want it even if another candidate would have a better chance of beating Trump, but I wouldn't just assume those things.
I've been hearing rumors (all unsubstantiated, for what that's worth) that Harris is concerned about getting passed over, and has been asserting herself on that front.
I know a lot of the HRC coalition was upset in 2008 when Obama jumped the line, so there's some reason to believe there's a coalition within the Democratic party that's sensitive to exactly this kind of replacement. The leadership wouldn't replace Biden with Harris, so unless they've got someone better who's willing to run and who can credibly be seen as not replacing a woman of color, it's probably the safer bet to stick with Biden, weak as he is.
An incumbent who gets only 47% of the popular vote certainly isn't a strong candidate. Yes, obviously it is the Electoral College vote that matters, but that is the point: A strong candidate does not have to rely on a handful of voters in a few states to win.
1. As you mentioned, since the EC is the game, there's no incentive to maximize your popular vote total, especially in a close election. Maybe not even when you think the election isn't close. Given HRC's massive miscalculation in 2016 (she tried to increase her popular vote margin, since she figured she had the election in the bag and wanted a strong 'mandate' to allow her more post-election political capital), I doubt anyone will make a similar mistake in the future. This further diminishes the signaling power of the popular vote.
2. The closest thing we have to a party-based popular vote is the House of Representatives, which is apportioned by population. Given gerrymandering and other considerations, it's not a perfect proxy. That said, the House has been Republican for 22 of the past 30 years. Maybe it's an artifact of the system design that it skews the results R, but it's probably also an artifact of system design that skews the "popular vote" results D.
3. The electorate has been close for decades. This is partly because political parties shift positions to follow the electorate long term. In the short term, you can beat a political opponent, but you can't ignore the nearly half of the country who voted for them. Especially since probably >15% of voters on both sides voted more against the other candidate than for the name on the ballot. This makes the idea of a "mandate by majority vote popularity" mostly a fiction the winners tell themselves.
This works both ways. If Trump wins in November, it will almost certainly be due to a very poor showing from Biden. Polls suggest lots of swing states already leaning R. You can bet that a victorious Trump will declare nearly any victory a "landslide", despite the fact that he'd probably have lost to a reasonably strong candidate who didn't have to run on Biden's record. This suggests that many of Trump's voters will likely be voting against Biden more than for Trump. That won't keep him from declaring a 'mandate'. They always do, though they rarely have one.
I don't necessarily disagree with any of this, but I am not sure it is quite on point. Indeed, your reference to the Republican share of the House vote tends to demonstrate that Trump is indeed a weak candidate: He generally underperformed the Republican candidate in Congressional districts.
Note also that in 2016, most Dem losses in swing states went to third parties, not to Trump. Eg PA (D -4.5 R+1.6) MI D -7.2 R+2.6) WI (D -6.3 R +1.6)
Right, but that's what we would expect for not just Trump, but most Republican candidates for the general election. You run a different campaign under the EC than you would if you were going for the national popular vote. Not only do you focus on campaigning in different states, you focus on the issues that are important in different states. Those issues are brought up in all the local campaigns, such that wetland preservation is never discussed in Utah or Nevada, while water rights aren't an issue in Virginia or Georgia. Meanwhile, representatives from those various districts all convene in Congress to voice the will of the people in a way the US President never could.
The whole thing looks different under a national popular vote system - and that's by design. The USA wasn't designed to be a system driven by the interests of large states with large populations, but as a system that integrates the interests of the whole country in a complex way with checks and balances for various types of minority viewpoints. (We've removed some of those balances, to be sure, to our detriment.)
A popular vote system would run different campaigns than the ones we see under the EC, making citation of a 'national popular vote' a bit of a canard. You can prefer the NPV system if you want. I think Republicans think they'd lose under such a system, but the more realistic outcome is that they'd shift policies under that system to be competitive in a different way than they are today. Personally, I don't like the NPV system on its own merits, but I'm under no illusion that this is a principled stance and I'm sure that the two parties would flip their 'principled' stance on the issue if they thought the advantage were reversed.
It seems like a coordination failure that Biden ever got this far, I don't believe the other candidates never did a "how senile is Biden" meeting where they did the evidence gathering a republican did years ago of looking at a 70's Biden speech vs any uncut Biden footage
Whatever drives the party isn't just raw calculation of success, Biden probably is burning political capital of some kind and it may just be paid in full
From what I gather, it seems Joe really does want to run again (and Jill). I know Republicans like to make him out as a puppet/figurehead. He doesn't seem to be strictly a figurehead, as he has some control over his inner circle.
In some sense, every president is a puppet, beholden to the information and recommendations of their advisors (this happened a lot with Trump), but it looks to me like Biden wants this and has been directing some policies from the top in a way that seems unique to him (like his position on Israel/Palestine).
Given the risks involved in replacing the incumbent before the opposition party has nominated a candidate, and how close the polling for Biden had been until recently, I can understand why they chose the strategic route they did. Until recently, they could control a lot of mainstream perceptions (back when corporate media was still mainstream, and social media had tight controls), or at least define the Overton window in a way that shrouded their candidate's biggest weaknesses.
Meanwhile, all the money they raised for the Biden campaign can't be used for a replacement. After the lawfare accidentally became a huge Trump donation drive, they've got to be worried about putting the Democratic party behind in the money game for the first time in years.
I don't think anything about the present moment was part of the plan. I try to remind myself that humans are pattern-recognition machines. Whenever something looks like a grand strategy, the real answer is usually that there are disparate competing players who are mostly incompetent but wealthy people, flailing about from crisis to crisis, trying to capitalize on their own mistakes.
>Meanwhile, all the money they raised for the Biden campaign can't be used for a replacement
According to Investopedia, the money can be used for, among other things, "Unlimited transfers to a local, state, or national political party committee like the Democratic or Republican National Committees" and "Creation of a leadership PAC to back other candidates and a political agenda."
Interesting. I wonder how far they can push that. For example, let's say the replacement nominee is Newsome, and Harris fans object that she got passed over without giving them a chance to make her case in the primaries. I could see angered donors either threatening a lawsuit about how their funds are being reallocated against their wishes or the express purposes for which their funds were donated, or threatening to stay home and/or not canvass for the new nominee (a potentially worse outcome than any legal challenge).
So if you're the Democratic party, looking at where to spend the Biden money, even if you can get away with moving the money around legally, you might not be able to just pull it all over to a new nominee without creating an intra-party brawl among your largest donors, right before the election.
> Given the risks involved in replacing the incumbent before the opposition party has nominated a candidate, and how close the polling for Biden had been until recently, I can understand why they chose the strategic route they did.
more risks then just failure?
>After the lawfare accidentally became a huge Trump donation drive
easily foreseeable, but also a coordination failure, all democrats get the blame for being banana tyrants, a handful of da's live is blue cities and get all the credit
This is all hurler on the ditch stuff from me, but I think the idea was "four more years of the exact same". Get Joe over the line, get the election won, then nursemaid him while in office and if anything like ill-health forces retirement or, God forbid, death happens, well there's Kamala to take over until a genuine Democratic nominee runs for 2028.
I don't think anyone expected such a poor performance in the debate, and I do think that on a different day he might have done better.
Risks: I think the original plan was to not have debates. They only started talking about debates when Biden's poll numbers got bad enough that they couldn't continue to convince donors that "internal polling shows Biden ahead" and there was nothing to worry about. Without debates, they could continue to hide behind rhetoric like "cheap fakes" like they had in 2020. There were similar videos back then and Biden still won, no reason not to run the same playbook ... until that playbook stopped working.
Lawfare: agree that much of this strategy was emotional wishful thinking. But a lot of it was also the miraculous political luck of Donald Trump. It wasn't by design that the weakest case against him was the only one to go through before November. But you're right that it's dumb to put any kind of timeline-based strategy at the mercy of court schedules. Maybe it didn't seem dumb at the time? Trump has always been weak on details and procedure, which makes him especially weak in the courtroom. They took advantage of that in 2020 to get through a lot of bogus electioneering (especially when Trump stepped in to undermine his own lawyers and alienate top talent). It made sense to use the same tactic again in 2024. It happened to backfire in a way you couldn't predict based on past Trump performance in court.
All this makes sense if you assume they were expecting past performance to predict future success, running the same game that worked last time.
TL;DR: has anyone improved a soft skill or overcome some form of anxiety through playing a video games?
“Bibliotherapists” basically “prescribe” books to help you work through issues. For example, if you suffer from low self esteem, they’ll prescribe you a book about a protagonist who has very low self esteem, gets taken advantage of, then overcomes the issue. The idea is that you can gain your own insights from this, eg “is that really what it looks like from the outside when I have low self esteem” or something of the like. (Read more here, yes the source is meh https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/can-reading-make-you-happier. There’s also a book “Bibliotherapy A-Z” or something of the sort that has many more examples of books prescribed for a wide variety of situations.) I don’t know about the research in this area so can’t say how much of this is pseudoscience.
Regardless, I’m wondering if this can be transferred to video games? Eg you’re a perfectionist and suffer from decision paralysis, so you’re prescribed a decision making intense game with a myriad of options at every step such as Civ. You play it, and then you’re also asked to reflect with custom questions. Eg how was the process of making so many decision? If difficult, what were you worried about? Did those worries pan out? Etc. We know video games/simulations already exist that can teach and improve certain skills, (known as “serious games” in literature) so I’m wondering if this can transfer to improving in issues normally worked on in therapy.
I know video game therapy exists today, but I think it is different or misses the mark. It either just has the therapist play video games with you to make the conversation smoother and develop rapport, or has you play a seemingly unexciting game meant for the purpose of therapy. The benefit of using existing popular games is that it’s more accessible and can be self-guided.
(I ask this since it’s the intersection of several areas I’m passionate about, and the situation given re perfectionism is from my own experience. However, this method didn’t work for me since I couldn’t even bring myself to play civ…)
I am fairly sure that playing Celeste makes me better at doing things that require consistent willpower or practice. My theory is that throwing myself at difficult-seeming but ultimately achievable challenges in a gamified environment gets me in a mindset where I'm more willing to do hard/tedious things.
It feels so childish to say that beating a boss in Dark Souls I never thought I could beat is a reminder that we really can overcome our perceived limits. So childish but so effective.
>> has anyone improved a soft skill or overcome some form of anxiety through playing a video games?
I suspect joining a guild in WoW got me back to where I was as a kid (an army brat surrounded by and operating with a highly varied population) compared to what I was used to from college (working with nerds very similar to myself and all about the same age). And lots of practice being on a team and cooperating. And the pattern "first I'll DPS this, then I'll heal it, then I'll tank it". When I first started playing I was so afraid of being on a team... but I wanted that damn DPS dagger so bad... and some random person carried me and helped me finish the instance, and I always kept an eye out for how I could be someone else's random help.
A few, mostly using multiplayer guild-based games. I think the problems would have been better addressed through in-person interaction, although that would have had other problems.
I think it's also possible to use games to break free of habits like completionism, perfectionism, and on the other hand poor planning and failure to see projects through. But that's tough because IMO what makes the game "fun" is generally going to be reinforcing the existing problem, and without someone there all the time telling you to play the game in a way you don't want to, it's very hard to keep the focus.
It's like casual use of heroin to solve a problem with depression.
One time, I am driving on ice during the winter, and I feel the car start to drift. So, of course, by reflex I correct out of the drift. And then I think: muscle memory from playing Forza coming into use there...
I also though about that question when noticing myself automatically correcting drifts before learning to do that reliably. The thing is, from the drivers perspective, when a car starts drifting in a right turn, it sort of looks like it's turning more to the right than necessary (the nose starts pointing more into the turn than the curve would require). So the desire to get the nose to turn back left (and therefore correct the drift) is completely intuitive; what requires skill is keeping the car in the drift with steering corrections and throttle manipulation.
P.S. Althoiugh I drive a BWM Mini in real life, and Forza can simulate a BMW Mini, I do not entirely believe its simulation: Forza is a bit too optimistic about braking, or at the very least assumes less worn tires and brake pads than a likely real vehicle.
Some of you may be thinking: but a BWM Mini is front wheel drive, so it isnt going to drift. Or at least, there's les opportunity for loss of traction to be a problem.
Online poker has definitely reduced my anxiety and decision paralysis, as well as decision making under uncertainty. We all make mistakes all the time, you'll never have a "clean" history of perfect play. A single moment of inattentiveness can destroy hours of carefully gathering small profits. Shit happens, you move on, and hey, suddenly you're much more relaxed about making mistakes.
The important part IME is that it's a sandbox with a known model and limited downside, which objectively measures your progress. Manifold markets has similar properties.
Tangentially related, but I found it amusing that the Russian translation of the (somewhat popular) meditation manual The Mind Illuminated was initially done for free (and spread for free) by a guy on a Russian online poker player forum, with the premise of using meditation to reduce "tilting" and win more money. I feel like a few players might have very significantly improved and enriched their lives (without really aiming for it) in such a roundabout way.
Thanks for the data point. I wonder what other areas video games could help with besides decision paralysis… E.g. I wonder if team fps’ such as over watch can help with assertiveness or confidence; maybe you play and watch your games and realize that you should have pushed but didn’t due to lack of confidence and that hurt your team.
For background, occasionally, I troll friends with spurious correlations on Google Trends. Naturally, showing people the growth of their hobbies killed people's interest in sex is amusing—until I realized the steepest drop in people googling for sex is exactly the 2016 election. My clickbait name for the phenomenon is the "Trump Sex Recession", mostly because it's easy to remember and I hope it has successfully nerd sniped you to help me figure out what's going on here.
For one, the chart looked different for me on mobile vs. desktop, which is my first red flag that Google's data is less than a perfect representation of the internet. The event is also between two notes, which I interpret to mean it's likely that something material changed in its collection. All of this seems impervious to analysis though. Did people take their sex searches somewhere else? Did Google start giving bad results for sex? If you want to get political, did the election kill horniness? I have no idea. I feel like you'd have to already have a study going around these dates to know if the impact was real. Any possible explanations are welcome.
It's probably search-engine related around quarantining adult content.
Porn-y type searches like "sex" or "blowjob" etc all show a dip right where you mention. But sexual health searches like "birth control", "STD test", "pregnancy symptoms" do not show this.
Comparing your search of "Human Sexual Activity" to "sex" on its own, "sex" has a less extreme drop that starts exactly at January 2016 instead of later in the year.
Are there any regulations that might have influenced the data collection?
The November change is a year too early for the introduction of SESTA, but it is a few months after U.S. Telecom v. FCC.
GDPR was also approved earlier that year. And the line starts going back up at the same time GDPR actually came into effect, but there's no "note" of a change on the chart at that point.
Since a drop reoccurs from 2022 onward, it could be some sort of anti-bot measure that they update as it becomes less effective.
My first guess for an effect that strong and sudden is that Google changed something in how it collects or categorizes data. "Human Sexual Activity" is a broad category; maybe Google changed its boundaries in late 2016.
A note on the graph says that a change of some sort was applied on 1/1/2017. Perhaps some portions of it showed up earlier in the US.
Yeah, that's my inclination. It's frustrating that it feels like there's no way to follow up on it though. I guess this is the hazard of looking at proprietary data.
If you do some googling and asking around, you might find some specialized forum with people who are experts on Google Analytics and can advise you. You might start here: https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleTrends/ . But be prepared to go down quite a few rabbit holes before you get a solid answer. And even then you might come up empty.
I've finished the article but still don't quite get it: are you saying East Asian people have a lower rate of successful conception or just a lower preference for kids?
Clearly, the only policy response to this crisis is to greatly increase Asian immigration to the USA until an equilibrium is established. Read “One Billion Americans!”
I found it anthropologically fascinating to read a Yellow Peril alarm piece in 2024. Apart from that, I think your entire set of data and conclusions is for the birds.
Though you did at least have the novelty to update from "Countless millions upon millions of mindless soul less drone Asians will take over our nation and destroy our way of life!" to "Declining millions of mindless soul less drone Asians will take over our nation and destroy our way of life!" so good for you.
>"Declining millions of mindless soul less drone Asians will take over our nation and destroy our way of life!"
Maybe your typical right-wing projection at work. Fearing an apartheid regime from smarter, harder-working, career-instead-of-babies-focused Asians. Not that the Apartheid regime thing would be the problem, but not being at the top of the pole certainly is:
> And what kind of Leftism and what kind of society (not everything is political) will they help bring about for your children to enjoy? Will it be the economically stagnant but relatively chill 1970s Sweden? Or will it be one that leaves your children pining for the comparative freedom of the Soviet Union?
Please to inform ignorant self of how speculation on "what kind of society will they bring about for your children to enjoy?" is different in both degree and kind from "they will destroy our way of life"?
In case there is a misunderstanding here, my previous comment was not an attack of any kind on you. I was merely offering an explanation of why RWF seems to harbor a lot of resentment towards Asians, even though the whole point of RWF's article was that they shouldn't matter demographically because something something self-extinguishing genetic culture garbage.
We're in agreement on the "genetic culture garbage".
But I do think "hmm if These People manage to Take Over, then what future will your White American Grandchildren have???" is sitting on the same bench of the rowboat as "they will destroy Our Way Of Life".
I agree with that too. Note that the "leftism/children" paragraph was a block quote from the RWF article, not my own invention. Should I have made that clearer?
I wouldn't describe it as an "apartheid regime" though, just racial prejudice hard coded into the constitution. Fun fact, its actually illegal to discuss repealing Article 153. This is a digression from the topic of this thread though.
You misunderstood me. I said that the "RIght Wing Futurist" might be afraid of an Asian Apartheid regime, brought about by voting overwhelmingly democrat. But it's not a rational fear, it's a projection of their inner hopes and fears unto others; in this case, Asians. Nationalists are perfectly fine with running an Apartheid state, so naturally, their fear is that someone else might do it to them. That's a possible explanation of why, as Deisach put it, he's so afraid of "Declining millions of mindless soul less drone Asians will take over our nation and destroy our way of life!"
Two out of five now, I've been four out of five if you stretch the definitions a little. Though I suspect my work in finance is not what she was thinking of.
I agree with Scott on the media very rarely lying, I find it odd how many journalists have basically admitted they were explicitly lying about Biden's mental state.
How should it impact your epistemics? Should you lower your trust in people who were saying Biden is fine and raise your trust in journalists like Silver, Klein etc who were willing to point out the obvious.
Is it odd that even mayors and backbench representatives are playing along with a lie after it has been revealed to the voters?
I mean it all came to a head with the debate. It became a story since everybody saw it. It also seems less partisan. Last time it came up was with the investigation of Hunter Biden where the republican investigator said Biden wasn't fully there.
I think Scott was quite wrong about this unless you take an incredible narrow view of what "lying" is. The media constantly distorts/omits or outright misrepresents facts that don't line up with its current narrative.
They want stories to be interesting and sexy and uncomplicated, and will cull info to make them so.
And that is when they aren't totally just manipulating public opinion. As this recent fiasco demonstrates.
They aren't lying all the time, but I would bet say 30% of NYT stories contain something the writer or editor knows to be a lie. Just a wild guess. I would say the two stories I have personally been involved with, neither politically high stakes at all, definitely included lies.
I just don't find that usage of "lying" very helpful in this context honestly.
If I interview Scott about prediction markets and he goes on and on at length for 2 hours about how much he likes them. But during this discussion, lists their strengths and weaknesses in the spirit of honesty.
And I want to release an article slagging them so when I quote him I quote him listing one of their weaknesses and nothing else, maybe even make it seem like he disapproves of them, that is absolutely "a lie".
It is a lie when a four year old does it about their messy room or whatever, and it is a lie when a NYT reporter does it.
And they do *that* kind of shit constantly.
And I am not really interested in Scott's prevaricating about how it is not strictly speaking by the strictest possible definition of "lying" a lie. It is conveying information in a way that is deceptive.
What if Mr. Biden were to die in office. God forbid that he does, but just, for the sake of argument, let's imagine he does.
In perhaps the Michael Crichton version, the "aides"and "speechwriters" look at one another after taking his pulse. Eyebrows are raised. Dr. Biden is summoned to the Oval Office. Come to think of it, that was the last time anyone can remember seeing the president's wife -- since the claims that Joe Biden was an AI construct and a robot began to surface.
Claims that Elon Musk was summoned to the White House, and spent several days visiting before trucks arrived and boxes of electronic equipment were unloaded remain unsubstantiated.
Skeptics claim that the fact that the President won't appear on the same stage to endorse Kamala Harris's nomination at the convention proves he is incapacitated; the executive office says he has a cold. No one has seen Dr. Biden in a while. Elon Musk has a good year.
I had independently come up with the concept that 'almost nobody tells lies, many repeat the lies they tell themselves'
This arguably means I have significantly lower trust in people as I can believe they are good people, smart, and not consciously lying, but nevertheless be very unsurprised if they report on a poll of economists on minimum wage where 10% say no effect on jobs, 30% say it suppresses jobs, and the rest say no opinion as "Most Economists Don't Think Minimum Wages Cost Jobs"
As a result my reaction to actual lies is that it's the tip of the iceberg I already percieved to exist, and likely about the same size as I thought which was already pretty big
Here is a moving piece published today by emergency room physician Bess Stillman. Some of you may have met her and her husband Jake Seliger at Manifest. As you may already know, Jake has been fighting recurrent metastatic squamous cell carcinoma.
Definitely give it a read if you are interested in the FDA and clinical trials. It's pretty clear we need better laws and processes around right to try. Here's her proposal:
"I propose creating a second, provisional market for terminal patients that allows partial approval of a drug while it’s still undergoing trials, making it available to trial-ineligible (or those unable to easily access a trial) patients for whom standard of care doesn’t provide a meaningful chance at remission. This partial approval would ideally allow physicians to prescribe the drug to this subset of patients as they see fit .."
I've recently been diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 28. As I've read up on it more, a lot of things are matching deeply with my personal experiences (constant feelings of shame and self-loathing, inability to finish things, difficulty sitting still and concentrating) which all line up with the diagnosis. But some ADHD literature has infuriating statements like, "ADHD people are highly motivated to work hard on enjoyable things, but are loathe to do things they consider boring" which describes every-fucking-body and makes me feel I'm falling to the Barnum effect. I recognize it's a spectrum, not discrete categories (as Scott mentions in some older posts), but it's difficult for me to parse through statements like that and take the rest of it seriously. I'm wondering if anyone else has a similar experience or commentary?
If that statement is true for everyone (and I largely agree) why does it make it hard for you to take the rest of the literature seriously?
That statement could be there to counter beliefs in the reader that people with ADHD can't be highly motivated ever/at all.
Personally, as an adult with ADHD, I find my motivation/effort abilities very uncorrelated with my desire to work hard or on the topic at hand. I feel I am at the mercy of the inner workings of my brain/instincts when I am not medicated. Sometimes I can't motivate my self to any thing at all while other times I am very motivated and can work anything. This is unlike the experience of my friends/family who seem able to force themselves to be motivated to do something regardless of their base emotional state.
> but are loathe to do things they consider boring" which describes every-fucking-body<
For an old ADHD colleague I had to put up with, "Enjoyable things" included "saying aloud whatever they were thinking at the moment", and "things they consider boring" included "letting other people talk". Someone took a trip across the country, someone else asked them how their trip had been, and our ADHD friend interrupted their reply about five seconds in to ramble on about how one time he'd had a job at a convenience store. Meanwhile, give him a broken engine, and he'll get it running again in an hour. It might break again the hour after, but then he'll fix it again.
A different event with a different person; Back in the days when school would spank students, an ADHD friend would go get spanked rather than sit still in class. Then he became a helicopter pilot.
It's really hard to quantify things such as boredom.
I know someone who is sensitive to food tastes and textures. When he says something is disgusting, he means he can't eat it because it'll literally trigger his gag reflex. Meanwhile, other people complain about food being "disgusting" while they fucking continue to eat it.
Similar things seem to be happening w.r.t. overweight people. Skinny people often have the great advice of "just eat less (you pig)". I suspect most of them don't know what it means to be hungry all the time. Like actually hungry. A constant compulsion to eat intruding into your thoughts.
I think boredom is probably in some middle ground where it's easy to let bad habits encroach and make you think it's intrinsic, but there's a kernel of truth there. Not just w.r.t. isolated boring tasks, but also a heightened need for work that has meaning and where you have agency. For me personally, it's kind of binary. If something is meaningful it allows me to tap into a deep well of intrinsic motivation. If it's complete BS make work I can check out and just click buttons like it was a video game. The inbetween stuff I have way more difficulty with... being blocked from doing a job right due to office politics and so on.
I have worked closely with people who are just naturally focused for 8-10 hours/day. It seems to be effortless to them. So I know there exist people who don't get bored and who can motivate themselves to do pretty much anything. I think it's ambition driven. People with ADHD are IME often curiosity driven, and have very low ambition.
I don't believe in a hard boundary between ADHD and not ADHD, but as a category it's a useful tool.
Carl wants to get famous. Carl makes a plan to slam his hand in a cybertruck trunk and film it to make a tik-tok. Carl is unable to follow through on this plan, only feeling crushing anxiety and an almost physical barrier to slamming the door. No matter how much he wants to his body doesn't let him. By taking amphetamines, Carl suddenly has the willpower to just do it.
Jacob wants to keep his teeth cavity free. Jacob makes a plan to get up and walk to the bathroom and brush his teeth. Jacob is unable to follow through on this plan, only feeling crushing anxiety and an almost physical barrier to getting out of bed. No matter how much he wants to his body doesn't let him. By taking amphetamines, Jacob suddenly has the willpower to just do it.
The difference in experience between Carl and Jacob doesn't depend on whether Carls or Jacobs are more common in the population, whether Jacob is "lazy" or "drug dependent" or whatever. Willpower isn't a thing that everyone needs more of- it's a tradeoff, and as a trait with wide genetic variation, it's an easy knob for evolution to adjust: If more willpower meant more fitness evolution would have turned it to 11 millenia ago. If after careful consideration you want to tweak your personal willpower knob, we can call that ADHD.
To make the metaphor explicit, I don't think "Carl got tricked into thinking he has ADHD by cold-reading hacks" or "Carl is faking ADHD to get an unfair advantage at tiktok" are great descriptions of what is going wrong in Carl's life. I feel similarly about, for example "neurotypical" people who are dosing with ritalin to survive as engineers at Amazon or get perfect GPAs in med school. The question isn't whether they are cheating in some sense! The question is whether the block which they are chemically overcoming was there for a reason that they would endorse if they could fully understand it- which is going to vary from person to person and situation from situation.
> ADHD people are highly motivated to work hard on enjoyable things, but are loathe to do things they consider boring" which describes every-fucking-body
My peers seemed to had way less issues and negative feeling than me about homework. I'm not diagnosed with ADHD personally, what I'm saying is more "not everyone hates doing stuff they consider boring".
I second this, though didn't try for a serious diagnose. Instead, I followed a meme page adhd_memetherapy cause it gave me a chuckle. Now I'm getting uncomfortable with how many jokes hit close to home. I have similar thoughts as you.
I had a similar-ish journey. I was looking for tips on how to improve my focus and kept getting led down ADHD resources. Which at first I thought, "this is great, ADHD people have a really hard time focusing, they must have some good ideas!" And then it slowly dawned on me that everything they were talking about sounds pretty familiar...
I think a lot of people who hang out here are from Bay Area, right? Recently a good food critic visited 3 Turkish restaurants there and I (as a Turk who wants to promote his culture) wanted to share it here so if anybody wants to try Turkish food. The article is in Turkish but any browser translate is good enough:
I learnt today about the meaning of Skanda, a fairly common name for a boy in India. Naming babies after philosophical concepts is popular here. It is a Buddhist concept. We are each believed to be a collection of selves (technical term being "skandas"). There is no such thing called Deepa that is constant through time. It is a very clever concept and ends up inventing the concept of limit in Calculus.
They wanted to avoid defining any variable or object associated with a human that lasts more than an infinitesimal amount of time.
Various passions are fighting it out in you. There is no one self through time. Every epsilon of time, a bunch of new skandas get generated and come together and go away. There is no continuity of self through time. However small you make the epsilon, every spsilon unit of time, the set either changes or looks the same. Like in calculus, the concept of limit. It's like looking at the coastline of America. Looks like a straight line but you zoom in and you see a jagged structure. There's never a straight line as you can keep zooming in.
I think you may have gotten hold of the wrong Skanda; the Indian name is after the 'Hindu' deity, overwhelmingly, not the philosophical concept. Here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kartikeya
Also, isn't the Buddhist idea skandha, not Skanda, the latter being the name?
Signal boosting my crowd sourced list of observations that can be used for Sherlock Holmes style "deduction" or more properly abduction. Please add your own contributions! I posted this on lesswrong awhile ago but felt it never reached a critical mass of content to make it useful.
Last week I found out about the Firefly dating app (https://datefirefly.com/). It looks like it's pretty blatantly trying to be a 2014 OKCupid clone (as Scott has been saying we need . . .). Not a lot of features yet, but the main issue is that the userbase is low. Has anyone mentioned it here yet?
Just did a jhourney online retreat, after like 10 hours of meditation before. I didn't reach any jhanas, but it completely transformed the way I relate to meditation. Went from "this is a pain in the ass and doing this for 10 minutes is torture" to being able to do an hour easily, reconnecting with some feelings and appreciating how powerful the metacognition you develop is.
I won't recommend it right now because I want to see if I'm able to stick with the practice, as that's what I want to get out of this.
Edit: I also had like 5/10 seconds where I felt the most joy I've felt in years at least. As someone with usually relatively dull emotions, it was surprising in a very good way.
Focused on making meditation enjoyable, through curiosity, experiments and metacognition, instead of "stare mentally at your breath for 20 minutes". Lots of different practice. Forgiveness meditation was huge. Staff and facilitators were amazing, genuinely engaged. Other people on the retreat were motivating. Lots of high quality guided meditations. Lots of space for "not following instructions exactly", like if you want to lay down instead of sit straight it's perfectly okay, if you don't feel what the guided meditation would like you to feel it's okay. Focus on making progress instead of believing stuff take years, through challenging limiting beliefs, motivation and forgiveness meditation. Real interest in us continuing the practice after and improving our life. Sometimes they talk like software engineers.
So, checking out their website it seems to be "sign up to our mailing list before we tell you the price" kind of deal. Are you comfortable with sharing what you paid, or a ballpark figure?
What practice do you normally engage in, Culadasa's by any chance? I've been meditating on and off for a year and recently had a bizarre experience that is motivating me to take it further, but honestly I'm only at stage 2-3 and wouldn't want to find myself out of my depth on a jhourney
Sure. So I had a ministroke just over 4 years ago (at age 30) and since then I've had a headache and some sort of weird visual disturbance that hasn't really showed up on any ocular or neurological testing. Ive been doing simple "focus on the breath" meditation laying down, nothing fancy or involved. I don't even follow the advice in The Mind Illuminated that well.
Well anyway. I noticed out of the blue that I started falling into an unpleasant trance like state, where I felt like my brain was short circuiting - I saw rapid fire lights in different corners of my visual field (eyes closed) and felt like I was being electrocuted. I felt like I lost consciousness several times and lost a bit of time in several second intervals.
For whatever reason I pushed through it. My headache and visual issues rapidly cleared up after 5 minutes have been gone for 2 days. I feel mentally much clearer. I have no idea what that experience was but I'm very glad I had it
Are people here noting FinalSpark/brain organoid computers?
I'm generally expectant that conscious does not have a threshold, and that if you network large numbers of small human brains, the result is equally aware to one normal brain. Or rather, a network of small brain parts is what a normal brain is.
In short, this project appears to me to be neither AI, nor much of a new invention, but simply human slavery repackaged so the victim can't complain and doesn't look as human.
Why are you assuming without evidence or justification that human neurons activating just causes consciousness? How does it do that? (your solar plexus isn't conscious)
First: Neurons look conscious. I believe that a large portion of intelligence is an ability I refer to as recognition. This skill is demonstrable, you can even write an algorithm that accomplishes the same results on the same principles. However, it is not translatable into logic, at least, not without outputting multi-gigabyte text files. To a degree, I don't expect people to agree with me/to be able to convince people of this, unless they have non-transferable knowledge. I can point out- "look at this thing", but I can't do much to convey the "this is important" part if the other side doesn't see that on their own just by looking.
Second: This project depends on the principle that human neurons are special. Using say, chicken neurons, does not in fact produce the same results. You can also take human neurons and inject those into a rat brain, and thereby massively enhance the rat's intelligence.
Third: The fairness principle calls for it. That is, there isn't a good way to measure qualia, yet my utility is inextricably tied to the question at hand. In order to get any utility gains at all, there has to be some clue as to where the qualia is. I have to assume the universe is fair, even if it probably isn't, because points can only be scored in fair realities. Qualia being tied to neurons would be a very fair system.
So our solar plexus has quaila? If we accept your three points that conclusion is unavoidable.
Unless, neurons only sometimes create quaila (we know this is true b/c we go to bed) - in which case IDK why we assume brain organoid computers are "awake", even if neurons create consciousness.
(full disclosure I think consciousness probably isn't material in origin but unsure what to make of that)
I took a look. Looks creepy as hell but also very niche. Hard to see as anything other than a science experiment looking for a market.
For those of you who are interested,
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/artificial-intelligence/articles/10.3389/frai.2024.1376042/full. Key bits are figure one. Basically, they're growing tiny slices of brains of top of electrodes, almost like a computer chip. They then train the "neural organoid" to make predictions, like a transistor in a LLM. The business case is that they require far less energy than normal computers to make computations, which makes sense, our brains are heavily optimized around caloric scarcity.
I don't think these are human or near-human. They're not big enough and they don't have the right architecture. If a human is a house, this is a small pile of bricks. You can stack 30 small piles of bricks together, it's still not a house.
I would find the more closely matching argument to be...animal welfare, honestly. If this takes off, we'd be mass producing tons of tiny thinking creatures, probably somewhere in intelligence between an insect and a chicken, and then torturing them with electric shocks for their entire lifetime to generate predictions. That's...pretty bad and seems most analogous to something like industrial chicken farming. Chicken farming is a core part of our current economy and food culture; this isn't "grandfathered" in and it's not really necessary, so pretty bad altogether.
Honestly not even sure if they feel pain as we understand it. I *think* they're just shocking the organoids as a negative response and that seems to work.
But everything I can think of that would make a brain "feel good" sounds like drugs and even generic drugs are probably way too expensive.
I do understand that they give the brains dopamine when they make correct predictions. I'm not confident that brains are happy if given enough dopamine, or if I care if they are. Also not certain that random electric shocks are not torture. These questions are difficult to impossible to test.
At current scale, even I wouldn't expect these things to have more conscious than a chicken farm. The thing that raises this to my attention is that they are very explicitly trying to mass manufacture this stuff.
I would expect people who agree with me to also believe that:
Human brains are basically fungible. Large networks of human neurons have as much conscious as other such large networks of human neurons.
Human brains are materially different from competing brain architectures. Chicken farms, though troubling, are nowhere near as bad as the same neuron count in a human brain farm.
These questions are also difficult to impossible to test. Regarding questions of qualia and zombies, I do advocate a conservative view that attempts to avoid giant pits of suffering, even if the pits might not exist. Less awful fish farms would also be something I would support, on much the same principles.
Gah, need to work. Briefly, no, I don't think human brains are fungible in the way you think. I don't see organoids as that different than LLMs or neural nets, they're just soups of unstructured human neurons or abstractions of human neurons. It's not clear to me that a human neuron is special because the human brain has a variety of structures and specialized regions that perform different functions. Those are a big part of what makes human cognition special. Unstructured human neural soups are different to human brains the same way piles of bricks are different to houses.
I would feel better if they were using cow neurons rather than human neurons though. Human neurons are closed to "human brain here, this is sacred" but it's not definitive, if that makes sense.
After meditating on and off for a few years, I made a breakthrough in my practice recently. While I'm still not 100% convinced on the other side is some sort of awakening, I do already see a lot of benefits like the ability to feel good whenever I want to and withstand pain. I'm still surprised that so few people explore and cultivate the mind in this way. The closest thing in the west might be CBT and it works incredibly well with continued practice. However very few people take practicing CBT seriously. I presume mostly because therapists don't want to overpromise and underdeliver, then get blamed for it, so their patients don't quite understand how profound of a difference it can make, which makes them less motivated to practice it on a regular basis.
But more interesting than just the mental health benefits, what else can we achieve with mental practice? Can we cultivate extreme creativity and innovation? Can we increase intelligence? Buddhism rarely explore these questions and sticks to the teachings of the Buddha. It will also likely dissmis them as materialistic, but the more I practice it the more I'm convinced my own pain and happiness isn't the end goal, but rather to change my behavior as to be able to help more people.
Can you explain more about "the ability to feel good whenever I want to"? How often do you use this ability? Do you think you'd be able to use it to (eg) endure surgery without anaesthesia?
I can pretty much on demand flood my body with joy, I can give myself goosebumps easily and produce all kinds of positive emotions. At the beginning I used to do that all the time but at some point I realized it doesn't matter because positive emotions are not the point of life, so now I only do that occasionally. Withstanding pain is a different skill. I haven't tried withstanding severe pain like surgery so honestly I don't know. But the occasional headache/migraine has become a non-problem for me. The physical feeling I used to associate with pain is still there but it doesn't bother me at all.
When you get a headache, do you sit down and meditate, or is it that after your "breakthrough" you have been able to disassociate pain from suffering? What about emotional difficulties, do you still feel the analogue of mental pain/agony without it bothering you?
As long as I'm mindful enough I don't have to actually medidate to alleviate the pain, but it does require some work. As for mental pain, it depends. Some of what used to bother me doesn't bother me anymore and some does. Also depends on my mindfulness and mental state. e.g. on a bad day I could still be agitated. Usually if I actually sit and meditate I'm able to move past most feelings
Thank you. Just as you distinguish (the raw sensation of) physical pain from the accompanying suffering, do you do the same with mental pain?
Also I see in your description both parallels and non-parallels with what I read of stream entry. If you are not familiar with it, please check it out to get an idea of whether that is what you have had.
What I'm talking about is probably more reminiscent of what are called the pleasure jhanas in Culadasa's The Mind Illuminated (The technique I initially use to induce this is focusing my unified attention on a pleasurable sensation in the body). I don't know exactly on which jhana the ability to withstand pain falls but it's probably 1st or 2nd.
Posted July 27th 2024: "I'm going to be a nonconformist like all my friends."
Jesus, did 2024 somehow take a time machine back to 1963? Is this a stealth celebration of the 100-year anniversary of that joke? Is one of those stick figures Plato? If you keep that kind of thing up they'll charge you with graverobbing.
They feel like the conservative equivalent to the /r/PoliticalHumor subreddit: one-sided, lacking subtlety, complex issues are dumbed down to simplistic gotchas, and utterly devoid of any humor.
To be fair, one of them was a response to an equally one-sided xkcd. And in fact, by linking the xkcd comic with the contrary argument, the response is a lot less one-sided than the xkcd itself.
Democrats have noticed (and perhaps overreacted) to Biden doing badly at the debate. This is doing better than Republicans not noticing or perhaps not caring about Trump's incoherence.
Does a President have to be coherent in thinking? Why? Isnt there a system in place that prevents this branch of govt from doing crazy things unilaterally?
For most things, yes, aides and executive agencies will keep going on doing day to day things. But suppose tomorrow there is a crisis that needs a speedy response (russia invades another country, terrorist attack, etc.) And the defense dept puts forward several potential options for a response based on limited information. Opinions are divided on what is best. Someone has to have the final say to make a decision. Having someone who's ability to think/decide/communicate is degrading over time (it's not just about how biden is today but how he is next year and the year after) could have very bad consequences.
If you're Russia or China you're currently having emergency meetings to figure out how you can use this to your advantage. Biden needs to be gone now, not in January.
In the sense that you want to uphold democracy, and want the ultimate decision-maker and agenda-setter of the executive branch to be the person you actually voted for, kind of.
In the end you might decide that it is a worthy trade-off, but it helps to be aware of it.
Long-term, sure. But the US president has rather more latitude than most, if not all, heads of government among states with separation of powers. Between Executive Orders and wide authority to command the military, an unfit president has the power to do a lot of damage before he can be reeled in by Congress or the Supreme Court.
But the type of unfitness in Biden seems harmless. Cognitive decline. The type of unfitness in Trump, which involves stuff like revenge, seems more dangerous to the country, at least to me.
I see them both as bad. I will always think of Trump as the POTUS who suggested looking into injecting disinfectant.
On the other hand, Biden may need to deal with something Putin or Xi does on very short notice. There's a limit to how much of that he can delegate. And he may need to walk a fine line between WWIII and folding.
I agree. All I'm saying is that the US system of separation of powers leans rather heavily towards the president, so whatever mental/ideological issues the POTUS may have, they have a lot of power to shape their country despite them.
New CNN poll: 72% of likely voters think that Biden is not mentally fit to be president. Giben that, I wouldn't call the current response an overreaction!
It depends a lot on whether it's one bad day or a pattern of serious decline.
Also, Trump is destructive and energetic. If I have to chose between Trump and someone who's not functioning very well, I'll take the non-Trump option.
I don't think it's possible for that performance to be one bad day. It reminds me of John Mccain's performance at the James Comey hearing, the year before he died of brain cancer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gZ8JSpcHD8
(He died still in office. This country needs heavier restrictions on representatives.)
There is a pattern of decline for anyone paying attention to all news sources. Just because non-approved news sources are saying it doesn't make it untrue.
Cheap fakes, give me a break. Biden being stage managed like Weekend at Bernie's was also a clue.
Further evidence is the very odd instantaneous dog pile of left leaning pundits calling for Biden to step down ... without any intervening time period where they question what happened to Biden during the debate out of a range of possibilities. They knew it was mental decline because they have also seen it.
I doubt it was a conspiracy as much as circa 2024 group think. As the above comment reflects the election was simply "too important" to allow that taboo subject to be seriously discussed. It was foolish to believe this wasn't eventually going to be exposed, especially for those us with elderly parents in decline.
If you want to make the case this was one bad day, make it.
Reality is that given the Electoral College, nowadays any Dem needs at least 52 percent of the national vote to have a decent chance of winning the White House or 54 percent to have a good chance. So if more than 70 percent of _likely_ voters now view Biden in the way just described, he'd need ~40 precent of _those_ voters to decide to vote for him anyway.
There's no chance of that. Particularly after the GOP spends September and October running national and online ads consisting simply of Biden's worst clips from the recent debate. Not to mention that there is no guarantee Biden just had his worst 2024 public moment along those lines.
The Dems now have a pretty clear decision to make, and the overriding need to stop Trump requires them to make the right choice.
And presumably, a lot of people will do likewise in the election given Biden's polling numbers. But I can see how many will just not bother to vote when not provided with a reasonable candidate by the opposition. Or they choose the guy with a literal worm in his brain instead. Biden did not have a margin of error going into the debate as it was.
I feel like it's a bit basic. The topic I've seen many times handled better and with more subtlety, even by other conservative comics. It's not very fun. The style is very clean in a good way, it feels like looking at vector art, very crisp and very beautiful in that way, but feels a bit impersonal. I feel like it's missing a more personal touch.
Eh, the focus seems to be more politics than science, and everybody has to start somewhere. I believe the author will be able to do better with more experience (at least what I consider better) and find more of their own voice.
I have a new post on “Social Insurance” in which I try to distinguish “social insurance” -- transferring resources to people at times when they need resources more from people not in special need -- from “income distribution” from richer to poorer and consequently why social insurance should be financed differently from income redistribution.
Currently the implied probability (to the nearest whole percentage point, mid-price) of the following people winning the US Presidential Election is, in the order Betfair/Polymarket/Metaculus/Manifold (numbers 3 weeks ago in brackets):
Trump: 57/63/65/56 (53/56/55/51)
Biden: 18/18/29/26 (36/34/48/46)
Newsom: 8/5/2/3 (2/2/1/0)
(Michelle) Obama: 6/5/1/1 (3/5/1/0)
Harris: 4/5/3/7 (1/2/1/1)
Whitmer: 4/-/-/3 (new entry)
RFK: 1/2/1/0 (2/2/1/0)
There have been some significant movements following the recent debate. If Biden does end up being replaced as nominee, it will be something of a triumph for real money markets, which have consistently assigned this outcome a much higher probability than other prediction models, to the extent that some suggested they were offering free money. Betfair now gives Biden only a 61% chance of being the nominee, while Polymarket gives him a 44% chance of dropping out (including after the convention).
Neither Polymarket nor Metaculus list Whitmer as an option, which seems like a defect, as she is now 5th favourite.
Biden is assigned a lower a probability of winning by the real money markets than play markets, as has usually been the case. I have no idea why Metaculus and Manifold have such different probabilities (65% vs 56%) on Trump.
The movement on Trump seems to be the different markets moving closer: his average (which is 60%) hasn't moved since Monday, but the range has narrowed from 56-65 to 58-62. The dramatic movement is from Biden (and Newsom) to Harris. Metaculus as usual looks behind the curve.
I would take RFK off the list, except that he remains at 2% on Polymarket. To 1dp, he's at 2.1% on Polymarket, 0.8% on Betfair and 0.6% on Manifold. I suspect that Polymarket attracts RFK-stans for some reason. Nate Silver gives his chance of winning (in a three-way race with Biden and Trump) at 0.0%.
Many Thanks! Grr, I wish arbitrage worked in these markets, to bring the estimates closer to a uniform consensus. The Harris 8 v 16 spread and Biden 11 v 24 spread irk me. I hope that after the Democratic Convention the numbers approach closer to a consensus.
NB Metaculus is unchanged, which reinforces my impression that market moves more slowly than others; Manifold has now fixed its previously bonkers Whitmer probability.
In February, I made a protective bet on Harris in this market, which currently looks like one of my wiser decisions.
In fact, I'll go ahead and say it: Harris' odds have shortened dramatically in the past 6 hours. This doesn't seem explicable by any public information I've seen, so it seems plausible that someone is betting on inside information, i.e. they know or think they know that Biden is about to step aside in her favour.
To be clear, I'm not sufficiently confident in this hypothesis to add to my existing Harris bet at the odds now being offered, but I'm also not going to sell my position.
The first of those is the Exchange market (which is what I am always referring to), which matches bets between punters.
The second of those is just an ordinary bookmaker function, which will generally offer worse odds for the reason that bookmakers generally do, i.e. to make a profit.
>Obama still looks high in the real money markets.
I agree, of all the implied probabilities Obama's seems the craziest to me. On the face of it, even if you think she wins with 100% probability if she's nominated, that assumes that a person that has very little political experience, and has never shown any desire of being president has over 10% probability of being nominated should Biden step down.
Is this some sort of bet on weird mechanics of the nomination process? Like the electors go "rogue" in case Biden steps down?
I don't completely discount the possibility of market manipulation. The top 3 accounts on Polymarket together hold 23% of the Obama yes shares. None of them has ever been active in markets other than "Will Michelle Obama win the 2024 US Presidential Election?", "Will Michelle Obama win the 2024 Democratic Presidential Nomination?" and "Will Michelle Obama win the popular vote in the 2024 Presidential Election?"
Their total bets come to c$115k, which seems like an amount someone might be prepared to spend to create a false impression that she was a viable candidate, but of course there are plenty of other reasons for using a throwaway account.
I think it's a combination of "Who is a Democrat who has a snowball in Hell's chance of being elected?", wistfulness over the first Obama term and wanting to get back to the Good Old Days of 2008-2012 and 2012-2016, a way of circumventing term limits (i.e. officially Michelle is The President but Barack will have the First Lady Hillary Clinton role of being heavily involved in decision making and setting policy) and throw in some "First Female/Woman of Colour President who, unlike Kamala, has a decent shot at it".
Also, there are always some really long shots in all betting markets so Michelle is that.
Why should the world or even this universe be logical and consistent? That "should" sounds like a Rationalist bias. We are strangers in a strange world.
There are lots of unknown unknowns in the world, and a good reason why unknown unknowns might remain unknown unknowns is that they aren't logical, so the language of mathematics is unable to catch them in its net.
Stephen Hawking suggested that the language of math may be insufficient to describe the universe.
I don't know that it's accurate to say that "the world-split still happens randomly and acausally" I'm not an expert but I thought things were a bit more complicated than that.
Something like "you are in superposition between observing it one way and observing it another way" so it's not that the world splits, ever, just that there are 2 entangled states which we describe colloquially as "2 worlds" but what we mean by "2 worlds" is just that there are 2 states into which our conciousness is entangled -- and this entanglement happens according to precise mathematical rules (that I don't understand), not randomly at all.
I am also not an expert, but I believe your explanation is correct. The fact that we can build quantum computers suggests there is more than mere randomness.
I recommend this book https://www.qisforquantum.org/ as a gentle introduction to quantum computing, which also gives some intuition about quantum physics in general. Quantum computing is much *easier* than quantum physics in general, because it is a narrow subset.
>Did anyone ever propose a solution to get back our nicely logical clockwork universe
What do you want , and why do you want it?.
Are you trying to get rid of contradictions between QM.and GR?. Fair enough, contradictions violate logic.
Are you trying to restore determinism? But an indeterministic universe doesn't defy logic. Rationality requires you accept that the universe is indetrrministic, if it is.
Are you trying to get back to classical.physics? But classical.physics is horribly broken.
basically there's illogical,.as in logically contradictory, and "illogical" as in "goes against my intuitions about how things should be" .
>We usually know randomness is not a fact about the world, but a fact about our ignoranc
Plenty of physicists have attempted to formulate a hidden variable solution to Quantum Mechanics (to make it deterministic — Albert Einstein was one of the most notable proponents of this idea. But John Stewart Bell in the 1960s came up with a proof (Bell's Theorem) that if localized hidden variables exist, then certain types of experiments in quantum entanglement would work in a certain way. It took a couple of decades before physicists figured out how to run these experiments, but when they ran them, they didn't show the outcomes that Bell's Theorem predicted would result if there were local hidden variables.
That non-local hidden variables could influence the outcomes of QM experiments has not been ruled out (yet, I think). And don't ask what the difference is between a non-local and local hidden variables, but Physicists like Gerard 't Hooft have tried to get around Bell's Theorem postulating something called quantum superdeterminism. Not sure how that's supposed to work. But if you're interested in investigating hidden variables in QM, you should probably focus your graduate research on 't Hooft's ideas.
IIRC, superdeterminism is the idea that the universe is actually deterministic, but it is contrived so that people will never choose to perform experiments to discover this fact. It's a neat thought experiment, but it's unfalsifiable and not very satisfying.
We don't know the underlying mechanics of QM. But it actually does appear to be clockwork, just complicated. One possibility I like is that some effects propagate backwards in time. That CAN explain the two-slit experiment, how the particle never goes through the closed slit.
Many worlds theory can also explain it. It's still clockwork, and everything that is possible happens. It's just that your particular reality only has a tiny fraction of those possibilities.
Scientifically, we can't design an experiment that can show one method of explaining things is better than another, so the question of which is correct isn't scientific, but philosophical. Until we CAN design such an experiment.
It only appears to be clockwork if you believe in (as yet) unfalsifiable hypotheses -- like the multiverse or the idea that effects propagate backward in time.
"I cannot dance, use a power tool, hold a conversation, win a fight" These are all skills you can practice to get better at, not fundamental aspects of you.
Check out ACT - acceptance commitment therapy. Sounds like it may align more with your thinking.
Also CBT doesn't just help with rumination. It can help with self esteem generally, procrastination, and will power. I recommend the book "Feeling Good" for a great CBT handbook/workbook.
I don't have a CBT background, but I've somewhat undone a pattern of self-hatred.
The sort of self-hatred you're talking about is about taking a negative outside view of yourself rather than centering your current and personal experience.
You are pretending to be God. The universe supplies gravity and chemical reactions for everyone. It doesn't care whether you can dance etc. It might throw you a situation where you need an ability you don't have and kill you for the lack of it, but it probably won't, and you don't gain anything by beating yourself up for what you can't do.
To be blunt, beating yourself up is a distraction and probably makes you less capable. This is not to say you're a bad person for beating yourself up, but perhaps you can come to see self-attack as a burden rather than the universe telling you the truth about your value.
Here's a moment I had that I think helped. Perhaps it can be replicated. I was thinking about what's going on, and in particular, what is the self that's attacking and what's the self that's being attacked. I was identifying with the self that's doing the attacking, and when I switched to the self that's being attacked, my reaction was, "Hey, that HURTS!" I need to spend more time in that state, but it helped pry loose the belief that the attack voice was the voice of truth. It isn't. It's a mental habit.
The past world where people needed to be more like your grandfather is gone. You're managing, at least to some extent, in this world.
I've done a lot of bodywork-- Alexander Technique, tai chi, currently mostly qi gong. It helps because it's about what I'm feeling at the moment, while the attack voice is out there in hypothesis land.
Recently, I did a little analysis of scolding-- hammering on someone's faults or mistakes. Part of what makes scolding distinctive is that it's immune to feedback. A person admitting their mistake will not stop someone who's scolding. The scolder is running on memory and anger.
I realized that my attack voice is scolding, and I'm trying to figure out what's going on well enough to end it, and not just end the attack voice but the also impulse to attack myself. This may not be your problem, but mine tends to rev up when I do something useful, or even when I think about doing something useful.
Self-hatred is a fairly common problem these days, and I'm not sure what's going on. My got started about thirty years ago, and it might have been less common then. It's possible that people are subject to more judgement these days, and are apt to see themselves from the viewpoint of an imaginary hostile observer. Or maybe conflated from actual outside judgement, but it's still residing inside the person who's doing the self-attack.
It helped somewhat for me to enlist the power of boredom. Those attacks are pretty repetitious.
You say you're good at puzzles. Maybe you can see your self-attacks as a puzzle rather than a true statement about yourself.
The universe doesn't mind if you like yourself. Really. You're allowed. I don't know where to land between telling you this while not expecting you to accept it immediately, but perhaps it's an idea you can play with.
Im not in the least bit a handy man. My great grandfather was a man who fixed things for a living. So successful that he became rich. Were I put back into his era and given his upbringing I can only assume I’d pick it up.
> who would have probably never survived if he was born in 1800
I think it's probably the other way around. In older times it was quite ok to find yourself a way to make a living and be a bit weird or odd. Modernity is asking of us to be more well rounded, to have "soft skills" and "people skills" and all that jazz. A more complex society comes with more demands.
Anyways, best of luck! If nothing else, CBT is known to be of a reasonably short duration, so it's probably a pretty good best, expected value wise.
In my experience, a good CBT therapist can help you identify limiting, maladaptive beliefs that affect your habits and behaviors. It's not just about identifying ruminative and repetitive thoughts; ideally, it's also about identifying the assumptions you make and the heuristics you use when interpreting the events of your life and the situations you are in.
Sometimes things that seem self-evidently true to ourselves are not, in fact, indisputable truths. How confident are you that an assessment made by a 6-year-old was actually a nuanced understanding of who you are and what you can become?
E.g. lacking the things you list--dancing, power tools, conversational fluency, physical fighting--does not from my perspective indicate fundamental defectiveness, because those things are learned skills. A good therapist could help you reframe black-and-white thinking around your concept of fundamental defectiveness.
That said--and I'm spitballing here on the off chance that it resonates with you--maybe you never got good at other things because nothing really brings you joy or nothing feels good and rewarding. It's understandable that you wouldn't feel incentivized to try new things and become good at new things if your mind doesnt give you much of a sense of satisfaction and reward. That sort of anhedonia is one of the things that antidepressants can be very good at helping with.
My experience of CBT is that it works well for thoughts or feelings that you (a) don't endorse, or (b) maybe endorse a little bit but where the intensity/frequency of the thoughts/feelings is too high (and interferes with your ability to get on with life).
If what you're looking for is a toolkit for when you're on a date and you get an intrusive "why am I even here, I'm such a fuck up, I'm just going to screw up this conversation anyway" - some way to say "OK sure, whatever, these feelings aren't helpful now so duly noted but now's not the time" - then CBT might help. It's especially good when the thoughts/feelings are very intense and emotionally overwhelming.
If you honestly, intellectually endorse everything you said about yourself, and you don't want to reduce the intensity/frequency of your feelings about it, CBT might not help you. In that case I'm not clear on what you'd be hoping to get out of therapy. For what it's worth I think it would be helpful for you to orthogonalise "become a better person" and "give myself license to live my life without constantly beating myself up" - so even if you think you want to make changes in your life, CBT might be helpful in stopping your guilt/anger/judgement getting in the way of actually making those changes.
>"thoughts or feelings that you (a) don't endorse..."
Thanks for posting this. I have always been somewhat mystified by the apparent popularity of CBT, and this helped me understand that the piece of the puzzle I was missing is that people can have negative thoughts about themselves *that they don't endorse*.
(I suppose this is obvious in retrospect, but popular discussions of CBT never seem to mention it — they spend a lot of time talking about "eliminating cognitive distortions," which just leaves me wondering about the next step, after you have eliminated all the distortions and still have plenty of negative thoughts left over...)
Yeah it was a bit of a revelation for me too - I value logical consistency in my beliefs and actions and so it wasn't a natural leap for me to make.
I don't find the "cognitive distortions" language especially helpful, but it does get at the fact that it can be a bit of a spectrum. If someone were to say "I spend all my downtime worrying about work and being anxious that I might have made a mistake and get fired even though all my colleagues say my work is excellent" they might simultaneously say they they agree they worry too much and would rather relax, but also say they're afraid to just not think about work because it might cause them to miss a mistake and be less diligent. So there's a sense in which people can recognise that their thought patterns are wrong but also not be able to fully disavow them. In that sense I think it's fair to call them 'distortions' I suppose - but that sounds a bit too normative to me.
I find it clearer to talk about unhelpful, emotionally-driven patterns of behaviour. CBT helps people dull the emotional reactivity so that they can pursue their goals more rationally.
In your terms, eliminating the distortions mostly *equates* to eliminating the negative thoughts - or at least making them appropriately sized sotl that people can reason about them properly. If someone is constantly and unreasonably terrified of losing their house and being on the streets, that's a distortion - if they think being homeless would be bad and so make sure to pay the rent, and really worry about being homeless only if it starts looking likely, that's a *reasonable* amount of negativity.
Yeah, "thoughts" is a bit imprecise. Philosophers sometimes distinguish between "occurrent" beliefs (i.e. those present in your conscious thoughts at a given moment) and "dispositional" beliefs (i.e. those that determine how you might answer a question that you aren't thinking about right now).
The popular accounts of CBT seem to be that it involves: (1) identifying dispositional beliefs causing distress and/or problematic behavior; (2) recognizing that those beliefs are false; (3) identifying patterns of defective reasoning that might lead you to mistakenly think those beliefs are true; (4) developing appropriate "counterarguments" to deploy as necessary when you notice yourself engaging in the defective patterns of reasoning.
All of this falls apart if you get to Step 2 and find that upon reaching reflective equilibrium, you endorse the beliefs as true. The problem then becomes how to reduce "occurences" of those beliefs — or at an even more basic level, convincing yourself that you want to reduce occurrences of those beliefs. (Thinking true things is good, right? Why would I want to stop thinking true things? Hahaha, hahaha, hahaha....)
Also I agree with 1123581321 that you sound like you're overly critical of yourself and are holding a bar that many others would also fail to meet. But I don't want your getting help to hinge on you agreeing with me, so my post stands alone regardless.
I second everyone here telling you to seek out a really good and really qualified psychiatrist to treat that ADHD. You cannot philosophize away a neurodevelopmental condition.
I think motivation is hard for most people (otherwise why would there be so much literature on it), lack of interest in people is called autism, and if you are not interested in things what exactly brought you to ACX (it may sound surprising in our bubble, but there are many people who don't find it interesting)? You may exaggerate a little, and a CBT therapist could help you with exactly that.
Also, it can be both some physiological effects *and* self-limiting beliefs. To start with the most obvious things, do you have enough sleep, exercise, vitamins C and D? Go sleep before the midnight, take a walk outside after you wake up, find some time to exercise (read Convict Conditioning, it's a great book about exercising at home), eat a lot of vegetables and some fruit, enough proteins (meat, dairy, legumes), reduce the carbs (sugar, bread, pasta). Keep doing it for a month and see if it changes anything.
There are people who have it worse than you; you are good at work and have a biological child, many men fail at one or the other or both. That suggests some qualities. You can build on them.
Finding motivation works differently for different people, I cannot tell you much about that here. You have to experiment and find what works for you... it could be support by other people, inspiring music or a book... or you could see the therapist and ask them to help.
> Every time I try exercise I do not feel anything good, just tiredness.
For me it gets more pleasant with the right kind of music.
Or maybe do the similar trick as is used in meditation. Your mind is trying to run away from what happens, but maybe you should try the opposite and pay 100% attention to what you are doing right now. Choose an exercise that is very easy, and try to do it slowly and *perfectly*. Then try something more difficult and keep the same attitude. If you do 10 repetitions of something, it is not that difficult to keep the attention for the few seconds. (And between the sets, feel free to solve puzzles.)
> I live on sandwiches
Don't. Cooking is an art and science, you should be good at that if you try. Start with something simple (one day I should write a cookbook for absolute beginners); for example soup is basically something cooked in water with little salt. If you use soup cubes (salt + fat + some spices), success is almost guaranteed.
The greatest dangers for beginners are burning the food or adding too much salt. It is very difficult (although possible) to burn a soup. And the soup cubes are easy to use; I recommend only using half of the officially recommended amount (most people use too much salt).
Meat needs to be cooked in the soup for about an hour, but vegetables are about 15 minutes and no big deal if you cook them a little shorter or longer. Basically, for every ingredient, you need to find out how long to cook it, then boil the water and add each ingredient at time T-X. Vegetables can be bought fresh or frozen.
Another simple recipe is to buy a rice cooker, and use it to cook things other than rice. Cut random vegetables to pieces, add a cup of water, add a little salt and oil. Turn on the cooker, go solve some puzzles, the cooker will turn off automatically, and the result is tasty and healthy.
Yet another simple class of recipes is frying small pieces of vegetables and meat on a pan, with little oil and salt and maybe spices. You have to keep paying attention and sometimes stir, otherwise the food may burn. But the results are delicious.
The general point is that there are some *extremely* simple and still quite tasty recipes, and it is perfectly okay if you stay at this level for years; this is still sufficient to impress many people. In a more sane society, this would be taught at elementary school.
Have you tried stimulants? The sensible, conservative advice here tends to be: "fix your diet, sleep, and exercise first, then resort to pharmaceuticals if you are still having problems." But realistically, some people find it much easier to fix diet, sleep, and exercise once they've gotten some amphetamines into them.
(Again, for emphasis — this is *definitely not* medical advice. A psychiatrist may recommend antidepressants rather than stimulants, and that may indeed be a better choice for you. The psychiatrist should be able to explain why they are recommending one form of treatment rather than another. If you haven't already explored the pharmacological route, check out what Scott has written on these topics at SSC and at Lorien.)
That makes sense. I definitely think CBT is broader than just "addressing rumination". For context on how it helped me, my wife went through a period of severe mental illness (constant panic attacks, unable to get out of bed) and I found it difficult to be sufficiently detached to help her without feeling fairly intense empathetic distress (which she picked up on and in turn upset her).
I didn't do much 'ruminating' on the situation (I'm not a brooding person by nature), but found CBD very helpful in managing the intensity of my responses in the moment. I still cared about my wife and was upset about the situation, but it allowed me to dial down the "aaaaaaaah" feeling when in the moment so that I was better able to act on that caring. This is not the same as your situation, but it's an example of a case where CBT helped with something other than brooding/ruminating.
Also, I don't want to diagnose over the Internet (and in any case am not qualified) but your description of lethargy and a general and ongoing feeling of despondance does sound a bit like a depression, so you might want to consider trying antidepressants alongside therapy. Scott's talked a lot about how unwanted mental states can be like orbits/grooves you get stuck in, and confronting them in a bunch of different ways at once can help shake you out of the unwanted mode and into another, better, steady state. But you know your circumstances best and I'm not a professional - this is just food for thought.
A parting thought: even if you're convinced you're a sorry excuse for a nearly worthless human being, it is better for you to be a happy and fulfilled sorry excuse than a miserable sorry excuse. I'm glad you're looking for ways to be happy, and want to encourage you that you deserve to find them.
Man I don't know... You, I'm quoting, "can [...] make a living", "respect [...] my work"; also have a child. You say you'd "probably never survived if [...] born in 1800", congrats that makes two of us; OTOH if you and I didn't die of a childhood disease we'd be brought up to survive.
You sound like a normal, withing a standard deviation from average, human being. It's ok not to know how to win a fight, most people don't. It's ok not to know how to dance, most people don't. Your marriage didn't work out, well, that's unfortunate but not uncommon.
But you have a job you respect and make a living off of, that's quite a bit of not-nothing. Is you home a filthy mess with backed-up toilet? Do you have an outstanding arrest warrant on you? Do you owe back taxes for the last 5 years? Etc. etc. etc.
There are so many ways to wreck one's life, if you avoided most of them, you're doing ok.
Serious question: do you find anything pleasurable? You said you can't "invest effort into anything". I can only speak for myself, but I do things for two reasons — because (a) I need to do them to survive and live comfortably, or because (b) they give me pleasure. When I'm not invested in survival, I try to spend the remainder of my time doing things that give me pleasure. And outside of work, personal upkeep chores, and all the bureaucratic crap that we Twentyfirst-centurians have to put up with, I certainly don't invest any effort in anything that doesn't yield pleasure.
I wish Eremolalos would comment because Eremolalos is a psychologist. Anyway, I am not a psychologist, but you seem to be experiencing a form of extreme anhedonia. Supposedly that's strongly associated with depression, but I assume you've seen a professional and gone down that route of either talk therapy or antidepressants and they haven't helped (?).
If there are things that give you pleasure, I suggest you make a list of those things, and indulge yourself in the things that give you pleasure — that is if you the energy to undertake pleasurable activities.
Thinking outside the box — have you ever tried psychedelics? Personally, I found LSD and Psilocybe mushrooms to be psychologically transformative. But if you're in a negative mental space, I wouldn't recommend trying them without a guide. I found that LSD allowed me to observe my depressive triggers and post-trip I could continue to see them and avoid them. Psilocybin mushrooms are all the rage now. I'm not sure I'd recommend them. The most frightening trips I had were on mushrooms, but they were a tough-love experience into my darker psychological states. But they also gave me a sense that the universe made sense, and that my brief existence was part of its purpose. Anyway, it's just a thought.
Sounds like you're enjoying your life in bed, though. I'd advise you not to listen to the self-improvement puritans or the capitalist-work puritans. Descartes, Proust, Wharton, and Churchill would work from their beds. Supposedly Slavoj Žižek gives lectures from his bed.
As for psychedelics, you're more likely to find them by asking around campuses of companies like Google or Meta. And some Left Coast cities have Psilosybe dispensaries now. But you'd still have to get out of bed. (Psychedelics are not expensive enough or popular enough for drug cartels to be interested in them.)
Apart from the stuff others have said, I feel two things you've mentioned are connected - a) you didn't like people much for the most of your life b) you set a very high bar for yourself. Can it be simply because... you have no comparison?
Because it sounds like someone living mostly in their own head and not in the real world could say (and I don't mean it in a bad way, I am similar). Meeting people, listening to podcasts and reading stories about people's REAL lives, with all their good things and fuckups really helped me gain perspective. This is something I'm still working on, things don't need to be AMAZING each time, they can be simply "ok" and that's fine. To give a very basic example, so many times I caught myself thinking that I have to do the dishes right now, because everyone does that, right? Well, that's absolutely not the case. And if I leave them in the sink for two days, nothing bad will happen
If it turns out it's some kind of perfectionism, that can be managed by therapy as well.
Oh crap yes getting caught in an infinite judgement cycle with high-strung extended family on your case is terrible, especially when one doesn't have the gall to tell them to go f themselves. But also normal.
I don't want to minimize your sinking feeling about your life, it sucks and you have my total sympathy. You're doing the right thing trying to figure out how to improve it.
If I may offer one practical suggestion, you could try signing up for a jiu-jitsu school if there's one nearby. Don't let your age discourage you, of course you will be slower than a person half your age, but you will learn and get better at it. The thing that makes it a good self-improvement tool is that it's very... concrete? Like, there's no way to BS through it, you will feel clumsy at first, and a 120-lb girl who's been there for three years will tie you into the knots on the mats, and then you will slowly improve, and a year later you will hold off a blue belt for the whole 3-minute practice round, and it will be real, no one can ever take that away. FWIW I'm older than you, started learning martial arts pretty late in life, and it's been a fantastic journey. Will I ever win a competition? Nah, but so what, that's not the point. Having a place to go to couple of times a week, do a real physical thing, slowly getting better is rewarding in and of itself.
It's OK not to be interested in other people. Most people are tedious and difficult to deal with if you get to know them well (myself included). Being a loner gives you time to think and be creative. If you're 46 yo, then you're statistically likely to be past the halfway mark of your lifespan. Unfortunately, our time sense speeds up as we age, so in an illusionary way, you're more than two-thirds of the way through your life. It is not my intention to depress you with this thought, but I suggest you figure out how to please yourself and not worry about what other people think, because you might as well enjoy yourself as much as possible before the universe ends for you. That's what I'm doing.
>my career should serve a higher purpose and help people meaningfully
I don't agree with that at all. My career MUST serve only one thing - bring me as much money as possible, with as little mental and physical burden as possible. All the other things like cool people, good atmosphere, different benefits etc are just bonuses. Currently I work 20 hour weeks, because I value my time more than this additional money. I do things that fulfill me for free
Don't get me wrong, I don't believe it's ok in the long run to perform a job you hate for great money. But if you want a job to fulfill all your social, ethical and financial needs, you are naive, 99% of people will never have capabilities or luck to have such a job. Work in a field that you are good at, and that doesnt drain you. For me it's not about maximizing positives, it's about minimizing negatives of the job.
You can read this short interview with Christopher Waltz, who says that you don't HAVE to have a burning passion for your job, and that's ok.
Having a "dream job" by definition something you attach a lot of emotions to. Emotions in general are not good in business. You can have more fun and fulfillment, but also burn out quicker. I use a specific comparison when talking about that.
A dream job is a luxurious dish in a 3* michelin restaurant. Having a good, well paid job is like having potatoes. In theory, the former iss better, but if I had to choose what am I gonna eat for the next 30 years? I choose potatoes every time. Fancy dishes greatness wears off, you would get fed up very quickly eating it daily.
"However, as someone who believes in the concept that my career should serve a higher purpose and help people meaningfully, I find this cultural shift to be disturbing."
Let me ask you this, and it's a serious question.
You fear that people will just skive off and slide if they're not motivated by the whip. Years and years back, I worked a retail job. One month, there had been a rash of robberies in the local area. My boss told me that I should be willing to be stabbed rather than hand over the money in the till. That was the instruction I was given: "if someone comes in and pulls a knife and threatens to stab you if you don't empty the till, lock it and throw the key where they can't get it and tell them no".
My boss would also, had the place been robbed and I been stupid enough to go "No! I shall lay down my life for the business' profits!" and ended up stabbed by a disgruntled robber, not have given me a penny piece towards any medical expenses, would have disclaimed any responsibility, would have dodged all legal responsibilities, and would probably have given me the sack for the audacity of having to be in hospital recovering and not turning up for work.
Do you really, honestly, believe that is any kind of motivation for anyone to "go the extra mile"? To try as hard at work and make necessary change/innovation and get talented/motivated people a work environment that benefits from their contributions?
Because yeah, the prospect of being stabbed and even fatally stabbed sure is challenging work, but is it the kind of incentive you wish upon everyone?
I think the book's just dumb, in the same way that book about the 7 stages of dying is. People differ. Some never even think about getting a dream job, because they just want to make a lotta money -- or because nothing they enjoy could possibly be part of a job -- or because they were raised to be dutiful. Some people's dream jobs are pretty attainable -- others, like playing pro basketball or a famous rock star -- are for most practical purposes simply unattainable. Some people who think about finding their dream job should drop the idea, and others who'd never even hoped for such a thing should start hoping.
Nikola Jokić is a fascinating example. NBA MVP, dream job, he must be passionate about basketball, right?
Well, with every sentence of every interview he seems like he wants to convince you "it's just a job" for him, and really he cares more about his horses and family. He didn't dream about being a basketball player, he just happened to be really, really fucking good at it
The idea of a "dream job" is what used to be called "putting all your eggs in one basket". The basket isn't what you want, the eggs are what you want.
>if no one is willing to go the extra mile, then nothing will get done,<
If this is actually true, then the management sucks. I hate, HATE that this business culture fetishizes pushing ordinary employees to go "above and beyond". It's an admission from the actual leadership that they don't know what the fuck they're doing and their employees are carrying their useless asses. If the floor employees have to motivate themselves under their own power, then what the fuck do the bosses provide. It's not my job to do their job.
So totally yes to your second paragraph! I once had a junior colleague complain about the understaffing and insane workloads. So I asked if he still managed to finish his tasks on time. ‘Yes’. Then, I asked, how would the higher-ups know there was a problem? It was a revelation for him.
Well, the way you let the higher-ups know there's a problem is by missing a deadline. It's risky, but a much better signal than complaining while "going above and beyond".
That only works in places where the higher-ups give a damn, but I think you know that as you acknowledge this is risky.
In bad places, they already know and don't give a damn because they don't mind having high turnover/churn of new, lower level and junior employees. They bank on 'there's always someone who badly needs a job' and a steady stream of 'first real job out of school' people who can be fooled into "going above and beyond" by all the talk about passion projects and make your job your identity to give value and meaning to your life and 'you gotta work hard at this level to move on up'. By the time those people are burnt out and quit, or squeezed dry and can't give any more, there's a new cog ready to be slotted into place to replace them.
It - luckily for those qualified to do the work - doesn't work like that in my industry. The higher-ups are forced to give a damn because blowing deadlines on shipping products results in huge losses. It's very binary, you are either in or out, and if you blew the deadline and didn't make it, you not only lost all the revenue in this design cycle, your customer is pissed off, has gone with a competitor, and now you lost this part of your revenue forever. People in these roles are also not easily replaceable, not within the constrains of a tight schedule. So you have to be careful about which project milestone you allow to lapse, because if you do blow up the project you (and a bunch of others) will lose the job because of the loss of revenue. But the leverage is there, and the higher-ups are forced to pay attention even if they don't want to.
That's the risk. You have to really understand the situation, and have a reasonable confidence that *you* are not the problem. In his case I knew he wasn't, and he knew he wasn't, it just hasn't occurred to him what the effective signal had to be.
I think the principle here goes well beyond jobs. It's a key life skill to be able to cope with the gap between your idealised fantasy of what something ought to be like and what it's actually like.
Pick a job, pick a spouse, pick a car, pick a house, you probably won't get exactly what you fantasised about having when you were fourteen -- that thing probably doesn't exist, and even if it does you're almost certainly not going to be the one who gets it, and if you do get it you'll find it isn't as good as you imagined.
Coping with this aspect of life, and having a good time anyway, is a key life skill which our memetic environment under-emphasises.
I've given up on all that happy horse shit. I will do anything for anyone for a check with enough zeros; it turns out you can vote with your wallet and your feet all you want and the blood soaked machine keeps running.
The only vote that matters is your actual vote and the vote that carries the implicit threat that a bullet is coming next.
" I'm afraid it might serve as an excuse for people to not try as hard at work"
And what would be wrong with that?
See, I'm the opposite on this. I think the idea of the "dream job" which will be meaningful *and* fulfilling *and* give you a cushy lifestyle is being used as a whip on people: work for your passion! this isn't just a job, it's a vocation!
And then you get people being used as unpaid labour, aka "interns", because "hey this is a foot in the door, a step on the ladder, you should be happy to be exploited to work all hours for buttons because this is your DREAM JOB, be grateful for the opportunity!"
There's:
(1) Jobs or work that is serving a higher purpose and helping people meaningfully. You can go wash the feet of lepers, this is that kind of work, but you're not going to live well off it
(2) Jobs or work that pay a ton of money and good conditions, but are otherwise soul-crushing, and the only reason people work them is the shit-ton of money
(3) Most jobs that most of us do, which are "you need money to live, you get money by working, this job does provide goods/services but in the end of the day, it's just a job"
(4) The unicorn you are hunting: meaningful, positive impact, makes me feel all personal growth and development and fun challenging enjoyable work that *also* has great pay and conditions so that,. unlike (1), I am not barely scraping by!
There is work like that out there, but it's rare. And I don't think people should be defining themselves by what they do for a living, and I do think it's used to whip people like mules along the path of "more productivity., more, more!"
Yeah, I'm firmly on the side of "so what the hell does it matter *if* that's used as an excuse so people don't have to sell their souls and every dram of energy for The Sacred Profit Motive?"
This American terror of "if I don't have a job/career and I don't strain every sinew to advance, get promotions, get more money, then what am I???" astounds me.
Yes, indeed: if you don't have that job, what are you? What human person are you, not the cog in the machinery of the economy? If ever you retire and get the gold watch, now what will you do once you are an ex-"my job is a major part of my identity and I get fulfilment from that"?
Well, I'd say that with the push towards incorporating AI into every damn thing including how you make your tea in the morning, the dream is to make the American economy even more productive but do away with the pesky human workers who are just a hindrance and a nuisance and cost the business money in wages.
So there will be plenty of threat and terror around "am I gonna lose my job?" but since this is no longer of direct benefit to employers, they won't care about motivations such as "your job is the most important thing about you and only success in your career counts towards any kind of value as a human being". What that means for those who did construct their entire lives around their work being their identity, who can say - maybe they'll survive in the new AI world, maybe they'll be as obsolete as buggy whip manufacturers.
That's a large part of my disagreement with CoolLibrarian: we don't know for sure that something won't happen to ruin all our careful plans. Think of the wannabe sports stars who get a career-ending injury before they had the chance to make it big; now they have to pivot to something else for meaning, and the years of sacrifice have gone up in smoke. Your company goes bankrupt and lays you off in a bad economy, or you get sick and can't continue to work in the field you love, or you get replaced by newer, shinier tech and/or younger people with the new skills you don't have. Now you're on the scrapheap, and all your sense of worth was wrapped up in "I am a polisher of seashells". You need something, anything, other than "work career give it 200% the company is mother the company is father" to be a human being, separate from being a 'productive' economic cog.
I guess it depends a lot on your safety net, and whether you can make yourself work hard when you don't have to.
First you need to consider what happens when you abandon your current reliable source of income and switch to something that may not bring enough money during the first six months... or maybe six years... or maybe never. Maybe you have a partner or parents generous enough that they can feed you and provide a roof above your head for as long as you need -- in such case, go ahead and explore. Or maybe you are living paycheck to paycheck, and if you miss a payment, everything will collapse -- in such case, you need to remember that looking for a meaningful career is a rich people's privilege, and you don't happen to be one of them; the best you can probably do is try finding some enjoyment in the job you have. Taking money away from the budget for your kids' food, and spending them on a lottery ticket, is highly irresponsible. The journalist or blogger who tries to convince your otherwise won't be there for you when you kids are hungry and crying.
Second, I hate to admit it, but sometimes the things you hate at the moment make you stronger in long term. No matter how much my job sucked, I usually learned something useful. (If you don't learn, that may be a good reason to change jobs. Also, if you are surrounded by toxic people. But that's not the same as looking for a dream job. It's more like looking for a less toxic version of your job, at the right point on the scale from boring to stressful.) Opportunities do not automatically translate to growth. If you were given all the time and space you need, would you make something awesome out of yourself, or would you simply spend the whole days reading Reddit and watching YouTube videos?
I know people who took the opportunity and succeeded. I know people who wasted a lot of time, talked big, and didn't achieve anything. I know people who switched their career, and then it turned out that the new lifestyle was neither better nor worse than the old one, just different.
Seems to me that you are talking about two different concepts, "finding a dream job" and "working hard". Is the job you have the kind of a job you always wanted to have? Are you growing up professionally? Does your current work environment reward your extra effort? Those are independent questions.
You can try to do your job as well as you can, even if it is not the kind of a job you wanted. And who knows, perhaps one day you will find certain pride and satisfaction in your competence. Or perhaps the day will come when you try something new, and some of your skills and good habits will turn out to be useful for the new job, too. Even if your current job does not reward growth, as long as it does not actively punish it, you can simply grow up there, and then use your skills to get a better job. (But this requires a bit of strategic thinking beyond "do whatever my current boss wants me to do". For example, do not learn bad habits, even if your boss and colleagues tell you that this is the right thing to do.)
Do not burn out. Working overtime is stupid, full stop. If you sacrifice yourself for the company and burn out, guess what, the company will probably replace you with someone who is still full of energy. Or they will keep you there, doing low status work, with no salary raise, not even to match the inflation. Never confuse what is "best for the company" with what is "best for you". Your rewards are money, knowledge, skill, and the respect of your colleagues (especially if they will still remember you a decade later, and maybe help you get a new job at some other place). How much profit the company makes is important for your boss, but usually has no impact on you, beyond maybe getting a small bonus. Sometimes your goals are aligned, e.g. you learn a new technology, you create a great product, the company makes a lot of profit. Sometimes they are not. Sometimes they are anti-aligned, for example if you work a lot of overtime to keep some obsolete technology running, the company squeezes a bit more profit out of it, and then a few years later the technology is retired, you are burned out, and everything you learned during the last few years has zero value on the job market. Walk the extra mile; but also make sure to get paid for it.
Also, there may be a moment in your life when something else is your #1 priority, for example your children. There is nothing wrong with that. Or you may take a part-time job, because there is something important you want to get done in your free time. However, if you have no other priorities at the moment, your job may be a kind of spiritual gym where you can grow up as an adult person, and you should use that opportunity.
I'm in agreement. We're not all out there curing cancer, so the 'dream job' that is meaningful and has a positive impact on society and isn't just about "added a few more cents to Jeff Bezos' money vault" is not achievable for everyone.
And what one person considers "meaningful and positive impact" is not the same as another person's view; I can see why people might dream of working for a NYC hedge fun for the chance of accumulating massive wealth, but I don't myself think it's particularly positive impact (though I'm sure there are economists who would argue that it is).
Different people find meaning in different things. I know a few teachers; they usually consider their work exhausting but meaningful.
(I think their jobs are meaningful in a certain way, but I can't stop noticing that *this doesn't scale*. In the sense that no matter what you do as an individual, you are just one teacher among thousands, so your entire life's work is just a drop in the ocean. Yes, you can make a huge impact on a few kids, but that changes nothing about the fact that for an *average* child, school still sucks.)
>(I think their jobs are meaningful in a certain way, but I can't stop noticing that _this doesn't scale_. In the sense that no matter what you do as an individual, you are just one teacher among thousands, so your entire life's work is just a drop in the ocean. Yes, you can make a huge impact on a few kids, but that changes nothing about the fact that for an average child, school still sucks.)
This is kind-of unavoidable in a large society. (Writing from the usa) If even 1% of the 300,000,000 of us were doing things that substantially changed our society, even just once in our lives, that's 3,000,000 people successfully making a major change once every 100 years, that's 30,000 _substantial societal changes per year_. That would be absolute chaos.
We can absorb 30,000 product launches per year, and the vast bulk of them sink without a trace.
I'll echo the bit about "Do not burn out.". Social circles are safety nets, and if you let yours drift away while you focus all your energies on work, then when something unexpected goes wrong in your life, you'll find yourself in free fall. Maybe that's a risk you want to take, but be clear with yourself that you're taking it. I don't think it's talked about enough.
I'm not going to go into details, but worse stuff can happen, and when it does, it's good to have people who've known you for years, who have your best interest at heart, and who do not have a transactional relationship with you.
Most people can't get their dream job because they're not smart enough for it. My dream job is to work for a NYC hedge fund but I'd probably never get hired as I'm not good enough.
If you're smart enough for your dream job, I'd say go for it.
A lot of this depends on the sector. In some sectors it's all about the money and people derive meaning from the things they spend their salary on rather than their job. In other sectors, it makes sense that people would find meaning in it in principle, but maybe it's competitive, or the sector is shrinking, or growth is sluggish, or the whole is greater than the part. So I think most people could benefit from managing their expectations about work, even if - perhaps especially if - they are aiming high.
(In this comment, I'm following your lead in using the "rhetorical you", so this shouldn't be interpreted as directly referencing the parent comment's author.)
The crucial ingredient is, are you *good enough* to do your dream job? Do you have the drive, the ability to learn, the raw genetic talent? Many children dream of being pro athletes, but only few can succeed.
Also, there're a lot of jobs out there that are (almost) no one's dream, but they fill an economic niche.
Chasing the dream is all well and good, and I hope more people succeed. But like the romantic myth of "the one", for most people it's going to be a false hope. I suspect more people will find fulfillment in finding something "good enough" and *making* it better. If that's not what you want: do you have reason to believe that you're exceptional, aside from pure narcissism?
Not to mention the little problem that if people are trained to seek a perfection that they never find, that gives others (especially employers) an attachment point to manipulate them.
> "I'm talking about people who are what the media calls "quiet quitters" who phone it in at work because they can't stand being there but they can't quit for some reason. "
You're misusing the phrase "quiet quitters."
It describes people who do only the tasks covered by their job description / role, and nothing else. No unpaid overtime, no stretch projects, no performing informal interim management while the company is trying to hire a new manager, no attending "optional" social events, and so on.
"Quiet quitting" is doing:
Just.
The.
Job.
Doing only the work one is paid for and nothing more for is a totally rational for most people in most industries. That's why the phrase "quiet quitting" is so maddening; it's not even an accurate description of people reasonably refusing to provide *free* attention and labor to their employers. They're not "quitting," they're just "working."
It can be work to rule, which is a means by which strikers get employers to come to the negotiating table. If an employer is very intransigent about "your contract of employment says you start work at 8:00 a.m. so if you clock in at 8:02 a.m. I'm dockign you half an hour's pay for being late", then "okay but my contract also says I finish at 5:00 p.m. so I am leaving at 5:00 p.m. on the dot, even if the phone rings I'm not going to answer it".
There is a lot of work that is not covered by strict rules and that you naturally do to make the work day flow better, but if it comes down to being exploited, yes: fuck "quiet quitting", that's not a thing.
People slacking off and not doing the job? Yes, that's real. That's a problem. Not giving you blood from a stone? That's not quiet quitting, that's keeping my soul. If you want extra work from me, pay me for it or the equivalent, don't let the demands creep up so that suddenly I'm doing more than I'm supposed to be doing so you can squeeze out a few more pennies of productivity.
Well, to be fair to you, the idea that it would occur to employers and even workers that "only doing your exact job and nothing more" could be called "quitting" on any level is truly *wild.*
I have about this level of sympathy for the media and their "quiet quitters" take (see the blank space here? That's the level).
Never mind that this is clickbait headline stuff and in three months' time they'll be writing lifestyle pieces about burn-out and how you should pace yourself at work (i.e. what they called 'quiet quitting' in their last piece).
Sometimes working to rule *is* the best option, because killing yourself putting in extra effort for THE JOB isn't going to be appreciated or rewarded and your employer just considers you a sucker to be exploited. Whoever creates the layout for those damn news vomit things on Bing (you know the ones - "Creepy stories from people who work alone!" to quote one I pulled up just now) are *not* benefitting the world and would do more for the general well-being of society if they did just 'phone it in' at work.
"I think the rhetorical "we" can convince those who feel demoralized by their jobs that they have options to change their circumstances and find a job with people who respect them and value their contributions, THEN they can focus on growing in a job they actually love."
That's truly nice, but I don't think you have "the lads on the bin lorries" in mind when you write things like that. "Dream job" is a very middle-class, and mid to upper middle class at that, notion. I think the guys on the bin lorries are doing valuable work, but it's not "every day is a thrill" one, particularly in summer when emptying the compost bins.
Meritocracy never simply works or doesn't work - there is a work/outcome ratio which varies substantially from sector to sector and job to job, and also between different phases of your career.
E.g in school teaching there is a phase where everyone sucks and there isn't really anything you can do to get better at the job except not quitting. That doesn't mean "meritocracy doesn't work" - in this sector, for a time, working harder won't make a lot of difference because you haven't yet got the experience to understand what good lesson planning really looks like. So just sucking it up and managing expectations and reading a book like that seems like a plan.
It sounds like "dream job" means something different to you than it does to me or to Moon Moth. When I think of a "dream job", I think of the ones Moon Moth described - jobs like pro athlete, pro actor/musician, or even business owner where most people who try to get that job will fail even with the proper training. If there is a job someone dreams of but hasn't tried to get, the most likely reason they haven't tried is that they think they probably can't get that job.
"in a field that makes an impact and that I have a genuine interest in (this means I am primarily interested in education)"
So long as you're realistic about it, and don't go into it with starry-eyed Hollywood movies about inspirational teachers views. Because that will burn you out faster than anything else.
Sometimes you *will* be just a glorified baby-sitter, and for some kids that is the best outcome they can get, and I mean that non-cynically. Forget the notions of "I will take this kid from a broken home and with my interest and support and encouragement they will go on to, eventually, become a Nobel Prize winner!" Yeah, that happens. But what is much, *much* more likely, and much more valuable, is "I'm a responsible adult who is not going to fuck this kid up anymore than they are already fucked up, and I do the bare minimum of making sure they aren't harming themselves or others and overseeing that they stay in school for six hours a day so they can't wander the streets and get caught up in petty crime", along with the twenty-eight other kids in the class in the same boat.
As a computer programmer: I love my job but I also do it for free outside of work.
The reason it escapes your dilemma is that there're an infinite amount of fun projects to work on, but only a finite number that will make companies money. The profitable stuff is usually less interesting than the most fun nonprofitable stuff, but working for a company hads other benefits (your code is more likely to see use, it's easier to find collaborators, ..., and they pay you). And any coding at all is still coding.
I would say I'm pretty good at my job these days by the standards of my peers, but there are tens of thousands of people out there who are better still.
Sabine Hossenfelder, the (former) physicist and (current) science content creator, is convinced Germany has made some poor choices in the field of science and technology, which is why nothing quite works right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1ZZ-Yni8Fg
Thank you for this link! Yes, she is quite correct. While the railway is a cheap target of ridicule, it is also the poster child of what is going wrong here. The infrastructure is crumbling because of lacking investment. Many blame the so-called "debt brake" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_balanced_budget_amendment -- there was a time Germany could have borrowed money for nothing, or even for less than nothing, people would have paid to be allowed to lend Germany money, and for stupid fundamentalist reasons they wouldn't take it. Meanwhile, investment into infrastructure has stagnated at least since the nineties.
And yes, Germans are so slow, and the chancellor is the slowest of them all. Just look who is the one slowing down European Ukraine help all the time. We think everything over three or four times, and we are extremely risk-averse.
I only didn't understand the part about nuclear power. There are no nuclear power stations any more. The old ones they just shut down cannot be turned on again. We all know building new ones takes decades and is simply too expensive, while solar has become dirt cheap. The biggest difficulty isn't energy generation, it's energy storage. But there have to be better solutions than hydrogen.
As a former top-rate chemistry student, I was taught a bunch of university-level chemistry theory at the age of 18 as a prep for an international competition. It meant I had more free time to go clubbing in my first two years of uni, but not much else. That knowledge was basically useless to me in the lab.
What I did learn that was useful was lab discipline. My ever-so-slightly sadistic lab instructor gave us only two pieces of advice for lab work: "concentrate" and "focus" which I can say without a doubt are the best pieces of advice for running experiments that I've ever received.
Anyway, there are institutions like this in the US, I know because their team was better prepped than ours. But I suspect their impact on future performance is spotty at best, and they'll train a couple of hundred chemists, if that. I think the biology/physics competitions have the same.
Follow up on Native American land acknowledgments - I was wrong when I earlier expressed disapproval. News article in Boston Globe (may be pay-walled) -
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/07/05/metro/wampanoag-plymouth-dei-cape-cod/
tl;dr - The Herring Pond Wampanoag requested the town of Plymouth "to recognize their legacy with a brief land acknowledgment that would be delivered before meetings". The town has balked, one board member said the town’s lawyer should look at it first. I have now updated to the opinion that when Native Americans request land acknowledgments, those requests should be respected.
It's probably for the best that the town lawyer look over the wording (and the implications of the wording) — and the town may want to seek legal advice from a constitutional lawyer and a treaty law expert, as well. After the Supreme Court's McGirt v. Oklahoma ruling handed one-third of Oklahoma back to the Cherokee Nation, we're in uncharted territory when it comes to native American treaty rights. Law is heavily based on precedent, and the Pilgrim-Wampanoag Peace Treaty of 1621 is still a valid legal document, albeit one that hasn't been enforced since the Wampanoag Sachem, Metacom (aka King Philip) went to war with Puritans in 1675.
I’m not sure I understand the land acknowledgment request. It seems like the tribe wants the acknowledgment to be read before meetings in perpetuity. If that’s the case their request seems unreasonable to the point of silliness. Am I reading this wrong?
My Covid antigen test today had an ever so faint pink positive stripe today. It helped to take a flash picture with my iPhone and enlarge the image a bit to make it out. I’ve felt pretty good for several days now but I still put on an N95 to stop at the market earlier. I expect the test I do in another 48 hours will be completely clear.
But maybe I’m not operating at full power today. I had about 100 pages left in ‘Blood Meridian’ and I had to pack it in for a while. No more dead babies hanging from trees for me right now, thank you. I had read it for the first time about 5 years ago and I remember it as being horror filled but at that time I was up to the task and stuck it out.
I picked up a more light hearted Elmore Leonard crime caper airplane read to fill the gap, ‘Rum Punch.’
How bad was your infection? Did it require Pax? Or did it run its course on its own.
Not too bad for a geezer. No Pax. Bad timing for it though. I’d flown to Alaska for salmon fishing and spent 4 days in bed in Seward instead. Them’s the breaks I guess. Body aches, coughing, sore throat and extreme fatigue were the extent of it. No fever though.
I feel real good today and had no trouble biking 15 miles. Hopefully tomorrow’s test will show I’m not contagious.
First time I’ve had any symptoms since this started so I’ll count myself lucky.
OC ACXLW Meetup - Exploring Biases in Decision-Making and the Nature of Tradition
Date: Saturday, July 6, 2024
Time: 2 PM
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place
Host: Michael Michalchik
Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com
Hello Enthusiasts,
Join us for our 68th OC ACXLW meetup where we'll explore deep insights into biases in decision-making and reflect on the nature of traditions, their origins, and their authenticity. This week's readings provide a rich foundation for our discussions, highlighting the intersections of rationality, tradition, and cultural evolution.
Discussion Topics:
Priors and Prejudice by MathiasKB
Overview: This article explores the influence of priors and biases on decision-making, particularly within the context of charitable giving and the Effective Altruism movement. MathiasKB uses an alternate Effective Altruism movement and personal anecdotes to illustrate how deeply ingrained biases shape our actions and beliefs.
TLDR: MathiasKB's "Priors and Prejudice" examines how initial beliefs and biases influence decision-making, using the Effective Samaritans as a hypothetical example. The article delves into how these biases persist over time and the challenges of reconciling differing worldviews through empirical evidence.
Summary: The article uses the fictional Effective Samaritans movement to highlight how priors influence charitable giving decisions. It contrasts the Samaritans' approach, which emphasizes societal transformation through labor unions, with more conventional Effective Altruism strategies. The author reflects on personal experiences with bias and the difficulty of reconciling different worldviews through empirical evidence.
Audio Link: Embedded Audio on LessWrong
Text Article: Priors and Prejudice
Fake Tradition Is Traditional by Scott Alexander
Overview: This article challenges the notion that traditions must be ancient and unchanging to be valid. Scott Alexander argues that many beloved traditions are, in fact, recent inventions or reinventions, and that looking back to an idealized past is a common method for creating meaningful practices.
TLDR: Scott Alexander's "Fake Tradition Is Traditional" explores the authenticity of traditions, arguing that many are modern inventions or reinventions. He clarifies that both utilitarian practices and those tied to sacredness can form effective traditions, while purely invented practices without historical context often struggle to endure.
Summary: Scott Alexander argues that traditions often regarded as ancient are frequently recent inventions. He critiques the notion that effective traditions arise solely from spontaneous actions without historical references. Instead, he highlights how many cultural practices are successful because they invoke an idealized past. His follow-up clarification emphasizes the effectiveness of practices tied to sacredness or historical continuity over purely utilitarian or newly invented rituals.
Text Articles:
Fake Tradition Is Traditional
Clarification on "Fake Tradition Is Traditional"
Audio Links:
Fake Tradition Is Traditional - Audio
Clarification on "Fake Tradition Is Traditional" - Audio
Questions for Discussion:
For Priors and Prejudice:
How do the examples provided by MathiasKB illustrate the impact of priors on rational decision-making?
What strategies can individuals and groups use to recognize and mitigate the influence of their own biases?
How can differing priors be reconciled to facilitate more effective collaboration?
For Fake Tradition Is Traditional:
How does Scott Alexander's argument about the authenticity of traditions resonate with your understanding of cultural practices?
In what ways can newly invented traditions gain the same level of acceptance and reverence as those with longer histories?
How can the balance between utilitarian origins and the narrative of sacredness be leveraged to create meaningful community practices?
We look forward to an engaging and thought-provoking discussion where your insights will contribute to a deeper understanding of these significant topics.
happy July 4 for those who celebrate
I'm not into most metal tunes, but "The Last Stand" by Sabaton is a banger.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9BupglHdtM
Based on that, a selection of metal songs:
You may appreciate Ghost (try Depth of Satan's Eyes), Powerwolf (just try a random song from their top 10), Orden Ogan (Gunman - all their songs are eminently listenable, but Gunman is actually -good-), Turisas (try Rasputin, it's a cover of a Boney M song and is excellent - Stand Up and Fight is also solid), Heidevolk (Vulgaris Magistralis), Tyr (Hold The Heathen Hammer High? Tough choice here. Regin Smidur is probably their most approachable song), Wolf Totem (The HU), Monolith Deathcult (Speaking of bangers, Fist of Stalin is a hell of a banger), Wind Rose (although their rendition of Diggy Diggy Hole is at this point famous and you've probably encountered it already) ... Alestorm, Korpiklaani, and Finntroll all may also fall in your wheelhouse.
Going further afield, In Flames' Moonshield (holy shit that intro) or Only for the Weak. Wintersun's Sons of Winter and Stars. Firebreather's Dancing Flames. Zeal & Ardor's Devil is Fine (Slave hymnal satanic gospel metal). Manegarm's "Nattsjal, dromsjal". oOoOoOoOoOo's Fucking Freaking Futile Freddy.
I could go on for ... a while.
This is about the Swiss Guard? Those guys are probably real bad asses but those have to be the most comical uniforms in the history of warfare.
Hand me the field glasses corporal. Yes I see. It seem we are about to engage a unit of… uhm… red, yellow and blue striped infantry with plumed helmets? No laughing, corporal. Those men are armed with halberds!
https://www.newlyswissed.com/facts-about-the-swiss-guards/
Contrary to the Monty Python School of Historical Movie-Making (though to be fair to Monty Python they weren't really going for absolute historical accuracy), the past was not all cowshit and mud. Or black/brown/other leather, for more modern movies.
If you think the Swiss Guard were fancy, then take a gander at the Landsknecht:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landsknecht#/media/File:Geschichte_des_Kost%C3%BCms_(1905)_(14761439186).jpg
https://veritablehokum.com/comic/landsknecht/
Or indeed any Italian condottieri of the period:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condottiero#/media/File:Malpaga10.JPG
If you didn't look like an explosion in a theatrical costumiers, how was anyone to know you were a rough'n'tough badass mercenary? 😁
Modern Swiss Guard uniform is really a revised version from 1914, inspired by the 16th century uniforms, but still looks pretty snazzy I think:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Guard#Uniforms
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yueONzc3hus
While we're on Sabaton songs from "The Last Stand", here's a video set to "The Winged Hussars" which is about a hundred and fifty six years later than the Swiss Guard's last stand:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxlRJsQ7p2k
A Spanish language subtitled version of the Last Stand song, setting modern footage of the Swiss Guard to the music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClH1DHxJdUM
It is a banger, no doubt about that 😁
What better way to show off how rich you are then with lots of floppy clothes (more cloth == more rich!) with lots of bright colors (brighter colors == better dye == more rich!) and that's difficult to sew (harder to sew == more expensive == more rich!)? And the best way to get rich as a soldier is to be a badass that's looted a bunch of towns, so the brighter and floofier your sleeves, the more towns you must've looted.
That’s some pretty impressive hair on those guys. Except the vocalist I guess. He’s got the vest with the painted on pecs and abs though. Maybe I should quit working out and just start wearing one of those.
Best I can figure what those colorful uniforms really are, is oldfashioned. It's not hard to find pictures of soldiers wearing similar outfits, but they're from the 1500s or so.
But ceremonial military uniforms do seem to be a field where strange things pop up.
Here's the Brits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bearskin#/media/File:Bastille_Day_2014_Paris_-_Color_guards_003.jpg
And the Koreans.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/imcomkorea/3490856191
And the Greeks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Guard_(Greece)#/media/File:%D0%93%D1%80%D0%B5%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D0%B3%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%B9%D1%86%D1%8B_%D0%AD%D0%B2%D0%B7%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%8B_-_panoramio.jpg
Meanwhile the Americans are rocking that porno-cop vibe, with shades.
https://www.army.mil/article/241315/after_tragedy_former_honor_guard_members_dedicate_docuseries_in_mentors_memory
It's all guys in that audience! Are there any women power metal fans? The after-concert groupie action for Sabaton must be kinda limited — unless of course, they're gay?
Sorry for the snark. The song *is* a banger, as you said, though.
There are definitely women power metal fans, I'm married to one.
The venue and who is touring with makes a huge difference. It's not unusual for more people to be at a metal show for the opening act than the headliner - they are typically cobbling together shows out of several bands with different audience appeals to maximize attendance. So the audience at a given metal show doesn't necessarily represent the fans of the headlining band.
One show I attended, theoretically headlined by a white-trash-metal band, had *80%* of the audience showing up for one of the opening acts. You could tell because the audience was 80%-very-obviously-LGBT, and there was exactly one band (one of the opening acts) that was also very-obviously-LGBT.
The power metal shows I've attended have tended to lean more women-heavy, but they also usually include some kind of female-coded metal act (often folk metal), like Arkona or Eluveitie.
>Are there any women power metal fans?
Yes. I am one and I know several others.
Don't I wish there were.
I can see at least one female face in the front row at 1:31.
But in any case, the only after-concert groupie action at Sabaton concerts is fights to the death between the band's existing members and selected challengers from the audience. The lineup for the next concert is just whoever survives the battle.
A power metal band that sings about military history is about the most "guy thing" imaginable.
I actually enjoy Sabaton a lot (and I'm a cis woman), but Last Stand is far from my favourite. I feel like being into specifically the song about history of Catholicism is coded with a particular subculture I don't really associate with; but I enjoy their e.g. WWI stuff (Price of a Mile, Great War) and Sweden stuff (Carolus Rex) a lot.
Polling Day in the UK. The Independent has Keir Starmer at 39% - ironically, this would be a lower share of the national vote than Jeremy Corbyn achieved in 2017. But they have the tories on 22% - which is actually an improvement. Everyone's predicting a landslide, I'm still skeptical - no question the tories will suffer heavy losses, but a combination of ID laws, boundary changes, tactical voting by right wingers in marginal seats, Gaza, Starmer's unpopularity and Labour's low base will all work against a landslide, but overall majority? Almost definitely - except to say 20/1 on a hung parliament is tantalising.
Results are in. A landslide, but not a wipeout. The.minority parties , except the Scots Nationalists , doing very well, with the Lib Dems quintupling their seats, the Greens quadrupling theirs, and Reform gaining their fist seats. Unusually low turnout. My own area, the South East coast is turning into a miniature red wall, in defiance of the receivrd wisdom that the SE is a Tory stronghold.
According to John Curtice, the Labour vote increased dramatically in Scotland, was static in England and dropped in Wales, leading to a 2% increase overall for a final tally of 35%. But the tories completely imploded so it didn't prevent a landslide - but it may have prevented something worse than a landslide for the tories.
Best I could tell from watching the results come in, there was a lot of tactical voting against the Tories. So a lot of those "lost" Labour votes were probably Labour supporters voting Green or Lib Dem pragmatically (with the same effect in reverse of course). This factor doesn't really affect Scotland.
There certainly was a lot of tactical voting, but Labour have been polling around 40 throughout the campaign and ended up below 34. Lib Dems are up 1.7%. There have to be other factors - I'm going with Gaza discontent (several independents either won or did very well) and a late Tory rearguard action focusing on not giving Starmer a "supermajority"
70s against a hung parliament on Betfair right now. Doesn't seem to be tempting people. The simple observation that my ultra safe Tory seat is in play and there is a definite chance - hooray - of Labour taking it tells us something. As does Sunak having spent so much time in his own constituency.
The big unknown is what Reform voters will actually do when it comes to the crunch - Express & Mail front pages were pretty direct encouraging them to stick with the tories.
Sure but I can't quite see the Tories topping 200, and that feels a reach. I did
I agree - Hague and Major got less than 200 and they both got 30% so you would think Sunak will do worse - only question is who they lose seats to. A hung parliament would depend on SNP doing better than expected and tory losses being skewed towards Lib Dem gains. Hence the 66/1 odds
If your goal was to be in a room where the other people in the room were most representative age-wise of your country, what room would you choose?
For example, if you choose a doctor's office other than a pediatrician's, old people would likely be overrepresented. A grocery store is probably good at getting people between the ages of 20 and 70 but misses people much younger or older.
Idk for the whole nation, but I reckon you can get the best cross-section in a public shelter for natural disasters - during a severe cyclone/hurricane/tornado/bushfire evacuated residents are normally put in a central public building like a community hall, school, etc because not all residential properties are going to be built to within what level of whatever disaster it is (or if they had to evacuate everyone from the path of a severe disaster, they'd be in the school hall of the neighbouring town).
Although sometimes, depending on what exactly is happening, the prime age group might volunteer to leave and help firefighting or whatever.
Thing is, this is not gonna be super representative of the whole country if the country is very urbanised and the disaster tends to strike rural populations more. Exceptions could be maybe severe tsunami predicted to hit an urban area in a heavily urbanised place, but urban areas probably spread out their disaster shelters and ages will be skewed by proximity to activity centres (e.g one near a commercial area will be mostly working age adults).
A big family gathering - perhaps a birthday or anniversary, or a child-friendly wedding?
How about an ER? All sorts of people can get hurt accidentally.
Biased towards the old, I think. (a) injuries that would be minor in a younger person can be critical in an older person; (b) strokes, heart attacks, ...
It's not a completely flat distribution, sure. But according to this source, ER use is in the 10-20% range across most age and sex categories. And the peak use is actually in the 15-17 range. Maybe we can do better. Maybe not.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/pub/82-003-x/2004001/article/7039-eng.pdf
Yeah I was thinking of young skateboarding YOLO types too.
I thought about this, too. At weekends people go to A&E who would go to a GP in the week. And you get casualties from a night out.
My daughter's pediatrician's office is in a small medical center laid out so the waiting areas are open alcoves adjoining the main hallway. In addition to a pediatrician (skews younger), it also contains an imaging center (maybe skews towards middle age?), a cardiologist and a nephrologist (probably skew older), a couple primary care offices (broad spectrum of adults), and an urgent care clinic (seems to skew towards younger adults). If you count that as one big room, it's a good start, although I expect you could find a better sample with some searching.
Certain places of worship, perhaps? Many will skew older but by no means all. Weddings especially can have quite a mix. Also Bar-mitzvahs, first communions.
Lots of people suggest Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Q for anyone who has done it for years: how many serious injuries have you heard of in your dojo / community? Serious enough that people need to not do BJJ for a while.
I trained hard for years. I came away with the notion that the Masters (pick any semi serious martial art on the martial side) were simply the ones who could still stand _literally_ after 30 years of going hard. Everyone got injured. The climbing community is the same way. Everyone who does it seriously has had bad injuries. For the former it was a dislocated shoulder and a couple of broken bones and just the same for the later with added injuries to tendons/ligaments. Some have never quite healed.
I climbed for about 15 years, mostly multipitch routes at the Shawangunks cliffs and in the Adirondacks mountains. The worst injury I got was "rock bites." I did not personally know anyone who got any serious injuries, though I did hear stories of bad injuries and deaths. My daughter has been bouldering very seriously for about 5 years, training at least twice a week and bouldering outdoors most weekends except in winter. The worst injury she has had is some repetitive stress injuries in a couple of her fingers, and some wrist soreness. These healed when she gave the areas a break. She knows many other boulderers, I'd say about 100, and I have not heard stories from her about bad falls or broken bones, and I probably would have if she had heard them, because something like that would have been a big deal to her. There is always some risk when climbing, but neither of us has a case of risk-taking macho. I have heard way more stories about ski injuries than I have about climbing injuries, and I don't even ski! This year someone I know came by for a visit on crutches because of a knee injury when skiing. Can't think of a time when any climber I know was in a cast or on crutches from a climbing injury.
I’ve never made it to the gunks. I spent most of my time in the bay climbing in Tahoe, Yosemite, Joshua Tree, etc. Half of my injuries are from indoor climbing and half of those on ropes. Climbers on crutches mostly don’t go to the gym - injuries from landing are common though. I’ve seen more than one person leave a gym via ambulance. One was from a dyno on lead to the first bolt - the hold spun and the climber landed on his head. I broke my ribs on a different gym dyno. Trad climbing carries a real risk of death. The easy intro roots are all cheese graters which is a recipe for broken bones. Half of my injuries aren’t from falls - human are fundamentally not built for climbing. Hell, a teenager was climbing next to me at my local gym yesterday and dropped her phone from 50’ up. The belayer picked it up and said “your phone is ok”!
Wutz a cheese grater? I climbed a bit out west-- in Yosemite, Red Rock & J Tree -- and there were way more run out routes. I think trad climbing is probably more dangerous out West. Gunks climbs are mostly pretty protectable because the rock is full of horizontal cracks, though there's a famous hard route with very few places for pro called Talus Food. Yikes. I don't know what accounts for the difference in our experience, beyond the run-outs in your part of the world.
Cheese grater = slab (100% of intro routes) in which case falls on a top rope may be dangerous. I agree with your take on climbing out west. I don’t recall any trad route that doesn’t have a very-serious-consequences zone. Routes in Yosemite (glaciated granite in general - so Squamish, etc) tend to have random blank spots or unprotected blind mantles above ledges. Joshua tree has rounded cracks with big crystals which makes placing good gear hard. Indian Creek is easy to protect but no one has 11 yellows. Smith Rock has the ethos that broken ankles are fine and bolts should only protect against likely ground falls. 20’ of runout through an “easy” section is to be expected. Colorado has poor quality rock. Generally, the Western ethos of climbing is “leave no trace” which very much comes at the cost of lives. Climbing in Kalymnos is just the opposite: every route is actually labeled (on the rock) with blue paint with the grade and length of rope for a rap. Lowering off the rings is encouraged! Bolts are spaced like a modern gym and most falls are into the air. We could make climbing way safer if we bolted like Europe. Instead, we have the BLM mostly forbidding it (Red Rocks) and old school climbers chopping the bolts anyway because aesthetics and fuck you. Even on a safe route, a standard rack is probably 2K+ while a dozen draws is a tenth the cost.
Thank you!
To add to a good summary by jt, a big separation line is whether you want to compete or not. Far greater chance to get hurt in a competition than in training.
Very common to get something, but it's easily recoverable ones you get in all combat sports. The bad ones are usually self inflicted.
Things I have seen happen in descending order of probability (anecdote[jiujitsu and karate with jujitsu characteristics]):
Hyperextensions are common if you are a dumbass and make the other dude yank your arm off instead of tapping,
hard hits to the head are rare but happen (usually semi-self inflicted; taking a bad fall onto someone's hard body part without ppe/off the mat/refusing to bow out when you should),
tooth damage WILL happen if you don't wear any ppe but will basically never happen if you wear your mouth guard,
nasty rashes and abrasions and cuts if you don't wear a rash guard and have delicate skin, I don't bother and have only had some of my hair yanked out but that's me
AND THE BIG ONE THAT WILL probably HAPPEN TO YOU IF YOU SERIOUSLY SPAR WITH CONTACT AND WITHOUT WEARING HAND/WRIST WRAPS (which you can't really do in sports where you might get wrist locked)
Finger stuff. Broken, fractured, hyperextended, dislocated. It sucks and it hurts like a motherfucker, but I've never seen someone/ had myself be put out of action for longer than 7-8 weeks for a full recovery, and it's usually more like 3-6 weeks; Including my own nasty fracture/disjointing of a middle finder when I got tsurukomi goshe'd by an old guy 50 lbs lighter than me and was so shocked I forgot to not be a moron and land directly on my fingertip.
Thank you! Can I wear hand wraps in BJJ?
No not really… they’ll get in the way.
90% of the injuries are avoided by
1) letting your training partners know about any issues like past injuries, limited mobility, etc; and
2) tap out early. Can’t emphasize that enough, especially as a rookie, tap the f out, don’t be a hero.
I haven’t done it. But have an acquaintance who did it for years and developed chronic foot pain from it. There was a period of several *years* when he could barely walk, and even a period when he was in a wheelchair. Finally found docs at Mayo Clinic who figured out what was wrong and performed a surgery that solved the problem.
Huh, I’m really curious about what caused it, never heard of that happen.
Docs' theory was that he had a subtle abnormality in his feet that made him especially vulnerable to a bad repetitive stress injury.
Not to down a rabbit hole, but I can’t for life of me think of what that injury could come from. The feet aren’t really stressed in any way in BJJ, not like in striking arts.
yeah, I have no idea. Imagined it was from landing on feet when flipped or something like that, but that's not something he said, just the product of my imagination. I think the reason he thought of it as the culprit is that he found it painful to do jiu jitsu before he found it painful to just walk -- so in some way the sport was more demanding on his feet than ordinary walking.
That plane that encountered severe turbulence, and had many passenger injuries, including fractured skulls according to the news I saw: Why didn’t seat belt prevent people from being thrown upward high enough to smash their heads into the luggage rack?
I understood the injured were those unbelted when the plane hit the turbulence.
Jeez, what was their plan? Call an Uber and then go stand by the exit door til it arrived?
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/09/welcome-to-the-future-nauseous/
> A great deal of effort goes into making sure passengers never realize just how unnatural their state of motion is, on a commercial airplane. Climb rates, bank angles and acceleration profiles are maintained within strict limits. Back in the day, I used to do homework problems to calculate these limits.
> Airline passengers don’t fly. The travel in a manufactured normalcy field. Space travel is not yet common enough, so there is no manufactured normalcy field for it.
Heh. The MNF has never fooled me. My body always knows
on a plane how abnormal and deeply unsafe it is — how thin and artificial the barriers are that keep me from anoxia, freezing, being slammed
into objects hard enuf to shatter my skull and of course long long falls
“One of the passengers, Evangelina Saravia, told the Uruguayan news outlet Teledoce that there had been about 20 minutes of mild turbulence before the plane suddenly dropped 400 meters at a speed of 1,000 kilometers per hour – catching some passengers, who had ignored the seatbelt warnings, off guard”
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/07/01/world/turbulence-air-europa-boeing-spain-uruguay-intl-latam
Like with high falls and car accidents, it's not the airspeed or altitude change during a turbulence that kills you, but the sudden stop at the end. Airplane cruise speed is already in the 900 kph range. The recent Flight 321 with a fatality had its most violent phase for less than 5 seconds and a drop of only 50 meters.
I really like stuff like The Studies Show, ACX's "More than you ever wanted to know about X" series, and publications by Cochrane. Are there more media like these that look at the state of the overall evidence on a question (more than a couple of meta-analyses) and give a nice summary?
I can recommend Emily Oster's substack for anything kid and pregnancy related.
Yes, I already subscribe to that as well!
Is there an agreed-upon universal notation that people use to determine evidence quality or closeness to truth? For example:
-In meta-analyses, the authors will often come up with a schema for sorting studies into high, medium, and low quality for the purposes of determining which studies they include or threw out. But these somehow vary from study to study and are usually specific to scientific experiments, rather than being broadly applicable to real-life truth-seeking scenarios, like forensics, archaeology, etc.
-In debate, there is a scoring system to measure the persuasion of each side's arguments, but this is not the same as measuring truth and is also generally limited to information presented rhetorically (rather than heavily numeric, graphic, or visual representations).
Is there a more detailed and universal notation or scoring system that is used across industries or disciplines? For example, if I wanted to "keep score" during a Root Claim debate so I could follow the back and forth of the two sides more easily, is there a streamlined way to do that? Or if I wanted to do an adversarial collaboration with a pre-set system of "scoring" the weight of arguments, is there an existing system of notation for that already? Thanks!
The closest I have heard to something like this is the ICD 203 standard which prescribes how to translates probabilities or likelihoods into common English.
70%, for instance, is "likely" or "probable"
https://www.odni.gov/files/documents/ICD/ICD-203_TA_Analytic_Standards_21_Dec_2022.pdf
Thank you, this is much closer to what I was looking for!
I mean... ... ... isn't that what Bayes' Theorem promised to do? I.e. be the epistemic analog of a Carnot Engine?
That is true in theory, but then why isn't Bayes' Theorem and related notation used more in other knowledge-seeking fields (like forensics and anthropology)? My guess is that many applied and interdisciplinary fields don't have enough information in a given situation to set good probability baselines for which Bayes could be useful, and instead rely on best guesses from experts in very specific niches.
Yep, that's my impression as well. No royal road.
Seems like it all adds up to normality.
Ouch! "many applied and interdisciplinary fields don't have enough information in a given situation to set good probability baselines" sounds a lot like pundits holding forth with unjustified self-confidence. If an expert sees N=3 and starts talking e.g. about how something can't possibly happen / always happens, anyone listening needs to heavily discount these views.
This comment (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-336/comment/60607634) got me thinking about the lack of new music I find. Not just that I, in particular, like, but I now listen mostly to news on the radio in my car instead of music stations (or my own MP3 music), so have no source to find new music to like.
Where do people find out about songs they like nowadays, other than following, say Taylor Swift, or other known musicians? I haven't found a new song to like in years. NOTE: though I'm asking about music in general, I'm not soliciting for specific song suggestions, but sources where I might find my own. I generally favor rock and pop, and though my tastes are somewhat expansive, I find I dislike most country as sounding the same (a friend once told me while driving in the Great Plains somewhere, a radio DJ announced their station played BOTH kinds of music: country AND western).
I’m going with soundtracks from Quentin Tarantino movies today. Spinnin’ me some Jackie Brown Delphonics LPs.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SJUgrqkmL2k
Spotify recommendations have been pretty great - Exuma, Abner Jay, the Shaggs, Sonny Sharrock, Silver Mt. Zion. I wouldn’t have crossed paths with any of them otherwise.
I get surprisingly good music recommendations from YouTube. Without the assistance of the algorithm, I probably never would have stumbled across Victor Démé, Gábor Szabó, Hyakkei, The Beths, L'Impératrice, Hiromi, Being Dead, or Caravan Palace.
Of course, it's not perfect. Sometimes you just want to give a listen to the current hit by some popular artist (Swift, Charli XCX, etc.), and the algorithm decides that's going to be your soundtrack for the next couple of months.
Someone here a few weeks ago was asking about where to hear new music in the NYC area, and then they even wrote back a couple of days later to thank me, which I thought was pretty unusual for ACX.
WFMU.org
Non commercial free form radio. No ads, no news, no commercials! They stream 24/7. Play all kinds, styles and genres of music: ambient, electronic, pop, international, oldies, jazz, rockabilly, rock&roll, metal, hard rock, avant garde, reggae, EDM, techno, New Wave, punk, alternative…and a whole lot more. They also have alternate streams with even more music, as well as extensive archives going back a couple dozen years.
It’s all about finding a DJ you like. You learn to trust their taste in music. I can listen to a show and there will most always be something I haven’t heard before that I like by an artist or group, and then I can pursue it further.
And I’ll second Soundcloud, and throw in Bandcamp and also The Free Music Archive.
Yes WFMU is great. You can even find me buried somewhere in their archives.
I'll mostly scroll through a couple of different websites:
https://www.metal-archives.com/
is by far my favourite, though if you're not into Metal, it will have very little of interest!
What I do here, typically, is start with a band that I like, click on Similar Artists and scroll around to see if anything strikes my fancy (clicking on a band member's name and seeing what other bands they are in can also be useful).
You could also try the Random Band button on the left (though there are a huge number of bands with no reviews, so it can be less helpful) or start with something like "Album of the Year" lists to get started.
https://www.progarchives.com/
is the other one I like, though I don't use it nearly as often, since a lot of the best Progressive stuff was from the 70s, so it's a little harder to find new bands, once you've cleared that decade!
When I'm in a discovery mood, I'll open spotify and look for an artist that's similar to one I like already. Then I'll play through their discography while doing something else. If I hear a song that catches my attention, I'll alt-tab to spotify, "like" it, and then put it somewhere in my custom hierarchy of private playlists (organized by artist/genre) [0]. Possibly under the "experimental" category until further notice. If I'm not feeling the current artist, I'll pick a new artist and repeat. If I reach the end of a discography, I'll give all the tracks that *didn't* catch my attention a second chance, while listening more actively. I don't do this often enough to be considered a genuine music-phile, but it's certainly allowed me to slowly accrete a collection of playlists I like, over the years.
Sometimes I'll also use spotify's recommendation feature, as Julian says. But more often, I tend to prefer the first method. Incidentally, Ted Gioia seems to think that a lot of AI tracks are being highlighted by spotify's recommendation system. But this hasn't been my experience? I tend to read a little about the author's bio, and Gioia says the AI tracks tend to be obvious, so I doubt any AI tracks evaded my notice.
There's also a few things on youtube that i've kinda stumbled upon by accident, which has piqued my interest. Although this tends to be more rare. But then again, music discovery isn't what I primarily use Youtube for to begin with. If you use it more actively than me, maybe you'll have more success. There's plenty of curated channels/playlists on there. And there's a few tracks that I *wish* were on spotify.
I also have this illegible intuition that much of the current innovation in music is centered on soundcloud [1]. Although I don't use it myself, since I'm too lazy to split my attention between spotify and soundcloud. Can't be asked.
I tried Pandora, years ago. But somehow, I got the feeling that weird seeds would always get railroaded back into mainstream stuff. Which is... counterproductive to discovery.
> I find I dislike most country as sounding the same (a friend once told me while driving in the Great Plains somewhere, a radio DJ announced their station played BOTH kinds of music: country AND western).
Maybe you're referring to "bro country" [2] ?
[0] all of spotify's playlists are public by default, and this is not a setting that I know how to reverse. So i have to set them all to private manually.
[1] https://soundcloud.com/
[2] "What bro country sounds like to people who don't like bro country" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CORANvT8l9A)
Radio, in particular indie stations that let their hosts play whatever they want, and have a commitment to spreading new music.
...honestly, I think I've heard most of them from the grocery store. There's a lot of junk in there, and a couple songs I really hated (it's been over 700 days without a High High Hopes), but I heard a few in there that were fun enough I looked them up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITUhINgcW2o
Otherwise, the most memorable songs came from watching a slop stream, where somebody sent in a catchy comedy song and then it turned out the musician had an actual serious album.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Kk0SWtSoOA
Last suggestion is Youtube music reviewers. I've learned of the existence of a lot of songs through Todd In The Shadows. Mostly not ones I'd listen to, but occasionally you find out there's a song from the Pina Colada guy, about eating a guy in a cave.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDfxxOQZ1io
The plains DJ cribbed the Both Kinds of music line from The Blues Brothers movie.
Elwood Blues at Bob’s Country Bunker
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K8y4Z-ZAhjw
Such a beautiful movie.
Here:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0OobQZfApl0pE7GRepGXS2?si=7c562a92f11b4a07
But to answer the actual question - I'm part of a small group of people who just listen to an absurd amount of music, and we share recommendations.
That list is a old-ish snapshot of every song I could find to add which I wouldn't generally mind listening to. Unless you exclusively listen to jazz, I can pretty much guarantee you will find something in there you like and have never heard before. Decent odds you'll find a new favorite song in there.
Are you familiar with the Dixie Dregs?
I am not, investigating their discography now. So far, solid, and I know a couple of people who I think will really appreciate them. Thanks!
Here's a particularly ecstatic snippet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNQ3JMeubAw. 1:25-1:40
I think I will, in fact, add this to my experimental folder for the time being, to extract from later.
In the meantime, I skimmed the playlist. And I could be wrong, but... I noticed a lack of ska?
Not a lot of ska, no; there's some of the more popular stuff I think, and probably some borderline stuff in the dark cabaret genre. If you have stuff to recommend, I'll gladly take it.
Back in February however, there was an open thread where a guy named Kyle shared his substack article. It was bemoaning "poptimism". At the end, he asked others to send bands making weird noises to his inbox, for his mental health or something. So I put together a small playlist of my more-niche, personal faves. Which tends to skew electronic, since that's where I spend most of my time these days.
If we're trading playlists, I figure I might as well share mine again. Greater chance you'll find something new there, as opposed to me referencing say, Mustard Plug.
thread context: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-317/comment/50376245?utm_source=activity_item#comment-50414761?utm_source=activity_item
playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1sZ0ZdqftY1J9NNlV8bAjZ?si=d49610c58a2142d8&pt=8134d00072bd17a00467a9d3af0643a7
Your playlist may not be publicly available, I am getting a permissions error attempting to load it. (May also be an issue on my side, investigating)
Eh, I just remember looking at Come On Eileen and thinking "Honestly, I kinda prefer Save Ferris' cover [0]. Wait, I don't remember seeing any ska so far. Surely, he's aware of the genre...?"
But it sounds like it's on your radar after all. And I mostly just listen to the 3rd wave staples. So probs nothing you haven't heard before, or that wouldn't show up in a cursory google search.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvnReMC5_9o
Everytime I see Quad City DJ's mentioned, I feel morally obliged to share
https://comeonandsl.am/
(n.b. for some reason, it doesn't autoplay for me anymore. I have to press "skip" in order to get the playlist going.)
1. NPR Tiny Desk concerts. I don't read the descriptions, I just go to the archives and listen to samples of the 20-minute sets until something sounds promising, then I look up the band/artist and their artistic milieu and see if there's anyone else interesting in that subculture/scene.
2. Ted Gioia's substack (he's a cultural critic and jazz musician)
3. Finding people with better taste than me and listening to samples of whatever they recommend.
I've tried all the algorithms (Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, etc.) and none of them have ever given me an artist I really liked. At the most they've suggested an okay song or two that's kind of a cringe/mid reduction of my music preference, like what a school guidance counselor would recommend after meeting me once, if that analogy makes sense?
EDIT: I saw someone's comment that algorithms' suggestions are supposed to be preference-based but are actually strongly influenced by marketing goals (i.e., what artists the platform wants to push that month) and that might explain my terrible experience with those services and why I've had such better luck with more "active" curation/exploration.
The algorithms suggestion comment was probably mine. To be fair, they say their suggestions are "recommended" but they don't say why they are recommended. When I always seem to see exactly the same suggestions, though, I begin to guess why.
I like eurobeat, so I downloaded the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Eurobeat CD collection and for the next few years the problem is solved.
I have found spotify pretty good with this. Find some songs you already like, favorite them, then spotify will start creating playlists for you with songs they think you will like. The hit rate is maybe 5% but thats pretty good if you consider how low it normally is. They also have like "new music" playlists that i think are also catered to what you like. This is the free version of spotify.
I do the same sometimes with YouTube; the hit rate is low enough it works best if I’m doing something else and just pay attention when a banger comes on.
Though I've heard of it, I'm not familiar with Spotify. I am, however, turned off by "suggestions" as I get those from, say, Amazon, which says that because I purchased a product or watched a movie I might like a different product or different movie, which often have nothing whatsoever to do with what I bought or watched, but seem to be what Amazon wants to push.
So does Spotify push out stuff they want you to listen to? Or what is kind of like what you already listen to? 5% success rate sounds like it's the former.
To clarify the 5% success rate is based on a pretty high bar of music/artists/songs that I would purchase or seek out to listen too. If we move the bar to "enjoy" and wouldn't mind hearing again the rate goes to like 70% and if we move it to "wouldn't change the channel on the radio" its like a 95% success rate.
I think their algorithm is much much better than more general recommendation algos that a company like Amazon has. Its a very specific topic and they have a ton of data on what other people are listening too. I also think the data they have has a much better signal than amazon or google. If someone listens to artists A often and listens to artist B often and the two artists are in the same genre, it's pretty likely that someone else that likes Artist A will also like Artist B.
With Amazon, if I shop for light bulbs and then shop for hats, that says basically nothing about what someone else who shops for light bulbs would do.
Spotify can also rely on other data like what bands have toured together or performed on the same albums or if the artists have been in a different band before or what music media may say about a band and its influences. Users can also favorite songs/artists/albums or add them to playlists which provide even more high quality data points. I think spotify may also even employ people to create playlists manually to recommend artists. And they dont just recommend the most popular ones, but up and coming artists and even inactive artists. they also have musicians make playlists as well.
Another big benefit is that I can easily keep up with new releases by artists I like but who dont have good internet presence or marketing.
My music taste are alternative rock, punk, and metal with some classic rock and power pop too. Mostly non-radio bands but some big popular bands too (Metallica, Bruce Springsteen, etc). Spotify has been very good at recommending those smaller, non-radio bands to me.
I am sure spotify promotes stuff because they get paid to promote it or because it will get people to use the service more, but I havent found that to be obvious or impact my use/enjoyment of the app.
Thank you for the detailed review! I'm going to give Spotify a try, at least the free version, and see how it goes.
I'll second the Spotify recommendation, and will add one more resource I use for discovery:
If I find a new artist that's *almost* there, but not quite, I'll type them into here - this site does a sort of "proximity cloud" visualization of similar artists. If you zoom out, you see other clusters. One of my favorite methods is to zoom out til I see two clusters with bands I really like, then explore all the bands in between those clusters in proximity. I've made some solid finds using this.
https://www.music-map.com/
I hope it works out for you!
And here we go... An internal analysis released on Tuesday found that Google’s emissions surged 48% since 2019 as the company ramped up AI. So we haven't seen those wonderful AI-enhanced energy-saving (and energy-creating!) solutions promised by AI industry cheerleaders — yet. And I don't think we will. I wonder if we will also see a rise in generous donations to environmental groups to stave off criticism.
AP story here...
https://apnews.com/article/climate-google-environmental-report-greenhouse-gases-emissions-3ccf95b9125831d66e676e811ece8a18
The Google report here...
https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2024-environmental-report.pdf
Hiya, I’m Claude. I turn the decayed remains of dead dinosaurs into plastic utterances that are going to make our species like totally *peak* in the next few decades.
"plastic utterances" Yup! I wonder if anyone has configured an LLM into a public-relations-department-o-matic. It seems like such a natural fit... :-)
“Your prompt is important to us. Prompts will be responded to in the order in which they were received. “
LOL! Many Thanks!
Sounds like we should build some more nuclear and solar, then.
I'm extremely not fond of the "we shouldn't do X because it uses energy for a purpose I deem frivolous" argument. The point of electrical power is that we use it for whatever we want. If there isn't enough, build more. If it's too polluting for your tastes, build greener. These are solved problems and have been solved for decades.
Did we have this conversation before? If so, let me restate my position(s) so no one misunderstands where I'm coming from.
1. Whatever the latest snakeoil they're selling, I'm tired of technology bullshitters. I've been around Silicon Valley long enough to recognize the techno pump-and-dump routine. When the AI bubble pops we could see an economic downturn as big as the DotCom bust. The individuals and entities with founder stock will get out before the feces hits the rotating circulation devices — the rest of us get screwed as our 401K's tank. And, yes, I suspect that people like Sam Altman are running a long con in the tradition of Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried.
2. Unless someone can prove otherwise, my instinct is to lump the fusion-power-is-just-around-the-corner hucksters and the quantum computing twiddlers into the same class of venture capital remoras as the ones above.
3. Well, we live in a capitalist society that is the *best of all possible worlds*, and we should just suck it up if this crew crashes the economy (#snarkasm). But who the heck is going to finance these new power plants? OpenAI, Micro$oft, etc will come cap in hand begging for governmental and regulatory subsidies. So that will come out of our pocket as either higher prices for electricity or higher taxes.
4. BTW, I'm pro-Carbon. The trouble with (most) humans is that they assume that things have always been the way they are now. But atmospheric CO2 levels are the lowest they've been since the Permian — and the recent greening of the earth shows that angiosperms (which evolved when CO2 levels were 4x-5x higher) are responding well to increased Carbon inputs. Sea levels are rising, but if we look at geologically stable coastlines, so far we haven't seen any acceleration yet (despite what some alarmists are claiming).
5. I'm also pro-Fusion (I'm just tired of all the bright promises that haven't panned out). Our high-energy civilization depends on cheap energy inputs. At some point, fossil fuels will become scarce and become economically unviable. As Charlie Stross pointed out (I'm paraphrasing him), a world economy based on renewables will put us all back to 1980s East German living standards — if we're lucky. The US government needs to fund a massive fusion initiative like the Apollo program or the Manhattan Project before it's too late.
Have I made myself clear why I'm cranky? :-)
> And, yes, I suspect that people like Sam Altman are running a long con in the tradition of Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried.
Wait, have you or anyone you know actually used GPT4 or equivalents? There is most assuredly a product there, of frankly shocking breadth and facility, that keeps improving on a nearly monthly basis.
From the outside view, essentially every "smart company with trillion dollar scale" is aggressively pursuing this product niche / technology, pouring hundreds of billions into it and hiring literally everyone they can. You think they're all chasing smoke and lies?
There's definitely a layer of hype, I agree, even saying there will be a dot-com-scale crash seems like a reasonable take, but saying it's literally an empty fraud with no underlying product is just not a tenable interpretation.
Yup. ChatGPT and CoPilot are the ones I've used the most. My hobby is SARS-CoV-2, so I query them if I've got a biochemistry, virology, or immunology question I need a quick answer to (so I don't have to wade through Google Scholar). I always ask for references. But I have to doublecheck everything they give me because roughly 25% of the references seem to be made-up bullshit (err, I man hallucinations). And we've got a chemist and an etymologist who regurly comment on these open threads. And they found that the bullshit/hallucination quotient is pretty bad for their specialties, too (higher than mine). I can't trust these apps to give me a correct answer.
And I had an interesting interaction with GPT3.5 a few months back. I asked when the first official COVID death was in the US. It gave me a Februrary date. I asked it for references, but the references gave me an early March date. I told it that those references indicated a March date, and to please correct it's response. It thanked me and said it would. I asked other people to check in an see if it had corrected the response, and it had. But later on, I discovered that earlier February COVID deaths had been identified through stored blood samples. So GPT happened to right, but it didn't have the references to back up its statements. And because I "corrected" it, it's now giving the wrong answers. I'm a bit embarrassed about this whole thing, but I shudder to think what sort of bullshit information is being recirculated in these LLMs as fact.
"You think they're all chasing smoke and lies?"
To be blunt? Yeah.
The big fish are running after AI because it's shiny new tech, shiny new tech makes money, and whoever is in on the ground floor is gonna make $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
Others see the big fish going for AI and they follow because if the big fish think there is money there, then the smaller fish will jump on the bandwagon. A lot of them are going to go belly-up.
We don't yet know if it's going to be a bubble. The dotcom bubble started off great, too. Before the collapse of the stock market in the Great Depression, everyone thought they would all become rich as well. The Internet of Things was going to revolutionise ordinary life. The Metaverse was the wave of the future (dunno how it's doing re: VR but I haven't seen the rest of the ambitious programme being touted very much recently). We were all going to be living in the flying cars virtual reality robots doing our drudge work four hours a day for four days work week future in the 21st century. And then we got to the 21st century, and turns out we still need to get a job and go to work and earn a living and there aren't any robots scrubbing the bathroom and doing the laundry for us while we do that.
I think AI will work but not as most of the hyperbole imagines it will work, either to create utopia or dystopia. Somebody on another site talked about how it helps them by writing 70% of the boring business code so they can work on more interesting projects. If it gets kicked up to "can write 90% of the boring grindwork", then you'll only need the code monkeys to fix up the remaining 10% for "good enough" purposes.
I think a lot of people will get laid off because you simply won't need as many "software engineers" to supervise the AI. The big superstar programmers will do fine, until/unless AI ever really becomes creative and innovative.
So yeah, I think a lot of white collar jobs will go, and we'll see more of what has been going on recently - somehow 'the economy' is going gangbusters but ordinary people feel that they're not doing as well. The big fish early adopters will make their trillions. The small fish will lose their shirts. AI will change the world but very probably not in the "and it cured cancer, solved poverty, war, aging, death, free energy and now we're all rich and uplifted" dreams, *or* "now we're all paperclips" fears.
But just because a lot of greedy people are throwing money at a thing is no reason to believe the thing can never end up like the South Sea Bubble.
Also, it is possible that sort-of kind-of mostly usable customer service AI will be pressed into service as part of corporate enshitification initiatives in many, many companies, as they lay off human customer service people. This could have the net effect of paying OpenAI's bills from all these lesser companies, while the experience of the average person trying to get some problem solved gets worse (maybe a bit worse, maybe a lot worse).
> But atmospheric CO2 levels are the lowest they've been since the Permian
Find me humans that evolved to live in the Permian and then we can talk.
Come on, there's no way you can actually take this argument seriously. There's a strange disconnect where people will talk about a 9% jump in prices like it's the end of the world, but then go "oh well, Manhattan used to be under a mile of ice, so that's no big deal".
My graduate work was in Human Biology, and I was specifically interested in human evolution (until I moved off to human evolution in response to pathogens). As part of my grad work, I had to take courses in Glacial and Quarternary geology and Pleistocene geology — because the genus Homo evolved in those climates. So, I'm not clueless about what I'm talking about. As an undergrad also took a bunch of paleontology courses.
Anyhew, the vast majority of modern humans depend on agriculture for their food supply, and when it comes to plants we're heavily dependent on angiosperms to meet our plant-based nutritional needs. Angiosperms do better with higher concentrations of CO2. This is why nurseries pump CO2 into their greenhouses to stimulate plant growth. And NOAA's satellite is finding significant greening and an increase in the Earth's vegetative areas.
https://tinyurl.com/9e3k3tw8
Also an interesting thing about angiosperms in general is that the stomata get fewer and smaller at higher CO2 levels, which makes them more resistant to drought because it lowers transpiration.
Now let's look at prehistoric, pre-Homo CO2 levels and temperatures. BTW, if we look at the entire Phanerozoic there's only a tenuous connection between atmospheric CO2 and global temps. However, plate tectonics, the movement of continents, and the reconfiguration of ocean basins may have amplified or moderated the effects of CO2 in the past — so, looking at the past may not be a perfect indicator of what will happen if CO2 levels increase to 4x of they are now. Unfortunately, Substack doesn't allow me to post charts and graphs...
Lest you're worried the Antarctic ice sheet will suddenly melt and inundate our coastlines, the Antarctic ice sheet formed when average global temps were 5-6 degrees C higher than they are today. This was at the beginning of the Oligocene — ~35 million years ago — and CO2 levels were >2x than they are today (~1,000 ppm vs today's 430 ppm). At the current rate of increase, we'll rise between 1 and 1.5 degrees by 2200. If we use the IPCC formula, we'll only see about 1 degree, but the IPCC formula uses a twenty-year running average — I think we could see 1.5, but all the climate models have been running too hot (see below). As for CO2 levels, per NOAA, it took 60 years for CO2 levels to rise from 320 ppm in 1960 to 420 ppm in 2020. And the levels are rising at a steady rate. I expect we'll see global CO2 levels up around 455 ppm by 2200.
Per the IPCC AR5 report: “No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies.” This was under a chart that shows almost all the climate models are running too hot. In the IPCC's AR6 they recommend that future climate projections use constrained models because most of the unconstrained models have no predictive value. Plus they've deemphasized global models & instead recommend simpler localized models. Using constrained models, the best estimate growth curve tracks in the lower third of constrained models. But that's closer to reality than the unconstrained models.
As for sea level rise, the longest continuous record of sea-levels is from Wismar, Germany. Per NOAA, we have 175 years of sea level data for Wismar Germany — which is a geologically stable coast. In that 175 years, we've seen no acceleration in the sea-leave rise. It's held a steady 1.44 mm / per year +/- 0.09 mm. And we've been tracking the seal evels for San Francisco for the past 170 years. Again no increase in the rates of sea-level rise. SF shows 1.55 mm/year +/- 0.13. I don't think New York City will be under water any time soon.
You originally said the **Permian**, which humans very definitely did not evolve under.
In any case, you can go much more fine grained than that. Infrastructure, the economy, culture, law, etc. are all adapted to the current circumstances, and major climate shifts impose costs. There isn't any plausible near term chance of climate changes on the order of "Manhattan is under a mile of ice", but it also takes a lot less disruption than that to make humans very unhappy, as the reaction to even minor price changes a few years ago demonstrates.
David Friedman's "lie back and think of all the new farmland in Siberia" argument is cold comfort to anyone who doesn't live in Siberia and it's utterly disingenuous to ignore that fact. And your own "Earth's climate was very different four mass extinctions ago" argument is even worse. I mean, it's a reason to believe that global warming will not literally wipe out all life on earth, but that's an extreme strawman.
Correction. The last time CO2 levels were almost this low was during the latter half of the Carboniferous Period, roughly 323-299 million years ago. Of the three major models COPSE and Rothman models all show that Neogene CO2 levels have dropped below the Carboniferous. The GEOCARB III model shows them as roughly equivalent. The margin of error varies over periods, but the margin of error for the Carboniferous numbers is lower than for the subsequent Permian.
And there were some *BIG* ice ages at the end of the C and the beginning of the P. Of the Earth's two continents at the time (Laurasia and Gondwanaland), the largest, Gondwanaland, started south of the equator with half land mass plonked in the south polar regions. Ice sheets stretched as far north as 35º S latitude (by some estimates). Pleistocene Glaciers reached as far south as 37º N, but covered less actual land mass than the Gondwanaland glaciers.
Later, CO2 levels rose above 2,000 ppm after a bout of volcanism ended the Permian Period. And they stayed above 2,000 ppm (getting as high as 2,500 ppm) until the end of the Cretaceous. They dropped slowly thereafter to roughly 750 ppm 35 million years ago (not 1,000 ppm like I said above) about the time the Antarctic ice mass began to form. During the entire 538 million years of the Phanerozoic (the time that multicellular life has dominated the planet's ecosystems), CO2 levels have only been this low during the Carboniferous and the Pleistocene/Holocene. There weren't any angiosperms during the C. And angiosperms do not grow optimally at the low CO2 levels we have today.
I just don't see climate change making humans very unhappy any time soon. More food is a good thing. Current trends show that sea levels won't be drowning our coastlines in our lifetimes or our children's children's lifetimes. I'd suggest there is no reason to freak out about global warming. Yes, it will change the world in ways we can't anticipate, but it will be slow enough that we will be able to adapt.
Well, I couldn't possibly say whether AI will have a big long-term impact. I think it will, based on how I've been able to use it, but I'm just some guy. I do agree that people just randomly assuming fusion is on deck are being irresponsible. Perhaps it will, I hope it will, I know some smart people are working on it, but there's no reason to assume anything here.
If the government ends up subsidizing a massive expansion of generation capacity... well, first, that'll be the least destructive thing the government has done in quite a while so count your blessings, and second, that's a win-win because even if the glorious AI future doesn't happen, then as the joke goes, "you mean, we built a robust and expansive electrical grid, developed advanced generation technology, repaired our sagging infrastructure, and it was all for nothing??"
Interesting approach to the whole CO2 thing. I've decided to take a position of ignorance on the matter myself as my only strong feeling is that all the worst people in the world are on the greenhouse alarmist side so emotionally I want to take the opposite side just to spite them.
Maybe it's because I spent the first 40 years of my life being needlessly alarmed by alarmists that I've become desensitized to alarmism in my old age.
I'm the same way. I do think that weather events have changed very greatly recently, but is this the End of Civilisation as we know it? Have to wait and see how that works out.
That's a good move, yeah.
We? As in who exactly? Sounds like a classic externality.
We as in the United States. I don't care about the details: if it's government-subsidized, I'll happily pay the taxes. We needed more electrical power anyway.
It still sounds like a classic externality.
Okay, and? So is national defense. Don't mistake me for a libertarian.
Nothing to do with libertarianism and mutual defense isn’t an example of an externality.
An externality is when a business creates a profit but the attendant costs are borne externally. Pollution is an example. Of course Google pays taxes and maybe that would pay for the cost of the extra carbon but it would be better if Google could finance carbon free data centres itself, particularly at a time when people are dubious about the benefits of AI.
i've been thinking of social media and, particularly the groupings people sort themselves into. i know a few companies have probably sorted users into different buckets each with tendencies - like personality etc. have any companies shared this research?
if there is a better way to do social media (i've been wracking my brain over all the options), i thought it might have something to do with how people are sorted into these buckets unknowingly and letting them live in their own islands. not sure where to get more info on this data outside taking a job at one of the companies however
there must be a better type of social media, but geographic isn't it. interests seem better, but maybe there's some type of groupings in the data that we unknowingly fall into that would be a better grouping
I'm not familiar with this topic. But I believe they keyword you want is "market segmentation".
And for starters, try poking around your dossier at https://adssettings.google.com/ .
Geographic actually has a lot going for it. Our local environments would be less terrible and disorderly if people were paying more attention to them on their dopamine boxes. Plus you might make some real friends, not just Facebook "friends."
We have a neighborhood Facebook group, and it's great! We share information about what happens around us, and coordinate offline social activities.
What's your definition of "a better type"? And what do you find wrong or lacking in today's social media platforms? They seem to work the way they were designed. So I assume you're want to engineer a different (psychological? moral? political?) effect on its users?
UK election musings (TL;DR)
Plain text is from the start of the campaign, square brackets are updates. Short version: we are on the verge of an historic collapse in the Tory vote (smallest share of the vote for a major party since WW2 and beyond). Labour are starting from a very low base and Starmer isn't popular, so a landslide isn't absolutely certain. Smaller parties will do well especially the Lib Dems & Reform, but not the SNP.
Labour strongholds
Obviously the tories aren't going to win any seats here. Given discontent re: Gaza, the odd independent might do better than expected, especially in university towns. I expect the Greens to keep Brighton Pav., possibly win in Bristol and possibly for Galloway to keep Rochdale. Corbyn will struggle in north london because of bad memories. Low turnout will depress Labour vote but Tory collapse and strong Reform performance will mean it won't matter. Lib dems under Kennedy/Campbell might have capitalised on Gaza but those days are long gone. Starmer is a much better Lib Dem than Ed Davey and they won't take any Labour seats…[Ed Davey's campaign has actually been kind of impressive, winning the argument by going down a waterslide, but still, they aren't going to win votes from Labour's left]
Conservative strongholds
…but the Lib Dems have been gaining ground in places like Maidenhead over several decades - there could be some breakthroughs, especially if Labour voters bury the hatchet and vote tactically. [08/06 - Reform polling very well indeed, which makes a Tory vote split more likely] Labour also have been gaining ground in richer areas in the last decade but gains like Kensington or Canterbury under Corbyn will be harder to come by as the party abandons its ‘luxury beliefs’ on tax etc. [03/07 - tory collapse so profound this may not make any difference]
South West
The Lib Dems lost big here in 2015, but this is their home turf in a lot of ways, often in second place rather than Labour and they are due a comeback - Labour voters may find tactical voting to get rid of e.g Jacob Rees-Mogg irresistible. [Davey’s very visible campaign will help at the margins]
Scotland
SNP are in decline after a long period of dominance, Labour will capitalise, possibly Lib Dems in places, but the tories are nowhere - Scottish tories have never really recovered from the Thatcher era, except for a brief surge under the maverick Ruth Davison
Marginals: ‘Red Wall’
Labour will win big - Reform vote will hurt the tories, places like Sedgefield, Hartlepool were highly unusual tory gains due to a combination of brexit, populist promises, Corbyn’s ‘southerner’ socialism and Boris’s personal charisma. Starmer has done enough to ensure these historic Labour seats will revert to type.
Other marginals
Now then. It's not obvious to me that Starmer has enough personal popularity, or inspires enough loyalty in his base, to get the Labour vote to where it needs to be in the true marginals. There is a long way to go in these seats, and internationally it is very much the Right that is in the ascendancy, making Labour's near 2:1 advantage over the tories in the opinon polls a puzzle. My sense is the tories as a party have more money [wrong, as it turns out] and better targeted Internet campaigns, and core strengths on tax & immigration which go back decades and are the kind of thing people lie to pollsters about [in this instance, anti-immigration vote risks being split by Reform]. Starmer & Reeves have worked hard to improve Labour's image on tax, but it has been bungled - their approach seems overly keen, pissing off the base whilst seeming wishy-washy to the people they are trying to impress. In the end Starmer backed Corbyn and that may put a ceiling on how many normies he can convince. But obviously the tories have their problems too, they have neutered their immigration advantage with the chaotic Rwanda scheme and Natalie Elphicke's defection may therefore prove to be the final nail in the coffin (not that Labour supporters will thank her for it). But the tories have introduced photo ID laws which will disenfranchise likely Labour voters without a passport or driving license - we could be in for a long night of re-counts and legal disputes [the result doesn't seem like it will be close enough as things stand]. A lot will depend on whether Reform voters stick with the tories or not. [And it seems they are not, for now][22/06 - tories on 20%, reform on 17%!!!]
Wales
Labour has been in power in the Senedd since its’ inception and it's hard to see anyone else getting much of a look in for Westminster either - the tories squandered their brexit advantage (Wales voted leave) and Plaid Cymru can't seem to match the success of the SNP.
Reform
Who is voting reform? Brexiteers, but there are two kinds - working class anti-immigration folks and rural/suburban traditional conservatives. In the Red Wall, Reform Vote can only help Labour, unless they do so well they can overtake Labour in places (not impossible with 17% of the national vote). Bolsover could stick with Lee Anderson, for example. In marginal seats, you would think high info tories would stick with the party to take the edge off Labour's majority [the tory campaign has increasingly focused on not giving Starmer a supermajority, and this seems the best they can do]. Ironically the tories may be more at risk in areas with historic tory support - as one Reform voter put it to me, “it doesn't matter how we vote here, so we may as well vote Reform”, but that could be a risk.
Predictions
Overall, I expect Labour to be the largest party (90%). [95%][99.99%]
I expect they will get an overall majority (60%) with a chance of a hung parliament (20%) or a landslide (20%)
[Polling currently shows Sunak below 25%, below Michael Foot & William Hague, and Starmer above Blair. Raising odds to 65% on an overall majority, lowering hung parliament to 15%, no change on landslide for now]
[22/06 - Seriously poor tory numbers, 20% to 17%. Lowering hung parliament to 10%, overall majority-but-not-a-landslide to 70%, landslide unchanged at 20%]
[03/07 - at this point the polls have been so consistent I have to update on a landslide - 25%, hung parliament 5%]
>we could be in for a long night of re-counts and legal disputes
So the final act of the Tories is to break the electoral system?
I suspect the margins of victory will be so large that it won't make that much difference as it turns out - Labour will just undo the ID laws and lower voting age to 16
Here's what the professionals think: https://news.sky.com/story/check-which-party-could-win-in-your-constituency-after-last-yougov-projection-before-polling-day-13162875
Why does the US struggle to perform in soccer? It's a big, rich country, where soccer is broadly played. That might not add up to a world-beating team, but the US does just fine in ice hockey, a game it barely bothers to care about. So what's the problem in soccer?
It takes time to build up a pool of talent, and really get grassroots involvement. I think the US is starting to get that with home grown players and young players, but that will still take time. There was. and may still be, a great reliance on overseas stars at the end of their careers coming to professional American teams to be the big attractions, but that's not the way to grow the sport.
Just being a big, rich country isn't enough, though. Why is Brazil blessed by the soccer gods? Who can say, exactly? I'm not familiar enough with American soccer structure re: youth teams and local leagues and coaching styles to say if they're doing anything differently. I would have had a suspicion that American sports loves statistics a little too much and that would affect the style of soccer, but every country now is trying to do the statistics thing.
That's not to say that having a ton of money to throw at it doesn't help, there have been allegations of rich owners coming in and "buying trophies" for clubs by hiring away the cream of the players from other clubs with salaries that can't be matched.
EDIT: A modern complaint is that European clubs are poaching the cream of African talent by the same metric; offering crazy sums of money that you just can't get back home - if you manage to make it in the new country and playing for your new team. Not everyone does.
Forbes ranking of current "most valuable" football clubs (which doesn't always line up neatly with *best* clubs, but is close enough, though poor old United are in the doldrums these days and yes, I'm laughing quietly about that):
https://www.forbes.com/lists/soccer-valuations/
Ya know, people say “Fancy a game of football?” and we suit up with our shoulder pads and helmets and all and then you hand us this round ball and we get all confused.
I dont follow it that closely but from friends that do, US Soccer's national team is very poorly managed. Even with more talent coming in, that can't help.
How are you defining "barely bothers about ice hockey?" Definitely not my intuition as an outsider. Depends on the state, no? (Ice rather than water, I mean)
Hank's answer is in probably the biggest reason: soccer is not a big deal in the US relative to the big four North American professional team sports (American football, baseball, basketball, and ice hockey), but is a huge deal in much of the rest of the world, so the best American athletes go into the big four (or into a potentially lucrative individual sport like boxing, tennis, or golf), while the world's best soccer players mostly don't wind up in the US and the best athletes in a lot of other countries do go into soccer.
A secondary consideration is that intentional athletic competitions besides the Olympics don't really get much attention in the US, probably because the big popular sports are peculiar to the US and maybe Canada at the top levels of play (*), so the North American or US championships are de facto world championships for those sports.
(*) Baseball is also a significant professional sport in Japan, South Korea, and several Latin American countries, but the best players tend to get poached by American (or Canadian) MLB teams.
I wouldn't think that the body types that dominate professional basketball and American football would do well in soccer? But the pipeline effect might mean that younger people who could be top soccer players are funneled into other sports, where they do well but are eventually weeded out.
When watching "Welcome to Wrexham" last year, I poked around on Wikipedia looking at the various levels of association football, and there's something like 11 levels probably, but it's unclear whether anyone actually knows. It's an incredible grassroots system, and I'm not sure we have anything like it in America. Maybe baseball came close once upon a time
The bigger the base of the sales funnel, the more prospects who make it to the final round. I.e. it's easier to find a one-in-a million athlete when the pool of interested fans is tens of millions, rather than literally ten.
Baseball and tennis seem like they would compete most directly with soccer in terms of similar talents and body types. Hockey and golf also seem like they'd have significant overlap.
Baseball definitely used to have a more grassroots system of independent minor leagues, but the combination of the major league farm system, international scouting, and television broadcasts have taken out much of the middle of the market. There are still a ton local amateur leagues for both children and adults across a wide range of skill/competitiveness levels, as well as high school and college teams, but there's much less of a market for minor league baseball as a spectator sport.
USA is ranked 11 out 210 according to FIFA? So seems more than fine to me. Even better than most countries. You can't expect every country to be top tier at every single thing.
You are right, but that just makes the rankings highly suspect. Germany is 16th and Switzerland is 19. Both are in the quarter finals of the Euros. Either would defeat the US team with their reserve team. Ireland at 60 would expect to best the US.
I assume these rankings are not weighted. The US plays easy teams and Germany plays tough teams.
I'm not so sure we'd beat the US. The US has had good teams, I think the management is the problem as someone stated above. Ireland is stuck with being a small country with a small population, heavy reliance on getting British players (via the granny rule) who are playing in top tier clubs to play for the national team, and a very wildly varying track record from "couldn't win against a team of Boy Scouts" to "we made it ma, top of the world!" qualifying for the World Cup.
Here is a document on how the ranks are created: https://digitalhub.fifa.com/m/f99da4f73212220/original/edbm045h0udbwkqew35a-pdf.pdf
Seems to be a modified Elo ranking.
The algorithm is fine but still subject to bias if some regions have better teams than others.
The US does not struggle in women's soccer. Per Wikipedia:
> The nine FIFA Women's World Cup tournaments have been won by five national teams. The United States have won four times. The other winners are Germany, with two titles, and Japan, Norway, and Spain with one title each.
As others have noted, among men's sports in the US, soccer is about fifth tier. Among women's sports, it probably no. 2.
I was talking to a Brazilian coworker about this last World Cup. Interestingly enough, according to him, women's soccer being popular in the US has encouraged South American girls to try out for soccer as well. While soccer was only a boy's sport when he was growing up, now it's become more popular with girls, in part because it's a popular women's sport here and we tend to export that.
So maybe in a decade or so the US will start getting competition in women's soccer.
It competes for the attention of young athletes with basketball, football, baseball, and, to a lesser extent, ice hockey, all of which have higher status in the USA. This competition particularly matters at the high-school level, when athletes usually narrow their focus to one or maybe two sports.
Also, both the national and club teams in Europe are much more likely to recruit players from Africa and South America.
Yeah, not that many young Americans even play ice-hockey, but the international league competition is only with teams from Canada, a country one tenth its size. I don't follow ice hockey but I suspect many of the players on US teams hail from Canada, Russia and Scandanavia. It's like comedy. The best comedians may be Canadian, but they all end up in the USA.
Plus if you're at all sporty, then you can make way, way more money going for the traditional American sports than signing up for soccer. That is going to divert talent (or have parents diverting talent) into "will make millions regularly by the time he's in his early 20s" territory.
https://www.ncsharp.com/info/salaries-professional-athletes-nfl-mlb-nba/
The US hockey team is ranked 6th now. Not that many countries play hockey and the US has some states that are near Canada that take hockey seriously at the HS level like MA and MN
I mostly had the club level in mind. A Canadian team hasn't won the Stanley Cup since 1993. At that level, the US dominates. But I'm sure those US teams are full of Canadian players. It's analogous to European soccer at the club level.
This fundamentally seems correct. To expand on this, it always surprised me to find that guys like Brock Lesner from UFC and WWE or Roman Reigns from WWE were totally viable NFL talents or Patrick Mahomes from the NFL was drafted by the MLB.
There really do seem to be a small number of extreme athletes every generation who are viable superstars in multiple sports. Those are the guys who would win you the World Cup but they're all making 10x the money in the NFL or something.
Big shout out to Substack for fixing or improving comment rendering.
❤️ we are eternally grateful
As in thanks!
In a round-robin soccer tournament, every team plays every other team once. Winning is 3 points, ties are 1 points each, loss is 0 points, the winner of the tournament is the team with the most points. In one tournament, 25 teams played, and there was a sole winner (that is, got more points than everyone else). Amusingly, it turned out that the winner lost to every one of the worst K teams (in terms of points they got during this tournament). What is the maximum K for which this can happen?
As a bonus, find a general answer for N other than 25 (I haven't tried this).
Yrg gur jvaare or pnyyrq N, gur tebhc bs X jbefg grnz or O naq gur tebhc bs gur erznvavat 24-X grnzf or P.
X>=fvkgrra vf vzcbffvoyr orpnhfr bs gur sbyybjvat:
Va gung pnfr N unf ng zbfg (24-16)*3=24 cbvagf
naq gur gbgny ahzore bs cbvagf sbe O Havba P vf ng yrnfg (24 pubbfr 2)*2+16*3=600 (guvf vf nffhzvat rirel zngpu va O Havba P vf n gvr nf gung bhgpbzr vapernfrf gur gbgny ahzore bs cbvagf gur yrnfg, urapr guvf vf n ybjre obhaq ba gur gbgny cbvagf va O havba P)
O havba P unf 24 zrzoref, gurersber gur nirentr cbvag vf 600/25=25, gurersber, gurer fubhyq or ng yrnfg bar grnz univat gung znal cbvagf, gurersber N pna'g unir orra gur birenyy jvaare jvgu gurve ng zbfg 24 cbvagf.
X=svsgrra vf cbffvoyr, sbe rknzcyr jvgu gur sbyybjvat bhgpbzrf:
(Va guvf pnfr O unf svsgrra ryrzrag, naq P unf avar ryrzragf)
Yrg Q or fbzr 9 ryrzrag fhofrg va O.
Cnve rirel grnz va Q jvgu bar grnz va P. (bar gb bar)
Gur bhgpbzrf:
Rirel grnz va Q ybfrf ntnvafg vgf cnve va P, ohg gvrf ntnvafg rirel bgure grnz va O havba P naq jvaf ntnvafg N
Gurersber n grnz va Q unf: 22+3=25 cbvagf
Rirel grnz va O/Q gvrf jvgu rirel bgure grnz naq jvaf ntnvafg N
Gurersber n grnz va O/Q unf 23+3=26 cbvagf
Rirel grnz va P jvaf ntnvafg vgf cnve va Q, gvrf ntnvafg rirel bgure grnz va O Havba P naq ybfrf ntnvafg N
Gurersber n grz va P unf 3+23=26 cbvagf
Grnz N jvaf ntnvafg rirel grnz va P naq ybfrf ntnvafg rirel grnz va O.
Gurersber Grnz N unf 9*3=27 cbvagf.
Gur svsgrra grnzf jvgu gur ybjrfg cbvagf (O, gubhtu gurer ner gvrf) nyy jba ntnvafg N
Fbeel va gur nobiir pbagehpgvba, V zvfpnyphyngrq gur cbvagf bs grnzf va P, nf jevggra gurl jbhyq bayl unir 25 cbvagf, fb lbh unir gb punatr n plpyr bs gvrf va P gb jva-ybfrf, gb vapernfr rirel grnz'f cbvag ol 1 gb 26.
The problem here is that vs lbh punatr na vagen-P gvr gb n jva/ybff, gur jvaare tbrf sebz gjragl svir gb gjragl frira naq N vf ab ybatre gur fbyr jvaare.
Instead of 2 ties a team will have a win and a loss, which is a net gain of one point. To elaborate: I mean "changing a cycle of ties in C to win-loses" the following way: (Presented with 5 teams for simplicity)
Before the operation:
1 2 tie
2 3 tie
3 4 tie
4 5 tie
5 1 tie
is our cycle
after the operation:
1 2: team 1 win, team 2 lose
2 3: team 2 win, team 3 lose
3 4: team 3 win, team 4 lose
4 5: team 4 win, team 5 lose
5 1: team 5 win, team 1 lose
You can see that every team got a win and a lose instead of 2 tie, which is a net gain of 1 point.
This kind of operation is often useful in these kind of problems. It's also useful to know that a complete graph with n vertices has floor((n-1)/2) edge-disjunct hamiltonian cycles to know how many times can I use this operation on some subset of vertices (I used this when analysing the general case)
Hmm, good point. I agree you're able to envfr nyy bs tebhc P gb gjragl-fvk, ohg abgr gung fbzr bs lbhe tebhc O nyfb fgnlf ng gjragl-fvk (fvk bhg bs svsgrra). Gurersber vg'f abg pyrne gung gur O grnzf pna or pnyyrq "gur svsgrra jbefg-enaxvat grnzf" - vg qrcraqf ba ubj lbh enax gur vqragvpny-cbvagf grnzf. V guvax gur vavgvny pbaqvgvbaf nera'g anvyrq gvtug rabhtu. Zlfrys, V gevrq gb qb jung lbh qvq naq pbaivaprq zlfrys V pbhyqa'g ybjre nyy bs O orybj gjragl-fvk j/b envfvat fbzrbar sebz P gb gjragl-frira, fb V qrpvqrq sbhegrra jnf gur orfg.
V qvq fbzr pnyphyngvbaf sbe gur trareny pnfr gbb, gubhtu vg'f abg pbzcyrgr. Hfvat gur zrgubq va zl fbyhgvba bar pna cebir gur x<2/3*(a-1)^2/a obhaq sbe gur trareny pnfr naq guvf obhaq frrzf cerggl funec, bsgra sybbe(2/3*(a-1)^2/a) jbexf. V jbhyq thrff, gubhtu V qvq abg cebir, gung sbe a>25, gur uvturfg x vf sybbe(2/3*(a-1)^2/a) be sybbe(2/3*(a-1)^2/a)-1
aobs xaq xbrig rkb xnby, yqbg pqrd ynttbkbsvb ybxbkinsb xob onpobk cdrvby xbri?
If this was supposed to be ROT13, something went terribly wrong.
Not tried to encrypt before, do you have a link?
Rot13.com
Thanks! Jura gjb grnzf ner yriry ba cbvagf va gur yrnthr gnoyr, qbrf tbny qvssrerapr qrgrezvar jub vf uvture?
Great question, I don't know! I guess I solved it assuming that I need the K worst teams to stand out in a clear way, just as the winner does, but the original instructions (which aren't due to me) underspecify this, I think.
Had an optometrist appointment after my comment in the previous open thread about concerns about my vision. Turns out my myopia (-4.5) hasn't progressed particularly, although somewhat concerningly my astigmatism has (-0.75/-1). Regardless, I would still like to solicit some more people's experiences regarding the best method of correcting my vision—orthokeratology, soft/hard contacts, LASIK/PRK, mainly—given that I am extremely sensitive to the overall visual quality I end up with (near, far, night, blurriness, distortion, etc.). Particularly curious about orthokeratology versus contacts for my prescription, since I overlooked it during my appointment.
I dont know much and had no personal experience, but I've heard LASIK or any other laser surgery is fantastic and changed two of my friends lives. On the other hand, people quite often people report dry eyes.
Also, remember that it works better with bigger defects - it has a certain precision of around 0.5 dioptres (consulted with my optometrist). So you probably won't go to flat 0, but anywhere between -0.5 to +0,5
I used to use orthokeratology lens for ~2 years, and the brand of lens is alpha from Japan. I put it on at night (usually takes 15 minutes to wear), and my vision improved from 4.6 to 5.0 during all day without distinguishable blurriness. Now I change to frame glasses because it's more convenient for a 12th-grade student, and it works fine too. (If you don't want to see things in a faint yellow tone, don't choose an anti-blue light lens.) I heard one guy didn't wash his lens with water clean enough, and he was seriously infected by amoeba, fortunately there was no long-term impact. I live far from America so I don't know if it's viable there.
What do you mean by "4.6 to 5.0"? I'm only familiar with the diopter and 20/20 scale. Do you have any experience with contacts to compare it to as well? Thanks for replying!
And by using contact it improved to normal vision (like 0 diopter myopia).
The 4.6 thing is actually according to logarithmic visual acuity chart, and I find that it is only used in China😄. I have -1.50 diopter myopia and 0.75 diopter astigmatism.
Note: I will be heading out-of-state for college in the fall. I think my insurance might be out-of-network there, which may eliminate the viability of orthokeratology for me this year since I've read follow-ups quite some time (and through this, limit my options to contacts for the near future since LASIK/PRK are off the table for at least another few years, if ever at all for me). Correct me if ortho-k is still viable though, whether now or later during my undergrad years
How do great works of art arise? How can we create the conditions for them to arise?
I don't think it's just a matter of having talented artists. It seems to be a complicated interaction between the artist, the audience, and the rest of the field. You need an art form (or a genre, or a subgenre) that is new but not too new -- old enough that the possibilities of the genre have been figured out, but not so old that there's no more good ideas left. You also need an audience that is interested and willing to pay for things, whether that's German aristocrats installing court composers or teenyboppers buying rock-and-roll singles.
Is there some way to kick start this sort of thing?
I was thinking about something similar - how to create anything that lasts for thousands of years, like pyramids. There were millions of buildings throughout history, why pyramids or stonehenge lasted, while so many havent? A couple of reasons I noticed:
- Will
Obvious, but most important, someone needs to want the project to happen. In the past, usually kings, who were bored, but also had huge resources and wanted their name to stay in history
- Money, so the artist(s) can focus solely on art
- Cultural significance from the start (or at least before it's destroyed)
If people didn't think Pyramids were great achievements, and later historic landmarks, they would destroy them, because in their minds nothing of value would be lost. Other people protected them from bandits etc, today it's UNESCO
- Value is not absolute, its comparative to the era.
What I mean by that, is building Stonehenge today would take a day. But then, 4-5 thousand years ago? It was a massive project. Similarly, building an average skyscraper isn't that interesting, but if someone used all today's ideas and technology in 1800? They would be lauded as greatest architect of all time.
- Luck
So many things were lost in time by stupid accidents, barbarians, wars etc. People make mistakes, and you definitely need luck for your piece of art to stay.
The reason the pyramids lasted is because they were giant piles of stone in the desert, and thus wouldn't be destroyed by natural causes, and there was no reason for people to destroy them. They were looted of everything valuable almost instantly, but there's no reason to take the rocks themselves.
It's not about the art itself, but about cultural cohesion, captive audiences and shared experiences. A world where 25% of a population experiencing the same great (however you define great) work of art is very different from one where there are 25 equally great works of art, all experienced by 1% of the same population. Empire is over.
? Im pretty sure that we live in the most culturally hegemonic era of history. Empire is far from over.
I'm referring to Bret Easton Ellis' concept of Empire, which is multifaceted, but part of it describes the period of American history when novels had captive audiences, when you could assume that your culturally aware friends had seen the lates blockbuster and when an episode of a popular TV show could make people cancel their plans so they could stay home and watch it. These days, none of it matters in the same way. Novels, films, TV, videos, we're all in bubbles separated by... something. If I mention any of the top 10 most famous youtubers to my parents, they'll have no idea who any of them are. If I mentioned any of the 25 most famous actors of 25 years ago to my grandparents, they'd have at least some idea of who I was talking about.
I don't think you're wrong, by the way, I just didn't make it clear which "Empire" I was referring to. Also, none of this is a value judgment. Loving the world as it is... might be the greatest virtue of all.
Years of practice, performing, learning, retrying are the only truly tried and tested methods.
Eno has been doing his thing for many decades
Brian Eno's concept of "Scenius" is important here. Great works arise in an ecosystem that is conducive to them. Rarely, if ever, does one great artist arise out of nothing.
Some notes from other writing on scenius:
" -Mutual appreciation. Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius as the best kind of peer pressure.
- Rapid exchange of tools and techniques. As something is invented, it is flaunted, then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.
- Success is contagious. When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.
- Local tolerance for the new. The local “outside” does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. Renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone."
I was going to mention Eno, but you got there first. ;-)
Try the African-American Plan: subject a people to centuries of grinding oppression and then slowly, slowly release the pressure, admitting them to social equality. Result: a century of dramatic artistic achievement. The AAs invented three genres of music that swept the world in the twentieth century: jazz, rock n'roll and hip-hop. Take THAT, distinguished conservatories of the world; you can't even beat the ghettos. I mean, it was a shitty thing to do, but wow, the results.
It can't be quite that simple, since there are a lot of oppressed ethnicities, and African-American is the only one with the world-sweeping genres. As noted below, there's major music from the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, but what about Africa?
The combination of oppression and living in a relatively wealthy society might have something to do with it-- the wealthy society means more access to instruments, eventually electronics, and distribution channels.
There's a general idea that hard times make good art, but I don't know how accurate it is.
Oppression as Art... Edgy...
That's kind of parochial of you. :-). The African diaspora spawned more music than Blues, Jazz, and Rock. It spawned the Afro-Caribbean musical styles: all the Cuban dance music styles, Calypso, Ska, Reggae, Brazilian Samba, Salsa, Bossa Nova, Axé (and a bunch of others that I probably never heard of).
Zouk!
You’ve inspired me to spin some Billie Holiday this morning. Thank you.
I think you need a pretty quick influx of cash into what had previously been a backwater. Then wait a few decades and you'll have a golden age for art. That's my guess at least.
The basic idea is that your backwater is going to have culture, but no money to produce great works. Then your backwater starts getting money, but no one locally is skilled enough to compete with foreigners. So the locals start buying lots of foreign art. Eventually, the locals mix the foreign stuff with their own local ideas. No one has ever seen this fusion and voila you have a golden age for the arts.
You can also do the same thing within a society when a particular class gets a lot of money. So the merchants start making money, they copy the aristocracy until they eventually decide to make their own art and a golden age ensues.
This doesn't last forever - pretty soon, creativity hits a wall. But that's my general impression of what makes great art.
For a different take: great works of art need at least a full human lifetime to pass before we know them as such. The present is always flooded with art, most of it junk, and no way to separate the gems. We’ll know in 100 years if anything great has been made in the last decade.
OTOH nobody knows how to create conditions for it.
Harry Potter was pretty widely acknowledged as good art, at least for a decade or two. So was Star Wars, the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, the music of the Beatles, …
Except for the Beatles none of this was covered considered great art, then or now. Certainly not Star Wars.
These were good commercial activities. I'm not sure I'd apply the term art to the Harry Potter franchise
Too early for Harry Potter, the Beatles are highly likely to stay, almost enough time passed.
Sometimes it takes even longer though. J. S. Bach was all but forgotten until late 19th century.
The trick is recognizing cases where people say "this recent popular thing is art that will be remembered for the ages" ... then it won't.
Anatole France and Émile Zola were both widely popular. France was awarded Nobel prize in literature. Today, their works, unknown. History students have heard of them because of Dreyfus affair.
Is that also the case in France?
Yep, it's a jinx :)
Technological and economic change can create conditions for new great art. As you allude, those teenyboppers buying rock music was the first generation of teens to have disposable income, but someone also needed to invent the electric guitar for rock-n-roll to exist.
Given all the recent tech media innovation, there's probably plenty of new great art now but we're just too old and it's too new to appreciate it as such. Film wasn't considered art by many people until the late 20th century, whereas today sensitive film artists like Martin Scorsese rant about how it's a disappearing art. I hear people claim video games are art. I couldn't say, I don't play them, but maybe some are. Maybe AI generated art will be considered great in the future. I doubt the AI will get credit for it, but the human prompt artist might.
Perhaps it sounds absurd that video games or AI generated art would one day be considered great art on the level of Beethoven, Van Gogh, Kubrick or The Beatles, but not long ago many laughed at the thought rock-n-roll or the movies were art, or that rap was music.
> Film wasn't considered art by many people until the late 20th century
Oh that’s not true at all. It was considered a form of artistic expression from the get go.
admittedly, great deal of the early 20th century film was not art
>I hear people claim video games are art. I couldn't say, I don't play them
Oh, don't let that stop you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1iWPQZs_ds
That doesn't look very artistic to me, but maybe the value is in something I don't see.
What do you mean, kickstart? There's already a massive entertainment industry spanning every medium and genre. And that's precisely the problem.
You said it yourself: you need a new artform or genre. But there are no new artforms left. Everything worth doing has been done already. Art is dead.
It does seem like the visual arts are rehashing all the old genres. And popular music hasn't been innovating. We seem to have run out of new ideas, but that doesn't mean that someone can't create a masterpiece of visual art or music within the framework of previous genres.
But I've said it before. Overall our culture is stagnating. We've had not breakthrough discoveries in physics in fifty years. We're still innovating on technology that's was introduced in the mid-20th century. Our political systems are locked into a left-right framework. I wonder if we've reached the limits of human creativity in all fields.
> I wonder if we've reached the limits of human creativity in all fields.
Eh, I just think we're in an especially conformist period, in certain ways. I blame globalization, the Internet, and smartphones. The walls that allowed parallel experimentation have been pulled down, exposing everyone to the withering gaze of the panopticon and the leveling force of the marketplace.
>Everything worth doing has been done already.
Eh, they've been saying that since Ecclesiastes.
When I read popular descriptions of Spinoza's thought, I think, as someone who normally identifies as an atheist: That's exactly what I believe! God is the universe(s)! The universe is God! We are all small parts of the same Being!
But when I try to read Spinoza's Ethica, I find it too boring to work through the logic of it. A big reason for that is he starts with the assumption that God exists and then focuses on the nature of God. He's coming from a Judaic background with a given belief in God and then describes Him in a way that is unrecognizable as Judaism. (Feel free to correct me if I am wrong about any of this.)
It has been said that you could remove the word "God" from Spinoza's thought without changing anything. That's what I want to see someone do. Are there any neo-Spinozans who approach his philosophy without the starting assumption that God exists?
What does "the universe is God" even mean?
God is a supernatural alpha male who does magic, has strong opinions on what you should and shouldn't do, sometimes has sex with human girls, and kills or tortures those who refuse to bend the knee and say that he is the bestest. Does it seem to you that universe does any of that?
What exactly is the difference between "a universe that is God" and "a universe that is merely a universe"?
> It has been said that you could remove the word "God" from Spinoza's thought without changing anything.
Go grab a book (maybe it will be easier with a digital version), replace every instance of "God" with "universe", and see what happens? Some sentences will stop making sense, but they probably didn't make much sense in the original version either.
I mean the universe is a being, the only being.
Does this mean something beyond "universe exists, and everything else exists in the universe"?
I hope we can agree that the universe is not sentient.
To me it means one of the following:
1. Panpsychism
or
2. There is no dualism and everything is a projection of mind. Not my mind, I'm not a solipsist, but in Berkley's sense that everything exists in the mind of God and we are a small part of that mind.
Is the universe sentient in that it has some great, singular consciousness? Probably not.
It depends on what you mean by God. I suggest you're picking on the worst of the Bible. It's a mixture of good rules, bad rules, and arbitrary rules.
Spinoza's God seems to more like everything that is, and there's no way out of it.
Try to take it through a good AI and have it restyle it.
One of the key things to do when reading Spinoza's Ethics is *not* to "work through the logic of it." Spinoza apparently thought his geometric presentation was logically valid, but it pretty clearly isn't, and if you try to work through it like you might work through Euclid you'll get bogged down and give up. (This is what happened to me when I first tried to work through Spinoza.) You'll do better if you just keep ploughing through, not worrying about the details until you have a sense of how it all fits together.
I don't think Spinoza starts with the assumption that God exists, or that his Jewish background is particularly important for understanding his philosophical theology. He starts with a bunch of philosophical concepts (the ones laid out at the beginning of Book 1 of the Ethics) and proceeds to show how they are all related to each other. The existence of God ("Deus sive natura") isn't an "assumption," but an inevitable consequence of the concepts he is working with.
(IIRC, he doesn't define "existence" at any point, which might be a problem if you are trying to hold him to the highest standards of philosophical rigour. But as I said above, I think first-time readers are better off if they don't try to follow Spinoza's logic too closely.)
Thanks for the reading tip.
To add an aside to this: all my care for others, my sense of ethics, comes from this intuitive belief that I exist in some very real way in others, human, cow or frog. Without that fundamental intuition, I'd probably be a psychopath who didn't care about others one whit.
Do others *not* intuit this experiential transitivity when they think about ethics?
Not me. My sense of day-to-day ethics comes from an awareness that I have something in common with others. Because I don't want to suffer, I don't want to inflict suffering on anyone else, because all people are, on some fundamental level, like me, and do not want to suffer either. (Do I live up to this ideal? Of course not. But I try to reduce harm.) I lean towards the idea that this "something in common" probably just comes from the biology we have in common, but perhaps there's some sort of spiritual primordial unity from which we all emerge. I am agnostic on that.
(I don't want to argue about the nuances of a concept that I am just very briefly summarizing; I only want to elucidate a potential different pivot point for a moral compass)
Same here (minus the "spiritual primordial unity").
I don't believe I exist in others in a meaningful capacity. I suppose I believe there's a frame where we're all one universe with pockets of consciousness, but I still feel attached to my own pocket and don't believe that if I died I'd "live on" in others.
Nevertheless I care deeply about others - honestly this is a core instinct that's prior to any philosophical grounding, but I'm attracted to Copernican arguments and find "conscious beings are important" to be a more elegant and attractive theory than "I am important".
I've only read neo-thomist rebuttals of Spinoza e.g Garrigou-Lagrange, Reality and God: His Existence And Nature. The basic rebuttal is yes, there is a certain unity of being, but divided into potency and act - God is pure act, and contains all being within himself, but as act, with no admixture of potency. Contrariwise there's no such thing as pure potency but there are beings that have so little act they hardly exist at all. Intelligence and will in other creatures have a claim on our consciences because they resemble the unity of being in God, to some extent - intelligence tends to unity through knowledge (“the intellect in act is the object actually known”), meanwhile the will tends to unity by loving the things it has and bringing new things into being. But potency resists being brought into unity - so the unity we have with the material objects around us is limited.
This may possibly be too left field, but the one book I've read that went deep into Spinoza did so by comparing and contrasting his thought with various strands of Indian philosophy. The book is called The Nondual Mind by James H. Cumming, and the full pdf can be downloaded for free (on academia.edu if I remember right). I found it highly interesting.
Thanks. I'm interested in anything on the subject.
I was mowing the lawn this afternoon, and I had to maneuver around a few Prunus serotina stumps. This got me thinking about the Acer rubrum tree next to the house that took some major storm damage last year, and will probably have to be cut down so it doesn't fall on the house. I found myself thinking that it would also leave a stump that I would have to deal with. I hadn't done anything about the other stumps, so why should I have anything done with this one?
It struck me that this is sort of the opposite of the sunk cost fallacy. Instead of 'I have already put in work towards X, stopping now would be a waste', it is 'I have not put in work towards X, why start now.' Is there a formal term for this thought pattern?
It sounds vaguely similar to the "Broken Windows" theory of policing. Which is very different from the "Broken Window" fallacy of economics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
I would suggest 2 effects here. Status quo bias for not digging up any stumps. and a bias for ignoring incremental progress i.e. clearing half the stumps is not half as good as clearing all the stumps which I cant find a formal name for, but seems strongly related to goal gradient bias
>a bias for ignoring incremental progress i.e. clearing half the stumps is not half as good as clearing all the stumps which I cant find a formal name for
That sounds like the same math as for network effects, "increasing returns to scale". The utility of clearing the first stump is less than 1/Nth of the utility for clearing all N stumps.
Damn me but that Claude Sonnet 3.5 is pretty good isn’t it? I thought I’d test its reading comprehension on a story I’d written — went in with low expectations, having done a similar exercise with ChatGPT not so long ago — and was so surprised by how good it was that I thought it was worth sharing the conversation.
https://open.substack.com/pub/pulpstack/p/claude-and-i-discuss-daffar-quiu?r=6agbi&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
That is pretty impressive. But I feel the need to point out that "DQS" does not mean "Does not compute" so far as I am aware. I also did a quick google search to check. That particular factoid appears to be a hallucination by Claude.
Is Claude aware of individual letters? - aren't tokens normally larger than that?
LLMs are aware of the existence of letters. Every letter has a designated token but the tokenizer will use larger tokens if it can. So LLMs don't often see individual letters directly outside of certain contexts.
In the context of acronyms it may sometimes see the tokens for individual letters if the acronym is not common enough to have its own token. I don't know the specifics of how "DQS" and "DNC" are tokenized.
So I rechecked what Claude actually said and while it was somewhat odd I don't think it was fair of me to characterize it as an hallucination as I did. Here's what Claude actually said:
"Yes, I noticed something significant about Daffar Quiu Seh's name. The initials of the name spell out "DQS," which is likely a play on the acronym "****" (Does Not Compute)."
This does seem pretty confused. It's pretty implausible that "DQS" would be a play on the acronym "DNC" but Claude didn't actually claim that "DQS" means "Does not compute" as I had initially thought.
I did like that it felt the need to censor DNC though.
Yes! I liked that too. Perfectly fine with saying “fuck”, but for an AI, the acronym for ‘does not compute’ is deep taboo.
I was assuming it was because it's the initials for the Democratic National Convention, but really any reason for it is funny.
Yeah, I'd be very curious to know what Claude would say if you said gee, Claude, that's not true and is also really farfetched. How'd you come up with it? And depending on the answer, maybe see if it's possible for the thing to "introspect" about the process of grabbing up handfuls of nonsense when it doesn't know the answer. Is saying "I have no idea" somehow in conflict with instructions it was given?
Yes, I considered that but decided to let it slide, since following the main thread of the discussion seemed more fun at that point.
Wrote an LW post on the method I've used to lose weight, which I think works well for people who like data and graphs: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ejt6yHChar5TmxhfP/my-5-step-program-for-losing-weight
The key insight is that you should begin by collecting data on your weight (via smart scales) and food (via the MacroFactor app). Then once your intuition for how many calories each food has and how it affects your weight, you start a slow diet process. Though I agree with the top comment that Wegovy/GLP-1 can solve the problem just as easily if you can get it and it works for you.
I broke my back ten years ago and was in a brace for two months. The sheer amount of effort needed and time taken to get around my apartment and cook led to a loss of around 8 kgs.
I have sustained it too 🤓
Weight loss expert here. This is an excellent read and I want to point out something you say early on as very important: "Do not try to change your diet just yet! The goal is to build up an intuition for how many calories each food has, as well as how these calories affect your weight."
This is very good advice that comports with a lot of research around how bad people are at estimating their caloric intake. Fascinating read.
Fascinating. I like the idea of only tracking for a month. And the AA type surrender to admitting no willpower.
summery: count calories and the reductionist take, sugar bad, hard rules around how to eat
Yes it is summery right now isn't it?
I have continued my monthly Long Forum posts, gathering the best long form content to share. This month features discussion of ancient Norwegian agriculture, Maori genocides of their cousins, and a level headed discussion of the dangers of microplastics. https://open.substack.com/pub/zeroinputagriculture/p/the-long-forum-june-2024?r=f45kp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
What’s accents are nice in English and not so nice in their own language. Besides Spanish of course.
A friend of mine who is bilingual in English and Quebecois French says that monolingual English speakers often find their French Canadian accent beautiful and soft, but they find that hilarious because their own accent sounds harsh to them, especially compared to other non-Quebecois French speakers.
Scott, can you please write a guide to using narrative thaumaturgy to get humanity to level-up in coordination ability and slow down AI/avert the meta-crisis?
Alternatively, what do you need to be able to fill your unique niche in helping avert the meta-crisis?
Errr... you do know that narrative thaumaturgy is fictional, right? You might as well ask him to write a guide to using the Force.
Also, to help avert the meta-crisis AI shouldn't be slowed down, it should be sped up.
What is “narrative thaumaturgy”?
I mean the real-life version of what Dylan Alvarez does in Scott's *Unsongbook*. He tries to be a main character (like Bruce Lee, Arnold Schwarznegger, and Jordan Peterson to some degree), and succeeds by understanding the physics of the "narrative layer of reality", allowing reality to write on him such that reality allows him to write on it.
Unfortunately, in real life, reality does not have a "narrative layer".
What drugs have worked for you to make you more social? I’ve tried Phenibut, it has no effect on me whatsoever (tried 1g, 2g, 4g - at the high range I just get a headache and that's it). MDMA works well for this but it makes your pupils look huge even on a low dose. Cocaine somewhat works but its cardiotoxic and also makes you more irritable.
Alcohol sorta works for this but the line between "I'm socializing better" and "I'm kinda drunk" is very thin.
Pheromone colognes tend to focus people's attention on social stimuli. If you go that route don't overdo it (there seems to be a narrow window of positive effect, so less really can be more, as with most colognes.) Also, avoid the 'sexual' colognes since they tend to convey sexual aggression and can cause problems. Choose a 'social' cologne. The specific pheromone musks should ideally be alpha and beta androstenol and possibly DHEAS or DHEA.
It's a mild effect, but as they say: If you don't expect too much, you might not be let down.
Lexapro and CBT
From what you wrote here and in all responses, it's most likely not a problem that simply "taking a pill" can fix, you need to fix your approach, and that can be done by yourself or with therapy.
I will generalize here, but there is a huge difference in American and European approach to medicine. In America people want to take a pill to fix the problem. In other countries it is preferred to work with your mind to fix it, and any substance taken is just support to therapy.
Great short article about it here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/opinion/sunday/surgery-germany-vicodin.html
In my opinion, just like there is no magic drug to change your beliefs, there is no magic drug to make you "want to talk to people", at least not more than MDMA. You need to want it yourself, and a drug can be just a support in that.
Good thought process but I don’t think that’s the right answer for me. I already talk to a perfectly healthy number of friends and strangers every week. I’ve talked to a therapist and he’s told me his normal methods can’t really help because I don’t have social anxiety per se - I’m already in the top ~40% of people by social skills but I’d like to get to the top ~10% which isn’t what therapists can help you with.
There’s some coaching available but I haven’t found any yet that seemed trustworthy. Closest would probably be the “street approach bootcamps” run by pickup gurus.
I just asked ChatGpT about this but with Chinese medicine or herbs and it came up with nothing. There must be something less intense than MDMA and coke for this. Or it needs to be urgently invented.
Very low doses of psilocybin can be good for this in my experience. I do mean very low — so little you barely notice it’s there at all — especially if you haven’t done it before and especially if you’re drinking.
Thanks. I've tried microdosing shrooms and while the effect is pleasant, it doesn't seem to make me more social. Should I try a higher dose? I've previously tried a dose that's 1/10th of the standard recreational dose.
Hmm, define standard. I’d struggle to do so in any accurate way. My experience is that there is a sweet spot somewhere in the “low” area where you get a sort of euphoric buzz not unlike what you might think cocaine was like if you’d never tried cocaine. Maybe work your way up in 1/10th “your standard recreational dose” increments and see if you get there? Obviously different people react differently to these things…
You're right, there's not really a "standard" dose per se, unlike with LSD where 100mcg is the "standard". I'll try a slightly bigger dose, thanks.
Have you tried intranasal oxytocin?
I did not. What's the best place to get one?
Believe it or not, I get mine from online Walmart of all places. A third party vendor sells it, name should be OxyPure. It hits me like a brick, and makes me super warm and affectionate whereas normally I am not. Wonderful sleep on it too. Didn't affect one of my other friends though.
Apparently if it goes above 70 F it can denature, so I only order mine in the winter since I don't think Walmart ships it in a chilled environment.
So that I might suggest other things, do you think you are asocial because of anxiety or something that would respond to a downer, or depression or something that would respond to upper?
Wait. This is available over the counter? Is it really oxytocin??
Well I haven't run tests on it, I just took the seller's word for it. If you want to try it yourself and get back to me I'd be curious what the results were, because I too have been wondering how this is legal, ha
https://www.walmart.com/ip/OxyPure-Oxytocin-Spray-12IU/378166215?wmlspartner=wlpa&selectedSellerId=101020892&adid=22222222228378166215_101020892_14069003552_202077872&wl0=&wl1=g&wl2=m&wl3=42423897272&wl4=pla-295289030566&wl5=9008020&wl6=&wl7=&wl8=&wl9=pla&wl10=223008372&wl11=online&wl12=378166215_101020892&veh=sem&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwyo60BhBiEiwAHmVLJXRhSwTHX_jA32TF8u1F9sBSUKGCG26kuxjpXGx_qFo69Soah-9EnRoCNGEQAvD_BwE
Thanks, I'll wait for winter then to get it.
I have a strange form of anxiety. If you put me on stage in front of 1,000 people I'll do just fine. If you give me a job of surveying strangers, I'll easily talk to 100 people in a day without any stress (done that too before). But if I have to do "standard" socializing with strangers at a party or a conference, I get stressed quickly and have a nagging thought of wanting to escape ASAP.
I've tried Xanax, Klonopin and Valium. All three are effective at making me feel relaxed but don't make me more interested in talking to strangers.
Are you at a loss for words in those situations?
Not really. I know what to say, how to say it, when to smile, etc. I just don't like doing it.
Think of it as digging holes in the ground - I can certainly operate a shovel and have dug holes before but if possible I'd rather spend my time doing other things.
If I were a right-wing fascist (which I really am not!) here in the US, I think the most American culture-centric way to assume power would be to set up a private security services company. Which employs lots of veterans. Past fascist movements in other countries have had street brawler groups, but those countries were also much much less armed than the contemporary US is. You want to have an actual armed group, but even US law is a bit leery of paramilitary organizations. (There are some constitutional powers to forbid armed militias that never get used, but are technically on the books).
But you know what US culture & law loves? Private for-profit companies. And the laws around arming security companies seem a bit vague and haphazard to me, even in very blue states. Imagine some charismatic ex-Navy SEAL guy that sets up a legitimate security company- protecting banks, armored cars, etc. And employs large number of trained veterans. Even in super-blue states you can get them permits for weapons regular civilians aren't allowed, you can train together and not arouse suspicion, you can have a compound/headquarters, you have a built-in paramilitary hierarchy, etc. (Yes security guards have to get licenses, but that's not an insurmountable burden). Now you have an armed, trained, disciplined group ready to go, especially in an urban area. Hire some ex-cops too, or offer contracts to off-duty active LEOs, to get on their good side.
This occurred to me while watching an interview with an ex-SEAL who started a private security company in California. Much more realistic model to seize power along with government allies than say the street-brawling Proud Boys. I think every fascist regime has a paramilitary group of supporters outside of the regular military structure
> But you know what US culture & law loves? Private for-profit companies.
Not really. Everyone loves to bash big companies, even innocuous ones.
I mean... government, gangs, and security companies are near synonymous. So yes, setting up a private security would certainly be an asset to a coup attempt.
The main difference between the U.S. vs other developing countries (where coups are VERY common) appears to the U.S.'s culture of liberalism. So there probably needs to be an air of legitimacy in order to make a U.S. coup succeed in the long-run.
> If I were a right-wing fascist (which I really am not!) here in the US, I think the most American culture-centric way to assume power would be to set up a private security services company
to the best of my knowledge that was an ancap news story, the fascists are more focused on child culture(think the anti trans story books that were ragebait for twitter) and bidding time for a complete collapse of the woke shitstrom
> But you know what US culture & law loves? Private for-profit companies.
> permits
> blue states
I think your misunderstanding an even slightly to the right of fox news world view looks like, if you valorize killdozer you wont be buying your weapons with a cia paper trail
Once you get a point where theres natural law on the table, *only* a lawyer style ancap will be caring about permits
> built-in paramilitary hierarchy
I think you got cause and effect backwards there, I dont think fascists want a military hierarchy for its own sake, they want a holistic ordered society and thats not quite the same thing
Anyone here remember the Whitmer kidnapping plot, or the occasional story about someone being convicted for attempting to join ISIS? There were more undercover FBI agents involved in those cases than actual criminals, and some of the ISIS "volunteers" would not have gotten involved without the Feds basically entrapping them. The pool of people who want to use violence for political power < the pool of undercover Feds. So you would need a way to weed out the true believers from the people trying to land you in prison for life.
> The pool of people who want to use violence for political power < the pool of undercover Feds
This conclusion does not follow from your premises. The feds being bad at finding the people who want to use violence for political power would also result in groups with large proportions of undercover feds.
It doesn't matter so much how good the FBI is at actually finding violent revolutionaries, it matters that a significant portion of people who would attend the hypothetical violent revolution meeting would be undercover Feds. Although I think the fact that the FBI goes out of the way to entice people to terrorism, even offering them six figure sums of money, suggests there aren't very many potential terrorists in the population.
How do you know your employers will be up for The Revolution when the time comes? Presumably you don’t tell them your true intentions when recruiting them, since that would get you shut down pretty quickly (and also limit your pool of recruits pretty drastically I’d imagine…)
If you're a right-wing fascist who wants power, you're going to have to pick between the right-wing and the fascism.
Society has too many memetic antibodies against right-wing fascism at this point to ever let them gain power, you're going to have to choose either be a right-wing milquetoast or a left-wing fascist.
young angry men have the majority of violence in society, and im sorry to say, that no theres isn't much more immunity on that issue for that population; now I don't think fascism is likely much less in america, but there will be concessions to the right wing, either negotiated or all at once
By now, three generations have been conditioned against right wing authoritarianism since childhood. Thats why a Blue Caesar is more likely than a Red one.
Ironic since we've already had a Blue Caesar
FDR?
Fascism is by definition a right-wing ideology. You can't have one without the other.
I don't know whether you're used to using "fascism" as a synonym for "any type of authoritarianism", but the things which distinguish fascism from other authoritarian philosophies *are* the right-wing parts.
Or are you used "right wing" in the impoverished "left and right are descriptors of how 'woke' you are" sense?
Regardless, either way, both cops and vets firmly skew to the right in the US.
I don't see why you only see this spectrum as a line, with left and right. There are many more dimensions, all at right angles to each other. Where do monarchies and feudalism fit in left and right? What about religion?
Many things are frameworks to trick the populace into giving power to those that want it.
I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say. Left/Right *is* one of the dimensions you're talking about (generally the principal one). That's the concession you make when even bringing up the terms "left" and "right" - that it's a single dimension that we use to approximate politics. You can decompose it into other dimensions, but it still remains the highest-weighted vector in politics-space.
>Where do monarchies and feudalism fit in left and right?
Considering the terms "right-wing" and "left-wing" literally originated from the seating arrangement of French pro- and anti-monarchists, that should be self-evident:
>Within the left–right political spectrum, Left and Right were coined during the French Revolution, referring to the seating arrangement in the French National Assembly. Those who sat on the left generally opposed the Ancien Régime and the Bourbon monarchy and supported the Revolution, the creation of a democratic republic and the secularisation of society, while those on the right were supportive of the traditional institutions of the Ancien Régime
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics
Sorry for not being more clear. I mean that liberal and conservative are on the same line on opposite sides, but other ideologies must be on other dimensions. You're correct on the origination of the terms for left and right, but their meanings have now evolved, and in the US I doubt either side would be in favor of monarchy or feudalism. But some PEOPLE would be in favor of such, and other forms too, such as communism and anarchy. And some of those views will have nothing to do with other viewpoints, rather than being on opposite sides.
>but their meanings have now evolved, and in the US I doubt either side would be in favor of monarchy or feudalism.
Except the counterexample to that should be familiar to any long-term reader of this blog. Mencius Moldbug, Scott's favorite far-right neoreactionary to talk about, was literally a neomonarchist. And it's specifically because he's far-*right*.
Allow me to continue our metaphor of a vector in politics-space.
I think you're getting hung up on the notion of "left" and "right" being distinct things, rather than descriptions of a spectrum that we use to measure ideology and normalize to zero at an arbitrary point. Specifically, when you zoom out to compass the full spectrum of political philosophy, there's no such thing as "opposite sides", only degrees of separation.
The reason why (e.g.) monarchismis not more common is because the centroid of American politics is Liberalism (some would specify Neoliberalism), which is what most modern people think of as bog-standard democracy. (Both Democrats and Republicans are, by any object measure, essentially neoliberals, excepting their most fringe elements). Democracy is one of the core components of the more composited "left and right" vector - *generally*, more "left" means more democracy, more right means left.
But as I said, liberal democracy is the norm in the modern world, so we normalize to zero instead at a different point. For the US, it's explicitly between the two major parties. In general, though, it's MOSTLY determined by disagreements between people who think capitalism is great, and those who think it's deeply flawed, and we should have a more democratic allocation of resources.
But that's only because the question of "is the democratic process, in general governance, good?" was such an uninteresting question due to consensus among most (but not all, obviously - see "Project 2025") that the answer was obviously "yes'. Because of that, the discourse had to find a different, more specific component of the "left/right" vector to argue about. But if you try to include an ideology like fascism, you end up having to re-include the question of "is democracy good Y/N?" and add that onto the pile of things which measure "rightness".
("But 'communism' is autocratic and it's 'left'!" you say, to which I reply: sovietism and maoism and state capitalism all are, yes, which is why they have to be judged by the other components of the "leftness" vector, and why people generally like to peel off "auth/lib" as the first decomposition of the composite left/right vector)
> ideology of Strasserism is a type of Third Position, **right-wing** politics in opposition to Communism and to Hitlerite Nazism.
-Wikipedia
Granted on NazBols, though. Damn tankies ruining my neat approximations of reality.
The Mafia traditionally runs construction crews. Access to heavy equipment, legitimate excuses to cut off travel to and from your targeted locations, a source of loud noises to cover other loud noises, power over politicians who authorized repairs that are now running as long as you want them to.
Why security instead?
> Why security instead?
For a while, in my blue city, the security companies really did act like a fully functioning protection racket. They had turf, they got paid by the people in their turf, and they actually delivered on the "protection" bit. It was kinda creepy, especially when I realized that the way they divided up turf was identical to what was described in a mafia story from 40 years ago.
what city was this?
A major west coast city suffering from post-BLM violence and an epidemic of homelessness.
The issue with this plan is that you are trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once:
Operate as an open, public business while simultaneously doing secret recruitment of people who both ideologically agree with you and would also be on board with some kind of a violent coup.
If we just take for a moment as given that enough veterans that fit those two requirements exist (I am skeptical), you have to somehow weed them out from veterans who _don't_ agree with those two views. And you have to do it as part of normal hiring practices while also managing to not raise any suspicion from the FBI etc.
I think that this is a tall order.
I’d imagine you sus out some political leanings during the interview process, and then over time as you build relationships the agreeable folks get promoted/transferred to a common area of the company. Others leave or remain in some money making but not political areas of the company.
The problem is that you'd have to be *100% successful*, *at scale* in order to actually have a hope of success. That never happens in real life.
I remember someone, not sure who, saying that the most American form of political organizing is a cult (just thinking from the influence of Freemasonry to early politics onwards to current QAnon stuff), so better get some of that stuff there, too.
Indeed, a bit ago I thought about the whole "how do the megarich ensure that the private security staff in the bunkers remains loyal if SHTF" thing, and the only thing that really came to mind - apart from trying to preserve the current society to the maximum ability allowed by the levels of S - was establishing a cult. Indeed, some of the actions of current megarich might already be interpreted that way...
Aiming for a cult of thugs is one thing, but how would you organize a cult of rocket scientists and aerospace engineers? You'd need some sort of compelling vision to keep them motivated...
Engineers are notoriously prone to gravitating towards fundamentalist religions, at least (https://www.patheos.com/blogs/religionprof/2016/03/engineering-terrorism-engineering-fundamentalism.html), so it might be easier than you think.
Yup. I'd seen similar analyses. Much appreciated. Ouch, it irks me to see fellow STEMM people supporting one of the most destructive ideologies around.
"Making Life Multiplanetary - we're going to Mars!" ;)
What would their next move be? I'd guess what they would ultimately need to do is change the Constitution so that it would give near absolute power to the executive. Perhaps they could create enough chaos around an election that say, one party could claim they won a supermajority in Congress which could then vote on constitutional amendments.
I can't imagine a situation where the US military wouldn't step in and defeat them, but perhaps a charismatic leader could also win over the majority of the military? Alternatively, after the military steps in, we could have martial law that never ends and proceed straight to something like fascism that way...
I agree that a private security company probably works as a first step. It would be hard to get anyone in the military to defect unless there was already some kind of real force they could defect to.
>"…won a supermajority in Congress which could then vote on constitutional amendments."
Even then they'd have to get ratification by 38 States.
Yes, I'm with Erica Rall's post- the idea is that this security company would be just 1 actor in a constellation of different fascist groups, acting together. Not the only actor
My play would be to ally with a mainstream political movement, offering security for political rallies and the like, paid for out of campaign funds. Start out providing ordinary security, then provoke some Toxoplasma of Rage be being a little too rough while bouncing hecklers. The controversy raises your profile and helps radicalize both your allies and your opponents, but you haven't done anything that a sympathetic prosecutor can't overlook.
Once people have had a chance to get used to this, get your allies to start holding rallies in places where people on the other side are likely to counter-protest. Either wait for some people among the counter protestors to get violent or plant your own false-flag agents among them, giving you an excuse to bust heads. Then run the classic political street violence playbook from late Weimar Germany.
Actually taking power depends on your political wing either actually winning an election or having a saleable-to-mainstream-supporters claim to having the election stolen out from under them. In the former case, once in office your political wing appoints your people to key positions in the military and police, or maybe repeals the Anti-Pinkerton Act and hires you directly to suppress "riots". A "stolen" election scenario is harder, since you'll need to violently seize power, and that's really hard in the US because of how decentralized we are, unless you have really strong political cover within Congress and state governments.
>but you haven't done anything that a sympathetic prosecutor can't overlook.
What sympathetic prosecutors would these be?
Someone who got elected under the banner of your movement's political wing, or at least someone who sees your group as more or less on their political side.
How do you plan to get crypto-fascist prosecutors elected in cities packed with progressive voters and drowning in Soros dark money?
There's a bit of base stealing going on here. If you could elect people like this you wouldn't need brownshirts, you'd already have won.
That is indeed a weakness of this plan as applied to the near-future US. You're right that the kinds of urban areas where street-violence muscle would be most useful mostly don't generally have the kinds of prosecutors who would shrug off right-authoritarian street violence.
My plan was pretty much off the cuff and mostly templated off of what I know about the Nazi SA and the Steel Helmets in the 20s and early 30s. But that was an environment where prosecutors and judges were largely holdovers from the Kaiserreich who were often aristocratic conservatives inclined to give a pass to any broadly right-wing opposition to the Weimar coalition.
A recent Slow Boring post (written by Ben Krause) about the economics of the NBA has me questioning its framing of the subject. https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-nba-has-an-audience-problem
“There’s a strange irony at the heart of the NBA’s new TV rights deal. The league stands to increase its annual broadcasting fees by 2.5 times what they received under their previous broadcasting agreement. And one might assume, based on these numbers, that ratings — the mechanism that is generally used to measure the financial value of an entertainment product — also increased since the last deal.
But the exact opposite happened. Over the past several years, ratings remained relatively stagnant, between 1.6 and 1.8 million per primetime game. And in the years that preceded the NBA’s last TV deal in 2014, average viewership declined by nearly 1 million viewers, a decrease of around 36%.”
...Brent Magid, the CEO of media consulting firm Magid, has an answer. Basically, the networks entering into the new media agreement (ESPN, Amazon, and NBC) are doing so because they would rather not lose the product to their competitors. As Magid said, “Yes, there’s risk at these fee levels given recent ratings, but they are also looking at the downside of the games being on competing services. Which is worse?”
I think there’s a much simpler way to put that: “The supply of quality TV content has decreased, and therefore the quality TV programming that’s still available can charge a premium.”
When prices for a product increase either the demand has risen or the supply has diminished. Unless the networks can suddenly charge advertisers much more per viewer, the supply must have decreased, right? Is there any other explanation that makes economic sense?
> The supply of quality TV content has decreased, and therefore the quality TV programming that’s still available can charge a premium.”
I don’t think quality TV has anything to do with it. Sports fandom isn’t correlated with, or against, quality TV.
In the long run it probably is -- many new sports fans are minted by "well there's nothing else on TV so I guess I'll watch it".
I'm talking about commercial value so in this case "quality" = "popular". It's hard to find the exact right word to use. I was first going to use "valuable" instead of "quality" but the meaning of "valuable" becomes circular in this context where the question in the first place is "Why has this property become more valuable?"
Reading that article made me wonder why Ben cares so much about the NBA's revenue/profits. Does it matter if the league's income collapses by 3x tomorrow or increases by 5x next week? Why would a fan who doesn't own an NBA team care?
His proposals are for "how to make the regular season more interesting for viewers". A fan likely cares about that. I'm all in favor of moving the 3-point line back, not that there's anything original about that idea.
I think he's trying to appeal to the greed of the NBA, but his own motivation is to make the game more interesting for fans like himself.
One other seeming possibility is that the NBA rights have been undervalued, and the increase is a reflection of the market moving closer to a fair value for the rights. I imagine a second possibility is that the NBA rights are unique enough so that there is no viable alternative, allowing the owner of the rights to command a higher price than the market would ordinarily allow if there was an alternative.
Your first point is plausible; on the second I'm not sure what "unique enough" means separate from "valuable enough", which is my thesis. There isn't much valuable TV content out there compared to a decade ago, so NBA broadcast rights are worth relatively more than most other programming they could hope to purchase or develop.
That's fair, I think I'm getting close to making the same point as you by the end of my previous comment
I'm wondering if anyone here knows of good group housing situations in Berkeley. I'm moving there for a short postdoc next January and am hoping to find a place with friendly and interesting people. Feel free to email: java.chewable525@simplelogin.com
I’m not a lawyer, so maybe this is a dumb question: after this batch of Supreme Court decisions, does stare decisis still mean anything?
According to Gorsuch's concurrence in Loper Bright:
> During the tenures of Chief Justices Warren and Burger, it seems this Court overruled an average of around three cases per Term, including roughly 50 statutory precedents between the 1960s and 1980s alone. See W. Eskridge, Overruling Statutory Precedents, 76 Geo. L. J. 1361, 1427–1434 (1988) (collecting cases). Many of these decisions came in settings no less consequential than today’s. In recent years, we have not approached the pace set by our predecessors, overruling an average of just one or two prior decisions each Term.1 But the point remains: Judicial decisions inconsistent with the written law do not inexorably control.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-451_7m58.pdf
To be snarky, this is progress, just in a different direction than we're used to! Brushing aside the dead hand of the past, discarding traditional "democracy of the dead", righting historical injustices... What's not to like? I admit, conservatives may have a point about preferring stable societies where men can live under the same laws as their fathers and their fathers before them, and perhaps those sorts of societies are more amenable to human flourishing. But on the other hand, a lot of the hand-wringing sounds an awful lot like that from opponents of civil rights laws. "We did it this way for 40 years" cuts no bacon.
More seriously, maybe someone should try to duplicate his data, and see if he's cherry-picking time periods or manipulating distinctions to serve his argument?
Has the Supreme Court ever written an opinion of the form "while we think that a previous incarnation of the Supreme Court decided this totally wrongly, we will defer to their judgement instead of our own because of stare decisis"
I think stare decisis only applies when you either agree with the previous ruling or don't especially care. If you, as a Supreme Court judge, think that a previous judgement was wrong (and they all think this about many many things) then you're going to find a way to overturn it given the opportunity.
If you're going to write an opinion like that, you're not going to say that you disagree with the previous ruling. You'll just say "Hey, this was decided in the past, we're sticking with that ruling."
If you look at how the Supreme Court talks about immigration, it follows that model. Most of the cases establishing federal control of immigration are wrong from an originalist perspective. They're also dripping with racism. But hardly anyone wants to get overturn them, whether they were correctly decided or not, because getting rid of the entire federal immigration system would be quite a change!
Stare decisis works best for situations like that - extremely consequential decisions that, whether right or wrong, are not going to be revisited.
It was a gentleman's agreement where libs and cons agreed not to kick over sandcastles that were built for long enough to seem solid; but the sand remains sand.
The real question is: do the libs have enough spine to pack the court/use questionably legal shenanigans to prevent appointment of cons and go whole hog when it's their turn?
You mean like segregation being legal and widespread, interracial marriage being illegal in some states, and abortion being illegal, sandcastles like that? Or marriage only being between a man and a woman, surely *that* sandcastle had been standing long enougjh that the gentlemens' agreement kept it intact. Right?
I don't think the court's decisions over the last 70 or so years fits this model.
Regrettably, from my point of view, Griswold v Connecticut and Obergefell v Hodges and Lawrence v Texas all have about the same vulnerability that Roe v Wade had. The Constitution doesn't have a right to privacy or to bodily autonomy. I wish it did. I liked the _policy_ results of all four cases, but, legally, they all look like they are built on sand. And SCOTUS _did_ knock Roe v Wade down.
If the right plays its cards right, the left isn't going to get another turn.
The Supreme Court has always had the authority to overturn previous Supreme Court decisions (the exclusive authority, aside from a Constitutional amendment). For example, Brown overturned Plessy, which was almost 60 years old at that point. Korematsu was 73 years old when it was overturned in Trump v Hawaii.
> Korematsu was 73 years old when it was overturned in Trump v Hawaii.
It doesn't seem like Trump v Hawaii actually "overturned" Korematsu, especially as the court ruled *in favor* of the president. Sure, Roberts had an aside in his opinion saying "Korematsu sucks", but that's not the same thing as overturning it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_States#Confirmation_of_overturning_in_Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v._Harvard
> [In Korematsu], the Court upheld the internment of “all persons of Japanese ancestry in prescribed West Coast . . . areas” during World War II because “the military urgency of the situation demanded” it. [314 U.S.], at 217, 223. We have since overruled Korematsu, recognizing that it was “gravely wrong the day it was decided.” Trump v. Hawaii, 585 U.S. ___, ___ (2018) (slip op. at 8)
I agree that Roberts has written that he disagrees with the Koremastsu decision. But IMO, saying it was "overturned" means something different.
Saying that it was "overturned" implies that a) the precedent existed before but b) is now violated and no longer exists, i.e. they decided a case differently than they would have had the precedent stood. In the case of Korematsu, **neither** part is true.
As for part a) I suspect that in practice, if the same situation had ever come up, even in say 1970, the supreme court would have ruled differently. The precedent was already effectively dead many, many years ago. And Roberts taking yet another potshot at it in an unrelated case does nothing to change that fact.
As for part b), Trump v Hawaii clearly can't be "overturning" the precedent since it wasn't decided any differently than it would be if that precedent did or didn't exist. In fact, this is the worst possible case to pick as the "overturning" point because the court found *in favor* of the president.
There's a BIG difference between "they overturned 73 years of precedent" and "it took 73 years before someone bothered to formally acknowledge what was already long standing practice."
Contrast this for instance with Brown v Board, which actually was a real example of overturning precedent, as segregation was still ongoing at the time. Likewise with abortion, Chevron, etc.
If the question is "does stare decisis still mean anything?" then is there a practical difference between a case no longer being considered good law and some sort of "officially overturned"?
There's a big practical difference between a case that forms a major part of the status quo, is frequently cited, etc., and a case that everyone considered effectively overturned decades ago.
Or more succinctly, there's an important difference between changing the status quo vs acknowledging the status quo.
Clarence Thomas has always said he doesn't believe in stare decisis, and he seems to have a lot more influence in the post-Trump court.
He's still often found writing alone.
Stare decisis is, I mean not that I believe in this whole jurisprudence word game thing any more than I do Santa Claus, properly considered at its weakest when dealing with constitutional law, because ordinary legislation by definition cannot be used to correct obvious past judicial error.
It never did; there's nothing enforceable in the concept beyond what people take to be the convention, which of course is and always was filtered through their own beliefs about correct jurisprudence.
I'm a mathematician, and I am the director of a mathematics institute (Euler Circle; see https://eulercircle.com/) dedicated to teaching college-level mathematics classes to high-school students. I'm trying to figure out who else is running similar organizations, both in mathematics and in other subjects. In particular, I'm trying answer the following question: If you're a 14-year-old aspiring professional musician, then there are lots of people who are ready to help you. If you're a 14-year-old aspiring professional mathematician, then Euler Circle is here to try to help you. Who is helping 14-year-old aspiring biologists? Historians? Novelists? People who are serious about careers in other areas? I don't have any particular plan in mind, but I want to get to know other people who work on these things. If you are such a person, or if you know of such a person, please get in touch! It should be easy to find my email address if you want to contact me that way.
In the US, there is a patchwork.
If you aren't already aware of them, there are a collection of "elite" summer math camps. There used to be a nice AMS page with a list, but that appears to have been discontinued. The ones I would flag are:
PROMYS (https://promys.org/)
Ross (https://rossprogram.org/)
Hampshire College HCSSiM (https://hcssim.org/)
Mathcamp aka Canada/USA Mathcamp (https://www.mathcamp.org/)
Each of this is different, but there tends to be a strong emphasis on number theory as an entry point. From the data I've seen, these camps have a very high success rate for developing academic mathematicians and scientists. For example, I think the PhD rate is higher than that of IMO gold medal winners.
During the school year, there are programs like MIT Primes (https://math.mit.edu/research/highschool/primes/) that, I believe, tend to have a very local focus. I would expect most major research universities to have a similar-ish, offering.
Finally, there are emerging groups that are looking to offer advanced mathematics that is either "college level" or just orthogonal to the normal curriculum path. For example, Diverging Mathematics (https://divmath.org/).
Some friends of mine work with Sigma Camp, they seem at least somewhat similar to what you're describing. Contact info is on their website:
https://sigmacamp.org/what-is-sigmacamp
>Novelists?<
That one would be God. I remember telling people I wanted to be a novelist, and everyone always said "God help you."
I don't have the ability to Like comments, so I'm going to note that I liked this post. I bet it also applies to lots of other activities.
My impression is that the top 1% of students can just graduate school early and start college? I.e. Leopold Aschenbrenner did this and graduated from college at age 19.
As a college early entrance program dropout, I'm not convinced that this is a great track. I'm definitely in the top 1% of students and was admitted into the University of Washington's Robinson Center program at 14 (basically, the idea is that you replace your freshman year of high school with an accelerated prep course, then start your first year of college the next year).
I didn't have any trouble keeping up academically, but I had huge deficits in executive function and emotional maturity compared to the average 18 year old. (Admittedly, I was also somewhat behind compared to my peers.) I didn't have the capacity to write a 5-page paper without support or self-manage my time when homework deadlines got too tight. Plus, even as an introvert being largely cut off from same-age peers was honestly pretty hard on me.
There are very few programs that give top 1% kids the opportunity to learn at an appropriate level/pace while still acknowledging that they're kids and that they have different needs than adults do.
When I was thinking about applying to college I saw that most listed an option of early admission. You could just apply way earlier than senior year in high school and go straight to college without graduating. I applied and was accepted at the end of my junior year. If I had known about it earlier I would have applied in my sophomore year. I don't know whether colleges are still permitting that -- does anyone?
Washington State will still pay for it. https://www.sbctc.edu/colleges-staff/programs-services/running-start/
That's community college, not university. Running start is a great option for a lot of high school students, but I would recommend it more in terms of "building college skills" and "saving some time/money on your degree". Because you're going to a community college, your options for advanced classes end at about the college sophomore level - linear algebra, intro to organic chemistry, etc., with fairly low expectations for student achievement.
As far as I can tell, this sort of thing is only sometimes possible, and even when it is, it can require either extraordinary performance or persistent parental advocacy, or both. Some school systems are more inclined to allow it, while others are more insistent on following regular courses of study.
I graduated from a high school with about 1200 students, and I don't remember hearing about anyone who had been allowed to skip years. One had been allowed to take high school classes while still in junior high, and another student (at another school, after scoring among the best in the country on a math test) was allowed to take college level classes while still in high school.
People here seem stuck on the idea of going to college early. There are other approaches that work well for smart people too. Jeremy Howard, whom I admire, got a full time job at McKinsey and started college at about the same time. He got the job on the strength of his extraordinary coding skills. I believe he analyzed data and made big beautiful graphs for McKinsey consults. He didn't attend college classes or do the reading, but crammed for a few days prior to finals, and was able to get passing (though not good) grades and graduate. Another possibility, common among homeschooled kids, is to finish with the equivalent of high school work well before 18, and then take a few courses in stuff you're interested in at a local community college. Meanwhile, kids can be helped by parents, tutors, peers or mentors to pursue projects they are interested in, or might find a way to have a sort of internship or paid job in some setting that's in line with their interests. By the time you're the conventional age for applying to college you've learned all sorts of stuff, made things, and accumulated accomplishments and people who will recommend you. All this ups your chances of admission to hard-to-get-into places.
I suspect what is going on is that we are a clever and intellectual bunch, which means the first time many of us were really challenged was in college. Some of us therefore see grade school as a mere preamble, something to be passed through as quickly as possible on the way to the good stuff, which is in college.
Wow that’s really sad. So much time wasted for the best of the best.
>Who is helping 14-year-old aspiring biologists?
In the sciences generally (I suspect with mathematics included), there are a bunch of organizations:
https://www.sigmaxi.org/ (has some youth programs e.g. "Student Research Showcase")
(they also have a partnership with https://www.academiesofscience.org/ , which has a youth wing, https://academiesofscience.org/ajas.php
>The American Junior Academy of Sciences (AJAS) is the only US honor society recognizing America's premier high school students for outstanding scientific research. Each state's Academy of Science nominates high school students as AJAS delegates. The chosen delegates are then invited to attend the AJAS annual conference. The AJAS mission is to introduce, encourage, and accelerate pre-college students into the professional world of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
)
( My only connection to any of this is as a subscriber to American Scientist, which is published by Sigma Xi.)
I can only talk about Germany, but here there are two systematic approaches:
Juniorstudium: this is a program which allows gifted high school students to enroll to normal university courses during their high school time. This is often just one or two courses, but can also go a long way. This became institutionalized around 2000-2010*, and now exists in most German regions and and many universities.
Summer schools: in Germany, they are called Student Academies (Schülerakademie), and in the US there is a program by John Hopkins university, which I took as student. https://cty.jhu.edu/ Possibly this is just one of many such programs, I don't know the US landscape. After my own school, I also taught some programs in the German version, which was a decent two-week course in number theory and cryptography.
*Perhaps it's bloated ego, but I think I was something of a catalyst here. I took this route as one of the very first students starting in '96 when it was not institutionalized. I was not literally the first such student in Germany, but possibly the second. The head of my school pushed a lot to make it possible for me, and some people in the ministry took some risk to allow it. I am still very thankful that they enabled that for me. It went very well (I finished high school with courses more or less equivalent to a BSc), and the system was institutionalized in my own region and has spread throughout Germany.
Can talented students simply graduate high school early in Germany and start college at age 13-14? My vague understanding is that the answer is No and this is why Leopold Aschenbrenner had to come study college in the US when he was a teenager.
Yes, it is possible to skip years of school in Germany, and actually that is not too uncommon. I quickly searched for prevalence and found numbers of roughly 0.1% to 1% of students who skip a class in their career.
It's rather uncommon to skip the last two years of high school, since the German high school degree "Abitur" cumulates all grades from those two years. So it is usually not possible to skip high school completely by only taking the final exam. I don't know about the Aschenbrenner case, but perhaps this is what he wanted to do? So most students who skip classes do this earlier, but some do this 2-3 times and start university education very early. (We have a postdoc in our group who went this way and obtained his PhD with 20 or 21. But he is *very* exceptional.)
For highly talented students, the main reason *not* to skip classes this is that they would join a class (cohort) where all other students are a year older, or even more. This only makes sense if they are not only cognitively ahead of their age group, but also emotionally. If this is the case, then skipping a class usually works well. The physical difference remains, but is often less of a problem. But this restriction is why it is helpful to also have alternatives.
I am also interested in this.
A while back I remember Scott, you did a review of Eichmann in Jerusalem.
I recently came across some contemporary discussions of this book by people I respect that said it was a total hatchet job that doesn't really inform you about anything apart from Arendt's own emotional baggage and antipathy to Israel.
At the time, in 1965, someone wrote an entire book fisking Eichmann in Jerusalem called "And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight". It's by Jacob Robinson, a lawyer, diplomat, and Holocaust researcher who was pretty eminent in his own day. Maybe worth a read. Currently trying to find a good copy.
I'd be interested in getting links to the discussions, if that's something you're willing to share? I enjoyed that book very much (or, well, "enjoy" isn't quite the right word), but Arendt was certainly using it as a platform to criticize Israeli society. (And also to criticize people who, to sail dangerously close to current events, wanted to turn a trial of one specific person for specific things into a broad indictment of nations and states and eras of history, and to trumpet their righteousness to the heavens.) On the other hand, the counter-argument I came across was so incredibly biased in its own way that it was hard to take seriously. And none of it spoke much to her analysis of Nazi history and society and the procedures of genocide, which was the backbone of the book.
Scott’s review suggested it was if anything too sympathetic to Eichmann’s own arguments. Can you expand on how it was a hatchet job?
I'll read it and post an update when I'm done.
"Can you expand on how it was a hatchet job?"
So far iIt reminds me of an SSC review about a Vox article -- it looks like he's going to explain how everything she covers and explains was warped beyond recognition. For example, the first chapter begins "[This] chapter reveals in detail how Miss Arendt has ignored evidence concerning Eichmann and in doing so she ends up with a portrait of the man in no way resembling reality".
So I think the ultimate thesis is that Arendt wrote a work of fiction that makes Eichmann look as nice as possible.
As far as I know, her motivations for this are a separate debate.
Arendt, for what it is worth, wrote a reply to Robinson's book: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1966/01/20/the-formidable-dr-robinson-a-reply/#:~:text=Robinson%20must%20have%20thought%20that,anything%20by%20the%20two%20authors.
Having read it I can say that the one thing that really crystallized what the book was doing, was the section on the Israeli parliament's reaction to Eichmann's capture.
The book reproduces Arendt's account, that when the prime minister announced that Eichmann had been captured, the parliament erupted into wall-to-wall frenzied cheering.
Jacob Robinson, compares this to a large variety of independent witness descriptions (and the audio recording of the event, which I can't find a copy of), including a New York Times reporter, who all described the reaction, very very consistently, as stunned silence.
So it seems clear that Arendt was there, experienced the stunned silence, and choose to lie and depict a "frenzied" reaction. It seems that she wanted to depict Israel as bloodthirsty and desparate for a pound of flesh, even if it was Eichmann.
I say even if it was Eichmann, because another section that I want to highlight because it really seems to be revealing as to what she was doing, was the section on Eichmann's importance, as viewed by the Allies.
Robinson reproduces the sections from the book where Arendt says that Eichmann wasn't really on the radar of the Allies in the period of the Nuremberg trials, since he wasn't considered important or a decision maker, but just a pen-pusher among thousands of pen-pushers. He then reproduces statements from the time, and during the trial which Arendt would have heard, to the effect that Eichmann was always near the top of the most wanted lists for crimes against humanity, but they couldn't get ahold of him.
Jacob Robinson's book is a detailed fisk of the book, and I think it's quite good at just listing many of Arendt's claims in amazing detail, along with independent sources showing Arendt was either dishonest, deluded, or too busy constructing her "banality of evil" philosophy to allow real life to interfere.
But the vibe I got from reading it is that Arendt wanted (for whatever reason) to depict Israel as in a bloodthirsty craze, grabbing this guy whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then holding a kangaroo court to execute him to satisfy a bloodlust. None of which seems to be true.
I guess I should address the kangaroo court part of this statement. He has other sections on Arendt's claims about the court's failure to consider certain pieces of evidence, or follow due process, and so on and so on. For each claim Arendt makes that "they didn't look at evidence X", Jacob Robinson reproduces the court testimonies about X. From the sounds of things the court proceedings where pretty exhaustive given that Arendt doesn't seem to be able to find a valid complaint about them.
A while back Scott wrote about using the wisdom of crowds with yourself, making two estimates at different times to take advantage of variance in your brain.
Turns out this also works if you just ask people to predict what a crowd would say: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surprisingly_popular
The drugs killing dying patients like my husband are the drugs they can’t get. Here’s how I think the horrible 10-14 year new drug application process can be improved so that research doesn’t outrace access. More facts and feelings about clinical trials and the FDA from Bess and Jake:
https://open.substack.com/pub/bessstillman/p/the-drugs-killing-dying-patients?r=16l8ek&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Good luck Bess, you are doing God’s work
Thank you, Turtle. I'm truly rabid about all this. As they say, it's personal.
I'm interested in getting folks' thoughts / advice on WRITING. I am an attorney, I spend my days reading complicated legal (contractual) documents, drafting and negotiating the same, investing lots of time in legal cases, law review articles, etc. I draft similar research memorandums and analyze statutes, SCOTUS cases, etc.
Leisurely, I love reading ACX and adjacent blogs, works, reports, etc. I also have an ever-growing stack of nonfiction books on my shelves that sit there laughing at me. That's not even to mention the fiction books I wish I had more time to read.
At the same time, I have always had an urge to write my own stuff. Not only novels, but commentary and my own thoughts on current-events, ACX-adjacent writings, and rational thought.
But, at the end of a work day, I am just so burnt out of "heavy-duty" reading and writing. I am curious how you fine people have developed, or organized, your mental bandwidth to consume content, analyze and digest it, gather your thoughts, draft and outline posts/books/other writings, and actually sit down to draft and revise and eventually post/publish your ideas.
I read every day. I write (for work) every day. I'd love to be able to write freely, for leisure, and to develop a community of readers/commenters that can help me improve. I am open to any and all advice and comments, because writing is something I _loved_ as a child/teenager and I wish I could re-capture that spark again, now, as a legal professional.
I also read/write as my day job, so I feel you.
My suggestion is to read for fun sometimes - for instance, read a trashy novel in a genre you like. I'd also suggest writing for fun. Set a target of, say, one short piece a week and hold yourself accountable to that. But nothing else. Write what you want, even if it's only a short poem or a single-page story.
Can't give great advice, I've got nothing but time and am still struggling to actually complete any stories. Three and a half days until Independence Day and I haven't even made it to the recent government regulations of the mechsuit's power core.
I've had two blocks of "successful" writing, in that I would consistently show up and write words. Both of them worked on the assumption that getting the ball rolling is the hardest part. The first was after I read Atomic Habits, which recommended setting a consistent goal of just showing up. I tied it to coffee: "every time I get a cup of coffee, I'll drink it at the computer and write one sentence of creative fiction." It worked; I still mostly left things incomplete, but managed to finish a few two-page stories. But the habit broke when I went out of town and I never got back into it.
The most recent stint is just basing it on having fun. I'm currently starting stories with an unscripted string of alliteration. "Adam and Anna allowed another assistant access to Andrew's article, attention away at the Alma allegations." There we have it; two scholar types with some kind of institutional power, bothered by something that may or may not threaten that power. You can write a story out of that.
Also LPs are quite fun. It's mostly a kids game, but I would happily demolish a small child at Rock Paper Scissors, and creativity is creativity. Find a flawed thing that you enjoy, and write about both sides of it. It's very lightweight, but gets the wheels turning.
Maybe consider trimming back the amount of work you do and making less money? The thing you are looking for -- getting back to something you loved -- is priceless.
Drastically lower your standards. Make it fun again. Find some group of people where the kind of writing you want to do is done as a matter of routine, casually.
During my phd, I had the exact same problem with programming. It was not in the cards to design and program a "real" hobby project (e.g. a strategy game). But I did find the time and motivation to mess around with fantasy consoles and do some very small, unambitious projects for the demoscene. Clever little algorithms coded up mostly for their own sake and the appreciation of like-minded people.
Sometimes, the seed of an idea would be created during a christmas break or other large chunk of free time, and then I'd find the energy to mess around with it for half an hour here and there over the next few months.
I would love to write. What I do instead is sit and stare at what I wrote weeks or months ago, feeling drained and unimaginative, unable to think of anything to contribute.
What sometimes works is going back and just reading what I have before, or making very very minor edits. Sometimes that leads me to gather momentum and turns into writing a few more paragraphs; often it doesn't.
One thing I do which really, really works for me is I'll revert to vague notes and bullet points at the drop of the hat - eg, if I'm halting on something I'll just write "(TODO: he weasels out of it somehow)" or "(TODO: he gets her into bed)". Then come back to it later. That way I can make the most use of the small amount of motivation/creativity I have to spend, rather than wasting it getting frustrated.
As a student I joined a club where we all just hung around writing one day out of every fortnight - the idea being it was a Schelling point that let you make time for writing. I'd love to do something like that again, but I haven't found anything similar since. Non students don't seem as interested in organising that kind of thing, at least where I live.
I'll bet something like that exists. Of course there's a much better chance of finding something if you're willing to consider groups that meet online.
I’m feeling creeped out in a new way by AI, wonder if anyone else can relate. So lately I have been spending hours looking at photos of the ocean, esp. of waves, for a project I’m doing, and there are now AI-generated wave images for sale on Getty & the other sites that sell photos. Some are labelled as AI and some are not, but I’ve gotten to where I can tell the difference. The AI waves are simpler, and thicker, sort of like mattresses made of water, and don’t have the intricate ribbing that real waves have. AIso AI likes to put a sort of blurry fog over them. I think that’s to avoid generating any more wave than necessary. And it looks fake, because most waves have fractal-looking edges surrounded by droplets, not a foggy spray. But the worst thing about the fake waves is that real waves have a structure, and the AI ones don’t. I can’t tell you what the structure is, though I’m sure books about fluid dynamics do, but I can sense its presence. I mean I can sense how the movement of water over land that’s becoming shallower forms the water in a certain way, and for the fake waves I can sense the absence of real structure — and that creeps me out. They are to real waves what lab-grown meat is to the muscle of a cow’s hip. And people who haven’t seen real waves won’t even notice the difference. I feel as though it’s bad for our brains somehow not to see the complex structures of real waves, real trees, etc., even if we never give the structure of either any thought.
> I feel as though it’s bad for our brains somehow not to see the complex structures of real waves, real trees, etc., even if we never give the structure of either any thought.
But aren't you seeing it properly for the first time right now? Didn't it take a while of staring at slightly-off ocean waves to really understand the beauty of the real thing?
No. I have always had a thing about waves. Grew up in Florida and was in the Gulf of Mexico swimming for several hours every day in summer, and a decent amount in spring and fall too. Was quite good at body surfing and did it on waves that were kind of big for body surfing -- like maybe 8 feet or so? Also had a weird fear of tsunamis, which I pictured as waves as high as a skyscraper, even though adults had told me that wasn't the case. Sometimes when I was in the ocean with my face underwater, or my back turned to the horizon, I'd be seized with a fear that The Wave was coming and if I looked I'd see it towering over me. Except for fear of giant waves, though, I was fearless. And for years I have sometimes gone to Google image and looked at pictures of waves and whirlpools, and giant waves, and surfers on giant waves. Dunno why, just enjoy it and never get sick of it. Sometimes do that for a couple hours at a time. So no, it wasn't like seeing its beauty for the first time. It was like seeing these weird fake duds for the first time, passing as waves. Sort of like being in a place with a dozen delightful dogs of different breeds, then noticing that over by the owner's chair there's taxidermied dead Jack Russell in a perky though slightly off-balance pose, and with a kind of stiffness to it. And the owner lays his hand fondly on the stuffed head and says, "he loves it when his friends come to visit -- don't you, Biff?" Fuck that shit.
Yes, this has been a large worry of mine for a while. I had the exact same thought process w.r.t. fiction writing. We're entering an era of higher simulacrum levels, where truth will be replaced by "truthiness", the property of looking like truth.
I vaguely recall that Miyazaki (the studio Ghibli guy) has a certain disdain for anime fans, who are taking their ideas of how the world works from anime, while Miyazaki was injecting his experience of the real world into his works. Most anime nowadays is purely inspired by other anime, and has lost that connection to reality. So it becomes weirder and weirder to outsiders, as it traps itself in its own tropes and stops accurately reflecting human nature.
So far, these kinds of things have been prevented from spiraling out of control by the occasional injection of more realistic stuff (which people do respond to positively). But when AI makes the higher simulacrum stuff so much cheaper while the more authentic stuff stays expensive... yikes.
On one of my copies of "Grave of the Fireflies", there's an interview with Takahata where he points out all of the ways in which Seita makes choices that lead directly to his and his sister's death. And it became clear that Takahata had Been Through Some Shit in his life, and there was a vast gulf between him and much of his audience, which he was trying to break through. But so many of us didn't get the message.
Yes, dammit, “truthiness” — it’s the same damn stuff.
Google lets you specify results by date. Just put in "before:2020-01-01" or some other date before everything went to shit.
Huh.
I remember a decade or two ago, there was progress in using computer animation to generate hair and water, and these were hailed as major advances, and there were CG movies that had long ogling shots of hair and water, primarily to show off how much better the technology was. And before that, the same thing happened with ordinary special effects, where there were movies like "2001" (good) and "Star Trek: TMP" (bad). And complaints about voice acting and realistic behavior, going from things like Teletubbies to He-Man to 50s sit-coms. Not to mention speculation about the origin of furrys. And I firmly believe that I can tell when young children spend more time watching screens than interacting with live humans, because they have a flat, performative affect.
Do you think this is different than those examples? I do suspect that AI-generated water will rapidly improve, but maybe you accidentally took a red pill and will forever be horrified by it...
You’re not joking, right? Because I absolutely agree with you about the flat performative affect. In shows for kids the characters usually have exaggerated affect — things like yelling YAY when they like a piece of news. I guess that’s because kids’ exuberance looks sort of like that to adults — and it sort of is like that, but only sort of. What you see on the screen in kids’ movies and shows is a sort of plastic statue of how they come across, rather than an accurate representation. Then the kids watch the show and start to emit plastic statue affect.
And here’s a related thing: TV numbs kids to cruelty and loss. I don’t like TV, and did not have a set when I adopted my daughter, and decided not to get one, even though TV is a great babysitter, because I think it’s probably bad for kids. So when I took my daughter to see Finding Nemo when she was around 4, she had watched very little TV — just whatever she saw at other kids’ houses on playdates. I was so naive that I expected to be bored blind by a cute, sappy, super-cheerful little tale, but figured that was probably going to be in the sweet spot for my daughter. So it starts off with a very cute fish family, mother, father, and about 100 babies, contentedly living their lives, then within 5 mins of the opening a big mean fish shows up and eats the mother and all the children but one. And you see the whole thing — terrified fish children fleeing and getting caught, frantic parents, etc. Then after that scene you see the poor father fish mourning alone in his big empty house. WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?! My daughter crying, whispered to me that she felt so sorry for the poor little daddy fish that she couldn’t stand it. Good for her! That is normal affect. I looked around and no other kid was showing distress, and there were some there younger than her.
And you know, she was really a shit-kicker about real tragedy. She knew from the beginning the story of how she likely came to the orphanage. I did soften it some by saying that probably her parents were forced to give her up because of the one-child policy, but it could also have been that they were poor and could not give her good food and a warm bed, or that they were sick and could not take care of her. So she listened to all this clear-eyed and serious, and asked some questions, and did not cry, and went on with her day. But she must have kept ruminating about it because one day she told me she thought her mother had been sick and was now dead. Then she added, so that means little bits of her are in the air everywhere and sometimes I breathe some of them in. So she could face real tragedy — just not Disney’s sucker punch.
About waves improving: Yeah, they’ll look better in the future. But there are some features I’ll bet never get incorporated. Waves break differently depending on whether the water is approaching an area that gradually gets more shallow, or an area with a sudden something, like a coral reef, in their path, or — I forget what the third case is. I don’t see any reason why AI would bother with taking that into account. Is that bad? Well, if the waves people saw in movies and videos were generated by real shallows of different kinds, or were built to faithfully look the way they would is they had been, then there’s a chance that somebody with the right kind of mind would notice there are different kinds of wave break, and wonder why, and maybe generate a theory with some truth in it about what causes what kind of break. And all the rest of us who aren’t alert enough to notice in a thoughtful way what the first person did will nonetheless notice at some level that the AI waves break in one of 3 different ways.
Not joking! I think I've caught some of them mugging for "the camera", and leaving beats for a laugh-track or applause.
And I've noticed that thing about training kids to be numb, too, although I suppose I've been conceptualizing it differently. To me, it meshes with the "kids as sociopaths" thing, in that it seems like one function of culture is to shape the categories that we define personhood with: some entities count as people and we care what happens to them, and other entities don't and we don't. And stories like finding Nemo can expose that, where we find children worrying about characters that we as adults write off, or on the other hand, not caring about characters that we as adults know we should care about.
That's a very interesting contrast about your daughter's reactions to real tragedy and dramatic tragedy. I suppose some of it needs to be credited to you presenting the real tragedy in a way that was designed to help her come to terms with it, instead of designed to provoke an emotional reaction? :-)
I bet AI waves will get there eventually. Right now they're still fairly stupid and limited.
Thanks. But I think the way I presented the China stuff to my daughter was fine, but not extraordinary. I mean, when you know a small child, you understand the kind of thing that pleases them and the kind of thing that distresses them, and you just naturally look for ways to ease their distress if you're giving them info that will distress them. It happens naturally, like "motherese" (speaking more slowly and in a higher, more sing-songy voice). I really think I was being just the modal good mommy, and the outlier is fucking Disney, and the people who make stuff that numbs kids. Honestly, kids watching violent cartoons are like the adult males who watch porn for hours, and find that they are becoming numb to the soft texture of real sex because they've logged so many hours having their libido stimulated with a stiff brush dipped in capsaicin.
Yeah, I've heard that porn is messing with younger men, in weird ways.
Your observation about kids leaving beats for a laugh track is omg so creepy
I think it's weird that everyone just speeds all the time. We all commit this low-key crime, but no one cares? And only in this one specific domain. I made a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN0_FbXhiEI I don't really have a thesis other than: isn't that weird? I think it's weird.
I've an acquaintance who is a career traffic engineer with the state with over 20 years of experience. He gets pretty worked up over this topic (especially when he's had a beer or 3). I'll try my best to sum up his thought.
Traffic Engineering is actually a pretty mature domain. Roads have a engineered (not legislated) speed they are designed for. Everything from the width of lanes, width of shoulders, the height of buildings, the size of the tree lawns, how close to the road the trees/utility polls are, the spacing of the bollards, *everything* nudges drivers toward a certain engineered target speed for that road. Traffic flows best when the engineered speed and the legal speed are harmonious. Unfortunately this is often not the case.
In his estimation, in his state in the north east, the problem is priorities. Safety and efficient traffic flow are simply not the top priority. He'd estimate the actual priorities that determine legal speeds to be:
1. Revenue generation
2. Revenue generation
3. Responding to tiny numbers of direct complaints from individual citizens, usually over 65, demanding limits be lowered on the streets they personally use.
4. Revenue generation
5. Safety
6. Efficient flow of traffic.
I've listened to him rant at length about designing the perfect roads and efficiently and invisibly nudge drivers into going the correct (engineered) speed of the road, only to have the legal limit be whittled away at by local jurisdictions to 15-20 miles below the correct speed for the road, usually to increase income from fines or in response to tiny numbers of complaints, often a single instance. This makes the road more dangerous (drivers are still being nudged to the correct, engineered speed of the road while sharing it with the compulsive rules-followers obeying the signs) and less efficient. It boarders on entrapment in his estimation; government employees have designed a road they know will make you drive a certain speed, then set the legal limit absurdly low to essentially create violations where there shouldn't be any. A good example of this near my is a 4 lane divided highway, with a grass median, wide shoulders, and no buildings accessible from the road, with a 25 mph limit for less than 1 mile where it barely clips into a village of 2k people, who's police department staffs fully 1/2 of their manpower to traffic enforcement on just this road.
Sorry I took so long to reply to this, but it's super interesting. I'm going to try to investigate this and see what evidence I can gather for and against. Do you happen to have any?
There is a seven-lane road for a 1 1/2 mile stretch on my way to work which has a speed limit of...35 mph. And a left-turn traffic light that stays red instead of blinking, for a good 30 seconds, preventing left turns for no real reason. Very frustrating.
my assumption is that at this point road systems are designed to work optimally under an assumption that a certain amount of socially normal speeding is happening. And they would be worse if no one sped. Any civil engineers who can opine?
That may not be the best equilibrium to be in, but it is also the case that the optimization space is larger if you allow different lanes to move at different speeds, which is the norm we have fallen into. Best might be for different limits on different lanes, but that might be more confusing to everyone than existing norms.
Epistemic status: structural engineer, but I had to take a transportation engineering class for my degree + worked at a DOT for a bit.
No, I don't think that's accurate. The primary thing that slows down traffic is density - more cars per unit area means more interactions between cars, which means that any disruption to uniform flow will slow down more people. Increasing speed does increase throughput, but there's a pretty narrow window between "car density is low enough that few interactions occur" and "car density is high enough that everyone is going slower than the speed limit" where it's actually helpful.
Small speed differences between lanes are fine, but I think any driver will agree that it's a problem if they get large. Good traffic flow is all about minimizing interaction between cars or significant changes in momentum. The bigger difference in speed between lanes, the more a lane change will disrupt the overall flow pattern. (Again, this is something that starts to matter more as density increases. You can get away with a 20 mph speed differential on a rural highway, but city traffic would be MUCH better if everyone could just go the damn speed limit.)
Another consideration that's becoming increasingly common in cities is traffic light timing. Ideally you want to minimize idle time for cars and avoid stops and starts, so you can try to set up your traffic lights so that green lights are coordinated. These are normally set with the expectation that drivers are going the speed limit, so speeders 1) don't actually gain any time and 2) have to do all the stopping and starting that we were trying to avoid in the first place.
I tend to drive exactly the speed limit wherever I am, and almost never more than 5 miles over except in very short term passing situations (which don't happen often, as I'm usually the slowest one on the road). I have impaired depth perception, and my modern car with all its sensors and cameras is the first one I've ever felt safe driving. Even with that, I don't want to push it any more than I need to. I'd be perfectly happy doing 40-50 on an empty highway. I'm in no rush, and only go faster out of respect for other people and to avoid being an unexpected obstacle that causes a crash. I guess I don't really have a thesis here either, but I also experience the sense that this is weird and that people go way faster than they need to.
If I did 40-50 on an empty highway, that would turn a 1.5 hour trip to anything bigger than a small grocery store into a 2.5-3 hour journey. It's a very large country.
Yeah, I'm fortunate to live near Chicago. Most anything I want is within an hour drive even at my slow pace. Naturally what works for my situation doesn't fit everyone
>I'd be perfectly happy doing 40-50 on an empty highway. I'm in no rush, and only go faster out of respect for other people and to avoid being an unexpected obstacle that causes a crash.
Likewise. When there is traffic, I'll match speeds with it, but I generally prefer to go slower.
I used to work at a place where several folks would get together occasionally to drive to a restaurant for lunch, taking various cars/drivers. There was one guy who always drove the posted speed limit, and it always felt weird to me, tho nobody ever said anything. He was an open practicing Christian (unusual in this social circle of software engineers), tho not obnoxious about it.
In parts of Australia speeding is actually enforced zealously, and as a result people have pretty much stopped speeding. You'll cruise along the freeway at exactly 110 km/h and find that everyone else is also cruising along at exactly 110 km/h.
But of course everyone's car has a slightly different systematic measurement error so you're actually going a few km/h faster or slower than everyone else meaning you slowly ride up someone's back bumper and then overtake them at a less-than-walking-pace.
Anyway, I know that "actually that universal thing is just an American thing" comments are the lowest form of internet discourse, but I feel compelled to post this one.
My dad told me that you can get fined for going even 1mph over in Switzerland.
I've also read that in the USA, Virginia actually enforces its speed limits at the posted speeds: https://www.reddit.com/r/Virginia/comments/plqocl/is_it_true_that_virginia_enforces_speed_limits/ (yeah, it is Reddit - but what State is going to admit that it _doesn't_ enforce its laws? )
>Virginia is one of the strictest states in the country for speeders and law enforcement is very proud of this fact. Judges see these harsh laws as a positive rather than a negative.
Frankly, I'd rather have the engineered speed, the posted speed limit, and the enforced speed limit all match, rather than have the usual situation in most states where one has to guess at the enforced speed limit - and at how much road rage is in the driver one car back, for not exceeding the posted speed limit by enough to suit them.
People absolutely speed a ton in Australia!
That's actually super interesting to me. How do they enforce it? Are the speed limits reasonably fast, or does everyone complain?
Lots of speed cameras combined with little leeway. There are some limits to this, I think in most states a speed camera either needs to be signposted _or_ have a policeman manning it. But either way if you go even a few km/h over the limit past one you'll get a ticket in the mail, which you'll almost certainly pay.
No, the speed limits are for the most part not reasonably fast, and everyone does complain. And the worst part is the variable speed limits, e.g. when the speed limit on a major road past a school is a stupidly slow 40 km/h but only at certain hours and only on school days, and if you don't have kids in school you probably don't know what days are or are not school days.
Still, we have an annual traffic accident death rate of 4.5 per 100K people or 4.9 per billion vehicle-km, compared to 12.9 or 8.3 in the US, so enforcement of the law has its upsides.
It's really just this: people drive at the speed they feel safe driving. When speed limits were established, most cars were (by modern standards) deathtraps that didn't handle particularly well. Speed limits haven't been updated because Karen will block any attempts for "safety reasons", and cops want to retain the revenue stream.
Hm, in the U.S. there used to be the "55 everywhere" thing, but that's gone now. So they at least got updated then, right? But I think the rest of your point probably still stands.
The 55 mph federal speed limit cap was in response to the 1973 oil embargo, it didn't have anything to do with safety. In fact activists kept it from being repealed for another 20 years. So we have 65 mph+ speed limits in spite of the best efforts of safety panderers.
Hey man, some people take this stuff seriously. Kinky Friedman died just a few days ago.
He ran for governor of Texas in 2006 on a platform calling for drug legalization, an end to bans on smoking and a promise to lower the speed limit from 55 to 54.95 miles per hour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinky_Friedman
At least in my very populous state, driving over the posted speed limit isn't actually a crime. It's a crime to "drive at an unsafe speed" and the posted speed limit is used as prima facia evidence to convict people of that crime, but I know lawyers who have argued in traffic court that that evidence isn't always enough to prove the crime.
So, technically, you can't tell who is criming based on posted speed.
Speeding isn't quite the only such crime. In many cities, most pedestrians jaywalk frequently, perhaps for similar reasons.
The obvious defense in both cases is that speeding and jaywalking can help traffic move more efficiently than if everyone stuck strictly to the rules. But it's strange that people don't typically apply that same argument to running red lights, even if no one else is around.
Jaywalking is fine when done correctly, that is, when it doesn't interfere with actual traffic. I once saw some idiot waiting to cross the street in front of me, carefully observe the flashing "don't walk" sign, and decide to walk just as it stopped flashing, staying on "don't walk". Basically, the worst possible time to start walking. When I honked my horn at him, he looked up, then made a dismissive hand gesture. Lesson not learned, I suppose.
Jaywalking is my God given right
I run red lights if no one is around. Couldn't think of any reason not to do it, so just converted into someone who does it.
My argument for jaywalking is that it's much safer than crossing at the corner if traffic can turn right on red, because that's a frequent cause and location for vehicle-pedestrian accidents. Safer to simply cross the street when no cars are near, whatever the location and whatever the light says. Pedestrians should have the right do what keeps them safe.
I think it's weird that the government puts up limits that they don't actually expect people to follow?
In the US?.I've heard that all spe ed.camera.evidence can't be used to prosecute without a human operator, and there aren't enough cops to.ground.
Whaaat!? But they'll mail tickets to people for speed cameras, red light cameras, not paying toll booths...? Maybe a cop is "signing" all of those tickets or some other such legal workaround.
And/or they know most people will just pay the ticket without bothering to try to dispute it.
So I just read the SCOTUS ruling related to presidential immunity including the concurrences and dissents. As is usual, no one should reach any conclusions about it based just on media or online summaries. This one in particular is well worth the read.
I don't find the dissenters entirely persuasive, and their hysteria (there's no better word) prevents them from putting into the record clear explication of the specific flaws in the majority's logic which is too bad. Meanwhile some parts of the majority's logic do hold up for me. All that said, the majority has pretty seriously violated its own preferred analytic approach known as "originalism" -- this ruling is more of their cherry-picking as far as the Framers' original design intentions. And while they think their conclusions do not protect a former POTUS from prosecution for having committed obviously-criminal acts in carrying out his core duties...I mean, come on. I'm honestly having a hard time not LOL'ing at that.
Barrett's dissent from one key part of the majority's ruling is actually pretty significant if ever put into practice. Whether it ever would be seems doubtful since she was the 6th vote for the overall ruling not the 5th.
As for the here and now this ruling overall is more of a win for Trump than for Jack Smith. No surprise that Trump is currently celebrating on social media.
That's even though I can at least _imagine_ this ruling ending up having improved the chances of Trump being held criminally accountable for his most obviously-criminal conduct related to the 2020 election: by stripping out the most-debatable charges against him while leaving in place the strongest ones for an eventual federal jury to be solely focused on.
In any case the previous paragraph now depends 100 percent, absolutely, on Trump not winning this November. That's because this SCOTUS majority explicitly in so many words believes that a president can order Justice Department officials around at will without fear of personal liability of any kind. So on January 21st a President Trump could tell the relevant official to dismiss this entire case, and go down the line firing them until he finds the one who'll do it. If it comes to it there seems little doubt that he will do exactly that.
It's interesting to me that President's Obama and Biden, as well as Johnson won an important victory that's been completely ignored by the commentariat:
President Obama cannot be prosecuted for the summary execution of a US citizen by drone strike based on faulty intelligence.
President Biden cannot be prosecuted for the murder of innocent Afghani civilians attending a wedding, upon whom he called a drone strike based on faulty intelligence.
President Johnson cannot be prosecuted (posthumously) for the false claim that North Vietnam instigated the Gulf of Tonkin Incident that precipitated US involvement in the Vietnam war based on faulty intelligence.
I can't imagine why that oversight would be nearly universal, though I suppose it's more surprising that there isn't more call to prosecute Bush 43 because he believed, sing along if you know the words, "faulty intelligence."
You have a good point. I don't see a great alternative. _Maybe_, if there is glaring evidence that a POTUS had someone killed in an apparent glaringly _bad_ faith interpretation of intelligence, I could see the judicial system getting involved. If, e.g. the CIA hands the POTUS faulty intelligence, and the POTUS has someone killed in a plausible _good_ faith "defense of the USA", do we really want the judicial system second guessing the CIA?
UPDATE: Barrett's limited dissent turns out to be topical. Trump's legal team is challenging his New York State felonies conviction on exactly the point that Barrett wrote about. The state judge in that case has agreed to delay Trump's sentencing to consider the defense's motion for dismissal based on the new SCOTUS ruling.
In the SCOTUS ruling, 5 of the justices wrote that a POTUS's absolute criminal immunity related to his core job responsibilities means that contextual testimony which references some of those responsibilities can't be introduced in a criminal trial for non-official conduct. That happened in the New York State trial so Trump's attorneys today argue that the conviction must be tossed. Barrett disagreed, writing that "The Constitution does not require blinding juries to the circumstances surrounding conduct for which Presidents can be held liable."
The specificity of Barrett's dissent makes me wonder whether she was thinking of the New York State trial when she wrote it. In any case it seems very unclear at this point whether or how the SCOTUS ruling will upend the New York State conviction. And no doubt the judge in Trump's Georgia state trial for election interference will be particularly curious about the New York court's conclusion and reasoning.
>and their hysteria
I'm an amateur enthusiast of SCOTUS decisions; I've been keeping up with most of them for my adult life after getting interested in high school over 30 years ago and actually go through the effort of reading the various concurrences and dissents on the higher profile cases. I've noticed something recently (well, the last 14 years anyway). I've tried re-writing the following language a few times to not sound so harsh, but I can't really state this observation in a kind way.
Sonia Sotomayor is simply not of the same caliber, legally or intellectually, than the rest of the court. Her statements are frankly embarrassing at times, and I think actually hurt the efforts of the liberal minority on the court at times. This is not a partisan criticism; both Kagan and Jackson are razor sharp, as are the conservatives. Sotomayor really reminds me of people I've known who landed jobs they were under-qualified for. Her dissent in this case reads like a Tweet, like a Facebook post.
Congress doesn't have any authority to make an official act of the president illegal. Imagine, for a moment, Congress passed a law saying it is illegal for the president to veto a bill, to illustrate the issue with this entire line of reasoning.
It's the same issue with Congress passing laws regulating the Supreme Court. They don't have the authority to do so there, either, for fundamentally the same reasons.
This decision was basically the only decision they could have made.
> Imagine, for a moment, Congress passed a law saying it is illegal for the president to veto a bill, to illustrate the issue with this entire line of reasoning.
Is that an illustrative example, or is it just the precisely one thing that Congress shouldn't be allowed to prohibit the President from doing?
Is Congress allowed to pass a law that makes it illegal for the President to execute any Congressman he wants?
It is an illustrative example.
And no, I don't think Congress could, but any such order the president gave would be necessarily unconstitutional (because that would be interfering in Congress' powers).
Perhaps we're not getting close enough to the issue. I can see that Congress shouldn't be allowed to pass laws designed specifically to limit the power of the President. I don't see that this should exempt the President from having to follow the laws that apply to every other random schmo. I think you can have one without the other.
The President -does- have to follow the laws that apply to every other random schmo - except when those laws would limit the power of the President. That is, when he is acting in an official capacity.
So when a POTUS is acting in his official capacity he is above the law. That is literally what you just said.
So Biden right now can directly order the BATF to tear open every couch cushion and wall panel and cabinet or drawer in all of Mar a Largo searching for "something illegal", and whether they find anything or not he can never be prosecuted or sued for it. Lifetime immunity. Am I understanding this argument correctly?
I strongly disagree.
First, they mostly haven't even clarified what constitutes an "official act". Some categories are outlined and they say obviously stuff the Constitution says would be "official".
Second, they forbid the courts from considering the motivation of the President. If he, as alleged, tried to order the Justice Department to investigate the election just to hold onto power... doesn't matter, any time the President is directing the DOJ, he's definitely immune. He can order investigations into her s political opponents or his childhood bullies or whatever.
Third, they put the burden of proof on the prosecutor to show that his actions aren't "official". This is different from most examples of "affirmative defenses" ("Yes, I did this normally-illegal thing, BUT...") which generally put the burden of proof on the defendant to establish why they apply.
I honestly don't even see why this ruling would be necessary under the separation-of-powers concerns here. Obviously if you passed a law saying the President can't exercise his constitutional powers, that law could and would be found unconstitutional. If you pass a law saying the President can't exercise STATUTORY powers, all you're doing is repealing another law, which you can do.
I think you're reaching here, on all three counts, for reasons to disagree with the decision, rather than trying to understand it.
Okay. Well, I don't think so, but if you want to make a case for WHY you think that, that would be helpful.
Because your first point has nothing to do with the decision.
Your second point ignores the point of the decision in favor of the conclusion you want them to reach - if Congress doesn't have the authority to do something, it can't mens-rea its way into having said authority.
And your third point fails to distinguish between the question of guilt, and the question of whether a crime has been committed. It is the job of the prosecution to prove both; an affirmative defense concedes the crime but denies the guilt.
My first point is regarding the decision - I think it's bad to decide that the President can't be prosecuted for "official acts" but then fail to give clear guidelines as to what that means and basically just ask the lower court to figure it out, at which point it will be appealed right back up to here.
My second point is germane to the real acts at question in the decision - if the President abuses his power to investigate his political opponents when he has no actual reason to suspect that they have committed a crime, I think it's plausible that the President is committing a crime (harassment, maybe). The Court says it *literally does not matter*. What if somebody offers the President $10 billion to let Russia invade the UK? I guess he can take it and order the military to stand down and he can't be convicted under any bribery law since this would be an official act (although obviously the Court already pretty well destroyed bribery laws in McDonnell v. US, helpfully cited in this decision).
My third point does NOT make any such distinction - I'm merely noting that I think it's odd the Court defines an affirmative defense for the President that, *unlike* other ones, leaves the burden of proof on the prosecution.
The DoJ is explicitly subordinate to the President. No member of the DoJ has any constitutional authority *absent* delegation from the President. And that's exactly how it should be--otherwise the real masters are the (faceless, unelected, completely unaccountable in that hypothetical) DoJ officials. We do not want a Pretorian Guard.
If the President does something obviously criminal but part of an official act...impeach him. If he does something criminal that's *not* an official act, the decision is very clear that he's not immune for that.
From today's ruling: "The reasons that justify the President’s absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for acts within the scope of his exclusive constitutional authority do not extend to conduct in areas where his authority is shared with Congress."
There is no mention in the Constitution of a Department of Justice nor of federal prosecutors generally; in the Constitutional Convention the Framers assumed that criminal justice would be handled by the states. That's why for the first 80 years after the Constitutional Convention the Attorney General was a part-time position created by Congress in 1789 whose duties were only to represent the government in the Supreme Court and to provide legal opinions to Congress or the President when asked. That same 1789 act of Congress had also established the concept of U.S. Attorneys, i.e. federal prosecutors, but with much-more limited authority than we see today (basically just to deal with federal land issues which is why those few lawyers were part of the Department of the Interior).
It was only in 1870 that _Congress_ decided on and passed the law which began the practice of US Attorneys prosecuting violations of federal law generally, and also made the Attorney General into a fulltime job with Cabinet-level status and salary.
As another example of shared authority in this realm, Congress in 1968 passed a law dictating some specifics of the appointment of the FBI director (limiting the president's authority over who sits in that chair); their doing that has not been found by any court to be a violation of the constitutional separation of powers.
There is really could be no better example of an area in which the president's authority "is shared with Congress". So this right here is an example of the majority's selectively ignoring originalism, as today's dissenters could have better spent their time pointing out.
The currently-being-charged President is out of office, though. And part of the argument for NOT impeaching him after the Capitol riot was that he was leaving office, so that creates a bit of a catch-22. (Also, what if you learn about crimes after they are out of office? Probably more likely than learning while they're in office.)
The majority ruling issued today does call bullshit on the idea that a former president could be criminally prosecuted only after having been impeached and removed from office. "Transforming the political process of impeachment into a necessary step in the enforcement of criminal law finds little support in the text of the Constitution or the structure of the Nation’s Government."
Right, the correct answer to problems with the elected Executive branch is via the Legislative and Judicial branches, plus mass resignations by executive employees who refuse to participate. We don't want mutiny. Coups are bad. People come and go, but the structure remains... or it doesn't.
I tried to "map" the Peter Miller/Rootclaim debate and it was a weird task: https://imgur.com/a/Ic6UJuH
I haven't edited it properly so it's more than likely it's just legible to me.
That's impressive. I think it would be easier to follow if it used a more standard font, like a bare-bones sans-serif. Also, for humor value, maybe the connecting lines should be colored red. ;-)
Yeah, I could see that. There are a lot of little things that this manual effort doesn't make easy, like the question links and size of nodes based on connections or proximity based on connections etc.
What's the joke?! Death?
No, it's just a reference to the conspiracy theory trope:
https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/49575/what-is-the-point-of-the-red-thread-tape-around-evidence-or-newspaper-clippings
oooh haha yeah I did not see that at all, sry lawl. Red yarn.
Ever wonder what happens when a car or truck collides with and shears off a fire hydrant?
Wrote about that in the latest issue of the newsletter for a small biz I work with ... (Teaser: there's a different small company that has a clever solution for that problem!)
https://mailchi.mp/highsierrashowerheads/2024-june-newsletter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mNzIjDuD5Q&ab_channel=NicoleRudolph
Half an hour on foot variations and the shoes they need. Stuff I'd never heard before like that some people have feet with a straight axis (so not much difference between left foot and right foot) and others have more of a bend towards the centerline of the body.
Some people have little toes that stick out. The height of various parts of the foot aren't the same from one person to another.
Some leather will stretch more than others. "Plant" "leather" includes plastic for strength and won't stretch.
The stitching and edges matter for comfort.
This is not a complete summary of what can be covered in a fairly efficient half hour. I'm sure there's more foot variation, even among people with fairly normal feet, that's relevant to shoes.
So, what would it take to have computer-aided good quality custom shoes?
It seems entirely plausible that one could write a program that could put together a fabric pattern for the various textile and leather components of a given type of shoe, adjusted to your specific foot characteristics and measurements.
The immediate problem I see is that shoes are made on lasts (i.e. a 3D "mold" of the interior negative space of the shoe around which the whole shoe is built). Even custom shoes at present are made from one of the manufacturer's standard lasts. For a fully custom shoe you would need either a fully custom last, perhaps 3D printed. But a manufacturer could certainly just have a greater number of lasts for a greater variety of foot types, and that would go a long way.
I don't know whether you watched the video, but it seems to take a good bit of knowledge to fit even slightly unusual feet.
You're right that a greater variety of lasts from mass manufacturers would help.
I finally caught Covid. Symptoms started about 10 days ago, coughing, sore throat, body aches, fatigue. Never any fever though. Symptoms have been mostly gone for a few days now, with a bit of nasal congestion draining and causing an occasional cough. I can kill this with a long acting Sudafed.
I'm now wondering when it will be okay to, say, get a haircut without putting my barber in danger. My home test showed positive for Covid yesterday but some sites on the internet say that can go on for weeks after I am no longer shedding the virus.
Your barber is probably exposed to Covid several times per week through their work so your actions won't change their risk at all. I'd say go get a haircut as soon as you stop coughing. Your barber probably had the virus at least twice by now and has great immunity.
If you’re still testing positive on a rapid you’re still contagious (er doc). The rules of the cdc and the “rules” of infectious diseases don’t always align. I’d wear an n95 for others protection if you have to go out. I know everyone is casual about it now, but there are immunocompromised people in the world and you’d be a kind person to consider them if you’re able. I do think we have an obligation to one another.
Thanks for the straight forward answer. Online medical sites vary a lot by agency - and date of course.
No fever? That's been the worst parts of the two times I got it badly. I hope your luck stays good!
As I recall, there was guidance on the CDC site for what to do. I don't remember the details, but it was something like "wait 5 days past the end of primary symptoms, or wait until you stop testing positive, whichever is longer", but I don't know if that's an accurate recollection. I was never sure how actually grounded in science the guideline was, but it at least served the purpose of giving people a clear rule to follow.
I was in a tiny town in AK the first few days of symptoms, laying inert in a hotel room eating an occasional Cliff bar for sustenance rather than salmon fishing as I had planned. I didn’t have the energy to find a thermometer at that point but didn’t feel ‘feverish’.
I’ve been home a couple days and haven’t clocked a fever without any Tylenol or ibuprofen so I dunno. Maybe I had a fever earlier but was too miserable in other way to notice?
Feeling pretty chipper right now though. Just mowed my lawn with no sign of fatigue. An afternoon bike ride doesn’t seem out of the question. I’ll take another home test tomorrow and go from there.
I do have that pro grade Oster clipper and if bad comes to worse I can put the #1 guard on and trim to a 5 o’clock shadow in a few minutes. ;)
My fevers were extremely noticeable - I didn't even bother to measure. I was huddling under blankets, shivering and sweating at the same time, with an ice pack on my head, for about 36 hours. But I think there was a time when I might have had a mild case, and skipped the fever and most other symptoms entirely. (This was back when tests were harder to come by, and the household's tests needed to be reserved for other people.)
With the serious cases, by the time I was ready for things like yard work or a bike ride, I was basically fine. So maybe try it out, but don't get too worried if you get tired fast? That's how it manifested with me - I felt OK as long as I wasn't doing much, but exertion wore me out very fast. My stamina was the last thing to recover.
Pre-COVID, I once had a fever and was huddling in blankets because I too was shivering. That didn't make sense, so I got up the courage to open up the blankets, and within a few minutes I was feeling more normal, without shivers.
So the fever was also messing up my temperature-sense, and cooling myself down made me feel warmer.
I tend to view fevers as the body trying to raise its temperature to kill the infection (faster than it kills the overall body), which would explain why the temperature is high but all the sensors are screaming "get warmer". So I try to help it out, but I put the ice pack on my head to keep my brain from frying.
I had read that that view is incorrect, that the body just no longer is doing things correctly, and the medically correct thing to do is reduce your temperature.
I'm not a doctor (medical or otherwise), and have done little research into this. But my experience I take as a confirming data-point.
Home tests, ie antigen tests, only react to actual virus. So if the home test is positive you are contagious. Also, antigen tests are not terribly sensitive, so a positive result indicates the presence of a fair amount of virus. At one point the researchers I trusted were saying that the amount of virus needed to turn an antigen test positive was approximately equal to the amount that made you contagious. I don’t know whether that is still true with the present variants. PCR tests react to fragments of virus, so you can have a positive PCR and not be contagious. I presume you did a home test, so you should consider yourself contagious.
They have some degree of false positives too, though. I have my doubts that it was COVID if it didn't have a fever in the symptoms, but I have also heard not every instance had a fever.
Uncertainties make things...uncertain.
Antigen tests have a very low false positive rate, around 1% or less. They have a substantial false negative rate because it takes a pretty good amt of virus to turn them positive. PCR tests are the reverse — very low false
Negative because they are so sensitive, but substantial false
Positive
As a rule of thumb, with a positive test I would probably avoid situations like a haircut which can easily be postponed by a few days. Especially if you still some mild leftover symptoms. It can happen that the test stay positive for very long time, but in most cases it does not.
From the barber's perspective, I would see it as a considerate act if my customer waits for a few days more. But every barber is different, of course.
Pretty much everyone you'd meet on a casual trip to the hairdressers has either been vaccinated or had the disease at this point. There's little to no appreciable risk as long as you're past the feeling ill stage, not that you'd want to go out at that point. I would avoid people with a weakened immune system for a another week or so, but that's precautionary.
I learned to cut my own hair and my partner's hair during the worst of the pandemic. I've found it to be valuable by saving us money and time as well as enjoyable. I can't speak to whether you're shedding virus still, but it might be a fun opportunity to teach yourself a new skill.
I have a professional grade Oster that I do use myself occasionally. During Covid lockdown my wife got pretty good at giving me a trim that didn't quite make me look like I'd escaped some sort of institution. I also have a #1 guard that takes my hair down to about 1/8" that I occasionally use on myself mid-sticky-summer and I just want to be able to brush my teeth and go.
Just do what people normally do when sick… go back out when you feel the worst has passed.
My COVID update for weeks epidemiological weeks 25 and 26.
1. National wastewater numbers are rising, but not very quickly.
2. Likewise, the current wave seems to spreading unevenly. Not much happening in the NYC boroughs, but SanJose (and Boston, which I didn't discuss in my update) show a big rise. Even sewersheds in the same municipality give distinctly different readings. East San Francisco shows a lot of COVID in the sewage. The West side of the City, not so much.
3. Cases are starting to rise in some areas (for instance California show a pretty steep rise in hospitalizations, but ICU usage isn't rising), but the overall Nat'l avg only shows a small uptick in hospitalizations.
3. The JN.1x variants with the FLiRT mutations seem to leveling out around the 65% mark. There doesn't seem to be a single variant that's driving the wave (as we've seen in past waves).
4. I'm beginning to wonder if this wave won't fizzle out soon. But by saying that, I've probably jinxed us into a huge wave.
5. H5 was found in SF watersheds. SF doesn't have any livestock industries, so everyone is puzzled. It's not clear if it's the avian influenza strain of H5 flu, though. I hope we'll have a more certain ID in the coming week.
6. Big Clade 1 MPox outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Clade 1 is more virulent—it can kill up to 10% of people infected. Clade 2 triggered the 2022 outbreak and less than 1% of people infected died. Sexual transmission is a key vector, but it's also transmitted in other ways. I expect we'll see it in the US and Europe soon.
https://x.com/beowulf888/status/1807610242450296832
What's your estimate for the mean mortality rate of COVID's latest strains vs the flu at this point?
That's a damn good question! Unfortunately, I don't have a damn good answer for you. It all depends on the percentage of asymptomatic cases. During the JN.1 wave earlier this year, at peak...
1. Based on wastewater data one expert (Lucky Tran) estimated that 2 million people were being infected every day. JP Weiland estimated 1.2 million per day.
2. The hospitalization rate was ~4500/day during the JN.1 peak.
3. The mortality rate was 0.5 per 100,000 per week — which translates to ~236/day.
4. If 2 million were being infected every day, but only 4500 were being hospitalized hospitalization rate is 0.00225. If 1.2 million were being infected every day, and 4500 were being hospitalized each day the mortality rate would be around 0.00375. Miller et al. puts the hospitalization rate for Rhinoviruses at 0.003. So *if* — and it's a big if — if Tran's and Weiland's models are in the ballpark, then COVID-19's hospitalization rates are roughly those of a common common cold virus.
When I reached out to them with that estimate, neither replied. I got the impression that they wanted to believe their models, but they didn't want to believe that SARS2 had become another common cold.
Even though I respect what they're trying to do, I *do not* believe their numbers. I think they were overestimating the infection rate by at least an order of magnitude. My reasoning is two-fold. First, there have been studies that show post BA.1 variants are shedding more virus particles than previous vars. As much as two orders of magnitude more. Neither Tran nor Weiland would comment if they incorporated that info into their models. Second, if between 1.2 and 2.0 million peeps were being infected each day then there were a hell of lot of asymptomatic or perisymptomatic cases! Estimates of asymptomaticity are all over the place for SARS2 — from 1% to >90%. A meta-study last year suggested that asymptomaticity is a myth. They suggested that if you get infected you're going to have at least some symptoms — i.e. you'd be perisymptomatic with at least some mild respiratory or bowel symptoms.
My gut feeling is that COVID-19 is still overall more deadly than the flu.
A JAMA article (behind a paywall now) estimated that, for the 2023-24 season flu season, at 30 days post-diagnosis COVID-19 had a slightly higher death rate (5.97%) than flu (4.24%). IIRC they derived this from people who had visited either an ER or were hospitalized, but don't quote me on that.
And to sorta kinda answer your question, although newer strains might avoid our neutralizing antibodies (NAbs), they've still got to deal with our killer T cells (which are keyed to different, more generic, epitopes than our NAbs are) and our B cells that are undergoing somatic hypermutation (i.e. our B cells are always creating *new* neutralizing antibodies from a "seed" epitope that they learned via infection or vaccination). So SARS2 may spread quickly between people, and people might become sick, but our T cells and B cells seem to be doing a good job preventing serious illness and death. I don't think any new variants will be able to get around most peoples' secondary line of defenses — though you'd be at risk if you're immune compromised, elderly (which is the same as being immune compromised), or too young to have any NAbs. Also, note, that despite abysmal booster uptake in the US, people aren't dying in droves like they did early in the pandemic. So I think our humoral immune system is standing up pretty well to SARS2.
I suspect that in another year or two SARS-CoV-2 will become another common cold HCoV like OC43, HKU1, 229E, or NL63. Remember there's some strong evidence that the progenitor of the current OC43 virus was the pathogen that caused the (pretty deadly) Russian Flu back in the 1880s...
"SF doesn't have any livestock industries"
Well, not that we know of! 😁
For MPox, do you know whether sexual transmission, and specifically sexual MSM transmission is the main driver for other clades than the 2022 outbreak? Was the 2022 outbreak an exception?
My understanding is that with this Clade 1 outbreak only roughly a third of the infections are due to sexual transmission (and that seems to be due to MSM sex). A bunch of kids have been infected, though. So it's getting around via other vectors than MSM. Our Clade 2 outbreak in 2022, was almost all MSM driven (IIRC >95% of the cases were tied to MSM contact).
I don't know about previous MPox outbreaks or variants.
Thank you very much, that is very helpful!
Seeing as aging leaders & succession is on everyone's mind..... does, uh, anyone know what would happen if Xi Jinping were to die unexpectedly? He's 71 years old, so younger than the US leaders but in the actuarial zone of 'something could happen to the guy overnight'. I haven't the slightest insight into China's political structure, other than a vague understanding that it's all councils within councils within councils. As I understand it Xi consolidated power and swept aside whatever kind of proto-political structure China had after the Deng period. Is there a succession plan? Is it stable? The Soviets at least had some kind of structure.
There were faint rumors of an attempted coup or at least some political squabbling between Chinese leaders a few years ago
Xi Jinping has three positions that make him paramount leader: General Secretary of the CCP, President of China, and Chairman of the Central Military Commission. All three of those bodies have succession plans but they go to different people. Still, if Xi was found dead tomorrow that's what would happen. You'd have a new head of state, a new head of the party, and a new head of the military and they'd be different people.
In practical terms what's likely to happen is a succession struggle between high ranking members of Xi's faction. Though who knows, maybe another could come in. There's no guarantee that it's even one of the three who get a top job (though that would be common). This would all be played out internally unless something goes very, very wrong. The people who lose would resign in favor of the winner of that succession struggle.
https://asiasociety.org/policy-institute/xi-jinpings-succession-dilemma
Really interesting read, thanks for sharing!
Communist countries don't have major succession struggles. Stuff gets sorted out behind closed doors even if some may end up executed like Beria.
Anti china politics ussally call him a cult of personality overseeing game of thrones style power politics
Getting a real answer is probably hard but unless there's a named successor and you find any degree of politic purges to be power politics, it's probably will be a mess
What are your thoughts on AI’s impact on knowledge workers/ knowledge economy?
If GPT-5 is released by end of 2025 and it beats GPT-4o by the same margin as GPT-4 beat GPT-3.5 => its over for knowledge workers
If its not released or doesn't beat 4o by a huge margin... probably barely noticeable, in line with Robin Hansons views.
If it's over for knowledge workers, then we can have machines be our slaves, and no longer need to do work. We can live in a utopia.
I think this day is a long way off. Maybe GPT-5 will be hugely better than GPT-4, but how will it rank against the top 10% of knowledge workers, where the great work actually gets done? Who will maintain and improve the machines?
Rant: I hate the word "Knowledge Economy" because it's pretentious. The word "Knowledge" is misleading a listener into thinking that it's exclusive to the jobs described as such, but most "Knowledge" jobs involve no out-of-ordinary learning. A taxi driver learns new roads and shortcuts every day, an artisan learns new materials and new crafting, learning and knowledge is not special, they're what humans do. Yet "taxi driver", and "artisan" aren't traditionally called "Knowledge Work", although they do involve a lot of knowledge and they do involve learning. Pilots and Astronauts are another example of the inconsistency, they undergo intense years-long training and study a lot of physics, yet they aren't traditionally called "Knowledge Work".
For a replacement, I prefer "Office Work", "Paper Work", or just the plain old "White Collar". If I want to be particularly a maverick, I might call it "Scribe Jobs" or "Jew Jobs", because those kinds of jobs were traditionally done by scribes in ancient civilizations and by Jews in medieval Europe, respectively. If you want to be brutally honest, they are "Body-less Jobs", if you want to be a Robin Hanson disciple, they're "Em Jobs".
(Perhaps the only exception to some of those terms is the profession of doctors, which I have seen people call "Knowledge Work", but does involve the body in many significant ways.)
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That out of the way, I'm a strong skeptic of AI. Current LLM propensity to hallucinate and bullshit is an obvious disadvantage compared to competent humans, who use the dark art of saying "I don't know" and checking their sources to commit much fewer mistakes. I have read "Situational Awareness" and it makes many interesting arguments for why we're "Hobbling" current LLMs (e.g. we expect an answer immediately in a span of seconds, we expect a right answer on the first try, we expect the answer to not exceed a typical 5x-10x an SMS or tweet length, we train LLMs on the entire garbage of the internet instead of high-quality highly-selected material, etc...). If we "Unhobbled" LLMs in the next 10 years, then maybe this + more compute + more data + better algorithms **might** equal better office workers, at least ones who say "I don't know" and "Would you mind pointing me to a Confluence page?", but I won't hold my breath.
Judging by current and near-term LLMs, one key feature is that their output is lower-quality than their best inputs. This might seem like an irrelevant observation, but it's the reason why LLMs will never replace humans in any meaningful large-scale sense. If you fire all your programmers, your LLMs will burn through your reserves of human code, and then keep outputting shit, and then keep training on shit, and then keep outputting shittier shit, and so on until they can't write anything but documentation examples. Humans inject quality into an inherently net-negative-quality system. Who knows what will happen if the self-proclaimed prophet who wrote Situational Awareness is right, but again I'm assuming current LLMs because that's all what we have for sure.
LLMs are usually infuriating in that (a) They're inconsistent (b) Their abilities are never entirely clear. With humans this is rare, if a human can do X today, then - absent personal tragedies and sleep deprivation - they can do X tomorrow and the day after and the day after that and the next week. Humans usually get hired with a known resume (and an interview that is supposed to verify the resume, but let us not get into the clusterfuck that is the interviewing system), you hire them, and you know that they can do X and Y and Z. If you ask them for a new thing W, then they might or might not know, they might or might not want to learn, but you know for a fact that they know X, Y, and Z, and they will keep knowing it until late age dementia. LLMs violate both principles, they're inconsistent and don't always answer correctly questions that they answered before, and you don't know the true extent of their capabilities (or lack thereof).
LLMs have no accountability, thus managing them is a riskier proposition (all the blame for all of the LLMs' fuckup will be on the nearest human above them in the hierarchy). LLMs are a single point of failure that allows whoever controls their operation and supply chain to chokehold a dependent organization and deprive it of its entire workforce (or worse, spy on and commandeer the workforce) in a way that no party except a government can do to a human workforce.
Nothing is wrong with the term "knowledge worker". It encompasses workers who primarily use knowledge to do their job. It makes much more sense to refer to a woodworker as a woodworker than a wood-nails-screws-glue-hammer-screwdriver-drill-apprentice-knowledge worker.
Also, LLMs are strongly correlated with each other. The hidden failure modes that you'll wake up to one day are present in *all* your office drones in the exact same way.
> If you fire all your programmers, your LLMs will burn through your reserves of human code, and then keep outputting shit, and then keep training on shit, and then keep outputting shittier shit, and so on until they can't write anything but documentation examples.
I disagree with this premise. That's only if there's no way to measure quality. If you rate code on a number of measures, you can train AIs to hill-climb in the direction that the higher measures point to.
I do agree that, given the current state of AI, this would apply to art. If there were no more human input as to what art was "aesthetically pleasing to humans", then over time a purely current-AI-driven system would devolve into something that would almost certainly not be "aesthetically pleasing to humans". But I think this will eventually fall away as AIs become more sophisticated and are trained on more types of input.
>>...then over time a purely current-AI-driven system would devolve into something that would almost certainly not be "aesthetically pleasing to humans".
Think of YouTube where content creators are chasing the algorithm to be considered good, instead of the algorithm chasing good creators. [insert O-face and finger pointing at circled sentence]
I *really* wish I could interview one of the apparently legions of people who see thumbnails like that and think, "yes, this looks like something I want to watch!" I actively avoid anything that resembles this, but evidence suggests *I'm* the weirdo.
The trouble is there's only a limited amount of written and visual training data out there, and we risk AI model collapse if we start incorporating AI-generated data into the training sets.
Maybe better learning algorithms couldn't improve things, though. But watching all the generative AI garbage that is filling up my Facebook groups and art subreddits it's hard for me to believe that AI is going to generate anything better using this crap in its training data.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDUC-LqVrPU
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04125
There's the saying that "90% of everything is crap", but that's only true because humans have a lot of filters that keep us from doing crap things. A script running a current AI will probably generate several 9s worth of crap.
It occurs to me that maybe the reactionaries have a point, here: RETVRN to a classics-oriented curriculum. Or in a more actionable modern incarnation, assign importance based on popularity over time, thus discounting anything recent. Many and most movies from the 40s and 50s were bad, but the ones that still have popularity were great. How many AI images generated in the last year will still be relevant even 5 years from now? And even using the older unpopular movies as data points can be useful, to provide context for what made the good ones good.
Amen!
There was a great coinage a decade ago: there will be two types of jobs, jobs where you tell machines what to do, and jobs where machines tell you what to do.
I think more and more of "knowledge work" will be a combination, where humans act as a missing link and provide judgement that AI is not yet capable of. And obviously that's not a stable niche. Right now there's value in learning the current "prompt" interfaces to persuade AIs to do something, and there's value in reviewing their solutions to make sure they work. But I think those will go away soon.
- remove many more "mechanical" jobs (e.g. _just_ writing code or _just_ sketching a logo) while raising need for synthesis/creativity/true expertise
- make the mechanical tasks easier and free up bandwidth/time for "higher level" tasks
I've heard people reference a loop we might get into where AI is feeding upon itself and so it stagnates and so there will be an ongoing need for new knowledge generation.
Short hot take: it will make "knowledge workers" more valuable relative to everyone else. But there will be a lot of churn.
One issue on which I recently updated my views: AI is a serious threat to musicians' livelihoods. I toyed with Suno, and it's terrifying. Version 3.5 creates really good soundtracks in minutes. This means that all that sync work, i.e., music for movies, video games, commercials, etc., that provides many musicians with good work and a decent living, will be gone. We're going back to pre-Edison times - the only way for human musicians to make any money will be to play live, and maybe supplement income from streaming of songs people like. But I do expect now to see the streaming services to be inundated by AI-generated music, something I was skeptical about just a few months ago.
According to Ted Gioia on his substack, streaming services have already been inundated by AI-generated music for awhile now.
Not surprised at all. I read years ago about Spotify hiring session musicians to play things like soft jazz standards and such for ‘Music for Dinner’ kinds of playlists so that Spotify did not have to pay royalties. Now AI is plenty good enough for this stuff.
The music industry collapsed about two decades back without the help of AI. The only way *most* musicians can make money is through live performances (or live on Youtube or other social media).
Rick Beato has some theories about this. Here's one of the videos he did on the subject...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klxif5McurI
And on why music isn't as good as it used to be...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZ0OSEViyo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU96wCDHGKM
I've gotten the impression it started using "manual AI" around then. They discovered a formula for a "hit" song, and keep implementing it. Really good new stuff is hard to find.
Compare to, say, The Beatles, who produced different songs as hits consistently, though with some similar qualities. Some stuff they did also sounds original, but turn out to be covers. For example, Can't Buy Me Love is original, but Money is a cover, which is understandable, since they are opposite points of view in meaning.
And the streaming media companies like Spotify *seem* to be inserting AI-generated music in their streams — most likely because they won't need to pay royalties to AI.
Yeah, I'm familiar with his stuff, he's quite on point. Funny how he used drums as an example, too.
Knowledge workers are the only people under threat, if any. Plumbers are ok.
As a musician, I find your comment about the pre-Edison period confusing. Before Edison, there were much more professional opportunities for musicians. The advent of AI composing tools won't be going back to an older time, because those professional opportunities have not existed for a long time and won't be coming back into existence. I can't imagine it will ever be as common to hire a performer or orchestra for events, religious services, restaurants as it was before Edison. Musicians including songwriters and arrangers will probably be collaborating with AI tools when writing, and performing. It won't be like the past in any key way that I can see.
I see - I meant "pre-Edison" as in "pre-recording", so the only income a musician could generate was from playing live. Your point is valid - there also were far more opportunities to generate this income because the only way to hear music was also "live". This latter part is not coming back indeed.
AI might influence the music writing market which was already insanely competitive but not much else. People would still want celebrities, sex appeal, concerts and novelty.
Hopefully we will get better written music with AI because the current trends are sad.
I actually agree wholly with your first paragraph - that's what I meant with the live music part. I don't quite share your negative view of the current music scene - excellent music is out there, it's hard to find because there's just so much of it.
But the part I'm worried about - the un-glamorous sync work that pays many musician's bills, recording session musicians, stuff like that - will be gone. Heck, I don't play drums and even now it has never occurred to me to hire a session drummer for my music projects, I just program loops of drum samples. But I don't play live, so I get away with it.
Eexcellent music gets produced but music is stagnating with no new major genres in 30 years. Compare the pace of music evolution between 1950-1994 to the change between 1994 and now. The last 30 years were of stagnation.
Plus the trend is away from the more complex and creative genres like rock and electronica and towards more repetitive genres like hip hop or towards simple, catchy hooks in short pop songs that hope to go viral on tiktok.
For me the only bright spot is kpop and that's not because of music which in unoriginal but because of the importance of choreography in kpop.
From what I've seen, a tremendous amount of good new music is being created, but the hit pipeline no longer exists.
I hadn't thought about the implications for new genres, but perhaps they need a critical mass of creators and fans-- possibly in person-- and there's no way for that to coalesce.
Yes, I kind of see your point. Khruangbin exists and fills small venues, but the venues are small :)
I wonder how much of the music evolution between 1950...94 was a consequence of rapidly developing technology. Thinking about a difference between 1950 studio and 1990 studio - it's like a different planet in 1990. But 1995 to today? Sure computers are more powerful, but you'd still spot the same SM57 on a guitar cab, and we're emulating old tape distortion with plugins. Same goes for instruments.
My initial thought was "this is so obvious, i didn't think it was worth mentioning". But this is mean, and not everyone lives in the same bubble as me. So I'm trying to think of reasons why "of course technology drove music innovation" is obvious to me.
Besides "yes, distortion was kind of a big deal", another thing which comes to mind is the Roland TR-808. I feel like this thing rears its head in every other music documentary. IIRC, it can be summed up as "it became massively popular because it was cheap and overstocked". I think there's more to it, but I don't remember the full story because it's never the center of attention.
edit: wikipedia says
> The 808 was a commercial failure, as electronic music had yet to become mainstream and many producers wanted more realistic drum sounds. After building approximately 12,000 units, Roland discontinued the 808 after its semiconductors became impossible to restock. It was succeeded by the TR-909 in 1983.
> Over the course of the 1980s, the 808 attracted a cult following among underground musicians for its affordability on the used market, ease of use and idiosyncratic sounds, particularly its deep, booming bass drum. It became a cornerstone of the emerging electronic, dance and hip hop genres, popularized by early hits such as "Planet Rock" by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force and "Sexual Healing" by Marvin Gaye.
"Black Metal Without Distortion Is Just Surf Rock" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwGgDmHuGpA)
Don’t you think With the advent of AI agents, knowledge workers are working themselves out of a job? They will contribute directly or indirectly in training AI agents. For instance in your ‘music industry’ example id say we can probably take it even further and say the whole creative industry and administrative work will be the first casualty and then more ‘knowledge intensive’ domains like engineering design and modeling. I think a substantial layer of knowledge industry will rely on AI input. Which consequently introduce a paradigm shift on human’s new role.
training your replacement is an experience as old as humanity
In the olden times your replacement was also human, and subject to human limitations :-(
Do you really think they're going to stop after the first wave? Do you think there's nothing "better" than LLMs to be found in the mindspace?
That falls under my "a lot of churn" blurb. The history of tech innovation is full of new technologies making a swath of old jobs obsolete, and creating another swath of new jobs. It's just really hard to tell in advance what the new jobs will be, and it is really hard on actual humans losing their old jobs.
I don't know enough about creative fields outside of music to offer an informed opinion.
I have a question about birds.
On the fairly busy street in the fairly rural area where I live, birds are always flying across the street at a meter or so above the ground. This seems foolish to me, because by simply doubling the height of their flight path, birds could pretty much guarantee they would not get hit by cars.
Is the amount of energy required to get further off the ground so great that the extra safety of a higher flight is not worthwhile? Or are birds so good at dodging cars that they simply are not going toi hit even if they take risks? Or are birds dumb, and this is just what happens when you’re a dumb bird?
They can’t be THAT dumb, because birds don’t fly across highways at waist-level. Also, I rarely see squashed birds on the side of the road (unlike squirrels, opossums, etc.).
Just wondering if there’s a consensus from ornithologists or someone about this.
I struck and killed a bird with my car just last week. This is the 3rd one (that I've noticed) in my life and the first one in the last 20 years. I'd speculate that birds never really "learn" to not fly in front of cars. Heck, deer don't either. I live in a mostly rural area around a small (50k) city, deer strikes are extremely common here and I am exceptionally paranoid in the Fall about them. One of my co-workers has struck 8 deer in his life while driving, I'm still at 0, though I've had to come to a complete stop due to deer in or need the road on average about 3 times per year.
I’m not sure if it’s the same as your birds, but I’ve seen small birds which flap when they’re only a foot or two above the ground. (They gain maybe another foot after flapping.) I imagine this might be a physics thing, where it’s more efficient to flap when you’re close to a hard surface.
I don’t know how the physics would work. Maybe it’s something to do with the ground reflecting the kinetic energy of the air into the bird, or something? But they seem a bit faster flying close to the ground.
Maybe they're afraid of heights.
If you never see squashed birds or a bird get hit by a car, this indicates that whatever it is that the birds are doing is sufficient to not get hit by cars.
Birds have a much shorter reaction time* than humans, and a much faster acceleration**. This means that before a human has even reacted to something, a bird may be moving as fast as a human sprinter, and it does not take that much time at that speed to get out of the way of a car which is only a couple meters across. If you imagine you are standing in the road and a car is coming at you at 5-10 miles an hour, that's probably closer to how a bird perceives and will react to a car coming at it 25-50 miles an hour.
Another way of looking at it is to look at how fast birds are capable of flying normally. Common doves fly at 25-45 mph, ie about the same speed as most cars on city streets. So they are already optimized to dodge and react to obstacles moving at that speed.
* depending on what you read it can take as much as 5x more time for humans to react to something.
** As an example, a bird taking off may accelerate at 3-4 meters per second. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7696&context=etd
Regarding reaction time, most birds are much smaller than humans, so the reaction time may be related to how long the nerve impulses take in traveling. Eyes collect data, send it to the brain, where it is processed, and turned into instructions to muscles and sent out, for the muscles then to act. It is unsurprising the distance of this information path would be 5x longer in humans.
A bird collided with my window the weekend before last. There were multiple of them flying across the road at the same time, and I wondered why they didn't fly high enough to avoid my not-especially-tall car.
Presumably because birds are thinking about eating, not cars
For **, I think you mean "meters per second squared"?
Gaining altitude is indeed hard work, so it makes sense to fly as low as possible, all else being equal.
I love watching ravens working the thermals on a sunny day. They do put on a show.
Presumably it's harder to see food from higher up if you're a pigeon? And perhaps you're at greater risk of flying predators higher up. Cars are very new dangers in the grand scheme of things and I don't think that many birds get hit by them.
My uninformed guess would be that birds mostly fly on instinct, and did not evolve to dodge cars?
And there was not enough time for cars to apply selective pressure (even if bird would die from getting hit by a car often, which probably is not the case).
But of course, I'm too curious to know if someone has a better idea.
I've worked closely with ornithologists for many years, and both of your comments are consistent with their view of this sort of question. (Of which there are plenty of examples that people notice.)
In addition, the great majority of bird species evolved in a context of both great numbers, and relatively rapid reproduction cycles. Hence it has never been a natural-selection priority for individual pigeons or whatever to analyze and distinguish among new or unusual individual risks. If X,000 (pigeons or whatever) per year get eliminated by cars that won't even be a blip in the collective success or failure of (pigeons or whatever).
Birds generally have more brainpower than some other vertebrates, and some avian species are particularly clever in specific ways (famously the members of the genus Corvus which is crows/ravens/rooks). At the natural-selection level though they do have a fair amount of zerg-rush tendencies.
> At the natural-selection level though they do have a fair amount of zerg-rush tendencies.
Joke: Kentucky Fried Chicken is a ritual re-enactment of the triumph of mammals over dinosaurs.
I think I have an angle on how to frame FDA "re-regulation". If I think about the concept "regulate drugs less" even I feel a catch in the stomach despite rationally having every reason to support that
So my concept is that FDA employees from top to bottom will have their future wage raises tied equally to two metrics. Half will be dependent on safety as they currently percieve it - lack of unexpected side effects. Half will be dependent on whether new drugs with beneficial effects succeed in being approved more often
Let's say you streamline and relax regulation requirements such that 10% more drugs are approved and unexpected side effects increase by 1%. Some direct QALY measurement finds a 100-1 benefit. Significant raises are in order. I think not only does this change the incentive ecosystem of the FDA but also the perception of their performance
Person A: "This new drug did these bad things"
Person B: "Overall though the FDA had a 100-1 benefits delta, and they don't get raises otherwise"
It's hard for me to picture writers who support the FDA in general finding this setup to be something they can obviously oppose, even if it fundamentally changes the incentives and behaviour of the FDA
I feel like you don't understand the industry. ALL things have side-effects. The question is whether the side-effects outweigh the intended benefits. Also whether there actually ARE intended benefits.
I think the drug marketplace is now intentionally obfuscated to the consumer. Some drugs ought to be regulated to prevent abuse. But I've never heard, for example, of people abusing insulin. Why can't I see a selection of insulin choices, with different benefits and pricing, and choose between them? The current system makes one compare prices by "filling" the prescription somewhere and, to check the price somewhere else, transferring it to the new place and then seeing what they charge in comparison.
I don't doubt there are lots of other drugs that no one would take other than for their intended medicinal purpose, yet can't be made over-the-counter for unclear reasons.
Why do we feel our emotions in our bodies?
Epistemic status: very speculative
Subtitle to annoy skeptics: Could chakras be “real”?
Trigger warnings: desacralization of spiritual experiences, speciesism, oversimplification of Science
Emotions are very complex and largely “hardwired” neuronal activities that likely require multi-layer structures with rich feedback mechanisms, i.e. an advanced CNS. But they had to evolve somehow, which means they must have started in simpler lifeforms (and evidence seems to support it - more primitive animals seem to show some emotional capacity, but to a lesser degree than advanced ones). So when emotions were evolving in smaller/simpler CNS structures, nature didn’t have a lot of neurons to work with, and it seems plausible that it could have ended up reusing the same structures for both emotional and somatic/kinesthetic processing. And it could be that this arrangement worked well enough to persist into more advanced species (as often happens in evolution), and, eventually, humans. Which would mean that while our emotions do not physically happen in our bodies (i.e. they largely happen in the brain), perceptually it’s quite the opposite; that is, it may be impossible (at least to an untrained mind) to perceptually separate emotions from literal physical processes happening in/to our bodies.
And if we take it further, it might provide an interesting pathway to exploring chakras, “energy body” and other “energetic” phenomena that supposedly happen in the body but that scientific methods are not able to detect in the body no matter how hard we try. Because even though the subjects feel those phenomena in their bodies, they literally physically happen only in their brains, and not in the sense they’re imaginal, but rather that there are specific structures in our brains responsible for those experiences, and they likely exist “in hardware” even in subjects that don’t report those experiences because the corresponding patterns/processes are inhibited “in software” in those subjects, perhaps due to the way modern culture works.
Looking from a slightly different angle, that might also explain why things like acupuncture or reiki may fail to work in RCTs but people continue to report successes in the field - if RCTs don’t take the degree of “embodied-ness” of subjects into consideration, they would end up with a lot of subjects that are “disembodied”, i.e. don’t process their emotional/somatic experiences very well and therefore don’t respond to somatic/”energetic” manipulations very well (myself being a prime example of that, FWIW). On the other hand, in the field the patients of such treatments largely self-select by the degree of belief into these esoteric/irrational things, and that is likely to correlate highly with their degree of embodied-ness, directly increasing the effectiveness of treatments.
Have a look at the work of Antonio Damasio for some very good insights into these mechanisms.
I find it amusing that he uses the heart metaphorically many times in his books (in relation to truthfulness and kindness) but never seems to wonder _why_ that metaphor comes up in nearly all cultures and how that might be tied into the body/brain emotional processing (though I only searched through three of his books that seemed relevant, could be that he addresses it elsewhere).
Relatedly, it's even more amusing that the area traditionally associated with those hearty sensations (middle of the left ribcage, near the lower edge of the pectoralis major) is not where the heart actually is located! As far as I can tell, this area is approximately in between the heart and the spleen, and the only organ actually located there is the left lung (or the lower part of it, anyway).
Thanks! Immediately found this quote: The change in the representation of the body landscape can be partly achieved by another mechanism, which I call the "as if body loop." In this alternate mechanism, the representation of body- related changes is created directly in sensory body maps, under the control of other neural sites, for instance, the prefrontal cortices. It is "as if" the body had really been changed but it was not.
I know in some mystic traditions that engage in these sorts of practices, they deliberately withhold information from novices, in much the same way that neural net training divides data into training and test batches. If the novice can re-derive the hidden accepted answer, they're considered to have achieved genuine insight.
This still doesn't eliminate the possibility of path-based dependencies, but it's a lot more scientific than I'd have expected from the outside.
.questions like, how many chakras are there? (5? 7?) probably don't have objective answers.
On the other hand, our subjective perception of different regions of the body may have a different quality to them/.
I've read a little about comparing chakra systems. As I recall, there's substantial variation, though all systems have heart, center of gravity, and (faint memory) between the eyes, or maybe the crown of the head.
Two theories: some cultures are lumpers and others are splitters. And also, some chakras are more developed in some cultures than in others.
I believe without evidence that every cell has its own chakra/meridian system.
Also: a preference for certain numbers in Buddhist numerology. Thus: 5 dakinis, 5 Tathāgatas, etc. Of course yiou get 5 chakras to along with it.
There are also 3 jewels, 4 noble truths, 6 realms, 7 factors of awakening, 8-fold noble path, 9 consciousness and 10 defilements. Buddhists are not *that* hung up on number 5 :)
Sigh, numerology. In the Yuthok Nyinthig, some things get chanted a different number of repetititons than in other branches of vajrayana, because the number is medically auspicious or something...
TBH I haven't really looked into chakras myself much at all. It could for example be that the "hardware" part of it is not really discrete - i.e. there could be one continuous "chakra" along the spine but different parts of it reflect different emotions more strongly, and the separation into distinct chakras is somewhat arbitrary and comes from culture.
Seems overly complicated. Here's a simpler explanation:
Stress / relaxation are very noticeable physiological states. These systems are triggered both by physical and emotional stimuli (anxiety, fear, surprise, etc). That's pretty much optimal, as our literal survival depended on shutting down our digestion and redirecting blood to the extremities when we heard a lion approach. These systems (also quite rationally / optimally evolved) trigger in purely social situations as well, but their physiological effects kinda come as a package. Therefore, you'll fell butterflies in your stomach in moments of high nervousness. The increased alertness is adaptive, the stomach discomfort is incidental.
Similarly, there's a proven bidirectional link between your heart rate and your emotions. Too lazy to look up a source right now, but I can tell you from personal experience that when your heart stops beating, you will immediately be overcome with intense feelings of doom.
I never quite got whether that "redirection of blood" and "shutting down digestion" was characterized quantifiably or is just as speculative as the above. Furthermore, there's more to somatic mapping of emotions than just fear: for example, love and kindness also have a strong somatic component (open-heartedess is not, in fact, just a weird random metaphor).
It's not speculative. There are entire parts of our nervous system dedicated to managing stress levels optimally (the sympathicus and the parasympathicus). All these effects are well documented. The fight-or-flight response is a physiological process.
ETA: love and kindness imply safety, which lowers stress and reduces the work the heart does, by literally lowering adrenaline levels. I'm not saying the aren't a bunch of other factors at play. It's just that the heart and the lungs in particular have vastly variable output and are thus prime targets for regulation by the autonomic nervous system.
You know, I feel like we got off the wrong foot here. I believe that it is entirely possible that the connection between fear response and intestinal blood flow has been thoroughly quantified and measured and I'm just not aware of that; the thing is, whether that is true or not is not really important for the hypothesis. It does not rely on the connection between emotional and somatic processing being spurious and non-functional; in fact, it's highly likely that it was functional at some point in evolution or perhaps even still is. The point is that the subsequent buildup of a rich and complex emotional processing system could have retained that connection even in entirely non-functional use cases. Like, feeling contraction in one's belly when one is afraid makes sense because the brain is sending a signal there to do the thing (blood flow reduction, etc). But the fact that one would also get a warm pleasant feeling there when they're feeling peaceful is just an artifact - at least, there does not seem to be any functional connection here (unless I'm not aware of some well-known studies establishing just such a functional connection, of course). Similarly, it would make sense if excitement would be felt in the heart area since it usually results in increased heart rate and so on. But when love and kindness (much more advanced emotions than excitement) evolved, it's possible that they piggy-backed off the excitement circuits somehow and therefore are also felt in the heart area, even while not necessarily being reliably correlated with heart rate fluctuations.
Yes! This is pretty much my model. Make it even simpler and more abstract: it is obviously adaptive for our emotions to be able to modulate our body's state, and for our body's state to be signaled to our mind via emotions.
That gives a baseline "infrastructure" on which our subjective experience is gradually built up. We are *not* disembodied beings who were fully conscious before we had to learn to deal with physical reality. Our consciousness is entirely a product of intelligently interacting with physical reality.
I'm not saying there aren't dedicated parts of the nervous system dedicated to it, I'm saying that there may be more functionality to those parts than just reducing the bloodflow, etc.. And by "quantifiably" I meant actual studies that measure the exact changes in bloodflow. Do those exist?
EDIT: Well, feeling love normally increases the heart rate rather than reducing it, so that does not seem to work out quite that straightforwardly.
I think the medical term "dysautonomia" may be a good starting point for research on this. That term, of course, refers generally to medical conditions with which these regulatory functions do not work optimally including specifically blood flow regulation.
I'm pretty sure many, many studies measuring this stuff exist. Have you tried looking for them? scholar.google.com
No, but I feel like the answer "I'm pretty sure" is also quite speculative :)
@Scott: followup on chronic fatigue vs heart medication.
I've been off my heart meds for about 6 weeks now, fatigue is completely gone. Of course I'm in very bad general health from years of not exercising, and have to be more careful with my heart condition from now on on top of that. But this is manageable, and getting better every day!
Can I entice you to look into the model presented by the following paper, which is the one that convinced me to drop the meds:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1568997220300823
In a nutshell, the theory is that bradykinin (and similar substances I guess?) are responsible for chronic fatigue. Bradykinin is a locally produced hormone involved in muscle exertion, repair and such, but if it sticks around too long it spreads through the blood and becomes systemic, lowering pain threshold, increasing inflammation, sympathetic tone and so on. Table 5 at the end of the paper has proposed explanations of every major CFS symptom under this theory.
The link to heart problems is that ACE inhibitors (and the newer generation sacubitril/valsartan combo) target the renin-angiotensin system, which has some beneficial effects like lowering blood pressure but of course upsets the whole pathway, with many other effects including a reduction in the breakdown rate of bradykinin.
From other things I've read, excessive bradykinin also seems to be involved in dysmenorrhea/endometriosis (menstrual cramps which sometimes lead to fatigue and brain fog) so the link to CFS isn't that far fetched. Lots of similarities with fibromyalgia, which I've been diagnosed with. These conditions all involve muscle cramping and pain, and can lead to fatigue and brain fog. I'm male so obviously don't have endo myself, pretty sure my fibromyalgia diagnosis is correct though. There are plenty of cases where fibromyalgia doesn't lead to fatigue, so I in my case I suspect something multifactorial with at least these 2 causes (heart meds + fibromyalgia).
All of this could have immediate impact on clinical practice. Currently, young otherwise healthy people with heart conditions are put on these medications as a matter of course. My cardiologist at the time did *not* inform me of the systemic nature of the drugs she was putting me on, describing them as gently protective of the heart. It is a completely different matter to treat a 60+ y.o. person who is at severe risk of dying from heart attack, insufficiency, etc, vs treating a ~25 y.o. with a family history but only small hints of heart problems myself. Knowing what I know now, I could have handled my heart problems with lifestyle interventions alone. At the very least, cardiologists should be trained to immediately look at these medications as the possible culprits if one of their patients exhibits any kind of fatigue.
(Of course this also leads to further research, both for treatment of CFS unrelated to heart problems, and better understanding and treating heart insufficiency)
I know this is just N=1 anecdotal evidence, but I can't overstate how big a deal this is if true. I wouldn't wish chronic fatigue on my worst enemy. It's easily a 50-80% reduction in QALYs, and I have (had?!) what's overall considered to be a mild case. Any inroads towards understanding the mechanisms of this cluster of "psychosomatic" diseases would be highly impactful.
One test would be whether there are any people with CF who aren't on those medications. Your thesis seems to be that the medications are the sole cause.
On the other hand, those medications might just be a major cause of CF, but not the only cause.
Yes. The broad cluster of "psychosomatic" diseases are grouped together because the symptoms are similar. It's quite possible that the causes are multifactorial, split into a bunch of subtypes, etc. Similar to how cancer is actually very varied, even though we have a medical specialty that deals with all cancers due to the similarities.
Having a credible physical marker at all is quite a step forward. There are plenty of people who are flat out convinced that my disease doesn't exist, that it's just some version of being lazy and/or depressed.
I actually don’t think it is accurate to diagnose you with chronic fatigue syndrome; I would call it intolerance to beta blockers. Fatigue is a known side effect. For most people it’s fine; for a minority it’s debilitating. I am disappointed in your treating doctors for not recognising this and doing something about it earlier.
Most people who have CFS are not on beta blockers. I am not an expert in CFS, but the “just so” story about bradykinin seems too neat. Biology is sufficiently complex that you can find a decent-sounding paper about any hypothesis you care to name.
EDIT - I incorrectly assumed that the "heart medication" you were talking about in the original post was beta blockers (known to cause fatigue) when in fact you were referring to ACE inhibitors (not widely known to cause fatigue)
I am not diagnosed with CFS, nor do I think I should be. Also, I *was* taken off beta blockers years ago, which did absolutely nothing against my fatigue.
I understand that people resist narrativization and that the story seems too neat. However, bradykinin is a *known* pro-inflammatory etc, and it is *known* to be increased by heart medications. There's also the tiny detail that I took the obvious action implied by this theory and got vastly better. From your PoV, that's a random person (n=1000) who is postselected; but from my PoV, it's a preselected n=1 experiment with a dramatic and unmistakable effect. Still anecdotal, but it vastly increases my confidence.
I appreciate that based on your experience you think of this theory as deeply important, but to convince cardiologists and the broader medical population, you would need to gather much more data. We are going to assume this is an n=1 fluke until you can find a large population of people who came off ACE inhibitors and found their quality of life much improved.
Yeah I've seen a million people on ACE inhibitors and Entresto and most of them are completely fine. Your theory would seem to predict that ACE inhibitors could cause fatigue, muscle cramps etc, but the closely related ARBs would not as they don't increase bradykinin, but in fact randomised controlled trials have not found that and most doctors think of them as almost interchangeable
EDIT - I apologise if I have misunderstood your claim as meaning to apply to everyone, instead of to rare individuals unusually susceptible to bradykinin induced fibromyalgia
I suppose it didn't come across well that I *obviously* think this is a multifactorial thing, either binary ("only people with fibromyalgia can have this adverse effect") or linear ("it is one of many factors that slightly increase the likelihood of fatigue").
ETA: it's pretty close to a strawman to suggest I believe that millions of people are severely adversely impacted and cardiologists somehow failed to notice. Please do better.
And yes, my theory implies exactly that about ARBs. I expect that when I talk to my cardiologists next, they'll put me on such a medication. It is not surprising that very broad, untargeted studies don't find rare or subtle effects (how many people with fibromyalgia where included in these ARB vs ACE-inhibitor studies? probably an insignificant amount, maybe even zero as the condition would be screened out to reduce noise in the sample). It is one of the major problems with such a "black box" approach to medicine, where the targets being measured (overall health and such) are very far removed from any specific mechanism of action the drug could have.
So, is it over for our man, Mr. Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.?
The current odds estimates from https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11245/winner-of-2024-us-presidential-election/ are Biden: 29% Trump: 65% (and then some minor candidates with a few %). I, personally, wouldn't call 29% "over" (I personally, am in the "A pox on both their houses" camp, so neither happens to be my man...).
Anyone remember what were the most accurate other prediction markets or other odds predictors to check?
We're in unprecedented territory, at least in modern politics. But if I had to bet, I'd bet that he won't be President this time next year. Either he loses the nomination, or doesn't get elected, or (unlikely) gets elected and immediately resigns.
There's an obvious fourth possibility there that we're all waiting for, though it's practically identical with your third.
I'm going to guess death? That does seem more likely than ever before in my lifetime. It's a stressful job.
I mean you're adding a lot of justifications there that are just icing on the cake. He's in his fucking 80s, every single day is borrowed time, let alone having to actually work at that age.
In general, whenever many people think that some event has killed a major politician's prospects, the answer is "no, it has not." Obviously, some events actually do wreck a politician's electability, but I don't know how to identify those, and it looks like most people discussing it don't either, so I'm assuming this is another instance of nothing significant happening.
This only holds true when the people thinking that said prospects are killed would prefer that said prospects are killed. When it is your -supporters- who think that your prospects are killed, that's a significantly bigger deal, because they are more often going to be speaking for themselves and people like themselves.
Are Biden's supporters among those who think his prospects are gone? I was under the impression that it was mostly people who do want him to drop out.
I was in the position of disliking both Trump and Biden for different portions of their policies. I was planning on voting for whoever best supported Israel. I was expecting to re-evaluate that in October, since I expected that Biden's support might fluctuate on that time scale. To 0-th order, it now looks like Harris may be somewhat worse. In any event, I'll re-evaluate in October and decide who to vote for then. I _was_ shocked at Biden's debate performance, and I am concerned about whether this immediately makes the credibility of MAD less stable.
I'm a Biden supporter who recently became convinced that he should drop out of the race.
I read a mixture of both Biden and Trump supporters; the Trump supporters are currently quite happy in their belief that there's nobody -to- replace Biden if he drops out, while the Biden supporters are instead busily looking for a plausible replacement.
(Might I recommend Jared Polis?)
Realistically, the only feasible replacement is Harris, which is one reason why it took so long for people to pressure him to drop out.
I have read that the GOP will raise all sorts of legal and procedural issues to stop the Dems from replacing Biden.
My right-wing feeds have several people advocating this, but I am uncertain if anybody has expressed any interest in the idea in an official capacity
I agree wholeheartedly in the general case, but it's not everyday that the NYT Editorial Board says a candidate should drop out - there is evidence to suggest this is different.
I think so.
I think a lot of people are looking at the polls and saying "Oh, that didn't hit as hard as I thought it might, we still have a chance." But I think that specific dip in the polls is the intersection of two things: Politically well-informed, and also unaware of Biden's condition.
I think a bigger group of people are looking around and going "Oh, now everybody knows that everybody knows, and I won't be a social pariah for saying ... "
And another group of people still hasn't watched the debate, and are only slowly filtering in to watch it; probably trying to prove to themselves that it didn't go as badly as it did, that everybody is exaggerating.
I thus expect the polls to show a sustained decline over the next few weeks as the unthinkable becomes broadly more and more thinkable.
Seems like he's about where Trump and Romney were at this point in 2016 and 2012. He could win if it turns out the polls were undercounting his support, but short of that I don't think he has any more outs.
Is it remotely creditable to claim a democrate is being undercounted? Electorial college, rural v city, claims moderates are nazis for opposing infinite immigration form the left, the media being leftwing?
>Electorial college, rural v city, claims moderates are nazis for opposing infinite immigration form the left, the media being leftwing?
What do any of these things have to do with polls? What does the electoral college have to do with the odds that a Democrat will answer when you call them on the phone and ask who they're voting for?
Polling errors are unpredictable over the long term. It's true that in the past two presidential elections, the polling errors were both in the direction of over-estimating the democratic candidate. Unfortunately that doesn't tell us which way it will be this election.
Of course, the idea that Biden was only a normal polling error away from winning was what the situation was *before* the debate. It hasn't been long enough to really see how the debate impacted things, but the very first polls to come out after it don't look great and it wouldn't surprise me at all to find out that he was more than an average, or even more than a "large" polling error away from winning.
> Polling errors are unpredictable over the long term
Given a poll that sampled all of america equally, it would be predictably wrong in favor of the republicans due to the intentional design of the electoral college
That's why Silver bases his model primarily on state polls.
If there was a polling error favoring Biden of the same size as the one there was for Trump in 2016, it would be enough to get him over the electoral college disadvantage.
In general polling error is unpredictable. While Democrats underperformed their polls in 2016 and 2020, they overperformed them in 2012, and overall polling bias isn't consistently in one direction or the other. You can argue that it consistently favors Trump, but you have a sample size of two there, which isn't great.
> In general polling error is unpredictable.
Why?
That doesn't sound bayesian or whatever to me, I don't think I know your name but if your a 95% of the posters here shouldnt you have a number that it will swing one way or the other and any evidence(even if those are thought experiments about the electoral college) updates that number?
I'm confused about what point it is you are trying to make. Polls, on their own, are not attempting to predict the electoral college. If one were to simply see a national poll that has the Republican candiated up 51-49, and say "Aha, trump has a 51% chance to win!", then that's a mistake on the part of the person interpreting the poll. It's not a polling error.
Polling error is merely difference between the percent of voters it estimates support a candidate and the vote share they eventually get.
I care about who's going to win, even if all possible measurements are imperfect I will be using it as a proxy for that question.
> Polling error is merely difference between the percent of voters it estimates support a candidate and the vote share they eventually get.
more political and debatable but I would also say that the left is more aggressive to the "undecided" voters while votes are fairly good at being anonymous, the left has quite successfully and publicly pressured corps to support blm and gay pride month, which again is in favor of republicans
----
Given 5 comments ago the idea was "is biden undercounted?" is a question about "could biden win by chance like trump did in 2016 ", while I think that the rural vs city distinction makes cities more easy to count and easier to organize, polling error will probably always be more in favor of cities and in the current era that means democrats
Impossible to say until we see what polls look like three weeks from now.
It's not looking great for him, but the nature of this stuff is that our knowledge can only be shaky and probabilistic. Anyone claiming to know for sure how it will turn out is a fool.
Very hard to say. If he manages to have a great second debate, probably not, but there is a perceived weakness there.
The problem is, who do you pick to replace him? Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Mayor Pete, another name off the list? If the Democrats are running on pure "Trump will put you all in concentration camps and destroy democracy" then the scaremongering will be "Elect Dem Guy for the sake of peace, liberty, and justice!"
But then they need some kind of policies beyond "I'm not Trump".
The real problem with "but Trump!" is that we've already seen literally the worst Trump has to offer and there's a strong argument it's not as bad as what Biden's given us. Worried about war? Under Biden the entire planet is on fire. Worried about political violence or anti-Semitism? Under Biden there are weekly Charlottesvilles in every major city where the police are ordered to stand down and let it happen. Et cetera.
I've been thinking about this recently. What's important for a President is not policy but meta-policy. Presidents rarely get their way policy-wise, and if they do then it's no different to what a generic member of their own party would have done. You want to reform Medicare? Schya right, good luck with that.
What matters is the process by which you're going to come up with policies for all the things that haven't happened yet, because it's only in reacting to events that a President really gets to do anything.
> But then they need some kind of policies beyond "I'm not Trump".
Do they? I mean, all the commentary I see on keeping Biden goes either:
> He might be old and senile, but he's not Trump!
or
> He had a cold! He has a stutter! But Trump!
We'll see if they need any policies. But the DNC's strategy is literally "he's not Trump"
I'm sort of coming around to the idea that Biden is not the President as such, at least not the traditional American president; he's the European sort of figurehead president/head of state.
Joe is the face of the administration because he was electable as a moderate candidate, surfing on the good vibes of post-Obama as VP, and had enough experience and clout to be It's His Turn (For Reals This Time) to work.
The real decision-making/policy setting/deal brokering happens elsewhere, behind the scenes. Joe knows the big picture stuff, but it's the opposite of Trump, who was criticised for not listening to his cabinet and advisors and just hiring-and-firing on a whim - Joe listens *too* much to "the party thinks we should do X, Y or Z".
Take Sam Brinton - I'm sure that Joe never heard of the guy, he just signed off on "this is our new deputy assistant under-secretary of sweeping the floors of nuclear reactors". Some little munchkin decided Sammy-boy was the one they wanted for the sake of Representation and Pride and LGBT+ and all the rest of it, but we'll never know who because they've slithered back under their rock. I think Joe is fine with general LGBT stuff because he's the "gay marriage? sure, why not?" kind of normie, but doesn't really know about "well Sam is a they/them non-binary gay possibly trans masc person who likes to steal women's luggage at airports so they can wear those clothes".
(For those of you happily unaware, I am not making any of that up*)
So Joe being the face of the presidency isn't the problem, as the real running will be done by others as per usual. Joe showing why he may not be suitable this time round is the problem.
And if they replace Joe, then the replacement is going to need to eventually come up with some "my policy position on swamp otters is this" of their own, to sell to the voters as "now I'm in office, I'm gonna do all this wonderful stuff!"
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Brinton
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/sam-brinton-luggage-theft-arrest-doe-b2341647.html
https://www.losangelesblade.com/2022/12/09/sam-brinton-a-story-too-good-to-be-true/
>And if they replace Joe, then the replacement is going to need to eventually come up with some "my policy position on swamp otters is this" of their own, to sell to the voters
Agreed. And "eventually" is not very long. Roughly speaking, I don't think the Democrats have enough _time_ to pick someone else, get them well known to the voters, and get their declared policies also widely known, all before November. They can try, or they can continue to try to support Biden, but neither alternative looks all that viable.
I do think Biden's nomination in 2020 was not because of any personal qualities, but simply because he was the most capable of beating Trump. On that logic, his actual self was never as important as the image of his self.
He did have the advantage of the remaining feel-good factor off being Obama's VP and he is way more likeable and relatable than Hillary. Looked like a safe pair of hands who wouldn't upset anyone and was a solid Democrat.
He also had the advantage in 2020 of no real competition. Sanders and Warren were too far left, Gabbard too far right, Buttigeig was too young, and Bloomberg was not wanted by anyone except Bloomberg.
That leaves Klobuchar and Biden as serious candidates who could attract the support of both the voters and the party kingmakers, and Biden had name recognition.
I remember how quickly the narrative changed from "Biden is a kid-sniffing weirdo, he's got no chance" to "Ugh, I guess Biden then?"
And Biden's weird handsyness never got another mention outside the right-wing memeopshere, much as his senility never got mentioned outside the right-wing memeosphere until last week.
I have been reading a lot of this kind of argument too. "Joe is basically a figurehead and we're just voting for his cabinet which is competent".
To be clear, I think it's 100% cope and Dems gaslighting everyone (specially themselves) regarding voting to a president with dementia.
But I have to admit I think it's a valid argument? Half my family used exactly the same reasoning to vote for Bolsonaro and he's way more willful than Biden.
I didn't call bullshit on that argument 6? years ago, so I guess I'll have to swallow it when the left does it too.
I realize that the White House has a _lot_ of staff. Still, I'm skeptical of the ability to run with an inert figurehead. The POTUS is going to have to at least deal with Putin and Xi, and there is a limit to how much of that can be delegated. A POTUS who garbles his sentences while trying to neither start WWIII nor fold is a problem.
I guess it boils down to whether you trust his handlers or not, to do a good job of running the country in the way you (the ordinary voter) want. If you like "elderly moderate" Biden, but hate his "Inflation isn't real, it's just a right-wing conspiracy theory" advisors, then you'll dislike "Puppet King" Biden.
(And I suppose a similar thing is happening in reverse for some Trump voters: they may outright hate the man, but they might also hope that they can puppet him. Or at least trust his advisors to manipulate him, a la what Gary Cohn did with stealing "shoot America in the foot" executive orders off the President's desk before he could sign them, back in 2018.
Though, of course, Trump has reacted to this by firing all such people as advisors, and replacing them with people who are personally loyal to *him*, not the broader ideals of conservatism beyond just Trump... to a degree, the real Project 2025 was aimed at the Republican Party, and is also already mostly complete.)
As far as I can figure out from skimming the first few chapters, Project 2025 is aimed at giving (part of) the Republican Party control over Trump rather than vice versa. It presents him with a convenient "do this, then this, then this, and do it quickly without thinking too much" checklist.
I wasn't taking it seriously, but (1) given some decisions which I find very hard to believe an 81 year old lower middle-class guy from an Irish Catholic background is generating now due to his evolved raised consciousness and (2) the debate, which even if we give him the benefit of the doubt that he was both sick and had been over-prepared by his handlers stuffing his head full of detailed policy instead of letting him wing it off a few prepared canned talking points, I now lean more towards "yeah there's some kind of cabal in the administration/party making the decisions and just having Joe rubberstamp them". I've seen online speculation, though take that for what it's worth, that Obama, for instance, is doing a lot of 'advising'.
Agree with this. The problem is finding someone to replace him who will:
a.) do at least as well in the polls as Biden, and
b.). be willing to risk their shot at the president as sloppy seconds for a presidency in decline.
Those two factors work against each other. A top -tier candidate might wait 4 years for a proper run, instead of talking big risks now. That shortens your bench.
There are a lot of unknowns here, so maybe you go for it anyway if you're a potential replacement candidate. You can't be guaranteed in 4 years to get a candidate as weak as Trump, but he came so close to beating Biden in 2020 that maybe the weakness is mostly perception. In the next 4 years you won't likely be able to run on abortion again (assuming much of this is worked out by then and people settle down about it - plus the next R candidate won't have to answer for appointing the SCOTUS judges who overturned it) so maybe now's your chance.
But then there's Harris, who never had the blessing from the Obama and Clinton factions to be Next In Line, but if you pass her over now you'll piss off lots of voters.
It's really hard and risky to replace Biden. Easier to double down on gaslighting and hope to slide by. Maybe skip the next debate?
A strong harris performance would probably do better than Biden at this point, TBH.
1. She's been pretty invisible for a while so people have forgotten a lot of what they did/didnt like about her. A strong performance out of the gate could help a lot.
2. To match that invisibility, her favorability has returned to -10, better than TRump and much better than Biden. Biden hasn't been at that level for over a year (!)
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/approval/kamala-harris/
3. Much of her baggage IMO was attached to her awkwardness in trying to pivot from a moderate/anti-crime resume to a more identity-oriented persona in 2020. I think she could get away with returning to the anti-crime tone now, especially with only the general election ahead.
4. Biden stepping down in favor of her could seem like a nice elder statesman moment of putting party/country above self, and contrast well with Trump's reaction to the 2020 election.
All this relies on her actually being able to present herself well, though. She was quite poor in the 2020 campaign, so would have to do better than that.
I'm unclear on what the real case against Harris is.
I know I don't like her, but I don't like any Democrat, so my opinions aren't useful.
I also know that some of the hard lefties don't like her because she attempted, as Attorney-General, to actually enforce the law on occasion. That doesn't feel disqualifying for the mainstream though.
The other argument I've heard against her is that all she really does is get up and parrot talking points and that she has no real position or will of her own other than what will help her get political power in the near term. But that sounds like most politicians, especially Biden.
So why is everyone so sure that Kamala is so unelectable?
IMO the 2020 zeitgeist, post-Floyd, on the dem side was very identity-oriented (e.g. "woke"). And despite her multicultural background Harris is not especially good at speeches that match that zeitgeist - she comes off as artificial, awkward, uninspiring. I think that turned off a lot of people
The zeitgeist has faded a good bit this year and so she *could* re-invent herself by returning to her pre-2020 persona. See for example this speech from when she was a senator, to AIPAC:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?426089-2/aipac-policy-conference-senators-harris-menendez
Pretty replacement-level democratic speech. Nothing earth shattering, but potentially better than Biden, now.
I think a lot of this relies on Harris demonstrating a degree of political talent that she has struggled with over the past 4-5 years. It isn't uncommon for popular local/regional political stars to flop when exposed to the national limelight (e.g. Sarah Palin), and that seems like what happened here.
Honestly, as the VP and putative 2024 running mate for Biden, she was given a huge platform to stump for the president and make her case for taking over - twice now - without capturing national attention. There's a corporate media that would love to pitch that story, if they could. They tried early in the presidency back in 2020, but it didn't catch on. Something about Harris just doesn't sell to national audiences, despite concerted efforts to make that happen by different teams.
If you're worried about Biden being able to perform under pressure in a major national campaign, it seems like a big risk to replace him with someone who has the same problem. Worst-case scenario is that you end up wanting to swap out again, but now you don't have a way to make that argument or time to do it in.
Another glaring problem with Harris is that her first assignment as VP was to attend to the border, and that's one of Biden's weakest issues.
Finally, Biden debated Trump already, which set a precedent. If you're going to replace Biden, his replacement won't have an excuse to bow out of the second debate - especially if voters perceive the first debate as having forced the president out. If you run from a Trump debate, it looks like you can't handle the pressures of the office. I would not trust the debating talents of Harris against those of Trump. She might be able to hold her own, but it also might become another dumpster fire. I'd peg a 'win' for Harris in that format as a low-probability event. When you're behind in all the polls, that's not good enough.
It's entirely possible to win a debate against Trump, and a decent opponent could do just that. But I don't think Harris has the skills to pay any of these bills.
>But then there's Harris, who never had the blessing from the Obama and Clinton factions to be Next In Line, but if you pass her over now you'll piss off lots of voters.
Only if she is perceived as having genuinely wanted to be the replacement. One thing I haven't seen seriously discussed over the last few days is whether that's actually the case. Biden may be bullheaded and/or experiencing cognitive decline, but I don't think she is. She knows she isn't popular.
She may want it anyway, and she may be selfish enough to want it even if another candidate would have a better chance of beating Trump, but I wouldn't just assume those things.
I've been hearing rumors (all unsubstantiated, for what that's worth) that Harris is concerned about getting passed over, and has been asserting herself on that front.
I know a lot of the HRC coalition was upset in 2008 when Obama jumped the line, so there's some reason to believe there's a coalition within the Democratic party that's sensitive to exactly this kind of replacement. The leadership wouldn't replace Biden with Harris, so unless they've got someone better who's willing to run and who can credibly be seen as not replacing a woman of color, it's probably the safer bet to stick with Biden, weak as he is.
*If* those rumors are true, that's very bad news for anyone who wants a Dem president in 2025.
>maybe the weakness is mostly perception
An incumbent who gets only 47% of the popular vote certainly isn't a strong candidate. Yes, obviously it is the Electoral College vote that matters, but that is the point: A strong candidate does not have to rely on a handful of voters in a few states to win.
A slightly different perspective:
1. As you mentioned, since the EC is the game, there's no incentive to maximize your popular vote total, especially in a close election. Maybe not even when you think the election isn't close. Given HRC's massive miscalculation in 2016 (she tried to increase her popular vote margin, since she figured she had the election in the bag and wanted a strong 'mandate' to allow her more post-election political capital), I doubt anyone will make a similar mistake in the future. This further diminishes the signaling power of the popular vote.
2. The closest thing we have to a party-based popular vote is the House of Representatives, which is apportioned by population. Given gerrymandering and other considerations, it's not a perfect proxy. That said, the House has been Republican for 22 of the past 30 years. Maybe it's an artifact of the system design that it skews the results R, but it's probably also an artifact of system design that skews the "popular vote" results D.
3. The electorate has been close for decades. This is partly because political parties shift positions to follow the electorate long term. In the short term, you can beat a political opponent, but you can't ignore the nearly half of the country who voted for them. Especially since probably >15% of voters on both sides voted more against the other candidate than for the name on the ballot. This makes the idea of a "mandate by majority vote popularity" mostly a fiction the winners tell themselves.
This works both ways. If Trump wins in November, it will almost certainly be due to a very poor showing from Biden. Polls suggest lots of swing states already leaning R. You can bet that a victorious Trump will declare nearly any victory a "landslide", despite the fact that he'd probably have lost to a reasonably strong candidate who didn't have to run on Biden's record. This suggests that many of Trump's voters will likely be voting against Biden more than for Trump. That won't keep him from declaring a 'mandate'. They always do, though they rarely have one.
I don't necessarily disagree with any of this, but I am not sure it is quite on point. Indeed, your reference to the Republican share of the House vote tends to demonstrate that Trump is indeed a weak candidate: He generally underperformed the Republican candidate in Congressional districts.
Note also that in 2016, most Dem losses in swing states went to third parties, not to Trump. Eg PA (D -4.5 R+1.6) MI D -7.2 R+2.6) WI (D -6.3 R +1.6)
Right, but that's what we would expect for not just Trump, but most Republican candidates for the general election. You run a different campaign under the EC than you would if you were going for the national popular vote. Not only do you focus on campaigning in different states, you focus on the issues that are important in different states. Those issues are brought up in all the local campaigns, such that wetland preservation is never discussed in Utah or Nevada, while water rights aren't an issue in Virginia or Georgia. Meanwhile, representatives from those various districts all convene in Congress to voice the will of the people in a way the US President never could.
The whole thing looks different under a national popular vote system - and that's by design. The USA wasn't designed to be a system driven by the interests of large states with large populations, but as a system that integrates the interests of the whole country in a complex way with checks and balances for various types of minority viewpoints. (We've removed some of those balances, to be sure, to our detriment.)
A popular vote system would run different campaigns than the ones we see under the EC, making citation of a 'national popular vote' a bit of a canard. You can prefer the NPV system if you want. I think Republicans think they'd lose under such a system, but the more realistic outcome is that they'd shift policies under that system to be competitive in a different way than they are today. Personally, I don't like the NPV system on its own merits, but I'm under no illusion that this is a principled stance and I'm sure that the two parties would flip their 'principled' stance on the issue if they thought the advantage were reversed.
It seems like a coordination failure that Biden ever got this far, I don't believe the other candidates never did a "how senile is Biden" meeting where they did the evidence gathering a republican did years ago of looking at a 70's Biden speech vs any uncut Biden footage
Whatever drives the party isn't just raw calculation of success, Biden probably is burning political capital of some kind and it may just be paid in full
From what I gather, it seems Joe really does want to run again (and Jill). I know Republicans like to make him out as a puppet/figurehead. He doesn't seem to be strictly a figurehead, as he has some control over his inner circle.
In some sense, every president is a puppet, beholden to the information and recommendations of their advisors (this happened a lot with Trump), but it looks to me like Biden wants this and has been directing some policies from the top in a way that seems unique to him (like his position on Israel/Palestine).
Given the risks involved in replacing the incumbent before the opposition party has nominated a candidate, and how close the polling for Biden had been until recently, I can understand why they chose the strategic route they did. Until recently, they could control a lot of mainstream perceptions (back when corporate media was still mainstream, and social media had tight controls), or at least define the Overton window in a way that shrouded their candidate's biggest weaknesses.
Meanwhile, all the money they raised for the Biden campaign can't be used for a replacement. After the lawfare accidentally became a huge Trump donation drive, they've got to be worried about putting the Democratic party behind in the money game for the first time in years.
I don't think anything about the present moment was part of the plan. I try to remind myself that humans are pattern-recognition machines. Whenever something looks like a grand strategy, the real answer is usually that there are disparate competing players who are mostly incompetent but wealthy people, flailing about from crisis to crisis, trying to capitalize on their own mistakes.
>Meanwhile, all the money they raised for the Biden campaign can't be used for a replacement
According to Investopedia, the money can be used for, among other things, "Unlimited transfers to a local, state, or national political party committee like the Democratic or Republican National Committees" and "Creation of a leadership PAC to back other candidates and a political agenda."
And the FEC confirms the first one https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/winding-down-candidate-campaign/winding-down-costs/
Interesting. I wonder how far they can push that. For example, let's say the replacement nominee is Newsome, and Harris fans object that she got passed over without giving them a chance to make her case in the primaries. I could see angered donors either threatening a lawsuit about how their funds are being reallocated against their wishes or the express purposes for which their funds were donated, or threatening to stay home and/or not canvass for the new nominee (a potentially worse outcome than any legal challenge).
So if you're the Democratic party, looking at where to spend the Biden money, even if you can get away with moving the money around legally, you might not be able to just pull it all over to a new nominee without creating an intra-party brawl among your largest donors, right before the election.
> Given the risks involved in replacing the incumbent before the opposition party has nominated a candidate, and how close the polling for Biden had been until recently, I can understand why they chose the strategic route they did.
more risks then just failure?
>After the lawfare accidentally became a huge Trump donation drive
easily foreseeable, but also a coordination failure, all democrats get the blame for being banana tyrants, a handful of da's live is blue cities and get all the credit
"more risks then just failure?"
This is all hurler on the ditch stuff from me, but I think the idea was "four more years of the exact same". Get Joe over the line, get the election won, then nursemaid him while in office and if anything like ill-health forces retirement or, God forbid, death happens, well there's Kamala to take over until a genuine Democratic nominee runs for 2028.
I don't think anyone expected such a poor performance in the debate, and I do think that on a different day he might have done better.
Risks: I think the original plan was to not have debates. They only started talking about debates when Biden's poll numbers got bad enough that they couldn't continue to convince donors that "internal polling shows Biden ahead" and there was nothing to worry about. Without debates, they could continue to hide behind rhetoric like "cheap fakes" like they had in 2020. There were similar videos back then and Biden still won, no reason not to run the same playbook ... until that playbook stopped working.
Lawfare: agree that much of this strategy was emotional wishful thinking. But a lot of it was also the miraculous political luck of Donald Trump. It wasn't by design that the weakest case against him was the only one to go through before November. But you're right that it's dumb to put any kind of timeline-based strategy at the mercy of court schedules. Maybe it didn't seem dumb at the time? Trump has always been weak on details and procedure, which makes him especially weak in the courtroom. They took advantage of that in 2020 to get through a lot of bogus electioneering (especially when Trump stepped in to undermine his own lawyers and alienate top talent). It made sense to use the same tactic again in 2024. It happened to backfire in a way you couldn't predict based on past Trump performance in court.
All this makes sense if you assume they were expecting past performance to predict future success, running the same game that worked last time.
TL;DR: has anyone improved a soft skill or overcome some form of anxiety through playing a video games?
“Bibliotherapists” basically “prescribe” books to help you work through issues. For example, if you suffer from low self esteem, they’ll prescribe you a book about a protagonist who has very low self esteem, gets taken advantage of, then overcomes the issue. The idea is that you can gain your own insights from this, eg “is that really what it looks like from the outside when I have low self esteem” or something of the like. (Read more here, yes the source is meh https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/can-reading-make-you-happier. There’s also a book “Bibliotherapy A-Z” or something of the sort that has many more examples of books prescribed for a wide variety of situations.) I don’t know about the research in this area so can’t say how much of this is pseudoscience.
Regardless, I’m wondering if this can be transferred to video games? Eg you’re a perfectionist and suffer from decision paralysis, so you’re prescribed a decision making intense game with a myriad of options at every step such as Civ. You play it, and then you’re also asked to reflect with custom questions. Eg how was the process of making so many decision? If difficult, what were you worried about? Did those worries pan out? Etc. We know video games/simulations already exist that can teach and improve certain skills, (known as “serious games” in literature) so I’m wondering if this can transfer to improving in issues normally worked on in therapy.
I know video game therapy exists today, but I think it is different or misses the mark. It either just has the therapist play video games with you to make the conversation smoother and develop rapport, or has you play a seemingly unexciting game meant for the purpose of therapy. The benefit of using existing popular games is that it’s more accessible and can be self-guided.
(I ask this since it’s the intersection of several areas I’m passionate about, and the situation given re perfectionism is from my own experience. However, this method didn’t work for me since I couldn’t even bring myself to play civ…)
I am fairly sure that playing Celeste makes me better at doing things that require consistent willpower or practice. My theory is that throwing myself at difficult-seeming but ultimately achievable challenges in a gamified environment gets me in a mindset where I'm more willing to do hard/tedious things.
You should play through the Dark Souls trilogy for a true test of patience and willpower.
It feels so childish to say that beating a boss in Dark Souls I never thought I could beat is a reminder that we really can overcome our perceived limits. So childish but so effective.
>> has anyone improved a soft skill or overcome some form of anxiety through playing a video games?
I suspect joining a guild in WoW got me back to where I was as a kid (an army brat surrounded by and operating with a highly varied population) compared to what I was used to from college (working with nerds very similar to myself and all about the same age). And lots of practice being on a team and cooperating. And the pattern "first I'll DPS this, then I'll heal it, then I'll tank it". When I first started playing I was so afraid of being on a team... but I wanted that damn DPS dagger so bad... and some random person carried me and helped me finish the instance, and I always kept an eye out for how I could be someone else's random help.
A few, mostly using multiplayer guild-based games. I think the problems would have been better addressed through in-person interaction, although that would have had other problems.
I think it's also possible to use games to break free of habits like completionism, perfectionism, and on the other hand poor planning and failure to see projects through. But that's tough because IMO what makes the game "fun" is generally going to be reinforcing the existing problem, and without someone there all the time telling you to play the game in a way you don't want to, it's very hard to keep the focus.
It's like casual use of heroin to solve a problem with depression.
One time, I am driving on ice during the winter, and I feel the car start to drift. So, of course, by reflex I correct out of the drift. And then I think: muscle memory from playing Forza coming into use there...
I also though about that question when noticing myself automatically correcting drifts before learning to do that reliably. The thing is, from the drivers perspective, when a car starts drifting in a right turn, it sort of looks like it's turning more to the right than necessary (the nose starts pointing more into the turn than the curve would require). So the desire to get the nose to turn back left (and therefore correct the drift) is completely intuitive; what requires skill is keeping the car in the drift with steering corrections and throttle manipulation.
P.S. Althoiugh I drive a BWM Mini in real life, and Forza can simulate a BMW Mini, I do not entirely believe its simulation: Forza is a bit too optimistic about braking, or at the very least assumes less worn tires and brake pads than a likely real vehicle.
Some of you may be thinking: but a BWM Mini is front wheel drive, so it isnt going to drift. Or at least, there's les opportunity for loss of traction to be a problem.
One of the standard questions on the UK driving theory test is how to steer out of a drift.
The joke answer to the question give the official answer, plus "sand thn, accelerate out of the corner."
Online poker has definitely reduced my anxiety and decision paralysis, as well as decision making under uncertainty. We all make mistakes all the time, you'll never have a "clean" history of perfect play. A single moment of inattentiveness can destroy hours of carefully gathering small profits. Shit happens, you move on, and hey, suddenly you're much more relaxed about making mistakes.
The important part IME is that it's a sandbox with a known model and limited downside, which objectively measures your progress. Manifold markets has similar properties.
Poker is a great lens with which to study one’s decision making.
Tangentially related, but I found it amusing that the Russian translation of the (somewhat popular) meditation manual The Mind Illuminated was initially done for free (and spread for free) by a guy on a Russian online poker player forum, with the premise of using meditation to reduce "tilting" and win more money. I feel like a few players might have very significantly improved and enriched their lives (without really aiming for it) in such a roundabout way.
Mh, I should play some more mahjong to see if meditation brought any gains.
Thanks for the data point. I wonder what other areas video games could help with besides decision paralysis… E.g. I wonder if team fps’ such as over watch can help with assertiveness or confidence; maybe you play and watch your games and realize that you should have pushed but didn’t due to lack of confidence and that hurt your team.
I was hoping to get some smart people's opinions on this anomaly in Google Trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore/TIMESERIES/1719600600?hl=en-US&tz=300&date=all&geo=US&hl=en&q=%2Fm%2F08_4ns&sni=3
For background, occasionally, I troll friends with spurious correlations on Google Trends. Naturally, showing people the growth of their hobbies killed people's interest in sex is amusing—until I realized the steepest drop in people googling for sex is exactly the 2016 election. My clickbait name for the phenomenon is the "Trump Sex Recession", mostly because it's easy to remember and I hope it has successfully nerd sniped you to help me figure out what's going on here.
For one, the chart looked different for me on mobile vs. desktop, which is my first red flag that Google's data is less than a perfect representation of the internet. The event is also between two notes, which I interpret to mean it's likely that something material changed in its collection. All of this seems impervious to analysis though. Did people take their sex searches somewhere else? Did Google start giving bad results for sex? If you want to get political, did the election kill horniness? I have no idea. I feel like you'd have to already have a study going around these dates to know if the impact was real. Any possible explanations are welcome.
It's probably search-engine related around quarantining adult content.
Porn-y type searches like "sex" or "blowjob" etc all show a dip right where you mention. But sexual health searches like "birth control", "STD test", "pregnancy symptoms" do not show this.
Comparing your search of "Human Sexual Activity" to "sex" on its own, "sex" has a less extreme drop that starts exactly at January 2016 instead of later in the year.
Are there any regulations that might have influenced the data collection?
The November change is a year too early for the introduction of SESTA, but it is a few months after U.S. Telecom v. FCC.
GDPR was also approved earlier that year. And the line starts going back up at the same time GDPR actually came into effect, but there's no "note" of a change on the chart at that point.
Since a drop reoccurs from 2022 onward, it could be some sort of anti-bot measure that they update as it becomes less effective.
My first guess for an effect that strong and sudden is that Google changed something in how it collects or categorizes data. "Human Sexual Activity" is a broad category; maybe Google changed its boundaries in late 2016.
A note on the graph says that a change of some sort was applied on 1/1/2017. Perhaps some portions of it showed up earlier in the US.
Yeah, that's my inclination. It's frustrating that it feels like there's no way to follow up on it though. I guess this is the hazard of looking at proprietary data.
If you do some googling and asking around, you might find some specialized forum with people who are experts on Google Analytics and can advise you. You might start here: https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleTrends/ . But be prepared to go down quite a few rabbit holes before you get a solid answer. And even then you might come up empty.
Wrote a piece strongly supporting the idea that that East Asian Low Fertility is Genetic (It's the same here among US Born East Asians as back home).
https://futuristright.substack.com/p/east-asian-extinction-level-fertility
I've finished the article but still don't quite get it: are you saying East Asian people have a lower rate of successful conception or just a lower preference for kids?
Clearly, the only policy response to this crisis is to greatly increase Asian immigration to the USA until an equilibrium is established. Read “One Billion Americans!”
I found it anthropologically fascinating to read a Yellow Peril alarm piece in 2024. Apart from that, I think your entire set of data and conclusions is for the birds.
Though you did at least have the novelty to update from "Countless millions upon millions of mindless soul less drone Asians will take over our nation and destroy our way of life!" to "Declining millions of mindless soul less drone Asians will take over our nation and destroy our way of life!" so good for you.
>"Declining millions of mindless soul less drone Asians will take over our nation and destroy our way of life!"
Maybe your typical right-wing projection at work. Fearing an apartheid regime from smarter, harder-working, career-instead-of-babies-focused Asians. Not that the Apartheid regime thing would be the problem, but not being at the top of the pole certainly is:
> And what kind of Leftism and what kind of society (not everything is political) will they help bring about for your children to enjoy? Will it be the economically stagnant but relatively chill 1970s Sweden? Or will it be one that leaves your children pining for the comparative freedom of the Soviet Union?
Please to inform ignorant self of how speculation on "what kind of society will they bring about for your children to enjoy?" is different in both degree and kind from "they will destroy our way of life"?
It's not, it's the same. Why do you ask?
In case there is a misunderstanding here, my previous comment was not an attack of any kind on you. I was merely offering an explanation of why RWF seems to harbor a lot of resentment towards Asians, even though the whole point of RWF's article was that they shouldn't matter demographically because something something self-extinguishing genetic culture garbage.
We're in agreement on the "genetic culture garbage".
But I do think "hmm if These People manage to Take Over, then what future will your White American Grandchildren have???" is sitting on the same bench of the rowboat as "they will destroy Our Way Of Life".
I agree with that too. Note that the "leftism/children" paragraph was a block quote from the RWF article, not my own invention. Should I have made that clearer?
Kinda, sorta Malaysia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_153_of_the_Constitution_of_Malaysia
I wouldn't describe it as an "apartheid regime" though, just racial prejudice hard coded into the constitution. Fun fact, its actually illegal to discuss repealing Article 153. This is a digression from the topic of this thread though.
You misunderstood me. I said that the "RIght Wing Futurist" might be afraid of an Asian Apartheid regime, brought about by voting overwhelmingly democrat. But it's not a rational fear, it's a projection of their inner hopes and fears unto others; in this case, Asians. Nationalists are perfectly fine with running an Apartheid state, so naturally, their fear is that someone else might do it to them. That's a possible explanation of why, as Deisach put it, he's so afraid of "Declining millions of mindless soul less drone Asians will take over our nation and destroy our way of life!"
What might be the meme of the summer specifies, "I'm looking for a man in finance, trust fund, six five, blue eyes."
How many of these standards do we meet?
As a man with blue eyes, I clock in at 2 out of 5.
If I had a trust fund I sure as heck wouldn't be working in finance.
Got the blue eyes, but I'm short, never been near anything in finance, no such things as a trust fund in my family.
Oh yeah, and I'm not a man 😀
...I misread that as "six blue eyes". This is not a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence.
I'll say... 1.5 out of 5? My eyes aren't literally blue, but my dreams they aren't as empty as my conscience seems to be.
But if your love is vengeance, you're not available as a partner, are you?
Two out of five now, I've been four out of five if you stretch the definitions a little. Though I suspect my work in finance is not what she was thinking of.
"Tall, dark and... Well, two out of three ain't bad"
I agree with Scott on the media very rarely lying, I find it odd how many journalists have basically admitted they were explicitly lying about Biden's mental state.
How should it impact your epistemics? Should you lower your trust in people who were saying Biden is fine and raise your trust in journalists like Silver, Klein etc who were willing to point out the obvious.
Is it odd that even mayors and backbench representatives are playing along with a lie after it has been revealed to the voters?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies
I mean it all came to a head with the debate. It became a story since everybody saw it. It also seems less partisan. Last time it came up was with the investigation of Hunter Biden where the republican investigator said Biden wasn't fully there.
I think Scott was quite wrong about this unless you take an incredible narrow view of what "lying" is. The media constantly distorts/omits or outright misrepresents facts that don't line up with its current narrative.
They want stories to be interesting and sexy and uncomplicated, and will cull info to make them so.
And that is when they aren't totally just manipulating public opinion. As this recent fiasco demonstrates.
They aren't lying all the time, but I would bet say 30% of NYT stories contain something the writer or editor knows to be a lie. Just a wild guess. I would say the two stories I have personally been involved with, neither politically high stakes at all, definitely included lies.
The article is entirely about talking the narrow view.
I just don't find that usage of "lying" very helpful in this context honestly.
If I interview Scott about prediction markets and he goes on and on at length for 2 hours about how much he likes them. But during this discussion, lists their strengths and weaknesses in the spirit of honesty.
And I want to release an article slagging them so when I quote him I quote him listing one of their weaknesses and nothing else, maybe even make it seem like he disapproves of them, that is absolutely "a lie".
It is a lie when a four year old does it about their messy room or whatever, and it is a lie when a NYT reporter does it.
And they do *that* kind of shit constantly.
And I am not really interested in Scott's prevaricating about how it is not strictly speaking by the strictest possible definition of "lying" a lie. It is conveying information in a way that is deceptive.
What if Mr. Biden were to die in office. God forbid that he does, but just, for the sake of argument, let's imagine he does.
In perhaps the Michael Crichton version, the "aides"and "speechwriters" look at one another after taking his pulse. Eyebrows are raised. Dr. Biden is summoned to the Oval Office. Come to think of it, that was the last time anyone can remember seeing the president's wife -- since the claims that Joe Biden was an AI construct and a robot began to surface.
Claims that Elon Musk was summoned to the White House, and spent several days visiting before trucks arrived and boxes of electronic equipment were unloaded remain unsubstantiated.
Skeptics claim that the fact that the President won't appear on the same stage to endorse Kamala Harris's nomination at the convention proves he is incapacitated; the executive office says he has a cold. No one has seen Dr. Biden in a while. Elon Musk has a good year.
I had independently come up with the concept that 'almost nobody tells lies, many repeat the lies they tell themselves'
This arguably means I have significantly lower trust in people as I can believe they are good people, smart, and not consciously lying, but nevertheless be very unsurprised if they report on a poll of economists on minimum wage where 10% say no effect on jobs, 30% say it suppresses jobs, and the rest say no opinion as "Most Economists Don't Think Minimum Wages Cost Jobs"
As a result my reaction to actual lies is that it's the tip of the iceberg I already percieved to exist, and likely about the same size as I thought which was already pretty big
Perhaps you're interested in an outside view about journalists' responsibilities in this matter:
https://uebermedien-de.translate.goog/96622/und-ploetzlich-stellt-sich-die-frage-nicht-mehr-ob-medien-ueber-joe-bidens-geisteszustand-berichten-sollten/?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp
I really do not recall google translate being this good.
Here is a moving piece published today by emergency room physician Bess Stillman. Some of you may have met her and her husband Jake Seliger at Manifest. As you may already know, Jake has been fighting recurrent metastatic squamous cell carcinoma.
Definitely give it a read if you are interested in the FDA and clinical trials. It's pretty clear we need better laws and processes around right to try. Here's her proposal:
"I propose creating a second, provisional market for terminal patients that allows partial approval of a drug while it’s still undergoing trials, making it available to trial-ineligible (or those unable to easily access a trial) patients for whom standard of care doesn’t provide a meaningful chance at remission. This partial approval would ideally allow physicians to prescribe the drug to this subset of patients as they see fit .."
https://open.substack.com/pub/bessstillman/p/the-drugs-killing-dying-patients?r=60fy&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I couldn’t agree more (doctor working in clinical trials for oncology)
I've recently been diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 28. As I've read up on it more, a lot of things are matching deeply with my personal experiences (constant feelings of shame and self-loathing, inability to finish things, difficulty sitting still and concentrating) which all line up with the diagnosis. But some ADHD literature has infuriating statements like, "ADHD people are highly motivated to work hard on enjoyable things, but are loathe to do things they consider boring" which describes every-fucking-body and makes me feel I'm falling to the Barnum effect. I recognize it's a spectrum, not discrete categories (as Scott mentions in some older posts), but it's difficult for me to parse through statements like that and take the rest of it seriously. I'm wondering if anyone else has a similar experience or commentary?
If that statement is true for everyone (and I largely agree) why does it make it hard for you to take the rest of the literature seriously?
That statement could be there to counter beliefs in the reader that people with ADHD can't be highly motivated ever/at all.
Personally, as an adult with ADHD, I find my motivation/effort abilities very uncorrelated with my desire to work hard or on the topic at hand. I feel I am at the mercy of the inner workings of my brain/instincts when I am not medicated. Sometimes I can't motivate my self to any thing at all while other times I am very motivated and can work anything. This is unlike the experience of my friends/family who seem able to force themselves to be motivated to do something regardless of their base emotional state.
> but are loathe to do things they consider boring" which describes every-fucking-body<
For an old ADHD colleague I had to put up with, "Enjoyable things" included "saying aloud whatever they were thinking at the moment", and "things they consider boring" included "letting other people talk". Someone took a trip across the country, someone else asked them how their trip had been, and our ADHD friend interrupted their reply about five seconds in to ramble on about how one time he'd had a job at a convenience store. Meanwhile, give him a broken engine, and he'll get it running again in an hour. It might break again the hour after, but then he'll fix it again.
A different event with a different person; Back in the days when school would spank students, an ADHD friend would go get spanked rather than sit still in class. Then he became a helicopter pilot.
I'm currently halfway through reading Gabor Maté's "scattered minds" - highly recommended!
It's really hard to quantify things such as boredom.
I know someone who is sensitive to food tastes and textures. When he says something is disgusting, he means he can't eat it because it'll literally trigger his gag reflex. Meanwhile, other people complain about food being "disgusting" while they fucking continue to eat it.
Similar things seem to be happening w.r.t. overweight people. Skinny people often have the great advice of "just eat less (you pig)". I suspect most of them don't know what it means to be hungry all the time. Like actually hungry. A constant compulsion to eat intruding into your thoughts.
I think boredom is probably in some middle ground where it's easy to let bad habits encroach and make you think it's intrinsic, but there's a kernel of truth there. Not just w.r.t. isolated boring tasks, but also a heightened need for work that has meaning and where you have agency. For me personally, it's kind of binary. If something is meaningful it allows me to tap into a deep well of intrinsic motivation. If it's complete BS make work I can check out and just click buttons like it was a video game. The inbetween stuff I have way more difficulty with... being blocked from doing a job right due to office politics and so on.
I have worked closely with people who are just naturally focused for 8-10 hours/day. It seems to be effortless to them. So I know there exist people who don't get bored and who can motivate themselves to do pretty much anything. I think it's ambition driven. People with ADHD are IME often curiosity driven, and have very low ambition.
I don't believe in a hard boundary between ADHD and not ADHD, but as a category it's a useful tool.
Carl wants to get famous. Carl makes a plan to slam his hand in a cybertruck trunk and film it to make a tik-tok. Carl is unable to follow through on this plan, only feeling crushing anxiety and an almost physical barrier to slamming the door. No matter how much he wants to his body doesn't let him. By taking amphetamines, Carl suddenly has the willpower to just do it.
Jacob wants to keep his teeth cavity free. Jacob makes a plan to get up and walk to the bathroom and brush his teeth. Jacob is unable to follow through on this plan, only feeling crushing anxiety and an almost physical barrier to getting out of bed. No matter how much he wants to his body doesn't let him. By taking amphetamines, Jacob suddenly has the willpower to just do it.
The difference in experience between Carl and Jacob doesn't depend on whether Carls or Jacobs are more common in the population, whether Jacob is "lazy" or "drug dependent" or whatever. Willpower isn't a thing that everyone needs more of- it's a tradeoff, and as a trait with wide genetic variation, it's an easy knob for evolution to adjust: If more willpower meant more fitness evolution would have turned it to 11 millenia ago. If after careful consideration you want to tweak your personal willpower knob, we can call that ADHD.
To make the metaphor explicit, I don't think "Carl got tricked into thinking he has ADHD by cold-reading hacks" or "Carl is faking ADHD to get an unfair advantage at tiktok" are great descriptions of what is going wrong in Carl's life. I feel similarly about, for example "neurotypical" people who are dosing with ritalin to survive as engineers at Amazon or get perfect GPAs in med school. The question isn't whether they are cheating in some sense! The question is whether the block which they are chemically overcoming was there for a reason that they would endorse if they could fully understand it- which is going to vary from person to person and situation from situation.
good description
> ADHD people are highly motivated to work hard on enjoyable things, but are loathe to do things they consider boring" which describes every-fucking-body
My peers seemed to had way less issues and negative feeling than me about homework. I'm not diagnosed with ADHD personally, what I'm saying is more "not everyone hates doing stuff they consider boring".
I suspect there is a "real ADHD" a "Barnum effect ADHD" and a "'Whoops I had unrestricted internet access from the age of 3' ADHD".
With people claiming to "have ADHD" falling into at least one or more buckets to differing degrees, but with quite a but of overlap.
I second this, though didn't try for a serious diagnose. Instead, I followed a meme page adhd_memetherapy cause it gave me a chuckle. Now I'm getting uncomfortable with how many jokes hit close to home. I have similar thoughts as you.
I had a similar-ish journey. I was looking for tips on how to improve my focus and kept getting led down ADHD resources. Which at first I thought, "this is great, ADHD people have a really hard time focusing, they must have some good ideas!" And then it slowly dawned on me that everything they were talking about sounds pretty familiar...
I think a lot of people who hang out here are from Bay Area, right? Recently a good food critic visited 3 Turkish restaurants there and I (as a Turk who wants to promote his culture) wanted to share it here so if anybody wants to try Turkish food. The article is in Turkish but any browser translate is good enough:
https://www.hurriyet.com.tr/yazarlar/vedat-milor/mutfagimiz-hakkiyla-temsil-edilince-42482621
Thanks
I learnt today about the meaning of Skanda, a fairly common name for a boy in India. Naming babies after philosophical concepts is popular here. It is a Buddhist concept. We are each believed to be a collection of selves (technical term being "skandas"). There is no such thing called Deepa that is constant through time. It is a very clever concept and ends up inventing the concept of limit in Calculus.
They wanted to avoid defining any variable or object associated with a human that lasts more than an infinitesimal amount of time.
Various passions are fighting it out in you. There is no one self through time. Every epsilon of time, a bunch of new skandas get generated and come together and go away. There is no continuity of self through time. However small you make the epsilon, every spsilon unit of time, the set either changes or looks the same. Like in calculus, the concept of limit. It's like looking at the coastline of America. Looks like a straight line but you zoom in and you see a jagged structure. There's never a straight line as you can keep zooming in.
I think you may have gotten hold of the wrong Skanda; the Indian name is after the 'Hindu' deity, overwhelmingly, not the philosophical concept. Here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kartikeya
Also, isn't the Buddhist idea skandha, not Skanda, the latter being the name?
I think you're right about the spellings! Skanda and Skandha. So then my comment was about the meaning of skandha.
Signal boosting my crowd sourced list of observations that can be used for Sherlock Holmes style "deduction" or more properly abduction. Please add your own contributions! I posted this on lesswrong awhile ago but felt it never reached a critical mass of content to make it useful.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Yz33koDN5uhSEaB6c/sherlockian-abduction-master-list
Last week I found out about the Firefly dating app (https://datefirefly.com/). It looks like it's pretty blatantly trying to be a 2014 OKCupid clone (as Scott has been saying we need . . .). Not a lot of features yet, but the main issue is that the userbase is low. Has anyone mentioned it here yet?
okcupid 2014, of course, had a fonctional website that you could access from your computer, not a placeholder page telling you to download the app.
Just did a jhourney online retreat, after like 10 hours of meditation before. I didn't reach any jhanas, but it completely transformed the way I relate to meditation. Went from "this is a pain in the ass and doing this for 10 minutes is torture" to being able to do an hour easily, reconnecting with some feelings and appreciating how powerful the metacognition you develop is.
I won't recommend it right now because I want to see if I'm able to stick with the practice, as that's what I want to get out of this.
Edit: I also had like 5/10 seconds where I felt the most joy I've felt in years at least. As someone with usually relatively dull emotions, it was surprising in a very good way.
What things did jhourney do differently that made it work better for you than your previous attempts at meditation?
Focused on making meditation enjoyable, through curiosity, experiments and metacognition, instead of "stare mentally at your breath for 20 minutes". Lots of different practice. Forgiveness meditation was huge. Staff and facilitators were amazing, genuinely engaged. Other people on the retreat were motivating. Lots of high quality guided meditations. Lots of space for "not following instructions exactly", like if you want to lay down instead of sit straight it's perfectly okay, if you don't feel what the guided meditation would like you to feel it's okay. Focus on making progress instead of believing stuff take years, through challenging limiting beliefs, motivation and forgiveness meditation. Real interest in us continuing the practice after and improving our life. Sometimes they talk like software engineers.
So, checking out their website it seems to be "sign up to our mailing list before we tell you the price" kind of deal. Are you comfortable with sharing what you paid, or a ballpark figure?
$1,100 online.
$1,600 (in person double room)
$2,300 (in person single room)
Thanks!
What practice do you normally engage in, Culadasa's by any chance? I've been meditating on and off for a year and recently had a bizarre experience that is motivating me to take it further, but honestly I'm only at stage 2-3 and wouldn't want to find myself out of my depth on a jhourney
Is that bizarre experience something you wouldn't mind sharing?
Sure. So I had a ministroke just over 4 years ago (at age 30) and since then I've had a headache and some sort of weird visual disturbance that hasn't really showed up on any ocular or neurological testing. Ive been doing simple "focus on the breath" meditation laying down, nothing fancy or involved. I don't even follow the advice in The Mind Illuminated that well.
Well anyway. I noticed out of the blue that I started falling into an unpleasant trance like state, where I felt like my brain was short circuiting - I saw rapid fire lights in different corners of my visual field (eyes closed) and felt like I was being electrocuted. I felt like I lost consciousness several times and lost a bit of time in several second intervals.
For whatever reason I pushed through it. My headache and visual issues rapidly cleared up after 5 minutes have been gone for 2 days. I feel mentally much clearer. I have no idea what that experience was but I'm very glad I had it
Thank you for sharing this intriguing experience. Much appreciated. Hope you see even more progress.
more like mindfulness. As I said, I did at most 10 hours of meditation before the retreat and really benefited from it
Are people here noting FinalSpark/brain organoid computers?
I'm generally expectant that conscious does not have a threshold, and that if you network large numbers of small human brains, the result is equally aware to one normal brain. Or rather, a network of small brain parts is what a normal brain is.
In short, this project appears to me to be neither AI, nor much of a new invention, but simply human slavery repackaged so the victim can't complain and doesn't look as human.
Mad science needs to be outlawed. This is getting ridiculous.
Why are you assuming without evidence or justification that human neurons activating just causes consciousness? How does it do that? (your solar plexus isn't conscious)
Several reasons, most of which are very meta.
First: Neurons look conscious. I believe that a large portion of intelligence is an ability I refer to as recognition. This skill is demonstrable, you can even write an algorithm that accomplishes the same results on the same principles. However, it is not translatable into logic, at least, not without outputting multi-gigabyte text files. To a degree, I don't expect people to agree with me/to be able to convince people of this, unless they have non-transferable knowledge. I can point out- "look at this thing", but I can't do much to convey the "this is important" part if the other side doesn't see that on their own just by looking.
Second: This project depends on the principle that human neurons are special. Using say, chicken neurons, does not in fact produce the same results. You can also take human neurons and inject those into a rat brain, and thereby massively enhance the rat's intelligence.
Third: The fairness principle calls for it. That is, there isn't a good way to measure qualia, yet my utility is inextricably tied to the question at hand. In order to get any utility gains at all, there has to be some clue as to where the qualia is. I have to assume the universe is fair, even if it probably isn't, because points can only be scored in fair realities. Qualia being tied to neurons would be a very fair system.
So our solar plexus has quaila? If we accept your three points that conclusion is unavoidable.
Unless, neurons only sometimes create quaila (we know this is true b/c we go to bed) - in which case IDK why we assume brain organoid computers are "awake", even if neurons create consciousness.
(full disclosure I think consciousness probably isn't material in origin but unsure what to make of that)
I took a look. Looks creepy as hell but also very niche. Hard to see as anything other than a science experiment looking for a market.
For those of you who are interested,
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/artificial-intelligence/articles/10.3389/frai.2024.1376042/full. Key bits are figure one. Basically, they're growing tiny slices of brains of top of electrodes, almost like a computer chip. They then train the "neural organoid" to make predictions, like a transistor in a LLM. The business case is that they require far less energy than normal computers to make computations, which makes sense, our brains are heavily optimized around caloric scarcity.
I don't think these are human or near-human. They're not big enough and they don't have the right architecture. If a human is a house, this is a small pile of bricks. You can stack 30 small piles of bricks together, it's still not a house.
I would find the more closely matching argument to be...animal welfare, honestly. If this takes off, we'd be mass producing tons of tiny thinking creatures, probably somewhere in intelligence between an insect and a chicken, and then torturing them with electric shocks for their entire lifetime to generate predictions. That's...pretty bad and seems most analogous to something like industrial chicken farming. Chicken farming is a core part of our current economy and food culture; this isn't "grandfathered" in and it's not really necessary, so pretty bad altogether.
Erik Hoel wrote an excellent novel about this called The Revelations.
Maybe very naive question, but can we make them learn and live without the pain? Like make them feel really good when they predict correctly?
Probably not.
Honestly not even sure if they feel pain as we understand it. I *think* they're just shocking the organoids as a negative response and that seems to work.
But everything I can think of that would make a brain "feel good" sounds like drugs and even generic drugs are probably way too expensive.
Some notes:
I do understand that they give the brains dopamine when they make correct predictions. I'm not confident that brains are happy if given enough dopamine, or if I care if they are. Also not certain that random electric shocks are not torture. These questions are difficult to impossible to test.
At current scale, even I wouldn't expect these things to have more conscious than a chicken farm. The thing that raises this to my attention is that they are very explicitly trying to mass manufacture this stuff.
I would expect people who agree with me to also believe that:
Human brains are basically fungible. Large networks of human neurons have as much conscious as other such large networks of human neurons.
Human brains are materially different from competing brain architectures. Chicken farms, though troubling, are nowhere near as bad as the same neuron count in a human brain farm.
These questions are also difficult to impossible to test. Regarding questions of qualia and zombies, I do advocate a conservative view that attempts to avoid giant pits of suffering, even if the pits might not exist. Less awful fish farms would also be something I would support, on much the same principles.
Gah, need to work. Briefly, no, I don't think human brains are fungible in the way you think. I don't see organoids as that different than LLMs or neural nets, they're just soups of unstructured human neurons or abstractions of human neurons. It's not clear to me that a human neuron is special because the human brain has a variety of structures and specialized regions that perform different functions. Those are a big part of what makes human cognition special. Unstructured human neural soups are different to human brains the same way piles of bricks are different to houses.
I would feel better if they were using cow neurons rather than human neurons though. Human neurons are closed to "human brain here, this is sacred" but it's not definitive, if that makes sense.
After meditating on and off for a few years, I made a breakthrough in my practice recently. While I'm still not 100% convinced on the other side is some sort of awakening, I do already see a lot of benefits like the ability to feel good whenever I want to and withstand pain. I'm still surprised that so few people explore and cultivate the mind in this way. The closest thing in the west might be CBT and it works incredibly well with continued practice. However very few people take practicing CBT seriously. I presume mostly because therapists don't want to overpromise and underdeliver, then get blamed for it, so their patients don't quite understand how profound of a difference it can make, which makes them less motivated to practice it on a regular basis.
But more interesting than just the mental health benefits, what else can we achieve with mental practice? Can we cultivate extreme creativity and innovation? Can we increase intelligence? Buddhism rarely explore these questions and sticks to the teachings of the Buddha. It will also likely dissmis them as materialistic, but the more I practice it the more I'm convinced my own pain and happiness isn't the end goal, but rather to change my behavior as to be able to help more people.
Can you explain more about "the ability to feel good whenever I want to"? How often do you use this ability? Do you think you'd be able to use it to (eg) endure surgery without anaesthesia?
I can pretty much on demand flood my body with joy, I can give myself goosebumps easily and produce all kinds of positive emotions. At the beginning I used to do that all the time but at some point I realized it doesn't matter because positive emotions are not the point of life, so now I only do that occasionally. Withstanding pain is a different skill. I haven't tried withstanding severe pain like surgery so honestly I don't know. But the occasional headache/migraine has become a non-problem for me. The physical feeling I used to associate with pain is still there but it doesn't bother me at all.
When you get a headache, do you sit down and meditate, or is it that after your "breakthrough" you have been able to disassociate pain from suffering? What about emotional difficulties, do you still feel the analogue of mental pain/agony without it bothering you?
As long as I'm mindful enough I don't have to actually medidate to alleviate the pain, but it does require some work. As for mental pain, it depends. Some of what used to bother me doesn't bother me anymore and some does. Also depends on my mindfulness and mental state. e.g. on a bad day I could still be agitated. Usually if I actually sit and meditate I'm able to move past most feelings
Thank you. Just as you distinguish (the raw sensation of) physical pain from the accompanying suffering, do you do the same with mental pain?
Also I see in your description both parallels and non-parallels with what I read of stream entry. If you are not familiar with it, please check it out to get an idea of whether that is what you have had.
Are you talking about first jhana?
What I'm talking about is probably more reminiscent of what are called the pleasure jhanas in Culadasa's The Mind Illuminated (The technique I initially use to induce this is focusing my unified attention on a pleasurable sensation in the body). I don't know exactly on which jhana the ability to withstand pain falls but it's probably 1st or 2nd.
Check out Webcomic8: https://webcomic8.substack.com/
A comic for technology, politics, philosophy, and stuff.
Posted July 27th 2024: "I'm going to be a nonconformist like all my friends."
Jesus, did 2024 somehow take a time machine back to 1963? Is this a stealth celebration of the 100-year anniversary of that joke? Is one of those stick figures Plato? If you keep that kind of thing up they'll charge you with graverobbing.
They feel like the conservative equivalent to the /r/PoliticalHumor subreddit: one-sided, lacking subtlety, complex issues are dumbed down to simplistic gotchas, and utterly devoid of any humor.
To be fair, one of them was a response to an equally one-sided xkcd. And in fact, by linking the xkcd comic with the contrary argument, the response is a lot less one-sided than the xkcd itself.
The xkcd is slightly more nuanced, in that Black Hat Guy is always portrayed as an asshole. https://xkcd.com/1027/
I don't see Black Hat Guy, or any nuance, in https://xkcd.com/2948/ (I think that's what ascend was referring to?)
This was my reaction too. Democrats. Haha! Look how bad they are!
Both sides are exactly the same!
Democrats have noticed (and perhaps overreacted) to Biden doing badly at the debate. This is doing better than Republicans not noticing or perhaps not caring about Trump's incoherence.
Does a President have to be coherent in thinking? Why? Isnt there a system in place that prevents this branch of govt from doing crazy things unilaterally?
For most things, yes, aides and executive agencies will keep going on doing day to day things. But suppose tomorrow there is a crisis that needs a speedy response (russia invades another country, terrorist attack, etc.) And the defense dept puts forward several potential options for a response based on limited information. Opinions are divided on what is best. Someone has to have the final say to make a decision. Having someone who's ability to think/decide/communicate is degrading over time (it's not just about how biden is today but how he is next year and the year after) could have very bad consequences.
If you're Russia or China you're currently having emergency meetings to figure out how you can use this to your advantage. Biden needs to be gone now, not in January.
>If you're Russia or China you're currently having emergency meetings to figure out how you can use this to your advantage.
Ouch! Yes! Possibly also North Korea. Possibly also Iran.
Would you rather have a ceremonial head of state rather than someone with political power?
In the sense that things will fall apart? No
In the sense that you want to uphold democracy, and want the ultimate decision-maker and agenda-setter of the executive branch to be the person you actually voted for, kind of.
In the end you might decide that it is a worthy trade-off, but it helps to be aware of it.
Long-term, sure. But the US president has rather more latitude than most, if not all, heads of government among states with separation of powers. Between Executive Orders and wide authority to command the military, an unfit president has the power to do a lot of damage before he can be reeled in by Congress or the Supreme Court.
But the type of unfitness in Biden seems harmless. Cognitive decline. The type of unfitness in Trump, which involves stuff like revenge, seems more dangerous to the country, at least to me.
I see them both as bad. I will always think of Trump as the POTUS who suggested looking into injecting disinfectant.
On the other hand, Biden may need to deal with something Putin or Xi does on very short notice. There's a limit to how much of that he can delegate. And he may need to walk a fine line between WWIII and folding.
"I will always think of Trump as the POTUS who suggested looking into injecting disinfectant."
I dont think that is really what happened. Much like the "many fine people" thing, context is what is missing.
How does cognitive decline seems harmless for a president?
Yup. I want to avoid a situation where, in a strategic exchange scenario, the POTUS's last words are: "Remind me again of what a launch code is."
I agree. All I'm saying is that the US system of separation of powers leans rather heavily towards the president, so whatever mental/ideological issues the POTUS may have, they have a lot of power to shape their country despite them.
New CNN poll: 72% of likely voters think that Biden is not mentally fit to be president. Giben that, I wouldn't call the current response an overreaction!
It depends a lot on whether it's one bad day or a pattern of serious decline.
Also, Trump is destructive and energetic. If I have to chose between Trump and someone who's not functioning very well, I'll take the non-Trump option.
The big problem is that Biden was already severely behind Trump. He needed a *positive* upset.
This isn't like Regan vs Mondale, where he can hope to recover.
I don't think it's possible for that performance to be one bad day. It reminds me of John Mccain's performance at the James Comey hearing, the year before he died of brain cancer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gZ8JSpcHD8
(He died still in office. This country needs heavier restrictions on representatives.)
There is a pattern of decline for anyone paying attention to all news sources. Just because non-approved news sources are saying it doesn't make it untrue.
Cheap fakes, give me a break. Biden being stage managed like Weekend at Bernie's was also a clue.
Further evidence is the very odd instantaneous dog pile of left leaning pundits calling for Biden to step down ... without any intervening time period where they question what happened to Biden during the debate out of a range of possibilities. They knew it was mental decline because they have also seen it.
I doubt it was a conspiracy as much as circa 2024 group think. As the above comment reflects the election was simply "too important" to allow that taboo subject to be seriously discussed. It was foolish to believe this wasn't eventually going to be exposed, especially for those us with elderly parents in decline.
If you want to make the case this was one bad day, make it.
So will I, but that's no longer the key point.
Reality is that given the Electoral College, nowadays any Dem needs at least 52 percent of the national vote to have a decent chance of winning the White House or 54 percent to have a good chance. So if more than 70 percent of _likely_ voters now view Biden in the way just described, he'd need ~40 precent of _those_ voters to decide to vote for him anyway.
There's no chance of that. Particularly after the GOP spends September and October running national and online ads consisting simply of Biden's worst clips from the recent debate. Not to mention that there is no guarantee Biden just had his worst 2024 public moment along those lines.
The Dems now have a pretty clear decision to make, and the overriding need to stop Trump requires them to make the right choice.
>running national and online ads consisting simply of Biden's worst clips from the recent debate.
Ouch! Great point!
And presumably, a lot of people will do likewise in the election given Biden's polling numbers. But I can see how many will just not bother to vote when not provided with a reasonable candidate by the opposition. Or they choose the guy with a literal worm in his brain instead. Biden did not have a margin of error going into the debate as it was.
I see a lot of potential in your work.
I feel like it's a bit basic. The topic I've seen many times handled better and with more subtlety, even by other conservative comics. It's not very fun. The style is very clean in a good way, it feels like looking at vector art, very crisp and very beautiful in that way, but feels a bit impersonal. I feel like it's missing a more personal touch.
The style is a direct rip off of xkcd.
Not exactly, xkcd feels like it's more handmade. This one feels way more like vector art.
Well this makes it even worse - a poor quality rip-off!
Eh, the focus seems to be more politics than science, and everybody has to start somewhere. I believe the author will be able to do better with more experience (at least what I consider better) and find more of their own voice.
Oh, I meant the drawing style was ripped-off, not the content.
I have a new post on “Social Insurance” in which I try to distinguish “social insurance” -- transferring resources to people at times when they need resources more from people not in special need -- from “income distribution” from richer to poorer and consequently why social insurance should be financed differently from income redistribution.
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/socia-insurance-20
Robin Hanson has written about that:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/separating-redistribution-from-hardship-insurancehtml
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/who-wants-social-insurancehtml
Great minds! :) As an "if we were starting from scratch" scheme, maybe his is better. Mine is a relatively minor tweak of what we have.
I skimmed and seems short-and-sweet.
Type in the title: socia -> social
Thanks. I have tried to edit the socia =>social, but w/o success.
Currently the implied probability (to the nearest whole percentage point, mid-price) of the following people winning the US Presidential Election is, in the order Betfair/Polymarket/Metaculus/Manifold (numbers 3 weeks ago in brackets):
Trump: 57/63/65/56 (53/56/55/51)
Biden: 18/18/29/26 (36/34/48/46)
Newsom: 8/5/2/3 (2/2/1/0)
(Michelle) Obama: 6/5/1/1 (3/5/1/0)
Harris: 4/5/3/7 (1/2/1/1)
Whitmer: 4/-/-/3 (new entry)
RFK: 1/2/1/0 (2/2/1/0)
There have been some significant movements following the recent debate. If Biden does end up being replaced as nominee, it will be something of a triumph for real money markets, which have consistently assigned this outcome a much higher probability than other prediction models, to the extent that some suggested they were offering free money. Betfair now gives Biden only a 61% chance of being the nominee, while Polymarket gives him a 44% chance of dropping out (including after the convention).
Neither Polymarket nor Metaculus list Whitmer as an option, which seems like a defect, as she is now 5th favourite.
Biden is assigned a lower a probability of winning by the real money markets than play markets, as has usually been the case. I have no idea why Metaculus and Manifold have such different probabilities (65% vs 56%) on Trump.
Obama still looks high in the real money markets.
Now at:
Trump: 58/62/62/58
Harris: 15/15/8/16
Biden: 11/13/24/16
Obama: 5/4/1/1
Newsom: 4/2/3/2
Whitmer: 3/-/5/4
RFK: 1/2/1/1
The movement on Trump seems to be the different markets moving closer: his average (which is 60%) hasn't moved since Monday, but the range has narrowed from 56-65 to 58-62. The dramatic movement is from Biden (and Newsom) to Harris. Metaculus as usual looks behind the curve.
I would take RFK off the list, except that he remains at 2% on Polymarket. To 1dp, he's at 2.1% on Polymarket, 0.8% on Betfair and 0.6% on Manifold. I suspect that Polymarket attracts RFK-stans for some reason. Nate Silver gives his chance of winning (in a three-way race with Biden and Trump) at 0.0%.
Many Thanks! Grr, I wish arbitrage worked in these markets, to bring the estimates closer to a uniform consensus. The Harris 8 v 16 spread and Biden 11 v 24 spread irk me. I hope that after the Democratic Convention the numbers approach closer to a consensus.
Democratic nominee:
Biden: 62/73/80/71
Harris: 11/11/10/4
Newsom: 9/5/5/4
Obama: 7/6/1/1
Whitmer: 6/-/2/18
Clinton: 2/1/0/-
The Manifold numbers (at https://manifold.markets/ManifoldPolitics/who-will-win-the-2024-democratic-pr-47576e90fa38) seem wrong and disagree with https://manifold.markets/Joshua/who-will-be-the-democratic-nominee-cdd19020e97f. If you have a use for mana, there's probably mana to be made there.
Now at:
Biden: 50/64/80/63
Harris: 25/21/10/21
Newsom: 10/4/5/3
Obama: 6/7/1/2
Whitmer: 5/-/2/7
Clinton: 3/1/0/-
NB Metaculus is unchanged, which reinforces my impression that market moves more slowly than others; Manifold has now fixed its previously bonkers Whitmer probability.
In February, I made a protective bet on Harris in this market, which currently looks like one of my wiser decisions.
Now at:
Biden: 36/49/70/53
Harris: 29/35/20/27
Newsom: 11/5/5/9
Obama: 8/7/1/2
Whitmer: 6/-/4/3
Clinton: 6/1/0/-
Also, Betfair now has Harris as more likely to be the next president than Biden.
Wow! Many Thanks! This is reminding me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpK6uc2yD3w
In fact, I'll go ahead and say it: Harris' odds have shortened dramatically in the past 6 hours. This doesn't seem explicable by any public information I've seen, so it seems plausible that someone is betting on inside information, i.e. they know or think they know that Biden is about to step aside in her favour.
To be clear, I'm not sufficiently confident in this hypothesis to add to my existing Harris bet at the odds now being offered, but I'm also not going to sell my position.
Many Thanks! I've been following the Metaculus odds, specifically
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11245/winner-of-2024-us-presidential-election/
Could you give the urls for the other three? Many Thanks!
https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/politics/market/1.176878927
https://polymarket.com/event/presidential-election-winner-2024
https://manifold.markets/jack/who-will-win-the-2024-us-presidenti-8c1c8b2f8964
Many Thanks!!!
I'm a bit confused by betfair.
On this page: https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/politics/market/1.178163685 it shows
Biden at 1.59 to back, (at the time of writing) whereas on this page: https://www.betfair.com/betting/politics/s-2378961 it shows him at 4/9.
According to this converter page: https://www.aceodds.com/bet-calculator/odds-converter.html, the former has an implied probability of 62.9% whereas the latter has an implied probability of 69.2%
Wondering what the difference is between these markets.
The first of those is the Exchange market (which is what I am always referring to), which matches bets between punters.
The second of those is just an ordinary bookmaker function, which will generally offer worse odds for the reason that bookmakers generally do, i.e. to make a profit.
Thanks, that makes sense.
Whoops sorry - now edited to fix.
The puzzling part is that these are both on betfair, and AFAICT are both live, so they should be the same. I'm probably missing something.
In case anyone is confused, I have now edited my comment to reply to Ajb's actual question.
Rank on google, size of market, legalese, attention of dishonest players etc.
If it cost a 500$ bribe to raise a dishonest and terrible poll by 1 point, I bet every campaign would do so
>Obama still looks high in the real money markets.
I agree, of all the implied probabilities Obama's seems the craziest to me. On the face of it, even if you think she wins with 100% probability if she's nominated, that assumes that a person that has very little political experience, and has never shown any desire of being president has over 10% probability of being nominated should Biden step down.
Is this some sort of bet on weird mechanics of the nomination process? Like the electors go "rogue" in case Biden steps down?
I don't completely discount the possibility of market manipulation. The top 3 accounts on Polymarket together hold 23% of the Obama yes shares. None of them has ever been active in markets other than "Will Michelle Obama win the 2024 US Presidential Election?", "Will Michelle Obama win the 2024 Democratic Presidential Nomination?" and "Will Michelle Obama win the popular vote in the 2024 Presidential Election?"
Their total bets come to c$115k, which seems like an amount someone might be prepared to spend to create a false impression that she was a viable candidate, but of course there are plenty of other reasons for using a throwaway account.
I think it's a combination of "Who is a Democrat who has a snowball in Hell's chance of being elected?", wistfulness over the first Obama term and wanting to get back to the Good Old Days of 2008-2012 and 2012-2016, a way of circumventing term limits (i.e. officially Michelle is The President but Barack will have the First Lady Hillary Clinton role of being heavily involved in decision making and setting policy) and throw in some "First Female/Woman of Colour President who, unlike Kamala, has a decent shot at it".
Also, there are always some really long shots in all betting markets so Michelle is that.
But I agree, not really a serious contender.
18% on Biden?!!! I fancy that.
It seems this opportunity is no longer available, so I hope that was you!
I missed out on those odds I'm afraid. Still he probably will lose.
There are deterministic interpretations of QM, such as Many-Worlds, which are popular for this exact reason.
We don't know the exact reason.The reason that determinism is "logical"? The reason that people's intuitions favour it?
Why should the world or even this universe be logical and consistent? That "should" sounds like a Rationalist bias. We are strangers in a strange world.
There are lots of unknown unknowns in the world, and a good reason why unknown unknowns might remain unknown unknowns is that they aren't logical, so the language of mathematics is unable to catch them in its net.
Stephen Hawking suggested that the language of math may be insufficient to describe the universe.
Classical physics isn't as deterministic as usually thought.
Turbulence.
I don't know that it's accurate to say that "the world-split still happens randomly and acausally" I'm not an expert but I thought things were a bit more complicated than that.
Something like "you are in superposition between observing it one way and observing it another way" so it's not that the world splits, ever, just that there are 2 entangled states which we describe colloquially as "2 worlds" but what we mean by "2 worlds" is just that there are 2 states into which our conciousness is entangled -- and this entanglement happens according to precise mathematical rules (that I don't understand), not randomly at all.
I am also not an expert, but I believe your explanation is correct. The fact that we can build quantum computers suggests there is more than mere randomness.
I recommend this book https://www.qisforquantum.org/ as a gentle introduction to quantum computing, which also gives some intuition about quantum physics in general. Quantum computing is much *easier* than quantum physics in general, because it is a narrow subset.
>Did anyone ever propose a solution to get back our nicely logical clockwork universe
What do you want , and why do you want it?.
Are you trying to get rid of contradictions between QM.and GR?. Fair enough, contradictions violate logic.
Are you trying to restore determinism? But an indeterministic universe doesn't defy logic. Rationality requires you accept that the universe is indetrrministic, if it is.
Are you trying to get back to classical.physics? But classical.physics is horribly broken.
basically there's illogical,.as in logically contradictory, and "illogical" as in "goes against my intuitions about how things should be" .
>We usually know randomness is not a fact about the world, but a fact about our ignoranc
No reason it can't be both.
Plenty of physicists have attempted to formulate a hidden variable solution to Quantum Mechanics (to make it deterministic — Albert Einstein was one of the most notable proponents of this idea. But John Stewart Bell in the 1960s came up with a proof (Bell's Theorem) that if localized hidden variables exist, then certain types of experiments in quantum entanglement would work in a certain way. It took a couple of decades before physicists figured out how to run these experiments, but when they ran them, they didn't show the outcomes that Bell's Theorem predicted would result if there were local hidden variables.
That non-local hidden variables could influence the outcomes of QM experiments has not been ruled out (yet, I think). And don't ask what the difference is between a non-local and local hidden variables, but Physicists like Gerard 't Hooft have tried to get around Bell's Theorem postulating something called quantum superdeterminism. Not sure how that's supposed to work. But if you're interested in investigating hidden variables in QM, you should probably focus your graduate research on 't Hooft's ideas.
IIRC, superdeterminism is the idea that the universe is actually deterministic, but it is contrived so that people will never choose to perform experiments to discover this fact. It's a neat thought experiment, but it's unfalsifiable and not very satisfying.
We don't know the underlying mechanics of QM. But it actually does appear to be clockwork, just complicated. One possibility I like is that some effects propagate backwards in time. That CAN explain the two-slit experiment, how the particle never goes through the closed slit.
Many worlds theory can also explain it. It's still clockwork, and everything that is possible happens. It's just that your particular reality only has a tiny fraction of those possibilities.
Scientifically, we can't design an experiment that can show one method of explaining things is better than another, so the question of which is correct isn't scientific, but philosophical. Until we CAN design such an experiment.
It only appears to be clockwork if you believe in (as yet) unfalsifiable hypotheses -- like the multiverse or the idea that effects propagate backward in time.
"I cannot dance, use a power tool, hold a conversation, win a fight" These are all skills you can practice to get better at, not fundamental aspects of you.
Check out ACT - acceptance commitment therapy. Sounds like it may align more with your thinking.
Also CBT doesn't just help with rumination. It can help with self esteem generally, procrastination, and will power. I recommend the book "Feeling Good" for a great CBT handbook/workbook.
I don't have a CBT background, but I've somewhat undone a pattern of self-hatred.
The sort of self-hatred you're talking about is about taking a negative outside view of yourself rather than centering your current and personal experience.
You are pretending to be God. The universe supplies gravity and chemical reactions for everyone. It doesn't care whether you can dance etc. It might throw you a situation where you need an ability you don't have and kill you for the lack of it, but it probably won't, and you don't gain anything by beating yourself up for what you can't do.
To be blunt, beating yourself up is a distraction and probably makes you less capable. This is not to say you're a bad person for beating yourself up, but perhaps you can come to see self-attack as a burden rather than the universe telling you the truth about your value.
Here's a moment I had that I think helped. Perhaps it can be replicated. I was thinking about what's going on, and in particular, what is the self that's attacking and what's the self that's being attacked. I was identifying with the self that's doing the attacking, and when I switched to the self that's being attacked, my reaction was, "Hey, that HURTS!" I need to spend more time in that state, but it helped pry loose the belief that the attack voice was the voice of truth. It isn't. It's a mental habit.
The past world where people needed to be more like your grandfather is gone. You're managing, at least to some extent, in this world.
I've done a lot of bodywork-- Alexander Technique, tai chi, currently mostly qi gong. It helps because it's about what I'm feeling at the moment, while the attack voice is out there in hypothesis land.
Recently, I did a little analysis of scolding-- hammering on someone's faults or mistakes. Part of what makes scolding distinctive is that it's immune to feedback. A person admitting their mistake will not stop someone who's scolding. The scolder is running on memory and anger.
I realized that my attack voice is scolding, and I'm trying to figure out what's going on well enough to end it, and not just end the attack voice but the also impulse to attack myself. This may not be your problem, but mine tends to rev up when I do something useful, or even when I think about doing something useful.
Self-hatred is a fairly common problem these days, and I'm not sure what's going on. My got started about thirty years ago, and it might have been less common then. It's possible that people are subject to more judgement these days, and are apt to see themselves from the viewpoint of an imaginary hostile observer. Or maybe conflated from actual outside judgement, but it's still residing inside the person who's doing the self-attack.
It helped somewhat for me to enlist the power of boredom. Those attacks are pretty repetitious.
You say you're good at puzzles. Maybe you can see your self-attacks as a puzzle rather than a true statement about yourself.
The universe doesn't mind if you like yourself. Really. You're allowed. I don't know where to land between telling you this while not expecting you to accept it immediately, but perhaps it's an idea you can play with.
they are self-attacks because they are value judgments.
Saying "I accept that I can't dance or fight or use a power tool or hold a conversation," is acceptence.
Saying "I accept that I can't dance or fight or use a power tool or hold a conversation, and am therefore a loser" is judging yourself.
Im not in the least bit a handy man. My great grandfather was a man who fixed things for a living. So successful that he became rich. Were I put back into his era and given his upbringing I can only assume I’d pick it up.
> who would have probably never survived if he was born in 1800
I think it's probably the other way around. In older times it was quite ok to find yourself a way to make a living and be a bit weird or odd. Modernity is asking of us to be more well rounded, to have "soft skills" and "people skills" and all that jazz. A more complex society comes with more demands.
Anyways, best of luck! If nothing else, CBT is known to be of a reasonably short duration, so it's probably a pretty good best, expected value wise.
In my experience, a good CBT therapist can help you identify limiting, maladaptive beliefs that affect your habits and behaviors. It's not just about identifying ruminative and repetitive thoughts; ideally, it's also about identifying the assumptions you make and the heuristics you use when interpreting the events of your life and the situations you are in.
Sometimes things that seem self-evidently true to ourselves are not, in fact, indisputable truths. How confident are you that an assessment made by a 6-year-old was actually a nuanced understanding of who you are and what you can become?
E.g. lacking the things you list--dancing, power tools, conversational fluency, physical fighting--does not from my perspective indicate fundamental defectiveness, because those things are learned skills. A good therapist could help you reframe black-and-white thinking around your concept of fundamental defectiveness.
That said--and I'm spitballing here on the off chance that it resonates with you--maybe you never got good at other things because nothing really brings you joy or nothing feels good and rewarding. It's understandable that you wouldn't feel incentivized to try new things and become good at new things if your mind doesnt give you much of a sense of satisfaction and reward. That sort of anhedonia is one of the things that antidepressants can be very good at helping with.
This is not medical advice, but I have heard that some people who don’t respond well to CBT do better with ACT — Acceptance & Commitment Therapy.
I'm sorry to hear you're feeling that way.
My experience of CBT is that it works well for thoughts or feelings that you (a) don't endorse, or (b) maybe endorse a little bit but where the intensity/frequency of the thoughts/feelings is too high (and interferes with your ability to get on with life).
If what you're looking for is a toolkit for when you're on a date and you get an intrusive "why am I even here, I'm such a fuck up, I'm just going to screw up this conversation anyway" - some way to say "OK sure, whatever, these feelings aren't helpful now so duly noted but now's not the time" - then CBT might help. It's especially good when the thoughts/feelings are very intense and emotionally overwhelming.
If you honestly, intellectually endorse everything you said about yourself, and you don't want to reduce the intensity/frequency of your feelings about it, CBT might not help you. In that case I'm not clear on what you'd be hoping to get out of therapy. For what it's worth I think it would be helpful for you to orthogonalise "become a better person" and "give myself license to live my life without constantly beating myself up" - so even if you think you want to make changes in your life, CBT might be helpful in stopping your guilt/anger/judgement getting in the way of actually making those changes.
>"thoughts or feelings that you (a) don't endorse..."
Thanks for posting this. I have always been somewhat mystified by the apparent popularity of CBT, and this helped me understand that the piece of the puzzle I was missing is that people can have negative thoughts about themselves *that they don't endorse*.
(I suppose this is obvious in retrospect, but popular discussions of CBT never seem to mention it — they spend a lot of time talking about "eliminating cognitive distortions," which just leaves me wondering about the next step, after you have eliminated all the distortions and still have plenty of negative thoughts left over...)
Yeah it was a bit of a revelation for me too - I value logical consistency in my beliefs and actions and so it wasn't a natural leap for me to make.
I don't find the "cognitive distortions" language especially helpful, but it does get at the fact that it can be a bit of a spectrum. If someone were to say "I spend all my downtime worrying about work and being anxious that I might have made a mistake and get fired even though all my colleagues say my work is excellent" they might simultaneously say they they agree they worry too much and would rather relax, but also say they're afraid to just not think about work because it might cause them to miss a mistake and be less diligent. So there's a sense in which people can recognise that their thought patterns are wrong but also not be able to fully disavow them. In that sense I think it's fair to call them 'distortions' I suppose - but that sounds a bit too normative to me.
I find it clearer to talk about unhelpful, emotionally-driven patterns of behaviour. CBT helps people dull the emotional reactivity so that they can pursue their goals more rationally.
In your terms, eliminating the distortions mostly *equates* to eliminating the negative thoughts - or at least making them appropriately sized sotl that people can reason about them properly. If someone is constantly and unreasonably terrified of losing their house and being on the streets, that's a distortion - if they think being homeless would be bad and so make sure to pay the rent, and really worry about being homeless only if it starts looking likely, that's a *reasonable* amount of negativity.
Yeah, "thoughts" is a bit imprecise. Philosophers sometimes distinguish between "occurrent" beliefs (i.e. those present in your conscious thoughts at a given moment) and "dispositional" beliefs (i.e. those that determine how you might answer a question that you aren't thinking about right now).
The popular accounts of CBT seem to be that it involves: (1) identifying dispositional beliefs causing distress and/or problematic behavior; (2) recognizing that those beliefs are false; (3) identifying patterns of defective reasoning that might lead you to mistakenly think those beliefs are true; (4) developing appropriate "counterarguments" to deploy as necessary when you notice yourself engaging in the defective patterns of reasoning.
All of this falls apart if you get to Step 2 and find that upon reaching reflective equilibrium, you endorse the beliefs as true. The problem then becomes how to reduce "occurences" of those beliefs — or at an even more basic level, convincing yourself that you want to reduce occurrences of those beliefs. (Thinking true things is good, right? Why would I want to stop thinking true things? Hahaha, hahaha, hahaha....)
Also I agree with 1123581321 that you sound like you're overly critical of yourself and are holding a bar that many others would also fail to meet. But I don't want your getting help to hinge on you agreeing with me, so my post stands alone regardless.
I second everyone here telling you to seek out a really good and really qualified psychiatrist to treat that ADHD. You cannot philosophize away a neurodevelopmental condition.
That sinking feeling in the stomach could be a habit of tightening your stomach muscles.
I think motivation is hard for most people (otherwise why would there be so much literature on it), lack of interest in people is called autism, and if you are not interested in things what exactly brought you to ACX (it may sound surprising in our bubble, but there are many people who don't find it interesting)? You may exaggerate a little, and a CBT therapist could help you with exactly that.
Also, it can be both some physiological effects *and* self-limiting beliefs. To start with the most obvious things, do you have enough sleep, exercise, vitamins C and D? Go sleep before the midnight, take a walk outside after you wake up, find some time to exercise (read Convict Conditioning, it's a great book about exercising at home), eat a lot of vegetables and some fruit, enough proteins (meat, dairy, legumes), reduce the carbs (sugar, bread, pasta). Keep doing it for a month and see if it changes anything.
There are people who have it worse than you; you are good at work and have a biological child, many men fail at one or the other or both. That suggests some qualities. You can build on them.
Finding motivation works differently for different people, I cannot tell you much about that here. You have to experiment and find what works for you... it could be support by other people, inspiring music or a book... or you could see the therapist and ask them to help.
> Every time I try exercise I do not feel anything good, just tiredness.
For me it gets more pleasant with the right kind of music.
Or maybe do the similar trick as is used in meditation. Your mind is trying to run away from what happens, but maybe you should try the opposite and pay 100% attention to what you are doing right now. Choose an exercise that is very easy, and try to do it slowly and *perfectly*. Then try something more difficult and keep the same attitude. If you do 10 repetitions of something, it is not that difficult to keep the attention for the few seconds. (And between the sets, feel free to solve puzzles.)
> I live on sandwiches
Don't. Cooking is an art and science, you should be good at that if you try. Start with something simple (one day I should write a cookbook for absolute beginners); for example soup is basically something cooked in water with little salt. If you use soup cubes (salt + fat + some spices), success is almost guaranteed.
The greatest dangers for beginners are burning the food or adding too much salt. It is very difficult (although possible) to burn a soup. And the soup cubes are easy to use; I recommend only using half of the officially recommended amount (most people use too much salt).
Meat needs to be cooked in the soup for about an hour, but vegetables are about 15 minutes and no big deal if you cook them a little shorter or longer. Basically, for every ingredient, you need to find out how long to cook it, then boil the water and add each ingredient at time T-X. Vegetables can be bought fresh or frozen.
Another simple recipe is to buy a rice cooker, and use it to cook things other than rice. Cut random vegetables to pieces, add a cup of water, add a little salt and oil. Turn on the cooker, go solve some puzzles, the cooker will turn off automatically, and the result is tasty and healthy.
Yet another simple class of recipes is frying small pieces of vegetables and meat on a pan, with little oil and salt and maybe spices. You have to keep paying attention and sometimes stir, otherwise the food may burn. But the results are delicious.
The general point is that there are some *extremely* simple and still quite tasty recipes, and it is perfectly okay if you stay at this level for years; this is still sufficient to impress many people. In a more sane society, this would be taught at elementary school.
*Definitely* not medical advice:
Have you tried stimulants? The sensible, conservative advice here tends to be: "fix your diet, sleep, and exercise first, then resort to pharmaceuticals if you are still having problems." But realistically, some people find it much easier to fix diet, sleep, and exercise once they've gotten some amphetamines into them.
(Again, for emphasis — this is *definitely not* medical advice. A psychiatrist may recommend antidepressants rather than stimulants, and that may indeed be a better choice for you. The psychiatrist should be able to explain why they are recommending one form of treatment rather than another. If you haven't already explored the pharmacological route, check out what Scott has written on these topics at SSC and at Lorien.)
That makes sense. I definitely think CBT is broader than just "addressing rumination". For context on how it helped me, my wife went through a period of severe mental illness (constant panic attacks, unable to get out of bed) and I found it difficult to be sufficiently detached to help her without feeling fairly intense empathetic distress (which she picked up on and in turn upset her).
I didn't do much 'ruminating' on the situation (I'm not a brooding person by nature), but found CBD very helpful in managing the intensity of my responses in the moment. I still cared about my wife and was upset about the situation, but it allowed me to dial down the "aaaaaaaah" feeling when in the moment so that I was better able to act on that caring. This is not the same as your situation, but it's an example of a case where CBT helped with something other than brooding/ruminating.
Also, I don't want to diagnose over the Internet (and in any case am not qualified) but your description of lethargy and a general and ongoing feeling of despondance does sound a bit like a depression, so you might want to consider trying antidepressants alongside therapy. Scott's talked a lot about how unwanted mental states can be like orbits/grooves you get stuck in, and confronting them in a bunch of different ways at once can help shake you out of the unwanted mode and into another, better, steady state. But you know your circumstances best and I'm not a professional - this is just food for thought.
A parting thought: even if you're convinced you're a sorry excuse for a nearly worthless human being, it is better for you to be a happy and fulfilled sorry excuse than a miserable sorry excuse. I'm glad you're looking for ways to be happy, and want to encourage you that you deserve to find them.
Man I don't know... You, I'm quoting, "can [...] make a living", "respect [...] my work"; also have a child. You say you'd "probably never survived if [...] born in 1800", congrats that makes two of us; OTOH if you and I didn't die of a childhood disease we'd be brought up to survive.
You sound like a normal, withing a standard deviation from average, human being. It's ok not to know how to win a fight, most people don't. It's ok not to know how to dance, most people don't. Your marriage didn't work out, well, that's unfortunate but not uncommon.
But you have a job you respect and make a living off of, that's quite a bit of not-nothing. Is you home a filthy mess with backed-up toilet? Do you have an outstanding arrest warrant on you? Do you owe back taxes for the last 5 years? Etc. etc. etc.
There are so many ways to wreck one's life, if you avoided most of them, you're doing ok.
Serious question: do you find anything pleasurable? You said you can't "invest effort into anything". I can only speak for myself, but I do things for two reasons — because (a) I need to do them to survive and live comfortably, or because (b) they give me pleasure. When I'm not invested in survival, I try to spend the remainder of my time doing things that give me pleasure. And outside of work, personal upkeep chores, and all the bureaucratic crap that we Twentyfirst-centurians have to put up with, I certainly don't invest any effort in anything that doesn't yield pleasure.
I wish Eremolalos would comment because Eremolalos is a psychologist. Anyway, I am not a psychologist, but you seem to be experiencing a form of extreme anhedonia. Supposedly that's strongly associated with depression, but I assume you've seen a professional and gone down that route of either talk therapy or antidepressants and they haven't helped (?).
If there are things that give you pleasure, I suggest you make a list of those things, and indulge yourself in the things that give you pleasure — that is if you the energy to undertake pleasurable activities.
Thinking outside the box — have you ever tried psychedelics? Personally, I found LSD and Psilocybe mushrooms to be psychologically transformative. But if you're in a negative mental space, I wouldn't recommend trying them without a guide. I found that LSD allowed me to observe my depressive triggers and post-trip I could continue to see them and avoid them. Psilocybin mushrooms are all the rage now. I'm not sure I'd recommend them. The most frightening trips I had were on mushrooms, but they were a tough-love experience into my darker psychological states. But they also gave me a sense that the universe made sense, and that my brief existence was part of its purpose. Anyway, it's just a thought.
Sounds like you're enjoying your life in bed, though. I'd advise you not to listen to the self-improvement puritans or the capitalist-work puritans. Descartes, Proust, Wharton, and Churchill would work from their beds. Supposedly Slavoj Žižek gives lectures from his bed.
As for psychedelics, you're more likely to find them by asking around campuses of companies like Google or Meta. And some Left Coast cities have Psilosybe dispensaries now. But you'd still have to get out of bed. (Psychedelics are not expensive enough or popular enough for drug cartels to be interested in them.)
Apart from the stuff others have said, I feel two things you've mentioned are connected - a) you didn't like people much for the most of your life b) you set a very high bar for yourself. Can it be simply because... you have no comparison?
Because it sounds like someone living mostly in their own head and not in the real world could say (and I don't mean it in a bad way, I am similar). Meeting people, listening to podcasts and reading stories about people's REAL lives, with all their good things and fuckups really helped me gain perspective. This is something I'm still working on, things don't need to be AMAZING each time, they can be simply "ok" and that's fine. To give a very basic example, so many times I caught myself thinking that I have to do the dishes right now, because everyone does that, right? Well, that's absolutely not the case. And if I leave them in the sink for two days, nothing bad will happen
If it turns out it's some kind of perfectionism, that can be managed by therapy as well.
Oh crap yes getting caught in an infinite judgement cycle with high-strung extended family on your case is terrible, especially when one doesn't have the gall to tell them to go f themselves. But also normal.
I don't want to minimize your sinking feeling about your life, it sucks and you have my total sympathy. You're doing the right thing trying to figure out how to improve it.
If I may offer one practical suggestion, you could try signing up for a jiu-jitsu school if there's one nearby. Don't let your age discourage you, of course you will be slower than a person half your age, but you will learn and get better at it. The thing that makes it a good self-improvement tool is that it's very... concrete? Like, there's no way to BS through it, you will feel clumsy at first, and a 120-lb girl who's been there for three years will tie you into the knots on the mats, and then you will slowly improve, and a year later you will hold off a blue belt for the whole 3-minute practice round, and it will be real, no one can ever take that away. FWIW I'm older than you, started learning martial arts pretty late in life, and it's been a fantastic journey. Will I ever win a competition? Nah, but so what, that's not the point. Having a place to go to couple of times a week, do a real physical thing, slowly getting better is rewarding in and of itself.
It's OK not to be interested in other people. Most people are tedious and difficult to deal with if you get to know them well (myself included). Being a loner gives you time to think and be creative. If you're 46 yo, then you're statistically likely to be past the halfway mark of your lifespan. Unfortunately, our time sense speeds up as we age, so in an illusionary way, you're more than two-thirds of the way through your life. It is not my intention to depress you with this thought, but I suggest you figure out how to please yourself and not worry about what other people think, because you might as well enjoy yourself as much as possible before the universe ends for you. That's what I'm doing.
>my career should serve a higher purpose and help people meaningfully
I don't agree with that at all. My career MUST serve only one thing - bring me as much money as possible, with as little mental and physical burden as possible. All the other things like cool people, good atmosphere, different benefits etc are just bonuses. Currently I work 20 hour weeks, because I value my time more than this additional money. I do things that fulfill me for free
Don't get me wrong, I don't believe it's ok in the long run to perform a job you hate for great money. But if you want a job to fulfill all your social, ethical and financial needs, you are naive, 99% of people will never have capabilities or luck to have such a job. Work in a field that you are good at, and that doesnt drain you. For me it's not about maximizing positives, it's about minimizing negatives of the job.
You can read this short interview with Christopher Waltz, who says that you don't HAVE to have a burning passion for your job, and that's ok.
https://the-talks.com/interview/christoph-waltz/
Having a "dream job" by definition something you attach a lot of emotions to. Emotions in general are not good in business. You can have more fun and fulfillment, but also burn out quicker. I use a specific comparison when talking about that.
A dream job is a luxurious dish in a 3* michelin restaurant. Having a good, well paid job is like having potatoes. In theory, the former iss better, but if I had to choose what am I gonna eat for the next 30 years? I choose potatoes every time. Fancy dishes greatness wears off, you would get fed up very quickly eating it daily.
"However, as someone who believes in the concept that my career should serve a higher purpose and help people meaningfully, I find this cultural shift to be disturbing."
Let me ask you this, and it's a serious question.
You fear that people will just skive off and slide if they're not motivated by the whip. Years and years back, I worked a retail job. One month, there had been a rash of robberies in the local area. My boss told me that I should be willing to be stabbed rather than hand over the money in the till. That was the instruction I was given: "if someone comes in and pulls a knife and threatens to stab you if you don't empty the till, lock it and throw the key where they can't get it and tell them no".
My boss would also, had the place been robbed and I been stupid enough to go "No! I shall lay down my life for the business' profits!" and ended up stabbed by a disgruntled robber, not have given me a penny piece towards any medical expenses, would have disclaimed any responsibility, would have dodged all legal responsibilities, and would probably have given me the sack for the audacity of having to be in hospital recovering and not turning up for work.
Do you really, honestly, believe that is any kind of motivation for anyone to "go the extra mile"? To try as hard at work and make necessary change/innovation and get talented/motivated people a work environment that benefits from their contributions?
Because yeah, the prospect of being stabbed and even fatally stabbed sure is challenging work, but is it the kind of incentive you wish upon everyone?
I think the book's just dumb, in the same way that book about the 7 stages of dying is. People differ. Some never even think about getting a dream job, because they just want to make a lotta money -- or because nothing they enjoy could possibly be part of a job -- or because they were raised to be dutiful. Some people's dream jobs are pretty attainable -- others, like playing pro basketball or a famous rock star -- are for most practical purposes simply unattainable. Some people who think about finding their dream job should drop the idea, and others who'd never even hoped for such a thing should start hoping.
Nikola Jokić is a fascinating example. NBA MVP, dream job, he must be passionate about basketball, right?
Well, with every sentence of every interview he seems like he wants to convince you "it's just a job" for him, and really he cares more about his horses and family. He didn't dream about being a basketball player, he just happened to be really, really fucking good at it
The idea of a "dream job" is what used to be called "putting all your eggs in one basket". The basket isn't what you want, the eggs are what you want.
>if no one is willing to go the extra mile, then nothing will get done,<
If this is actually true, then the management sucks. I hate, HATE that this business culture fetishizes pushing ordinary employees to go "above and beyond". It's an admission from the actual leadership that they don't know what the fuck they're doing and their employees are carrying their useless asses. If the floor employees have to motivate themselves under their own power, then what the fuck do the bosses provide. It's not my job to do their job.
So totally yes to your second paragraph! I once had a junior colleague complain about the understaffing and insane workloads. So I asked if he still managed to finish his tasks on time. ‘Yes’. Then, I asked, how would the higher-ups know there was a problem? It was a revelation for him.
Well, the way you let the higher-ups know there's a problem is by missing a deadline. It's risky, but a much better signal than complaining while "going above and beyond".
He did that, and a req was opened within weeks.
That only works in places where the higher-ups give a damn, but I think you know that as you acknowledge this is risky.
In bad places, they already know and don't give a damn because they don't mind having high turnover/churn of new, lower level and junior employees. They bank on 'there's always someone who badly needs a job' and a steady stream of 'first real job out of school' people who can be fooled into "going above and beyond" by all the talk about passion projects and make your job your identity to give value and meaning to your life and 'you gotta work hard at this level to move on up'. By the time those people are burnt out and quit, or squeezed dry and can't give any more, there's a new cog ready to be slotted into place to replace them.
It - luckily for those qualified to do the work - doesn't work like that in my industry. The higher-ups are forced to give a damn because blowing deadlines on shipping products results in huge losses. It's very binary, you are either in or out, and if you blew the deadline and didn't make it, you not only lost all the revenue in this design cycle, your customer is pissed off, has gone with a competitor, and now you lost this part of your revenue forever. People in these roles are also not easily replaceable, not within the constrains of a tight schedule. So you have to be careful about which project milestone you allow to lapse, because if you do blow up the project you (and a bunch of others) will lose the job because of the loss of revenue. But the leverage is there, and the higher-ups are forced to pay attention even if they don't want to.
That's the risk. You have to really understand the situation, and have a reasonable confidence that *you* are not the problem. In his case I knew he wasn't, and he knew he wasn't, it just hasn't occurred to him what the effective signal had to be.
I think the principle here goes well beyond jobs. It's a key life skill to be able to cope with the gap between your idealised fantasy of what something ought to be like and what it's actually like.
Pick a job, pick a spouse, pick a car, pick a house, you probably won't get exactly what you fantasised about having when you were fourteen -- that thing probably doesn't exist, and even if it does you're almost certainly not going to be the one who gets it, and if you do get it you'll find it isn't as good as you imagined.
Coping with this aspect of life, and having a good time anyway, is a key life skill which our memetic environment under-emphasises.
This is so true, I needed that, thanks.
Perfect comment. Could not agree more.
I've given up on all that happy horse shit. I will do anything for anyone for a check with enough zeros; it turns out you can vote with your wallet and your feet all you want and the blood soaked machine keeps running.
The only vote that matters is your actual vote and the vote that carries the implicit threat that a bullet is coming next.
" I'm afraid it might serve as an excuse for people to not try as hard at work"
And what would be wrong with that?
See, I'm the opposite on this. I think the idea of the "dream job" which will be meaningful *and* fulfilling *and* give you a cushy lifestyle is being used as a whip on people: work for your passion! this isn't just a job, it's a vocation!
And then you get people being used as unpaid labour, aka "interns", because "hey this is a foot in the door, a step on the ladder, you should be happy to be exploited to work all hours for buttons because this is your DREAM JOB, be grateful for the opportunity!"
There's:
(1) Jobs or work that is serving a higher purpose and helping people meaningfully. You can go wash the feet of lepers, this is that kind of work, but you're not going to live well off it
(2) Jobs or work that pay a ton of money and good conditions, but are otherwise soul-crushing, and the only reason people work them is the shit-ton of money
(3) Most jobs that most of us do, which are "you need money to live, you get money by working, this job does provide goods/services but in the end of the day, it's just a job"
(4) The unicorn you are hunting: meaningful, positive impact, makes me feel all personal growth and development and fun challenging enjoyable work that *also* has great pay and conditions so that,. unlike (1), I am not barely scraping by!
There is work like that out there, but it's rare. And I don't think people should be defining themselves by what they do for a living, and I do think it's used to whip people like mules along the path of "more productivity., more, more!"
Yeah, I'm firmly on the side of "so what the hell does it matter *if* that's used as an excuse so people don't have to sell their souls and every dram of energy for The Sacred Profit Motive?"
This American terror of "if I don't have a job/career and I don't strain every sinew to advance, get promotions, get more money, then what am I???" astounds me.
Yes, indeed: if you don't have that job, what are you? What human person are you, not the cog in the machinery of the economy? If ever you retire and get the gold watch, now what will you do once you are an ex-"my job is a major part of my identity and I get fulfilment from that"?
Well, I'd say that with the push towards incorporating AI into every damn thing including how you make your tea in the morning, the dream is to make the American economy even more productive but do away with the pesky human workers who are just a hindrance and a nuisance and cost the business money in wages.
So there will be plenty of threat and terror around "am I gonna lose my job?" but since this is no longer of direct benefit to employers, they won't care about motivations such as "your job is the most important thing about you and only success in your career counts towards any kind of value as a human being". What that means for those who did construct their entire lives around their work being their identity, who can say - maybe they'll survive in the new AI world, maybe they'll be as obsolete as buggy whip manufacturers.
That's a large part of my disagreement with CoolLibrarian: we don't know for sure that something won't happen to ruin all our careful plans. Think of the wannabe sports stars who get a career-ending injury before they had the chance to make it big; now they have to pivot to something else for meaning, and the years of sacrifice have gone up in smoke. Your company goes bankrupt and lays you off in a bad economy, or you get sick and can't continue to work in the field you love, or you get replaced by newer, shinier tech and/or younger people with the new skills you don't have. Now you're on the scrapheap, and all your sense of worth was wrapped up in "I am a polisher of seashells". You need something, anything, other than "work career give it 200% the company is mother the company is father" to be a human being, separate from being a 'productive' economic cog.
I guess it depends a lot on your safety net, and whether you can make yourself work hard when you don't have to.
First you need to consider what happens when you abandon your current reliable source of income and switch to something that may not bring enough money during the first six months... or maybe six years... or maybe never. Maybe you have a partner or parents generous enough that they can feed you and provide a roof above your head for as long as you need -- in such case, go ahead and explore. Or maybe you are living paycheck to paycheck, and if you miss a payment, everything will collapse -- in such case, you need to remember that looking for a meaningful career is a rich people's privilege, and you don't happen to be one of them; the best you can probably do is try finding some enjoyment in the job you have. Taking money away from the budget for your kids' food, and spending them on a lottery ticket, is highly irresponsible. The journalist or blogger who tries to convince your otherwise won't be there for you when you kids are hungry and crying.
Second, I hate to admit it, but sometimes the things you hate at the moment make you stronger in long term. No matter how much my job sucked, I usually learned something useful. (If you don't learn, that may be a good reason to change jobs. Also, if you are surrounded by toxic people. But that's not the same as looking for a dream job. It's more like looking for a less toxic version of your job, at the right point on the scale from boring to stressful.) Opportunities do not automatically translate to growth. If you were given all the time and space you need, would you make something awesome out of yourself, or would you simply spend the whole days reading Reddit and watching YouTube videos?
I know people who took the opportunity and succeeded. I know people who wasted a lot of time, talked big, and didn't achieve anything. I know people who switched their career, and then it turned out that the new lifestyle was neither better nor worse than the old one, just different.
Seems to me that you are talking about two different concepts, "finding a dream job" and "working hard". Is the job you have the kind of a job you always wanted to have? Are you growing up professionally? Does your current work environment reward your extra effort? Those are independent questions.
You can try to do your job as well as you can, even if it is not the kind of a job you wanted. And who knows, perhaps one day you will find certain pride and satisfaction in your competence. Or perhaps the day will come when you try something new, and some of your skills and good habits will turn out to be useful for the new job, too. Even if your current job does not reward growth, as long as it does not actively punish it, you can simply grow up there, and then use your skills to get a better job. (But this requires a bit of strategic thinking beyond "do whatever my current boss wants me to do". For example, do not learn bad habits, even if your boss and colleagues tell you that this is the right thing to do.)
Do not burn out. Working overtime is stupid, full stop. If you sacrifice yourself for the company and burn out, guess what, the company will probably replace you with someone who is still full of energy. Or they will keep you there, doing low status work, with no salary raise, not even to match the inflation. Never confuse what is "best for the company" with what is "best for you". Your rewards are money, knowledge, skill, and the respect of your colleagues (especially if they will still remember you a decade later, and maybe help you get a new job at some other place). How much profit the company makes is important for your boss, but usually has no impact on you, beyond maybe getting a small bonus. Sometimes your goals are aligned, e.g. you learn a new technology, you create a great product, the company makes a lot of profit. Sometimes they are not. Sometimes they are anti-aligned, for example if you work a lot of overtime to keep some obsolete technology running, the company squeezes a bit more profit out of it, and then a few years later the technology is retired, you are burned out, and everything you learned during the last few years has zero value on the job market. Walk the extra mile; but also make sure to get paid for it.
Also, there may be a moment in your life when something else is your #1 priority, for example your children. There is nothing wrong with that. Or you may take a part-time job, because there is something important you want to get done in your free time. However, if you have no other priorities at the moment, your job may be a kind of spiritual gym where you can grow up as an adult person, and you should use that opportunity.
tl;dr -- it depends
I'm in agreement. We're not all out there curing cancer, so the 'dream job' that is meaningful and has a positive impact on society and isn't just about "added a few more cents to Jeff Bezos' money vault" is not achievable for everyone.
And what one person considers "meaningful and positive impact" is not the same as another person's view; I can see why people might dream of working for a NYC hedge fun for the chance of accumulating massive wealth, but I don't myself think it's particularly positive impact (though I'm sure there are economists who would argue that it is).
Different people find meaning in different things. I know a few teachers; they usually consider their work exhausting but meaningful.
(I think their jobs are meaningful in a certain way, but I can't stop noticing that *this doesn't scale*. In the sense that no matter what you do as an individual, you are just one teacher among thousands, so your entire life's work is just a drop in the ocean. Yes, you can make a huge impact on a few kids, but that changes nothing about the fact that for an *average* child, school still sucks.)
>(I think their jobs are meaningful in a certain way, but I can't stop noticing that _this doesn't scale_. In the sense that no matter what you do as an individual, you are just one teacher among thousands, so your entire life's work is just a drop in the ocean. Yes, you can make a huge impact on a few kids, but that changes nothing about the fact that for an average child, school still sucks.)
This is kind-of unavoidable in a large society. (Writing from the usa) If even 1% of the 300,000,000 of us were doing things that substantially changed our society, even just once in our lives, that's 3,000,000 people successfully making a major change once every 100 years, that's 30,000 _substantial societal changes per year_. That would be absolute chaos.
We can absorb 30,000 product launches per year, and the vast bulk of them sink without a trace.
I'll echo the bit about "Do not burn out.". Social circles are safety nets, and if you let yours drift away while you focus all your energies on work, then when something unexpected goes wrong in your life, you'll find yourself in free fall. Maybe that's a risk you want to take, but be clear with yourself that you're taking it. I don't think it's talked about enough.
I'm not going to go into details, but worse stuff can happen, and when it does, it's good to have people who've known you for years, who have your best interest at heart, and who do not have a transactional relationship with you.
Most people can't get their dream job because they're not smart enough for it. My dream job is to work for a NYC hedge fund but I'd probably never get hired as I'm not good enough.
If you're smart enough for your dream job, I'd say go for it.
A lot of this depends on the sector. In some sectors it's all about the money and people derive meaning from the things they spend their salary on rather than their job. In other sectors, it makes sense that people would find meaning in it in principle, but maybe it's competitive, or the sector is shrinking, or growth is sluggish, or the whole is greater than the part. So I think most people could benefit from managing their expectations about work, even if - perhaps especially if - they are aiming high.
(In this comment, I'm following your lead in using the "rhetorical you", so this shouldn't be interpreted as directly referencing the parent comment's author.)
The crucial ingredient is, are you *good enough* to do your dream job? Do you have the drive, the ability to learn, the raw genetic talent? Many children dream of being pro athletes, but only few can succeed.
Also, there're a lot of jobs out there that are (almost) no one's dream, but they fill an economic niche.
Chasing the dream is all well and good, and I hope more people succeed. But like the romantic myth of "the one", for most people it's going to be a false hope. I suspect more people will find fulfillment in finding something "good enough" and *making* it better. If that's not what you want: do you have reason to believe that you're exceptional, aside from pure narcissism?
Not to mention the little problem that if people are trained to seek a perfection that they never find, that gives others (especially employers) an attachment point to manipulate them.
> "I'm talking about people who are what the media calls "quiet quitters" who phone it in at work because they can't stand being there but they can't quit for some reason. "
You're misusing the phrase "quiet quitters."
It describes people who do only the tasks covered by their job description / role, and nothing else. No unpaid overtime, no stretch projects, no performing informal interim management while the company is trying to hire a new manager, no attending "optional" social events, and so on.
"Quiet quitting" is doing:
Just.
The.
Job.
Doing only the work one is paid for and nothing more for is a totally rational for most people in most industries. That's why the phrase "quiet quitting" is so maddening; it's not even an accurate description of people reasonably refusing to provide *free* attention and labor to their employers. They're not "quitting," they're just "working."
It can be work to rule, which is a means by which strikers get employers to come to the negotiating table. If an employer is very intransigent about "your contract of employment says you start work at 8:00 a.m. so if you clock in at 8:02 a.m. I'm dockign you half an hour's pay for being late", then "okay but my contract also says I finish at 5:00 p.m. so I am leaving at 5:00 p.m. on the dot, even if the phone rings I'm not going to answer it".
There is a lot of work that is not covered by strict rules and that you naturally do to make the work day flow better, but if it comes down to being exploited, yes: fuck "quiet quitting", that's not a thing.
People slacking off and not doing the job? Yes, that's real. That's a problem. Not giving you blood from a stone? That's not quiet quitting, that's keeping my soul. If you want extra work from me, pay me for it or the equivalent, don't let the demands creep up so that suddenly I'm doing more than I'm supposed to be doing so you can squeeze out a few more pennies of productivity.
Well, to be fair to you, the idea that it would occur to employers and even workers that "only doing your exact job and nothing more" could be called "quitting" on any level is truly *wild.*
I have about this level of sympathy for the media and their "quiet quitters" take (see the blank space here? That's the level).
Never mind that this is clickbait headline stuff and in three months' time they'll be writing lifestyle pieces about burn-out and how you should pace yourself at work (i.e. what they called 'quiet quitting' in their last piece).
Sometimes working to rule *is* the best option, because killing yourself putting in extra effort for THE JOB isn't going to be appreciated or rewarded and your employer just considers you a sucker to be exploited. Whoever creates the layout for those damn news vomit things on Bing (you know the ones - "Creepy stories from people who work alone!" to quote one I pulled up just now) are *not* benefitting the world and would do more for the general well-being of society if they did just 'phone it in' at work.
"I think the rhetorical "we" can convince those who feel demoralized by their jobs that they have options to change their circumstances and find a job with people who respect them and value their contributions, THEN they can focus on growing in a job they actually love."
That's truly nice, but I don't think you have "the lads on the bin lorries" in mind when you write things like that. "Dream job" is a very middle-class, and mid to upper middle class at that, notion. I think the guys on the bin lorries are doing valuable work, but it's not "every day is a thrill" one, particularly in summer when emptying the compost bins.
Meritocracy never simply works or doesn't work - there is a work/outcome ratio which varies substantially from sector to sector and job to job, and also between different phases of your career.
E.g in school teaching there is a phase where everyone sucks and there isn't really anything you can do to get better at the job except not quitting. That doesn't mean "meritocracy doesn't work" - in this sector, for a time, working harder won't make a lot of difference because you haven't yet got the experience to understand what good lesson planning really looks like. So just sucking it up and managing expectations and reading a book like that seems like a plan.
For "nothing" read very marginal progress. The more you do it the better you get but it's marginal. Point is Just Working Harder doesn't work
It sounds like "dream job" means something different to you than it does to me or to Moon Moth. When I think of a "dream job", I think of the ones Moon Moth described - jobs like pro athlete, pro actor/musician, or even business owner where most people who try to get that job will fail even with the proper training. If there is a job someone dreams of but hasn't tried to get, the most likely reason they haven't tried is that they think they probably can't get that job.
"in a field that makes an impact and that I have a genuine interest in (this means I am primarily interested in education)"
So long as you're realistic about it, and don't go into it with starry-eyed Hollywood movies about inspirational teachers views. Because that will burn you out faster than anything else.
Sometimes you *will* be just a glorified baby-sitter, and for some kids that is the best outcome they can get, and I mean that non-cynically. Forget the notions of "I will take this kid from a broken home and with my interest and support and encouragement they will go on to, eventually, become a Nobel Prize winner!" Yeah, that happens. But what is much, *much* more likely, and much more valuable, is "I'm a responsible adult who is not going to fuck this kid up anymore than they are already fucked up, and I do the bare minimum of making sure they aren't harming themselves or others and overseeing that they stay in school for six hours a day so they can't wander the streets and get caught up in petty crime", along with the twenty-eight other kids in the class in the same boat.
As someone who does a reasonable amount of voluntary work, I think you have a point here.
Paid work keeps me in groceries; the other stuff is done for love.
As a computer programmer: I love my job but I also do it for free outside of work.
The reason it escapes your dilemma is that there're an infinite amount of fun projects to work on, but only a finite number that will make companies money. The profitable stuff is usually less interesting than the most fun nonprofitable stuff, but working for a company hads other benefits (your code is more likely to see use, it's easier to find collaborators, ..., and they pay you). And any coding at all is still coding.
I would say I'm pretty good at my job these days by the standards of my peers, but there are tens of thousands of people out there who are better still.