Just came across this article (https://www.tabletmag.com/feature/american-vulcan-palmer-luckey-anduril), which is a pretty wild interesting story. But I also found it very ironic, because right after talking about how Luckey was smeared by inaccurate media articles, the article itself proceeds to smear Facebook the same way!
As i may have mentioned before, I am currently struggling with Grave's disease (overactive thyroid0.
The cardiology department has just had the bright idea they could prescribe spironolactone for thw water retention (edema) I get as a symptom of the thyroid condition. Which will probably work, yes.
And, I am thinking to myself... spironolactone? I just happen to know what *else* that is prescribed for, having been following the news about restrictions on prescribing puberty blockers. It's a testosterone blocker, also often prescribed for MtF transsexuals. Fine. Fine. I shall play dumb and pretend that I do not know this.
I started some of his books and liked them but haven't finished anything yet. I mostly liked his analysis of the psychology of the modern man, I didn't get a lot of insights on AI.
I'm not saying that the Unabomber wasn't a smart guy, but I am going to say that someone who couldn't even manage to keep himself from blowing up buildings and airplanes probably isn't who we should turn to when it comes to keeping AI from doing likewise.
I also question the wisdom of linking to one of the premiere resources for literary piracy, personally.
I thought this might have been a clip from an SNL skit — sort of a reprise of their classic Bass-O-Matic skit — but, no, it's a real company with a real product! And how much development time was required to make its lips sync with its voice?
What would be the optimal immigration policy for the USA? I don't believe it is either Open Borders or Zero Immigrants. My best guess is we need to allow way, way more immigrants with college degrees and maybe the same or fewer without degrees? In either category, what would be a method for determining what the optimum number per year would be?
The critical question is whether we maintain a welfare state for the immigrants. If we do, then we don't want poor immigrants, since they cost us more than they pay us. That leads to the popular policy of letting in only high end immigrants.
But the immigrants who we, and they, can gain most from are at the other end of the scale, poor people happy to do unskilled work at a wage high for them, low for us, and work their way up from there, the equivalent of my ancestors who came in from eastern Europe to work in sweatshops in New York a century and more ago. They are better off coming in without the protections of a welfare state than being kept out — but that option is barred by current ideology.
Don't you need to consider the labour capital ration as well? Expanding the labour supply will probably push down per capita gdp and wages for a fixed amount of capital.
Also, if the source of higher incomes in developed countries is non-rivalous, like institutions or governance, surely it makes more sense to extend them to low-income countries rather than concentrating everyone in places that are already high income.
Does it depend at all on the particular state? My guess is that unskilled immigrants to Texas, which has a relatively small welfare state, are a net positive to the economy whereas low skilled immigrants to California are a net negative, but I don't know what the data says.
I'll perversely say, more unskilled laborers and fewer skilled or degreed immigrants. Also, dismantle the H1-B visa system which is really a soft form of indentured servitude.
Something like Australian / NZ point system would be a good start. Less “family re-unification”, more “we have shortage of this labor type, come in”. Our immigration system is such a hopeless mess, any streamlining and simplification would be welcome at this point.
The optimal immigration policy is a Schengen Area within the core American Empire (US, Anglosphere, EU, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Israel) and a MrBeast style gameshow at the southern border open to any IQ > 115, where contestants have to pass through several rounds of challenges testing intelligence, fitness, creativity, patience, sociability, and adherence to American Empire cultural norms.
It sounds like you are looking for workers who will add value: I don't know if your strategy for achieving that is right or not, but more importantly I don't know if it's the right aim - or more to the point the aim most people would agree on.
There's a review of the book "Then I Am Myself the World" by Christof Koch in the latest Science News. Koch is into ITT (integrated information theory), which postulates you can measure a system's consciousness by measuring the amount of integrated information within it. Koch did this with the generative AI ChatGPT, and the money quote is -
"(it) has an itsy bitsy bit of consciousness" but experiences the world something much less than a worm with only 300 neurons.
So maybe we're safe from AI doom for a little while.
Can you say a bit about what Koch means by integrated information? What's an example? Is what is integrated things about self and things about world? (So, for instance, GPT4 will tell you it's an LLM, and whether LLM's like itself can or can't do a certain task. That seems to me like some knowledge about self integrated with knowledge about the world. )
I didn't read Koch's book. Integrated information theory (IIT, got the acronym wrong the first time) is something I tried to learn about by reading Erik Hoel's book "The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science", but it was over my head and, altho he helped develop the theory, he winds up trashing it. If only someone more expert than me could write up a review of either of these books for next years contest.
I wasn't asked and have no idea what he means with the fluffy phrase "integrated information" but I think his overall idea is panpsychism plus the assumption that an atom has a different - and vastly poorer experience - than a fox because an atom can do viewer and less complex actions than a fox. That's my interpretation of him saying that what matters is how much "irreducible causal power" a thing has.
My example is, a fox can do actions that its individual atoms can't. Not its atoms hunt rats, the fox does.
And I think, for sure: hunting a rat feels much different than to only swing arround a few nanometer. I know, I've done both.
I don't get it. Clearly, my group is right, and the other group is wrong. So why don't all utilitarians join my group and declare a war on the other group? Is it because they are stupid, or because they are hypocrites? What cause could possibly bring more utility than making my group win?
I am also baffled. Me and my in-group are clearly utility monsters, so why aren't utilitarians fulfilling our every whim at the expense of the out-group?
For the benefit of folks who haven’t watched The Big Lebowski a half a dozen time that’s a reference to The Dude describing his time in the music business. As a roadie for Metallica, along with his opinion of the group. Mettalica loved the joke BTW.
I didn’t get that when I played it. I’ll delete the link.
Edit; I’m finding YouTube clips for a lot of Big Lebowski scenes. Not that one though.
Further Edit: I did find it dubbed into French, Japanese and a language I can only guess at with non ASII character set letters with diacritics and other ornamentations I don’t know the names of.
I've heard time and again that in Chasidic culture, men don't work. And I've said it.
At least for Williamsberg Chasidim, it just isn't true, and I'm wondering to what extent it's true elsewhere.
The video is an overview of the lively business culture of Williamsberg, with a lot of work being done by men. What they generally don't have is college degrees, but you can do a lot without a degree. There are many business supplying specialized cultural products (kosher food, wigs for women, etc.), non-religious products and services (plumbing, extermination), and selling outside the community. Computers are more of factor than they used to be, and so is entertainment.
Note that my link is about Chasidic culture where men work, but there's a possibility (if I can trust what I keep hearing about Israel) where Chasidic men (at least in some groups) don't work.
What's up with that is that the universe is out to get you. You think you have a nice handy generalization, and wham! the universe hits you with an exception. This is especially true for biology and for humans.
An interesting idea of "the bezzle", the window of time after a fraud has been committed when the action appears positive-sum, since the fraudster benefited, and the mark hasn't realized anything is amiss.
It helps explain why people get mad at whistleblowers, because everyone is happier *before* the whistle is blown, even if in reality some of the parties were worse off.
Whistleblowers probably aren't very popular even before they blow the whistle. In order to be willing to do it, you probably need to have a bond with the company and your coworkers that's defective, i.e. falls short of what's needed by the other parties. The thing that makes someone capable of blowing the whistle also generally makes them a bad team player. Still, we need them. If every crew rebelled against their Capt. Bligh there would be no Navy. But if there were many Capt. Blighs there also would be no Navy.
Every place I've worked there has been a huge glob of stuff that everybody knows is bad, but everybody thinks of it as stuff you can't acknowledge, much less challenge. The first place I ever worked was a small diner in the south. I was a waitress. The owner came in most days to check on things and punch and smack the busboys (all black, by the way) for not moving as fast as the thought they should. I remember him tasting the day's special and saying "Jesus, they must be hungry today!"
Whistleblowers are people who see something wrong in an organization and want to fix it. If they're not getting along with the rest of the organization, whistleblowing is one of the primary ways we hear about them. If they *are* getting along with the rest of the organization, then they're probably just working with their management (upwards or down; some of these people are themselves managers), getting the change that way, and we people outside the organization never hear of them.
Therefore, by the time we hear of someone in the news as a whistleblower, it's virtually certain they didn't get along with their team.
There's a catch here, though. Some people don't get along with their team because their team is corrupt and doing illegal things and then they go to the press. Others don't get along with their team because their team is trying to do its job and it's the individual who's corrupted by delusions of speaking truth to power and goes to the press. The press doesn't have a very large incentive to tell one from the other, but it often has a large incentive to report pot stirring and underdog stories, so both types of people are reported as whistleblowers, and it falls to us readers to figure out whether the person reported as a whistleblower actually *is* one, assuming we ourselves have any incentive to do so.
What makes you think I'm saying people who blow the whistle are immoral? I'm saying they're bad team players. They do not bond deeply with coworkers or the organization itself, are less loyal to it and its workers, less willing to forgive the organization its various lies and injustices, more skeptical of its view of how it should be seen. That's not equivalent to their being immoral. As a matter of fact, I think I am a bad team player. I have never been able to feel affection and loyalty for the places where I worked and went to school. I have tried to do a good job, and treat my coworkers fairly, but I have always been angry and creeped out by the lies and injustices that went on at the place, that everybody else seemed to shrug off as part of the package.
If you're going to pull Reddit-style rude gotchas on here, how about you at least try first to get clear what people are saying, and ask for clarification if it sounds ridiculous, instead of pulling out your dick and whizzing a steam of exclamatory question marks?
> I have tried to do a good job, and treat my coworkers fairly, but I have always been angry and creeped out by the lies and injustices that went on at the place, that everybody else seemed to shrug off as part of the package.
Then it isnt *your* cope, but all the same.
The chance your the person who take credit for others work, or makes delusional shots in basketball rather then passing, sound low. i.e. a bad team player.
> As a matter of fact, I think I am a bad team player. I have never been able to feel affection and loyalty for the places where I worked and went to school.
Actions are what matter
> If you're going to pull Reddit-style rude gotchas on here, how about you at least try first to get clear what people are saying, and ask for clarification if it sounds ridiculous, instead of pulling out your dick and whizzing a steam of exclamatory question marks?
Why? Im no less angry at the statement, but presumably mean girls turned hr ladies have convinced you of something
<Why? I'm no less angry at the statement, but presumably mean girls turned hr ladies have convinced you of something
ACX reasons: Because this is not Reddit, and if you engage in Reddit style rudeness, especially in response to someone who has not been rude to you, a lot of people are going to think you're a jackass and not take your posts seriously.
My reasons: I am not exactly distressed by your various negative takes on me, but I am irritated, and am likely in the future to skip over comments by you because, ugh, it's that monky guy who adds extra y's or something to monky. I have the impression that you read my posts on this thread not trying to get what I was saying, but scanning for bits that will give you a chance to exclaim about ways I am lame and dumb and wrong. Specifically: (1) A quick reading of my first post gave you the impression that I thought whistleblowers were bad people because honesty is less important than team players. Unless you have lousy reading comprehension skills you will have noticed, though, that I was not expressing any anger at or personal disapproval of whistleblowers, so it would be natural to wonder whether your first interpretation is correct. But you just went with your first impression, rather than re-reading, or asking me whether I was saying that being a team player is more important than being honest. So then you posted exclamations about how INCREDIBLY WRONG AND DUMB I WAS -- WAHHHHHHH!
(2) So then I clarify what I meant, and you let me off the hook for being a bad player who hogs the ball, but you still ended with an insult: I am calling myself a bad player because I am pussy-whipped by the HT lady. Again, rather than assuming I have been intimidated by a mean cunt into thinking I am Bad when actually I am a Good Guy, you could have asked me why I was calling myself a bad team player even though I believe I treat my coworkers fairly and pull my weight. But nope, you went for pussy whip.
> A quick reading of my first post gave you the impression that I thought whistleblowers were bad people because honesty is less important than team players. Unless you have lousy reading comprehension skills you will have noticed, though, that I was not expressing any anger at or personal disapproval of whistleblowers, so it would be natural to wonder whether your first interpretation is correct.
I quoted a statement because I was responding to a statement
> So then you posted exclamations about how INCREDIBLY WRONG AND DUMB I WAS -- WAHHHHHHH!
>> Then it isnt *your* cope, but all the same.
>> The chance your the person who take credit for others work, or makes delusional shots in basketball rather then passing, sound low. i.e. a bad team player.
I granted/clarified it wasn't a cope about your actions.
> I pulled my weight....
I believe you confused by my lazy sentence structure on this comment, to rephrase it verbosely
1. the definition of a bad team player is related to taking undue credit
2. given your claims you dont sound like you do that
3. qed you are there not a bad team player
I was also hoping to imply that that a "bad team player" commits local anti social behavior, a whistle blower commits high-cost, pro-socail behavior at a higher level of abstraction and its extremely unlikely for an ethical person to actually be less ethical at less abstract, lower cost, situations
> a mean cunt
From my point of view this is the first direct(i.e. about people here) insult in this thread
I pulled my weight, and did the hospital equivalent of passing the ball. But here are they ways I was not a team player: If I had a patient to refer, I sent them to whoever I thought was best, not to the person who had recently done me a favor, or the person I knew needed to pick up some more patients. I did not make an effort to pretend to like and respect various people on staff that I thought were dishonest, greedy and self-serving. I made a few friends on staff, but did not feel a bond with the rest of staff — skipped their baby showers, holiday parties, retirement parties, etc. Did not schmooze with them. Did not respect the head of the unit where I worked, and sometimes warned people to beware of his tendency to do various unscrupulous and unfair things. Had some major objections to certain hospital policies, and spoke about them bluntly whenever it was relevant. Overall, I just did not exude the “I’m OK you’re OK” feeling that organizations want and need from staff. I was respected, and was not disliked, but I definitely did not pull my weight when it came to working to create an atmosphere of “we’re all fine folks here.”
> but presumably mean girls turned hr ladies have convinced you of something
Is hr Human Relations? I don't think I ever spoke with one, or even knew who the hospital HR staff were. What on earth do you think one convinced me of? And what makes you expect that it's easy to convince me of things? You sure didn't get very far with convincing me I'm immoral.
At the risk of receiving a whizzing stream of exclamatory question marks, I wonder if Monkyyy could explain his Simiiforme reasoning for his belief that honesty is necessarily a prosocial behavior? Honesty is usually perceived by those on the receiving-end of it as an antisocial behavior.
Id draw the line closer to kant's axe murder then most. Everything depends on truth surviving lies, charitys that work rather then are money laundering schemes. If theres to much causal lying in society, something like giving to charity could easily break down and your giving money to a gold plated throne of the middle ages church. The proper use of violence depends on finding the right guy, etc etc etc etc
One of my friends lost a job because he wouldn't pad his expense account. He didn't report that everyone else was padding their expense accounts, but they were afraid he would.
Lorien made a question earlier asking why utilitarians more in favor of gender roles. A good discussion came from that. I have a similar comment, but different enough that I want to post about it separate from the discussion thread that Lorien started.
My question is... why aren't utilitarians more active in opposing what's called wokeness? At this point, in 2024, it's pretty clear that what's called "wokeness" has made people less happy, particularly the woke themselves. This philosophy/ideology is known for deriding toxicity, but is itself highly toxic. It focuses the mind almost exclusively on negative externalities, and it actively encourages very uncharitable interpretations of the words/actions of others through the promotion of ideas like micro-aggressions.
The art/entertainment that arises from it is widely considered inferior to what came before, as we can see with various viewer satisfaction metrics and falling ratings for several major franchises (Dr. Who, Star Trek, Star Wars, MCU TV shows).
I think it's pretty clear that most people in the west would like less "wokeness" in their world. That most people dislike it. And it could even be argued that many of the woke themselves would enjoy greater emotional well-being from not being woke.
So opposing wokeness seems to me as both a way to genuinely serve utilitarian goals while also making utilitariansm more popular with the general population. With such a win/win proposition just sitting there, completely consistent with utilitarian goals/beliefs, it's odd to me that the movement doesn't go for it more than it does.
Is it that "wokeness" isn't defined as well as most utilitarians would like? Is it that utilitarians believe it'll implode on its own? Is it just that... actively opposing wokeness would feel like being pro-Republican, and most utilitarians really don't want that? I'm genuinely curious here.
I think a utilitarian would say that specialization is good, and if we have a gender that is born a bit more empathic and another that is born with a bit more innate understanding of how objects work then it is good that they specialize on that. The issue is that it is only true on the average with many outliers.
Don't woke people think that wokeness will be beneficial in the long run? And perhaps in the short run, at least for some people (eg, supposed victims of racism, speech wokesters deem harmful, etc). Unless a utilitarian knows those things are untrue, wouldn't a utilitarian be agnostic?
Note also that the Civil Rights Movement likely made 80% of the people in much of the Deep South unhappy in the short term. What should utilitarian at the time have believed about it?
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
Since you raised the Civil Rights Movement, I thought it only fitting to raise this famous quote from arguably the greatest leader involved in that movement.
Do you think that modern wokism is consistent with Dr. King's statement here? To me, the answer is very clear. Even if it's not clear to your, I hope you'll think about it, and maybe keep it in mind when you read woke commentary in the future.
I really don't understand what you are talking about. Did you somehow misinterpret my comment as an endorsement of "wokism"? It was neither an endorsement nor a criticism.
The Civil Rights movement has very strong moral valiance. That might not be why you raised it, but even if not, it gives strength to your question.
So I'm replying by saying "Ok... but does modern wokism share the same moral valiance and moral values of the civil rights movement?" And I'm saying no, it doesn't... so it shouldn't get to benefit from the comparison.
It's entirely possible you're just being fair and neutral and raising open questions here. I fully respect that. Still, I feel that wokism gets far too easy of a pass by simply equating itself with things like the Union side of the Civil War, the armies that fought against the Nazis on D-Day, and the American Civil Rights movement. Wokeness is very different from these 3, it has very different values propelling it forward than these 3, so it shouldn't get to benefit from the widespread agreement that modern people have with these three.
Honestly, you need to read more carefully. It is very clear why I mentioned the Civil Rights Movement: Because it made people happier in the long term, and hence a utilitarian might support it, even if it made most people unhappy in the short-term. That is the same for wokeness: unless we are sure that wokesters are incorrect that wokeness will increase happiness in the long term, then it makes sense for utilitarians to be agnostic. That is true even though wokeness is not the moral equivalent of the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, it is true of permitting reform and NIMBYism and YIMBYism and 1000 other things that are not the moral equivalent of the Civil Rights Movement.
> At this point, in 2024, it's pretty clear that what's called "wokeness" has made people less happy
I don't think this is clear at all, at least for a definition of 'happy' that you could get a utilitarian to agree to
First of all, you don't present any evidence that wokeness has made people less happy _in toto_. That seems like a prerequisite for a utilitarian caring / taking action. Quality of media is just one part of the rich tapestry of human experience, and not even really something utilitarians typically care much about. On the assumption that you reckon you have such evidence but just haven't presented it (for brevity), I still don't think it is obvious all utilitarians should oppose wokeness.
Even the worst critics of wokeness view the process as being one of redistributing power and prestige. Therefore for every loser (typically characterised as being straight white men) there are winners (typically characterised as racial or sexual minorities). Maybe the utility gain isn't zero sum, but it isn't like woke utilitarians are totally ignorant of the fact that the utility gain *might not* be zero sum; they just believe that in fact the gains of making the worst off better are worth the costs of harming the better off. So the evidence you would need to convince a utilitarian is not just that things have got worse in the last decade, and that this is a direct result of wokeness, but also that the specific utility function of the utilitarian you are talking to is not satisfied by this state of affairs. This is nontrivial.
Arguing that media has got worse over the last decade is totally irrelevant to a woke utilitarian. Even if they agreed with you - and they probably wouldn't - they would say that worse media is a totally reasonable tradeoff to ensure that historic power imbalances were corrected
Even if it were true, it seems like *opposing* wokeness has made a lot of people unhappy. If you look at anti-woke media review channels, the personalities on those channels seem to be in a constant state of heightened anger at finding slights (real and imagined) in that media. For example a bunch of people got really, genuinely, non-performatively angry that Princess Peach was wearing trousers in the Mario movie trailer (her karting outfit, which she has worn since we'll before wokeness was a thing). Those people would be much happier if they stopped opposing wokeness, because opposing wokeness clearly causes them to tilt at ridiculous windmills. A utilitarian must at least consider that efforts to oppose wokeness would cause misery, such that even if it would have been better to oppose it ten years ago, it is too late to do it now and it is better to settle into a slightly suboptimal equilibrium than to perpetuate the culture war
Overall I think your argument requires that nobody genuinely believes wokeness is good. But since some people clearly do believe this, it is unlikely that you'll convince them by appealing to the 'obviousness' of your position
Going by this study, 80% of Americans believe that political correctness is a problem. Political Correctness/SJWism/Wokism... these terms have been used pretty interchangably in my experience. They don't always mean exactly the same thing, but there's substantial overlap here.
If 80% of Americans (strongly) dislike political correctness, then that means 80% of American (strongly) dislike at least a core part of what's considered "wokeness".
If this 80% is even close to accurate, then your suggestion of an even trade-off between "winners" and "losers" is very incorrect. It's not 1-for-1, it's 4 losers-for-1 winner (at best), and at that point it's anti-utilitarian and should be opposed.
I'm going to guess, from your reply, that you yourself are at least somewhat woke or progressive. Fair enough. Wanting greater equality, in at least practical terms, is understandable and admirable. Wokism is just one of many ways to try to achieve that, and a good argument can be made that there are much better and less counter-productive ways to achieve it. Utilitarians in general, and the effective altruism movement specifically, have a good philosophical framework to suggest different ways of achieving that. And to be fair, EA does address this some with the way it promotes altruistic and charitable living, much healthier than actively encouraging people to interpret the words of others in the most uncharitable way possible.
That being said, wokism is a competitor to EA, arguably the main competitor given its prominence in the modern American media landscape. The woke themselves recognize this, which is why the owner of this substack had a NY Times hitpiece wrote against him. Simply ignoring a major competitor, especially one that is not ignoring you, doesn't seem wise or prudent to me.
Given what you wrote about "quality of media", I get the impression you don't care much about it, so probably not worth getting into the various Rotten Tomatoes scores and IMDB scores and TV show ratings at a specific level. Plus, most of this information is not hard to find.
To be clear, I'm not a conservative. On a political compass, I'd consider myself Center-Left. My impression is that wokism has horribly distracted us from much more practical economy inequality concerns, while simultaneously creating a media and narrative landscape that actively repulses most people, thus making for a much less pleasure cultural atmosphere to live within.
Asian-made entertainment, largely free of woke elements, has been dramatically on the rise in recent years and decades. I don't think this is purely a coincidence. I considered getting into detail on this, but again, given what you wrote on "quality of media" probably pointless.
Have a good day. Thanks for the thorough and thought-provoking reply.
Interestingly enough I think we actually totally agree on the fundamental-level issues (I too would consider myself on the economic left and I too consider the culture war a distraction from actually pressing issues of economic inequality). I'd hazard a guess we agree in every particular on the harm that identity politics has wrought on the classic economic left as a political block.
However I'd also consider myself a strong utilitarian, and therefore I bristle at suggestions that the good is something that is trivially easy to determine, particularly when a large number of people think otherwise. I'd be incredibly surprised if at one point 80% of people didn't oppose interracial marriage, or gay marriage, or assisted dying, or anything like that, and it would have been terrible if utilitarians had let them get away with saying 'Since it is obviously wrong that X, we should make it a cornerstone of utilitarian philosophy to oppose X'. It is the 'obvious' bit I disagreed with, rather than the suggestion that in the final accounting we might find wokeness has caused more harm than good.
If I might - I appreciate the polite and good faith indication that you've got better things to do than go back and forth with me (in which case no problem at all) - but it I'd possible your reply indicates a bit of an error in your thinking. Imagine a world where 80% of people had more than enough to eat and 20% of people were starving. You could make the 20% vastly vastly better off by redistributing food from the 80% so that everyone had exactly enough to eat. If you asked 'Are you better off before or after redistribution?' you'd get 80/20 against it. But if you asked 'Solve for U(x) where U(x) is the utility you gain from your next marginal calorie' you'd get an average score much higher in the post-redistribution world. Almost all (possibly all?) utilitarians believe utility is better thought about in the second kind of terms, and woke utilitarians believe that this is true PLUS we actually live in a world like this except it is power / prestige which is inadequately distributed. So your evidence wouldn't convince them. I thought you might be interested in this feedback just in case you had a different expectation of what your evidence would prove to a utilitarian
Utilitarianism isn't a movement, it's just a philosophical position, compatible with all sorts of object-level political beliefs. You'll find utilitarians supporting all sorts of different things.
According to Aristotle we have two appetites - the concupiscible appetite directs us towards good things which are pleasant - food etc. while the irascible appetite directs us towards good things which are difficult to achieve e.g hiking up a mountain. The irascible appetite needs to be put in its place but we all need some difficult goals in life. I assume the woke are relatively unhappy while focused on the difficult goal of achieving equality as they see it, but many will have concupiscible goals that balance this.
Utilitarians are well aware that wokeness is a strawman that pretends that every form of egalitarianism is part of the over-corrective push of an outspoken minority, so they focus their utils on things that actually matter.
Some random thoughts on the Qur'an, in no particular order, since I've been reading it*:
- The Qur'an is extremely rambly and meandering, which makes it a bit hard to read. Most of the chapters cover a very, very wide range of topics, except for those at the end, which only cover one topic because they're only one paragraph or so long. There are a few anecdotes that are interesting enough to read (mostly various abbreviated versions of corresponding incidents from the Bible), but it's kinda hard to fish them out of the sheer mass of purple prose about how Allah is great and nonbelievers are evil. A lot of modern translations (eg Clear Quran) tend to only intensify the purple prose, making it even more unreadable.
- For example, surah 2 relates the tale of how Moses told the Israelites to slaughter a cow. In the Qur'an's version, this is apparently a one-off incident to resolve a disputed murder. In Deuteronomy 21's version, however, God commands the Israelites to slaughter a cow *every time* there is a disputed murder.
- There are a few points it really, *really*, likes to drive home. Some version of this is repeated in nearly every chapter.
- In Islam, all Muslims will go to Paradise, but all non-Muslims will go to "the fire", which is how the Qur'an *always* refers to the Islamic version of hell.
- Allah is almighty, wise, all-seeing, all-knowing, and so on.
- There are two or three cryptic-looking letters at the beginning of each chapter. (By the way, these are called the "muqatta'at", and have fueled a truly insane amount of speculation.)
Any further thoughts on this? Am I misunderstanding anything?
*proofreading it on Wikisource, as a matter of fact!
- Are you reading it in the traditional order, or the chronological order in which it was written and received by Mohammed (the latter makes much more sense)?
- The biography of Mohammed by Karen Armstrong is a highly readable book which I would strongly recommend as a companion piece to the Quran, especially when reading the surahs in chronological order.
- These taken together highlight how much many parts of the Quran are highly relevant to Mohammed's day to day live and evolving circumstances, including a few bits highly convenient to the prophet himself at that particular point.
I only just started a few days ago and haven't mustered the patience to get past the second surah, but what you describe fits with my impressions - it's like a fire-and-brimstone preacher riffing on vaguely-alluded-to Old Testament stories, with the stringency of a Trump campaign rally speech. You really have to wonder if Allah the All-Knowing couldn't afford a better editor.
I was gifted a Quran by a Muslim coworker a few years ago. I found it difficult to read too. I’ve read that in the original Arabic the repetition that I found frustrating reads as poetic and is actually a pleasure to read.
All that babbling by the concern trolls on the right and in the MSM about Kamala's issues and positions is just noise. Anna Navarro (a Republican BTW) reminds us that's there only one big issue we need to be concerned about this election. And it's the GOP elephant in the room...
"Let's be serious. Donald Trump and his minions have called Kamala a communist. I know communism. I fled communism from Nicaragua when I was eight years old. I don't take it lightly. And let me tell you what communist dictators do, and it's never just for one day. They attack the free press. They call them the enemy of the people like Ortega does in Nicaragua. They put their unqualified relatives in cushy government jobs so they can get rich off their positions like the Castros do in Cuba. And they refuse to accept legitimate elections when they lose and call for violence to stay in power like Maduro is doing right now in Venezuela. Now you tell me something. Do any of those things sound familiar? Is there anyone running for president who reminds you of that? And I know one thing. It's not Kamala Harris..."
Politics is the mind-killer. It is the little death that precedes total obliteration. I will face the hot takes and I will permit them to pass over me and through me. And when the thinkpieces and quips have gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the dunks have gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Kamala is a Communist the same way Trump is a Fascist, which is to say it's all very damn stupid, I'm not even going to touch "but *they* started it!" by both sides, and it's just the way modern politics is going.
Party A says Party B is not alone stupid but evil, and trying to bring back Bad Thing X.
Party B says Party A is not alone evil but stupid, and trying to bring back Bad Thing Y.
Stop calling Trump a Fascist, stop calling Harris a Communist. I would like that, but it's not gonna happen.
Help me out here. I find it hard to distinguish authoritarian communists from authoritarian fascists. What criteria make them different?
1. Authoritarian fascists and authoritarian communists both try to control the media, and penalize vocal and active dissent.
2. Authoritarian fascists and communists both try to control the courts to get the desired results politically and legally, and to veil their illegal actions in a cloak of legality.
3. Authoritarian fascists and communists both promote corruption to divert money and power into their hands — and authoritarian fascist and communist leaders give cushy positions to family and friends so they can profit from their control of the state.
4. Authoritarian fascists and communists both promote nationalist agendas, identifying themselves as true patriots and their enemies as enemies of the nation.
5. Authoritarian fascists and communists both target out-groups such as ethnic minorities or religious minorities for persecution to direct their citizens' anger at the out-groups rather than the leadership.
6. Authoritarian fascists and communists both try to distort the economy for their own and the benefit of the leadership clique.
The only difference that I can see between the two is that communists try to micro-manage businesses with a command-and-control economy, while fascists allow favored businesses to create monopolies (in return for kickbacks) that put pressure on businesses that don't play along. Either way, independent entrepreneurial activities are stifled.
The simplest way to tell fascists from communists is that fascists identify as fascists while communists identify as communists. Trying to make up some list of criteria for who belongs to a particular political movement just seems like a bad idea.
I'm pretty sure that nobody outside the lunatic fringe self-identifies as fascist or communist anymore, except in the latter case for a few historical ruling parties that are stuck with "communist" in their name and everybody then says that the Chinese aren't *really* communist.
And, yeah, the Chinese probably don't count as communist any more, but the people who do mostly call themselves "socialist". Close enough, I suppose. The fascists call themselves a bunch of other things, depending on the local political clime, and their critics then say "but with policies like those, they're basically admitting they're fascists".
Started out with Lexapro to try and improve my mood and sociability... and WOW! Absolutely amazing effects on day 4, though on days 5 and 6 things have gone back to baseline so far. Is there a reason why the effects haven't been consistent? Perhaps there's a way to speed up the onset of Lexapro to get me to feel great again sooner?
I'm 100% sure its not placebo: I track my mood every day consistently and three days ago was THE best mood of my entire year, by far. I was also skeptical the SSRI would actually do anything so I don't think it was placebo.
Wrote an answer but somehow it didn't get through. Here tis again: Most drugs in this class take 4 weeks plus to work, but lexapro is unusually fast, with some feeling a difference in 1 week. So maybe you are just an unusually fast responder. If what you felt was a drug effect then you can expect the mood lift to be stable once the drug fully kicks in. Don't discount placebo completely, though. Scott was sure he was microdosing on the real deal, but found out at end of study he's been taking placebo.
I hadn't really been following the story of the luxury superyacht which was sunk by a waterspout off the coast of Sicily, until I learned the name of it.
It was renamed "Bayesian" or "the Bayesian", thanks to the owner (?) who is the wife (now widow) of a guy involved in tech and finance:
"Built in 2008, the 56-meter (184-foot) yacht was manufactured by Italian company Perini Navi, Reuters reported. According to the Associated Press, the boat has been available for charter for $215,000 (€195,000) per week.
Lynch’s wife is linked to the yacht. The Bayesian is held by the company Revtom Limited, according to records from the maritime information service Equasis. The company’s latest annual return from April lists Bacares as the proprietor.
“Bayesian,” the name given to the vessel, is linked to the statistical theory on which Lynch built his fortune, according to Reuters."
That is not all, however, The man, Michael Lynch, was involved in a long legal battle with Hewlett-Packard over the sale of his company, Autonomy, to them, along with his VP of finance and another company member. Allegations of financial jiggery-pokery, which is all being covered in detail over at The Motte: https://www.themotte.org/post/1131/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week
So Lynch is acquitted, goes on a celebratory yacht trip, and ends up dead. But wait, there's more! That same weekend, his co-defendant *also* ends up dead after being struck by a car:
What's that quote from "The Importance of Being Earnest"? "To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."?
To have one Rationalist or Rationalist-adjacent billionaire involved in financial shenanigans (SBF) may be a misfortune, to have two (Lynch and Bayesianism) looks like carelessness 😁
I know, it's "throw a stone and hit one" territory. But for a movement all about winning bigly, maybe try and avoid the appearance of criminality because you assume you are just that much smarter than the normies?
It's all sorts of ironic. The boat's problem was probably that it had one very tall mast not two shorter ones. Tallest aluminium mast in the world. You would expect a statistician to ask: what are the odds of someone making a bigger one? If they do is it likely to be twice as high, or one metre higher? What do the constraints governing that question tell me about my own mast?
There is also some question about whether the keel of the yacht was in its lowered position or not, and whether some hatchways had been left open in spite of a storm warning.
I just heard someone say 83-86% of Democrats are in favor of a cease-fire in Israel. So apparently people think polls should influence policy. Or is this just an American thing?
This is not about Israel, Gaza, or even specifically Democrats. But people seem to think their non-expert opinion matters. Don't we appoint people to government positions so they can make the best decisions for us? They should be giving us what we NEED, which isn't necessarily what we WANT.
It's ridiculous to think something as complex as foreign policy should be determined by how people feel about a situation.
In general issue polling is terrible and cursed, since people will say they support more services, less taxes, lower deficits, and whatever else you want them to answer in your poll. Unless it's very careful to explicitly list the tradeoff involved in a neutral way, issue polling should be completely ignored.
As of 2024, approximately 92% of Republicans believe that violent crime in the United States is increasing, while all the data seems to suggest that violent crime is lower than at the beginning of the 1960s. Why should something as complex as the criminal justice system be left up to people who have no clue on how to look at the data?
Because you see the bigger pattern if you zoom out. Unfortunately, I can't post graphs as a response. But there's this — the age-adjusted homicide rates since 1900. For some reason, they're tracking it against the inflation rate (post 1962 there *does* seem to visually be a rough correlation). The three most recent peaks were 1974, 1981, and 1991. In this chart the 2022 COVID peak is about half the height of those three peaks and has fallen since then. The un-age-adjusted homicide rate has dropped from 6.8/100K in 2022 to 4.8/100K (2Q of this year). This in line with late 1950s and the early 1960s.
What's interesting to me is that the age-adjusted homicide rate back in the 1920s and early 1930s was nearly as high as the later 20th Century peaks. I wonder if other categories of violent crimes were also as high back then as they were in early 1990s? See, you learn new things when you zoom out. ;-)
Because you see the bigger pattern if you zoom out. Unfortunately, I can't post graphs as a response. But there's this — the age-adjusted homicide rates since 1900. For some reason, they're tracking it against the inflation rate (post 1962 there *does* seem to visually be a rough correlation). The three most recent peaks were 1974, 1981, and 1991. In this chart the 2022 COVID peak is about half the height of those three peaks and has fallen since then. The un-age-adjusted homicide rate has dropped from 6.8/100K in 2022 to 4.8/100K (2Q of this year). This in line with late 1950s and 1960s.
What's interesting to me is that the age-adjusted homicide rate back in the 1920s and early 1930s was nearly as high the later 20th Century peaks. I wonder if other categories of violent crimes were also as high back then as they were in early 1990s? See, you learn new things when you zoom out. ;-)
I don't think many Democrats look at the data either. I don't think most people look at the data. Seems to me most people vote based on vibes, group identification, and what's currently being said in their echo chamber.
Sometimes I wonder whether the modern world is too complex for democracy toe even sort of work. I have no idea what a better alternative would be, though.
The alternative is to have a permanent stable of experts and lobby groups that are indirectly influenced by public opinion. Which is roughly what we ended up with.
I must be misunderstanding. The only place I can find for public opinion in your point of view is in choosing who we elect to office. After that, people should pipe down and do what they’re told?
Shouldn’t policy makers continue to consider the will of the people after they’re elected? And isn’t polling a tool to help them understand the people’s will?
Yes, policy makers should CONSIDER the will of the people, but people seem to think their collective will should be the policy. As Professor Feynman said, one cannot claim to be smarter than 1000 other people, but can certainly claim to be smarter than the average of 1000 other people.
So long as people only express their opinion, that is reasonable. If others, even policy-makers, find it reasonable, it can influence policy. I just find it unreasonable for the mob to think it can dictate policy.
I think you are directionally correct that people want to exert too much influence over the fine details of policy, and that people should leave more questions up to the experts, and judge them by long-term results.
However, I think you picked a really bad example to start with. "Should that war stop?" is exactly the kind of question the average voter is pretty well capable of judging for themselves.
Maybe they THINK they are, but I opine they are not. It's much more complicated than should they stop trying to kill people. Here are some points to consider:
* What can they do to prevent a 10/7 again? If they let them rearm, maybe they will plot another one.
* They don't want to kill more people, but having their own citizens killed is worse than killing more people.
* Some people in the US support the Palestinians, and some support the Israelis. This is not trivial to resolve.
* Consider other countries participating: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt. One must also consider potential impacts of China's influence, and others.
* If we support Israel less, could those resources be better used at home? Abroad? What pushback will happen for any of these choices?
I'm not an expert, as I have said, and there are probably dozens of other implications to consider. I have no reason to think this is a bad example.
If the public couldn't dictate policy, the policy would be to give all the money to policymakers. It happens in every country without a working democratic system.
The public informs policy by voting out people who make decisions they don't like. They don't dictate it.
For this particular instance, I doubt anyone would vote for Trump because of a disagreement on the Israel thing, but they might stay "uncommitted" and not vote at all, which is close to the same thing for this election.
To be precise, I believe those who run the country should take expert advice into consideration to make decisions for running the country. I don't expect the leaders to be experts in all things, not even all the things for which they have charge.
Yeah, direct democracy for every choice would be a disaster--a majority vote for which drugs should be approved by the FDA or something would make no sense. I think the main value of democracy is that when lots of people are unhappy about how things are going or about big visible decisions made by public officials, they can provide feedback that the elected officials have to care about. So the public isn't voting on specific FDA approvals, but if they are sufficiently unhappy about FDA actions, they can make the president and many congressmen care about that, and apply pressure to the FDA's leadership.
It all depends on the terms of the cease-fire, right?
The poll answer might as well be saying "war is bad", perhaps extending to "Palestinian civilians dying is bad" (given that Israel is inflicting most of the casualties).
Technically, there's also a difference between "being in favor of a cease-fire" and thinking that the US government should use carrots and sticks to get both sides to agree to something they'd otherwise not agree to. (Which, I think, they're already trying.)
Ultimately, though, this is a tension in any representative democracy: whether the representative should merely reflect the will of their constituents, or whether they were chosen to exercise their independent judgement? (And in practice, where in between should an individual politician fall at a given moment?)
And there's also the civil service, which in theory exists to provide expertise and consistency to governmental affairs. The State Department probably has it's own views on this situation.
I think no one, especially in this forum, would think war is not bad. My point isn't whether Israel should cease fire, but that people think they know what's best for the country based on their limited knowledge and experience. Everyone is, of course, entitled to their opinion, but only informed opinions should make policy, whether foreign or some other kind.
I know this may shock you, but some people actually believe in democracy, and I don't just mean picking between one of two multimillionaire oligarchs every couple years
Democracy works if people do what they think is best for the country, not for themselves. It is not two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner. And uninformed, ignorant people have no credibility for their opinions on policy, just because of how they feel.
In terms of being uninformed I’d say the pro Israel lobby tops that list. So much so that future historians and their students will find it hard to explain the support.
Democracy IS two wolves voting to eat the one sheep. The usual objection to that is to advocate some kind of "individual rights"-based "liberalism" instead. You can just admit you don't care much for either, and prefer some kind of oligarchy/aristocracy, instead of misrepresenting them.
This could be the basis of an ad to encourage voting. Show the wolves voting over how to allocate the sheep (we don't want to be gory, something like Claymation would be good). Then the punchline: "If you don't vote, you are the sheep!"
It is the strict definition of democracy, just as Bob is outvoted as one vote in 10 in lifeboat survivors (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lifeboat-games-and-backscratchers). But as a system of governing, no, that is a bad idea. It's simply self-interest, first and foremost, and do you really need government for that?
So democracy works when people vote not necessarily for what is best for them, but for the right thing to do, about which there can be legitimate disagreements.
There is not yet any perfect form of government discovered or invented.
A Kissinger-like policy of acting in "US interests," would not (and did not!) result in a lot of support for Israel, which is hated by oil-rich neighbors. Our support is floating on a raft of humanitarian interest. Without getting into a long recounting of the emergence of US support, Israel has always been upsetting to advisors and forced through over their objections by elected officials.
Fortunately, I guess, opinions on foreign policy don't matter as much since people in the US usually rate FP at the bottom of what they care about. This is why the Biden regime has largely been able to (correctly) support Israel to allow them to pursue their terror eradication goal, while the potential for more direct US involvement has constituted a credible threat to Hezbollah/Iran, keeping them to the periphery of the conflict. Much of the pro-Palestine movement is just an opportunity for "socially conscious" people to get pictures of themselves supporting The Current Thing on social media, thereby boosting their own social status, and is not representative of anything like an informed opinion.
Russia news. Russia welcomes Westerners who are willing to abandon liberal values, except if they are Evangelicals, because then they will be killed (in Ukraine) or imprisoned (in Russia). I don't link because it is all over Google. Are these people really stupid? Alienating the largest anti-liberal group in the West? This does not look like a coherent state. One cannot at the same time drain away Western conservatives and be murderously paranoid about everyone who might be an American agent...
Isn't the largest anti-liberal group in the West Roman Catholics? At least they seem to be the only ones who sometimes manage to get their countries to not be too liberal on abortion and divorce.
Russia lies about this. I was surprised how few people knew that the free world has far more religious freedom. It's also the more religious of the two sides including theocratic Iran. I thought it was one of those things we all learned in school. Ukraine sometimes flies over Russian Evangelicals to talk with American Evangelicals to impress this fact on them.
Anyway, if you want to leave the decadent US for a place where your dollar goes farther and people are more religious and traditional then there's much better options. Russia is a world leader in divorce and alcoholism. It has the same church attendance as Sweden. It also has a lot of crime and a life expectancy comparable to North Korea. You can argue that China's doing well but not Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, etc.
This is partly false (alcoholism) and partly misleading. Russian (and Ukrainian) life expectancy are very similar and very close to the world average. The murder rate (a proxy for the crime level as murders are harder to ignore) is similar to that of the US.
It's true that it's mostly secular but why invent things?
The WHO shows Russia as either the highest or second highest in alcohol addiction rate. It trades with Belarus though Hungary is creeping up close. It is not number one in alcohol consumption but that's not the claim.
The Russian murder rate is about 15% higher than the US which is still fairly significant. And its life expectancy at birth is about the same as North Korea, 73 years, vs 79 in the US.
Well, why did you choose North Korea rather than any other country having approximately the same (world average) life expectancy like Paraguay, Dominican Republic or Ukraine?
Russia is definitely one of heavy-drinking countries (breaking news!), I just think this data doesn't tell us whether it's "normal East European drinking" or "a world leader in alcoholism" on par with Hungary, of all places.
Because they're allies that border each other and both undemocratic. But if you want to compare them to Paraguay then go ahead.
The WHO statistics are based on people who have long term addictive behaviors, not on raw consumption, because the WHO is interested in alcoholism as a disease. By most measures Russia is unusually socially dysfunctional even compared to Eastern Europe. I don't really care whether a country drinks. Finland drinks a lot. Saudi Arabia drinks very little. But people who need treatment for alcoholism is unambiguously a social issue in a way that Italians drinking wine is not.
Alcoholism and per capita alcohol consumption are (naturally) correlated but not exactly the same. Russia has a high concentration of substance abusers of various types and alcohol is among them.
Again - a lot of people in Russia (and other ex-USSR states) were hit hard by USSR collapse, and turned to alcohol (and other substances)... but they largely dies out by mid-00
It's WHO data. And while you're right alcoholism rates declined after the late 1990s/2000s they still remain higher than pretty much everyone else. The main competitors are Belarus or Hungary. And looking at the latest data it does look like Russia's slipped into second behind Belarus and, if trends continue, might slip into third behind Hungary. But this is due to Hungary/Belarus going up rather than Russia going down. And they're all neck in neck anyway.
At a purely pragmatic level, persecuting Evangelicals is likely to increase US support for Ukraine.
But also: do you *really* want to incur the wrath of the kind of Evangelical that donates a Red Heifer to Israel for .. um ... Biblical prophetic reasons. Those guys mioht not have any qualms about nuking Russia into annihilation.,
My wife and I do IVF to do genetic testing (we need to) and we want a large family. Based on our experiences I suspect that the Dr isn’t trying hard enough to optimize for a large family. Anyone have any thoughts on how to go about optimizing the process to get more out of each retrieval, increase the chances of successful transfers etc..?
Feel free to reply or email me at iz8162k23 at gmail
Try and convince the doctor that yes, you really *do* want a large family and won't end up with frozen embryos that you then leave in storage forever because "eh, we changed our minds, one kid is enough" or that, if you end up with twins/triplets in the successful round of implantation, you won't go to court over "we wanted ONE baby not THREE".
Multiple births seem to be considered a risk, and the recommendation is "selective reduction":
"What can I do to reduce the risk of multiple births?
During a fertility treatment cycle when fertility drugs are used with timed intercourse or insemination, your doctor will monitor your cycle very carefully. The use of fertility medications makes it more likely that one or more eggs will be fertilized. However, if it appears that too many eggs are developing, your doctor may cancel your cycle and tell you not to have an insemination or intercourse to reduce or eliminate your risk of multiple births. During in vitro fertilization (IVF), the egg and sperm are joined (fertilized) in the laboratory. The resulting embryo (fertilized egg) is then placed into the womb (uterus). Multiple gestations are least likely when one embryo is placed in the womb. ASRM has published guidelines on the number of embryos to transfer when undergoing an IVF cycle. These guidelines can be found at www.asrm.org.
Some pregnancies may start as a multiple gestation but undergo what’s called a “spontaneous reduction”. This is when one of the pregnancies stops growing (miscarriage) and the other pregnancy continues normally. No treatment is needed when this occurs, and ultrasounds can determine if the remaining pregnancy is growing normally. In some cases, the risk of a multiple gestation is too great. A doctor may suggest that you consider a procedure called selective reduction. Selective reduction is a procedure to reduce the number of fetuses to one or two. Usually, the procedure is done after the risk of a miscarriage, but still early in the pregnancy to increase the chance of a healthy and successful pregnancy. Choosing to do this procedure is difficult. Individuals and couples who are thinking about this option should talk to their doctor and a counselor."
I suspect my dr is too conservative with this but Idk. We’re hopefully going to be working with an advocate\concierge of sorts going forward but all the info I can get is good as I’m sure they aren’t perfectly informed either
There may be some disadvantages of getting lots of eggs per cycle. You would need to check on that. It def uses up the woman's remaining eggs faster. But whether it reduces quality of eggs or is hard on the woman's system I don't know. I had IVF and only made about 4 eggs per cycle. Talked with other women who were making a dozen or so per cycle, and nobody seemed worried about that. You will probably also have speak up to the doctor and tell him your preferences. If there are some disadvantages to doing it the way you want to, let him explain that. Then, if you decide that the disadvantages are outweighed by the advantages, just state clearly that you understand the pros and cons, but have some unusual priorities and would like treatment to be carried out in the way you prefer, rather than the usual way. Many docs would be OK with that, so long as what you're proposing isn't actually dangerous for the woman. Others, however, are not able to see you as in informed consumer of their services. But to be heard even by the responsive ones you have to speak up really loudly and clearly (but in a polite friendly way).
It is probably easier for all docs to do their jobs if their patients accept the role of compliant children, so docs give subtle cues that that is what they prefer. However, into every life a little rain must fall, and there are situations where active patient involvement complicates the docs life and slows them down, but leads to a better outcome. I would recommend speaking up despite the cues that smiling compliance is preferred. You can start with something not a bit argumentative, something like "we've been thinking things over and would like to ask what is done in situations where people would like to have a large family. Are there adjustments that favor that outcome?" And then ask about pros and cons of the adjustments. You have to be willing to say things that defy the cues and make things awkward. Obviously if the doctor says, "I never do that, if you want someone who will then go elsewhere," then there's no point in continuing. But most are not that rigid.
Could be 'Ozempic undoes the specific toxic effects of the modern environment', those being large amounts of calories in the form of ultraprocessed food and lack of exercise, and those toxic effects including, but not limited to, obesity.
I'm skeptical that brainwashing is a useful concept on average - I mean the chance that you or anyone you know has been brainwashed or will be brainwashed is low enough to consider other options first: horses not zebras.
External evidence for brainwashing [alternative explanation]:
- Membership of a niche political or religious organisation [the English speaking world prizes such groups highly in its history and culture, even if this or that group is cringe]
- Devotion to a charismatic leader [also cringe, but also the human condition - ancestor worship; monarchism; great man theory of history; fan culture]
- Refusal to engage in reasoned argument [an idea can be useful X% of the time and still break down the rest of the time. Many people find this embarrassing and don't like talking about it]
- breaks off contact with people outside the organisation [half-empty: teenage angst or mid-life crisis. Half-full: having constantly to defend your treasured imperfect idea to friends and family is exhausting, even if they are right that doesn't stop them being assholes about it, cutting off may be rational]
- sudden change in personality [half-empty: teenage angst or midlife crisis; half-full: “find yourself” is a trope but personality is a compromise, encountering a transformative idea can make a person e.g less agreeable and that is a good thing if they were too agreeable previously]
People delude themselves into believing ridiculous nonsense all the time, based on flimsy or nonexistent evidence. Human belief systems are far more of a social construct than anything else. So the odds of any one person you meet with outlandish views having been brainwashed is extremely low. But there are clearly psychological mechanisms to get people to believe in obvious nonsense, and someone with access to those mechanisms would be a very effective brainwasher.
Having an idea that works less than 100% of the time seems pretty universal! And if culture is brainwashing then we don't have a word for what real cults do and that seems a shame.
I think you left off most of the traits that distinguish cults from people being raised in a culture that carries with it a few assumptions about the world. Such as,
- Sleep deprivation.
- Replacement of normal activities with ideological reinforcement.
- Threat of isolation from group for deviation made the subject of continual, active concern.
- Near-term promises of an apocalypse or great change, intended to promote near-term thinking.
There is also the matter of degree or quantity. Threats of isolation for deviance are universal, but not a continual, active threat for very small deviations or lack of devotion.
I don't deny there really are cults that really do brainwash - I deny that the next crazy person you meet on the Internet has been brainwashed (on average).
This community really loves truth. Is it widely known that learning one true statement in isolation can lead to a less accurate view or worse decision?
Note that learning one true statement and then having a less accurate view goes 100% against Bayesianism!
Basically investigate an issue thoroughly or shut up about it. But "truthbombing" is not helpful.
Thinking about this, I am much less sympathetic to free speech concerns. People just throwing 14/50 out (purported US racial crime stats) are really not helping anyone to understand this well. It is better if they shut up.
Understand that we are in a new historic situation. The legacy media obsessing about listening to both sides can be sometimes ridiculous but handles this kind of situation really well. Instagram memes do not. In the past free speech was more defensible, because the standards of argumentation and attention spans were higher.
I know there are dangers of people having too much power, I really wish this was somehow democratized.
> Note that learning one true statement and then having a less accurate view goes 100% against Bayesianism!
No it doesnt, its probabilistic for a reason
>Thinking about this, I am much less sympathetic to free speech concerns.
>I know there are dangers of people having too much power, I really wish this was somehow democratized.
what if PURELY HYPOTHETICALLY, we lived in a system when you were accused of a crime you got to say your side of the story before a judgement was ruled; and maybe imagine "rights" such as something about everyone saying what they wanted
Your link goes to an assertion that being aware of a stereotype, even when the stereotype is true, can cause people to make worse decisions. And of course, that is possible, if the person has a poor understanding of probability. But that certainly doesn't go against Bayesianism. In fact it is the opposite! The point of Bayesianism is to help make an accurate assessment in the context of numerous sources of information, even if many are somewhat inconclusive.
What you are saying is pretty old and trite: that we should promote the well-intentioned lie in the hope of attaining a happier future. What you neglect is that people have memory and you can only go to that well so many times before it dries up. Maybe if people were more aware of the 14/50 statistic (it's for homicides collated by the FBI and I believe it's gotten worse over the last few years; "purported" is an adjective with little justification) they might be less eager to leap to simplistic explanations of the statistics of fatal interactions with police - but I don't see you complaining about *those* errors.
Or is your quibble just with statements made in isolation? But they never are; even if someone just posts "14/50", they are posting it in a context of implied assertions, some of which may well be false, and it is right to challenge those. But by that token, your argument also provides only a small part of the picture...
What makes you think this community loves truth? I'd say that's a false statement right off the bat. Most of the interactions on these threads seem to be people arguing their opinions without any supporting data.
I'd say it's better than most places for discussing things, but not great. Things weighing in favor of people being responsive when they hear the case for an unfamiliar truth is that people are are less identified with groups united by common views; and are smart and have trained minds, so can understand complex arguments and data. Things weighing against are that many people are very identified with their smarts and erudition, and so experience attacks on things they believe as attacks on them; many people are not good listeners; and many people are not good introspectionists, so are much less likely to be consciously aware that they are rejecting an idea because of wounded vanity.
The best set-up I ever heard about for fruitful idea exchange was the Yale Political Union, who had (and may still have -- I don't know) the idea that all debaters could expect to be "broken" in some debate, i.e. to say at some point, "I have no rebuttals for your main argument. You have convinced me you are right." Most debaters broke others and were broken from time to time, and having some of each on their record earned people respect.
Nothing drives soi-disant rationalists crazier than someone who swamps their preconceived notions with contrary data. I hang out here for those moments, and I cherish them. Can you provide a link to the exchange? ;-)
So in the abstract, I think it's worth refining the concept of "true" into three variants.
* illustrative = correspondence between signifier and signified
* faithful = correspondence between signified and referent
* factual = correspondence between signifier and referent
In the ivory tower, "factual" (i.e. "truth" being a property of whether propositions are descriptive of reality) tends to be privileged over the others. But what's often more important is "faithfullness" (i.e. whether your mental model is faithful to reality). Because mental-models (not blobs of ink) are what pay the rent.
So when I hear
> Is it widely known that learning one true statement in isolation can lead to a less accurate view or worse decision?
my initial reaction is: "focusing on statements over models is a red-herring to begin with". E.g. this is the issue with statements like "dihydrogen monoxide is a key component of acid rain". Technically correct, but pragmatically misleading for those who slept through chemistry class.
----
> Note that learning one true statement and then having a less accurate view goes 100% against Bayesianism!
To reiterate, I think it's a mistake to privilege statements over models. E.g. copper is a micronutrient. Copper is needed for a healthy diet, but you can't just eat copper ingots in isolation and expect to live very long. Likewise, a proposition is often just a single node in a bayesian network. That node might be *needed* to achieve 100% accuracy. But of course it's not *sufficient* to achieve 100% accuracy. And there's no guarantee that adding that particular node to the model will result in a monotonic increase in accuracy, on the margin. This is what Peter is really getting at, when he talks about conditionalization.
----
Yes, epistemology is hard work. No royal road. Dunning Kruger. Facts are cheaper than models. Etc. So on the individual level, I'd agree that "deep dive or stfu" is probably a good heuristic. That being said,
> Understand that we are in a new historic situation.
> In the past free speech was more defensible, because the standards of argumentation and attention spans were higher.
As I understand, no actually, we're in an old historical situation. The Pull Request [0] tells me (don't remember where exactly, but I'll look if asked) that Ben Franklin, et al would have felt right at home with modern shitposters on twitter. It's the post-WWII era that's unique in the quality of its information environent. The theories I've heard on why include: A) market segmentation was not as advanced; B) government regulation. I wish I could comment more on this, but I don't really understand it that well myself at the moment.
The idea "freedom of speech" was predicated on the idea that the media environment is a market, and bad ideas would lose to their competition. So an advocate for freedom of speech would probably counter that the best counter to "truthbombing about the 13%" is for others to advocate for the contrary position. Personally, I have some reservations about why this might not always be the case, which I find hard to articulate [1] at the moment. But I think it's worth acknowledging that the original solution was to have the racists, the antiracists, and any other willing contenders, to duke it out in an epistemic battle royale. Rather than to expect one's ideological rivals to cultivate a sense of discipline and rigor.
A) the idea that "truth always wins" seems sort of optimistic to me. I do think truth tends to win the long-run. But, as the saying goes: "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent". I think falsehoods can be very effective in the short-term/medium-term.
B) I think the market incentives for falsehood can be stronger than the market incentives for verisimilitude, even in the long-term, if the falsehoods are loadbearing components of the simulacrum.
The problem with info hazards in the real world is that they are usually highly contextual: a fact that might challenge one person's deeply held incorrect belief can push another further down the road of confirmation bias. Free speech is a concern because people who are challenged by a true fact can claim to just be preventing confirmation bias and protecting everyone from true but misleading info and thus suppress it. Allowing only true information is the worst solution, except for all the others.
Following on from the interesting "slave/master morality" discussion I had with Concerned Citizen in the previous thread, I've now written a more sustained criticism of Nietzsche's work:
As well as criticising his idea, I try to work through the political implications for us. Basically, the master/slave thing is lurking in the background of the Culture War, even when not explicitly invoked -- so dissolving it makes the whole debate look a lot less intractable (at least to me).
Even if you have no interest in Nietzsche, please take a look at Section 4, which is the politically juicy part (but fairly short and simple).
Does anyone know anything about mold-related respiratory issues? I’ve been having intermittent breathing issues for the past year, which I have finally, (nearly) conclusively linked to mold exposure. I’ve seen doctors for this a few times, but they have tended to focus on the wrong things, and I have yet to actually be diagnosed with anything.
The problem started with my car: within a week or so of getting it back from a body shop (where it had sat idle for two months last summer) I started having symptoms while driving it and for some time afterwards. Once I figured this out I mostly stopped driving it, but the symptoms persisted intermittently for weeks afterwards, slowly fading in frequency and intensity. For the next several months I made repeated attempts to clean the car (not knowing what exactly was responsible), only to have the symptoms return at full intensity if I tried driving it again. In December I discovered mold growing under the seats, which I assumed was responsible, but my best efforts to clean it still didn’t render it safe to drive. We ultimately just got rid of the car, but that didn’t solve the problem: I had several recurrences of high-intensity symptoms in the months following (which led me to doubt the mold had been responsible), before gradually returning to something like normalcy during the middle of the summer. Then, towards the end of July, I started gradually having symptoms return in my apartment. I’ve managed to play whack-a-mold with several clusters–one of which I identified conclusively, dispelling my remaining doubts as to the cause–and intend to scour the apartment thoroughly, but that won’t happen instantly.
The major symptoms have been aching lungs, shortness of breath (sometimes extreme but generally short-lived) and a strange, altered-state-of-consciousness feeling that’s a little like (but not exactly like) dizziness, lightheadedness or being high. Each of these differs in its pattern of presentation, and they don’t necessarily occur all at the same time. There’s a long list of other possible minor symptoms, but none of them have the same combination of consistency, frequency and unusualness as those three. My spouse has had exactly none of these issues despite driving the same car (far more than I did after the trouble started) and living in the same apartment, which suggests that it’s an allergic or other autoimmune problem.
The single most helpful thing to have right now would be something to take to my doctor to start rending this problem legible and hopefully treatable: a test or a specialist referral I could request, or something like that. To keep this from getting to novel length. I’ll write a separate comment in reply to this one detailing what tests I’ve already had done, and a few relevant pieces of medical history.
The next most useful thing to have would be any non-medical strategies for mitigating the problem. I’m doing my best to both avoid affected areas and to clean proactively, but neither are easy when I usually can’t tell there’s a problem somewhere until it starts making me sick.
And if anyone has similar experiences to share, I’d be happy to hear about them, even if they don’t contain any actionable advice.
Finally, I’ve tried to strike a balance between brevity and describing the situation, but I could write many times more than this on the details of the symptoms, circumstances and sequence of events. If there’s anything you want to hear more detail about, by all means ask.
I don't know anything about this, but I came across this chronic illness programme focussed on nervous system regulation: https://retrainingthebrain.com/
If you scroll down, a couple of their physician endorsements mention mold-related illness.
I came across the programme linked to by this person who used it to recover from ME: https://alexmeeka.com/about/
I'm 37, male, in generally active and in good health (though significantly overweight). The one medication I take regularly medication is extended-release methylphenidate for ADHD (Biphentin here in Canada, better known as Ritalin in the U.S.). I started taking it four or five months before the trouble started and stepped up to a much higher dose (which pushed it from "not really working" to "working quite well") about two months prior. I've had COVID once, at the very end of 2022; I was up-to-date on vaccinations and recovered within a few days: I didn't have any lingering effects that would indicate long-COVID in the 8 months between then and the start of my breathing issues.
I'd been totally out of shape at the start of 2023, but made a serious effort to get more exercise starting in March or early April. When I moved to the higher Biphentin dose in June I stepped these efforts up further, as I discovered the medication worked more reliably on days when I'd exercise. I still wasn't in what I'd consider good shape by the time the issues began, but I was well on my way there: at the beginning of the month I'd gone on vacation and spent a week hiking nearly every day, something I'd never have managed a year earlier. I've been very consistent in keeping up with exercise in the year since, though breathing issues have sometimes limited what I can do, and gains have come much slower than in the past.
When the breathing issues started I had a couple of appointments with my GP, who ordered some blood tests, an ECG, none of which returned anything unusual. His only other suggestion was that the Biphentin could be responsible. I was highly skeptical because the timing didn't match well, but went down to a lower dose for a while, with no obvious effect on the issues. I didn't seek medical help for months after, believing I had the problem in-hand (since it was then confined to my car). When it started to crop up elsewhere in March, I booked an appointment with a doctor at the health center at my university (I don't think much of my GP, and was happy to realize I had a quick alternative). She ordered more blood work, another ECG and a chest x-ray. Blood work came back normal other than a slightly-elevated white blood cell count. ECG showed a minor irregularity, which got me referred to a cardiologist, which seems to have been a dead-end. She also ordered a spirometry test: unfortunately the wait time was 1-2 months and there was no way to ensure the test occurred on a day when I was significantly symptomatic: I ended up having mild shortness of breath that day but nothing else. The test came back normal.
And that's the extent of it. Other than the spirometry (which was unfortunately timed) I don't feel like any of the tests I had were especially suited to detect the problems I'm actually having, but I don't especially know what to request instead or how to pursue this further. I have an appointment with the university doctor on Friday, and I will at least be able to tell her pretty definitely that the mold is the cause; she was dubious before, when the evidence was, admittedly, much more ambiguous.
Not to sound all Fat Person Complaining (because that is precisely what I am going to do), but it could be that, as you say you are overweight and out of shape/getting back into shape, that the doctor(s) consider "well duh, of course you're breathless, you're fat - lose the tubbiness, you'll breathe better".
It's often hard to get concerns taken seriously when the doctor is looking at the 'obvious' answer - your bloodwork came back okay so it's not mould spores, it's because you're fat (insert saw about 'hoofbeats and zebras' here).
If you're going to pursue this, you really do need to have a lot of evidence about yes, I am exposed to mould, no it's not allergies, etc.
It's a real concern, though I think I've been lucky enough to avoid most of it in this case. It probably helps that by pure coincidence, the day I had my first appointment with the university doctor I also had probably the single worst shortness of breath event I've had to date. I usually don't notice it unless I'm doing something that involves at least mild exertion, but she said I was audibly gasping for breath *while talking to her* (which I actually *hadn't* noticed, thanks ADHD hyperfocus). Anyhow, she did make a bit of a comment on my weight, but clearly didn't regard it has the whole problem. And she did prescribe me an inhaler, which is (one presumes) not intended as merely a treatment for Being Fat.
The annoying line I've got instead, from both doctors, is "maybe it's anxiety." Setting aside all the reasons I think that's exceedingly unlikely, it would still be an unbelievably stupid place to *start.* Anxiety would be pretty much the best-case-scenario: it's not going to cause any long-term damage to my lungs, and the optimal treatment might well be to just ignore it. But it's also extremely difficult to falsify: there's no test that will conclusively rule out anxiety the way you can rule out infection or allergies or anything else. I've tried to push back against that suggestion as firmly as I can without crossing the line into coming across as "crazy person loudly insisting they're not crazy."
Part of all that is my own fault, too. The times when I've sought medical help have specifically been the times when I felt like I didn't know what was going on. In December I was sure (correctly, as it turns out) that it was the mold in my car; I didn't see any reason to involve a doctor again because I was sure I could handle it myself. Only when stuff happened to make me doubt that conclusion did I go seek out a doctor again; this means I didn't make a point of impressing on her quite how strong the evidence for "it's the mold, damn it" really was (and even, doubts aside, it was really pretty strong). So when I mentioned it as the most likely possibility she said "well, maybe" and went on to focus on other things.
In hindsight, I should have been more proactive about looking for more info even when I *was* pretty sure it was the mold. Even when I finish getting my apartment clean, I'm sure this isn't the last time I'll have to deal with this, and I want as much information and as many weapons as I can: I should have had that mindset from the start. Regardless, I do wish the doctors had taken me more seriously. Which is the refrain of every Fat Person Complaining ever. :-)
See a respiratory physician and consider getting a CT scan of your lungs. There are various types of interstitial lung disease that could explain these symptoms, many triggered by external allergens such as mold (see - extrinsic allergic alveolitis)
I’ve been thinking a lot about the suppression of the self, in the context of meditation. So I was thinking about this during a recent debate on race. And it occurred to me that one form of white privilege, and in particular white male privilege, is that it appears that we have an easier time detaching ourselves from our identity. If someone says something mean about white males, my visceral emotional response is rather low. And so is my visceral emotional response about most of my identity. I know not everyone is the same. But I can see someone who experiences discrimination from a young age to have a naturally stronger sense of identity. If you don’t like me because of how I look or where I come from, then “I” must be real and different than you. So while I think that identity politics are objectively bad, and that enlightened people would benefit from disassociating themselves from their various identities in most cases, I can also see why this would be easier to do, as in requiring less mental stamina, for a non-marginalized group. In this context I’m talking about white privilege not as a systemic advantage of itself (I’m more likely to be promoted just because I’m white) but as an intrinsic advantage (I can reason with less identity bias), even if the latter is a second order effect from the former.
That's an interesting choice of words; I would have expected something more like "dissolution of the self". That would take the perspective that what we call the "self" is an illusion.
> But I can see someone who experiences discrimination from a young age to have a naturally stronger sense of identity.
I think you're taking small population-level differences and blowing them up into absolutes. Even if you've correctly identified a general trend, you shouldn't assume that every person you encounter is an example of that trend, especially in places where people are already pre-selected for being outliers in other dimensions.
I often feel something like this. Let's take a historic look. National, ethnic and religious identities used to be big. Then after WW2 Sartre and other existentialists came up with this idea that existing-as-something is unauthentic. This has been rather explicitly about Nazis making a big deal out of national-racial identity. And then Alan Watts and hippie buddhism happened and so on. Anyway by the 1970's there was this type of a completely freely floating individual who does not need to belong to anywhere, with Frank Zappa a typical example.
And then at some point people realized that this works for white men and not so well for everybody else, partially because everybody else still treats them according to their perceived identity, partially because they actually need that identity as a sort of a group-therapy-safe-space way.
What you call privilege I call virtue. I'm not sure how true your theory is, but I don't think it's productive to make excuses for undesirable tendencies.
If I had to guess, it's personal insecurity in a social context where resentment is the order of the day.
Another possible reason for not being very distressed by criticism and mockery of your demographic group is not identifying with it very powerfully. I am a woman, but have never felt much personal rage in response to screeds about unfair treatment of women, sexism, etc. I think it's because I don't feel much bond with other members of my gender. I feel a strong bond with female friends, of course, but not with womanhood as a whole. In general, I tend not to from bonds with groups. I don't know why -- something to do with not being very social in general I think. Anyhow, I don't know whether any of this applies to you, but it's another route by which someone can end up relatively impervious to attacks on one's demographic.
Hypothesis: everyone who generally supports a major party in US politics believes the other party to be more authoritarian. Americans, with the exception of Curtis Yarvin, don't like authoritarianism and identify with the party they perceive to be more freedom loving. Or does anyone reading this believe the party they support is more authoritarian than the other side?
I think of both parties as theEnemyOfFreedom(TM), (albeit they have different mixes of the chains in which they would bind us) so I don't support either one.
Paradoxically, I think the bugman would willingly describe himself simultaneously as both an authoritarian and a freedomphile. To paraphrase his own words: "Neon-Redox is to Libertarianism as Relativity is to Newtonian Physics". Or perhaps it would be more helpful to describe his salespitch as "small government, but with strong state-capacity". And he speaks rather highly of Rothbard, Von Mises, etc (but also Friedrich List).
Good point. I shouldn't have made an exception for him. He seems to believe democracy is more authoritarian than monarchy. He's just another freedom loving American like the rest of us but with different perceptions.
People I like, who tell me to do things I already want to do, aren't authoritarian! It's only authoritarian when it comes from people I dislike, or people who want me to do something I don't want to do.
I'm not American but every party I have voted for has at least some authoritarian tendencies. I don't believe liberty is the highest good, so I'm okay with that, but even if I did, it's reasonable to trade off authoritarian tendencies in one area against another. Murray Rothbard voted Democrat sometimes because they were more anti-war, even though he was a libertarian.
I vote party A more often than party B and think party A is more authoritarian (thats not why i vote for them) maybe regularly voting for both disqualifies me here.
*NYC People*: We want to host a weekly AI group to discuss papers, new developments, etc. Here's a form to gauge people's availability: https://whenisgood.net/5mffk8h - I'm assuming this would be a weekly thing, so just mark whatever time slots you'd expect to be available on a weekly basis. Time zone is EST.
My personal vote is we meet in person + host a camera feed that runs on Zoom. In-person chats are just so much more fruitful in my experience.
It's not just a matter of SF. I'd call it "narrative bias". Stories/narratives in general are systematically biased by their very nature and this tends to bias the expectations of anyone who isn't thrust in contact with the ground reality data of the relevant question.
Ways that stories are biased include
* Everything important is done by a small number of memorable characters
* Everything important happens due to the intentional actions of the heroes and villains or at the very least is an identifiable consequence of the character flaws/virtues of said characters.
* The audience already knows that everything will work out in the end. And also usually knows a lot more about the world than the characters should know.
* The audience also knows everything mentioned in the story is relevant to the story, which greatly constraints what will happen next.
* The world operates at the fidelity of simulation by one person with no special expertise
* No matter what happens, the world and people have to be similar to the modern day audience so they can identify with the story
And of course it goes on and on.
One of the greatest correctives of this is to read stories about real life. For example, I read a lot about WW2 and I was struck over and over by how accounts of war are never remotely like fiction. Not just in technical details but the way that things happen mostly due to random chance and fog of war and the "story" is completely directionless. This often even bleeds through in movies that are *based* on real life stories, though the filmwriters often take significant liberties in order to fight this and make the story more story-like.
Once someone made a summary of the common elements of conspiracy theories and it immediately struck me that it can also double as a "how to write a popular movie script" manual. It is not bad epistemology. It is people watching films. Note: popular, not good. It is people watching the rather lowbrow or maybe youth-targeting kinds of films. The kinds with Lex Luthor kinds of characters. If you rather watch Space Odyssey the result will be different, but ultimately still too story-like.
Another thing is that it really matters who is accusing whom. I distinctly remember the first Star Wars reboots, early 2000s, when Palpatine was conspiring to overthrow the republic, and people were looking at each other funny and gulped. They did not say so, but they thought about Bush/Cheney. The whole kind of thing sounded believable for a moment, even when not very probable. Of course that was not a very high brow movie either. Higher brow movies avoid these very obviously evil characters and show someone more conflicted.
Let's call this the Popcorn Theory of making sense of the world.
>Once someone made a summary of the common elements of conspiracy theories and it immediately struck me that it can also double as a "how to write a popular movie script" manual.
This is sometimes a problem with "based on a true story" movies. If it was completely fiction, the script writer could just make up something dramatically appropriate. But, they are constrained by what actually did happen...
(Of course, "based on a true story" movies contain much that is made up)
Yeah, it's really interesting to see how writers handle this.
One notable case is Riphagen: The Untouchable. As the name suggests, in real life the villain got away scott free. The movie solves this by a) making him seem like a hero at first and b) once that is revealed, introducing a completely fictional sympathetic character trying to bring him to justice. Said character eventually manages to track him down and gets into a dramatic confrontation, at which point the villain makes a speech, kills him, and drives away.
> but the way that things happen mostly due to random chance and fog of war and the "story" is completely directionless.
That's something that bugs me about a lot of self-help stuff. Shit happens. Maybe our brains process it through narrative, but that's a limitation that we need to work around. "Crafting a personal narrative" is an exercise in hubris and narcissistic naval gazing.
Ah, yes, personal brands. Self as commodity.. Yecch to all of it. People who in midlife are feeling a certain loss of enthusiasm for self might consider viewing this change as a developmental step -- increased maturity, decreased self-centeredness. If someone's really bothered by falling out of love with themselves I think simple interventions, things like having their butt liposuctioned, make more sense than plastic surgery of the self. "Crafting personal narratives," OMG. It's like that shit people write about themselves on dating apps: "Joyful, insightful 40-something, loves deep conversations, art, staying fit . . .." Back when there were no dating apps, but people used to advertise for dates in the Personals part of the Classifieds, I was once browsing the personals in the Village Voice and flinching at all the glowing personal narratives on display. Then I came to this guy: "Fat dirty depressed writer seeks woman who can stand him." If I had been someone capable of answering a date ad, I would have responded to that guy.
> If someone's really bothered by falling out of love with themselves I think simple interventions, things like having their butt liposuctioned, make more sense than plastic surgery of the self.
LOL! Good point. Come to think of it, plastic psychosurgery reminds me of the line from the original Planet of the Apes: "You cut up his brain, you bloody baboon!"
>OMG. It's like that shit people write about themselves on dating apps: "Joyful, insightful 40-something, loves deep conversations, art, staying fit . . .."
Conjures up an image of taking an advertisement down into Doctor Frankenstein's lab, and when the lightening bolt flows through the cardboard cut-out: "It's alive!" (well, sort-of...).
Just tried googling the phrase "craft personal narrative," and there sure were a lot of hits. Sounds like its about as popular as Brazilion butt lifts.
That's why I asked whether there were actual *non-online circles* where this is a thing. I've never heard anyone say it in real life (and for that matter, never heard of it online until right now).
A small, family-owned business, High Sierra Showerheads, would love your votes for their product in a manufacturing association's contest for the Coolest Thing Made in California.
They make water- and energy-saving shower heads that use a unique nozzle design; this product also incorporates a truly fogless mirror.
Voting takes 2 clicks and 10 seconds max: the first to get to a web page, the other to click on a "VOTE NOW" button. (You won't be asked for your email address or any other info to vote.) Thanks!
Here's the direct link to the voting page, on a California manufacturing association's website:
Update: great points by both Al Quinn and Arrk Mindmaster, in replies below!
The "details for anyone interested" web page answers these questions, but clearly there's benefit in describing the 'ask' more fully in this post, as well!
High Sierra Showerheads is a small business in the California mountains. For over a decade, they've made water- and energy-saving shower heads using a globally-unique nozzle design that splits and collides water streams. They have customers like Ohio State and the US Air Force Academy, and their products are best picks by the likes of CNET and CNN Underscored.
High Sierra's owner/founder, David Malcolm, created a design for a truly fogless mirror, fully integrated into a shower head. This is the product entered in the current contest. We'd love to see it become more widely known; it's a great tool for shaving and many other beauty or health needs in the shower!
This contest is for the Coolest Thing Made in California, sponsored by the California Manufacturers & Technology Association (CMTA). This is the second year of this contest, which spotlights great products built in California, with the goal of publicizing and supporting manufacturing in California and the USA.
This year, there are 158 entrants. The contest has multiple rounds; the 16 products with the most votes in the initial round will go on to the next round. Last year, a Tesla SUV was the winner. And a different product made by High Sierra Showerheads, their Half Dome rain shower head, also reached the Top 16 last year.
What is the point of these "contests"? Getting randos to click on something with no understanding for you to "win" is such a depressing thought. Just hire some people on Mechanical Turk.
Thanks for this super-helpful feedback, Al. I've added info to my original post above that I'm hoping will help answer this question. And I'll definitely put more info into these posts if I ever do this again!
Nothing really here to make me want to click. Is the only enticement to support a small, family-owned business I don't even know the name of, let alone what they do. Yes, it's a small amount of effort, but my internet security instincts also take over and make me not want to click strange links.
I recommend you describe the product, and what voting for it will help win, so I know why it would help and what it would help with.
Thanks so much, Arrk Mindmaster, for this incredibly helpful feedback. I tend to err on the side of verbosity, so in this post I veered too far into the terse side.
I've added more info that I'm hoping will make this clearer!
Weird fragment from today's New York Times summary, with emphasis added to one word:
>“Only in America,” Harris said, as the Philadelphia crowd burst into a chant of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”
>This sort of unabashed patriotism doesn’t always come naturally to today’s Democratic Party. But it has been central to Harris’s presidential campaign. In her ads and speeches, she portrays herself as a tough, _populist_, progressive patriot.
Haven't they been using "populist" as a term of derision, close to a slur, for years? And yet, here they are using it either neutrally or positively??? Is all the previous use being flushed down the memory hole this week? Usually they use it to mean something a large fraction of the electorate likes, but which isn't enough to the left for the Times's taste. This has the flavor of "we were always at war with East Asia"...
"Right-wing populist" has certainly been a term of derision for a long time. I'm not sure "populist" by itself has the same connotation. I remember Bernie Sanders being described as a populist fairly often in 2016, and it didn't seem like most people who said it intended it derogatorily.
>I remember Bernie Sanders being described as a populist fairly often in 2016, and it didn't seem like most people who said it intended it derogatorily.
Admittedly I didn't follow Sanders's campaign closely, so I probably missed that...
>"Right-wing populist" has certainly been a term of derision for a long time.
Presumably by the left and sort-of kind-of center-left (including the non-Fox media)? Do you happen to remember if Fox used "left-wing populist" as a term of derision for Sanders?
I feel the need to plug "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson", a musical about our most (in)famously populist President, from the good old days of the W. Bush administration. The first song is called "Populism, Yea Yea", and a chorus from a later song is:
> Sometimes, you have to take the initiative
> Sometimes, your whole family dies of cholera
> Sometimes, you have to make your own story
> Sometimes, you have to shoot the storyteller in the neck
Many Thanks! I'd heard of Jackson, but hadn't known of the musical about him. I tend to think of Jackson as a predecessor to General Masaharu (Bataan Death March) Homma.
It could just be accurate. Price controls are a populist measure, and so are subsidies for consumers. So is a chant at a rally. "It worked once," I can imagine the campaign managers thinking.
I have rather the same feeling as Jeffrey; political rallies where the candidate flies the flag and their proposals are described as "populist" were described in terms that went as far as "this is a threat to democracy!" because something something strongman il duce fascism something something.
Seems that if it's a strong woman, that makes it all okay. See also the crafting of Walz as "now this is a *real* guy who is a veteran and is a white Mid-western man and is down home and fits all the stereotypes, but now we *like* that kind of thing".
Oh, well: we have always supported Mom and apple pie, right?
It would be okay if it was anyone from the right party, because the majority of newspapers are, and have always been, "party papers." It's a little unnatural to see the Times reveal it.
I shouldn't be so surprised, politics and indeed partisanship have always been like this. "These are my principles, and if you don't like them, I have others!"
Many Thanks! It still feels weird to me to see the spin on this reverse so suddenly.
>Price controls are a populist measure
Ouch, Ouch, Ouch. Yeah, in the sense of both popular, and anti-elitist (in the _unfortunate_ sense of: Economists have _studied_ this, and have actual knowledge of what goes wrong, and the general public doesn't know/remember this, and Harris is (actively?) ignoring specialist knowledge. This isn't a good-for-the-99%, bad-for-the-1% antielitism. :-( )
I wouldn't worry too much, politics is a machine for turning promises into air. I also doubt the other candidate would really bring back public hangings.
I agree that all the debt forgiveness etc. etc. are campaign promises, which are on a par with "be a good child and Santa will bring you a present", except you are more likely to get something from Santa.
> The thing that bugs me most about Kamala is the way that reality is about to shift around her.... culture is downstream of politics, and in particular culture is downstream of the short-term electoral needs of the Democratic Party, which means she's about to be beatified, canonised, and then deified in rapid succession. The things that people think they believe about her this week will be gone by the end of next month
And that was before the term "coconutpilled" was even invented.
Anyway populism is cool now, and Democrats chant "USA USA" at rallies, and it has always been this way, quit misremembering.
I think "populist" has always been neutral-ish, at least in my parlance. It refers to a platform or candidate that builds its platform and power by (charitably) appealing to the people, rather than by ingratiating itself with the elite, or (uncharitably) by debasing itself before the whims of the lowest-common-denominator Joe Schmoe without regard for what's actually good policy.
I don't think there's anything inconsistent about liking some populists and disliking others. Trump is a populist on the right; Bernie is a populist on the left. Romney is a non-populist on the right; Hillary is a non-populist on the left.
I think the negative aura the word has acquired in the last few years is just a symptom of it having been used to describe Trump too often.
It's been used to describe anyone with more restrictionist views on immigration/migrants that are more closely aligned with public opinion. Orban, Meloni, PiS etc etc. And it's been deemed deeply negative by the West's thought leaders since migration is one of the contemporary left's sacred cows.
>I think the negative aura the word has acquired in the last few years is just a symptom of it having been used to describe Trump too often.
Could be, though I've also seen the Times use it to describe many politicians that it dislikes, typically in Europe as well as the USA, e.g. Viktor Orban.
The government has made it clear they would rather sleepwalk into a sectarian, fractured society than try to police the scary parts of the population.
The arrests and media crackdowns are happening for one reason only: to signal to the aboriginal British that they cannot get away with the same tactics that minority or politically favoured groups are allowed to use to influence policy.
A while ago I argued with someone on here who smugly told me that if a gang of thugs wants to burn down my business, the only moral thing to do is let them go right ahead and hope I can eventually claim on the insurance afterwards.
Those are the rules for me, a white British man. If instead you're a Muslim and you believe a gang of Far Right are coming to burn down your mosque, you're allowed to form gangs of your own and roam the streets wielding machetes, which the police won't take off you and the media will call "mostly peaceful" for a few moments before once again talking about the Far Right.
A lot of people right now are holding that I would be in the wrong yet the Muslims are in the right. There are all sorts of fine distinctions they can reach for to justify this - distinctions that need not necessarily be coherent with each other, or still apply tomorrow when talking about a different case.
Their *motivation* for rushing to find these distinctions is that the organised, motivated and coordinated Muslim communities are *not to be crossed*, but I can be without consequence.
People unconsciously assume that things will stay as they are. They watch the fuel gauge falling and note that yes that's theoretically a concern, but they cannot viscerally imagine that the car will actually stop, because the car has always been running.
When the teacher is weak and unauthoritative, de facto control of the class reverts to the rowdiest group of kids. Playground rules don't work on the basis of universal principles, it's about who has the strength and the numbers and the will to impose their desires on others. The modern white British do not have these things.
We've just had an election, so it's five years before anyone in power next has to pretend to give a shit about people's opinions. The power of media and government "nudge psychology" programs will eventually sap the British people of any will to coordinate, while in the short term the internet censorship destroys their ability to do so.
But if it wasn't well-documented, it would still be a safe assumption that it happened. Which is true everywhere. Which means that no one is aboriginal.
Surely the term is used to connote some kind of inherited ownership, and the line you draw it totally arbitrary. What's the point of the concept "aboriginal" again?
Frankly, this whole thread, including your reply, sounds like orchestrated propaganda to me. For example, further down Turtle advocates material by Tommy Robinson. He was banned from Twitter for years for his calls for violence before Musk took over, he was co-founder of the "English Defense League", some members of which actively planned terrorist attacks (though it is unclear how much Robinson knew about that or approved that), and he has served four prison terms.
For me, your reply sounds too metaphorical and too unspecific to be believable. You mention a previous conversation here on ACX. Could you provide a link so that I can check out the conversation?
This immediate recourse to character assassination is a tactic I wish more people would spot and hold in contempt. Tommy Robinson is uncouth, therefore the English have no legitimate grievances and in fact Harehills didn't happen at all?
Horror at the idea of others accessing out-of-bubble source material is another thing I have little respect for, and have seen time and time again from people who fervently believe themselves to be reasonable intellectuals.
The game plan is always: 1: sound like a smart person, 2: raise uncertainty and reasonable doubt so the other guy looks like less of a smart person than you, 3: your work is done when people are no longer talking about the original issue.
The midwit version is very similar, but replace "be smart and reasonable" with gotchas, tribal scorn and character attacks.
I have no idea when that previous conversation was. It was an Open Thread, the thread starter was asking a hypothetical about Kyle Rittenhouse and the guy was called NobodySpecial or NobodysPerfect or something like that.
There is a difference between out-of-bubble source material and source material from an extremist. I was willing to look into your conversation, but I very much doubt that the video is worth my time.
And after finding out that the video is 2 hours, sorry, no way. If you have a good summary, you can point me to that.
- A video clip went viral on UK social media showing a white schoolboy tackling a Syrian schoolboy and pouring a bottle of water on his face
- Prominent newscasters including Piers Morgan and Jeremy Vine immediately condemned it as a racist, despicable attack that has no place in the UK
- Theresa May (the PM at the time) mentioned it in a speech
- The white schoolboy faced a torrent of abuse on social media and people threatening his family in real life. He dropped out of school and attempted suicide
- Someone alerted Tommy that there was more to the story and the Syrian schoolboy had a history of violence against the girls in the class
- He went to the school to investigate
- He found that many of the teachers had been paid not to speak to any press
- Of the ones who were willing to speak to him, they unanimously agreed that the Syrian schoolboy was violent against girls and smaller boys, lied frequently, and had been subject to more than 100 school disciplinary actions
- In contrast, the white schoolboy was a "good boy" with a "strong sense of justice"
- The attack had been motivated by the Syrian schoolboy threatening to rape the white schoolboy's younger sister
- Another schoolgirl told him that the Syrian schoolboy had hit her with a hockey stick, viciously, with her back turned, that had led to chronic pain
- This context got absolutely no mention in the media, almost like they had orders from the top to portray things a certain way
- When Tommy went public with the story, he was promptly sued for libel by the Syrian schoolboy's family
- His family was subsequently targeted and his 11 year old son got death threats
- When the case went to court, the judge threw out all the evidence from the numerous school kids who gave evidence in favour of Tommy, siding with the Syrian schoolboy (who, again, had several school disciplinary actions against him for lying.) His reasoning was "People lie for all sorts of reasons, and they may lie for no reason at all."
- The press failed to report on any of this, in fact they left the courtroom when the other school kids were giving evidence (if you Google the story in the press, you will find a few headlines like "Far right activist Tommy Robinson loses court case for libel")
- He was subsequently bankrupted for 1.6 million pounds
- He had to divorce his wife because she was being targeted
Actually, him showing the video at all is illegal in the UK. The current spate of riots were triggered, partly by the Southport attacks, but partly because he held a huge rally the week prior where he showed the video and was immediately arrested on suspicion of "terrorism." (They later let him go and last I heard he was in Canada giving an interview to Jordan Peterson.)
The target of Robinson’s libel was a fifteen year old schoolboy. The Court wrote: “As was entirely predictable, the Claimant then became the target of abuse which ultimately led to him and his family having to leave their home, and the Claimant to have to abandon his education. The Defendant is responsible for this harm, some of the scars of which, particularly the impact on the Claimant’s education, are likely last for many years, if not a lifetime.”
Robinson attempts to portray himself as a victim, but he’s about as unsympathetic a victim as one can imagine.
So it is his version of the court case on libeling that he lost? No wonder that he is the good guy in his version. But regardless of whether his version is plausible or not, what is the connection to the recent riots and imprisonments?
Edit: Sorry, I misread the last paragraph. I see it now. But sorry, they may have been angry due to the video, but being angry does not justify posting addresses, instructions for arson, and calls for violence and murder.
Lol. The word "extremist" literally means outside the Overton window. "There's a difference between out-of-bubble source material and material that's outside the acceptable realms of my bubble."
This is awful. My condolences. You are always welcome here in Australia and in the meantime I will advocate for people in other English speaking countries (USA, Canada) to vote right wing before the totalitarian globalist agenda stifles us all
Some people were jailed for “inciting violence” eg calling for attacks on migrant hotels.
Others were jailed for “sharing misinformation” eg saying incorrectly that the Southport attacker was an asylum seeker who arrived in the UK on a boat.
Jailing people for either offence is totally wrong, even if in the first case some consequences (eg loss of one’s job) might be appropriate.
I don’t think the first one is protected by the first amendment even in the US. I was expecting stories of people making mildly inappropriate jokes on their podcasts getting knocks at their doors. If you call for violence at a specific time and place in the us, with some shades of gray like can they prove intent, that’s a crime even here.
It was indeed specific times and specific locations. I don't know which case exactly is meant here, but probably it refers to a telegram group with several thousand members, in which they posted target addresses together with instructions for malicious arson and calls for violence.
That absolutely justifies arresting them. It has nothing to do with a mean post or an unpleasant opinion. I think this whole thread is orchestrated propaganda, including the first reply.
> I think this whole thread is orchestrated propaganda, including the first reply.
Do you mean this thread here on ACX? And do you mean my comment -- "Your honor, he's a meanie asshole" -- then asking what the content of the posts was? If so, why was my response part of orchestrated propaganda? By "orchestrated" do you literally mean you think Turtle and I conferred about something supportive I could say in reply to Turtle's original post? Um, no, we did not confer. And I don't even see how my post is supportive of Turtle's view. I didn't say, "damn right, there's no way that's ok,." I asked what the posts were that got people jailed. And, for the record, when I heard that some were calls for violence, my thought was that if they weren't just random rage, but actual suggestions of times, places, means and people to target, then I thought that legal action was warranted.
No, I wasn't referring to you, I was referring to turtle and rebelcredential. I think the first three or so posts in this thread were by them, and these were all very out of place of the usual discourse. Not just content-wise, but also in terms of style. My impression by these three posts were indeed that this was the same person, playing a game of posting with different accounts.
I am no longer sure it is the case. There seem to be differences between them in their further posts. For turtle, I do think the posts are actively misleading, and I find "propaganda" still a fitting term. For rebelcredential it was just the first post which I find misplaced, and the subsequent posts are simply a reaction to me being confrontative. I certainly wasn't kind.
> I think this whole thread is orchestrated propaganda, including the first reply.
> Frankly, this whole thread, including your reply, sounds like orchestrated propaganda to me.
Funny, to me "orchestrated propaganda" is stuff like seeing the same phrasing posted multiple times, as if someone was trying to hammer in a carefully worded message through repetition.
If by "multiple times" you mean "twice, by the same person, which makes it less surprising that they would reuse the same phrasing."
Also, it's bold to claim a conspiracy from two posts when there's a guy replying to every one of your comments in support. (Not that I'm accusing him of being orchestrated propaganda either, I'm well aware that some people just Post A Whole Dang Lot.)
You really shouldn't, the guy is hardly unbiased and known for playing the victim when he has done a lot of pretty reprehensile stuff. You yourself seem rather desperate to downplay what has been a lot of serious rioting as "social media posts", and seem to ignore that your own links show that muslims as well as whites have been imprisoned for the rioting.
Totally get people being imprisoned for violent rioting. Strongly against people being imprisoned for saying mean things while other people are violently rioting. Do you disagree? And have you watched the documentary before commenting about it?
IANAL but I believe that to lose first amendment protection for incitement, speech must be calling for both imminent and specific acts. Something broad and vague like "We should burn down immigrant businesses" would be protected, whereas something like "Come join us in 15 minutes to burn down (specific and real local business): wouldn't be. It doesn't look like the exact text of the posts is quoted in the articles (although I just skimmed and could have missed it), but even something like "I think people should burn down the hotels housing immigrants" would, I think, still be protected in the US.
The Yezer-ra is a more general evil influence analogous to dopa-mine. The suffix "mine" suggests selfishness. Dopa-mine is involved in over-arching selfish attention and reward systems. The Christian correlate might be oxy-to-sin which is involved in bonding and ingroup preference and, by association, anti-outgroup bias. It is Christian, since 'sin' is not a natively Jewish concept.
The left kidney produces levo-adrenaline. It is, in contrast, much more situation specific, providing small bursts of evil or selfishness to get a person through tough moral dilemmas.
I saw an interesting question on DSL that I am going to paraphrase here. This is sort of a sci-fi future hypothetical. There is a new medical process that can change your biological sex. Some stipulations:
1. Your entire body would change, with corresponding differences in height/muscle mass/bone density/structure, etc.
2. Your mind would be the same but your brain would be immersed in a body with different hormones and all that entails.
3. You are comfortable with your body and don't need to relearn how to move with different limbs or have traumatic phantom sensations or anything like that.
4. The procedure is expensive, not enough to break the bank but a considerable cost, and takes a while to go through. E.g. this isn't something you do for a joke at a party, but a commitment of weeks/months.
5. None of your characteristics change, if you are old/fat/ugly or the reverse that will still be true when you are the other sex.
6. The procedure is completely reversible and you can switch back to the way you were before.
Would you do it? What would you think of other people who did it? Would this have major ethical/moral implications?
Personally, I think I would have to briefly switch purely out of curiosity. It would be very enlightening to see how the other half lives, so to speak.
No, I'm not really curious to know what the male version of me would be like, and if I'm still going to be old fat and ugly, it's pointless.
I think more people would be motivated to try it if it were "you get that young, fit, attractive body you always wanted, *plus* you can switch sex if you like!"
As for the "what would you think of other people?", well, that depends. If it really is a genuine sex-swap so that it's a natally female or male body, instead of the current procedures we use, then it really would be "I am a genuine woman/man, now I can have the body to fit my mind" for some. For others, it might be a fad or a phase, and I'd judge them a lot more harshly than someone who always had dysphoria and really did feel better once 'adjusted'.
It's a shame you added the cost and time constraints. I could imagine trying this out of curiosity in my teens or twenties. But in your twenties you can't afford it and in your thirties it's not easy to commit weeks or months to something like this if you have work, family, etc to maintain.
Realistically the main draw is to see what sex is like as a girl. Maybe as a close second there's an element of competitiveness - I'd wanna see how hot I was as a girl, and whether I could act hotter than other girls.
I'm going to predict that everyone ends up bisexual, on the grounds that you'd bring your old mind with you, which is attracted to girls, but your new body would be attracted to men. The mind-body connection is two-way and sex drive is overspill-y enough that I think you'd end up keeping both.
But yeah, this is a what-happens-in-Vegas experience, or at the very least bored Sunday afternoon territory. Good Lord I wouldn't want this anywhere normal life! Imagine having to meet your parents. Or explain to your girlfriend.
"you'd bring your old mind with you, which is attracted to girls, but your new body would be attracted to men"
That's the question, isn't it? I think the mind would over-ride the body, see the phenomenon of "transbians". If you always liked women as a 'man', then even in a new female body with female hormones, you'll still like women - or so it seems for some trans women today.
I don't think it would actually rewire your brain to adjust your sexual orientation. The description just specifies your brain being exposed to different hormones, and I know from personal experience that hormones alone don't necessarily change your sexual orientation: I liked girls when my body was full of testosterone ,and I still like girls now that my body is full of estrogen.
Isn't the "consequence-free" a decent approximation in the real world? Accidental pregnancy is a non-issue for this case, and STD transmission probability is lower than for all other pairings. :-)
Ethics and morality: less fun than thinking about sex, so it goes in a separate comment.
If the transition was free and instant, I predict:
- all whinging about feminism to disappear overnight. You can't guilt trip people when they can just go and check if you're full of shit.
- in a short space of time, any actual social inequality between the sexes to balance out. In the same way that showing people a live aerial view of the roads would solve traffic jams, by letting everyone see the full picture and coordinate independently.
- the ratio of men vs women would now obey the laws of supply and demand. I predict that would be great for everyone.
- I think we'd see the death of mystique and romance. I mean, the Internet already drove multiple nails into the coffin anyway. But while the opposite sex is a dark, uncharted mystery it's fascinating and glamorous. If you can just go there and see, it becomes mundane.
- no idea what happens with reproduction. But heuristically, giving people more social choice has resulted in fewer of them sticking with the main pathway (find straight partner, marry, have kids) necessary for society to sustain itself. So I predict we all die out.
While it would be interesting to have the experience, such an invasive procedure, if real (and if incapable of reversing things like aging), almost certainly has risks that I'm not willing to endure.
Also: I'm reasonably healthy and in good shape, but with significant hair loss. How would that work out? It's particularly brutal to be a bald woman.
Heck yeah I'd try. Curiosity would impel me. And I'd want to go back, too, after I'd gotten a bit used to it, to see what that experience felt like to me.
Whether I'd do it long term, how I'd look at people who did it, what the implications would be... those would depend on a lot of stuff about how this affected society.
Likewise. I'm skeptical that such a technology could exist without a _lot_ of other capabilities being implied. Enough massively parallel microsurgery to swap XX<-->XY in each of trillions of cells (on top of the macroscopic changes) implies many other capabilities.
I think it would be easier to clone a replacement body then upload the brain into it, which is indeed a whole other set of technological requirements, but still easier than trying to turn "adult body of one sex into adult body of the other sex".
Unless we're either invoking something like Star Trek transporters, so the settings can be changed there, which is a huge difference in society already, or magic to do it (again, another huge difference in society).
Frankly, I think "magic is real and it works, look, I can change Samuel into Samantha" is much more of an upheaval than "Samuel is now Samantha".
Many Thanks! Yes, I agree that something like constructing a replacement body would probably be a simpler path than having to dig into each and every cell and change its chromosomes. ( Open question as to whether cloning or mechanically constructing the cells, molecule by molecule (massively parallel) a la Drexler would be more feasible. )
As you said
>which is indeed a whole other set of technological requirements
and, if we actually _had_ those, fixing _any_ damage to the person's body, including aging, seems like it would be implied by those capabilities. Which changes the thought experiment rather strongly - but without it, the experiment doesn't look very self-consistent...
I think I would try it, and I would expect that flipping around would be widespread.
Of course, if there was a third mode "asexual without genitals", I might eventually settle on that.
Other things to consider is if sexual preferences would change, as Christina has pointed out they are kinda tied to hormones. If sexual preferences did not change, then this would completely change the dating market. At the moment, the dating prospects of a male in the lower quarter of the attractiveness distribution are rather slim. But the moment incels would magically transition, they could just start to have lots of lesbian sex with each other, which to me sounds preferable even given that per the hypothetical, they would not turn into super-hot women.
Yeah, but that's still the problem: they don't want average to bad looking trans woman incel, they want the 'pretty or hot popular girl is my girlfriend and likes me and loves me' experience.
'The only partner I can get is ugly former man, just like me' isn't going to be more appealing than "why don't you guys just have sex with each other already, that'll solve your problems about not having a relationship" right now.
Per the hypothetical, the transition would be much easier, faster and thorough than what is possible with present day medical interventions.
From a market perspective, it would not be functionally different from a pill which just makes the incels attracted to men -- which is notably different from just dating a gender you are not attracted to.
Now I don't know anything about the gay dating market dynamics. I would expect that some matches will be complementary (a rich person living in a mansion and an extra hot person may both prefer each other to someone similar to themselves), but a model where income, style, charisma and hotness are all projected on a single axis called attractiveness is probably not terrible far from the truth. (This is sweeping complementary traits like dom/sub under the rug, but I am not convinced they are key to the dating market.)
Also, for sufficiently large populations, the dating goals should align. For heterosexual dating markets, this is not generally true: if men are mostly interested in causal hookups and women are mostly interested in starting families, then this imbalance will distort the respective markets.
Now it is certainly possible that there a significant fraction of gays living in high population areas are involuntary celibate because they would only have sex with someone who is in twice their own quantile in the attractiveness distribution. This would be some evidence for 'incels are celibate because they have unrealistic standards'.
Or it could be that there are few gay incels, which would be evidence for 'inceldom is partly caused by difference in dating preference between men and women'.
> 2. Your mind would be the same but your brain would be immersed in a body with different hormones and all that entails.
You wildly underestimate the plausibility of this. Hormones make a LOT of the mind.
To that end, I would almost certainly try it, if only to see if the hormones would switch a sexual attraction.
When I was experiencing a sexual dysfunction I incorrectly attributed to asexuality, I was intellectually bi, but when that dysfunction was accidentally corrected, I switched to straight, *totally against my will.* I went from general attraction to women to being actively repulsed by them with no inciting event or trauma, just the hormonal correction.
I just meant the procedure wouldn't transform your mind as if you had been the other sex your whole life or something like that. My impression from accounts of FtM people is that the transition to testosterone is especially jarring.
I agree that, if we were to look at it the way we look at other drugs, testosterone should probably be only accessible under a doctor's supervision. It's a known cause of violence!
We know from the accounts of trans people who have taken hormones that they a big effect...
So, yeah, your mind would not be the same.
Though I get the impression that we shouldnt overestimate the effect either. Trans people are typically gender variant even before they started on hormones.
(What I'm getting at here is that a study of trans people would tell you the effect of hprmones + whatever gender variance this population had to start with ... whoch is probably less than the pure hormonal effect)
I'm of course biased, but I think the more interesting and generally applicable information comes from the cis folk who experience these shifts.
Don't get me wrong,
there's definitely some interesting information to be gleaned from trans people who take hormones, but by definition the entire group is experiencing an intense and distressing dysphoria, which obviously also also shapes personality.
Whereas folk like myself or people who have benign tumors which monkey with hormones (like Ken Baker, and another dude whose name I can't recall who wrote a memoir on the topic) *don't* start from a foundation of distress/trauma/frustration/desire/meaningful censure from others, and thus arguably have a somewhat...less invested...perspective.
Wouldn't do it, but mostly from a terminal lack of curiosity. There's nothing about it I'd be looking forward to and a number of things I'd either dread or miss.
Weird coincidence that this is posted right after I watch a Youtube clip of Joe Rogan talking about how excited he would be to become a woman and have sex with a man.
I'm trans, so I'd be all over this. Sounds strictly better than existing options for medical and surgical transition.
More broadly, a lot of the current backlash against availability of medical transition is fear that people (especially teenagers) are making an irreversible mistake by transitioning. Being fully reversible answers that in large part. It'd also be beneficial for adults who are unsure if they want to transition or not, since they can always go back if they don't like it.
>More broadly, a lot of the current backlash against availability of medical transition is fear that people (especially teenagers) are making an irreversible mistake by transitioning.
I agree with this characterization, but I think it's a cultural blind spot that cost-benefit analyses are instinctually focused on the effects on individuals to the exclusion of how individual decisions affect others around them.
> it's a cultural blind spot that cost-benefit analyses are instinctually focused on the effects on individuals to the exclusion of how individual decisions affect others around them.
How so? Despite my problems with some of the political ideology that got popular in the 2010s, I'm 100% on team "individual people have individual worth" and "it's inhumane to make some people suffer for the good of all". If transition fixes dysphoria, then so be it. And everything I heard, from a number of trans people whom I knew in the before time, was that it did work. Heck, I didn't even need to talk to them, I knew a few of them before and after, and just watching them go from being miserable and depressed to bouncy and happy was heartwarming.
I remember around a decade ago when my mother and I were idly chatting about her younger years. I can't recall exactly what past incident it was, but I remember asking her why she hadn't made a certain choice that, being your standard cardboard cutout college lib at the time, seemed obvious to me the correct one. To paraphrase, she responded to me by saying that people should take into account the effects of their decisions on not only themselves but also those close to them. You'll have to take my word for it that she didn't seem to regret the choice she ended up making. She wasn't saying that she had no individual worth, nor am I now saying that individuals don't have worth. My point is that evaluating the merits of choices solely by their benefit to the respective individuals making the decision is not the only or best way to evaluate them.
Point 2, to quote myself:
>The calculus changes if the procedure to transition becomes far more frictionless as in the hypothetical. I'd expect that an unknown number people with lower mental distress relative to those currently transitioning might also go through with it in a reality where transitioning is made easier.
The number of trans-identifying youth has exploded as trans acceptance has increased. Youth in the Western world (the most trans accepting countries) are unhappier than ever. Trans acceptance might not have caused the unhappiness, but it's certainly not an endorsement of the idea that the benefits to your trans acquaintances is evidence that it would be a net benefit for all.
> My point is that evaluating the merits of choices solely by their benefit to the respective individuals making the decision is not the only or best way to evaluate them.
I agree, especially with the part about ”respective individuals making the decision". I'm making a lot of life decisions right now based on the benefits to other people. But I feel like it's important that they're *my* decisions, you know?
> Youth in the Western world (the most trans accepting countries) are unhappier than ever.
I suspect that these things are not directly linked. That is, there's a bunch of toxic stuff in the culture, which is making people unhappy. And some of the toxic stuff has infected trans discourse, and the interaction means that kids try to fix their unhappiness with transition. (Alternatively, it might be possible that something in our culture is actually causing more dysphoria than in the past.)
I get both your points. There's value in people feeling like they are more or less free to own their own actions and to act without too many constraints, including cultural norms. And it's difficult to disentangle cause and effect of cultural trends. I was questioning the near ubiquitous assumption that things be evaluated solely on the benefits to individuals and the freeing of individuals from constraints. And I've become increasingly wary of tearing down fences.
Apart from our Enlightenment heritage, I think it's too easy to advocate for tearing them down. It's easy to identify the beneficiaries of a change. In this case, you identified people you knew personally who went from miserable to happy. In contrast, it's difficult to predict who'll be worse off due to a change and more difficult still to draw a line between cause and effect, particularly because people are loathe to acknowledge that a change they advocated for did any harm at all. No one wants to believe that they harmed anyone else, and people are great at believing what they want to believe. Another factor is that people's behavior changes when the game is different and it's difficult to predict how their behaviors will change. I alluded to the explosion of trans identifying young people, but another example is electoral reform and the popular vote. It's common for people to complain about the Electoral College producing a winner that got fewer votes, but they don't realize that none of the actors (voters, candidates, parties) would behave in the same way in a system where the popular vote matters.
Commitment of weeks/months only? I suspect many people would do it back and forth just out of curiosity, I'd probably consider it myself. To give the ultimate boring answer, it depends on the cost!
>Would this have major ethical/moral implications?
At a societal level it would probably wreck at least some number of families that are currently functioning fine or better than fine. I can't think of any benefits at a societal level that would be sufficient to counterbalance this beyond the vague sort of titillating eye-opening enlightenment from seeing through others' eyes. It reminds me of that Indian fellow who pretended to be black to get into med school and, while he did have an easier time getting into med school, experienced racism.
Edit: On the other hand, the high price tag would mean that the wrecking would be limited to high income families, and so the procedure would be good for equity.
I have heard a number of anecdotes from other trans people on online forums who lost spouses over their transitions, usually because spouse's sexual orientation wasn't compatible with the transition. So I do have to admit that in the short term, increasing the availability of transitions would at least marginally increase how often that happens. But there are a few other things that I think need to be taken into account here.
For one thing, the characteristic of these marriages as "functioning fine or better than fine" is dubious. By the same anecdotes, the decision to transition in these circumstances generally comes after desperately trying to suppress and live with dysphoria for the sake of maintaining the marriage, and living with a problem that makes you desperately unhappy doesn't sound "fine" to me. And if the decision to transition is made casually without consideration for the spouse, that sounds like a clear sign the marriage was already on thin ice.
For another, in the long term, making transition more available means more people will be able to transition before getting married in the first place. Especially in this hypothetical, where full reversibility also removes the "am I making an irreversible mistake" fear as a barrier to transition. I'd expect it to play out as something like what happened a generation or so ago, when increased awareness about and acceptance of being gay lead to some broken marriages at first when people married to a member of the opposite sex accepted that they're gay and would be happier in a same-sex relationship, but longer term there are a lot fewer gay people are trying to be straight, especially those committing to the role enough to get married.
The last bit is to note that a lot of marriages do survive one parter realizing they're trans. The other partner might already identify as bisexual, or they may find there's some flexibility in their orientation at least with regard for their spouse.
I've heard from a number of transwomen that taking hormones made them attracted to guys. SO, apparently, this sometimes happens, even if its not universal. Also apparently: transmen dont experience a effect like this, or at least, its even rarer.
>By the same anecdotes, the decision to transition in these circumstances generally comes after desperately trying to suppress and live with dysphoria for the sake of maintaining the marriage, and living with a problem that makes you desperately unhappy doesn't sound "fine" to me. And if the decision to transition is made casually without consideration for the spouse, that sounds like a clear sign the marriage was already on thin ice.
The calculus changes if the procedure to transition becomes far more frictionless as in the hypothetical. I'd expect that an unknown number people with lower mental distress relative to those currently transitioning might also go through with it in a reality where transitioning is made easier. And it also disregards the effect on their children.
>For another, in the long term, making transition more available means more people will be able to transition before getting married in the first place. Especially in this hypothetical, where full reversibility also removes the "am I making an irreversible mistake" fear as a barrier to transition.
I agree that this could mitigate the number of broken marriages. But in this case, it does so by lowering the number of marriages that occur in the first place. You could argue that marriage numbers wouldn't be affected because post-transition people can get married after, but then you'd have to assume that the number of FTM transitioners would equal the number of MTF transitioners and I don't think that's true now nor would it be true in a world with the hypothetical procedure.
My impression is that there are far more MTF transitions than FTM, so it would create a gender imbalance.
And we can theorize X leads to Y all day long, but the proof is in the pudding. In general do the societies that treat rainbow flags as sacred value marriage as much as the ones that don't? My roommate is from India. He rolls his eyes at Pride Parades and his parents have been sending him profiles of girls on Indian dating sites on a daily basis since his early 20s.
Edit: >Wouldn't people who are happier with their gender be more likely to marry?
I think desire for marriage is as much or more a socially ingrained priority than it is a matter of individual personal preference.
Used to be way more MTF but now FTM is catching up and it's often teenage girls. Hence the worries over social contagion and the subsequent fighting between trans activists, portraying such things as the Cass Report as institutional transphobia, and those wanting to restrict "healthcare for trans kids".
"Results: Through June 2017, a total of 421 transgender individuals were seen who initiated hormonal therapy after 1990. Over the past 25 years, there has been a significant increase in the number of individuals seen. The mean age at initiation has remained higher in MTF than in FTM but has decreased steadily in both groups with the overall average dropping <30 years since 2015 (27.5±10.6). Since 1990, there has been a steady increase in the percentage of FTM such that it is now equivalent to MTF.
Conclusion: Consistent with many reports, we are seeing an increasing number of gender dysphoric individuals seeking hormonal therapy. The age at initiation has been dropping over the past 25 years, and we have seen a steady increase in the number of FTM such that the incidence now equals that of MTF. Possible reasons for these changes are discussed."
"Sex assigned at birth. Sex assigned at birth differs from gender identity because it is based on phenotypic sex characteristics and is the sex stated on an individual’s birth certificate. It may or may not align with gender identity. Trans and non-trans adults are equally likely to have been assigned either male or female at birth."
If I'm reading this right, then the trans adults who were "assigned male at birth" (meaning now they're trans women or non-binary or agender or other identification) make up 48% of respondents, and "assigned female at birth" (meaning they're now trans men etc.) make up 52%.
At the risk of taking a mostly-joking statement too seriously, KFF survey data seems to indicate that the birth sex of trans people is pretty close to 50/50: specifically, 47% natal male, 53% natal female (compared to the 48/52 split in non-trans people in the survey sample). Although there are about twice as many trans women as trans men, with the remainder identifying as nonbinary or gender nonconforming.
Also, about 70% of trans people surveyed are gay or bi, and other surveys I've seen suggest that a plurality of both trans men and trans women are bisexual. And a fair number of cis people are bisexual, too, which gives at least a few percent worth of cushion against uneven gender ratios.
The KFF survey also helpfully gives data about marital status. Marriage rates are quite a bit lower among trans adults than cis adults (26% currently married vs 49%), but a lot of this is likely age effects as trans people in the sample skew quite a bit younger (53% of trans adults are under 35, compared with 28% for cis adults). Raw divorce rates are almost identical (8% vs 9%), but that does give a higher divorce rate if you look at the number relative to if they've ever been married.
>At the risk of taking a mostly-joking statement too seriously, KFF survey data seems to indicate that the birth sex of trans people is pretty close to 50/50: specifically, 47% natal male, 53% natal female (compared to the 48/52 split in non-trans people in the survey sample). Although there are about twice as many trans women as trans men, with the remainder identifying as nonbinary or gender nonconforming.
I'm confused. Is this saying that that more men transition to female than vice versa despite both sexes being as likely to *say* that they are trans?
There are more MtF than FtM, but there are also more FtX than MtX, so FtX + FtM ~= MtX + MtF.
"Nonbinary" (or NB, or Enby) means any gender identity other than strictly male or strictly female. There are a bunch of subcategories, but the big ones I'm familiar with are Genderqueer (aiming for a mix of masculine and feminine characteristics), Agender (minimizing gendered characteristics), and Genderfluid (gender identity varies with mood).
Enbies often but don't always pursue medical transition, sometimes the same sort of hormones that MtFs or FtMs take and sometimes variations thereof (lower doses, adding SERMs to suppress breast development in MtX, adding finasteride to reduce body and facial hair in FtX, etc).
I just want to gauge what other people think about it. I assume your stance is there would be no implications. But I could see a spiritual/religious perspective of it being immoral to reject God's plan/destiny/etc.
If anyone claims that as the reason but has willingly received medical treatment in the past, they're lying. It makes no sense to suddenly draw the line there unless it's a rationalization for something else.
I'm gonna be mean here: the special cases ones who seem to be excessively online and lap up all the attention would be immensely dissatisfied to now be "only" a straight/gay woman (or man).
The general run of trans people would like this, I think, but the "oh tee-hee am I a man? am I a woman? am I a cute anime cat-girl? today I think I'm going girl-mode! feeling cute, skirt spinny!" set would hate having the I'M SO SPECIAL label taken away. I think that, even with perfect body swap technology, they would *still* insist on "but I'm *trans*, I'm not like you cis lumpenproles who were born that way".
>just as long as they don't demand that uninvolved third parties pay for it or approve of it
What do you think the odds are that activists don't try to frame this procedure as "healthcare" with the implication that it be publicly funded? What do you think the odds are that they don't get their way at some point?
Pretty much daily updates on the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts, and as warranted stuff about e.g. Taiwan/China or Houthi/All Mankind. The Gaza stuff is under the "Iran" heading.
Has summaries, maps, and in-depth analysis. Follows basically all the even semi-credible sources from both sides, with an appropriate (not necessarily symmetric) level of skepticism.
In the past week, Peter Thiel and Demis Hassabis gave separate interviews, and both said the AI industry is in a bubble, but at the same time that real progress in the technology was happening and few people understood how big the impact would be in the medium term. Thiel analogized the present state of the industry to the internet in 1999: poised for a massive breakout while simultaneously in a bubble that was about to pop.
What are some examples of AI startups and proposed applications that seem likely to fail when the "bubble" pops?
I think the "bubble popping" is a subtly wrong way to look at it. I think a lot of current businesses will collapse, but that's because increasing AI power will render them pointless. They'll end up like companies offering dial-up Internet access over land lines.
In particular, I predict that prompt engineering, while useful for the foreseeable future (such as that is), won't really be a thing for more than a few years. It'll get about as much use as Linux virtual consoles, which is to say that they'll primarily be used by very tech-savvy people who are troubleshooting a custom private installation.
Yes, but what happens if/when market disenchantment with general-purpose LLMs causes GPU sales to plummet? My understanding is that greater than 80% of Nvidia's GPU output goes to support these beasts. Sure, specialized AI applications will continue to prosper in their own limited way, but if the demand for Nvidia's H200 chip suddenly craters, we'll see ripples across the entire spectrum of tech industries — but especially in the semi sector. Maybe I'm over-worrying, but I see a potential Dot Com bubble situation if that happens.
I honestly don't see that happening any time soon. Yeah, there's hype that's out of hand, and irrational enthusiasm, but there's also useful demand for those things, and ongoing R&D. The hype dying away just means that OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. will be able to get more computing power for their money. I didn't think we've hit the limit of the usefulness of GPT-style AIs, and even once we do, there's effort being put into finding the next transformer-level improvement.
I think it's much easier to see that many will fail than to identify exactly which ones will fail.
Even companies which have a shit business model today might easily be able to pivot to a less shit business model in the future, if they have a good team and good management. I remember the first internet bubble and how everybody decried all these companies like Google with "millions of users and no revenue model" -- but it turned out that finding a revenue model isn't that hard once you have millions (and soon billions) of users.
Similarly, I think right now if you have a company with a lot of high quality in-house AI expertise, _and_ smart management, _and_ a funding source that can keep the lights on in the medium term, then it doesn't matter that much what your current business model is. But if you're a couple of clueless trend followers with no deep understanding of AI *or* business, currently living off seed funding from an equally clueless VC, then you're almost certainly doomed.
I think it would be easier to try to find AI startups that *won't* fail when the bubble pops. To be fair, nearly all startups fail even under normal circumstances.
The AI industry appears to have hit on a very powerful new set of tools that is too expensive to fully utilize and likely plateaued at its current level of capability in a way that will not be improved by the price coming down. I think LLMs are essentially what I think Google search and other narrow AI tools are: A technology that will be a component of an eventual AGI.
I think we’re even close to a point where the right wrapper around a bunch of technologies might allow us to build an AGI, but it will take a serious technological insight that we aren’t obviously close to for it to come together.
"I think we’re even close to a point where the right wrapper around a bunch of technologies might allow us to build an AGI, but it will take a serious technological insight that we aren’t obviously close to for it to come together."
I agree. I think the first "AGI" will be a sort of Frankenstein machine that is a collection of dozens of more specialized LLMs and programs. Whenever it receives a prompt, it will usually know which of its specialized modules to activate to handle it best. It will be inelegant and will require an enormous amount of computer servers and electricity to function, but will still exhibit enough "general" intelligence from the end user's perspective to fool a sizeable minority of people into thinking it's an AGI. The term I use for it is "Fake AGI."
I think even fake AGI is probably that far away as anything that is actually useful or cost-competitive. A real single model AI agent that can outperform humans with an annual cost less than several times a human’s salary to operate may actually not be something we do for generations.
There are a lot of economic incentives, but there have also been waves of hype around this and lots of tools that cost a lot and don’t work very well. Once there is a legit AI-bubble driven economic crash, it will be a decade before anyone will invest serious money into anything new and capital intensive. IMO, this is unlikely to be more than a year out from now and may already be in very early stages
I probably wouldn’t short Nvidia, but I both wouldn’t go long on them right now and would hold off on buying a new gaming GPU, because the AI bubble bursting could see a hell of a lot of silicon with nowhere to go being repurposed for consumer GPUs at a relative bargain.
Without venture capital and irrational confidence to subsidize it, the current wave of LLM AI will even recede as providers are forced to charge what it actually costs to provide. You can see that process already kind of starting with OpenAI putting GPT-5 on ice and shifting their focus to GPT-4omini. A model which is less useful than the big ones but which can be run at manageable cost. Unfortunately it’s hard to hype up a model that trades capability for provider margins, and interest is already waning even in the big boys that are legit impressive as they have stopped becoming more impressive fast enough to draw attention.
It’s a gut feeling, but I think that Sam Altman is going to personally fall from grace and the board that tried to fire him will be almost entirely vindicated in the not too distant future.
Yeah, right now they're trying to throw AI into everything as an incentive to purchase - I'm getting lots of Dell emails about "our new laptops with Copilot built in!" - but I think it'll end up like the Internet of Things where we don't, in general, have our kettles telling us that the water is now boiled so come make the tea.
Right now I think it's a bubble, and it'll burst, and we'll eventually get useful products but not the anticipated bonanza that everyone is staking their money on today where AI is the new buzzword to throw around when trying to sell your product or service.
I posted about this a while ago, there's a huge crop of startups trying to develop "AI for some specific field", whose engineering mostly amounts to wrapping a generic LLM API with some proprietary prompts. This is pretty low value add and doesn't necessarily work very well, so I don't expect most of those to survive.
I think that "AI Whispering Consultancy" is likely to be a viable business model just like "SEO Consultancy". Someone who understands the subtleties of the various models and can help you design an optimal custom prompt for your specific application.
I'm also wondering whether there'll be a less ethical business model in trying to get particular pieces of data incorporated into training sets. You give me a million dollars and I try to make sure that the phrase "Pepsi tastes better than Coke" is incorporated into the training set of GPT-5 in at least five million different locations.
>I'm also wondering whether there'll be a less ethical business model in trying to get particular pieces of data incorporated into training sets.
One of the things that currently creeps me out about LLMs is that OpenAI doesn't disclose its training sets. It is reasonably clear that wikipedia is in there. What about textbooks? Which _parts_ of Reddit? r/FemaleDatingStrategy ? What about Hamlet? What about fiction in general? What about religious texts in general?
I thought *everything* that was in print format and online was in their training sets? I thought the big problem was getting more training data — that doesn't exist yet — for the next generation of LLMs?
Having said that I'm pretty sure from previous discussions that the OED and the Merck Index aren't in their training sets.
>I thought the big problem was getting more training data — that doesn't exist yet — for the next generation of LLMs?
Many Thanks! Yeah, I've seen claims that one of the problems further scaling is running into is running out of human-generated text. I've tried looking for a statement of what is in their training set but was not successful.
>Having said that I'm pretty sure from previous discussions that the OED and the Merck Index aren't in their training sets.
Or that the LLM was unable to make full use of the information in them? :-)
They’re cagey about it. And the real problem is twofold. They’re running out of training data/increasingly losing access to once-available data, and the training data needs scale logarithmically for linear improvements in capability. There seems to be several orders of magnitude too little data available in the whole world for for LLMs to 10x their current capability. And even if that weren’t true, you’d need Victor Fries or Raymond Cocteau to design the cooling solutions for the training servers.
It seems to me that that would be fairly useful actually. I’m not saying there’s any money in it, but narrowing down what an AI can do with a few buttons would be helpful for many applications.
This, and I also expect many of the much smaller funded foundation models to wither away; assuming scale continues to be king, there's only room (and funding) for a couple of big models + an open source uncensored version.
I honestly don't see how things would improve by having a fake 'person' talking to you about "Hi, I'm Bob/Babs and I'm here to help! Your bus will be arriving in ten minutes at 10:00:00 a.m.!" "Yeah, but it's already 10:10 a.m. and no sign of it, what's the hold up?" "I'm sorry you seem to be having a bad experience with GoSlow Bus Services. Your bus will arrive at 10:00:00 a.m.!" "I already said it's late, what is happening?" "Are you sure you are at the right stop? By the timetable, the next 125BC bus is due to arrive at 10:00:00 a.m.!"
Good luck with trying to get the AI to tell you what the hell is going on and sort out your problem. Maybe it'll end up like the Canadian airline chatbot that promised refund to a passenger, the airline went to court to deny this because the chatbot was allegedly its own entity, and the court ruled nope, have to pay up:
"In 2022, Air Canada's chatbot promised a discount that wasn't available to passenger Jake Moffatt, who was assured that he could book a full-fare flight for his grandmother's funeral and then apply for a bereavement fare after the fact.
According to a civil-resolutions tribunal decision last Wednesday, when Moffatt applied for the discount, the airline said the chatbot had been wrong – the request needed to be submitted before the flight – and it wouldn't offer the discount. Instead, the airline said the chatbot was a "separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions". Air Canada argued that Moffatt should have gone to the link provided by the chatbot, where he would have seen the correct policy.
The British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal rejected that argument, ruling that Air Canada had to pay Moffatt $812.02 (£642.64) in damages and tribunal fees. "It should be obvious to Air Canada that it is responsible for all the information on its website," read tribunal member Christopher Rivers' written response. "It makes no difference whether the information comes from a static page or a chatbot."
I honestly don't think we *do* need "many things in the built environment" to "wake up", and I don't think it's cowardice holding it back so much as "we tried to do it on the cheap and replace our real humans, the end product was crappy, and it caused so much hassle we had to scrap it".
I don't want a Talkie Toaster, I want accurate information.
> A trivial example: you could make a train car or a train station that you can actually speak to, asking it how long to get to someplace or what the best route is from A to B or if there are any service interruptions
That's just a voice UI slapped on top of Google Maps. Which Google will probably release soon if they haven't already.
*Snerk.* Exactly. They can't even get Google Flights right as a *website,* with tens of thousands of genius Phd's toiling in their clickfarm mines.
I'd dearly like to be able to tell Gemini to book me a flight with 20kg of luggage to X on Y date and have it handle the details, but I predict that this will never happen, even though they could literally do it today.
Contrary to **Level 50 Lapras** above, I also don't expect a usable AI interface in Google Maps either, although I would dearly love and use that too. I'd love to be able to tell it "look at all the pictures of 4 star hotel gyms in <city> and list which ones have an actual power rack, not a smith machine, and their prices."
Once again, I'd bet on never being able to usably do this with a Google product, even though they are literally THE best positioned company to do this and much other "AI personal assistant" style stuff. They're just going to ruin it, full stop, just like they ruined search, their core competency, much less all their other acquisitions and bright ideas that are used by tens to hundreds of millions that they just let trail off into oblivion.
The way I hear it, the fear of a minor miscalculation or the reality of a hallucination is too much for LLM tech to be loadbearing right now. A current LLM, tech-wise, could easily handle such a transaction. But maybe it would sometimes spend thousands of dollars by accident, or share your credit card with a scammer. Or, even easier, book the wrong day or something because it doesn't know you can't make it to the airport in 20 minutes and that's the [best price/other metric it is using to pick].
I just don't think this is so much of an issue, and even if it were, they should let people opt-in and assume the risk of things going wrong. I've built little "hallucination detection" tools locally where you just pipe results to another LLM via the API and have it double check things, and it significantly improves things and lets you do a "hallucination estimator", and I'm sure Google can do much better than that.
Also, it would be a dialogue like OP envisions. "There's flights at 7AM, 2PM, and 10PM, and they're all within $50 of each other, which one do you want?"
I actually do the "power rack detection" thing today with GPT4, it's just frustrating for a number of reasons (it won't do inline pictures, OR deep link specific pics, so you can double check, and only has ~70% accuracy), and being able to directly access Google maps pics instead of Trip Advisor pics would be a major step up in terms of coverage in given cities.
This sounds like a retrofuturistic idea, the future imagined by a past that did not see us all walking around with powerful computers in our pockets, reliably connected to a network providing near-immediate access to incomprehensibly vast amounts of information.
My thoughts exactly. It also reminds me of Ray Kurzweil's prediction from 1999 that, within 20 years, the average person would be wearing a dozen little computers on them, embedded in jewelry, their wristwatches, and their clothes, that would be linked together through a LAN. In reality, all of that was consolidated into one device--the smartphone.
Likewise, instead of making a train station kiosk "intelligent" by allowing travelers to ask it when the next train is arriving, it would be better if the rail company fed live data to the internet about the locations of its trains, track problems, delays, etc., where private users could access it and make sense of it themselves. It would be most convenient if you could ask your AI personal assistant on your smartphone when the train was coming, it could look at the rail company's live data, and answer you.
I wish google directions worked better when i am already on one of the trains i need to be on. It instead thinks i have to walk to the station and get on the next one. Then the directions might not be optimized around the exact timing of express trains and such. Bolting google maps on to the train itself could solve that.
And yet every time I try to plan a trip, Google tells me they don't have the latest bus schedule for my area, or the location data are minutes out of date.
I agree that kind of information would be a good thing. But you just need a website, not a talking train station (which would itself need to get up-to-date information through a website of some kind anyway).
Finding the correct train timetable for my line, and then squinting at it, and then zooming in, and then figuring out that actually _that's_ the timetable for days starting with "T" in odd-numbered years in March and I need to look at another timetable... is a frustrating experience.
I'd rather say "Yo phone, when are the next three trains from Moose Hat to Cockfosters?" and it will tell me.
But it's easier if I can ask my phone rather than needing to go to the station. What is really needed is better integration between language models and live data sources.
If there was an agreed-upon feed for this sort of data which sufficiently-trusted sources could publish to, and which language models could read from in real time, that would be useful. It would need to be curated so it didn't wind up as spam.
"I'd rather say "Yo phone, when are the next three trains from Moose Hat to Cockfosters?" and it will tell me."
Provided you're willing to run the risk that it will hallucinate an answer as it doesn't want to say "No trains" and thus it assures you that there are three imaginary trains running at these times, where you'll wait for them and none of them show up, because it's the third Tuesday and a full moon and you want to travel to Zone Y outside of peak rush non-standard discounted Zone Z hours, so of course there are no trains from that station to that destination today.
> What is really needed is better integration between language models and live data sources.
Sure, that'd be good, but this problem doesn't take large language models to solve. Better integration with Google Maps will be enough. (I'd actually prefer to use that over having to talk to an LLM-powered assistant.)
You are being argued against but that’s exactly where I think AI should go. Take the general model with its ability to understand complex English sentences, and follow on questions, add some real time data and an ability to retort in natural sounding language.
I’m pretty sure that call centres are setting this up as we speak. Apples new AI service (Apple intelligence) seems to also focus on narrow tasks using general LLMS in the background.
Isn’t that just normal lag between early and late adopters? Train station and car manufacturers aren’t going to invest in that kind of thing until they know the companies behind technology will still be alive in 10 years.
>a train station that you can actually speak to, asking it how long to get to someplace or what the best route is from A to B or if there are any service interruptions.
That doesn't take AI, that just takes Internet connection and access to the company website.
Having it respond to freeform questions fluently enough that people wouldn't have to switch mental contexts into UI navigation or careful phrasing would be part of the huge difference, surely?
Like, bus stations have static placards showing the bus routes. Airports have updating billboards telling you whether a flight is delayed or not. I don't know what else people are trying to ask here.
In the cases I'm primarily thinking about, I don't mean that the semantics of the question make it impossible for the passenger to answer using those static resources. I am referring mainly to the secondary attributes of the experience, which are often important to start with and which I would expect to be more important in circumstances like “harried traveler on not much sleep” where mental “stack space” is more limited. There is a substantial difference in mental effort between “babble a question in whatever order makes sense to you at the time and get a narrow response delivered directly” and “understand the format of this chart and scan it for which combination of cells contains the information you need”, a substantial difference in flow effects between “say a question now and it is buffered for you” and “wait for the site to load before you can start scrolling”, etc.
For an analogy, think pocket calculator versus paper arithmetic. The question may indeed be as simple as “which routes here get me to Raging Rabbit Station”, but the delivery method is totally different.
Being able to synthesize even a *little* bit past the edge of the locally authoritative database would amplify this further: “If I get out of Luigi's Pizzeria at eleven, what bus will I be able to take home?” And in-context follow-up questions: “How much will it cost?”
Which, now that I've written it out, leads me to actually think that this application may not show up because in anticipation it gets displaced by “everyone has a smartphone and asks Siri or Gemini, and the transit company uploads their tables to the major map sites, has them scraped implicitly, or offers the AI access using local OS integrations when their app is installed”.
So what is being asked for here seems to be "give me an AI that I don't have to look up things myself, just ask it for this information". I don't know if that's 'cooler', it's certainly lazier, it might be more efficient, but it's also making us ever more dependent on things to replace our brains.
I do get the appeal for "I've been travelling for hours, I'm tired and hungry and I just want to know where to go when" use, but a lot of this sounds like "aw man, you expect me to TYPE the QUESTION in MANUALLY like a caveman?" issues.
The reason we aren't doing this yet is because we can't to the necessary level of accuracy and reliability. There are a *lot* of tasks where the thing that matters most is avoiding being wrong 1% of the time. If your train station tells even 0.5% of customers that the train is leaving 15 minutes later than it is, and they miss the train, that is going the make it useless. So until the hallucination problem is fixed (or greatly, *greatly* reduced), the kinds of applications you are talking about aren't going to happen. You see the reason why in every single example of a business trying to do something similar and it fails spectacularly in some edge case or when some troll manages to jailbreak it.
Don't get me wrong, I find the current gen LLMs immensely useful, but that's because I understand their limitations and am willing to accept the situations where they just don't do what I want them to do.
They are very much not ready for interacting with average customers in ways that actually matter.
>The reason we aren't doing this yet is because we can't to the necessary level of accuracy and reliability.
Yup. In general, I've almost never found the current version of customer assistance applications useful to me. Now, I may be a corner case. The usual reason that I've encountered one of these is that I've already used the business's web site, and I've hit something ambiguous or contradictory, so I'm calling them on the phone, and they've connected me to their AI. And the AI does _not_ have access to better information to resolve the problem than the website does. So I almost always wind up having to get to a human.
The chatbot will be working off the published timetable, and in reality that depends heavily on the conditions on the day - are there breakdowns, diversions, delays, what? - and those being updated regularly and in a timely manner. The AI can't look out the window to see if it's raining or if there are the wrong kind of leaves on the tracks.
If the train is delayed because a passenger had a medical emergency so everything is running half an hour late, that needs some human somewhere to enter that information. If everyone is too busy calling an ambulance and dealing with the passengers already on board, the AI is just going to tell you happily "The train will be arriving in ten minutes!" as per the timetable, but then you're waiting half an hour due to the delay that the AI didn't know about.
LLMs trained on specific information are too small to outperform giant models on specific tasks. (Source: review paper that I saw once.) This is because "specific information" is like, a million times less information about general reasoning and English grammar than the entirety of the scrape-able internet + books.
If they're not updating the signs, they're sure as heck not updating the AI. Or rather, they're not updating the information the AI needs to tell you, because Joe told Bill the line is blocked, but Bill hasn't entered that on the computer yet.
I'm still mulling this study over, but I am inclined to believe its conclusions that ~10% of students given mindfulness meditation training were adversely affected by the program (and for the rest it didn't provide any measurable benefits). However, I don't know how the British educational system implemented their School-Based Mindfulness Training (SBMT) curricula. I'm sorry, but I don't think teachers (or child psychologists for that matter) are capable of being effective meditation instructors by taking a course or two and passing a certification exam. It seems to me that if someone is going to teach mindfulness, they need a couple of decades in the meditation trenches before they're qualified to teach meditation to adults — let alone children! I remember the well-meaning boob who first taught me Buddhist meditation. He was a young bliss-head who couldn't get his brain around that I was having some very weird negative experiences with my initial forays into mindfulness meditation. Luckily I met a Lama who, when I described what I was experiencing, gave me some visualization exercises to get around the crazy stuff I was experiencing.
Anyway, the study tested more than 8,000 children (aged 11-14) across 84 schools in the UK from 2016 to 2018. Its results showed that mindfulness failed to improve the mental well-being of children compared to a control group, and very likely had detrimental effects on those who were at risk of mental health problems.
Heard from someone who has done years of training and meditation with Tibetan buddhists that Tibetans like to start kids out by sounding a gong and having them listen to the sound as it grows fainter and fainter, seeing whether they can identify the moment when it becomes silence. This lovely exercise seems benign to me.
I'm going to be cynical here and say that they're not really teaching "mindfulness meditation", what they are trying to teach is "sit down, be quiet, focus" for modern kids who are hyper-stimulated and the old methods of expecting discipline and good behaviour in class have gone because you're not allowed use corporal punishment anymore.
The end results that this is supposed to achieve is "And then little Johnny paid attention in class, did his homework, and got better grades in his tests". Judge for yourself if you think this is very likely the second the kids leave the classroom environment and go home.
Also I suspect anyone who needs to reduce an esoteric practice into an acronym has missed the point of that esoteric practice and doesn't know what the f**k they're doing.
it's like CBT - oh, this really works for a small subset of people when it's a new thing? Well, let's try it for everyone!
And now we've got "ten online sessions of CBT to cure your lumbago, fix your depression, spray for blight on the spuds, and get ten more miles to the gallon for your car" watered-down to sweet damn-all version of it recommended by the health system over here instead of real therapy which is too long and expensive.
(I may be *slightly* jaundiced about my experiences with the Irish mental health services, brief and pointless as they were).
It's actually short for "SuBMiT", which is a joint project by BDSM evangelists and Islamic fundamentalists to get people to shut up and do what they say...
There seems to be fair amount of evidence that a small percentage of people trying mindfullness experience really bad effects - on the order of a psychotic break. But his seems to be way less than 10%.
I can totally believe results along the line of, "actually, not much benefit".
To date, I have only encountered people with anxiety disorders from it (I'm a psychologist). But anxiety disorders are torturous and disabling. One man I saw had become unable to stop paying attention to his breath because he had a fear that if he did he would stop breathing. He understood perfectly well that the body does not work that way, but that knowledge did nothing to reduce his fear and his habit of paying attention to his breath. Sometimes he would get stuck imagining what it would be like to be unable to inhale & then he'd have a panic attack. He had a terrible time sleeping because the moment his attention began to diffuse he'd be yanked awake by the awareness that he was forgetting to pay attention to his breathing.
Oh, that sounds terrible. Typically, of course, you'll be fine because unconcious breathing reflexes will take over.
Though, kind of reminiscent of the time I was in the ER recently where the nurse was asking me if she could disable my Sp02 alarm (it was giving major hypoxia warning alerts) and I'm thinking to myself, how likely is it that if I go to sleep right now, I might never wake up.
Something like, my blood oxygen was going low but not fatally low when I tried to sleep, and unneccessary alarms distract attention from the ones that actually matter. (The following morning, when the ER doc is round to see me, he's like, yeah, some people's blood oxygen goes low like that when they try to sleep, thats not a big problem)
Is it true, though, that it's not a big problem? People with sleep apnea do badly on various cognitive tests, and if they use a C-PAP cognitive scores improve, but some never get back into the average range. I believe that's thought to be the result of brain damage from the years with untreated sleep apnea.
There's something else that can shake some people up in a way that I think is similar to what mindfulness training does: philosophy. I myself, as a freshman, went through a period of depersonalization set off by lots of reading and rumination about free will and the nature of consciousness, and since then have run across several other people who have experienced the same thing. One, a philosophy major, actually ended up changing majors in his junior year because he could not face taking even one more philosophy course.
Can totally sympathize with the guy who doesn't want to know whether he is in The Matrix or not. If I recall correctly, Plato's Republic has a character who makes this point...
"And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision,—what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them,—will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?"
That sounds like the standard gatekeeping everyone does, with occupational licensing being the formalized version of that. Noöne seriously thinks that, say, massage therapy or hair styling is dangerous and requires a license to perform safely.
"Massage therapy is quite safe, but nothing’s perfect. Strong, deep tissue massage causes the most trouble, of course. It may aggravate problems, instead of helping. Some chronic pain patients may be disastrously traumatized by intense massage (what I call a “sensory injury”). Occasionally it causes new physical injuries, usually just minor bruises and nerve lesions, but sometimes far worse: there’s a small but serious risk of spinal injury or stroke with any neck manipulation, and blood clots can be dangerously dislodged causing pulmonary embolism (a “stroke” in the lung).
On the milder side, patients often feel sore and a bit icky after massage (post-massage soreness and malaise). Although often rationalized by massage therapists as a healing crisis or the effects of “detoxifying,” it’s probably a minor muscle crush injury (rhabdomyolysis).
Athletic performance may be slightly impaired by pre-event massage — a minor consideration for most of us, but not for serious competitors.
Finally, sometimes massage therapy is a costly distraction from more appropriate care (as with any alternative medicine)."
Like anything else, if you don't know what you're doing, then cutting and styling hair or massage can cause harm ranging from the minor (she chopped my hair off! I'll have to wear a hat until it grows out!) to the more serious. And of course, there are always lawyers waiting to help you take a case:
"Immediately after the accident, seeking prompt medical attention is crucial. In severe cases, calling an ambulance could be necessary, however, if the injury seemed less severe, consulting your family doctor or GP is advised. In the event of a reaction to adhesive from eyelash extensions, eyelash tint, hair colour, or other beauty products, seeking prompt medical attention is crucial.
Timely medical attention is crucial in addressing allergic reactions, as they can lead to severe health complications. Delaying medical treatment may impact your ability to file a personal injury claim. To evaluate your eligibility for compensation regarding an allergic reaction from a beauty treatment, further details about the treatment context are necessary. We recommend consulting our personal injury solicitors to assess your case and determine the potential for making a claim related to allergic reactions in the beauty salon."
Well, one of the baristas at my local coffee shop had a small bald patch on the side of her head. She said it came from a chemical burn from some hair treatment that had gone wrong. Of course, she regularly dyed her hair in bright primary colors, and she changed them up regularly. So she was probably in a high-risk group for Hair Styling Trauma (HST). ;-)
That's what I thought too, but then I occasionally hear stories about people who mess their lives up. Maybe the quality-religious group dedicated to ending suffering took it a bit more seriously than average? Even if it's most often just some guy who has weird visions and found another religion...
I agree, heavy introspection is a strong and rather unnatural thing to do; like all such things it can be beneficial or harmful, so care and good guidance is needed.
Can I ask what kind of crazy stuff you experienced, and what was the remedy?
One common side effect of badly guided meditation is dissociation, where you learn to push your urgent feelings away from attention in the name of following the breath or some such.
My issue was hallucinatory sensations. Very early in my meditative practice, my body would start to itch. My instructor said to just acknowledge the itching sensation and it would pass. The more I resisted scratching myself, the more parts of my body began to itch. I could resist scratching, but my meditative internal discourse became "I will not scratch the itch" — I will not scratch the itch" — instead of following my breath. After several sessions of uncomfortable sitting meditation, suddenly one of the itching sensations on my forearm turned into a burning sensation. I tried to ignore it, but it really felt like my arm was on fire. I glanced at my arm, and it wasn't on fire. I tried to relax and acknowledge the sensation, but it was torture. Then, I felt the fire sensation on my back and at the crown of my head. I screamed and ran from the room. The burning sensation went away when I rubbed the affected places. When I explained the situation to the instructor, he looked at me as if I were crazy. He thought I was making it up. The following week, I attended a talk by the late Tara Rinpoche (not the current one). During the question and answer period, I explained my problem. He said that things like what I was experiencing could happen and it was best to scratch the itch instead of resisting it. He also suggested that at the beginning of my meditation, I visualize myself as floating in a cool pool of still water, and to return to that visualization if the itching started up. That worked for me.
The dissociation is my personal experience; I tend naturally towards the "3rd party observer" mode of my own existence and meditation amplified that in somewhat unhelpful ways, in addition to e.g. making me hyper aware of minor aches and pains and irregular breathing.
> I've learned to avoid any sort of meditation like the plague because it invariably just intensifies all the unpleasant sensations and makes it harder for me to function, whether I'm leaning into the sensations, trying to focus on a specific innocuous sensation, not explicitly focusing on anything, counting, trying to visualize something, or whatever.
That does sound slightly unusual to me. One pretty common thing that the mind does is that it automatically stops paying attention to something that is just there without changing much. When there are lots of unpleasant sensations in the body or noise around, it's usually our own reactive complaining thoughts that keep the mind paying attention to those unwanted stimula. So when one achieves a decent level of concentration on *whatever technique*, while not suppressing the stimulus but just allowing them to be there, the usual result is that the reactive complaints eventually stop and the stimulus kind of fades into the background, and you can rest for a while in the sense of just being there. For me at least that is the measure of a meditation session having done its job.
Though I would note that in the chod tradition of vajrayana Buddhism, people would deliberately seek out frightening settings ... like a charnel ground with decomposing cadavers
I just learned that the 2003 World Series of Poker champion was named Chris Moneymaker (yes, that's his real name). And the 2006 champion was Jamie Gold.
My wife's grandmother is turning 104 and one of her biggest complaints is how bored she always is. Her sight and hearing are both poor, and her mobility isn't great either. She's also more comfortable in Greek than in English.
Any suggestions for what she can do to keep herself occupied other than nagging her 80+ year old daughter who's taking care of her?
Knitting or crochet might be an option, depending on just how bad her eyesight and dexterity are. There are things like winter hats that are made with thick yarns and fairly simple patterns. I'm also fairly certain knitting books are available in Greek.
Audiobooks might be easier to follow than either paper books or films, because she doesn't have to use her eyes. If she's comfortable using an ebook reader, you can also get her one of those and set it to show very large print.
This last one is only feasible in specific circumstances, but she might benefit from a mobility scooter which would allow her to make short trips on her own (if that's safe in her neighborhood and feasible with her overall health).
There might also be organisations (red cross, churches, sport clubs and so on) that offer guided activities for seniors. Maybe it will do her good to meet some new people.
Has anyone in your extended family caught the family-tree/genealogy bug? (In my family I'm that nut.) Got the Ancestry.com account, pestering people for old photos to scan, etc?
The very best advice to newbies in that hobby is, "interview your oldest surviving relatives. Do it now while you still can. Just get them talking and telling all the old stories from their childhood and young adulthood. Telling the stories is what's fun for them so get them going and just listen and write. Write down every single thing they can recall, every story, every person they mention, the old rumors, all of it. Transcribe, don't debate. Half of it at least will turn out to be wrong or mangled but that's for you to figure out later. It will also include some gems of info and personal stories and new leads that you'd never otherwise discover."
A 104-year-old who's still corpus mentus, holy moly that is rare gold for this particular purpose. Find that relative and set up some times for this, maybe with you or somebody else there for some Greek-to-English translation if that makes things easier on Grandma. If handled right it should be a lot of fun for her, I've sure never had a relative in that age bracket who didn't enjoy telling family stories.
The objective in the moment is not to extract data points or fill out family group sheets it's just to get her talking. Maybe pay for cousin whoever the family-tree hobbyist to visit once a week for a while for one-hour sessions or something like that? And of course quietly set up an audio recorder in the corner and record it all for your and others' future remembrances and enjoyment.
If done gently/persistently those sessions will tire Grandma out while also becoming something she looks forward to each week for as long as she's able. And could end up being pure family gold. I am quite jealous typing this!
Unfortunately (or fortunately) she already wrote her memoirs back when she was a relative spring chicken of 90. And other family members have assisted with translating it from Greek to English.
So that's off the table as a constructive outlet, although she certainly likes telling stories about the past to anyone who will listen. The most interesting ones IMHO are her salient memories of WW2, like when the Nazis came through and put gold stars on all of the Jewish houses in her village.
What about her recording an oral or video version of selected parts of her memoirs? That would reach more people than her memoirs, even if they are published. I think I read somewhere that there's a project going on of compiling interviews of holocaust survivors. I wonder whether the group is interested in memoirs of witnesses. Another idea: would she enjoy a pet? My grandmother, who also stayed alert and lively up to a great age, had a parakeet that amused her a lot (and in fact it heard her laugh so much that it learned to do an excellent imitation of her laugh). And cats provide a lot of entertainment, and also adapt well to spending a lot of time cuddling with elderly owners who don't move around much.
Full disclosure - I work on GPCR agonists for a pharmaceutical company, and while GLP1R is not the target I am an expert on, I do work on GLP1R. I am a structural biologist, so general cell biology and endocrinology are not my strongest suits either.
I was traveling and missed the initial discussion on the GLP1/GLP1R post. I applaud everyone making a genuine attempt to understand the mechanisms here, but I also wanted to offer some perspective that I didn't see in either the post or the comments.
There are mainly two things I want to bring up:
1) No one knows the mechanism for all these effects. And this isn't one of those "we don't yet understand" things where everyone does understand but there are one or two loose ends yet to be fully elucidated so to cover their but in a paper's discussion section, they have to attenuate whatever it is they are saying type-things. No, this is actually no one knows. The folks doing the bleeding edge research, in universities, in drug development, are asking a lot of the same fundamental questions that are being asked here, and don't yet have answers. It's a complicated field, it's a confusing field, and even when we do get answers, I wouldn't expect them to be satisfying.
2) The situation as presented (GLP1 binds to GLP1R which does X, Y or Z), is simply too much of a simplification to ever arrive at a solution, even if the data where out there. Because there are some confounding factors I want to bring up.
I saw no real mention of signal bias. I think that this is very worth pointing out. When GLP1 binds to GLP1R on the outside of a cell, it enables (well maybe*) GLP1R to bind a G⍺ protein on the inside of the cell. That protein then starts a signaling cascade, leading to the opening of calcium channels, which will transduce the signal throughout the neurons.
However, there are more than one G⍺ protein. The most well known G⍺ protein is G⍺s. This is the protein that is thought to be the primary binder of GLP1R when GLP binds, which results in the cyclic AMP/protein kinase A (PKA). However, GLP1R can also bind G⍺i and G⍺o, which will cause ERK1/2 mediated signaling, and also G⍺q which will go down the protein kinase B (PKB) pathway. Finally, (well maybe not finally, there's probably even more we don't know about or I have missed), you have two β-arrestin proteins (1 & 2) that can bind in place of G⍺. These are widely misunderstood. Most people think they facilitate internalization of the receptor from the membrane - i.e. shutting the signal off, but actually when GLP1 binds GLP1R extracelluarly, it's possible for G⍺ to never bind intracellularly, and instead just one of the β-arrestins will bind and then you have a situation called "G-protein independent signaling" in which the GLP1-GLP1R-β-arrestin complex is capable of signaling intracellularly on its own, and in some cases this signaling is more sustained than the G-protein mediated signaling.
In general, for most GPCR agonists, all the pathways get activated, just in a specific ratio. With GLP1 and GLP1R, you get mostly, but not entirely, G⍺s signaling. However, if you look at the cryo-EM structures of semaglutide and taspoglutide bound to GLP1R, there are minor conformational differences in the receptors that could lead to slightly different G⍺ signaling biases. Perhaps a little more G⍺q or something - we don't totally know (yet).
One thing that's beginning to be reported, is that the mixture of side effects and on-target effects seems to depend on that bias profile. So for example (I'm making this example up just FYI, just to illustrate the point), binding more G⍺i might lead to more nausea, while binding more G⍺o might lead to more weight loss. Unfortunately, I can't really go more into detail here at the moment, although there's plenty of published work out there.
Tl;dr:
Semaglutide and liraglutide are not perfect GLP1 clones. This can cause a change in the bias profiles for G⍺s recruitment, which can lead to slightly different effects vs just plain GLP1. Dose and efficacy could also play a role here. Also, lots of other things can impact G⍺s recruitment such as GIPR and GCGS.
*Incretins specifically (GLP1R, GIPR, GCGR) have relatively high constitutive activity in the cell, meaning they can bind G⍺ without their agonists being present. This is at lower, but still significant levels. Specifically this makes me wonder if the idea of the lone receptor fishing for an agonist in the membrane is perhaps incomplete, and some, or all receptors could be primed by a G⍺.
Does anyone have a good link for what the modern thinking is on “mirror neurons”? The two extremes I’ve come across are ‘it’s responsible for the human ability for mimicry and is a critical component for proper development’ and ‘it exists, sort of, but its importance has been greatly overblown.’ Thanks for helping me understand what these are and how important they currently seem to be!
Also, the wiki page on the subject is only a stub 4+ years without an update. If you are knowledgeable on this subject, please feel free to update it!
Hm, what do you mean by "mirror neurons have been debunked"? I do believe that the importance of mirror neurons has been terribly overblown, but there seems pretty hard evidence in monkeys (and rodents, I believe) that there are neurons which activate when the monkey moves, and which also activate when they observe another monkey make a similar movement. Do you challenge those findings?
To be clear, I don't find those findings super exciting. Perhaps the most exciting aspect is that those neurons are in the motor control areas.
Now, the situation in humans is a lot less clear, because we can't implant electrodes into humans. With a few exceptions for epilepsy reasons, but epilepsy is usually not generated in those motor control regions, so they are basically black boxes for us on the level of individual neuronal activity. Researchers have tried to get something out of fMRI data (a "mirror neuron system"), but that data is so coarse that any findings for humans are on very shaky grounds. Perhaps you meant that this mirror neuron system is debunked? I agree that this looks fishy and that we have no proof of mirror neurons in humans. But "debunked" sounds pretty strong to me. We simply have no way of looking for them.
And of course, in popular press there were lots of misconceptions which never had a chance of being correct. Even if mirror neurons exist, they are not little homunculi which receive their knowledge about the other person from ether. They are not different from the other neurons that surround them. Knowing that mirror neurons exist is more like a statistical statement, and doesn't have vast philosophical implications.
I'm considering quitting my job without much of a backup plan, and I have a family to support. I don't really have easy to market skills nor experience in high demand right now, but my job is making me a worse person than I ought to be and it's not where I want to stay. It's affecting me physically--I need to leave soon. I've known this for 2+ years but couldn't land a new job. I've applied to probably a thousand jobs in the last year and a half with only a handful of interviews. I don't know what I'm asking for really, but if anyone has experience in this situation, I am interested in what you have to say.
Not sure what industry you're in, but you could consider some kind of trade or "lower skill" job as a temporary stop gap while you look for something in your preferred industry. In my area jobs like a bus driver, substitute tracher, CNC Machinest, etc. are easy to get and pay well. They can be fairly low stress depending on the org. Plus they may be physical and/or provide more time outdoors which usually does wonders for mental health
I once had a lousy job I didn't like and which was slowly getting worse. I figured out exactly how much I was earning per day and every day I asked myself "Can I put up with one more day in exchange for $X?" Every day the answer was yes, so I kept on going to work, until eventually I had another job offer in hand. But I gave myself permission to quit if the answer was ever no.
I found that this sort of short term thinking was helpful, since I was no longer focused on the big and unfixable problems associated with the job, I was just focused on the fact that if I go to work and sit in a chair and do the bare minimum for a while, then have a nice lunch, then do the bare minimum for a while again, then I'll wind up hundreds of dollars richer.
Your job shouldn't be making you a worse person. Would it still be making you a worse person if you were just going through the motions day to day?
I have difficulty allowing myself to do the bare minimum, I'd feel guilty or if I got called out, that'd be another set of headaches. Plus it would probably show on our already pretextual, exploitative performance reviews heavily influenced by my micromanager who is threatened by me. I'll try to come up with a dollar amount per day as you suggested, and try that. It might help, and I appreciate it.
Hey Stan. I don’t have any direct advice, but just my experience. Last year (exactly 12 months ago) I was fired from my last full time job. (Honestly, a lot about the place annoyed me, and I probably semi-engineered the firing subconsciously.)
The last 12 months has been a killer. I’ve applied for lots of jobs without any joy, and have been freelancing to make ends meet. Several months I haven’t managed to make ends meet. I’ve done a lot of work on my mentality, especially around money and value and worth (including self worth), and it’s definitely improving, but slowly. The stress of financial pressure (I also have a family to support) seems to have affected my health and made me more prone to infection and illness.
Highly recommend finding something else before quitting (one possibly useful tactic could be to experiment with not-giving-a-fuck at work - identify the minimum allowed or expected and deliver that, and use other time you have to work on your own skills and mindset). I also understand none of this might be possible for you if your job is completely unpalatable.
Wow, thank you for sharing your experience. I know things can get worse, but I know they can get better and I do not want to be the guy who freezes in the face of uncertainty. I hope things get better for you fast. Appreciate your thoughtful advice, I have some thinking to do.
No worries man. Good luck with it all. For what it’s is worth, I suspect that the rate of digital transformation/evolution/disruption in the wider commercial ecosystem over the past 10-20 years means most jobs (and effectively 100% of jobs in older companies and organisations) feel like terrible jobs, because they create a vast cognitive dissonance between the individual (who is agile and appreciates that change is inevitable and is seeking ways to integrate that change into his life) and the organisation (which is necessarily inagile and inflexible and run by systems, processes and policies).
It's harder to live without enough money than you think. Don't do it yet.
The AskAManager blog has a *lot* of great advice, including how to fine tune resumes/cover letters, ace interviews, and so on. Even if you know all of the obvious stuff, it might just be the obvious stuff that everyone else knows. There might be little nuggets of advice in there that will put you slightly ahead of your peers. Good luck.
Thanks Christina, I will check out that blog. I loved how you phrased it, "Even if you know all of the obvious stuff, it might just be the obvious stuff that everyone else knows." Been there and probably still am there in many respects!
My impression is that most people looking for a new job aren't going about it in the best way. So whether you keep your present job or not, try to improve your job-hunting game. Here are some suggestions for how to:
-Find out what kinds of jobs are easiest to get now, and which have a glut of applicants.. Target the former
-Find out which applicants for a certain job get hired. Target the ones for which you fit the profile.
-Look for info about how to get hired for particular jobs. Is it crucial to have certain keywords on your resume? Will it improve your chances to apply directly at the company's site, rather than via some job-hunting site?
-Consider the possibility that if you picked up one new skill you would qualify for some appealing jobs you currently don't qualify for. If there isn't currently a glut of applicants for those jobs, it might be worth putting in the time to learn the skill.
-Network. Tell everyone you know that you are looking for a job. I know someone who just got a great lead from his old high school football coach.
-Consider funky possibilities. There are jobs that are not advertised. If you have a high LSAT score there's a company that will pay you $120/hour to tutor LSAT prep. People who do LSAT tutoring independently sometimes charge twice that. There are many wealthy people who are willing to pay quite a lot for things that will help their children advance in life, but most know enough to be able to tell whether you have a high level of competence. If you are extraordinarily accomplished in an academic field, the arts, or even in certain sports you can earn quite a lot per hour tutoring and mentoring the children of the prosperous. There are also well-off people who will pay well for a personal assistant who will run errands, look up recipes, book flights, hotels etc for their upcoming trips, search for info of various kinds, find someone reliable to take care of the yellow-jacket nest under the eaves, etc etc.
You've given me a lot to think about. I haven't really considered funky possibilities, and I definitely need to up my networking game (introvert here). Thanks for the astute response, Eremolalos!
I don't really see how someone would actually get that information. Companies seem to have sources of labor market statistics and they know their own hiring data, and I vaguely remember seeing statistics compiled from H1Bs, but unless you know of some websites I don't you're proposing doing more than an economics PhD of sleuthing there.
It's possible you're right. I was able to find information for a family friend who was applying for Data Science jobs, but that was my only foray into job app stats. However, a quick google does turn up a lot of sites that say they have data.
Is there reason to think all these sites are bullshit?
I do get that individual companies might not want to make public the stats about how many applicants they get, but what I was talking about in my initial post was not individual companies, but particular jobs. One reason I think the info is probably findable is that so many people want it -- not just people applying for jobs, but economists, investors, etc. Stands to reason there would be organizations set up to make money by providing this info. Another is that a lot of job-hunting takes place through organizations that have no reason to hide the info they about how many people are apply for particular jobs. In fact selling that data would be a source of income for them.
For Data Science jobs, I found good info at The Bureau of Labor Statistics, on some sites and publications for people in the Data Science field, and from this YouTube guy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w13zJB_jyBI
The YouTuber tells what sources he used, but I judged him to be reliable and did not go to the sources.
I don't know how it whether it would be harder or easier to get the info on other jobs.
BLS data tends to be bad about lumping, I was surprised to see that data science had its own category. "Mathematicians and Statisticians" alone covers at least a dozen wildly different jobs.
Talk to people, lean on your support network, try find ways to pause whatever it is that's making you a worse person.
But don't jump until you have a replacement job lined up. Your family is your primary responsibility, but your continued health is also their responsibility.
Maybe lower your standards for jobs a bit, and find something that will let your family survive, while giving you the peace of mind to recover and do a proper job search. It's possible that the time and stress savings could put you ahead, even if the pay is less.
The consensus, even among my family, is not to quit. I've been not quitting for 2 years. So frustrating, but I am occasionally hopeful. I recently lowered my standards, especially if the job title & new experience looks good on a resume--we'll see. My sincere thanks Moon Moth.
If you feel like your spending is not under control, look into frugality (FIRE movement is one place to check). If you can make meaningful improvements to your budgeting, it will give you much more flexibility on employment options (maybe take a risk and change fields if yours feels dead end). That isn't an immediate fix but can set you up to be more flexible in the future. I kind of dislike my current job, but that feeling is largely negated by the fact that I could quit today and not have any money problems.
I dipped my toes into FIRE a few years ago and developed a few good habits along with some small investing. I am pretty much debt free and it'd be nice to retire early. But I'll reacquaint myself with it! Appreciate your response.
Don’t do it yet. It could send you into a negative spiral and keep you out of the labor market for much longer than you want. Look for jobs, take interviews from time to time, but don’t quit cold turkey. Find ways to reinvent your job. Look for interesting projects. Think of it as doing a masters on X and put another year or two with that mindset. Meditate. Think of whether your inner voice is part of why your job is making you miserable.
I understand how you feel, but the way. I’ve quit before. It feels liberating, for a moment. But I was always financially secure, and finding my next thing took 9-12 months. If you can’t afford that, and you have a family, the stress of not having an income will be really bad.
Yeah, I cannot do 9-12 months. Maybe 6 and then I'd be in trouble. You're probably right, at least partly, about the inner voice. But at this point it is pretty ingrained and I get headaches the instant certain aspects of my job pop up, sometimes even just by thinking about them. Thanks for the advice, it's persuasive.
What is a respected job in your local area? If you do something that is highly respected, that can be worth a pay-cut or career change.
Eg. Operators at my local oil refinery are well-respected, and I will likely soon be working there (a change that does not require experience… they give you a standard IQ test + mechanical reasoning test, then train you if you do well).
Thanks, Brad. I sort of started recently looking for anything that looks great on a resume, even if it pays less. I'll try to see what others do around here and elsewhere I could possibly do and expand my search. Honestly, I'd take a significant pay cut for a non-miserable, reduced stress job.
I sympathize but having sampled the tech job market for over a year now I got the impression it is not easy at all to find a good job at the moment. Certainly more difficult than 5 years ago. If you can, I would suggest you continue looking/interviewing while you keep your current job.
Thanks alstoc, this is the advice everyone seems to be saying, it's quite reasonable, sage, and with no offense intended, miserable. I'll probably stick with my job but redouble my efforts at landing something new.
I wouldn’t recommend redoubling your efforts, as that can lead to frustration, anxiety, stress, and even depression. Instead, keep searching while your carry on with your life. Let the job search simmer in the background—steadily ongoing, but not dominating your focus. All you can do is improve the odds in your favor, but remember that the outcome is largely beyond your control. Don’t count time. And avoid setting strict deadlines or constantly waiting for responses from companies; you never know how long the process will take, and counting the days (or months) can become all-consuming.
Thanks, that sounds like a less stressful way to go. Unfortunately, there was a development thanks to the high stress (especially lately), and I had a medical situation unfold that made me rethink my priorities. Health got bumped up a lot.
For those of you believe in effective altruism (trying to maximize the value of charitable donations), I've found a cause that saves more lives per $ than the top ranked GiveWell charity.
GiveWell
(https://givewell.org/charities/top-charities) ranks charities by cost per life saved. Malaria nets is the most efficient, at $5,000 per life saved. And that's amazing, but I found a better one.
If you donate towards getting drone jammers for Ukrainian medics, the cost per life saved is even better. It's $5k for a drone jammer to protect medics going to the front line. Each jammer saves *at least* one life and they do not have nearly enough. The impact is probably even higher since medics will go on to save more lives. So you can donate $100 towards a jammer and saves lives basically as efficiently as possible.
'It's $5k for a drone jammer to protect medics going to the front line. Each jammer saves *at least* one life and they do not have nearly enough.'
Where can I find the data or analysis that produced this lower bound? Intuitively, it sounds unrealistically high to me. Less than $5k per personel life saved seems like it would be a far better spending opportunity on the margin for Ukraine's military than most other things they could buy. So I would expect this to have been arbitraged down to less anomalous levels already.
It's also easy to think of many ways it could be false. For example, the drone jammers probably don't have a 100% success rate, and in any case can't stop artillery. More importantly, they don't know who will be attacked in advance and so they have to give them to everyone.
It had not even occurred to me that the implicit argumentation was literally 'let's just assume each additional jammer leads to an additional person equipped with a jammer, and each person so equipped will survive when they counterfactually wouldn't have'.
I now suspect that this was indeed the line of thought here.
If so, this is a very silly analysis. I'm not going to claim that GWWC's estimates are really all that great. But if you've ever glanced at what their attempts at impact calculations look like, it's a completely different world compared to this. If GWWC used this sort of reasoning, they could probably claim something like <$5 per life saved for their top charities and call it a day. (one per mosquito net!)
If Ukraine regularly targeted Russian medics and medical facilities then that would be valid. But they don't. There are some opportunities in Gaza if you really want to both sides this. Though not really for drone jammers.
Why? Effective Altruism isn't a pacifist ideology. There've been multiple debates in the ratsphere about whether assassinating Putin would work as a cause area if it ended the war.
That's the problem. Were there similar discussions around assassinating Zelensky? A Ukrainian surrender would end the war too, and save just as many QALYs.
But I get the sense that's not really what this is about. This feels much closer to starting with the desired political outcome, and reasoning backwards into a narrative of how actually this is the totally utilitarian outcome. This has *always* been a failure mode of utilitarianism.
Perhaps EA shouldn't stick to pure pacifism, but that at least provides a backstop against its more nasty tendencies.
Not about assassinating Zelensky. The parallel argument was about whether the US should pressure Ukraine to surrender or cut off aid. This is because Zelensky is not a dictator and the situation is not parallel.
You're starting from a premise ("We're being unfair to Russia!") and then trying to reason back from it. But it's not actually true in this case. There's plenty of people who are pro-Putin around. To the contrary, it seems like it's the other side that desperately wants to complicate what is a fairly easy moral calculus because they don't like that it might condemn their side.
Also, providing lifesaving medical treatment even on a battlefield is allowed by most pacifist religions and ideologies. Likewise moving someone out of danger or running jammers. The usual line is you can't participate in an act of killing even in a supporting role. But plenty of pacifists served as combat medics and wore body armor without complaint.
I think cost per life saved is not an ideal metric. What you want to optimize for is cost per QALY, but this is harder to measure because it is not enough to observe that you lowered Malaria by x%, you would also have to observe what age your population reaches at what health level.
Of course, there are reasons why the QALY per life saved would be lower for either prospective Malaria victims (they are generally poor people in poor countries) or Ukrainian soldiers (they will either survive with injuries disqualifying them from military service (which would lower QALY) or will likely find themselves in a situation to get shot at again (which will also lower their QALY)).
The other thing to consider is that if this is such an effective investment, then why is the Ukrainian military not paying for it? From a quick google search, Ukraine has around 1.2M active troops and received 64G$ in military aid in 2024, for about 50k$ per soldier.
Now, granted, not all of that is cash to be spent how they see fit, a lot of it is likely fancy Western weapon systems with insane sticker prices, but I don't think that this is enough to explain the difference. You can always argue that due to corruption, the Ukrainian military is not willing to invest into cheap devices to save their soldiers lives, but the other hypothetical is that these jammers are less cost effective than advertised.
For another thing, a Ukrainian conscript makes 20kUAH a month, which is around 500$. I will grant you that the median conscript does have some obligations, so this is not his disposable income, but I would personally invest a week's salary into a device which is guaranteed to save my life (even if it will only work once).
Part of the benefits of the bed net figure is that it is backed up by rigorous evidence, not just a claim by some bed net manufacturer, and it seems unlikely that the insects will come up with a strategy to circumvent the nets. With the jammers, the error bars are much higher.
To the people bringing up "saving lives could lead to ending other lives." Medics do not engage in general combat and are protected by the Geneva Conventions. The chances they will kill anyone outside of self-defense is very low. They are supposed to carry weapons only to defend themselves and their patients. They also are obliged to provide aid to Russians as well. The fact Russia target them at all is a war crime.
Protecting medics and medical facilities (and keeping them out of combat, unlike certain militaries using them as shields) is the one of the most established ways to make war a little less horrible. So no, the fact it might facilitate other killing is not the moral complexity. It's a more efficient and better charity. So are things like medical supplies or other high need goods. You can also get them to Myanmar, Sudan, or Gaza but the risk of it being stolen/intercepted is much higher there. (And if you want to argue the jammers might be used for non-medical purposes that too is a valid concern. But it's like body armor or medical supplies: more likely to save than end even other lives.)
Also, not to sideswipe EA, but you usually get best value for money per live saved in refugee situations or wars. (Which are honestly usually the same thing.) Why doesn't EA do more with that?
It's really not black and white. Soldiers rescued by medical personnel are going to end up back on the front unless they are crippled. Something like 1/2-2/3 of casualties will end up combat viable at some point in the future, depending on the severity of their wounds and quality of treatment.
It is in most moral philosophies and in the international rules of war both sides have agreed to. What morality are you exploring? It can't be pure utilitarianism because the math works out there (you save more lives in net at cheaper cost).
There's the moral quandary that soldiers kill people, so saving the lives of soldiers enables them to do more killing in the future. Anyway I don't have strong moral claims here, I was more concerned with the math of effective charity. Reducing preventable malaria deaths is straightforward. Saving a medic from drones attacks is much more complicated. The jammer might not even do anything, they can still be shot or hit by artillery or blown up by a glide bomb. Rescued soldiers are much more likely to die in the future, with the ongoing war. And they are also likely to kill soldiers on the opposing side. Of course all the saved lives that are too crippled to be soldiers any more are subtracted from the above.
It depends on your system of morality. Most systems agree that if you save someone and they go on to kill someone else you are not responsible for that. Some don't. Utilitarianism is one of them but if you do the utilitarian calculation then you find it still nets out to be more efficient and a net positive. Firstly because of the 50x cost multiplier and secondly because if you're indifferent to whose lives then you also have to factor in all the lives the soldier saves as well as their likelihood of killing nobody (since most soldiers don't) and living through the war (as most soldiers do).
Your objections (that the person could go on to kill someone or be killed in another way) are true in Africa as well. Especially with low life expectancies the latter in particular is a huge downward pressure if you count not by lives but by quality adjusted life years. Which I suspect is why they generally don't.
Russians have a fantastic, wonderful path to saving their lives, and a lot of money too - stop their war and get out of the neighboring country. Ukrainians don't have that luxury (well, now they control some 1000 sq. km of actual Russian territory, there will need to be an exchange. OTOH Russia doesn't have an established border anymore, so who knows how this is going to work out).
If your charity goes to saving someone on the battlefield, there is a good chance they are either going to a) kill someone else, or b) get killed by someone else. I don't think the math is quite as simple as the malaria net scenario.
Hold on, why do you say "gun safety" is a misnomer? There are clear and simple rules for gun safety, they work when followed, and not following them results in Alec Baldwin shooting a bystander. What am I missing here?
Indeed, yes, there are four rules for gun safety, but mostly the people who use those two words in succession mean that law abiding people are safer without guns. How they can come to this conclusion given that police and criminals will still have guns, I cannot imagine.
Hoplophobes call gun control "Gun Safety" because "gun control" is racist. Gun nuts call avoidance of negligent discharges "Gun Safety" because there are ways to handle guns safely. Same word used by different parties with different, conflicting even, meanings.
> How they can come to this conclusion given that police and criminals will still have guns, I cannot imagine.
Well for one thing, the largest cause of gun deaths is suicide.
Another issue is that an armed society is a MAD society, where there's a tendency for people to shoot first in fear of getting shot in return. At the very least, that's the excuse that that guy in Texas who killed a protestor used.
People who want to kill themselves use an effective means. Guns are widely available in the US, and are effective, so people use guns. There is no evidence that reducing gun availability will decrease the suicide rate.
Yeah this is a strange own goal, it’s almost as if they don’t care if the policies they advocate get actually enabled. Like, they need to convince a large proportion of people who disagree with them - you’d think the least they could do is to learn the basic lingo as at least a sign of respect? to be taken seriously? Especially basic policies like requiring safe storage - BTW, every badass former military guy I’ve trained with, and shot weapons with, has had only utter disdain for careless civilians who refuse to learn basic gun safety. These people’d be natural allies for sensible safety proposals if those proposing the safety cared to engage respectfully.
Ah, but that's not how "gun safety" is usually used. It usually means, "OUR guns are safe, even when we use them to shoot you (and your little dog too!). YOUR guns are not safe, regardless of what you use them for, hunting, defending yourself against rapists, your family against home-invaders, etc."
Without looking too hard, here's an article from TODAY (I hadn't seen it before I posted my comment): https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4831399-gun-safety-election-issues/. The headline says "gun safety," and the article is about restricting who can own guns, and what kind, what you might call "gun control" instead.
You don't know? There's giffords, everytown, 97percent, Shannon Watts just for a start. Our illustrious VP has talked about gun safety when she meant gun control.
By anyone using the phrase. That's almost certainly gonna be activists advocating for "gun safety", and they DON'T mean teaching children trigger discipline, or anything like it.
Do you have a specific example of someone (e.g., an activist) saying something like "OUR guns are safe, even when we use them to shoot you (and your little dog too!). YOUR guns are not safe, regardless of what you use them for, hunting, defending yourself against rapists, your family against home-invaders, etc."?
He used the word "means", which in this context I think "means" something like "my outgroup alternates between two incompatible positions, and this is what it would sound like if they tried to articulate both at once, but of course the underlying principle is simply who-whom".
On the object level, I think the support isn't quite there. There are factions on the left that are against police (especially armed police) and against the military, although I think the left's lock on the federal bureaucracy means that they tend to be OK with the FBI, ATF, and USSS. But even then, I think they view law enforcement guns as a regrettable necessity required by everyone else being armed.
I suppose the exception is the lunatic left fringe when some vocal right-winger gets busted, but even then I think it's less about the guns, and more about the exact same feeling that motivated the right wing to cheer when Osama bin Laden was killed.
Is this a genuine question, or an argument phrased as a question?
For what it's worth, everything I know about Scott suggests he believes that AI will, in the coming decades, potentially pose an existential threat to humanity. So I would wager he's very unlikely to give a grant to someone promoting the position "AI safety is an absurd field and we should always and everywhere oppose it".
It's a question. We have no reason to believe that an AI will go out of control. Seems to me like we should be studying the possibility, not seeking to limit the use of AI. And yet "AI Safety" means "AI Control" just like "Gun Safety" means "Gun Control". And it's not their own AIs or guns that they're talking about controlling -- it's YOUR AI.
The whole thing is just stoooopid, because who is the most likely to create an AI which can go out of control? Someone who is beyond a government's control in the first place. So why are governments talking about restricting AIs when it's the criminals who will be running rogue AIs. Same thing with guns. And yet grownups keep enacting childish fantasies of a society where the good people don't have guns and the bad people do.
I want to hit somebody with a stick, Jo, really, I do. A cluebat. Or ClueBringer, even.
(3) If this is her vision for the economy, I freakin' hope she doesn't get elected
(4) If this is her vision for the economy, I freakin' hope she does get elected
Me, I think it's going to be a combination of (1) and (2). Should she be elected, the fine words butter no parsnips.
Add in that I lived under Fianna Fáil governments passing populist "spend spend spend" budgets, and the chickens eventually come home to roost, the cows do come home at last, and the bills have to be paid.
As for the likes of the first time buyers' grants for housing, it's a nice idea on paper. But I think the reality is, as in Ireland with these, that (a) they do little when supply is the problem and (b) some developers and construction firms will hike up prices in response, e.g. you're looking to buy a house for €250,000, you get relief of €30,000, now you just have to get a mortgage for €220,000. Except some developers took that as "oh great, an extra €20,000 is available" and slapped that on the price so now you're paying €270,000 and are back where you started, looking for a mortgage on €250,000.
The IMF also warned back in 2016/17 that this would likely drive up housing prices. So I think that good intentions may not work out as intended.
As for medical debt forgiveness, price controls, etc. - well, I'll believe them when I see them. Again, likely to be a lot of court cases over "can you do this?" by Big Pharma, big grocery chains, and so on.
But what do I know, I'm just some peasant out of the bog, so informed opinion welcome, please!
I have just very low confidence anything she put out yet maps to any evidence for what she will attempt, honestly. She doesn't seem like she has any personal beliefs about almost anything related to economics or foreign policy. She's just saying random stuff someone she trusts thinks will poll well. After she gets elected various interests will decide what the policy is, very hard to predict at this point.
I'm not American, but I think Biden's and now Harris' anti capitalism and anti market rhetoric is deeply scary and signals the possibility that America, a lone (relative) beacon of economic liberty will turn away from principles that have enriched her and humanity, for the detriment of all involved. I hope this will not happen, of course, but I am occasionally mildly annoyed that they are so stupid
I suspect that you're getting a heavily distorted view of Harris's proposals, but in any case, there's a conspicuous omission from your post - what is Trump saying.
Almost anything looks sane when compared to Trump's plans to tax trade into oblivion. Then there's the more minor idiocies like wanting to make "tips" tax free. But I suspect that you're working backward from your conclusion so this is all irrelevant anyway.
(1) It's not helping to say "sure, our proposals are stupid, but have you seen what the other guy is saying?" I'm not at all sure that these items are anything more than campaign promises, which is to say crap designed to get voters to support you, but the fact remains - if they are anything like what she really said, and the reason I used the BBC was precisely to avoid 'partisan bias', then they have to be evaluated on the basis of "what the candidate says she intends to do if elected".
If the proposals are bad, it is no defence to say "but my opponent's views are worse". That's like saying "Sure, my economics are screwed up, but if you compare them to Stalin, they look pretty good!"
(2) "Then there's the more minor idiocies like wanting to make "tips" tax free."
Do you mean Kamala's proposal to make tips tax free is idiocy? So you do think some, at least, of what is being reported to be her proposals are bad proposals?
(3) "But I suspect that you're working backward from your conclusion so this is all irrelevant anyway"
No, this is real questions because I don't know anything about economic policy apart from being a human living in the current world, and I wondered if these were genuine policies or just "vote for me and I'll give you sunshine and rainbows!" guff.
But sure, keep telling yourself that any questioning of the Coconut Tree World is simply trolling and motivated reasoning.
> Do you mean Kamala's proposal to make tips tax free is idiocy? So you do think some, at least, of what is being reported to be her proposals are bad proposals?
Since I don't follow the news, I didn't realize that Harris had copied Trump's proposal there. But yes, that's a dumb proposal no matter who makes it.
I'm not even saying that there aren't dumb parts of Harris's proposals, just that I think a) you're getting a distorted view and ignoring the good parts and b) ignoring the even dumber things that Trump has proposed.
I did wonder if you were just reflexively going "But Trump did Dumb Thing!" (and by the bye, if you don't follow the news, how did you know? Getting your information in canned talking points from The Usual Sources?)
That's why I wanted you to clarify if you meant Harris' proposal. Since you have clarified that you were "getting a distorted view", I can now ignore anything else you throw at me, on the grounds that if I'm ignorant, tu quoque, yes?
Oh, certainly. But the difference between "crappy" and "slightly less crappy" may not be very wide, and it does matter when one side is leaning heavily into "they're weird, they're dumb, they're stoopid" about the opponents.
If you're presenting yourself as the smart choice then the onus is on you to have smart policies, not "well they're not quite as terrible as the terrible ones our dumb, weird opponents have".
Noah smith had a good article on how Singapore manages this. Basically they control the housing starts to keep prices relatively high (as a major asset for the middle class) but not too high with grants of up to $61k for first time lower income earners. Thus the lower income family gains an asset class worth up to $61k more than they paid after buying a house, a grant that is financed out of general taxation, and therefore is a form of redistribution.
However the Singaporean government have some advantages - the government owns 90% of the land, and they never let the prices go to bubble territory.
As the Irishman said when asked for directions by the way off track tourist “I wouldn’t start from here if I were you”, i wouldn’t start from here if we were us.
Noah overstates the tension between owners and buyers and makes a common mistake when looking at pct of household wealth in housing.
The correct understanding is one Zvi makes. Homeowners are net flat housing, not net long. They have a large future liability to house themselves that offsets their asset. Combine assets and liabilities and most peoples wealth is not wrapped up in housing.
To make things less abstract, if housing nominal prices stayed fixed, meaning the real price fell overtime, which homeowners would be screwed? None. Landlords might be screwed if they are currently cash flow negative and relying on some nominal appreciation. But thats not the tension he referred to. Meanwhile that would be a great outcome for long term affordability.
> They have a large future liability to house themselves that offsets their asset. Combine assets and liabilities and most peoples wealth is not wrapped up in housing.
I’m not sure what that means in practice. The liability to house themselves is what? Rent, if they sell the house?
Maybe, but a lot of people depend on downsizing or moving out of the city later in life - by buying another house rather than renting.
Imputed rent is the technical term, the theoretical cost of renting from yourself. But yes rent would be the cost if they sold, or the new house price if they moved. So long as they don't sell they bear no *net* cost because the asset = the liability.
Assume for the moment that all house prices move proportionally together. If house prices go down, theyd take a paper loss but they still have just as much house, and if they move theyd be able to buy cheaper as well. Basically once you buy a house, then for the cost of the mortgage + upkeep and property tax, you get to have that much house in terms of overall space/quality for the rest of your life no matter what house prices do, even if you move. To the extent that property tax is somewhat linked to price, overall you will have less cost for the same amount of house if prices go down in fact.
You are of course long the specific location you buy a house in and would benefit from a local boom, but we are talking about national housing policy here.
It is true that to the extent people down size at end of life and so will consume less house in the future they may be be slightly long house on average, but that future change in position should also be discounted at appropriate rates. So people may have some positive house wealth (if the property tax effect is not stronger), but it is much smaller than a stat that ignores the liability side altogether.
I think the proposals are even less likely than Obama's to get implemented, because while his were primarily opposed by "the system," the new set of proposals are the kind that attract votes but cause disasters. The incentives for demanding price controls are inverted between the campaign, where they win the non-economist demographic, and the white house where the laws of economics and the empty shelf would apply even to those unaware of the cause. The same goes for the housing subsidy: democrats who are not first-time homebuyers may tolerate promises the subsidy now under the belief that promises are never kept, but if their friends actually got $25,000 from their own pockets they'd riot at the next election.
I'm with you on the secondary effects (a student of Frederic Bastiat).
I would think she should know better, Kamala is two years younger than I. We lived through milk shortages in the 70s, when then President Nixon capped milk price. Dairies failed causing a large drop in production. Perhaps as a teen, she wasn't the news junkie I was, or her Marxist parents didn't enlighten her on concepts such as open markets. Or perhaps that she grew up in Berkeley, California; the Marxist capitol of the world. But still, you'd think someone would be much more aware than to propose price caps with today's knowledge.
The same with throwing money at housing. This will be a repeat of the 2008 housing bubble. Throwing money at a slow growth market will only cause price inflation. If we have a shrinking population, why do we have a housing shortage??? We don't have fewer houses, home prices should be falling.
All these things going wrong, she says she'll fix !!! spoiler alert, you're already in the executive suite, why are you not doing anything?
> If we have a shrinking population, why do we have a housing shortage???
As a news junkie you should know that the population is increasing, not shrinking. In any case the problem with housing is a regional issue, demand outstripping supply in certain areas, but by no means all.
Listen, I think the motivations he granted the globalists weren't very charitable but what he said earlier was quite true and for people who suffered the effect of it (which, as a professional you likely to not suffer quite as much as most) the annoyance over the course of decades well who are we kidding over the course of all of civilization where the elite control what goes on can definitely upset an annoyed people and have them given over to hyperbole.
It is after all very annoying how the vast majority of people are at the very bottom of the pyramid having their lives governed by people way way above them and not necessarily to the benefit of anybody.
I myself don't care for the elite much but the following subjectively important and interesting video did quite poorly on YouTube precisely because I obviously don't feel hatred towards the elitists, even though I absolutely think that they are doing harm that I could reverse if I had even the smallest amount of influence.
That video as the only non reporter at Maxwell's trial was the very first video on my channel.
My second video proves the point that I lack the desire for fire and pitchfork to be employed against them (without precluding the possibility that it may be necessary).
His loathing borne of frustration undoubtedly does not serve him well, certainly not as well as stoicism or actually getting involved with what I'm doing, but I think his anger needs to be understood to the degree that if you do not empathize, no doubt you can still sympathize.
There is a helluva lot more to the housing plan than has yet reached the headlines, and a lot less to the $25K homebuyer subsidy part of it. It is also perhaps relevant to note that none of this is actually brand-new now -- Harris is simply tweaking and building upon of a set of policy changes/proposals that the Biden Administration began carrying out and issuing more than a year ago.
(A) The proposed $25K would not be to all first-time home buyers. It would be limited to those who can document two years of on-time rent payments. It is an expansion on the Biden proposal to provide that $25K subsidy to an estimated 400,000/year first-generation home buyers (US citizens and legal permanent residents who could document that none of their parents or grandparents had been homeowners).
The Harris proposed $25K would apply to an estimated 1 million home buyers per year, which would be somewhere between 1/6th and 1/8th of US home purchases in a typical year. How much that would inflate housing prices is an open question, particularly if realtors and sellers don’t have a way to know in advance which interested buyers do and do not have that subsidy in their hip pocket.
(B) There is a good deal more in the proposal to cut through America's NIMBY problem (the supply side) than about boosting demand with subsidies. This Noah Smith writeup both details that and contextualizes it:
If you think, as I do, that bureaucratic sclerosis turning us into a society that can't build stuff anymore is one of this country's most urgent issues, then this Biden/Harris policy approach is very welcome. For my money that part is much more significant than a new subsidy aimed at a limited subset of new homebuyers.
"Harris is simply tweaking and building upon of a set of policy changes/proposals that the Biden Administration began carrying out and issuing more than a year ago."
Ah, so this is the usual political gambit of repeating even louder the announcements about "more of thing!" that you already made, so that it sounds like a whole new tranche of "more thing!" instead of "same amount of thing we already announced".
I would expect that when the details (if any) are hashed out, then "terms and conditions will apply" and a lot fewer people will get less money than the big, vague announcement makes it sound.
I'm suspicious of his argument that the $25k subsidy/$10k tax credit is actually fine because Singapore does it. I imagine Singapore does a lot of things differently that might make individual factors play out differently in Singapore than in the US. Maybe the US should also set ethnic quotas for neighbourhoods because Singapore does it and Noah can make up some post hoc rationalization about how it improves race relations.
I don't think anything the President does can actually fix the NIMBY problem, even if they legitimately wanted to and weren't just politically posturing. Most of that has to do with state/local ordnances, building codes and zoning laws, as well as adversarial review. Changing that is entirely outside the scope of the fedgov, excepting judicious application of the FYTW clause of the Constitution. Harris' plan seems to consist of price controls for rent (very bad), tax benefits and incentives for people who otherwise wouldn't own homes (brings the 2008 sub-prime mortgage fiasco to mind), and incentives to build "affordable" housing. If this means houses that are cheaper to build, great. If this means affordable housing in the California way, where it is required to be sold/rented at below market rates to selected beneficiaries, very bad.
That is a poor and highly selective summary of the Biden/Harris policy proposal. If it was accurate I would entirely agree with you about it. Fortunately it is not accurate.
The Smith writeup that I linked has a much better description of what Biden and now Harris have proposed on this subject (of which some smallish parts have already been implemented by Biden).
So Kamala is going to tackle the Sacred Parking Lot, is she?
Yes, that's rather snarky, but I was more amused by the brass-necked cheek of the grift going on: sorry, you can't build here because this is a sacred plot of land for our tribe, why thank you very much for your kind donation. Ah, good old San Francisco!
"The city of Berkeley will purchase Spenger’s parking lot and transfer the property to Sogorea Te’ Land Trust as part of a recent settlement agreement over the contested plot of land in West Berkeley.
The Berkeley City Council unanimously approved an ordinance today authorizing the purchase, making Berkeley among the first in the country to outright return land to Indigenous people. The city will purchase the property with $25.5 million from Sogorea Te’, an Indigenous-led land trust based in Oakland, and $1.5 million from the city’s general fund.
The decision appears to mark the end of a years-long legal battle over the property at 1900 Fourth St. between the city and developer Ruegg & Ellsworth. The parties in the case filed a notice of settlement in Alameda County Superior Court Friday."
Now, why does my wizened cold black stony heart whisper to me that, should a nice big fat lump of developer money be pushed across the desk of the Land Trust, that this sacred shellmound will be turned into office buildings or apartment blocks faster than you can say "rip up the tarmac, Patsy me boy!"?
I don't know if this is true or not, I'm going by various comments I've read, but nobody knows if there actually *is* a sacred tribal site under the parking lot, it's just an assumption being made by the "give us money or else" set of objectors? Though I probably am being unreasonably mean about that:
"Efforts to develop the property, a parking lot once owned by Spenger’s Fish Grotto, date back two decades. Developers faced opposition from some Ohlone, who protested the development of a sacred shellmound site. In 2018, Berkeley blocked a streamlined permit to build housing on the site. They had been embroiled in a legal battle since.
Beneath the parking lot, adjacent to an upscale commercial area in West Berkeley, some Ohlone say, is the last undeveloped part of the oldest shellmound and village site around the Bay, a ceremonial site and fishing village.
“It’s one of the most culturally significant sites for the Lisjan people and to have it protected forever, I think I’m without words,” said Corrina Gould, a co-director of Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. Gould also leads Confederated Villages of Lisjan (pronounced Le-shawn), a group of seven tribes across the Bay Area that was involved in the lawsuit alongside the city of Berkeley.
The city of Berkeley designated the site a landmark in 2000 and it was added to a list of endangered historic places by The National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2020, though questions have been raised about the exact location of the shellmound."
Just came across this article (https://www.tabletmag.com/feature/american-vulcan-palmer-luckey-anduril), which is a pretty wild interesting story. But I also found it very ironic, because right after talking about how Luckey was smeared by inaccurate media articles, the article itself proceeds to smear Facebook the same way!
Tablet is at war with Facebook for a while: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation
This is kind of funny..
As i may have mentioned before, I am currently struggling with Grave's disease (overactive thyroid0.
The cardiology department has just had the bright idea they could prescribe spironolactone for thw water retention (edema) I get as a symptom of the thyroid condition. Which will probably work, yes.
And, I am thinking to myself... spironolactone? I just happen to know what *else* that is prescribed for, having been following the news about restrictions on prescribing puberty blockers. It's a testosterone blocker, also often prescribed for MtF transsexuals. Fine. Fine. I shall play dumb and pretend that I do not know this.
And are you okay with having less testosterone?
Before the pedants point this out: puberty blocker ban applies to e..g triptorelin but not to testosterone blockers like spironolactone.
Has anyone read [Anti-tech revolution: Why and How](https://annas-archive.org/md5/5d393d7d4b253ea73308250affeb4098) or anything by the same author?
Chapter 2 has some interesting and plausible (to me) insights on AI safety.
I started some of his books and liked them but haven't finished anything yet. I mostly liked his analysis of the psychology of the modern man, I didn't get a lot of insights on AI.
I'm not saying that the Unabomber wasn't a smart guy, but I am going to say that someone who couldn't even manage to keep himself from blowing up buildings and airplanes probably isn't who we should turn to when it comes to keeping AI from doing likewise.
I also question the wisdom of linking to one of the premiere resources for literary piracy, personally.
Piracy is based. But yeah, I get your point.
I've seen Scott link to sci-hub before
Orange county meetup announcement for this Saturday.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iAPDEeUMkIs38OXiOASp9EvExwn5-Kyv1_rKjAzKAkc/edit?usp=sharing
I thought this might have been a clip from an SNL skit — sort of a reprise of their classic Bass-O-Matic skit — but, no, it's a real company with a real product! And how much development time was required to make its lips sync with its voice?
https://x.com/i/status/1826636139970621747
https://www.trumpytrout.com/?mid=12243062
Has anyone played the new "Black Myth: Wukong" game yet? Yes, I know it's only just been released, but who else can I ask but you guys?
Pros: It's about Sun Wukong so that's immediately appealing to me, the visuals look *amazing*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cr5rQ1NZ0Tw
Cons: I see it described as "soulslike" and I'm not too hot at the aul' combat, so would the difficulty level be too high?
I have not played it, but of course somebody has. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLnywm2XgJg You can see what the game is going to expect of you.
Thanks for the link! Very helpful. So basically "stand there and hit with your staff and/or run like hell when over-matched" - I can do that 😁
Mention of some issues with PC version so I may wait to see if there are any patches. Much more inclined to try this now, though.
This is just shameless self promotion. I wrote about geoengineering recently, including the use of aerosols to reflect the sun and carbon mineralization to sequester CO2: https://www.aei.org/articles/the-promise-of-geoengineering/
What would be the optimal immigration policy for the USA? I don't believe it is either Open Borders or Zero Immigrants. My best guess is we need to allow way, way more immigrants with college degrees and maybe the same or fewer without degrees? In either category, what would be a method for determining what the optimum number per year would be?
The critical question is whether we maintain a welfare state for the immigrants. If we do, then we don't want poor immigrants, since they cost us more than they pay us. That leads to the popular policy of letting in only high end immigrants.
But the immigrants who we, and they, can gain most from are at the other end of the scale, poor people happy to do unskilled work at a wage high for them, low for us, and work their way up from there, the equivalent of my ancestors who came in from eastern Europe to work in sweatshops in New York a century and more ago. They are better off coming in without the protections of a welfare state than being kept out — but that option is barred by current ideology.
Don't you need to consider the labour capital ration as well? Expanding the labour supply will probably push down per capita gdp and wages for a fixed amount of capital.
Also, if the source of higher incomes in developed countries is non-rivalous, like institutions or governance, surely it makes more sense to extend them to low-income countries rather than concentrating everyone in places that are already high income.
Does it depend at all on the particular state? My guess is that unskilled immigrants to Texas, which has a relatively small welfare state, are a net positive to the economy whereas low skilled immigrants to California are a net negative, but I don't know what the data says.
I'll perversely say, more unskilled laborers and fewer skilled or degreed immigrants. Also, dismantle the H1-B visa system which is really a soft form of indentured servitude.
Something like Australian / NZ point system would be a good start. Less “family re-unification”, more “we have shortage of this labor type, come in”. Our immigration system is such a hopeless mess, any streamlining and simplification would be welcome at this point.
The optimal immigration policy is a Schengen Area within the core American Empire (US, Anglosphere, EU, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Israel) and a MrBeast style gameshow at the southern border open to any IQ > 115, where contestants have to pass through several rounds of challenges testing intelligence, fitness, creativity, patience, sociability, and adherence to American Empire cultural norms.
Optimal for what? What's the aim?
It sounds like you are looking for workers who will add value: I don't know if your strategy for achieving that is right or not, but more importantly I don't know if it's the right aim - or more to the point the aim most people would agree on.
I recognize my comment isn't adding to the conversation, but just wanted to echo this sentiment.
I am confused why none of the other responders have either posed this same question or engaged with it, even in passing, in their own responses.
There's a review of the book "Then I Am Myself the World" by Christof Koch in the latest Science News. Koch is into ITT (integrated information theory), which postulates you can measure a system's consciousness by measuring the amount of integrated information within it. Koch did this with the generative AI ChatGPT, and the money quote is -
"(it) has an itsy bitsy bit of consciousness" but experiences the world something much less than a worm with only 300 neurons.
So maybe we're safe from AI doom for a little while.
IIRC, Scott Aaronson was very critical of ITT on his blog.
How conscious is Amazon, Microsoft, or the DoD under IIT?
Can you say a bit about what Koch means by integrated information? What's an example? Is what is integrated things about self and things about world? (So, for instance, GPT4 will tell you it's an LLM, and whether LLM's like itself can or can't do a certain task. That seems to me like some knowledge about self integrated with knowledge about the world. )
I didn't read Koch's book. Integrated information theory (IIT, got the acronym wrong the first time) is something I tried to learn about by reading Erik Hoel's book "The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science", but it was over my head and, altho he helped develop the theory, he winds up trashing it. If only someone more expert than me could write up a review of either of these books for next years contest.
I wasn't asked and have no idea what he means with the fluffy phrase "integrated information" but I think his overall idea is panpsychism plus the assumption that an atom has a different - and vastly poorer experience - than a fox because an atom can do viewer and less complex actions than a fox. That's my interpretation of him saying that what matters is how much "irreducible causal power" a thing has.
My example is, a fox can do actions that its individual atoms can't. Not its atoms hunt rats, the fox does.
And I think, for sure: hunting a rat feels much different than to only swing arround a few nanometer. I know, I've done both.
I don't get it. Clearly, my group is right, and the other group is wrong. So why don't all utilitarians join my group and declare a war on the other group? Is it because they are stupid, or because they are hypocrites? What cause could possibly bring more utility than making my group win?
> What cause could possibly bring more utility than making my group win?
Have you considered making *my* group win? Obviously more utilitarian.
If you let me win the argument, the endorphin rush will trickle down to everyone's benefit.
So many people disagree with me, *too*! Must be that same group of stupid and /or hypocritical nincompoops.
I am also baffled. Me and my in-group are clearly utility monsters, so why aren't utilitarians fulfilling our every whim at the expense of the out-group?
Thank you for point #3 here.
Metallica just donated $40,000 to a Mpls homeless shelter.
https://www.fox9.com/news/minneapolis-homeless-shelter-thanks-metallica-donation
Maybe they aren’t a bunch of assholes.
For the benefit of folks who haven’t watched The Big Lebowski a half a dozen time that’s a reference to The Dude describing his time in the music business. As a roadie for Metallica, along with his opinion of the group. Mettalica loved the joke BTW.
Maybe they're not assholes, but the ad I saw on that website is. It popped up over the video, and the x in the corner was actually a download link.
I didn’t get that when I played it. I’ll delete the link.
Edit; I’m finding YouTube clips for a lot of Big Lebowski scenes. Not that one though.
Further Edit: I did find it dubbed into French, Japanese and a language I can only guess at with non ASII character set letters with diacritics and other ornamentations I don’t know the names of.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXXOGYqbK5o (14.10)
I've heard time and again that in Chasidic culture, men don't work. And I've said it.
At least for Williamsberg Chasidim, it just isn't true, and I'm wondering to what extent it's true elsewhere.
The video is an overview of the lively business culture of Williamsberg, with a lot of work being done by men. What they generally don't have is college degrees, but you can do a lot without a degree. There are many business supplying specialized cultural products (kosher food, wigs for women, etc.), non-religious products and services (plumbing, extermination), and selling outside the community. Computers are more of factor than they used to be, and so is entertainment.
I've heard that Jews are some of the most value-add people on the planet. But this subset is the extreme opposite? What's up with that?
Note that my link is about Chasidic culture where men work, but there's a possibility (if I can trust what I keep hearing about Israel) where Chasidic men (at least in some groups) don't work.
What's up with that is that the universe is out to get you. You think you have a nice handy generalization, and wham! the universe hits you with an exception. This is especially true for biology and for humans.
An interesting idea of "the bezzle", the window of time after a fraud has been committed when the action appears positive-sum, since the fraudster benefited, and the mark hasn't realized anything is amiss.
It helps explain why people get mad at whistleblowers, because everyone is happier *before* the whistle is blown, even if in reality some of the parties were worse off.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/06/29/the-science-bezzle/
Whistleblowers probably aren't very popular even before they blow the whistle. In order to be willing to do it, you probably need to have a bond with the company and your coworkers that's defective, i.e. falls short of what's needed by the other parties. The thing that makes someone capable of blowing the whistle also generally makes them a bad team player. Still, we need them. If every crew rebelled against their Capt. Bligh there would be no Navy. But if there were many Capt. Blighs there also would be no Navy.
Every place I've worked there has been a huge glob of stuff that everybody knows is bad, but everybody thinks of it as stuff you can't acknowledge, much less challenge. The first place I ever worked was a small diner in the south. I was a waitress. The owner came in most days to check on things and punch and smack the busboys (all black, by the way) for not moving as fast as the thought they should. I remember him tasting the day's special and saying "Jesus, they must be hungry today!"
> The thing that makes someone capable of blowing the whistle also generally makes them a bad team player
???????????????????????????????????????????????
That sounds like the largest "its ok to be immoral" cope ive heard in a while
Honesty is the first virtue, its incredibly prosocail to tell the truth at the cost of a job
Whistleblowers are people who see something wrong in an organization and want to fix it. If they're not getting along with the rest of the organization, whistleblowing is one of the primary ways we hear about them. If they *are* getting along with the rest of the organization, then they're probably just working with their management (upwards or down; some of these people are themselves managers), getting the change that way, and we people outside the organization never hear of them.
Therefore, by the time we hear of someone in the news as a whistleblower, it's virtually certain they didn't get along with their team.
There's a catch here, though. Some people don't get along with their team because their team is corrupt and doing illegal things and then they go to the press. Others don't get along with their team because their team is trying to do its job and it's the individual who's corrupted by delusions of speaking truth to power and goes to the press. The press doesn't have a very large incentive to tell one from the other, but it often has a large incentive to report pot stirring and underdog stories, so both types of people are reported as whistleblowers, and it falls to us readers to figure out whether the person reported as a whistleblower actually *is* one, assuming we ourselves have any incentive to do so.
What makes you think I'm saying people who blow the whistle are immoral? I'm saying they're bad team players. They do not bond deeply with coworkers or the organization itself, are less loyal to it and its workers, less willing to forgive the organization its various lies and injustices, more skeptical of its view of how it should be seen. That's not equivalent to their being immoral. As a matter of fact, I think I am a bad team player. I have never been able to feel affection and loyalty for the places where I worked and went to school. I have tried to do a good job, and treat my coworkers fairly, but I have always been angry and creeped out by the lies and injustices that went on at the place, that everybody else seemed to shrug off as part of the package.
If you're going to pull Reddit-style rude gotchas on here, how about you at least try first to get clear what people are saying, and ask for clarification if it sounds ridiculous, instead of pulling out your dick and whizzing a steam of exclamatory question marks?
> I have tried to do a good job, and treat my coworkers fairly, but I have always been angry and creeped out by the lies and injustices that went on at the place, that everybody else seemed to shrug off as part of the package.
Then it isnt *your* cope, but all the same.
The chance your the person who take credit for others work, or makes delusional shots in basketball rather then passing, sound low. i.e. a bad team player.
> As a matter of fact, I think I am a bad team player. I have never been able to feel affection and loyalty for the places where I worked and went to school.
Actions are what matter
> If you're going to pull Reddit-style rude gotchas on here, how about you at least try first to get clear what people are saying, and ask for clarification if it sounds ridiculous, instead of pulling out your dick and whizzing a steam of exclamatory question marks?
Why? Im no less angry at the statement, but presumably mean girls turned hr ladies have convinced you of something
<Why? I'm no less angry at the statement, but presumably mean girls turned hr ladies have convinced you of something
ACX reasons: Because this is not Reddit, and if you engage in Reddit style rudeness, especially in response to someone who has not been rude to you, a lot of people are going to think you're a jackass and not take your posts seriously.
My reasons: I am not exactly distressed by your various negative takes on me, but I am irritated, and am likely in the future to skip over comments by you because, ugh, it's that monky guy who adds extra y's or something to monky. I have the impression that you read my posts on this thread not trying to get what I was saying, but scanning for bits that will give you a chance to exclaim about ways I am lame and dumb and wrong. Specifically: (1) A quick reading of my first post gave you the impression that I thought whistleblowers were bad people because honesty is less important than team players. Unless you have lousy reading comprehension skills you will have noticed, though, that I was not expressing any anger at or personal disapproval of whistleblowers, so it would be natural to wonder whether your first interpretation is correct. But you just went with your first impression, rather than re-reading, or asking me whether I was saying that being a team player is more important than being honest. So then you posted exclamations about how INCREDIBLY WRONG AND DUMB I WAS -- WAHHHHHHH!
(2) So then I clarify what I meant, and you let me off the hook for being a bad player who hogs the ball, but you still ended with an insult: I am calling myself a bad player because I am pussy-whipped by the HT lady. Again, rather than assuming I have been intimidated by a mean cunt into thinking I am Bad when actually I am a Good Guy, you could have asked me why I was calling myself a bad team player even though I believe I treat my coworkers fairly and pull my weight. But nope, you went for pussy whip.
If you want to get meta about this.... fine
> A quick reading of my first post gave you the impression that I thought whistleblowers were bad people because honesty is less important than team players. Unless you have lousy reading comprehension skills you will have noticed, though, that I was not expressing any anger at or personal disapproval of whistleblowers, so it would be natural to wonder whether your first interpretation is correct.
I quoted a statement because I was responding to a statement
> So then you posted exclamations about how INCREDIBLY WRONG AND DUMB I WAS -- WAHHHHHHH!
>> Then it isnt *your* cope, but all the same.
>> The chance your the person who take credit for others work, or makes delusional shots in basketball rather then passing, sound low. i.e. a bad team player.
I granted/clarified it wasn't a cope about your actions.
> I pulled my weight....
I believe you confused by my lazy sentence structure on this comment, to rephrase it verbosely
1. the definition of a bad team player is related to taking undue credit
2. given your claims you dont sound like you do that
3. qed you are there not a bad team player
I was also hoping to imply that that a "bad team player" commits local anti social behavior, a whistle blower commits high-cost, pro-socail behavior at a higher level of abstraction and its extremely unlikely for an ethical person to actually be less ethical at less abstract, lower cost, situations
> a mean cunt
From my point of view this is the first direct(i.e. about people here) insult in this thread
I pulled my weight, and did the hospital equivalent of passing the ball. But here are they ways I was not a team player: If I had a patient to refer, I sent them to whoever I thought was best, not to the person who had recently done me a favor, or the person I knew needed to pick up some more patients. I did not make an effort to pretend to like and respect various people on staff that I thought were dishonest, greedy and self-serving. I made a few friends on staff, but did not feel a bond with the rest of staff — skipped their baby showers, holiday parties, retirement parties, etc. Did not schmooze with them. Did not respect the head of the unit where I worked, and sometimes warned people to beware of his tendency to do various unscrupulous and unfair things. Had some major objections to certain hospital policies, and spoke about them bluntly whenever it was relevant. Overall, I just did not exude the “I’m OK you’re OK” feeling that organizations want and need from staff. I was respected, and was not disliked, but I definitely did not pull my weight when it came to working to create an atmosphere of “we’re all fine folks here.”
> but presumably mean girls turned hr ladies have convinced you of something
Is hr Human Relations? I don't think I ever spoke with one, or even knew who the hospital HR staff were. What on earth do you think one convinced me of? And what makes you expect that it's easy to convince me of things? You sure didn't get very far with convincing me I'm immoral.
At the risk of receiving a whizzing stream of exclamatory question marks, I wonder if Monkyyy could explain his Simiiforme reasoning for his belief that honesty is necessarily a prosocial behavior? Honesty is usually perceived by those on the receiving-end of it as an antisocial behavior.
Its more simiiforeme intuition /s
Id draw the line closer to kant's axe murder then most. Everything depends on truth surviving lies, charitys that work rather then are money laundering schemes. If theres to much causal lying in society, something like giving to charity could easily break down and your giving money to a gold plated throne of the middle ages church. The proper use of violence depends on finding the right guy, etc etc etc etc
One of my friends lost a job because he wouldn't pad his expense account. He didn't report that everyone else was padding their expense accounts, but they were afraid he would.
serpico
I predict a few more people in the typical ACX age cohort will pick up on my joking Big Lebowski reference above.
Serpico is definitely a film worth seeking out though.
Wow that's disgusting. Which industry, finance?
I don't remember and we're out of touch. I don't think it was finance.
Lorien made a question earlier asking why utilitarians more in favor of gender roles. A good discussion came from that. I have a similar comment, but different enough that I want to post about it separate from the discussion thread that Lorien started.
My question is... why aren't utilitarians more active in opposing what's called wokeness? At this point, in 2024, it's pretty clear that what's called "wokeness" has made people less happy, particularly the woke themselves. This philosophy/ideology is known for deriding toxicity, but is itself highly toxic. It focuses the mind almost exclusively on negative externalities, and it actively encourages very uncharitable interpretations of the words/actions of others through the promotion of ideas like micro-aggressions.
The art/entertainment that arises from it is widely considered inferior to what came before, as we can see with various viewer satisfaction metrics and falling ratings for several major franchises (Dr. Who, Star Trek, Star Wars, MCU TV shows).
I think it's pretty clear that most people in the west would like less "wokeness" in their world. That most people dislike it. And it could even be argued that many of the woke themselves would enjoy greater emotional well-being from not being woke.
So opposing wokeness seems to me as both a way to genuinely serve utilitarian goals while also making utilitariansm more popular with the general population. With such a win/win proposition just sitting there, completely consistent with utilitarian goals/beliefs, it's odd to me that the movement doesn't go for it more than it does.
Is it that "wokeness" isn't defined as well as most utilitarians would like? Is it that utilitarians believe it'll implode on its own? Is it just that... actively opposing wokeness would feel like being pro-Republican, and most utilitarians really don't want that? I'm genuinely curious here.
I think a utilitarian would say that specialization is good, and if we have a gender that is born a bit more empathic and another that is born with a bit more innate understanding of how objects work then it is good that they specialize on that. The issue is that it is only true on the average with many outliers.
I think I see what you're saying, as it pertains to gender roles.
And yes, I think you're basically right here.
Don't woke people think that wokeness will be beneficial in the long run? And perhaps in the short run, at least for some people (eg, supposed victims of racism, speech wokesters deem harmful, etc). Unless a utilitarian knows those things are untrue, wouldn't a utilitarian be agnostic?
Note also that the Civil Rights Movement likely made 80% of the people in much of the Deep South unhappy in the short term. What should utilitarian at the time have believed about it?
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
Since you raised the Civil Rights Movement, I thought it only fitting to raise this famous quote from arguably the greatest leader involved in that movement.
Do you think that modern wokism is consistent with Dr. King's statement here? To me, the answer is very clear. Even if it's not clear to your, I hope you'll think about it, and maybe keep it in mind when you read woke commentary in the future.
I really don't understand what you are talking about. Did you somehow misinterpret my comment as an endorsement of "wokism"? It was neither an endorsement nor a criticism.
The Civil Rights movement has very strong moral valiance. That might not be why you raised it, but even if not, it gives strength to your question.
So I'm replying by saying "Ok... but does modern wokism share the same moral valiance and moral values of the civil rights movement?" And I'm saying no, it doesn't... so it shouldn't get to benefit from the comparison.
It's entirely possible you're just being fair and neutral and raising open questions here. I fully respect that. Still, I feel that wokism gets far too easy of a pass by simply equating itself with things like the Union side of the Civil War, the armies that fought against the Nazis on D-Day, and the American Civil Rights movement. Wokeness is very different from these 3, it has very different values propelling it forward than these 3, so it shouldn't get to benefit from the widespread agreement that modern people have with these three.
Honestly, you need to read more carefully. It is very clear why I mentioned the Civil Rights Movement: Because it made people happier in the long term, and hence a utilitarian might support it, even if it made most people unhappy in the short-term. That is the same for wokeness: unless we are sure that wokesters are incorrect that wokeness will increase happiness in the long term, then it makes sense for utilitarians to be agnostic. That is true even though wokeness is not the moral equivalent of the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, it is true of permitting reform and NIMBYism and YIMBYism and 1000 other things that are not the moral equivalent of the Civil Rights Movement.
> At this point, in 2024, it's pretty clear that what's called "wokeness" has made people less happy
I don't think this is clear at all, at least for a definition of 'happy' that you could get a utilitarian to agree to
First of all, you don't present any evidence that wokeness has made people less happy _in toto_. That seems like a prerequisite for a utilitarian caring / taking action. Quality of media is just one part of the rich tapestry of human experience, and not even really something utilitarians typically care much about. On the assumption that you reckon you have such evidence but just haven't presented it (for brevity), I still don't think it is obvious all utilitarians should oppose wokeness.
Even the worst critics of wokeness view the process as being one of redistributing power and prestige. Therefore for every loser (typically characterised as being straight white men) there are winners (typically characterised as racial or sexual minorities). Maybe the utility gain isn't zero sum, but it isn't like woke utilitarians are totally ignorant of the fact that the utility gain *might not* be zero sum; they just believe that in fact the gains of making the worst off better are worth the costs of harming the better off. So the evidence you would need to convince a utilitarian is not just that things have got worse in the last decade, and that this is a direct result of wokeness, but also that the specific utility function of the utilitarian you are talking to is not satisfied by this state of affairs. This is nontrivial.
Arguing that media has got worse over the last decade is totally irrelevant to a woke utilitarian. Even if they agreed with you - and they probably wouldn't - they would say that worse media is a totally reasonable tradeoff to ensure that historic power imbalances were corrected
Even if it were true, it seems like *opposing* wokeness has made a lot of people unhappy. If you look at anti-woke media review channels, the personalities on those channels seem to be in a constant state of heightened anger at finding slights (real and imagined) in that media. For example a bunch of people got really, genuinely, non-performatively angry that Princess Peach was wearing trousers in the Mario movie trailer (her karting outfit, which she has worn since we'll before wokeness was a thing). Those people would be much happier if they stopped opposing wokeness, because opposing wokeness clearly causes them to tilt at ridiculous windmills. A utilitarian must at least consider that efforts to oppose wokeness would cause misery, such that even if it would have been better to oppose it ten years ago, it is too late to do it now and it is better to settle into a slightly suboptimal equilibrium than to perpetuate the culture war
Overall I think your argument requires that nobody genuinely believes wokeness is good. But since some people clearly do believe this, it is unlikely that you'll convince them by appealing to the 'obviousness' of your position
This study is from 2018, so slightly dated, but probably recent enough.
https://reason.com/2018/10/11/political-correctness-americans-vote-maj/
Going by this study, 80% of Americans believe that political correctness is a problem. Political Correctness/SJWism/Wokism... these terms have been used pretty interchangably in my experience. They don't always mean exactly the same thing, but there's substantial overlap here.
If 80% of Americans (strongly) dislike political correctness, then that means 80% of American (strongly) dislike at least a core part of what's considered "wokeness".
If this 80% is even close to accurate, then your suggestion of an even trade-off between "winners" and "losers" is very incorrect. It's not 1-for-1, it's 4 losers-for-1 winner (at best), and at that point it's anti-utilitarian and should be opposed.
I'm going to guess, from your reply, that you yourself are at least somewhat woke or progressive. Fair enough. Wanting greater equality, in at least practical terms, is understandable and admirable. Wokism is just one of many ways to try to achieve that, and a good argument can be made that there are much better and less counter-productive ways to achieve it. Utilitarians in general, and the effective altruism movement specifically, have a good philosophical framework to suggest different ways of achieving that. And to be fair, EA does address this some with the way it promotes altruistic and charitable living, much healthier than actively encouraging people to interpret the words of others in the most uncharitable way possible.
That being said, wokism is a competitor to EA, arguably the main competitor given its prominence in the modern American media landscape. The woke themselves recognize this, which is why the owner of this substack had a NY Times hitpiece wrote against him. Simply ignoring a major competitor, especially one that is not ignoring you, doesn't seem wise or prudent to me.
Given what you wrote about "quality of media", I get the impression you don't care much about it, so probably not worth getting into the various Rotten Tomatoes scores and IMDB scores and TV show ratings at a specific level. Plus, most of this information is not hard to find.
To be clear, I'm not a conservative. On a political compass, I'd consider myself Center-Left. My impression is that wokism has horribly distracted us from much more practical economy inequality concerns, while simultaneously creating a media and narrative landscape that actively repulses most people, thus making for a much less pleasure cultural atmosphere to live within.
Asian-made entertainment, largely free of woke elements, has been dramatically on the rise in recent years and decades. I don't think this is purely a coincidence. I considered getting into detail on this, but again, given what you wrote on "quality of media" probably pointless.
Have a good day. Thanks for the thorough and thought-provoking reply.
Interestingly enough I think we actually totally agree on the fundamental-level issues (I too would consider myself on the economic left and I too consider the culture war a distraction from actually pressing issues of economic inequality). I'd hazard a guess we agree in every particular on the harm that identity politics has wrought on the classic economic left as a political block.
However I'd also consider myself a strong utilitarian, and therefore I bristle at suggestions that the good is something that is trivially easy to determine, particularly when a large number of people think otherwise. I'd be incredibly surprised if at one point 80% of people didn't oppose interracial marriage, or gay marriage, or assisted dying, or anything like that, and it would have been terrible if utilitarians had let them get away with saying 'Since it is obviously wrong that X, we should make it a cornerstone of utilitarian philosophy to oppose X'. It is the 'obvious' bit I disagreed with, rather than the suggestion that in the final accounting we might find wokeness has caused more harm than good.
If I might - I appreciate the polite and good faith indication that you've got better things to do than go back and forth with me (in which case no problem at all) - but it I'd possible your reply indicates a bit of an error in your thinking. Imagine a world where 80% of people had more than enough to eat and 20% of people were starving. You could make the 20% vastly vastly better off by redistributing food from the 80% so that everyone had exactly enough to eat. If you asked 'Are you better off before or after redistribution?' you'd get 80/20 against it. But if you asked 'Solve for U(x) where U(x) is the utility you gain from your next marginal calorie' you'd get an average score much higher in the post-redistribution world. Almost all (possibly all?) utilitarians believe utility is better thought about in the second kind of terms, and woke utilitarians believe that this is true PLUS we actually live in a world like this except it is power / prestige which is inadequately distributed. So your evidence wouldn't convince them. I thought you might be interested in this feedback just in case you had a different expectation of what your evidence would prove to a utilitarian
Utilitarianism isn't a movement, it's just a philosophical position, compatible with all sorts of object-level political beliefs. You'll find utilitarians supporting all sorts of different things.
According to Aristotle we have two appetites - the concupiscible appetite directs us towards good things which are pleasant - food etc. while the irascible appetite directs us towards good things which are difficult to achieve e.g hiking up a mountain. The irascible appetite needs to be put in its place but we all need some difficult goals in life. I assume the woke are relatively unhappy while focused on the difficult goal of achieving equality as they see it, but many will have concupiscible goals that balance this.
Utilitarians are well aware that wokeness is a strawman that pretends that every form of egalitarianism is part of the over-corrective push of an outspoken minority, so they focus their utils on things that actually matter.
Some random thoughts on the Qur'an, in no particular order, since I've been reading it*:
- The Qur'an is extremely rambly and meandering, which makes it a bit hard to read. Most of the chapters cover a very, very wide range of topics, except for those at the end, which only cover one topic because they're only one paragraph or so long. There are a few anecdotes that are interesting enough to read (mostly various abbreviated versions of corresponding incidents from the Bible), but it's kinda hard to fish them out of the sheer mass of purple prose about how Allah is great and nonbelievers are evil. A lot of modern translations (eg Clear Quran) tend to only intensify the purple prose, making it even more unreadable.
- For example, surah 2 relates the tale of how Moses told the Israelites to slaughter a cow. In the Qur'an's version, this is apparently a one-off incident to resolve a disputed murder. In Deuteronomy 21's version, however, God commands the Israelites to slaughter a cow *every time* there is a disputed murder.
- There are a few points it really, *really*, likes to drive home. Some version of this is repeated in nearly every chapter.
- In Islam, all Muslims will go to Paradise, but all non-Muslims will go to "the fire", which is how the Qur'an *always* refers to the Islamic version of hell.
- Allah is almighty, wise, all-seeing, all-knowing, and so on.
- There are two or three cryptic-looking letters at the beginning of each chapter. (By the way, these are called the "muqatta'at", and have fueled a truly insane amount of speculation.)
Any further thoughts on this? Am I misunderstanding anything?
*proofreading it on Wikisource, as a matter of fact!
- Are you reading it in the traditional order, or the chronological order in which it was written and received by Mohammed (the latter makes much more sense)?
- The biography of Mohammed by Karen Armstrong is a highly readable book which I would strongly recommend as a companion piece to the Quran, especially when reading the surahs in chronological order.
- These taken together highlight how much many parts of the Quran are highly relevant to Mohammed's day to day live and evolving circumstances, including a few bits highly convenient to the prophet himself at that particular point.
Traditional order. Might switch to chronological order, but apparently people differ a lot on which surahs should be considered the earliest or latest (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surah#Chronological_order_of_surahs for more info).
I only just started a few days ago and haven't mustered the patience to get past the second surah, but what you describe fits with my impressions - it's like a fire-and-brimstone preacher riffing on vaguely-alluded-to Old Testament stories, with the stringency of a Trump campaign rally speech. You really have to wonder if Allah the All-Knowing couldn't afford a better editor.
I was gifted a Quran by a Muslim coworker a few years ago. I found it difficult to read too. I’ve read that in the original Arabic the repetition that I found frustrating reads as poetic and is actually a pleasure to read.
This is similar to e.g. the Iliad which reads as trudgingly repetitive but has a much better spoken quality.
I'm impressed! I got bogged down in the purple prose. And the different translations of key points make me more confused about what it's saying.
All that babbling by the concern trolls on the right and in the MSM about Kamala's issues and positions is just noise. Anna Navarro (a Republican BTW) reminds us that's there only one big issue we need to be concerned about this election. And it's the GOP elephant in the room...
"Let's be serious. Donald Trump and his minions have called Kamala a communist. I know communism. I fled communism from Nicaragua when I was eight years old. I don't take it lightly. And let me tell you what communist dictators do, and it's never just for one day. They attack the free press. They call them the enemy of the people like Ortega does in Nicaragua. They put their unqualified relatives in cushy government jobs so they can get rich off their positions like the Castros do in Cuba. And they refuse to accept legitimate elections when they lose and call for violence to stay in power like Maduro is doing right now in Venezuela. Now you tell me something. Do any of those things sound familiar? Is there anyone running for president who reminds you of that? And I know one thing. It's not Kamala Harris..."
https://youtu.be/PgNQrCdsG1I?t=91
Politics is the mind-killer. It is the little death that precedes total obliteration. I will face the hot takes and I will permit them to pass over me and through me. And when the thinkpieces and quips have gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the dunks have gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Kamala is a Communist the same way Trump is a Fascist, which is to say it's all very damn stupid, I'm not even going to touch "but *they* started it!" by both sides, and it's just the way modern politics is going.
Party A says Party B is not alone stupid but evil, and trying to bring back Bad Thing X.
Party B says Party A is not alone evil but stupid, and trying to bring back Bad Thing Y.
Stop calling Trump a Fascist, stop calling Harris a Communist. I would like that, but it's not gonna happen.
Trump literally tried to rig the election by calling that guy and ask him to find votes. That's fascist or close enough.
It's authoritarian, but not fascist. Fascisim is a specific ideology that is a subset of authoritarianism.
Help me out here. I find it hard to distinguish authoritarian communists from authoritarian fascists. What criteria make them different?
1. Authoritarian fascists and authoritarian communists both try to control the media, and penalize vocal and active dissent.
2. Authoritarian fascists and communists both try to control the courts to get the desired results politically and legally, and to veil their illegal actions in a cloak of legality.
3. Authoritarian fascists and communists both promote corruption to divert money and power into their hands — and authoritarian fascist and communist leaders give cushy positions to family and friends so they can profit from their control of the state.
4. Authoritarian fascists and communists both promote nationalist agendas, identifying themselves as true patriots and their enemies as enemies of the nation.
5. Authoritarian fascists and communists both target out-groups such as ethnic minorities or religious minorities for persecution to direct their citizens' anger at the out-groups rather than the leadership.
6. Authoritarian fascists and communists both try to distort the economy for their own and the benefit of the leadership clique.
The only difference that I can see between the two is that communists try to micro-manage businesses with a command-and-control economy, while fascists allow favored businesses to create monopolies (in return for kickbacks) that put pressure on businesses that don't play along. Either way, independent entrepreneurial activities are stifled.
What am I missing here?
The simplest way to tell fascists from communists is that fascists identify as fascists while communists identify as communists. Trying to make up some list of criteria for who belongs to a particular political movement just seems like a bad idea.
I'm pretty sure that nobody outside the lunatic fringe self-identifies as fascist or communist anymore, except in the latter case for a few historical ruling parties that are stuck with "communist" in their name and everybody then says that the Chinese aren't *really* communist.
And, yeah, the Chinese probably don't count as communist any more, but the people who do mostly call themselves "socialist". Close enough, I suppose. The fascists call themselves a bunch of other things, depending on the local political clime, and their critics then say "but with policies like those, they're basically admitting they're fascists".
Started out with Lexapro to try and improve my mood and sociability... and WOW! Absolutely amazing effects on day 4, though on days 5 and 6 things have gone back to baseline so far. Is there a reason why the effects haven't been consistent? Perhaps there's a way to speed up the onset of Lexapro to get me to feel great again sooner?
I'm 100% sure its not placebo: I track my mood every day consistently and three days ago was THE best mood of my entire year, by far. I was also skeptical the SSRI would actually do anything so I don't think it was placebo.
Wrote an answer but somehow it didn't get through. Here tis again: Most drugs in this class take 4 weeks plus to work, but lexapro is unusually fast, with some feeling a difference in 1 week. So maybe you are just an unusually fast responder. If what you felt was a drug effect then you can expect the mood lift to be stable once the drug fully kicks in. Don't discount placebo completely, though. Scott was sure he was microdosing on the real deal, but found out at end of study he's been taking placebo.
I hadn't really been following the story of the luxury superyacht which was sunk by a waterspout off the coast of Sicily, until I learned the name of it.
It was renamed "Bayesian" or "the Bayesian", thanks to the owner (?) who is the wife (now widow) of a guy involved in tech and finance:
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/20/europe/bayesian-yacht-what-we-know-intl/index.html
"Built in 2008, the 56-meter (184-foot) yacht was manufactured by Italian company Perini Navi, Reuters reported. According to the Associated Press, the boat has been available for charter for $215,000 (€195,000) per week.
Lynch’s wife is linked to the yacht. The Bayesian is held by the company Revtom Limited, according to records from the maritime information service Equasis. The company’s latest annual return from April lists Bacares as the proprietor.
“Bayesian,” the name given to the vessel, is linked to the statistical theory on which Lynch built his fortune, according to Reuters."
That is not all, however, The man, Michael Lynch, was involved in a long legal battle with Hewlett-Packard over the sale of his company, Autonomy, to them, along with his VP of finance and another company member. Allegations of financial jiggery-pokery, which is all being covered in detail over at The Motte: https://www.themotte.org/post/1131/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week
So Lynch is acquitted, goes on a celebratory yacht trip, and ends up dead. But wait, there's more! That same weekend, his co-defendant *also* ends up dead after being struck by a car:
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/19/uk/stephen-chamberlain-mike-lynch-co-defendant-dies-car-intl-latam/index.html?iid=cnn_buildContentRecirc_end_recirc
What's that quote from "The Importance of Being Earnest"? "To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."?
To have one Rationalist or Rationalist-adjacent billionaire involved in financial shenanigans (SBF) may be a misfortune, to have two (Lynch and Bayesianism) looks like carelessness 😁
t's kind of like hoe we were speculating on just how long it was going to be until Putin killed Yevgeny Prigozhin...
Seriously, I think Lynch was a tragic accident and weird co-incidence. Yevgeny Prigozhin on the other hand...
I was told that the bayesian.org website went down for a while around the same time the yacht did. <queue eerie theremin music>
NB: I don't know if this was a Bayesian joke or not.
Possibly a joke, but if it's real, Not A Coincidence Because Nothing Is Ever A Coincidence 😁
I dunno. Looking for fraud amongst billionaires is like looking for criminals at a prison.
I know, it's "throw a stone and hit one" territory. But for a movement all about winning bigly, maybe try and avoid the appearance of criminality because you assume you are just that much smarter than the normies?
It's all sorts of ironic. The boat's problem was probably that it had one very tall mast not two shorter ones. Tallest aluminium mast in the world. You would expect a statistician to ask: what are the odds of someone making a bigger one? If they do is it likely to be twice as high, or one metre higher? What do the constraints governing that question tell me about my own mast?
There is also some question about whether the keel of the yacht was in its lowered position or not, and whether some hatchways had been left open in spite of a storm warning.
Also Bazos’ yacht has a taller mast.
I just heard someone say 83-86% of Democrats are in favor of a cease-fire in Israel. So apparently people think polls should influence policy. Or is this just an American thing?
This is not about Israel, Gaza, or even specifically Democrats. But people seem to think their non-expert opinion matters. Don't we appoint people to government positions so they can make the best decisions for us? They should be giving us what we NEED, which isn't necessarily what we WANT.
It's ridiculous to think something as complex as foreign policy should be determined by how people feel about a situation.
In general issue polling is terrible and cursed, since people will say they support more services, less taxes, lower deficits, and whatever else you want them to answer in your poll. Unless it's very careful to explicitly list the tradeoff involved in a neutral way, issue polling should be completely ignored.
As of 2024, approximately 92% of Republicans believe that violent crime in the United States is increasing, while all the data seems to suggest that violent crime is lower than at the beginning of the 1960s. Why should something as complex as the criminal justice system be left up to people who have no clue on how to look at the data?
Both could be true!
I assume that when people say "violent crime is increasing", they aren't necessarily taking 1961 as a baseline?
What if we take 2015 as a baseline? Or 2010? Or 2000? Or any other time in the adult life of someone under the age of 50? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_intentional_homicide_rate#/media/File:Timeline_of_U.S._homicide_rate._FBI_and_CDC.png
Because you see the bigger pattern if you zoom out. Unfortunately, I can't post graphs as a response. But there's this — the age-adjusted homicide rates since 1900. For some reason, they're tracking it against the inflation rate (post 1962 there *does* seem to visually be a rough correlation). The three most recent peaks were 1974, 1981, and 1991. In this chart the 2022 COVID peak is about half the height of those three peaks and has fallen since then. The un-age-adjusted homicide rate has dropped from 6.8/100K in 2022 to 4.8/100K (2Q of this year). This in line with late 1950s and the early 1960s.
What's interesting to me is that the age-adjusted homicide rate back in the 1920s and early 1930s was nearly as high as the later 20th Century peaks. I wonder if other categories of violent crimes were also as high back then as they were in early 1990s? See, you learn new things when you zoom out. ;-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Age-Adjusted_Homicide_Rates_in_the_USA,_1900-2022,_with_Major_Theorized_Contributors.jpg/2
> Because you see the bigger pattern if you zoom out.
Why not zoom out even more, there has been a major increase of gun violence since the dinosaurs went extinct
What if it was gun violence and not a giant asteroid that caused their extinction? Interesting thought. Hmmm.
Because you see the bigger pattern if you zoom out. Unfortunately, I can't post graphs as a response. But there's this — the age-adjusted homicide rates since 1900. For some reason, they're tracking it against the inflation rate (post 1962 there *does* seem to visually be a rough correlation). The three most recent peaks were 1974, 1981, and 1991. In this chart the 2022 COVID peak is about half the height of those three peaks and has fallen since then. The un-age-adjusted homicide rate has dropped from 6.8/100K in 2022 to 4.8/100K (2Q of this year). This in line with late 1950s and 1960s.
What's interesting to me is that the age-adjusted homicide rate back in the 1920s and early 1930s was nearly as high the later 20th Century peaks. I wonder if other categories of violent crimes were also as high back then as they were in early 1990s? See, you learn new things when you zoom out. ;-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Age-Adjusted_Homicide_Rates_in_the_USA,_1900-2022,_with_Major_Theorized_Contributors.jpg/2
For some reason, Substack duplicated my reply. It must have eaten Eremelalos's reply (above) as compensation. Sorry, Eremolalos!
I don't think many Democrats look at the data either. I don't think most people look at the data. Seems to me most people vote based on vibes, group identification, and what's currently being said in their echo chamber.
Sometimes I wonder whether the modern world is too complex for democracy toe even sort of work. I have no idea what a better alternative would be, though.
The alternative is to have a permanent stable of experts and lobby groups that are indirectly influenced by public opinion. Which is roughly what we ended up with.
And we sort of muddle along with this system. But we muddle along better than authoritarian societies!
Because if you instituted a nomenklatura they would send everybody *else* to jail.
I must be misunderstanding. The only place I can find for public opinion in your point of view is in choosing who we elect to office. After that, people should pipe down and do what they’re told?
Shouldn’t policy makers continue to consider the will of the people after they’re elected? And isn’t polling a tool to help them understand the people’s will?
People were arrested for protesting at the Democratic National Convention over this (https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/protesters-breach-security-fence-democratic-national-convention/).
Yes, policy makers should CONSIDER the will of the people, but people seem to think their collective will should be the policy. As Professor Feynman said, one cannot claim to be smarter than 1000 other people, but can certainly claim to be smarter than the average of 1000 other people.
So long as people only express their opinion, that is reasonable. If others, even policy-makers, find it reasonable, it can influence policy. I just find it unreasonable for the mob to think it can dictate policy.
I mean, the threat here is pretty clear: govern in a way I find acceptable or you will lose my vote.
I think you are directionally correct that people want to exert too much influence over the fine details of policy, and that people should leave more questions up to the experts, and judge them by long-term results.
However, I think you picked a really bad example to start with. "Should that war stop?" is exactly the kind of question the average voter is pretty well capable of judging for themselves.
Maybe they THINK they are, but I opine they are not. It's much more complicated than should they stop trying to kill people. Here are some points to consider:
* What can they do to prevent a 10/7 again? If they let them rearm, maybe they will plot another one.
* They don't want to kill more people, but having their own citizens killed is worse than killing more people.
* Some people in the US support the Palestinians, and some support the Israelis. This is not trivial to resolve.
* Consider other countries participating: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt. One must also consider potential impacts of China's influence, and others.
* If we support Israel less, could those resources be better used at home? Abroad? What pushback will happen for any of these choices?
I'm not an expert, as I have said, and there are probably dozens of other implications to consider. I have no reason to think this is a bad example.
You might be overestimating how far the effects of a second ceasefire would reach.
My estimates, whether over or under, are almost certainly wrong, not being an expert.
If the public couldn't dictate policy, the policy would be to give all the money to policymakers. It happens in every country without a working democratic system.
The public informs policy by voting out people who make decisions they don't like. They don't dictate it.
For this particular instance, I doubt anyone would vote for Trump because of a disagreement on the Israel thing, but they might stay "uncommitted" and not vote at all, which is close to the same thing for this election.
Politicians care a lot about opinion polls and the effects on the marginal voter. That is how public opinion "dictates policy."
Do you actually believe experts should run the country or are you making a reductio?
To be precise, I believe those who run the country should take expert advice into consideration to make decisions for running the country. I don't expect the leaders to be experts in all things, not even all the things for which they have charge.
Yeah, direct democracy for every choice would be a disaster--a majority vote for which drugs should be approved by the FDA or something would make no sense. I think the main value of democracy is that when lots of people are unhappy about how things are going or about big visible decisions made by public officials, they can provide feedback that the elected officials have to care about. So the public isn't voting on specific FDA approvals, but if they are sufficiently unhappy about FDA actions, they can make the president and many congressmen care about that, and apply pressure to the FDA's leadership.
That's my position too but I think it implies there is a balance to be struck between expert opinion and what the man in the street can stomach.
>I just heard someone say 83-86% of Democrats are in favor of a cease-fire in Israel. So apparently people think polls should influence policy.<
...this doesn't follow. They make polls for ice cream flavors too. https://www.idfa.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2404080_topline_IDFA_US_Adults.pdf It doesn't mean they're trying to pressure ice cream shops into anything, it means they like to talk about themselves.
I have a sense that the war provokes a little more emotional engagement among both parties than ice cream preferences...
Well, if you have a sense, then by all means apply a double standard.
It all depends on the terms of the cease-fire, right?
The poll answer might as well be saying "war is bad", perhaps extending to "Palestinian civilians dying is bad" (given that Israel is inflicting most of the casualties).
Technically, there's also a difference between "being in favor of a cease-fire" and thinking that the US government should use carrots and sticks to get both sides to agree to something they'd otherwise not agree to. (Which, I think, they're already trying.)
Ultimately, though, this is a tension in any representative democracy: whether the representative should merely reflect the will of their constituents, or whether they were chosen to exercise their independent judgement? (And in practice, where in between should an individual politician fall at a given moment?)
And there's also the civil service, which in theory exists to provide expertise and consistency to governmental affairs. The State Department probably has it's own views on this situation.
I think no one, especially in this forum, would think war is not bad. My point isn't whether Israel should cease fire, but that people think they know what's best for the country based on their limited knowledge and experience. Everyone is, of course, entitled to their opinion, but only informed opinions should make policy, whether foreign or some other kind.
A lot of people think the current war in Gaza is good, and some of them argue such at length in these comment sections whenever the subject comes up.
I know this may shock you, but some people actually believe in democracy, and I don't just mean picking between one of two multimillionaire oligarchs every couple years
Democracy works if people do what they think is best for the country, not for themselves. It is not two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner. And uninformed, ignorant people have no credibility for their opinions on policy, just because of how they feel.
In terms of being uninformed I’d say the pro Israel lobby tops that list. So much so that future historians and their students will find it hard to explain the support.
Democracy IS two wolves voting to eat the one sheep. The usual objection to that is to advocate some kind of "individual rights"-based "liberalism" instead. You can just admit you don't care much for either, and prefer some kind of oligarchy/aristocracy, instead of misrepresenting them.
This could be the basis of an ad to encourage voting. Show the wolves voting over how to allocate the sheep (we don't want to be gory, something like Claymation would be good). Then the punchline: "If you don't vote, you are the sheep!"
It COULD, though that sounds to me like it'd imply "Be a wolf instead!", which in context would mean "gang up on minorities."
It is the strict definition of democracy, just as Bob is outvoted as one vote in 10 in lifeboat survivors (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lifeboat-games-and-backscratchers). But as a system of governing, no, that is a bad idea. It's simply self-interest, first and foremost, and do you really need government for that?
So democracy works when people vote not necessarily for what is best for them, but for the right thing to do, about which there can be legitimate disagreements.
There is not yet any perfect form of government discovered or invented.
A Kissinger-like policy of acting in "US interests," would not (and did not!) result in a lot of support for Israel, which is hated by oil-rich neighbors. Our support is floating on a raft of humanitarian interest. Without getting into a long recounting of the emergence of US support, Israel has always been upsetting to advisors and forced through over their objections by elected officials.
Fortunately, I guess, opinions on foreign policy don't matter as much since people in the US usually rate FP at the bottom of what they care about. This is why the Biden regime has largely been able to (correctly) support Israel to allow them to pursue their terror eradication goal, while the potential for more direct US involvement has constituted a credible threat to Hezbollah/Iran, keeping them to the periphery of the conflict. Much of the pro-Palestine movement is just an opportunity for "socially conscious" people to get pictures of themselves supporting The Current Thing on social media, thereby boosting their own social status, and is not representative of anything like an informed opinion.
"terror eradication" is an interesting euphemism for ethnic cleansing. Reminiscent of Nazi "anti-partisan operations"
I'm not here to challenge you in believing whatever you want
Russia news. Russia welcomes Westerners who are willing to abandon liberal values, except if they are Evangelicals, because then they will be killed (in Ukraine) or imprisoned (in Russia). I don't link because it is all over Google. Are these people really stupid? Alienating the largest anti-liberal group in the West? This does not look like a coherent state. One cannot at the same time drain away Western conservatives and be murderously paranoid about everyone who might be an American agent...
Isn't the largest anti-liberal group in the West Roman Catholics? At least they seem to be the only ones who sometimes manage to get their countries to not be too liberal on abortion and divorce.
It's very traditional and illiberal to persecute heretics :)
Russia lies about this. I was surprised how few people knew that the free world has far more religious freedom. It's also the more religious of the two sides including theocratic Iran. I thought it was one of those things we all learned in school. Ukraine sometimes flies over Russian Evangelicals to talk with American Evangelicals to impress this fact on them.
Anyway, if you want to leave the decadent US for a place where your dollar goes farther and people are more religious and traditional then there's much better options. Russia is a world leader in divorce and alcoholism. It has the same church attendance as Sweden. It also has a lot of crime and a life expectancy comparable to North Korea. You can argue that China's doing well but not Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, etc.
This is partly false (alcoholism) and partly misleading. Russian (and Ukrainian) life expectancy are very similar and very close to the world average. The murder rate (a proxy for the crime level as murders are harder to ignore) is similar to that of the US.
It's true that it's mostly secular but why invent things?
The WHO shows Russia as either the highest or second highest in alcohol addiction rate. It trades with Belarus though Hungary is creeping up close. It is not number one in alcohol consumption but that's not the claim.
The Russian murder rate is about 15% higher than the US which is still fairly significant. And its life expectancy at birth is about the same as North Korea, 73 years, vs 79 in the US.
Well, why did you choose North Korea rather than any other country having approximately the same (world average) life expectancy like Paraguay, Dominican Republic or Ukraine?
As to the WHO alcohol addiction data, you're right but I find it strange that it differs so much from alcohol consumption per capita rankings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_consumption_per_capita) and that similar countries have very different alcohol addiction rates.
Is Portugal 4x worse than Spain? Is Ukraine so much better than nearly all of its neighbours (3x less than Russia, Hungary and Belarus, 2x less than Poland and Slovakia)? (https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-details/GHO/alcohol-use-disorders-(15-)-12-month-prevalence-(-)-with-95-) It seems like the definition of "alcohol use disorder" plays a role here. Of course consumption per capita data is not perfect as well, it may not capture illegal production of alcohol.
Russia is definitely one of heavy-drinking countries (breaking news!), I just think this data doesn't tell us whether it's "normal East European drinking" or "a world leader in alcoholism" on par with Hungary, of all places.
Because they're allies that border each other and both undemocratic. But if you want to compare them to Paraguay then go ahead.
The WHO statistics are based on people who have long term addictive behaviors, not on raw consumption, because the WHO is interested in alcoholism as a disease. By most measures Russia is unusually socially dysfunctional even compared to Eastern Europe. I don't really care whether a country drinks. Finland drinks a lot. Saudi Arabia drinks very little. But people who need treatment for alcoholism is unambiguously a social issue in a way that Italians drinking wine is not.
FWIW, per capita alcohol consumption in Russia is lower than in Poland, UK, Germany or Ireland (and bunch of other countries), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_consumption_per_capita
It _used_ to be higher - but never as high as movies would lead you to believe...
Alcoholism and per capita alcohol consumption are (naturally) correlated but not exactly the same. Russia has a high concentration of substance abusers of various types and alcohol is among them.
Any data to back that claim?
Again - a lot of people in Russia (and other ex-USSR states) were hit hard by USSR collapse, and turned to alcohol (and other substances)... but they largely dies out by mid-00
It's WHO data. And while you're right alcoholism rates declined after the late 1990s/2000s they still remain higher than pretty much everyone else. The main competitors are Belarus or Hungary. And looking at the latest data it does look like Russia's slipped into second behind Belarus and, if trends continue, might slip into third behind Hungary. But this is due to Hungary/Belarus going up rather than Russia going down. And they're all neck in neck anyway.
At a purely pragmatic level, persecuting Evangelicals is likely to increase US support for Ukraine.
But also: do you *really* want to incur the wrath of the kind of Evangelical that donates a Red Heifer to Israel for .. um ... Biblical prophetic reasons. Those guys mioht not have any qualms about nuking Russia into annihilation.,
My wife and I do IVF to do genetic testing (we need to) and we want a large family. Based on our experiences I suspect that the Dr isn’t trying hard enough to optimize for a large family. Anyone have any thoughts on how to go about optimizing the process to get more out of each retrieval, increase the chances of successful transfers etc..?
Feel free to reply or email me at iz8162k23 at gmail
Try and convince the doctor that yes, you really *do* want a large family and won't end up with frozen embryos that you then leave in storage forever because "eh, we changed our minds, one kid is enough" or that, if you end up with twins/triplets in the successful round of implantation, you won't go to court over "we wanted ONE baby not THREE".
Multiple births seem to be considered a risk, and the recommendation is "selective reduction":
https://www.reproductivefacts.org/news-and-publications/fact-sheets-and-infographics/fertility-drugs-and-the-risk-of-multiple-births/
"What can I do to reduce the risk of multiple births?
During a fertility treatment cycle when fertility drugs are used with timed intercourse or insemination, your doctor will monitor your cycle very carefully. The use of fertility medications makes it more likely that one or more eggs will be fertilized. However, if it appears that too many eggs are developing, your doctor may cancel your cycle and tell you not to have an insemination or intercourse to reduce or eliminate your risk of multiple births. During in vitro fertilization (IVF), the egg and sperm are joined (fertilized) in the laboratory. The resulting embryo (fertilized egg) is then placed into the womb (uterus). Multiple gestations are least likely when one embryo is placed in the womb. ASRM has published guidelines on the number of embryos to transfer when undergoing an IVF cycle. These guidelines can be found at www.asrm.org.
Some pregnancies may start as a multiple gestation but undergo what’s called a “spontaneous reduction”. This is when one of the pregnancies stops growing (miscarriage) and the other pregnancy continues normally. No treatment is needed when this occurs, and ultrasounds can determine if the remaining pregnancy is growing normally. In some cases, the risk of a multiple gestation is too great. A doctor may suggest that you consider a procedure called selective reduction. Selective reduction is a procedure to reduce the number of fetuses to one or two. Usually, the procedure is done after the risk of a miscarriage, but still early in the pregnancy to increase the chance of a healthy and successful pregnancy. Choosing to do this procedure is difficult. Individuals and couples who are thinking about this option should talk to their doctor and a counselor."
use more ovary-stimulating drug
to get more eggs
per
cycle
I suspect my dr is too conservative with this but Idk. We’re hopefully going to be working with an advocate\concierge of sorts going forward but all the info I can get is good as I’m sure they aren’t perfectly informed either
There may be some disadvantages of getting lots of eggs per cycle. You would need to check on that. It def uses up the woman's remaining eggs faster. But whether it reduces quality of eggs or is hard on the woman's system I don't know. I had IVF and only made about 4 eggs per cycle. Talked with other women who were making a dozen or so per cycle, and nobody seemed worried about that. You will probably also have speak up to the doctor and tell him your preferences. If there are some disadvantages to doing it the way you want to, let him explain that. Then, if you decide that the disadvantages are outweighed by the advantages, just state clearly that you understand the pros and cons, but have some unusual priorities and would like treatment to be carried out in the way you prefer, rather than the usual way. Many docs would be OK with that, so long as what you're proposing isn't actually dangerous for the woman. Others, however, are not able to see you as in informed consumer of their services. But to be heard even by the responsive ones you have to speak up really loudly and clearly (but in a polite friendly way).
They seem pretty unwilling to engage with us in any way other than treating us as children.
It is probably easier for all docs to do their jobs if their patients accept the role of compliant children, so docs give subtle cues that that is what they prefer. However, into every life a little rain must fall, and there are situations where active patient involvement complicates the docs life and slows them down, but leads to a better outcome. I would recommend speaking up despite the cues that smiling compliance is preferred. You can start with something not a bit argumentative, something like "we've been thinking things over and would like to ask what is done in situations where people would like to have a large family. Are there adjustments that favor that outcome?" And then ask about pros and cons of the adjustments. You have to be willing to say things that defy the cues and make things awkward. Obviously if the doctor says, "I never do that, if you want someone who will then go elsewhere," then there's no point in continuing. But most are not that rigid.
Here's something very important and frequently ignored. For older women, frozen embryo transfers work better than fresh embryo transfers.
Interesting. Thanks !
Thanks! Replied
Just wanted to applaud Manifold for being so transparent with their finances!
*where* did they disclose their finances?
Could be 'Ozempic undoes the specific toxic effects of the modern environment', those being large amounts of calories in the form of ultraprocessed food and lack of exercise, and those toxic effects including, but not limited to, obesity.
I'm skeptical that brainwashing is a useful concept on average - I mean the chance that you or anyone you know has been brainwashed or will be brainwashed is low enough to consider other options first: horses not zebras.
External evidence for brainwashing [alternative explanation]:
- Membership of a niche political or religious organisation [the English speaking world prizes such groups highly in its history and culture, even if this or that group is cringe]
- Devotion to a charismatic leader [also cringe, but also the human condition - ancestor worship; monarchism; great man theory of history; fan culture]
- Refusal to engage in reasoned argument [an idea can be useful X% of the time and still break down the rest of the time. Many people find this embarrassing and don't like talking about it]
- breaks off contact with people outside the organisation [half-empty: teenage angst or mid-life crisis. Half-full: having constantly to defend your treasured imperfect idea to friends and family is exhausting, even if they are right that doesn't stop them being assholes about it, cutting off may be rational]
- sudden change in personality [half-empty: teenage angst or midlife crisis; half-full: “find yourself” is a trope but personality is a compromise, encountering a transformative idea can make a person e.g less agreeable and that is a good thing if they were too agreeable previously]
People delude themselves into believing ridiculous nonsense all the time, based on flimsy or nonexistent evidence. Human belief systems are far more of a social construct than anything else. So the odds of any one person you meet with outlandish views having been brainwashed is extremely low. But there are clearly psychological mechanisms to get people to believe in obvious nonsense, and someone with access to those mechanisms would be a very effective brainwasher.
> the odds of any one person you meet with outlandish views having been brainwashed is extremely low
Well said.
>someone with access to those mechanisms would be a very effective brainwasher.
Indeed. The question is what the odds are that the next type-A political/religious communicator you encounter is trying to brainwash you.
Alternatively, culture brainwashes everybody, making the familiar experiences you put in brackets universal.
Having an idea that works less than 100% of the time seems pretty universal! And if culture is brainwashing then we don't have a word for what real cults do and that seems a shame.
I think you left off most of the traits that distinguish cults from people being raised in a culture that carries with it a few assumptions about the world. Such as,
- Sleep deprivation.
- Replacement of normal activities with ideological reinforcement.
- Threat of isolation from group for deviation made the subject of continual, active concern.
- Near-term promises of an apocalypse or great change, intended to promote near-term thinking.
There is also the matter of degree or quantity. Threats of isolation for deviance are universal, but not a continual, active threat for very small deviations or lack of devotion.
I don't deny there really are cults that really do brainwash - I deny that the next crazy person you meet on the Internet has been brainwashed (on average).
Oh, it never occurred to me that you'd be denying that because I never thought anyone believed it. Yes I agree.
I'm pretty sure people use the word for fringe political groups on the other side of the divide e.g QAnon, BLM or whatever.
This community really loves truth. Is it widely known that learning one true statement in isolation can lead to a less accurate view or worse decision?
https://substack.com/@peteri394q/note/c-65138247
Note that learning one true statement and then having a less accurate view goes 100% against Bayesianism!
Basically investigate an issue thoroughly or shut up about it. But "truthbombing" is not helpful.
Thinking about this, I am much less sympathetic to free speech concerns. People just throwing 14/50 out (purported US racial crime stats) are really not helping anyone to understand this well. It is better if they shut up.
Understand that we are in a new historic situation. The legacy media obsessing about listening to both sides can be sometimes ridiculous but handles this kind of situation really well. Instagram memes do not. In the past free speech was more defensible, because the standards of argumentation and attention spans were higher.
I know there are dangers of people having too much power, I really wish this was somehow democratized.
> Note that learning one true statement and then having a less accurate view goes 100% against Bayesianism!
No it doesnt, its probabilistic for a reason
>Thinking about this, I am much less sympathetic to free speech concerns.
>I know there are dangers of people having too much power, I really wish this was somehow democratized.
what if PURELY HYPOTHETICALLY, we lived in a system when you were accused of a crime you got to say your side of the story before a judgement was ruled; and maybe imagine "rights" such as something about everyone saying what they wanted
Your link goes to an assertion that being aware of a stereotype, even when the stereotype is true, can cause people to make worse decisions. And of course, that is possible, if the person has a poor understanding of probability. But that certainly doesn't go against Bayesianism. In fact it is the opposite! The point of Bayesianism is to help make an accurate assessment in the context of numerous sources of information, even if many are somewhat inconclusive.
What you are saying is pretty old and trite: that we should promote the well-intentioned lie in the hope of attaining a happier future. What you neglect is that people have memory and you can only go to that well so many times before it dries up. Maybe if people were more aware of the 14/50 statistic (it's for homicides collated by the FBI and I believe it's gotten worse over the last few years; "purported" is an adjective with little justification) they might be less eager to leap to simplistic explanations of the statistics of fatal interactions with police - but I don't see you complaining about *those* errors.
Or is your quibble just with statements made in isolation? But they never are; even if someone just posts "14/50", they are posting it in a context of implied assertions, some of which may well be false, and it is right to challenge those. But by that token, your argument also provides only a small part of the picture...
There's a classic Scott post on "Learned Epistemic Helplessness" in this vein.
What makes you think this community loves truth? I'd say that's a false statement right off the bat. Most of the interactions on these threads seem to be people arguing their opinions without any supporting data.
I'd say it's better than most places for discussing things, but not great. Things weighing in favor of people being responsive when they hear the case for an unfamiliar truth is that people are are less identified with groups united by common views; and are smart and have trained minds, so can understand complex arguments and data. Things weighing against are that many people are very identified with their smarts and erudition, and so experience attacks on things they believe as attacks on them; many people are not good listeners; and many people are not good introspectionists, so are much less likely to be consciously aware that they are rejecting an idea because of wounded vanity.
The best set-up I ever heard about for fruitful idea exchange was the Yale Political Union, who had (and may still have -- I don't know) the idea that all debaters could expect to be "broken" in some debate, i.e. to say at some point, "I have no rebuttals for your main argument. You have convinced me you are right." Most debaters broke others and were broken from time to time, and having some of each on their record earned people respect.
Even worse, I was recently chastised by someone on here for providing too much data to support an empirical claim.
Nothing drives soi-disant rationalists crazier than someone who swamps their preconceived notions with contrary data. I hang out here for those moments, and I cherish them. Can you provide a link to the exchange? ;-)
https://fromthechair.substack.com/p/magic-runes-and-sand-dunes-the-binary
So in the abstract, I think it's worth refining the concept of "true" into three variants.
* illustrative = correspondence between signifier and signified
* faithful = correspondence between signified and referent
* factual = correspondence between signifier and referent
In the ivory tower, "factual" (i.e. "truth" being a property of whether propositions are descriptive of reality) tends to be privileged over the others. But what's often more important is "faithfullness" (i.e. whether your mental model is faithful to reality). Because mental-models (not blobs of ink) are what pay the rent.
So when I hear
> Is it widely known that learning one true statement in isolation can lead to a less accurate view or worse decision?
my initial reaction is: "focusing on statements over models is a red-herring to begin with". E.g. this is the issue with statements like "dihydrogen monoxide is a key component of acid rain". Technically correct, but pragmatically misleading for those who slept through chemistry class.
----
> Note that learning one true statement and then having a less accurate view goes 100% against Bayesianism!
To reiterate, I think it's a mistake to privilege statements over models. E.g. copper is a micronutrient. Copper is needed for a healthy diet, but you can't just eat copper ingots in isolation and expect to live very long. Likewise, a proposition is often just a single node in a bayesian network. That node might be *needed* to achieve 100% accuracy. But of course it's not *sufficient* to achieve 100% accuracy. And there's no guarantee that adding that particular node to the model will result in a monotonic increase in accuracy, on the margin. This is what Peter is really getting at, when he talks about conditionalization.
----
Yes, epistemology is hard work. No royal road. Dunning Kruger. Facts are cheaper than models. Etc. So on the individual level, I'd agree that "deep dive or stfu" is probably a good heuristic. That being said,
> Understand that we are in a new historic situation.
> In the past free speech was more defensible, because the standards of argumentation and attention spans were higher.
As I understand, no actually, we're in an old historical situation. The Pull Request [0] tells me (don't remember where exactly, but I'll look if asked) that Ben Franklin, et al would have felt right at home with modern shitposters on twitter. It's the post-WWII era that's unique in the quality of its information environent. The theories I've heard on why include: A) market segmentation was not as advanced; B) government regulation. I wish I could comment more on this, but I don't really understand it that well myself at the moment.
The idea "freedom of speech" was predicated on the idea that the media environment is a market, and bad ideas would lose to their competition. So an advocate for freedom of speech would probably counter that the best counter to "truthbombing about the 13%" is for others to advocate for the contrary position. Personally, I have some reservations about why this might not always be the case, which I find hard to articulate [1] at the moment. But I think it's worth acknowledging that the original solution was to have the racists, the antiracists, and any other willing contenders, to duke it out in an epistemic battle royale. Rather than to expect one's ideological rivals to cultivate a sense of discipline and rigor.
----
[0] https://www.thepullrequest.com/
[1] If I had to put it into words, I'd say that
A) the idea that "truth always wins" seems sort of optimistic to me. I do think truth tends to win the long-run. But, as the saying goes: "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent". I think falsehoods can be very effective in the short-term/medium-term.
B) I think the market incentives for falsehood can be stronger than the market incentives for verisimilitude, even in the long-term, if the falsehoods are loadbearing components of the simulacrum.
For an intra-rationalist debate about how certain kinds of evidence can skew reasoning, I recommend this: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-kavanaugh-on-fideism
> Note that learning one true statement and then having a less accurate view goes 100% against Bayesianism!
I don't see this - we're picking marbles from a bag, of course picking one extra marble can skew your picture of what's in the bag.
See https://nickbostrom.com/information-hazards.pdf for an academic dive into this.
The problem with info hazards in the real world is that they are usually highly contextual: a fact that might challenge one person's deeply held incorrect belief can push another further down the road of confirmation bias. Free speech is a concern because people who are challenged by a true fact can claim to just be preventing confirmation bias and protecting everyone from true but misleading info and thus suppress it. Allowing only true information is the worst solution, except for all the others.
The secret to being a bore is to say everything.
Following on from the interesting "slave/master morality" discussion I had with Concerned Citizen in the previous thread, I've now written a more sustained criticism of Nietzsche's work:
https://gayasarainbow.substack.com/p/ni-dieu-ni-maitre
As well as criticising his idea, I try to work through the political implications for us. Basically, the master/slave thing is lurking in the background of the Culture War, even when not explicitly invoked -- so dissolving it makes the whole debate look a lot less intractable (at least to me).
Even if you have no interest in Nietzsche, please take a look at Section 4, which is the politically juicy part (but fairly short and simple).
Does anyone know anything about mold-related respiratory issues? I’ve been having intermittent breathing issues for the past year, which I have finally, (nearly) conclusively linked to mold exposure. I’ve seen doctors for this a few times, but they have tended to focus on the wrong things, and I have yet to actually be diagnosed with anything.
The problem started with my car: within a week or so of getting it back from a body shop (where it had sat idle for two months last summer) I started having symptoms while driving it and for some time afterwards. Once I figured this out I mostly stopped driving it, but the symptoms persisted intermittently for weeks afterwards, slowly fading in frequency and intensity. For the next several months I made repeated attempts to clean the car (not knowing what exactly was responsible), only to have the symptoms return at full intensity if I tried driving it again. In December I discovered mold growing under the seats, which I assumed was responsible, but my best efforts to clean it still didn’t render it safe to drive. We ultimately just got rid of the car, but that didn’t solve the problem: I had several recurrences of high-intensity symptoms in the months following (which led me to doubt the mold had been responsible), before gradually returning to something like normalcy during the middle of the summer. Then, towards the end of July, I started gradually having symptoms return in my apartment. I’ve managed to play whack-a-mold with several clusters–one of which I identified conclusively, dispelling my remaining doubts as to the cause–and intend to scour the apartment thoroughly, but that won’t happen instantly.
The major symptoms have been aching lungs, shortness of breath (sometimes extreme but generally short-lived) and a strange, altered-state-of-consciousness feeling that’s a little like (but not exactly like) dizziness, lightheadedness or being high. Each of these differs in its pattern of presentation, and they don’t necessarily occur all at the same time. There’s a long list of other possible minor symptoms, but none of them have the same combination of consistency, frequency and unusualness as those three. My spouse has had exactly none of these issues despite driving the same car (far more than I did after the trouble started) and living in the same apartment, which suggests that it’s an allergic or other autoimmune problem.
The single most helpful thing to have right now would be something to take to my doctor to start rending this problem legible and hopefully treatable: a test or a specialist referral I could request, or something like that. To keep this from getting to novel length. I’ll write a separate comment in reply to this one detailing what tests I’ve already had done, and a few relevant pieces of medical history.
The next most useful thing to have would be any non-medical strategies for mitigating the problem. I’m doing my best to both avoid affected areas and to clean proactively, but neither are easy when I usually can’t tell there’s a problem somewhere until it starts making me sick.
And if anyone has similar experiences to share, I’d be happy to hear about them, even if they don’t contain any actionable advice.
Finally, I’ve tried to strike a balance between brevity and describing the situation, but I could write many times more than this on the details of the symptoms, circumstances and sequence of events. If there’s anything you want to hear more detail about, by all means ask.
I don't know anything about this, but I came across this chronic illness programme focussed on nervous system regulation: https://retrainingthebrain.com/
If you scroll down, a couple of their physician endorsements mention mold-related illness.
I came across the programme linked to by this person who used it to recover from ME: https://alexmeeka.com/about/
She reviews the programme here: https://alexmeeka.com/2024/07/14/my-review-of-dnrs-a-neuroplasticity-based-program-for-chronic-illness-recovery/
Health and Medical Information:
I'm 37, male, in generally active and in good health (though significantly overweight). The one medication I take regularly medication is extended-release methylphenidate for ADHD (Biphentin here in Canada, better known as Ritalin in the U.S.). I started taking it four or five months before the trouble started and stepped up to a much higher dose (which pushed it from "not really working" to "working quite well") about two months prior. I've had COVID once, at the very end of 2022; I was up-to-date on vaccinations and recovered within a few days: I didn't have any lingering effects that would indicate long-COVID in the 8 months between then and the start of my breathing issues.
I'd been totally out of shape at the start of 2023, but made a serious effort to get more exercise starting in March or early April. When I moved to the higher Biphentin dose in June I stepped these efforts up further, as I discovered the medication worked more reliably on days when I'd exercise. I still wasn't in what I'd consider good shape by the time the issues began, but I was well on my way there: at the beginning of the month I'd gone on vacation and spent a week hiking nearly every day, something I'd never have managed a year earlier. I've been very consistent in keeping up with exercise in the year since, though breathing issues have sometimes limited what I can do, and gains have come much slower than in the past.
When the breathing issues started I had a couple of appointments with my GP, who ordered some blood tests, an ECG, none of which returned anything unusual. His only other suggestion was that the Biphentin could be responsible. I was highly skeptical because the timing didn't match well, but went down to a lower dose for a while, with no obvious effect on the issues. I didn't seek medical help for months after, believing I had the problem in-hand (since it was then confined to my car). When it started to crop up elsewhere in March, I booked an appointment with a doctor at the health center at my university (I don't think much of my GP, and was happy to realize I had a quick alternative). She ordered more blood work, another ECG and a chest x-ray. Blood work came back normal other than a slightly-elevated white blood cell count. ECG showed a minor irregularity, which got me referred to a cardiologist, which seems to have been a dead-end. She also ordered a spirometry test: unfortunately the wait time was 1-2 months and there was no way to ensure the test occurred on a day when I was significantly symptomatic: I ended up having mild shortness of breath that day but nothing else. The test came back normal.
And that's the extent of it. Other than the spirometry (which was unfortunately timed) I don't feel like any of the tests I had were especially suited to detect the problems I'm actually having, but I don't especially know what to request instead or how to pursue this further. I have an appointment with the university doctor on Friday, and I will at least be able to tell her pretty definitely that the mold is the cause; she was dubious before, when the evidence was, admittedly, much more ambiguous.
Not to sound all Fat Person Complaining (because that is precisely what I am going to do), but it could be that, as you say you are overweight and out of shape/getting back into shape, that the doctor(s) consider "well duh, of course you're breathless, you're fat - lose the tubbiness, you'll breathe better".
It's often hard to get concerns taken seriously when the doctor is looking at the 'obvious' answer - your bloodwork came back okay so it's not mould spores, it's because you're fat (insert saw about 'hoofbeats and zebras' here).
If you're going to pursue this, you really do need to have a lot of evidence about yes, I am exposed to mould, no it's not allergies, etc.
It's a real concern, though I think I've been lucky enough to avoid most of it in this case. It probably helps that by pure coincidence, the day I had my first appointment with the university doctor I also had probably the single worst shortness of breath event I've had to date. I usually don't notice it unless I'm doing something that involves at least mild exertion, but she said I was audibly gasping for breath *while talking to her* (which I actually *hadn't* noticed, thanks ADHD hyperfocus). Anyhow, she did make a bit of a comment on my weight, but clearly didn't regard it has the whole problem. And she did prescribe me an inhaler, which is (one presumes) not intended as merely a treatment for Being Fat.
The annoying line I've got instead, from both doctors, is "maybe it's anxiety." Setting aside all the reasons I think that's exceedingly unlikely, it would still be an unbelievably stupid place to *start.* Anxiety would be pretty much the best-case-scenario: it's not going to cause any long-term damage to my lungs, and the optimal treatment might well be to just ignore it. But it's also extremely difficult to falsify: there's no test that will conclusively rule out anxiety the way you can rule out infection or allergies or anything else. I've tried to push back against that suggestion as firmly as I can without crossing the line into coming across as "crazy person loudly insisting they're not crazy."
Part of all that is my own fault, too. The times when I've sought medical help have specifically been the times when I felt like I didn't know what was going on. In December I was sure (correctly, as it turns out) that it was the mold in my car; I didn't see any reason to involve a doctor again because I was sure I could handle it myself. Only when stuff happened to make me doubt that conclusion did I go seek out a doctor again; this means I didn't make a point of impressing on her quite how strong the evidence for "it's the mold, damn it" really was (and even, doubts aside, it was really pretty strong). So when I mentioned it as the most likely possibility she said "well, maybe" and went on to focus on other things.
In hindsight, I should have been more proactive about looking for more info even when I *was* pretty sure it was the mold. Even when I finish getting my apartment clean, I'm sure this isn't the last time I'll have to deal with this, and I want as much information and as many weapons as I can: I should have had that mindset from the start. Regardless, I do wish the doctors had taken me more seriously. Which is the refrain of every Fat Person Complaining ever. :-)
See a respiratory physician and consider getting a CT scan of your lungs. There are various types of interstitial lung disease that could explain these symptoms, many triggered by external allergens such as mold (see - extrinsic allergic alveolitis)
I wrote about why you need a mentor (or become one), mainly because of regretting that I haven't had one yet myself: https://handpickedberlin.com/why-you-need-a-mentor/
Late to the party, but if you still see this I'd appreciate feedback.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the suppression of the self, in the context of meditation. So I was thinking about this during a recent debate on race. And it occurred to me that one form of white privilege, and in particular white male privilege, is that it appears that we have an easier time detaching ourselves from our identity. If someone says something mean about white males, my visceral emotional response is rather low. And so is my visceral emotional response about most of my identity. I know not everyone is the same. But I can see someone who experiences discrimination from a young age to have a naturally stronger sense of identity. If you don’t like me because of how I look or where I come from, then “I” must be real and different than you. So while I think that identity politics are objectively bad, and that enlightened people would benefit from disassociating themselves from their various identities in most cases, I can also see why this would be easier to do, as in requiring less mental stamina, for a non-marginalized group. In this context I’m talking about white privilege not as a systemic advantage of itself (I’m more likely to be promoted just because I’m white) but as an intrinsic advantage (I can reason with less identity bias), even if the latter is a second order effect from the former.
> suppression of the self
That's an interesting choice of words; I would have expected something more like "dissolution of the self". That would take the perspective that what we call the "self" is an illusion.
> But I can see someone who experiences discrimination from a young age to have a naturally stronger sense of identity.
I think you're taking small population-level differences and blowing them up into absolutes. Even if you've correctly identified a general trend, you shouldn't assume that every person you encounter is an example of that trend, especially in places where people are already pre-selected for being outliers in other dimensions.
I often feel something like this. Let's take a historic look. National, ethnic and religious identities used to be big. Then after WW2 Sartre and other existentialists came up with this idea that existing-as-something is unauthentic. This has been rather explicitly about Nazis making a big deal out of national-racial identity. And then Alan Watts and hippie buddhism happened and so on. Anyway by the 1970's there was this type of a completely freely floating individual who does not need to belong to anywhere, with Frank Zappa a typical example.
And then at some point people realized that this works for white men and not so well for everybody else, partially because everybody else still treats them according to their perceived identity, partially because they actually need that identity as a sort of a group-therapy-safe-space way.
What you call privilege I call virtue. I'm not sure how true your theory is, but I don't think it's productive to make excuses for undesirable tendencies.
If I had to guess, it's personal insecurity in a social context where resentment is the order of the day.
if you look at the history if it, it is privilege: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-343/comment/66072476
I'm seeing excuses decorated with namedropping of famous people who were probably not as influential as you think they are.
Another possible reason for not being very distressed by criticism and mockery of your demographic group is not identifying with it very powerfully. I am a woman, but have never felt much personal rage in response to screeds about unfair treatment of women, sexism, etc. I think it's because I don't feel much bond with other members of my gender. I feel a strong bond with female friends, of course, but not with womanhood as a whole. In general, I tend not to from bonds with groups. I don't know why -- something to do with not being very social in general I think. Anyhow, I don't know whether any of this applies to you, but it's another route by which someone can end up relatively impervious to attacks on one's demographic.
relax, everybody is on the spectrum around here :)))
Hypothesis: everyone who generally supports a major party in US politics believes the other party to be more authoritarian. Americans, with the exception of Curtis Yarvin, don't like authoritarianism and identify with the party they perceive to be more freedom loving. Or does anyone reading this believe the party they support is more authoritarian than the other side?
I think of both parties as theEnemyOfFreedom(TM), (albeit they have different mixes of the chains in which they would bind us) so I don't support either one.
Paradoxically, I think the bugman would willingly describe himself simultaneously as both an authoritarian and a freedomphile. To paraphrase his own words: "Neon-Redox is to Libertarianism as Relativity is to Newtonian Physics". Or perhaps it would be more helpful to describe his salespitch as "small government, but with strong state-capacity". And he speaks rather highly of Rothbard, Von Mises, etc (but also Friedrich List).
Good point. I shouldn't have made an exception for him. He seems to believe democracy is more authoritarian than monarchy. He's just another freedom loving American like the rest of us but with different perceptions.
People I like, who tell me to do things I already want to do, aren't authoritarian! It's only authoritarian when it comes from people I dislike, or people who want me to do something I don't want to do.
I'm not American but every party I have voted for has at least some authoritarian tendencies. I don't believe liberty is the highest good, so I'm okay with that, but even if I did, it's reasonable to trade off authoritarian tendencies in one area against another. Murray Rothbard voted Democrat sometimes because they were more anti-war, even though he was a libertarian.
I vote party A more often than party B and think party A is more authoritarian (thats not why i vote for them) maybe regularly voting for both disqualifies me here.
*NYC People*: We want to host a weekly AI group to discuss papers, new developments, etc. Here's a form to gauge people's availability: https://whenisgood.net/5mffk8h - I'm assuming this would be a weekly thing, so just mark whatever time slots you'd expect to be available on a weekly basis. Time zone is EST.
My personal vote is we meet in person + host a camera feed that runs on Zoom. In-person chats are just so much more fruitful in my experience.
I wrote an article about a phenomenon I’ve noticed where people’s predictions tend to follow the rules of fiction even though reality is usually much more boring: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wXyXtQTCZ8upjgBvZ/beware-the-science-fiction-bias-in-predictions-of-the-future
It's not just a matter of SF. I'd call it "narrative bias". Stories/narratives in general are systematically biased by their very nature and this tends to bias the expectations of anyone who isn't thrust in contact with the ground reality data of the relevant question.
Ways that stories are biased include
* Everything important is done by a small number of memorable characters
* Everything important happens due to the intentional actions of the heroes and villains or at the very least is an identifiable consequence of the character flaws/virtues of said characters.
* The audience already knows that everything will work out in the end. And also usually knows a lot more about the world than the characters should know.
* The audience also knows everything mentioned in the story is relevant to the story, which greatly constraints what will happen next.
* The world operates at the fidelity of simulation by one person with no special expertise
* No matter what happens, the world and people have to be similar to the modern day audience so they can identify with the story
And of course it goes on and on.
One of the greatest correctives of this is to read stories about real life. For example, I read a lot about WW2 and I was struck over and over by how accounts of war are never remotely like fiction. Not just in technical details but the way that things happen mostly due to random chance and fog of war and the "story" is completely directionless. This often even bleeds through in movies that are *based* on real life stories, though the filmwriters often take significant liberties in order to fight this and make the story more story-like.
Once someone made a summary of the common elements of conspiracy theories and it immediately struck me that it can also double as a "how to write a popular movie script" manual. It is not bad epistemology. It is people watching films. Note: popular, not good. It is people watching the rather lowbrow or maybe youth-targeting kinds of films. The kinds with Lex Luthor kinds of characters. If you rather watch Space Odyssey the result will be different, but ultimately still too story-like.
Another thing is that it really matters who is accusing whom. I distinctly remember the first Star Wars reboots, early 2000s, when Palpatine was conspiring to overthrow the republic, and people were looking at each other funny and gulped. They did not say so, but they thought about Bush/Cheney. The whole kind of thing sounded believable for a moment, even when not very probable. Of course that was not a very high brow movie either. Higher brow movies avoid these very obviously evil characters and show someone more conflicted.
Let's call this the Popcorn Theory of making sense of the world.
>Once someone made a summary of the common elements of conspiracy theories and it immediately struck me that it can also double as a "how to write a popular movie script" manual.
QAnon is/was a mirrored Alternate Reality Game:
https://archive.ph/20240424153811/https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/qanon-game-plays-believers/2021/05/10/31d8ea46-928b-11eb-a74e-1f4cf89fd948_story.html
This is sometimes a problem with "based on a true story" movies. If it was completely fiction, the script writer could just make up something dramatically appropriate. But, they are constrained by what actually did happen...
(Of course, "based on a true story" movies contain much that is made up)
I tend to assume that "a true story" contains much that is made up. And "based on a true story" contains little that isn't!
Yeah, it's really interesting to see how writers handle this.
One notable case is Riphagen: The Untouchable. As the name suggests, in real life the villain got away scott free. The movie solves this by a) making him seem like a hero at first and b) once that is revealed, introducing a completely fictional sympathetic character trying to bring him to justice. Said character eventually manages to track him down and gets into a dramatic confrontation, at which point the villain makes a speech, kills him, and drives away.
> but the way that things happen mostly due to random chance and fog of war and the "story" is completely directionless.
That's something that bugs me about a lot of self-help stuff. Shit happens. Maybe our brains process it through narrative, but that's a limitation that we need to work around. "Crafting a personal narrative" is an exercise in hubris and narcissistic naval gazing.
Ewwww, are we supposed to be crafting personal narratives these days?
<mildSnark>
Is crafting a personal narrative better or worse than promoting a personal brand? :-)
</mildSnark>
Ah, yes, personal brands. Self as commodity.. Yecch to all of it. People who in midlife are feeling a certain loss of enthusiasm for self might consider viewing this change as a developmental step -- increased maturity, decreased self-centeredness. If someone's really bothered by falling out of love with themselves I think simple interventions, things like having their butt liposuctioned, make more sense than plastic surgery of the self. "Crafting personal narratives," OMG. It's like that shit people write about themselves on dating apps: "Joyful, insightful 40-something, loves deep conversations, art, staying fit . . .." Back when there were no dating apps, but people used to advertise for dates in the Personals part of the Classifieds, I was once browsing the personals in the Village Voice and flinching at all the glowing personal narratives on display. Then I came to this guy: "Fat dirty depressed writer seeks woman who can stand him." If I had been someone capable of answering a date ad, I would have responded to that guy.
Many Thanks!
>Yecch to all of it.
Agreed!
> If someone's really bothered by falling out of love with themselves I think simple interventions, things like having their butt liposuctioned, make more sense than plastic surgery of the self.
LOL! Good point. Come to think of it, plastic psychosurgery reminds me of the line from the original Planet of the Apes: "You cut up his brain, you bloody baboon!"
>OMG. It's like that shit people write about themselves on dating apps: "Joyful, insightful 40-something, loves deep conversations, art, staying fit . . .."
Conjures up an image of taking an advertisement down into Doctor Frankenstein's lab, and when the lightening bolt flows through the cardboard cut-out: "It's alive!" (well, sort-of...).
Not that I'm aware of. Are there actual non-online circles in which this is meaningfully a thing?
Just tried googling the phrase "craft personal narrative," and there sure were a lot of hits. Sounds like its about as popular as Brazilion butt lifts.
That's why I asked whether there were actual *non-online circles* where this is a thing. I've never heard anyone say it in real life (and for that matter, never heard of it online until right now).
I know this term has another meaning, but it literally feels like self-abuse to me.
A small, family-owned business, High Sierra Showerheads, would love your votes for their product in a manufacturing association's contest for the Coolest Thing Made in California.
They make water- and energy-saving shower heads that use a unique nozzle design; this product also incorporates a truly fogless mirror.
Voting takes 2 clicks and 10 seconds max: the first to get to a web page, the other to click on a "VOTE NOW" button. (You won't be asked for your email address or any other info to vote.) Thanks!
Here's the direct link to the voting page, on a California manufacturing association's website:
https://coolestthingcalifornia.com/contestants/reflections/
(Just click the "VOTE NOW" button at the top.)
Here are details for anyone interested. You can cast up to 5 votes in a row, each day. And every vote will help:
https://mailchi.mp/highsierrashowerheads/2024-coolest-thing-contest-1
Thanks!
Update: great points by both Al Quinn and Arrk Mindmaster, in replies below!
The "details for anyone interested" web page answers these questions, but clearly there's benefit in describing the 'ask' more fully in this post, as well!
High Sierra Showerheads is a small business in the California mountains. For over a decade, they've made water- and energy-saving shower heads using a globally-unique nozzle design that splits and collides water streams. They have customers like Ohio State and the US Air Force Academy, and their products are best picks by the likes of CNET and CNN Underscored.
High Sierra's owner/founder, David Malcolm, created a design for a truly fogless mirror, fully integrated into a shower head. This is the product entered in the current contest. We'd love to see it become more widely known; it's a great tool for shaving and many other beauty or health needs in the shower!
This contest is for the Coolest Thing Made in California, sponsored by the California Manufacturers & Technology Association (CMTA). This is the second year of this contest, which spotlights great products built in California, with the goal of publicizing and supporting manufacturing in California and the USA.
This year, there are 158 entrants. The contest has multiple rounds; the 16 products with the most votes in the initial round will go on to the next round. Last year, a Tesla SUV was the winner. And a different product made by High Sierra Showerheads, their Half Dome rain shower head, also reached the Top 16 last year.
What is the point of these "contests"? Getting randos to click on something with no understanding for you to "win" is such a depressing thought. Just hire some people on Mechanical Turk.
Thanks for this super-helpful feedback, Al. I've added info to my original post above that I'm hoping will help answer this question. And I'll definitely put more info into these posts if I ever do this again!
Some constructive criticism here.
Nothing really here to make me want to click. Is the only enticement to support a small, family-owned business I don't even know the name of, let alone what they do. Yes, it's a small amount of effort, but my internet security instincts also take over and make me not want to click strange links.
I recommend you describe the product, and what voting for it will help win, so I know why it would help and what it would help with.
Thanks so much, Arrk Mindmaster, for this incredibly helpful feedback. I tend to err on the side of verbosity, so in this post I veered too far into the terse side.
I've added more info that I'm hoping will make this clearer!
Weird fragment from today's New York Times summary, with emphasis added to one word:
>“Only in America,” Harris said, as the Philadelphia crowd burst into a chant of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”
>This sort of unabashed patriotism doesn’t always come naturally to today’s Democratic Party. But it has been central to Harris’s presidential campaign. In her ads and speeches, she portrays herself as a tough, _populist_, progressive patriot.
Haven't they been using "populist" as a term of derision, close to a slur, for years? And yet, here they are using it either neutrally or positively??? Is all the previous use being flushed down the memory hole this week? Usually they use it to mean something a large fraction of the electorate likes, but which isn't enough to the left for the Times's taste. This has the flavor of "we were always at war with East Asia"...
"Right-wing populist" has certainly been a term of derision for a long time. I'm not sure "populist" by itself has the same connotation. I remember Bernie Sanders being described as a populist fairly often in 2016, and it didn't seem like most people who said it intended it derogatorily.
Many Thanks!
>I remember Bernie Sanders being described as a populist fairly often in 2016, and it didn't seem like most people who said it intended it derogatorily.
Admittedly I didn't follow Sanders's campaign closely, so I probably missed that...
>"Right-wing populist" has certainly been a term of derision for a long time.
Presumably by the left and sort-of kind-of center-left (including the non-Fox media)? Do you happen to remember if Fox used "left-wing populist" as a term of derision for Sanders?
No populist is not considered a slur in itself.
They come in a lot of flavors.
Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Tulsi Gabbard, Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson, J D Vance and Sarah Palin are all considered by some to be populists.
I don’t watch cable news but ‘left wing populist’doesn’t have a whole lot of zing when you consider that Bernie calls himself a Democratic Socialist.
That sounds reasonable. Many Thanks!
I feel the need to plug "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson", a musical about our most (in)famously populist President, from the good old days of the W. Bush administration. The first song is called "Populism, Yea Yea", and a chorus from a later song is:
> Sometimes, you have to take the initiative
> Sometimes, your whole family dies of cholera
> Sometimes, you have to make your own story
> Sometimes, you have to shoot the storyteller in the neck
> Sometimes, you have to take back the country
> Sometimes, you have to kill everyone
> Everyone, everyone, everyone, everyone, everyone!
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL13222FB159C4B271
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Bloody_Andrew_Jackson
https://genius.com/albums/Michael-friedman/Bloody-bloody-andrew-jackson
Many Thanks! I'd heard of Jackson, but hadn't known of the musical about him. I tend to think of Jackson as a predecessor to General Masaharu (Bataan Death March) Homma.
Just part of the centrist vibe shift. Left-populism used to be a thing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Man_a_King_(song)
Many Thanks! I'd known of Huey Long, but not of his policy proposals. Yup, definitely left of center.
He drove FDR to the left during the Great Depression.
Many Thanks!
It could just be accurate. Price controls are a populist measure, and so are subsidies for consumers. So is a chant at a rally. "It worked once," I can imagine the campaign managers thinking.
I have rather the same feeling as Jeffrey; political rallies where the candidate flies the flag and their proposals are described as "populist" were described in terms that went as far as "this is a threat to democracy!" because something something strongman il duce fascism something something.
Seems that if it's a strong woman, that makes it all okay. See also the crafting of Walz as "now this is a *real* guy who is a veteran and is a white Mid-western man and is down home and fits all the stereotypes, but now we *like* that kind of thing".
Oh, well: we have always supported Mom and apple pie, right?
It would be okay if it was anyone from the right party, because the majority of newspapers are, and have always been, "party papers." It's a little unnatural to see the Times reveal it.
I shouldn't be so surprised, politics and indeed partisanship have always been like this. "These are my principles, and if you don't like them, I have others!"
Many Thanks! It still feels weird to me to see the spin on this reverse so suddenly.
>Price controls are a populist measure
Ouch, Ouch, Ouch. Yeah, in the sense of both popular, and anti-elitist (in the _unfortunate_ sense of: Economists have _studied_ this, and have actual knowledge of what goes wrong, and the general public doesn't know/remember this, and Harris is (actively?) ignoring specialist knowledge. This isn't a good-for-the-99%, bad-for-the-1% antielitism. :-( )
I wouldn't worry too much, politics is a machine for turning promises into air. I also doubt the other candidate would really bring back public hangings.
Then again, we have nothing else to go on...
I agree that all the debt forgiveness etc. etc. are campaign promises, which are on a par with "be a good child and Santa will bring you a present", except you are more likely to get something from Santa.
Yup, I think of all politicians as two-faced - but that is probably an underestimate, particularly for the recent crops of them...
Many Thanks!
>politics is a machine for turning promises into air
Very true!
In Open Thread 339 I wrote:
> The thing that bugs me most about Kamala is the way that reality is about to shift around her.... culture is downstream of politics, and in particular culture is downstream of the short-term electoral needs of the Democratic Party, which means she's about to be beatified, canonised, and then deified in rapid succession. The things that people think they believe about her this week will be gone by the end of next month
And that was before the term "coconutpilled" was even invented.
Anyway populism is cool now, and Democrats chant "USA USA" at rallies, and it has always been this way, quit misremembering.
Many Thanks!
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
I think "populist" has always been neutral-ish, at least in my parlance. It refers to a platform or candidate that builds its platform and power by (charitably) appealing to the people, rather than by ingratiating itself with the elite, or (uncharitably) by debasing itself before the whims of the lowest-common-denominator Joe Schmoe without regard for what's actually good policy.
I don't think there's anything inconsistent about liking some populists and disliking others. Trump is a populist on the right; Bernie is a populist on the left. Romney is a non-populist on the right; Hillary is a non-populist on the left.
I think the negative aura the word has acquired in the last few years is just a symptom of it having been used to describe Trump too often.
It's been used to describe anyone with more restrictionist views on immigration/migrants that are more closely aligned with public opinion. Orban, Meloni, PiS etc etc. And it's been deemed deeply negative by the West's thought leaders since migration is one of the contemporary left's sacred cows.
Many Thanks!
>I think the negative aura the word has acquired in the last few years is just a symptom of it having been used to describe Trump too often.
Could be, though I've also seen the Times use it to describe many politicians that it dislikes, typically in Europe as well as the USA, e.g. Viktor Orban.
Apparently the UK is releasing prisoners now to make room for people who posted mean things on social media during the recent riots.
What’s going on in the UK?? Are you guys doing alright??
No! We're not!
The government has made it clear they would rather sleepwalk into a sectarian, fractured society than try to police the scary parts of the population.
The arrests and media crackdowns are happening for one reason only: to signal to the aboriginal British that they cannot get away with the same tactics that minority or politically favoured groups are allowed to use to influence policy.
A while ago I argued with someone on here who smugly told me that if a gang of thugs wants to burn down my business, the only moral thing to do is let them go right ahead and hope I can eventually claim on the insurance afterwards.
Those are the rules for me, a white British man. If instead you're a Muslim and you believe a gang of Far Right are coming to burn down your mosque, you're allowed to form gangs of your own and roam the streets wielding machetes, which the police won't take off you and the media will call "mostly peaceful" for a few moments before once again talking about the Far Right.
A lot of people right now are holding that I would be in the wrong yet the Muslims are in the right. There are all sorts of fine distinctions they can reach for to justify this - distinctions that need not necessarily be coherent with each other, or still apply tomorrow when talking about a different case.
Their *motivation* for rushing to find these distinctions is that the organised, motivated and coordinated Muslim communities are *not to be crossed*, but I can be without consequence.
People unconsciously assume that things will stay as they are. They watch the fuel gauge falling and note that yes that's theoretically a concern, but they cannot viscerally imagine that the car will actually stop, because the car has always been running.
When the teacher is weak and unauthoritative, de facto control of the class reverts to the rowdiest group of kids. Playground rules don't work on the basis of universal principles, it's about who has the strength and the numbers and the will to impose their desires on others. The modern white British do not have these things.
We've just had an election, so it's five years before anyone in power next has to pretend to give a shit about people's opinions. The power of media and government "nudge psychology" programs will eventually sap the British people of any will to coordinate, while in the short term the internet censorship destroys their ability to do so.
>while in the short term the internet censorship destroys their ability to do so.
BTW, the EU is trying to censor _in the USA_ https://jonathanturley.org/2024/08/19/the-eu-just-declared-war-on-free-speech-in-america-it-is-time-to-fight-back/
> aboriginal British
For anyone past the Celts, this description seems like a stretch when their conquest of the group preceding them is reasonably well-documented.
But if it wasn't well-documented, it would still be a safe assumption that it happened. Which is true everywhere. Which means that no one is aboriginal.
I'd say "aboriginal" could reasonably be used to describe the earliest KNOWN group in a particular place.
Surely the term is used to connote some kind of inherited ownership, and the line you draw it totally arbitrary. What's the point of the concept "aboriginal" again?
Frankly, this whole thread, including your reply, sounds like orchestrated propaganda to me. For example, further down Turtle advocates material by Tommy Robinson. He was banned from Twitter for years for his calls for violence before Musk took over, he was co-founder of the "English Defense League", some members of which actively planned terrorist attacks (though it is unclear how much Robinson knew about that or approved that), and he has served four prison terms.
For me, your reply sounds too metaphorical and too unspecific to be believable. You mention a previous conversation here on ACX. Could you provide a link so that I can check out the conversation?
This immediate recourse to character assassination is a tactic I wish more people would spot and hold in contempt. Tommy Robinson is uncouth, therefore the English have no legitimate grievances and in fact Harehills didn't happen at all?
Horror at the idea of others accessing out-of-bubble source material is another thing I have little respect for, and have seen time and time again from people who fervently believe themselves to be reasonable intellectuals.
The game plan is always: 1: sound like a smart person, 2: raise uncertainty and reasonable doubt so the other guy looks like less of a smart person than you, 3: your work is done when people are no longer talking about the original issue.
The midwit version is very similar, but replace "be smart and reasonable" with gotchas, tribal scorn and character attacks.
I have no idea when that previous conversation was. It was an Open Thread, the thread starter was asking a hypothetical about Kyle Rittenhouse and the guy was called NobodySpecial or NobodysPerfect or something like that.
There is a difference between out-of-bubble source material and source material from an extremist. I was willing to look into your conversation, but I very much doubt that the video is worth my time.
And after finding out that the video is 2 hours, sorry, no way. If you have a good summary, you can point me to that.
Here's my summary:
- A video clip went viral on UK social media showing a white schoolboy tackling a Syrian schoolboy and pouring a bottle of water on his face
- Prominent newscasters including Piers Morgan and Jeremy Vine immediately condemned it as a racist, despicable attack that has no place in the UK
- Theresa May (the PM at the time) mentioned it in a speech
- The white schoolboy faced a torrent of abuse on social media and people threatening his family in real life. He dropped out of school and attempted suicide
- Someone alerted Tommy that there was more to the story and the Syrian schoolboy had a history of violence against the girls in the class
- He went to the school to investigate
- He found that many of the teachers had been paid not to speak to any press
- Of the ones who were willing to speak to him, they unanimously agreed that the Syrian schoolboy was violent against girls and smaller boys, lied frequently, and had been subject to more than 100 school disciplinary actions
- In contrast, the white schoolboy was a "good boy" with a "strong sense of justice"
- The attack had been motivated by the Syrian schoolboy threatening to rape the white schoolboy's younger sister
- Another schoolgirl told him that the Syrian schoolboy had hit her with a hockey stick, viciously, with her back turned, that had led to chronic pain
- This context got absolutely no mention in the media, almost like they had orders from the top to portray things a certain way
- When Tommy went public with the story, he was promptly sued for libel by the Syrian schoolboy's family
- His family was subsequently targeted and his 11 year old son got death threats
- When the case went to court, the judge threw out all the evidence from the numerous school kids who gave evidence in favour of Tommy, siding with the Syrian schoolboy (who, again, had several school disciplinary actions against him for lying.) His reasoning was "People lie for all sorts of reasons, and they may lie for no reason at all."
- The press failed to report on any of this, in fact they left the courtroom when the other school kids were giving evidence (if you Google the story in the press, you will find a few headlines like "Far right activist Tommy Robinson loses court case for libel")
- He was subsequently bankrupted for 1.6 million pounds
- He had to divorce his wife because she was being targeted
Actually, him showing the video at all is illegal in the UK. The current spate of riots were triggered, partly by the Southport attacks, but partly because he held a huge rally the week prior where he showed the video and was immediately arrested on suspicion of "terrorism." (They later let him go and last I heard he was in Canada giving an interview to Jordan Peterson.)
That’s a fair summary of what is claimed in the video. For the facts, skip the video and read the Court’s judgement:
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Hijazi-v-Yaxley-Lennon-judgment-220721.pdf
The target of Robinson’s libel was a fifteen year old schoolboy. The Court wrote: “As was entirely predictable, the Claimant then became the target of abuse which ultimately led to him and his family having to leave their home, and the Claimant to have to abandon his education. The Defendant is responsible for this harm, some of the scars of which, particularly the impact on the Claimant’s education, are likely last for many years, if not a lifetime.”
Robinson attempts to portray himself as a victim, but he’s about as unsympathetic a victim as one can imagine.
Many Thanks for the detailed context!
So it is his version of the court case on libeling that he lost? No wonder that he is the good guy in his version. But regardless of whether his version is plausible or not, what is the connection to the recent riots and imprisonments?
Edit: Sorry, I misread the last paragraph. I see it now. But sorry, they may have been angry due to the video, but being angry does not justify posting addresses, instructions for arson, and calls for violence and murder.
Lol. The word "extremist" literally means outside the Overton window. "There's a difference between out-of-bubble source material and material that's outside the acceptable realms of my bubble."
LOL! Great point!
You can believe whatever helps you sleep at night. You should watch the video though.
"Always click through to the source material." -Elon Musk
This is awful. My condolences. You are always welcome here in Australia and in the meantime I will advocate for people in other English speaking countries (USA, Canada) to vote right wing before the totalitarian globalist agenda stifles us all
> You are always welcome here in Australia
LOL.
"Your honor, he is a meanie asshole."
Jeez. What kind of post qualifies as mean enough to merit jail time? Were there any examples?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy76dxkpjpjo.amp
https://www.standingforfreedom.com/2024/08/think-before-you-post-the-u-k-is-now-jailing-people-for-social-media-comments/
Some people were jailed for “inciting violence” eg calling for attacks on migrant hotels.
Others were jailed for “sharing misinformation” eg saying incorrectly that the Southport attacker was an asylum seeker who arrived in the UK on a boat.
Jailing people for either offence is totally wrong, even if in the first case some consequences (eg loss of one’s job) might be appropriate.
I don’t think the first one is protected by the first amendment even in the US. I was expecting stories of people making mildly inappropriate jokes on their podcasts getting knocks at their doors. If you call for violence at a specific time and place in the us, with some shades of gray like can they prove intent, that’s a crime even here.
It was indeed specific times and specific locations. I don't know which case exactly is meant here, but probably it refers to a telegram group with several thousand members, in which they posted target addresses together with instructions for malicious arson and calls for violence.
That absolutely justifies arresting them. It has nothing to do with a mean post or an unpleasant opinion. I think this whole thread is orchestrated propaganda, including the first reply.
> I think this whole thread is orchestrated propaganda, including the first reply.
Do you mean this thread here on ACX? And do you mean my comment -- "Your honor, he's a meanie asshole" -- then asking what the content of the posts was? If so, why was my response part of orchestrated propaganda? By "orchestrated" do you literally mean you think Turtle and I conferred about something supportive I could say in reply to Turtle's original post? Um, no, we did not confer. And I don't even see how my post is supportive of Turtle's view. I didn't say, "damn right, there's no way that's ok,." I asked what the posts were that got people jailed. And, for the record, when I heard that some were calls for violence, my thought was that if they weren't just random rage, but actual suggestions of times, places, means and people to target, then I thought that legal action was warranted.
No, I wasn't referring to you, I was referring to turtle and rebelcredential. I think the first three or so posts in this thread were by them, and these were all very out of place of the usual discourse. Not just content-wise, but also in terms of style. My impression by these three posts were indeed that this was the same person, playing a game of posting with different accounts.
I am no longer sure it is the case. There seem to be differences between them in their further posts. For turtle, I do think the posts are actively misleading, and I find "propaganda" still a fitting term. For rebelcredential it was just the first post which I find misplaced, and the subsequent posts are simply a reaction to me being confrontative. I certainly wasn't kind.
> I think this whole thread is orchestrated propaganda, including the first reply.
> Frankly, this whole thread, including your reply, sounds like orchestrated propaganda to me.
Funny, to me "orchestrated propaganda" is stuff like seeing the same phrasing posted multiple times, as if someone was trying to hammer in a carefully worded message through repetition.
If by "multiple times" you mean "twice, by the same person, which makes it less surprising that they would reuse the same phrasing."
Also, it's bold to claim a conspiracy from two posts when there's a guy replying to every one of your comments in support. (Not that I'm accusing him of being orchestrated propaganda either, I'm well aware that some people just Post A Whole Dang Lot.)
There’s also a guy who was arrested for chanting “who the f**k is Allah” (hate speech!)
You guys should watch the Tommy Robinson documentary. Search for “Silenced” on X. Eye opening
You really shouldn't, the guy is hardly unbiased and known for playing the victim when he has done a lot of pretty reprehensile stuff. You yourself seem rather desperate to downplay what has been a lot of serious rioting as "social media posts", and seem to ignore that your own links show that muslims as well as whites have been imprisoned for the rioting.
In context, your username is amusing.
Totally get people being imprisoned for violent rioting. Strongly against people being imprisoned for saying mean things while other people are violently rioting. Do you disagree? And have you watched the documentary before commenting about it?
IANAL but I believe that to lose first amendment protection for incitement, speech must be calling for both imminent and specific acts. Something broad and vague like "We should burn down immigrant businesses" would be protected, whereas something like "Come join us in 15 minutes to burn down (specific and real local business): wouldn't be. It doesn't look like the exact text of the posts is quoted in the articles (although I just skimmed and could have missed it), but even something like "I think people should burn down the hotels housing immigrants" would, I think, still be protected in the US.
This is a pretty accurate summary of US law, but of course US law is very much an outlier in this respect.
This type of speech has long been illegal in W. Europe, so the recent arrests are not evidence of negative change, as OP seems to imply.
Very disingenuous to claim what's happening here is not a negative change and it somehow represents "business as usual" for the government.
Jordan Parlour is the guy in question. The messages went something like:
JP: Let's smash this hotel (which was housing asylum seekers)
Other: I'm down if you are
JP: I'll be there at 5
Not sure if that counts as imminent incitement, but he did provide a specific time and target.
Clearly Ozempic works because it suppresses the yetzer-ra. It is an evil antagonist.
Just to check, that's a different sort of evil than the evil of the left kidney?
Yes!
The Yezer-ra is a more general evil influence analogous to dopa-mine. The suffix "mine" suggests selfishness. Dopa-mine is involved in over-arching selfish attention and reward systems. The Christian correlate might be oxy-to-sin which is involved in bonding and ingroup preference and, by association, anti-outgroup bias. It is Christian, since 'sin' is not a natively Jewish concept.
The left kidney produces levo-adrenaline. It is, in contrast, much more situation specific, providing small bursts of evil or selfishness to get a person through tough moral dilemmas.
Nah. Yetzer-hara is an evil myth. People are naturally calm.
Is there a way for me to donate to the SSC grantmaking fund? Specifically the AI safety part. I have about $10-15k.
(Very) short story I wrote about AI not needing "diamondoid nanobots" to pose a threat: https://blakehouseholder.substack.com/p/recommended
I saw an interesting question on DSL that I am going to paraphrase here. This is sort of a sci-fi future hypothetical. There is a new medical process that can change your biological sex. Some stipulations:
1. Your entire body would change, with corresponding differences in height/muscle mass/bone density/structure, etc.
2. Your mind would be the same but your brain would be immersed in a body with different hormones and all that entails.
3. You are comfortable with your body and don't need to relearn how to move with different limbs or have traumatic phantom sensations or anything like that.
4. The procedure is expensive, not enough to break the bank but a considerable cost, and takes a while to go through. E.g. this isn't something you do for a joke at a party, but a commitment of weeks/months.
5. None of your characteristics change, if you are old/fat/ugly or the reverse that will still be true when you are the other sex.
6. The procedure is completely reversible and you can switch back to the way you were before.
Would you do it? What would you think of other people who did it? Would this have major ethical/moral implications?
Personally, I think I would have to briefly switch purely out of curiosity. It would be very enlightening to see how the other half lives, so to speak.
No, I'm not really curious to know what the male version of me would be like, and if I'm still going to be old fat and ugly, it's pointless.
I think more people would be motivated to try it if it were "you get that young, fit, attractive body you always wanted, *plus* you can switch sex if you like!"
As for the "what would you think of other people?", well, that depends. If it really is a genuine sex-swap so that it's a natally female or male body, instead of the current procedures we use, then it really would be "I am a genuine woman/man, now I can have the body to fit my mind" for some. For others, it might be a fad or a phase, and I'd judge them a lot more harshly than someone who always had dysphoria and really did feel better once 'adjusted'.
It's a shame you added the cost and time constraints. I could imagine trying this out of curiosity in my teens or twenties. But in your twenties you can't afford it and in your thirties it's not easy to commit weeks or months to something like this if you have work, family, etc to maintain.
Realistically the main draw is to see what sex is like as a girl. Maybe as a close second there's an element of competitiveness - I'd wanna see how hot I was as a girl, and whether I could act hotter than other girls.
I'm going to predict that everyone ends up bisexual, on the grounds that you'd bring your old mind with you, which is attracted to girls, but your new body would be attracted to men. The mind-body connection is two-way and sex drive is overspill-y enough that I think you'd end up keeping both.
But yeah, this is a what-happens-in-Vegas experience, or at the very least bored Sunday afternoon territory. Good Lord I wouldn't want this anywhere normal life! Imagine having to meet your parents. Or explain to your girlfriend.
"you'd bring your old mind with you, which is attracted to girls, but your new body would be attracted to men"
That's the question, isn't it? I think the mind would over-ride the body, see the phenomenon of "transbians". If you always liked women as a 'man', then even in a new female body with female hormones, you'll still like women - or so it seems for some trans women today.
https://medium.com/the-identity-current/plight-of-the-transbian-4ab1a048b09b
I don't think it would actually rewire your brain to adjust your sexual orientation. The description just specifies your brain being exposed to different hormones, and I know from personal experience that hormones alone don't necessarily change your sexual orientation: I liked girls when my body was full of testosterone ,and I still like girls now that my body is full of estrogen.
Get away with your logic while I'm trying to imagine consequence-free girl on girl action.
<mildSnark>
>consequence-free girl on girl action.
Isn't the "consequence-free" a decent approximation in the real world? Accidental pregnancy is a non-issue for this case, and STD transmission probability is lower than for all other pairings. :-)
</mildSnark>
Yeah, and as a man in a world bereft of this fictional technology, I'm not getting in on it.
Same here! Many Thanks!
Ethics and morality: less fun than thinking about sex, so it goes in a separate comment.
If the transition was free and instant, I predict:
- all whinging about feminism to disappear overnight. You can't guilt trip people when they can just go and check if you're full of shit.
- in a short space of time, any actual social inequality between the sexes to balance out. In the same way that showing people a live aerial view of the roads would solve traffic jams, by letting everyone see the full picture and coordinate independently.
- the ratio of men vs women would now obey the laws of supply and demand. I predict that would be great for everyone.
- I think we'd see the death of mystique and romance. I mean, the Internet already drove multiple nails into the coffin anyway. But while the opposite sex is a dark, uncharted mystery it's fascinating and glamorous. If you can just go there and see, it becomes mundane.
- no idea what happens with reproduction. But heuristically, giving people more social choice has resulted in fewer of them sticking with the main pathway (find straight partner, marry, have kids) necessary for society to sustain itself. So I predict we all die out.
Of course I would. Just imagine the experience points.
While it would be interesting to have the experience, such an invasive procedure, if real (and if incapable of reversing things like aging), almost certainly has risks that I'm not willing to endure.
Also: I'm reasonably healthy and in good shape, but with significant hair loss. How would that work out? It's particularly brutal to be a bald woman.
Heck yeah I'd try. Curiosity would impel me. And I'd want to go back, too, after I'd gotten a bit used to it, to see what that experience felt like to me.
Whether I'd do it long term, how I'd look at people who did it, what the implications would be... those would depend on a lot of stuff about how this affected society.
Likewise. I'm skeptical that such a technology could exist without a _lot_ of other capabilities being implied. Enough massively parallel microsurgery to swap XX<-->XY in each of trillions of cells (on top of the macroscopic changes) implies many other capabilities.
I think it would be easier to clone a replacement body then upload the brain into it, which is indeed a whole other set of technological requirements, but still easier than trying to turn "adult body of one sex into adult body of the other sex".
Unless we're either invoking something like Star Trek transporters, so the settings can be changed there, which is a huge difference in society already, or magic to do it (again, another huge difference in society).
Frankly, I think "magic is real and it works, look, I can change Samuel into Samantha" is much more of an upheaval than "Samuel is now Samantha".
Many Thanks! Yes, I agree that something like constructing a replacement body would probably be a simpler path than having to dig into each and every cell and change its chromosomes. ( Open question as to whether cloning or mechanically constructing the cells, molecule by molecule (massively parallel) a la Drexler would be more feasible. )
As you said
>which is indeed a whole other set of technological requirements
and, if we actually _had_ those, fixing _any_ damage to the person's body, including aging, seems like it would be implied by those capabilities. Which changes the thought experiment rather strongly - but without it, the experiment doesn't look very self-consistent...
I think I would try it, and I would expect that flipping around would be widespread.
Of course, if there was a third mode "asexual without genitals", I might eventually settle on that.
Other things to consider is if sexual preferences would change, as Christina has pointed out they are kinda tied to hormones. If sexual preferences did not change, then this would completely change the dating market. At the moment, the dating prospects of a male in the lower quarter of the attractiveness distribution are rather slim. But the moment incels would magically transition, they could just start to have lots of lesbian sex with each other, which to me sounds preferable even given that per the hypothetical, they would not turn into super-hot women.
Yeah, but that's still the problem: they don't want average to bad looking trans woman incel, they want the 'pretty or hot popular girl is my girlfriend and likes me and loves me' experience.
'The only partner I can get is ugly former man, just like me' isn't going to be more appealing than "why don't you guys just have sex with each other already, that'll solve your problems about not having a relationship" right now.
Per the hypothetical, the transition would be much easier, faster and thorough than what is possible with present day medical interventions.
From a market perspective, it would not be functionally different from a pill which just makes the incels attracted to men -- which is notably different from just dating a gender you are not attracted to.
Now I don't know anything about the gay dating market dynamics. I would expect that some matches will be complementary (a rich person living in a mansion and an extra hot person may both prefer each other to someone similar to themselves), but a model where income, style, charisma and hotness are all projected on a single axis called attractiveness is probably not terrible far from the truth. (This is sweeping complementary traits like dom/sub under the rug, but I am not convinced they are key to the dating market.)
Also, for sufficiently large populations, the dating goals should align. For heterosexual dating markets, this is not generally true: if men are mostly interested in causal hookups and women are mostly interested in starting families, then this imbalance will distort the respective markets.
Now it is certainly possible that there a significant fraction of gays living in high population areas are involuntary celibate because they would only have sex with someone who is in twice their own quantile in the attractiveness distribution. This would be some evidence for 'incels are celibate because they have unrealistic standards'.
Or it could be that there are few gay incels, which would be evidence for 'inceldom is partly caused by difference in dating preference between men and women'.
> 2. Your mind would be the same but your brain would be immersed in a body with different hormones and all that entails.
You wildly underestimate the plausibility of this. Hormones make a LOT of the mind.
To that end, I would almost certainly try it, if only to see if the hormones would switch a sexual attraction.
When I was experiencing a sexual dysfunction I incorrectly attributed to asexuality, I was intellectually bi, but when that dysfunction was accidentally corrected, I switched to straight, *totally against my will.* I went from general attraction to women to being actively repulsed by them with no inciting event or trauma, just the hormonal correction.
I'd love to be a straight man.
I just meant the procedure wouldn't transform your mind as if you had been the other sex your whole life or something like that. My impression from accounts of FtM people is that the transition to testosterone is especially jarring.
e.g. I am in a bar with an FtM who is on testosterone for about the first time.
Now, the landlord of this bar is an alcoholic, and, truth be told, a bit annoying.
This is not a good reason for starting a bar fight.
However, FtM person is on testosterone, and not used to the effect yet.
So, there am I, trying to calm people down before a movie-style bar fight breaks out,
I totally believe that testosterone has psychological effecrs.
Yeah, it's like a can of "instant teenage boy". :-)
I agree that, if we were to look at it the way we look at other drugs, testosterone should probably be only accessible under a doctor's supervision. It's a known cause of violence!
We know from the accounts of trans people who have taken hormones that they a big effect...
So, yeah, your mind would not be the same.
Though I get the impression that we shouldnt overestimate the effect either. Trans people are typically gender variant even before they started on hormones.
(What I'm getting at here is that a study of trans people would tell you the effect of hprmones + whatever gender variance this population had to start with ... whoch is probably less than the pure hormonal effect)
I'm of course biased, but I think the more interesting and generally applicable information comes from the cis folk who experience these shifts.
Don't get me wrong,
there's definitely some interesting information to be gleaned from trans people who take hormones, but by definition the entire group is experiencing an intense and distressing dysphoria, which obviously also also shapes personality.
Whereas folk like myself or people who have benign tumors which monkey with hormones (like Ken Baker, and another dude whose name I can't recall who wrote a memoir on the topic) *don't* start from a foundation of distress/trauma/frustration/desire/meaningful censure from others, and thus arguably have a somewhat...less invested...perspective.
yeah, sure ... HRT to treat menopause, oral contraceptives, cancer treatments...
Wouldn't do it, but mostly from a terminal lack of curiosity. There's nothing about it I'd be looking forward to and a number of things I'd either dread or miss.
Weird coincidence that this is posted right after I watch a Youtube clip of Joe Rogan talking about how excited he would be to become a woman and have sex with a man.
Yeah, I think a lot of people would try it just to see what sex in that body is like.
People have been playing around with this notion since forever; see the myths of Tiresias and Caeneus and, in Hindu mythology, king Ila:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ila_(Hinduism)
I'm trans, so I'd be all over this. Sounds strictly better than existing options for medical and surgical transition.
More broadly, a lot of the current backlash against availability of medical transition is fear that people (especially teenagers) are making an irreversible mistake by transitioning. Being fully reversible answers that in large part. It'd also be beneficial for adults who are unsure if they want to transition or not, since they can always go back if they don't like it.
>More broadly, a lot of the current backlash against availability of medical transition is fear that people (especially teenagers) are making an irreversible mistake by transitioning.
I agree with this characterization, but I think it's a cultural blind spot that cost-benefit analyses are instinctually focused on the effects on individuals to the exclusion of how individual decisions affect others around them.
> it's a cultural blind spot that cost-benefit analyses are instinctually focused on the effects on individuals to the exclusion of how individual decisions affect others around them.
How so? Despite my problems with some of the political ideology that got popular in the 2010s, I'm 100% on team "individual people have individual worth" and "it's inhumane to make some people suffer for the good of all". If transition fixes dysphoria, then so be it. And everything I heard, from a number of trans people whom I knew in the before time, was that it did work. Heck, I didn't even need to talk to them, I knew a few of them before and after, and just watching them go from being miserable and depressed to bouncy and happy was heartwarming.
I remember around a decade ago when my mother and I were idly chatting about her younger years. I can't recall exactly what past incident it was, but I remember asking her why she hadn't made a certain choice that, being your standard cardboard cutout college lib at the time, seemed obvious to me the correct one. To paraphrase, she responded to me by saying that people should take into account the effects of their decisions on not only themselves but also those close to them. You'll have to take my word for it that she didn't seem to regret the choice she ended up making. She wasn't saying that she had no individual worth, nor am I now saying that individuals don't have worth. My point is that evaluating the merits of choices solely by their benefit to the respective individuals making the decision is not the only or best way to evaluate them.
Point 2, to quote myself:
>The calculus changes if the procedure to transition becomes far more frictionless as in the hypothetical. I'd expect that an unknown number people with lower mental distress relative to those currently transitioning might also go through with it in a reality where transitioning is made easier.
The number of trans-identifying youth has exploded as trans acceptance has increased. Youth in the Western world (the most trans accepting countries) are unhappier than ever. Trans acceptance might not have caused the unhappiness, but it's certainly not an endorsement of the idea that the benefits to your trans acquaintances is evidence that it would be a net benefit for all.
> My point is that evaluating the merits of choices solely by their benefit to the respective individuals making the decision is not the only or best way to evaluate them.
I agree, especially with the part about ”respective individuals making the decision". I'm making a lot of life decisions right now based on the benefits to other people. But I feel like it's important that they're *my* decisions, you know?
> Youth in the Western world (the most trans accepting countries) are unhappier than ever.
I suspect that these things are not directly linked. That is, there's a bunch of toxic stuff in the culture, which is making people unhappy. And some of the toxic stuff has infected trans discourse, and the interaction means that kids try to fix their unhappiness with transition. (Alternatively, it might be possible that something in our culture is actually causing more dysphoria than in the past.)
I get both your points. There's value in people feeling like they are more or less free to own their own actions and to act without too many constraints, including cultural norms. And it's difficult to disentangle cause and effect of cultural trends. I was questioning the near ubiquitous assumption that things be evaluated solely on the benefits to individuals and the freeing of individuals from constraints. And I've become increasingly wary of tearing down fences.
Apart from our Enlightenment heritage, I think it's too easy to advocate for tearing them down. It's easy to identify the beneficiaries of a change. In this case, you identified people you knew personally who went from miserable to happy. In contrast, it's difficult to predict who'll be worse off due to a change and more difficult still to draw a line between cause and effect, particularly because people are loathe to acknowledge that a change they advocated for did any harm at all. No one wants to believe that they harmed anyone else, and people are great at believing what they want to believe. Another factor is that people's behavior changes when the game is different and it's difficult to predict how their behaviors will change. I alluded to the explosion of trans identifying young people, but another example is electoral reform and the popular vote. It's common for people to complain about the Electoral College producing a winner that got fewer votes, but they don't realize that none of the actors (voters, candidates, parties) would behave in the same way in a system where the popular vote matters.
The original author of this question clearly hasn't read enough John Varley.
Yep.
Or Iain Banks. This stuff is all over the Culture series.
Or Jack Chalker!
Or the Ancient Greek legend of Tiresias :-)
Don't answer any comparative questions about sex/gender. Modern social media is just as vengeful as the Goddess Hera.
I admit that that legend has something to do with my curiosity. ;-)
Commitment of weeks/months only? I suspect many people would do it back and forth just out of curiosity, I'd probably consider it myself. To give the ultimate boring answer, it depends on the cost!
>Would this have major ethical/moral implications?
At a societal level it would probably wreck at least some number of families that are currently functioning fine or better than fine. I can't think of any benefits at a societal level that would be sufficient to counterbalance this beyond the vague sort of titillating eye-opening enlightenment from seeing through others' eyes. It reminds me of that Indian fellow who pretended to be black to get into med school and, while he did have an easier time getting into med school, experienced racism.
Edit: On the other hand, the high price tag would mean that the wrecking would be limited to high income families, and so the procedure would be good for equity.
I have heard a number of anecdotes from other trans people on online forums who lost spouses over their transitions, usually because spouse's sexual orientation wasn't compatible with the transition. So I do have to admit that in the short term, increasing the availability of transitions would at least marginally increase how often that happens. But there are a few other things that I think need to be taken into account here.
For one thing, the characteristic of these marriages as "functioning fine or better than fine" is dubious. By the same anecdotes, the decision to transition in these circumstances generally comes after desperately trying to suppress and live with dysphoria for the sake of maintaining the marriage, and living with a problem that makes you desperately unhappy doesn't sound "fine" to me. And if the decision to transition is made casually without consideration for the spouse, that sounds like a clear sign the marriage was already on thin ice.
For another, in the long term, making transition more available means more people will be able to transition before getting married in the first place. Especially in this hypothetical, where full reversibility also removes the "am I making an irreversible mistake" fear as a barrier to transition. I'd expect it to play out as something like what happened a generation or so ago, when increased awareness about and acceptance of being gay lead to some broken marriages at first when people married to a member of the opposite sex accepted that they're gay and would be happier in a same-sex relationship, but longer term there are a lot fewer gay people are trying to be straight, especially those committing to the role enough to get married.
The last bit is to note that a lot of marriages do survive one parter realizing they're trans. The other partner might already identify as bisexual, or they may find there's some flexibility in their orientation at least with regard for their spouse.
I've heard from a number of transwomen that taking hormones made them attracted to guys. SO, apparently, this sometimes happens, even if its not universal. Also apparently: transmen dont experience a effect like this, or at least, its even rarer.
>By the same anecdotes, the decision to transition in these circumstances generally comes after desperately trying to suppress and live with dysphoria for the sake of maintaining the marriage, and living with a problem that makes you desperately unhappy doesn't sound "fine" to me. And if the decision to transition is made casually without consideration for the spouse, that sounds like a clear sign the marriage was already on thin ice.
The calculus changes if the procedure to transition becomes far more frictionless as in the hypothetical. I'd expect that an unknown number people with lower mental distress relative to those currently transitioning might also go through with it in a reality where transitioning is made easier. And it also disregards the effect on their children.
>For another, in the long term, making transition more available means more people will be able to transition before getting married in the first place. Especially in this hypothetical, where full reversibility also removes the "am I making an irreversible mistake" fear as a barrier to transition.
I agree that this could mitigate the number of broken marriages. But in this case, it does so by lowering the number of marriages that occur in the first place. You could argue that marriage numbers wouldn't be affected because post-transition people can get married after, but then you'd have to assume that the number of FTM transitioners would equal the number of MTF transitioners and I don't think that's true now nor would it be true in a world with the hypothetical procedure.
I was mostly joking with the last bit.
"But in this case, it does so by lowering the number of marriages that occur in the first place."
How would that follow? The desire to marry presumably isn't changed.
Wouldn't people who are happier with their gender be more likely to marry?
My impression is that there are far more MTF transitions than FTM, so it would create a gender imbalance.
And we can theorize X leads to Y all day long, but the proof is in the pudding. In general do the societies that treat rainbow flags as sacred value marriage as much as the ones that don't? My roommate is from India. He rolls his eyes at Pride Parades and his parents have been sending him profiles of girls on Indian dating sites on a daily basis since his early 20s.
Edit: >Wouldn't people who are happier with their gender be more likely to marry?
I think desire for marriage is as much or more a socially ingrained priority than it is a matter of individual personal preference.
Used to be way more MTF but now FTM is catching up and it's often teenage girls. Hence the worries over social contagion and the subsequent fighting between trans activists, portraying such things as the Cass Report as institutional transphobia, and those wanting to restrict "healthcare for trans kids".
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7906237/
"Results: Through June 2017, a total of 421 transgender individuals were seen who initiated hormonal therapy after 1990. Over the past 25 years, there has been a significant increase in the number of individuals seen. The mean age at initiation has remained higher in MTF than in FTM but has decreased steadily in both groups with the overall average dropping <30 years since 2015 (27.5±10.6). Since 1990, there has been a steady increase in the percentage of FTM such that it is now equivalent to MTF.
Conclusion: Consistent with many reports, we are seeing an increasing number of gender dysphoric individuals seeking hormonal therapy. The age at initiation has been dropping over the past 25 years, and we have seen a steady increase in the number of FTM such that the incidence now equals that of MTF. Possible reasons for these changes are discussed."
This survey is from 2023:
https://www.kff.org/other/issue-brief/trans-people-in-the-u-s-identities-demographics-and-wellbeing/
"Sex assigned at birth. Sex assigned at birth differs from gender identity because it is based on phenotypic sex characteristics and is the sex stated on an individual’s birth certificate. It may or may not align with gender identity. Trans and non-trans adults are equally likely to have been assigned either male or female at birth."
If I'm reading this right, then the trans adults who were "assigned male at birth" (meaning now they're trans women or non-binary or agender or other identification) make up 48% of respondents, and "assigned female at birth" (meaning they're now trans men etc.) make up 52%.
So slightly more FtM than MtF?
>I was mostly joking with the last bit.
At the risk of taking a mostly-joking statement too seriously, KFF survey data seems to indicate that the birth sex of trans people is pretty close to 50/50: specifically, 47% natal male, 53% natal female (compared to the 48/52 split in non-trans people in the survey sample). Although there are about twice as many trans women as trans men, with the remainder identifying as nonbinary or gender nonconforming.
Also, about 70% of trans people surveyed are gay or bi, and other surveys I've seen suggest that a plurality of both trans men and trans women are bisexual. And a fair number of cis people are bisexual, too, which gives at least a few percent worth of cushion against uneven gender ratios.
The KFF survey also helpfully gives data about marital status. Marriage rates are quite a bit lower among trans adults than cis adults (26% currently married vs 49%), but a lot of this is likely age effects as trans people in the sample skew quite a bit younger (53% of trans adults are under 35, compared with 28% for cis adults). Raw divorce rates are almost identical (8% vs 9%), but that does give a higher divorce rate if you look at the number relative to if they've ever been married.
https://www.kff.org/other/issue-brief/trans-people-in-the-u-s-identities-demographics-and-wellbeing/
>At the risk of taking a mostly-joking statement too seriously, KFF survey data seems to indicate that the birth sex of trans people is pretty close to 50/50: specifically, 47% natal male, 53% natal female (compared to the 48/52 split in non-trans people in the survey sample). Although there are about twice as many trans women as trans men, with the remainder identifying as nonbinary or gender nonconforming.
I'm confused. Is this saying that that more men transition to female than vice versa despite both sexes being as likely to *say* that they are trans?
There are four categories here:
Male to female (MtF)
Male to nonbinary (MtX)
Female to male (FtM)
Female to nonbinary (FtX)
There are more MtF than FtM, but there are also more FtX than MtX, so FtX + FtM ~= MtX + MtF.
"Nonbinary" (or NB, or Enby) means any gender identity other than strictly male or strictly female. There are a bunch of subcategories, but the big ones I'm familiar with are Genderqueer (aiming for a mix of masculine and feminine characteristics), Agender (minimizing gendered characteristics), and Genderfluid (gender identity varies with mood).
Enbies often but don't always pursue medical transition, sometimes the same sort of hormones that MtFs or FtMs take and sometimes variations thereof (lower doses, adding SERMs to suppress breast development in MtX, adding finasteride to reduce body and facial hair in FtX, etc).
...Why would that have anything to do with ethics or morality?
I just want to gauge what other people think about it. I assume your stance is there would be no implications. But I could see a spiritual/religious perspective of it being immoral to reject God's plan/destiny/etc.
If anyone claims that as the reason but has willingly received medical treatment in the past, they're lying. It makes no sense to suddenly draw the line there unless it's a rationalization for something else.
There are people who refuse all medical treatment, or decide to go on hospice, reporting that kind of thought process.
If I could afford it I would give it a go. It’s basically culture genofixing but with capitalism.
Here’s a question: Would this cure gender dysphoria in transgender folks or result in them remaining trans with a sign flip?
The mind is unchanged, so presumably cure.
I'm gonna be mean here: the special cases ones who seem to be excessively online and lap up all the attention would be immensely dissatisfied to now be "only" a straight/gay woman (or man).
The general run of trans people would like this, I think, but the "oh tee-hee am I a man? am I a woman? am I a cute anime cat-girl? today I think I'm going girl-mode! feeling cute, skirt spinny!" set would hate having the I'M SO SPECIAL label taken away. I think that, even with perfect body swap technology, they would *still* insist on "but I'm *trans*, I'm not like you cis lumpenproles who were born that way".
>just as long as they don't demand that uninvolved third parties pay for it or approve of it
What do you think the odds are that activists don't try to frame this procedure as "healthcare" with the implication that it be publicly funded? What do you think the odds are that they don't get their way at some point?
What's a good source to get updates on events in the Ukraine war, without the usual propaganda and bias from either of the two sides?
https://www.iswresearch.org
Pretty much daily updates on the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts, and as warranted stuff about e.g. Taiwan/China or Houthi/All Mankind. The Gaza stuff is under the "Iran" heading.
Has summaries, maps, and in-depth analysis. Follows basically all the even semi-credible sources from both sides, with an appropriate (not necessarily symmetric) level of skepticism.
https://understandingwar.org/ generally has dry "here are the locations of the troops" reporting.
https://www.criticalthreats.org/ (?)
@Scott if your link to the Manifold job ad clarified that it's on site in SF it might save some people a little time.
In the past week, Peter Thiel and Demis Hassabis gave separate interviews, and both said the AI industry is in a bubble, but at the same time that real progress in the technology was happening and few people understood how big the impact would be in the medium term. Thiel analogized the present state of the industry to the internet in 1999: poised for a massive breakout while simultaneously in a bubble that was about to pop.
What are some examples of AI startups and proposed applications that seem likely to fail when the "bubble" pops?
I think the "bubble popping" is a subtly wrong way to look at it. I think a lot of current businesses will collapse, but that's because increasing AI power will render them pointless. They'll end up like companies offering dial-up Internet access over land lines.
In particular, I predict that prompt engineering, while useful for the foreseeable future (such as that is), won't really be a thing for more than a few years. It'll get about as much use as Linux virtual consoles, which is to say that they'll primarily be used by very tech-savvy people who are troubleshooting a custom private installation.
Yes, but what happens if/when market disenchantment with general-purpose LLMs causes GPU sales to plummet? My understanding is that greater than 80% of Nvidia's GPU output goes to support these beasts. Sure, specialized AI applications will continue to prosper in their own limited way, but if the demand for Nvidia's H200 chip suddenly craters, we'll see ripples across the entire spectrum of tech industries — but especially in the semi sector. Maybe I'm over-worrying, but I see a potential Dot Com bubble situation if that happens.
I honestly don't see that happening any time soon. Yeah, there's hype that's out of hand, and irrational enthusiasm, but there's also useful demand for those things, and ongoing R&D. The hype dying away just means that OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. will be able to get more computing power for their money. I didn't think we've hit the limit of the usefulness of GPT-style AIs, and even once we do, there's effort being put into finding the next transformer-level improvement.
I think it's much easier to see that many will fail than to identify exactly which ones will fail.
Even companies which have a shit business model today might easily be able to pivot to a less shit business model in the future, if they have a good team and good management. I remember the first internet bubble and how everybody decried all these companies like Google with "millions of users and no revenue model" -- but it turned out that finding a revenue model isn't that hard once you have millions (and soon billions) of users.
Similarly, I think right now if you have a company with a lot of high quality in-house AI expertise, _and_ smart management, _and_ a funding source that can keep the lights on in the medium term, then it doesn't matter that much what your current business model is. But if you're a couple of clueless trend followers with no deep understanding of AI *or* business, currently living off seed funding from an equally clueless VC, then you're almost certainly doomed.
I think it would be easier to try to find AI startups that *won't* fail when the bubble pops. To be fair, nearly all startups fail even under normal circumstances.
The AI industry appears to have hit on a very powerful new set of tools that is too expensive to fully utilize and likely plateaued at its current level of capability in a way that will not be improved by the price coming down. I think LLMs are essentially what I think Google search and other narrow AI tools are: A technology that will be a component of an eventual AGI.
I think we’re even close to a point where the right wrapper around a bunch of technologies might allow us to build an AGI, but it will take a serious technological insight that we aren’t obviously close to for it to come together.
"I think we’re even close to a point where the right wrapper around a bunch of technologies might allow us to build an AGI, but it will take a serious technological insight that we aren’t obviously close to for it to come together."
I agree. I think the first "AGI" will be a sort of Frankenstein machine that is a collection of dozens of more specialized LLMs and programs. Whenever it receives a prompt, it will usually know which of its specialized modules to activate to handle it best. It will be inelegant and will require an enormous amount of computer servers and electricity to function, but will still exhibit enough "general" intelligence from the end user's perspective to fool a sizeable minority of people into thinking it's an AGI. The term I use for it is "Fake AGI."
I think "Real AGI" is still 20 - 30 years away.
I think even fake AGI is probably that far away as anything that is actually useful or cost-competitive. A real single model AI agent that can outperform humans with an annual cost less than several times a human’s salary to operate may actually not be something we do for generations.
There are a lot of economic incentives, but there have also been waves of hype around this and lots of tools that cost a lot and don’t work very well. Once there is a legit AI-bubble driven economic crash, it will be a decade before anyone will invest serious money into anything new and capital intensive. IMO, this is unlikely to be more than a year out from now and may already be in very early stages
I probably wouldn’t short Nvidia, but I both wouldn’t go long on them right now and would hold off on buying a new gaming GPU, because the AI bubble bursting could see a hell of a lot of silicon with nowhere to go being repurposed for consumer GPUs at a relative bargain.
Without venture capital and irrational confidence to subsidize it, the current wave of LLM AI will even recede as providers are forced to charge what it actually costs to provide. You can see that process already kind of starting with OpenAI putting GPT-5 on ice and shifting their focus to GPT-4omini. A model which is less useful than the big ones but which can be run at manageable cost. Unfortunately it’s hard to hype up a model that trades capability for provider margins, and interest is already waning even in the big boys that are legit impressive as they have stopped becoming more impressive fast enough to draw attention.
It’s a gut feeling, but I think that Sam Altman is going to personally fall from grace and the board that tried to fire him will be almost entirely vindicated in the not too distant future.
I think your prediction hinges heavily on how good GPT-5 is.
Recent reports that gpt-5 is unreleased because it wasn’t very impressive are the hinge of this prediction.
Yeah, right now they're trying to throw AI into everything as an incentive to purchase - I'm getting lots of Dell emails about "our new laptops with Copilot built in!" - but I think it'll end up like the Internet of Things where we don't, in general, have our kettles telling us that the water is now boiled so come make the tea.
Right now I think it's a bubble, and it'll burst, and we'll eventually get useful products but not the anticipated bonanza that everyone is staking their money on today where AI is the new buzzword to throw around when trying to sell your product or service.
I posted about this a while ago, there's a huge crop of startups trying to develop "AI for some specific field", whose engineering mostly amounts to wrapping a generic LLM API with some proprietary prompts. This is pretty low value add and doesn't necessarily work very well, so I don't expect most of those to survive.
I think that "AI Whispering Consultancy" is likely to be a viable business model just like "SEO Consultancy". Someone who understands the subtleties of the various models and can help you design an optimal custom prompt for your specific application.
I'm also wondering whether there'll be a less ethical business model in trying to get particular pieces of data incorporated into training sets. You give me a million dollars and I try to make sure that the phrase "Pepsi tastes better than Coke" is incorporated into the training set of GPT-5 in at least five million different locations.
>I'm also wondering whether there'll be a less ethical business model in trying to get particular pieces of data incorporated into training sets.
One of the things that currently creeps me out about LLMs is that OpenAI doesn't disclose its training sets. It is reasonably clear that wikipedia is in there. What about textbooks? Which _parts_ of Reddit? r/FemaleDatingStrategy ? What about Hamlet? What about fiction in general? What about religious texts in general?
I thought *everything* that was in print format and online was in their training sets? I thought the big problem was getting more training data — that doesn't exist yet — for the next generation of LLMs?
Having said that I'm pretty sure from previous discussions that the OED and the Merck Index aren't in their training sets.
>I thought the big problem was getting more training data — that doesn't exist yet — for the next generation of LLMs?
Many Thanks! Yeah, I've seen claims that one of the problems further scaling is running into is running out of human-generated text. I've tried looking for a statement of what is in their training set but was not successful.
>Having said that I'm pretty sure from previous discussions that the OED and the Merck Index aren't in their training sets.
Or that the LLM was unable to make full use of the information in them? :-)
They’re cagey about it. And the real problem is twofold. They’re running out of training data/increasingly losing access to once-available data, and the training data needs scale logarithmically for linear improvements in capability. There seems to be several orders of magnitude too little data available in the whole world for for LLMs to 10x their current capability. And even if that weren’t true, you’d need Victor Fries or Raymond Cocteau to design the cooling solutions for the training servers.
It seems to me that that would be fairly useful actually. I’m not saying there’s any money in it, but narrowing down what an AI can do with a few buttons would be helpful for many applications.
This, and I also expect many of the much smaller funded foundation models to wither away; assuming scale continues to be king, there's only room (and funding) for a couple of big models + an open source uncensored version.
True, but I suspect providing some kind of fine-tuning/LoRA might be a viable strategy.
There already is an app like this, for Irish transport:
https://www.transportforireland.ie/available-apps/tfi-live/
I honestly don't see how things would improve by having a fake 'person' talking to you about "Hi, I'm Bob/Babs and I'm here to help! Your bus will be arriving in ten minutes at 10:00:00 a.m.!" "Yeah, but it's already 10:10 a.m. and no sign of it, what's the hold up?" "I'm sorry you seem to be having a bad experience with GoSlow Bus Services. Your bus will arrive at 10:00:00 a.m.!" "I already said it's late, what is happening?" "Are you sure you are at the right stop? By the timetable, the next 125BC bus is due to arrive at 10:00:00 a.m.!"
Good luck with trying to get the AI to tell you what the hell is going on and sort out your problem. Maybe it'll end up like the Canadian airline chatbot that promised refund to a passenger, the airline went to court to deny this because the chatbot was allegedly its own entity, and the court ruled nope, have to pay up:
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know
"In 2022, Air Canada's chatbot promised a discount that wasn't available to passenger Jake Moffatt, who was assured that he could book a full-fare flight for his grandmother's funeral and then apply for a bereavement fare after the fact.
According to a civil-resolutions tribunal decision last Wednesday, when Moffatt applied for the discount, the airline said the chatbot had been wrong – the request needed to be submitted before the flight – and it wouldn't offer the discount. Instead, the airline said the chatbot was a "separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions". Air Canada argued that Moffatt should have gone to the link provided by the chatbot, where he would have seen the correct policy.
The British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal rejected that argument, ruling that Air Canada had to pay Moffatt $812.02 (£642.64) in damages and tribunal fees. "It should be obvious to Air Canada that it is responsible for all the information on its website," read tribunal member Christopher Rivers' written response. "It makes no difference whether the information comes from a static page or a chatbot."
I honestly don't think we *do* need "many things in the built environment" to "wake up", and I don't think it's cowardice holding it back so much as "we tried to do it on the cheap and replace our real humans, the end product was crappy, and it caused so much hassle we had to scrap it".
I don't want a Talkie Toaster, I want accurate information.
> A trivial example: you could make a train car or a train station that you can actually speak to, asking it how long to get to someplace or what the best route is from A to B or if there are any service interruptions
That's just a voice UI slapped on top of Google Maps. Which Google will probably release soon if they haven't already.
*Snerk.* Exactly. They can't even get Google Flights right as a *website,* with tens of thousands of genius Phd's toiling in their clickfarm mines.
I'd dearly like to be able to tell Gemini to book me a flight with 20kg of luggage to X on Y date and have it handle the details, but I predict that this will never happen, even though they could literally do it today.
Contrary to **Level 50 Lapras** above, I also don't expect a usable AI interface in Google Maps either, although I would dearly love and use that too. I'd love to be able to tell it "look at all the pictures of 4 star hotel gyms in <city> and list which ones have an actual power rack, not a smith machine, and their prices."
Once again, I'd bet on never being able to usably do this with a Google product, even though they are literally THE best positioned company to do this and much other "AI personal assistant" style stuff. They're just going to ruin it, full stop, just like they ruined search, their core competency, much less all their other acquisitions and bright ideas that are used by tens to hundreds of millions that they just let trail off into oblivion.
The way I hear it, the fear of a minor miscalculation or the reality of a hallucination is too much for LLM tech to be loadbearing right now. A current LLM, tech-wise, could easily handle such a transaction. But maybe it would sometimes spend thousands of dollars by accident, or share your credit card with a scammer. Or, even easier, book the wrong day or something because it doesn't know you can't make it to the airport in 20 minutes and that's the [best price/other metric it is using to pick].
I just don't think this is so much of an issue, and even if it were, they should let people opt-in and assume the risk of things going wrong. I've built little "hallucination detection" tools locally where you just pipe results to another LLM via the API and have it double check things, and it significantly improves things and lets you do a "hallucination estimator", and I'm sure Google can do much better than that.
Also, it would be a dialogue like OP envisions. "There's flights at 7AM, 2PM, and 10PM, and they're all within $50 of each other, which one do you want?"
I actually do the "power rack detection" thing today with GPT4, it's just frustrating for a number of reasons (it won't do inline pictures, OR deep link specific pics, so you can double check, and only has ~70% accuracy), and being able to directly access Google maps pics instead of Trip Advisor pics would be a major step up in terms of coverage in given cities.
This sounds like a retrofuturistic idea, the future imagined by a past that did not see us all walking around with powerful computers in our pockets, reliably connected to a network providing near-immediate access to incomprehensibly vast amounts of information.
My thoughts exactly. It also reminds me of Ray Kurzweil's prediction from 1999 that, within 20 years, the average person would be wearing a dozen little computers on them, embedded in jewelry, their wristwatches, and their clothes, that would be linked together through a LAN. In reality, all of that was consolidated into one device--the smartphone.
Likewise, instead of making a train station kiosk "intelligent" by allowing travelers to ask it when the next train is arriving, it would be better if the rail company fed live data to the internet about the locations of its trains, track problems, delays, etc., where private users could access it and make sense of it themselves. It would be most convenient if you could ask your AI personal assistant on your smartphone when the train was coming, it could look at the rail company's live data, and answer you.
I wish google directions worked better when i am already on one of the trains i need to be on. It instead thinks i have to walk to the station and get on the next one. Then the directions might not be optimized around the exact timing of express trains and such. Bolting google maps on to the train itself could solve that.
Probably depends on the area and circumstances. I never had that problem while using Google Maps for directions in Japan.
Well thats where i live too and it never knows im already on the train :/
And yet every time I try to plan a trip, Google tells me they don't have the latest bus schedule for my area, or the location data are minutes out of date.
I agree that kind of information would be a good thing. But you just need a website, not a talking train station (which would itself need to get up-to-date information through a website of some kind anyway).
Finding the correct train timetable for my line, and then squinting at it, and then zooming in, and then figuring out that actually _that's_ the timetable for days starting with "T" in odd-numbered years in March and I need to look at another timetable... is a frustrating experience.
I'd rather say "Yo phone, when are the next three trains from Moose Hat to Cockfosters?" and it will tell me.
But it's easier if I can ask my phone rather than needing to go to the station. What is really needed is better integration between language models and live data sources.
If there was an agreed-upon feed for this sort of data which sufficiently-trusted sources could publish to, and which language models could read from in real time, that would be useful. It would need to be curated so it didn't wind up as spam.
"I'd rather say "Yo phone, when are the next three trains from Moose Hat to Cockfosters?" and it will tell me."
Provided you're willing to run the risk that it will hallucinate an answer as it doesn't want to say "No trains" and thus it assures you that there are three imaginary trains running at these times, where you'll wait for them and none of them show up, because it's the third Tuesday and a full moon and you want to travel to Zone Y outside of peak rush non-standard discounted Zone Z hours, so of course there are no trains from that station to that destination today.
> What is really needed is better integration between language models and live data sources.
Sure, that'd be good, but this problem doesn't take large language models to solve. Better integration with Google Maps will be enough. (I'd actually prefer to use that over having to talk to an LLM-powered assistant.)
You are being argued against but that’s exactly where I think AI should go. Take the general model with its ability to understand complex English sentences, and follow on questions, add some real time data and an ability to retort in natural sounding language.
I’m pretty sure that call centres are setting this up as we speak. Apples new AI service (Apple intelligence) seems to also focus on narrow tasks using general LLMS in the background.
Isn’t that just normal lag between early and late adopters? Train station and car manufacturers aren’t going to invest in that kind of thing until they know the companies behind technology will still be alive in 10 years.
>a train station that you can actually speak to, asking it how long to get to someplace or what the best route is from A to B or if there are any service interruptions.
That doesn't take AI, that just takes Internet connection and access to the company website.
Having it respond to freeform questions fluently enough that people wouldn't have to switch mental contexts into UI navigation or careful phrasing would be part of the huge difference, surely?
Can you give an example of such a question?
Like, bus stations have static placards showing the bus routes. Airports have updating billboards telling you whether a flight is delayed or not. I don't know what else people are trying to ask here.
I'm just interested in my flight. Looking up the number is a chore, and so is finding it in a list. They're reasonable chores, but, can we do better?
In the cases I'm primarily thinking about, I don't mean that the semantics of the question make it impossible for the passenger to answer using those static resources. I am referring mainly to the secondary attributes of the experience, which are often important to start with and which I would expect to be more important in circumstances like “harried traveler on not much sleep” where mental “stack space” is more limited. There is a substantial difference in mental effort between “babble a question in whatever order makes sense to you at the time and get a narrow response delivered directly” and “understand the format of this chart and scan it for which combination of cells contains the information you need”, a substantial difference in flow effects between “say a question now and it is buffered for you” and “wait for the site to load before you can start scrolling”, etc.
For an analogy, think pocket calculator versus paper arithmetic. The question may indeed be as simple as “which routes here get me to Raging Rabbit Station”, but the delivery method is totally different.
Being able to synthesize even a *little* bit past the edge of the locally authoritative database would amplify this further: “If I get out of Luigi's Pizzeria at eleven, what bus will I be able to take home?” And in-context follow-up questions: “How much will it cost?”
Which, now that I've written it out, leads me to actually think that this application may not show up because in anticipation it gets displaced by “everyone has a smartphone and asks Siri or Gemini, and the transit company uploads their tables to the major map sites, has them scraped implicitly, or offers the AI access using local OS integrations when their app is installed”.
People are already creating apps for train and bus arrivals:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nextbus.dublin&hl=en_IE
So what is being asked for here seems to be "give me an AI that I don't have to look up things myself, just ask it for this information". I don't know if that's 'cooler', it's certainly lazier, it might be more efficient, but it's also making us ever more dependent on things to replace our brains.
I do get the appeal for "I've been travelling for hours, I'm tired and hungry and I just want to know where to go when" use, but a lot of this sounds like "aw man, you expect me to TYPE the QUESTION in MANUALLY like a caveman?" issues.
The reason we aren't doing this yet is because we can't to the necessary level of accuracy and reliability. There are a *lot* of tasks where the thing that matters most is avoiding being wrong 1% of the time. If your train station tells even 0.5% of customers that the train is leaving 15 minutes later than it is, and they miss the train, that is going the make it useless. So until the hallucination problem is fixed (or greatly, *greatly* reduced), the kinds of applications you are talking about aren't going to happen. You see the reason why in every single example of a business trying to do something similar and it fails spectacularly in some edge case or when some troll manages to jailbreak it.
Don't get me wrong, I find the current gen LLMs immensely useful, but that's because I understand their limitations and am willing to accept the situations where they just don't do what I want them to do.
They are very much not ready for interacting with average customers in ways that actually matter.
>The reason we aren't doing this yet is because we can't to the necessary level of accuracy and reliability.
Yup. In general, I've almost never found the current version of customer assistance applications useful to me. Now, I may be a corner case. The usual reason that I've encountered one of these is that I've already used the business's web site, and I've hit something ambiguous or contradictory, so I'm calling them on the phone, and they've connected me to their AI. And the AI does _not_ have access to better information to resolve the problem than the website does. So I almost always wind up having to get to a human.
The chatbot will be working off the published timetable, and in reality that depends heavily on the conditions on the day - are there breakdowns, diversions, delays, what? - and those being updated regularly and in a timely manner. The AI can't look out the window to see if it's raining or if there are the wrong kind of leaves on the tracks.
If the train is delayed because a passenger had a medical emergency so everything is running half an hour late, that needs some human somewhere to enter that information. If everyone is too busy calling an ambulance and dealing with the passengers already on board, the AI is just going to tell you happily "The train will be arriving in ten minutes!" as per the timetable, but then you're waiting half an hour due to the delay that the AI didn't know about.
LLMs trained on specific information are too small to outperform giant models on specific tasks. (Source: review paper that I saw once.) This is because "specific information" is like, a million times less information about general reasoning and English grammar than the entirety of the scrape-able internet + books.
If they're not updating the signs, they're sure as heck not updating the AI. Or rather, they're not updating the information the AI needs to tell you, because Joe told Bill the line is blocked, but Bill hasn't entered that on the computer yet.
Why do you imagine maintaining a new-fangled talking train station would go any better than maintaining a website?
I'm still mulling this study over, but I am inclined to believe its conclusions that ~10% of students given mindfulness meditation training were adversely affected by the program (and for the rest it didn't provide any measurable benefits). However, I don't know how the British educational system implemented their School-Based Mindfulness Training (SBMT) curricula. I'm sorry, but I don't think teachers (or child psychologists for that matter) are capable of being effective meditation instructors by taking a course or two and passing a certification exam. It seems to me that if someone is going to teach mindfulness, they need a couple of decades in the meditation trenches before they're qualified to teach meditation to adults — let alone children! I remember the well-meaning boob who first taught me Buddhist meditation. He was a young bliss-head who couldn't get his brain around that I was having some very weird negative experiences with my initial forays into mindfulness meditation. Luckily I met a Lama who, when I described what I was experiencing, gave me some visualization exercises to get around the crazy stuff I was experiencing.
Anyway, the study tested more than 8,000 children (aged 11-14) across 84 schools in the UK from 2016 to 2018. Its results showed that mindfulness failed to improve the mental well-being of children compared to a control group, and very likely had detrimental effects on those who were at risk of mental health problems.
https://mentalhealth.bmj.com/content/25/3/117
Heard from someone who has done years of training and meditation with Tibetan buddhists that Tibetans like to start kids out by sounding a gong and having them listen to the sound as it grows fainter and fainter, seeing whether they can identify the moment when it becomes silence. This lovely exercise seems benign to me.
I'm going to be cynical here and say that they're not really teaching "mindfulness meditation", what they are trying to teach is "sit down, be quiet, focus" for modern kids who are hyper-stimulated and the old methods of expecting discipline and good behaviour in class have gone because you're not allowed use corporal punishment anymore.
The end results that this is supposed to achieve is "And then little Johnny paid attention in class, did his homework, and got better grades in his tests". Judge for yourself if you think this is very likely the second the kids leave the classroom environment and go home.
Also I suspect anyone who needs to reduce an esoteric practice into an acronym has missed the point of that esoteric practice and doesn't know what the f**k they're doing.
<mildSnark>
Hmm... Would a governmental or corporate acronym-heavy version be "Transcendental Misrepresentation"? :-)
</mildSnark>
it's like CBT - oh, this really works for a small subset of people when it's a new thing? Well, let's try it for everyone!
And now we've got "ten online sessions of CBT to cure your lumbago, fix your depression, spray for blight on the spuds, and get ten more miles to the gallon for your car" watered-down to sweet damn-all version of it recommended by the health system over here instead of real therapy which is too long and expensive.
(I may be *slightly* jaundiced about my experiences with the Irish mental health services, brief and pointless as they were).
At least it's not a pre-existing word...
STIM: School-based Training In Mindfulness
Now we've got SBMT, which to my ears if you try saying it sounds like "sbbmft". "How did your sbbmmfft session in school go today, sweetheart?"
It's actually short for "SuBMiT", which is a joint project by BDSM evangelists and Islamic fundamentalists to get people to shut up and do what they say...
There seems to be fair amount of evidence that a small percentage of people trying mindfullness experience really bad effects - on the order of a psychotic break. But his seems to be way less than 10%.
I can totally believe results along the line of, "actually, not much benefit".
To date, I have only encountered people with anxiety disorders from it (I'm a psychologist). But anxiety disorders are torturous and disabling. One man I saw had become unable to stop paying attention to his breath because he had a fear that if he did he would stop breathing. He understood perfectly well that the body does not work that way, but that knowledge did nothing to reduce his fear and his habit of paying attention to his breath. Sometimes he would get stuck imagining what it would be like to be unable to inhale & then he'd have a panic attack. He had a terrible time sleeping because the moment his attention began to diffuse he'd be yanked awake by the awareness that he was forgetting to pay attention to his breathing.
Oh, that sounds terrible. Typically, of course, you'll be fine because unconcious breathing reflexes will take over.
Though, kind of reminiscent of the time I was in the ER recently where the nurse was asking me if she could disable my Sp02 alarm (it was giving major hypoxia warning alerts) and I'm thinking to myself, how likely is it that if I go to sleep right now, I might never wake up.
What was the nurse's reasoning? That seems like a bad idea?
Something like, my blood oxygen was going low but not fatally low when I tried to sleep, and unneccessary alarms distract attention from the ones that actually matter. (The following morning, when the ER doc is round to see me, he's like, yeah, some people's blood oxygen goes low like that when they try to sleep, thats not a big problem)
Is it true, though, that it's not a big problem? People with sleep apnea do badly on various cognitive tests, and if they use a C-PAP cognitive scores improve, but some never get back into the average range. I believe that's thought to be the result of brain damage from the years with untreated sleep apnea.
There's something else that can shake some people up in a way that I think is similar to what mindfulness training does: philosophy. I myself, as a freshman, went through a period of depersonalization set off by lots of reading and rumination about free will and the nature of consciousness, and since then have run across several other people who have experienced the same thing. One, a philosophy major, actually ended up changing majors in his junior year because he could not face taking even one more philosophy course.
Can totally sympathize with the guy who doesn't want to know whether he is in The Matrix or not. If I recall correctly, Plato's Republic has a character who makes this point...
"And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision,—what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them,—will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?"
etc.
The tradition I was in had kept a guideline about "meditation could be dangerous; don't try it without access to an experienced teacher".
The Lama Ole version is just don't do it if you are not mentally healthy, say mantras but don't go deeper than that.
That sounds like the standard gatekeeping everyone does, with occupational licensing being the formalized version of that. Noöne seriously thinks that, say, massage therapy or hair styling is dangerous and requires a license to perform safely.
" Noöne seriously thinks that, say, massage therapy or hair styling is dangerous and requires a license to perform safely."
AHEM.
https://www.painscience.com/articles/massage-therapy-side-effects.php
"Massage therapy is quite safe, but nothing’s perfect. Strong, deep tissue massage causes the most trouble, of course. It may aggravate problems, instead of helping. Some chronic pain patients may be disastrously traumatized by intense massage (what I call a “sensory injury”). Occasionally it causes new physical injuries, usually just minor bruises and nerve lesions, but sometimes far worse: there’s a small but serious risk of spinal injury or stroke with any neck manipulation, and blood clots can be dangerously dislodged causing pulmonary embolism (a “stroke” in the lung).
On the milder side, patients often feel sore and a bit icky after massage (post-massage soreness and malaise). Although often rationalized by massage therapists as a healing crisis or the effects of “detoxifying,” it’s probably a minor muscle crush injury (rhabdomyolysis).
Athletic performance may be slightly impaired by pre-event massage — a minor consideration for most of us, but not for serious competitors.
Finally, sometimes massage therapy is a costly distraction from more appropriate care (as with any alternative medicine)."
Like anything else, if you don't know what you're doing, then cutting and styling hair or massage can cause harm ranging from the minor (she chopped my hair off! I'll have to wear a hat until it grows out!) to the more serious. And of course, there are always lawyers waiting to help you take a case:
https://www.traceysolicitors.ie/en/accident-in-a-public-place/beauty-salon-injury-claims-2/
"Immediately after the accident, seeking prompt medical attention is crucial. In severe cases, calling an ambulance could be necessary, however, if the injury seemed less severe, consulting your family doctor or GP is advised. In the event of a reaction to adhesive from eyelash extensions, eyelash tint, hair colour, or other beauty products, seeking prompt medical attention is crucial.
Timely medical attention is crucial in addressing allergic reactions, as they can lead to severe health complications. Delaying medical treatment may impact your ability to file a personal injury claim. To evaluate your eligibility for compensation regarding an allergic reaction from a beauty treatment, further details about the treatment context are necessary. We recommend consulting our personal injury solicitors to assess your case and determine the potential for making a claim related to allergic reactions in the beauty salon."
Well, one of the baristas at my local coffee shop had a small bald patch on the side of her head. She said it came from a chemical burn from some hair treatment that had gone wrong. Of course, she regularly dyed her hair in bright primary colors, and she changed them up regularly. So she was probably in a high-risk group for Hair Styling Trauma (HST). ;-)
That's what I thought too, but then I occasionally hear stories about people who mess their lives up. Maybe the quality-religious group dedicated to ending suffering took it a bit more seriously than average? Even if it's most often just some guy who has weird visions and found another religion...
I agree, heavy introspection is a strong and rather unnatural thing to do; like all such things it can be beneficial or harmful, so care and good guidance is needed.
Can I ask what kind of crazy stuff you experienced, and what was the remedy?
One common side effect of badly guided meditation is dissociation, where you learn to push your urgent feelings away from attention in the name of following the breath or some such.
My issue was hallucinatory sensations. Very early in my meditative practice, my body would start to itch. My instructor said to just acknowledge the itching sensation and it would pass. The more I resisted scratching myself, the more parts of my body began to itch. I could resist scratching, but my meditative internal discourse became "I will not scratch the itch" — I will not scratch the itch" — instead of following my breath. After several sessions of uncomfortable sitting meditation, suddenly one of the itching sensations on my forearm turned into a burning sensation. I tried to ignore it, but it really felt like my arm was on fire. I glanced at my arm, and it wasn't on fire. I tried to relax and acknowledge the sensation, but it was torture. Then, I felt the fire sensation on my back and at the crown of my head. I screamed and ran from the room. The burning sensation went away when I rubbed the affected places. When I explained the situation to the instructor, he looked at me as if I were crazy. He thought I was making it up. The following week, I attended a talk by the late Tara Rinpoche (not the current one). During the question and answer period, I explained my problem. He said that things like what I was experiencing could happen and it was best to scratch the itch instead of resisting it. He also suggested that at the beginning of my meditation, I visualize myself as floating in a cool pool of still water, and to return to that visualization if the itching started up. That worked for me.
Cool, that was good advice for you then. Thanks for sharing.
The dissociation is my personal experience; I tend naturally towards the "3rd party observer" mode of my own existence and meditation amplified that in somewhat unhelpful ways, in addition to e.g. making me hyper aware of minor aches and pains and irregular breathing.
> I've learned to avoid any sort of meditation like the plague because it invariably just intensifies all the unpleasant sensations and makes it harder for me to function, whether I'm leaning into the sensations, trying to focus on a specific innocuous sensation, not explicitly focusing on anything, counting, trying to visualize something, or whatever.
That does sound slightly unusual to me. One pretty common thing that the mind does is that it automatically stops paying attention to something that is just there without changing much. When there are lots of unpleasant sensations in the body or noise around, it's usually our own reactive complaining thoughts that keep the mind paying attention to those unwanted stimula. So when one achieves a decent level of concentration on *whatever technique*, while not suppressing the stimulus but just allowing them to be there, the usual result is that the reactive complaints eventually stop and the stimulus kind of fades into the background, and you can rest for a while in the sense of just being there. For me at least that is the measure of a meditation session having done its job.
That sounds like it could make sense. Dissociation is probably a completely different mechanism than sensory gating though.
Though I would note that in the chod tradition of vajrayana Buddhism, people would deliberately seek out frightening settings ... like a charnel ground with decomposing cadavers
More fun with nominative determinism:
I just learned that the 2003 World Series of Poker champion was named Chris Moneymaker (yes, that's his real name). And the 2006 champion was Jamie Gold.
Could be old news to you, but there’s a rising star of tennis called Katy Volynets.
This was one of the most incredible matches I have ever watched: Tennys Sondgren vs Roger Federer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSkPBR5p-3A
Who names their kid Tennys?
I hadn't heard of her. Amusing. Thanks.
How about Silvio Berlusconi. His last name has the word "Burlesque" in it.
My wife's grandmother is turning 104 and one of her biggest complaints is how bored she always is. Her sight and hearing are both poor, and her mobility isn't great either. She's also more comfortable in Greek than in English.
Any suggestions for what she can do to keep herself occupied other than nagging her 80+ year old daughter who's taking care of her?
Is she likes history, maybe history podcasts. There might be some in Greek. Either way - turn up the volume.
Knitting or crochet might be an option, depending on just how bad her eyesight and dexterity are. There are things like winter hats that are made with thick yarns and fairly simple patterns. I'm also fairly certain knitting books are available in Greek.
Audiobooks might be easier to follow than either paper books or films, because she doesn't have to use her eyes. If she's comfortable using an ebook reader, you can also get her one of those and set it to show very large print.
This last one is only feasible in specific circumstances, but she might benefit from a mobility scooter which would allow her to make short trips on her own (if that's safe in her neighborhood and feasible with her overall health).
There might also be organisations (red cross, churches, sport clubs and so on) that offer guided activities for seniors. Maybe it will do her good to meet some new people.
Has anyone in your extended family caught the family-tree/genealogy bug? (In my family I'm that nut.) Got the Ancestry.com account, pestering people for old photos to scan, etc?
The very best advice to newbies in that hobby is, "interview your oldest surviving relatives. Do it now while you still can. Just get them talking and telling all the old stories from their childhood and young adulthood. Telling the stories is what's fun for them so get them going and just listen and write. Write down every single thing they can recall, every story, every person they mention, the old rumors, all of it. Transcribe, don't debate. Half of it at least will turn out to be wrong or mangled but that's for you to figure out later. It will also include some gems of info and personal stories and new leads that you'd never otherwise discover."
A 104-year-old who's still corpus mentus, holy moly that is rare gold for this particular purpose. Find that relative and set up some times for this, maybe with you or somebody else there for some Greek-to-English translation if that makes things easier on Grandma. If handled right it should be a lot of fun for her, I've sure never had a relative in that age bracket who didn't enjoy telling family stories.
The objective in the moment is not to extract data points or fill out family group sheets it's just to get her talking. Maybe pay for cousin whoever the family-tree hobbyist to visit once a week for a while for one-hour sessions or something like that? And of course quietly set up an audio recorder in the corner and record it all for your and others' future remembrances and enjoyment.
If done gently/persistently those sessions will tire Grandma out while also becoming something she looks forward to each week for as long as she's able. And could end up being pure family gold. I am quite jealous typing this!
Unfortunately (or fortunately) she already wrote her memoirs back when she was a relative spring chicken of 90. And other family members have assisted with translating it from Greek to English.
So that's off the table as a constructive outlet, although she certainly likes telling stories about the past to anyone who will listen. The most interesting ones IMHO are her salient memories of WW2, like when the Nazis came through and put gold stars on all of the Jewish houses in her village.
What about her recording an oral or video version of selected parts of her memoirs? That would reach more people than her memoirs, even if they are published. I think I read somewhere that there's a project going on of compiling interviews of holocaust survivors. I wonder whether the group is interested in memoirs of witnesses. Another idea: would she enjoy a pet? My grandmother, who also stayed alert and lively up to a great age, had a parakeet that amused her a lot (and in fact it heard her laugh so much that it learned to do an excellent imitation of her laugh). And cats provide a lot of entertainment, and also adapt well to spending a lot of time cuddling with elderly owners who don't move around much.
Full disclosure - I work on GPCR agonists for a pharmaceutical company, and while GLP1R is not the target I am an expert on, I do work on GLP1R. I am a structural biologist, so general cell biology and endocrinology are not my strongest suits either.
I was traveling and missed the initial discussion on the GLP1/GLP1R post. I applaud everyone making a genuine attempt to understand the mechanisms here, but I also wanted to offer some perspective that I didn't see in either the post or the comments.
There are mainly two things I want to bring up:
1) No one knows the mechanism for all these effects. And this isn't one of those "we don't yet understand" things where everyone does understand but there are one or two loose ends yet to be fully elucidated so to cover their but in a paper's discussion section, they have to attenuate whatever it is they are saying type-things. No, this is actually no one knows. The folks doing the bleeding edge research, in universities, in drug development, are asking a lot of the same fundamental questions that are being asked here, and don't yet have answers. It's a complicated field, it's a confusing field, and even when we do get answers, I wouldn't expect them to be satisfying.
2) The situation as presented (GLP1 binds to GLP1R which does X, Y or Z), is simply too much of a simplification to ever arrive at a solution, even if the data where out there. Because there are some confounding factors I want to bring up.
I saw no real mention of signal bias. I think that this is very worth pointing out. When GLP1 binds to GLP1R on the outside of a cell, it enables (well maybe*) GLP1R to bind a G⍺ protein on the inside of the cell. That protein then starts a signaling cascade, leading to the opening of calcium channels, which will transduce the signal throughout the neurons.
However, there are more than one G⍺ protein. The most well known G⍺ protein is G⍺s. This is the protein that is thought to be the primary binder of GLP1R when GLP binds, which results in the cyclic AMP/protein kinase A (PKA). However, GLP1R can also bind G⍺i and G⍺o, which will cause ERK1/2 mediated signaling, and also G⍺q which will go down the protein kinase B (PKB) pathway. Finally, (well maybe not finally, there's probably even more we don't know about or I have missed), you have two β-arrestin proteins (1 & 2) that can bind in place of G⍺. These are widely misunderstood. Most people think they facilitate internalization of the receptor from the membrane - i.e. shutting the signal off, but actually when GLP1 binds GLP1R extracelluarly, it's possible for G⍺ to never bind intracellularly, and instead just one of the β-arrestins will bind and then you have a situation called "G-protein independent signaling" in which the GLP1-GLP1R-β-arrestin complex is capable of signaling intracellularly on its own, and in some cases this signaling is more sustained than the G-protein mediated signaling.
In general, for most GPCR agonists, all the pathways get activated, just in a specific ratio. With GLP1 and GLP1R, you get mostly, but not entirely, G⍺s signaling. However, if you look at the cryo-EM structures of semaglutide and taspoglutide bound to GLP1R, there are minor conformational differences in the receptors that could lead to slightly different G⍺ signaling biases. Perhaps a little more G⍺q or something - we don't totally know (yet).
One thing that's beginning to be reported, is that the mixture of side effects and on-target effects seems to depend on that bias profile. So for example (I'm making this example up just FYI, just to illustrate the point), binding more G⍺i might lead to more nausea, while binding more G⍺o might lead to more weight loss. Unfortunately, I can't really go more into detail here at the moment, although there's plenty of published work out there.
Tl;dr:
Semaglutide and liraglutide are not perfect GLP1 clones. This can cause a change in the bias profiles for G⍺s recruitment, which can lead to slightly different effects vs just plain GLP1. Dose and efficacy could also play a role here. Also, lots of other things can impact G⍺s recruitment such as GIPR and GCGS.
*Incretins specifically (GLP1R, GIPR, GCGR) have relatively high constitutive activity in the cell, meaning they can bind G⍺ without their agonists being present. This is at lower, but still significant levels. Specifically this makes me wonder if the idea of the lone receptor fishing for an agonist in the membrane is perhaps incomplete, and some, or all receptors could be primed by a G⍺.
When should I bug my doctor to prescribe this stuff on the chance that it will retard the progression of my Parkinson's?
Thanks!
Thanks!
Does anyone have a good link for what the modern thinking is on “mirror neurons”? The two extremes I’ve come across are ‘it’s responsible for the human ability for mimicry and is a critical component for proper development’ and ‘it exists, sort of, but its importance has been greatly overblown.’ Thanks for helping me understand what these are and how important they currently seem to be!
Also, the wiki page on the subject is only a stub 4+ years without an update. If you are knowledgeable on this subject, please feel free to update it!
I don't have a link, but supposing there aren't mirror neurons, how *do* people imitate what other people do?
As far as I understand, the latest is that mirror neurons have basically been debunked as a concept.
Hm, what do you mean by "mirror neurons have been debunked"? I do believe that the importance of mirror neurons has been terribly overblown, but there seems pretty hard evidence in monkeys (and rodents, I believe) that there are neurons which activate when the monkey moves, and which also activate when they observe another monkey make a similar movement. Do you challenge those findings?
To be clear, I don't find those findings super exciting. Perhaps the most exciting aspect is that those neurons are in the motor control areas.
Now, the situation in humans is a lot less clear, because we can't implant electrodes into humans. With a few exceptions for epilepsy reasons, but epilepsy is usually not generated in those motor control regions, so they are basically black boxes for us on the level of individual neuronal activity. Researchers have tried to get something out of fMRI data (a "mirror neuron system"), but that data is so coarse that any findings for humans are on very shaky grounds. Perhaps you meant that this mirror neuron system is debunked? I agree that this looks fishy and that we have no proof of mirror neurons in humans. But "debunked" sounds pretty strong to me. We simply have no way of looking for them.
And of course, in popular press there were lots of misconceptions which never had a chance of being correct. Even if mirror neurons exist, they are not little homunculi which receive their knowledge about the other person from ether. They are not different from the other neurons that surround them. Knowing that mirror neurons exist is more like a statistical statement, and doesn't have vast philosophical implications.
I'm considering quitting my job without much of a backup plan, and I have a family to support. I don't really have easy to market skills nor experience in high demand right now, but my job is making me a worse person than I ought to be and it's not where I want to stay. It's affecting me physically--I need to leave soon. I've known this for 2+ years but couldn't land a new job. I've applied to probably a thousand jobs in the last year and a half with only a handful of interviews. I don't know what I'm asking for really, but if anyone has experience in this situation, I am interested in what you have to say.
What is the current job that's bringing so much misery?
Not sure what industry you're in, but you could consider some kind of trade or "lower skill" job as a temporary stop gap while you look for something in your preferred industry. In my area jobs like a bus driver, substitute tracher, CNC Machinest, etc. are easy to get and pay well. They can be fairly low stress depending on the org. Plus they may be physical and/or provide more time outdoors which usually does wonders for mental health
It's a lot easier to get a new job when you still have a current job.
I once had a lousy job I didn't like and which was slowly getting worse. I figured out exactly how much I was earning per day and every day I asked myself "Can I put up with one more day in exchange for $X?" Every day the answer was yes, so I kept on going to work, until eventually I had another job offer in hand. But I gave myself permission to quit if the answer was ever no.
I found that this sort of short term thinking was helpful, since I was no longer focused on the big and unfixable problems associated with the job, I was just focused on the fact that if I go to work and sit in a chair and do the bare minimum for a while, then have a nice lunch, then do the bare minimum for a while again, then I'll wind up hundreds of dollars richer.
Your job shouldn't be making you a worse person. Would it still be making you a worse person if you were just going through the motions day to day?
I have difficulty allowing myself to do the bare minimum, I'd feel guilty or if I got called out, that'd be another set of headaches. Plus it would probably show on our already pretextual, exploitative performance reviews heavily influenced by my micromanager who is threatened by me. I'll try to come up with a dollar amount per day as you suggested, and try that. It might help, and I appreciate it.
> I found that this sort of short term thinking was helpful
I've also found this to be helpful.
Hey Stan. I don’t have any direct advice, but just my experience. Last year (exactly 12 months ago) I was fired from my last full time job. (Honestly, a lot about the place annoyed me, and I probably semi-engineered the firing subconsciously.)
The last 12 months has been a killer. I’ve applied for lots of jobs without any joy, and have been freelancing to make ends meet. Several months I haven’t managed to make ends meet. I’ve done a lot of work on my mentality, especially around money and value and worth (including self worth), and it’s definitely improving, but slowly. The stress of financial pressure (I also have a family to support) seems to have affected my health and made me more prone to infection and illness.
Highly recommend finding something else before quitting (one possibly useful tactic could be to experiment with not-giving-a-fuck at work - identify the minimum allowed or expected and deliver that, and use other time you have to work on your own skills and mindset). I also understand none of this might be possible for you if your job is completely unpalatable.
Good luck.
Wow, thank you for sharing your experience. I know things can get worse, but I know they can get better and I do not want to be the guy who freezes in the face of uncertainty. I hope things get better for you fast. Appreciate your thoughtful advice, I have some thinking to do.
No worries man. Good luck with it all. For what it’s is worth, I suspect that the rate of digital transformation/evolution/disruption in the wider commercial ecosystem over the past 10-20 years means most jobs (and effectively 100% of jobs in older companies and organisations) feel like terrible jobs, because they create a vast cognitive dissonance between the individual (who is agile and appreciates that change is inevitable and is seeking ways to integrate that change into his life) and the organisation (which is necessarily inagile and inflexible and run by systems, processes and policies).
It's harder to live without enough money than you think. Don't do it yet.
The AskAManager blog has a *lot* of great advice, including how to fine tune resumes/cover letters, ace interviews, and so on. Even if you know all of the obvious stuff, it might just be the obvious stuff that everyone else knows. There might be little nuggets of advice in there that will put you slightly ahead of your peers. Good luck.
Thanks Christina, I will check out that blog. I loved how you phrased it, "Even if you know all of the obvious stuff, it might just be the obvious stuff that everyone else knows." Been there and probably still am there in many respects!
My impression is that most people looking for a new job aren't going about it in the best way. So whether you keep your present job or not, try to improve your job-hunting game. Here are some suggestions for how to:
-Find out what kinds of jobs are easiest to get now, and which have a glut of applicants.. Target the former
-Find out which applicants for a certain job get hired. Target the ones for which you fit the profile.
-Look for info about how to get hired for particular jobs. Is it crucial to have certain keywords on your resume? Will it improve your chances to apply directly at the company's site, rather than via some job-hunting site?
-Consider the possibility that if you picked up one new skill you would qualify for some appealing jobs you currently don't qualify for. If there isn't currently a glut of applicants for those jobs, it might be worth putting in the time to learn the skill.
-Network. Tell everyone you know that you are looking for a job. I know someone who just got a great lead from his old high school football coach.
-Consider funky possibilities. There are jobs that are not advertised. If you have a high LSAT score there's a company that will pay you $120/hour to tutor LSAT prep. People who do LSAT tutoring independently sometimes charge twice that. There are many wealthy people who are willing to pay quite a lot for things that will help their children advance in life, but most know enough to be able to tell whether you have a high level of competence. If you are extraordinarily accomplished in an academic field, the arts, or even in certain sports you can earn quite a lot per hour tutoring and mentoring the children of the prosperous. There are also well-off people who will pay well for a personal assistant who will run errands, look up recipes, book flights, hotels etc for their upcoming trips, search for info of various kinds, find someone reliable to take care of the yellow-jacket nest under the eaves, etc etc.
You've given me a lot to think about. I haven't really considered funky possibilities, and I definitely need to up my networking game (introvert here). Thanks for the astute response, Eremolalos!
I don't really see how someone would actually get that information. Companies seem to have sources of labor market statistics and they know their own hiring data, and I vaguely remember seeing statistics compiled from H1Bs, but unless you know of some websites I don't you're proposing doing more than an economics PhD of sleuthing there.
It's possible you're right. I was able to find information for a family friend who was applying for Data Science jobs, but that was my only foray into job app stats. However, a quick google does turn up a lot of sites that say they have data.
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=data+on+how+many+applicants+for+a+given+job&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
Is there reason to think all these sites are bullshit?
I do get that individual companies might not want to make public the stats about how many applicants they get, but what I was talking about in my initial post was not individual companies, but particular jobs. One reason I think the info is probably findable is that so many people want it -- not just people applying for jobs, but economists, investors, etc. Stands to reason there would be organizations set up to make money by providing this info. Another is that a lot of job-hunting takes place through organizations that have no reason to hide the info they about how many people are apply for particular jobs. In fact selling that data would be a source of income for them.
I did not click through all of the results, but the ones I saw were unsourced and did not even attempt to divide jobs by field.
For Data Science jobs, I found good info at The Bureau of Labor Statistics, on some sites and publications for people in the Data Science field, and from this YouTube guy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w13zJB_jyBI
The YouTuber tells what sources he used, but I judged him to be reliable and did not go to the sources.
I don't know how it whether it would be harder or easier to get the info on other jobs.
BLS data tends to be bad about lumping, I was surprised to see that data science had its own category. "Mathematicians and Statisticians" alone covers at least a dozen wildly different jobs.
Talk to people, lean on your support network, try find ways to pause whatever it is that's making you a worse person.
But don't jump until you have a replacement job lined up. Your family is your primary responsibility, but your continued health is also their responsibility.
Maybe lower your standards for jobs a bit, and find something that will let your family survive, while giving you the peace of mind to recover and do a proper job search. It's possible that the time and stress savings could put you ahead, even if the pay is less.
The consensus, even among my family, is not to quit. I've been not quitting for 2 years. So frustrating, but I am occasionally hopeful. I recently lowered my standards, especially if the job title & new experience looks good on a resume--we'll see. My sincere thanks Moon Moth.
Are you able to build up savings while working? The more savings you have, the easier things will be.
I probably can be doing a better job at this. But it's definitely harder than it used to be. Thanks
If you feel like your spending is not under control, look into frugality (FIRE movement is one place to check). If you can make meaningful improvements to your budgeting, it will give you much more flexibility on employment options (maybe take a risk and change fields if yours feels dead end). That isn't an immediate fix but can set you up to be more flexible in the future. I kind of dislike my current job, but that feeling is largely negated by the fact that I could quit today and not have any money problems.
I dipped my toes into FIRE a few years ago and developed a few good habits along with some small investing. I am pretty much debt free and it'd be nice to retire early. But I'll reacquaint myself with it! Appreciate your response.
Don’t do it yet. It could send you into a negative spiral and keep you out of the labor market for much longer than you want. Look for jobs, take interviews from time to time, but don’t quit cold turkey. Find ways to reinvent your job. Look for interesting projects. Think of it as doing a masters on X and put another year or two with that mindset. Meditate. Think of whether your inner voice is part of why your job is making you miserable.
I understand how you feel, but the way. I’ve quit before. It feels liberating, for a moment. But I was always financially secure, and finding my next thing took 9-12 months. If you can’t afford that, and you have a family, the stress of not having an income will be really bad.
Yeah, I cannot do 9-12 months. Maybe 6 and then I'd be in trouble. You're probably right, at least partly, about the inner voice. But at this point it is pretty ingrained and I get headaches the instant certain aspects of my job pop up, sometimes even just by thinking about them. Thanks for the advice, it's persuasive.
What is a respected job in your local area? If you do something that is highly respected, that can be worth a pay-cut or career change.
Eg. Operators at my local oil refinery are well-respected, and I will likely soon be working there (a change that does not require experience… they give you a standard IQ test + mechanical reasoning test, then train you if you do well).
Thanks, Brad. I sort of started recently looking for anything that looks great on a resume, even if it pays less. I'll try to see what others do around here and elsewhere I could possibly do and expand my search. Honestly, I'd take a significant pay cut for a non-miserable, reduced stress job.
I sympathize but having sampled the tech job market for over a year now I got the impression it is not easy at all to find a good job at the moment. Certainly more difficult than 5 years ago. If you can, I would suggest you continue looking/interviewing while you keep your current job.
Thanks alstoc, this is the advice everyone seems to be saying, it's quite reasonable, sage, and with no offense intended, miserable. I'll probably stick with my job but redouble my efforts at landing something new.
I wouldn’t recommend redoubling your efforts, as that can lead to frustration, anxiety, stress, and even depression. Instead, keep searching while your carry on with your life. Let the job search simmer in the background—steadily ongoing, but not dominating your focus. All you can do is improve the odds in your favor, but remember that the outcome is largely beyond your control. Don’t count time. And avoid setting strict deadlines or constantly waiting for responses from companies; you never know how long the process will take, and counting the days (or months) can become all-consuming.
Thanks, that sounds like a less stressful way to go. Unfortunately, there was a development thanks to the high stress (especially lately), and I had a medical situation unfold that made me rethink my priorities. Health got bumped up a lot.
For those of you believe in effective altruism (trying to maximize the value of charitable donations), I've found a cause that saves more lives per $ than the top ranked GiveWell charity.
GiveWell
(https://givewell.org/charities/top-charities) ranks charities by cost per life saved. Malaria nets is the most efficient, at $5,000 per life saved. And that's amazing, but I found a better one.
If you donate towards getting drone jammers for Ukrainian medics, the cost per life saved is even better. It's $5k for a drone jammer to protect medics going to the front line. Each jammer saves *at least* one life and they do not have nearly enough. The impact is probably even higher since medics will go on to save more lives. So you can donate $100 towards a jammer and saves lives basically as efficiently as possible.
Here's more info and a good place to donate:
https://x.com/Harri_Est/status/1823010493386142022,
@bekamaciorowski is a combat medic in Ukraine who helps fundraiser and distribute jammers.
'It's $5k for a drone jammer to protect medics going to the front line. Each jammer saves *at least* one life and they do not have nearly enough.'
Where can I find the data or analysis that produced this lower bound? Intuitively, it sounds unrealistically high to me. Less than $5k per personel life saved seems like it would be a far better spending opportunity on the margin for Ukraine's military than most other things they could buy. So I would expect this to have been arbitraged down to less anomalous levels already.
It's also easy to think of many ways it could be false. For example, the drone jammers probably don't have a 100% success rate, and in any case can't stop artillery. More importantly, they don't know who will be attacked in advance and so they have to give them to everyone.
It had not even occurred to me that the implicit argumentation was literally 'let's just assume each additional jammer leads to an additional person equipped with a jammer, and each person so equipped will survive when they counterfactually wouldn't have'.
I now suspect that this was indeed the line of thought here.
If so, this is a very silly analysis. I'm not going to claim that GWWC's estimates are really all that great. But if you've ever glanced at what their attempts at impact calculations look like, it's a completely different world compared to this. If GWWC used this sort of reasoning, they could probably claim something like <$5 per life saved for their top charities and call it a day. (one per mosquito net!)
Lol. You can also buy drone jammers for Russians if they're more your style - QALY's are QALY's after all!
If Ukraine regularly targeted Russian medics and medical facilities then that would be valid. But they don't. There are some opportunities in Gaza if you really want to both sides this. Though not really for drone jammers.
The point is more that once you're buying military hardware, stop pretending this is "effective altruism"
Why? Effective Altruism isn't a pacifist ideology. There've been multiple debates in the ratsphere about whether assassinating Putin would work as a cause area if it ended the war.
That's the problem. Were there similar discussions around assassinating Zelensky? A Ukrainian surrender would end the war too, and save just as many QALYs.
But I get the sense that's not really what this is about. This feels much closer to starting with the desired political outcome, and reasoning backwards into a narrative of how actually this is the totally utilitarian outcome. This has *always* been a failure mode of utilitarianism.
Perhaps EA shouldn't stick to pure pacifism, but that at least provides a backstop against its more nasty tendencies.
Not about assassinating Zelensky. The parallel argument was about whether the US should pressure Ukraine to surrender or cut off aid. This is because Zelensky is not a dictator and the situation is not parallel.
You're starting from a premise ("We're being unfair to Russia!") and then trying to reason back from it. But it's not actually true in this case. There's plenty of people who are pro-Putin around. To the contrary, it seems like it's the other side that desperately wants to complicate what is a fairly easy moral calculus because they don't like that it might condemn their side.
Also, providing lifesaving medical treatment even on a battlefield is allowed by most pacifist religions and ideologies. Likewise moving someone out of danger or running jammers. The usual line is you can't participate in an act of killing even in a supporting role. But plenty of pacifists served as combat medics and wore body armor without complaint.
I think cost per life saved is not an ideal metric. What you want to optimize for is cost per QALY, but this is harder to measure because it is not enough to observe that you lowered Malaria by x%, you would also have to observe what age your population reaches at what health level.
Of course, there are reasons why the QALY per life saved would be lower for either prospective Malaria victims (they are generally poor people in poor countries) or Ukrainian soldiers (they will either survive with injuries disqualifying them from military service (which would lower QALY) or will likely find themselves in a situation to get shot at again (which will also lower their QALY)).
The other thing to consider is that if this is such an effective investment, then why is the Ukrainian military not paying for it? From a quick google search, Ukraine has around 1.2M active troops and received 64G$ in military aid in 2024, for about 50k$ per soldier.
Now, granted, not all of that is cash to be spent how they see fit, a lot of it is likely fancy Western weapon systems with insane sticker prices, but I don't think that this is enough to explain the difference. You can always argue that due to corruption, the Ukrainian military is not willing to invest into cheap devices to save their soldiers lives, but the other hypothetical is that these jammers are less cost effective than advertised.
For another thing, a Ukrainian conscript makes 20kUAH a month, which is around 500$. I will grant you that the median conscript does have some obligations, so this is not his disposable income, but I would personally invest a week's salary into a device which is guaranteed to save my life (even if it will only work once).
Part of the benefits of the bed net figure is that it is backed up by rigorous evidence, not just a claim by some bed net manufacturer, and it seems unlikely that the insects will come up with a strategy to circumvent the nets. With the jammers, the error bars are much higher.
The device is $5k, or 10 months of a Ukrainian soldier's salary.
To the people bringing up "saving lives could lead to ending other lives." Medics do not engage in general combat and are protected by the Geneva Conventions. The chances they will kill anyone outside of self-defense is very low. They are supposed to carry weapons only to defend themselves and their patients. They also are obliged to provide aid to Russians as well. The fact Russia target them at all is a war crime.
Protecting medics and medical facilities (and keeping them out of combat, unlike certain militaries using them as shields) is the one of the most established ways to make war a little less horrible. So no, the fact it might facilitate other killing is not the moral complexity. It's a more efficient and better charity. So are things like medical supplies or other high need goods. You can also get them to Myanmar, Sudan, or Gaza but the risk of it being stolen/intercepted is much higher there. (And if you want to argue the jammers might be used for non-medical purposes that too is a valid concern. But it's like body armor or medical supplies: more likely to save than end even other lives.)
Also, not to sideswipe EA, but you usually get best value for money per live saved in refugee situations or wars. (Which are honestly usually the same thing.) Why doesn't EA do more with that?
It's really not black and white. Soldiers rescued by medical personnel are going to end up back on the front unless they are crippled. Something like 1/2-2/3 of casualties will end up combat viable at some point in the future, depending on the severity of their wounds and quality of treatment.
It is in most moral philosophies and in the international rules of war both sides have agreed to. What morality are you exploring? It can't be pure utilitarianism because the math works out there (you save more lives in net at cheaper cost).
There's the moral quandary that soldiers kill people, so saving the lives of soldiers enables them to do more killing in the future. Anyway I don't have strong moral claims here, I was more concerned with the math of effective charity. Reducing preventable malaria deaths is straightforward. Saving a medic from drones attacks is much more complicated. The jammer might not even do anything, they can still be shot or hit by artillery or blown up by a glide bomb. Rescued soldiers are much more likely to die in the future, with the ongoing war. And they are also likely to kill soldiers on the opposing side. Of course all the saved lives that are too crippled to be soldiers any more are subtracted from the above.
It depends on your system of morality. Most systems agree that if you save someone and they go on to kill someone else you are not responsible for that. Some don't. Utilitarianism is one of them but if you do the utilitarian calculation then you find it still nets out to be more efficient and a net positive. Firstly because of the 50x cost multiplier and secondly because if you're indifferent to whose lives then you also have to factor in all the lives the soldier saves as well as their likelihood of killing nobody (since most soldiers don't) and living through the war (as most soldiers do).
Your objections (that the person could go on to kill someone or be killed in another way) are true in Africa as well. Especially with low life expectancies the latter in particular is a huge downward pressure if you count not by lives but by quality adjusted life years. Which I suspect is why they generally don't.
I donated! Thanks for sharing!
Does this account for Russian lives that saving a Ukrainian life might cost?
It should also account for the Ukrainian lives saved by costing the Russian lives as well.
was thinking about the same thing too
Russians have a fantastic, wonderful path to saving their lives, and a lot of money too - stop their war and get out of the neighboring country. Ukrainians don't have that luxury (well, now they control some 1000 sq. km of actual Russian territory, there will need to be an exchange. OTOH Russia doesn't have an established border anymore, so who knows how this is going to work out).
If your charity goes to saving someone on the battlefield, there is a good chance they are either going to a) kill someone else, or b) get killed by someone else. I don't think the math is quite as simple as the malaria net scenario.
Would your "AI Safety" grants also go to people who are advocating for the idea that restrictions on AI are like restrictions on prosperity?
To me, "AI Safety" is like "Gun Safety" -- a misnomer.
Hold on, why do you say "gun safety" is a misnomer? There are clear and simple rules for gun safety, they work when followed, and not following them results in Alec Baldwin shooting a bystander. What am I missing here?
Indeed, yes, there are four rules for gun safety, but mostly the people who use those two words in succession mean that law abiding people are safer without guns. How they can come to this conclusion given that police and criminals will still have guns, I cannot imagine.
Isn't that "gun control"? I'm not American but FWIW I've never heard gun safety used the same way as gun control.
I'm American and I've never heard "gun safety" used to mean "gun control" either.
Here's a bunch of examples of "gun control" and "gun safety" being used interchangeably:
https://thehill.com/social-tags/gun-safety/.
(Paywalled) Articles from a rudimentary Google search,
The New York Times - Gun Safety Must Be Everything That Republicans Fear: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/29/opinion/gun-safety-republicans.html
The Washington Post - How two gun-friendly senators are turning the tide on gun safety: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/03/gun-bill-king-heinrich-assault-weapons-ban/
Here's an organization called "Everytown for Gun Safety": everytown.org.
https://x.com/search?q=gun%20safety&src=typed_query
https://www.google.com/search?q=gun+safety
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_safety
And now? We keep throwing links at each other until one loses interest?
If you don't believe the US President, who are you going to believe?
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/03/23/fact-sheet-vice-president-harris-announces-gun-safety-solutions-while-continuing-efforts-to-keep-schools-safe-from-gun-violence/
Hoplophobes call gun control "Gun Safety" because "gun control" is racist. Gun nuts call avoidance of negligent discharges "Gun Safety" because there are ways to handle guns safely. Same word used by different parties with different, conflicting even, meanings.
> How they can come to this conclusion given that police and criminals will still have guns, I cannot imagine.
Well for one thing, the largest cause of gun deaths is suicide.
Another issue is that an armed society is a MAD society, where there's a tendency for people to shoot first in fear of getting shot in return. At the very least, that's the excuse that that guy in Texas who killed a protestor used.
People who want to kill themselves use an effective means. Guns are widely available in the US, and are effective, so people use guns. There is no evidence that reducing gun availability will decrease the suicide rate.
Yeah this is a strange own goal, it’s almost as if they don’t care if the policies they advocate get actually enabled. Like, they need to convince a large proportion of people who disagree with them - you’d think the least they could do is to learn the basic lingo as at least a sign of respect? to be taken seriously? Especially basic policies like requiring safe storage - BTW, every badass former military guy I’ve trained with, and shot weapons with, has had only utter disdain for careless civilians who refuse to learn basic gun safety. These people’d be natural allies for sensible safety proposals if those proposing the safety cared to engage respectfully.
One can only dream.
Ah, but that's not how "gun safety" is usually used. It usually means, "OUR guns are safe, even when we use them to shoot you (and your little dog too!). YOUR guns are not safe, regardless of what you use them for, hunting, defending yourself against rapists, your family against home-invaders, etc."
...are you talking about Gun Control? I've only ever heard Gun Safety in the "treat every gun as if it's loaded" sense.
Without looking too hard, here's an article from TODAY (I hadn't seen it before I posted my comment): https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4831399-gun-safety-election-issues/. The headline says "gun safety," and the article is about restricting who can own guns, and what kind, what you might call "gun control" instead.
And more from the same site, https://thehill.com/social-tags/gun-safety/.
And just pulling up (paywalled) articles from a rudimentary Google search,
The New York Times - Gun Safety Must Be Everything That Republicans Fear: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/29/opinion/gun-safety-republicans.html
The Washington Post - How two gun-friendly senators are turning the tide on gun safety: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/03/gun-bill-king-heinrich-assault-weapons-ban/
Here's an organization called "Everytown for Gun Safety": everytown.org.
They all use the terms "gun control" and "gun safety" interchangeably.
"but that's not how "gun safety" is usually used" - usually used by whom? Who are these people in your hypothetical example?
You don't know? There's giffords, everytown, 97percent, Shannon Watts just for a start. Our illustrious VP has talked about gun safety when she meant gun control.
By anyone using the phrase. That's almost certainly gonna be activists advocating for "gun safety", and they DON'T mean teaching children trigger discipline, or anything like it.
Do you have a specific example of someone (e.g., an activist) saying something like "OUR guns are safe, even when we use them to shoot you (and your little dog too!). YOUR guns are not safe, regardless of what you use them for, hunting, defending yourself against rapists, your family against home-invaders, etc."?
He used the word "means", which in this context I think "means" something like "my outgroup alternates between two incompatible positions, and this is what it would sound like if they tried to articulate both at once, but of course the underlying principle is simply who-whom".
On the object level, I think the support isn't quite there. There are factions on the left that are against police (especially armed police) and against the military, although I think the left's lock on the federal bureaucracy means that they tend to be OK with the FBI, ATF, and USSS. But even then, I think they view law enforcement guns as a regrettable necessity required by everyone else being armed.
I suppose the exception is the lunatic left fringe when some vocal right-winger gets busted, but even then I think it's less about the guns, and more about the exact same feeling that motivated the right wing to cheer when Osama bin Laden was killed.
Is this a genuine question, or an argument phrased as a question?
For what it's worth, everything I know about Scott suggests he believes that AI will, in the coming decades, potentially pose an existential threat to humanity. So I would wager he's very unlikely to give a grant to someone promoting the position "AI safety is an absurd field and we should always and everywhere oppose it".
It's a question. We have no reason to believe that an AI will go out of control. Seems to me like we should be studying the possibility, not seeking to limit the use of AI. And yet "AI Safety" means "AI Control" just like "Gun Safety" means "Gun Control". And it's not their own AIs or guns that they're talking about controlling -- it's YOUR AI.
The whole thing is just stoooopid, because who is the most likely to create an AI which can go out of control? Someone who is beyond a government's control in the first place. So why are governments talking about restricting AIs when it's the criminals who will be running rogue AIs. Same thing with guns. And yet grownups keep enacting childish fantasies of a society where the good people don't have guns and the bad people do.
I want to hit somebody with a stick, Jo, really, I do. A cluebat. Or ClueBringer, even.
'It's a question. We have no reason to believe that an AI will go out of control.'
We have plenty of reason to believe that. Or at least people like me and Scott (I presume) think we do.
If you want an introductory resource, there isn't really a truly great one I'm aware of. Here's a selection of popular intro material anyway:
Scott's old Superintelligence FAQ: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LTtNXM9shNM9AC2mp/superintelligence-faq
Robert Miles' youtube channel. The older videos are probably the most useful ones here: https://www.youtube.com/@RobertMilesAI/videos
Superintelligence by Bostrom: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20527133-superintelligence
Human Compatible by Russel: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Human-Compatible-AI-Problem-Control/dp/0241335205#
AI Safety Fundamentals course material: https://course.aisafetyfundamentals.com/alignment
If you're starting to feel familiar with some of the standard intro points like the orthogonality thesis, list of lethalities by Eliezer briefly summarises a lot of other stuff: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities
It might be in the course materials as well, but many people report that this writeup is what made the nature of the distinction between the goals of an AI and its loss functions properly click: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pdaGN6pQyQarFHXF4/reward-is-not-the-optimization-target
John Wentworth has a series of short writeups on the problems with some common alignment proposals: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/TLSzP4xP42PPBctgw
Is it possible? Of course. Is it probable? Not at all. There isn't a good introductory resource because it Isn't Going To Happen.
Worry more, MUCH more, about the coming polar magnetic shift.
What are your opinions on Kamala Harris' economic proposals? (I don't think we can call them policies as yet).
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8xqy0jv24o
(1) They're campaign promises, Deiseach, and will fade away like the morning dew should she be elected
(2) I totally believe she will do all this when she gets into power, just like Obama shut down Guantanamo Bay. Oh, wait...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/01/why-obama-has-failed-to-close-guantanamo
(3) If this is her vision for the economy, I freakin' hope she doesn't get elected
(4) If this is her vision for the economy, I freakin' hope she does get elected
Me, I think it's going to be a combination of (1) and (2). Should she be elected, the fine words butter no parsnips.
Add in that I lived under Fianna Fáil governments passing populist "spend spend spend" budgets, and the chickens eventually come home to roost, the cows do come home at last, and the bills have to be paid.
As for the likes of the first time buyers' grants for housing, it's a nice idea on paper. But I think the reality is, as in Ireland with these, that (a) they do little when supply is the problem and (b) some developers and construction firms will hike up prices in response, e.g. you're looking to buy a house for €250,000, you get relief of €30,000, now you just have to get a mortgage for €220,000. Except some developers took that as "oh great, an extra €20,000 is available" and slapped that on the price so now you're paying €270,000 and are back where you started, looking for a mortgage on €250,000.
The IMF also warned back in 2016/17 that this would likely drive up housing prices. So I think that good intentions may not work out as intended.
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/imf-warns-states-help-to-buy-scheme-adding-to-pressures-on-housing-market/35710046.html
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/housing/owning-a-home/help-with-buying-a-home/help-to-buy-scheme/
As for medical debt forgiveness, price controls, etc. - well, I'll believe them when I see them. Again, likely to be a lot of court cases over "can you do this?" by Big Pharma, big grocery chains, and so on.
But what do I know, I'm just some peasant out of the bog, so informed opinion welcome, please!
I have just very low confidence anything she put out yet maps to any evidence for what she will attempt, honestly. She doesn't seem like she has any personal beliefs about almost anything related to economics or foreign policy. She's just saying random stuff someone she trusts thinks will poll well. After she gets elected various interests will decide what the policy is, very hard to predict at this point.
I'm not American, but I think Biden's and now Harris' anti capitalism and anti market rhetoric is deeply scary and signals the possibility that America, a lone (relative) beacon of economic liberty will turn away from principles that have enriched her and humanity, for the detriment of all involved. I hope this will not happen, of course, but I am occasionally mildly annoyed that they are so stupid
It worked for Trump. It seems like that's just what the political market demands nowadays.
I suspect that you're getting a heavily distorted view of Harris's proposals, but in any case, there's a conspicuous omission from your post - what is Trump saying.
Almost anything looks sane when compared to Trump's plans to tax trade into oblivion. Then there's the more minor idiocies like wanting to make "tips" tax free. But I suspect that you're working backward from your conclusion so this is all irrelevant anyway.
(1) It's not helping to say "sure, our proposals are stupid, but have you seen what the other guy is saying?" I'm not at all sure that these items are anything more than campaign promises, which is to say crap designed to get voters to support you, but the fact remains - if they are anything like what she really said, and the reason I used the BBC was precisely to avoid 'partisan bias', then they have to be evaluated on the basis of "what the candidate says she intends to do if elected".
If the proposals are bad, it is no defence to say "but my opponent's views are worse". That's like saying "Sure, my economics are screwed up, but if you compare them to Stalin, they look pretty good!"
(2) "Then there's the more minor idiocies like wanting to make "tips" tax free."
Do you mean Kamala's proposal to make tips tax free is idiocy? So you do think some, at least, of what is being reported to be her proposals are bad proposals?
(3) "But I suspect that you're working backward from your conclusion so this is all irrelevant anyway"
No, this is real questions because I don't know anything about economic policy apart from being a human living in the current world, and I wondered if these were genuine policies or just "vote for me and I'll give you sunshine and rainbows!" guff.
But sure, keep telling yourself that any questioning of the Coconut Tree World is simply trolling and motivated reasoning.
> Do you mean Kamala's proposal to make tips tax free is idiocy? So you do think some, at least, of what is being reported to be her proposals are bad proposals?
Since I don't follow the news, I didn't realize that Harris had copied Trump's proposal there. But yes, that's a dumb proposal no matter who makes it.
I'm not even saying that there aren't dumb parts of Harris's proposals, just that I think a) you're getting a distorted view and ignoring the good parts and b) ignoring the even dumber things that Trump has proposed.
I did wonder if you were just reflexively going "But Trump did Dumb Thing!" (and by the bye, if you don't follow the news, how did you know? Getting your information in canned talking points from The Usual Sources?)
That's why I wanted you to clarify if you meant Harris' proposal. Since you have clarified that you were "getting a distorted view", I can now ignore anything else you throw at me, on the grounds that if I'm ignorant, tu quoque, yes?
> If the proposals are bad, it is no defence to say "but my opponent's views are worse".
It's pretty darn relevant when you're talking about choosing between them.
Oh, certainly. But the difference between "crappy" and "slightly less crappy" may not be very wide, and it does matter when one side is leaning heavily into "they're weird, they're dumb, they're stoopid" about the opponents.
If you're presenting yourself as the smart choice then the onus is on you to have smart policies, not "well they're not quite as terrible as the terrible ones our dumb, weird opponents have".
Noah smith had a good article on how Singapore manages this. Basically they control the housing starts to keep prices relatively high (as a major asset for the middle class) but not too high with grants of up to $61k for first time lower income earners. Thus the lower income family gains an asset class worth up to $61k more than they paid after buying a house, a grant that is financed out of general taxation, and therefore is a form of redistribution.
However the Singaporean government have some advantages - the government owns 90% of the land, and they never let the prices go to bubble territory.
As the Irishman said when asked for directions by the way off track tourist “I wouldn’t start from here if I were you”, i wouldn’t start from here if we were us.
https://open.substack.com/pub/noahpinion/p/harris-has-the-right-idea-on-housing?r=3lk55z&utm_medium=ios
Noah overstates the tension between owners and buyers and makes a common mistake when looking at pct of household wealth in housing.
The correct understanding is one Zvi makes. Homeowners are net flat housing, not net long. They have a large future liability to house themselves that offsets their asset. Combine assets and liabilities and most peoples wealth is not wrapped up in housing.
To make things less abstract, if housing nominal prices stayed fixed, meaning the real price fell overtime, which homeowners would be screwed? None. Landlords might be screwed if they are currently cash flow negative and relying on some nominal appreciation. But thats not the tension he referred to. Meanwhile that would be a great outcome for long term affordability.
> They have a large future liability to house themselves that offsets their asset. Combine assets and liabilities and most peoples wealth is not wrapped up in housing.
I’m not sure what that means in practice. The liability to house themselves is what? Rent, if they sell the house?
Maybe, but a lot of people depend on downsizing or moving out of the city later in life - by buying another house rather than renting.
Imputed rent is the technical term, the theoretical cost of renting from yourself. But yes rent would be the cost if they sold, or the new house price if they moved. So long as they don't sell they bear no *net* cost because the asset = the liability.
Assume for the moment that all house prices move proportionally together. If house prices go down, theyd take a paper loss but they still have just as much house, and if they move theyd be able to buy cheaper as well. Basically once you buy a house, then for the cost of the mortgage + upkeep and property tax, you get to have that much house in terms of overall space/quality for the rest of your life no matter what house prices do, even if you move. To the extent that property tax is somewhat linked to price, overall you will have less cost for the same amount of house if prices go down in fact.
You are of course long the specific location you buy a house in and would benefit from a local boom, but we are talking about national housing policy here.
It is true that to the extent people down size at end of life and so will consume less house in the future they may be be slightly long house on average, but that future change in position should also be discounted at appropriate rates. So people may have some positive house wealth (if the property tax effect is not stronger), but it is much smaller than a stat that ignores the liability side altogether.
I think the proposals are even less likely than Obama's to get implemented, because while his were primarily opposed by "the system," the new set of proposals are the kind that attract votes but cause disasters. The incentives for demanding price controls are inverted between the campaign, where they win the non-economist demographic, and the white house where the laws of economics and the empty shelf would apply even to those unaware of the cause. The same goes for the housing subsidy: democrats who are not first-time homebuyers may tolerate promises the subsidy now under the belief that promises are never kept, but if their friends actually got $25,000 from their own pockets they'd riot at the next election.
Noah Smith is bullish on her housing plan: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/harris-has-the-right-idea-on-housing
Also bearish on the "anti-price gouging" thing, but that one's vaguer and hopefully less likely to get implemented.
I'm with you on the secondary effects (a student of Frederic Bastiat).
I would think she should know better, Kamala is two years younger than I. We lived through milk shortages in the 70s, when then President Nixon capped milk price. Dairies failed causing a large drop in production. Perhaps as a teen, she wasn't the news junkie I was, or her Marxist parents didn't enlighten her on concepts such as open markets. Or perhaps that she grew up in Berkeley, California; the Marxist capitol of the world. But still, you'd think someone would be much more aware than to propose price caps with today's knowledge.
The same with throwing money at housing. This will be a repeat of the 2008 housing bubble. Throwing money at a slow growth market will only cause price inflation. If we have a shrinking population, why do we have a housing shortage??? We don't have fewer houses, home prices should be falling.
All these things going wrong, she says she'll fix !!! spoiler alert, you're already in the executive suite, why are you not doing anything?
> If we have a shrinking population, why do we have a housing shortage???
As a news junkie you should know that the population is increasing, not shrinking. In any case the problem with housing is a regional issue, demand outstripping supply in certain areas, but by no means all.
Banned because the last sentence degenerated into things with too high of an inflammatoriness-to-evidence-provided ratio.
Listen, I think the motivations he granted the globalists weren't very charitable but what he said earlier was quite true and for people who suffered the effect of it (which, as a professional you likely to not suffer quite as much as most) the annoyance over the course of decades well who are we kidding over the course of all of civilization where the elite control what goes on can definitely upset an annoyed people and have them given over to hyperbole.
It is after all very annoying how the vast majority of people are at the very bottom of the pyramid having their lives governed by people way way above them and not necessarily to the benefit of anybody.
https://youtu.be/pN6eAYPVy4w
I myself don't care for the elite much but the following subjectively important and interesting video did quite poorly on YouTube precisely because I obviously don't feel hatred towards the elitists, even though I absolutely think that they are doing harm that I could reverse if I had even the smallest amount of influence.
https://youtu.be/BzHYd2Uar6s
That video as the only non reporter at Maxwell's trial was the very first video on my channel.
My second video proves the point that I lack the desire for fire and pitchfork to be employed against them (without precluding the possibility that it may be necessary).
https://youtu.be/2fYRLbyUPCw
His loathing borne of frustration undoubtedly does not serve him well, certainly not as well as stoicism or actually getting involved with what I'm doing, but I think his anger needs to be understood to the degree that if you do not empathize, no doubt you can still sympathize.
There is a helluva lot more to the housing plan than has yet reached the headlines, and a lot less to the $25K homebuyer subsidy part of it. It is also perhaps relevant to note that none of this is actually brand-new now -- Harris is simply tweaking and building upon of a set of policy changes/proposals that the Biden Administration began carrying out and issuing more than a year ago.
(A) The proposed $25K would not be to all first-time home buyers. It would be limited to those who can document two years of on-time rent payments. It is an expansion on the Biden proposal to provide that $25K subsidy to an estimated 400,000/year first-generation home buyers (US citizens and legal permanent residents who could document that none of their parents or grandparents had been homeowners).
The Harris proposed $25K would apply to an estimated 1 million home buyers per year, which would be somewhere between 1/6th and 1/8th of US home purchases in a typical year. How much that would inflate housing prices is an open question, particularly if realtors and sellers don’t have a way to know in advance which interested buyers do and do not have that subsidy in their hip pocket.
(B) There is a good deal more in the proposal to cut through America's NIMBY problem (the supply side) than about boosting demand with subsidies. This Noah Smith writeup both details that and contextualizes it:
https://substack.com/@noahpinion/p-147849831
If you think, as I do, that bureaucratic sclerosis turning us into a society that can't build stuff anymore is one of this country's most urgent issues, then this Biden/Harris policy approach is very welcome. For my money that part is much more significant than a new subsidy aimed at a limited subset of new homebuyers.
"Harris is simply tweaking and building upon of a set of policy changes/proposals that the Biden Administration began carrying out and issuing more than a year ago."
Ah, so this is the usual political gambit of repeating even louder the announcements about "more of thing!" that you already made, so that it sounds like a whole new tranche of "more thing!" instead of "same amount of thing we already announced".
I would expect that when the details (if any) are hashed out, then "terms and conditions will apply" and a lot fewer people will get less money than the big, vague announcement makes it sound.
I'm suspicious of his argument that the $25k subsidy/$10k tax credit is actually fine because Singapore does it. I imagine Singapore does a lot of things differently that might make individual factors play out differently in Singapore than in the US. Maybe the US should also set ethnic quotas for neighbourhoods because Singapore does it and Noah can make up some post hoc rationalization about how it improves race relations.
Hey, if we introduced caning for littering and everything above, I'd happily take that housing subsidy...
I don't think anything the President does can actually fix the NIMBY problem, even if they legitimately wanted to and weren't just politically posturing. Most of that has to do with state/local ordnances, building codes and zoning laws, as well as adversarial review. Changing that is entirely outside the scope of the fedgov, excepting judicious application of the FYTW clause of the Constitution. Harris' plan seems to consist of price controls for rent (very bad), tax benefits and incentives for people who otherwise wouldn't own homes (brings the 2008 sub-prime mortgage fiasco to mind), and incentives to build "affordable" housing. If this means houses that are cheaper to build, great. If this means affordable housing in the California way, where it is required to be sold/rented at below market rates to selected beneficiaries, very bad.
That is a poor and highly selective summary of the Biden/Harris policy proposal. If it was accurate I would entirely agree with you about it. Fortunately it is not accurate.
The Smith writeup that I linked has a much better description of what Biden and now Harris have proposed on this subject (of which some smallish parts have already been implemented by Biden).
So Kamala is going to tackle the Sacred Parking Lot, is she?
Yes, that's rather snarky, but I was more amused by the brass-necked cheek of the grift going on: sorry, you can't build here because this is a sacred plot of land for our tribe, why thank you very much for your kind donation. Ah, good old San Francisco!
https://www.berkeleyside.org/2024/03/12/berkeley-shellmound-spengers-lot-sogorea-te-settlement
"The city of Berkeley will purchase Spenger’s parking lot and transfer the property to Sogorea Te’ Land Trust as part of a recent settlement agreement over the contested plot of land in West Berkeley.
The Berkeley City Council unanimously approved an ordinance today authorizing the purchase, making Berkeley among the first in the country to outright return land to Indigenous people. The city will purchase the property with $25.5 million from Sogorea Te’, an Indigenous-led land trust based in Oakland, and $1.5 million from the city’s general fund.
The decision appears to mark the end of a years-long legal battle over the property at 1900 Fourth St. between the city and developer Ruegg & Ellsworth. The parties in the case filed a notice of settlement in Alameda County Superior Court Friday."
Now, why does my wizened cold black stony heart whisper to me that, should a nice big fat lump of developer money be pushed across the desk of the Land Trust, that this sacred shellmound will be turned into office buildings or apartment blocks faster than you can say "rip up the tarmac, Patsy me boy!"?
I don't know if this is true or not, I'm going by various comments I've read, but nobody knows if there actually *is* a sacred tribal site under the parking lot, it's just an assumption being made by the "give us money or else" set of objectors? Though I probably am being unreasonably mean about that:
"Efforts to develop the property, a parking lot once owned by Spenger’s Fish Grotto, date back two decades. Developers faced opposition from some Ohlone, who protested the development of a sacred shellmound site. In 2018, Berkeley blocked a streamlined permit to build housing on the site. They had been embroiled in a legal battle since.
Beneath the parking lot, adjacent to an upscale commercial area in West Berkeley, some Ohlone say, is the last undeveloped part of the oldest shellmound and village site around the Bay, a ceremonial site and fishing village.
“It’s one of the most culturally significant sites for the Lisjan people and to have it protected forever, I think I’m without words,” said Corrina Gould, a co-director of Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. Gould also leads Confederated Villages of Lisjan (pronounced Le-shawn), a group of seven tribes across the Bay Area that was involved in the lawsuit alongside the city of Berkeley.
The city of Berkeley designated the site a landmark in 2000 and it was added to a list of endangered historic places by The National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2020, though questions have been raised about the exact location of the shellmound."
I read the article you linked and that is what the key elements were listed as.
> A ban on algorithm-driven price-setting tools for landlords to set rents.
Price controls.
> Up to $25,000 in down-payment support for first-time homebuyers.
> To provide a $10,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers.
> Tax incentives for builders that build starter homes sold to first-time buyers.
Incentivizing people who otherwise can't afford to buy a house.
> An expansion of a tax incentive for building affordable rental housing.
> To repurpose some federal land for affordable housing.
Affordable housing, with the caveat of what "affordable" means (because the article doesn't specify).