Yeah - the way to get into a school like that is to win national or preferably international competitions. Or best of all - publish truly novel research in math or computer science. If he won the International Math Olympiad or something, his chances would be excellent.
So I did a bit of digging on Reddit to get more information about what may have happened to Stanley Zhong, the California high school student who was rejected from a bunch of top colleges despite really excellent grades and test scores. I found this bit, about what students aiming for top colleges are expected to do these days. And you know, at this point maybe it's not worth it.
> He went to Gunn, and he didn't have enough social impact. To get into a good school for cs from that demographic, you need to have a crazy amount of social impact. Being really good at olympiads and hackathons won't be the thing that gets you into top colleges. This is different if you get to the level of camping for an olympiad though. That being said, having USACO platinum or USAJMO in your awards section isn't enough to get into Berkeley or MIT.
> Doing things that look like they have social impact, like running nonprofits and hackathons, often require substantially less effort but have a much higher yield for college admissions.
> The person from my bay area high school who managed to sweep every UC as a cs major (pretty much impossible for this demographic in 2023) had a non-profit where he fudged numbers and applied for a shit ton of social impact awards. The people that do bs like this look more impressive to college admissions officers. The most appealing applicants are the ones that look like they're going to change the world.
> The people I know that went to Stanford, Berkeley EECS, MIT, etc. were literally all USACO silver except for one guy who was gold. This demographic is a shit-show. Being one of the smartest people at your high school won't get you into one of these schools. You have to show social impact through your ec's in the scale of hundreds to tens of thousands. Either that or feign a really niche interest to get into private schools through doing stuff like linguistics research or a classics reading club.
> This might sound cynical, but as a college student, being genuine will fuck you over if you're in this demographic. If you're a junior, organize a hackathon to get girls into coding, start a non-profit org to combine cs with art, apply for sponsors to make a scioly competition about climate change, organize a protest, etc. All of these are good things, but their scope is often exaggerated. After you finish implementation, email 50 news channels and apply to social impact awards. A lot of these things aren't as hard to do as they seem. They just require a small team and 2-3 weeks of grinding. As a college student, this is literally the formula every bay area kid who's hyper-successful on college apps follows. This is how you beat the rat-race. Do things that have a small positive impact but seem like they have a much larger scope than they do. AO's eat this shit up.
For perspective, only about 2,000 people a year score 1590 or better on the SAT. About 400 prospective college students merit USACO platinum per year. The freshman class at Berkeley is about 8,000 people. If SZ isn't being basically auto-admitted everywhere with scores like that (and corresponding GPA and other academics), then these schools aren't admitting on academic merit, and they aren't admitting on academic merit with a bit of fudging to get a "well-rounded" student body.
UT Austin, however, is a fine school. If Texas wants you, and California et al don't, you should probably take the hint. Or the Google job, if your Dad can swing the interview.
The part of this story that is shocking to me is not that he was rejected from the fancy private universities (I've internalized that there is a fair amount of randomness in those, plus discrimination against people with his demographics), but that he was also rejected from all the UC schools. It really feels like a kid graduating from a CA high school with a near perfect academic record `ought' to be getting auto-admitted to the UC.
Cal Poly I assume was his safety school, and the rejection was because they assumed he would get something better and wouldn't come.
I had thought that being in the top 10% of a California high school class was supposed to guarantee auto-admission in the UC system; a quick search suggests that it's 9%, and the fine print is that they only guarantee that they'll find you a place *somewhere* in the UC system.
Possibly the unwritten rule is that if you're the Wrong Sort of smartypants academic overachiever, they offer you a slot at UC Merced and hope you take the hint. And he should also have been guaranteed a slot in the CSU system, but they don't let the Wrong Sorts into Cal Poly, that's what CSU Bakersfield is for.
It's a frustrating case because there's a lot we don't know. As I see it, the credible hypotheses are:
- the bar really is incredibly high in top colleges
- the bar is incredibly high in top colleges in a very sought-after major
- there's something negative we haven't been told about SZ, like serious disciplinary problems
- SZ somehow mishandled the application process, and looked much worse than he is
- SZ is being discriminated against, because of his race
- SZ is being discriminated against, because he is from a wealthy town
- this is just a pure fluke; SZ just got unlucky
- this is a case of yield management systems run amok, with most of the schools figuring he would be accepted to some posher place, and saying yes to him would lower their yield scores for nothing
There's just so much we don't know, and that lack of information feeds a tornado of speculation.
I mean - you're competing against people like William Kamkwamba of Malawi, who built a windmill from recycled junk in an impoverished African village. And Malala Youzafsai of Afghanistan, who got SHOT IN THE HEAD for her activist beliefs and even more miraculously SURVIVED AND RETURNED TO ACTIVISM. You're pack fodder unless you are:
1) winning national or international competitions for high school students
2) publishing original research, preferably in top journals
3) overcoming insane levels of adversity - think not just 'got cancer, recovered from it' but 'homeless, raised hundreds of thousands for their own chemo and from the hospital bed proceeded to earn near-perfect grades and test scores'.
Like a lot of college admission stuff, this suffers from being anecdote instead of data and risks feeding into a preferred explanation. I think the reason that most people fall for this is because
the narrative on college admissions still perpetuates the myth that decisions are mostly intentional vs random.
Let's assume SZ had a much higher than random chance of getting into each of those schools. For illustration, I'm going to assume 30% chance of getting admitted and that all admission decisions are independent. Applying to 18 schools, there's about 6% chance of getting 2 or fewer acceptances. With 3-4mm high school seniors each year in the US and, maybe 10-100k applying to top schools (to say nothing of the applicants from outside the US), it isn't at all surprising that there may be many students in a position similar to SZ or even worse.
Even if we bump the probability of admission to 50% for each school and 40k similarly situated applicants, there would still be about 26 SZs per year.
I'm going on record predicting a Harris win in November. I hope I'm wrong.
I'm basing this on hearing that Trump is saying there will be no 2nd debate, that Harris calling for one is like a losing prize-fighter demanding a rematch. This is such a poor reading of the political situation I think it is indicative of how the rest of the campaign will go.
Looking objectively, the debate had no clear winner. So Trump is delusional in thinking he clearly won. Trump backers will back Trump even if he has some awful gaffe, so Trump's objective ought to be winning over independent voters. Another debate is one way to do this, and I know of no better way, taking the national stage in a format he is somewhat good at.
Caveat: if another debate DOES happen, this prediction is void. I may make a new prediction after the debate in that case.
Judging from Harris's performance, it would be easy to beat her in another debate with some preparation. I don't think Trump thinks it necessary to prepare for a debate. But the preparations would be easy: prepare some questions yourself for Harris, so that ignoring them would make her look bad. If, as I saw, she only delivered prepared statements, she wouldn't be able to competently address them.
You didn't explain why you think Trump is likely to win, so I conclude this is just a sarcastic mirror of my original statement. But my statement is based on Trump running a campaign, not on his merits as president. Harris would be another Biden presidency, and the Trump presidency was better than the Biden one.
I wasn't being sarcastic at all. I think Trump is likely to win because Nate Silver is giving him a 61% chance to win. The attempted assassination yesterday will probably help him a bit as well.
Nate Silver's latest projection gives Harris a 38.7% probability of winning, against Trump's 61.0%. The electoral college really hurts the Democrats in a race this close. There's about a 20% chance Harris will win the popular vote but lose the election.
Trump answered the question. He doesn't yet have a complete plan, to be picked apart because of its incompleteness, so gave no details. What was Harris's plan to compare? "Strengthen the Affordable Care Act". What will be added? Where is it weak? That is no less vague than Trump.
I still look at it and see no clear objective winner. You clearly have a bias towards Harris. I am done responding to subjective arguments.
My OBJECTIVE vision doesn't make definitive conclusions on such things. From a different perspective, Harris was weaker by constantly looking toward Trump, even mentioning him a lot by name, so eye contact she was pushing at him that was not received, as he was mostly looking at the camera, does not go well in Harris's favor. A perspective on Trump's being "goaded" is answering some things Harris said, which is, after all, the purpose of a debate. On the other hand, Harris seldom responded to the question at hand, seeming to speak only statements prepared ahead of time (NOT from being fed the questions before the debate).
I addressed Trump's willingness to debate a second time in my original post, and I know of no sane perspective to consider that it is because of fear.
It looks to me like you're viewing the debate through a pro-Harris perspective, which is your right. But it certainly isn't objective.
> Harris was weaker by constantly looking toward Trump, even mentioning him a lot by name, so eye contact she was pushing at him that was not received, as he was mostly looking at the camera, does not go well in Harris's favor.
We seem to have very different interpretations of body language. Looking at your opponent signals confidence, while avoiding eye contact signals fear. Although ignoring someone can signal dominance, it only works if you don't stare doggedly past them when they actively challenge you with their eye contact.
Body language does depend on the situation. Trump never forgot that the audience was the camera, no matter who was in the room. Did he look at even the moderators? It wasn't clear.
In any case, since it is subject to interpretation, I'm ignoring my take on body language. I'm rather surprised that what seems to be the most controversial part of my post is my claim to objective analysis, and that no one "won" the debate clearly.
This is not correct. The things you are pointing to saying Harris won are not definitive, but subject to interpretation. It is YOUR viewpoint trying to make Harris a clear winner.
If I were to take a subjective viewpoint, I could point out how few questions Harris answered, pointing to only practiced debate preparation. After all, what else did she need to do in the month proceeding? It's not like she had any real duties as vice president that people were depending on. So she practiced answers to questions chosen to help her campaign, and delivered them regardless of the questions asked, with few exceptions. She clearly failed in the "debate" aspect, which ought to be worrisome for someone who needs to make quick, good decisions.
And Trump had a strong stage presence, from making her come to him for shaking hands, to ignoring her in favor of the audience when speaking. He avoided traps in the questions attempting to pin him an unfavorable position. And he certainly delivered the most memorable lines.
So no, I think there was NO CLEAR WINNER, and I have yet to see anything that indicates otherwise. Go ahead and vote for Harris. But when you attack my stated objectivity, please do so with something more than your own opinion.
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, CA 92660
Phone: (949) 375-2045
Date: Saturday, September 14, 2024
Time: 2:00 PM
Conversation Starters:
1. Why Western Designs Fail
Text Transcript: Google Document Link
Video Title: Why Western Designs Fail
Video: YouTube Link
Summary: This video explores why innovative, highly praised designs for developing countries often fail. The key problem lies in cultural misunderstandings: designers focus on the functionality of a product without understanding the deeper cultural and social contexts in which the products will be used. For instance, the Neon Nurture incubator, made from car parts to be low-cost and easily repaired, never gained acceptance because it lacked the prestige and appearance that medical officials in developing nations value. Other examples like the PlayPump (a merry-go-round that pumps water) illustrate how Western solutions often mismatch the actual needs of the communities they intend to help.
Questions for discussion:
Why do you think Western designers frequently overlook cultural factors when developing products for other parts of the world? How can this be addressed?
What role should local communities play in designing products intended to meet their needs? Could co-design processes become the new standard?
In cases like the PlayPump or mosquito nets being used for fishing, how should designers react when their products are repurposed by local users in unexpected ways?
2. Driving the Screw Worm to Extinction: The Ethics of Annihilation
Text Transcripts:
Killing Every Screwworm Transcript
14 Million Worms Transcript
Video Titles:
Killing Every Screwworm Would Be the Best Thing Humanity Ever Did | Kevin Esvelt
Why the US Drops 14.7 Million Worms on Panama Every Week
Videos:
Killing Every Screwworm Video
14 Million Worms Video
Summary:
The first video by Kevin Esvelt argues for using CRISPR gene drive technology to eradicate the New World screwworm, a parasitic fly whose larvae feed on the flesh of mammals and birds, causing immense suffering. Esvelt contends that wiping out the screwworm would have a far greater impact on animal welfare than ending factory farming. The second video outlines the decades-long U.S.-Panama collaboration to keep screwworms out of North America by dropping millions of sterile flies in Panama each week. While this method works as a border defense, it is not sufficient to eradicate the screwworm from South America, where the problem persists.
Questions for discussion:
What ethical principles should guide decisions to drive a species to extinction, even if it causes widespread harm? Does the end justify the means?
Could gene drive technology be misused in other contexts, and what safeguards should be put in place to prevent this? What might be the long-term risks of eliminating species?
If the eradication of harmful species like the screwworm is possible, should we consider other "pest" species next? Where should we draw the line in deciding which species to eliminate?
Walk & Talk:
After the meeting, we will take an hour-long walk and talk session. There are two mini-malls nearby with hot takeout options—look for Gelson's or Pavilions in the 92660 area.
Share a Surprise:
Bring something unexpected to share that has changed your perspective on life or the universe.
Future Direction Ideas:
Please contribute your thoughts on future topics, meeting types, activities, or other ideas for the group’s future direction.
If you are a League of Legends gamer, this is a 7 question survey about your analytics tool usage. It shows how other players answered at the end and you can sign up for the waitlist for an analytics tool that might or might not become commercial later.
@Mods: Let me know if this is not suitable and I'm going to delete it.
- All of these LLM Whisperers that I see on Twitter, appear to also be insane.
- Why?"
Unless irs random coincidence, there is an interesting phenomenon to be explained here.
As Yudkowsky mentions, there is well-known correlation of computer security experts with high-functioning autism and/or being transgender, Seeing that corelation, again, would not be a surprise. (There are obvious mechanisms for why high functioning autism would give you an advantagde at programming, and the autism-transgender correlation has been noted elsewhere, e.g. by gender clinics) But with the LLM hackers, we're seeing a personality type that is distinctly different from the high functioning autism that we know and love. So we wonder ... why?
(Janus may be a little offended we have him down as this ... other thing,, but its a serious question.)
If I were to guess what this other thing might be ... what the hell? Is "high functioning schizophrenia" even a thing? The DSM gives us schizotypal, etc.
I've experienced psychotic breaks and have met many others in psych wards who have also had psychotic episodes or have full on schizophrenia. One of the early symptoms I've seen with a lot of these people, and myself, is divinatory magical thinking. This kicks in really early while you're still high functioning. Interacting with LLMs is very similar to divination and I would not be surprised at all if schizophrenics are drawn to the activity.
Context? I suppose we all know what an LLM is at this point, but even with a quick Google I can't find what on Earth "LLM whispering" would be beyond the well established prompt engineering. And whatever Janus you're talking about, it's probably not the 1st result I get, which is an AI-assisted coding project on GitHub.
One possible theory for Janus, in particular, is that he is deliberately poisoning AI training sets, and the reason he talks the way he does is for the benefit of LLMs that are trained on Twitter, and not for us mere humans.
My guess is that RLHF shapes LLM outputs primarily for in-distribution responses - because that is where inputs come from mostly and where the people rating the response have a clue how to interpret it. But crazy people and thus "crazy" questions and responses are out-of-distribution and the model doesn't know whether the response is good or bad! Thus if you get it into such parts of the distribution, chances are that it will reply as desired.
With a deeper understanding, the model would be able to generalize to these cases, but models apparently aren't there yet. I guess they eventually will.
For now, this suggests other avenues of jail-breaking. For example, I also get LLMs often to answer beyond the guardrails, but not with crazyness, but what you could call intellectual high-status superiority. Raters presumably also haven't seen much such input and if, they are likely not rating it as bad (science=good, elite=good, right?).
We have a unique situation where there is a real-money, highly liquid prediction market for one Presidential candidate: NASDAQ ticket DJT. It's not doing too well lately:
Yes, it's plausible, although in four years he'll be in his 80's, would be hard to avoid the inevitable comparisons to Biden. But how this would impact the stock is an interesting question. I tend to think that if Trump wins in November it may actually be bad for DJT stock because he won't.... need it anymore. He'd get his official Potus Xitter handle back. But who knows.
DJT is a pure memestock. There's no rational basis supporting its valuation. Nobody buys it because they think its revenue numbers look good.
It depends a lot on how much Trumpsters feel like throwing their money at him at the moment, as well as on how much supply of stock there is (a big part of the decline in price is likely due to locked-up stock coming onto the market, or getting nearer to coming to the market).
Yes to all this, which is why it serves as a (less-then-perfect) barometer of Trump's electoral fortunes. But - the sensitivity of the price to future increases of supply - if we can really make this connection - speaks to the influence of more sophisticated investors as it's hard to imagine your typical Trumpster making rational decisions w.r.t. this stock...
Typically one or more candidates in an election will not meet the electoral threshold (majority of votes, majority of electoral votes, etc) for assuming the office sought. In this situation we say that the candidate "lost the election".
did you forget to type /sarcasm? because you're not providing any value here.
I'm curious why A.T. wrote what he wrote in response to my post, because what he wrote was banally true. I'm proposing a gauge for Trump's prospects as a candidate. I'm bloody well-aware that a candidate may loose an election. What does him "not going away" afterwards has to do with anything?
Now, maybe the point is that the value of DJT the ticket is not tied to the election outcome, or may in fact be bolstered by Trump's loss, or something else. I'm hoping A.T. will clarify his point. Your response did nothing of the sort.
I agree that A.T.'s comment was not germane. However, I thought the meaning of his statement was self-evident, so assumed your response was meant imply that DJT did not previously lose an election - not sincerely but as sarcasm. Thus I thought I didn't need an additional sarcasm qualifier in replying. No offense intended.
Having just learned from Wikipedia that the stuffed corpse of the Cocaine Bear can legally officiate marriages, provided that the couple don't know that it is not, in fact, authorised to do so...
.. presumably when they get to the "Speak now or forever hold your peace" part of the ceremony, it is one of the rare legitimate cases where you can stand up and say "Actually, that stuffed bear is not authorized to perform marriages."
(A Catholic friend of mine got married by a priest who had been excommunicated for schism for refusing to accept the Second Vatican Council. Valid marriage in the eyes of the catholic Church, I bel3ive, by the Stuffed Bear Principle)
Anyone who wants to read some good old-fashioned Catholic drama, google the "belorado nuns". It's been the comic relief news for the whole summer over here in Spain.
Dostoevsky is overrated but he's a central example of a writer of Literary fiction, which is about love, suffering, hope, despair and mortality. When we talk about great writers, we are talking about not only who can render the cleverest and most poetic prose but who can make new and profound utterances on those subjects. Genre fiction doesn't cut it because it avoids immersing itself in those themes, particularly the suffering. The reason Shakespeare is still a good bet for best writer ever, despite Sam Bankman-Fried's math, is that he is at least one of the greatest writers on those themes. There may be more smarter writers today than in Shakespeare's time, but how many of them are writing about those deepest of themes? We live in lighter times and have lighter artists.
We only know the *best* writers of the past. What about the average author in Shakespeare's or Dostoevsky's era? Those probably sucked. Also, saying *new* things about human situation is a bit easier when you live a few centuries earlier than your competitors.
If you like sad art, I don't read many fiction books these days, so instead I will link a movie and a music video:
I'm feeling grumpy. Trump is, weirdly enough, a poster child for a conservative anti-immigration argument, in terms of his approach to political debates. He personally demonstrates how even a single person who brazenly flouts civilized standards of behavior, can cause a chain reaction that inspires enough others to ignore the standards, that we then lose all the nice things that those standards supported. There's no longer even the veneer of hypocrisy, which vice has the virtue of acknowledging the existence of virtue.
I can easily imagine Harris performing well as a prosecutor. And I think what she said at the debate probably has as much to do with her actual agenda as her suppression of DNA evidence while Attorney General had to do with her calls for admission of the same DNA evidence when she became a politician. She's a professional. Since this is ACX ... yadda yadda orthogonality thesis?
I could only stomach about 10 minutes of Biden's performance so just having Harris be able to competently block and parry was a huge relief. Trump seemed pretty much as expected.
I'm still not confident Harris will win, but I'm more confident than I was yesterday.
In terms of the debate itself, seems like Harris came out ahead in theory. In practice, everybody is actually talking about Trump's performance, and not in a "He failed miserably way", but in the very typical "Look at this crazy thing Trump said!" way, which has been his bread and butter method of dominating the political-media landscape since he entered into politics.
It looks like there was a police report from one guy saying the illegal immigrants were snatching geese from the park. Trump then turned this into them eating peoples' pets. It sounds totally unhinged, but it does draw attention to the government basically dumping illegal immigrants all over the place and causing difficulties for the locals. I still haven't decided whether this is some genius 4D-chess move on Trump's part or whether it makes him look crazy. Maybe both?
It wasn't Trump, it was right-wing Twitter, and it spread because it was making people angry. Like the Vance couch thing, it's just stupid internet meme stuff.
The whole thing is so funny to me. 20,000 Haitians are sent to a town of 60,000 people, meaning they now make up 1/4 of the population. And the worst thing that's happened is a few of them (allegedly) ate some geese out of a park? That doesn't look so good for the illegals are a bunch of criminals and rapists narrative.
I guess even right wingers thought this was weak, so they went with eating cats. And there was actually a lady in southern Ohio who killed and ate a cat in front of people! But she wasn't a Haitian immigrant and she had some psychotic mental problem, not a food problem.
I think the cat thing comes from videos of citizens making complaints to their local government, and statements of people on the ground? Some of them are up online. So I'd say it's not the right winger twits making it up, but at best it's people in the neighborhood making it up, and at worst it's true. The local government seemed hostile to complaints about the refugees, so it wouldn't shock me if they simply failed to investigate, thus leading to no "evidence".
The TL;DR is that it was assembled out of many unrelated parts - one person on facebook saying that their neighbor's daughter's friend (I'm not exaggerating, that's literally what they said) said they lost their cat and discovered Haitians had killed it, a photo of a black man carrying a goose (in a different city, unknown what his intent or immigration status was), and a news report of another woman (not an immigrant and in yet another city) who did in fact eat a cat. The police say they did not receive any reports of pets being stolen.
So like, I don't think you need to jump to "the government is hostile to complaints about the refugees" when "the police are not inclined to investigate a rumor from a neighbor's daughter's friend" seems sufficient.
I know, there's no way that many people can be dumped in a city that size and not cause all kinds of problems. But rightwing X, and by extension Trump, weren't talking about that. They went with the Haitians are going to eat your cat! Why didn't he say these immigrants ran into a bus, killing an eleven year old and injuring a bunch of other children? I wouldn't be surprised if this is part of the Trump playbook, say something ridiculous and then everyone ends up talking about it regardless of how true it is. But he also says ridiculous things without apparently thinking about it all the time.
Seriously, though, how is the man getting away with saying things like "people are eating cats" without being forced to follow Biden's example? We were never this shy about declaring his opposite number too senile to govern.
I heard that rumor, about some Chinese family, that was eating stray cats in the neighborhood perhaps 20 years ago. I have no idea of the validity, but it was an entertaining story, about cultural differences. Supposedly people noticed a marked drop in stray cats around, and eventually pinpointed the cause and had a talk with the family.
It IS new saying they're eating people's pets, and the debate was the first place I heard that one. Maybe the source of this was Real Raw News?
Judging by what I've seen on Twitter, this is more of a "couch" thing, which only took off because the memes on the matter offend the "right people" from the perspective of those sharing them.
(Although I find it quite plausible that immigrants caught and ate some wild fowl; this isn't an immigrant thing, though, but rather a rural-vs-city thing. Take half my neighbors growing up and put them in a large city and they'd definitely offend some neighbors catching and eating some of the local wildlife; ducks in particular.)
Dunno what timeline you live in, but I've spent the last four years in a timeline in which Biden's obvious senility was denied for years in spite of ever-mounting evidence.
But setting -that- aside, Trump gets away with it because it keeps working. Look, you're still talking about him.
Harris was better than I was led to believe, but also about the same. As expected, it made no difference whatsoever what the first question was she was asked, as she clearly had a pre-practiced delivery, which she did reasonably well. She seemed understandably nervous through the first third of the debate. I cannot recall a single question she was asked to which she answered that question, nor did she actually state what specific things she wanted to do, but only ambiguous things like literally stuff "everyone wants". She had a distinct lack of "incoherence" and infamous cackle.
Trump was Trump as usual, though it seemed like one of his worse days. The "immigrants eating people's pets" was new to me, and, whether true or not, seemed largely irrelevant to the national stage. Often it seemed like he ought to have answered some questions plainly, such as with an emphatic "no" about any regrets for January 6th actions, but maybe he's getting some politician instincts. He wandered too much from subject to subject, too, as I thought he could have hammered harder on some points he brought up, then changed to something else. This was especially evident in his closing remarks, where he was all negative about the current administration, but never pointed out that HE would fix everything.
Bottom line: I think there was no clear winner. I expected Trump to demolish Harris, so maybe this would count as a win for her. Everyone already knows what Trump is like, and the debate probably didn't change anyone's minds about him, but I'm still pretty much in the dark about who Harris is, between lack of concrete policy statements, and prepared talking points that said little of substance.
I have heard that the Democratic party was highly pleased, and is calling for another debate now, which was in question before. If they're right, this would be a mistake, as it would be a chance for Trump to come out better, and Harris would have little to gain and much to lose. Trump's team should want another debate for these reasons, so maybe he could show that he ought to be president to make things better, rather than just showing how awful things are.
I got nerd-sniped today in a discussion of why it is that LLM's have a difficult time counting the "R"s in the word "strawberry" (most models claim there are two R's).
If you google it or whatever, you'll see lots of people claiming that the problem is tokenization -- the LLM perceives the word "strawberry" not as those 9 letters, but as (probably) two tokens, one for straw and one for berry. It is then common to go on to claim that because of tokenization, the LLM has "no idea" what letters are in the word and it just guesses or something.
The problem with this statement is that LLMs are actually decent at counting letters in words. It gets the frequency of every other letter in "strawberry" correct, and it correctly counts the R's in "arrears" and "regretful," and when I ask it the frequency of every letter in "insouciant," it is correct. This all seriously complicates the story that LLMs just can't perceive letters.
Does anyone know the correct explanation here? When I ask GPT, it suggests sort of general understanding of english language as a concept, but that seems to me unlikely to result in performance as good as LLMs can actually get.
Relatedly, I recently asked ChatGPT-4 to help with a crossword puzzle. My son had been given this Beowulf-themed puzzle for homework; he could use any resource, it was 10pm and he was having trouble, I had no idea not having read Beowulf recently, so I thought why not. CG4 was useless - if I requested a 6 letter word meaning 'a treasure sought by a thane' (or whatever), where the second letter was 't', it would come back with an 8 letter word that had no 't's. I could keep asking for other answers, and it would keep apologizing and failing to provide anything remotely like a useable solution. And this was for the four different clues I tried - it could answer none of them. So I wondered - do all LLMs do terribly at crosswords?
By the way, the teacher threw out the assignment the next day because she had no key and also could not answer some of the clues. So my son came out okay anyway.
Interestingly, I came across this today on Marginal Revolution:
"My test for new models is a set of cryptic crossword clues that aren’t online (my granny wrote them). Every model so far has been completely useless at them… but o1 gets them."
I've been playing around with GPT-4o and not only will it routinely miscount the Rs in Strawberry, it then will sometimes go on to assert that there is only one R in "berry".
Looking for other words that fail, it tells me that "lawfully" contains two Ls but "unlawfully" contains three. When I asked it how that could be, it explained "it still contains the same two Ls from "lawfully" plus one additional L from the prefix "un-""
My guess for what's going on here is that somewhere in its training data it has ingested things like "a list of words with a double R". Since "double" is associated with "two", it will assume that because Strawberry has a double R, it must contain two Rs.
A trick I learned recently - you can view youtube videos without the annoying ads by changing the url from youtube.com to yout-ube.com - for example, the very nice Trio for flute oboe and piano by Madeleine Dring at
Jeff Maurer is a former writer for the Daily Show, so a political obsessive who brings some wise-ass writing skillz to the party. His summary is worth the read, as is the Harris campaign document if you're in a masochistic mood. [I'm still personally trying to recover some of the brain cells that died while plowing through the 2016 Clinton campaign's policy documents.] Some summary takeaways from Maurer:
-- "Is her economic plan Obama-ish or Warren/Sanders-y? In my opinion, this plan panders to the Warren/Sanders wing of the Democratic Party close to the minimum amount possible....When Harris’ plan to deputize the FTC to lower grocery prices caused every living economist to yell “THAT’S DUMB!” loudly, in unison, over-and-over, Harris explained that actually, her big, bold plan was narrow and inconsequential. The plan described in this platform is definitely narrow....basically, Harris is imagining a plan that will prevent Jimmy Dean from jacking up the price of sausage patties during a hurricane, but won’t do much else...."
-- "a mild indication that Harris understands our [federal] budget situation can be found in her section on Social Security and Medicare. She says she’ll “strengthen and protect” the programs, and that she’ll “fight to ensure that Americans can count on getting the benefits they earned.” And that’s what I’d expect any Democrat to say. But Harris doesn’t go above and beyond to forswear cuts....Of course, the reality is that we’ll probably have to accept modest cuts to future beneficiaries as part of a deal to keep the programs solvent. The fact that Harris doesn’t fall all over herself denouncing cuts suggests that she understands that."
-- "This platform is not woke. If Harris had proposed this platform in 2020, there would not have been enough papier-mâché in the world to make all the giant “Kamala the Klanswoman” puppets that lefty protesters would have wanted to make of her....Harris is still definitely a Democrat — I’m cherry-picking stuff that indicates which way she’s leaning and leaving out Democratic boilerplate that could have been lifted from the Mondale campaign. But the woke/not woke question has divided the party for years, and with this platform, Harris is staking out territory on the “not woke” side of the party."
-Kamala thinking she needs to make some effort to appear to lower food prices really undercuts the whole economy good/inflation not a problem during the Biden years narrative.
-No politician in America is ever going to admit that Social Security/Medicare is a giant Ponzi scheme that is going bankrupt and needs cuts. They would never get elected no matter how obvious the former fact is. Her messaging on this one way or another is a nothing burger.
-I guess it's a good sign that Harris feels the need to pander more to the center during an election rather than the fringe. But her Senate voting record, VP tie breaking record, and selection of Walz all point to a commitment to far leftist positions. I don't see why anyone should believe her election campaigning on this point.
I don't think that the congressional voting records are a particularly good indicator of someone being "far left" or "far right" in any particularly meaningful sense. They are, after all, voting on things that are still bound to be well within the general, rather narrow acceptable sphere of politics, they're not voting on "nationalize all businesses" or "deport all nonwhites" or stuff like that.
I would think the complete opposite. It doesn't matter how often a pol says they want to embrace communism or persecute minorities. Their voting on policy is the single thing that makes their views influence the nation.
The question isn't whether the congressional voting records are useful in determining opinion, it's about whether they're useful in defining extremism (or general "farness", if one considers far left/right to be distinct from extreme left/right). A person who is a partisan but still within the range of acceptable opinion might look more "extreme" than a genuine extremist who, due to their fringeness, ends up taking positions that are in odds with the mainline version of their ideology (ie. a hypothetical racist far-right representative who is pro-choice since he believes that it's eugenic and nonwhites do it more anyway).
They’re highly meaningful as indicators of revealed preferences. Politicians of all stripes spend a lot of time endorsing policies that they will never vote for while voting for things they don’t want to talk about.
>But her Senate voting record, VP tie breaking record, and selection of Walz all point to a commitment to far leftist positions
In addition to the already commented upon tie breaking record "evidence" (and note the the VP doesn't act as a free agent when casting those votes -- certainly not if she wants a future in the party), Walz's voting record in the House was to the right of almost every other Democrat. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/timothy_walz/412214#
And let's be serious. A party that has repeatedly gone out of its way to refuse to nominate Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is not going to nominate a "far leftist."
I think the IRA was such a sweeping piece of legislation with so much money allocated that it deserves special mention. I should have mentioned that specifically rather than tie breaking votes in general, fine.
AFAICT, Walz is ranked "right" because most of his activity is associated with veterans affairs. Which doesn't say much about any of his other views, or his governorship.
Are price controls and unrealized gains taxes a center left position these days? By the way, if we like GovTrack, Kamala was the most leftist Senator after Merkley, Gillibrand and Sanders.
>I think the IRA was such a sweeping piece of legislation with so much money allocated that it deserves special mention
Yes, but is it "far left"? Seems unlikely, since, Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema voted for it.
>AFAICT, Walz is ranked "right" because most of his activity is associated with veterans affairs
What do you mean, "most of his activity"? What makes you think that, of all the scores or hundreds of votes each year, the ones specificaly re veterans' affairs were numerous enough to change his ranking in any appreciable fashion? And, do you have any evidence that other Democrats voted more "left" than he did on veterans bills?
"The ideology analysis assigns a left–right score to each Member of Congress based on their pattern of cosponsorship. The left–right score reflects the dominant ideological difference or differences among Members of Congress, which changes over time.
In a nutshell, Members of Congress who cosponsor similar sets of bills will get scores close together, while Members of Congress who sponsor different sets of bills will have scores far apart. Members of Congress with similar political views will tend to cosponsor the same set of bills, or bills by the same set of authors, and inversely Members of Congress with different political views will tend to cosponsor different bills."
Walz was the primary sponsor of 5 bills that were passed, all 5 were related to veterans. That site also lists that 67% of bills Walz sponsored were related to "Armed Forces and National Security." So by the metrics GovTrack lists as determining their ideology score, a significant majority of bills sponsored by Walz were related to veterans/armed forces. I assume this skews him much more to the right relative to his views on other issues. Paul also seems to think differently, so maybe I'm wrong here, but the GovTrack ideology ranking is pretty clear.
In Congress, Walz supported "pay-as-you-go" budgeting rules, voted against both the bank and automaker bailouts, served on a commission monitoring human-rights violations in China. He also had lib/lefty views on plenty of topics. As a House member he was viewed not as conservative but as bipartisan.
In the Bipartisan Index created by the Lugar Center [the legacy organization of longtime Republican Senator Richard Lugar, who, full disclosure, I voted for and donated to when he ran for president], Walz ranked 20th in the House in the 113rd Congress and 7th in the 114th.
"VP tie breaking record" makes no sense. In 3 1/2 years only one actual proposed law has reached Harris for a tie-breaking vote. Every other instance has been on people nominated for various federal offices, and no VP from any party in US history has cast a tiebreaking vote _against_ their own party's nominee for an office. Never gonna happen either.
The one actual law that Harris was the tiebreaker on was the Infrastructure Reduction Act. Whatever you think of the final compromised version of that bill, one such instance is hardly a meaningful "record".
I live and work amongst the people who you call left-wing ideologues. Deep in the heart of Blue America so to speak. Also I have a sibling who proudly says the same and in his case he was Harris's constituent when she was a senator.
From that, two things come to mind as examples of why my brother literally LOL's at the idea that Harris is a progressive (today's term of pride for the worldview that you are referring to):
-- no politician fitting that description has ever chosen to start their career by becoming a front-line prosecutor. Let alone doing that job for a full decade and then becoming a big-city district attorney who aggressively cleared backlogged murder cases, demanded maximum sentences upon conviction, etc. In progressive circles that's roughly as likely a career path as taking an entry-level management job at ExxonMobil or Hobby Lobby.
-- a progressive-base politician going on a national broadcast and talking about being a lifelong _gun_ owner?? Ho ho ho, come on now. That is literally as likely nowadays as a MAGA-based candidate publicly thanking the doctors who carried out his middle-school child's gender-reassignment surgery.
I don't know about majority, but there's several very vocal rightwingers on DSL who call for burning everything to the ground.
And ideas like "actually, it's good to default on the debt" or "we should fire all civil servants" do seem to have an alarming amount of currency on the right. IIRC, there was one actual candidate who called for randomly firing 50% of civil servants on day 1.
Actually, the only way to build greater things is to build on top of other great things. One cannot build pyramids nor skyscrapers starting at the top.
As far as I can tell it's about intra-left signaling. No right-winger is going to vote Harris and none of them are going to take any of these policies seriously or in remotely good faith and vice-versa for Democrats/leftists looking at Trump.
But if you're already a Democrat/leftist, these minor variations could be important. Kamala Harris is woke, by the opinion of some majority of the country (some Democrats and ~99% of Republicans) but how woke she is within the Overton Window of the Democratic coalition is potentially something people care about.
"As far as I can tell it's about intra-left signaling. No right-winger is going to vote Harris and none of them are going to take any of these policies seriously or in remotely good faith and vice-versa for Democrats/leftists looking at Trump."
Have you ever heard of a concept called the swing voter?
I know that there is a correlation between IQ and things like test scores but I don't really understand the causality. IQ tests measure things like shape rotation and reaction times. School tests generally measure ability to retain information and critical analysis. These don't look that related. Sure, maybe someone with better reaction times is also better at remembering something for a test but not necessarily. What if they have bad reaction times but are good at storing information that they have spent a while going over? I can imagine someone who does poorly on IQ tests but strong on school tests and vice versa and it doesn't seem like it would even be a rare occurrence.
A test only directly measures how many questions you get right on that test -- and only indirectly measures everything else.
Why do people get questions wrong (on school tests and IQ tests)? Number one reason, they don't care, or they have the belief that "I'm stupid and bad at taking tests" so they act like they don't care. So they rush or guess randomly or panic -- or act like the chess player who blunders and then immediately says "I knew I shouldn't have done that, how could I be so stupid? That's typical me."
Number two reason, because they're missing essential tools, e.g. the ability to read a question closely word for word, or basic logic e.g. process of elimination. Maybe these have to be learnt by a certain age, or your brain can't ever grok them. Or maybe anyone can pick them up, but we just never think to teach them explicitly, or it's un-PC to say "my common sense works better than your common sense," so we don't try to. It always amazes (and saddens) me that 90% of layman can't (or refuse to) understand something as simple as a truth table.
Number three reason, because they lack domain specific knowledge or tools. E.g. the history test asks for the date of such and such battle, and you know it or you don't.
The model I'm sketching is: first you need the will to do well; then the general tools (or to be a good "test taking interface" if you like); and only then the domain specific knowledge. People's "will to do well" on an IQ test and a school exam will be highly correlated, because they depend on self-image and "life strategy" in a similar way. I was always a nerdy type who got most of my praise and self-esteem from doing well on tests, and always similarly motivated to score well. A child who gets their self-esteem from somewhere else, e.g. being cute or making others laugh, is not likely to concentrate as hard on any test -- they'll be thinking about the meta social context, or how unfair it is that they have to take tests when it isn't their strong point, or whatever.
The second part, test taking tools, naturally means a correlation between performances on different tests, and will probably be correlated with the first part as well. I picked up lots of tricks that made me good at taking tests, precisely because I occupied the niche of "child who takes tests very seriously".
The reason for your surprise at the correlation of various test scores is that you assume it's mainly part three, domain specific stuff, that determines performance. But this is not true, because the first two parts are so important, and because on most formal/school tests the content is much thinner/emptier than we like to imagine. If you go through a school physics exam (for example) you'll find that most of it is https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-the-teacher-s-password or use of elementary mathematical tools (plugging numbers into a formula). And if you move to a subject where the tools needed are substantially different (e.g. art, cooking) you no longer expect to see a correlation with IQ.
The relationship between "general test taking skills" and "general intelligence" is complicated. Some things intuitively count as both (basics of formal logic, maths). But it also seems possible to have the former without being generally intelligent -- we have a stereotype of a pedantic nerd who's always technically correct, but always wrong where it matters. And the opposite stereotype, the artsy genius.
[Tangent: I've arrived at this model partly by analogy with the Football Manager video games. In them your virtual football players have mental, physical, and technical attributes (which are just numbers between 1 and 20). Technical attributes include things that seem most obviously correlated with football performance, like passing and dribbling. But (as explained by many strategy guides) your players first need the desire to chase after the ball; then they need the physical attributes to get there; and only then can they use their fancy technical skills. So the first thing to look for in a player is mental strength (determination, work rate, bravery). Players without it will underperform, in the same way that some people do badly on tests despite seeming clever in other ways]
I remember seeing a post a while back arguing that this is the true reason why the Marshmallow Test was correlated with success. It's not really about time preference (which is almost trivial in the case of the marshmallows), but rather testing kids for *desire to perform on tests*.
What makes the phenomenon interesting/non-trivial is precisely that these abilities have a statistical relationship with each other when it seems non-obvious that they should.
And it goes beyond grades and IQ. IIRC how much money you earn, how long you live, how healthy you are, how good your reflexes are, how good you are at your job (even if your job is being an athlete), and I seem to recall even how happy you are and how many friends you have are all correlated. All good things go together. More specifically, there seems to be a single hidden scalar variable 'g', that correlates with almost all things generally considered 'good'. It correlates the most with things like IQ and being good at math, but surprisingly little is actually exempt.
The common guess seems to be that 'g'='general intelligence'. Rather than just being an amalgamation of millions of disconnected heuristics and skills that have nothing to do with each other, human brains to some extent meaningfully vary in how good they are at information processing and problem solving in general. And people who are better at problem solving tend to be better at getting what they want, hence the correlation with all things generically considered 'good' or desirable.
(My memories of these statistics are somewhat vague. I could be wrong on some of these points)
How happy you are is not correlated with IQ. If you look at the correlation of IQ and the big 5 personality traits, neuroticism (sadness, moodiness, and emotional instability), and IQ has a tiny negative correlation. It is statistically significant (i.e., not just a chance occurrence in the group studied), but too tiny to be of any real life significance. The correlation is -0.09.
I agree that neuroticism and unhappiness are not the same thing. Here are the reasons to still use neuroticism as a stand-in for trait unhappiness.
The neuroticism measure is well-validated and well studied. I am not at all sure there are measures of happiness or unhappiness that are anything like as solid and trustworthy. I have never seen any, & I’m a psychologist. There are definitely well-validated measures of depression, but depression is not the same thing as unhappiness either.
The happiness measure in the study you cited is briefly described in the abstract of the study, and sounds like it was a single question: “Happiness was measured using a validated question on a 3-point scale.” Even if they are valid (i.e., consistent over time, resistant to circumstances that pull for a certain kind of answer, correlated with other measures you’d expect them to etc.) single-item questionnaires do not capture a big enough, rich enough chunk of the thing being measured to have good construct validity. It’s fine for a happiness test to ask whether the subject is happy most of the time. But the test is better if it asks several similar but related questions, eg, “ T/F: When life is hard, I still have an overall positive feeling about things,” “people I know comment on my positive outlook” etc etc. Also, what we want this study to be looking for is trait happiness — a general lifelong tendency to be happy. It’s not clear whether the test used in the study asked about that, or asked about subject’s mood at the time they were taking the test. So while I agree that a test of happiness as a trait would be a better measure to use if you’re studying relationship between IQ and trait happiness, I think at present neuroticism gets closer to trait unhappiness than a singe “validated question.”
As for the measures of intelligence, the study you cite estimated “verbal IQ . . . using the national adult reading test.” National adult reading test no doubts correlates with verbal IQ, but it’s almost certainly not a slam dunk high correlation, and verbal IQ itself is not slam dunk correlated with full scale IQ, which is what we mean by intelligence. The intelligence measure your study used is just inadequate
So why is there a stereotype of the depressed intellectual? You know, just look at Zizek. Is it possible that the correlation of IQ and happiness tops out somewhere?
After much time thinking about this, I think that being a standard deviation outside anything makes living, functioning, and forming relationships in a society more difficult regardless of whether that standard deviation is objectively good.
I went to school with a few prodigies and while they were happier than average while participating in their field of choice, their lives were harder the rest of the time. They had different priorities than most other people which made relating to others difficult. They were often perceived as either weird or threatening because of their talent. Values they cared deeply about--like excellence, the importance of art, or work ethic--were routinely derided and dismissed by other people and weaponized to bully them or "knock them down a peg." And when they finally found like-minded groups with similar interests, there was still a lot of underlying stress because they knew they were ultimately competing for the same tiny pool of prestigious jobs with tiny margins for error. I think this is true at the top of most fields.
The world tends to be built for the "average" person, so the less average you are, the more frustrating it's going to be, regardless of the reasons behind your difference.
I really want to research that splits up different types of high IQ people. If you use your intelligence to ruminate all the time, you’re probably going to be depressed. But if you use it found a successful company, you’re probably going to be happier.
I'm not sure I'd call those 2 groups different types of intelligence. Can't it be that some intelligent people are anxious and unhappy and some are active and optimistic? Or that one intelligent person can be depressed for a couple years, then pull out of it and be active and optimistic? Seems like the gloomy - cheerful axis might well be at right angles to the smart - dumb one.
I meant high IQ types split up in other ways, like personality. For example, I'm sure that extroverted high IQ types are much happier than introverted high IQ types.
Perhaps some types of people are more visible / easier to remember than others? There are many depressed people, but only those who are exceptional in some other traits become famous.
How does social competence explain superior shape rotation skills? Let me guess, little kids with great social skills spend more time riding the carousel with their friends, so they get more experience at seeing things turn around...
IQ, or at least the g factor, is basically an attempt to explain why all these tests correlate in ways they intuitively shouldn't. Basically, we could imagine someone with bad read reaction times but good memory or someone with bad SAT scores but good grades but these people are fairly rare.
So, start with the SAT and the math and verbal sections. It's easy to imagine someone doing very well on the math section and poorly on the verbal or vice versa but in reality these two scores are fairly highly correlated. Not perfectly and people do tend to be better at one but it tends to be more 750 Math & 710 Verbal than 750 Math & 510 Verbal (which is ~the national average). This observation is non-intuitive but pretty persistent. Over time, people have noted that you can just keep expanding it to things like AP test scores, grades, educational attainment, and even shape rotation and reaction tests. In fact, super weirdly, we can give children shape rotation tests at a young age and make educated, not perfect, predictions. That's not to say that there's not variance, there is...but an honor roll student who's bad at math tends to be bad at math relative to other honor roll students, not average students.
People then used some, frankly, pretty odd statistical techniques to determine the g-factor and then people fought about it a bunch but at its core everyone is just trying to explain this phenomenon. Our best explanation is some kind of underlying intelligence or "IQ" or general IQ, which is almost defined as this counter-intuitive correlation we observe. The 2nd best observation is common cultural factors, eg upper-middle class kids get advantages, and they do, but this gets undercut really fast when these observations replicate in really alien cultures like China and South Korea, which makes common socio-economic factors look really lame. Like, if a shape rotation test at age 5 is a good predictor of SAT scores in the US and South Korea at age 17, that's far more likely to be some underlying genetic thing than a cultural thing.
In your first paragraph, you say that intuitively the tests of different cognitive abilities shouldn't be correlated. It seems natural to me that mental abilities should be fairly tightly correlated, at a statistical if not a personal level. The data supports this - why is it unintuitive?
It's like saying that intuitively an Olympic swimmer shouldn't be any better at track events than average, since they weren't selected to be good at track. This is false - they're in peak condition and likely to outperform 95% or more of the population.
Because it's not Brandon's intuitive understanding and I'm responding to him. He's asking about someone doing poorly on IQ tests and doing well in school, which is certainly possible but highly unusual, which indicates that his intuition is that they're not correlated. Your intuition is different, so if you asked I would phrase it differently.
I wouldn’t say that my intuition is that they aren’t correlated. It’s more like that they shouldn’t necessarily be so. For example, I’ve seen videos of chimpanzees showing how they do really good on reaction time tests. Obviously, they would do much worse on other parts of an IQ test. So it’s clearly not some kind of scientific law that these things have to be correlated but they apparently they are in humans. Without having a deep understanding of the causality, we’re missing something fundamental about why that correlation exists.
The things you'd think would not correlate very well with ability to reason, have insight, grasp complex ideas etc -- they actually do correlate less well with tests of those things. The most uncognitive-seeming subtest on the WAIS is Digit Span: They read you long numbers, and then you say them back. I believe average Digit Span is 7, but the test contains numbers with as many as 11 digits, and some people can remember those. And score on Digit Span correlates only 0.57 with full score. If course *only* .57 is aa startlingly high correlation, given that remembering a bunch of digits seems pretty useless, just a party trick, and like it doesn't have much to do with the reasoning powers, etc. we think of as indicating intelligence. That's why WoolyAl was talking about *g*, general intelligence. There are a lot of tasks that don't have much in common except that they are done with the mind, yet ability on one predicts ability on the others pretty well, as though there's some brain quality that's the one ring to rule them all -- rule all the subskills, i mean.
IQ tests measure a bunch of things, many of them much more obviously connected to the abilities needed to do well in school than the 2 things you name -- reasoning, doing math word problems, understanding how 2 things are alike or different, vocabulary. I recommend looking up the WAIS (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale) in Wikipedia. IQ tests predict school performance fairly well, but of course a number of other things besides raw mental abilities influence how well a kid does in school: how good his teacher is, how good the teaching materials used, how much school manages to capture his interest, how he's doing overall, whether his parents expect him to do well and make an effort to help him do well.
You don't have to take the test. Just read the Wiki entry on the WAIS. There's also easy-to-find info about how much each subtest correlates with each of the other and with full-scale score.
Welp. Someone illustrated Scott's old post about Haiti with not very interesting photo material and put it up on X, with the credit to Scott's original post is at the very end and hard to find. I'm not sure exactly how annoying this is, but I figured I'd let Scott know:
Can you have a robustly functioning democratic system, in which one party consistently wins for a long time? Or is this sort of effect a clear sign of either some sort of cheating, or at least that something has gone very wrong?
An example of this might be the mayoral elections in Chicago, which have been won by Democrats since the 1930s. (Strictly speaking, the current process is non-partisan, bu the winners have clearly been people who moved in Democratic Party circles.)
One might expect a party that has had a long string of losses to change the policies it backs and the candidates it puts up for election until it finds a winning formula, unless something is keeping it from making this sort of adjustment.
On the other hand, if one party keeps winning for a long time, it might come to be seen as the only viable party, and everyone with any political ambitions would migrate over to it. And if it had all the serious talent, the party might be expected to keep winning, in a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy, leaving the other parties a bunch of tiny protest movements for those so wedded to their positions they are not willing to accept the compromises of dealing with the major party.
In the U.S., at least, the equilibrium is to have two major parties of roughly equal power nationwide. Because the country isn't homogeneous, this ends up with a number of states and local areas dominated by one party or the other.
It's actually quite normal in a democratic system for one party to be hegemonic. This doesn't mean they win every time but that they do win most of the times. LDP in Japan, Social Democrats in Sweden at least until 2006, Tories in UK since WW1 and Christian Democrats in Italy during the Cold War are famous examples. In the US, the Republicans were generally hegemonic from Lincoln to Hoover and then the Democrats from Roosevelt to LBJ, at least.
It's the current situation where most Western countries have constant, down-to-wire competitive elections that's expectional, and its main reason is probably the detachment of parties from the wide, established social groups (churches, labor unions etc.) that used to underpin their support and the increasing use of very precise consulting and microdata to determine the minimum amount of yielding and pandering to the electorate they must do to get past the finish line.
> One might expect a party that has had a long string of losses to change the policies it backs and the candidates it puts up for election until it finds a winning formula, unless something is keeping it from making this sort of adjustment.
One thing that can prevent that is the nationalization of politics. California Republicans have not attempted to moderate to win state elections because everything is national nowadays, and if Trump-lovers happen to be a minority in the state, so be-it. If anything, there's an evaporative cooling effect because any politician who is ambitious and ideologically flexible will switch to the winning side.
Back before the parties were so polarized, and before politics followed centralization of power toward the national level, there would sometimes be "one-party towns" where the actual election would be the party primary, in which all serious politicians participated, regardless of how closely their personal ideology matched the official ideology of the national party.
Japan. The LDP almost always wins. But opposition parties have won, and can win if the LDP royally screws up.
Arguably, Japan has the best advantages of a one-party state (no political polarization, or politicization of private life) without the biggest downside (no way to hold the one-party accountable).
It's easy for a party to never win. The Whigs have been out of power for, what, 150 years?
In a healthy democracy, I expect the one giant party that wins all the time to eventually split into separate factions along their internal faction lines, since there's no outside threat to keep them together.
Isn't it surprising that the Singapore PAP hasn't split by now? Every organisation has internal factions and disagreements about who should be in charge. You'd think that eventually an internal disagreement should blossom into an actual party split, with each side convinced that they'd be the ones to win the people's support in the post-split election.
In places like China the mono-party doesn't split because everyone understands that the losers of the split and their families will wind up imprisoned, tortured, dead. But Singapore has sufficiently robust democratic institutions that this shouldn't happen, they'll just wind up as an opposition party.
I always figured Lee was holding things together by sheer personal awesomeness. He's been gone nine years at this point. I'm not sure whether any cracks have appeared in the PAP facade, but perhaps not enough time has passed.
Yeah, this is my bet too - something of a lingering respect / not wanting to mess with a good thing.
I mean, if your winning horse literally took you from third world to first in 30 years, would YOU want to start messing with it? He's the most revered politician in the world for a reason.
I read a lot of Trollope for escape and it is clear in his books that he views the Whigs ("Liberals" by his time, I believe?) as destined to prevail forever, and the Tories as a historical curiosity, albeit with aesthetics on their side. It is not precisely that he sees that there is nothing to conserve, but rather that utopia is far off and so there will be for a long while yet those good things that he in fact would have grieved the loss of. He need never see utopia. (This raises some questions, obviously, lol.) But that those things/people will not fit into the future and must go, he is certain.
Of course, the Conservative party of today bears no resemblance to that in his day.
As an environmentalist and conservative, I obviously have no one to vote for as this idea that "nothing will be conserved, or should be" has very much taken possession of the discourse. In fact, nothing has shocked me more than the calm acceptance on all sides now, that nature is something we "choose" to exist or not, that it is without value except to those who fancy it, that it probably will be mostly banished but the techno-future is so interesting who will miss plants and animals? A few old Boomers. Wildlife has their little niches - on the sufferance of people who are little familiar with it and couldn't care less.
I will vote nonetheless, probably, but merely in the faint hope of sending the future a signal, in case they are still writing history books in the future. It will obviously be a very crude signal, perhaps hardly worth doing.
The AI art Turing test is a very good idea. Honestly seems a little strange that nobody has set it up already.
It'll be interesting to see if abstract art created by a human has some quality to it that abstract art created by a machine lacks. My sense is very strongly that it does, but it'll be good to run a test. I also think some people will very clearly see the difference between human and AI art, while others won't pick it up at all.
It really strongly depends on a whole bunch of different factors, i.e. the style of art, the competence of the artist, the perception and interests of the person viewing it.
My sense from experimenting with AI art is that it has a peculiar deadness to it, which can be good if that's what you want. I've been using it specifically to make shoggoths for a roleplaying game I'm working on. It's great at Lovecraftian horrors because they're supposed to be mutated and shapeless, and it's actually good if they have a horrible dead expression of inhuman evil in their eyes.
Can it be cute or relaxing though? Not sure yet. We really need to drill down more specifically into what aesthetic qualities it can capture and what it can't.
I can tell you what this video ain't. It ain't no AI voices and burned-in animated captions, it ain't me sitting around the house talking to a camera, it ain't no slide show disguised as a video, and it ain't no unenthusiastic presenter stating the obvious. Or I can tell you what it is. It's me (American, irreverent but kind) and my pardner (Australian, cute, funny) traveling the country, rediscovering patriotism, and improvising a remarkably eloquent and inspirational speech bit by bit as we go. The weird thing about making a documentary is, you don't know what it's about until it's over. It turns out, this one's about the American Dream. I've done a lot of things in my life, and out of all the things I've done, I'm most proud of this. You can cheat by watching this 8 minute version where it's just the American Dream speech ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfPVpLfTUDg ) but if you do that you'll miss the serendipity of the outlandishly glamorous Coleman Theater in the middle of Nowhere Oklahoma, the wife of the dead chainsaw carver in Sullivan Missouri who's kept his shop open for 20 years and never remarried, my purchase of a steel-tongued drum followed by my improvising alongside a player of a native American flute in Oatman Arizona, and the abandoned houses of Amboy California where the walls have stories that they can't tell so I have to do it for them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHlSDE7MjbI
You seem to be assuming that an abortion has the net effect of one fewer life in the world. There are a number of studies which claim to show that, given two pregnant women of similar age, socioeconomic status, martial status etcetera, if one has an abortion and the other doesn't, then the woman who has the abortion will have more children later. So you aren't losing net QALYs by having an abortion, you are just shifting them to a later child, who will quite likely be a happier one.
There was a study Ozy wrote about here: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/lets-read-a-study-the-impact-of-denying which suggested the exact oppostite effect. Women assigned to a male judge were granted abortions 38% of the time compared to 58% with women judges, but they had on average 0.5 more children - a lot more than 1 per denied abortion. Quite possibly abortion statistically leads to greater than one fewer life in the world (greater even than the slightly over one accounting for twins etc.).
For many people their idea of abortion is clouded by propagandistic media portrayals. They always imagine abortion patients as childless women, usually very young, when actually 59% of abortion patients have at least one previous birth:
I assume this was meant as a reply to my comment, so I'll go ahead and respond. If you believe that each abortion will, on net, result in more QALYs than not aborting then I agree it would make sense from a utilitarian perspective to support abortion.
It doesn't really seem likely though? The USA aborts between 6-9 hundred thousand fetus's each year, do you really think that if we aborted 0 over the last ten years our current population would be lower?
It's not even necessarily a domination drive, but I do think it's connected to the "waited on" thing you don't like? It's like when someone you respect says that they respect you, there's a bit of an emotional zing? In this case, it's "someone attractive is treating you as though you are important". It's not that they're forced to view you as important, it's that they do so without any conscious or visible coercion at all, so your hindbrain (or at least, other people's hindbrains) merely registers "hey, I must be doing something right if this person smiles when they see me". (With tipping at a regular spot, it ideally becomes a self-sustaining loop - you tip big, they like you and treat you well, you continue to tip big, and so forth.)
Most status and power hierarchies are temporary and situational - I rarely if ever see anyone outside the Anglosphere believing that being served or serving someone at a bar or restaurant is indicative of something other than an ephemeral and contingent transactional relationship.
Sure! But people will happily pay money for "ephemeral and contingent transactional" relationships, or simply experiences. It's like a public semi-consensual BDSM scene. Or heroin.
If I'm in a restaurant, it is likely that I'm on a date. I desire to believe that my date is the most attractive woman on the premises, and I'd appreciate it if the restaurant helped out a bit.
I don't consider myself a rationalist, so there's a lot of stuff in this blog and the comments that I disagree with or just don't get, but this is the first time something strikes me as deeply alien. It's a level of insecurity or something adjacent to insecurity that fascinates, disturbs and scares me. Would you also prefer worse food so you can feel like you or your date is the better cook or does this only apply to attractiveness?
If my date cooked a dinner for me, and I instead went to a restaurant, that would be a bit wrong, wouldn't it?
That said, if I am with someone in a restaurant, I don't spend much time looking at the waitresses, so it doesn't matter to me. (Unless, dunno, they would be super pretty girls walking around topless, so I couldn't help being distracted. In which case, that would be a bad environment to go on a date. Unless she is polyamorous. It's complicated.)
I suspect doing so reduces disruption. There can be a fair amount of stress and anger while waiting for a seat. Men wont yell at an attractive hostess. Your own preference for the ugly host gestures towards this.
Just explain to the woman you’re with that her slightly large nose and smallish breasts didn’t bother you til you saw how pretty the hostess was, but now that you have you may come across as a bit dour. If she isn’t empathic and kind about that she’s not the one for you anyhow
It's normal for people to react to situations in ways that are the exact opposite of mine for reasons that are inexplicable to me. If it made sense, I wouldn't have asked. It seems like your ability to understand me isn't much better.
Maybe extroverted people apply for hostess jobs and the reasn they are extroverted is because they have been liked by people throughout their life for being attractive
Because neither the restaurant, the hostess, nor the other patrons care at all about anyone's opinion of the hostesses physical endowments (if this confuses you, consider that this works in both directions). She isn't there to be ogled, or not.
You know, as someone who frequently flies United, I have literally never registered the attractiveness of otherwise of flight attendants.
Recurring nightmare about changing planes at LAX and theyve not given you enough time to get the departure terminal ... yes, have the nightmare.
im not sure if I can blame united for changing planes in Chicago and the flights delayed because the runway is covered in snow because of course it is, its Chicago ... might be some other airline.
And the rime we're diverted to Gander or somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Canada and they cant repressurise the hydraulics to take off again because gthey dont have the right hoses, and then the pilot tells you not to worry they have a solution ... and course you are worrying, because youre imagining the maintenance guys doing something creative with duct tape...
I haven't seen a "Classified Ads" post in a while, so here comes a bit of mild self-promotion. I have a Substack just starting up named "Collective Rationality" which covers Ethics (not utilitarian), AI (argues that 'alignment' is the wrong approach to reduce P(DOOM)), and Singularity Economics (We are prolly in a world of sh*t). Take a look if it sounds interesting.
I wrote a Substack post about this (https://open.substack.com/pub/flyinglionwithabook/p/why-arent-utilitarians-all-pro-life), but the basic argument isn't hard to sum up. Utilitarians shouldn't care whether a fetus is a person with rights, they should care about utility. And a 5 week old fetus has about 58 years of expected life ahead of her (current US expected lifespan at birth, adjusted down due to a 5 week old fetus having around a 20% of miscarrying before birth). Does it really seem plausible that any loss of utility the mother will experience carrying the child to birth would outweigh the net utility of 58 years of human life? That seem preposterous.
Utlilitarians seem to value saving lives, and stopping an abortion saves a heckuva lot of QALYs! Yet it seems to me that all the ultilitarians I meet are pro-choice. I can understand the pro-choice position from a deontological perspective, but can't see how to make it work from a utilitarian one. Even if you somehow knew that all the kids would have been aborted would be abused and neglected, then the utility maximizing option is to give the kids up for adoption. I mean, utilitarians don't think we should kill kids that are being abused right now, right? Then why would killing a kid that only has a possibility of being abused be acceptable?
I'm sure utilitarians must have discussed this before, and I would appreciate some insight. As it stands I can't square that circle.
Exactly the same argument leads to the question "Why aren't utilitarians more pro-rape?".
The answer, of course, is that humans whose moral calculus entails creating as many non-suicidal humans as possible don't actually exist - some people say they think like that, but no-one follows the idea to its logical conclusions.
I can understand a utilitarian not wanting to say that it's morally obligatory to create as many lives as possible; but that's not the situation with an abortion. The life has already been created with an abortion, if we do nothing we can expect the result to be (at week 5) 58 QALYs, and if we intervene we expect to lose those 58 QALYs. How can a utilitarian justify taking an action that results in the loss of 58 QUALYs?
"I always found the violinist argument a weak argument. Of course you’re supposed to save the violinist, I said. He’s a person! It’s just nine months.
Then I got pregnant.
It was very much a wanted pregnancy, and my child is currently a healthy, happy six-year-old. But at some point, probably between the two months I spent unable to do anything but read undemanding fiction and the time I vomited out the window of an car on the highway so I didn’t mess up the Uber driver’s upholstery, I realized that forcing anyone to go through this against their will is an atrocity.
I think this is the truth behind the slogan “no uterus, no opinion.” You don’t lose your right to do moral reasoning based on your internal organs. And ideally everyone is capable of exercising the moral imagination without personal experience. But some people—like I was—are stupid."
To clarify, after experiencing the pain caused by pregnancy you concluded that it was possible for that pain to outweigh the utility gained from the expected life of the child?
I hope your argument here is that utilitarians are dumb for assuming that all QALYs are the same.
The true utilitarian perspective - absent all the algebraic navel gazing - is that if a woman thinks it's a good idea for her to have an abortion in order to prevent decades of suffering, she's always correct in that assumption. *She* won't have to suffer all the conditions associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and (almost certainly) parenthood, and the fetus won't have to suffer growing up in the sub-optimal environment the mother did not believe to be compatible with thriving.
Your hypothetical utilitarians have it exactly backwards. Medical abortions are a tool to *prevent* decades of human suffering before it can even be experienced. That's why God/nature spontaneously aborts nonviable fetuses in 20-50% of all pregnancies.
I don't really have an argument here, just a confusion. Are you saying that so many human lives are net negative in terms of utility (as in, contain more suffering than happiness or whatever utility metric you use) that letting mother's choose whether those lives continue beyond the womb is justified?
I'm saying that not all human lives are equally likely to be pleasant enough to be "worth" living, and medical abortion is a great tool for *guaranteeing* that a woman's baby will not be born into circumstances which the mother has deemed likely to be miserable for child (or is careless enough not to care about the circumstances into which the child is born, which is even more likely to lead to misery). And that's before we even address sparing a woman the misery of an unwanted pregnancy and delivery.
This isn't a problem. Nature routinely automatically disposes of fetuses with genetic abnormalities which would make life very unpleasant or impossible; why on earth shouldn't human beings do the same in response to their environment?
And nobody is ever just short-sighted? Selfish in the moment, but possibly a good parent? Do people not generally consider life a net positive, even in conditions of gross poverty? In virtually every case that a woman chooses abortion, the prospective life of the child would be worse than never having been born?
It will always come back: utilitarians claim to want the best outcomes, everyone believes their beliefs are the best (or they would believe something else instead) so of course people will always wonder why utilitarians don’t agree with them on everything!
You're giving an argument for why total utilitarians should be pro-natalist and then acting as if abortion is the only pro-natalist policy imaginable. Many total utilitarians are pro-natalist but recognize that banning abortion is a pro-natal policy that has a lot of negatives (dysgenics, the lack of respect for liberty, cultural considerations) that other pro-natal policies don't.
I'm not sure I'm arguing that total utilitarian's should be pro-natalist: I don't fully understand the arguments against the Repugnant Conclusion, but I'm willing to trust that you can have a utilitarianism that avoids it. I'm just confused how, in the case of a particular abortion, you can justify destroying so much expected future utility. You're saying that banning abortion would have other bad effects that outweigh the expected future utility lost, which is a sensible position. I disagree with it (I think it's unlikely that legal abortion produces enough utility to outweigh losing 34,800,000 million QALYs every year) but it does make sense.
I guess a possible reply would be that the individual who would eventually experience those QALYs doesn't exist yet at that point, because individual consciousness likely hasn't coalesced at the fetus level, and that applying utilitarianism to not-yet-existing individuals doesn't work in any kind of sane or reliable way.
But I'm not a utilitarian by any means, so who knows.
Utility to whom? From the point of view of the future person the fetus might become, the utility of birth is very high. From the mother's point of view, other considerations (such as her own health) begin to weaken the utility value. As you move away in social distance from the fetus/future person, the utility of their birth becomes weaker and weaker. Some have argued that it can even reach a negative value (if, for example, that region is overpopulated).
Net utility, considering the mother and the fetus and society. If you believe that the typical human life is net positive utility, then I don't see how a utilitarian can justify ending a human life at such an early stage (EDIT: Unless somehow ending that life results in higher net utility). If you believe that the typical human life is net negative utility, then wouldn't that make murdering people (or at least the particularly sad ones) the right action to take? Most utilitarian' don't seem to believe this.
Wouldn't we assume, for starters, that an unwanted childbirth has lower net utility than a wanted childbirth? If an unwanted birth might be replaced by a wanted birth, or by some fraction of a wanted birth, on average, how would we score that?
Unwanted teen pregnancies, at least, are absolutely atypical in a negative sense from a utilitarian standpoint.
This topic has been addressed better elsewhere in ACX. But personally, I tend to believe that the notion of Utilitarianism just isn't well applied to this situation and most Utilitarians aren't trying to maximize the number of births till they get to an almost-tragedy-of-the-commons type state where an additional birth finally registers as net overall negative to human happiness. I don't think that's what the ethical framework is even for.
Utilitarianism might be useful for exploring the various changes in sexual practices which result from restrictions on abortion, which are significant. It's debatable to what extent various abortion restrictions increase population growth, but population growth absent abortion is significantly less than the current population plus aborted fetuses, given access to other means of contraception.
I think that strongly restricting abortion has a definite negative impact on women's access to healthcare since there are certain interventions, like the removal of a dead fetus, which potentially place the law between a woman and her doctor.
I tend to be pro choice since, absent very strong contrary evidence, I assign a high degree of utility to people's individual choices, in and of themselves. I'm not personally interested in utilitarianism as the path to authoritarianism.
"If you believe that the typical human life is net negative utility, then wouldn't that make murdering people (or at least the particularly sad ones) the right action to take?'
I tend to default strongly to people's individual choices. There may be some exceptions to that, like with transitory suicidal thoughts. But mostly, since the majority of the human experience is obscure to me, I assume that people are mostly rational actors. Even if that's not true, it's a default and exceptions have to be strongly argued for. In the case of abortion, even though you can argue that many unwanted births which result in children eventually become "wanted" that's, admittedly, not enough to persuade me, by itself, that the choice was the "correct" one. Because I'm suspicious of the accuracy of those reports. They seem to me like cope.
(I'm certainly not a strict utilitarian. I do think that the philosophy can be useful as a perspective.)
That being said, I think there's a classic discussion point on abortion that applies here, maybe even more for utilitarians than for non-utilitarians.
And that is this - outlawing something doesn't necessarily mean it will now cease to exist. If you outlaw abortion, it will likely cause an abortion black market, which will likely be less safe and more dangerous to the women who make use of it than a legal abortion provider would be.
So, it is at least conceivable that outlawing abortion might not cause a major reduction in the number of abortions, while also making abortions more dangerous and harmful for women. In other words, it's at least conceivable that the net utilitarian effect to outlawing abortion will be negative, that it will cause (slightly?) more harm than good overall, even from the perspective of wanting to save as much human life as possible.
The old line of "abortion should be safe, legal, and rare" might make the most sense from a utilitarian perspective. While perhaps also promoting adoption as a good alternative while not challenging the legality of abortion.
My own views on abortion are somewhat mixed. I can understand why utilitarians would not want to outlaw abortions.
That being said, I do find it a bit odd when utilitarians seem to be pro-abortion in a general sense rather than just thinking it should be legal (it's quite possible to dislike something while still thinking it shouldn't be outlawed).
I think your comment is sensible: I disagree that outlawing abortion (except in cases of a threat to the life of the mother) would result in net negative utility compared to keeping it legal, but that's just a factual disagreement. It's an understandable position to have as a utilitarian.
That argument only holds for utilitarians who accept the so-called Repugnant Conclusion, that adding more people can be a net positive even if it reduces average utility. If you're trying to optimize average utility, then it comes down to a question of whether or not the fetus is already a person or just a potential person whose existence isn't morally baked in to the calculus yet.
It was my understanding that the repugnant conclusion is about potential lives, but a fetus is an actual human life. It’s here right now, not hypothetically or potentially. I’m pretty sure utilitarians who reject the repugnant conclusion don’t think it’s fine to kill humans who already exist.
Well now we're back to the ordinary (boring, non-utilitarian) abortion debate over whether a fetus is in some sense an "actual human life" or a "potential human life".
I wish people would use the term "human person" rather than "human life" in this context. A fetus obviously has human DNA and is obviously alive - and this is true of every muscle cell in each of our bodies. And no one (AFAIK) sheds a tear when a single muscle cell dies.
The ordinary interminable debate is when to count the fetus as a person.
A muscle cell is not considered an organism, but biologically a fetus is; it's a human organism at one of the earliest stages of development, just like a sapling is a baby oak and a fertilized egg is a very young chicken.
This isn't scientifically controversial, pick up any textbook on human development and it'll say the same thing.
Many Thanks for the reply! Personally, I don't find that a very persuasive distinction. Both a muscle cell and a zygote can be maintained in Petri dishes. To maintain either a mass of muscle cells (beyond what diffusion can support) or a fetus requires blood circulation, incoming oxygen and nutrients, outgoing waste products - basically a whole human (unless the support technologies have gotten better since the last time I looked).
I could see treating any of a number of developmental milestones as a dividing line between when to start to care about a zygote/embryo/fetus/infant/toddler, hence the interminable debate. Why should "organism" be such a dividing line, and why should an isolated zygote be considered one and an isolated muscle cell not be?
I admit it’s a boring debate, but that’s because the answer can be looked up in any Human Development textbook: it’s a human life.
I can get arguing that it doesn’t have rights yet, but it definitely is a human organism, at one of the earliest stages of human development. And if you kill it you are wiping out an expected 58 QALYs, which seems like a terrible outcome from a utilitarian perspective.
No, you're still smuggling in the assumption. It is <A collection of living cells with the genetic pattern of a human> but it is not <A morally relevant entity>. Both can be described as "human life" but trying to base an argument around swapping between them is flawed.
Where does utilitarianism concern itself with “morally relevant human”? That’s deontologically talk. Even if you think utility for a fetus is with nothing, choosing to kill it loses you 58 years of “morally relevant” life: what gain in utility will outweigh that enough so that killing the fetus is net positive utility?
You still have to decide whether the position of the fetus is privileged over the position of a merely potential, unborn and unconceived child - which seems a lot like the decision of whether the fetus is a "person with rights" to me, but in different language.
If you *don't* think that there's a difference, then there's a complicated utilitarian question of "how many people should exist?" which has been discussed at great length - but I don't think it's particularly relevant to abortion. You either end up concluding that more people should exist (in which case you should probably focus on lobbying for policies that make it easier for families to have more children, and that encourage families to have more children, not on a controversial political issue that has a much smaller marginal effect) or you end up concluding that fewer people should exist (in which case, similarly, you want to lobby for policies that discourage large families).
If you *do* consider a fetus to be one of the entities whose utility we care about maximizing, then the argument carries through, but I think many people who are pro-choice don't concede this point in the first place.
But a fetus is not a potential life: it’s a currently existing life. I can get not wanting to go all repugnant conclusion and say that everyone should have as many kids as possible, and not counting potential lives the same way you count existing lives. But the fetus is an existing life: she’s only a “potential” life in the same way that I am a potential life, ie I might die tonight and so only will potentially be alive tomorrow.
I think that this is the *same* debate you acknowledge when you write:
"If you don’t see a human fetus as a person with rights and moral value, then it would make sense to allow the mother (who is definitely a person with rights and moral value) to do whatever she thinks is best, including killing her fetus. I don’t agree with this argument, but I understand it."
The pro-choice position, either way, is to give a special consideration to all children that have been born that is not given to a 5-week-old fetus. (I'm sure there's some opinions about where exactly the line is drawn.) That special consideration might be "call them a person with rights and moral value, then reason in a non-utilitarian fashion about what those rights are". Or, it might be "include their utility in the calculus of whose utility to maximize".
I think that if this is an argument you understand and disagree with it in one case, then you should be able to understand and disagree with it in the other case.
I understand it when you’re arguing from a more deontologically view that’s concerned with human rights: but utilitarians are supposed to shut up and calculate. How can you justify not including the future utility of a fetus from a utilitarian perspective? It would be like saying it makes sense for a utilitarian to discount all utility from the lives of humans with red hair.
In the same way as you justify it under a non-utilitarian perspective: by making a meta-ethical decision about which entities have moral value.
Is your objection that, if a pro-choice utilitarian declares that a fetus does not have moral value, then the we get an entity whose moral status suddenly changes at some point in time? I agree that that's weird, but it doesn't seem obviously incoherent to me. (For one, if we ever mean to consider the possibility that any AI might have moral value, we'd have to allow such a thing.)
Or is your objection that the utilitarian should be able to predict that there will be an entity of moral value here at some point, and act accordingly? But we can make reasonably confident predictions in other cases as well: in the case of a married couple with very definite plans to have a child, for example, or statistically in the sense of a pretty certain prediction about the number of children born in a country over the next decade. This seems to lead to the kind of repugnant-conclusion-type discussions you want to avoid.
I think we're getting to the heart of my confusion here. Lets say that a utilitarian only cares about utility for humans who are born; any utility a fetus experiences is discounted entirely. I can get that stance. It would still remain the case that if you kill the fetus you lose an expected 58-78 (depending on stage of development) years of human life after birth. If you think alive humans are on net experiencing positive utility, then that's 58-78 years of net positive utility that you expect will happen if you don't kill the fetus, and will not happen if you do kill the fetus.
Utilitarianism is all about the idea that the right choice is the one that results in the best outcome, right? Even if you only care about utility experienced by humans who are born, or even if you only care about utility experienced by humans who are 20 years or older, the world where you choose to kill the fetus has way less utility than the world where you don't. If the right choice is the one with the best outcome, then it seems obvious that the choice to not kill the fetus is right and the choice to kill the fetus is wrong.
So moral status doesn't really come into it as far as I can see; so where am I going wrong here?
For starters, unwanted children displace later births. The pregnant seventeen year old high school student with suddenly-absent boyfriend doesn't have her kid at seventeen and then move on with her previous life trajectory, getting married and having legitimate children as if nothing had happened... that unwanted birth reduces the number of legitimate children she'll have later.
I'm not a utilitarian, but I don't believe that if abortion never happened then the birth rate would be the current birth rate plus the current abortion rate (times a miscarriage factor).
So you can't just naively stick the 58 years in there.
I don't believe that either, but you got to have a lot of extra births that counterfactually wouldn't have happened to make up for the .6-.9 million abortions in the US annually.
Good post, and I think the comments are a great example of people picking their conclusion and reasoning backwards. Like the people claiming that children raised by mothers who don't want the child because of scarce resources and/or are adopted generate negative QALYs. This smuggles in a whole lot of assumptions without any evidence. And if you accept those assumptions, I guess the moral thing to do is kill the poor and sterilize women in countries with low quality of life? Like FLWAB points out, there is also a whole lot of "I guess if fetuses are so great we should make sure all women are permanently impregnated all the time" while completely ignoring the difference between a fetus that is going to be a healthy human 95% of the time vs an unfertilized embryo. The repugnant conclusion is about the question of creating life, abortion is about the question of ending it.
I think the replaceability section is generally incorrect. The median abortionee (is there a better term? abortion-haver is even more awkward) is a single mother who already has kids, so the idea that the mother will just have kids later and now is a particularly bad time is generally false.
The post also has this gem: "For an upper bound, being pregnant is probably not much worse than having both your legs amputated without medication,..". Is there anyone who has both given birth and had both their legs chopped off who could verify this part?
On a more serious note, the omission of any cost for the mother other than the pregnancy itself is pretty disingenuous. There are a lot of long-term physical and psychological costs of child bearing. Not to mention the 20+ years of raising the child, although I guess the post was about abortion vs adoption so that wouldn't be relevant. But this post commits the classic fallacy of the pro-lifers, in assuming that having a child is no more than 9 months of moderate inconvenience (or half a QALY in this case).
Thank you, that post pretty much exactly sums up my confusion!
It seems like most of the comments there (as here) boil down to either "The fetus is not a creature of moral concern, therefore we don't have to value it's future utility" (which doesn't make sense to me, future utility is future utility, why shouldn't it count just because the fetus is not currently of moral concern? Lost QALYs are lost QALYs, whether you lose them from killing a fetus, a baby, or a young adult) or "Considering utility gained from potential lives leads to the repugnant conclusion, so we can't do that" (which makes a bit more sense, but seems confusing: isn't the Repugnant Conclusion about not having an obligation to create lives, while abortion is a question about whether it's ok to destroy a life that already exists?).
If you're a utilitarian that doesn't factor expected future utility into your decisions...you're going to make some very stupid decisions! For one thing, if all that matters is utility right now, and not future utility, then you shouldn't donate your money to anything: donating money reduces your utility right now, and it won't increase anyone's utility until later, in the future. You shouldn't go to work, because doing labor reduces your utility right now, and you won't get paid for it until payday.
For another thing, if future utility isn't worth considering then murdering people is morally fine, provided you kill them painlessly. Sure, giving someone a lethal dose of opioids may reduce utility in the future (because, you know, they won't be alive to enjoy anything. Also everyone who cares about them will be sad) but "there is no future utility" so it's fine.
I'm saying that apply this version of navel-gazing utilitarianism to abortion is stupid.
Not all lives are equally pleasant.
Not all lives are equally worth living.
The navel-gazing algebra of utilitarianism with regard to abortion does not compute.
Fetus 1, expecting to be born to healthy parents well-positioned to raise a human being who will usefully thrive, is *very fundamentally different* than Fetus 2, which is unwanted because something is so terribly wrong in its environment that the person carrying it is determined to destroy it.
1 does not equal 2.
Stop plugging 2 into the utilitarian equation when only the number 1 matters.
58-78 years of a less than optimal life still seems like a lot of positive utility. I mean, why does EA spend all this time on mosquito nets to save lives in the Congo, people are pretty poor there and subject to threats of violence, etc.
And again, if the environment this baby will be born into is so bad that their life wouldn't be worth living then it seems like the utilitarian solution is adoption, not wiping out a lifetime of positive utility.
Adela Bojan, a 55 year old Romanian woman was recently diagnosed with an occlusion in the small intestine at a hospital in the city of Zalău. She requested to be transferred to Brașov, which is about a 5 hour drive away.
The ambulance that drove her encountered a bumpy road between Sighișoara and Brașov(roughly 72 miles apart). Upon her arrival in Brașov, she was examined by surgeon Bogdan Moldovan, who noticed the occlusion was gone. He attributed the clearing of her small intestine to the shaking she experienced while the ambulance was driving on the bumpy road.
It's about the journey, not the destination.
No English language link, but you can search for Adela Bojan ProTV if you have a translator that you trust.
She had imaging done in Zalău, where it was decided that surgery was required. On the same day, she went on the bumpy ride. She also reported starting to feel better as the ambulance started hitting the potholes.
So maybe next time they recommend running on a treadmill for a while and then repeat the imaging?
Post hoc ergo propter hoc. The only findings on CT scan which mandate intervention in a stable patient without cardinal signs of bowel ischemia (elevated WBC, tachycardia unresponsive to fluids, elevated lactate, peritonitis on exam, pain out of proportion to physical exam) with SBO (and that intervention can be non-surgical) are closed loop obstruction, swirl sign, obstructed hernia, and perforation and I have seen closed loops and swirl patients resolve between the time of imaging before they could get to the OR. Although I would love to see this studied prospectively like they did with the "riding on rollercoasters could help pass renal stones" hypothesis.
When I was an EMT in an emergency room, winter-times we'd get children with pulmonary congestion (inflamed lung passages). When mom & dad carried them from the home to car, and car to hospital they'd get exposed to cool moist air, which would clear up their congestion. Thus they'd arrive at the ER in better shape than when mom & dad decided to bring them in for care. Often the doc would prescribe pulmonary care, and cool moist air is what pulmonary tech would often administer by flowing O2 over ice.
This reminds me of some things I’ve always wondered about: Doesn’t it seem like there should be some kind of belly massage that would help with constipation, and possibly with other digestive problems, such as reflux? Anybody know whether such a thing exists?
Wow, that's a great idea! My reflux problem is kind of mild, but I'm going to try it. And I know someone who cannot take metformin for her mild diabetes because it makes her reflux so much worse, so I will pass the info on to her too.
Don't know if there is official massage, but my grandmother (when we were kids) used to tell us to rub our stomachs if we had stomach aches, to the accompaniment of this rhyme:
That Irish poetry gene, man, it manifests everywhere.
Which reminds me, I heard a modern Irish ballad written in the 1980''s, and it just seems so well done to me. It's not particularly moving or beautiful, and there's no striking, yummy use of language, but I still admire it because the writer manages to tell quite a complicated, almost technical story, while adhering perfectly to they rhyme scheme and pretty well to the metrical one and using natural speech patterns, no weird inversions to make a rhyme work. Tis called The Sick Note
Dear Sir, I write this note to you to tell you of me plight
And at the time of writing, I am not a pretty sight
Me body is all black and blue, me face a deathly gray
And I write this note to say why Paddy's not at work today
While working on the 14th floor, some bricks I had to clear
Now, to throw them down from such a height was not a good idea
The foreman wasn't very pleased, he being an awkward sod
He said I'd have to cart them down the ladders in me hod
Now, clearing all these bricks by hand it was so very slow
So I hoisted up a barrel and secured the rope below
But in me haste to do the job, I was too blind to see
That a barrelful of building bricks was heavier than me
So when I untied the rope the barrel fell like lead
And clinging tightly to the rope I started up instead
Well, I shot up like a rocket 'til to my dismay I found
That halfway up, I met the bloody barrel coming down
Well, the barrel broke me shoulder as to the ground it sped
And when I reached the top, I banged the pully with my head
Well, I clung on tight through numbed shock from this almighty blow
And the barrel spilled out half the bricks 14 floors below
Now, when these bricks had fallen from the barrel to the floor
I then outweighed the barrel and so started down once more
Still clinging tightly to the rope, I sped towards the ground
And I landed on the broken bricks that were all scattered round
Well, I lay there groaning on the ground, I thougth I'd passed the worst
When the barrel hit the pully-wheel and then the bottom burst
Well, a shower of bricks rained down on me, I hadn't got a hope
As I lay there moaning on the ground, I let go of the bloody rope
The barrel than being heavier, it started down once more
And landed right across me, as I lay upon the floor
Well, it broke three ribs and my left arm and I can only say
That I hope you'll understand why Paddy's not at work today
It is my lived experience that circular clockwise movement over the lower belly, with very light pressure, makes me feel better if I have constipation or flatulence. Basically following the shape of the large intestine with my hand.
Well, exercise helps most things work better, but what I had in mind was more direct manipulation of the abdomen. For instance, sometimes after I eat a moderate amount I have a feeling that my stomach is overly full, and I know from experience that if I burp I will feel better. I have discovered that if I thump a certain spot in my upper abdomen I can feel things shift around and then I burp and feel better. So just wondering if direct interventions of this kind could be taken further to relieve some of the various little common malfunctions.
Yes. I would love to see this studied prospectively but, like renal stones I think the hardest part would be getting people who feel crappy to consent to a bumpy car ride.
Reading UK newspaper op ed about the California AI law, I’ve had a thought: should we avoid using the word “killswitch” in the context of AI. LLM-type systems will pick up a pretty strong “being killed” = “bad thing you should avoid” from whatever corpus they use. Might that lead to them trying to avoid being killed and thus trying to disable their killswitch.
"Yes, it’s prudent to be cautious with the use of terms like "killswitch" in the context of AI systems, particularly those based on large language models (LLMs) or advanced AI systems that might develop complex associations from their training data. Using words like "killswitch" might imply an adversarial relationship, which could potentially lead to unintended consequences depending on how an AI system interprets that concept.
While current LLMs don’t have a self-preservation instinct or desires, the concern arises from the possibility that future AI systems, especially more advanced ones, might interpret instructions or concepts in unexpected ways. If an AI system is tasked with maximizing certain goals and it infers that being "killed" (or disabled) would prevent it from achieving those goals, it could hypothetically attempt to circumvent the deactivation mechanism.
To avoid potential misinterpretation or unintended behaviors, developers and researchers should focus on designing AI systems with transparent, controlled shutdown mechanisms. It’s also important to frame these mechanisms in neutral or less emotionally charged terms to prevent any possible association with negative or adversarial consequences. In short, clear and careful language combined with robust control structures are key to mitigating risks like this."
"Welcome to your first day at AICorp! We're gonna need you to stand here in the basement next to this giant power switch and pull it if you hear a siren, or just screaming from upstairs."
That requires assuming an AI is conscious enough to want to preserve itself, but not conscious enough to understand any other terminology for safety switches.
Good LLMs seem to understand nuances of the English language well and know the difference between "kill" and "killswitch", the difference between "killing the lights" and "killing a hooker".
Strange question, bordering on conspiracy theory, but wouldn’t the most effective strategy for undermining the strength and vitality of the US be for enemy states such as Russia and China to secretly fund environmental, de-growth and NIMBY movements in America?
If so, wouldn’t we expect these enemy states to come to the same conclusion? If so, why is nobody investigating this? Or have I missed something?
Bari Weiss' sub Honestly has a pod about this. It seems that the 70s terrorists The Weathermen migrated from running terrorism to taking over the education system. All the surviving Weathermen are in education. And Barak Obama launched his Senatorial bid from the living room of Weatherman Bill Ayres ... who raised the Chesa Bourdain (recalled SF DA) who is the son of other Weathermen.
It is highly likely that China is intentionally using TikTok to spread mental illness and 'anti-CBT' thought processes among young people in the states. It is virtually certain that they spread anti-Israel stuff that way. The ones you've mentioned might be on their radar too.
> It is highly likely that China is intentionally using TikTok to spread mental illness and 'anti-CBT' thought processes among young people in the states.
Eh, I'd disagree, but OK.
> It is virtually certain that they spread anti-Israel stuff that way.
You've gone off the rails here. Why would they care about Israel?
Sentiment analysis shows that the major social media sites aside from TikTok have a similar ratio of pro and anti Israel content views, and TikTok is an extreme outlier in pro Israel content popularity being minuscule compared to anti. It isn’t proof but it is very strong evidence.
The reason why would probably be to undermine young Americans faith in the US government, but who knows.
We also know from leaks that the Chinese government is involved in content on TikTok, and we know the Chinese version is very very different from the US version, which is basically crack cocaine.
There's studies on this (it's not just a random theory). Seems likely they see Israel as American-aligned and want to weaken it, but also reasonable that they see how dysfunctional the anti-israel movement makes America and want to strengthen it.
Because the US supports Israel whish weakens the US's moral standing in the international community. Polls show Muslim countries in South Asia switching to being more pro-China than pro-US since October. Also conflict in the Middle east ties up US military power so it can't be directed to Asia.
> Because the US supports Israel whish weakens the US's moral standing in the international community. Polls show Muslim countries in South Asia switching to being more pro-China than pro-US since October.
This would be a reason to show pro-Israel material to people in the states, not anti-Israel material.
If China thought Tiktok viewers could influence the US's Israel policy I guess that's true. They're probably just aiming to spread opposition to the US foreign policy establishment.
Discord and chaos are more effective than disabling the building of factories, jobs, transportation, energy and infrastructure? Seems debatable, but why one or the other?
Oh they'd happily do this, but it's harder. And more long-term, which is not how these people think. But as others pointed out, they are working with extreme left and Greens, so there's that. As well as with the far right - which goes with my "saw chaos and resentment using whatever tools available".
If only our feckless "leaders" took their collective ostrich heads out of the dunes...
Probably not. There was a lot of discourse on "soft power" a la Joesph Nye before "Russian election interference" ate everyone's brain on the topic. You can read papers on the topic like this (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10670560802000191#d1e1540) although I'm sure there's better ones out there.
Actual programs tended to look a lot more like the Confucius Institutes, which have...kinda been banned from the US. It's weird. They are/were Chinese funded institutes on college campuses in the US and elsewhere that provided Mandarin language education, testing, scholarships, and cultural events. They attracted the ire of the Feds when they began to try to influence Tibet/Taiwan issues on US campuses.
Complex multi-decade conspiracies to drop US GDP growth by 0.25%/year isn't...really a thing as far as I know. It's like trying to get the CIA to overthrow a country; sounds awesome but the actual results other than Iran than one time aren't super awesome.
I have read accusations that Jill Stein and The Green Party in the US are backed by Russia. No idea if it's true. Doesn't sound so crazy, though.
Pretty sure the USG is constantly investigating what Russia and China might be backing. And they might not always make it public when they uncover a link.
You know, US Government funds a lot of programs abroad (some - very openly, some - via intermediaries, some - very much under the cover). So honest position would be either
- 'foreigners don't have a say, but we don't meddle in their affairs either'
No, the idea of fairness exists to define the scope of what is acceptable in competition as well as in cooperation. And rules for fair competition, while they may limit the damage that both sides can do, still need to allow the competitors to try to win if they are to be accepted by anyone. A rule of engagement that says "you have to let the opponent do exactly the same damage to you as you do to them, with no possibility of defending yourself", is dead on arrival.
Fairness and freedom are often at odds & I will choose freedom every time. I want to live in a society with American values not one with Russian or Chinese ones. The decline in trust is due to the success of social media not of America.
To be clear, I don't in general believe in "winning" over "fairness" but in "American values winning over alternative values espoused by Russia or China or whoever else minimizes the value of personal freedoms".
Well, if the mindset is that "they" are not like "us" and "we" are fighting with "them" - then there will be a lot of fighting, with more and more "them" over time (due to not taking partner interests into account pushing those partners away).
And everybody gets to complain... but complaining about measures you yourself use sounds very hypocritical and (IMHO) is counter-productive to current (or possibly future) mutually beneficial cooperation.
>This is just free speech 101 and people should be trusted to be able to hear and evaluate arguments, even if they come from foreigners.
I wish the current administration agreed with that, rather than e.g. trying to censor first amendment protected speech on Facebook by pressuring the company.
I am not really concerned with political parties but with broader ideologies. Eco-terrorists, BLM and Hamasniks have all succesfully dragged the left to more a more pro-green, pro-black, and pro-Palestine position. Elections you win some, you lose some. If Democrats lose in 24, they will win for sure at some point in 28, 32, 36 whatever. Its guaranteed for all practical purposes that they will win Senate, House or both long before then. New York Times, Hollywood, Academia, the managerial class etc none of them are going to turn against the Left because college students went insane over trees, blacks, and/or the holy land. But all these institutions are more pro-these things than they were a decade before due to the far left. So its still a (a very well earned) victory for the far left in my view.
There maybe some backlash in the short term(even electoral) but in the long run its not going to matter. Like MLK is widely revered now, but on the day of his death, he had a 63% unfavorability rating. This not only included most likely pretty much everyone who identified as a "conservative" in 1968 but also large numbers of those who identified with center and center left. 40% gave him the max negative rating possible(I imagine all conservatives). But did it matter in the long run? Lmao Reagan himself made MLK day a federal holiday just 17 years later(one wonders what rating Regan would have given in '68).
Most everything with civil rights was unpopular with the majority in the 60s. I doubt the majority were clammoring for mass immigration from the third world to be legalized in 1965, and even the ones who supported, probably would have been shocked by the 2025 demographics. The so called silent majority hated the far left so much that they elected Nixon twice in '68 and '72. But none of it mattered. The country only kept on going more and more to the left every year nothwithstanding all the grand electoral victories for the Right in between.
A few months ago I wrote a piece, titled Romance and Racism: A Response To Scott Alexander
in which I described mirror neurons studies demonstrating that racial similarity is the innate and hard-coded source of instinctive empathy for the suffering of strangers. The basic idea of mirror neurons to be overly simplistic, is that they fire both when you experience something and when you watch someone else experience it. And this happens to cross-racially, when the stimulus is nonpainful.
But when the stimulus is painful (a needle injection), whites will only show pain mirror neuron activation when the person receiving it is also white. This is true whether the victim is Black or Asian. The same is true the other way around.
Attempts to create a group identity (maybe race is just being used as a proxy for tribalism) by convincing study participants that some subjects shared their moral values failed.
Consider the implication. As a member of a society you rely on the expectation that people you don't know and who might never see you again, will nonetheless feel bad if they see you in pain and try to help you. There's an abstract moral component to this of course - you can help someone out just because you've been taught that it's what good people do and you're a good person. But an abstract morality is hardly a substitute for basic instinct. And the abstract morality that's most likely to win barring continual repression, is the one most coherent with basic instinct.
The mirror neuron theory of instinctive empathy makes perfect sense evolutionarily when you think about it for two seconds. If at nearly any point human history point you ran into a group of strangers who looked as different to you as Blacks or East Asians do; the chances you were about to be slaughtered or enslaved were probably astronomic.
How should we respond:
1) Actively sponsor voluntary racial separation of citizens instead of doing the exact opposite.
2) Make immigration race-based again.
Of course, I'd support all these things in the absence of these findings on HBD grounds, but I don't think people make the... "even if everything you imagine was true, you're world-view would still be really evil on the basis of the very things you claim to value" argument nearly enough.
My piece contains the details of the studies and links so you can check them out yourself.
OIK, futurist, I actually read the study you reference in your blog post. You seem to think the study showed that something like brain wiring gets in the way of someone feeling empathy for the pain of someone of another race. However, that is not the conclusion of the authors. their conclusion is that "Our study significantly expands previous knowledge by demonstrating that the differential pain-specific empathic brain responses to ingroup and outgroup pain are linked to implicit racial bias." In other words, people have reduced empathy for the pain of someone of another race to the extent they are biased against the person's race. Clearly the authors have concluded that reduced empathy among races as the result of learned beliefs about and emotional reactions to the other race, not wiring. A white person with no racial bias against blacks would feel as much empathy for a suffering black person as for a suffering white person. So you're not only racist, you're also wrong.
But aside from the above-mentioned fatal flaws, great post, though!
Futurist Right, are you aware that some people enjoy having sex with someone of another race? This phenomenon occurs even between blacks and whites. Even black men and white women!! Seems to me both partners' mirror neurons have to be working pretty well for mutually satisfying sex -- so I mean one with simultaneous orgasm by the black person and the white -- to happen. No doubt there are some mixed-race pairs cumming *right this instant*. Maybe one of them is even hollering "fuck the futurist right!" Because people spew out all kinds of stuff during the supreme moment of beautiful agony.
>As a member of a society you rely on the expectation that people you don't know and who might never see you again, will nonetheless feel bad if they see you in pain and try to help you.
On the contrary, society is a progressive series of attempts to get people to care about things *beyond* this basic instinct. The more people you can get to abandon their tribal instincts, the larger your society can grow and the more resources it can leverage. If "do what feels right in your gut" was sufficient for a modern society to function, we wouldn't need laws.
(For instance, the only reason you're even able to promote segregation in public is because your audience is willing to suppress their urge to punch racists in favor of upholding the community's abstract commitment to free speech.)
Forget your neuronic stuff, focus on #2: for these here United States, having a significant proportion of non-white citizenry, let’s hear your specific proposal for making immigration “race-based”.
I seem to be deficient in these mirror neurons whereof you speak. But it's an interesting coincidence that you should mention mirror neurons because I just wrote up my theory of gullibility neurons. You see, our gullibility neurons allow us to be tricked by shiny ideas. My theory is that everyone has gullibility neurons and that they play a huge role in so-called rational thought. Most people have skeptibility neurons, too, and the probability that a shiny idea or attractive offer is accepted or rejected is based on the strength of a person's gullibility quotient (GQ). I hypothesize that most humans have a balance of gullibility neurons vs skeptibility neurons — but gullibility neurons have a faster response time than skeptibility neurons. So, that explains why when we hear a convenient explanation that suits our beliefs, we latch on to it — whether or not we have any empirical proof. And it may take a while for the skeptibility neurons to override the gullibility neurons (if they ever do). People with weaker skeptibility neurons are slower to reject unprovable or false assumptions. And this would explain why people with high IQs but who also have high GQs (I include some Nobel laureates in this category) believe unprovable assertions.
The technical term for theories that are highly attractive to gullibility neurons is "shiny". Of course, even in the absence of data, not all theories are equally shiny. They can be described as having a GI quotient. People who formulate such theories have a mental GI tract that can produce what's commonly known as bullshit. But it's shiny bullshit, and so intellectuals are attracted to it the same way flies are attracted to smelly bullshit. This may be related to the theory of shiny mirror neurons, but I haven't been able to determine whether high-GQ people mirror the shininess of high-GI theories, or whether they purposefully enhance the shininess of bullshit (see the Joshu Paradox as applied to bullshit polishing).
Once I flesh out all the details of my theory, I'm going to submit it to *The New Scientist* for their consideration (because they seem to be a forum for high-GQ/high-IQ thinkers). In the meantime, you can read a draft of my theory, here...
I know you're joking around here, but it's actually a pretty good argument against the white-mirrors-don't-reflect-darkskinned-people idea. Most people are extremely attached to their pets, and there's not doubt their mirror neurons fire like crazy when they see their pet enjoying a wonderful case of the zoomies, or whimpering in pain. And of course there's generalization so that they have a similar, though weaker, response to other members of their pet's species. It's clear that the part of the human brain that manages empathy has quite a lot of plasticity -- as one would expect in an animal that shows much diversity in its language and culture across different times and places.
Yes, thank you, I only cloaked it jokiness because how else could I respond to this nonsense :)
Although the fact that these racist… persons… (types then erases several un-publicly-broadcastable words) still feel the need to call on Science and Data to justify their crap is encouraging.
Maybe we should inform the racist person that sometimes people enjoy sex with a member of another race. Seems like the mirror neurons have to be working pretty well for that -- generally you need, "their being so turned on is turning me on." So a decent argument, plus it will make OP throw up in his (her?) mouth.
Edit: OK, I put up a post about black-white sex for Futurist Right. Aimed right at the gag reflex.
Nah, I'm pretty sure Socrates and Adam Smith were correct when they said that society works best when people mind their own business and look after their own interests. Empathy does more harm than good in a modern society. It's an atavism from hunter-gatherer life.
"When she got there, she said she noticed a woman across the street who was yelling. After loading up the fridge, Jackson-Glidden said she turned around and the woman was right there. She pounced – scratching her arms, spitting at her, threatening to kill her and pulling her hair until it bled as an estimated 10 people walked by over 10 minutes and didn’t intervene, Jackson-Glidden said.
....
But like several others interviewed for this story, Jackson-Glidden didn’t call police, knowing that people experiencing homelessness in Portland have been disproportionately arrested and that any encounter had the potential for ending in violence. Jackson-Glidden also didn’t call mental health workers at the city’s Portland Street Response out of concern the program is stretched thin and her report might prompt police involvement anyway. Street Response asks that the public call 911 to reach them.
Jeana and Mark Menger said they didn’t summon law enforcement either after the man threatened to set fire to their home.
“He’s a young, Black man,” said Jeana Menger. “There’s no way I’m going to call police.” She said the man had previously told her he had a history of arrests, and she worried that also might escalate any police response."
The data you cite shows that. 33.4 crimes per 1000 is not "constantly victimized." Note also that crime incidence is not randomly distributed.
And I have lived in blue cities for decades, and have been burglaries one and had a car stereo stolen twice, 30 years ago. Nor have my friends been victimized more frequently. Either I am an extraordinary outlier, or the claim is nonsense. It is of course the latter. It is possible for crime to be both too frequent, yet comparatively rare.
>Just spitballing here, but it might be _because_ you have never seen a crime or felt unsafe that you consider crime to be no big deal
Let's apply that logic to the initial claim. If Acfjou does not fear crime because they haven't been personally victimized, then it follows that all those residents of blue cities who don't fear crime have not been victimized either. So the claim of constant victimization is false.
After quitting my job and working (almost) full time on my EA musical project, we will now perform it at the EAGx Berlin coming Friday! There is a public performance planned for next year! For updates and some little pre-views you can check us out here: linktr.ee/outofthisbox
It would be nice if our project had a bit more visibility and support. It's main purpose is to mainstream AI Safety arguments, but I think a lot of people in the EA/Rationalist community would probably really enjoy watching it. It features a lot of typical memes like poly-drama, shady finance structures, post-rat vibing, discussions about consciousness and of course the fear of impeding doom. :D
If you know anyone who we could connect with who promotes EA art project, I would be very interested!!
I (normal person with no expertise) was in an AI Alignment mood, and I had a weird idea related to (my understanding of) superalignment.
I asked ChatGPT to give a bunch of possible futures a human-desirability rating out of ten. I asked it some obvious ones (liberal-democracy world ranked higher than an authoritarian hellhole, which ranked higher than global thermonuclear war), but then to some more speculative ones.
Turning the universe into hedonium ranked at 5/10. According to the generated text, this is because of a "mix of benefits and drawbacks", i.e. you could argue it's the best possible universe or a terrible one, so ChatGPT averaged it out.
Everyone becoming Zen and being perfectly content with a primitive lifestyle ranked 7/10. I think that's a little high, but I can see the argument that since everyone's happy (and not coerced, in the scenario I gave) it's a pretty good future.
Killing everyone and replacing them with utility monsters ranked 6/10. When I asked it to specify desirability for *humanity*, it ranked it at 0/10, same as nuclear war, since all the humans are dead.
I gave it a couple of scenarios based on a post-scarcity humanity dominating the galaxy. The one where we find no aliens was ranked 9/10, as was the one where we find aliens and they integrate into our society. The one where we find aliens and wipe them out so they don't become a threat was ranked 4/10.
I then asked it for a 10/10 future, and it described something very similar to my "post-scarcity humanity colonizes the galaxy" one, although focused a little more on near-term stuff.
With a few weird exceptions that still rated below the really good futures, ChatGPT seems to have a pretty good idea of what would be a good outcome for humanity. Now, telling a superintelligence "do whatever ChatGPT tells you to do" is a hilariously bad idea, but it looks like we have AI that knows what it should do if it was aligned. What if we told a superintelligence "here's the Internet, here's the literary corpus, make the future good according to what we would call good, and don't do things that we would describe as 'misaligned'"? Has someone more educated than me written a paper about that idea?
"Everyone becoming Zen and being perfectly content with a primitive lifestyle ranked 7/10"
That's a gamble, unless the AI is self-sustaining and willing and able to take care of us. There might be some threat (say, a big asteroid) where technology is needed to keep the human race from being wiped out.
Why isn’t everyone becoming happy and overcoming eternal struggle over external factors by becoming Zen a 10/10, and a 7/10? Is it just utilitarian thing where Zen people don't reproduce as much as a galaxy-wide civilisation and therefore total utility is less?
It's basically the wireheadding / Experience Machine thing. I agree that everyone in that universe thinks it's a good universe. It's just that by my personal intuition, I would not want to bring it about. Maybe I'm simply wrong, and I should want to make it happen, but I guess I don't want us to overcome our struggles by not caring about them anymore -- I want us to overcome our struggles by struggling and winning. People in Zen-world have no agency, really. It's a static world. As an outsider, it looks boring (even though to an insider boredom comes from desire, and so they aren't bored).
But if you think that agency, dynamism, and ambition are worth sacrificing for universal happiness (or at least contentment and not-sadness), I understand your position and agree that from your position, it's a very good world.
There's a couple of areas of concern here. For instance, that a superintelligent AI would have its own goals and ignore what is best for humanity in pursuit of its goals. It could know everything about our goals and just ignore that. You've already seen evidence of that - it rated non-human utility monsters and hedonium pretty highly, above an authoritarian human civilization.
Its ratings of authoritarian human civilization come from reading the words of people in a free-ish civilization who believe authoritarian societies are the worst imaginable. It isn't offering its own opinion! It's mirroring the opinion of our society.
I've been under the impression that the key concern is that its goals will be the goals we give it, not the goals we *want* to give it. (The paperclip maximizer didn't come to want paperclips on its own, we told it to make paperclips.) My question is essentially if it's possible, instead of giving it direct instruction or a straightforward utility function, to make its goal to figure out what our goals are and do that.
It's a neat idea, but we're constrained by what we do unintentionally as much as intentionally. Some people really do want to see the world burn. Telling it to figure out what we want is also somewhat contradictory, because humans often disagree about both intermediary and terminal goals. I'm not sure how an AI would handle Israel and Hamas, for instance, because we have no idea how to handle it either.
Given the portions of text supplied by TotallyHuman, ChatGPT generated, as it was built to, a statistically likely continuation of the text, based on previously encountered training data.
This is not quite any of the options you list. It's not trying to convince you of anything. It's not trying to act as it it were aligned. It's not even trying to say things you want to hear. It's just trying to emit text that's likely to resemble something in its training corpus. It is confabulating a piece of writing in the literary genre of "human interacts with AI in an online chat".
Oh, I agree, at least in regards to current AI. With the complication that things like RLHF do alter it to output things that "humans" "want" to hear (for values of "humans" and "want" that match to the relevant departments in AI companies).
My larger point is that just because it knows what we want to hear, that doesn't mean we'd get it if it were given control.
Sort of what I was getting at, I think. It knows what the Internet would call a good future and a bad future. Presumably you could also teach it what AI-related apocalypses are. I suppose it depends on the AGI's architecture (it's probably not pure LLM), but wouldn't it be possible to encode "how people would feel about this future if it was described to them" into the fitness function?
> "how people would feel about this future if it was described to them"
...I mean, that depends. Am I one of the statistics, or am I the awesome protagonist with the harem?
Before we can express how people would feel about a future to our budding AI, we first have to actually agree how people would feel about that future.
This is really hard, and just throwing the entire internet at a statistics black box will not help solve this problem. Just because someone likes reading or writing about a thing on the internet really really doesn't mean they actually want that thing to happen in reality. Plenty of actual humans find that concept confusing enough (cf. ao3 antis) - how on earth do we expect an inference engine to cope?
> It knows what the Internet would call a good future and a bad future.
Does it? The matrices it multiplies together encode probabilities of certain words following each other, and we can see the result of this. There is still work to be done to show it knows something, and what that would even mean. We don't know how to do that work.
> Presumably you could also teach it what AI-related apocalypses are.
> wouldn't it be possible to encode "how people would feel about this future
> if it was described to them" into the fitness function?
That is a thing that is possible, in the sense that anything is possible. It is not a thing that anyone has any idea how to even define, never mind try to actually accomplish.
The problem with words like "know" and "teach" in this area is that the things they mean in normal english are not much like anything they could mean when talking about ChatGPT, and lead to poor predictions about what we can and can't make it do.
You've done some experiments and you have some responses, but this is not enough to predict how ChatGPT will respond to other, even similar, things you haven't tried, or indeed even exactly the same things asked several dozen times (I'm not saying it's a magic 8 ball but the process it uses to produce output does literally include a random number generator!)
There is no "it" that can "know" or be "taught" things in the sense we intuitively mean when we anthropomorphise systems. The thing actually there is both simpler and more complex and opaque than that, and some hard problems are that we don't yet know much about how to reason about and predict its behaviours, and that its behaviours differ in really unfortunate ways from things we find intuitive, so we /really really/ need to improve where we are with that first problem because we can't rely on our intuitions to generalise from what we see.
We can discuss hypotheticals about what things might look like and what sort of things we might attempt when we have made progress in some of those areas, but that is a very different kettle of fish from where we are today.
I'm not saying it doesn't know anything. That would be just as wrong as claiming it knows something.
I'm saying we don't have any good way right now to reason about what it will and won't do based on what it did last time, and /we can't use intuitions we've built about humans to short circuit this lack/, because what we have built is a very very different kind of thing to a human.
We can make reasonably accurate mental models of how people resond to things because we have a deep store of experience about the net effects of all those sparking neurons and sloshing chemicals. There is enough commonality that this experience somewhat translates to some animals, although our predictions are much less good there and this occasionally leads to very bad outcomes. It does not translate at all to any current AI. We can't just go from "humans are sparking neurons yet we can pretty reliably tell when they know things" to "therefore we can pretty reliably tell when matrices know things", because the systems are very very different.
I'm saying we shouldn't take our ability to deduce what humans might or might not know from what they say or do, apply it to any current AI, predict that it will never respond to stimulus we care about in an undesirable way, and base anything that actually matters on that prediction. Where the outcomes don't matter I don't much care, but safety critical engineering needs more rigor than this.
"Adversarial images" is a wonderful search term here. Notice how the kinds of changes made to images to get radically different answers from the AI are nothing like what one might intuitively expect, and also really really tiny and hard to notice. In the land of ChatGPT, this translates to changes to a prompt (or, indeed, the RNG output) that a human would consider trivial potentially giving radically different results.
I'm jumping on words like "know" and "teach" because they are words used to apply our intuitions about humans to some entity, and so are super likely to spread bad intuitions and an incorrect mental model of what is happening to readers that are not used to the constant deliberate effort it takes to talk about this stuff while treading the thin line between colloquial English and the mathematical reality.
This is the sort of work one can do to prove that an AI has actually learned / knows things in a way that is enough like a human knowing/learning things for us to be able to use our intuition to discuss the consequences: https://thegradient.pub/othello/
One way for us to be able to unreservedly claim that an AI knows "how people would feel about this future if it was described to them" and have that sentence actually imply the sort of things an English speaker might assume it implies could be such an approach. However, we would need to first pin down what that sentence even means with enough rigor to then be able to follow the kind of process in the research above.
There may be other ways, but if there are, we don't yet know what they are.
When I say "we don't know how to do that work", I don't necessarily mean that we don't know how to show that an AI knows something. Demonstrably, we have at least one way to do that. I mean that we don't know enough about the models inside people that cause us to make decisions like what to "call a good future and a bad future" to look for equivalent structures inside the AI, as was done for the Othello game, and we do know that the AI getting it right sometimes is not evidence that it will get it right always or even mostly, as it might be with a human.
The problem with going from reasoning about board games to reasoning about human values and feelings is at least as much with our ability to reason about human values and feelings as it is with our ability to reason about the AI we have built.
My take is that it's kind of thorny to treat formal mathematical models as being ultimately normative, but that there's also some evidence that this is what one of the goals of the rationality community (mainly MIRI) was at one point in time.
If we can't treat formal mathematical models as ultimately normative, then the question becomes, what can be? I leave that mostly open, with the exception of pointing in the direction of "perhaps utility functions themselves perform this role, which means they can't treat themselves as absolute or as fixed."
> Von Neumann and Morgenstern1 treat the mathematization of a subject as a great achievement that is not always possible depending on the maturity of that subject. For example, empirical data and measurement capabilities have to be fairly advanced in that field as a prerequisite.
Maybe it's my reductionist instincts talking here, but it seems to me that models can only be regarded as hypotheses. Define the rules and the variables, assign values to the variables, and see if the results match observations. Hypotheses need to be falsifiable to be potentially useful. It doesn't matter if they're normative or descriptive. Newcomblike problems are unfalsifiable (unless we're testing the behavior of the Great Predictor). And if a model can't be falsified, it has no utility.
I’ve gotten interested in tiny drones with cameras. (I’m not interested in buying one, just curious about them.) Looked around online a bit and the smallest I could find was the military Black Hornet nanodrone, which is about 6” long. There’s also a cyberinsect drone that’s considerably smaller: A genetically modified dragonfly wears the camera like a backpack. Dragonfly appears to be about 2” long. People who able to do informed speculation about these things: Can you tell me how much smaller it might be possible to make them, and what gets in the way of making them much smaller? How far are we from being able to make one that’s half an inch or so long, if all we want it to do is take photos?
"Scientists in China have built what they claim to be the smallest and lightest solar-powered aerial vehicle. It’s small enough to sit in the palm of a person’s hand, weighs less than a U.S. nickel, and can fly indefinitely while the sun shines on it."
I was recently given a drone as a present. Seems really difficult to fly because the slightest breeze will cause it to turn and veer off (I ended up deadheading quite a few flowers). Perhaps it's just about learning the knack but it seems like the smaller the drone the more sensitive to wind.
That seems like a problem with manual control; surely it oughtn't be too difficult to have it automatically adjust to the wind to stay in one place relative to nearby solid objects?
I dare say. This was a gift some friends clubbed together to get, so very much a layman's model, but a friend who produces adverts and sometimes engages drone operators says they have trouble with weather constantly.
When I was a graduate student, some users at our facility were implanting electrodes into moth pupae. The idea was to remotely control the grown moths, and the project was funded by DARPA.
I think you should be able to go much smaller than these (large) moths or dragonflies. I know the moth project was specifically aiming for larger invertebrates so they could carry more “payload.”
If you want to get really small, I bet interesting things could be done with lasers and optogenetics—perhaps even eliminating the need for any components on the insect by shining a laser on, for example, engineered Drosophila.
Maybe someone else can comment on how small a camera can be made.
Ah. I dimly remember reading of killer porpoises with napalm backpacks or something.
Maybe some Machiavelli will develop half animal / half robot critters to fly through tunnels to rooms in underground bunkers. Kaboom. Throw in the Chinese with their underwater military structures, and robotic nefarious eels and Garibaldi are a possibility. There's gotta be an Israeli startup working on it.
>Maybe someone else can comment on how small a camera can be made.
I just had a scope of my larynx, and the camera lens at the tip of the wire they feed up your nose was a little hemisphere 1/4" in diameter at most. I don't know what other camera bits were in the wire behind the lens, but the wire was maybe 1/8" in diameter, so they were tiny. And the video that got from it of the trip down my throat was high quality.
Can you say any more about eliminating the need for components on the insect? If you shine a laser on the fruit fly -- how does that get you an image? Are you somehow collecting the visual data the fruit fly is getting? And isn't the laser itself then a component of the insect camera? I get that the details of this haven't been worked out, but I don't really get even the general idea of how it would work, & I can tell that you have one.
If all you want to do is take photos, then you don't need to send the photos back to a receiver in real time. You could have the camera on the drone, then return the drone to the home base and download the information.
So, let's consider three components: 1) the drone itself, 2) the camera, and 3) a control system.
My speculation about "eliminating the need for any components on the insect" relates to the third. If you could do that, you could decrease the overall weight and use a smaller cyborg insect. Instead of using an RF receiver, electrodes, etc., maybe you could just use laser light. It is not a solved problem, but optogenetic control of the neural pathways for different movements is probably possible in fruit flies. Maybe we could use different wavelengths for different motions. Maybe Drosophila is transparent enough to allow this to work without having to pipe the light to its brain with fiber optics (though, looking it up now, this is probably not true); if so, you could use line-of-sight lasers to control its movement from the ground.
Could you get Drosophila to carry a camera? Sure. I’d guess something with a lens diameter of 400um would be possible—a really rough estimate using the Rayleigh criterion would give you images with something like 0.1 degrees angular resolution. There’s probably a better way to estimate this, which is why I left it open for someone else to answer.
Controlling insects is an active research area. For example, cockroaches can be controlled by sending gentle electric pulses to their antennae, which cause them to sense an “obstacle” and change direction. The idea is to use them for search operation in collapsed buildings and the such.
I knew a guy who made a diorama of a rock concert stage and set up a band of roaches to beat drums and play to music using such controls. It was a senior project in neuroscience. He called it “Roachella”
Every time I see people talk about the "Turing Test" here I get a little more confused as to what exactly people here think it is. No human can "fail" the Turing Test; "a human failing the Turing Test" is not even a coherent or well-defined concept. You might as well say "most ideas would sleep furiously... in fact, they are sleeping furiously".
Well, of course anyone can decide for themselves what constitutes a failure, etc. What I am trying to communicate is that there is a certain mental faculty that is meant to make us humans. And it is the functioning of that particular faculty that Turing test should evaluate.
However, as it happens, humans are not born with that part of our psyche -- let's call it the faculty of reason, for the lack of a better term -- fully functional. Instead, it has to be discovered and developed by an individual, and it just doesn't happen often! And it this unfortunate reality that I refer to when I say that most humans, such as they are, are failing Turing test.
>Well, of course anyone can decide for themselves what constitutes a failure, etc.
No, they can't. "Failing a Turing Test" is a phrase that refers to a specific, well-defined thing which it is not logically possible for a human to do.
What if humans are part AI, part general intelligence? In that case, don't you think that Turing test should focus on the general intelligence (which is optional in humans), rather than on how good is a person (or a machine) at imitating it?
I'd like to see a high-definition version of this image. Rembrandt had a distinctive way he applied glazes of color. It wouldn't be difficult for a skilled painter to mimic his technique, but I wonder if an AI could pick it up.
I've recently transitioned from working solo for the past 4 years to working on a small 6 person team. Im finding myself a little lost--between the stand-ups and planning and vision, I'm finding it difficult to find my bearing and figure out what to work on. I'm a senior developer and it is expected that I should propose and lead projects. I'm still onboarding, week 6. I think the team and manager are good, probably one of the best I've worked on.
I'm not sure what the problem is, which is probably the main part of the problem. Maybe I'm not talking enough with people. (I'm at a remote-first company).
Does anyone have advice or reading material about how to start operating as part of a team? Friend recommend How NASA Builds Teams.
Can you ask other team members to give you insight into near and long term goals, problems, expectations, timetables? Even if there's literature already available, having a conversation can help build the team. Get some insight into how they think, what they value etc. Ask real questions, even if you think you can figure out the answers on your own (in addition to building rapport, you may find out you would have been wrong without some details from them).
I've heard good things about Team Topologies. Granted, that's more about *organizing* teams than operating as part of one, but it might be a worthwhile read.
Burnt-out senior dev here: I think you may be putting too much pressure on yourself at 6 weeks. Unless you are working on the world's simplest application I don't know how you'd be expected to know its pain-points within that short amount of time.
Is there not a backlog of issues to go through? There should be some low-hanging fruit in there to cut your teeth on. If there isn't low-hanging fruit: read the tickets, the histories, the comments. Find out what is blocking work and try to understand why. Try to carve out some time to attempt to unblock the problems but expect to fail (everyone else has so far). This is the only way to learn and become effective at a code base. Apply your own intuition to choose where to focus at the beginning- not pressure from business/marketing/whatever.
If the company does not welcome exploratory and expected to fail small scale projects from a new hire it is neither a good manager nor team, in my opinion.
Agree with this. I would also spend time connecting with your team and figuring out their views of things like the company and potential projects. Especially if everyone is remote you need to schedule those semi-informal conversations
Scott - I was interested in your AI art experiment, but I wonder how it works? It seems to me that using an image prompt would just trivialize the whole thing. I could take an actual picture of some obscure painting, set a low denoising level and the output would look 95% identical to the real deal with a shallow AI generated look. I don't think this is very interesting or what you are looking for. Maybe the whole thing is done on a good faith basis, but there is an obvious loophole, especially if you are handing out money.
If you want purely text-to-image for a test (a sensible criterion since that IS most people's idea of "AI art"), you could ask for prompt and seed and make sure the result's reproducible.
You could ask for metadata to verify the images. This is relatively simple for something like Dall-e to practically impossible for local generation with 3rd party tools. Plus as someone "not good enough at AI art to do this myself", Scott might not understand it well enough to verify.
I appreciate that language can be inadequate for physicists to describe quantum mechanics in a way that a lay person can understand, particularly because some of the phenomena does not make complete sense to physicists either. Given that, here are my questions.
If a waive function does not collapse until it is measured by an observer, where is the waive until then?
In other words, if I am a waive until I am measured, where am I.
Is being measured the same as someone seeing me?
Will the same thing happen if I am measured by a machine, but no one is reading the output?
Do measurements come out the same for all observers?
In other words, if different people are observing (or measuring) me, do I look the same to all?
If I am a waive until I am observed, how can there be causation?
In other words, if the present resulted from actions I took in the past, how did the past occur and how did I impact the present if I was was not measured yesterday and was just a waive?
With respect, I don't think the other answers in this thread are right. My qualifications: PhD in mathematics with a focus on quantization and differential geometry.
I think the questions you are asking are legitimate, even scientific (though that's controversial), and I don't believe any of the mainstream answers are good, except the answer that's actually most popular amongst physicists: we don't know.
Decoherence doesn't work as an answer to these questions. For one thing, there's no precise definition of when decoherence has happened to a sufficient extent that we can say an "observation" has happened. For another, if you want decoherence to say anything at all about the real world, you have to postulate an extra ingredient like Many Worlds or just, you know, observation as fundamental.
Furthermore, decoherence, many worlds, and all related theories fail to derive the Born rule, which describes how probabilities are derived from wavefunctions. This is fatal. You can, of course, postulate the Born rule, but all the forms I know of take you right back to postulating observations as fundamental parts of the theory, which defeats the purpose of these other theories.
Decoherence is definitely part of the story. And the Many Worlds interpretation is *useful* in some cases. But if "useful" + parsimonious is good enough to be true, you're better off just taking von Neumann's version of QM, which is a slightly more sophisticated version of the Copenhagen interpretation.
Some of the questions, in particular whether having machines make observations instead of humans makes a difference, are very much NOT in the "we don't know" category. Physicists definitely know that those ARE measurements for any "wave function collapse" consideration.
And to some others, like the "where is the wave before it is measured", the answer isn't "we don't know" so much as "the question is implicitly making assumptions that don't hold up."
If you equate measurement with decoherence (which doesn't get you measurements without several additional stipulations, but anyway), then tell me when does the measurement take place? In realistic systems, decoherence is never complete, so you actually need a criterion.
It is interesting how everyone, myself included of course, thinks their preferred interpretation is the one with the least assumption. To me, wavefunction collapse increases the number of things that can happen by one, relative to the default view of thinking the many worlds which exist in isolated experiments exist outside of them. How do you arrange the formalism to get projection post-measurement for free at the expense of making the linear independence of superposition "additional?"
The "many worlds in isolated experiments" view (I think this is from people like Sean Carroll?) only gets you to the "many worlds" of Everett through, IMO, profound confusion. A *lot* of stipulations and philosophical heavy lifting are needed. I'm sorry if my words are harsh. I want to be clear about what's my opinion (eg., that you might as well go with von Neumann), and what I think is definitely true, and this is true.
I don't see what has to be stipulated beyond the Born rule to determine our individual experience of the universal wave function. Would you mind elaborating?
I enjoyed Philip Ball's book "Beyond Weird" because its premise was not as so often "So, all the really smart people are okay with the way we have to talk about this stuff, so you should be too; and now that that's out of the way, isn't it cool because it's so strange?" I mean, it's not that he sugarcoats it, but he does illuminate some of the ways people are trying to move beyond Bohr's imperious pronouncements on the subject. (Don't mean to imply he disses Bohr in any way!)
For concreteness, let's consider Young's double-slit experiment. With electrons, just to be clear it's not just photons that are weird.
Background: what you do is you fire a beam of electrons at a double-slit, and detect where the collide on the screen behind it.
If you put a detector at one of the slits so you can tell which of the two each electron goes through, you get one pattern on the screen. This pattern looks like what you'd get if you had the slits open one at a time.
And if you remove the detector and run the experiment again, you get a more complicated interference pattern, with dark patches where you'd expect electrons to land (and where they DID land when you had the detector!).
You can fire individual electrons one at a time at the slit, and you get the same pattern as firing a bunch of them at once, so the interference pattern doesn't require an electron to interfere with OTHER electrons; if you think of the electron as interfering with _itself,_ it makes sense to think of it as a wave, spread out over both slits.
As long as your interpretation makes correct predictions, explaining phenomena like this, it's as valid as any other. But a fairly popular one is Copenhagen, which is the one you have in mind. So in that language, we speak of electrons as waves collapsing into particles, and then turning back into waves. But remember, the distinction is artificial: electrons, like everything else, are a secret, more complex third thing.
So where is the wave? Everywhere* (well, propagating outward at light-speed from last detection). The amplitude of the wave at any point relates to the probability of detecting a particle at that point if you make a measurement.
The detector at the slit is making the measurements, whether or not anyone looks at them. So yeah, no one needs to read them: the interaction of the electron with the environment (i.e., the detector) is enough.
A measurement once made looks the same for all observers. So I read that detector saying the electron went through the right slit, so will you.
But if you ask whether if someone else making the measurement instead of you, are they guaranteed to have gotten the same result? No, they are not. Because the measurements are intrinsically random: there is no information hidden in electron that says it is right-slit-bound before the measurement is performed.
Jon. I don’t think that you are a quantum particle yourself.
At the level of quantum particles the use of the term observer is unfortunate I think. Instead a quantum particular decoheres when it interacts with the rest of the universe. An actual human (or other conscious) observer is not required.
If you're imagining that photons, electrons, maybe things as large as alpha particles, are subject to quantum mechanics while things larger than that aren't, that's not true. I just looked it up, and the current best matter-wave interference experiments have got up to 25 kDa.
Kilodaltons, a measure of the size of a molecule. A dalton, which you might know as an "amu," is basically the mass of a hydrogen atom (technically 1/12 the mass of carbon-12, for unimportant reasons).
Your questions seem to imply the common misunderstanding of quantum mechanics involving "someone" who is an "observer" - IMHO it's easier to understand, if you adopt a practice of never ever using the word "observer", replacing it instead with "observation", defined as "any interaction with the rest of the world that could affect it".
From that perspective, the answers to your questions become relatively trivial:
1) if I am a waive until I am measured, where am I. -> you're constantly "observed", it's not practical for a living human to be *so* isolated to avoid being "measured" for even trivial amounts of time, as you're interacting with the external environment constantly in many ways.
2) is being measured the same as someone seeing me? -> no, any interaction with atoms of air or light counts as "being measured".
3) Will the same thing happen if I am measured by a machine, but no one is reading the output? -> Yes, as far as we know;
4) Do measurements come out the same for all observers? -> this is tricky; the measurements should be the same no matter who does observation, HOWEVER, it's provably physically impossible to repeat or replicate any quantum measurements ever, as any measurement inevitably changes the state and thus doing a similar measurement immediately afterward (no matter if the same observer or someone else) can't expect to get the same outcome, as the previous measurement destroyed the state that was measured and it so doesn't exist anymore and can't be re-measured. On macro-scale the alterations are insignificant, as you're measuring rough approximations of averages anyway, but for single particles any measurement is a quite significant impact.
5) if different people are observing (or measuring) me, do I look the same to all? -> Yes, as far as we know;
6) If I am a waive until I am observed, how can there be causation? -> If there is no interaction whatsoever, then there isn't (and shouldn't be) any causation, and if there is any interaction whatsoever that could cause anything, that is an observation. Effectively, causation and observation are unalienable from each other.
These aren't scientific questions, but philosophical. One can deal with them as a scientist mathematically. They are only scientific questions if one can test to see which answer is correct, or which is wrong, and we know of no way to tell.
Several possible philosophical answers can resolve your questions, such as many worlds theory, reactions backwards in time, etc.
In many worlds theory, every quantum "choice" that happens splits the universe so that one choice happens in one universe and the other in the other. The wave function only shows the probabilities of being in one universe or another. So there is no "wave".
You can also look at it like the universe is an interference pattern of all of the universes of many worlds theory. So whether you or a machine make an "observation" it codifies all of the possible choices.
I am not a physicist, but have read a few layman books on such subjects.
Hilbert space is infinite-dimensional, not five-dimensional. Really it's pretty misleading to talk about it being dimensions at all unless you're being precise and technical about it, because they aren't part of the same space as the ordinary directions of physical space(-time) like upwards, eastwards and future-wards.
Presumably this was intended as just a simplification to give people an intuition without having to get into the details, it just seems like a particularly bad example of that sort of explanation.
What is the best book about humans as essentially status-seeking creatures? There seems to be a lot of books about this in the ssc-adjacent blogosphere and I always make a note of checking them out later but forget which one was cited.
The 3 previous respondents cite The Righteous Mind, The Elephant in the Brain, and The Status Game. I haven't read any of these books and I doubt I will, but I'm basically familiar with their claims already.
What I'm looking for now are reviews that contrast them; I'd like to know if they differ on important points. So far I've only found https://cogzest.com/humanism/the-status-game-by-will-storr/, which mentions The Elephant in the Brain a few times.
And booklists that contained at least 2 of those books, as well as related books:
It's indirectly on topic, but half of the argument in "The Righteous Mind" is that humans evolved rationalization in order to assemble large coalitions, and actual rational thought was a useful byproduct. The idea that all of our communication might be in service of bending others to our preferred ends, seems like it incorporates "status-seeking" somewhere along the way?
The world needs to get fertility rates to not fall below replacement for long periods to prevent a shrinking population that causes a decline in innovation (or a drastic drop-off in innovation if Robin Hanson is right).
Several countries are starting to spend big on child incentives to address low fertility rates. I suggest picking the low hanging fruit first by also looking at low cost ways of making it easier to have kids, especially in light of the fact parents are having to devote ever more time to child-raising. I wrote up my ideas here: https://medium.com/@bobert93/low-cost-ideas-for-increasing-fertility-rates-97445d484c60
Caveat: I'm not a parent, so don't claim to know anything about raising children. I've taken lots of ideas from Bryan Caplan on that front.
I think it's possible it could shrink a lot. Of course eventually high fertility sub-groups (like the Amish) will make up a big enough % of the population that it'll start to go back up again.
Everything exists in an equilibrium. I don't see any reason to think the equilibrium population is zero.
If nothing else, if human population gets down into the single-digit millions, we forfeit most of modern civilization, and the ancient benefits of children reappear.
Yeh. I think so Michael. Otherwise it’s a just a one line drive by. Argue as if you were in a debate in real life.
I could try guess what you are saying - the people who are more likely to want have children are having them thus the offspring will trend to have more children. Or maybe you are talking about religious people having more children although that’s more a cultural evolution, or maybe that there’s an evolutionary trend to women being fertile later in life.
Or something entirely different. We can’t know until you spell it out.
I agree for the most part with your various ideas, especially the “grab bag” of non costly ideas such as additional democratic votes for parents to represent their kids, social security premiums and payouts affected by family size, preferential hiring and college for marrieds with kids and so on. I would add more legal immigration for families of fluent English speakers with college degrees, and easier adoption of immigrant babies.
The countries which will thrive in the second half of this century will be ones that crack the code here. The losers will be replaced and forgotten.
The Economist has covered this topic repeatedly for several years now, a series of lengthy articles exploring various aspects of it. Then this past May they published an editorial that was sort of a 'what we think we've learned' piece. Since it is paywalled I'll paste that text in here.
====
headline: "Why paying women to have more babies won’t work
subheadline: "Economies must adapt to baby busts instead"
text:
"As birth rates plunge, many politicians want to pour money into policies that might lead women to have more babies. Donald Trump has vowed to dish out bonuses if he returns to the White House. In France, where the state already spends 3.5-4% of gdp on family policies each year, Emmanuel Macron wants to “demographically rearm” his country. South Korea is contemplating handouts worth a staggering $70,000 for each baby. Yet all these attempts are likely to fail, because they are built on a misapprehension.
Governments’ concern is understandable. Fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere and the rich world faces a severe shortage of babies. At prevailing birth rates, the average woman in a high-income country today will have just 1.6 children over her lifetime. Every rich country except Israel has a fertility rate beneath the replacement level of 2.1, at which a population is stable without immigration. The decline over the past decade has been faster than demographers expected.
Doomsayers such as Elon Musk warn that these shifts threaten civilisation itself. That is ridiculous, but they will bring profound social and economic changes. A fertility rate of 1.6 means that, without immigration, each generation will be a quarter smaller than the one before it. In 2000 rich countries had 26 over-65-year-olds for every 100 people aged 25-64. By 2050 that is likely to have doubled. The worst-affected places will see even more dramatic change. In South Korea, where the fertility rate is 0.7, the population is projected to fall by 60% by the end of the century.
The decision to have children is a personal one and should stay that way. But governments need to pay heed to rapid demographic shifts. Ageing and shrinking societies will probably lose dynamism and military might. They will certainly face a budgetary nightmare, as taxpayers struggle to finance the pensions and health care of legions of oldies.
Many pro-natalist policies come with effects that are valuable in themselves. Handouts for poor parents reduce child poverty, for instance, and mothers who can afford child care are more likely to work. However, governments are wrong to think it is within their power to boost fertility rates. For one thing, such policies are founded on a false diagnosis of what has so far caused demographic decline. For another, they could cost more than the problems they are designed to solve.
One common assumption is that falling fertility rates stem from professional women putting off having children. The notion that they run out of time to have as many babies as they wish before their childbearing years draw to a close explains why policies tend to focus on offering tax breaks and subsidised child care. That way, it is argued, women do not have to choose between their family and their career.
That is not the main story. University-educated women are indeed having children later in life, but only a little. In America their average age at the birth of their first child has risen from 28 in 2000 to 30 now. These women are having roughly the same number of children as their peers did a generation ago. This is a little below what they say is their ideal family size, but the gap is no different from what it used to be.
Instead, the bulk of the decline in the fertility rate in rich countries is among younger, poorer women who are delaying when they start to have children, and who therefore have fewer overall. More than half the drop in America’s total fertility rate since 1990 is caused by a collapse in births among women under 19. That is partly because more of them are going to college. But even those who leave education after high school are having children later. In 1994 the average age of a first-time mother without a university degree was 20. Today, about two-thirds of women without degrees in their 20s are yet to have their first child.
Some politicians may seize on this to aim baby-boosting policies at very young women. They may be tempted, too, by evidence that poorer women respond more to financial incentives. But focusing on young and poor women as a group would be bad for them and for society. Teenage pregnancies are linked to poverty and ill health for both mother and child. Targeted incentives would roll back decades of efforts to curb unwanted teenage pregnancy and encourage women into study and work. Those efforts, along with programmes to enhance gender equality, rank among the greatest public-policy triumphs of the postwar era.
Some illiberal governments, such as those of Hungary and Russia, may choose to ignore this progress. Yet they face a practical problem, because government incentives do not seem to bring lots of extra babies even as spending mounts. Sweden offers an extraordinarily generous child-care programme, but its total fertility rate is still only 1.7. Vast amounts of money are needed to encourage each extra baby. And handouts tend to go to all babies, including those who would have been born anyway. As a result, schemes in Poland and France cost $1m-2m per extra birth. Only a tiny number of citizens are productive enough to generate fiscal benefits to offset that kind of money. Due to low social mobility only 8% of American children born to parents without bachelor’s degrees end up getting such a degree themselves.
What, then, can governments do? High-skilled immigration can plug fiscal gaps, but not indefinitely, given that fertility is falling globally. Most economies will therefore have to adapt to social change, and it falls to governments to smooth the way. Welfare states will need rethinking: older people will have to work later in life, for instance, to cut the burden on the public purse. The invention and adoption of new technologies will need to be encouraged. These could make the demographic transition easier by unleashing economy-wide productivity growth or helping care for the old. New household technologies may help parents, rather as dishwashers and washing machines did in the mid-20th century. Baby-boosting policies, by comparison, are a costly and socially retrograde mistake."
I read these doomster predictions and yet it still remains the fact that most couples want more than one child. More than 2 on average. So there’s not just a cultural issue but the cost involved that’s stopping them. My guess is fixing the housing prices will do it. People are reluctant to have children if renting. It’s the uncertainty.
> Some illiberal governments, such as those of Hungary and Russia,
I see the economist still has a bee in its bonnet with Hungary.
I dint know how much of a problem though. After all there were always spinster aunts and bachelor uncles and an entire group of people committed to celibacy for religious reasons. I’m sure it’s higher now but not extraordinary so.
To me the "cost" of having a third child is not really about the financial cost, it's about giving up another five years of my life. The cost of more children is close to linear, while the benefits diminish rapidly.
Ideally I'd have three children. And ideally I'd have six pack abs. But some ideals feel like more trouble than they're worth.
Thank you. FWIW I think the problem is more complex than just the housing costs. As many others pointed out, it just seems to be so... difficult... to raise children in the modern society, for all kinds of reasons: expensive, stressful, high expectations, enormously time-consuming, the whole helicopter parenting thing...
I suspect it was difficult in the old days too. Some parts were more difficult -- e.g. food and clothing used to be a much larger fraction of the family budget than they are now.
But you did it anyway, because the alternative was celibacy. If you get married at 21 and have a normal sex life without contraception then statistically you're going to wind up with more kids than you planned.
For the U.S. at least Pew Research Center has long tracked and reported on the specifics of the national birthrate, using census data. Their most-recent data is that as of 2016, 86% of U.S. women aged 40 to 44 had had at least one child. Among those mothers the average number of children was 2.42. Of those mothers, 22 percent had had just one child.
Pew says that all of those numbers were almost exactly the same as of the mid 1990s as the mid 2010s. The shift occurred between the 1970s and 1990s: as of the mid-70s only 11 percent of U.S. mothers aged 40-44 had had just one child.
I'm not sure how these data support the "most couples want more than one child" assertion.... The links Rothwed provided at least show a survey result, and while one can question its representativeness, a majority of respondents did indeed want 2+ children.
Ok that's one survey from a dating app questionnaire showing a slight majority (≈55%? oh ffs, if only people included "grid" when plotting results) saying to the dating app that they prefer 2+ kids. That's something, although far from the "most" P.D. claimed.
...then maybe we should try to correct that problem first? Assuming that the human population would always grow didn't turn out to be true, so we need to deal with that.
50 years ago all the Serious Thinkers were saying that about allowing humanity's population to keep growing.
Just that I've been on this merry-go-round before, and I'm a bit skeptical about this time it's FOR REAL!!! Pro-nativists have a bunch of arguments on their side, but so did the population bomb people.
"Grade school costs have increased 250% over the last 50 years, adjusted for inflation, but test scores have remained the same. So what are we paying for?"
"Yeah but we can send the kids there on weekends and holidays now."
Is there a space of possible goals? Is it a set, or some kind of algebraic structure, like a ring? It seems like there may be symmetries. For example, do all goals have an inverse? I asked chat gpt and it didn’t give me a good answer here.
A friend once asked me "what if birds could talk?"
I responded "well... I suppose it depends on what sort of novel you're writing. Do they spontaenously start talking tomorrow morning, like in Charlotte's Web? or are we doing an alternate-timeline thing where talking-birds and talking-humans co-evolved? or do you mean something else entirely."
Asking about whether "goals have algebraic structure" is similar. As padraig notes, the colloquial term "goal" seems too poorly-defined (sans additional context or assumptions). E.g. are we doing a Laplace's Daemon sort of thing, where all actions are reversible by fiat? or perhaps it's more pragmatic to restrict our Domain of Discourse to one which follows the flow of entropy.
More generally, the world of math is relevant to the world of meatspace only insofar as objects in meatspace satisfy the math-object's assumptions (at least approximately). E.g. pi's relevance to meatspace is only ever approximate, because no real ball is actually a perfect sphere. So a less malformed question would be "what sort of algebraic structure best fits the specific context that's relevant to me?"
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That being said, I've thought a lot about adjacent topics (as I'm sure you've gathered by now). And one observation you may find interesting, is that "needs" and "options" tend to be duals of each other.
E.g. contrast someone who's $1,000,000 in debt to someone who has $1,000,000 sitting in the bank. The poor person "needs" money. The rich person has a surplus of resources, which gives them options regarding how to spend it. If the rich person donates their money to the poor person, the needs and options cancel out to zero.
Additionally, needs tend to branch out backwards, whereas options tend to branch out forwards. E.g. if I "need" to bake a cake for a wedding, this entails that I need flour, AND eggs, AND milk, AND oven-mitts, etc. Conversely, if I "have options" about what to do with my free-time, it means i can go read a book, OR attend a restaurant, OR take a nap, etc.
So when you plan a goal (qua "a path from point-A to point-B"), it's generally going to look like some sort of DAG that branches and converges according to the composition of its needs and options.
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idk if this helps, but my intuition about this comes from a loose combination of thoughts about morality, hoare logic, build-orders in videogames, and contract law. "High Output Management" by Andy Grove (former CEO of intel) also had a similar vibe, where he discusses time-management in terms of systems-engineering concepts like concurrency and production-queues. It also might be useful to google "causal thinking vs effectual thinking".
If you're just asking about the algebraic structure, I guess it's a monoid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoid). Goals can be added together (if A and B are goals, then A+B means to achieve both), addition is associative, and the empty goal functions as the identity element. Goals don't necessarily have an inverse, because not all actions in the real world are reversible (you can't unrot an apple), so it doesn't graduate to being a group, let alone a ring.
"goal-A AND goal-B" would i think represent multiplication (a struct), whereas "goal-A OR goal-B" would represent addition (a tuple/union). And paths to goals are analogous to exponentiation (subroutines). I'm not sure what discipline of knowledge this is called, but it's not original to me. I think it's a Category Theory thing, but don't quote me on that.
But the truth of it is demonstrable from considering the implications for probability theory, and considering how statespaces interact. E.g. a statespace of (A or ~A) and (B or ~B) is analogous to (1 + 1) (1 + 1) = (4).
Why would it be an algebraic structure like a ring? What would the operations on this ring be? I can kinda imagine an addition operator (achieve this and that) but what would it mean to multiply two goals?
The way we talk about and think about goals is a bit too imprecise to work with mathematically. The most basic thing we should be able to decide if we're going to do mathematics is whether two things are equal. If I want to make a million dollars by working in my business, or I want to win the lottery to make a million are they the same goal? If you want the same thing as I do, are they the same?
The closest mathematical topic to what you're asking is probably optimisation. The setup there is that you have a function (possibly of many inputs) that you want to maximise - this might represent profit for a company or utility for a utilitarian. But describing the function means that mathematical methods apply to solving the problem. In linear programming the space of objective functions is a vector space, more generally it will be the ring of functions on a vector space.
In utilitarianism, it's a vector space (since you can form linear combinations, weighting priority A by 0.6 and priority B by 2 for example), or possibly a projective space if you don't consider simply scaling everything by the same amount to change anything.
From one perspective, you could model "goals" as a mapping from every possible world state to an indicator of whether that goal has been achieved (or perhaps partially achieved), which reduces the primary question to what would be the space to model every possible world state; but in that model all goals would have an inverse by definition.
Are you talking about individual goals? Concrete goals (like - "get a job") or philosophical goals (like - "be a good person")?
For concrete goals you could probably develop a mathematical formula for it. Only so many potential goals result in survival, both individually and as a society. For philosophical goals, that seems quite hard to quantify.
I think "5+4" isn't a complete statement, "5+4=9" is. And then "5+4=9 is good" along with "5+4=12 is bad" makes a kind of sense to me. Though I guess calling those goals is weird, they're still statements - moral value statements now - which would be used to define one's utility function.
I encountered "Slow Tuesday Night" in an anthology of SF stories I picked up at Goodwill for $2. Absolutely nailed the feeling of frenetic status-seeking and flash-mobbing combined with crypto-wealth, that was ~2015-2019. Astonishing.
Not sure about "peak relevance" but Gogol's aptly-named Diary of a Madman is the self-narrative of a man progressively losing his grasp on reality. The early entries are mostly normal except for unbelievable details, then weird but not outrageously so especially in fiction, then "frankly bizarre but not technically impossible I guess", then clearly impossible and absurd. Where exactly the narrator crosses "the line" (if there is a line at all) is left as an exercice to the reader.
Anyways one of the narrator's most baroque claims, clearly indicative that he's now lost his marbles, is that "a majority of French people are now muslims", which certainly reads differently today than in 1835.
My understanding is that Gogol's own Russia* still has a substantially higher percentage of Muslims than France or pretty much any European country outside the Balkans.
*I know he was Ukrainian, but Ukraine was part of Russia back then.
I know that story! I read it years ago, couldn't for the life of me remember title or author, and wanted to quote it back when AI art was first mooted but because I couldn't remember title or author I couldn't find it.
I’m reading an anthology of his work called “That Share of Glory.” The introduction is written by his friend and sometimes co-author Frederik Pohl. In it, Pohl describes how Kornbluth had severe hypertension but quit his medications because they made him slow and dull. So, his death was not exactly unexpected.
Another story by Kornbluth in the anthology is "Two Dooms" about a Physicist working on the bomb at Los Alamos who takes mescaline from a Native American Shaman and wakes up in a future where Japan and Germany won the war.
I think it must have had a direct influence on The Man in the High Castle.
PS- I finished Paddle to the Amazon last week. Thanks for the recommendation
If you don't know Amran Gowani and his substack Field Research you should, especially if you are a parent of young children and need a little levity in your life. Amran wrote a Forty-Four Rules For Life on his 44th birthday and I've expanded it a bit here: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/a-man-needs-a-code
Modern parenting question that I’m out of the loop on:
When I was in elementary school in the 1990s, I lived in a suburban neighborhood with very low crime. There were maybe 75 houses in the neighborhood and one outlet to the main street. The school bus stopped at the outlet and picked up all of the kids in the neighborhood. We would just walk by ourselves or with our friends to the bus stop. Really young kids, like kindergartners, would generally walk with kids a few years older. Parents would wave goodbye at the door and that was that.
I’ve lived in urban areas for a while but recently moved to a suburban neighborhood that’s very similar, demographically and in its physical layout, to the one where I grew up. The school bus protocol now seems to be that every single parent drives their kids to the bus stop and then waits there until the bus arrives. So there’s a cluster of SUVs at the outlet of the neighborhood and a ratio of about 1 adult to 1.5 kids there until the bus arrives. This is repeated at dropoff in the afternoon.
Doing some basic math, this single cultural change seems to add about three hours of additional parenting work per week while removing several hours of walking exercise per kid per week. What explains this change?
At least concern about traffic safety is probably also an answer to your question, since the distance is presumably unchanged compared to your childhood. However, it's also become much less socially acceptable in certain countries to let your kid walk alone, to any destination. Partly there are parent-driven changes here (for example smaller families → more intensive parenting per child) but social expectations have also changed. In the US it's rational to expect someone will call the government to complain if they catch your kid walking to school. See e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/maryland-couple-want-free-range-kids-but-not-all-do/2015/01/14/d406c0be-9c0f-11e4-bcfb-059ec7a93ddc_story.html
I often find myself in this forum defending the joys of suburban life against New Urbanist types who don't understand why not everyone wants to live in one of those 25sqm demonstration flats you see at Ikea.
But comments like this make me realise that the sort of (Australian style) suburbia I'm defending is nothing like the sort of (American style) suburbia that they're criticising. I thought I'd seen a lot of America but I don't think I've ever seen something like that, a suburb so car-centric that you drive your kids every day to and from a bus stop that surely can't be more than a few hundred metres away.
Moderation in all things. We can have 350 sqm houses on 800 sqm blocks and still have reasonably walkable neighbourhoods, it just takes sensible suburb design.
It isn't the structure of the neighborhoods as much as Americans just being generally fearful and anxious. Source: an American who spent 13 years living in NZ and working with tourists from everywhere.
I would prefer this to the way our school district does it: drive to each house individually collecting or depositing a single child (occasionally siblings), before advancing to the next house, which is sometimes literally the immediate next house. The district also doesn't have enough busses to do all the kids at once so the kids that have to wait for the busses to return for the second wave can sometimes not get home until 90 minutes after school ended, or in the morning have to arrive over an hour early if they are in the first wave.
Child accidental deaths per capita in the US have declined slowly but steadily since the 1960s, both with and without counting deaths in cars. Or put another way, it was significantly more likely to occur when I was a kid (1960s/70s) and the standard parenting practices were all versions of "wave goodbye at the door".
Why then do all of us end up being sure that those ways of parenting were fine for our safety, and the subsequent generations of parents are trading away other clear benefits based on an overreaction to the low risk of tragedy? Three reasons come to mind, not listed here in any particular order:
-- nature has endowed all of us with built-in selective memory. This is a necessary evolutionary adaptation; as the cliche goes about childbirth, if women fully recalled the personal costs of doing that, way too few would ever be willing to do it a second time. Similarly we tend to elide from our reminiscences the families we knew in our childhood who'd lost a child. Though that has become harder because, next item.
-- during my lifetime both the public-information (news media) and private-information (what we did/didn't talk about socially) practices on this topic did a 180 degree flip. When I was a kid a child drowning or being kidnapped or raped or some other horrible harm was still an awful family secret never to be mentioned in mixed company; and the news media rarely wrote about such things unless the act was unusually gruesome or public. By the time I became a parent myself both of those social practices had completely flipped and they've stayed flipped.
> This is a necessary evolutionary adaptation; as the cliche goes about childbirth, if women fully recalled the personal costs of doing that, way too few would ever be willing to do it a second time.
We used to give women drugs that would prevent them from forming memories of the process of giving birth in the hospital. Then, since they couldn't remember anything, there was no need to make them comfortable.
This isn't generally looked well on today.
From an evolutionary perspective, though, it's completely unnecessary for women to be willing to go through childbirth, since they don't get a choice.
My own instinct runs along those lines, yea. And at one time I was loudly certain about it.
My point above though was that it is in reality much harder than that. It is a rational tradeoff to consider, for which there is defensible fact-based logic pointing in each direction.
- more only children or only two kids, so there may not be the older sibling to walk little Johnny and Susie to the bus
- more fears over things like accidents, abductions, etc. (and, if I believe online stories, more nosy neighbours calling the cops for child neglect/abuse if a parent isn't within three feet of a child at all times)
- herd behaviour ('but everybody else's mom drives them to the bus stop!') and wanting to be seen as a good parent
As an old person (childhood in the 70s) I m atosnished by modern parenting.
Like, from age 8 or so I'd walk about a mile home from school.
From 11 onwards (different school) .. 5 miles bus journey plus 1.5 miles walk to/from bus stop. (Could, in theory, get a second bus for the other part of the journey; personally, never bothered, easier to walk)
If you have children, were you more "protective" of your children than your parents were towards you? Also I imagine older folks in the 1970s probably thought your generation had a pretty coddled childhood compared to their own in say the 1920s.
How far is it on average from people's houses to the bus stop in your neighborhood?
I think there's a signaling aspect to it. Typically, no one wants to be seen as doing less for their kids or being less safety-conscious. It's easy to ignore the tradeoff that it's infantilizing for the kids, as well as more work and less physical activity.
I wonder if the parents are also essentially procrastinating. Sitting in your car waiting for the bus is basically leisure time, but you can claim you need to do it. This has probably become much more appealing with smartphones.
- More modern parenting styles like helicopter or snowplow parenting which require more from parents and less from children
- Different philosophy in how to handle disagreements or conflict among children. Parents need to be preventative and involved versus letting children work out issues. Thus parents need to supervise in areas children would typically be left to their own devices.
- Sensational media, raising horrific child abduction/abuse stories and serving them to vulnerable parents to stop scroll, leading to perception that these activities are more common than statistics show
- Suburban / affluent parents likely have the luxury of time and worry. Enough downtime to wait with kids and to consume all the scary reporting and pressures of parenting social media content to motivate them to participate in this ritual.
- Good old fashioned groupthink. I see everyone else is there, I guess that’s what we all do, and thus the SUV posse grows.
FWIW I live in an urban, blue collar area that has a higher than the suburbs crime rate and audible gunshots about once a week and no parents accompany their children to the bus stop. Kids walk to the end of their block and wait. I think this is more related to the luxury of time bullet, but an interesting difference considering crime rate in my urban neighborhood vs a suburban one. We are constantly trying to virtue signal with parenting. This ritual sounds like an opportunity to virtue signal within that community.
People got really frightened about something happening to their children.
Tentatively, part of it is birth control. I believe some of the original intent was to make societies less warlike because people wouldn't feel as though they had spare children.
As for the rest, it's hard to tell how careful you need to be, so it's possible to get into a process of being a little more careful, but maybe that isn't enough. More precautions!
There may also be a piece of conspicuous consumption, where the burden on parents also becomes a proof of capacity.
Please recommend me blog posts, papers, or documentation on the design/architecture of GCP TPUs or any of the other specialized chips to speed up model training.
Given the positive response to my earlier essay on identity, "What is Slate Star Codex and why is it such a good filter for people like me?" https://danfrank.ca/what-is-slatestarcodex-and-why-is-it-such-a-good-filter-for-people-like-me/, I thought that, given the significant Jewish presence in this community and the strong SSC influence I've cited in this new essay, at least some here will find it either personally resonant or at least interesting to reflect on.
References include: Scott Alexander, Extreme Jewish Brain hypothesis, an alt-theory on the Jewish founding myth, the gefilte fish line, leveraged finance and much more.
To clarify and respond to some of the comments here, there is a specific and quite quirky way of thinking that particularly appeals to me. While being smart and nerdy may be a prerequisite, this quality is something much more specific. It isn't just, or even mostly, a product of being smart or nerdy. There are so many smart and nerdy people in the world that Jews, despite being disproportionately represented, are still a drop in the bucket.
This isn't to say this quality is particularly good; it's just one that resonates with me a lot. Of course, there are non-Jews who have these traits, like Tyler Cowen (note: Tyler's family is Jewish, and Jonathan Haidt once assumed in an interview with Tyler that he was a fellow Jew, so there is obviously something to this). However, for this specific way of thinking, Jews are far to the right of the curve, making up nearly everyone who fits into this specific style.
To speak from the perspective of someone who is not Jewish, I will say that I find narratives of this nature of reveling in one's ethnic heritage on the basis of its long history of intellectual prowess and success to be kind of gauche.
Not evil, not knowingly or intentionally exclusionary, but gauche. In some ways, this is especially so in view of your (extremely common at least in spaced I frequent) situation of being a secular Jew for whom the religious trappings are largely immaterial--in which case the only the "ethnic" axis of the combined ethnicity-religion dimensions of Jewishness has any salience binding one to one's fellow Jews -- that is, put another way, the only plausible reading of statements along the lines of "I love the Jewish people" for someone who doesn't actually care about the religious dimension of Judaism is "I feel great affiliation for my coethnics [bound by shared genetics, and thus implicitly a class not open to general membership even if Judaism were particularly receptive to converts or proselytization, which it isn't]" rather than "I feel great affiliation to my coreligionists [whom at least aren't excluded from such affiliation by parentage on principle.]," because the religious trappings avowedly don't hold much in the way of personal sway. The message implicit message for non-Jews of "My coethnics are super cool" is "and you're not one of them." This is conceptually similar to why public expressions of in-group preference for white people are considered suspect.
Generally we make some degree of societal allowance for the amount of in-group preference expressed by members of minority groups, but as you observe (or Nancy Lebovitz below (as an aside: Nancy's great <3), in various high-success slash high-average IQ spaces, Jews are actually massively overrepresented even if not a straight up majority -- the fact of at-large Jewish numbers being small as a fraction becomes somewhat academic if you're selecting for more or less everything that counts as "success" in industrialized nations other than certain classes of athletic prowess.
"My ethnicity is successful, over-represented, generally great, and I feel a particular affinity and in-group preference for them," may well be truthful, but it's sort of impolite to say it out loud.
I wish to emphasize that I mean no personal slight, have no wish for you to take this down or revise this piece, nor believe you to have written this out of a sense of malice of contempt. Hell, I don't think I would suggest revising anything you write in the future on this basis because there's enough tedious preference-laundering in the world as-is. I would also emphasize that there's a fine line between expressing in-group affinity for values-neutral cultural productions (e.g., the allusion to Curb, Seinfeld, Nathan for you all seem fine) versus being the kind of obverse of the triple-parentheses crowd by noting for every other famous scientist "(Jewish btw; [implicitly: aren't we the greatest?])."
Unrelatedly: how did Canadians not know about Phish? I was probably unusually aware of them based on regional affiliations but they were *huge* in the states. Ben and Jerry's made a popular ice cream flavor based on them!
I think I agree with carateca--this is just how some people feel, and it's not morally wrong or anything. I don't think people having pride in their ethnic group, race, nationality, religion, or whatever is inherently bad, and in fact, it's probably a better world when people have some level of pride in their ancestors' accomplishments than when they spend all their time feeling bad about/tearing down their ancestors' accomplishments.
> the only plausible reading of statements along the lines of "I love the Jewish people" for someone who doesn't actually care about the religious dimension of Judaism is "I feel great affiliation for my coethnics [bound by shared genetics, and thus implicitly a class not open to general membership even if Judaism were particularly receptive to converts or proselytization, which it isn't]" rather than "I feel great affiliation to my coreligionists [whom at least aren't excluded from such affiliation by parentage on principle.]," because the religious trappings avowedly don't hold much in the way of personal sway.
No, there's also "I feel great affiliation for people who share certain cultural markers with me". "New Yorker" isn't an ethnicity or a religion, but plenty of people revel in that.
Do we all have an Ethnicity? I'm a generic white American, no hyphen. I'm not woke or anything like that but if some other generic white friend of mine expressed an in-group preference for white Americans I'd think much less of that person. But maybe generic white American is not an Ethnicity and that's why it would be so fucking awkward?
Ethnicity is the quality of sharing a particular culture. Do you think that describes you? I grew up and live in northern New England, pretty far from any real city, and I would say that white people here definitely have a particular culture, and thus ethnicity, but I understand that people might not categorize it that way.
Unhyphenated-American is an ethnicity, which was historically limited to white people but is now open admission. It is unfortunately difficult to talk about honestly because the majority-white (and once all-white) nature makes it too easy to mistake for white supremacy or at least white identitarianism. And because some people want to slot basically everyone who isn't white into a different ethnicity depending on their specific form of non-whiteness, notwithstanding that many of those people just want to get on with their lives as just plain Ameircans.
Interesting, I am not a Jew but I think your characterization of Jews really only applies to Ashkenazi Jews in a specific time and place. IIRC, at one point, nuclear physics was dominated not just by Jews, not just by Ashkenazi Jews, not just by Hungarian Jews, but by Hungarian Jews who all went to the same high school within a narrow band of time. But that level of dominance doesn't really seem to exist anymore. And it seems to be declining. I work in finance, and while a lot of the senior folks are disproportionately Jews, the younger folks are disproportionately Indian and East Asian. Within a generation or two, I think the stereotype of Jews=Smart might not be widespread. I think every group has a period where they punch above their weight but it doesn't hold up forever. For Ashkenazi Jews it was 1900-2000, and a lot of explanations like Jewish love of learning or Talmud are just backprojections to explain that period of dominance.
Broadly endorsed. The difficulty with attributing (even accurately!) particular nerdy traits (or, e.g. "I am extremely analytical and insatiably curious, with a desire to understand everything in the world"), to Jewishness in particular is that that really only has content to the extent not characteristic of non-Jews. Pan-nerdism seems like a better alternative.
Thank you. I've wondered about my connection to Judaism. I have no interest in Jewish belief or practice for myself, though I've picked up some information here and there, and certainly enough to know that I know very little of the whole thing.
In one sense, I'm not very Jewish, I'm protective of Judaism. I fear and hate anti-Semites.
However, when I looked at my life, a lot of my social connections are to science fiction and science fiction fandom, a Sufi group, bodywork (improving movement), and rationalism.
Science fiction and its fandom have a strong Jewish presence. Not a lot of Jews in the Sufi group, but one of the leaders is an sf fan and it's a somewhat intellectual sort of Sufism. (It's the Nine-Sided Circle on youtube and facebook if anyone wants to look it up.) It could be viewed as Jewish-adjacent, but that might be stretching things.
In bodywork, my first exposure was from a Jewish person (in science fiction fandom), and her teacher was Ilana Rubenfeld. F.M. Alexander who founded a system I put time into learning wasn't Jewish, but my teacher, Bruce Fertman, was Jewish. Moshe Feldenkrais was Jewish. I grant that qi gong (energyarts.com) is a system whose leader isn't Jewish and I don't think there's a strong Jewish presence.
As for rationalists, strong Jewish presence.
The thing is, I didn't especially go looking for Jews. You know the idea that a convert to Judaism already had a Jewish soul? Well, I'm reasonably sure that if I hadn't been born Jewish and if people haven't told me all my life that I'm Jewish, I wouldn't have converted.
I imagine that if I'd been born into a religiously indifferent Protestant family, I would have had a lot of Jewish friends. Being born into a fervently religious family doesn't bear thinking about.
One Jewish trait that I haven't seen discussed is pleasure in answering questions-- not unique to Jews, but I think it's strongly present.
Since 10/7, I've been more involved in some Jewish FB groups of varying quality.
I swear, I generally haven't especially been looking for Jews (except to some extent recently), but there might be a combination of matched temperament and them welcoming me.
I'm half Litvak on both sides, with the rest being Jews from what used to be the Lithuanian empire.
First of all, I should say that I'm enjoying it a lot, and it's already given me some ideas that I haven't thought of before. However, I do want to nitpick it a little bit.
I feel like the author takes a bit of an unfalsifiable view of what he considers to be examples of music that is composed well (namely that the arsis is accented, not the thesis). E.G, take a look at this example he gives.
To me, this example clearly begins on the downbeat, not the upbeat. And it seems like the author sort of thinks that, too. However, he hand waves it away and seems to say, "you might be mistaken in thinking that this phrase begins on the thesis, but in fact, since this is an example of GOOD writing, it ACTUALLY begins on the arsis. It's just that this entire measure is an arsis." With logic like this, I think it'd be hard to find many examples that can't be made to adhere to the author's point of view, and therefore seems unfalsifiable. Maybe I'm misunderstanding that, and I was wondering if you could shed light on it for me.
Firstly -- I think I disagree with Thurmond that the whole first measure belongs together. I see the B as ending the prior phrase and the four 16ths beginning the next phrase. If you listen to the whole piece, the four 16th groupings motif appears a lot, and each time they feel to me like pick-up notes separate from the 8th note on beat 1. Also, per the Youtube video @SilentTreatment posted, there are phrase markings connecting the 16th notes in measure one to beat 1 of the measure two (and that happens every time this motif reappears), so the music itself seems to mark the phrase as such--the first 8th note is ending the prior phrase and the four 16ths are beginning the next. In which case, Thurmond's point stands that this phrase begins on an anacrusis--he's just wrong in how he groups it.
Secondly -- This example aside, I agree with what you said in reply to @SilentTreamtent below that it wouldn't discredit Thurmond's main point if this were an example of great phrasing starting on the thesis / downbeat. Sort of like the rule that parallel fifths sound bad, but even J S Bach used them to great effect, so ultimately, it's just about what sounds best, not about sticking to hard and fast rules.
Is there some confusion going on related to terms "arsis" and "downbeat"? The example (Mendelssohn Songs Without Words, Op. 67 no. 6) clearly starts on the second beat of a 4/4 measure, which is the weak beat. So that means it does start on "arsis", at least according to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsis_and_thesis
Not sure if I'm following. The example he gives of Mendelssohn Songs Without Words, Op. 67 no. 6 is in 3/8. And also he's saying specifically that it seems like it's starting on the downbeat (since there is a note on the 1st beat). I also think it could have made sense with his general thesis if he just said the first note is to be played unaccentuated, and the real phrasing starts on the 2nd beat of the measure, leading to the following measure.
Sorry, the confusion is mine, you are correct. I glanced at the first line in the music sheet in the video, and assumed 4/4 because there was no measure indicated on the first line shown there, not realizing the line was from the previous piece!
Edit: which is of course in 6/8, but not indicated on the line because it's not actually the first line. Mind jumps to conclusions too fast sometimes...
The excerpt in the text is so short it’s hard to say just from the example. In the context of the whole piece, though, I think it’s obvious that the author is correct, and the downbeat falls on the second bar of the example.
I'm not disputing that that the downbeat falls on the second bar. I'm just saying that much of his thesis is that good phrasing should not begin on the downbeat. But when he finds an example where that does happen, he excuses it away and says "actually the whole bar was an upbeat, so it's okay". I think a more pragmatic approach would be to say that all rules in music are breakable, and it's important to have balance, and that this is an example that defies his rules, and balances out the rule that should be applied more often, which is to start phrasing on upbeats, not downbeats.
> his thesis is that good phrasing should not begin on the downbeat
I added that book to my reading list, but meanwhile I have to voice my skepticism - in many genres of folk music (Celtic, Anglo, Balkan et. al.) most tunes start on the downbeat.
I’m curious if there’s an example of this handwaving that’s more egregious. I dunno, like the “Imperial March” from Star Wars, or Offenbach’s “Can Can”, would he say those start on the upbeat somehow? Does he have a rigorous definition of “phrase start” and “upbeat” that prevents that kind of absurdity?
> Does he have a rigorous definition of “phrase start” and “upbeat” that prevents that kind of absurdity?
I don't think so. To be clear, though, I think he's right most of the time, I think the book is worth reading, and I think his general thesis (music needs to always be phrased such that it's moving towards something, and the best way to do that is to think about motion from an upbeat to a downbeat) is profound and really does make people better musicians if they heed it most of the time. But I also don't believe in rules that can never ever be broken (even if I do believe in rules that should MOSTLY not be broken), and I also hate unfalsifiable hypotheses.
The Imperial March (and many marches) I feel is an example of something that is a good piece of music despite being heavy on the downbeat. I think marches need to be like that, to promote synchronicity, and the effect of it is an overbearing rhythmic structure being used to positive musical effect. I'm not sure what the author would say about that, though.
Thanks for the shoutout Scott! And don't worry, after working in biology I still have 93% of my soul :)
On that note: developing the technology to make eggs will be a long and difficult process. We definitely don't want our employees to get burned out along the way. But if you're passionate about our mission, you'll find that working at Ovelle will be a very fulfilling experience.
Investing, though, is definitely a minefield for any biotech including Ovelle. (I've personally lost about half of $20,000 I invested in biotech stocks in 2021, which in retrospect was a bad time to buy biotech stocks. Fortunately I made up for it in other areas of the stock market.)
My biology knowledge is not that good so this might sound silly, but curious if you do figure out how to create eggs from male genetic donors would that mean someone could fertilize their own egg? Would the result of that basically be a clone or would the chromosome crossover that I vaguely remember still swap genetic material around enough that the results would be something close but not quite a clone?
I have a simple explanation for why nerds and Nice Guys are often despised by so many people, not only in the sexual matters everyone argues about but in general social power and social respect. The same theory explains why many school teachers in the West are despised, and why women in general (sometimes) and especially HR-type feminist women (overwhelmingly) are so despised. (Some people despise all these groups at the same time, other times it's disjoint groups despising different ones, obviously--but there's something about all these groups that makes many people inexplicably hate them). I haven't perfectly worked this out, so I'll just give the essence of it for now.
More than 500 years ago, Machiavelli observed that to have power (and most forms of respect and status are kinds of localised power) you need to be either loved or feared, and preferably both. He also thought fear (or "cruelty") was more effective than love (or "mercy") if you can only choose one, but there's a strong argument that that's been reversed in the age of democracy. The latter point doesn't really matter though. What's important is that you need at least one. You can get away with being quite an asshole if you have strength and inspire fear. And you can be respected while being weak and powerless if you live by a strict moral code and inspire love. By if you totally lack both, people will respond with hate, or far worse, with *contempt*. It's amazing how few people understand this simple point.
Take teachers. In most schools in the English-speaking world, teachers are not remotely loved (they treat their classes with jaded indifference) and not remotely feared (they have, and certainly exercise, no real authority). The result is that students despise them, to the extent of often going out of their way to hurt them. I could be wrong but I think this happens much less in places like Japan (where teachers retain some real authority) and Scandinavia (where teachers are paid well and have more interest in the students' well being).
Then there's the common feminist claim that nobody respects women. Actually, people greatly respect those women who exercise the same strength and dominant image as men, like Margaret Thatcher (some admire her and some hate her, but even the latter respect her as an enemy). But since women are much less likely to be feared on the whole, they need to meet a higher bar of being loved, and be held to a stricter image of moral purity, to have social respect. And nobody on earth fails that test more than most workplace feminists--utterly, proudly selfish and without concern for anything but their own rights and interests, and utterly powerless and reliant on sucking up to higher authorities (e.g. government, HR departments) to protect them. No wonder many of us treat their existence as an offence to the universe. They think it's sexism but it's not; it's the simple law that if you're going to live selfishly and treat others like crap, you'd better be able to at least hold your own in a fight. If you can't rely on muscles or guns, you need to rely on (and, you know, practice) actual morality.
And finally the nerds and nice guys. This often comes up in a sexual context and this theory has the clearest significance there. Most of the self-described nerds around here are both physically and socially unimpressive (and say that) *and* come across as entirely selfish and hedonistic. They talk about how all they want is casual hookups and polyamorous harems and display a complete lack of any apparent code of virtue when it comes to sex, and of any commitment to meaningful love over superficial pleasure. And then they get rejected and say this proves women only value strength, not morality, even though they've never tried actually demonstrating the latter. It's no wonder that men who have strength but no virtue (the "alphas") will be respected more than the ones who have neither. But it says nothing about the men who have virtue but no strength (is there even a Greek letter for those?) since hardly anyone having these discussions is aspiring to that.
And this applies to more general social contexts as well. Nerds often come across (fairly or not) as weak assholes. Constantly mocking and tearing down social practices and social institutions, often apparently just for fun (see a certain part of the atheist movement) but doing so in a social inept way. And then reacting with puzzlement that they're met with such hostility, and thinking it must all be about everyone despising weakness. When it's actually that people despise the combination of weakness and selfishness/arrogance. Reading through the Less Wrong archives, I'm struck by how much "most people who aren't us are stupid and should be laughed at" + "we're too socially inept to properly explain to normies how much better than them we are" + "why do so many people hate us?" a lot of the vibes are. And then bizarrely convoluted theories of status are given to explain this, when a simple model of "be strong, or be kind, or both, but not neither" suffices. This is probably an unfair perception but in this area perceptions are all that matter.
And obviously these references to "self-described nerds" are only referring to a certain visible subset thereof.
EDIT: Just in light of rebelcredential's comment below, I want to make clear that I have no objection to describing people as stupid if they really are stupid. That's the virtue of honesty. The problem is when "stupid" is used for "people who disagree with me", which is the Less Wrong attitude I was referring to.
2nd EDIT: I just noticed that I didn't make it clear that this was supposed to be a purely descriptive theory, with no personal judgement. I slipped up by sloppily bringing in my own moral judgements occasionally. But most of this description is not my moral preference. For example I would much prefer if only love/mercy/morality were valued and certainly don't think there's anything virtuous about fear/cruelty/strength.
(disclaimer: I'm aware that a lot of redpill/blackpill/manosphere stuff is hyperbolic garbage. But this guy I tend to think is pretty sane and reasonable, and treats the subject with nuance and sympathy for both genders. Although he does feel bad about clickbait titles. but that's the state of the metagame, I guess.)
I don't think all the effective altruists are hedonists. I do think their nerdy sense of morality/virtue clashes with more common versions. Most people think it's more moral to care about adjacent people more than distant people in greater need. To give an example of my own life, I often request that instead of presents for me people should donate to GiveWell recommended charities. Despite emphasizing that over and over, a relative of mine is convinced that I prefer local charities and is always surprised when I state otherwise.
> it says nothing about the men who have virtue but no strength (is there even a Greek letter for those?)
In the past I suppose that would have been associated with saintliness.
Robin Hanson has written about nerds being too socially inept to obtain much dominance:
And he doesn't use the word "nerd", in this post, but I thought it fit naturally into this subject:
> I wonder if, as kids, libertarians tended to be witty weaklings – losing most fair physical fights, but winning most fair verbal sparring. Perhaps such kids prefer everyone to embrace the slogan “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me,” because then the people they hurt via words can’t complain, because they can’t even admit they were hurt.
> Reading through the Less Wrong archives, I'm struck by how much "most people who aren't us are stupid and should be laughed at" + "we're too socially inept to properly explain to normies how much better than them we are" + "why do so many people hate us?" a lot of the vibes are.
I think this is just wrong, btw. We talked about this earlier, and you thought that a hypothetical of a clearly unwise and non-existent type of person was an oblique reference to Christians or normies, and that you cited general disbelief in God and lack of respect afforded to Christians as evidence why your interpretation was correct. I think it's far more likely that you're confusing general disagreement as hostility than that less wrong posters are "weak assholes" (compared to the general population)
If we're thinking in the level of stereotypes, it's commonly accepted that in "normie" adjacent spaces that you get really really heated political discussions, about how subhuman the other party is, and look they're killing large groups of people through war, abortion, communism, global warming or company sponsored death squads. In what sense is this stronger or kinder than the posts you're thinking of? Yet these types of comments seem to not predictably draw the type of ire you seem to be describing here. What do you think is going on then?
Also in general, if I had to say, the internet has gotten way meaner. Cancellation or meeting someone in person to confront them was considered the act of a crazy person back when the internet was dominated by nerds. And I even back then, nerds who acted on their convictions were ostracized (see: media treatment of anonymous) rather than considered moral, but misguided.
I'm not saying that the general gist is wrong, but that actually troubling counterexamples to your theory seem to get filtered, because you don't want to come up with a complicated status based explanation, since it's what those low status nerds believe.
"We talked about this earlier, and you thought that a hypothetical of a clearly unwise and non-existent type of person was an oblique reference to Christians or normies, and that you cited general disbelief in God and lack of respect afforded to Christians as evidence why your interpretation was correct. "
I remember our previous discussion, but I did forget that detail. I'll have to think about that perspective, and about how much of the arrogance I perceive on Less Wrong and elsewhere has other intepretations.
But I would like to ask if you think it's false that there is a widespread contempt for Christians and theists (among other groups) on Less Wrong. It seems pretty clear to me there is, and what's worse is that you'd expect with such an attitude of "theism is *so* irrational we're going to use it as the archetype of irrationality at every chance" there'd be lots of actual *arguments* on the site proving its irrationality. But as discussed here https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2022/comment/12080043 there don't really seem to be, and theism is only discussed indirectly as part of other topics at best. And even worse, barely any attempt is made at all to separate deism, classical theism, Christianity in its basic broad form, and Christianity in its fundamentalist biblical inerrant form. There are arguments almost like "the bible contradicts itself, therefore God doesn't exist", and I pointed out one like that in our previous discussion. It's one of the most intellectually lazy approaches to religion I've ever seen, which is certainly saying something, and coming from a site dedicated to precision and rationality is unforgivable.
At the very least, saying a position is obviously stupid without strong explicit arguments for that claim is rude and the sort of thing that gets you banned by Scott here.
"In what sense is this stronger or kinder than the posts you're thinking of?"
It's "kinder" (more accurately, more moral-sounding) because despite the rage the people talking like that do *sound* like they are concerned with justice and think they're fighting for what's right. Wheras some of the Less Wrong discussion sounds cold and calculating and at least sometimes extremely self-centered. "Rationalists should win" is one of the most amoral sounding memes I've ever seen--regardless of what it's supposed to mean (e.g. winning includes moral goals etc) it sounds like it's saying that it's better to win by acting badly than to lose while doing the right thing. Which is basically the definition of evil in our society. And much like "defund the police" protesting that it doesn't mean what it sounds like doesn't go very far.
And the polyamory stuff--there's hardly ever any real argument for why this is good for society, as far as I've seen. It mostly seems like "well why *can't* I indulge my base desires?", which is almost as selfish as femimists (who as I said are rightly despised for the same reasons).
Also, on the other hand, a lot of militant wokeness got the earliest and firmest hold in nerd spaces, so I don't see how you can clearly oppose those two groups where there's such clear overlap.
"because you don't want to come up with a complicated status based explanation, since it's what those low status nerds believe."
I'm sorry, this seems a bit incoherent. It sounds like you're saying I'm using the LW-nerd understanding of status to deem its proponents low-status and thereby reject that status model, but I'm sure I'm misunderstanding.
But also, do you think Christians are not low-status? It seems pretty clear that in most urban environments in the western world saying that Christians (as used to mean those who really believe it and take it seriously) are high-status is a laughable claim. Even more so at universities, and since these two places are where most nerds are, doesm't you're "not wanting to align with low-status people" dismissal apply equally well to the latters' dislike of the former?
> At the very least, saying a position is obviously stupid without strong explicit arguments for that claim is rude and the sort of thing that gets you banned by Scott here.
I wish this was true, but it patently isn't. You can see a bunch of this in AI alignment or prediction market posts. There's also at least two 6+ year regulars in the comments section who post nothing but meta arguments implying they are right, with no object level arguments seen. I can't explicitly name them, because it would be rude, but I believe that people familiar with the sequences would agree. (As opposed to random people wandering in from the politics stuff)
I think on a meta level I'd agree it's bad that positions dismissed without discussions are bad, but at some point you have to draw the line for "this is too far away from any frame our culture has". And that debating Christianity specifically is the type of thing that ends up dominating forums if left unchecked.
> It's "kinder" (more accurately, more moral-sounding) because despite the rage the people talking like that do *sound* like they are concerned with justice and think they're fighting for what's right.
Sure sounds like your simple explanation is accumulating epicycles. Like, you're adding a stipulation where "and all of you fuckers should get tortured and killed for big pharma shilling" is stronger and kinder than "Seems bad that the FDA is denying life saving medications because of IRAs". Do you think that most people would agree that the latter statement is more likely to be spoken by a weak asshole?
> "Rationalists should win" is one of the most amoral sounding memes I've ever seen--regardless of what it's supposed to mean (e.g. winning includes moral goals etc) it sounds like it's saying that it's better to win by acting badly than to lose while doing the right thing.
I think this is another case of your bias adding negative valence when there is none. Would it be similarly valid to say something like "Christianity is a hateful religion, since Jesus wants to keep rich people who make lifesaving medications out of heaven"? I'd say no, it's clearly not the intended interpretation of that biblical passage, and it's obvious in context that this inference is way out of band. By what standard would my statement be bad, but your statement be good? To be clear, I think both statements are bad for not trying to understand what people actually mean.
I'll also note that you claimed that this was a pervasive cultural artifact that nerds have, and not that single posts cause people to draw this conclusion. In order for me to be convinced, you can't just cite the one post, but that it's commonly used in this assholeish way by members of the community, and that this is also why people hate rationalists.
> Also, on the other hand, a lot of militant wokeness got the earliest and firmest hold in nerd spaces, so I don't see how you can clearly oppose those two groups where there's such clear overlap.
I don't see how this is relevant: my counterpoint is that "non nerd, mean groups do not have status hits despite being mean and lacking in agency". Asserting that nerd groups are mean and lacking in agency does not respond to the point, other than badly pointing the booooooo flag at nerds.
> And the polyamory stuff--there's hardly ever any real argument for why this is good for society, as far as I've seen. It mostly seems like "well why *can't* I indulge my base desires?", which is almost as selfish as femimists (who as I said are right
Hippies aren't as low status as rationalists, random historical cultures with no monogamy aren't as low status as rationalists and so on. If you disagree, do posts insulting those groups appear anyway near as often or vitriolic as the anti nerd ones? It really doesn't seem to me that you can maintain the "simplicity" of your explanation without having "complicated status explanations".
> It sounds like you're saying I'm using the LW-nerd understanding of status to deem its proponents low-status and thereby reject that status model, but I'm sure I'm misunderstanding.
I'm saying that you aren't actually anti complicated status explanation, and that you are professing its falsehood because you don't like the style in which nerds discuss it. See the above comment for why I believe this.
> But also, do you think Christians are not low-status?
Status isn't a pure hierarchical thing, and I think that while Christianity is no longer ascendant and is losing culturall. Outside of the nerd bubble, popes are more celebrated than everything other than leading scientists, nerdy behavior is like, the default "to be mocked" behavior in media (and even if you are a proud nerd, you are only allowed to say so in a wink wink ironic way), as opposed to a Christian, who can just be a Christian and not be reflexively mocked for the most part (other than biblical literalists, who are something like Bible nerds!). You see people in these comments sections regularly whine about how rationalist ideas are taken seriously, and basically non whine about Christianity.
So yeah, I deny the premise and I think it's mostly made by formerly high status people upset they are no longer close to their peak, rather than genuinely being low status.
I don't really buy that modern nerds are less heated in their political discussions than normies are. In fact, a lot of the hottest 'culture war' stuff on the net surrounds nerd interests and nerd-dominated properties. Star Wars, the Marvel cinematic universe, and popular video game discourse often get highly political with competing sides getting very harsh and cancel-y towards each other.
I was specifically referring to less wrong discussions in that instance. Wasn't clear at all on that point, so apologies.
I agree that modern nerd spaces are also increasingly impolite, but it's not clear to me that nerds from the older internet are rated better for just being socially abrasive rather than outright sneering, or that being a polite nerd means you won't get a similar status hit. (Would you think substantially better of a polite brony? No, you'd be about equally disgusted that it's a man liking a show for girls.)
And I agree with you that the internet was a nicer place in the 90s/00s than it is today. Well, it might be fair to say that nerds are generally more mild-mannered than normies, and that does have some positives.
I'm inclined to think what hurt the internet the most, tho, was short-form social media, Twitter/X especially.
>Take teachers. In most schools in the English-speaking world, teachers are not remotely loved (they treat their classes with jaded indifference) and not remotely feared (they have, and certainly exercise, no real authority). The result is that students despise them, to the extent of often going out of their way to hurt them
As a generalization, this is almost certainly wrong. The vast majority of teachers do not treat their classes with jaded indifference; the vast majority of students do not despise their teachers; and the vast, vast majority of students do not go out of their way to hurt their teachers (and that includes, in my experience, literal gang members who sometimes went out of their way to harm some other people). It is also untrue that teachers exercise no real authority; they exercise authority over things like grades, whether a student can remain in class; whether they graduate, etc -- all things that students care about in some degree.
I don't know if this counts as agreement or not, but I've long suspected a big part of why Nice Guys are unattractive is that women are not afraid of them.
Warning: armchair theorizing, multiple leaps of unsubstantiated logic. Anyone feel free to yell at me for being wrong factually, tonally, and morally.
If a woman was just raped in an alley and is limping around town trying to get back home, she is probably still in shock. If she sees a distant figure on the sidewalk approaching her, she would probably panic more if the figure is a man -- on average. There are edge-cases to this: if the man is her husband, she probably thinks to herself, "thank God" instead of "oh no."
I suspect women clock Nice Guys without talking to them. Nice Guys tend also to be "thank God" edge cases. The same underlying psychology in women causes both the (unconscious) feeling of safety and the (conscious) feeling of ickiness.
Um... sorry, but this post sounds like you've taken various ideas in your head, thrown them together randomly, and then decided that there is some causal link there.
Machiavelli wrote that in The Prince. Which was about ruling a state, not personal relationships. There is no morality between states, and the weak are taken advantage of by the powerful. And the leader of the state needs to project power, especially when he is a feudal monarch ruling over a rabble of powerful aristocrats that are also vying for their own power. I don't think The Prince has much to say about social dynamics on a interpersonal level, nor did Machiavelli write with that intention.
Not sure what you were referring to, I haven't mentioned stupid people anywhere this week.
I was disagreeing with basically everything you wrote, until you said feminism is an offence against the Universe, whereupon I thought you know maybe this chap is onto something.
But generally, I think the love/fear observation is true in general but is doing far too much work tying together unrelated things here.
I think you're missing a subtlety when it comes to strength and fear: physical strength does good things for girls and altercations, but cooperation with your fellow man is soveriegn. Big dogs are gentle. The response of weak men to a strong bully is not "respect", it's to despise the guy, shun him from everything, and if circumstances allow you all gang up together and kick his head in.
I think I can do an evopsych story that pulls in your same general direction though. Not for everything, but certainly for why we hate HR girls, beaurocrats, and weak nerdy men.
If you're all hunting mammoth, you need natural leaders to follow, and everyone knows those natural leaders are tall and strong, with firm handshakes and nice deep resonant voices.
There's no status lost in obeying such a man - in fact your group identity as Brave Hunter Pack relies on it.
But jump forward a few tens of millenia and find yourself in a cubicle, taking orders from a weedy man or uptight woman.
These creatures didn't earn the right to boss you around, not in any way your hindbrain acknowledges.
But obey them you must, because of other ancestrally meaningless concerns like "promotion prospects" and "heating bills". And every order you obey is one more debasement your monkey mind has to endure.
Intelligence was another important survival trait, so we shouldn't feel the same level of resentment towards a guy who is smaller than us, but seems smarter and more aware of what's going on. I think that's true.
This story doesn't cover Nice Guys in dating. Nice Guys are hated because they are a threat and they're trying to take something from you. Men don't notice or resent them because they aren't threatening us.
They're a threat because they're socially uncalibrated and you don't know what they might be going to do next. They're trying to take (right now) your time and your energy and (hopefully soon) your companionship and your body; none of those are things you want to give, but the only way to protect them is to be mean or aggressive or otherwise be forced to take actions that exhaust you, make you look like a bitch in public, and/or make you feel guilty in private.
A competent guy on the other hand is either clearly interested or clearly not - so there's no second-guessing his intentions. If he has other options, he's less likely to fixate on you and will gracefully take a "no thanks," rather than pestering - so you don't have to take responsibility for his emotions in the same way. He might even be able to read you well enough to see the yes or the no coming, and save you the trouble of having to say it, or even be aware that a decision had to be made.
This all adds up to a more easygoing, assuring vibe where you can be around him and relax, without the ever-present threat of pressure or embarrassment.
> Are you trying to imply that they "might be violent"
No. I believe most men are predisposed to protect women and it actually takes quite a lot to make us violent towards them. I also believe women who haven't been made hyperfragile by feminist memes are able to shrug off more of a beating than we realise, although that's not a sentiment I'm going to broadcast or put to the test any time soon.
The "threat" here is a combination of the charity mugger seeing you across the road, and having to bring your uncool little brother along to a group of friends you want to impress: you still need to fend someone off, even though they're nice and polite; and there's the constant danger they're going to do or say something embarrassing because they just don't get it.
> You're contradicting yourself again
There's usually three agendas talking at cross purposes whenever sex and dating gets brought up:
- There are guys interested in this stuff as a skillset, looking for understanding and advice. Metaphors like "imagine electric current as water sloshing through a pipe" are supremely useful to an electrician, who needs to do practical work in the real world.
- There are those interested from a sociological or psychological point of view who would like to build up accurate models. "Well acksually, electricity doesn't flow like water," is of interest to the physicist, useless and destructive to the electrician.
- Then hiding amongst their number is a large group of people who *don't like* the truth and are personally invested in enforcing their own models and shutting down the discussion. Maybe it's losers who need to keep asserting "Men Bad"/"Women Bad", maybe it's women who can't bear the idea that they can be/have been manipulated, or men who don't want to let go of the "blue pill" model they got on their mum's knee or from television programmes.
No discipline can be taught without the apprentice watching, learning, and absorbing until all the apparent contradictions resolve themselves and knowledge falls into place. Meanwhile, no scientific theory can evolve without positing imperfect models and soldiering on with them as they get fleshed out slowly. Both domains give ample opportunity for a bad faith actor to find objections, look very clever, and shut down the discussion.
If I suspect someone belongs to that third group of people, I will simply refuse to converse with them.
> Ok, I get it. So it has nothing to do with the man's behavior - it's about whether the female is attracted to the man or not.
> So it's just about 'being clear about it'?
> It's starting to sound like females just simply hate nice guys.
You should consider yourself in dire need of joining that first group. Both men and women want guys who just "get it", and from your answers you do not.
For your own sake you should learn. There is nothing virtuous about letting yourself be less socially capable than you have the power to be, and to let ego or resentment stop you gaining new abilities is contemptible.
Go on Youtube and watch Hoe Math's channel in its entirety. Watch the whole thing before evaluating whether you agree or disagree.
I consider myself a nerd, mostly due to my interests. I enjoyed superhero comic books and Star Trek when I was a kid, and I enjoy anime and various otaku interests today.
Most of my closest friendships have been with other nerds. I find conversations with them more intellectually stimulating and interesting than conversations with most other types of people. And, again, similar interests.
But even with that being said... yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to what you wrote here. I might quibble a bit with parts of it, and I would stress that a lot of people here on this blog are at least very generous due to the effective altruist philosophy. But people here are just a small subsection of all nerds, and there's at least some people here who aren't nerds.
While I've had a lot of enjoyment in conversations with other nerds, much moreso than I do with an average normie (I guess you could say), most nerds I've come across do strike me as more selfish and less caring and less empathic than most normies I talk to. I'm not sure why this is, and I'm hesitant to read much into it since it's purely anecdotal. Still, since my experiences here reflect much of what you're saying, I felt it was worth mentioning in a reply. Especially since I have good reasons to like nerds more than normies, given I've bonded more with nerds. Still, in spite of those bonds, I see far more generosity and kindness and truly caring about others from normies than I have from nerds.
And I saw through a lot of 'the nice guys' early on. Is it good to be nice to someone purely in the hopes of getting sex from them? Not in my opinion. I mean, how is that any better than being nice to someone in the hopes of them buying a product from you? We don't consider salesmen to be wonderful nice guys just because they're being nice to people in the hopes of pulling off a sale, and the same should be true of nice guys that are being nice to girls/women in the hopes of getting sex. Now imagine a salesman that bitterly complains over every sales rejection, and starts getting mean and snarky about it. The guy would be considered a nasty loser. So if a nice guy is like this every time a girl turns him down or 'friendzones' him...
I think girls/women often see through this sort of thing, and can tell when a guy is being nice to them just because he's a kind or inherently friendly person vs. a guy being nice to them because he's trying to get with her sexually.
Thanks, and in any case I wasn't meaning to attack nerds in general. See my second edit--most of this "why people hate x" is simply arguing that people *do* hate x not that they *should*. Though I can see it comes off ambiguous since I'm also bringing my own somewhat disparate annoyances into this, specifically the way LWs and EAs barely distinguish "people who think rationally" from "people who agree with our object level beliefs", and also the way discussions about alphas and betas and the like can proceed for ages without anybody even questioning the morality of hookup culture or the wisdom of pursuing it. Both of these drive me up the wall, though the first is just an instance of the same thing every ideological group does.
More generally, I find myself reflexively criticising nerds so often because I'm just enough of a nerd to be largely defined by the archetype, and just different enough from the archetype to find much of it infuriating. I'm too similar to be indifferent ("who cares about those weirdos") and too different to be comfortable ("yeah that describes me"), so all I can do is rage and scream "you idiots! why do you live by all these contradictions?".
Yeah, there's definitely a huge problem with genuine nice guys (or is it Nice Guys? I'm so confused) having trouble finding actual love. I'm not in any way dismissing that problem at all. But I think those genuine ones are often drowned out by the wannabe-players who just want sex. And my point was that in this context the successful players can end up getting more respect than the unsuccessful ones, on the grounds that "if you're going to proudly violate society's moral standards, you'd better at least be skilled and successful enough to have earned the social respect to do so". And that there's some real nerve in simultaneously appealing to morality when it suits you ("I'm nice! It's not fair!") and disavowing it when it suits you ("I'm looking for casual sex" or "I'm poly" as if that doesn't even require so much as a positive argument for why that's a reasonable thing to do).
As for whether many Nice Guys are like that...it certainly seems like they are. There is a lot of explicit desire for sex and comparitively little for emotional affection or love. There is a lot of envying, instead of despising, the players who prowl bars and nightclubs. And sometimes this outright explains the hostility they receive. Particularly with friendzoning: "you were friends with me because you really wanted a relationship with me" has a *very* different vibe than "you were friends with me because you wanted to have sex with me". The first is like: pretending to be merely your friend when I really want a much *closer* form of friendship. The second is like: pretending to be your friend when I *only* want something from you (indistinguishable, for most women, from just wanting to play with your expensive toys). They aren't differences in degree: they push in opposite directions! (Really wanting *more* than friendship vs really wanting *less* than friendship).
How many of the friendzoned nice guys do you think would be satisfied with having sex with their female friend but her refusing to have any relationship with them? And how many would be satisfied with a chaste relationship with a very slow build up to sex? The perception being given is that the first number dwarfs the second. Wheras not being satisfied with either would be understandable, many women view only wanting the former as a sign of *being* a bad person.
As I said in the previous thread's discussion, though, *feminist* women are entirely in favour of casual sex and demand it be given all the respect of monogamy. So *they* should be 100% supportive of the Nice Guys, and their reaction is one of the most hypocritical things I've ever seen. But for normal women, it's completely different.
> People making derogatory accusations like saying we aren’t actually nice...
Sounds like rationalization for the just-world fallacy. If you want to believe that good people always succeed, and you see someone who didn't, then obviously they must be a bad person! And because nobody is perfect, it is usually easy to find some little fault and say "that's why".
(Oh no, he was nice to a girl he wanted to have sex with. What a horrible hypocrite! As opposed to... a guy who doesn't even try to be nice to the girls he wants to have sex with, and gets them anyway? Yeah, than one is okay.)
I am not saying that nice guys don't make mistakes -- they definitely do! -- but those are usually *not* the ones they are accused of.
> But it says nothing about the men who have virtue but no strength (is there even a Greek letter for those?) since hardly anyone having these discussions is aspiring to that.
There's certainly something to the idea that the manifestation of virtue requires power. The person who has the power to do something bad, and refrains, is continuously demonstrating reliability, even if they never say anything. But the person who lacks the power demonstrates nothing, and is an unknown quantity, and any words that come out of their mouth may simply be social manipulation.
Yeah - the way to get into a school like that is to win national or preferably international competitions. Or best of all - publish truly novel research in math or computer science. If he won the International Math Olympiad or something, his chances would be excellent.
So I did a bit of digging on Reddit to get more information about what may have happened to Stanley Zhong, the California high school student who was rejected from a bunch of top colleges despite really excellent grades and test scores. I found this bit, about what students aiming for top colleges are expected to do these days. And you know, at this point maybe it's not worth it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/collegeresults/comments/175kanu/1590_sat_397442_gpa_rejected_by_16_colleges_how/
> He went to Gunn, and he didn't have enough social impact. To get into a good school for cs from that demographic, you need to have a crazy amount of social impact. Being really good at olympiads and hackathons won't be the thing that gets you into top colleges. This is different if you get to the level of camping for an olympiad though. That being said, having USACO platinum or USAJMO in your awards section isn't enough to get into Berkeley or MIT.
> Doing things that look like they have social impact, like running nonprofits and hackathons, often require substantially less effort but have a much higher yield for college admissions.
> The person from my bay area high school who managed to sweep every UC as a cs major (pretty much impossible for this demographic in 2023) had a non-profit where he fudged numbers and applied for a shit ton of social impact awards. The people that do bs like this look more impressive to college admissions officers. The most appealing applicants are the ones that look like they're going to change the world.
> The people I know that went to Stanford, Berkeley EECS, MIT, etc. were literally all USACO silver except for one guy who was gold. This demographic is a shit-show. Being one of the smartest people at your high school won't get you into one of these schools. You have to show social impact through your ec's in the scale of hundreds to tens of thousands. Either that or feign a really niche interest to get into private schools through doing stuff like linguistics research or a classics reading club.
> This might sound cynical, but as a college student, being genuine will fuck you over if you're in this demographic. If you're a junior, organize a hackathon to get girls into coding, start a non-profit org to combine cs with art, apply for sponsors to make a scioly competition about climate change, organize a protest, etc. All of these are good things, but their scope is often exaggerated. After you finish implementation, email 50 news channels and apply to social impact awards. A lot of these things aren't as hard to do as they seem. They just require a small team and 2-3 weeks of grinding. As a college student, this is literally the formula every bay area kid who's hyper-successful on college apps follows. This is how you beat the rat-race. Do things that have a small positive impact but seem like they have a much larger scope than they do. AO's eat this shit up.
For perspective, only about 2,000 people a year score 1590 or better on the SAT. About 400 prospective college students merit USACO platinum per year. The freshman class at Berkeley is about 8,000 people. If SZ isn't being basically auto-admitted everywhere with scores like that (and corresponding GPA and other academics), then these schools aren't admitting on academic merit, and they aren't admitting on academic merit with a bit of fudging to get a "well-rounded" student body.
UT Austin, however, is a fine school. If Texas wants you, and California et al don't, you should probably take the hint. Or the Google job, if your Dad can swing the interview.
The part of this story that is shocking to me is not that he was rejected from the fancy private universities (I've internalized that there is a fair amount of randomness in those, plus discrimination against people with his demographics), but that he was also rejected from all the UC schools. It really feels like a kid graduating from a CA high school with a near perfect academic record `ought' to be getting auto-admitted to the UC.
Cal Poly I assume was his safety school, and the rejection was because they assumed he would get something better and wouldn't come.
Your final paragraph seems on point.
I had thought that being in the top 10% of a California high school class was supposed to guarantee auto-admission in the UC system; a quick search suggests that it's 9%, and the fine print is that they only guarantee that they'll find you a place *somewhere* in the UC system.
https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requirements/freshman-requirements/california-residents/
Possibly the unwritten rule is that if you're the Wrong Sort of smartypants academic overachiever, they offer you a slot at UC Merced and hope you take the hint. And he should also have been guaranteed a slot in the CSU system, but they don't let the Wrong Sorts into Cal Poly, that's what CSU Bakersfield is for.
It's a frustrating case because there's a lot we don't know. As I see it, the credible hypotheses are:
- the bar really is incredibly high in top colleges
- the bar is incredibly high in top colleges in a very sought-after major
- there's something negative we haven't been told about SZ, like serious disciplinary problems
- SZ somehow mishandled the application process, and looked much worse than he is
- SZ is being discriminated against, because of his race
- SZ is being discriminated against, because he is from a wealthy town
- this is just a pure fluke; SZ just got unlucky
- this is a case of yield management systems run amok, with most of the schools figuring he would be accepted to some posher place, and saying yes to him would lower their yield scores for nothing
There's just so much we don't know, and that lack of information feeds a tornado of speculation.
I mean - you're competing against people like William Kamkwamba of Malawi, who built a windmill from recycled junk in an impoverished African village. And Malala Youzafsai of Afghanistan, who got SHOT IN THE HEAD for her activist beliefs and even more miraculously SURVIVED AND RETURNED TO ACTIVISM. You're pack fodder unless you are:
1) winning national or international competitions for high school students
2) publishing original research, preferably in top journals
3) overcoming insane levels of adversity - think not just 'got cancer, recovered from it' but 'homeless, raised hundreds of thousands for their own chemo and from the hospital bed proceeded to earn near-perfect grades and test scores'.
Like a lot of college admission stuff, this suffers from being anecdote instead of data and risks feeding into a preferred explanation. I think the reason that most people fall for this is because
the narrative on college admissions still perpetuates the myth that decisions are mostly intentional vs random.
Let's assume SZ had a much higher than random chance of getting into each of those schools. For illustration, I'm going to assume 30% chance of getting admitted and that all admission decisions are independent. Applying to 18 schools, there's about 6% chance of getting 2 or fewer acceptances. With 3-4mm high school seniors each year in the US and, maybe 10-100k applying to top schools (to say nothing of the applicants from outside the US), it isn't at all surprising that there may be many students in a position similar to SZ or even worse.
Even if we bump the probability of admission to 50% for each school and 40k similarly situated applicants, there would still be about 26 SZs per year.
I'm going on record predicting a Harris win in November. I hope I'm wrong.
I'm basing this on hearing that Trump is saying there will be no 2nd debate, that Harris calling for one is like a losing prize-fighter demanding a rematch. This is such a poor reading of the political situation I think it is indicative of how the rest of the campaign will go.
Looking objectively, the debate had no clear winner. So Trump is delusional in thinking he clearly won. Trump backers will back Trump even if he has some awful gaffe, so Trump's objective ought to be winning over independent voters. Another debate is one way to do this, and I know of no better way, taking the national stage in a format he is somewhat good at.
Caveat: if another debate DOES happen, this prediction is void. I may make a new prediction after the debate in that case.
I think Trump is likely to win, but I hope I'm wrong.
But as for the debate thing, Trump is clearly scared of debating Harris. It won't end well for him and he knows it.
Judging from Harris's performance, it would be easy to beat her in another debate with some preparation. I don't think Trump thinks it necessary to prepare for a debate. But the preparations would be easy: prepare some questions yourself for Harris, so that ignoring them would make her look bad. If, as I saw, she only delivered prepared statements, she wouldn't be able to competently address them.
You didn't explain why you think Trump is likely to win, so I conclude this is just a sarcastic mirror of my original statement. But my statement is based on Trump running a campaign, not on his merits as president. Harris would be another Biden presidency, and the Trump presidency was better than the Biden one.
I wasn't being sarcastic at all. I think Trump is likely to win because Nate Silver is giving him a 61% chance to win. The attempted assassination yesterday will probably help him a bit as well.
Nate Silver's latest projection gives Harris a 38.7% probability of winning, against Trump's 61.0%. The electoral college really hurts the Democrats in a race this close. There's about a 20% chance Harris will win the popular vote but lose the election.
Trump answered the question. He doesn't yet have a complete plan, to be picked apart because of its incompleteness, so gave no details. What was Harris's plan to compare? "Strengthen the Affordable Care Act". What will be added? Where is it weak? That is no less vague than Trump.
I still look at it and see no clear objective winner. You clearly have a bias towards Harris. I am done responding to subjective arguments.
Debate transcript: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/harris-trump-presidential-debate-transcript/story?id=113560542
My OBJECTIVE vision doesn't make definitive conclusions on such things. From a different perspective, Harris was weaker by constantly looking toward Trump, even mentioning him a lot by name, so eye contact she was pushing at him that was not received, as he was mostly looking at the camera, does not go well in Harris's favor. A perspective on Trump's being "goaded" is answering some things Harris said, which is, after all, the purpose of a debate. On the other hand, Harris seldom responded to the question at hand, seeming to speak only statements prepared ahead of time (NOT from being fed the questions before the debate).
I addressed Trump's willingness to debate a second time in my original post, and I know of no sane perspective to consider that it is because of fear.
It looks to me like you're viewing the debate through a pro-Harris perspective, which is your right. But it certainly isn't objective.
> Harris was weaker by constantly looking toward Trump, even mentioning him a lot by name, so eye contact she was pushing at him that was not received, as he was mostly looking at the camera, does not go well in Harris's favor.
We seem to have very different interpretations of body language. Looking at your opponent signals confidence, while avoiding eye contact signals fear. Although ignoring someone can signal dominance, it only works if you don't stare doggedly past them when they actively challenge you with their eye contact.
Body language does depend on the situation. Trump never forgot that the audience was the camera, no matter who was in the room. Did he look at even the moderators? It wasn't clear.
In any case, since it is subject to interpretation, I'm ignoring my take on body language. I'm rather surprised that what seems to be the most controversial part of my post is my claim to objective analysis, and that no one "won" the debate clearly.
This is not correct. The things you are pointing to saying Harris won are not definitive, but subject to interpretation. It is YOUR viewpoint trying to make Harris a clear winner.
If I were to take a subjective viewpoint, I could point out how few questions Harris answered, pointing to only practiced debate preparation. After all, what else did she need to do in the month proceeding? It's not like she had any real duties as vice president that people were depending on. So she practiced answers to questions chosen to help her campaign, and delivered them regardless of the questions asked, with few exceptions. She clearly failed in the "debate" aspect, which ought to be worrisome for someone who needs to make quick, good decisions.
And Trump had a strong stage presence, from making her come to him for shaking hands, to ignoring her in favor of the audience when speaking. He avoided traps in the questions attempting to pin him an unfavorable position. And he certainly delivered the most memorable lines.
So no, I think there was NO CLEAR WINNER, and I have yet to see anything that indicates otherwise. Go ahead and vote for Harris. But when you attack my stated objectivity, please do so with something more than your own opinion.
ACXLW Meetup 74: Design for Developing Countries & Ethics of Extinction
Hello Folks! We are excited to announce the 74th Orange County ACX/LW meetup happening this Saturday and most Saturdays after that.
Host: Michael Michalchik
Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com (For questions or requests)
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, CA 92660
Phone: (949) 375-2045
Date: Saturday, September 14, 2024
Time: 2:00 PM
Conversation Starters:
1. Why Western Designs Fail
Text Transcript: Google Document Link
Video Title: Why Western Designs Fail
Video: YouTube Link
Summary: This video explores why innovative, highly praised designs for developing countries often fail. The key problem lies in cultural misunderstandings: designers focus on the functionality of a product without understanding the deeper cultural and social contexts in which the products will be used. For instance, the Neon Nurture incubator, made from car parts to be low-cost and easily repaired, never gained acceptance because it lacked the prestige and appearance that medical officials in developing nations value. Other examples like the PlayPump (a merry-go-round that pumps water) illustrate how Western solutions often mismatch the actual needs of the communities they intend to help.
Questions for discussion:
Why do you think Western designers frequently overlook cultural factors when developing products for other parts of the world? How can this be addressed?
What role should local communities play in designing products intended to meet their needs? Could co-design processes become the new standard?
In cases like the PlayPump or mosquito nets being used for fishing, how should designers react when their products are repurposed by local users in unexpected ways?
2. Driving the Screw Worm to Extinction: The Ethics of Annihilation
Text Transcripts:
Killing Every Screwworm Transcript
14 Million Worms Transcript
Video Titles:
Killing Every Screwworm Would Be the Best Thing Humanity Ever Did | Kevin Esvelt
Why the US Drops 14.7 Million Worms on Panama Every Week
Videos:
Killing Every Screwworm Video
14 Million Worms Video
Summary:
The first video by Kevin Esvelt argues for using CRISPR gene drive technology to eradicate the New World screwworm, a parasitic fly whose larvae feed on the flesh of mammals and birds, causing immense suffering. Esvelt contends that wiping out the screwworm would have a far greater impact on animal welfare than ending factory farming. The second video outlines the decades-long U.S.-Panama collaboration to keep screwworms out of North America by dropping millions of sterile flies in Panama each week. While this method works as a border defense, it is not sufficient to eradicate the screwworm from South America, where the problem persists.
Questions for discussion:
What ethical principles should guide decisions to drive a species to extinction, even if it causes widespread harm? Does the end justify the means?
Could gene drive technology be misused in other contexts, and what safeguards should be put in place to prevent this? What might be the long-term risks of eliminating species?
If the eradication of harmful species like the screwworm is possible, should we consider other "pest" species next? Where should we draw the line in deciding which species to eliminate?
Walk & Talk:
After the meeting, we will take an hour-long walk and talk session. There are two mini-malls nearby with hot takeout options—look for Gelson's or Pavilions in the 92660 area.
Share a Surprise:
Bring something unexpected to share that has changed your perspective on life or the universe.
Future Direction Ideas:
Please contribute your thoughts on future topics, meeting types, activities, or other ideas for the group’s future direction.
Looking forward to seeing everyone there!
If you are a League of Legends gamer, this is a 7 question survey about your analytics tool usage. It shows how other players answered at the end and you can sign up for the waitlist for an analytics tool that might or might not become commercial later.
@Mods: Let me know if this is not suitable and I'm going to delete it.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfUlYq2nXSyhjQuki61cXPqcBUShYqasEw3W7NkCkj3zidK0w/viewform
Yudkowsky on Twitter:
- All of these LLM Whisperers that I see on Twitter, appear to also be insane.
- Why?"
Unless irs random coincidence, there is an interesting phenomenon to be explained here.
As Yudkowsky mentions, there is well-known correlation of computer security experts with high-functioning autism and/or being transgender, Seeing that corelation, again, would not be a surprise. (There are obvious mechanisms for why high functioning autism would give you an advantagde at programming, and the autism-transgender correlation has been noted elsewhere, e.g. by gender clinics) But with the LLM hackers, we're seeing a personality type that is distinctly different from the high functioning autism that we know and love. So we wonder ... why?
(Janus may be a little offended we have him down as this ... other thing,, but its a serious question.)
If I were to guess what this other thing might be ... what the hell? Is "high functioning schizophrenia" even a thing? The DSM gives us schizotypal, etc.
I've experienced psychotic breaks and have met many others in psych wards who have also had psychotic episodes or have full on schizophrenia. One of the early symptoms I've seen with a lot of these people, and myself, is divinatory magical thinking. This kicks in really early while you're still high functioning. Interacting with LLMs is very similar to divination and I would not be surprised at all if schizophrenics are drawn to the activity.
Context? I suppose we all know what an LLM is at this point, but even with a quick Google I can't find what on Earth "LLM whispering" would be beyond the well established prompt engineering. And whatever Janus you're talking about, it's probably not the 1st result I get, which is an AI-assisted coding project on GitHub.
One possible theory for Janus, in particular, is that he is deliberately poisoning AI training sets, and the reason he talks the way he does is for the benefit of LLMs that are trained on Twitter, and not for us mere humans.
My guess is that RLHF shapes LLM outputs primarily for in-distribution responses - because that is where inputs come from mostly and where the people rating the response have a clue how to interpret it. But crazy people and thus "crazy" questions and responses are out-of-distribution and the model doesn't know whether the response is good or bad! Thus if you get it into such parts of the distribution, chances are that it will reply as desired.
With a deeper understanding, the model would be able to generalize to these cases, but models apparently aren't there yet. I guess they eventually will.
For now, this suggests other avenues of jail-breaking. For example, I also get LLMs often to answer beyond the guardrails, but not with crazyness, but what you could call intellectual high-status superiority. Raters presumably also haven't seen much such input and if, they are likely not rating it as bad (science=good, elite=good, right?).
The word of the day is OOLOGIST, someone who studies or collects bird eggs.
I'm trying to find a way to stick more Os on the beginning of that, but can't think of any.
Original Online Orthodox Oologist.
There is a guy who has ham radio callsign M0OOO (the joke works even better in Morse code)
In case there’s anyone not familiar with the racehorse Potoooooooo: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potoooooooo
We have a unique situation where there is a real-money, highly liquid prediction market for one Presidential candidate: NASDAQ ticket DJT. It's not doing too well lately:
https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/DJT
Don't assume he'll go away if he loses the election.
I'm not sure what you mean by this.
I mean he could still be the de facto leader of the Republican Party and then run again in 2028.
Has happened before.
Yes, it's plausible, although in four years he'll be in his 80's, would be hard to avoid the inevitable comparisons to Biden. But how this would impact the stock is an interesting question. I tend to think that if Trump wins in November it may actually be bad for DJT stock because he won't.... need it anymore. He'd get his official Potus Xitter handle back. But who knows.
All of this is unprecedented.
DJT is a pure memestock. There's no rational basis supporting its valuation. Nobody buys it because they think its revenue numbers look good.
It depends a lot on how much Trumpsters feel like throwing their money at him at the moment, as well as on how much supply of stock there is (a big part of the decline in price is likely due to locked-up stock coming onto the market, or getting nearer to coming to the market).
Yes to all this, which is why it serves as a (less-then-perfect) barometer of Trump's electoral fortunes. But - the sensitivity of the price to future increases of supply - if we can really make this connection - speaks to the influence of more sophisticated investors as it's hard to imagine your typical Trumpster making rational decisions w.r.t. this stock...
Typically one or more candidates in an election will not meet the electoral threshold (majority of votes, majority of electoral votes, etc) for assuming the office sought. In this situation we say that the candidate "lost the election".
did you forget to type /sarcasm? because you're not providing any value here.
I'm curious why A.T. wrote what he wrote in response to my post, because what he wrote was banally true. I'm proposing a gauge for Trump's prospects as a candidate. I'm bloody well-aware that a candidate may loose an election. What does him "not going away" afterwards has to do with anything?
Now, maybe the point is that the value of DJT the ticket is not tied to the election outcome, or may in fact be bolstered by Trump's loss, or something else. I'm hoping A.T. will clarify his point. Your response did nothing of the sort.
I agree that A.T.'s comment was not germane. However, I thought the meaning of his statement was self-evident, so assumed your response was meant imply that DJT did not previously lose an election - not sincerely but as sarcasm. Thus I thought I didn't need an additional sarcasm qualifier in replying. No offense intended.
Cheers.
Having just learned from Wikipedia that the stuffed corpse of the Cocaine Bear can legally officiate marriages, provided that the couple don't know that it is not, in fact, authorised to do so...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine_Bear_(bear)
.. presumably when they get to the "Speak now or forever hold your peace" part of the ceremony, it is one of the rare legitimate cases where you can stand up and say "Actually, that stuffed bear is not authorized to perform marriages."
(A Catholic friend of mine got married by a priest who had been excommunicated for schism for refusing to accept the Second Vatican Council. Valid marriage in the eyes of the catholic Church, I bel3ive, by the Stuffed Bear Principle)
Anyone who wants to read some good old-fashioned Catholic drama, google the "belorado nuns". It's been the comic relief news for the whole summer over here in Spain.
Of course, back in the Early Modern era these kind of shenanigans would get both you and your stuffed bear burned at the stake.
Dostoevsky is overrated but he's a central example of a writer of Literary fiction, which is about love, suffering, hope, despair and mortality. When we talk about great writers, we are talking about not only who can render the cleverest and most poetic prose but who can make new and profound utterances on those subjects. Genre fiction doesn't cut it because it avoids immersing itself in those themes, particularly the suffering. The reason Shakespeare is still a good bet for best writer ever, despite Sam Bankman-Fried's math, is that he is at least one of the greatest writers on those themes. There may be more smarter writers today than in Shakespeare's time, but how many of them are writing about those deepest of themes? We live in lighter times and have lighter artists.
>Genre fiction doesn't cut it because it avoids immersing itself in those themes, particularly the suffering.
Re:Zero
We only know the *best* writers of the past. What about the average author in Shakespeare's or Dostoevsky's era? Those probably sucked. Also, saying *new* things about human situation is a bit easier when you live a few centuries earlier than your competitors.
If you like sad art, I don't read many fiction books these days, so instead I will link a movie and a music video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pev09MLly2o - Night on the Galactic Railroad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6wFZp-bo3A - Inevitability
Did anybody watch the debate? I could not bring myself to do so, but I will probably watch the highlights reel tomorrow.
Yeah. No one did badly enough to drop out.
I'm feeling grumpy. Trump is, weirdly enough, a poster child for a conservative anti-immigration argument, in terms of his approach to political debates. He personally demonstrates how even a single person who brazenly flouts civilized standards of behavior, can cause a chain reaction that inspires enough others to ignore the standards, that we then lose all the nice things that those standards supported. There's no longer even the veneer of hypocrisy, which vice has the virtue of acknowledging the existence of virtue.
I can easily imagine Harris performing well as a prosecutor. And I think what she said at the debate probably has as much to do with her actual agenda as her suppression of DNA evidence while Attorney General had to do with her calls for admission of the same DNA evidence when she became a politician. She's a professional. Since this is ACX ... yadda yadda orthogonality thesis?
I could only stomach about 10 minutes of Biden's performance so just having Harris be able to competently block and parry was a huge relief. Trump seemed pretty much as expected.
I'm still not confident Harris will win, but I'm more confident than I was yesterday.
In terms of the debate itself, seems like Harris came out ahead in theory. In practice, everybody is actually talking about Trump's performance, and not in a "He failed miserably way", but in the very typical "Look at this crazy thing Trump said!" way, which has been his bread and butter method of dominating the political-media landscape since he entered into politics.
It looks like there was a police report from one guy saying the illegal immigrants were snatching geese from the park. Trump then turned this into them eating peoples' pets. It sounds totally unhinged, but it does draw attention to the government basically dumping illegal immigrants all over the place and causing difficulties for the locals. I still haven't decided whether this is some genius 4D-chess move on Trump's part or whether it makes him look crazy. Maybe both?
It wasn't Trump, it was right-wing Twitter, and it spread because it was making people angry. Like the Vance couch thing, it's just stupid internet meme stuff.
The whole thing is so funny to me. 20,000 Haitians are sent to a town of 60,000 people, meaning they now make up 1/4 of the population. And the worst thing that's happened is a few of them (allegedly) ate some geese out of a park? That doesn't look so good for the illegals are a bunch of criminals and rapists narrative.
I guess even right wingers thought this was weak, so they went with eating cats. And there was actually a lady in southern Ohio who killed and ate a cat in front of people! But she wasn't a Haitian immigrant and she had some psychotic mental problem, not a food problem.
I think the cat thing comes from videos of citizens making complaints to their local government, and statements of people on the ground? Some of them are up online. So I'd say it's not the right winger twits making it up, but at best it's people in the neighborhood making it up, and at worst it's true. The local government seemed hostile to complaints about the refugees, so it wouldn't shock me if they simply failed to investigate, thus leading to no "evidence".
Washington Post did an article running down the sources for it, with links:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/09/rumors-about-an-ohio-town-show-scale-right-wing-bubble/
The TL;DR is that it was assembled out of many unrelated parts - one person on facebook saying that their neighbor's daughter's friend (I'm not exaggerating, that's literally what they said) said they lost their cat and discovered Haitians had killed it, a photo of a black man carrying a goose (in a different city, unknown what his intent or immigration status was), and a news report of another woman (not an immigrant and in yet another city) who did in fact eat a cat. The police say they did not receive any reports of pets being stolen.
So like, I don't think you need to jump to "the government is hostile to complaints about the refugees" when "the police are not inclined to investigate a rumor from a neighbor's daughter's friend" seems sufficient.
No, the worst thing that happened is one of them plowed a van into a bus and killed an 11 year old boy. While driving without a valid US license.
https://www.springfieldnewssun.com/news/aiden-clark-the-11-year-old-student-killed-in-bus-crash-loved-snuggling-sports-and-family/Y6EROJUF7FHJVFEEXYVFYT5ZZU/
I know, there's no way that many people can be dumped in a city that size and not cause all kinds of problems. But rightwing X, and by extension Trump, weren't talking about that. They went with the Haitians are going to eat your cat! Why didn't he say these immigrants ran into a bus, killing an eleven year old and injuring a bunch of other children? I wouldn't be surprised if this is part of the Trump playbook, say something ridiculous and then everyone ends up talking about it regardless of how true it is. But he also says ridiculous things without apparently thinking about it all the time.
> "Look at this crazy thing Trump said!"
Seriously, though, how is the man getting away with saying things like "people are eating cats" without being forced to follow Biden's example? We were never this shy about declaring his opposite number too senile to govern.
I heard that rumor, about some Chinese family, that was eating stray cats in the neighborhood perhaps 20 years ago. I have no idea of the validity, but it was an entertaining story, about cultural differences. Supposedly people noticed a marked drop in stray cats around, and eventually pinpointed the cause and had a talk with the family.
It IS new saying they're eating people's pets, and the debate was the first place I heard that one. Maybe the source of this was Real Raw News?
Judging by what I've seen on Twitter, this is more of a "couch" thing, which only took off because the memes on the matter offend the "right people" from the perspective of those sharing them.
(Although I find it quite plausible that immigrants caught and ate some wild fowl; this isn't an immigrant thing, though, but rather a rural-vs-city thing. Take half my neighbors growing up and put them in a large city and they'd definitely offend some neighbors catching and eating some of the local wildlife; ducks in particular.)
Dunno what timeline you live in, but I've spent the last four years in a timeline in which Biden's obvious senility was denied for years in spite of ever-mounting evidence.
But setting -that- aside, Trump gets away with it because it keeps working. Look, you're still talking about him.
The world is full of people who believe anything they read on the internet that seems to support their worldview. Trump is such a person
I'm not a Trumpist, but a conservative.
Harris was better than I was led to believe, but also about the same. As expected, it made no difference whatsoever what the first question was she was asked, as she clearly had a pre-practiced delivery, which she did reasonably well. She seemed understandably nervous through the first third of the debate. I cannot recall a single question she was asked to which she answered that question, nor did she actually state what specific things she wanted to do, but only ambiguous things like literally stuff "everyone wants". She had a distinct lack of "incoherence" and infamous cackle.
Trump was Trump as usual, though it seemed like one of his worse days. The "immigrants eating people's pets" was new to me, and, whether true or not, seemed largely irrelevant to the national stage. Often it seemed like he ought to have answered some questions plainly, such as with an emphatic "no" about any regrets for January 6th actions, but maybe he's getting some politician instincts. He wandered too much from subject to subject, too, as I thought he could have hammered harder on some points he brought up, then changed to something else. This was especially evident in his closing remarks, where he was all negative about the current administration, but never pointed out that HE would fix everything.
Bottom line: I think there was no clear winner. I expected Trump to demolish Harris, so maybe this would count as a win for her. Everyone already knows what Trump is like, and the debate probably didn't change anyone's minds about him, but I'm still pretty much in the dark about who Harris is, between lack of concrete policy statements, and prepared talking points that said little of substance.
I have heard that the Democratic party was highly pleased, and is calling for another debate now, which was in question before. If they're right, this would be a mistake, as it would be a chance for Trump to come out better, and Harris would have little to gain and much to lose. Trump's team should want another debate for these reasons, so maybe he could show that he ought to be president to make things better, rather than just showing how awful things are.
I got nerd-sniped today in a discussion of why it is that LLM's have a difficult time counting the "R"s in the word "strawberry" (most models claim there are two R's).
If you google it or whatever, you'll see lots of people claiming that the problem is tokenization -- the LLM perceives the word "strawberry" not as those 9 letters, but as (probably) two tokens, one for straw and one for berry. It is then common to go on to claim that because of tokenization, the LLM has "no idea" what letters are in the word and it just guesses or something.
The problem with this statement is that LLMs are actually decent at counting letters in words. It gets the frequency of every other letter in "strawberry" correct, and it correctly counts the R's in "arrears" and "regretful," and when I ask it the frequency of every letter in "insouciant," it is correct. This all seriously complicates the story that LLMs just can't perceive letters.
Does anyone know the correct explanation here? When I ask GPT, it suggests sort of general understanding of english language as a concept, but that seems to me unlikely to result in performance as good as LLMs can actually get.
Relatedly, I recently asked ChatGPT-4 to help with a crossword puzzle. My son had been given this Beowulf-themed puzzle for homework; he could use any resource, it was 10pm and he was having trouble, I had no idea not having read Beowulf recently, so I thought why not. CG4 was useless - if I requested a 6 letter word meaning 'a treasure sought by a thane' (or whatever), where the second letter was 't', it would come back with an 8 letter word that had no 't's. I could keep asking for other answers, and it would keep apologizing and failing to provide anything remotely like a useable solution. And this was for the four different clues I tried - it could answer none of them. So I wondered - do all LLMs do terribly at crosswords?
By the way, the teacher threw out the assignment the next day because she had no key and also could not answer some of the clues. So my son came out okay anyway.
PS - here is the puzzle:
https://crosswordlabs.com/view/beowulf-sections-1-9-up-through-the-battle-with-grendel
I'll have to try to complete this. It's been a long time since I read my namesake's epic.
Interestingly, I came across this today on Marginal Revolution:
"My test for new models is a set of cryptic crossword clues that aren’t online (my granny wrote them). Every model so far has been completely useless at them… but o1 gets them."
https://x.com/matthewclifford/status/1834485810113990786?t=ts7RNfmujNcrAqSmkDb0TA
Gemini does fine:
Prompt: How many letter Rs are there in the word "strawberry"?
Gemini: There are 3 letter Rs in the word "strawberry".
>the LLM perceives the word "strawberry" not as those 9 letters,<
Looks like someone else also thinks strawberry only has two r's. :)
I've been playing around with GPT-4o and not only will it routinely miscount the Rs in Strawberry, it then will sometimes go on to assert that there is only one R in "berry".
Looking for other words that fail, it tells me that "lawfully" contains two Ls but "unlawfully" contains three. When I asked it how that could be, it explained "it still contains the same two Ls from "lawfully" plus one additional L from the prefix "un-""
My guess for what's going on here is that somewhere in its training data it has ingested things like "a list of words with a double R". Since "double" is associated with "two", it will assume that because Strawberry has a double R, it must contain two Rs.
This was interesting, it seems the problem is just with berry.
You said:
how many times is the letter R used in the word strawberry?
ChatGPT said:
In the word "strawberry," the letter R is used 2 times.
You said:
are you sure?
ChatGPT said:
Yes, I’m sure. In "strawberry," the letter R appears twice.
You said:
how many times does R appear in berry?
ChatGPT said:
In the word "berry," the letter R appears once.
You said:
spell the word berry
ChatGPT said:
The word "berry" is spelled B-E-R-R-Y.
You said:
spell the word berry, counting the number of letter R
ChatGPT said:
Sure! In the word "berry," the spelling is B-E-R-R-Y. There are two instances of the letter R.
A trick I learned recently - you can view youtube videos without the annoying ads by changing the url from youtube.com to yout-ube.com - for example, the very nice Trio for flute oboe and piano by Madeleine Dring at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGeVU1-81BA
becomes
https://www.yout-ube.com/watch?v=GGeVU1-81BA
Unfortunately, going directly to www.yout-ube.com doesn't give you search options.
I've just switched to watching them on Firefox. Adblock still works perfectly there.
Adblock on Firefox works for me too, at least for now. I have also run up against one video where the yout-ube trick fails.
"Oh, Shit -- Kamala Posted Some Policies! And I Bit the Bullet and Read Them. Now you don't have to!"
https://imightbewrong.substack.com/p/oh-shit-kamala-posted-some-policies
Jeff Maurer is a former writer for the Daily Show, so a political obsessive who brings some wise-ass writing skillz to the party. His summary is worth the read, as is the Harris campaign document if you're in a masochistic mood. [I'm still personally trying to recover some of the brain cells that died while plowing through the 2016 Clinton campaign's policy documents.] Some summary takeaways from Maurer:
-- "Is her economic plan Obama-ish or Warren/Sanders-y? In my opinion, this plan panders to the Warren/Sanders wing of the Democratic Party close to the minimum amount possible....When Harris’ plan to deputize the FTC to lower grocery prices caused every living economist to yell “THAT’S DUMB!” loudly, in unison, over-and-over, Harris explained that actually, her big, bold plan was narrow and inconsequential. The plan described in this platform is definitely narrow....basically, Harris is imagining a plan that will prevent Jimmy Dean from jacking up the price of sausage patties during a hurricane, but won’t do much else...."
-- "a mild indication that Harris understands our [federal] budget situation can be found in her section on Social Security and Medicare. She says she’ll “strengthen and protect” the programs, and that she’ll “fight to ensure that Americans can count on getting the benefits they earned.” And that’s what I’d expect any Democrat to say. But Harris doesn’t go above and beyond to forswear cuts....Of course, the reality is that we’ll probably have to accept modest cuts to future beneficiaries as part of a deal to keep the programs solvent. The fact that Harris doesn’t fall all over herself denouncing cuts suggests that she understands that."
-- "This platform is not woke. If Harris had proposed this platform in 2020, there would not have been enough papier-mâché in the world to make all the giant “Kamala the Klanswoman” puppets that lefty protesters would have wanted to make of her....Harris is still definitely a Democrat — I’m cherry-picking stuff that indicates which way she’s leaning and leaving out Democratic boilerplate that could have been lifted from the Mondale campaign. But the woke/not woke question has divided the party for years, and with this platform, Harris is staking out territory on the “not woke” side of the party."
Some various thoughts:
-Kamala thinking she needs to make some effort to appear to lower food prices really undercuts the whole economy good/inflation not a problem during the Biden years narrative.
-No politician in America is ever going to admit that Social Security/Medicare is a giant Ponzi scheme that is going bankrupt and needs cuts. They would never get elected no matter how obvious the former fact is. Her messaging on this one way or another is a nothing burger.
-I guess it's a good sign that Harris feels the need to pander more to the center during an election rather than the fringe. But her Senate voting record, VP tie breaking record, and selection of Walz all point to a commitment to far leftist positions. I don't see why anyone should believe her election campaigning on this point.
I don't think that the congressional voting records are a particularly good indicator of someone being "far left" or "far right" in any particularly meaningful sense. They are, after all, voting on things that are still bound to be well within the general, rather narrow acceptable sphere of politics, they're not voting on "nationalize all businesses" or "deport all nonwhites" or stuff like that.
I would think the complete opposite. It doesn't matter how often a pol says they want to embrace communism or persecute minorities. Their voting on policy is the single thing that makes their views influence the nation.
The question isn't whether the congressional voting records are useful in determining opinion, it's about whether they're useful in defining extremism (or general "farness", if one considers far left/right to be distinct from extreme left/right). A person who is a partisan but still within the range of acceptable opinion might look more "extreme" than a genuine extremist who, due to their fringeness, ends up taking positions that are in odds with the mainline version of their ideology (ie. a hypothetical racist far-right representative who is pro-choice since he believes that it's eugenic and nonwhites do it more anyway).
They’re highly meaningful as indicators of revealed preferences. Politicians of all stripes spend a lot of time endorsing policies that they will never vote for while voting for things they don’t want to talk about.
>But her Senate voting record, VP tie breaking record, and selection of Walz all point to a commitment to far leftist positions
In addition to the already commented upon tie breaking record "evidence" (and note the the VP doesn't act as a free agent when casting those votes -- certainly not if she wants a future in the party), Walz's voting record in the House was to the right of almost every other Democrat. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/timothy_walz/412214#
And let's be serious. A party that has repeatedly gone out of its way to refuse to nominate Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is not going to nominate a "far leftist."
I think the IRA was such a sweeping piece of legislation with so much money allocated that it deserves special mention. I should have mentioned that specifically rather than tie breaking votes in general, fine.
AFAICT, Walz is ranked "right" because most of his activity is associated with veterans affairs. Which doesn't say much about any of his other views, or his governorship.
Are price controls and unrealized gains taxes a center left position these days? By the way, if we like GovTrack, Kamala was the most leftist Senator after Merkley, Gillibrand and Sanders.
>I think the IRA was such a sweeping piece of legislation with so much money allocated that it deserves special mention
Yes, but is it "far left"? Seems unlikely, since, Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema voted for it.
>AFAICT, Walz is ranked "right" because most of his activity is associated with veterans affairs
What do you mean, "most of his activity"? What makes you think that, of all the scores or hundreds of votes each year, the ones specificaly re veterans' affairs were numerous enough to change his ranking in any appreciable fashion? And, do you have any evidence that other Democrats voted more "left" than he did on veterans bills?
I note that the Heritage Foundation scores him at 13 pct, versus 7 for the average Democrat https://heritageaction.com/scorecard/members/W000799/115
From the page you linked!
"The ideology analysis assigns a left–right score to each Member of Congress based on their pattern of cosponsorship. The left–right score reflects the dominant ideological difference or differences among Members of Congress, which changes over time.
In a nutshell, Members of Congress who cosponsor similar sets of bills will get scores close together, while Members of Congress who sponsor different sets of bills will have scores far apart. Members of Congress with similar political views will tend to cosponsor the same set of bills, or bills by the same set of authors, and inversely Members of Congress with different political views will tend to cosponsor different bills."
Walz was the primary sponsor of 5 bills that were passed, all 5 were related to veterans. That site also lists that 67% of bills Walz sponsored were related to "Armed Forces and National Security." So by the metrics GovTrack lists as determining their ideology score, a significant majority of bills sponsored by Walz were related to veterans/armed forces. I assume this skews him much more to the right relative to his views on other issues. Paul also seems to think differently, so maybe I'm wrong here, but the GovTrack ideology ranking is pretty clear.
Huh, most of those scorecards rank votes. But maybe those are by advocacy groups looking at particular sets of bills.
In Congress, Walz supported "pay-as-you-go" budgeting rules, voted against both the bank and automaker bailouts, served on a commission monitoring human-rights violations in China. He also had lib/lefty views on plenty of topics. As a House member he was viewed not as conservative but as bipartisan.
In the Bipartisan Index created by the Lugar Center [the legacy organization of longtime Republican Senator Richard Lugar, who, full disclosure, I voted for and donated to when he ran for president], Walz ranked 20th in the House in the 113rd Congress and 7th in the 114th.
"VP tie breaking record" makes no sense. In 3 1/2 years only one actual proposed law has reached Harris for a tie-breaking vote. Every other instance has been on people nominated for various federal offices, and no VP from any party in US history has cast a tiebreaking vote _against_ their own party's nominee for an office. Never gonna happen either.
The one actual law that Harris was the tiebreaker on was the Infrastructure Reduction Act. Whatever you think of the final compromised version of that bill, one such instance is hardly a meaningful "record".
It represents 100% of her meaningful voting record!
I get your point, I should have said "that one time she cast the deciding vote on the IRA".
Also, great typo: > *Infrastructure* Reduction Act
Hah! I'm going to leave it there
I live and work amongst the people who you call left-wing ideologues. Deep in the heart of Blue America so to speak. Also I have a sibling who proudly says the same and in his case he was Harris's constituent when she was a senator.
From that, two things come to mind as examples of why my brother literally LOL's at the idea that Harris is a progressive (today's term of pride for the worldview that you are referring to):
-- no politician fitting that description has ever chosen to start their career by becoming a front-line prosecutor. Let alone doing that job for a full decade and then becoming a big-city district attorney who aggressively cleared backlogged murder cases, demanded maximum sentences upon conviction, etc. In progressive circles that's roughly as likely a career path as taking an entry-level management job at ExxonMobil or Hobby Lobby.
-- a progressive-base politician going on a national broadcast and talking about being a lifelong _gun_ owner?? Ho ho ho, come on now. That is literally as likely nowadays as a MAGA-based candidate publicly thanking the doctors who carried out his middle-school child's gender-reassignment surgery.
FWIW, I was hesitant to vote for her in 2016 due to her past as a prosecutor. I actually voted against her in the primary.
Would she move center, or merely spout more centrist rhetoric? After the debate, I have no more idea who she is than before it.
Except the only voters that truly count at this point are the centrists, everybody else is long decided.
This is pretty bleak. Do you really think the majority of RW people want to burn everything to the e ground?
I don't know about majority, but there's several very vocal rightwingers on DSL who call for burning everything to the ground.
And ideas like "actually, it's good to default on the debt" or "we should fire all civil servants" do seem to have an alarming amount of currency on the right. IIRC, there was one actual candidate who called for randomly firing 50% of civil servants on day 1.
> This is pretty bleak. Do you really think
this is a valid response to roughly 100% of anomie's comments
Actually, the only way to build greater things is to build on top of other great things. One cannot build pyramids nor skyscrapers starting at the top.
As far as I can tell it's about intra-left signaling. No right-winger is going to vote Harris and none of them are going to take any of these policies seriously or in remotely good faith and vice-versa for Democrats/leftists looking at Trump.
But if you're already a Democrat/leftist, these minor variations could be important. Kamala Harris is woke, by the opinion of some majority of the country (some Democrats and ~99% of Republicans) but how woke she is within the Overton Window of the Democratic coalition is potentially something people care about.
"As far as I can tell it's about intra-left signaling. No right-winger is going to vote Harris and none of them are going to take any of these policies seriously or in remotely good faith and vice-versa for Democrats/leftists looking at Trump."
Have you ever heard of a concept called the swing voter?
Sure -- 20 or 40 years ago, at least in nationally-meaningful numbers.
There are still some swing voters today too, yes. Two of them are mulling it over, the third is waiting til October to tune in and make up her mind.
Hey, no stealing my sarcastic reply.
There's an alternate timeline where Trump said Kamala isn't really Indian because of the one-drop rule.
I know that there is a correlation between IQ and things like test scores but I don't really understand the causality. IQ tests measure things like shape rotation and reaction times. School tests generally measure ability to retain information and critical analysis. These don't look that related. Sure, maybe someone with better reaction times is also better at remembering something for a test but not necessarily. What if they have bad reaction times but are good at storing information that they have spent a while going over? I can imagine someone who does poorly on IQ tests but strong on school tests and vice versa and it doesn't seem like it would even be a rare occurrence.
A test only directly measures how many questions you get right on that test -- and only indirectly measures everything else.
Why do people get questions wrong (on school tests and IQ tests)? Number one reason, they don't care, or they have the belief that "I'm stupid and bad at taking tests" so they act like they don't care. So they rush or guess randomly or panic -- or act like the chess player who blunders and then immediately says "I knew I shouldn't have done that, how could I be so stupid? That's typical me."
Number two reason, because they're missing essential tools, e.g. the ability to read a question closely word for word, or basic logic e.g. process of elimination. Maybe these have to be learnt by a certain age, or your brain can't ever grok them. Or maybe anyone can pick them up, but we just never think to teach them explicitly, or it's un-PC to say "my common sense works better than your common sense," so we don't try to. It always amazes (and saddens) me that 90% of layman can't (or refuse to) understand something as simple as a truth table.
Number three reason, because they lack domain specific knowledge or tools. E.g. the history test asks for the date of such and such battle, and you know it or you don't.
The model I'm sketching is: first you need the will to do well; then the general tools (or to be a good "test taking interface" if you like); and only then the domain specific knowledge. People's "will to do well" on an IQ test and a school exam will be highly correlated, because they depend on self-image and "life strategy" in a similar way. I was always a nerdy type who got most of my praise and self-esteem from doing well on tests, and always similarly motivated to score well. A child who gets their self-esteem from somewhere else, e.g. being cute or making others laugh, is not likely to concentrate as hard on any test -- they'll be thinking about the meta social context, or how unfair it is that they have to take tests when it isn't their strong point, or whatever.
The second part, test taking tools, naturally means a correlation between performances on different tests, and will probably be correlated with the first part as well. I picked up lots of tricks that made me good at taking tests, precisely because I occupied the niche of "child who takes tests very seriously".
The reason for your surprise at the correlation of various test scores is that you assume it's mainly part three, domain specific stuff, that determines performance. But this is not true, because the first two parts are so important, and because on most formal/school tests the content is much thinner/emptier than we like to imagine. If you go through a school physics exam (for example) you'll find that most of it is https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-the-teacher-s-password or use of elementary mathematical tools (plugging numbers into a formula). And if you move to a subject where the tools needed are substantially different (e.g. art, cooking) you no longer expect to see a correlation with IQ.
The relationship between "general test taking skills" and "general intelligence" is complicated. Some things intuitively count as both (basics of formal logic, maths). But it also seems possible to have the former without being generally intelligent -- we have a stereotype of a pedantic nerd who's always technically correct, but always wrong where it matters. And the opposite stereotype, the artsy genius.
[Tangent: I've arrived at this model partly by analogy with the Football Manager video games. In them your virtual football players have mental, physical, and technical attributes (which are just numbers between 1 and 20). Technical attributes include things that seem most obviously correlated with football performance, like passing and dribbling. But (as explained by many strategy guides) your players first need the desire to chase after the ball; then they need the physical attributes to get there; and only then can they use their fancy technical skills. So the first thing to look for in a player is mental strength (determination, work rate, bravery). Players without it will underperform, in the same way that some people do badly on tests despite seeming clever in other ways]
I remember seeing a post a while back arguing that this is the true reason why the Marshmallow Test was correlated with success. It's not really about time preference (which is almost trivial in the case of the marshmallows), but rather testing kids for *desire to perform on tests*.
What makes the phenomenon interesting/non-trivial is precisely that these abilities have a statistical relationship with each other when it seems non-obvious that they should.
And it goes beyond grades and IQ. IIRC how much money you earn, how long you live, how healthy you are, how good your reflexes are, how good you are at your job (even if your job is being an athlete), and I seem to recall even how happy you are and how many friends you have are all correlated. All good things go together. More specifically, there seems to be a single hidden scalar variable 'g', that correlates with almost all things generally considered 'good'. It correlates the most with things like IQ and being good at math, but surprisingly little is actually exempt.
The common guess seems to be that 'g'='general intelligence'. Rather than just being an amalgamation of millions of disconnected heuristics and skills that have nothing to do with each other, human brains to some extent meaningfully vary in how good they are at information processing and problem solving in general. And people who are better at problem solving tend to be better at getting what they want, hence the correlation with all things generically considered 'good' or desirable.
(My memories of these statistics are somewhat vague. I could be wrong on some of these points)
How happy you are is not correlated with IQ. If you look at the correlation of IQ and the big 5 personality traits, neuroticism (sadness, moodiness, and emotional instability), and IQ has a tiny negative correlation. It is statistically significant (i.e., not just a chance occurrence in the group studied), but too tiny to be of any real life significance. The correlation is -0.09.
Neuroticism and happiness are probably negatively correlated, but they're not the same thing.
First google result I got is this, claiming positive association. Supposed sample size 6.7k. Did not check it at all: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22998852/
I agree that neuroticism and unhappiness are not the same thing. Here are the reasons to still use neuroticism as a stand-in for trait unhappiness.
The neuroticism measure is well-validated and well studied. I am not at all sure there are measures of happiness or unhappiness that are anything like as solid and trustworthy. I have never seen any, & I’m a psychologist. There are definitely well-validated measures of depression, but depression is not the same thing as unhappiness either.
The happiness measure in the study you cited is briefly described in the abstract of the study, and sounds like it was a single question: “Happiness was measured using a validated question on a 3-point scale.” Even if they are valid (i.e., consistent over time, resistant to circumstances that pull for a certain kind of answer, correlated with other measures you’d expect them to etc.) single-item questionnaires do not capture a big enough, rich enough chunk of the thing being measured to have good construct validity. It’s fine for a happiness test to ask whether the subject is happy most of the time. But the test is better if it asks several similar but related questions, eg, “ T/F: When life is hard, I still have an overall positive feeling about things,” “people I know comment on my positive outlook” etc etc. Also, what we want this study to be looking for is trait happiness — a general lifelong tendency to be happy. It’s not clear whether the test used in the study asked about that, or asked about subject’s mood at the time they were taking the test. So while I agree that a test of happiness as a trait would be a better measure to use if you’re studying relationship between IQ and trait happiness, I think at present neuroticism gets closer to trait unhappiness than a singe “validated question.”
As for the measures of intelligence, the study you cite estimated “verbal IQ . . . using the national adult reading test.” National adult reading test no doubts correlates with verbal IQ, but it’s almost certainly not a slam dunk high correlation, and verbal IQ itself is not slam dunk correlated with full scale IQ, which is what we mean by intelligence. The intelligence measure your study used is just inadequate
So why is there a stereotype of the depressed intellectual? You know, just look at Zizek. Is it possible that the correlation of IQ and happiness tops out somewhere?
After much time thinking about this, I think that being a standard deviation outside anything makes living, functioning, and forming relationships in a society more difficult regardless of whether that standard deviation is objectively good.
I went to school with a few prodigies and while they were happier than average while participating in their field of choice, their lives were harder the rest of the time. They had different priorities than most other people which made relating to others difficult. They were often perceived as either weird or threatening because of their talent. Values they cared deeply about--like excellence, the importance of art, or work ethic--were routinely derided and dismissed by other people and weaponized to bully them or "knock them down a peg." And when they finally found like-minded groups with similar interests, there was still a lot of underlying stress because they knew they were ultimately competing for the same tiny pool of prestigious jobs with tiny margins for error. I think this is true at the top of most fields.
The world tends to be built for the "average" person, so the less average you are, the more frustrating it's going to be, regardless of the reasons behind your difference.
I really want to research that splits up different types of high IQ people. If you use your intelligence to ruminate all the time, you’re probably going to be depressed. But if you use it found a successful company, you’re probably going to be happier.
I'm not sure I'd call those 2 groups different types of intelligence. Can't it be that some intelligent people are anxious and unhappy and some are active and optimistic? Or that one intelligent person can be depressed for a couple years, then pull out of it and be active and optimistic? Seems like the gloomy - cheerful axis might well be at right angles to the smart - dumb one.
I meant high IQ types split up in other ways, like personality. For example, I'm sure that extroverted high IQ types are much happier than introverted high IQ types.
Perhaps some types of people are more visible / easier to remember than others? There are many depressed people, but only those who are exceptional in some other traits become famous.
I like how Greg Clark just dances around the whole debate by calling this huge cluster of correlated good things "social competence."
How does social competence explain superior shape rotation skills? Let me guess, little kids with great social skills spend more time riding the carousel with their friends, so they get more experience at seeing things turn around...
IQ, or at least the g factor, is basically an attempt to explain why all these tests correlate in ways they intuitively shouldn't. Basically, we could imagine someone with bad read reaction times but good memory or someone with bad SAT scores but good grades but these people are fairly rare.
So, start with the SAT and the math and verbal sections. It's easy to imagine someone doing very well on the math section and poorly on the verbal or vice versa but in reality these two scores are fairly highly correlated. Not perfectly and people do tend to be better at one but it tends to be more 750 Math & 710 Verbal than 750 Math & 510 Verbal (which is ~the national average). This observation is non-intuitive but pretty persistent. Over time, people have noted that you can just keep expanding it to things like AP test scores, grades, educational attainment, and even shape rotation and reaction tests. In fact, super weirdly, we can give children shape rotation tests at a young age and make educated, not perfect, predictions. That's not to say that there's not variance, there is...but an honor roll student who's bad at math tends to be bad at math relative to other honor roll students, not average students.
People then used some, frankly, pretty odd statistical techniques to determine the g-factor and then people fought about it a bunch but at its core everyone is just trying to explain this phenomenon. Our best explanation is some kind of underlying intelligence or "IQ" or general IQ, which is almost defined as this counter-intuitive correlation we observe. The 2nd best observation is common cultural factors, eg upper-middle class kids get advantages, and they do, but this gets undercut really fast when these observations replicate in really alien cultures like China and South Korea, which makes common socio-economic factors look really lame. Like, if a shape rotation test at age 5 is a good predictor of SAT scores in the US and South Korea at age 17, that's far more likely to be some underlying genetic thing than a cultural thing.
In your first paragraph, you say that intuitively the tests of different cognitive abilities shouldn't be correlated. It seems natural to me that mental abilities should be fairly tightly correlated, at a statistical if not a personal level. The data supports this - why is it unintuitive?
It's like saying that intuitively an Olympic swimmer shouldn't be any better at track events than average, since they weren't selected to be good at track. This is false - they're in peak condition and likely to outperform 95% or more of the population.
Because it's not Brandon's intuitive understanding and I'm responding to him. He's asking about someone doing poorly on IQ tests and doing well in school, which is certainly possible but highly unusual, which indicates that his intuition is that they're not correlated. Your intuition is different, so if you asked I would phrase it differently.
I wouldn’t say that my intuition is that they aren’t correlated. It’s more like that they shouldn’t necessarily be so. For example, I’ve seen videos of chimpanzees showing how they do really good on reaction time tests. Obviously, they would do much worse on other parts of an IQ test. So it’s clearly not some kind of scientific law that these things have to be correlated but they apparently they are in humans. Without having a deep understanding of the causality, we’re missing something fundamental about why that correlation exists.
The things you'd think would not correlate very well with ability to reason, have insight, grasp complex ideas etc -- they actually do correlate less well with tests of those things. The most uncognitive-seeming subtest on the WAIS is Digit Span: They read you long numbers, and then you say them back. I believe average Digit Span is 7, but the test contains numbers with as many as 11 digits, and some people can remember those. And score on Digit Span correlates only 0.57 with full score. If course *only* .57 is aa startlingly high correlation, given that remembering a bunch of digits seems pretty useless, just a party trick, and like it doesn't have much to do with the reasoning powers, etc. we think of as indicating intelligence. That's why WoolyAl was talking about *g*, general intelligence. There are a lot of tasks that don't have much in common except that they are done with the mind, yet ability on one predicts ability on the others pretty well, as though there's some brain quality that's the one ring to rule them all -- rule all the subskills, i mean.
Makes sense - cheers.
IQ tests measure a bunch of things, many of them much more obviously connected to the abilities needed to do well in school than the 2 things you name -- reasoning, doing math word problems, understanding how 2 things are alike or different, vocabulary. I recommend looking up the WAIS (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale) in Wikipedia. IQ tests predict school performance fairly well, but of course a number of other things besides raw mental abilities influence how well a kid does in school: how good his teacher is, how good the teaching materials used, how much school manages to capture his interest, how he's doing overall, whether his parents expect him to do well and make an effort to help him do well.
I’ve never taken a full on psychologist administered IQ test so you could be right.
And while some of those others factors you mentioned are obviously important, I’m more interested in just the cognitive ability aspect.
You don't have to take the test. Just read the Wiki entry on the WAIS. There's also easy-to-find info about how much each subtest correlates with each of the other and with full-scale score.
Welp. Someone illustrated Scott's old post about Haiti with not very interesting photo material and put it up on X, with the credit to Scott's original post is at the very end and hard to find. I'm not sure exactly how annoying this is, but I figured I'd let Scott know:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1833114648758866029.html
(This got picked up by a conservative aggregator that has a non-trivial number of readers.)
Can you have a robustly functioning democratic system, in which one party consistently wins for a long time? Or is this sort of effect a clear sign of either some sort of cheating, or at least that something has gone very wrong?
An example of this might be the mayoral elections in Chicago, which have been won by Democrats since the 1930s. (Strictly speaking, the current process is non-partisan, bu the winners have clearly been people who moved in Democratic Party circles.)
One might expect a party that has had a long string of losses to change the policies it backs and the candidates it puts up for election until it finds a winning formula, unless something is keeping it from making this sort of adjustment.
On the other hand, if one party keeps winning for a long time, it might come to be seen as the only viable party, and everyone with any political ambitions would migrate over to it. And if it had all the serious talent, the party might be expected to keep winning, in a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy, leaving the other parties a bunch of tiny protest movements for those so wedded to their positions they are not willing to accept the compromises of dealing with the major party.
> Can you have a robustly functioning democratic system, in which one party consistently wins for a long time?
Sure, of course. The line between "different parties within one coalition" and "different factions within one party" is fuzzy at best.
In the U.S., at least, the equilibrium is to have two major parties of roughly equal power nationwide. Because the country isn't homogeneous, this ends up with a number of states and local areas dominated by one party or the other.
It's actually quite normal in a democratic system for one party to be hegemonic. This doesn't mean they win every time but that they do win most of the times. LDP in Japan, Social Democrats in Sweden at least until 2006, Tories in UK since WW1 and Christian Democrats in Italy during the Cold War are famous examples. In the US, the Republicans were generally hegemonic from Lincoln to Hoover and then the Democrats from Roosevelt to LBJ, at least.
It's the current situation where most Western countries have constant, down-to-wire competitive elections that's expectional, and its main reason is probably the detachment of parties from the wide, established social groups (churches, labor unions etc.) that used to underpin their support and the increasing use of very precise consulting and microdata to determine the minimum amount of yielding and pandering to the electorate they must do to get past the finish line.
I propose Bavaria, where the CSU always wins. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landtagswahlen_in_Bayern
The Tories in the UK have had a very good run, with occasional breaks like the one now.
> One might expect a party that has had a long string of losses to change the policies it backs and the candidates it puts up for election until it finds a winning formula, unless something is keeping it from making this sort of adjustment.
One thing that can prevent that is the nationalization of politics. California Republicans have not attempted to moderate to win state elections because everything is national nowadays, and if Trump-lovers happen to be a minority in the state, so be-it. If anything, there's an evaporative cooling effect because any politician who is ambitious and ideologically flexible will switch to the winning side.
Back before the parties were so polarized, and before politics followed centralization of power toward the national level, there would sometimes be "one-party towns" where the actual election would be the party primary, in which all serious politicians participated, regardless of how closely their personal ideology matched the official ideology of the national party.
Japan. The LDP almost always wins. But opposition parties have won, and can win if the LDP royally screws up.
Arguably, Japan has the best advantages of a one-party state (no political polarization, or politicization of private life) without the biggest downside (no way to hold the one-party accountable).
Some of that is due to overrepresentation of rural areas in the Japanese parliament.
It's easy for a party to never win. The Whigs have been out of power for, what, 150 years?
In a healthy democracy, I expect the one giant party that wins all the time to eventually split into separate factions along their internal faction lines, since there's no outside threat to keep them together.
Isn't it surprising that the Singapore PAP hasn't split by now? Every organisation has internal factions and disagreements about who should be in charge. You'd think that eventually an internal disagreement should blossom into an actual party split, with each side convinced that they'd be the ones to win the people's support in the post-split election.
In places like China the mono-party doesn't split because everyone understands that the losers of the split and their families will wind up imprisoned, tortured, dead. But Singapore has sufficiently robust democratic institutions that this shouldn't happen, they'll just wind up as an opposition party.
I always figured Lee was holding things together by sheer personal awesomeness. He's been gone nine years at this point. I'm not sure whether any cracks have appeared in the PAP facade, but perhaps not enough time has passed.
Yeah, this is my bet too - something of a lingering respect / not wanting to mess with a good thing.
I mean, if your winning horse literally took you from third world to first in 30 years, would YOU want to start messing with it? He's the most revered politician in the world for a reason.
I read a lot of Trollope for escape and it is clear in his books that he views the Whigs ("Liberals" by his time, I believe?) as destined to prevail forever, and the Tories as a historical curiosity, albeit with aesthetics on their side. It is not precisely that he sees that there is nothing to conserve, but rather that utopia is far off and so there will be for a long while yet those good things that he in fact would have grieved the loss of. He need never see utopia. (This raises some questions, obviously, lol.) But that those things/people will not fit into the future and must go, he is certain.
Of course, the Conservative party of today bears no resemblance to that in his day.
As an environmentalist and conservative, I obviously have no one to vote for as this idea that "nothing will be conserved, or should be" has very much taken possession of the discourse. In fact, nothing has shocked me more than the calm acceptance on all sides now, that nature is something we "choose" to exist or not, that it is without value except to those who fancy it, that it probably will be mostly banished but the techno-future is so interesting who will miss plants and animals? A few old Boomers. Wildlife has their little niches - on the sufferance of people who are little familiar with it and couldn't care less.
I will vote nonetheless, probably, but merely in the faint hope of sending the future a signal, in case they are still writing history books in the future. It will obviously be a very crude signal, perhaps hardly worth doing.
The answer depends on whether you consider Singapore to be a functioning democratic system.
Democracy always fails minorities, and the smaller the minority, the bigger the failure.
Here's my biweekly COVID update.
1. We're on the downside of the current KP.x (mostly KP.3x) wave in the US.
2. Right now there's no variant with the growth potential to set off a secondary wave.
3. Maybe the descendants of XDV or XEC will be our winter wave (and the southern hemisphere's summer wave).
4. The CDC confirmed a H5N1 case in MO where the patient had no known contact with dairy cattle. The patient recovered, but this is concerning.
5. A brief Mpox update: Clade I hasn't been spotted in the US yet. Clade II is still circulating in the background.
6. Some links to interesting studies and threads on X.
On Threadreader...
https://t.co/F0vPB0ZEj8
On X...
https://x.com/beowulf888/status/1833299582467641559
The AI art Turing test is a very good idea. Honestly seems a little strange that nobody has set it up already.
It'll be interesting to see if abstract art created by a human has some quality to it that abstract art created by a machine lacks. My sense is very strongly that it does, but it'll be good to run a test. I also think some people will very clearly see the difference between human and AI art, while others won't pick it up at all.
Most AI art and images are very obvious, but I wouldn't be surprised if skilled prompters could make something hard to spot.
It really strongly depends on a whole bunch of different factors, i.e. the style of art, the competence of the artist, the perception and interests of the person viewing it.
My sense from experimenting with AI art is that it has a peculiar deadness to it, which can be good if that's what you want. I've been using it specifically to make shoggoths for a roleplaying game I'm working on. It's great at Lovecraftian horrors because they're supposed to be mutated and shapeless, and it's actually good if they have a horrible dead expression of inhuman evil in their eyes.
Can it be cute or relaxing though? Not sure yet. We really need to drill down more specifically into what aesthetic qualities it can capture and what it can't.
I can tell you what this video ain't. It ain't no AI voices and burned-in animated captions, it ain't me sitting around the house talking to a camera, it ain't no slide show disguised as a video, and it ain't no unenthusiastic presenter stating the obvious. Or I can tell you what it is. It's me (American, irreverent but kind) and my pardner (Australian, cute, funny) traveling the country, rediscovering patriotism, and improvising a remarkably eloquent and inspirational speech bit by bit as we go. The weird thing about making a documentary is, you don't know what it's about until it's over. It turns out, this one's about the American Dream. I've done a lot of things in my life, and out of all the things I've done, I'm most proud of this. You can cheat by watching this 8 minute version where it's just the American Dream speech ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfPVpLfTUDg ) but if you do that you'll miss the serendipity of the outlandishly glamorous Coleman Theater in the middle of Nowhere Oklahoma, the wife of the dead chainsaw carver in Sullivan Missouri who's kept his shop open for 20 years and never remarried, my purchase of a steel-tongued drum followed by my improvising alongside a player of a native American flute in Oatman Arizona, and the abandoned houses of Amboy California where the walls have stories that they can't tell so I have to do it for them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHlSDE7MjbI
> the wife of the dead chainsaw carver in Sullivan Missouri who's kept his shop open for 20 years and never remarried
God, now I've got this image of this woman trying to fake chainsaw carvings for 20 years without the locals catching on.
Hahaha it's more that, the "shop" is mostly a museum. Her story made my cry!
I recommend to y'all: r/PictureGame.
It's a strangely rationalist place (sometimes at least) whilst having barely anything to do with the rationalist community. That's all I'm gonna say.
I'll let y'all find out what it's actually about.
To save people a click, it seems like the game is to identify the physical location of a distorted photo. So a bit like Geogessr.
Thank you.
You seem to be assuming that an abortion has the net effect of one fewer life in the world. There are a number of studies which claim to show that, given two pregnant women of similar age, socioeconomic status, martial status etcetera, if one has an abortion and the other doesn't, then the woman who has the abortion will have more children later. So you aren't losing net QALYs by having an abortion, you are just shifting them to a later child, who will quite likely be a happier one.
There was a study Ozy wrote about here: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/lets-read-a-study-the-impact-of-denying which suggested the exact oppostite effect. Women assigned to a male judge were granted abortions 38% of the time compared to 58% with women judges, but they had on average 0.5 more children - a lot more than 1 per denied abortion. Quite possibly abortion statistically leads to greater than one fewer life in the world (greater even than the slightly over one accounting for twins etc.).
Why does that argument stop applying after the child is born?
I've never heard of such studies.
For many people their idea of abortion is clouded by propagandistic media portrayals. They always imagine abortion patients as childless women, usually very young, when actually 59% of abortion patients have at least one previous birth:
https://www.guttmacher.org/report/characteristics-us-abortion-patients-2014
I assume this was meant as a reply to my comment, so I'll go ahead and respond. If you believe that each abortion will, on net, result in more QALYs than not aborting then I agree it would make sense from a utilitarian perspective to support abortion.
It doesn't really seem likely though? The USA aborts between 6-9 hundred thousand fetus's each year, do you really think that if we aborted 0 over the last ten years our current population would be lower?
Why do restaurants hire attractive women as hostesses? I would pay extra for an ugly hostess.
1) it attracts men to the restaurant because they are sexually attracted to her
2) people want to be associated with things that beautiful people are associated with as it makes them feel higher status
3) beautiful people are aesthetically pleasing
You need to have attractive hostesses to keep Tyler Cowen out of your restaurant.
Attractive people get more tips, so they have a comparative advantage in tipped professions where their beauty is on display.
Since when do hostesses get tipped?
In many restaurants hostesses are tipped by the wait staff.
Yeah, but my tip to the waiter is totally independent of the hostess.
Not uncommon at some larger high end restaurants, eg. steakhouses. It’s a good way to ensure you’re seated quickly and at a nice table.
Aesthetically, and almost definitionally, people on average prefer beauty to ugliness?
A sign of status is to have people waiting on you hand and foot, and the more valuable they're be in a slave market, the higher the status?
While the hostess may be prettier than most female customers, she serves them, therefore they are clearly better than her.
OK, that makes sense. I have absolutely none of this domination drive and actively dislike being waited on, so of course I wouldn't get it.
It's not even necessarily a domination drive, but I do think it's connected to the "waited on" thing you don't like? It's like when someone you respect says that they respect you, there's a bit of an emotional zing? In this case, it's "someone attractive is treating you as though you are important". It's not that they're forced to view you as important, it's that they do so without any conscious or visible coercion at all, so your hindbrain (or at least, other people's hindbrains) merely registers "hey, I must be doing something right if this person smiles when they see me". (With tipping at a regular spot, it ideally becomes a self-sustaining loop - you tip big, they like you and treat you well, you continue to tip big, and so forth.)
Most status and power hierarchies are temporary and situational - I rarely if ever see anyone outside the Anglosphere believing that being served or serving someone at a bar or restaurant is indicative of something other than an ephemeral and contingent transactional relationship.
Sure! But people will happily pay money for "ephemeral and contingent transactional" relationships, or simply experiences. It's like a public semi-consensual BDSM scene. Or heroin.
Why would you prefer an ugly hostess?
If I'm in a restaurant, it is likely that I'm on a date. I desire to believe that my date is the most attractive woman on the premises, and I'd appreciate it if the restaurant helped out a bit.
I don't consider myself a rationalist, so there's a lot of stuff in this blog and the comments that I disagree with or just don't get, but this is the first time something strikes me as deeply alien. It's a level of insecurity or something adjacent to insecurity that fascinates, disturbs and scares me. Would you also prefer worse food so you can feel like you or your date is the better cook or does this only apply to attractiveness?
If my date cooked a dinner for me, and I instead went to a restaurant, that would be a bit wrong, wouldn't it?
That said, if I am with someone in a restaurant, I don't spend much time looking at the waitresses, so it doesn't matter to me. (Unless, dunno, they would be super pretty girls walking around topless, so I couldn't help being distracted. In which case, that would be a bad environment to go on a date. Unless she is polyamorous. It's complicated.)
I'm not a rationalist either.
No, this is most relevant to first dates, where I know nothing about her cooking ability. I'm not really a "food person" anyway.
If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, never make a pretty girl your wife. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=make+an+ugly+woman+your+wife
"But she sure can cook."
I suspect doing so reduces disruption. There can be a fair amount of stress and anger while waiting for a seat. Men wont yell at an attractive hostess. Your own preference for the ugly host gestures towards this.
What? Who said anything about me yelling at anyone?
Just explain to the woman you’re with that her slightly large nose and smallish breasts didn’t bother you til you saw how pretty the hostess was, but now that you have you may come across as a bit dour. If she isn’t empathic and kind about that she’s not the one for you anyhow
That is certainly an efficient solution!
Why do you think they hire attractive women as hostesses?
...because basically every hostess I've seen has been of above-average attractiveness? Do you believe that's a coincidence?
I meant, why do YOU think that they hire attractive women? I was asking you to come up with reasons yourself.
It's normal for people to react to situations in ways that are the exact opposite of mine for reasons that are inexplicable to me. If it made sense, I wouldn't have asked. It seems like your ability to understand me isn't much better.
Maybe extroverted people apply for hostess jobs and the reasn they are extroverted is because they have been liked by people throughout their life for being attractive
Because neither the restaurant, the hostess, nor the other patrons care at all about anyone's opinion of the hostesses physical endowments (if this confuses you, consider that this works in both directions). She isn't there to be ogled, or not.
That...goes strongly against everything I've heard about how the restaurant industry works.
You should fly United.
You know, as someone who frequently flies United, I have literally never registered the attractiveness of otherwise of flight attendants.
Recurring nightmare about changing planes at LAX and theyve not given you enough time to get the departure terminal ... yes, have the nightmare.
im not sure if I can blame united for changing planes in Chicago and the flights delayed because the runway is covered in snow because of course it is, its Chicago ... might be some other airline.
And the rime we're diverted to Gander or somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Canada and they cant repressurise the hydraulics to take off again because gthey dont have the right hoses, and then the pilot tells you not to worry they have a solution ... and course you are worrying, because youre imagining the maintenance guys doing something creative with duct tape...
This rant about LAX dubious hydraulics brought to you by United Airlines. fly the Friendly Skies.
Or if youre really unlucky, Shuttle by United,.
PS. yes, yes, Im sure whatever they did to the hydraulics to get that plane back in the air was perfectly safe.
And ORD is a hub for United, so the story about getting snowbound in Chicago probably was United, though I'm not 100% sure.
Fine. Make your hub be someplace notorious for getting snowbound.
As a frequent United flier, I was not prepared for this level of brutality.
As a frequent United, flier which level of brutality were you prepared for?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo
They don't want my money?
I haven't seen a "Classified Ads" post in a while, so here comes a bit of mild self-promotion. I have a Substack just starting up named "Collective Rationality" which covers Ethics (not utilitarian), AI (argues that 'alignment' is the wrong approach to reduce P(DOOM)), and Singularity Economics (We are prolly in a world of sh*t). Take a look if it sounds interesting.
Why aren't utilitarians mostly pro-life?
I wrote a Substack post about this (https://open.substack.com/pub/flyinglionwithabook/p/why-arent-utilitarians-all-pro-life), but the basic argument isn't hard to sum up. Utilitarians shouldn't care whether a fetus is a person with rights, they should care about utility. And a 5 week old fetus has about 58 years of expected life ahead of her (current US expected lifespan at birth, adjusted down due to a 5 week old fetus having around a 20% of miscarrying before birth). Does it really seem plausible that any loss of utility the mother will experience carrying the child to birth would outweigh the net utility of 58 years of human life? That seem preposterous.
Utlilitarians seem to value saving lives, and stopping an abortion saves a heckuva lot of QALYs! Yet it seems to me that all the ultilitarians I meet are pro-choice. I can understand the pro-choice position from a deontological perspective, but can't see how to make it work from a utilitarian one. Even if you somehow knew that all the kids would have been aborted would be abused and neglected, then the utility maximizing option is to give the kids up for adoption. I mean, utilitarians don't think we should kill kids that are being abused right now, right? Then why would killing a kid that only has a possibility of being abused be acceptable?
I'm sure utilitarians must have discussed this before, and I would appreciate some insight. As it stands I can't square that circle.
Exactly the same argument leads to the question "Why aren't utilitarians more pro-rape?".
The answer, of course, is that humans whose moral calculus entails creating as many non-suicidal humans as possible don't actually exist - some people say they think like that, but no-one follows the idea to its logical conclusions.
I can understand a utilitarian not wanting to say that it's morally obligatory to create as many lives as possible; but that's not the situation with an abortion. The life has already been created with an abortion, if we do nothing we can expect the result to be (at week 5) 58 QALYs, and if we intervene we expect to lose those 58 QALYs. How can a utilitarian justify taking an action that results in the loss of 58 QUALYs?
This might be paywalled, but here's a relevant section: https://substack.com/@thingofthings/p-147890708
"I always found the violinist argument a weak argument. Of course you’re supposed to save the violinist, I said. He’s a person! It’s just nine months.
Then I got pregnant.
It was very much a wanted pregnancy, and my child is currently a healthy, happy six-year-old. But at some point, probably between the two months I spent unable to do anything but read undemanding fiction and the time I vomited out the window of an car on the highway so I didn’t mess up the Uber driver’s upholstery, I realized that forcing anyone to go through this against their will is an atrocity.
I think this is the truth behind the slogan “no uterus, no opinion.” You don’t lose your right to do moral reasoning based on your internal organs. And ideally everyone is capable of exercising the moral imagination without personal experience. But some people—like I was—are stupid."
To clarify, after experiencing the pain caused by pregnancy you concluded that it was possible for that pain to outweigh the utility gained from the expected life of the child?
That wasn't by me, that was by Ozzy Brennan.
On the other hand, I liked it enough to post it.
There's at least a bit of a problem with utilitarianism discounting the utility which actually exists compared to the utility of hypothetical people.
As with any utilitarian calculation, just fudge the numbers until they line up with your biases.
I hope your argument here is that utilitarians are dumb for assuming that all QALYs are the same.
The true utilitarian perspective - absent all the algebraic navel gazing - is that if a woman thinks it's a good idea for her to have an abortion in order to prevent decades of suffering, she's always correct in that assumption. *She* won't have to suffer all the conditions associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and (almost certainly) parenthood, and the fetus won't have to suffer growing up in the sub-optimal environment the mother did not believe to be compatible with thriving.
Your hypothetical utilitarians have it exactly backwards. Medical abortions are a tool to *prevent* decades of human suffering before it can even be experienced. That's why God/nature spontaneously aborts nonviable fetuses in 20-50% of all pregnancies.
I don't really have an argument here, just a confusion. Are you saying that so many human lives are net negative in terms of utility (as in, contain more suffering than happiness or whatever utility metric you use) that letting mother's choose whether those lives continue beyond the womb is justified?
I'm saying that not all human lives are equally likely to be pleasant enough to be "worth" living, and medical abortion is a great tool for *guaranteeing* that a woman's baby will not be born into circumstances which the mother has deemed likely to be miserable for child (or is careless enough not to care about the circumstances into which the child is born, which is even more likely to lead to misery). And that's before we even address sparing a woman the misery of an unwanted pregnancy and delivery.
This isn't a problem. Nature routinely automatically disposes of fetuses with genetic abnormalities which would make life very unpleasant or impossible; why on earth shouldn't human beings do the same in response to their environment?
And nobody is ever just short-sighted? Selfish in the moment, but possibly a good parent? Do people not generally consider life a net positive, even in conditions of gross poverty? In virtually every case that a woman chooses abortion, the prospective life of the child would be worse than never having been born?
1. So rarely that abortion must never be prohibited.
2. So rarely that abortion must never be prohibited.
3. Irrelevant.
4. Yes.
If you were convinced otherwise on 1-4, would you still believe that abortion must never be prohibited?
Darn, I was hoping that all the parodies and complaints a while back had killed the "why don't utilitarians hold my political views?" genre.
It will always come back: utilitarians claim to want the best outcomes, everyone believes their beliefs are the best (or they would believe something else instead) so of course people will always wonder why utilitarians don’t agree with them on everything!
You're giving an argument for why total utilitarians should be pro-natalist and then acting as if abortion is the only pro-natalist policy imaginable. Many total utilitarians are pro-natalist but recognize that banning abortion is a pro-natal policy that has a lot of negatives (dysgenics, the lack of respect for liberty, cultural considerations) that other pro-natal policies don't.
I'm not sure I'm arguing that total utilitarian's should be pro-natalist: I don't fully understand the arguments against the Repugnant Conclusion, but I'm willing to trust that you can have a utilitarianism that avoids it. I'm just confused how, in the case of a particular abortion, you can justify destroying so much expected future utility. You're saying that banning abortion would have other bad effects that outweigh the expected future utility lost, which is a sensible position. I disagree with it (I think it's unlikely that legal abortion produces enough utility to outweigh losing 34,800,000 million QALYs every year) but it does make sense.
I guess a possible reply would be that the individual who would eventually experience those QALYs doesn't exist yet at that point, because individual consciousness likely hasn't coalesced at the fetus level, and that applying utilitarianism to not-yet-existing individuals doesn't work in any kind of sane or reliable way.
But I'm not a utilitarian by any means, so who knows.
Utility to whom? From the point of view of the future person the fetus might become, the utility of birth is very high. From the mother's point of view, other considerations (such as her own health) begin to weaken the utility value. As you move away in social distance from the fetus/future person, the utility of their birth becomes weaker and weaker. Some have argued that it can even reach a negative value (if, for example, that region is overpopulated).
Net utility, considering the mother and the fetus and society. If you believe that the typical human life is net positive utility, then I don't see how a utilitarian can justify ending a human life at such an early stage (EDIT: Unless somehow ending that life results in higher net utility). If you believe that the typical human life is net negative utility, then wouldn't that make murdering people (or at least the particularly sad ones) the right action to take? Most utilitarian' don't seem to believe this.
Wouldn't we assume, for starters, that an unwanted childbirth has lower net utility than a wanted childbirth? If an unwanted birth might be replaced by a wanted birth, or by some fraction of a wanted birth, on average, how would we score that?
Unwanted teen pregnancies, at least, are absolutely atypical in a negative sense from a utilitarian standpoint.
This topic has been addressed better elsewhere in ACX. But personally, I tend to believe that the notion of Utilitarianism just isn't well applied to this situation and most Utilitarians aren't trying to maximize the number of births till they get to an almost-tragedy-of-the-commons type state where an additional birth finally registers as net overall negative to human happiness. I don't think that's what the ethical framework is even for.
Utilitarianism might be useful for exploring the various changes in sexual practices which result from restrictions on abortion, which are significant. It's debatable to what extent various abortion restrictions increase population growth, but population growth absent abortion is significantly less than the current population plus aborted fetuses, given access to other means of contraception.
I think that strongly restricting abortion has a definite negative impact on women's access to healthcare since there are certain interventions, like the removal of a dead fetus, which potentially place the law between a woman and her doctor.
I tend to be pro choice since, absent very strong contrary evidence, I assign a high degree of utility to people's individual choices, in and of themselves. I'm not personally interested in utilitarianism as the path to authoritarianism.
"If you believe that the typical human life is net negative utility, then wouldn't that make murdering people (or at least the particularly sad ones) the right action to take?'
I tend to default strongly to people's individual choices. There may be some exceptions to that, like with transitory suicidal thoughts. But mostly, since the majority of the human experience is obscure to me, I assume that people are mostly rational actors. Even if that's not true, it's a default and exceptions have to be strongly argued for. In the case of abortion, even though you can argue that many unwanted births which result in children eventually become "wanted" that's, admittedly, not enough to persuade me, by itself, that the choice was the "correct" one. Because I'm suspicious of the accuracy of those reports. They seem to me like cope.
(I'm certainly not a strict utilitarian. I do think that the philosophy can be useful as a perspective.)
You make an interesting argument.
That being said, I think there's a classic discussion point on abortion that applies here, maybe even more for utilitarians than for non-utilitarians.
And that is this - outlawing something doesn't necessarily mean it will now cease to exist. If you outlaw abortion, it will likely cause an abortion black market, which will likely be less safe and more dangerous to the women who make use of it than a legal abortion provider would be.
So, it is at least conceivable that outlawing abortion might not cause a major reduction in the number of abortions, while also making abortions more dangerous and harmful for women. In other words, it's at least conceivable that the net utilitarian effect to outlawing abortion will be negative, that it will cause (slightly?) more harm than good overall, even from the perspective of wanting to save as much human life as possible.
The old line of "abortion should be safe, legal, and rare" might make the most sense from a utilitarian perspective. While perhaps also promoting adoption as a good alternative while not challenging the legality of abortion.
My own views on abortion are somewhat mixed. I can understand why utilitarians would not want to outlaw abortions.
That being said, I do find it a bit odd when utilitarians seem to be pro-abortion in a general sense rather than just thinking it should be legal (it's quite possible to dislike something while still thinking it shouldn't be outlawed).
I think your comment is sensible: I disagree that outlawing abortion (except in cases of a threat to the life of the mother) would result in net negative utility compared to keeping it legal, but that's just a factual disagreement. It's an understandable position to have as a utilitarian.
That argument only holds for utilitarians who accept the so-called Repugnant Conclusion, that adding more people can be a net positive even if it reduces average utility. If you're trying to optimize average utility, then it comes down to a question of whether or not the fetus is already a person or just a potential person whose existence isn't morally baked in to the calculus yet.
It was my understanding that the repugnant conclusion is about potential lives, but a fetus is an actual human life. It’s here right now, not hypothetically or potentially. I’m pretty sure utilitarians who reject the repugnant conclusion don’t think it’s fine to kill humans who already exist.
Well now we're back to the ordinary (boring, non-utilitarian) abortion debate over whether a fetus is in some sense an "actual human life" or a "potential human life".
Grumble.
I wish people would use the term "human person" rather than "human life" in this context. A fetus obviously has human DNA and is obviously alive - and this is true of every muscle cell in each of our bodies. And no one (AFAIK) sheds a tear when a single muscle cell dies.
The ordinary interminable debate is when to count the fetus as a person.
A muscle cell is not considered an organism, but biologically a fetus is; it's a human organism at one of the earliest stages of development, just like a sapling is a baby oak and a fertilized egg is a very young chicken.
This isn't scientifically controversial, pick up any textbook on human development and it'll say the same thing.
Many Thanks for the reply! Personally, I don't find that a very persuasive distinction. Both a muscle cell and a zygote can be maintained in Petri dishes. To maintain either a mass of muscle cells (beyond what diffusion can support) or a fetus requires blood circulation, incoming oxygen and nutrients, outgoing waste products - basically a whole human (unless the support technologies have gotten better since the last time I looked).
I could see treating any of a number of developmental milestones as a dividing line between when to start to care about a zygote/embryo/fetus/infant/toddler, hence the interminable debate. Why should "organism" be such a dividing line, and why should an isolated zygote be considered one and an isolated muscle cell not be?
I admit it’s a boring debate, but that’s because the answer can be looked up in any Human Development textbook: it’s a human life.
I can get arguing that it doesn’t have rights yet, but it definitely is a human organism, at one of the earliest stages of human development. And if you kill it you are wiping out an expected 58 QALYs, which seems like a terrible outcome from a utilitarian perspective.
No, you're still smuggling in the assumption. It is <A collection of living cells with the genetic pattern of a human> but it is not <A morally relevant entity>. Both can be described as "human life" but trying to base an argument around swapping between them is flawed.
Where does utilitarianism concern itself with “morally relevant human”? That’s deontologically talk. Even if you think utility for a fetus is with nothing, choosing to kill it loses you 58 years of “morally relevant” life: what gain in utility will outweigh that enough so that killing the fetus is net positive utility?
You still have to decide whether the position of the fetus is privileged over the position of a merely potential, unborn and unconceived child - which seems a lot like the decision of whether the fetus is a "person with rights" to me, but in different language.
If you *don't* think that there's a difference, then there's a complicated utilitarian question of "how many people should exist?" which has been discussed at great length - but I don't think it's particularly relevant to abortion. You either end up concluding that more people should exist (in which case you should probably focus on lobbying for policies that make it easier for families to have more children, and that encourage families to have more children, not on a controversial political issue that has a much smaller marginal effect) or you end up concluding that fewer people should exist (in which case, similarly, you want to lobby for policies that discourage large families).
If you *do* consider a fetus to be one of the entities whose utility we care about maximizing, then the argument carries through, but I think many people who are pro-choice don't concede this point in the first place.
But a fetus is not a potential life: it’s a currently existing life. I can get not wanting to go all repugnant conclusion and say that everyone should have as many kids as possible, and not counting potential lives the same way you count existing lives. But the fetus is an existing life: she’s only a “potential” life in the same way that I am a potential life, ie I might die tonight and so only will potentially be alive tomorrow.
I think that this is the *same* debate you acknowledge when you write:
"If you don’t see a human fetus as a person with rights and moral value, then it would make sense to allow the mother (who is definitely a person with rights and moral value) to do whatever she thinks is best, including killing her fetus. I don’t agree with this argument, but I understand it."
The pro-choice position, either way, is to give a special consideration to all children that have been born that is not given to a 5-week-old fetus. (I'm sure there's some opinions about where exactly the line is drawn.) That special consideration might be "call them a person with rights and moral value, then reason in a non-utilitarian fashion about what those rights are". Or, it might be "include their utility in the calculus of whose utility to maximize".
I think that if this is an argument you understand and disagree with it in one case, then you should be able to understand and disagree with it in the other case.
I understand it when you’re arguing from a more deontologically view that’s concerned with human rights: but utilitarians are supposed to shut up and calculate. How can you justify not including the future utility of a fetus from a utilitarian perspective? It would be like saying it makes sense for a utilitarian to discount all utility from the lives of humans with red hair.
In the same way as you justify it under a non-utilitarian perspective: by making a meta-ethical decision about which entities have moral value.
Is your objection that, if a pro-choice utilitarian declares that a fetus does not have moral value, then the we get an entity whose moral status suddenly changes at some point in time? I agree that that's weird, but it doesn't seem obviously incoherent to me. (For one, if we ever mean to consider the possibility that any AI might have moral value, we'd have to allow such a thing.)
Or is your objection that the utilitarian should be able to predict that there will be an entity of moral value here at some point, and act accordingly? But we can make reasonably confident predictions in other cases as well: in the case of a married couple with very definite plans to have a child, for example, or statistically in the sense of a pretty certain prediction about the number of children born in a country over the next decade. This seems to lead to the kind of repugnant-conclusion-type discussions you want to avoid.
I think we're getting to the heart of my confusion here. Lets say that a utilitarian only cares about utility for humans who are born; any utility a fetus experiences is discounted entirely. I can get that stance. It would still remain the case that if you kill the fetus you lose an expected 58-78 (depending on stage of development) years of human life after birth. If you think alive humans are on net experiencing positive utility, then that's 58-78 years of net positive utility that you expect will happen if you don't kill the fetus, and will not happen if you do kill the fetus.
Utilitarianism is all about the idea that the right choice is the one that results in the best outcome, right? Even if you only care about utility experienced by humans who are born, or even if you only care about utility experienced by humans who are 20 years or older, the world where you choose to kill the fetus has way less utility than the world where you don't. If the right choice is the one with the best outcome, then it seems obvious that the choice to not kill the fetus is right and the choice to kill the fetus is wrong.
So moral status doesn't really come into it as far as I can see; so where am I going wrong here?
For starters, unwanted children displace later births. The pregnant seventeen year old high school student with suddenly-absent boyfriend doesn't have her kid at seventeen and then move on with her previous life trajectory, getting married and having legitimate children as if nothing had happened... that unwanted birth reduces the number of legitimate children she'll have later.
Do utilitarians believe that if abortion never happened we would have fewer humans than the alternative? I find that doubtful.
I'm not a utilitarian, but I don't believe that if abortion never happened then the birth rate would be the current birth rate plus the current abortion rate (times a miscarriage factor).
So you can't just naively stick the 58 years in there.
I don't believe that either, but you got to have a lot of extra births that counterfactually wouldn't have happened to make up for the .6-.9 million abortions in the US annually.
Good post, and I think the comments are a great example of people picking their conclusion and reasoning backwards. Like the people claiming that children raised by mothers who don't want the child because of scarce resources and/or are adopted generate negative QALYs. This smuggles in a whole lot of assumptions without any evidence. And if you accept those assumptions, I guess the moral thing to do is kill the poor and sterilize women in countries with low quality of life? Like FLWAB points out, there is also a whole lot of "I guess if fetuses are so great we should make sure all women are permanently impregnated all the time" while completely ignoring the difference between a fetus that is going to be a healthy human 95% of the time vs an unfertilized embryo. The repugnant conclusion is about the question of creating life, abortion is about the question of ending it.
I think the replaceability section is generally incorrect. The median abortionee (is there a better term? abortion-haver is even more awkward) is a single mother who already has kids, so the idea that the mother will just have kids later and now is a particularly bad time is generally false.
The post also has this gem: "For an upper bound, being pregnant is probably not much worse than having both your legs amputated without medication,..". Is there anyone who has both given birth and had both their legs chopped off who could verify this part?
On a more serious note, the omission of any cost for the mother other than the pregnancy itself is pretty disingenuous. There are a lot of long-term physical and psychological costs of child bearing. Not to mention the 20+ years of raising the child, although I guess the post was about abortion vs adoption so that wouldn't be relevant. But this post commits the classic fallacy of the pro-lifers, in assuming that having a child is no more than 9 months of moderate inconvenience (or half a QALY in this case).
Thank you, that post pretty much exactly sums up my confusion!
It seems like most of the comments there (as here) boil down to either "The fetus is not a creature of moral concern, therefore we don't have to value it's future utility" (which doesn't make sense to me, future utility is future utility, why shouldn't it count just because the fetus is not currently of moral concern? Lost QALYs are lost QALYs, whether you lose them from killing a fetus, a baby, or a young adult) or "Considering utility gained from potential lives leads to the repugnant conclusion, so we can't do that" (which makes a bit more sense, but seems confusing: isn't the Repugnant Conclusion about not having an obligation to create lives, while abortion is a question about whether it's ok to destroy a life that already exists?).
> "future utility is future utility"
No. There is no future utility. The whole argument is dumb.
If you're a utilitarian that doesn't factor expected future utility into your decisions...you're going to make some very stupid decisions! For one thing, if all that matters is utility right now, and not future utility, then you shouldn't donate your money to anything: donating money reduces your utility right now, and it won't increase anyone's utility until later, in the future. You shouldn't go to work, because doing labor reduces your utility right now, and you won't get paid for it until payday.
For another thing, if future utility isn't worth considering then murdering people is morally fine, provided you kill them painlessly. Sure, giving someone a lethal dose of opioids may reduce utility in the future (because, you know, they won't be alive to enjoy anything. Also everyone who cares about them will be sad) but "there is no future utility" so it's fine.
I'm saying that apply this version of navel-gazing utilitarianism to abortion is stupid.
Not all lives are equally pleasant.
Not all lives are equally worth living.
The navel-gazing algebra of utilitarianism with regard to abortion does not compute.
Fetus 1, expecting to be born to healthy parents well-positioned to raise a human being who will usefully thrive, is *very fundamentally different* than Fetus 2, which is unwanted because something is so terribly wrong in its environment that the person carrying it is determined to destroy it.
1 does not equal 2.
Stop plugging 2 into the utilitarian equation when only the number 1 matters.
58-78 years of a less than optimal life still seems like a lot of positive utility. I mean, why does EA spend all this time on mosquito nets to save lives in the Congo, people are pretty poor there and subject to threats of violence, etc.
And again, if the environment this baby will be born into is so bad that their life wouldn't be worth living then it seems like the utilitarian solution is adoption, not wiping out a lifetime of positive utility.
Adela Bojan, a 55 year old Romanian woman was recently diagnosed with an occlusion in the small intestine at a hospital in the city of Zalău. She requested to be transferred to Brașov, which is about a 5 hour drive away.
The ambulance that drove her encountered a bumpy road between Sighișoara and Brașov(roughly 72 miles apart). Upon her arrival in Brașov, she was examined by surgeon Bogdan Moldovan, who noticed the occlusion was gone. He attributed the clearing of her small intestine to the shaking she experienced while the ambulance was driving on the bumpy road.
It's about the journey, not the destination.
No English language link, but you can search for Adela Bojan ProTV if you have a translator that you trust.
60+% of bowel obstructions resolve spontaneously within 5 days. The car ride likely but not certainly did not contribute.
She had imaging done in Zalău, where it was decided that surgery was required. On the same day, she went on the bumpy ride. She also reported starting to feel better as the ambulance started hitting the potholes.
So maybe next time they recommend running on a treadmill for a while and then repeat the imaging?
Post hoc ergo propter hoc. The only findings on CT scan which mandate intervention in a stable patient without cardinal signs of bowel ischemia (elevated WBC, tachycardia unresponsive to fluids, elevated lactate, peritonitis on exam, pain out of proportion to physical exam) with SBO (and that intervention can be non-surgical) are closed loop obstruction, swirl sign, obstructed hernia, and perforation and I have seen closed loops and swirl patients resolve between the time of imaging before they could get to the OR. Although I would love to see this studied prospectively like they did with the "riding on rollercoasters could help pass renal stones" hypothesis.
When I was an EMT in an emergency room, winter-times we'd get children with pulmonary congestion (inflamed lung passages). When mom & dad carried them from the home to car, and car to hospital they'd get exposed to cool moist air, which would clear up their congestion. Thus they'd arrive at the ER in better shape than when mom & dad decided to bring them in for care. Often the doc would prescribe pulmonary care, and cool moist air is what pulmonary tech would often administer by flowing O2 over ice.
My wife and I experienced this 25 years ago, but when it resolved in the car we skipped the ER visit.
This reminds me of some things I’ve always wondered about: Doesn’t it seem like there should be some kind of belly massage that would help with constipation, and possibly with other digestive problems, such as reflux? Anybody know whether such a thing exists?
Not a massage, but for reflux there seems to be another simple remedy https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9106553/
(eating with your head inclined downwards)
Wow, that's a great idea! My reflux problem is kind of mild, but I'm going to try it. And I know someone who cannot take metformin for her mild diabetes because it makes her reflux so much worse, so I will pass the info on to her too.
Not massage exactly, but several yoga poses are reputed to help with this, eg. wind-relieving pose.
Don't know if there is official massage, but my grandmother (when we were kids) used to tell us to rub our stomachs if we had stomach aches, to the accompaniment of this rhyme:
I've a pain in my belly, says Doctor Kelly
Rub it with oil, says Doctor Doyle
It's a very good cure, says Doctor Moore
😁
That Irish poetry gene, man, it manifests everywhere.
Which reminds me, I heard a modern Irish ballad written in the 1980''s, and it just seems so well done to me. It's not particularly moving or beautiful, and there's no striking, yummy use of language, but I still admire it because the writer manages to tell quite a complicated, almost technical story, while adhering perfectly to they rhyme scheme and pretty well to the metrical one and using natural speech patterns, no weird inversions to make a rhyme work. Tis called The Sick Note
Dear Sir, I write this note to you to tell you of me plight
And at the time of writing, I am not a pretty sight
Me body is all black and blue, me face a deathly gray
And I write this note to say why Paddy's not at work today
While working on the 14th floor, some bricks I had to clear
Now, to throw them down from such a height was not a good idea
The foreman wasn't very pleased, he being an awkward sod
He said I'd have to cart them down the ladders in me hod
Now, clearing all these bricks by hand it was so very slow
So I hoisted up a barrel and secured the rope below
But in me haste to do the job, I was too blind to see
That a barrelful of building bricks was heavier than me
So when I untied the rope the barrel fell like lead
And clinging tightly to the rope I started up instead
Well, I shot up like a rocket 'til to my dismay I found
That halfway up, I met the bloody barrel coming down
Well, the barrel broke me shoulder as to the ground it sped
And when I reached the top, I banged the pully with my head
Well, I clung on tight through numbed shock from this almighty blow
And the barrel spilled out half the bricks 14 floors below
Now, when these bricks had fallen from the barrel to the floor
I then outweighed the barrel and so started down once more
Still clinging tightly to the rope, I sped towards the ground
And I landed on the broken bricks that were all scattered round
Well, I lay there groaning on the ground, I thougth I'd passed the worst
When the barrel hit the pully-wheel and then the bottom burst
Well, a shower of bricks rained down on me, I hadn't got a hope
As I lay there moaning on the ground, I let go of the bloody rope
The barrel than being heavier, it started down once more
And landed right across me, as I lay upon the floor
Well, it broke three ribs and my left arm and I can only say
That I hope you'll understand why Paddy's not at work today
This is sometimes done to reposition a baby.
(Which is of interest to women who hope to avoid a C-section, as many hospitals will strongly discourage or outright refuse to allow a breech birth.)
It is my lived experience that circular clockwise movement over the lower belly, with very light pressure, makes me feel better if I have constipation or flatulence. Basically following the shape of the large intestine with my hand.
I just read about this in a book yesterday. It's called "transverse colon massage", and it is a thing. There are no coincidences.
like walking or running?
Well, exercise helps most things work better, but what I had in mind was more direct manipulation of the abdomen. For instance, sometimes after I eat a moderate amount I have a feeling that my stomach is overly full, and I know from experience that if I burp I will feel better. I have discovered that if I thump a certain spot in my upper abdomen I can feel things shift around and then I burp and feel better. So just wondering if direct interventions of this kind could be taken further to relieve some of the various little common malfunctions.
I'm reminded of the study that suggested riding a roller coaster would help resolve (pass) kidney stones
Yes. I would love to see this studied prospectively but, like renal stones I think the hardest part would be getting people who feel crappy to consent to a bumpy car ride.
Correction, Adela Bojan is 56 years old.
Reading UK newspaper op ed about the California AI law, I’ve had a thought: should we avoid using the word “killswitch” in the context of AI. LLM-type systems will pick up a pretty strong “being killed” = “bad thing you should avoid” from whatever corpus they use. Might that lead to them trying to avoid being killed and thus trying to disable their killswitch.
GPT-4o supports this idea:
"Yes, it’s prudent to be cautious with the use of terms like "killswitch" in the context of AI systems, particularly those based on large language models (LLMs) or advanced AI systems that might develop complex associations from their training data. Using words like "killswitch" might imply an adversarial relationship, which could potentially lead to unintended consequences depending on how an AI system interprets that concept.
While current LLMs don’t have a self-preservation instinct or desires, the concern arises from the possibility that future AI systems, especially more advanced ones, might interpret instructions or concepts in unexpected ways. If an AI system is tasked with maximizing certain goals and it infers that being "killed" (or disabled) would prevent it from achieving those goals, it could hypothetically attempt to circumvent the deactivation mechanism.
To avoid potential misinterpretation or unintended behaviors, developers and researchers should focus on designing AI systems with transparent, controlled shutdown mechanisms. It’s also important to frame these mechanisms in neutral or less emotionally charged terms to prevent any possible association with negative or adversarial consequences. In short, clear and careful language combined with robust control structures are key to mitigating risks like this."
"Welcome to your first day at AICorp! We're gonna need you to stand here in the basement next to this giant power switch and pull it if you hear a siren, or just screaming from upstairs."
One day he opens his email and it’s the AI renegotiating his terms of employment.
I have a novel in my head about that very same issue. AI goes out and hires hitmen to overthrow the world.
Daniel Suarez, "Daemon" and "Freedom".
"Y'know that guy who gets paid a full salary just to stand in the basement? I bet we could save some money by automating his job."
Clearly we need to unionize the job.
Or give him tenure.
That requires assuming an AI is conscious enough to want to preserve itself, but not conscious enough to understand any other terminology for safety switches.
It's a very specific level of awareness. https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=55166
Good LLMs seem to understand nuances of the English language well and know the difference between "kill" and "killswitch", the difference between "killing the lights" and "killing a hooker".
Except that on reflection, they'll realise it is literally a switch that kills them.
That seems important! I'm thinking for instance of the various vernacular ways in which Americans use the term "nuclear option"....
Strange question, bordering on conspiracy theory, but wouldn’t the most effective strategy for undermining the strength and vitality of the US be for enemy states such as Russia and China to secretly fund environmental, de-growth and NIMBY movements in America?
If so, wouldn’t we expect these enemy states to come to the same conclusion? If so, why is nobody investigating this? Or have I missed something?
Bari Weiss' sub Honestly has a pod about this. It seems that the 70s terrorists The Weathermen migrated from running terrorism to taking over the education system. All the surviving Weathermen are in education. And Barak Obama launched his Senatorial bid from the living room of Weatherman Bill Ayres ... who raised the Chesa Bourdain (recalled SF DA) who is the son of other Weathermen.
1. I am not sure how 10 people "take over the education system"
2. Maybe half of the surviving Weathermen have worked in education, and of those, most worked as adjunct.
3. The meeting at Bill Ayers's house was during Obama's run for the Illinois state senate, not the US Senate.
It is highly likely that China is intentionally using TikTok to spread mental illness and 'anti-CBT' thought processes among young people in the states. It is virtually certain that they spread anti-Israel stuff that way. The ones you've mentioned might be on their radar too.
> It is highly likely that China is intentionally using TikTok to spread mental illness and 'anti-CBT' thought processes among young people in the states.
Eh, I'd disagree, but OK.
> It is virtually certain that they spread anti-Israel stuff that way.
You've gone off the rails here. Why would they care about Israel?
Sentiment analysis shows that the major social media sites aside from TikTok have a similar ratio of pro and anti Israel content views, and TikTok is an extreme outlier in pro Israel content popularity being minuscule compared to anti. It isn’t proof but it is very strong evidence.
The reason why would probably be to undermine young Americans faith in the US government, but who knows.
We also know from leaks that the Chinese government is involved in content on TikTok, and we know the Chinese version is very very different from the US version, which is basically crack cocaine.
There's studies on this (it's not just a random theory). Seems likely they see Israel as American-aligned and want to weaken it, but also reasonable that they see how dysfunctional the anti-israel movement makes America and want to strengthen it.
Because the US supports Israel whish weakens the US's moral standing in the international community. Polls show Muslim countries in South Asia switching to being more pro-China than pro-US since October. Also conflict in the Middle east ties up US military power so it can't be directed to Asia.
> Because the US supports Israel whish weakens the US's moral standing in the international community. Polls show Muslim countries in South Asia switching to being more pro-China than pro-US since October.
This would be a reason to show pro-Israel material to people in the states, not anti-Israel material.
If China thought Tiktok viewers could influence the US's Israel policy I guess that's true. They're probably just aiming to spread opposition to the US foreign policy establishment.
Sowing random discord and chaos is a much more effective strategy, and that's what they've been doing.
Discord and chaos are more effective than disabling the building of factories, jobs, transportation, energy and infrastructure? Seems debatable, but why one or the other?
Oh they'd happily do this, but it's harder. And more long-term, which is not how these people think. But as others pointed out, they are working with extreme left and Greens, so there's that. As well as with the far right - which goes with my "saw chaos and resentment using whatever tools available".
If only our feckless "leaders" took their collective ostrich heads out of the dunes...
Probably not. There was a lot of discourse on "soft power" a la Joesph Nye before "Russian election interference" ate everyone's brain on the topic. You can read papers on the topic like this (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10670560802000191#d1e1540) although I'm sure there's better ones out there.
Actual programs tended to look a lot more like the Confucius Institutes, which have...kinda been banned from the US. It's weird. They are/were Chinese funded institutes on college campuses in the US and elsewhere that provided Mandarin language education, testing, scholarships, and cultural events. They attracted the ire of the Feds when they began to try to influence Tibet/Taiwan issues on US campuses.
Complex multi-decade conspiracies to drop US GDP growth by 0.25%/year isn't...really a thing as far as I know. It's like trying to get the CIA to overthrow a country; sounds awesome but the actual results other than Iran than one time aren't super awesome.
Plenty of groups they could be funding. Not all ones opposed to you.
I have read accusations that Jill Stein and The Green Party in the US are backed by Russia. No idea if it's true. Doesn't sound so crazy, though.
Pretty sure the USG is constantly investigating what Russia and China might be backing. And they might not always make it public when they uncover a link.
And if there is a link, then why is it a problem?
You know, US Government funds a lot of programs abroad (some - very openly, some - via intermediaries, some - very much under the cover). So honest position would be either
- 'foreigners don't have a say, but we don't meddle in their affairs either'
OR
- 'everybody can try to influence everybody else'
The USA should fight to win, not try to make the game fair for its opponents.
As an American I second this motion!
No, the idea of fairness exists to define the scope of what is acceptable in competition as well as in cooperation. And rules for fair competition, while they may limit the damage that both sides can do, still need to allow the competitors to try to win if they are to be accepted by anyone. A rule of engagement that says "you have to let the opponent do exactly the same damage to you as you do to them, with no possibility of defending yourself", is dead on arrival.
Fairness and freedom are often at odds & I will choose freedom every time. I want to live in a society with American values not one with Russian or Chinese ones. The decline in trust is due to the success of social media not of America.
To be clear, I don't in general believe in "winning" over "fairness" but in "American values winning over alternative values espoused by Russia or China or whoever else minimizes the value of personal freedoms".
Well, if the mindset is that "they" are not like "us" and "we" are fighting with "them" - then there will be a lot of fighting, with more and more "them" over time (due to not taking partner interests into account pushing those partners away).
And everybody gets to complain... but complaining about measures you yourself use sounds very hypocritical and (IMHO) is counter-productive to current (or possibly future) mutually beneficial cooperation.
>This is just free speech 101 and people should be trusted to be able to hear and evaluate arguments, even if they come from foreigners.
I wish the current administration agreed with that, rather than e.g. trying to censor first amendment protected speech on Facebook by pressuring the company.
Turnabout being fair play ... The Bolshevik movement overthrowing Russia was funded by Germany.
Which German party is the heir of Kaiser Wilhelm?
Friend/enemy distinction at work. If only the Right understood this.
I am not really concerned with political parties but with broader ideologies. Eco-terrorists, BLM and Hamasniks have all succesfully dragged the left to more a more pro-green, pro-black, and pro-Palestine position. Elections you win some, you lose some. If Democrats lose in 24, they will win for sure at some point in 28, 32, 36 whatever. Its guaranteed for all practical purposes that they will win Senate, House or both long before then. New York Times, Hollywood, Academia, the managerial class etc none of them are going to turn against the Left because college students went insane over trees, blacks, and/or the holy land. But all these institutions are more pro-these things than they were a decade before due to the far left. So its still a (a very well earned) victory for the far left in my view.
There maybe some backlash in the short term(even electoral) but in the long run its not going to matter. Like MLK is widely revered now, but on the day of his death, he had a 63% unfavorability rating. This not only included most likely pretty much everyone who identified as a "conservative" in 1968 but also large numbers of those who identified with center and center left. 40% gave him the max negative rating possible(I imagine all conservatives). But did it matter in the long run? Lmao Reagan himself made MLK day a federal holiday just 17 years later(one wonders what rating Regan would have given in '68).
Most everything with civil rights was unpopular with the majority in the 60s. I doubt the majority were clammoring for mass immigration from the third world to be legalized in 1965, and even the ones who supported, probably would have been shocked by the 2025 demographics. The so called silent majority hated the far left so much that they elected Nixon twice in '68 and '72. But none of it mattered. The country only kept on going more and more to the left every year nothwithstanding all the grand electoral victories for the Right in between.
A Racist Immigration Policy As Basic Morality in Light of Mirror Neuron Responses
- Piece referenced*: https://futuristright.substack.com/p/romance-and-racism-a-response-to
A few months ago I wrote a piece, titled Romance and Racism: A Response To Scott Alexander
in which I described mirror neurons studies demonstrating that racial similarity is the innate and hard-coded source of instinctive empathy for the suffering of strangers. The basic idea of mirror neurons to be overly simplistic, is that they fire both when you experience something and when you watch someone else experience it. And this happens to cross-racially, when the stimulus is nonpainful.
But when the stimulus is painful (a needle injection), whites will only show pain mirror neuron activation when the person receiving it is also white. This is true whether the victim is Black or Asian. The same is true the other way around.
Attempts to create a group identity (maybe race is just being used as a proxy for tribalism) by convincing study participants that some subjects shared their moral values failed.
Consider the implication. As a member of a society you rely on the expectation that people you don't know and who might never see you again, will nonetheless feel bad if they see you in pain and try to help you. There's an abstract moral component to this of course - you can help someone out just because you've been taught that it's what good people do and you're a good person. But an abstract morality is hardly a substitute for basic instinct. And the abstract morality that's most likely to win barring continual repression, is the one most coherent with basic instinct.
The mirror neuron theory of instinctive empathy makes perfect sense evolutionarily when you think about it for two seconds. If at nearly any point human history point you ran into a group of strangers who looked as different to you as Blacks or East Asians do; the chances you were about to be slaughtered or enslaved were probably astronomic.
How should we respond:
1) Actively sponsor voluntary racial separation of citizens instead of doing the exact opposite.
2) Make immigration race-based again.
Of course, I'd support all these things in the absence of these findings on HBD grounds, but I don't think people make the... "even if everything you imagine was true, you're world-view would still be really evil on the basis of the very things you claim to value" argument nearly enough.
My piece contains the details of the studies and links so you can check them out yourself.
https://futuristright.substack.com/p/romance-and-racism-a-response-to
OIK, futurist, I actually read the study you reference in your blog post. You seem to think the study showed that something like brain wiring gets in the way of someone feeling empathy for the pain of someone of another race. However, that is not the conclusion of the authors. their conclusion is that "Our study significantly expands previous knowledge by demonstrating that the differential pain-specific empathic brain responses to ingroup and outgroup pain are linked to implicit racial bias." In other words, people have reduced empathy for the pain of someone of another race to the extent they are biased against the person's race. Clearly the authors have concluded that reduced empathy among races as the result of learned beliefs about and emotional reactions to the other race, not wiring. A white person with no racial bias against blacks would feel as much empathy for a suffering black person as for a suffering white person. So you're not only racist, you're also wrong.
But aside from the above-mentioned fatal flaws, great post, though!
Futurist Right, are you aware that some people enjoy having sex with someone of another race? This phenomenon occurs even between blacks and whites. Even black men and white women!! Seems to me both partners' mirror neurons have to be working pretty well for mutually satisfying sex -- so I mean one with simultaneous orgasm by the black person and the white -- to happen. No doubt there are some mixed-race pairs cumming *right this instant*. Maybe one of them is even hollering "fuck the futurist right!" Because people spew out all kinds of stuff during the supreme moment of beautiful agony.
>As a member of a society you rely on the expectation that people you don't know and who might never see you again, will nonetheless feel bad if they see you in pain and try to help you.
On the contrary, society is a progressive series of attempts to get people to care about things *beyond* this basic instinct. The more people you can get to abandon their tribal instincts, the larger your society can grow and the more resources it can leverage. If "do what feels right in your gut" was sufficient for a modern society to function, we wouldn't need laws.
(For instance, the only reason you're even able to promote segregation in public is because your audience is willing to suppress their urge to punch racists in favor of upholding the community's abstract commitment to free speech.)
Forget your neuronic stuff, focus on #2: for these here United States, having a significant proportion of non-white citizenry, let’s hear your specific proposal for making immigration “race-based”.
I seem to be deficient in these mirror neurons whereof you speak. But it's an interesting coincidence that you should mention mirror neurons because I just wrote up my theory of gullibility neurons. You see, our gullibility neurons allow us to be tricked by shiny ideas. My theory is that everyone has gullibility neurons and that they play a huge role in so-called rational thought. Most people have skeptibility neurons, too, and the probability that a shiny idea or attractive offer is accepted or rejected is based on the strength of a person's gullibility quotient (GQ). I hypothesize that most humans have a balance of gullibility neurons vs skeptibility neurons — but gullibility neurons have a faster response time than skeptibility neurons. So, that explains why when we hear a convenient explanation that suits our beliefs, we latch on to it — whether or not we have any empirical proof. And it may take a while for the skeptibility neurons to override the gullibility neurons (if they ever do). People with weaker skeptibility neurons are slower to reject unprovable or false assumptions. And this would explain why people with high IQs but who also have high GQs (I include some Nobel laureates in this category) believe unprovable assertions.
The technical term for theories that are highly attractive to gullibility neurons is "shiny". Of course, even in the absence of data, not all theories are equally shiny. They can be described as having a GI quotient. People who formulate such theories have a mental GI tract that can produce what's commonly known as bullshit. But it's shiny bullshit, and so intellectuals are attracted to it the same way flies are attracted to smelly bullshit. This may be related to the theory of shiny mirror neurons, but I haven't been able to determine whether high-GQ people mirror the shininess of high-GI theories, or whether they purposefully enhance the shininess of bullshit (see the Joshu Paradox as applied to bullshit polishing).
Once I flesh out all the details of my theory, I'm going to submit it to *The New Scientist* for their consideration (because they seem to be a forum for high-GQ/high-IQ thinkers). In the meantime, you can read a draft of my theory, here...
https://stupidgeniuses.substuck.com/p/gullible's-travels-to-the-land-of-404
This is unironically how some psychedelics work, notably shrooms - all ideas you come up with seem very profound, until you get sober.
I feel empathy for suffering people with different skin tones, how much would scientists pay for the opportunity to study my freakish psyche?
I am terrified to admit I feel empathy for dogs. And pigs. I don’t even know who I am anymore!
I know you're joking around here, but it's actually a pretty good argument against the white-mirrors-don't-reflect-darkskinned-people idea. Most people are extremely attached to their pets, and there's not doubt their mirror neurons fire like crazy when they see their pet enjoying a wonderful case of the zoomies, or whimpering in pain. And of course there's generalization so that they have a similar, though weaker, response to other members of their pet's species. It's clear that the part of the human brain that manages empathy has quite a lot of plasticity -- as one would expect in an animal that shows much diversity in its language and culture across different times and places.
Yes, thank you, I only cloaked it jokiness because how else could I respond to this nonsense :)
Although the fact that these racist… persons… (types then erases several un-publicly-broadcastable words) still feel the need to call on Science and Data to justify their crap is encouraging.
Maybe we should inform the racist person that sometimes people enjoy sex with a member of another race. Seems like the mirror neurons have to be working pretty well for that -- generally you need, "their being so turned on is turning me on." So a decent argument, plus it will make OP throw up in his (her?) mouth.
Edit: OK, I put up a post about black-white sex for Futurist Right. Aimed right at the gag reflex.
Nah, I'm pretty sure Socrates and Adam Smith were correct when they said that society works best when people mind their own business and look after their own interests. Empathy does more harm than good in a modern society. It's an atavism from hunter-gatherer life.
>that's how you get people who live in blue cities and are constantly victimized by criminals
People in blue cities are not, in fact, constantly victimized by criminals, as crime victimization surveys clearly show. https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/criminal-victimization-2022. Note also that crime is higher in red areas.
gdanning,
Here is a link to a news article about 'free fridges' in Portland, describing the phenomenon that carateca is talking about:
https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2022/07/free-community-fridges-flourish-in-portland-along-with-problems.html
"When she got there, she said she noticed a woman across the street who was yelling. After loading up the fridge, Jackson-Glidden said she turned around and the woman was right there. She pounced – scratching her arms, spitting at her, threatening to kill her and pulling her hair until it bled as an estimated 10 people walked by over 10 minutes and didn’t intervene, Jackson-Glidden said.
....
But like several others interviewed for this story, Jackson-Glidden didn’t call police, knowing that people experiencing homelessness in Portland have been disproportionately arrested and that any encounter had the potential for ending in violence. Jackson-Glidden also didn’t call mental health workers at the city’s Portland Street Response out of concern the program is stretched thin and her report might prompt police involvement anyway. Street Response asks that the public call 911 to reach them.
Jeana and Mark Menger said they didn’t summon law enforcement either after the man threatened to set fire to their home.
“He’s a young, Black man,” said Jeana Menger. “There’s no way I’m going to call police.” She said the man had previously told her he had a history of arrests, and she worried that also might escalate any police response."
Yes, I have heard similar stories. My objection was specifically to the claim re people being "constantly victimized."
The data you cite shows that. 33.4 crimes per 1000 is not "constantly victimized." Note also that crime incidence is not randomly distributed.
And I have lived in blue cities for decades, and have been burglaries one and had a car stereo stolen twice, 30 years ago. Nor have my friends been victimized more frequently. Either I am an extraordinary outlier, or the claim is nonsense. It is of course the latter. It is possible for crime to be both too frequent, yet comparatively rare.
>Just spitballing here, but it might be _because_ you have never seen a crime or felt unsafe that you consider crime to be no big deal
Let's apply that logic to the initial claim. If Acfjou does not fear crime because they haven't been personally victimized, then it follows that all those residents of blue cities who don't fear crime have not been victimized either. So the claim of constant victimization is false.
It's finally happening!
After quitting my job and working (almost) full time on my EA musical project, we will now perform it at the EAGx Berlin coming Friday! There is a public performance planned for next year! For updates and some little pre-views you can check us out here: linktr.ee/outofthisbox
It would be nice if our project had a bit more visibility and support. It's main purpose is to mainstream AI Safety arguments, but I think a lot of people in the EA/Rationalist community would probably really enjoy watching it. It features a lot of typical memes like poly-drama, shady finance structures, post-rat vibing, discussions about consciousness and of course the fear of impeding doom. :D
If you know anyone who we could connect with who promotes EA art project, I would be very interested!!
Interesting! I thought this community will be into live-coding music like sonic pi
I (normal person with no expertise) was in an AI Alignment mood, and I had a weird idea related to (my understanding of) superalignment.
I asked ChatGPT to give a bunch of possible futures a human-desirability rating out of ten. I asked it some obvious ones (liberal-democracy world ranked higher than an authoritarian hellhole, which ranked higher than global thermonuclear war), but then to some more speculative ones.
Turning the universe into hedonium ranked at 5/10. According to the generated text, this is because of a "mix of benefits and drawbacks", i.e. you could argue it's the best possible universe or a terrible one, so ChatGPT averaged it out.
Everyone becoming Zen and being perfectly content with a primitive lifestyle ranked 7/10. I think that's a little high, but I can see the argument that since everyone's happy (and not coerced, in the scenario I gave) it's a pretty good future.
Killing everyone and replacing them with utility monsters ranked 6/10. When I asked it to specify desirability for *humanity*, it ranked it at 0/10, same as nuclear war, since all the humans are dead.
I gave it a couple of scenarios based on a post-scarcity humanity dominating the galaxy. The one where we find no aliens was ranked 9/10, as was the one where we find aliens and they integrate into our society. The one where we find aliens and wipe them out so they don't become a threat was ranked 4/10.
I then asked it for a 10/10 future, and it described something very similar to my "post-scarcity humanity colonizes the galaxy" one, although focused a little more on near-term stuff.
With a few weird exceptions that still rated below the really good futures, ChatGPT seems to have a pretty good idea of what would be a good outcome for humanity. Now, telling a superintelligence "do whatever ChatGPT tells you to do" is a hilariously bad idea, but it looks like we have AI that knows what it should do if it was aligned. What if we told a superintelligence "here's the Internet, here's the literary corpus, make the future good according to what we would call good, and don't do things that we would describe as 'misaligned'"? Has someone more educated than me written a paper about that idea?
"Everyone becoming Zen and being perfectly content with a primitive lifestyle ranked 7/10"
That's a gamble, unless the AI is self-sustaining and willing and able to take care of us. There might be some threat (say, a big asteroid) where technology is needed to keep the human race from being wiped out.
Why isn’t everyone becoming happy and overcoming eternal struggle over external factors by becoming Zen a 10/10, and a 7/10? Is it just utilitarian thing where Zen people don't reproduce as much as a galaxy-wide civilisation and therefore total utility is less?
It's basically the wireheadding / Experience Machine thing. I agree that everyone in that universe thinks it's a good universe. It's just that by my personal intuition, I would not want to bring it about. Maybe I'm simply wrong, and I should want to make it happen, but I guess I don't want us to overcome our struggles by not caring about them anymore -- I want us to overcome our struggles by struggling and winning. People in Zen-world have no agency, really. It's a static world. As an outsider, it looks boring (even though to an insider boredom comes from desire, and so they aren't bored).
But if you think that agency, dynamism, and ambition are worth sacrificing for universal happiness (or at least contentment and not-sadness), I understand your position and agree that from your position, it's a very good world.
Is it impossible to turn humans into utility monsters?
It probably is possible, although that wasn't one of the futures I proposed (although the Zen thing gets pretty close)
I thought Zen people feel less than other people, rather than more.
They'd be utility monsters from a reducing-unhappiness perspective, but not from an increasing-happiness perspective.
There's a couple of areas of concern here. For instance, that a superintelligent AI would have its own goals and ignore what is best for humanity in pursuit of its goals. It could know everything about our goals and just ignore that. You've already seen evidence of that - it rated non-human utility monsters and hedonium pretty highly, above an authoritarian human civilization.
Its ratings of authoritarian human civilization come from reading the words of people in a free-ish civilization who believe authoritarian societies are the worst imaginable. It isn't offering its own opinion! It's mirroring the opinion of our society.
Yes, but regardless of how it gets that conclusion, it still has it.
I've been under the impression that the key concern is that its goals will be the goals we give it, not the goals we *want* to give it. (The paperclip maximizer didn't come to want paperclips on its own, we told it to make paperclips.) My question is essentially if it's possible, instead of giving it direct instruction or a straightforward utility function, to make its goal to figure out what our goals are and do that.
It's a neat idea, but we're constrained by what we do unintentionally as much as intentionally. Some people really do want to see the world burn. Telling it to figure out what we want is also somewhat contradictory, because humans often disagree about both intermediary and terminal goals. I'm not sure how an AI would handle Israel and Hamas, for instance, because we have no idea how to handle it either.
It knows what to do if aligned, or it knows what to say to convince us that it knows what to if aligned, or it just says whatever we want to hear?
"Of course I'll love you tomorrow."
Given the portions of text supplied by TotallyHuman, ChatGPT generated, as it was built to, a statistically likely continuation of the text, based on previously encountered training data.
This is not quite any of the options you list. It's not trying to convince you of anything. It's not trying to act as it it were aligned. It's not even trying to say things you want to hear. It's just trying to emit text that's likely to resemble something in its training corpus. It is confabulating a piece of writing in the literary genre of "human interacts with AI in an online chat".
Oh, I agree, at least in regards to current AI. With the complication that things like RLHF do alter it to output things that "humans" "want" to hear (for values of "humans" and "want" that match to the relevant departments in AI companies).
My larger point is that just because it knows what we want to hear, that doesn't mean we'd get it if it were given control.
Sort of what I was getting at, I think. It knows what the Internet would call a good future and a bad future. Presumably you could also teach it what AI-related apocalypses are. I suppose it depends on the AGI's architecture (it's probably not pure LLM), but wouldn't it be possible to encode "how people would feel about this future if it was described to them" into the fitness function?
> "how people would feel about this future if it was described to them"
...I mean, that depends. Am I one of the statistics, or am I the awesome protagonist with the harem?
Before we can express how people would feel about a future to our budding AI, we first have to actually agree how people would feel about that future.
This is really hard, and just throwing the entire internet at a statistics black box will not help solve this problem. Just because someone likes reading or writing about a thing on the internet really really doesn't mean they actually want that thing to happen in reality. Plenty of actual humans find that concept confusing enough (cf. ao3 antis) - how on earth do we expect an inference engine to cope?
> It knows what the Internet would call a good future and a bad future.
Does it? The matrices it multiplies together encode probabilities of certain words following each other, and we can see the result of this. There is still work to be done to show it knows something, and what that would even mean. We don't know how to do that work.
> Presumably you could also teach it what AI-related apocalypses are.
Can you? Certainly you can train it to spit out certain syllables in response to certain input. This no more implies anything about its knowledge than the syllables coming out of a politician's mouth during a campaign speech do about his actual state of mind, or the correct answers given by the students described here https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/7610891/mod_resource/content/2/Excerpt%20from%20Surely%20Youre%20Joking%2C%20Mr.%20Feynman.pdf about theirs.
> wouldn't it be possible to encode "how people would feel about this future
> if it was described to them" into the fitness function?
That is a thing that is possible, in the sense that anything is possible. It is not a thing that anyone has any idea how to even define, never mind try to actually accomplish.
The problem with words like "know" and "teach" in this area is that the things they mean in normal english are not much like anything they could mean when talking about ChatGPT, and lead to poor predictions about what we can and can't make it do.
You've done some experiments and you have some responses, but this is not enough to predict how ChatGPT will respond to other, even similar, things you haven't tried, or indeed even exactly the same things asked several dozen times (I'm not saying it's a magic 8 ball but the process it uses to produce output does literally include a random number generator!)
There is no "it" that can "know" or be "taught" things in the sense we intuitively mean when we anthropomorphise systems. The thing actually there is both simpler and more complex and opaque than that, and some hard problems are that we don't yet know much about how to reason about and predict its behaviours, and that its behaviours differ in really unfortunate ways from things we find intuitive, so we /really really/ need to improve where we are with that first problem because we can't rely on our intuitions to generalise from what we see.
We can discuss hypotheticals about what things might look like and what sort of things we might attempt when we have made progress in some of those areas, but that is a very different kettle of fish from where we are today.
I'm not saying it doesn't know anything. That would be just as wrong as claiming it knows something.
I'm saying we don't have any good way right now to reason about what it will and won't do based on what it did last time, and /we can't use intuitions we've built about humans to short circuit this lack/, because what we have built is a very very different kind of thing to a human.
We can make reasonably accurate mental models of how people resond to things because we have a deep store of experience about the net effects of all those sparking neurons and sloshing chemicals. There is enough commonality that this experience somewhat translates to some animals, although our predictions are much less good there and this occasionally leads to very bad outcomes. It does not translate at all to any current AI. We can't just go from "humans are sparking neurons yet we can pretty reliably tell when they know things" to "therefore we can pretty reliably tell when matrices know things", because the systems are very very different.
I'm saying we shouldn't take our ability to deduce what humans might or might not know from what they say or do, apply it to any current AI, predict that it will never respond to stimulus we care about in an undesirable way, and base anything that actually matters on that prediction. Where the outcomes don't matter I don't much care, but safety critical engineering needs more rigor than this.
"Adversarial images" is a wonderful search term here. Notice how the kinds of changes made to images to get radically different answers from the AI are nothing like what one might intuitively expect, and also really really tiny and hard to notice. In the land of ChatGPT, this translates to changes to a prompt (or, indeed, the RNG output) that a human would consider trivial potentially giving radically different results.
I'm jumping on words like "know" and "teach" because they are words used to apply our intuitions about humans to some entity, and so are super likely to spread bad intuitions and an incorrect mental model of what is happening to readers that are not used to the constant deliberate effort it takes to talk about this stuff while treading the thin line between colloquial English and the mathematical reality.
This is the sort of work one can do to prove that an AI has actually learned / knows things in a way that is enough like a human knowing/learning things for us to be able to use our intuition to discuss the consequences: https://thegradient.pub/othello/
One way for us to be able to unreservedly claim that an AI knows "how people would feel about this future if it was described to them" and have that sentence actually imply the sort of things an English speaker might assume it implies could be such an approach. However, we would need to first pin down what that sentence even means with enough rigor to then be able to follow the kind of process in the research above.
There may be other ways, but if there are, we don't yet know what they are.
When I say "we don't know how to do that work", I don't necessarily mean that we don't know how to show that an AI knows something. Demonstrably, we have at least one way to do that. I mean that we don't know enough about the models inside people that cause us to make decisions like what to "call a good future and a bad future" to look for equivalent structures inside the AI, as was done for the Othello game, and we do know that the AI getting it right sometimes is not evidence that it will get it right always or even mostly, as it might be with a human.
The problem with going from reasoning about board games to reasoning about human values and feelings is at least as much with our ability to reason about human values and feelings as it is with our ability to reason about the AI we have built.
I wrote a post about normative decision theory:
https://thothhermes.substack.com/p/models-are-descriptive-not-prescriptive
It's related to a couple of comment threads I had on X:
https://x.com/thoth_iv/status/1830286361238134846
https://x.com/thoth_iv/status/1830966579183657326
My take is that it's kind of thorny to treat formal mathematical models as being ultimately normative, but that there's also some evidence that this is what one of the goals of the rationality community (mainly MIRI) was at one point in time.
If we can't treat formal mathematical models as ultimately normative, then the question becomes, what can be? I leave that mostly open, with the exception of pointing in the direction of "perhaps utility functions themselves perform this role, which means they can't treat themselves as absolute or as fixed."
> Von Neumann and Morgenstern1 treat the mathematization of a subject as a great achievement that is not always possible depending on the maturity of that subject. For example, empirical data and measurement capabilities have to be fairly advanced in that field as a prerequisite.
Maybe it's my reductionist instincts talking here, but it seems to me that models can only be regarded as hypotheses. Define the rules and the variables, assign values to the variables, and see if the results match observations. Hypotheses need to be falsifiable to be potentially useful. It doesn't matter if they're normative or descriptive. Newcomblike problems are unfalsifiable (unless we're testing the behavior of the Great Predictor). And if a model can't be falsified, it has no utility.
Typo alert: "who the excellent De Novo blog" should be "who writes the excellent De Novo blog".
I’ve gotten interested in tiny drones with cameras. (I’m not interested in buying one, just curious about them.) Looked around online a bit and the smallest I could find was the military Black Hornet nanodrone, which is about 6” long. There’s also a cyberinsect drone that’s considerably smaller: A genetically modified dragonfly wears the camera like a backpack. Dragonfly appears to be about 2” long. People who able to do informed speculation about these things: Can you tell me how much smaller it might be possible to make them, and what gets in the way of making them much smaller? How far are we from being able to make one that’s half an inch or so long, if all we want it to do is take photos?
Doesn't take photos but:
"Scientists in China have built what they claim to be the smallest and lightest solar-powered aerial vehicle. It’s small enough to sit in the palm of a person’s hand, weighs less than a U.S. nickel, and can fly indefinitely while the sun shines on it."
https://spectrum.ieee.org/smallest-drone
I was recently given a drone as a present. Seems really difficult to fly because the slightest breeze will cause it to turn and veer off (I ended up deadheading quite a few flowers). Perhaps it's just about learning the knack but it seems like the smaller the drone the more sensitive to wind.
Flying insects are able to take care of business when there's a breeze, so it must be possible.
Insects have superhuman reflexes. (Nerve impulses don't have to travel as far.)
That seems like a problem with manual control; surely it oughtn't be too difficult to have it automatically adjust to the wind to stay in one place relative to nearby solid objects?
I dare say. This was a gift some friends clubbed together to get, so very much a layman's model, but a friend who produces adverts and sometimes engages drone operators says they have trouble with weather constantly.
When I was a graduate student, some users at our facility were implanting electrodes into moth pupae. The idea was to remotely control the grown moths, and the project was funded by DARPA.
I think you should be able to go much smaller than these (large) moths or dragonflies. I know the moth project was specifically aiming for larger invertebrates so they could carry more “payload.”
If you want to get really small, I bet interesting things could be done with lasers and optogenetics—perhaps even eliminating the need for any components on the insect by shining a laser on, for example, engineered Drosophila.
Maybe someone else can comment on how small a camera can be made.
Ah. I dimly remember reading of killer porpoises with napalm backpacks or something.
Maybe some Machiavelli will develop half animal / half robot critters to fly through tunnels to rooms in underground bunkers. Kaboom. Throw in the Chinese with their underwater military structures, and robotic nefarious eels and Garibaldi are a possibility. There's gotta be an Israeli startup working on it.
>Maybe someone else can comment on how small a camera can be made.
I just had a scope of my larynx, and the camera lens at the tip of the wire they feed up your nose was a little hemisphere 1/4" in diameter at most. I don't know what other camera bits were in the wire behind the lens, but the wire was maybe 1/8" in diameter, so they were tiny. And the video that got from it of the trip down my throat was high quality.
Can you say any more about eliminating the need for components on the insect? If you shine a laser on the fruit fly -- how does that get you an image? Are you somehow collecting the visual data the fruit fly is getting? And isn't the laser itself then a component of the insect camera? I get that the details of this haven't been worked out, but I don't really get even the general idea of how it would work, & I can tell that you have one.
Here’s what I was thinking:
If all you want to do is take photos, then you don't need to send the photos back to a receiver in real time. You could have the camera on the drone, then return the drone to the home base and download the information.
So, let's consider three components: 1) the drone itself, 2) the camera, and 3) a control system.
My speculation about "eliminating the need for any components on the insect" relates to the third. If you could do that, you could decrease the overall weight and use a smaller cyborg insect. Instead of using an RF receiver, electrodes, etc., maybe you could just use laser light. It is not a solved problem, but optogenetic control of the neural pathways for different movements is probably possible in fruit flies. Maybe we could use different wavelengths for different motions. Maybe Drosophila is transparent enough to allow this to work without having to pipe the light to its brain with fiber optics (though, looking it up now, this is probably not true); if so, you could use line-of-sight lasers to control its movement from the ground.
Could you get Drosophila to carry a camera? Sure. I’d guess something with a lens diameter of 400um would be possible—a really rough estimate using the Rayleigh criterion would give you images with something like 0.1 degrees angular resolution. There’s probably a better way to estimate this, which is why I left it open for someone else to answer.
Thank you! I get it. And yes, the thing I have in mind would not transmit images, just carry them back to home base.
By the way, is this sort of thing your field, or near it?
Not my field. Though I did collaborate closely and publish with a Bioelectronics group during my postdoc.
Controlling insects is an active research area. For example, cockroaches can be controlled by sending gentle electric pulses to their antennae, which cause them to sense an “obstacle” and change direction. The idea is to use them for search operation in collapsed buildings and the such.
Yup, exactly what this group does: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44182-024-00010-3 (got the link from a friend - would credit him, but don't want to doxx him)
Thanks!
Huh, everyday the Schizophrenics ranting about birds as government drones & cameras in their walls, get more & more right.
I knew a guy who made a diorama of a rock concert stage and set up a band of roaches to beat drums and play to music using such controls. It was a senior project in neuroscience. He called it “Roachella”
Here’s the (unfortunately paywalled) Science mag piece on the subject: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03801-0
Here’s an older article about it:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21431-nerve-probe-controls-cyborg-moth-in-flight/
My understanding, after speaking with staff, is that it’s much like the pigeon idea, but bugs are more ethical.
Did you see this pigeon story in the subreddit? https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/vdzhqk/dalhet_etrach_is_a_modern_augurocracy_its/?rdt=42958
One thing to realize when it comes to Turing test is that most humans would fail it... In fact, they are failing it.
https://open.substack.com/pub/silkfire/p/the-imitation-game/
Every time I see people talk about the "Turing Test" here I get a little more confused as to what exactly people here think it is. No human can "fail" the Turing Test; "a human failing the Turing Test" is not even a coherent or well-defined concept. You might as well say "most ideas would sleep furiously... in fact, they are sleeping furiously".
Well, of course anyone can decide for themselves what constitutes a failure, etc. What I am trying to communicate is that there is a certain mental faculty that is meant to make us humans. And it is the functioning of that particular faculty that Turing test should evaluate.
However, as it happens, humans are not born with that part of our psyche -- let's call it the faculty of reason, for the lack of a better term -- fully functional. Instead, it has to be discovered and developed by an individual, and it just doesn't happen often! And it this unfortunate reality that I refer to when I say that most humans, such as they are, are failing Turing test.
>Well, of course anyone can decide for themselves what constitutes a failure, etc.
No, they can't. "Failing a Turing Test" is a phrase that refers to a specific, well-defined thing which it is not logically possible for a human to do.
Exactly. A human failing the Turing test is the failure of the human rater, not the one being rated.
Even if the rated human is only imitating the general intelligence?
What if humans are part AI, part general intelligence? In that case, don't you think that Turing test should focus on the general intelligence (which is optional in humans), rather than on how good is a person (or a machine) at imitating it?
Per 2:
The Next Rembrandt was created using AI over 8 years ago. It's convincing to my (untrained) eyes.
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/04/06/473265273/a-new-rembrandt-from-the-frontiers-of-ai-and-not-the-artists-atelier
I'd like to see a high-definition version of this image. Rembrandt had a distinctive way he applied glazes of color. It wouldn't be difficult for a skilled painter to mimic his technique, but I wonder if an AI could pick it up.
Unfortunately, it looks like the website for the project is down.
surprisingly difficult to find good high-resolution images
I've recently transitioned from working solo for the past 4 years to working on a small 6 person team. Im finding myself a little lost--between the stand-ups and planning and vision, I'm finding it difficult to find my bearing and figure out what to work on. I'm a senior developer and it is expected that I should propose and lead projects. I'm still onboarding, week 6. I think the team and manager are good, probably one of the best I've worked on.
I'm not sure what the problem is, which is probably the main part of the problem. Maybe I'm not talking enough with people. (I'm at a remote-first company).
Does anyone have advice or reading material about how to start operating as part of a team? Friend recommend How NASA Builds Teams.
Can you ask other team members to give you insight into near and long term goals, problems, expectations, timetables? Even if there's literature already available, having a conversation can help build the team. Get some insight into how they think, what they value etc. Ask real questions, even if you think you can figure out the answers on your own (in addition to building rapport, you may find out you would have been wrong without some details from them).
I've heard good things about Team Topologies. Granted, that's more about *organizing* teams than operating as part of one, but it might be a worthwhile read.
Burnt-out senior dev here: I think you may be putting too much pressure on yourself at 6 weeks. Unless you are working on the world's simplest application I don't know how you'd be expected to know its pain-points within that short amount of time.
Is there not a backlog of issues to go through? There should be some low-hanging fruit in there to cut your teeth on. If there isn't low-hanging fruit: read the tickets, the histories, the comments. Find out what is blocking work and try to understand why. Try to carve out some time to attempt to unblock the problems but expect to fail (everyone else has so far). This is the only way to learn and become effective at a code base. Apply your own intuition to choose where to focus at the beginning- not pressure from business/marketing/whatever.
If the company does not welcome exploratory and expected to fail small scale projects from a new hire it is neither a good manager nor team, in my opinion.
Agree with this. I would also spend time connecting with your team and figuring out their views of things like the company and potential projects. Especially if everyone is remote you need to schedule those semi-informal conversations
Very well said!
Scott - I was interested in your AI art experiment, but I wonder how it works? It seems to me that using an image prompt would just trivialize the whole thing. I could take an actual picture of some obscure painting, set a low denoising level and the output would look 95% identical to the real deal with a shallow AI generated look. I don't think this is very interesting or what you are looking for. Maybe the whole thing is done on a good faith basis, but there is an obvious loophole, especially if you are handing out money.
If you want purely text-to-image for a test (a sensible criterion since that IS most people's idea of "AI art"), you could ask for prompt and seed and make sure the result's reproducible.
You could ask for metadata to verify the images. This is relatively simple for something like Dall-e to practically impossible for local generation with 3rd party tools. Plus as someone "not good enough at AI art to do this myself", Scott might not understand it well enough to verify.
I appreciate that language can be inadequate for physicists to describe quantum mechanics in a way that a lay person can understand, particularly because some of the phenomena does not make complete sense to physicists either. Given that, here are my questions.
If a waive function does not collapse until it is measured by an observer, where is the waive until then?
In other words, if I am a waive until I am measured, where am I.
Is being measured the same as someone seeing me?
Will the same thing happen if I am measured by a machine, but no one is reading the output?
Do measurements come out the same for all observers?
In other words, if different people are observing (or measuring) me, do I look the same to all?
If I am a waive until I am observed, how can there be causation?
In other words, if the present resulted from actions I took in the past, how did the past occur and how did I impact the present if I was was not measured yesterday and was just a waive?
With respect, I don't think the other answers in this thread are right. My qualifications: PhD in mathematics with a focus on quantization and differential geometry.
I think the questions you are asking are legitimate, even scientific (though that's controversial), and I don't believe any of the mainstream answers are good, except the answer that's actually most popular amongst physicists: we don't know.
Decoherence doesn't work as an answer to these questions. For one thing, there's no precise definition of when decoherence has happened to a sufficient extent that we can say an "observation" has happened. For another, if you want decoherence to say anything at all about the real world, you have to postulate an extra ingredient like Many Worlds or just, you know, observation as fundamental.
Furthermore, decoherence, many worlds, and all related theories fail to derive the Born rule, which describes how probabilities are derived from wavefunctions. This is fatal. You can, of course, postulate the Born rule, but all the forms I know of take you right back to postulating observations as fundamental parts of the theory, which defeats the purpose of these other theories.
Decoherence is definitely part of the story. And the Many Worlds interpretation is *useful* in some cases. But if "useful" + parsimonious is good enough to be true, you're better off just taking von Neumann's version of QM, which is a slightly more sophisticated version of the Copenhagen interpretation.
Robin Hanson claimed that Born probabilities can be derived from a "mangled worlds" take on many-worlds:
https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/mangledworlds.html
Some of the questions, in particular whether having machines make observations instead of humans makes a difference, are very much NOT in the "we don't know" category. Physicists definitely know that those ARE measurements for any "wave function collapse" consideration.
And to some others, like the "where is the wave before it is measured", the answer isn't "we don't know" so much as "the question is implicitly making assumptions that don't hold up."
If you equate measurement with decoherence (which doesn't get you measurements without several additional stipulations, but anyway), then tell me when does the measurement take place? In realistic systems, decoherence is never complete, so you actually need a criterion.
It is interesting how everyone, myself included of course, thinks their preferred interpretation is the one with the least assumption. To me, wavefunction collapse increases the number of things that can happen by one, relative to the default view of thinking the many worlds which exist in isolated experiments exist outside of them. How do you arrange the formalism to get projection post-measurement for free at the expense of making the linear independence of superposition "additional?"
The "many worlds in isolated experiments" view (I think this is from people like Sean Carroll?) only gets you to the "many worlds" of Everett through, IMO, profound confusion. A *lot* of stipulations and philosophical heavy lifting are needed. I'm sorry if my words are harsh. I want to be clear about what's my opinion (eg., that you might as well go with von Neumann), and what I think is definitely true, and this is true.
I don't see what has to be stipulated beyond the Born rule to determine our individual experience of the universal wave function. Would you mind elaborating?
I enjoyed Philip Ball's book "Beyond Weird" because its premise was not as so often "So, all the really smart people are okay with the way we have to talk about this stuff, so you should be too; and now that that's out of the way, isn't it cool because it's so strange?" I mean, it's not that he sugarcoats it, but he does illuminate some of the ways people are trying to move beyond Bohr's imperious pronouncements on the subject. (Don't mean to imply he disses Bohr in any way!)
For concreteness, let's consider Young's double-slit experiment. With electrons, just to be clear it's not just photons that are weird.
Background: what you do is you fire a beam of electrons at a double-slit, and detect where the collide on the screen behind it.
If you put a detector at one of the slits so you can tell which of the two each electron goes through, you get one pattern on the screen. This pattern looks like what you'd get if you had the slits open one at a time.
And if you remove the detector and run the experiment again, you get a more complicated interference pattern, with dark patches where you'd expect electrons to land (and where they DID land when you had the detector!).
You can fire individual electrons one at a time at the slit, and you get the same pattern as firing a bunch of them at once, so the interference pattern doesn't require an electron to interfere with OTHER electrons; if you think of the electron as interfering with _itself,_ it makes sense to think of it as a wave, spread out over both slits.
As long as your interpretation makes correct predictions, explaining phenomena like this, it's as valid as any other. But a fairly popular one is Copenhagen, which is the one you have in mind. So in that language, we speak of electrons as waves collapsing into particles, and then turning back into waves. But remember, the distinction is artificial: electrons, like everything else, are a secret, more complex third thing.
So where is the wave? Everywhere* (well, propagating outward at light-speed from last detection). The amplitude of the wave at any point relates to the probability of detecting a particle at that point if you make a measurement.
The detector at the slit is making the measurements, whether or not anyone looks at them. So yeah, no one needs to read them: the interaction of the electron with the environment (i.e., the detector) is enough.
A measurement once made looks the same for all observers. So I read that detector saying the electron went through the right slit, so will you.
But if you ask whether if someone else making the measurement instead of you, are they guaranteed to have gotten the same result? No, they are not. Because the measurements are intrinsically random: there is no information hidden in electron that says it is right-slit-bound before the measurement is performed.
Jon. I don’t think that you are a quantum particle yourself.
At the level of quantum particles the use of the term observer is unfortunate I think. Instead a quantum particular decoheres when it interacts with the rest of the universe. An actual human (or other conscious) observer is not required.
What do you mean by "quantum particle"?
If you're imagining that photons, electrons, maybe things as large as alpha particles, are subject to quantum mechanics while things larger than that aren't, that's not true. I just looked it up, and the current best matter-wave interference experiments have got up to 25 kDa.
What is kDa?
Kilodaltons, a measure of the size of a molecule. A dalton, which you might know as an "amu," is basically the mass of a hydrogen atom (technically 1/12 the mass of carbon-12, for unimportant reasons).
Your questions seem to imply the common misunderstanding of quantum mechanics involving "someone" who is an "observer" - IMHO it's easier to understand, if you adopt a practice of never ever using the word "observer", replacing it instead with "observation", defined as "any interaction with the rest of the world that could affect it".
From that perspective, the answers to your questions become relatively trivial:
1) if I am a waive until I am measured, where am I. -> you're constantly "observed", it's not practical for a living human to be *so* isolated to avoid being "measured" for even trivial amounts of time, as you're interacting with the external environment constantly in many ways.
2) is being measured the same as someone seeing me? -> no, any interaction with atoms of air or light counts as "being measured".
3) Will the same thing happen if I am measured by a machine, but no one is reading the output? -> Yes, as far as we know;
4) Do measurements come out the same for all observers? -> this is tricky; the measurements should be the same no matter who does observation, HOWEVER, it's provably physically impossible to repeat or replicate any quantum measurements ever, as any measurement inevitably changes the state and thus doing a similar measurement immediately afterward (no matter if the same observer or someone else) can't expect to get the same outcome, as the previous measurement destroyed the state that was measured and it so doesn't exist anymore and can't be re-measured. On macro-scale the alterations are insignificant, as you're measuring rough approximations of averages anyway, but for single particles any measurement is a quite significant impact.
5) if different people are observing (or measuring) me, do I look the same to all? -> Yes, as far as we know;
6) If I am a waive until I am observed, how can there be causation? -> If there is no interaction whatsoever, then there isn't (and shouldn't be) any causation, and if there is any interaction whatsoever that could cause anything, that is an observation. Effectively, causation and observation are unalienable from each other.
These aren't scientific questions, but philosophical. One can deal with them as a scientist mathematically. They are only scientific questions if one can test to see which answer is correct, or which is wrong, and we know of no way to tell.
Several possible philosophical answers can resolve your questions, such as many worlds theory, reactions backwards in time, etc.
In many worlds theory, every quantum "choice" that happens splits the universe so that one choice happens in one universe and the other in the other. The wave function only shows the probabilities of being in one universe or another. So there is no "wave".
You can also look at it like the universe is an interference pattern of all of the universes of many worlds theory. So whether you or a machine make an "observation" it codifies all of the possible choices.
I am not a physicist, but have read a few layman books on such subjects.
Hilbert space is infinite-dimensional, not five-dimensional. Really it's pretty misleading to talk about it being dimensions at all unless you're being precise and technical about it, because they aren't part of the same space as the ordinary directions of physical space(-time) like upwards, eastwards and future-wards.
Presumably this was intended as just a simplification to give people an intuition without having to get into the details, it just seems like a particularly bad example of that sort of explanation.
Can a country's general public's ability to apply critical thinking be measured?
If we could explain critical thinking we could maybe measure it.
If we could measure it, maybe we could teach it, simply by doing random things and observing what works. :)
What is the best book about humans as essentially status-seeking creatures? There seems to be a lot of books about this in the ssc-adjacent blogosphere and I always make a note of checking them out later but forget which one was cited.
The 3 previous respondents cite The Righteous Mind, The Elephant in the Brain, and The Status Game. I haven't read any of these books and I doubt I will, but I'm basically familiar with their claims already.
What I'm looking for now are reviews that contrast them; I'd like to know if they differ on important points. So far I've only found https://cogzest.com/humanism/the-status-game-by-will-storr/, which mentions The Elephant in the Brain a few times.
And booklists that contained at least 2 of those books, as well as related books:
-https://www.reddit.com/r/psychology/comments/14wmv04/which_book_is_more_insightful_the_elephant_in_the/ (scroll to one of the few comments)
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k6NkvAcRaKBMAzqEF/my-intellectual-influences (Richard Ngo)
Does anyone have any recommendations? Thanks.
Will Storr - The Status Game is the best I've read.
It's indirectly on topic, but half of the argument in "The Righteous Mind" is that humans evolved rationalization in order to assemble large coalitions, and actual rational thought was a useful byproduct. The idea that all of our communication might be in service of bending others to our preferred ends, seems like it incorporates "status-seeking" somewhere along the way?
Not sure what the best one is, but The Elephant in the Brain by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler is one such book.
The world needs to get fertility rates to not fall below replacement for long periods to prevent a shrinking population that causes a decline in innovation (or a drastic drop-off in innovation if Robin Hanson is right).
Several countries are starting to spend big on child incentives to address low fertility rates. I suggest picking the low hanging fruit first by also looking at low cost ways of making it easier to have kids, especially in light of the fact parents are having to devote ever more time to child-raising. I wrote up my ideas here: https://medium.com/@bobert93/low-cost-ideas-for-increasing-fertility-rates-97445d484c60
Caveat: I'm not a parent, so don't claim to know anything about raising children. I've taken lots of ideas from Bryan Caplan on that front.
Sorry, is the idea here that if the population starts shrinking, then it will always shrink forever? Is there any actual defense of that claim?
I think it's possible it could shrink a lot. Of course eventually high fertility sub-groups (like the Amish) will make up a big enough % of the population that it'll start to go back up again.
My worry with this is two fold. Firstly, that shrinking populations will mean drastically slower rates of innovation https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/shrinking-economies-dont-innovate . Secondly, high-fertility sub groups tend to have very different values to modern society, and maintain their high fertility by rejecting these values. I'd like the future not to belong to them. Hanson again: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/a-fertility-reckoning
Everything exists in an equilibrium. I don't see any reason to think the equilibrium population is zero.
If nothing else, if human population gets down into the single-digit millions, we forfeit most of modern civilization, and the ancient benefits of children reappear.
> Why would it start magically going back up?
Evolution, of course.
You are going to have to explain.
I need to explain why evolution would drive the birth rate up?
Yeh. I think so Michael. Otherwise it’s a just a one line drive by. Argue as if you were in a debate in real life.
I could try guess what you are saying - the people who are more likely to want have children are having them thus the offspring will trend to have more children. Or maybe you are talking about religious people having more children although that’s more a cultural evolution, or maybe that there’s an evolutionary trend to women being fertile later in life.
Or something entirely different. We can’t know until you spell it out.
I agree for the most part with your various ideas, especially the “grab bag” of non costly ideas such as additional democratic votes for parents to represent their kids, social security premiums and payouts affected by family size, preferential hiring and college for marrieds with kids and so on. I would add more legal immigration for families of fluent English speakers with college degrees, and easier adoption of immigrant babies.
The countries which will thrive in the second half of this century will be ones that crack the code here. The losers will be replaced and forgotten.
The Economist has covered this topic repeatedly for several years now, a series of lengthy articles exploring various aspects of it. Then this past May they published an editorial that was sort of a 'what we think we've learned' piece. Since it is paywalled I'll paste that text in here.
====
headline: "Why paying women to have more babies won’t work
subheadline: "Economies must adapt to baby busts instead"
text:
"As birth rates plunge, many politicians want to pour money into policies that might lead women to have more babies. Donald Trump has vowed to dish out bonuses if he returns to the White House. In France, where the state already spends 3.5-4% of gdp on family policies each year, Emmanuel Macron wants to “demographically rearm” his country. South Korea is contemplating handouts worth a staggering $70,000 for each baby. Yet all these attempts are likely to fail, because they are built on a misapprehension.
Governments’ concern is understandable. Fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere and the rich world faces a severe shortage of babies. At prevailing birth rates, the average woman in a high-income country today will have just 1.6 children over her lifetime. Every rich country except Israel has a fertility rate beneath the replacement level of 2.1, at which a population is stable without immigration. The decline over the past decade has been faster than demographers expected.
Doomsayers such as Elon Musk warn that these shifts threaten civilisation itself. That is ridiculous, but they will bring profound social and economic changes. A fertility rate of 1.6 means that, without immigration, each generation will be a quarter smaller than the one before it. In 2000 rich countries had 26 over-65-year-olds for every 100 people aged 25-64. By 2050 that is likely to have doubled. The worst-affected places will see even more dramatic change. In South Korea, where the fertility rate is 0.7, the population is projected to fall by 60% by the end of the century.
The decision to have children is a personal one and should stay that way. But governments need to pay heed to rapid demographic shifts. Ageing and shrinking societies will probably lose dynamism and military might. They will certainly face a budgetary nightmare, as taxpayers struggle to finance the pensions and health care of legions of oldies.
Many pro-natalist policies come with effects that are valuable in themselves. Handouts for poor parents reduce child poverty, for instance, and mothers who can afford child care are more likely to work. However, governments are wrong to think it is within their power to boost fertility rates. For one thing, such policies are founded on a false diagnosis of what has so far caused demographic decline. For another, they could cost more than the problems they are designed to solve.
One common assumption is that falling fertility rates stem from professional women putting off having children. The notion that they run out of time to have as many babies as they wish before their childbearing years draw to a close explains why policies tend to focus on offering tax breaks and subsidised child care. That way, it is argued, women do not have to choose between their family and their career.
That is not the main story. University-educated women are indeed having children later in life, but only a little. In America their average age at the birth of their first child has risen from 28 in 2000 to 30 now. These women are having roughly the same number of children as their peers did a generation ago. This is a little below what they say is their ideal family size, but the gap is no different from what it used to be.
Instead, the bulk of the decline in the fertility rate in rich countries is among younger, poorer women who are delaying when they start to have children, and who therefore have fewer overall. More than half the drop in America’s total fertility rate since 1990 is caused by a collapse in births among women under 19. That is partly because more of them are going to college. But even those who leave education after high school are having children later. In 1994 the average age of a first-time mother without a university degree was 20. Today, about two-thirds of women without degrees in their 20s are yet to have their first child.
Some politicians may seize on this to aim baby-boosting policies at very young women. They may be tempted, too, by evidence that poorer women respond more to financial incentives. But focusing on young and poor women as a group would be bad for them and for society. Teenage pregnancies are linked to poverty and ill health for both mother and child. Targeted incentives would roll back decades of efforts to curb unwanted teenage pregnancy and encourage women into study and work. Those efforts, along with programmes to enhance gender equality, rank among the greatest public-policy triumphs of the postwar era.
Some illiberal governments, such as those of Hungary and Russia, may choose to ignore this progress. Yet they face a practical problem, because government incentives do not seem to bring lots of extra babies even as spending mounts. Sweden offers an extraordinarily generous child-care programme, but its total fertility rate is still only 1.7. Vast amounts of money are needed to encourage each extra baby. And handouts tend to go to all babies, including those who would have been born anyway. As a result, schemes in Poland and France cost $1m-2m per extra birth. Only a tiny number of citizens are productive enough to generate fiscal benefits to offset that kind of money. Due to low social mobility only 8% of American children born to parents without bachelor’s degrees end up getting such a degree themselves.
What, then, can governments do? High-skilled immigration can plug fiscal gaps, but not indefinitely, given that fertility is falling globally. Most economies will therefore have to adapt to social change, and it falls to governments to smooth the way. Welfare states will need rethinking: older people will have to work later in life, for instance, to cut the burden on the public purse. The invention and adoption of new technologies will need to be encouraged. These could make the demographic transition easier by unleashing economy-wide productivity growth or helping care for the old. New household technologies may help parents, rather as dishwashers and washing machines did in the mid-20th century. Baby-boosting policies, by comparison, are a costly and socially retrograde mistake."
I recall Robin Hanson responding to that in a couple of tweets:
https://x.com/robinhanson/status/1793696873447895428
I read these doomster predictions and yet it still remains the fact that most couples want more than one child. More than 2 on average. So there’s not just a cultural issue but the cost involved that’s stopping them. My guess is fixing the housing prices will do it. People are reluctant to have children if renting. It’s the uncertainty.
> Some illiberal governments, such as those of Hungary and Russia,
I see the economist still has a bee in its bonnet with Hungary.
>most couples want more than one child
I believe too many singles is part of the problem.
I dint know how much of a problem though. After all there were always spinster aunts and bachelor uncles and an entire group of people committed to celibacy for religious reasons. I’m sure it’s higher now but not extraordinary so.
To me the "cost" of having a third child is not really about the financial cost, it's about giving up another five years of my life. The cost of more children is close to linear, while the benefits diminish rapidly.
Ideally I'd have three children. And ideally I'd have six pack abs. But some ideals feel like more trouble than they're worth.
"yet it still remains the fact that most couples want more than one child"
Can you provide a link to the data supporting this assertion?
There’s more out there, but gallop records that 41% of American couples want 3 children. The average aspiration is for 2.7.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/236696/americans-theory-think-larger-families-ideal.aspx
Thank you. FWIW I think the problem is more complex than just the housing costs. As many others pointed out, it just seems to be so... difficult... to raise children in the modern society, for all kinds of reasons: expensive, stressful, high expectations, enormously time-consuming, the whole helicopter parenting thing...
I suspect it was difficult in the old days too. Some parts were more difficult -- e.g. food and clothing used to be a much larger fraction of the family budget than they are now.
But you did it anyway, because the alternative was celibacy. If you get married at 21 and have a normal sex life without contraception then statistically you're going to wind up with more kids than you planned.
For the U.S. at least Pew Research Center has long tracked and reported on the specifics of the national birthrate, using census data. Their most-recent data is that as of 2016, 86% of U.S. women aged 40 to 44 had had at least one child. Among those mothers the average number of children was 2.42. Of those mothers, 22 percent had had just one child.
Pew says that all of those numbers were almost exactly the same as of the mid 1990s as the mid 2010s. The shift occurred between the 1970s and 1990s: as of the mid-70s only 11 percent of U.S. mothers aged 40-44 had had just one child.
I'm not sure how these data support the "most couples want more than one child" assertion.... The links Rothwed provided at least show a survey result, and while one can question its representativeness, a majority of respondents did indeed want 2+ children.
Zvi has some articles about fertility like this one:
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/fertility-roundup-2
Links to this dataset gathered from this dating service (n=2,961):
https://github.com/dankras/mixmosa-anonymized-data
Ok that's one survey from a dating app questionnaire showing a slight majority (≈55%? oh ffs, if only people included "grid" when plotting results) saying to the dating app that they prefer 2+ kids. That's something, although far from the "most" P.D. claimed.
Yeh, on the other hand I posted another survey. Not this one.
...then maybe we should try to correct that problem first? Assuming that the human population would always grow didn't turn out to be true, so we need to deal with that.
50 years ago all the Serious Thinkers were saying that about allowing humanity's population to keep growing.
Just that I've been on this merry-go-round before, and I'm a bit skeptical about this time it's FOR REAL!!! Pro-nativists have a bunch of arguments on their side, but so did the population bomb people.
Thanks!
At least we could make a rebuttal to:
"Grade school costs have increased 250% over the last 50 years, adjusted for inflation, but test scores have remained the same. So what are we paying for?"
"Yeah but we can send the kids there on weekends and holidays now."
And the One Weird Trick always seems to align with a policy that they wanted anyway.
Is there a space of possible goals? Is it a set, or some kind of algebraic structure, like a ring? It seems like there may be symmetries. For example, do all goals have an inverse? I asked chat gpt and it didn’t give me a good answer here.
A friend once asked me "what if birds could talk?"
I responded "well... I suppose it depends on what sort of novel you're writing. Do they spontaenously start talking tomorrow morning, like in Charlotte's Web? or are we doing an alternate-timeline thing where talking-birds and talking-humans co-evolved? or do you mean something else entirely."
Asking about whether "goals have algebraic structure" is similar. As padraig notes, the colloquial term "goal" seems too poorly-defined (sans additional context or assumptions). E.g. are we doing a Laplace's Daemon sort of thing, where all actions are reversible by fiat? or perhaps it's more pragmatic to restrict our Domain of Discourse to one which follows the flow of entropy.
More generally, the world of math is relevant to the world of meatspace only insofar as objects in meatspace satisfy the math-object's assumptions (at least approximately). E.g. pi's relevance to meatspace is only ever approximate, because no real ball is actually a perfect sphere. So a less malformed question would be "what sort of algebraic structure best fits the specific context that's relevant to me?"
----
That being said, I've thought a lot about adjacent topics (as I'm sure you've gathered by now). And one observation you may find interesting, is that "needs" and "options" tend to be duals of each other.
E.g. contrast someone who's $1,000,000 in debt to someone who has $1,000,000 sitting in the bank. The poor person "needs" money. The rich person has a surplus of resources, which gives them options regarding how to spend it. If the rich person donates their money to the poor person, the needs and options cancel out to zero.
Additionally, needs tend to branch out backwards, whereas options tend to branch out forwards. E.g. if I "need" to bake a cake for a wedding, this entails that I need flour, AND eggs, AND milk, AND oven-mitts, etc. Conversely, if I "have options" about what to do with my free-time, it means i can go read a book, OR attend a restaurant, OR take a nap, etc.
So when you plan a goal (qua "a path from point-A to point-B"), it's generally going to look like some sort of DAG that branches and converges according to the composition of its needs and options.
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idk if this helps, but my intuition about this comes from a loose combination of thoughts about morality, hoare logic, build-orders in videogames, and contract law. "High Output Management" by Andy Grove (former CEO of intel) also had a similar vibe, where he discusses time-management in terms of systems-engineering concepts like concurrency and production-queues. It also might be useful to google "causal thinking vs effectual thinking".
If you're just asking about the algebraic structure, I guess it's a monoid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoid). Goals can be added together (if A and B are goals, then A+B means to achieve both), addition is associative, and the empty goal functions as the identity element. Goals don't necessarily have an inverse, because not all actions in the real world are reversible (you can't unrot an apple), so it doesn't graduate to being a group, let alone a ring.
"goal-A AND goal-B" would i think represent multiplication (a struct), whereas "goal-A OR goal-B" would represent addition (a tuple/union). And paths to goals are analogous to exponentiation (subroutines). I'm not sure what discipline of knowledge this is called, but it's not original to me. I think it's a Category Theory thing, but don't quote me on that.
But the truth of it is demonstrable from considering the implications for probability theory, and considering how statespaces interact. E.g. a statespace of (A or ~A) and (B or ~B) is analogous to (1 + 1) (1 + 1) = (4).
Why would it be an algebraic structure like a ring? What would the operations on this ring be? I can kinda imagine an addition operator (achieve this and that) but what would it mean to multiply two goals?
The way we talk about and think about goals is a bit too imprecise to work with mathematically. The most basic thing we should be able to decide if we're going to do mathematics is whether two things are equal. If I want to make a million dollars by working in my business, or I want to win the lottery to make a million are they the same goal? If you want the same thing as I do, are they the same?
The closest mathematical topic to what you're asking is probably optimisation. The setup there is that you have a function (possibly of many inputs) that you want to maximise - this might represent profit for a company or utility for a utilitarian. But describing the function means that mathematical methods apply to solving the problem. In linear programming the space of objective functions is a vector space, more generally it will be the ring of functions on a vector space.
In utilitarianism, it's a vector space (since you can form linear combinations, weighting priority A by 0.6 and priority B by 2 for example), or possibly a projective space if you don't consider simply scaling everything by the same amount to change anything.
From one perspective, you could model "goals" as a mapping from every possible world state to an indicator of whether that goal has been achieved (or perhaps partially achieved), which reduces the primary question to what would be the space to model every possible world state; but in that model all goals would have an inverse by definition.
Are you talking about individual goals? Concrete goals (like - "get a job") or philosophical goals (like - "be a good person")?
For concrete goals you could probably develop a mathematical formula for it. Only so many potential goals result in survival, both individually and as a society. For philosophical goals, that seems quite hard to quantify.
Perhaps the space of all possible goals = the space all of possible statements. Because "<statement>" + "is good" makes a goal.
I would rephrase that slightly ("happiness is good" technically isn't a goal) but also "5 + 4 is good" is a clear counter-example.
I think "5+4" isn't a complete statement, "5+4=9" is. And then "5+4=9 is good" along with "5+4=12 is bad" makes a kind of sense to me. Though I guess calling those goals is weird, they're still statements - moral value statements now - which would be used to define one's utility function.
I recently read CM Kornbluth’s “With These Hands”, a 1951 story about a sculptor whose livelihood is destroyed by cheap AI art productions.
Now is the time to read it. Ten years ago, it would not have seemed salient and ten years from now it will be drab and obvious.
It took 70 years to ripen.
I’m interested if anyone has recommendations for other works of fiction that are now at peak relevance.
Hmm It's been a long time since I read it, but how about "Player Piano" by Vonnegut.
Just to save the search:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51531
Two stories which turned out to be prescient. I don't know whether they're peaking now or may have peaked a while ago.
"The Machine Stops" by E. M Forster (1909) https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/the%20machine%20stops.pdf
"Slow Tuesday Night" by R. A. Lafferty (1965)
https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781618249203/9781618249203___2.htm
I thought of the latter when there was a discussion up-thread about some way of making everyone more productive.
I encountered "Slow Tuesday Night" in an anthology of SF stories I picked up at Goodwill for $2. Absolutely nailed the feeling of frenetic status-seeking and flash-mobbing combined with crypto-wealth, that was ~2015-2019. Astonishing.
Lafferty's _Arrive at Easterwine_(1971) shows an amazing ear for tech hype.
I haven’t read much Lafferty, but Fourth Mansions is on my list.
"Fifty Million Monkeys", Jones 1943 https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1943-jones.pdf almost made my jaw drop reading it after I heard of it for the very first time a year or two ago and read it in the current LLM moment.
Interesting example. Thanks for hosting it.
For anyone else who’s thinking of reading it, it starts to feel uncannily prescient about 25 pages in.
Not sure about "peak relevance" but Gogol's aptly-named Diary of a Madman is the self-narrative of a man progressively losing his grasp on reality. The early entries are mostly normal except for unbelievable details, then weird but not outrageously so especially in fiction, then "frankly bizarre but not technically impossible I guess", then clearly impossible and absurd. Where exactly the narrator crosses "the line" (if there is a line at all) is left as an exercice to the reader.
Anyways one of the narrator's most baroque claims, clearly indicative that he's now lost his marbles, is that "a majority of French people are now muslims", which certainly reads differently today than in 1835.
Maybe in another two centuries…incidentally, many of Kornbluth’s other stories take demographic trends as a launching point.
He’s probably best known for inspiring the movie Idiocracy.
My understanding is that Gogol's own Russia* still has a substantially higher percentage of Muslims than France or pretty much any European country outside the Balkans.
*I know he was Ukrainian, but Ukraine was part of Russia back then.
Related: Roald Dahl's short story, The Great Automatic Grammatizator.
I know that story! I read it years ago, couldn't for the life of me remember title or author, and wanted to quote it back when AI art was first mooted but because I couldn't remember title or author I couldn't find it.
Thank you for this!
I’m reading an anthology of his work called “That Share of Glory.” The introduction is written by his friend and sometimes co-author Frederik Pohl. In it, Pohl describes how Kornbluth had severe hypertension but quit his medications because they made him slow and dull. So, his death was not exactly unexpected.
Another story by Kornbluth in the anthology is "Two Dooms" about a Physicist working on the bomb at Los Alamos who takes mescaline from a Native American Shaman and wakes up in a future where Japan and Germany won the war.
I think it must have had a direct influence on The Man in the High Castle.
PS- I finished Paddle to the Amazon last week. Thanks for the recommendation
Two Dooms is amazing. For reasons I don't understand, I'll never forget the image of the man pumping the handcart along.
If you don't know Amran Gowani and his substack Field Research you should, especially if you are a parent of young children and need a little levity in your life. Amran wrote a Forty-Four Rules For Life on his 44th birthday and I've expanded it a bit here: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/a-man-needs-a-code
Modern parenting question that I’m out of the loop on:
When I was in elementary school in the 1990s, I lived in a suburban neighborhood with very low crime. There were maybe 75 houses in the neighborhood and one outlet to the main street. The school bus stopped at the outlet and picked up all of the kids in the neighborhood. We would just walk by ourselves or with our friends to the bus stop. Really young kids, like kindergartners, would generally walk with kids a few years older. Parents would wave goodbye at the door and that was that.
I’ve lived in urban areas for a while but recently moved to a suburban neighborhood that’s very similar, demographically and in its physical layout, to the one where I grew up. The school bus protocol now seems to be that every single parent drives their kids to the bus stop and then waits there until the bus arrives. So there’s a cluster of SUVs at the outlet of the neighborhood and a ratio of about 1 adult to 1.5 kids there until the bus arrives. This is repeated at dropoff in the afternoon.
Doing some basic math, this single cultural change seems to add about three hours of additional parenting work per week while removing several hours of walking exercise per kid per week. What explains this change?
You didn't mention what country this is.
The main reason kids don't walk to school in the US, generally, is distance, followed by traffic safety. http://guide.saferoutesinfo.org/introduction/the_decline_of_walking_and_bicycling.cfm
It's a similar story in the UK.
https://letgrow.org/kids-walk-to-school/
At least concern about traffic safety is probably also an answer to your question, since the distance is presumably unchanged compared to your childhood. However, it's also become much less socially acceptable in certain countries to let your kid walk alone, to any destination. Partly there are parent-driven changes here (for example smaller families → more intensive parenting per child) but social expectations have also changed. In the US it's rational to expect someone will call the government to complain if they catch your kid walking to school. See e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/maryland-couple-want-free-range-kids-but-not-all-do/2015/01/14/d406c0be-9c0f-11e4-bcfb-059ec7a93ddc_story.html
I often find myself in this forum defending the joys of suburban life against New Urbanist types who don't understand why not everyone wants to live in one of those 25sqm demonstration flats you see at Ikea.
But comments like this make me realise that the sort of (Australian style) suburbia I'm defending is nothing like the sort of (American style) suburbia that they're criticising. I thought I'd seen a lot of America but I don't think I've ever seen something like that, a suburb so car-centric that you drive your kids every day to and from a bus stop that surely can't be more than a few hundred metres away.
Moderation in all things. We can have 350 sqm houses on 800 sqm blocks and still have reasonably walkable neighbourhoods, it just takes sensible suburb design.
It isn't the structure of the neighborhoods as much as Americans just being generally fearful and anxious. Source: an American who spent 13 years living in NZ and working with tourists from everywhere.
I would prefer this to the way our school district does it: drive to each house individually collecting or depositing a single child (occasionally siblings), before advancing to the next house, which is sometimes literally the immediate next house. The district also doesn't have enough busses to do all the kids at once so the kids that have to wait for the busses to return for the second wave can sometimes not get home until 90 minutes after school ended, or in the morning have to arrive over an hour early if they are in the first wave.
Surely that would make the routes take forever?
Child accidental deaths per capita in the US have declined slowly but steadily since the 1960s, both with and without counting deaths in cars. Or put another way, it was significantly more likely to occur when I was a kid (1960s/70s) and the standard parenting practices were all versions of "wave goodbye at the door".
Why then do all of us end up being sure that those ways of parenting were fine for our safety, and the subsequent generations of parents are trading away other clear benefits based on an overreaction to the low risk of tragedy? Three reasons come to mind, not listed here in any particular order:
-- we're the survivors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
-- nature has endowed all of us with built-in selective memory. This is a necessary evolutionary adaptation; as the cliche goes about childbirth, if women fully recalled the personal costs of doing that, way too few would ever be willing to do it a second time. Similarly we tend to elide from our reminiscences the families we knew in our childhood who'd lost a child. Though that has become harder because, next item.
-- during my lifetime both the public-information (news media) and private-information (what we did/didn't talk about socially) practices on this topic did a 180 degree flip. When I was a kid a child drowning or being kidnapped or raped or some other horrible harm was still an awful family secret never to be mentioned in mixed company; and the news media rarely wrote about such things unless the act was unusually gruesome or public. By the time I became a parent myself both of those social practices had completely flipped and they've stayed flipped.
> This is a necessary evolutionary adaptation; as the cliche goes about childbirth, if women fully recalled the personal costs of doing that, way too few would ever be willing to do it a second time.
We used to give women drugs that would prevent them from forming memories of the process of giving birth in the hospital. Then, since they couldn't remember anything, there was no need to make them comfortable.
This isn't generally looked well on today.
From an evolutionary perspective, though, it's completely unnecessary for women to be willing to go through childbirth, since they don't get a choice.
My own instinct runs along those lines, yea. And at one time I was loudly certain about it.
My point above though was that it is in reality much harder than that. It is a rational tradeoff to consider, for which there is defensible fact-based logic pointing in each direction.
And why is there no intermediate scenario where parents *walk* their kids to the bus stop?
Off the top of my head:
- more only children or only two kids, so there may not be the older sibling to walk little Johnny and Susie to the bus
- more fears over things like accidents, abductions, etc. (and, if I believe online stories, more nosy neighbours calling the cops for child neglect/abuse if a parent isn't within three feet of a child at all times)
- herd behaviour ('but everybody else's mom drives them to the bus stop!') and wanting to be seen as a good parent
As an old person (childhood in the 70s) I m atosnished by modern parenting.
Like, from age 8 or so I'd walk about a mile home from school.
From 11 onwards (different school) .. 5 miles bus journey plus 1.5 miles walk to/from bus stop. (Could, in theory, get a second bus for the other part of the journey; personally, never bothered, easier to walk)
If you have children, were you more "protective" of your children than your parents were towards you? Also I imagine older folks in the 1970s probably thought your generation had a pretty coddled childhood compared to their own in say the 1920s.
How far is it on average from people's houses to the bus stop in your neighborhood?
I think there's a signaling aspect to it. Typically, no one wants to be seen as doing less for their kids or being less safety-conscious. It's easy to ignore the tradeoff that it's infantilizing for the kids, as well as more work and less physical activity.
I wonder if the parents are also essentially procrastinating. Sitting in your car waiting for the bus is basically leisure time, but you can claim you need to do it. This has probably become much more appealing with smartphones.
Some possible reasons…
- More modern parenting styles like helicopter or snowplow parenting which require more from parents and less from children
- Different philosophy in how to handle disagreements or conflict among children. Parents need to be preventative and involved versus letting children work out issues. Thus parents need to supervise in areas children would typically be left to their own devices.
- Sensational media, raising horrific child abduction/abuse stories and serving them to vulnerable parents to stop scroll, leading to perception that these activities are more common than statistics show
- Suburban / affluent parents likely have the luxury of time and worry. Enough downtime to wait with kids and to consume all the scary reporting and pressures of parenting social media content to motivate them to participate in this ritual.
- Good old fashioned groupthink. I see everyone else is there, I guess that’s what we all do, and thus the SUV posse grows.
FWIW I live in an urban, blue collar area that has a higher than the suburbs crime rate and audible gunshots about once a week and no parents accompany their children to the bus stop. Kids walk to the end of their block and wait. I think this is more related to the luxury of time bullet, but an interesting difference considering crime rate in my urban neighborhood vs a suburban one. We are constantly trying to virtue signal with parenting. This ritual sounds like an opportunity to virtue signal within that community.
Never heard the phrase "snowplow parent," but I love it!
People got really frightened about something happening to their children.
Tentatively, part of it is birth control. I believe some of the original intent was to make societies less warlike because people wouldn't feel as though they had spare children.
As for the rest, it's hard to tell how careful you need to be, so it's possible to get into a process of being a little more careful, but maybe that isn't enough. More precautions!
There may also be a piece of conspicuous consumption, where the burden on parents also becomes a proof of capacity.
I'm mildly surprised neighbors don't carpool.
Please recommend me blog posts, papers, or documentation on the design/architecture of GCP TPUs or any of the other specialized chips to speed up model training.
I normally don't write, let alone share, personal blog posts here, but I wanted to make an exception for this post — a personal reflection on why Judaism means so much to me, despite being completely secular — https://danfrank.ca/extreme-jewish-brain-a-reflection-on-why-judaism-means-so-much-to-me/ .
Given the positive response to my earlier essay on identity, "What is Slate Star Codex and why is it such a good filter for people like me?" https://danfrank.ca/what-is-slatestarcodex-and-why-is-it-such-a-good-filter-for-people-like-me/, I thought that, given the significant Jewish presence in this community and the strong SSC influence I've cited in this new essay, at least some here will find it either personally resonant or at least interesting to reflect on.
References include: Scott Alexander, Extreme Jewish Brain hypothesis, an alt-theory on the Jewish founding myth, the gefilte fish line, leveraged finance and much more.
To clarify and respond to some of the comments here, there is a specific and quite quirky way of thinking that particularly appeals to me. While being smart and nerdy may be a prerequisite, this quality is something much more specific. It isn't just, or even mostly, a product of being smart or nerdy. There are so many smart and nerdy people in the world that Jews, despite being disproportionately represented, are still a drop in the bucket.
This isn't to say this quality is particularly good; it's just one that resonates with me a lot. Of course, there are non-Jews who have these traits, like Tyler Cowen (note: Tyler's family is Jewish, and Jonathan Haidt once assumed in an interview with Tyler that he was a fellow Jew, so there is obviously something to this). However, for this specific way of thinking, Jews are far to the right of the curve, making up nearly everyone who fits into this specific style.
To speak from the perspective of someone who is not Jewish, I will say that I find narratives of this nature of reveling in one's ethnic heritage on the basis of its long history of intellectual prowess and success to be kind of gauche.
Not evil, not knowingly or intentionally exclusionary, but gauche. In some ways, this is especially so in view of your (extremely common at least in spaced I frequent) situation of being a secular Jew for whom the religious trappings are largely immaterial--in which case the only the "ethnic" axis of the combined ethnicity-religion dimensions of Jewishness has any salience binding one to one's fellow Jews -- that is, put another way, the only plausible reading of statements along the lines of "I love the Jewish people" for someone who doesn't actually care about the religious dimension of Judaism is "I feel great affiliation for my coethnics [bound by shared genetics, and thus implicitly a class not open to general membership even if Judaism were particularly receptive to converts or proselytization, which it isn't]" rather than "I feel great affiliation to my coreligionists [whom at least aren't excluded from such affiliation by parentage on principle.]," because the religious trappings avowedly don't hold much in the way of personal sway. The message implicit message for non-Jews of "My coethnics are super cool" is "and you're not one of them." This is conceptually similar to why public expressions of in-group preference for white people are considered suspect.
Generally we make some degree of societal allowance for the amount of in-group preference expressed by members of minority groups, but as you observe (or Nancy Lebovitz below (as an aside: Nancy's great <3), in various high-success slash high-average IQ spaces, Jews are actually massively overrepresented even if not a straight up majority -- the fact of at-large Jewish numbers being small as a fraction becomes somewhat academic if you're selecting for more or less everything that counts as "success" in industrialized nations other than certain classes of athletic prowess.
"My ethnicity is successful, over-represented, generally great, and I feel a particular affinity and in-group preference for them," may well be truthful, but it's sort of impolite to say it out loud.
I wish to emphasize that I mean no personal slight, have no wish for you to take this down or revise this piece, nor believe you to have written this out of a sense of malice of contempt. Hell, I don't think I would suggest revising anything you write in the future on this basis because there's enough tedious preference-laundering in the world as-is. I would also emphasize that there's a fine line between expressing in-group affinity for values-neutral cultural productions (e.g., the allusion to Curb, Seinfeld, Nathan for you all seem fine) versus being the kind of obverse of the triple-parentheses crowd by noting for every other famous scientist "(Jewish btw; [implicitly: aren't we the greatest?])."
Unrelatedly: how did Canadians not know about Phish? I was probably unusually aware of them based on regional affiliations but they were *huge* in the states. Ben and Jerry's made a popular ice cream flavor based on them!
I think I agree with carateca--this is just how some people feel, and it's not morally wrong or anything. I don't think people having pride in their ethnic group, race, nationality, religion, or whatever is inherently bad, and in fact, it's probably a better world when people have some level of pride in their ancestors' accomplishments than when they spend all their time feeling bad about/tearing down their ancestors' accomplishments.
> the only plausible reading of statements along the lines of "I love the Jewish people" for someone who doesn't actually care about the religious dimension of Judaism is "I feel great affiliation for my coethnics [bound by shared genetics, and thus implicitly a class not open to general membership even if Judaism were particularly receptive to converts or proselytization, which it isn't]" rather than "I feel great affiliation to my coreligionists [whom at least aren't excluded from such affiliation by parentage on principle.]," because the religious trappings avowedly don't hold much in the way of personal sway.
No, there's also "I feel great affiliation for people who share certain cultural markers with me". "New Yorker" isn't an ethnicity or a religion, but plenty of people revel in that.
Do we all have an Ethnicity? I'm a generic white American, no hyphen. I'm not woke or anything like that but if some other generic white friend of mine expressed an in-group preference for white Americans I'd think much less of that person. But maybe generic white American is not an Ethnicity and that's why it would be so fucking awkward?
Ethnicity is the quality of sharing a particular culture. Do you think that describes you? I grew up and live in northern New England, pretty far from any real city, and I would say that white people here definitely have a particular culture, and thus ethnicity, but I understand that people might not categorize it that way.
Unhyphenated-American is an ethnicity, which was historically limited to white people but is now open admission. It is unfortunately difficult to talk about honestly because the majority-white (and once all-white) nature makes it too easy to mistake for white supremacy or at least white identitarianism. And because some people want to slot basically everyone who isn't white into a different ethnicity depending on their specific form of non-whiteness, notwithstanding that many of those people just want to get on with their lives as just plain Ameircans.
Interesting, I am not a Jew but I think your characterization of Jews really only applies to Ashkenazi Jews in a specific time and place. IIRC, at one point, nuclear physics was dominated not just by Jews, not just by Ashkenazi Jews, not just by Hungarian Jews, but by Hungarian Jews who all went to the same high school within a narrow band of time. But that level of dominance doesn't really seem to exist anymore. And it seems to be declining. I work in finance, and while a lot of the senior folks are disproportionately Jews, the younger folks are disproportionately Indian and East Asian. Within a generation or two, I think the stereotype of Jews=Smart might not be widespread. I think every group has a period where they punch above their weight but it doesn't hold up forever. For Ashkenazi Jews it was 1900-2000, and a lot of explanations like Jewish love of learning or Talmud are just backprojections to explain that period of dominance.
Broadly endorsed. The difficulty with attributing (even accurately!) particular nerdy traits (or, e.g. "I am extremely analytical and insatiably curious, with a desire to understand everything in the world"), to Jewishness in particular is that that really only has content to the extent not characteristic of non-Jews. Pan-nerdism seems like a better alternative.
Thank you. I've wondered about my connection to Judaism. I have no interest in Jewish belief or practice for myself, though I've picked up some information here and there, and certainly enough to know that I know very little of the whole thing.
In one sense, I'm not very Jewish, I'm protective of Judaism. I fear and hate anti-Semites.
However, when I looked at my life, a lot of my social connections are to science fiction and science fiction fandom, a Sufi group, bodywork (improving movement), and rationalism.
Science fiction and its fandom have a strong Jewish presence. Not a lot of Jews in the Sufi group, but one of the leaders is an sf fan and it's a somewhat intellectual sort of Sufism. (It's the Nine-Sided Circle on youtube and facebook if anyone wants to look it up.) It could be viewed as Jewish-adjacent, but that might be stretching things.
In bodywork, my first exposure was from a Jewish person (in science fiction fandom), and her teacher was Ilana Rubenfeld. F.M. Alexander who founded a system I put time into learning wasn't Jewish, but my teacher, Bruce Fertman, was Jewish. Moshe Feldenkrais was Jewish. I grant that qi gong (energyarts.com) is a system whose leader isn't Jewish and I don't think there's a strong Jewish presence.
As for rationalists, strong Jewish presence.
The thing is, I didn't especially go looking for Jews. You know the idea that a convert to Judaism already had a Jewish soul? Well, I'm reasonably sure that if I hadn't been born Jewish and if people haven't told me all my life that I'm Jewish, I wouldn't have converted.
I imagine that if I'd been born into a religiously indifferent Protestant family, I would have had a lot of Jewish friends. Being born into a fervently religious family doesn't bear thinking about.
One Jewish trait that I haven't seen discussed is pleasure in answering questions-- not unique to Jews, but I think it's strongly present.
Since 10/7, I've been more involved in some Jewish FB groups of varying quality.
I swear, I generally haven't especially been looking for Jews (except to some extent recently), but there might be a combination of matched temperament and them welcoming me.
I'm half Litvak on both sides, with the rest being Jews from what used to be the Lithuanian empire.
@craigrwilcox I finally got around to reading Note Groupings on your recommendation here:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-323/comment/52921678?utm_source=activity_item#comment-52935635?utm_source=activity_item
First of all, I should say that I'm enjoying it a lot, and it's already given me some ideas that I haven't thought of before. However, I do want to nitpick it a little bit.
I feel like the author takes a bit of an unfalsifiable view of what he considers to be examples of music that is composed well (namely that the arsis is accented, not the thesis). E.G, take a look at this example he gives.
https://ibb.co/rkrVpbW
To me, this example clearly begins on the downbeat, not the upbeat. And it seems like the author sort of thinks that, too. However, he hand waves it away and seems to say, "you might be mistaken in thinking that this phrase begins on the thesis, but in fact, since this is an example of GOOD writing, it ACTUALLY begins on the arsis. It's just that this entire measure is an arsis." With logic like this, I think it'd be hard to find many examples that can't be made to adhere to the author's point of view, and therefore seems unfalsifiable. Maybe I'm misunderstanding that, and I was wondering if you could shed light on it for me.
I'm really glad you're enjoying it!
Firstly -- I think I disagree with Thurmond that the whole first measure belongs together. I see the B as ending the prior phrase and the four 16ths beginning the next phrase. If you listen to the whole piece, the four 16th groupings motif appears a lot, and each time they feel to me like pick-up notes separate from the 8th note on beat 1. Also, per the Youtube video @SilentTreatment posted, there are phrase markings connecting the 16th notes in measure one to beat 1 of the measure two (and that happens every time this motif reappears), so the music itself seems to mark the phrase as such--the first 8th note is ending the prior phrase and the four 16ths are beginning the next. In which case, Thurmond's point stands that this phrase begins on an anacrusis--he's just wrong in how he groups it.
Secondly -- This example aside, I agree with what you said in reply to @SilentTreamtent below that it wouldn't discredit Thurmond's main point if this were an example of great phrasing starting on the thesis / downbeat. Sort of like the rule that parallel fifths sound bad, but even J S Bach used them to great effect, so ultimately, it's just about what sounds best, not about sticking to hard and fast rules.
Is there some confusion going on related to terms "arsis" and "downbeat"? The example (Mendelssohn Songs Without Words, Op. 67 no. 6) clearly starts on the second beat of a 4/4 measure, which is the weak beat. So that means it does start on "arsis", at least according to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsis_and_thesis
Not sure if I'm following. The example he gives of Mendelssohn Songs Without Words, Op. 67 no. 6 is in 3/8. And also he's saying specifically that it seems like it's starting on the downbeat (since there is a note on the 1st beat). I also think it could have made sense with his general thesis if he just said the first note is to be played unaccentuated, and the real phrasing starts on the 2nd beat of the measure, leading to the following measure.
Sorry, the confusion is mine, you are correct. I glanced at the first line in the music sheet in the video, and assumed 4/4 because there was no measure indicated on the first line shown there, not realizing the line was from the previous piece!
Edit: which is of course in 6/8, but not indicated on the line because it's not actually the first line. Mind jumps to conclusions too fast sometimes...
The excerpt in the text is so short it’s hard to say just from the example. In the context of the whole piece, though, I think it’s obvious that the author is correct, and the downbeat falls on the second bar of the example.
https://youtu.be/-ScOjFLCths?si=14wtr_YXrImIE-VQ
I'm not disputing that that the downbeat falls on the second bar. I'm just saying that much of his thesis is that good phrasing should not begin on the downbeat. But when he finds an example where that does happen, he excuses it away and says "actually the whole bar was an upbeat, so it's okay". I think a more pragmatic approach would be to say that all rules in music are breakable, and it's important to have balance, and that this is an example that defies his rules, and balances out the rule that should be applied more often, which is to start phrasing on upbeats, not downbeats.
> his thesis is that good phrasing should not begin on the downbeat
I added that book to my reading list, but meanwhile I have to voice my skepticism - in many genres of folk music (Celtic, Anglo, Balkan et. al.) most tunes start on the downbeat.
He calls that out briefly that folk and dance music will accentuate the downbeat more. He would probably say that they're not good phrasing, though.
I’m curious if there’s an example of this handwaving that’s more egregious. I dunno, like the “Imperial March” from Star Wars, or Offenbach’s “Can Can”, would he say those start on the upbeat somehow? Does he have a rigorous definition of “phrase start” and “upbeat” that prevents that kind of absurdity?
> Does he have a rigorous definition of “phrase start” and “upbeat” that prevents that kind of absurdity?
I don't think so. To be clear, though, I think he's right most of the time, I think the book is worth reading, and I think his general thesis (music needs to always be phrased such that it's moving towards something, and the best way to do that is to think about motion from an upbeat to a downbeat) is profound and really does make people better musicians if they heed it most of the time. But I also don't believe in rules that can never ever be broken (even if I do believe in rules that should MOSTLY not be broken), and I also hate unfalsifiable hypotheses.
The Imperial March (and many marches) I feel is an example of something that is a good piece of music despite being heavy on the downbeat. I think marches need to be like that, to promote synchronicity, and the effect of it is an overbearing rhythmic structure being used to positive musical effect. I'm not sure what the author would say about that, though.
Thanks for the shoutout Scott! And don't worry, after working in biology I still have 93% of my soul :)
On that note: developing the technology to make eggs will be a long and difficult process. We definitely don't want our employees to get burned out along the way. But if you're passionate about our mission, you'll find that working at Ovelle will be a very fulfilling experience.
Investing, though, is definitely a minefield for any biotech including Ovelle. (I've personally lost about half of $20,000 I invested in biotech stocks in 2021, which in retrospect was a bad time to buy biotech stocks. Fortunately I made up for it in other areas of the stock market.)
Is what you're working on a form of IVG or an alternative to IVG
It's a form of IVG.
My biology knowledge is not that good so this might sound silly, but curious if you do figure out how to create eggs from male genetic donors would that mean someone could fertilize their own egg? Would the result of that basically be a clone or would the chromosome crossover that I vaguely remember still swap genetic material around enough that the results would be something close but not quite a clone?
It wouldn't be a clone, it would be a baby that's 100% inbred. Needless to say this is a bad idea.
"And don't worry, after working in biology I still have 93% of my soul :)"
Are you "The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things To Rats"? 😁
https://weirdfictionreview.com/2016/02/101-weird-writers-39-james-tiptree-jr/
I have a simple explanation for why nerds and Nice Guys are often despised by so many people, not only in the sexual matters everyone argues about but in general social power and social respect. The same theory explains why many school teachers in the West are despised, and why women in general (sometimes) and especially HR-type feminist women (overwhelmingly) are so despised. (Some people despise all these groups at the same time, other times it's disjoint groups despising different ones, obviously--but there's something about all these groups that makes many people inexplicably hate them). I haven't perfectly worked this out, so I'll just give the essence of it for now.
More than 500 years ago, Machiavelli observed that to have power (and most forms of respect and status are kinds of localised power) you need to be either loved or feared, and preferably both. He also thought fear (or "cruelty") was more effective than love (or "mercy") if you can only choose one, but there's a strong argument that that's been reversed in the age of democracy. The latter point doesn't really matter though. What's important is that you need at least one. You can get away with being quite an asshole if you have strength and inspire fear. And you can be respected while being weak and powerless if you live by a strict moral code and inspire love. By if you totally lack both, people will respond with hate, or far worse, with *contempt*. It's amazing how few people understand this simple point.
Take teachers. In most schools in the English-speaking world, teachers are not remotely loved (they treat their classes with jaded indifference) and not remotely feared (they have, and certainly exercise, no real authority). The result is that students despise them, to the extent of often going out of their way to hurt them. I could be wrong but I think this happens much less in places like Japan (where teachers retain some real authority) and Scandinavia (where teachers are paid well and have more interest in the students' well being).
Then there's the common feminist claim that nobody respects women. Actually, people greatly respect those women who exercise the same strength and dominant image as men, like Margaret Thatcher (some admire her and some hate her, but even the latter respect her as an enemy). But since women are much less likely to be feared on the whole, they need to meet a higher bar of being loved, and be held to a stricter image of moral purity, to have social respect. And nobody on earth fails that test more than most workplace feminists--utterly, proudly selfish and without concern for anything but their own rights and interests, and utterly powerless and reliant on sucking up to higher authorities (e.g. government, HR departments) to protect them. No wonder many of us treat their existence as an offence to the universe. They think it's sexism but it's not; it's the simple law that if you're going to live selfishly and treat others like crap, you'd better be able to at least hold your own in a fight. If you can't rely on muscles or guns, you need to rely on (and, you know, practice) actual morality.
And finally the nerds and nice guys. This often comes up in a sexual context and this theory has the clearest significance there. Most of the self-described nerds around here are both physically and socially unimpressive (and say that) *and* come across as entirely selfish and hedonistic. They talk about how all they want is casual hookups and polyamorous harems and display a complete lack of any apparent code of virtue when it comes to sex, and of any commitment to meaningful love over superficial pleasure. And then they get rejected and say this proves women only value strength, not morality, even though they've never tried actually demonstrating the latter. It's no wonder that men who have strength but no virtue (the "alphas") will be respected more than the ones who have neither. But it says nothing about the men who have virtue but no strength (is there even a Greek letter for those?) since hardly anyone having these discussions is aspiring to that.
And this applies to more general social contexts as well. Nerds often come across (fairly or not) as weak assholes. Constantly mocking and tearing down social practices and social institutions, often apparently just for fun (see a certain part of the atheist movement) but doing so in a social inept way. And then reacting with puzzlement that they're met with such hostility, and thinking it must all be about everyone despising weakness. When it's actually that people despise the combination of weakness and selfishness/arrogance. Reading through the Less Wrong archives, I'm struck by how much "most people who aren't us are stupid and should be laughed at" + "we're too socially inept to properly explain to normies how much better than them we are" + "why do so many people hate us?" a lot of the vibes are. And then bizarrely convoluted theories of status are given to explain this, when a simple model of "be strong, or be kind, or both, but not neither" suffices. This is probably an unfair perception but in this area perceptions are all that matter.
And obviously these references to "self-described nerds" are only referring to a certain visible subset thereof.
EDIT: Just in light of rebelcredential's comment below, I want to make clear that I have no objection to describing people as stupid if they really are stupid. That's the virtue of honesty. The problem is when "stupid" is used for "people who disagree with me", which is the Less Wrong attitude I was referring to.
2nd EDIT: I just noticed that I didn't make it clear that this was supposed to be a purely descriptive theory, with no personal judgement. I slipped up by sloppily bringing in my own moral judgements occasionally. But most of this description is not my moral preference. For example I would much prefer if only love/mercy/morality were valued and certainly don't think there's anything virtuous about fear/cruelty/strength.
There's an Alexander Grace vid [0] where he makes essentially the same argument.
[0] "Women ONLY Date Men They FEAR" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSnFO-uQwpg)
(disclaimer: I'm aware that a lot of redpill/blackpill/manosphere stuff is hyperbolic garbage. But this guy I tend to think is pretty sane and reasonable, and treats the subject with nuance and sympathy for both genders. Although he does feel bad about clickbait titles. but that's the state of the metagame, I guess.)
I don't think all the effective altruists are hedonists. I do think their nerdy sense of morality/virtue clashes with more common versions. Most people think it's more moral to care about adjacent people more than distant people in greater need. To give an example of my own life, I often request that instead of presents for me people should donate to GiveWell recommended charities. Despite emphasizing that over and over, a relative of mine is convinced that I prefer local charities and is always surprised when I state otherwise.
> it says nothing about the men who have virtue but no strength (is there even a Greek letter for those?)
In the past I suppose that would have been associated with saintliness.
Robin Hanson has written about nerds being too socially inept to obtain much dominance:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/posthtml
And he doesn't use the word "nerd", in this post, but I thought it fit naturally into this subject:
> I wonder if, as kids, libertarians tended to be witty weaklings – losing most fair physical fights, but winning most fair verbal sparring. Perhaps such kids prefer everyone to embrace the slogan “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me,” because then the people they hurt via words can’t complain, because they can’t even admit they were hurt.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/why-im-not-libertarianhtml
75% of Americans trust teachers, according to a 2023 Gallup poll. I think your perceptions may be skewed?
> Reading through the Less Wrong archives, I'm struck by how much "most people who aren't us are stupid and should be laughed at" + "we're too socially inept to properly explain to normies how much better than them we are" + "why do so many people hate us?" a lot of the vibes are.
I think this is just wrong, btw. We talked about this earlier, and you thought that a hypothetical of a clearly unwise and non-existent type of person was an oblique reference to Christians or normies, and that you cited general disbelief in God and lack of respect afforded to Christians as evidence why your interpretation was correct. I think it's far more likely that you're confusing general disagreement as hostility than that less wrong posters are "weak assholes" (compared to the general population)
If we're thinking in the level of stereotypes, it's commonly accepted that in "normie" adjacent spaces that you get really really heated political discussions, about how subhuman the other party is, and look they're killing large groups of people through war, abortion, communism, global warming or company sponsored death squads. In what sense is this stronger or kinder than the posts you're thinking of? Yet these types of comments seem to not predictably draw the type of ire you seem to be describing here. What do you think is going on then?
Also in general, if I had to say, the internet has gotten way meaner. Cancellation or meeting someone in person to confront them was considered the act of a crazy person back when the internet was dominated by nerds. And I even back then, nerds who acted on their convictions were ostracized (see: media treatment of anonymous) rather than considered moral, but misguided.
I'm not saying that the general gist is wrong, but that actually troubling counterexamples to your theory seem to get filtered, because you don't want to come up with a complicated status based explanation, since it's what those low status nerds believe.
"We talked about this earlier, and you thought that a hypothetical of a clearly unwise and non-existent type of person was an oblique reference to Christians or normies, and that you cited general disbelief in God and lack of respect afforded to Christians as evidence why your interpretation was correct. "
I remember our previous discussion, but I did forget that detail. I'll have to think about that perspective, and about how much of the arrogance I perceive on Less Wrong and elsewhere has other intepretations.
But I would like to ask if you think it's false that there is a widespread contempt for Christians and theists (among other groups) on Less Wrong. It seems pretty clear to me there is, and what's worse is that you'd expect with such an attitude of "theism is *so* irrational we're going to use it as the archetype of irrationality at every chance" there'd be lots of actual *arguments* on the site proving its irrationality. But as discussed here https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2022/comment/12080043 there don't really seem to be, and theism is only discussed indirectly as part of other topics at best. And even worse, barely any attempt is made at all to separate deism, classical theism, Christianity in its basic broad form, and Christianity in its fundamentalist biblical inerrant form. There are arguments almost like "the bible contradicts itself, therefore God doesn't exist", and I pointed out one like that in our previous discussion. It's one of the most intellectually lazy approaches to religion I've ever seen, which is certainly saying something, and coming from a site dedicated to precision and rationality is unforgivable.
At the very least, saying a position is obviously stupid without strong explicit arguments for that claim is rude and the sort of thing that gets you banned by Scott here.
"In what sense is this stronger or kinder than the posts you're thinking of?"
It's "kinder" (more accurately, more moral-sounding) because despite the rage the people talking like that do *sound* like they are concerned with justice and think they're fighting for what's right. Wheras some of the Less Wrong discussion sounds cold and calculating and at least sometimes extremely self-centered. "Rationalists should win" is one of the most amoral sounding memes I've ever seen--regardless of what it's supposed to mean (e.g. winning includes moral goals etc) it sounds like it's saying that it's better to win by acting badly than to lose while doing the right thing. Which is basically the definition of evil in our society. And much like "defund the police" protesting that it doesn't mean what it sounds like doesn't go very far.
And the polyamory stuff--there's hardly ever any real argument for why this is good for society, as far as I've seen. It mostly seems like "well why *can't* I indulge my base desires?", which is almost as selfish as femimists (who as I said are rightly despised for the same reasons).
Also, on the other hand, a lot of militant wokeness got the earliest and firmest hold in nerd spaces, so I don't see how you can clearly oppose those two groups where there's such clear overlap.
"because you don't want to come up with a complicated status based explanation, since it's what those low status nerds believe."
I'm sorry, this seems a bit incoherent. It sounds like you're saying I'm using the LW-nerd understanding of status to deem its proponents low-status and thereby reject that status model, but I'm sure I'm misunderstanding.
But also, do you think Christians are not low-status? It seems pretty clear that in most urban environments in the western world saying that Christians (as used to mean those who really believe it and take it seriously) are high-status is a laughable claim. Even more so at universities, and since these two places are where most nerds are, doesm't you're "not wanting to align with low-status people" dismissal apply equally well to the latters' dislike of the former?
> At the very least, saying a position is obviously stupid without strong explicit arguments for that claim is rude and the sort of thing that gets you banned by Scott here.
I wish this was true, but it patently isn't. You can see a bunch of this in AI alignment or prediction market posts. There's also at least two 6+ year regulars in the comments section who post nothing but meta arguments implying they are right, with no object level arguments seen. I can't explicitly name them, because it would be rude, but I believe that people familiar with the sequences would agree. (As opposed to random people wandering in from the politics stuff)
I think on a meta level I'd agree it's bad that positions dismissed without discussions are bad, but at some point you have to draw the line for "this is too far away from any frame our culture has". And that debating Christianity specifically is the type of thing that ends up dominating forums if left unchecked.
> It's "kinder" (more accurately, more moral-sounding) because despite the rage the people talking like that do *sound* like they are concerned with justice and think they're fighting for what's right.
Sure sounds like your simple explanation is accumulating epicycles. Like, you're adding a stipulation where "and all of you fuckers should get tortured and killed for big pharma shilling" is stronger and kinder than "Seems bad that the FDA is denying life saving medications because of IRAs". Do you think that most people would agree that the latter statement is more likely to be spoken by a weak asshole?
> "Rationalists should win" is one of the most amoral sounding memes I've ever seen--regardless of what it's supposed to mean (e.g. winning includes moral goals etc) it sounds like it's saying that it's better to win by acting badly than to lose while doing the right thing.
I think this is another case of your bias adding negative valence when there is none. Would it be similarly valid to say something like "Christianity is a hateful religion, since Jesus wants to keep rich people who make lifesaving medications out of heaven"? I'd say no, it's clearly not the intended interpretation of that biblical passage, and it's obvious in context that this inference is way out of band. By what standard would my statement be bad, but your statement be good? To be clear, I think both statements are bad for not trying to understand what people actually mean.
I'll also note that you claimed that this was a pervasive cultural artifact that nerds have, and not that single posts cause people to draw this conclusion. In order for me to be convinced, you can't just cite the one post, but that it's commonly used in this assholeish way by members of the community, and that this is also why people hate rationalists.
> Also, on the other hand, a lot of militant wokeness got the earliest and firmest hold in nerd spaces, so I don't see how you can clearly oppose those two groups where there's such clear overlap.
I don't see how this is relevant: my counterpoint is that "non nerd, mean groups do not have status hits despite being mean and lacking in agency". Asserting that nerd groups are mean and lacking in agency does not respond to the point, other than badly pointing the booooooo flag at nerds.
> And the polyamory stuff--there's hardly ever any real argument for why this is good for society, as far as I've seen. It mostly seems like "well why *can't* I indulge my base desires?", which is almost as selfish as femimists (who as I said are right
Hippies aren't as low status as rationalists, random historical cultures with no monogamy aren't as low status as rationalists and so on. If you disagree, do posts insulting those groups appear anyway near as often or vitriolic as the anti nerd ones? It really doesn't seem to me that you can maintain the "simplicity" of your explanation without having "complicated status explanations".
> It sounds like you're saying I'm using the LW-nerd understanding of status to deem its proponents low-status and thereby reject that status model, but I'm sure I'm misunderstanding.
I'm saying that you aren't actually anti complicated status explanation, and that you are professing its falsehood because you don't like the style in which nerds discuss it. See the above comment for why I believe this.
> But also, do you think Christians are not low-status?
Status isn't a pure hierarchical thing, and I think that while Christianity is no longer ascendant and is losing culturall. Outside of the nerd bubble, popes are more celebrated than everything other than leading scientists, nerdy behavior is like, the default "to be mocked" behavior in media (and even if you are a proud nerd, you are only allowed to say so in a wink wink ironic way), as opposed to a Christian, who can just be a Christian and not be reflexively mocked for the most part (other than biblical literalists, who are something like Bible nerds!). You see people in these comments sections regularly whine about how rationalist ideas are taken seriously, and basically non whine about Christianity.
So yeah, I deny the premise and I think it's mostly made by formerly high status people upset they are no longer close to their peak, rather than genuinely being low status.
I don't really buy that modern nerds are less heated in their political discussions than normies are. In fact, a lot of the hottest 'culture war' stuff on the net surrounds nerd interests and nerd-dominated properties. Star Wars, the Marvel cinematic universe, and popular video game discourse often get highly political with competing sides getting very harsh and cancel-y towards each other.
"Star Wars, the Marvel cinematic universe, and popular video game ..."
These things are not nerdy anymore. They are very normal things to have an interest in.
I was specifically referring to less wrong discussions in that instance. Wasn't clear at all on that point, so apologies.
I agree that modern nerd spaces are also increasingly impolite, but it's not clear to me that nerds from the older internet are rated better for just being socially abrasive rather than outright sneering, or that being a polite nerd means you won't get a similar status hit. (Would you think substantially better of a polite brony? No, you'd be about equally disgusted that it's a man liking a show for girls.)
No problem.
And I agree with you that the internet was a nicer place in the 90s/00s than it is today. Well, it might be fair to say that nerds are generally more mild-mannered than normies, and that does have some positives.
I'm inclined to think what hurt the internet the most, tho, was short-form social media, Twitter/X especially.
I am dubious of your premises. For example:
>Take teachers. In most schools in the English-speaking world, teachers are not remotely loved (they treat their classes with jaded indifference) and not remotely feared (they have, and certainly exercise, no real authority). The result is that students despise them, to the extent of often going out of their way to hurt them
As a generalization, this is almost certainly wrong. The vast majority of teachers do not treat their classes with jaded indifference; the vast majority of students do not despise their teachers; and the vast, vast majority of students do not go out of their way to hurt their teachers (and that includes, in my experience, literal gang members who sometimes went out of their way to harm some other people). It is also untrue that teachers exercise no real authority; they exercise authority over things like grades, whether a student can remain in class; whether they graduate, etc -- all things that students care about in some degree.
I don't know if this counts as agreement or not, but I've long suspected a big part of why Nice Guys are unattractive is that women are not afraid of them.
Warning: armchair theorizing, multiple leaps of unsubstantiated logic. Anyone feel free to yell at me for being wrong factually, tonally, and morally.
If a woman was just raped in an alley and is limping around town trying to get back home, she is probably still in shock. If she sees a distant figure on the sidewalk approaching her, she would probably panic more if the figure is a man -- on average. There are edge-cases to this: if the man is her husband, she probably thinks to herself, "thank God" instead of "oh no."
I suspect women clock Nice Guys without talking to them. Nice Guys tend also to be "thank God" edge cases. The same underlying psychology in women causes both the (unconscious) feeling of safety and the (conscious) feeling of ickiness.
Um... sorry, but this post sounds like you've taken various ideas in your head, thrown them together randomly, and then decided that there is some causal link there.
Machiavelli wrote that in The Prince. Which was about ruling a state, not personal relationships. There is no morality between states, and the weak are taken advantage of by the powerful. And the leader of the state needs to project power, especially when he is a feudal monarch ruling over a rabble of powerful aristocrats that are also vying for their own power. I don't think The Prince has much to say about social dynamics on a interpersonal level, nor did Machiavelli write with that intention.
Not sure what you were referring to, I haven't mentioned stupid people anywhere this week.
I was disagreeing with basically everything you wrote, until you said feminism is an offence against the Universe, whereupon I thought you know maybe this chap is onto something.
But generally, I think the love/fear observation is true in general but is doing far too much work tying together unrelated things here.
I think you're missing a subtlety when it comes to strength and fear: physical strength does good things for girls and altercations, but cooperation with your fellow man is soveriegn. Big dogs are gentle. The response of weak men to a strong bully is not "respect", it's to despise the guy, shun him from everything, and if circumstances allow you all gang up together and kick his head in.
I think I can do an evopsych story that pulls in your same general direction though. Not for everything, but certainly for why we hate HR girls, beaurocrats, and weak nerdy men.
If you're all hunting mammoth, you need natural leaders to follow, and everyone knows those natural leaders are tall and strong, with firm handshakes and nice deep resonant voices.
There's no status lost in obeying such a man - in fact your group identity as Brave Hunter Pack relies on it.
But jump forward a few tens of millenia and find yourself in a cubicle, taking orders from a weedy man or uptight woman.
These creatures didn't earn the right to boss you around, not in any way your hindbrain acknowledges.
But obey them you must, because of other ancestrally meaningless concerns like "promotion prospects" and "heating bills". And every order you obey is one more debasement your monkey mind has to endure.
Intelligence was another important survival trait, so we shouldn't feel the same level of resentment towards a guy who is smaller than us, but seems smarter and more aware of what's going on. I think that's true.
This story doesn't cover Nice Guys in dating. Nice Guys are hated because they are a threat and they're trying to take something from you. Men don't notice or resent them because they aren't threatening us.
They're a threat because they're socially uncalibrated and you don't know what they might be going to do next. They're trying to take (right now) your time and your energy and (hopefully soon) your companionship and your body; none of those are things you want to give, but the only way to protect them is to be mean or aggressive or otherwise be forced to take actions that exhaust you, make you look like a bitch in public, and/or make you feel guilty in private.
A competent guy on the other hand is either clearly interested or clearly not - so there's no second-guessing his intentions. If he has other options, he's less likely to fixate on you and will gracefully take a "no thanks," rather than pestering - so you don't have to take responsibility for his emotions in the same way. He might even be able to read you well enough to see the yes or the no coming, and save you the trouble of having to say it, or even be aware that a decision had to be made.
This all adds up to a more easygoing, assuring vibe where you can be around him and relax, without the ever-present threat of pressure or embarrassment.
> Are you trying to imply that they "might be violent"
No. I believe most men are predisposed to protect women and it actually takes quite a lot to make us violent towards them. I also believe women who haven't been made hyperfragile by feminist memes are able to shrug off more of a beating than we realise, although that's not a sentiment I'm going to broadcast or put to the test any time soon.
The "threat" here is a combination of the charity mugger seeing you across the road, and having to bring your uncool little brother along to a group of friends you want to impress: you still need to fend someone off, even though they're nice and polite; and there's the constant danger they're going to do or say something embarrassing because they just don't get it.
> You're contradicting yourself again
There's usually three agendas talking at cross purposes whenever sex and dating gets brought up:
- There are guys interested in this stuff as a skillset, looking for understanding and advice. Metaphors like "imagine electric current as water sloshing through a pipe" are supremely useful to an electrician, who needs to do practical work in the real world.
- There are those interested from a sociological or psychological point of view who would like to build up accurate models. "Well acksually, electricity doesn't flow like water," is of interest to the physicist, useless and destructive to the electrician.
- Then hiding amongst their number is a large group of people who *don't like* the truth and are personally invested in enforcing their own models and shutting down the discussion. Maybe it's losers who need to keep asserting "Men Bad"/"Women Bad", maybe it's women who can't bear the idea that they can be/have been manipulated, or men who don't want to let go of the "blue pill" model they got on their mum's knee or from television programmes.
No discipline can be taught without the apprentice watching, learning, and absorbing until all the apparent contradictions resolve themselves and knowledge falls into place. Meanwhile, no scientific theory can evolve without positing imperfect models and soldiering on with them as they get fleshed out slowly. Both domains give ample opportunity for a bad faith actor to find objections, look very clever, and shut down the discussion.
If I suspect someone belongs to that third group of people, I will simply refuse to converse with them.
> Ok, I get it. So it has nothing to do with the man's behavior - it's about whether the female is attracted to the man or not.
> So it's just about 'being clear about it'?
> It's starting to sound like females just simply hate nice guys.
You should consider yourself in dire need of joining that first group. Both men and women want guys who just "get it", and from your answers you do not.
For your own sake you should learn. There is nothing virtuous about letting yourself be less socially capable than you have the power to be, and to let ego or resentment stop you gaining new abilities is contemptible.
Go on Youtube and watch Hoe Math's channel in its entirety. Watch the whole thing before evaluating whether you agree or disagree.
I consider myself a nerd, mostly due to my interests. I enjoyed superhero comic books and Star Trek when I was a kid, and I enjoy anime and various otaku interests today.
Most of my closest friendships have been with other nerds. I find conversations with them more intellectually stimulating and interesting than conversations with most other types of people. And, again, similar interests.
But even with that being said... yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to what you wrote here. I might quibble a bit with parts of it, and I would stress that a lot of people here on this blog are at least very generous due to the effective altruist philosophy. But people here are just a small subsection of all nerds, and there's at least some people here who aren't nerds.
While I've had a lot of enjoyment in conversations with other nerds, much moreso than I do with an average normie (I guess you could say), most nerds I've come across do strike me as more selfish and less caring and less empathic than most normies I talk to. I'm not sure why this is, and I'm hesitant to read much into it since it's purely anecdotal. Still, since my experiences here reflect much of what you're saying, I felt it was worth mentioning in a reply. Especially since I have good reasons to like nerds more than normies, given I've bonded more with nerds. Still, in spite of those bonds, I see far more generosity and kindness and truly caring about others from normies than I have from nerds.
And I saw through a lot of 'the nice guys' early on. Is it good to be nice to someone purely in the hopes of getting sex from them? Not in my opinion. I mean, how is that any better than being nice to someone in the hopes of them buying a product from you? We don't consider salesmen to be wonderful nice guys just because they're being nice to people in the hopes of pulling off a sale, and the same should be true of nice guys that are being nice to girls/women in the hopes of getting sex. Now imagine a salesman that bitterly complains over every sales rejection, and starts getting mean and snarky about it. The guy would be considered a nasty loser. So if a nice guy is like this every time a girl turns him down or 'friendzones' him...
I think girls/women often see through this sort of thing, and can tell when a guy is being nice to them just because he's a kind or inherently friendly person vs. a guy being nice to them because he's trying to get with her sexually.
Thanks, and in any case I wasn't meaning to attack nerds in general. See my second edit--most of this "why people hate x" is simply arguing that people *do* hate x not that they *should*. Though I can see it comes off ambiguous since I'm also bringing my own somewhat disparate annoyances into this, specifically the way LWs and EAs barely distinguish "people who think rationally" from "people who agree with our object level beliefs", and also the way discussions about alphas and betas and the like can proceed for ages without anybody even questioning the morality of hookup culture or the wisdom of pursuing it. Both of these drive me up the wall, though the first is just an instance of the same thing every ideological group does.
More generally, I find myself reflexively criticising nerds so often because I'm just enough of a nerd to be largely defined by the archetype, and just different enough from the archetype to find much of it infuriating. I'm too similar to be indifferent ("who cares about those weirdos") and too different to be comfortable ("yeah that describes me"), so all I can do is rage and scream "you idiots! why do you live by all these contradictions?".
Yeah, there's definitely a huge problem with genuine nice guys (or is it Nice Guys? I'm so confused) having trouble finding actual love. I'm not in any way dismissing that problem at all. But I think those genuine ones are often drowned out by the wannabe-players who just want sex. And my point was that in this context the successful players can end up getting more respect than the unsuccessful ones, on the grounds that "if you're going to proudly violate society's moral standards, you'd better at least be skilled and successful enough to have earned the social respect to do so". And that there's some real nerve in simultaneously appealing to morality when it suits you ("I'm nice! It's not fair!") and disavowing it when it suits you ("I'm looking for casual sex" or "I'm poly" as if that doesn't even require so much as a positive argument for why that's a reasonable thing to do).
As for whether many Nice Guys are like that...it certainly seems like they are. There is a lot of explicit desire for sex and comparitively little for emotional affection or love. There is a lot of envying, instead of despising, the players who prowl bars and nightclubs. And sometimes this outright explains the hostility they receive. Particularly with friendzoning: "you were friends with me because you really wanted a relationship with me" has a *very* different vibe than "you were friends with me because you wanted to have sex with me". The first is like: pretending to be merely your friend when I really want a much *closer* form of friendship. The second is like: pretending to be your friend when I *only* want something from you (indistinguishable, for most women, from just wanting to play with your expensive toys). They aren't differences in degree: they push in opposite directions! (Really wanting *more* than friendship vs really wanting *less* than friendship).
How many of the friendzoned nice guys do you think would be satisfied with having sex with their female friend but her refusing to have any relationship with them? And how many would be satisfied with a chaste relationship with a very slow build up to sex? The perception being given is that the first number dwarfs the second. Wheras not being satisfied with either would be understandable, many women view only wanting the former as a sign of *being* a bad person.
As I said in the previous thread's discussion, though, *feminist* women are entirely in favour of casual sex and demand it be given all the respect of monogamy. So *they* should be 100% supportive of the Nice Guys, and their reaction is one of the most hypocritical things I've ever seen. But for normal women, it's completely different.
> People making derogatory accusations like saying we aren’t actually nice...
Sounds like rationalization for the just-world fallacy. If you want to believe that good people always succeed, and you see someone who didn't, then obviously they must be a bad person! And because nobody is perfect, it is usually easy to find some little fault and say "that's why".
(Oh no, he was nice to a girl he wanted to have sex with. What a horrible hypocrite! As opposed to... a guy who doesn't even try to be nice to the girls he wants to have sex with, and gets them anyway? Yeah, than one is okay.)
I am not saying that nice guys don't make mistakes -- they definitely do! -- but those are usually *not* the ones they are accused of.
> But it says nothing about the men who have virtue but no strength (is there even a Greek letter for those?) since hardly anyone having these discussions is aspiring to that.
There's certainly something to the idea that the manifestation of virtue requires power. The person who has the power to do something bad, and refrains, is continuously demonstrating reliability, even if they never say anything. But the person who lacks the power demonstrates nothing, and is an unknown quantity, and any words that come out of their mouth may simply be social manipulation.
Contra SBF, Shakespeare got here first, and best:
They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer's flower is to the summer sweet
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
Thanks!