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.
Trump lost the debate hard, which is why he was complaining about moderator bias the days after because he couldn't answer the super hard questions they asked him like "Will you support Ukraine?" or "Will you veto a federal abortion ban?"
You also say further down "Harris seldom responded to the question at hand, seeming to speak only statements prepared ahead of time" - which is a weird criticism to make when Trump said he had "concepts of a plan" with respect to healthcare and that it wasn't his responsibility to have one prepared because he's not currently President, or when he spent most of his time for a question ranting about his crowd sizes in response to provocation from Kamala. There was not a single question Kamala didn't answer, and she at least passed the sniff test for understanding how government works and what her responsibility to Americans is as a Presidential candidate.
Trump's greatest achievement was lying about Haitians eating cats and dogs in Springfield, which was pretty funny, but totally unbecoming of anybody running for President to spend his time repeating stupid lies off social media rather than coming up with a healthcare or foreign policy or abortion plan. It seems like he not only avoided the Republican debates but also refused to even watch them to at least get a feel of what policy members his own party members wanted, let alone the American public.
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.
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.
You should get your vision checked if your objective glance tells you there's no clear winner. One person was afraid to make eye contact with the other one, one person was easily goaded, one person ranted about completely false bullshit that consists of tropes that have been discredited for years. It wasn't Harris.
(Oh, and one person is afraid to do a second debate. That's not "no clear winner" territory.)
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.
Emphasizing OBJECTIVE doesn't make it so. You're coming at it with an anti-Harris perspective, just like you were before the debate when you made baseless claims that she'd drop out of it because she was the weaker candidate. Now that she's no longer done so, you've found a new framing of events that fits your worldview even though it's still divorced from reality.
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.
I am not attacking your objectivity because you have none to attack. You're a Trump fanatic through and through and you ought to be honest if not to us than to yourself by admitting as much.
> 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.
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?).
I'm deeply skeptical that people who fit the mold of rationalist to a T will consistently identify themselves as such. Rationalism is bound to attract an overabundance of people who shy away from being labeled as an "ist" whenever possible.
You've all surely met people who vote Republican (or Democrat) without fail but insist they are independents, not Republicans. That's a good analogy for I think what's happening in the ACX polls where readers get asked about their rationalist status. (If I'm misremembering these polls and mischaracterizing them, please disregard this comment entirely. Oops)
I'm not accusing anyone of being dishonest or sneaky. If your inner voice says "I'm not a rationalist," go ahead and speak your truth. I'm more calling onto question the limits of polling. Can we stop throwing around questionable ACX poll results and saying "There are barely any rationalists here!"
Anecdata: I don't see a lot of Less Wrong rationalists posting on these threads. Instead, I see a lot of classical rationalists (in the tradition of Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza) who think they can determine Truth through reason alone. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Less Wrong rationalists seem to embrace their own brand of Bayesian Empiricism. But I don't see much empirical thinking in the discussions on these threads. In fact, I'm not sure why Scott gave the Less Wrong crowd the moniker "rationalist" because it's confusing from a philosophical standpoint. Or did EY or somebody else mislabel the Less Wrong crowd?
Full disclosure: I am not a rationalist of either the Less Wrong type or the classical rationalist type. I am a mystic. But mystics have used rationalism and empiricism (even though didn't use these terms) as tools to reach their experiential a-rational goals at least since the Axial Age.
I see Bayesian arguments, and references to Bayesianism, approximately 4700 times more here than on any other forum I've seen. Of course, I have not yet visited Less Wrong, because my system might not be able to handle a shot of pure rationalism. I might drop dead.
(Yes, it's annoying there are two separate rationalisms. It sucks, it's confusing, but here we are)
the separation of different type of rationalism is in people's minds. It's not a feature of the processes that lead to good decisions. I think a big part of the grouping is about aesthetics and alliances and not about Bayesianism or other empirical or systematical ways of decisionmaking.
ACX is rationalist-leaning (whatever questionable poll results you wanna throw at me) so in the interests of “when in Rome,” I dom’t spend my time here trying to debunk rationalism. But I could write a whole book about my problems with rationalism and utilitarianism. They're not for me.
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.
Considering that the populace is full of negativity and anger, that's probably not a bad thing. I mean, have you seen how angry Hitler was in his speeches? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ3N_2r6R-o If he is able to successfully channel the people's rage, pain, resentment, hatred... oh, what a wonderful sight it will be.
Honestly, I'm still amazed at how much sheer bullshit he can string together, non-stop, for minutes on end. A deluge of words that don't mean anything together, but individually they have symbolism, power. It's like he accidentally managed to optimize his speech to appeal to instinct.
And look at Harris, smiling like an idiot as Trump goes on his tirades. She is not taking the man seriously. And that's the root of the problem: the liberals take everything for granted. Their institutions, their careers, their lives. As if God has entitled them to everything they have. It will be their undoing.
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.
It performed almost perfectly. Every response it provided followed the provided restrictions and was the correct answer. It was able to solve several ("deathprice", "anger") that GPT-4 never successfully answered.
The only oddity was that sometimes it would think and not provide a response. When looking at the chain of thought it would usually have the word in there, but I re-prompted in those cases to make it output the answer.
Response times were highly variable. Some questions took 10+ seconds despite seeming straightforward, others were mostly instant.
I ran out of tokens before it could answer the final 2 questions but based on its prior performance I doubt it would have struggled with those. Very much regretting doing this experiment given that my o1 tokens apparently won't refresh for an entire week. (I did use some on unrelated tasks since getting access yesterday.)
OpenAI, should you read this: I would glaaaaaaadly pay 5x the fee ($100 a month) for a significantly higher cap on o1 usage. Or more, make an offer. Hitting the o1 cap feels the same as when GPT-4 came out and being forced to downgrade to 3. It would also be nice to know when someone is approaching the cap and how long it'll be in effect.
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."
Granted I’ve only played with it a bit for a day in the chat interface, but not surprising. People complaining that it’s “just” the intelligence of 4 with a bolted on internal echo chamber and other tools (although it probably is more than that) or that it turns a single prompt internally into a few shot with validation are missing the point.
It feels like a significant step change in terms of the types of work it can complete at a given level of effort. I am legitimately bummed having to wait a week for the cap to reset. I expected I’d hit the cap today. I assumed it would lift after a day or two. Not a week, OpenAI. Come on you super geniuses, make this more generally available. Chop chop.
Bummed to the point that I’ll probably make a new account to get around it rather than wait, depending on how o1-mini goes for some things I’d planned to work on this weekend.
Looking through its CoT minimal outputs is interesting. It seems to be interacting with some sort of assistant persona itself when working through requests. And even referencing crossword clues about things being outside human control seemed to trigger extra consideration of safety. Pure anecdotal guessing though.
Worth adding - when looking through its reasoning, it has a tendency to get stuck on previous clues, especially the one "deathprice" that took the longest to answer, leading to longer chain of thought reasoning as it worked through and discarded answers specifically related to it.
I assume that's because its context is dominated with internal CoT text related to that clue. It would have probably been more efficient from a token standpoint to have a separate chat per question. Easier via API but I'm not a money bag BigCorp who would have o1 API access yet.
I tried the same exercise with GPT-4 and had generally good results by simply prompting it with the crossword clue, not including the length or other information in most of the cases. It got the majority on the first try and was able to guess correctly after I told it to try again and provided the length and / or a known letter in several cases. There were some that it never got correct. It did best when dealing with specific questions that could have only one correct answer and worse with more general ones.
You are right that it was terrible at matching explicit length restrictions though.
(Although this has the standard disclaimer about possible personalized data at the top, I didn't tweak it behind the scenes and none of my previous chats have involved Beowulf, crosswords, or Anglo-Saxon poetry, so there should be no user relevant memories involved.)
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."
Honestly, why are we even bothering to discuss policy ahead of the election? We all know this election isn't about economic policy. It's about deciding the future of this country: to let the liberal hegemony persist, or to burn everything to the ground. The populace does not give a damn about the specifics of how the economy functions.
Her sudden switch to appealing to moderates isn't going to convince anyone. She can't escape the fact that she's a colored woman. Do they really think such a person is electable in this country, in this cultural climate? Her policies, her competence, her demeanor, none of that matters. It's about what electing her would represent: complete cultural dominance of the left. The right will not let that happen.
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?
-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 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.)
It’s important to remember that you could just be engaging with a troll. That’s how I interpreted the first comment in this thread. I truly doubt it was made sincerely.
It’s the internet after all. Don’t engage with the patently preposterous
Simply scroll on.
Edit:
Also see the somewhat specialized form of trolling know as sea lioning.
I suspect the OP of engaging in one of its variants.
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?
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.
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.
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."
> Rate of victimization, by type of crime and location of residence, 2022
> Total violent crime
> Urban 33.4
> Suburban 23.9
> Rural 15.4
Let's look at the highest murder rate cities:
> The Democratic Party has dominated St. Louis city politics for decades
> Baltimore has been a Democratic stronghold for over 150 years, with Democrats dominating every level of government
> Detroit's last mayor from the Republican Party was Louis Miriani, who served from 1957 to 1962. The city in recent years has been a stronghold for the Democratic Party, with around 94% of votes in the city going to Joe Biden
> In the twenty-first century, [Shelby County] has become reliably Democratic, due mainly to the influence of Memphis
> United States presidential election results for Orleans Parish, Louisiana. Democratic: 83.15%
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.
First, just as an FYI: You mean wave. "Waive" is a verb in English which is used in contexts like "he waived his right to remain silent" meaning something like "gave up" or "chose not to use".
As for your questions: in some interpretations of quantum mechanics, the wave is spread out over an area until it collapses, with peaks representing particularly likely places for the particle to be. In others, the "wave" is only a mental construct we humans use to explain the spookiness of quantum mechanics and it's not technically anywhere.
Being measured is NOT the same as someone seeing you. In this case, measurement is any kind of interaction which requires that we know where the particle is - it could be the fancy equipment used by a quantum researcher or it could just be a bunch of other particles with well-defined locations passing through the area in a way that requires the first particle react to one of them somewhere. As such, yes, being measured by a machine is identical to being measured by a person.
Measurements are affected by observation, so while two observers measuring at the exact same moment will get the same result, two observers measuring at different times can get different ones, the latter affected by the former.
As for the last question, it again depends on how everything works. This isn't a solved part of QM. Many worlds people argue that the wave permeates a fifth dimension and that each solution for it comes true in one reality, so causation is possible because moving through time is to some degree moving from one wave solution to a subsequent one, even if the measurements never happen. Others who say that the waves are just the mental models we use to understand things would say that the particles are always somewhere, and that once a measurement figures out where causation flows naturally from that, as again any and all particle interactions ARE measurements.
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.
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.
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.
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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’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.
I’ve been reading a lot of Phillip K Dick lately. He had something closer to a typical lifespan, reaching the age of 58, but died 4 months short of the release of Blade Runner.
It’s well known that he took too much medication, that a lot of his master of paranoia writing was under the influence of amphetamines. His bio shows experiences with religious visions that led him to journal writings that were compiled after his death into The Exegesis of Phillip K Dick. About 944 not very well edited pages.
It seems like one of those genius on the edge of madness cases exacerbated by heavy drug use.
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
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.
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
the lesson of Multiarmed-Bandit is that the optimal level of risk is impossible to know a priori. It depends on the environment, and then you simply let the Blind Idiot God take the wheel. So I'd expect conservative dispositions to always be present in a population, at least to some extent.
what mark means is that "logical fallacies" are often heuristics that are frequently useful irl, despite lacking the iron-clad certainty of a veridical deduction.
One reason may be we tend to give one sided support to positions. If we think a plan of action has more benefits, we might also think it has less risks, is easier, etc. (Affect heuristic). It's possible that for some people, "nature" has positive affect, therefore it becomes a soldier in arguments.
I forgot to say: sometimes people try to alter nature and it burns them horribly, and they get very philosophic about their reluctance to ever try. Even though literally all their food comes from agriculture, which is clearly "improving nature".
Kelsey below mentioned how people polarize their views when having to make a tough choice, possibly as a way to persuade themselves that they were right. "Not only was I justified in choosing as I did, but it is fundamental to the universe that my choice was correct". So to take an extreme example, someone who doesn't like, say, dumping raw sewage in a river, might adopt a philosophy that says that all human interference with nature is bad, and we should voluntarily go extinct.
Nature is typically right, but not always. I think there's some strong evolutionary adaptation and lindy effect going on, where when one does something unnatural it's breaking away from that symbiosis hardened over millenia. If you ask what are the things that make someone most healthy, it's going to be naturalistic like 2000 years ago: physical activity, vegetables, sex, etc. It's not gaming on discord and the local McDonalds. Much more evidence is required to tip the scales away from the likely default.
It's like a start up looking for funding. You can make a good case and the funder might recognize the fundamentals and invest in you, but most of the time they want proof that it actually works so they want to see you making money.
Saying that a diet of mostly brown rice works has to be true, because so many people in history lived on that diet. Saying that a diet of refined synthetic chemicals works may not be true, even if the chemistry looks right on paper. People making this argument aren't necessarily saying that brown rice is great, and likely acknowledge people on such a diet being small and maybe look at life expectancy.
I may be wrong, but I watched a program many years ago that determined that peasants in Japan were actually healthier than the richer people because they ate brown rice instead of white. The white rice having been stripped of some nutrients in the process.
Either way, we know that people can live on a diet that is heavily rice, even before we knew anything about the nutrients involved.
That's what I heard as well. It takes a lot of work to turn brown rice into white rice, but it tastes better, so of course rich people are going to eat it.
which notes that the output of a traditional hand-pounding rice production process is white rice. It would be more work to make brown rice than it is to make white rice. This is not a problem, for peasants, because peasants have a lot to eat that isn't rice. It's a problem for people who aren't providing their own diet, most notably criminals and soldiers.
The view is very common today that peasants were stuck eating nothing but a staple grain, or perhaps potatoes. But this is just a myth.
Note also that the nutritional disease associated with overconsumption of white rice is beriberi, whereas the nutritional disease associated with being rich is gout. As you might predict from literally any premodern literature on food preferences, gout is caused by overconsumption of meat.
It seems like a Schelling point. Also, nature works, at least to some extent. Something other than nature (as a way of life, not a metaphysical claim) could just fail badly.
The parenthetical is a desperate attempt to fend off "but everything that exists is natural".
To take a wild silly stab at it: If existence is better than non-existence, then things that exist are inherently better than things that do not exist, so the fact that something exists, and has stably existed for a while, is evidence that the thing is good?
Alternatively, there's the view that while the "natural" may not be "perfect", it is at least "good enough" and there's no point changing it or condemning it.
I think that argument took "begging the question" to a new level. If I imagine the greatest entity possible, then yes, this would involve me imagining an entity that exists, but it's *still in my imagination.* It hasn't crawled its way out of my brain like the girl from "The Ring".
I still find it hard to believe that people took that argument seriously.
<I still find it hard to believe that people took that argument seriously.
Yeah, I felt that way too when I first heard it. It seemed like absolutely naked sophistry. But I think it has some appeal because it resonates with the structure of people's instinctive sense that there is somebody big in charge. That being has been there in their imagination since before they ever had any religious teaching. And then if they are exposed to any religion, even a dilute version of one, they have a name for the being, and a bit of clothing to dress him in.
So for many people god long ago crawled out of their brain into the universe. If somebody says maybe he does not exist, they experience that as an attempt to deny what god is like: along with being all knowing, all powerful, all that stuff, he also is *real.* Existing is just another of his impressive traits.
I think this is giving too much credit to logic behind it instead of plain old demands for people to conform. Rarely do you see someone appealing to nature curious about the exact culture or history of innovation X (eating brown rice, having a nuclear family, socially accepting homosexuality), and rather thinking up specific yay moments or tats reasons for why the thing they're advocating for is good. If I am deeply concerned about what works being what exists, I would want to know if this kind of thing has stopped existing in the past! Yet people will be content essentially just saying "This worked at least once" and then move on, implying this is mostly a status based reflex, rather than something well reasoned.
I was being a bit silly there, extrapolating from some justifications to an absurd conclusion.
Mostly I think it's just an old and popular meme, and when people need to rationalize something to themselves, they pick from the memes that are popular in the social group that they want to be part of.
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.
> you don't know what they might be going to do nex
Are you trying to imply that they "might be violent", which would supposedly repel women? Do you happen to be aware of the statistics around violent crime and its effect on number of sexual partners and fertility?
> They're trying to take (right now) your time and your energy and (hopefully soon) your companionship and your body
Surely other men do this too, no?
> none of those are things you want to give
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.
> A competent guy on the other hand is either clearly interested
Hold on - you just said that the thing nice guys do wrong is that they want to take your time and energy and companionship and body. But now non-nice guys are actively getting credit for doing that? So it's just about 'being clear about it'? Is there any evidence that nice guys who openly confess their love are considered more acceptable by females?
> 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
You're contradicting yourself again - you just said being clear and open was the critical virtue, but now it's about being subtle and not confessing. What was bad for nice guys is now good for non-nice guys. It's starting to sound like females just simply hate nice guys.
> 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.
Anyway, yes, obviously you can play the game and force yourself to not be a nice guy. It's quite obvious that a strategy of being nice is unsuccessful across nearly every dimension of life. But that strategic decision is separate from the original topic, which is asking *why* females hate nice guys.
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.
being dangerous is an asset, because a capacity to harm is also a capacity to protect (e.g. from other strange men).
There's a line somewhere in LOTR where Bilbo mentions that Gandalf isn't dangerous. And Ganfdalf says something to the effect of "you numbskull, of course I'm dangerous!"
You know, the answer is not obvious. I've been practicing MMA for some time, and find the crowd to be quite non-violent, maybe because once you learn how to fight you're less likely to need to prove it? Domestic abusers, for that matter, don't need to know how to throw a proper hook or a roundhouse kick to do what they do.
Yep, any self-defense instructor who doesn't teach this as the first and most powerful self-defense technique is full of it. MMA can be different because it's actually a competition sport so there isn't a strong emphasis on the self-defense aspects.
> 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.
I think there probably is a fair amount of "status game" overlap in your simplified schema, though. This shouldn't be surprising, because most socially mediated games are status games, and these games are deeply entwined in our brains, motivations, and social lives, and have been from the time before we were human.
I just reread Will Storr's The Status Game, and in it he elucidates 7 common status rules of hunter gatherer societies, so essentially what's been directly wired in over 200k years or so:
“One survey of sixty premodern societies uncovered seven common rules of play that are thought to be universal: help your family; help your group; return favors; be brave; defer to superiors; divide resources fairly; respect others’ property.”
The one that "be strong" falls down on is "be brave," and the ones that "be kind" falls down on is nearly all the others except the libertarian ideal of respecting property.
The nerds and other people you're calling out in particular are probably most bad at being brave (nerds, teachers, and feminists), deferring to superiors (nerds, although feminists and teachers do this one), and if selfish, dividing resources fairly (nerds, feminists), and any deficits in theses areas ping the radars of 200ky-embedded mental expectations in those nearby.
> The one that "be strong" falls down on is "be brave," and the ones that "be kind" falls down on is nearly all the others except the libertarian ideal of respecting property.
Could you go into this a bit more? I don't quite follow.
While a bit ironic given the topic and given the position you're taking, I still feel like asking... do you have any studies or statistical data backing up your assertions here?
> "You could also look at property values around university campuses and such"
I would expect this to reflect the value of renting property to students every year or staff wanting to live near work far more than any preference for nerdiness.
The seasons of American retail, according to the Seasonal aisle of a supermarket I used to live by.
Valentine's Day/Superbowl
Easter
Independence Day
Back to School
Halloween
Thanksgiving
Christmas/New Year
This is from memory. I may have missed one or two. But they had this stuff down to a science. The day after Halloween, all the Halloween stuff was gone, replaced by Thanksgiving stuff.
Were Cinquo de Mayo or St Patrick's Day represented? Not sure.
Christmas retailing is starting now in August in some places, so there's a lot of overlap in these "seasons". And after New Year we have things like "new year's resolutions that can last one to eight weeks", tax preparation season, and some things where you sell stuff like barbecue merchandise, or crops that actually do have something of a season.
It depends on how you look at it. I don't consider it the Christmas season until after Thanksgiving, and Christmas stuff earlier is a little irritating, more irritating the earlier. Early Christmas merchandising has nothing really to do with Christmas.
I just had a thought yesterday that common superstitions might be a filter for intelligence. "If a man's big toe is longer than all other of his toes, he will outlive his wife." Supposedly a traditional chinese saying. Imagine repeating this saying in your social circle and just observing peoples reactions:
1. The devout Believer = stupid
2. The Ignorant or Undecided, with maybe some doubts in either direction = "normie"
3. Ironic or sarcastic reaction = intelligent.
This is just a quick and dirty analysis. Maybe you can add some layers and detect other dimensions too. For example, depending on how people react you could also test their kindness.
Until somebody does a study, finds toe length is correlated to testosterone, and if your big toe is longer than your second toe, that means less testosterone, which means less testosterone-related diseases, giving life expectancy on a par with women and so he may indeed outlive his wife 😁
"AN EXPLORATORY STUDY OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SECOND TOE LENGTH AND ANDROGEN-LINKED BEHAVIORS
...Of the present hypotheses, some did receive support. There was an association between left-handedness and having a longer second toe for both men and women. As this trait has been connected with androgenization (Geschwind & Galaburda, 1985) and with a lower 2D:4D (Manning, Trivers, Thornhill, & Singh, 2000; Voracek, et al., 2006), this is evidence for a relationship between second toe length and androgenization.
Other results were mixed. There was a relationship between having a longer second toe and self-ratings of competitiveness in women as indicated by total COI score and the sub-scores that demonstrate a competitive and a winning orientation. In contrast, there were no such relationships found for men. Competitiveness is a trait associated with androgenization and with a masculinized 2D:4D (Manning & Taylor, 2001), and therefore a link between this trait and a longer second toe may be indicative of second-toe androgenization.
For women, analyses also revealed a relationship between having a longer toe compared to one’s other toes and self-ratings of physical aggression as indicated by this subscore on the BPAQ-SF. This was not found for men. The finding of a relationship between purportedly androgenized second toe morphology and some androgenized behaviors/traits for women but not for men is not entirely surprising, as Fink, Manning, and Neave (2004) and others have shown significant associations between digit lengths and androgenized behaviors for females and not males. Fink et al. (2004) explain this as resulting from males generally possessing a more competitive and aggressive personality type. Therefore, a greater within-sex variation in prenatal androgen exposure and circulating androgens is likely seen in females, thereby increasing the effectiveness of statistical comparisons. Further, it is suggested that females have a greater sensitivity to testosterone and may therefore have a lower threshold of response to the hormone (Bancroft, 2002); this may explain the behavioral correlates witnessed in the present study."
(I swear, I had no idea such a study existed before I decided to look it up on the off-chance that hey, maybe somebody has done that, wouldn't that be funny?)
EDIT: Your test question reminds me of the IQ Bell Curve Meme, so combining that with the Toe Study (if you'll forgive me):
"A version of the meme featuring three different Wojaks arrayed on an IQ Bell Curve chart gained increasing popularity in the early 2020s. At the lowest IQ level is a variant of Brainlet, in the middle of the curve is a Midwit crying Wojak and at the top end is a monk-like Wojak wearing a cloak. In this version, the Monk Wojak and the Brainlet Wojak agree with one another while the Midwit Wojak offers an unnecessarily complicated analysis."
On left (idiots/devout Believer): "If a man's big toe is longer than all of his other toes, he will outlive his wife"
Middle of curve (normie) "Noooo! That's just a dumb superstition!"
Right of curve (intelligent): "If a man's big toe is longer than all of his other toes, he will outlive his wife"
Greek toe or Morton’s toe considered an idealized form in Greek sculpture. The aesthetic standards persisted the Roman and Renaissance period. It appears in neoclassical works as well. The Statue of Liberty displays Greek toe.
My second toe is a bit longer than my great toe but I have to look pretty carefully to notice at
Regarding association with testosterone levels, mmmh, I’m not particularly furry but my DNA profile shows that a lot of my ancestors came from the Eurasian steppe and I have vaguely Asian features so I prefer to think that’s because of my ferocious Horse People forebears.
I think a lot of that happens in cultures naturally. Find some niches which are hard to enjoy without high intelligence, to deter people from joining for the signaling value. Have workplaces where smart people of different genders can meet each other. Whatever the Ashkenazi did.
Is this not just how most peoples lives are setup? If you are intelligent you find an appropriate white collar job for your personality and intelligence and well primarily be exposed to similar people then you go to events and functions that suit your level of intelligence. Going to the jazz festival is going to expose you to a different band of intelligence and personality than going to a cheap nightclub.
But yes, our intuitions are badly designed on this. It's perfectly acceptable for a single individual to want a smart partner. I suspect there would be a lot more pushback ("elitism", "discrimination", etc) for an institution who wants only smart members. Grammar schools in my country are under constant fire; imo the only reason the unis escape this is because they're not for smart people any more.
I think the secret sauce is the conversation. The activity may filter out people below a threshold, but it's the ability to engage in intelligent conversation that really allows people to shine, and activities like card games provide an easy opening. (Compare to the person who plays well and usually wins, but never says much.)
It's a pity that some of us aren't very good at generating speech on the fly. :-( Maybe there's something that allows for other forms of spontaneous creative expression?
Absolutely! And there's the layer of trying to win while only seeming like you care about winning in the precisely socially acceptable amount. Plus there's the randomization factor, which on the surface can disguise who's doing well over the short term, but even without score-keeping, it's possible to notice that someone played a bad hand well, or a good hand sub-optimally...
Nice idea. But how do you make it equally attractive to both sexes? The more autistic it is, the smarter the guys you get, the fewer girls are interested in playing.
If I may lean on stereotype for a moment, guys wanna fight and gals wanna scheme. Most RPGs lean way toward the fight side of the spectrum, with robust rules for combat and just some brief rules for social interactions. Try for a game system that equalizes that. And for a setting, maybe send The Three Musketeers careening into the Jane Austen novels.
I like this line of thinking. How do we allow for scheming in a game? Naively my mind just goes to encouraging people to make and break alliances, but there's probably much more to it than that.
Maplestory used to have a party quest where you and 4 other people have to stand on the correct set of 5 boxes out of a total of 9, which is determined solely through trial and error.
There were actually two large benefits to this: one, stupid people couldn't do it and got filtered out of the pool of people you might meet, and two, there was a lot of downtime during this process where you'd just chat with the rest of the group.
I once read about the Betrayer's Banquet - a long thin table where multiple small courses are served, where the quality deteriorates as you travel down the table - fois gras and caviar at the top end, a cold chicken's foot in a bowl at the bottom. After every course you play Prisoner's Dilemma with the person opposite to determine who moves up or down the table for the next course.
Now I'm thinking how could you do something similar with sex, and how much of a car crash would it be.
> So what wacky institutions/traditions/cultural practises could one come up with to indirectly achieve the same effect?
If it's just "assortative mating" you're after, I thought the evidence was that it was getting increasingly stronger? There's a study on 47k parent pairs showing genetic evidence of stronger assortative mating, where 9 out of 16 traits were strongly selected, including educational attainment. (Sunde, Eftedal 2024).
I think people are mostly figuring it out - "intelligence" is one of the most sought-after traits by both genders when pairing. I mean, generally undergrads date undergrads, grad students date grad students, and so on, right? Even if undergrad is becoming diluted as a macro signal, the higher ranks aren't, and any individual looking for intelligence in a partner can still evaluate via conversation and whatever.
But taking your question as posed, it's incredibly easy to find clusters of high-IQ men - just look here in the comments section, or in tech, or in any physics lab, or in finance, or in board game groups, or many other places. If women really want to find them, it's pretty easy, because pretty much all those things are 70-90% male and they can join and enjoy that favorable ratio.
I think the real question is - where do high IQ women cluster? What organizations or groups or practices are they a part of, outside of academia and research?
Men very naturally stratify and cluster themselves by intelligence, and they're strongly incentivised to demonstrate it when they have it. So it's really really easy to see.
Girls are very much more conform-and-get-along with each other. I would naively expect they'd still self-sort into friendship groups of similar IQ - but those groups would be social groups, not organised around a central goal or function like men would do.
Say you're a high IQ man. And say you're too old to have children, or otherwise don't plan to have children. Is having a matching high IQ woman partner or wife really a big value--compared to say, other personality traits? Asking for a friend.
If you're going to spend the rest of your life together, and grow old together, and experience mental decline together, I think it helps if you can see each other as roughly an intellectual peer? Don't end up like Mr. Bennet!
Mr. Bennet was really a terrible father. I know Mrs. Bennet was flighty and scatty and gossipy and obsessed with finding husbands for her daughters, but he pretty much abandoned the responsibility to her. He spoiled Lizzie because she was smart and agreed with his opinions, so she was his favourite. For all his 'education' of her, she isn't trained in anything that will help her to earn a living when the money from the estate goes. She might be able to get a position as a governess or as a paid companion to a wealthy widow, but her father is no help at all in planning a future for her.
But the minute he dies, his wife and children are out the door with no support other than what remains of Mrs. Bennet's dowry, since the estate is entailed. They don't have independent wealth, they don't have wealthy relatives who will help them out. If she doesn't get her two eldest daughters married off to suitable men, who will be able to step in and help support the younger girls, then the family is stuck when the inevitable happens and he dies.
And what does Mr. Bennet do? Retreat to his library, be insulting about his wife to Lizzie, and teach her to have contempt for her mother, who is the only one of the two parents doing *something* to hold the family together.
> Is having a matching high IQ woman partner or wife really a big value--compared to say, other personality traits?
Isn't this purely a matter of personal taste?
I imagine it varies widely, depending on how much you value "the life of the mind" at the hourly basis, how much intellectual stimulation you already get from your friend group and job, how important said "personality traits" are to you in your daily life and long-term picture, and much else.
And even if you can guess based on what you know of yourself, you can still be surprised by an "actuality" either way.
I think at the end of it all, the best you can do is try it either way and see.
Meet Jessica, the average American. She is 38, has a couple years of post-secondary education, works in health care or public education, is Christian but only goes to church a couple of times per year, and has a positive opinion of Taylor Swift.
I enjoy playing a game while taking a break from work, but I don't know what to play at the moment. I used to play Hearthstone (Battlegrounds) and Legends of Runeterra (Path of Champions), but it doesn't need to be a card game.
I've never been part of the "school is child prison" camp. School was OK for me - I was liked by teachers but not very popular, though with a few good friends.
But this year for the first time I'm trying to put my child (~3 yo) in daycare, and the adjustment process just seems savage. Why would we create attachment to new figures by leaving the child crying with them without help from his parents, to make him understand they can provide consolation? It's not the way I created his attachment to his grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins. It's not the way I imagine attachment happened in the ancestral environment, with other relatives. I know it won't scar him for life, or anything, but why would we do it?
And I get that people have constraints, and need to get back to work, and that's fine. But why deny that this is the reason and turn it into an ideology? Like it builds ability or something. We don't think that a child getting a too-large bunch of difficult math/gym exercises thrown at him right as he starts daycare/kindergarten/school so he cries but eventually overcomes them builds his resilience, then why the same with separation from parents?
I think we create this narrative because as parents we don’t want to feel like we are doing a practical job, making decisions on a spectrum of good/neutral/bad inputs that eventually lead to an outcome that is hard to predict. We want to feel like we are making the best decisions at every turn and being the greatest parents we can 100% of the time to try to manage a positive outcome. Or at least be able to feel like we did everything “right.” This leads to justification existing for almost every choice as a parent. And not just practical justification, but one where opposite choices are both inherently superior with no trade offs. The practical justification for daycare knows that, we have to use daycare, the child will eventually adjust and this moment of discomfort will be forgotten and not impact long term development. The “my choice is inherently better” justification says I am giving my child resiliency, socialization, and superior academics that give him a leg up. While at the same time staying at home is not just a practical choice to save money or align with your chosen family philosophy, but instead inherently better for your child’s attachment and development. As a daycare mom I’ve seen both sides and felt myself slipping into the inherently better choice side to shield myself from the inherently better stay at home narrative I see. I don’t want to say, I chose daycare and my son is having a rocky time adjusting but I’m mostly sure this won’t impact him too negatively. I want to say, oh we chose this daycare because it has xyz superiority metrics and will help him build xyz qualities.
> This leads to justification existing for almost every choice as a parent. And not just practical justification, but one where opposite choices are both inherently superior with no trade offs.
This dynamic feels like one of the core things wrong with modern politics. :-/
Regarding your last point, I think it's easier psychologically on the parents who need to put their kids in daycare to say that preschool is better than home. I had a daycare sales administrator say it was for academic reasons, and that the kids would be busy all day...then the kids napped two hours a day (might have been state law). I have friends who teach daycare, and they are not convinced it is better than being at home for the kids. Preschool, where the kids are not at school full time, is different. I thought it gave me a bruef enough break from parenting to see the forest for the trees, and helps teach customs and holidays and socialisation and rules . Regarding crying when being lwft, if the classroom has a high window you can see in but the child can't see out, often they are playing happily 5 minutes after crying for their parents not leave. If they are not, they might not be ready for daycare. A good daycare is certified by an organisation that willl let you drop in any time.
I used to work in a daycare as a substitute teacher (the school district had got into the daycare biz). It made me sad that outdoor time was so limited, and what there was, just a little fenced area with those very small play structures for very little children, whose possibilities are soon exhausted, as the other playgrounds were full of big kids and it was the custom that the school-aged kids and the daycare little ones never mixed. Once in awhile I saw the kids piled into a sort of buslike stroller and taken for a walk, which I would have enjoyed as a child, but I don't remember getting to do that. Like with anything, most adults are always more comfortable indoors, in their office, essentially.
The ladies who worked with me were mostly young, very sweet, with messy personal lives. Nearly all had children of their own. They weren't bright, but they passed the test of finding children interesting, and liking them. Once, one of the mothers dropped off a kid, and I heard them discussing whether the mom "speaks European". It gives me a pang, or rather a pain, when I hear nonsense about how daycare workers need to be super-educated so that it will all be "high-quality". Ain't gonna happen and not sure why it's thought desirable.
It seemed to me that 8, potentially ten hours spent in a classroom was a pretty unstimulating way to spend the day. But then - in other ways - too stimulating. How crabby some of the kids would get later in the day, and the ladies would ply them with carbs.
They couldn't design classes for gender parity and it seemed that parents sought daycare more for boys than girls. And some of the kids seemed depressed or had behavioral problems, and maybe that was part of the reason they were there (it was not the case that *all* the parents were working; a few of the parents had older children at the school, and saw the daycare as an extension of school but for the younger ones; one of the few times I saw the ladies exhibit judgment was when I inquired what one particular mom's career was: the answer was shopping and working out).
Garden of children stuff aside, it seemed like *a lot* for children the same age to be trapped together all day long, from sunup to sundown.
And some of them had to endure the sight of mothers who routinely came earlier than the absolute latest point, while theirs never came early. Some of the moms were teachers in the district so, especially with babies, whom they missed, they would come pretty soon after school let out.
I think the center right will be fighting a losing battle against the far right to maintain the sacrosanctity of Boomer icons like Churchill in right wing circles. I think our zeitgeist in general is that of poking holes, questioning things, rewriting narratives etc. Usually it's the left who leads the way, and they have done a good job removing almost the holiness associated with historical national figures in the West. Its only natural that the right which by its nature is 10 years behind the left, will also adopt some of these ideas.
I am not sure how they are seen in left wing circles, but I assume most Center left people don't really care about Churchill(at least as compared to Center Right) and the far left is pretty hostile to him(but for the opposite reason as the far right lol)
I think the left and the right are approaching their criticism of Churchill from different angles, so I'm not sure if it's fair to say that this is a case of the right catching up. The left tends to criticize historical figures for their moral failings, judging them by modern standards, like Jefferson owning slaves or Columbus brutalizing the indigenous people.
There are some elements of that with Churchill, like his antisemitism and treatment of India. But I think the biggest criticism coming from the right is that Churchill escalated and prolonged the war. The whole saving-the-world-from-Nazis thing is foundational to the modern US. Busting that myth is like crack to the anti-establishment right.
It has gone from the fringe far right to more "mainstream far right"(Tucker recently interviewed some historian who criticized Churchill for right wing reasons which set of a lot of panic amongst the center right). Churchill is not remotely the primary focus of far right by any means, but more about delegitimizing the icons of boomer center right liberal conservatism to shift the Right into a more "rightward" direction if it makes sense.
Tucker interviewed some dude with a rightwing podcast not a "historian" in any academic or literary sense of the word. He's one of these guys who "does his own research" and concludes the lamestream mainstream historians are all wrong.
Yeah, the right's getting more white-nationalist and the left's getting more anti-white-nationalist, so politically incorrect figures who fought fascism are going to fall from grace.
Can't say I approve either, but I have no idea how you would fight it. Conservative antifascism relied at least in part on the need to gain the approval of legacy media gatekeepers who are no longer able to function as gatekeepers.
In 10 years, it's going to be woke or fascist, take your pick. Unless something else happens nobody had predicted, which it often does.
My instinct is mostly to object to the statue removing of the last few years, but I also find the idea that I should see Churchill (for example) as a ”holy figure” irritating and tedious. In fact such an attitude is very vulnerable to attacks by the ”woke”.
If you accept the stance that the Second World War is the foundation myth of modern liberal democratic society then keeping figures like Churchill sacred is vital for the British system (and similar for figures in other countries for their respective nation). If the right rejects Churchill as they believe the country would have been better appeasing Hitler and the left rejects Churchill because they think World War 2 was fought to further colonialism then the whole foundation of Liberal Democracy being something that was fought for tooth and nail and worth the sacrifice is eroded since you have discarded the idea that it *was* fought for and wasn't just an excuse. Perhaps this is a necessary step in improving modern society but the people driving it wish for more brutal forms of government.
Not that there is anything wrong with criticising Churchill (or other figures) in an academic or intellectual context, the man was deeply flawed but large scale iconoclasm can have unintended results.
Well, sure, if the right starts to believe Churchill had the wrong policy concerning Hitler, that would be a major shift in political culture, but what does that issue have to do with keeping Churchill "sacred"? That is putting the cart before the horse.
"the left rejects Churchill because they think World War 2 was fought to further colonialism"
Afaik this isn't the main criticism of Churchill from the left. Almost all the criticsm I've seen is that he was a terrible person, a racist and colonist and disaster for the world who happened to get exactly one thing right which was to vigorously oppose Hitler.
She has been sedentary for forty years. She is likely overweight, if not obese, and prediabetic or diabetic. She has a high chance (compared to a twentysomething woman) of having hypertension, and/or cardiovascular, pulmonary, musculoskeletal, joint and tendon, and/or peripheral nervous system dysfunctions, and/or other degenerative diseases like arthritis or osteoporosis. Cancer is also a salient threat in her next twenty years. She has difficulty lifting twenty kilograms, let alone doing it twenty times a day.
This is not a person equipped for the physical demands of raising a child.
She cannot count on friends or family for physical help. Siblings are similar ages, and her parents are in their eighties. By their fifties, her friends and siblings have fairly fixed preferences and routines and are not going to be enthusiastic about forgoing their cruises and trips to Europe to help her raise her child. Any life partner who has not acted on the desire to raise a child before her or his fifties is unlikely to want to participate. The woman will be on her own.
So she will lean heavily on early childhood childcare. This will permanently damage the child's psyche (read about John Bowlby's infant attachment theory, which is not subject to the replication crisis) as well as making the child physically sick with infectious diseases about one-third of the time.
The child will be ill during childhood, and anxious, depressed, and/or avoidant as an adult. The child is at risk of both cluster A and cluster B psychiatric disorders as well.
Finally, there is a salient risk of the child's mother dying, quickly or slowly and agonisingly, leaving the child an orphan at any time before the age of 18.
(*) Since people here insist on having everything spoon-fed to them: understand that I am talking in terms of characteristics of populations, not those of some exceptional individual(s). Don't take my word for it: you won't anyway. Look up the statistics yourself and do your own calculations.
Your example is basically representing a poor, old, single unhealthy woman. Literally the opposite of “characteristic populations” but an exceptionally unfit individual for raising a child.
Unless you’re saying that most people over 50 who would consider having a child would be single, poor, unhealthy women.
Sixty percent of American women are overweight or obese. This number would be higher for over-fifities.
Edit: we ban high-speed driving through city streets, and buying high excplosives and poisons like strychnine over the counter. Some people would be responsible with these, but that doesn't matter.
What’s the obesity rate of women making less than $30,000 in the US? Should we ban any demographic that has expected less than average childrearing credentials?
Using population level statistics won’t be too useful without also considering who are the women within that bracket considering having children at this age? Considering that post-menopause would require expensive fertility treatments, my assumption (and I admit I could be wrong about this) would be they would be wealthy and healthy compared to their age bracket.
I assume the point though is mostly aimed at women, rather than men, which would be a whole different thing than to the statistics you reference.
I’m trying to follow your reasoning to where it leads and why this demographic should be banned from having children, while others that might have similar, or worse expected outcomes should not.
So your mental model of who shouldn't be getting kids in their fifties is actually very specific: it's a single, lonely, sedentary woman.
That's what you should have started with. There's a ton of statistics showing that, at least on the average, it's not great to be a child of a single mother, no matter what age. There are also many people who would support this with their anecdata. (Still, I imagine most people would agree that banning this would be going too far.)
But if you're assuming that that's the most likely kind of person who's going to want to have kids in their fifties, you might be completely wrong. Why would a typical single, lonely, sedentary woman in her fifties either give up her comfortable life to have a kid, or bring a kid into an already very uncomfortable life? If I was to guess, I'd guess the target demographic are mostly couples with reasonably good lives who for whatever reason failed to get their kids earlier.
I agree that this does the children a great disservice. I do not know what the original commenter’s reasoning is, but mine is that:
1) Children require physical energy and mobility to properly raise. It’s a physical mismatch between children who need to run around outdoors and parents whose strength will be failing as soon as the children need it.
2) The natural mode of life is that kids are raised by the parents, have a period where they and their parents can work side by side to begin raising the grandkids, and then as the parents begin to fail, the kids can take care of them. This creates a pattern where just when the kids will want to have grandkids, the parents will need much more care.
3) Kids should have the benefits of living and sharp parents later into their lives rather than aged and demented parents before middle age.
This is not inexcusable when it happens occasionally—an occasional geriatric father or middle-aged mother—but as a common societal pattern it would be atrocious and selfish.
>Children require physical energy and mobility to properly raise. It’s a physical mismatch between children who need to run around outdoors and parents whose strength will be failing as soon as the children need it.
1. Do you also think that disabled people should be barred from having children? Of all the things needed to properly raise children, physical energy and mobility are probably the least important. Being able to
2. I think you are greatly underestimating the strength and mobility of 50-60 year olds, and greatly overestimating the energy of little kids, who tucker out quite quickly.
At no point did I suggest some sort of dictatorial birth licensing regime for the old or any other group. I suggest that deferring reproduction does children a disservice. Immediately leaping from “this will probably be bad” to “this ought to be illegal” is the sign of an authoritarian mind.
You greatly underestimate how much energy and mobility contribute to healthy and well-raised children. It is no coincidence that your opinion arises commonly from the palest, fattest, most indolent culture in history. The public health crisis starts with people thinking it’s normal for kids and adults to couch-crash after 10 minutes of running around. Au contraire I have young kids and they’re perfectly capable of staying on their feet and sweating all day in tropical heat.
Sorry, I confused you with the original poster, who said "it should be banned."
But I am not sure that all the ad hominem material is warranted.
>You greatly underestimate how much energy and mobility contribute to healthy and well-raised children.
Do you have actual evidence for the claim that parental energy and mobility contribute to healthy and well-raised children? Because it seems to me that inculcating values and good habits and behaviors (including habits and behaviors related to health) do not require energy and mobility beyond that exhibited by most people in their 50s.
And, since it sounds like you are from a non-Western culture, is it possible that your view of what people in their 50s are capable of? 60 is quite old in many places, as it was in the West a few decades ago, but it really isn't in the West any more.
I am not from a non-Western culture. I just have a clear-eyed view of my own culture, and I live in a place that has tropical heat, and I keep my kids moving all day because it’s good for them!
My evidence I’ve already cited. This is the palest, fattest, most indolent generation in written memory: the empirical public health crisis is everywhere around you; our own institutions have been ringing the alarm bells for decades, and the things we die of and our very appearances are enough to conclude we’re not doing well.
I challenge you to explain why, if energy and mobility are not required, the steep drop in outside time, exercise, etc. has resulted in sky-high levels of myopia, depression, anxiety, suicide, obesity (and all its attendant ills, which are many and multifarious). I suppose there is the crazy Slime Mold Time Mold-type approach that it is lithium, or seed oils, or cell phone towers… or maybe it’s just that our whole culture is teaching its children that it is normal to sit on the couch and eat from dawn to dusk while squinting at a 6.1” to 6.6” drama toy.
Is your idea to just to prevent old people from having kids, or do you want a licensing scheme in general?
I can see the appeal of a licensing scheme, which filters depending on frailty, substance abuse, history of child abuse, stable relationship, emotional stability, resilience. Depending on your politics, you might also want to throw in 'ability to adequately support the kid' (where 'adequately' is highly cultural dependent), 'likelihood of genetic diseases', or 'correct parental ideology' (you would not want a kid raised by Nazis, would you?).
The problem is that unlike other licence-restricted activities, such as flying big airplanes, making babies is kind of hard to restrict without modifying the bodies of your citizens.
This is an area where, upon seeing the skulls of the victims of previous attempts of regulation, I would conclude that it is generally a bad idea if the state enforces limitations on who can have babies.
The most a state should do is to provide positive incentives for whatever people the state thinks should have more kids, and the option of free abortion for anyone who accidentally got pregnant.
I think we can agree that the fact that men can sire children at 80 while women go into menopause is not particularly fair. If we want to establish a cut-off age for having kids, we should have a better standard than 'in the ancestral environment, a woman your age would have had greater reproductive success by taking care of her many kids and grandkids than risking giving birth with her aging body again'.
Banning post-menopausal pregnancy would be like banning glasses in some annual eye test for car drivers to get rid of old drivers. Yes, there is a significant overlap between old age and having bad uncorrected eyesight, but the reason one might not want to have elderly drivers (like limited reaction speed) are mostly orthogonal to what strength of glasses they require.
> making babies is kind of hard to restrict without modifying the bodies of your citizens.
I mean, it's pretty easy to imagine a totalitarian state which will just execute you and your kids for having children without permission. It's not that easy to hide a baby, or even a pregnancy. But yeah, not that relevant for plausible near term future America.
My father was 61 when I was born and my mother died when I was young despite being younger than him.
If grown up to be a happy, well adjusted person, and a lot of the temperance in my life can be directly attributed to being raised by someone who was older, and has been through a lot of life already.
You’re going to have to elaborate on your claim otherwise it’s completely ridiculous.
I mean, obviously? If you’re going to make a claim, support it with literally nothing, and I have personal experience that directly contradicts your claim, it’s hard to take you very seriously.
Considering I’m quite happy and satisfied with my life, and see certain advantages in having been raised by a retirement aged man, you’ll have to support your claim with at least something.
You're making strong and controversial assertions without giving reasoning, then criticizing people when they make an assertion which is at least backed by an anecdote. Consider this your warning before being banned.
Not grandmothers by themselves though. Honestly I think childrearing was more done by older sisters and cousins. Sample size of 1, but my maternal grandmother mostly raised her younger siblings while her paternal grandmother spent most of her time siting and doing nothing. Women in general were not particularly physically active after late 50s at max, with most of the household work being done by the many daughters, daughters in law, granddaughters etc. You honestly can't be very physically active after a certain age in an era where food was very limited.
I have an actual non-theoretical child and I still don't understand what you're on about. Maybe actually make an argument instead of just dismissing anyone who doesn't exactly share your beliefs.
I do think I understand your angle, but I suggest you don't post things in the form "If you have to ask, you're missing details I'm not going to supply. Do research on your own and then get back to me," as it's generally off-putting. People here are generally interested in information they don't have, and if you think them ignorant, the best thing you can do is to enlighten them at least briefly. Even if you don't think it'll reach the person you're addressing, there are other people reading along that might be sincerely interested.
Do proponents of EA typically require that the target metric be some variant of “lives saved” or are they content with other metrics/goals so long as they are deliberately selected and applied?
There are definitely a number of worldviews within EA. For example, those prioritizing animal welfare are probably not optimizing for human lives saved.
The second one. I agree with 20WS below that QALYs are an improvement over life-saved and potentially cover a lot of things. But some people prefer things more measurable than QALYs, and other people have their own things they're interested in that aren't necessarily linked to QALYs at all.
QALY is a purely philosophical concept with no basis in reality. This disqalyfies it as a "metric", which – as the term implies – has to be measurable.
There is a spectrum of 'easy to measure' and 'good goal to optimize', with 'count of warm bodies at midnight' being easy to measure, and QALY being a good optimization target.
If you just optimize the number of lives saved today, you would prefer to rescue ten kids which were exposed to a lethal dose of radiation to one healthy kid. This seems like a bad move.
Of course, with QALY you have a lot more wiggle room, depending on your model. Nobody knows what the life expectancy of someone born in some specific country is going to be.
If QALY was dependent on socio-economic status (so 20 years living as a median westerner is worth more than 20 years living at median income a developing country), that would be bad. But just taking medical conditions impacting quality of life seems fine to me.
I'm not sure how to interpret your comment. It's not the "life years" part I object to, but the "quality-adjusted" part. You can measure years, you cannot measure QALYs.
I thought being able to measure (or at the very least, predict) the effectiveness of an intervention was _the_ most fundamental tenet of EA. How does that square with an unmeasurable pseudo-metric?
I'm not sure what you mean. When I type QALYs into Google I get a bunch of papers like eg this one (https://www.valueinhealthjournal.com/article/S1098-3015(18)34857-5/pdf) arguing that renal denervation for hypertension produces 0.31 QALYs, for a cost-effectiveness of €33,741 per QALY gained. You can't measure this without doing calculations. But the ancients couldn't measure regular years without building Stonehenge.
The reason it's used is that there isn't really any another other way to measure effectiveness. The "quality-adjusted" component is of course an estimate, and I'm sure lots of smart people have Opinions on the values chosen. That doesn't mean it can't be used at all - it just means nobody knows a better way to do it.
I'm not asking for myself. More just wondering why more critics of EA don't just adopt it with a different target metric (IE "get x elected" or "help homless people" or "save puppies").
But I would tend towards optimizing for QALY/$, in which happiness (for certain definitions of happy) would certainly be a factor.
There is a round of arguments on HBD on Substack, and I think it is really beating about the bush, because what everybody wants to know is two things: is white superiority true or black inferiority true.
And think we can answer that without genetics. Basically Yamnaya civ did not look very impressive, Egypt, Mesopotamia, China was more impressive. Mycenean Greece did not look very impressive, Greece started to get interesting after that collapsed. Scandinavians did not do anything truly interesting before the Viking Age. I don't see early whites doing anything galaxy brain like.
As for black, it is hard to tell, because in Africa everything tries to kill you and your cattle. It takes significant effort to just stay alive. The thing is, if a place is generally good for life, it is bad for human life. If it is generally bad for life, it is good for human life. I was looking at the landscape in Aalborg, Denmark from an airplane. It is one giant grassland, for cattle to eat. It is not generally good for life, it does not do much biodiversity, but it is really good for human life. Africa is really good for life, and that is not good for human life. Much of that life is hostile.
The pro-HBD arguments I've heard about "whether a place is good for life or not" are about the necessity of planning.
The argument goes that cold places (Europe) more often required planning for the winter.
Africa, so it is argued, is easier to live in, intellect-wise. Long-term planning (they say) isn't as necessary if you really just need to beat the environment in the moment.
I have heard this argument, and I think it sounds more like an argument for self-control, marshmallow test like (which seems largely disproven now), than for intelligence. Or for social organisation and enforcement.
Arguing for/against HBD by pointing to various civilization’s achievements is just another kind of HBD, though. The arguments about the unique features of European civilization predate the genetic arguments by centuries.
Civilizations can be regarded as differing by culture rather than genes. Most people understand that ancient civilizations differ from modern ones in the same location for reasons other than genetics.
In fact, we have very obvious controlled experiments in Germany and Korea. The real question is whether there's any residual left to be explained by genes.
I think trying to judge ethnic genetic intelligence based on the achievements of historical states is an fraught with danger.
It kinda works for early hominids: archaeological evidence of tool production, art, burial customs are all taken as signs of intelligence.
For example, I don't think you need an IQ of 120 to be a really good horse archer, it is a vocation which probably can be done fine with an IQ of 100, to historically very impressive results.
From my understanding, the genetics of the population in England in 1600 was mostly similar to the population in 1850. No aliens decided to CRISPR the English to uplift them towards the industrial revolution. The brain capacity (i.e. having a few very smart people) for the industrial revolution was likely there in 1600, but the circumstances were not right to use achieve great feats.
So while you can conclude from impressive civilizational feats that a people must have had (a subgroup of some) minimal intelligence, you can't really conclude the negation from a lack of such feats.
I would say that if you have archery (which has been around for 50-80k years) and horseback riding (perhaps around for some 3-5k years), the idea to shoot a bow while on a horse does not sound more genius than the idea to combine a car and a gun to do a drive-by shooting.
The hard part is in the execution, and honing it to the point where it becomes a viable military strategy. If you scale down a long bow for use on horseback, the result will not pack much of a punch. So either you need a path with more slack (perhaps you hunt rabbits on horseback, whose armor is much easier to defeat) or you have already developed composite bows for other reasons.
I don't think that raw intelligence is the bottleneck. Likely, it requires agility, non-conformity and luck. Probably, the first 100 times someone tried it, their tribes said: 'look at John, trying to fire his puny boy's bow from horseback, instead of learning to use a spear or how to quickly dismount to shoot a proper bow', and they ended up being right, until they were not.
The real trick is that it requires training from an early age, and hence it requires people who live a nomadic hunting lifestyle. You aren't going to get horseback archers out of farmers no matter how you try.
It's dumb online argument filled with fake beliefs. One example among money: No one really believes the IQ arguments otherwise you'd see race-neutral IQ supremacists all over.
Race-neutral IQ Supremacists is not a good brand, Supremacist has a history of being used by evil groups. We usually just call ourselves Meritocratics. But a good meritocracy is essentially going to want to be race neutral and value things like IQ. I am interested in HBD as a way to fight Affirmative Action, which is currently the most anti-meritocratic policy in place.
I’m clearly not the only one with this position, 50% of Americans are against using race as a criteria in admissions which only one third supporting it. I’m sure the average American does not think about HBD, but it is a useful tool to explain why without affirmative action some races get admitted at different rates. And if you think that I harbor some secret racist motive, that’s unlikely since I’m mixed race. Which of my ancestors races is supreme? I couldn’t care less. I just want smart doctors and other important positions.
I didn't want to listen to the whole thing, but it does raise an interesting question. Is sports betting destructive? If so, how destructive? It doesn't just take up a lot of money, it takes up a lot of attention.
I think the book you're looking for is Guns, Germs, and Steel. Its thesis is that macro-scale pre-modern differences in tech level were primarily about how much agriculture every region had.
The Yamnaya weren't impressive because you basically couldn't do agriculture on the steppe during their reign, and you had to rely on some combination of horses (until you evolved lactase persistance) and cows (I'm going off memory, read Razib Khan for the details).
The Scandinavians weren't impressive because Scandinavia was marginal for agriculture until people invented cold-resistant crops in the Middle Ages.
The sub-Saharan Africans weren't impressive because the standard bundle of crops invented in Mesopotamia didn't translate very well to the sub-Saharan African climate, plus because humans evolved in Africa there were many more germs and parasites evolved to prey on humans there.
The Greeks, Middle Easterners, Indians, and Chinese *were* impressive because there's a latitude-spanning band of basically similar friendly climates in those regions, so everyone could exchange crops and domestic animals - mostly the bundle invented in Mesopotamia, but also stuff like rice from the other direction. That meant they had agriculture a long time, which gave them more time to invent the cultural package of civilization and (more controversially) the genetic package of self-domestication to civilization (the most established versions of this hypothesis are lactase persistence in the Yamnaya, which required them to have cattle for a long time, and alcohol resistance in various groups but especially the South Chinese).
If you want to add genetic stuff as epicycles to this basic story, I think this would be a combination of more speculative genetic self-domestication (cf. the deep roots literature), latitude as a proxy for parasite load during evolutionary time (I think either Cochran or Harpending had a theory that high parasite load makes it harder to select for complex traits because they introduce too much noise), and a bunch of accidental eugenics/dysgenics programs (eg the jizya tax forcing everyone who couldn't pay out of Middle Eastern Christian minorities, leaving them enriched for the most successful genes). You would also have to trace a lot of weird migrations (the pre-classical Greeks, classical Greeks, and modern Greeks are pretty different people). Of course, all of these things add enough degrees of freedom that it's hard to turn these into hypotheses even if you wanted to.
From following Razib's blog over the years, it seems that Mycenaeans, classical Greeks, and modern Greeks are actually pretty much the same people. The biggest difference comes from a noticeable influx of Slavic ancestry during the Middle Ages (when most of mainland Greece was conquered by Slavs, only to be reconquered and assimilated by the Byzantine Empire).
"Of course, all of these things add enough degrees of freedom that it's hard to turn these into hypotheses even if you wanted to."
What about Gregory Clark's theory that market economies were selecting for IQ/conscientiousness? It's a single variable and it fits well for England, the Ashkenazim and East Asia, and he has a bunch of supporting data.
One theory is that conquest doesn't necessarily lead to the spread of a language. The deciding factor is how easy the language is to learn as an adult.
> The deciding factor is how easy the language is to learn as an adult.
This is not a normal theory. You're more likely to hear that languages become easier to learn as adults when adults find themselves compelled to learn them.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone advance the idea that some languages are learned by more people because of the ease of learning those particular languages.
You wouldn't, but the simplification process has been documented everywhere. We know it happens to languages that become widespread. We don't know the causes.
John McWhorter wrote a paper, "What happened to English?", documenting that simplification in English occurred well before any significant spread of the language, and attributing this to the need of Norsemen settling in the Danelaw to learn English.
You can also easily observe that nobody ever learns a language just because it's there, which seems to block the idea that a language might spread through greater learnability. Language learning is always driven by an external need to learn that language in particular.
I've heard a theory of the *reverse*. Languages that spread widely become more regularized because they are learned by lots of second language speakers.
The big counterexample to conquest leading to language spread would appear to be the Dutch East India company not bother to spread Dutch. And, conversely, there's Aramaic spreading via its popularity among scribes rather than conquerors. I recall Nicholas Ostler's "Empires of the Word" discussing those examples, and I could have sworn I wrote a blog post saying he doth protest too much about the association between conquest and language spread, but I can't find it (or even an entry in my list of books I've read since I started keeping track).
> And, conversely, there's Aramaic spreading via its popularity among scribes rather than conquerors.
Empires of the Word did have a lot of discussion of Sanskrit spreading in a non-coercive way. I don't remember this point about Aramaic, but it seems fundamentally flawed - a language being taken up by scribes tells you nothing about whether the language is in use. The world norm at the time was to write in languages that were long dead. One major boost to the spread of written Aramaic was that the Persian Empire made it the official language of all government documents. It was not the language of government officials, just documents.
> what everybody wants to know is two things: is white superiority true or black inferiority true
I think I count as part of "everybody", and that's not my main concern. Britain has, in the last 200 years, been at war with China, Japan, and Ashkenazi Jews, all peoples that plausible have higher genetic intelligence than the British. As a result I'd like to see a programme of (entirely non-coercive) genetic counselling offered to all couples who want to have a baby. This might include use of donated sperm/eggs from people with desirable traits (intelligence, conscientiousness, etc).
As for black people, a lot of black Africans live in English-speaking countries and it is in the interests of the English-speaking world that these countries be successful and prosperous. If genetic counselling helps achieve that, I'm for it. Note that that applies equally whether blacks are superior/same/inferior to whites intellectually.
Ashkenazi Jews on average likely have a higher intelligence than Brits but not Chinese, Japanese, (or Indians). Its just the type of person to move from these countries to the Anglosphere is selected for intelligence but that doesn't apply to their countrymen. I imagine Brits living in China, Japan, and India probably work in white collar professions as well and are thus more intelligent than the average Chinese/Japanese/Indian. But that doesn't mean the average Brit is more intelligent than the average Japanese.
Viking Age was not anything interesting. There were numerous periods throughout prehistory where waves of raider tribes came out of that region. Neither were all those Scandinavian raiders all that impressive compared to hosts of raider tribes throughout Eurasia. The only thing "interesting" about Vikings is that it occurred at a time when written culture had entrenched itself in Western Europe so those raids could be recorded for posterity.
For what it's worth I think there is a time and place where each civilization punches above its weight. No one in 924 AD would think of Northern Europeans as the master race but by 1924 they had achieved enough in quite a small span of time that many could come to that conclusion. But since 1945, I think Europe has been decline or at least growing slower than in past, allowing other regions to catch up. It's not evident now, but who knows sub-Saharan Africa could be the Northern Europe of 3024. Just like Northern Europe by about 1000 AD after a century of Christianization had the basic building blocks for prosperity in place like writing, state structure etc. It was still poor but over time it caught up to the more establishment centers of civilization to its South. Africa too has the basic structure in place. Over time they will be fine. The youthful dynamism with all its flaws will still set them well in comparison to the hospice of a continent that is Europe.
Some of their legal culture was quite interesting, especially as it manifested in Iceland. And overall they had an ethos of "go out and DO stuff, don't sit around and wait for permission" that, while not unique in the world, added a healthy sense of entrepreneurship back to a Roman/Christian-dominated continent.
One could perhaps even make a not-particularly-plausible argument that the whole "age of exploration" "colonialism" thing was Viking expeditions writ large. Get some dudes together, sail out, maybe make a settlement, if you find people either trade with them, or subjugate them and take their stuff, make some flowery speeches about how it's all for the glory of God and country, unless you can pull off independence...
Age of exploration was kickstarted by Europeans least influenced by the Vikings. Spaniards and Portuguese(with a lot of Italians in the beginning), which spread to the French, Dutch and English. Scandinavians barely did anything during the whole Age of Discovery period. If Vikings had any influence, you would expect this list to flow in the opposite direction.
Yup, that's why it's not particularly plausible. Unless there's a way to connect the Vikings to the reconquista, which seems more like the direct inspiration for Spain and Portugal.
You can connect the Vikings to the Spanish/Italian Explorers by noting that Christopher Columbus appears to have spent some time hanging out with Vikings in Iceland, just a few years before he started promoting the idea of sailing west from Europe to find interesting destinations within easy reach.
Of course, there were presumably a fair number of English mariners with experience in Iceland, and none of the discovered the new world. So either the Age of Exploration was fundamentally shaped by the personal idiosyncrasies of one man, or there was something about Spanish culture of the time that made it more receptive to such ideas. Maybe elements of both.
Yup. Fun fact, which I recently learned from the Rest is History podcast(highly recommend). Columbus was in Granada with Ferdinand and Isabella's entourage when the last Muslim ruler surrendered the keys of the city to them. 1492 was truly a cinematic year for Spain. A victorious end to a chapter spanning hundreds of years and a thrilling start to a chapter that would span hundreds of years.
If we're looking at the timescale of 3024 then I don't think you can make any reference at all to current fertility and birth rates. Subsaharan Africa will soon be 50%, 60%, 70% of new births, but is already undergoing the same demographic transition and will, like Europe and Asia, become a hospice in the near future. What depends to be seen is whether the non SSA areas will become overwhelmingly SSA in the short term (false I think). But to discuss the relative proportions of ethnic groups in 3024 based on current numbers is a bit like trying to predict the path of a double pendulum. A thousand years is plenty of time for birth rates to collapse, rise again, collapse again, and rise again.
Viking ships were stable enough to raid during the winter, yet light enough to carry them in portage, and shallow enough to land on any beach. I think this was very unusual.
I think his argument is that those features are similar enough to, say, advances in horse archer's equipment, that it's the same general sense. The Vikings weren't building large stable structures or whatever. Not that they weren't unique or interesting.
Yes, Vikings were about as interesting as say the Khitans. The only reason anyone cares about the Vikings is because the English and then the Germans who actually did achieve great things in the 18th and 19th centuries, idealized the Scandinavians and their ancestors for reasons.
I would say that the Vikings were historically important, but as you say because of how they affected future civilizations. I would say that a lot of future success and likely the willingness of northern European countries to create empires and fight major wars descends (at least partially) from inherited aggression and conquest/strength memes from the Vikings. That this would happen is definitely not something we could have predicted a priori and would not have been obvious when they were active.
As I pointed out in a in another comment, the Europeans who started the process of conquering the world, Spaniards and Portuguese(employing a lot of Italians) had little to no Viking influence. The French, Dutch, and the English followed a hundred years later, but it really wasn't until the 1800s that Northern Europeans became dominant. So why such a long gap for the agressive Viking genes to get to work. When Cortes was conquering Mexico and Clive was conquering Madras, it's more likely they were thinking of the Alexander, Romans and perhaps the Crusaders rather than the Vikings. Viking fan boys are a product of 19th century romanticism. Even the only time Scandinavia was geopolitically relevant in the last 1000 years, under the Swedish Empire in the 17th century, they were motivated by muscular Protestantism rather than Thor and Valhalla.
I think a better way to put it, would be saying that humans are invasive species outside of Africa, where everything evolved along with us and therefore is adapted to deal with us much better.
Your claim is really weird and obviously falls apart as soon as you actually think about it. Antarctica is bad for life, and for humans. Even relatively "mild" places like Denmark require humans to survive winters, which implies fire, shelter, food storage, and all the planning that goes with it.
Also, the stereotypical places that are "good for life" are the tropics, not Africa. Seems to me you're spinning a contorted narrative to avoid reaching certain conclusions.
Why stop there? Space is REALLY bad for life and so--by your interpretation of JustAnOgre--it must be REALLY good for human life.
It's clear that JustAnOgre is trying to lay out a heuristic, not define an absolute rule. Jumping to the most extreme possible counterexample to show that a heuristic is...well...a heuristic isn't charitable or even particularly reasonable.
It's not hard to find the sense in the heuristic, if you look for it. As a species, humans' superpower is intelligence which, among other things, confers a LARGE advantage in adaptability. All species are adapted for a niche, but humans are better than almost anything on the planet at surviving outside their niche. And the more generally hostile the biome, the fewer other species--including species of parasites, diseases and large predator--will be adapted to it. So humans can improve their relative fitness by moving from the biome to which they were evolutionarily adapted--certain parts of Africa--to any of a number of more hostile biomes. When you say "even relatively "mild" places like Denmark require humans to survive winters, which implies fire, shelter, food storage, and all the planning that goes with it." that is EXACTLY THE POINT. Humans can manage all of that. And pre-industrial humans are much, much better at managing fire, shelter and food storage than they are at battling diseases and parasites, so there is real advantage in trading the ancestral biome for that one.
Thank you. Humans and our livestock can be usefully modeled as invasive species, agriculture and pastoralism displacing natural ecosystems. When that happens, it is useful if the local species are not very good at fighting back, but of course there is a trade-off at the extremes, some real estate is not worth having.
I made a mistake of talking about Africa as if it would be one biome. What I had in mind is tropical climates everywhere - those are the ones that are good at resisting humans.
I recently started a substack! Based on some conversation on the discord, I wrote a piece on why I don’t think robots will be replacing human domestic labor any time soon. Currently I the works: a followup addressing the 1X NEO, which was announced just as I published the piece, and a look at what happens when a scientific paper isn’t massively flawed, but misrepresents itself, using the Nature Mexican Biobank paper.
If any of that sounds interesting, please read and subscribe!
What's the status on flow batteries? On the surface, they sound like the perfect solution for utility scale energy storage. Need more capacity? Just add some tanks. Need more power? Just add some fuel cells and pumps.
So why aren't they everywhere already? Is it cost of the fuel cells, cost of the liquids, durability? Neither mass nor volume should play a role for grid storage.
> Poor marketing, indifferent calibre of engineers.
Whose marketing? What engineers?
Storage for intermittent, renewable energy sources is set to be a billion dollar market, I'm sure there are "a few" engineers inspired to work on this.
Siemens, for one; other large engineering companies operating in the flow battery space (Hitachi? Fujitsu Heavy Industries? Bosch? I can't remember. There are a few tens of megawatts of flow batteries in China, but I can't remember the name of those companies either.)
Yes there are, and there is renewed work on flow batteries; it just hasn't amounted to much (yet), because there are three or five orders of magnitude less money behind it than is behind lithium chemistries. (And closely related chemistries, like sodium-ion. Oh, and sodium-sulfur.)
I am interest in this too, would love to have some indepth explanation from someone who is familiar with the industry,
My personal undestanding is that flow battery is too expensive upfront mainly due to the cost of the membrane exchange.
IIRC Redflow battery from australia is making some flow batteries that are only slightly [10-20%] more expensive than lithium-ion on a per life time kwh stored, but that is mainly because of the long expected life time of flow battery, so time to recoup investment is much longer than lithium-ion. They also need to be fully discharged every few days.
According to their financial report approx 1 year ago they were having problem bringing the cost of membrane manufacturing down.
Public flow battery companies that I tracked [redflow, gellion] all have their stock price fall precipitously. So I assumed that either scaling up is not as easy as the founders expected or the market is aware of some flaws in their designs.
I use ChatGPT mostly for personal use. I've created a custom GPT to be my Assistant Game Master for a Wild West Werewolf (White Wolf games is the publisher) campaign that I am running. I create every scene guide with the bot, have generated most of the home brew setting with the bot, and weekly engage with the bot to give it the recap of the last session and build what I am going to run for the next session. It is really helpful and at this point (I'm building session 14 right now) I don't see how I could do this without the bot! The art generation capabilities have been extremely helpful in helping the players visualize scenes and NPCs. I did some work with animated gifs and ai voice over videos early in the session to create some "shared dreams" and other content, but since then its just been scene guides and images.
I'm also using the bot for some personal coding projects, and to make macro enabled spreadsheets for work.
All in all I think the hype is overblown, but pair a skilled/creative user with a fine tuned bot and it really does act as a force multiplier. IMO
If anyone's interested here are the videos created, the first one used stock images that came with the service, and for the second two I replaced the stock footage with Dall-E 3 images or aitubo animated gifs.
I use AI all the time as an improved sort of search engine, to help formulate routine missives, to create illustrations, and to act as a sounding board for creative pursuits.
I occasionally create images on Bing to amuse my kids. I also at times ask ChatGPT if I want a list of 20 best SF authors or something, not so as to get recommendations but to get some "neutral" approximation what *others* might consider the best ones.
I don't think you can say "the AI trend has died down." The hype is certainly deflating, but the products are still improving every day.
The only "AI" product I use is ChatGPT, and only on occasion for personal interests. I work for the government, and about a year ago, I also used it to proofread draft papers. Then, my agency banned all use of LLMs due to privacy concerns. A committee was created to make LLM use rules and requirements and to find a model that met those, but it has yet to finish.
I strongly believe GPT-4 could do a large fraction of the tasks that my teammates and I do, and could provide useful feedback on most of the other tasks. It would not surprise me if GPT-5 could 75% replace some of us.
Personal anecdote: I really like AI art for "set dressing" - art for projects where the art isn't really the *point* of the project, and you don't need *great* art, but you need *some* kinda art to meet the expectations of the medium. For instance, CYOAs often need one image per choice, and you generally want the images to have a consistent style, but none of the individual images need to be standout works of art. AI is very good at meeting that need.
When Microsoft Copilot was announced, I realized it was sophisticated enough that I could fire the 6 employees underneath me, and me and my Lead could do the entire job ourselves. When I inquired up the chain about that possibility, I was told that an exploratory committee would look into it, and see if they could negotiate a secure contract. They assured me that no one would lose their job, and that it would take 5 years minimum to consider the possibility. I was also told to not use AI for anything at my job yet, since there were privacy concerns, and if I was discovered using AI, I would be reprimanded.
This is the federal government, so I wasn’t really surprised at this answer, but it definitely deflated the hype. I asked that answer again recently, and got the same answer, complete with them the 5 year timeline despite a year going by. It doesn’t matter how the technology improves as long as people are skeptical on adopting it.
Sounds like even without Copilot or any other AI tools, your department could have improved productivity substantially, and fire maybe 3 out of 6 employees underneath you. But that haven't happened - so not that surprising that AI adoption is not happening anytime soon :-)
Maybe, but I probably could only cut one and keep my productivity at where it needs to be. There is an incredible amplitude of writing that needs to be done for my subordinates jobs, and some of my employees IQ isn’t even 100. They take days to write a 10 page letter and either my lead or I have to make heavy edits afterwards.
If we paid 50% more, we could probably poach top talent from the private sector and fire half the staff, saving money overall, but that takes congressional action, so much, much less likely than the singularity occurring in my lifetime.
From a institutional perspective they do need to take these kinds of things slow. They have to consider the possibility that you're wrong. They also have to consider the possibility that you, personally, can handle the change but a future replacement for you could not.
They also have to consider the possibility that the technology messes something else up or gets shut down in a few years. Rehiring your six employees two years from now may end up being a bigger issue than what's saved in the meantime.
That's obviously putting aside the standard concerns - if these are union employees or have other job protections (federal employees, so the answer is yes even without a union), the fact that the positions are budgeted for and reducing positions helps no one in the organization, the fact that these employees could be tasked with other items as needed (general slack in the department), etc.
Yes, that is all logical. What my actual proposal was to roll out AI first and see how much it increased productivity, and then evaluate if the FTE would be better off moved elsewhere. A RIF was always unlikely. But since the first step of roll out AI is liable to take a decade, it’s no surprise my AI enthusiasm has been depleted. There’s a fair chance the singularity will occur before the government widely adopts AI.
Hah, you may be right. When you look at the institutional incentives for federal employees, it doesn't exactly look like a model designed for efficiency. And honestly, it's not and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Efficiency is not the most important thing. I would put longevity over efficiency at the federal level, actually. I do not think Copilot is going to be around in the same form a few years from now, which means institutionally that could cause a lot of problems in areas from contract negotiations to loss of service. Even counting on having you there to update the system when Copilot doesn't exist is a bad bet. You could change jobs, get promoted, retire, die, whatever before that happens. They have to make sure that the process continues even if the person who replaces you is less capable than you.
I ask factual questions about economic trends and sectors, statistics, population demographics, ancestral hominids, genetics, and more on a daily basis, and am usually very happy with the amount of time saved.
I use Perplexity and G4 for this and other things daily, and just estimating from the time it would take me to find the data, put the data in a dataframe, and do the analysis or graph, I think I probably save an hour or two a day.
I do know enough about each of these things to know if they're wrong, but the "meaningful mistake" rate is well below 10%, maybe below 5% now.
If you use them like you would use a bright intern or fresh-out-of-college direct report, I think they're great. Trust but verify, know the scope and pitfalls of what you're asking for, etc.
I even use G4 for things like "look at the pictures of hotels in the X area and tell me which ones have a real power rack, not a smith machine," which is a fairly unique use case you can't do with text descriptions, and which also saves significant time.
I think the biggest downside of them is I want them to actually work for me as a virtual assistant - I want to be able to book flights using them, or have them call businesses on my behalf, and they're just not there yet, even for any subscription ones. I think that's the killer app, and the one that should honestly be here today as long as you're willing to assume the risk of them using your credit cards, and which I'm disappointed don't exist yet.
I retired after my last startup a few years ago, but if I were doing another, yes, I'd absolutely be using them in domains that would usually cost or make me money.
It has not died down, just picking up steam. Why do you think it has? New models show up all the time, incrementally better and better. Hallucinations are rarer, fingers are fiver, videos are longer, games are doomer.
> New models show up all the time, incrementally better and better. Hallucinations are rarer, fingers are fiver, videos are longer, games are doomer.
That's all nice, but do you personally use any of this? Or are there artists, who were actually impacted by this? (Last year many artists feared AI. I am wondering how many of theses fears actually manifested in a tangible sense)
What I am asking is: Do these steps forward come with a tangible impact, or are they just more hype-fuel?
AI has not died down, and that Goldman Sachs report is currently being roundly mocked for extraordinary levels of analytic incompetence and ignorance, like reporting that ChatGPT usage has collapsed to near-zero (while actually it's kept growing dramatically) because they use a measure of domain name traffic... and OA changed the domain name a while back. (Which every ChatGPT user with two neurons to rub together noticed, implying either that the GS analysts and everyone reviewing the report don't use ChatGPT at all or lack even two neurons, in addition to the stunning level of out of touchness necessary to look at such a datapoint and not immediately go 'that can't be right, there must be something wrong with this traffic number, I'd better double and triple-check this'). Oops.
Well, this guy made thousands of fake songs with AI. Then he used a bot network to stream all of his "music" thousands of times a day so he could collect royalties. All told, he made more than $10MM. I wonder how much money he could've made if he only spammed a bunch of AI songs, without creating fraudulent listeners. Obviously nowhere near as much, but he was uploading "thousands a week". If each song would organically make $.50, that still comes out to $1,000 a week.
Also, who wouldn't listen to a band called Calvinistic Dust?
What exactly do you mean by "fake song"? Like, you press Play and nothing comes out of the speakers? If you mean the songs were falsely attributed to human writers/performers, the fakeness is an attribute of the attribution, not the song itself.
Also, "Calvinistic Dust" sounds like something from His Dark Materials.
The songs actually exist, but they don't have a coherent sound design or lyrics. If you've ever seen an AI-generated video where everything lacks permanence and kind of blends together, this is the audio version of that.
If each song only makes $.50 he's deeply in the red. It costs money to publish - anywhere from $0.99 per song to $10 per album. Streams make a fraction of a penny per.
I see. There must also be a cost for generation - and he partnered with an AI firm to generate thousands of songs a week and gave them a cut, so obviously they weren't working for free. I guess that explains why no one else is flooding the market with sketchy AI songs, it loses money.
Yes, the economics of this is absolutely brutal, which is why he had to create all these streaming bots to get literally billions of plays of his artificial drek. Getting organic streams requires heavy promotion. When an unknown artist publishes new music it just... sits there. Nobody will stream it (ask me how I know :) ). So this is why I'm not worried about AI-generated music displacing that of actual artists.
But what is going to happen - nah, happening already - is that livelihoods of session musicians, jingle / gaming / movie music creators will be, already being, destroyed. Example: I just recorded a song where I felt a piano track would sound good, and, not having nearly the proficiency on the instrument to play it myself, I poked around Garage Band app's piano samples until something I liked came out. This is awesome for me, and terrifying for someone who invested a decade+ into learning to play the instrument hoping to make a living out of it.
> So this is why I'm not worried about AI-generated music displacing that of actual artists.
Unfortunately it's already happening, through the roundabout route of major streaming companies producing (or having their "friends" produce) huge amounts of bottom-of-the-barrel AI music slop, and using their control of the algorithm to steer distracted people's auto-playing feeds to that crap, so they save on royalties. Ted Gioia's been writing about it repeatedly on his substack.
As I keep saying, automated, personalized feeds are digital crack and the mother of all that's gone wrong with the internet. They deserve nothing less than a full ban.
Oh yes, forgot about that one.... your are correct. All that "coffee-shop music", "soft jazz for quiet evening" crap. I avoid it like the plague, which is I guess why I keep forgetting it exists.
> Mr. Smith, prosecutors said, flatly lied to music distribution companies. In October 2018, one company informed Mr. Smith that it had received “multiple reports of streaming abuse” and that it planned to remove his songs from all stores.
> Mr. Smith, the charges said, responded with a strongly worded denial: “This is absolutely wrong and crazy!,” he said. “There is absolutely no fraud going on whatsoever! How can I appeal this?”
I have a feeling, that he could have walked away right there with what he gained so far (I guess couple million at that point?)
I myself and some of my coworkers use AI to help with programming. We usually just ask a chat bot to generate some boilerplate, or ask it for ideas to solve some specific error message. Full blown AI-Assistant coding seems too risky, since that would involve opening the codebase up to external forces, and that seems legally questionable. (for personal/private projects I do this though)
I have observed non-technical people who trust in AI a little too much. e.g. in one particular instance they asked the same question to a doctor and chatgpt, and gave chatgpt's answer more weight than the doctors. Am not worried about society-level changes though, because posers and fakers have been around for ages, so having an automated charlatans around shouldnt make too much of a difference, especially since that charlatans doesn't seem to have an agenda.
tools: I currently use perplexity. Before that I used openai-playground (it's about 2€ per month for about the same value as chatgpt for 20€ per month)
The biggest issue to me is that when AIs hallucinate, it's harder to spot because they don't have the signals that we use to estimate credibility in prior contexts. An AI's output always looks superficially similar whether it is correct or not.
Why do we as a society spend ~very little resources on developing new medications/interventions to make people more productive/hard working? Yes, there's Adderall, there's Vyvanse, Ritalin, Modafinil... but these are all based off decades-old research. The biggest problem with all of today's "ADHD" medications is that they don't necessarily make people more productive - they just make it *easier* to be more productive but are unable to give people that deep internal desire to work hard that's present inside of every self-made millionaire out there.
It seems like a literal trillion-dollar bill on the sidewalk: just imagine how insane GDP growth could get if *everyone* had the same drive and motivation as Elon Musk or whoever is your favorite example of a hard working person. Obviously this would no longer matter in a post-AGI world but until that happens the economy needs productive people and there's a big shortage of them.
Or maybe I'm wrong and we do invest lots of resources into this problem? Perhaps there's numerous labs out there trying to tweak the prefrontal cortex of mice to get them to work harder on solving mazes?
I have generally been very hostile towards this idea (for what I think are good reasons), but I'd like to offer something a little more positive. Both your suggestion and the suggestions Performative Bafflement makes can be broadly described as "trying to engineer human biology to allow greater productivity," and while I think that entire area is a minefield, I'm not hostile to "we should look for ways to increase productivity" as a general statement. I think it's very, very important to keep productivity an instrumental goal and not confuse it with a terminal goal, but I think there's quite a number of ways to approach the question of how to increase productivity that don't impinge nearly as much on most peoples' terminal goals as engineering human biology does.
In particular, I'd like to suggest that there are potentially MASSIVE gains in productivity to be made just by figuring out better systems of education and allocation of labour. The engines of capitalism are supposed to be well-tuned to attack the problem of optimal allocation of resources, but I think the labour market is pretty plainly a special case. Workers in modern, industrialized nations need long and costly job training that in many cases never really ends: an engineer with 20 years of experience is often much more valuable than an engineer with only 10, for example[1]. The market demand can change significantly on timescales as short as a few years or even a few months, so there's a clear mismatch here. But more even than those, the fundamental problem is that to a first approximation NONE of the suppliers of labour--that is, the workers themselves--act much like Homo Econimus in way that corporations do (or at least try to). People make career choices to a whole lot of reasons that aren't easily legible to the market and get priced in only imperfectly. Even in a world where they were priced in perfectly, labourers-in-training rarely have good information on the market: how many incoming college freshmen do you suspect have a good, or even modest handle on which careers are in-demand, what the requirements are, where those jobs are located and what kind of job security they have? And perhaps more significant than any of these is the problem that often NOBODY has a good sense of where a particular person's comparative advantage lies: not educators, not career councillors, not parents, not employers and not the workers themselves. There are some mechanisms for trying to figure this out, but they're weak.
I think there are quite a lot of gains to be made in figuring out how to get training programs to match up better with industry demand, how to train and retrain people for various jobs efficiently and how to help people figure out what they SHOULD[2] be doing career-wise. Every person who pays $100,000 for a degree that they don't end up using in their career is an inefficiency in the system, as is everyone who drops out of college after three years, as is everyone who has the talent and mindset to become a brilliant engineer but ends up stocking shelves because they either don't have the opportunity to learn that about themselves or don't have the resources to follow that path.
Probably nothing here is going to look like a lone, trillion-dollar bill lying on the sidewalk. But remember the joke about an economist who sees a $20 lying on the ground. You should be very, VERY suspicious if you think you've discovered a trillion dollar bill sitting ANYWHERE: the odds that it's real don't compare favourably to the odds that it's a fake, a mirage or a trap. I think if you were suggesting somewhere to look for a fruitful cluster of incremental improvements--which is what I'm trying to gesture at above--people would be much less alarmed.
[1] In a way that's not especially true of, for example, someone digging ditches in a per-industrial society.
[2] with "should" being determined by some combination of personal aptitude, desire and market demand.
I'm sure you don't conceive of your position as "we should throw all our efforts into inventing a pill that turns men into orcs," but it's hard not to see it in what you wrote. Regardless of how legally "voluntary" such a pill might be, I have a quite a strong preference for such a thing not to exist in the first place.
"Would a pill that gives us all the same passion and enjoyment from productive work as experienced by Stephen Wolfram such a bad thing to exist?"
I suspect you and are modelling human psychology in very fundamentally different ways. I'm can't peer inside any of these peoples' heads, but I'm at least a little skeptical that "passion and enjoyment for productive work" is something that any of these people *actually have.* I don't know anything about Wolfram, but the sense I've gotten from both of the Scotts is that they have passion and enjoyment for the specific subset of productive work *that they are actually engaged in.* You seem to be imagining they have passion for productivity *in the fully general sense* which I doubt is correct. Even if these three exceptional individuals do have such passion, I doubt it's especially common even among highly productive people.
Speaking from my own personal experience, I have HUGELY different amounts of drive and motivation for doing some sorts of work than other sorts. I've probably worked a greater number and variety of different jobs than 95% of humans, and the difference in my motivation between when I was selling T-shirts to tourists and when I was working in a physics lab is really, really extreme. Part of my career struggles have stemmed from the fact that my ADHD (long undiagnosed and untreated) made it harder to be effective even at the jobs that I enjoyed. But a LARGE part have stemmed from the fact that finding work that meets and acceptable threshold of achievable, lucrative and enjoyable is *actually quite hard.* I think, for example, that there are quite a lot of humans who would enjoy the job Scott Alexander has and work quite hard at it, but there simply isn't enough money in the field to support all of them.
When you talk about a pill that gives people a deep internal desire for productive work, I cannot help but understand that as giving people a desire for ALL or at least most productive work. Someone who's doing work that they enjoy probably has all the motivation they need. Someone who's doing work that they don't especially enjoy (but also don't hate), but is clearly getting them closer to their life goals is probably also pretty good on motivation. A pill that would make someone like Scott Alexander just as happy (or even 60% as happy) working on an assembly line or a call centre as he is writing about interesting things on the internet sounds like an abomination. It sounds like not a hair short of offering people the opportunity to self-mutilate in exchange for money.
> there are quite a lot of humans who would enjoy the job Scott Alexander has and work quite hard at it, but there simply isn't enough money in the field to support all of them.
It's not just the money. I run a small blog (on a different account) and very much enjoy writing there. I have a small audience that I'm perfectly content with and have a couple dozen ideas for future posts. My biggest obstacle is that writing is fun but it's less fun than going for a hike with my friends on the weekend, even though in the long term writing delivers far more satisfaction than hiking ever could. My hypothetical magic productivity pill would rewire my brain to optimize for the long-term instead of the short-term.
> A pill that would make someone like Scott Alexander just as happy (or even 60% as happy) working on an assembly line or a call centre as he is writing about interesting things on the internet sounds like an abomination
The most productive people that I've met were able to deliver excellent work even when they actively disliked their assigned task, as they had excellent self-control and were very high in conscientiousness. It would be perfectly fine if the magical productivity pill didn't change your perception of how much you enjoy doing the work, instead giving you the cognitive resources to fight through the boredom and deliver a good job despite being bored to death. If your only job option at the moment is to work in a call center, wouldn't you feel better knowing you at least did a great job at it?
I have a general suspicion that some of the negative response is to simply allowing people to modify themselves to become "better" than average at something. Reflexive anti-trans-humanism, maybe?
We seem fine with bringing people up to baseline, but when it comes to enhancements to let people be better than average, it's like a switch flips. And it's even worse if we let people do this to themselves with no approval and oversight.
One answer - it's illegal to give people medication-tier drugs without FDA approval, and the FDA only approves things for specific diseases, not for people who want to be more productive.
This isn't entirely right, because if you had a great intervention like this, you could use it for ADHD. I think the main answer here is that the FDA doesn't want more addictive substances for people to abuse, so to stay safe pharma companies focus on non-stimulant drugs, which are generally weak. I bet chemists could come up with lots of varieties of super-cocaine quickly, but they would go the same way as regular cocaine, so Big Pharma doesn't try.
That leaves supplements. Here there's lots of demand for performance enhancers and an easy regulatory environment, but two problems. First, in order to be sold as a supplement, a product needs to be at least sort of natural, and it's hard to get something in the sweet spot of "natural" and "not basically cocaine". Second, most fancy stuff works less well than just giving someone a giant dose of caffeine, so most energy drinks are giant doses of caffeine plus some other random stuff to make it look like it's fancy and high-tech and not just a giant dose of caffeine. Sabroxy is the only thing in this space that has ever impressed me, and it builds tolerance very quickly.
What's left is gray market nootropics. I have heard good things about bromantane and pramiracetam, but neither is 100% safe and both (are claimed by some, but not all) to have the potential for tolerance buildup. I think these are useful data points, because if I ask you whether you want bromantane (instead of the magical productivity drug you're imagining) you probably have lots of other considerations, are correctly nervous about taking something outside of the normal medical system, and eventually decide against.
Do you think that a "magical productivity drug" (if one could even exist) would necessarily be a stimulant? Extremely productive people that I've met in person were often quite calm and lacked the sort of hypomania that you see in people taking stimulants.
I don't know. There are lots of extremely happy pain-free people I know, but a drug that makes *you* extremely happy and pain-free is probably addictive and tolerance-building. I'm not sure why this is.
“Everyone” shouldn’t and doesn’t want to be like Elon Musk, or the average driven startup founder.
There are a lot of people who would want such a drug though. My guess is it’s a lot harder to develop a drug that effects “focus” than one that directly effects “desire for this specific thing.”
I’ve personally had success with nicotine during reading (something I used to really struggle with) and now I feel the urge to read, nicotine or not. Something like what you’re describing is probably not just a chemical, but maybe chemical + specific habit + mental conditioning.
The trillion dollar bill on the sidewalk is helping people learn to work together, not against each other, no new drugs needed. Well, maybe, but the drug would have to cure jealousy and envy.
Obviously religion is still around in a lot of places, and didn't do that perfectly and caused lots of wars. But it is funny he mentioned goals most of the world's major religions claim to aim toward.
> The trillion dollar bill on the sidewalk is helping people learn to work together, not against each other, no new drugs needed.
Technology and popping pills is way easier and more likely than somehow figuring out how to beat Moloch.
And how would this cooperation shake out, operationally, in a way that increases productivity? We already cooperate at the levels of individual businesses and corporations to drive economic outcomes, and further cooperation at that level is either conspiracy or price fixing, and wouldn't necessarily increase productivity.
So what does super-cooperation look like? Better political cooperation? That seems as likely to reduce productivity as it does to increase it. If everyone is pulling on the same team, but that team wants to pass out UBI and let people play video games all day, it seems like productivity takes a big hit?
I'm struggling to see how better cooperation actually turns out to be a trillion dollar bill, or to positively affect productivity at all.
"Technology and popping pills is way easier and more likely than somehow figuring out how to beat Moloch."
Easier, yes. But if you buckle down and do the hard thing, what you have at the end is a WAY TO BEAT MOLOCH. If you do the easy thing, all you end up doing is handing Moloch another weapon.
I think "productivity" here is suffering from about the worst case of Goodhart's law I've ever seen. I don't want an ascended economy, or a global paperclip maximizer, or an economy of carefully designed ems so perfectly optimized that they don't even *need* to be enslaved because they're just oh-so-happy to toil away endlessly for their overseers. All of those things would likely be vastly more productive than our current economy, and yet I'd rather regress all the way to the bronze age than "advance" to any one of them.
What I do want is human flourishing. Increased productivity *can* help improve human flourishing, but it's the measure, not the target, and some would do well to remember that.
Imagine you had a powerful-but-not-omnipotent genie that you could make unlimited wishes of. You knew this genie to be friendly and reasonable and that the wishes weren't traps: if some wish had big unforeseen (to you) negative consequences, the genie would just tell you, and work with you to find a way to get what you wanted without them.
As for powerful-but-not-omnipotent, let's describe it as follows: the genie will not make large, sweeping changes to the Earth or the universe. The genie will not violate the laws of physics in any large, repeated or detectable way. Once you are finished with the genie, the world-at-large will not look significantly different. But the genie can significantly tilt probabilities in ways that help you. If you want a winning lottery ticket, you'll find one in the parking lot. If there's a job you've always dreamed of doing, you'll be scouted by a recruiter tomorrow, and hired for it next week (training provided as-needed). If your mother is dying of incurable cancer, the doctor will discover an error in the tests and announce that it's easily treatable. If your biggest problems are with your own psychology, you'll find robust, easy treatments (possibly discovering that you've been misdiagnosed) very quickly.
You have use of the genie for a limited time, a few weeks to a few months, say. But the changes will persist. Can you think of any changes you'd make to your life, and to the lives of your friends and family? Can you think of any ways you expect your life could be persistently better, even after you've lost use of the genie?
If "yes," you now know what "human flourishing" looks like for TGGP specifically, and probably for many of those in your circle of concern. Expand that general idea to everyone in the world--keeping in mind that people will want different things--and there's a sufficient-but-not-necessary picture of "human flourishing." People are happier, healthier and living more of the lives they want to live (whatever form that takes).
Obviously we don't have genies, but technology has managed things only barely short of that level of miraculousness, and done it at scale. There are people living happy, healthy lives with previously untreatable diseases. There are people doing satisfying work in jobs that never even existed before, enjoying hobbies that were impossible 100 years ago, finding satisfying friendships and relationships that could never have happened when most humans spend their whole lives stuck in one place. Obviously there have been problems introduced as well, but "improving human flourishing" is clearly not impossible.
So, it increases utility? Although it seems the hypothetical only applies to existing people, so I guess average rather than total utility. Can the genie create a Fire-the-CEO market, or would that violate the bit about the world seeming different?
"The biggest problem with all of today's "ADHD" medications is that they don't necessarily make people more productive - they just make it *easier* to be more productive but are unable to give people that deep internal desire to work hard that's present inside of every self-made millionaire out there."
This sentence relies on a number of assumptions that look (to my eye) extremely shaky.
1. All "self-made millionaires" have a "deep internal desire to work hard." Are you basing this assumption on the empirical observation that they DO work hard? If so, why assume that this is the result of a deep internal desire for hard work specifically, or even that it's the result of any deep desire at all?
2. Most people who are not self-made millionaires lack the same deep internal desire to work hard. How could you know this? Is it because they aren't millionaires, or because you think they work less hard? Are there alternate possibilities you are failing to consider?
3. The lack of such a deep internal desire is a problem. Admittedly, this is partially a value judgment, but medications are usually taken voluntarily. Do you think everybody wants to self-modify to having a brain that is not just comfortable but eager to work 80-90 hour weeks? Do you think they should want that? Do you see any potential downsides to offering that self-modification as an option in a world where a substantial fraction of people don't want it?
I can speak to some experience as a great beneficiary of ADHD medication. From my personal experience, you are exactly correct that for a person with ADHD, finding and taking the right medication will make it *easier* to be productive. Something that perhaps you hadn't considered is that "making it easier for someone to be productive" and "making that person more productive" are very likely a distinction without a difference. When you make something cheaper, people buy more of it. When you make productivity cost less (in terms of mental effort) people do more of it. The world you want is the world we already have.
The minor reason that getting proper treatment for my ADHD didn't turn me into Elon Musk is that the treatment isn't perfect: it works pretty well but I'm still sometimes at a disadvantage. The major reason that ADHD treatment didn't turn me into Elon Musk is that I don't WANT to be Elon Musk. I cannot emphasize strongly enough just HOW MUCH I don't want to be Elon Musk. If, at the point I started looking for ADHD treatment, a genie had appeared to me with a pill, telling me that is was the only treatment that would work at all for my ADHD, but in addition to permanently curing my attention and executive function issues, it would give me a nearly irrepressible drive to work, that I'd plunge myself into my career to the near-exclusion of everything else, I'd walk away with out a second though. Better to live a life of frustrating mediocrity than sacrifice my soul to Moloch.
As it is, I have become much more productive since I found the right ADHD medication, and SOME of that extra productivity has gone into getting my career back on track. But some has also gone into the many other things that are important to me. I cannot strongly enough express the depths of contempt and revulsion I feel towards any worldview that would say that I ought to sacrifice most of who I am in order to make a line go up, or that others should do the same.
> I cannot strongly enough express the depths of contempt and revulsion I feel towards any worldview that would say that I ought to sacrifice most of who I am in order to make a line go up, or that others should do the same.
Why does everyone assume that myst_05 meant "what can we force the entire population to do to make line go up?"
It sounded like he's advocating for a fully voluntary model of productivity enhancement, and just bemoaning the fact that the array of options is so limited.
I personally agree with him - for all the good that things like Adderall can do, it seems like the menu of options available to people who want to increase their own productivity or economic or societal impact is really limited. That's a bad thing. We *should* work harder to make it easier for more people to increase their productivity and impact if that's what they want.
And given that this is one of those "positive externality" situations where society as a whole benefits from any increases in those things, we probably should be pouring significant resources into this from the top down.
I really don't understand why "let's give people who want to be more productive more options and affordances" is so controversial. Given how lopsided the responses are here, *obviously* it's not going to turn into people voting to make it mandatory from infancy.
"It sounded like he's advocating for a fully voluntary model of productivity enhancement, and just bemoaning the fact that the array of options is so limited. "
While I'd object rather strongly to the phrase "fully voluntary" I also didn't read his comment as "forcing people to take drugs." See point 3 which (I hope) is quite clear on that. There are two problems here, but only one is easy to explain.
The simple problem is that there's no such thing as a "fully voluntary" performance enhancing drug: not when it's enhancing performance in a highly-competitive domain. If such a drug were developed and made freely available, it wouldn't NEED to be made mandatory in the legal sense. Employers would simply set job requirements that the average person could not meet without it: anyone who wanted to stay employed would converge pretty quickly on taking this wonder-drug. The labour movement of centuries past fought long and hard for things like weekends, 40 hour weeks and overtime rules specifically because there's a strong tendency for employers to do this *even without* having a bottled-solution that they can nudge people towards. Cultural inertia has kept these improvements in place (the modern labour movement is certainly too weak to defend them at the society-wide level), but it's also the thing responsible for the generally dim view towards performance enhancing drugs. If we're trying to bring about a future where performance enhancing drugs are freely available, it seems safe to assume that the culture that allows that also isn't doing much to protect anyone against the soft coercion towards taking them: the current hostility towards them is *part of how it does that.*
The more complicated problem is one of worldview and mindset and how one understands human beings generally. It is probably difficult to communicate clearly and concisely. The best I think I can do is to point at the gap that myst_05 seems to see between "mak[ing] it easier to be more productive" and "giv[ing] people the deep, internal desire to work hard."
Imagine somebody who badly wants to improve their life circumstances but finds maintaining productivity difficult. Suppose that person takes some currently-available ADHD medication (and finds it effective). The medication makes it easier for them to be more productive. Will they become actually more productive as a result? I imagine that very probably it would: they want things that productivity can (usually) help people get, they now have decreased barriers to productivity, so why wouldn't they get more done?[1]
Now imagine a different person who has similar difficulties with high productivity, but has found a path through life that they find generally satisfying, that works well with the abilities they have. If they were to take ADHD medication, what could it actually do for them? It might make them a bit better at doing the things they were already doing, it might even open up some new opportunities, but by presumption, they're content where they are and not likely to take big risks or make big changes. The best I can read myst_05's position is that they want a medication that will turn this second sort of person into the first sort of person. To which myself (and it seems others) respond "holy cow, why would ANYBODY want that to exist? What possible benign use could it even HAVE?"
As far as I can tell, most humans have complex motivations and value a lot of different things. We have physical and mental limitations that somewhat determine how much energy we can put into tasks, but within those limitations, I think most people will already work very hard *in circumstances that make the tradeoffs worth it.* The reasons for most people to not be workaholic zombies isn't brain chemistry, it's that they value things that being a workaholic zombie won't get them, and don't sufficiently value the things it will get them. It seems like myst_05 is just sort of...glossing over all that, and rounding it off to "the most people have a deep, underlying desire to be workaholic zombies, they're just lacking the right tool and its very, very important for us to give it to them" Part of the revulsion I feel is not for the suggestion itself, but for this sort of worldview that seems to come through in what myst_05 writes: it a little like conversing with a paperclip maximizer who's not-so-subtly sizing me up for raw materials even as its trading small-talk.
[1] I can think of a few circumstance-dependent reasons, but none of those reasons are something a better medication could help with.
Thanks for explaining your view more comprehensively.
I do think we're probably coming at this from opposite ends of the spectrum. Your solution to me sounds more like "let's permanently cap human potential, because we don't want any tall poppies out there making us look bad."
You're thinking of the impact on the average person, and I'm thinking of the impact on high performers. I feel like your model is "if PED's are available, all the common people will be forced to take them and run on treadmills for their bosses 12 hours a day," which I really think there's no historic evidence for.
My model is "if PED's are available, the people at the outer edge of what's possible will take them and push that frontier further."
If you're worried about employers taking advantage of productivity drugs, legislation and regulation is the place for that, just like the legislation around 40 hour weeks. Do you seriously think Europe, for example, is going to be fine with employers redlining everybody and forcing them to take Productisin every day to make 60 hour mandatory work weeks? Not even America would be fine with that.
I mean, you know cocaine was legal during the industrial revolution right? Did US or UK employers mandate that everyone take it, or even pass it out for free to those who wanted it? No, not really.
When more people were doing manual labor, were employers of the 40's-60's forcing their employees to take testosterone, or passing it out for free, so they could lift and move more boxes or whatever easily? Of course not.
I don't see where you're getting "if performance enhancers existed, employers nation / worldwide would force their employees to take them." We have no historical evidence of that, and lots of evidence of people increasingly limiting employers' practices to make life easier.
I'm more of a libertarian "human potential maximalist." More choices is better. I'm 100% for individually-chosen PED's, in any domain, including work, sport, or recreation. Because if you're at the edges of what's possible, a 10% or 5% or even 1% bump is a huge deal.
Hell, I'm 100% for legalizing all drugs too, yes even opiates. You know right now, because of illegality, overdoses are the number one cause of death for people under 40? 100k young people a year die because of opiate policy, but the actual chemicals cost literal pennies. If America legalized and allowed them to be sold at 2x cost, it would save 100k lives a year. Sure, more people would be addicted, but that's their choice. And being illegal and expensive is the source of all the negative externalities anyways - if it's legal and cheap, who *cares* if people are addicted? That's up to them, and the health consequences of pharmaceutically pure opiates is basically "constipation." And more pople being addicted / constipated is worth saving 100k young people a year.
If somebody wants to work harder or be more productive, it's a good thing if they can get PED's that help them do this. I think that actually leads to more human flourishing overall, because it allows people to push the envelope and achieve more and BE more.
"But people will feel compelled to take them if other people are taking them." Isn't that a good thing?? You're bemoaning the fact that ultra competitive people want to compete harder. It's still an individual choice, and the net result is more high performers, and more people pushing the boundaries of human performance.
And there's not enough competitive people this is gonna be a society-wide problem. Burger flippers and cashiers aren't going to feel compelled to take them to flip more burgers or ring up more people per hour, they don't care enough, and the benefits of "winning" aren't exciting enough.
I think worrying that employers will abuse PED's and force everybody to take them is mistaken, there's basically no evidence of that. Work is a MUCH less competitive domain than sport, for example. And even in sport, do you see team managers forcing their people to take steroids?
Instead, you advocate policies that cap human potential, out of some nebulous fear employers will take advantage.
I think people should be free to live better through chemistry, and that high performers should be free to push the boundaries of what's possible.
There's quite a lot I could say in response to this when I have more time. But by far the most important thing I see is that we have a very large disagreement over what's actually being proposed here.
"My model is 'if PED's are available, the people at the outer edge of what's possible will take them and push that frontier further.'"
I think it's possible that this could be true of *some* performance-enhancing drugs, but it seems very much NOT true of the specific thing myst_05 is suggesting. He's not suggesting something that pushes 5 sigma people out to 7 sigmas, he's suggesting (AFAICT) something for the express purpose of pushing approximately average people significantly towards the right side. It seems like such a drug would be mostly useless for somebody who was already a workaholic: it can't give you more than 24 hours in a day, after all. The *entire idea* is to turn people who value non-work things into people who value work above all else. Again, I see very little benign use for that sort of thing: people who WANT to work hard (and don't have issues like ADHD or depression, which can be treated by other means) WILL work hard. A drug that specifically messes with peoples' basic personality and desires seems like a far more alarming notion than one that just gives you more energy, or wakes you up or whatever.
My particular interpretation was more along the lines of "this is an important class of drugs / interventions that is really limited today, but could have a lot of positive externalities if there were more options, why aren't we pouring more top-down money and effort into this?"
But you're right in his subsequent paragraphs, he touts broad-scale GDP benefits, with presumably broad-scale adoption, and that could be interpreted as "give it to everybody."
He did clarify in another comment that he meant for it to be fully voluntary, and would abhor a society forcing everybody to take it, for what it's worth.
> The *entire idea* is to turn people who value non-work things into people who value work above all else.
And I interpreted this more as allowing people suffering from akrasia (ie everyone at some point) to transform "desire" to "actions" when they deem it valuable enough, by taking a PED.
You say the people who want to work hard are working hard - I disagree. Lots of people WANT to work harder, or wish they accomplished more, or wish they didn't waste 12 hours of their weekend on TV and video games or whatever. I would definitely heavily bet there's many, many times more of these people than workaholics, or even people who don't accomplish much but are happy about it because they value other, non-productive values (the target audience you're describing who you don't want to change).
This is for people with akrasia, who individually want to do better and change their actions by their own lights, not the people who are happy with their current work life balance and productivity, or the Stephen Wolframs or Scotts of the world who are already very productive.
And akrasia is a big enough deal I actually could see it meaninfully impacting GDP if you had a widely available "take a pill" solution to it. Sure, most of it will go into hobbies or blog posts or whatever, but a decent chunk will probably spill over into economic impacts, and that chunk is probably pretty meaningful given how prevalent akrasia is.
"Why does everyone assume that myst_05 meant "what can we force the entire population to do to make line go up?""
Because his example of "how things would be better if we all were Elon Musk-levels of workaholic" is " just imagine how insane GDP growth could get if *everyone* had the same drive and motivation as Elon Musk or whoever is your favorite example of a hard working person" and not "imagine the happier, more contented society!" as the result.
Yes, I'm sure the FAANGs would love an extra trillion or so on their market cap, but does that really make *my* life better? No, I don't own stocks or shares, I'm not in a job that grants options, etc. so "the company shares are worth more means my potential wealth has increased" does not apply to me and a whole lot of other people.
Sorry, you are right, I didn't mean to imply that the drug will be mandatory for people to take. I just assumed that a lot of people would take such a drug willingly, given how many people complain about "Sunday scaries" or otherwise suffer from ADHD, procrastination and lack of motivation.
But yes, I would hate to live in a world where this drug is mandatory or where you basically can't survive if you don't take it.
I mean, forget adderall, why aren't we offering to CRISPR the "sleep 2-3 hours less a day" SNP into anyone who asks for it, for free? There should literally be space-race level funding for this, because it's something we could do today, it doesn't even require massively parallel CRISPR-ing like all the massively polygenic traits.
That's ~500M+ hours of productivity we could unlock basically tomorrow in just America. And yes, 99% of people will just waste it on binging another couple of episodes or rage-posting on Twitter or whatever, but even if only 1% of people use it productively, it's still many millions of hours of additional productivity!
Or, harking back to a recent SSC subreddit thread, why don't we infect everyone who wants to be an entrepreneur with toxoplasmosis? In a ~50k+ sample of negative and positive tested women, that increased the chances of doing a startup and the chances of being a serial entrepreneur 20-30%. That's probably the biggest possible single-point "entrepreneurship" lever in the literature.
Everyone is complaining that whatever surplus productivity unlocked will just end up being snaffled up by big corporations - so do your own thing! Start a company, run a small business, join a startup - do something where those hours of productivity actually directly positively impact both the world and your own bottom line.
Also, having worked in finance - make cocaine literally legal instead of just "defacto legal as long as you're an educated white person."
But you know, just looking at the responses here, obviously people just hate productivity fully generally.
Other people can handle the rest, I'll just address this: we can't CRISPR a gene into adult people's whole brains and have no idea if it would do anything positive even if we could (whatever gene you're referring to may affect development rather than the ongoing function of a developed brain). If we could do something like that, then there's about a billion more useful things to fix before you get to "make people sleep less".
"But you know, just looking at the responses here, obviously people just hate productivity fully generally. "
You understand other humans very, very poorly if this is actually what you think. Reread your post again, please. Are any of the things you suggested--reduced sleep, toxoplamosis, cocaine--are any of these things necessary for productivity-in-general?
If the answer is "no," then perhaps there are other reasons why people are disdainful of myst_05s suggestion. I'll wager most of those people would be equally disdainful of your suggestions: I know I certainly am. There is a big, BIG difference between thinking productivity is important and valuable, and the sort of thinking you are engaging in here.
> Are any of the things you suggested--reduced sleep, toxoplamosis, cocaine--are any of these things necessary for productivity-in-general?
No single factor is really necessary for a specific individual's productivity, or "productivity in general" - I understood myst_05's post to be looking for aggregate, societal level levers we could pull to increase productivity, and I think all of the ones I suggested qualify.
It seems like the menu of options available to people who want to increase their own productivity or economic or societal impact is really limited. That's a bad thing. We *should* work harder to make it easier for more people to increase their productivity and impact if that's what they want.
Sure, my suggestions are all outside the Overton window but I think that just shows how limited the options really are.
And it's fine with me if people are disdainful of my suggestions. If it's possible, I'm gonna pay to put the "sleep less" SNP into my own kids, and will do whatever I can (like owning cats! Dun dun dun!) to give them a better chance of being an entrepreneur, like me, and will be quite happy that they'll have those advantages against a background of people disdainful of taking advantage of them for themselves and their kids.
"I understood myst_05's post to be looking for AGGREGATE, SOCIETAL LEVEL LEVERS WE COULD PULL to increase productivity, and I think all of the ones I suggested qualify." (Emphasis mine.)
The highlighted part is exactly the problem. Both you and myst_05 are imagining these as transformative technologies applying on a society-wide level. To your credit you don't suggest they should be involuntary (except to your own kids, which is kind of horrifying) but you do at least imagine them seeing extremely widespread use.
In political terms I'm not a conservative. In fact, I end up loathing most political positions identified by that word. But I do consider myself "conservative" in the more fundamental meaning of the word: something like "careful and somewhat risk-averse." I think that sort of conservatism is EXTREMELY important at the level of entire societies; there are millions of mouldering corpses in the graveyards of the world that can attest to the consequences of eschewing it. In fact, I think the combination of Capitalism + Industrialization is have already caused our technological progress to far outpace our ability to recognize and mitigate risks. The fact that we've unlocked multiple new types of X-risk in the past century, without any especially convincing ways for dealing with any of them speaks to that.
All of the things you're proposing carry risks and tradeoffs. When the LEAST risky item on the list is "allow and maybe encourage copious cocaine use," that should be a bit of a red flag. But at least if somebody discovers that cocaine is harming them, they can (in theory) just stop taking it. There are, as you say, lots of factors that influence productivity in general, and it's been steadily improving for decades thanks to various incremental technology improvements. I'm thoroughly unconvinced that squeezing out ever more productivity is a goal so urgent and unarguably good that it's worth throwing any half-baked idea we can at it, no matter how risky, uncertain or irreversible.
Re: toxoplasmosis and your contention that "In a ~50k+ sample of negative and positive tested women, that increased the chances of doing a startup and the chances of being a serial entrepreneur 20-30%"
"African countries had the highest average seroprevalence rate of 61.4%, followed by Oceania with 38.5%, South America with 31.2%, Europe with 29.6%, USA/Canada with 17.5%, and Asia with 16.4%."
So you tell me which are the most economically successful countries and is that down to toxoplasmosis. And remember, correlation does not imply causation; how many of the infected women are the "single childless cat ladies" who are starting up small businesses like hair and nail salons of their own? In which case it may not be the toxoplasmosis that is responsible.
If you are serious and not trolling us about "I'm going to own cats to infect my kids", then make sure you wait until *after* pregnancy and birth to get those cats, because infection during pregnancy can have serious side effects. And that your kids never have any immune system weakness. You may get more side effects than just junior entrepreneurs!
"The toxoplasma parasites may infect tissues of the inner eye. This can occur in people with healthy immune systems. But the disease is more serious in people with weakened immunity. An infection in the eye is called ocular toxoplasmosis. Symptoms may include:
Eye pain.
Poor vision.
Floaters, which are specks that seem to swim in your vision.
Untreated eye disease can cause blindness.
Effect on people with weakened immune systems
People with weakened immune systems are likely to have more-serious disease from toxoplasmosis. A toxoplasmosis infection from earlier in life may become active again. People at risk include those living with HIV/AIDS, people receiving cancer treatment and people with a transplanted organ.
In addition to serious eye disease, toxoplasmosis can cause severe lung or brain disease for a person with weakened immunity. Rarely, the infection can show up in other tissues throughout the body.
Lung infection may cause:
Breathing problems.
Fever.
Cough.
Toxoplasmosis may cause inflammation of the brain, also called encephalitis. Symptoms may include:
Confusion.
Poor coordination.
Muscle weakness.
Seizures.
Changes in alertness.
Effect on fetus or infant
Toxoplasmosis can pass from the mother to the fetus during a pregnancy. This is called congenital toxoplasmosis.
Infection during the first trimester often causes more-severe disease. It also may result in miscarriage. For some babies with toxoplasmosis, serious disease may be present at birth or appear early in infancy. Medical problems may include:
Too much fluid in or around the brain, also called hydrocephalus.
Severe eye infection.
Irregularities in brain tissues.
An enlarged liver or spleen.
Symptoms of severe disease vary. They may include:
Problems with mental or motor skills.
Blindness or other vision problems.
Hearing problems.
Seizures.
Heart disorders.
Yellowing of the skin and whites of the eyes, also called jaundice.
Rash.
Most babies with toxoplasmosis do not show symptoms. But problems may show up later in childhood or teenage years. These include:
And why the fuck do I care about turning people into worker ants so GDP line go up and "economy booming!", yet people are finding it harder to stretch a dollar?
The problem is that the big megacorps aren't rich enough yet, so everyone must toil 24 hours of the day for Mammon!
Who *are* the productive people, tell me? The guys using AI to help them code to write yet another app to persuade people to spend money on useless crap?
There's a saying: "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath". Similarly, the economy should serve us, not we be the cogs for the economy.
No, we won't, since now everyone is going to spend those leisure hours on work, due to the drug-induced drive to work hard all the time. The hamster wheel just keeps turning faster and faster.
You can easily have leisure time without a productive economy. What you don't have is security: production buys security against famine, against drought, against wild beasts and angry neighbours.
But even that is now moot - you just need to be productive enough to build and maintain a few atom bombs, and then you have all the security you need.
> But even that is now moot - you just need to be productive enough to build and maintain a few atom bombs, and then you have all the security you need.
Not really working out for North Korea or Pakistan, is it?
I mean, would you rather be a farmer or regular citizen in either of those two places, or non-nuclear-power Germany, Japan, South Korea, Italy, or any country in South America?
Fair point, but all of those countries you mention are protected by nuclear weapons indirectly and all are nuclear threshold states (i.e., they could each build a nuclear weapon very quickly if the need arose).
And its also the case that most of them sacrifice at least some potential GDP in the name of leisure time.
Because a society of Elon Musks would be hopelessly non-functional?
Or are you assuming that you can get the 'driven' part without also getting a whole population of thin-skinned sociopaths who don't play nicely with others?
I think Elon's ability to run multiple companies successfully indicates some ability to cooperate with others, even if those others are selected for their willingness to work with him.
If you don’t like Elon, think of the most hardworking person you know instead. Wouldn’t it be great if everyone were capable of being as productive as her or him?
The hardest working people I know are doctors in public healthcare. They're working insane hours because the system itself is broken and cuts funding at the sharp end in favour of hiring more middle managers. They don't look after themselves properly and survive mainly on stimulants.
Meanwhile Elon nominally works 4 jobs (and gets paid insane amounts to do so), yet appears to have plenty of time to shitpost online, go to the gym and pursue relationships with women he will subsequently fall out with.
"Working hard" is a relative term. I'd prefer that doctors can work 40 hour weeks, earn good salaries and take time to care for themselves. I suspect that, if you could magically force everyone to work 100 hours a week, all that would happen is that you'd create enormous amounts of busywork, oversight work, compliance work etc.
Fix the system rather than trying to hammer people into better cogs for it.
Drugging everyone to be better workers does not sound like the kind of thing that would make them happier, healthier, nicer, stable people. GDP growth is meaningless if it doesn't actually come with the things people value, and more drug use seems counterproductive.
Just because we want, it doesn't mean we can. No guarantee that by spending trillion dollars on research we will be able to discover something better than what we already have.
I tried nootropics, they didn't work for me. Apparently I don't have ADHD or any other condition that could be treated to enable me to function better. Maybe when I am older I would benefit more but who knows. I wouldn't bet on this.
At the risk of being a bit conspiracy-theorist, I wonder if part of the reason is because it wouldn't work if everyone was a compulsive innovator or massively driven. The people who do menial labour, for example, wouldn't be substantially better served if they were spending their downtime coming up with better tools - if they because let's say 10x more productive, they wouldn't be 10x better off, their employer would just take the improved productivity as profit, paying the laborer as little as they could get away with in order to maximise their own personal profit. And that's ignoring the downstream effects - if you're a menial laborer doing menial labor, you're probably not doing it because you have a deep passionate love of menial labour. You're doing it because that's all you can do due to any number of factors. Lifting everyone up wouldn't change the fact that menial labour needs to be done, now you've just got (to use your example) Elon Musks doing it. Until you get robots and AI, but that changes the game so much that I doubt this would be helpful in that situation either.
And I wouldn't say that there is a shortage of productive people - what we have is a insane surplus of demand for extreme productivity in order to serve ever more power- or money-hungry interests who want to push people to do more and more for as little as possible. Add in governments who are growing ever more expansive (necessitating higher taxes) and invasive (necessitating ever more efficient forms of control and surveillance), and even if you increased people's productivity by 10x, the system would just adjust and we'd be back where we started real fast.
More widely, what other effects would we see? If the, for want of a better term, "willingness to disrupt the status quo" of people also increased, would this lead to lesser satisfaction with the status quo, leading to more social upheaval? Or do they just work hard but not change things, in which case you're in the above situation at best, or created a race of slaves at worst?
And of course that's assuming you can rigorously define what you're trying to improve in the first place, which I think you gloss over the difficulty of.
Agreed that, if nothing else was changed, just making people work harder would only result in better dividends to shareholders, not any improvements for the workers themselves.
Are not the people OP means by "productive", rather they mean "people like me in some kind of vaguely STEM-related job where my office job labour somehow adds a fraction of a cent to the share price and that means Me Productive!
Cleaning the office, sweeping the streets, making the desks at which OP sits - that's not productive, that's just toil by the little people which can be outsourced and then automated away. Maybe if the office desk is five dollars cheaper because the menial workers are drugged up to work 10 times harder on the production line, that makes the expenses of the employer furnishing the office for the Me Productives! cheaper, so that is contributing - but the *real* productive people are, of course, those whose backsides are plonked down on the chair in front of that cheaper desk.
"Service-based industries, including professional and business services, real estate, finance, and health care, make up the bulk (70%) of U.S. GDP.
...Professional and business services is the largest industry with $3.5 trillion in value added. It comprises establishments providing legal, consulting, design, administration, and other services. This is followed by real estate at $3.3 trillion, which has consistently been an integral part of the economy."
So what OP is visualising turns out to be "if real estate agents are 10x more productive" then the economy is shooting for the moon!
Hey there! Travis here, one of the co-founders of Ovelle and longtime reader of ACX. For a little background on our effort I would echo what Metacelsus said on his blog "Ovelle’s mission is to develop and deploy advanced biological technologies to help people become parents. Our approach will mainly center on using synthetic biology tools to identify factors that can rapidly generate our cells of interest. Our first goal will be to grow eggs from stem cells derived from biological women, as that’s the main unmet need today."
Achieving our mission will be hard and we face enormous scientific and practical hurdles. But imagine a world where family dreams come true with a simple swab!
Thanks for the shoutout Scott - it means the world to have voices like yours amplifying our mission.
P.S. If you're as excited about this as we are, we're always looking for brilliant minds and bold investors to help on our mission. Email us at contact@ovelle.bio
On your website you're not sharing any details about open positions, so it is very difficult to gauge both what kind of person you're still looking for, and whether you actually have the resources to employ them full- or even just part-time.
Hi RenOS, sorry about that! We just started. We do have the resources to employ people and were just about to start looking for people. We need somone with a PhD to help us differentiate human iPSCs, someone with experience with animal cell cultures to work on IVM of ovarian follicles, and a couple of research assistants to help with all of this. All the positions would be full time in Boston.
Molecular biologist here. I'm super excited by the potential of this technology, both as a scientist, and as an early-30s woman who is unpartnered and undecided about having kids.
I'm sure you've put a great deal of thought into this, and I'm wondering if you'd be willing to share at least on a basic level what your strategy is for managing the epigenetic state of human oocytes produced in vitro, including their RNA payload. I'd be concerned about incomplete erasure of epigenetic marks (10.1038/nbt.1667; 10.1016/j.diff.2014.09.001) from (presumably) fibroblasts during iPSC generation resulting in oocytes with some inappropriate epigenetic marks, which may or may not matter because they might get stripped during that early-cleavage epigenetic mopfest anyway. I'd also have questions about RNA payload - I did a quick lit search and dug up a lot more stuff about sperm RNA payload vs egg RNA payload but I'm aware that it's a huge deal for embryogenesis in Drosophila at least. Sorry I'm a little rusty on some of these exact mechanisms and don't have a huge amount of time to commit to looking for more sources, but very interested in your thoughts. I'm also not meaning to imply that these issues will sink your idea, quite the opposite - if you get on top of them they might be one of the biggest advantages of it. If I conceive naturally, I have no option but to pass along the epigenetic detritus of my life, not all of which is positive; it would be very interesting to have an alternative to that.
Hi Laura, thanks for the interest! Getting the correct epigenetic state is probably one of the most challenging parts of IVG, but there has been significant progress on this. For example see the recent work by Saitou et al. in 'In vitro reconstitution of epigenetic reprogramming in the human germ line' which used Bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) signaling https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07526-6. There are also new methods for directly manipulating the epigenetic state most notably demonstrated by a group using targeted DNA methylation rewriting in the paper 'Viable offspring derived from single unfertilized mammalian oocytes' https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2115248119. Happy to chat more over email if you want at travis@ovelle.bio.
I wrote a post in which I speculate about whether some kinds of obnoxious people (like the stereotypical "Karen") might be a load-bearing element of society.
It's a good point. Not that I value customer service all that much frankly--I hate people and don't blame anyone else for being grumpy. In general my assumption is the European equilibrium is better than the American, because I don't share the enthusiasm for dynamism and growth of most people on here.
As for the protesters...well, do you agree with the cause?
I’m inclined to disagree with the apocalyptic, norm-superceding urgency of it, then again I don’t have a good baseline on what a situation warranting such urgency would look like
"Multiply this event by a few orders of magnitude and you can see how this imposes costs not only on this particular McDonald’s, but also on all other McDonald’ses and on the restaurant industry as a whole. Because everyone knows how bad Karen encounters are, employee turnover goes up, the applicant pool is reduced and you might have to increase wages to keep people interested. It’s that, or you make super extra sure that the number of pickles incidents is kept to an absolute minimum.
The Eternal Karen gets what she wants. I mean, what can you do? Will you refuse to make improvements to your restaurant purely out of principle? Your competitors sure won’t. You submit, or you perish."
What will happen in reality is that hell no, we're not upping wages, this is a burger-flipping job, what do you expect? So the manager yells at the cashier, who decides - as you say - to hell with this, I'm quitting. Wages are not increased to compensate for dealing with Karens, so the applicant pool is reduced, again as you say. So the end result is that the McDonalds franchise here hires either teenagers (increasingly I've seen this) or the people who can't get better jobs, with the concomitant quality of service that means, which means more Karen incidents.
High turnover, worse service, more stress all around - but since everyone is doing the same (the Burger King franchise is sure not going to start paying high wages to get better staff for the same reason you're not paying higher wages), nobody perishes (unless and until they get *really* crappy to the point no-one goes there anymore). The individual Karen may get what she wants, the rest of us get reduced and worse service and have to put up with it (see any of the customer services online, which is where they mostly are, because trying to get through to a human on the phone is made as difficult as possible).
Customer services for most companies are now call centre agents who are working off scripts, and increasingly "Hi, I'm ToBI your AI assistant! how can I help you?" online chatbots. Karens provide a useful service when they act as whistleblowers, but the median result of someone throwing a strop is to make things worse for everyone.
To take the example you used of the nurse, yes they *are* shields there to protect upper levels, and a shield you can punch through is no use as a shield. So the nurse who lets the Karen get through to the surgeon gets reprimanded, and the layers of shielding are upped.
I refer you to a very sad case in Ireland, where a teenage girl died in University Hospital Limerick. Despite all the attempts to "punch through" the shield, nothing happened. The ultimate cause for this was the decision to shut down regional hospitals, as is often a recommendation when planning healthcare resources. But this decision put massive pressure on the major hospital for the region, which resulted in long-term over-demand for services, and there is still nothing being done right now. Jam tomorrow, when more beds are allocated, but no jam today. You can yell at the nurses all you like, it won't help in that situation.
My favorite quote about this goes something like, "We do not classify as a "weapon" a device which has never been tested and is not last of any military doctrine."
Because I'm capable of comparing the conflict there with, say, the Sudanese civil war, in which villages are regularly exterminated and civilians are deliberately gunned down.
Compared to Israel's (very flawed) attempts to minimise casualties - they haven't, for example, carpet-bombed the entirety of Gaza even though that would be a far more effective and efficient way of killing Gazans - in a war *they did not start*.
If Israel is doing a genocide, they're doing the most incompetent genocide on the planet. And say what you will about Israel's military, but "incompetent" is not *generally* how I'd describe it. Callous towards Palestinians? Sure. Prone to over-kill? Maybe. Oppressive? Arguably. But not incompetent.
"Villages" have not been exterminated - *all of Gaza* is being exterminated. Half of the hospitals are gone. 80% of the housing is gone. And still it continues.
Civlians are absolutely being targeted, there are countless stories of this happening. Two clear-cut cases include the World Central Kitchen airstrikes, and the 3 Israeli hostages waving a white flag. And tens of thousands of Palestinian children.
They're not failing to commit a genocide. They're doing it as fast as they possibly can, while managing the negative press from Israelis who want the hostages rescued. Just today they admitted that back in December they'd killed another 3 hostages by destroying the building they were in. Why haven't they mentioned it until now? Because Israelis would be horrified, and they would lose social license for the "war".
Israel is I believe presently killing Gazans at a rate well below that with which Gazans are creating new Gazans. If they are indeed "doing it as fast as they can", then it is mathematically impossible for them to commit actual genocide and accusing them of even attempted genocide would require an assumption that the Israelis are complete idiots,
If you want to accuse the Israelis of mass murder, that could lead to a discussion of collateral damage in a just war and, if you bring a good enough argument with proper supporting evidence, maybe a broad conclusion that the Israelis are in fact committing mass murder. I don't think that's the case, but it's at least possible. If you want to accuse the Israelis of genocide, that gets you the unthinking approval of your entire bubble, and everyone else rolling their eyes and moving on without you.
One thing that sticks out is the survey of US scholsrs of the Middle East where 75% say Israel is committing "genocide" or "major war crimes akin to genocide".
Because genocide requires the intent to exterminate a group. The genocide claim just isn't plausible, and frankly it is counterproductive: people know their own intent, so if you accuse me of genocide, I can know that you are wrong, and hence I can dismiss you.. OTOH, if you instead accuse me of the crime of violating the principle of proportionality https://casebook.icrc.org/a_to_z/glossary/proportionality I cannot dismiss your arguments.
What other intention could Israel possibly have? Its stated military goals are essentially 1. Destroy Hamas, 2. Save hostages. Goal 1 is not achievable, and pursuing it makes Goal 2 impractical. It's a fig leaf for exterminating Muslims, I suspect ahead of a proposed one-state solution with apartheid. None of the West Bank terrorism relates to either of the stated goals, but it's still happening. Why?
Totally happy to accuse Israel of violating the principle of proportionality, but I don't know why I would need to do that. Everybody can compare death toll numbers, so I expect we're already on the same page.
(Ignoring the "how could Israel possibly be taking preventative measures to respond to the mass-rape, mass-murder, and mass-kidnapping that the enemy perpetrated, rather than just being on a hate-filled campaign to kill Muslims"...) It sounds like you have some empirical predictions here:
1. Israel will not successfully destroy Hamas.
2. The hostages will not be successfully saved.
3. The population of Gaza will be exterminated, or at least drastically reduced. (Or, at the very least, reduced at least some amount.)
4. Israel will formally annex Gaza (and the West Bank?), and allow Israelis to live there.
Is that correct? And if so, if none of these happen, would it be clear that you were wrong more generally?
The only one of your statements that remains in question even at this moment is 4.
Israel will not destroy Hamas. I feel confident in saying this not because I'm clairvoyant but because no one to my knowledge has put forward a definition of destroying Hamas. Maybe it will kill Sinwar (and Deif, again). Maybe it will destroy some of the battalions of the armed wing. Does Hamas cease to exist then? Does PIJ? Does the whole concept of Palestinian armed resistance?
The hostages will not be, in the main, successfully saved because the pattern of Hamas murdering them as soon as the IDF closes in will continue. That's inherent in the concept of a hostage. The IDF has rescued 8 over a year of war. Perhaps 40 have died, 100 remain. The extrapolation looks simple.
The population of Gaza is already reduced, by as much as 10%. Assuming a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths for every direct death (as per the Lancet analysis) the total of excess deaths from Israel's assault on Gaza stands now on the order of two hundred thousand. The coefficient should probably be quite a bit higher, owing to the way famine and sanitary disasters compound in such a densely populated setting.
As to your fourth statement – what the Israeli government's political plans are, I don't know. I don't think this particular government does, either, beyond hanging on to power. I don't think Israelis will live in Gaza, because Gaza has been rendered unlivable. But piecemeal annexation of the West Bank continues, and given the climate of sharpened hostility to Palestinians, the settlers are more emboldened to grab land... sorry, assert property rights in Judea and Samaria... than ever. The West Bank as the basis of a state is on the brink of unviability. So... yes? Already happening?
The alternative for Israel is to agree a ceasefire and recover hostages by trading away Palestinian prisoners, who, if history is any guide, can often be recaptured by Israel again. Then, after that, preventing the next 10/7 by the usual means of border surveillance. This alternative has the merit of not involving genocide, or whatever not-quite-but-come-on definition of mass killing of civilians we're working with here.
Ideally, down the road, an Israeli government might come to power farsighted enough to actually concede something that can be dignified with the term 'Palestinian state', to normalise relations with the Arabs, and to achieve a modus vivendi with Iran, whereupon any point of Palestinian resistance will cease. That is how this ends. The question is only how many mostly-Palestinians die until it does.
At the very least, "genocide" tends to imply the population going down, rather than continuing to grow.
Additionally... Well, it's pretty obvious that Israel could wipe out the entire Gazan population in a matter of hours, even without using the nukes, if they wanted to. Instead, an absurd amount of effort has made it such that nearly half of all casualties have been terrorists, at the cost of hundreds of Israeli soldiers' lives and an absolute disaster for the Israeli economy, as a large portion of the population needs to stick around in an awful warzone full of hostile people.
Fundamentally, this isn't really a normal war. If Hamas had behaved like a government interested in protecting civilians, they would have evacuated the civilian population, moved all their fighting forces away from them, and gotten bombed to bits instantly. Zero civilian casualties, poof. Or, more reasonably, surrendered as soon as it became clear that they didn't have the ability to actually fight the IDF. Hamas's *only* real weapon is that they can get Gazans killed, and they're using it as much as they can. Hamas is responsible for every death in Gaza, for refusing to surrender in a war they started and lost.
I don't understand why this is not more widely disseminated. Hamas started this with the attack on Israel, and is using their own citizens as shields. It looks highly unsympathetic, objectively.
And yes, I know one can say Israel oppressed Gaza, which caused Hamas to launch 10/7. This doesn't hold water for sympathy. If one is oppressed, one holds peaceful protests. One does not go and kill and kidnap a bunch of innocent people as a protest.
In 1776, some people decided to no longer be ruled by another country. The declaration led to war, for the oppressors to continue to hold power. But the oppressed did not kill a bunch of innocent people to protest.
Israel does not and did not rule Gaza. Their objective was not to escape oppression, but to hurt their perceived enemies. To escape any oppression, they only needed to run their own country, from which Israel wasn't stopping them.
When there is an intentional permanent displacement of population, it may match "ethnic cleansing". Some of it is happening in West Bank. Not so much in Gaza, though the hawks in the Netanyahu's cabinet certainly talk about it.
When you discuss the IDF barely or not at all caring about civilian casualties when fighting Hamas, you can call it that. "Genocide" is best reserved for unambiguous and extreme cases, not unfortunate excesses of an ongoing war, be it in Gaza, in Ukraine or elsewhere.
When in doubt, use less connotation and more denotation.
Having said that, it's clearly not in Netanyahu's interests to go faster, given he'll have to face his corruption trial as soon as it's over. There are also the hostages he's pretending to care about, protests might ramp up if the Palestinians were destroyed any faster.
Kuwait could not tolerate having Palestinians. Lebanon could not. Syria could not. Jordan could not. Egypt refuses. There is a common factor here: Palestinians.
I would never dream of suggesting that people fleeing a humanitarian crisis are a "problem" simply because of their race. Remember that most countries didn't accept Jewish refugees during the rise of the Nazis. Ideas like yours are exactly why genocides happen.
If you google around a bit, you will find it is not that they dislike palestinians, but that they think if they would take them in, Israel would force them in, build settlements and basically never give the palestinians their land back.
How much of the increase in autism (1/140 boys profoundly autistic in the USA) is due to changes in reporting? How much is due to increased parental age? What are the other plausible contributing factors?
Profoundly autistic cannot be confused with nerdy. It's clearly a disability. "Profound autism is characterized by severe impairment and developmental challenges that interfere with the individual's ability to function independently"
I sort of feel like the D&D demographic has changed *somewhat*, a lot of those guys play Call of Duty or Fortnite now, and you have more theater kids who, of course, love pretending to be someone else. (A lot of LGBTQ, which overlaps.)
It's why the old grognards and the newer generation often don't get along.
Also we used to call it AD&D, I mean 2nd ed. And then it was renamed D&D back again with 3rd ed, and the thing is, in 2nd ed the whole mood was set by a serious kind of graphics, artwork. Something like Boris Vallejo. 3rd ed and on, the artwork got cartoonish and I think that attracted a different demo.
There was Basic (or BECMI D&D) for a younger audience and they kept the split up until 2000 when 3rd ed came out.
3rd ed was when the cheesecake and chainmail bikinis went out, everyone started looking more punky, and the adventurers started looking more diverse, so that's kind of the dividing line.
Interestingly the OSR (Old School Reniassance) came out a few years after, and attracted some more conservative players, though a lot of OSR was about old-style play ('rulings, not rules' and 'we explore dungeons, not characters') rather than the culture war per se. I don't think there was really much of a culture war in D&D until the Great Awokening hit in the mid-2010s like it did everywhere else.
I think last time this came up on ACX, there are two potential ways in which diagnosis might have been broadened..
a) Including people with mild versions of the symptoms, such that mosf ACX contributers are probably diagnosable
b) Allowing a more diverse range of symptoms at the heavily disabled end of the spectrum, so what was previously dx;d as some kind of mental retardation now gets dxed as autsim.
I really hope we get an AI really good at figuring out exactly what's the best product to try to sell you before we get an AI that is really good at convincing you to buy any arbitrary product. Do you guys think either of those are likely to happen a meaningfully long time before AGI?
Like, I really hate that even though ad companies gather worrying amounts of data on consumer behaviour that data seems seldom used to actually figure out what people want most.
I would be ok with this level of data collection if it was used to, say, have and AI design clothes maximally optimized for me to like.
Post my exposure to TLP, I watch ads because I'm interested in what my dossier looks like. the funniest ones are the rare ads that think I speak spanish or chinese.
So true. When I get an ad that’s actually relevant to me, I’m willing to tolerate that ad or even welcome it. If I’m forced to watch 30 seconds of something I know I’m not going to buy, or would never possibly have any use for (ex. Women’s products) it’s the definition of a complete waste of time.
It seems like most ads now are for drugs, insurance, law firms, or (for now) politicians.
For my own entertainment, I try to pronounce the chemical names, not the brand names, of the drugs while I can still see them. This is why I can type empagliflozin and semaglutide without looking them up.
> Like, I really hate that even though ad companies gather worrying amounts of data on consumer behaviour that data seems seldom used to actually figure out what people want most.
disclaimer: this my personal opinion / my best guess.
the goal is not to give people what they want most. The goal is also not to get a perfect match between a specific product and a specific consumer.
The goal for ad-marketing is this: "for a given product, find the consumer most likely to buy it after watching the ad."
And using Bayesian Priors, this boils down to "Find the most gullible consumer."
So when deciding on a product, it comes down to "What product would the most gullible consumer buy?"
If you are a gullable consumer, then you will find many products and ads tailored for your desires. If you are a responsible and frugal consumer, you will very few ads targeted at you, and fewer companies will tailor products to your needs.
On the other hand: If you are a more responsible consumer, than you are probably less likely to respond to ads, in the first place. So there is even less incentive for ad-marketing to analyse your needs.
I am not excpecting AI to change too much about this overall dynamic.
"The goal for ad-marketing is this: 'for a given product, find the consumer most likely to buy it after watching the ad.'
And using Bayesian Priors, this boils down to 'Find the most gullible consumer.'"
I disagree, in most cases this boils down to "Find a consumer who was just about to buy this product anyway". That's why Google is such a successful advertising company - they're basically standing outside your store, handing out ads for your store.
(This is useless at generating sales, but that's fine for Google.)
> Like, I really hate that even though ad companies gather worrying amounts of data on consumer behaviour that data seems seldom used to actually figure out what people want most.
Second that. It's always shocked me how overwhelmingly BAD Google and Facebook, the online-ad worldwide duopoly, is at targeting ads.
With the tens of thousands of Phd's and data scientists they have working on your digital cookie and behavior trail, and the unbelievable amount of data they have on everyone alive, they should literally know you better than you know yourself. As in, you go to a new part of downtown for a meeting, and they should be able to predict with 90%+ accuracy which lunch place you'll end up going to "serendipitously" and with no planning aforethought.
If FB or GOOG did dating apps and you were looking for a LTR, they should be able to instantly pick a partner with much higher chance of LTR success than both of you could yourselves, swiping for months. All the information is there, with certainty. An ASI would have no problem doing any of these things, and I'd even bet GPT-5 or 6 could do this with high fidelity.
And yet, with the collective brainpower of tens of thousands of Phd's working around the clock, and a surfeit of individualized data that would make the NSA jealous if they didn't snaffle it all for themselves anyways, FB and GOOG routinely fail to show me ANY advertisements that are even tangentially related to anything I care about and would buy.
And I'm a comparatively heavy spender in relation to the USA median - I have some pretty expensive hobbies, and for the non-expensive hobbies, I'm more than willing to throw down hundreds or thousands on a whim. Do FB or GOOG, the literal worldwide online advertisement monopoly tap into any of that? Not at all.
Of course, this just argues that they're almost certainly NOT going to try to get good at that, but will instead focus all of their collective brainpower + AI on getting you to buy whatever random crap has bid the highest for their ad slots.
The conflict here is between "I, the manufacturer/producer of the goods/services need to sell more to more customers at the cheapest cost to produce and highest price to retail" versus "I, the consumer, want something that serves me best in what I require at the least cost to me".
Since it's the producers using the AI, it's in their interests to get it to persuade people "buy my crap!" and not to tell people "don't buy this crap, it's crap, buy our competitors product instead, it'll be cheaper and do more for you".
> AIs can't get *arbitrarily* good at convincing you to buy an arbitrary product. What makes you think they'll be substantially better than current ads?
Speaking from experience, I think there's some headroom in both "rhetoric" and better targeting.
First, rhetoric. So the deal with current marketing, even for the really sophisticated operations, where they get tons of data and build sophisticated predictive acquisition and segmentation models, and where millions are spent on the data science marketing teams, the actual rhetoric and content is still completely fly-by-night, and you're optimizing between rhetorical options that are just whatever some given creative came up with because they seemed nice or like they might work.
I feel like when the world has artificial minds powerful enough to emulate (even partially) human minds, the empirics of rhetoric are really going to take off, because you could just Monte Carlo a combinatorial array of rhetorical strategies and find the ones that work the best for your target person or segment.
I actually think there's pretty significant headroom here when you take it out of "some random creative's best effort" and into the realm of "massively A/B tested or RL'd."
Second, better targeting. Right now, targeting is pretty dumb, even for these million dollar teams - you target your modeled segments with various channels whose response rates have been modeled, sometimes you do a little bit of optimizing the day or time of targeting, but it's *very* rare to have an intelligent targeting that takes into account your segment PLUS things you've clicked or searched for in the recent past PLUS your last-hour clickstream PLUS day and time of day, PLUS whatever else a G4 or G5 level model could learn or infer about you from an aggregated data source with all of your info and behaviors.
Again, I think there is quite a lot of lift here that you could drive, to the effect of many multiples of current conversion rates. And that effect size is HUGE - at Google or FB or F100 size, a couple of basis points can drive millions of dollars, so just imagine how much twos and fours and eight hundreds of percent can drive. There's going to be massive financial incentives to get smarter and unlock these two avenues with better intelligence, as well as many other avenues we haven't even thought to discuss here.
From the point of view of companies selling things, those are the same thing. Actually, the second is preferable, since it's probably more profitable to sell people any arbitrary thing than only sell them specific things. Which means that's where the money is going, which means all else being equal that's likely to happen first.
To be blunt, I'm extremely skeptical of the value of so-called privacy legislation. I'm not saying it's literally zero, but I'd strongly prefer solutions which make it extremely difficult to gather that information in the first place. So strong encryption that makes surveillance by ISPs and other observers more difficult, more widespread availability of pseudonymity tools like e-mail and phone aliasing, better firewalls like Portmaster to limit on-device spying, using cash, actually accepted and usable cryptocurrencies that make it harder to track my spending, and suchlike. Some laws might be helpful, for example things like not requiring me to hand over identifying information unless there's a damn good reason (and no, money laundering does not count as "a damn good reason"), but frankly what we've seen of how the existing laws are enforced I'm extremely doubtful
Ask Pavel Durov about how privacy laws are enforced. Apparently, providing an encrypted communications service makes you a child pornography distributor and drug dealer. Maybe also a terrorist, depending on how frisky the prosecutor feels.
Honestly, Telegram has never impressed me. It does some things well, but it does other things extremely poorly. Not encrypting chats by default, major downer. Being able to be added to groups without consent drove me off.
But to your main point, yes. Governments, especially authoritarian ones, are obviously not a fan of privacy - look at the UK's Online Safety Bill, or Australia's TAN law, or just the entirety of the US's law enforcement/intelligence entity's behavior, or many other examples. Another reason why I'm leery of laws. Laws can change, or governments can (and do) ignore their own laws when inconvenient. But the laws of mathematics and physics? No changing those.
OK. Let's do this. It's not uncommon to see the assertion that most people who are anti-Trump are for reasons that have nothing to do with policy. But his intended policies are bloody horrible! He wants to continue to raise tariffs and make it hard for US manufacturers to even import components that aren't made in the US. Is that good for the US economy? You've just raised the prices of products made in America. You've made it harder for US businesses to compete in foreign markets. If Donald Trump was a man of great probity and integrity, I still wouldn't want him to be POTUS because of this horrible economic platform. He's also floated the notion of putting a quack economist as head of the Federal Reserve, which could lead to disaster. On foreign policy, he's unlikely to continue to support Ukraine against Russia. He's suggested using the US miltary to fight Mexican drug gangs in Mexico.
Is it just TDS to believe those would all be goddawful policies?
The more distortionary a tax for a given amount of revenue raised, the worse it is for the economy.
Some things that make taxes more distortionary: elastic supply, smaller base / higher rates.
Imports are a subset of all sources of income, so the base is definitely smaller & you'd need higher rates to collect the same amount; but imports also have more elastic supply than sources of income in general, so you'd need *even higher* rates.
Absolutely. Tariffs will slow global trade, from which a lot of US wealth stems. US manufacturers will become less competitive in the short run from Buy America provisions and in the longer run from isolation from foreign competition.
Not at all. Hardly anyone stops working due to income taxes (they mostly encourage professional women to take more time off when they have kids, which might not be a bad thing), whereas tariffs really do and will stop the value created by the exchange of goods. And the likely result will be a tit-for-tat snowballing trade war between America and her allies in Europe and South America and maybe even way down under. Once enough damage has been done I suspect saner heads will prevail and agree to end it. But how long will that take? I don't know.
Everybody stops working eventually, and it is no longer the case (if it ever was) that this happens automatically on one's 65th birthday. And when someone is pondering whether they ought to retire this year, or go out and look for a new job to replace the one they were just laid off from or whatever, it is almost certainly the case that their expected take-home pay if they were to keep working is a significant factor in that decision.
So, yeah, at the margin, increased income taxes mean fewer people working. And at the margin is where economics happens.
Fair. The original question was how bad are tariffs vs. income taxes and of course the magnitude matters but given equal magnitudes tariffs are significantly worse for the economy.
> Hardly anyone stops working due to income taxes (they mostly encourage professional women to take more time off when they have kids, which might not be a bad thing)
Why do you think Europeans do so much less work than Americans?
Labor laws. It's much harder to fire a worker in most European countries. If it's harder to fire employers are more cautious to hire. As for # hours of the day and days year the workers do work, that also comes down to labor laws, I think.
Part of the problem here is a lot of people think he's a liar who has no intention of actually doing whatever policy proposals he might throw out in speeches.
Now, thinking someone is a liar is a sound reason for not voting for someone. But if you think he's just lying, getting too caught up in the specifics of the lies is missingvthe point.
Thinking he's strategically lying cuts both ways, of course.
Here in the UK, Liz Truss literally wrote a book on exactly what she would do if handed power, and when handed power proceeded to do precisely what she said she would - to surprised Pikachu faces all around, because the rest of her party had thought she'd been uttering platitudes to appeal to fringe beliefs like everyone else, rather than being a true believer herself.
What a person says they will do may only provide for a tenuous relationship between map and territory, but it is arguably better than discounting their words entirely and being left with no relationship between your model of them and reality at all.
No skin in the game here, but for an outside observer, the only real and potentially lasting harm is his attempt to undermine the elections. The rest is basically meh, some good, some bad. His supreme court picks turned out surprisingly decent so far.
Definitely nearly not as horrible as GWB, who turned a surplus into a series of bottomless deficits, destroyed 2 overseas countries, resulted in deaths of countless young Americans, and picked Alito as a Supreme Court judge (the only worse one is Thomas, picked by his dad). And he was not even the worst post-WWII president.
So... could America do better? Probably. Would another 4 years of Trump be a disaster? Not if he does not go after the basics of the system, which he might or might not. Would Harris be better? Well, she would leave the institutions alone, that is a plus. The rest is up in the air.
Disagree on the Supreme Court picks, Trump v. United States strikes me as one of the worst decisions I've seen in quite some time, both in its potential impacts and its reasoning.
Also delaying Ukraine aid is very meaningful, which he has done both as President and effectively as a candidate as well.
If you're concerned he might overthrow the government, its not clear thats an objections to actual *policies*. Well, I guess its an objection to the policy proposal of replacing US democracy with King Donald...
I'm far more concerned about his opponent trying that sort of thing (e.g., attacking the filibuster, trying to pack the Court), especially since she's likely to be more competent at executing her bad ideas.
Anyone who believes in Trump Derangement Syndrome after he became the first and only president to try to illegally overturn an election and orchestrate an attempt to at the very least prevent Congress and the vice president from performing their Constitutional duties (and, let's be real, murder them in the process), after he specifically formed his COVID response policies around killing as many people in blue districts as possible, after he very clearly leaked the identities of American spies to the Russians, and now during his active Project 2025 campaigning is simply too far gone to be reasoned with. They'll be happy to tell you why 100% tariffs on China are good actually, or why school shootings are facts of life, or why Ukraine should be allowed to be conquered by Russia, and no rational conversation can be had with any of them.
"after he specifically formed his COVID response policies around killing as many people in blue districts as possible"
Wow, the monster! If only he had a moustache, he would be the perfect archetype of a villain!
Remind me again, wasn't it the Blue Party that began with "you don't need masks, Covid is no worse than a cold, the right to attend a BLM street protest over-rides any silly contagion fears but you must not go to church because singing hymns will spread this lethal disease"?
Uh, no? I mean, other than the hyperbole, the third one was Democrats. The initial "don't wear masks" guidance was from the Trump administration, most notably Jerome Adams. And Trump himself repeatedly said it was basically just the flu.
AFAICT, COVID IS the flu. Fever, cough, aching...the only new symptom I know of is the loss of taste and smell. The death rate is apparently quite a bit higher for reasons I don't know, but people DO die from the flu, and some even from colds.
I did my own research on masking against diseases in 2020, looking specifically for data from BEFORE 2020, and found that masks would negligibly reduce transmission, and studies were often contradictory.
To the points on Trump, it is nonsense to accuse Trump of trying to kill blue-district people, leaking spy information to the Russians, and any association with Project 2025.
For starters, there are two very different viruses involved, yes?
The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus (which has some variants) causes the COVID-19 disease. In contrast, either of a set of three different influenza viruses (A and B, most commonly, and C, more rarely, each of which also have subtypes) can cause flu.
Because these are distinctly different viruses, symptoms of COVID differ from those of the flu. COVID symptoms uniquely include – but are not limited to – loss of smell (and hence taste), as you mentioned.
Some of COVID's baffling set of symptoms are related to that fact that, unlike influenza viruses, the virus that causes COVID can sometimes damage blood vessels.
From the British Heart Foundation (ttps://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-magazine/news/coronavirus-and-your-health/is-coronavirus-a-disease-of-the-blood-vessels):
"When Covid-19 first emerged, it was initially thought that ... it mainly caused lung problems. But as the outbreak progressed, case studies began to suggest that some of the most severe complications of the disease affected more than just the lungs. From reports of ‘sticky blood’ raising the risk of deep vein thrombosis, heart attack or stroke, to neurological effects, many complications seemed to be affecting the blood vessels. In particular, these problems can be caused by the way that Covid-19 affects the lining of the blood vessels, called the endothelium."
That's in part why COVID's death rate is higher. In its earlier days, it was 2x to 5x the rate of deaths from seasonal flu. (Note: also varying widely by age.)
Since then, we've gotten better at treating COVID, its variants have become less deadly, and far more people have some immune system resistance (via past infection, vaccination, or both) which helps protect them from severe disease and death, so it's likely the two rates have converged more closely.
I synthesized these stats from various reports in May 2020. They compare the hospitalization and death rates of COVID versus flu. Note: this comparison is between the original Wuhan (aka wildtype) variant, during the deadliest early months of the pandemic, to "normal" seasonal influenza. So the corresponding COVID numbers today may be considerably lower. (And as well, certain influenza subtypes can be especially virulent, compared with "normal" ones.)
For COVID-19 (in the early days of the pandemic)
- Hospitalization ~3+%
- Death (IFR) ~0.12-1.0% (but likely somewhere in 0.3-0.8%)
It's TDS to act like basically normal if bad policies justify freaking out about Trump being Hitler.
It's also TDS to take random Trump quotes out of context* and use it to exaggerate what "might" happen if he gets elected.
On a practical policy level, 4 years of Trump was barely distinguishable from any other president. The economy before covid hit was at an all-time high, and covid would've wrecked any other president too, in fact Trump's Project Warp speed was possibly the most impactful thing he did and better than anything proposed by his competitors.
All that said, none of the things you say here are "godawful" and it's TDS to be performatively emotional about them.
*which you're not even putting in the effort to actually do.
"The economy before covid hit was at an all-time high"
What metrics are you looking at for that "all-time high" claim, Drethelin?
During the four years of the Trump Administration, approximately from 2017 1Q to 2020 4Q, three key indicators that most readily come to mind in describing the state of the US economy ranged from average-to-good (growth) to excellent (unemployment + stock market), but none were at an all-time high:
1. Economic growth.
Quarterly growth in GDP and GDI (gross domestic income) was around recent multi-decade averages, and far below the growth rates of many periods prior to around 2003.
Also, as seen in that chart, the steady falls in that rate during the Trump Administration (again, pre-COVID) were a continuation along roughly the same slope of Obama-era reductions in that rate. That trend started in 2010, reflecting recovery from the Great Recession.
3. Stock market indexes.
The inflation-adjusted S&P 500 index reached higher levels at various points during the Biden Administration, than during the Trump Administration. And various past periods saw higher *rates* of rises in that index.
Update: Yes the inflation-adjusted S&P 500 reached an all-time high during the Trump Admin. But it also was at an all-time high (for its time) during the Clinton Administration (in large part due to the Dotcom Bubble). And similarly reached all-time highs during both the Obama and Biden Administrations. Albeit with many peaks and valleys along the way, broad-based indexes of US stock prices have been an upward march since the depths of the Great Depression.
> The worst part of your response is replying to my claim of an all-time high by comparing it to a FUTURE TIME.
No, I think you misunderstood Aron's point, which is that _many_ former US presidents can point to such an "all-time high" during their incumbency. It's not a badge of merit in particular.
I revised my third point, about US stock indexes, to clarify that all-time highs were similarly reached during the Clinton and Obama administrations. (So that wasn't just a "future time" phenomenon, but also a "past time" one. Multiple Presidents presided over all-time highs in that index, since the 1930s.)
Beyond that, do you have any specific objections to the data I shared, or my characterizations of that data, on how the Trump Administration didn't reach all-time highs in either economic growth or the unemployment rate? (Other than referring to them as "weaselly bullshit"?)
That was your original claim, before the goal posts got moved. Are you willing to put in the work to support that "all-time high economy" claim with your own data and arguments?
"My point that Trump is obviously not likely to be horrible for the economy."
From a pure economic policy perspective, Trump's first term wasn't *that* anomalous. I agree with you that "on a practical policy level, 4 years of Trump was barely distinguishable from any other president." (As well, the Biden Administration carried over a number of Trump Administration policies, including many of its tariffs and 'Made in USA' preferences for Federal purchasing.)
It's still worth considering that in Trump's prospective second term, he's likely to be advised by a very different group of people than those surrounding him in his first term.
For instance, during his first term, he didn't attempt a mass deportation of 10 million or more unauthorized aliens living in the USA; that's a policy plank for his second term:
Either or both of those policies, if carried out vigorously, would have far reaching economic impacts that would make his second term far different than his first.
The obvious answer is everything in politics is relative. The other potential option wants to tax unrealized gains and floated price controls. This would also be an economic disaster. So everyone has to pick which choice is possibly less horrible to them, which is why this is such a close race. Supporting Ukraine is hardly an uncontroversial topic where one side is clearly correct. Personally I don't think anything other than a direct NATO intervention will prevent Russia from winning, so sending more support just drags the whole affair out and gets more people killed.
As a side note on tariffs, what is the correct policy when other countries intentionally manipulate prices? Say China subsidizes half the cost for all their aluminum producers, who then flood the market with artificially cheap aluminum. A tariff in that scenario matching the price difference of the subsidy would remove a market distortion, not make it worse. Of course no one who makes tariff policy actually does it like this, but maybe they should?
Yes, Harris's flirtation with imposing a minimum tax rate on high income taxpayers (which would factor in unrealized gains), as well as her vague proposals about going after "price gouging," could both be extremely problematic:
Taxing unrealized gains is fundamentally unsound. It is possible that could cause one to be forced to sell some of those assets to pay the tax.
I know this is for people worth more than $100 million, but what makes $100 million special? Suppose you have the rookie Kamala Harris collectible card, of which only three now exist. You bought it for $1, and now it's worth $1 billion. You really like having the card, and have no wish sell it, even for $1 billion. But the rest of your assets are only worth about $300k, because you aren't wealthy. If the card goes up only 5%, you must now pay taxes on that, which would mean you are forced to sell the card.
This idea, in principle, of taxing money you don't actually have only because people are jealous of your possessions, is wrong. Warren Buffet makes billions in unrealized capital gains almost every year, but it is only paper profits. If he's keeping those assets, it's because he thinks it's better to have the assets than to have the money. If he were taxed on those unrealized gains, he would be forced to make some of the gains realized.
Absolutely. Unrealized gains ("paper profits") on various items are always ephemeral; they're never guaranteed. And for many such items, they're often hard to calculate. (Not just collectables, which give a very clear example, but also, say, one's share of a family business or farm.)
Plus, as you note, paying those taxes can inflict harms on personal, family, or business finances.
I'm not sure what the optimal game-theoretical strategy is for dealing with a situation like China subsidizing and dumping, so I can't judge how good or bad a tit-for-tat strategy is against a single country like China.
What is more obviously egregious is a Made in America type policy which places tariffs on everything not made in America regardless of whether it comes from China, India, Germany, The UK, Brazil, etc.
China dumping goods for less than it costs to make is good for consumers. Of course, if it drives American businesses out of business so they later hike up prices then this is bad, and is standard monopoly practice.
Tariffs are only really for protection of the importing countries' industries, not so much for revenue generation. One could achieve the same effect by subsidizing the protected industry, so they can lower their prices to be competitive. Every country needs its own industries of various sorts so as not to rely on a foreign power for something crucial, so some subsidies may be appropriate. But if China can produce things actually better and/or cheaper than the US, then the US should import from China what it can.
That's certainly one argument, though a political one, not economic. I think it's similar to not buying what a particular company sells because you don't like the way they operate. As a consumer, this is your prerogative.
Some of those sound like clickbait (quack Fed economist or invading Mexico) but tariffs and Ukraine are absolutely serious policy positions that sensible people can disagree on, even if there would be dramatic consequences to some of those policies.
But....that's not why 99% of TDS sufferers hate Trump. Like, we can see them, we've talked with them for 8 years, we can hear the inflection and the hate when they talk about him and that kind of hate has nothing to do with his decision to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2016-2017.
Like, I'm sure there's a few people who feel deep, abiding hate for a man over suboptimal trade policy, and if I were gonna meet them anywhere it'd be here, but that's simply not plausible for 99.9% of the TDS I observe.
The so-called TDS sufferers may pick up on the fact that he's a very loony guy who comes up with very loony policy positions. Maybe they focus on the looney things he says which inflame the culture war bullshit, but they are picking up on something real and important about the man: that he's fundamentally a whacko and they don't want a whacko for Commander in Chief. His whacko economic ideas come from the same place as his whacko statements meant to inflame the culture wars.
It's like a situation where you are interviewing someone for a job and perhaps they present themselves well and appear talented in some ways, but they also say some things that raise big red flags simply because they sound really weird. They give you a bad feeling about the person even if you can't put your finger on what that bad thing is. Others at your company interview the same person and some of them thing he'd make a great hire. You tell them, no way. This guy is nuts. The position is too important to hire someone who might be a maniac and who shows some signs of being a maniac.
Is it irrational to not want someone for an important position because he just *seems a lot like a maniac*? I don't think it is. Some people have a good sense for someone being really off. I think most of the so-called TDS sufferers simply correctly sense that the guy is really off and that he is likely to do bad things.
Yeah but this, this is TDS. You say it's about concrete policies but then pivot immediately to "They give you a bad feeling about the person even if you can't put your finger on what that bad thing is." and "Is it irrational to not want someone for an important position because he just *seems a lot like a maniac*?".
That's just vibes. That's fine, I think Kamala Harris is a lizard person, that's vibes, that's "character". People have voted on it forever. Why are you trying to convince me that's it's based on a sober assessment of his policies?
I said in my original post that even if he were a man of great probity, which he isn't, his economically illiterate platform is enough to disqualify him. (Harris's are bad too, but not nearly as bad.) For instance, Bernie Sanders is a man of integrity, I believe, but I wouldn't vote for him because of his wacko economic positions. The same goes for Trump.
Trump probably benefits politically from his low character because too many people see that and nothing else and miss how horrible his policy positions are. Most of his defenders miss that too.
I think "I just don't like the guy, he gives me a bad impression" is perfectly fine as a reason not to vote for someone (I don't much like Kamala, though I can't say I actively dislike her, she just doesn't give me much of a sincere impression).
It's when we get into (and first let me say I know it wasn't Hank said this) "and he deliberately used covid to kill off people in blue districts!" that we're getting into the derangement/tinfoil hat territory.
That's probably fair and it was probably wrong of me to say Hank had TDS just on that post. Voting on vibes is fair. I'm sure there's plenty of people who just think Trump gives off dumb conman vibes and that's it, cool.
But, again, it feels like we're discussing...highly theoretical populations. Like, some people might deeply care about Trump's trade policy and some people might just dispassionately judge his poor character but that's, like, a sub-10% minority of Trump discourse in person or online. They're rare like seeing someone driving a Corvette; I've seen quite a few but it's not a daily or even weekly occurrence.
One thing that's going to come up as a counter-argument for this is that even if everything you just said is true, it wouldn't begin to make a dent in "most people". Most people can hardly read, let alone have educated opinions on tariff policy.
Yes, a uterus would still be required. This would be a surrogate in the case of a gay male couple. For older women, the uterus is still functional even after the ovaries aren't, so in that case a surrogate would not be required. See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erramatti_Mangamma (although I would say 73 is probably too old to have kids, it's not biologically impossible)
Am I missing something? If I, a woman, wanted to have children with another woman, we wouldn't need egg cells, we'd need sperm cells. Is it implied you're working on both?
Both lesbian and gay couples can already have biological children. I think what is meant there is "combine the genetic material of both partners, instead of using donor sperm and donor eggs from outsiders".
For the gay couple, that still means you need a surrogate to gestate the pregnancy as is current practice. But if we're going to have women who spent the years since they turned 16 desperately avoiding becoming pregnant, because that would ruin their lives, via artificial means and then once they turn 50 desperately trying to become pregnant now, via artificial means, why baulk at mere surrogacy?
Presumably our 50 year old primigravida who is well-off enough to afford this procedure will also be well-off enough to get a younger surrogate to gestate and deliver the baby, and then of course nanny can be hired to do the looking-after in terms of feeding, nappy changing and so forth, and then of course childcare and kindergartens, so the physical labour of raising a child can be avoided and not strain the older mother.
I realise the above is very wet-blanket. I don't protest the effort to help the infertile conceive, but I've seen that same song-and-dance around IVF before, and now we've turned fertility into an entire industry where you can, at least if you have enough money, theoretically outsource the entire thing to someone else to provide donor eggs (healthy young college students preferred), donor sperm (only the best), surrogate (Third World women happy - or at least economically stressed enough - to rent out their wombs as human incubators until we solve the practicalities of artificial womb) and deliver the baby all on your behalf, so you need never have any physical involvement until the bought-and-paid for product is delivered.
And now, with embryo selection, and the range of options fertility clinics are already offering, the sufficiently wealthy can make sure the product is according to their list of preferences, no chances taken on the random shuffling of genetic material as has been done all throughout human history. What is progress for, if not to give us what we want exactly as we want it, or a refund if it disappoints?
(Yes, I *am* very damn cynical about human nature).
Turning babies into commodities? I suppose that is how we've gone, yes.
For those who are infertile, it may be a solution. But for the "I'll wait to have a kid till I'm 50 and over", it just seems - rather foolish, you know? During peak fertility years avoid pregnancy by all the means they can, then when fertility is naturally ended, go for extra effort and expense to become pregnant. Rather like saying "I want to be an athlete, so I'm going to eat until I'm five stone overweight, then wait twenty years until I decide to diet and exercise back to the figure I could have had all along and then start training to be a hurdler".
Oh, it's the height of foolishness. Eugenics supporters have been pointing that out for many years. But it needs to be compared to the alternative, which is often a low-IQ couple who had kids in their 20s because they were too shortsighted and horny to use birth control. "You're childless" is the one thing poor losers can say to rich winners which can actually get under their skin and hurt their feelings. And that's not a small thing, either, which is why there was so much anger at J.D. Vance for his cat lady comment. Some of those poor losers oppose assisted reproductive technology because it threatens to take away the one source of superiority they have.
I think you're coming from a Catholic perspective that values the natural order of 'biological parents make offspring in the old-fashioned way' as something created by God, and people here aren't likely to share that.
Oh yeah, it's Catholicism all the way down, but I was struck by the irony of "it would allow women to circumvent menopause by creating eggs at any age (women can safety become pregnant well into their 50s, they just lose the ability to create eggs naturally)" due to "I spent 35 years of my fertility doing my best to not get pregnant, now I am no longer at risk of becoming pregnant, I'm doing my best to do so".
I built this art installation, it's called The Church of the Infinite Game, I'm going to be setting it up in Sacramento and the Bay. I'm looking for people who would be interested in hosting an art event, the link is a rough explainer video, any feedback would be appreciated 🙏🏼
Nowhere near California, but I found it a fun trip down memory lane. I used to believe in a lot of that science-will-save-the-world stuff.
The only thing I can say is it's a little pre-Great Awokening; making fun of religion on behalf of science a la Richard Dawkins no longer is cool because it's all about LGBTBIPOC vs MAGA, and all the New Atheists are now evil white men.
Of course, you may not care what's cool, in which case more power to you. :)
I hope you find some place that will approve your installation.
I am going to agree with Deiseach on one thing, though. Of the four New Atheists, only Hitchens smoked. He's now dead at 62 from esophageal cancer. Dennett died at 82; the other two are still alive. Something to consider.
(That part of the video really was 'tell me you were raised Protestant or Protestant-adjacent without telling me you're Protestant' 😁 "Churches have icons, don't they?" depends on the church/denomination, depends what you consider an icon).
Re: the T-shirt, you can wear that on your hospital bed as you're screaming in pain from the lung cancer caused by smoking because the morphine patches are not cutting it anymore and it's now time for you to be drugged into insensibility as your family wait around the bedside for your inevitable, quick yet somehow drawn-out, death.
Went through that with a close family member, so forgive me for not thinking you're so bold and daring and convention-breaking unlike the sheeple.
I will add that in addition to health problems that it's fairly common for people who aren't former smokers to find second/third hand smoke totally disgusting, especially someone like me with allergic asthma. Smokers also seem to like to crowd around entrances to buildings and subject non-smokers to their disgusting habit, and when finished, throw butts on the ground as if somehow that doesn't count as littering.
I realise everyone is free to make their own choices, but I'm very sensitive about smoking due to family circumstances. If it were a dumb 17 year old who thought smoking was cool and transgressive, I'd roll my eyes. A grown adult though should know better. Lung cancer is not fun and cool.
For some people (like my family member) it's hellishly addictive and they tried and failed to quit or even reduce smoking countless times. Others can successfully give it up and not go back. Best of all, of course, is not to start in the first place.
Oh definitely, smoking is bad (it basically increases the frequency of every type of cancer) and you should always encourage people to quit. It does seem to be severely declining back here in the USA at least.
Why has nobody investigated the link between brain injuries and domestic violence?
1. We know that brain injuries cause aggression and reduce self control.
2. We also know that professions with a high risk of brain injury (army vet, police, football players) have higher rates of domestic violence.
But it seems nobody has investigated a causal link here. Why not? If the link exists, wouldn't taking steps to reduce brain injury help reduce domestic violence (and violence overall) which would be a great thing?
Whenever people bring up that army vets / police / football players have higher rates of domestic violence, it seems only because they want to assert some kind of moral failing of people who choose those professions, without considering that the risks of the profession itself could be in any way causal.
(Scott: is there anything about this in the psychiatric literature?)
There’s a really big literature about this, most of it observational. The tricky part is that there are a *lot* of confounders: substance abuse is the classic example of a factor that increases both injury risk and violence risk.
I think that a well-designed widely available intervention for young people with TBI would be a very good thing, but it’s an indirect way of addressing interpersonal violence.
Right, I know the link with violence *in general* is established. But somehow it never gets mentioned in the case of *domestic* violence, even though it is often mentioned that certain groups with high rates of TBI (army vets / police / football players) have higher rates of domestic violence.
I think that would remove some agency from them and lessen the whole 'DV is men being bad to women' aspect everyone is so fond of--it wouldn't be entirely their 'fault'.
No, it's because there are people who suffered concussions and brain injuries who are not domestic abusers, and there are domestic abusers who did not suffer brain injury. Women can be domestic violence abusers, too.
You know as well as I that the first thing a defence lawyer in a court case involving domestic violence would do is plead mitigation due to diminished responsibility because "my client played contact sports in high school" (even if said client was never concussed once, much less repeatedly).
""Twinkie defense" is a derisive label for an improbable legal defense. It is not a recognized legal defense in jurisprudence, but a catch-all term coined by reporters during their coverage of the trial of defendant Dan White for the murders of San Francisco city Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. White's defense was that he suffered diminished capacity as a result of his depression, a symptom of which was a change in diet from healthy food to Twinkies and other sugary foods. Contrary to common belief, White's attorneys did not argue that the Twinkies were the cause of White's actions, but that their consumption was symptomatic of his underlying depression. The product itself was only mentioned in passing during the trial. White was convicted of voluntary manslaughter rather than first-degree murder, and served five years in prison."
> there are people who suffered concussions and brain injuries who are not domestic abusers, and there are domestic abusers who did not suffer brain injury
Of course, causation is often multi-factorial. There are unvaccinated people who don't get Covid, and there are vaccinated people who do get Covid, but it's still good to get the vaccine!
There are drugs that reduce aggression in people with TBIs, and making more people with TBIs (men *or* women can have TBIs) aware of the problem and getting them to take those drugs could help reduce domestic violence on a population scale, but we're just ignoring that because we're worried about the "Twinkie defense"?
I loved making AI art using DALL-E 2, but it’s been discontinued in favour of DALL-E 3 and I’ve found the results of the latter unimpressive—they seem to lack artistic character and even when I request a particular style, all I seem to get is something that looks like an overly polished Deviantart piece.
What is the best way that I can continue creating DALL-E 2-quality AI art? Should I try the Pytorch implementation? Is there a specific way to prompt DALL-E 3 to circumvent these issues? Are there other websites or AI art generators that offer similar functionality as DALL-E 2?
SD/SDXL are probably the best choices right now if you have the hardware and are willing to get your hands dirty learning and you want ultimate control and flexibility and would make use of the advanced tools like Controlnet or Lora stacks. (Flux models may be better eventually, but they aren't necessarily now, and you'd need to do a lot of the same learning anyway.)
If you aren't interested in making that sort of investment, MJ is pretty viable for nice images *if* you don't just use it in the braindead default way a lot of people do. You can try using the `chaos`/`stylize` parameters and personalization to greatly reduce the MJ look and ramp up novelty you can select from and explore with variations. You can also try using DALL-E 2 samples as 'reference' images to generate 'in the style of', as well as using `/describe` to try to reverse-engineer the DALL-E 2 'look' you like in terms of MJ-comprehensible text descriptions.
The online AI websites are handy in that they have user friendly UI and offload generation so the user doesn't have to worry about it, but you don't have very much control over image creation. If you do want more control, you might consider running an AI locally - if your computer can handle it. I recently switched to an updated SDXL model and it's much more impressive than SD1.5
It does look really cool, but is ~10x slower than SDXL with the hardware I have. Plus it's new enough that there aren't a lot of tools developed/ported yet.
In case people missed it, Kalshi won their lawsuit against the CFTC, effectively legalizing prediction markets on elections in the US (as long as the CFTC doesn't win an appeal)!
Biotech is the part of technology that has the most need for human labour and the least need for human creativity. Your work is to very carefully carry out a defined set of steps over a period of many years which almost always results in your new treatment failing to hit the market.
Compared to other AI companion sites you might know, this one is focused on having a chatting experience that is as realistic as possible, including pauses, hesitation, variable typing speed, etc.
French ACXers - can you explain more to me about what's going on in your country?
My understanding is that the Left got the most votes in the election, but Macron picked the Right to form the government. Is this legal? Is it something that's precedented and normal, or is it considered an abuse of power?
Macron says that if he had selected the Left, they would have immediately lost a no-confidence vote. Is this true? If so, why didn't he do that, let them lose the vote, and then he could have given the government to the Right without anyone being able to blame him?
Do I understand correctly that Le Pen's party is now in government? Is this the breaching of some kind of important firewall precedent against the far right?
What is the prevailing public opinion about this in France? Is it a stable situation? What happens next?
>My understanding is that the Left got the most votes in the election,
No, the Left won the most seats (180 out of 577) but not the most votes; they got 26% of the vote, versus 37% for the National Rally and its allies, and 25% for Macron's party
You are using the votes on the 2nd round here which is strange, given that many candidates from the left and Macron's party dropped out to have more chances against Rassemblement national.
1st round results are much more informative and give a better indication on the results if France had a proportional system:
1st RN (Le Pen) + Ciotti: 33%
2nd NFP (Union of the left): 28% with other far left/center left/ left regionalist doing few additional percentages
3rd Ensemble (Macron's coalition): 20%
4th Les Republicains (New prime minister's party): 6.5%
PS. It's fairly clear that the candidate for prime minister that the Left finally agreed upon - an admittedly high-ranking civil servant whose public profile was so low that she did not have her own Wikipedia page - was a sacrificial lamb, in that it was already understood she would not be accepted by Macron. How Macron sees his appointee to prime minister (Barnier) is much less clear. Methinks it will be hard for Macron to distance himself from Barnier if the latter founders.
What would have been truly astral-level trolling on part of the Left would have been to put forward a member of the Communist Party as candidate to PM. After all, the official line of Macron and his previous PM (Attal) has been that Socialists, Greens and Communists are OK, and that it is LFI that is unacceptable. (This is basically a paraphrase of something Attal has actually said.)
Would that I can be a chavista sacrificial lamb, she did all her campaigning on paid leave from her well paid job and is now entitled to quit that job with a promise that she can return within 10 years including any promotions that she might ordinarily have expected whilst the 95% taxpayer funded far left LFI pay her and her staff generous salaries.
I agree that putting forward a non-LFI would have been much better, but if they could not agree to throw the LFI program out it would have been the same.
First, a piece of background: the left in France has been very disjointed in the past few years. The historicaly dominant socialist party (PS) had been gutted in 2017 by the somewhat more radical LFI, but LFI was a tad too far left to get the full support of center left electors, who'd turn to macron. It gave a lot of power to the centrists, who only had the radical left LFI and the far right RN as heavy weight opponents, and these two would only align in what they were opposed to, not what they agreed on (which is nearly nothing. Even demographic shifts, one calls replacement, the other calls "creolizing").
Then the European élection happened. Being almost purely proportional, r
It allows electors to eschew usual political calculation caused by first-past-the-post, revolving around vote wasting. The left was disjointed, but the PS overtook LFI, almost-14% to almost-10%. The far right RN won handily with 31% (plus 5% to an even extreme offshoot that would rejoin the fold after). The center took a beating, with 14%, barely more than the PS. Turns out that Macron's politics were rather unpopular after all
So of course, having just received support of just 14% of the voters, but still having a very favorable parliament (with the trad right -LR- supporting them, they had a majority), Macron did the only sensible thing and dissolved the parliament. We're still puzzled as to why.
During the blitz campaign, the left managed to unite in a coalition (NFP), and split amongst the parties which areas they'd send a candidate to. LFI had most of the candidates, but the PS had a larger share than what they currently held in parliament.
The legislative elections are held on 2 rounds, with the candidates of the first round that pass a certain threshold being qualified for the 3rd. It can leads to a 3 or 4-way 2nd round, in which they leader get the seat. Often, the weaker of the participants in these 3-ways would quit, to ensure the candidate closer to them would overtake the leader (or to secure their lead).
At the end of the first round, the RN was leading in nearly every area, but had only a few elected on the first round. It led to a 2nd round where the left would give up the 3-ways they were going to lose to vote for the centrists, and the centrists returning the favor, albeit not as much. The result was an election that everybody lost and won at the same time.
The RN was the largest party, had the most electors, but while predictions gave them close to 50% of the seats, they only had 20%.
The center lost a lot, but avoided annihilation thanks to the votes of leftists voters.
The left won a lot of seats, but divided evenly between LFI and the PS.m, and not nearly enough to have 50%.
Why having 50% matters? The parliament can vote to fire the government ("censor"). Having 50% ensure you win such a vote. Having 30% means that the 2 other blocs can kill you anytime you fail to satisfy the closest to you. And if the parliament don't vote for a law proposed by the government, the government can force it's way (art. 49.3) by tying it to a no-confidence vote (you don't want the law, but do you not want it so much you'd want to fire the government over it?). It's generally accepted that if a parliament did that, the president would probably dissolve it in turn (do you hate the govt more than you love your seat?). But now it's been done, and cant be redone for a year, so the parliament hold much more power than usual.
Who get to be PM? The president decide, but he better be someone who don't get censored instantly.
Now it get a bit on the opinion side.
The left claimed victory in the election, and clamored they would apply their program, all their program, only their program, and the rest could suck on it. So of course, even the centrists were ready to censor that. A lot of names were thrown on the left, but the division between LFI and PS kinda resurfaced, or the division between those who wanted a government and those who were fine avoiding this nest of trouble, realizing that it's going to be hard to be effective and popular with a parliament 30% centrist and 30% far right.
The result is macron nominating a LR PM (a party that has nearly no seats left), but which the center will vote for, and the far right will agree to. The left feels cheated, in my opinion because they forgot it's a multiplayer game, and their opponent is allowed to act contrary to their wish.
This sounds a lot like how Bennet became PM in Israel despite leading a 6 seat (5% of the votes) party, since he was right wing enough to appease some right leaning factions and not-bibi enough to appease the left.
The alternative to 'the Left forgot how the system works' is 'this is a gambit on the part of the Left', or rather on the part of its center-of-mass: the rational goal for the Left clearly ought to be a coalition government with the Left dominant and the center or part of it as junior coalition partner, but this is palatable neither to much of LFI nor to Macron; proposing to put forward its unmodified program and predictably failing amounts to "we tried" and makes the rational goal more palatable to LFI (but not to Macron, who would have always detested the outcome, partly for ego reasons).
This seems less of a stretch than, say, seeing Macron's choice of PM as a complicated gambit on the part of Macron (to what purpose?), except that nobody can tell what is on Macron's mind these days, so all bets that are based on his intentions are off.
All the background is needed to understand that the left didn't have the power to force a PM, even with one of their greatest electoral success in a decade. Macron had no reason to risk an opposed PM, even one who could do nothing, rather than a somewhat aligned one, which would be under threat if he failed to deliver to the center (or to the far right).
The RN is not in government yet, and I don't think they want to be.
I think the public is mostly dissatisfied with how long it took. Other than that, it's divided along party lines, the left is pissed, the far right is somewhat happy, the center is dodging the bullet of an extremist government
As a long term observer of French politics, and a voter in French elections, I have tried to respond to this as succinctly as possible:
1. Main actors
Macron - the President. He is often called right wing but he is literally from the socialist party, he represents the center left.
This is the current far-right party led by former essayist Eric Zemmour and, sometimes, Marine Le Pen’s niece, Marion Marechal Le Pen. Their platform includes expulsion of current non-citizen residents at the drop of a hat, essentially.
RN / Rassemblement National or National Rally, this is the former “Front National”, led by the daughter of that party. The daughter, Marine Le Pen, has conducted an extensive “de-far-right-ification” campaign and as some commenters have observed this party is now just the plain old right.
LR / Les Republicans. The former right now split between the RN-adjacent and the EN-adjacent. Call them center-right.
Renaissance, formerly formerly En Marche, Macron’s pet party. Centre-left. In the recent elections campaigned as "Ensemble" or Together, so EN, an alliance of vaguely centrist left wing parties.
PS / Parti Socialiste. Basically what is says on the tin, but in France, this counts as “the left”
EELV or the socialist European greens. Not watermelons because they are explicitly socialist, policies are sadly offensive to anyone who passed 10th year science however
LFI / La France Insoumise or the Unsubmitted. Jean-Luc Melenchon’s pet party. One of France’s most cultured and erudire politicians with a long career as a cultural conservative socialist, he created LFI as part of his pivot around 10 years ago to cultivating the radical protest vote, including (unfortunately) the Islamist vote. Ironically, whereas in the past Front National, the far-right party, clearly had a lot of antisemites, they are all gone now and the most antisemitic party by a long way is LFI. One point to horseshoe theory. They are also explicit fans of Chavez, Maduro and the Castros, and prefer Hamas (literally hamas, not just the Palestinians) to Israel. Unsurprisingly they are anathema to the centre-right and far right and increasingly to the centre-left and even the genuine socialist party left.
NFP / Nouvelle Front Populaire. The Alliance of the previous 3 and another dozen micro-parties created for the last parliamentary elections in order to stave off the eradication that the European elections suggested was coming.
2. Legal framework
The President, Macron, appoints the Prime Minister. Parliament can however pass a vote of no confidence which is essentially sacking the PM. Normally, and in every case until now, there is a party or grouping with a clear majority and they basically tell the President who they want as PM if they are not the President’s party, or if the President controls the parliament as Macron has until now, he names whoever he wishes.
3. Electoral background
The European elections held in June resulted in a relative rout for the right-wing RN. Consistent with trends across much of Europe, they “won” in France. This is what appears to have triggered Macron’s dissolution of Parliament, with the following two notable features: (1) the entire non-centre left and far-left reformed their on-again-off-again “union”, this time called NFP, and in the second round, they were joined in a tactical alliance with the centre-left (RE) in the cases where there were two mainstream left candidates against a right-wing one.
The French voting looked like this:
Parti | % EU election | % 1st round | % 2nd round | seats
Reconquete 5.5% | 0.8% | - | -
RN 31.4% | 33.2% | 24.6% | 142
LR 7.3% | 6.6% | 6.7% | 39
right-wing others 27
centrist others 29
ENS 14.6% | 20.0% | 26% | 150
left-wing others 12
NFP n/a | 28.1% | 30.8% | 178
PS 13.8% | within NFP | within NFP |
EELV 5.5% | within NFP | within NFP |
LFI 9.9% | within NFP | within NFP |
I have shown NFP and its main constituent parties separately because they are a very fragile alliance. The main voting blocs that emerge are:
- center and far left broad church: impossible given LFI's toxicity
- right and center: what happened
4. Post election
Macron first punted, saying that he would not name a PM until after the Olympics. The NFP attempted to pretend that they had won, and after two weeks of private and public arguments, eventually named a senior and suitably far-left public servant as their candidate, who was clearly aligned LFI but as a public servant was not a member of any party (although she then went to campaign for three weeks which seems clearly illegal). If this tactic was to have any success they would have had to name her in the first day or two. As it is, the right-wing and centre-right, RN and LR.
Post Olympics, he conducted what seemed a lot like a stage comedy, interviewing basically every vaguely centrist washed up politician for the job. This was made a bit harder by the fact that anyone who had any real political ambitions did not want it. After this had dragged on for quite a while, he nominated Michel Barnier, center-rightist with buckets of experience in statism at nearly every level of government possible. Astute readers here will recall that he was the EU point man for Brexit.
Whilst the far left hate him, and the current right do not much like him, the centre right and left are pretty positive and it is unlikely he will fail a no confidence vote (at least for now). The left will probably request one for the photo ops but it literally will not matter.
5. Way forward
With the parliamentary configuration as it is Michel Barnier is likely a pretty stable choice but is unlikely to be able to pass much other than "more spending" (since all parties support that).
The most interesting dynamic will be if there is a far left at the next Presidential elections or if they have destroyed themselves, and if there will be any strong centrist candidate who marks themselves out over the next year or so.
- Yes it's totally legal, the president can pick anyone he wants. It's unprecedented, but at the same time it's the whole situation is unprecedented as since the start of the 5th republic there has been some clear majority. The left only got a plurality of seats, but not a majority. Obviously the left considers it an abuse of power but they were the ones that were snubbed.
- Would the left have instantly lost a no confidence vote? Probably. But it's not 100%. Maybe he didn't want to roll the dice? Especially since one of the first things the left wanted to do was undoing Macron's signature pension reform, which he sees as his legacy. But honestly, I'm pretty sure only Macron really knows why he does things.
- Le Pen's party is not in government (yet), at least not officially. I doubt she will be given any cabinet positions. However there has obviously, mathematically been some kind of assurances for a sort of supply-and-confidence agreement. This to me obviously weekens the "front républicain" the firewall against the far right. But it's too early to say.
RN were doing very well and about to gain power. In response, every major left-wing party collaborated in order to block them - deliberately standing their own candidates up and down to ensure RN's opponent never had any other competition on a province-by-province level. This worked and RN was mostly blocked.
But that level of collaboration was torn from them by pure desperation, and all the Left parties in question hate each other and would never work together under nornal circumstances.
So, the Left is a fragile alliance that's very obviously unstable. The only reason they're there at all is because the "country" actually "wants" RN and everyone knows it.
That's the context for picking someone like Barnier - there was no one the Left would have accepted, because the Left didn't even want to accept each other. Meanwhile M. Brexit is Right enough to (hopefully) mollify the proles who could easily consider themselves cheated by this election.
EDIT: I'm not French. We were over there during the election though, hearing a lot of French-flavoured TDS from our neighbours. The province ultimately swung RN.
The Left is not so unstable that a government by it would be unstable by definition. It took forever to put forward a candidate, but, on the other hand, the Socialists refused to break the alliance when Macron was very obviously courting them to do so.
Something that is missing in this discussion is that Macron is very obviously caught in his own rhetoric (which he may or may not believe in fully): "the far left is as bad as the far right" (meaning, tacitly: at least as bad) is his motto. His (large) faction of the center can't ally with a united left block if its leadership insists it can't do so.
Note that the left instructed its candidates to step down in favor of the center even though the center reciprocated only very partially.
Um, the left is not so unstable as that, but they are so minoritaire as that. There was _never_ going to be a left wing candidate that was acceptable to the center and the far left, so there was never going to be a (more) left wing PM.
It is not just Macron but most of his party and quite a few further left that don't want to associate with LFI.
But why would it need to be acceptable to the center and the far-left? The center, center-right and center-left (Socialist Party and affiliates) have a majority together. If the Ecologists count as center-left, they don't need the center-right either.
>But why would it need to be acceptable to the center and the far-left? The >center, center-right and center-left (Socialist Party and affiliates) have a >majority together.
Macron either thinks that way or pretends to. The issue is that, despite Macron's repeated entreaties, the Socialist Party will clearly not break ranks with the left alliance it has just committed itself to. For one thing, that would be long-lasting electoral poison - the PS would be portrayed (not unreasonably) as a party of backstabbers, opportunists, enemies of left unity, etc.
The ecologists certainly don't, they are just far left who care slightly more about degrowth than Hamas.
And that center block does in theory have a majority but, as I wrote above, they cannot use it because the system does not require a majority. So the impossible alliances (the French center left and center right have spent 40 years thinking that they are the diametric opposite of each other, notwithstanding the largely superficial actual differences) are not made, and the center remains fragmented, whilst Rassemblement National with a third of the votes are quite united, and can easily muster another 10-12% of unaffiliated right and center right for key votes even before reaching out to center right.
So they are the largest voting bloc in a minority parliament, and large enough to have effectively a veto, again, assuming that no-one _has_ to form a majority and so no-one is forced to speak unpopular truths.
Le Pen's party is not in government, as in, it doesn't have any ministers (yet; no ministers have been definitely named yet, AFAIK). What Macron has done is selected a minister that is just to the left of Le Pen - a (particularly conservative?) member of the collapsed non-Le Pen right. Le Pen's people are not likely to move immediately to remove him, whereas the Left would surely move to remove him (for one thing, the Left (quite reasonably) does not see him as legitimate).
Essentially, Macron is now ruling with the unenthusiastic consent of the far right.
The answers to the other questions are less clear. I'll leave the floor to people who have figured it out more than I have. Two possibilities:
(a) Macron is playing four-dimensional chess (as badly as he did in June?), hoping that this new cabinet will be short-lived and that that somehow will be good for him; this seems unreasonable, but who knows;
(b) Macron has genuinely drifted to the hard right (but then, as you said, it would have been cleverer to appoint someone from the Left and then work behind the scenes to have the center (which is composed of several parties) vote to depose the new Left cabinet quickly).
Any other takes?
(On your first questions: it's legal, it's abnormal, it's certainly seen as arrogant and quite possibly an abuse of power, and I do not know what the closest precedent would be.)
Barnier is a long way to the left of Le Pen, he is a career politician and very centrist right winger who has been a French and European "minister" for various things over the past three decades.
Abuse of power is a ridiculous term, it is literally his power to name a PM and the only constraint is that parliament does not censure the PM, this is what drove the choice.
I don't understand the system. The President selects the Prime Minister, but the National Assembly can remove the Prime Minister if they don't like them?
Why not just get the National Assembly to select the Prime Minister on its own? I suppose because there's no guarantee that they'd ever agree on anyone, whereas if the choice is between "the guy the President selected or the next guy the President might select" then it's a narrower choice.
Also is it still fair to call the RN the "Far Right" given their level of popularity? Aren't they just the mainstream right at this point?
The "literate middle-of-the-road" (as in Le Monde, not as in Macron) informal definition makes RN 'Extreme Right' (i.e. Far Right) and La France Insoumise 'Radical Left' (less than extreme) irrespective of their number of voters. It would go something as follows: RN is extreme because it proposes measures that are openly unconstitutional and against EU law; FI proposes radical changes and uses fiery rhetoric, but, even when it has proposed (in the past) calling for an assembly to write a new constitution ("Sixth Republic"; not part of the current plans of the left coalition), it has in effect proposed overturning the current framework using means that are legal within that very framework.
Even Macron's (softer) proposed policies on immigration have been declared unconstitutional by the constitutional council. The RN proposes banning foreigners from all civil service positions, including all university positions, for instance, with no exceptions. There's a clear intention to extend that to dual citizens (whom Marine Le Pen seems to detest particularly).
In other countries, that kind of de jure constitutional arrangement, where the Head of State (President or Monarch) appoints the Head of Government (Prime Minister, Premier, or Chancellor) subject to a constraint that the latter must be able to command majority support (or at least passive toleration) in the legislature, produces varying results. Ranging from the Head of State having close to free choice of Head of Government (e.g. Imperial Germany) to the Head of State having little more than a ceremonial role and the real choice belonging to the internal institutions of the legislature.
Things that tend to lead to the appointment power having a real effect:
1. Informal constitutional norms, particularly how legitimate it's considered for the President or King to insist on a particular Prime Minister, and conversely how legitimate it is for legislative leaders to "storm the closet" (the term for the process in 18th century Britain) by refusing to accept any but their own choice of PM.
2. Whether or not there's a clear majority party or coalition in the legislature. In order to storm the closet effectively, the would-be government needs to have a majority locked up. If nobody has a majority, the President or King has a lot more room to act.
3. Whether or not the Head of State controls or influences a significant faction of the legislature. This is usually the case for elected Presidents unless the position is understood to be mostly ceremonial, and can also be the case for monarchs who can influence legislatures with patronage and honors and who have in some times and places ventured overtly into partisan electoral politics.
4. The independent authority of the Head of State and his appointees to act despite the legislature. The extreme case is something like late Weimar Germany, where the President and Chancellor could dissolve the legislature (preventing no-confidence votes) and govern by "emergency decrees" until new elections took place.
I don't have a good feel for the details of 1 with respect to modern France. I get the impression that the President usually has a fair degree of latitude in appointing the PM (much, much more so than modern British monarchs) but this is subject to some constraints in terms of respecting the will of voters in recent elections, and it's far from unheard of for the President to feel compelled to appoint a PM from a rival party.
Currently, there's definitely no dominant coalition. There are three big coalitions with between a quarter and a third of the seats, with the biggest coalition (Popular Front) having little internal cohesion between its constituent parties. And the second-biggest is Macron's own party and their current allies, which gives Macron a fair amount of leverage.
The French President has more power than any other head of state you are familiar with. Pretty much the only real constraint for a President who controls the assembly is demonstrations, which is what happened with Macron.
In the specific terms of reference for 1, the convention is that if the President controls the parliament, he names whoever he likes (see eg Macron's last several PMs or indeed Hollande's before that) and if he does not, he pretty much has to name whoever the majority propose.
The two issues here, which Garald and other "abuse of power" hyperventilators seem unwilling to deal with, are
(1) that the current situation has not happened in the 5th Republic, because there are no acceptable alliances to form a majority, and since the French system does <i>not/i> require any parliamentary majority, the unacceptable alliances are not made (as eg has happened in Germany and the Netherlands).
(2) as a result of the current economic situation and the previous point, <i>no-one with any ambition wants the job except the ones that not even their allies will support</i> so it turns out that the President's formal power gives him basically all the initiative back.
> Also is it still fair to call the RN the "Far Right" given their level of popularity? Aren't they just the mainstream right at this point?
Terms like "far right" evolve over time, but I think they average over a larger time period and geographic area than just France in one election (or even a few elections). If far-right parties remain popular for a long time, and become more popular in more places, I'm sure they'll eventually lose that label.
It might be worth it to point out that political labels don't exactly flow from a neutral, scientific place. They flow from the mouth or pen of whoever is ascribing the label, not a calculator or yardstick.
Yes, but that river flows both ways, and left wing European politicians are discovering that calling 30-40%,of the population "far right" is not a clearly winning move.
Unfortunately it still wins votes in inner city left wing enclaves so they keep doing it, slaves to the political version of the hedonic hamster wheel 🙄
Does anyone have thoughts on the issue of greatness in writing, specifically questions like "who's the greatest living author" or "who is the best screenwriter"? I'm currently with a piece on this topic, and I'd like input/feedback from anyone with knowledge of the landscape. I'm sure there's some voracious readers here, given Scott's output and interests.
Bottom line: meaningless question, but fun to talk about!
I would pick Cormac McCarthy as the ideal blend of popular and critical success plus he had a great movie made of one of his best books.
But real talk: I think art forms have a life cycle and the modern novel is in the terminal phase of its cycle. Like opera or classical symphonies or musicals, we might still get a great one now and then but the form is played out.
I am the greatest author in all of history. This will be discovered long after my death, when they scan my brain with futuristic technology and use it to reconstruct all the works I would have written if I wasn't such a lazy, easily distracted piece of shit.
I can only judge great writing by how much it enchants me, how much pleasure it gives me both in the moment of reading and hours, days, months, and maybe years---which means I continue to reread it---later. I like to always be in the middle of reading a good book because the words, images, ideas and personalities stay with me and reappear in my imagination as I go throughout my day, the way music you've heard recently will continue to revisit your mind.
I mostly read dead authors, but my favorite living ones are Karl Ove Knausgaard (although not every book he's written is great), Elena Ferrante (same. Her novellas are vastly superior to her famous quartet IMO, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Thomas Pynchon (particularly his early work), Antonio Lobo Antunes, and Mircea Cartarescu.
Regarding the Shakespear discussion below, I judge Shakespear the same way I judge any contemporary writer, and the question is the same: how much his writing enchants me. I think he's as great as the greatest of living writers today, as great as the greatest of any generation of writers so far. I'm particularly fond of Shakespear's Histories but don't honestly care much for his Comedies.
A writer like J.K. Rowling doesn't interest me at all, but I was already an adult when she started publishing novels. I've read a number of her pages, but they don't evoke anything in me.
I've never read DeLillo. Perhaps it's because I got into Pynchon first and when later I heard people compare DeLillo to him, I was over my Pynchon obsession and so wasn't enticed by this other Pynchonesque guy. I don't like Pynchon nearly as much now as when I read him when I was 20---I don't reread Pynchon---but I still count him among the greats because he has written so many amazing pages. His great weakness is character development. He creates all these wonderful, strange characters in fascinating, often hilarious situations, but the characters often don't grow and get fleshed out further.
I do have that, actually. Amongst the many things I tried to assess, and weigh (sometimes unevenly) against each other were: Activity level or prolificity, age, creative styles, critical reception & awards, financial success, genres and specialties, historic significance, influence on their field(s) & peers, name recognition, personal scandals, popularity with the public, and preferred vocation.
I find the Shakespeare question clarifying - it would be bizarre if Shakespeare was the greatest playwright ever (or even particularly good) given that there were so few people alive during his day, so there must be some kind of historical bias. But Shakespeare was, indeed, incredibly good. So when we say "greatest writer", we must mean something partway between "highly competent" and "pioneered new ways of doing things", and Shakespeare must get extra points for pioneering even above his competence (such that if I wrote a Shakespearean play today, it wouldn't make me as great as Shakespeare even if they play was just as good).
But I also find that most of the "original, pioneering" art of today seems - sorry to say this - kind of bad (except maybe in genre fiction, which is much younger and where the space has been less exhausted). Once you pick the low-hanging fruit of things that are both popularly-enjoyable and pioneering, in order to be pioneering you have to do some really weird stuff. My more culturally sophisticated friends tell me that if you really truly understand the whole history of literature, then what seem to me like bizarre experimental novels stand out as works of genius that react to everything that has come before and put it in a different light. That might be true, but the number of people who truly understand every piece of literature that has come before is small (and necessarily shrinking, as the mountain of literature you have to master grows ever higher).
What is the balance of pioneering vs. enjoyable for JK Rowling vs. Knausgaard? I'm not sure. Does it depend on how sophisticated you are (but can't even extremely sophisticated people enjoy Rowling for what it is?) I can never really get past this point because I don't have enough Quality Literature Appreciation Ability to 100% "get" the best and most sophisticated authors of today.
There are more rocket scientists and brain surgeons than there are great writers. It's the smallest and most extreme outlier group of talent imaginable.
Premodern Iceland never had more than ~40k people at a time. Sagas written there during a window of a few hundred years are an enduring (admittedly niche) treasure of human literature. Most Ancient Greek literature of note was written by Athenians born in the 5th century BC. Likewise with Russian lit and the 19th century.
Why? There are too many potential variables involved in a question like this. Culture, subculture, zeitgeist, education, environment (will not the barren majesty of Iceland inspire greater art than suburban strip malls?), religion, innate talent, things to do or lack thereof. The list could go on.
And in almost every variable except population, modern civilization is lacking. We may have more potential Shakespeares, but they're wasting their time on dopaminergic mindkillers, or crushing their spirits in an office job, or both.
Why not apply this type of argument to Plato? I've never been convinced that other writers are not in the same league as Shakespeare (Spanish speakers talk about Cervantes, French speakers about Voltaire, etc.).
Plato's achievement does seem to be on another level: he lived in the 4th century BC, language is not an issue. As per Whitehead, all subsequent philosophers have contributed footnotes to philosophy. I don't think there's a single credible competitor for most important philosopher (in the Western tradition). Is there any academic discipline where one person is so dominant?
> So when we say "greatest writer", we must mean something partway between "highly competent" and "pioneered new ways of doing things", and Shakespeare must get extra points for pioneering even above his competence
I think this fundamentally misunderstands what we mean by "great writer". A great writer is someone who wrote a great work. A great work is a work that everyone is expected to be familiar with. That's it. It's about shared culture, not quality of writing. Quality can get you into the canon, but what keeps you in the canon is the fact that you're already there. That is why great writers come from the past. They have to come from the past. A new writer hasn't had time for people to agree that he's great, and the agreement is what makes him great.
Shakespeare was the best at one particular thing -- writing plays in which the characters speak in poetry. This was fashionable at the time, but later the fashion changed towards more realistic dialogue and it has never changed back. It's not surprising that nobody has outdone him in the last century in his particular genre, because his particular genre is deeply out of fashion and nobody bothers to try. But the genre is still considered the most prestigious form of literature, so Shakespeare as the best practitioner of the most prestigious form of literature gets to be the greatest writer of all time.
(Similarly, Beethoven and symphonies.)
The interesting question is why the most prestigious art forms are the ones in which the artists of today refuse to actually work. I'm not sure which way the causation goes -- are they unfashionable because they're prestigious or prestigious because they're unfashionable? I wonder if this is what it was like in pre-Renaissance Europe when everybody acknowledged that the Greeks and Romans were better at this and that but refused to even try to compete with them.
I think it's actually not surprising that Shakespeare is going to remain one of the "greatest" for the same reason that all of the greatest physicists lived at the turn of the 20th century. Shakespeare lived at a time when the field was developing and was able to take all of the low hanging fruit (Except the novel), he codified most of the greatest plots so as long as he remains in the canon that others learn, they will continue to reference him and add to his prestige.
The genre-fiction-contains-the-innovation stance gets weirder when you take into account that the people who are most concerned about "what is the great, innovative literature of today" question tend to hate the stuff, or at least not include it in the discussion.
Which gets worse again when you find that the people talking about that question at an official, newspaper-and-magazine sanctioned level mostly want LGBTQ+/race driven stuff which is more about checked-box innovation than it is about the actual words that make up the story.
So you have sort of two rough groups:
1. People doing really interesting new stuff with pokemon fanfic, isekai, or whatever
2. People writing about non-binary vampire haitian-canadian immigrant families, which fuck me I'd actually read that just to see what it was like, but you get what I'm saying.
And one almost can't produce good work, because the filter isn't set to "Good words" in the first place, and one can't get recognition even when it does good work (which, to be fair, is rarer than it doing really bad work).
The end result being that if there were great, generation defining books being written right now, neither you or I would be likely to ever find them.
Yeah, done right (by someone culturally informed from the inside who can quote from folklore, legend and traditional practice) that could be really good, but done in the usual I AM SO OPPRESSÉD YA literature style, I'd rather spork my eyes out.
Returning to Hugo spats past, I thought the 'magic water' story was well-written, but it needed (1) to own up to being a literary fiction story and dump the very thin veneer of SF/Fantasy and (2) some better editing to filter out a lot of the whining gay Chinese guy was doing about his sister. The story by itself - gay Chinese guy struggles with coming out to traditional parents about not alone being gay, but his boyfriend is (gasp!) white - was not bad, if a little trite by now (which is why it probably got trotted out with a SF veneer for the Hugos, as it wouldn't be sufficiently novel for a literary fiction magazine), and the writing was good*. But it did need more editing and if you're gonna write a SF story, then for Klono's sake *put some SF in it* and 'magic water' that gets used once and then forgotten about ain't that.
*Certainly *way* better than the dinosaur story.
“The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” by John Chu is the 'magic water' story that won a Hugo in 2014. "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love" by Rachel Swirsky won a Nebula in 2013 and was nominated for the 2014 Hugos.
This is a tangent, but have you found pokemon fanfic or isekai that you'd call innovative? I consume RoyalRoad genre fiction the way nightclub patrons consume tiny bags of white powder in the disabled toilets, i.e. with great joy straight from my phone screen, and would happily read at least the first five chapters of anything that impressed you.
I write it as a living these days (isekai/litRPG stuff, I mean), I find my own stuff to be fine-to-pretty-good. Most of what's out there is very-bad-to-bad, and I don't think much of it is transcendent. I sort of threw it in as an example of genre. Right now if I was recommending stuff, I think I'd recommend Slumrat Rising or Unintentional Cultivator, if I wasn't recommending my stuff, which I wouldn't recommend here.
Right now I think Isekai is sort of where UFC fighting was for me fifteen to twenty years ago. It's very fun to watch, it delivers a certain kind of thing pretty well to the people who want that thing, but Chuck Liddell is competititve still. It's going to be another ten or fifteen years before the real pro athletes show up.
I enjoyed the first volumes of Slumrat Rising. I dropped it in volume 4 as I felt the story was stretching out a little and I was sick of the turnover of characters, but his earlier Black Parade stuff was great and I took guilty pleasure in reading Weeaboo's Unfortunate Isekai, so I might give it a read through now it's finished.
In terms of web serials with similar themes, Pale Lights is really good (same author as APGtE), and I dropped Godslayers during its hiatus but it has a similar vibe. Neither is exactly litrpg/isekai/cultivation, but both are in the neighbourhood. Sticking to genre and leaving theme to the side, I think The Game at Carousel applies litrpg mechanics to horror in a novel way but could use an editor, and Blue Core had an interesting and surprisingly well executed take on a isekai + litrpg + dungeon builder (content warning for the author's decision to make tentacle sex a major though infrequent plot point).
Fiction that takes risks can be more fun than fiction without flaws. It's like leaving a garden to wander through the forest instead: you have to wander for hours to find flowers, but there's a hell of a lot more surprises in what you do find, and after a while you begin to appreciate all those trees and shrubs too.
This reminds me that I haven't read all the way through Unsong either, which I really should do.
I think in terms of risky fiction, I could point you at 1% lifesteal by robert blaise, which is risky both because his (pretty good) writing style is nonstandard enough that not everyone will like it, and because he keeps having psych problems that keep him from writing.
Another is deadworld isekai, which is a really limited cast/wasteland setting that shouldn't have really worked as well as it did.
You shouldn't take that kind of statistical expectation logic too far. You can draw the reference categories to make any event you want as surprising as you want.
Only about 7% of the historical human population is alive today; is it weird for the greatest genius in some field to be alive now? Only 16% of the world is white; is it suspicious if the best X in the world is white? Less than 2% of America is named Joe; should we be surprised that the PotUS is?
Or to get really absurd; the mechanics of conception make any given exact combination of genes very unlikely. Should we assume that therefore nobody has ever been born?
The best anything has to be born somewhere, sometime, and in some body. And all categories are, in the grand scheme, minorities. Everything that happens anywhere is, in a cosmic sense, extremely unlikely.
So sure, it's surprising that we got Shakespeare from that background. But it would've been surprising to get him from any background. (And of course, it's a mistake to see him as The Best Writer. He's as good a candidate for the title as you're likely to find, but there isn't really a Best Writer.)
I think these arguments miss that we should be using conditional odds. The odds against a writer as great as Shakespear having lived when he did may be enormous *if you don't know that one existed*! Given that *we do know* a writer as great as Shakespear existed when he did, the odds of such a great writer existing in Elizabethan times is 100%.
Plenty of things that were astronomically unlikely to have happened have happened.
That's an interesting question. I think the original criticism of Shakespeare being the best discarded novelty and trailblazing, but if we added those items in, when would we expect to see the first best playwriter?
Not necessarily the best, and not necessarily the first, but the first that would be a contender for best ever. I think we would have a tough time saying Elizabethan England, but I wouldn't be surprised if we did narrow it down to a 200 year period in Northern Europe, with German, French, and English being top contenders.
Populations were growing very quickly and education was greatly expanded, meaning that the number of potentials was growing extremely quickly compared to previous generations. That it would happen sooner in that process makes sense if we value originality/novelty/low hanging fruit over substance, which I think is accurate. So a naive estimate might put the number around 1600AD, with a pretty wide range of maybe 100 years on either side, as a likely contender for best ever even with no prior knowledge that such a person existed.
Most of the human population who ever worked in field X are living today. Not for every X, but for example for X=physics or X = playwrights.
If you restrict to dead people, most professional playwrights who wrote in English (because the discussion won't consider Goethe and Chekhov, let alone all the great Chinese writers) have been male and white, so of course you would expect the best one to be male and white.
All excellent points, and I broadly agree. Two authors being suggested for greatest alive in 2024 are Stephen King and Don DeLillo. They couldn't be more different, and there's a distinct argument that the latter exemplifies your archetype of the "pioneering but bad" art of today.
I read Shakespeare's greatness in the context of the time and place he lived in. It was a moment ripe for the creation of a new language, the public were open to new and daring phrases.
It seems reasonable to me that there's a diminishing return to the size of population as far as culture goes, more a matter of concentration than scale. I notice the generation before me had a lively artistic life at my age (late twenties), while I can't economically survive in the inner city that was a fringe in their day. Now those friends are out on the far periphery and struggle just to get together for a jam.
So while it's still odd that Shakespeare stands so far above nearly any playwright you can name, it's plausible if you suppose that great minds emerge from great circumstances, and no amount of scale is to the better without equal forces of concentration for the best, freedom in their collaboration, and an audience willing and able to receive and support them.
I personally think the decline in personal patronage is to blame, along with population centres too large for effective networking.
I just tried with Firefly and couldn't. The word Pikachu was blocked from the prompt.
I was able to get something vaguely reminiscent of Pikachu but not recognizably the same character with the prompt "Cute yellow mouse monster with electricity powers" and "doodle drawing" selected under the effects settings.
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.
Trump lost the debate hard, which is why he was complaining about moderator bias the days after because he couldn't answer the super hard questions they asked him like "Will you support Ukraine?" or "Will you veto a federal abortion ban?"
You also say further down "Harris seldom responded to the question at hand, seeming to speak only statements prepared ahead of time" - which is a weird criticism to make when Trump said he had "concepts of a plan" with respect to healthcare and that it wasn't his responsibility to have one prepared because he's not currently President, or when he spent most of his time for a question ranting about his crowd sizes in response to provocation from Kamala. There was not a single question Kamala didn't answer, and she at least passed the sniff test for understanding how government works and what her responsibility to Americans is as a Presidential candidate.
Trump's greatest achievement was lying about Haitians eating cats and dogs in Springfield, which was pretty funny, but totally unbecoming of anybody running for President to spend his time repeating stupid lies off social media rather than coming up with a healthcare or foreign policy or abortion plan. It seems like he not only avoided the Republican debates but also refused to even watch them to at least get a feel of what policy members his own party members wanted, let alone the American public.
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
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.
You should get your vision checked if your objective glance tells you there's no clear winner. One person was afraid to make eye contact with the other one, one person was easily goaded, one person ranted about completely false bullshit that consists of tropes that have been discredited for years. It wasn't Harris.
(Oh, and one person is afraid to do a second debate. That's not "no clear winner" territory.)
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.
Emphasizing OBJECTIVE doesn't make it so. You're coming at it with an anti-Harris perspective, just like you were before the debate when you made baseless claims that she'd drop out of it because she was the weaker candidate. Now that she's no longer done so, you've found a new framing of events that fits your worldview even though it's still divorced from reality.
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.
I am not attacking your objectivity because you have none to attack. You're a Trump fanatic through and through and you ought to be honest if not to us than to yourself by admitting as much.
> 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.
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?).
Why do you assume the two groups are mutually exclusive? Autism is comorbid to schizophrenia and a whole bunch of other mental illnesses. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditions_comorbid_to_autism
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
I'm deeply skeptical that people who fit the mold of rationalist to a T will consistently identify themselves as such. Rationalism is bound to attract an overabundance of people who shy away from being labeled as an "ist" whenever possible.
You've all surely met people who vote Republican (or Democrat) without fail but insist they are independents, not Republicans. That's a good analogy for I think what's happening in the ACX polls where readers get asked about their rationalist status. (If I'm misremembering these polls and mischaracterizing them, please disregard this comment entirely. Oops)
I'm not accusing anyone of being dishonest or sneaky. If your inner voice says "I'm not a rationalist," go ahead and speak your truth. I'm more calling onto question the limits of polling. Can we stop throwing around questionable ACX poll results and saying "There are barely any rationalists here!"
Anecdata: I don't see a lot of Less Wrong rationalists posting on these threads. Instead, I see a lot of classical rationalists (in the tradition of Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza) who think they can determine Truth through reason alone. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Less Wrong rationalists seem to embrace their own brand of Bayesian Empiricism. But I don't see much empirical thinking in the discussions on these threads. In fact, I'm not sure why Scott gave the Less Wrong crowd the moniker "rationalist" because it's confusing from a philosophical standpoint. Or did EY or somebody else mislabel the Less Wrong crowd?
Full disclosure: I am not a rationalist of either the Less Wrong type or the classical rationalist type. I am a mystic. But mystics have used rationalism and empiricism (even though didn't use these terms) as tools to reach their experiential a-rational goals at least since the Axial Age.
I see Bayesian arguments, and references to Bayesianism, approximately 4700 times more here than on any other forum I've seen. Of course, I have not yet visited Less Wrong, because my system might not be able to handle a shot of pure rationalism. I might drop dead.
(Yes, it's annoying there are two separate rationalisms. It sucks, it's confusing, but here we are)
the separation of different type of rationalism is in people's minds. It's not a feature of the processes that lead to good decisions. I think a big part of the grouping is about aesthetics and alliances and not about Bayesianism or other empirical or systematical ways of decisionmaking.
ACX is rationalist-leaning (whatever questionable poll results you wanna throw at me) so in the interests of “when in Rome,” I dom’t spend my time here trying to debunk rationalism. But I could write a whole book about my problems with rationalism and utilitarianism. They're not for me.
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.)
What do you mean, senile? Do you think he actually believes that? He didn't even start that rumor himself.
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
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.
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.
Considering that the populace is full of negativity and anger, that's probably not a bad thing. I mean, have you seen how angry Hitler was in his speeches? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ3N_2r6R-o If he is able to successfully channel the people's rage, pain, resentment, hatred... oh, what a wonderful sight it will be.
Honestly, I'm still amazed at how much sheer bullshit he can string together, non-stop, for minutes on end. A deluge of words that don't mean anything together, but individually they have symbolism, power. It's like he accidentally managed to optimize his speech to appeal to instinct.
And look at Harris, smiling like an idiot as Trump goes on his tirades. She is not taking the man seriously. And that's the root of the problem: the liberals take everything for granted. Their institutions, their careers, their lives. As if God has entitled them to everything they have. It will be their undoing.
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
Following the o1 model release I had it try solving the crossword, this time providing the length of the word and any known letters from previous answers. https://chatgpt.com/share/66e46bb5-e268-8005-83be-4664c96d9863
It performed almost perfectly. Every response it provided followed the provided restrictions and was the correct answer. It was able to solve several ("deathprice", "anger") that GPT-4 never successfully answered.
The only oddity was that sometimes it would think and not provide a response. When looking at the chain of thought it would usually have the word in there, but I re-prompted in those cases to make it output the answer.
Response times were highly variable. Some questions took 10+ seconds despite seeming straightforward, others were mostly instant.
I ran out of tokens before it could answer the final 2 questions but based on its prior performance I doubt it would have struggled with those. Very much regretting doing this experiment given that my o1 tokens apparently won't refresh for an entire week. (I did use some on unrelated tasks since getting access yesterday.)
OpenAI, should you read this: I would glaaaaaaadly pay 5x the fee ($100 a month) for a significantly higher cap on o1 usage. Or more, make an offer. Hitting the o1 cap feels the same as when GPT-4 came out and being forced to downgrade to 3. It would also be nice to know when someone is approaching the cap and how long it'll be in effect.
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
Granted I’ve only played with it a bit for a day in the chat interface, but not surprising. People complaining that it’s “just” the intelligence of 4 with a bolted on internal echo chamber and other tools (although it probably is more than that) or that it turns a single prompt internally into a few shot with validation are missing the point.
It feels like a significant step change in terms of the types of work it can complete at a given level of effort. I am legitimately bummed having to wait a week for the cap to reset. I expected I’d hit the cap today. I assumed it would lift after a day or two. Not a week, OpenAI. Come on you super geniuses, make this more generally available. Chop chop.
Bummed to the point that I’ll probably make a new account to get around it rather than wait, depending on how o1-mini goes for some things I’d planned to work on this weekend.
Looking through its CoT minimal outputs is interesting. It seems to be interacting with some sort of assistant persona itself when working through requests. And even referencing crossword clues about things being outside human control seemed to trigger extra consideration of safety. Pure anecdotal guessing though.
Worth adding - when looking through its reasoning, it has a tendency to get stuck on previous clues, especially the one "deathprice" that took the longest to answer, leading to longer chain of thought reasoning as it worked through and discarded answers specifically related to it.
I assume that's because its context is dominated with internal CoT text related to that clue. It would have probably been more efficient from a token standpoint to have a separate chat per question. Easier via API but I'm not a money bag BigCorp who would have o1 API access yet.
I tried the same exercise with GPT-4 and had generally good results by simply prompting it with the crossword clue, not including the length or other information in most of the cases. It got the majority on the first try and was able to guess correctly after I told it to try again and provided the length and / or a known letter in several cases. There were some that it never got correct. It did best when dealing with specific questions that could have only one correct answer and worse with more general ones.
You are right that it was terrible at matching explicit length restrictions though.
https://chatgpt.com/share/86b55d38-faa6-424f-9372-0ac4562048ed
(Although this has the standard disclaimer about possible personalized data at the top, I didn't tweak it behind the scenes and none of my previous chats have involved Beowulf, crosswords, or Anglo-Saxon poetry, so there should be no user relevant memories involved.)
I'll have to try to complete this. It's been a long time since I read my namesake's epic.
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."
Honestly, why are we even bothering to discuss policy ahead of the election? We all know this election isn't about economic policy. It's about deciding the future of this country: to let the liberal hegemony persist, or to burn everything to the ground. The populace does not give a damn about the specifics of how the economy functions.
Her sudden switch to appealing to moderates isn't going to convince anyone. She can't escape the fact that she's a colored woman. Do they really think such a person is electable in this country, in this cultural climate? Her policies, her competence, her demeanor, none of that matters. It's about what electing her would represent: complete cultural dominance of the left. The right will not let that happen.
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
How else are you going to build something new?
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.
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.
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.
because most people prefer beauty. and restaurants are not going to change their hiring policy based on what you want. kind of a low iq question.
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.
It’s important to remember that you could just be engaging with a troll. That’s how I interpreted the first comment in this thread. I truly doubt it was made sincerely.
It’s the internet after all. Don’t engage with the patently preposterous
Simply scroll on.
Edit:
Also see the somewhat specialized form of trolling know as sea lioning.
I suspect the OP of engaging in one of its variants.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
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?
Because of social preassure.
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?
Interesting LessWrong post about this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/E6dDvRCr8eeTDJrAG/compartmentalizing-effective-altruism-and-abortion
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.
This reads like a parody.
> checks profile
> communist
... every time
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.
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."
Where do you think that link says that?
> Rate of victimization, by type of crime and location of residence, 2022
> Total violent crime
> Urban 33.4
> Suburban 23.9
> Rural 15.4
Let's look at the highest murder rate cities:
> The Democratic Party has dominated St. Louis city politics for decades
> Baltimore has been a Democratic stronghold for over 150 years, with Democrats dominating every level of government
> Detroit's last mayor from the Republican Party was Louis Miriani, who served from 1957 to 1962. The city in recent years has been a stronghold for the Democratic Party, with around 94% of votes in the city going to Joe Biden
> In the twenty-first century, [Shelby County] has become reliably Democratic, due mainly to the influence of Memphis
> United States presidential election results for Orleans Parish, Louisiana. Democratic: 83.15%
Should I go on?
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.
Perhaps you have no way of knowing their thinking on this but how were they planning on remotely controlling the moths?
This organic military equipment idea reminds me of the aborted B.F. Skinner pigeon guided bomb project.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon
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”
Wow, that’s news to me!
Here’s the (unfortunately paywalled) Science mag piece on the subject: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03801-0
This looks incredible. I might have access to this through my old university. They have some great alumni benefits.
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
Thanks!
No, I hadn’t seen the pigeon subreddit so thank again.
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.
First, just as an FYI: You mean wave. "Waive" is a verb in English which is used in contexts like "he waived his right to remain silent" meaning something like "gave up" or "chose not to use".
As for your questions: in some interpretations of quantum mechanics, the wave is spread out over an area until it collapses, with peaks representing particularly likely places for the particle to be. In others, the "wave" is only a mental construct we humans use to explain the spookiness of quantum mechanics and it's not technically anywhere.
Being measured is NOT the same as someone seeing you. In this case, measurement is any kind of interaction which requires that we know where the particle is - it could be the fancy equipment used by a quantum researcher or it could just be a bunch of other particles with well-defined locations passing through the area in a way that requires the first particle react to one of them somewhere. As such, yes, being measured by a machine is identical to being measured by a person.
Measurements are affected by observation, so while two observers measuring at the exact same moment will get the same result, two observers measuring at different times can get different ones, the latter affected by the former.
As for the last question, it again depends on how everything works. This isn't a solved part of QM. Many worlds people argue that the wave permeates a fifth dimension and that each solution for it comes true in one reality, so causation is possible because moving through time is to some degree moving from one wave solution to a subsequent one, even if the measurements never happen. Others who say that the waves are just the mental models we use to understand things would say that the particles are always somewhere, and that once a measurement figures out where causation flows naturally from that, as again any and all particle interactions ARE measurements.
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.
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.
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
Why would it start magically going back up? Industrialization can only happen once.
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.
----
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 checked his Wikipedia page. Poor guy died of a heart attack at 34. Had shoveled some snow and run for a train. Fatal heart attack.
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.
I’ve been reading a lot of Phillip K Dick lately. He had something closer to a typical lifespan, reaching the age of 58, but died 4 months short of the release of Blade Runner.
It’s well known that he took too much medication, that a lot of his master of paranoia writing was under the influence of amphetamines. His bio shows experiences with religious visions that led him to journal writings that were compiled after his death into The Exegesis of Phillip K Dick. About 944 not very well edited pages.
It seems like one of those genius on the edge of madness cases exacerbated by heavy drug use.
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.
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!
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
Why is the appeal to nature fallacy so common?
the lesson of Multiarmed-Bandit is that the optimal level of risk is impossible to know a priori. It depends on the environment, and then you simply let the Blind Idiot God take the wheel. So I'd expect conservative dispositions to always be present in a population, at least to some extent.
It's not always a fallacy.
it is in fact always a fallacy
what mark means is that "logical fallacies" are often heuristics that are frequently useful irl, despite lacking the iron-clad certainty of a veridical deduction.
I know what he means but he should have phrased it differently.
One reason may be we tend to give one sided support to positions. If we think a plan of action has more benefits, we might also think it has less risks, is easier, etc. (Affect heuristic). It's possible that for some people, "nature" has positive affect, therefore it becomes a soldier in arguments.
I forgot to say: sometimes people try to alter nature and it burns them horribly, and they get very philosophic about their reluctance to ever try. Even though literally all their food comes from agriculture, which is clearly "improving nature".
Kelsey below mentioned how people polarize their views when having to make a tough choice, possibly as a way to persuade themselves that they were right. "Not only was I justified in choosing as I did, but it is fundamental to the universe that my choice was correct". So to take an extreme example, someone who doesn't like, say, dumping raw sewage in a river, might adopt a philosophy that says that all human interference with nature is bad, and we should voluntarily go extinct.
Nature is typically right, but not always. I think there's some strong evolutionary adaptation and lindy effect going on, where when one does something unnatural it's breaking away from that symbiosis hardened over millenia. If you ask what are the things that make someone most healthy, it's going to be naturalistic like 2000 years ago: physical activity, vegetables, sex, etc. It's not gaming on discord and the local McDonalds. Much more evidence is required to tip the scales away from the likely default.
It's like a start up looking for funding. You can make a good case and the funder might recognize the fundamentals and invest in you, but most of the time they want proof that it actually works so they want to see you making money.
Saying that a diet of mostly brown rice works has to be true, because so many people in history lived on that diet. Saying that a diet of refined synthetic chemicals works may not be true, even if the chemistry looks right on paper. People making this argument aren't necessarily saying that brown rice is great, and likely acknowledge people on such a diet being small and maybe look at life expectancy.
> Saying that a diet of mostly brown rice works has to be true, because so many people in history lived on that diet.
You mean white rice. That's a historically common diet, for prisoners, and it left obvious signs of health problems in their skeletons.
Brown rice is not a historically common food.
I may be wrong, but I watched a program many years ago that determined that peasants in Japan were actually healthier than the richer people because they ate brown rice instead of white. The white rice having been stripped of some nutrients in the process.
Either way, we know that people can live on a diet that is heavily rice, even before we knew anything about the nutrients involved.
That's what I heard as well. It takes a lot of work to turn brown rice into white rice, but it tastes better, so of course rich people are going to eat it.
Compare this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMZPbqHwRJM
which notes that the output of a traditional hand-pounding rice production process is white rice. It would be more work to make brown rice than it is to make white rice. This is not a problem, for peasants, because peasants have a lot to eat that isn't rice. It's a problem for people who aren't providing their own diet, most notably criminals and soldiers.
The view is very common today that peasants were stuck eating nothing but a staple grain, or perhaps potatoes. But this is just a myth.
Note also that the nutritional disease associated with overconsumption of white rice is beriberi, whereas the nutritional disease associated with being rich is gout. As you might predict from literally any premodern literature on food preferences, gout is caused by overconsumption of meat.
It seems like a Schelling point. Also, nature works, at least to some extent. Something other than nature (as a way of life, not a metaphysical claim) could just fail badly.
The parenthetical is a desperate attempt to fend off "but everything that exists is natural".
To take a wild silly stab at it: If existence is better than non-existence, then things that exist are inherently better than things that do not exist, so the fact that something exists, and has stably existed for a while, is evidence that the thing is good?
Alternatively, there's the view that while the "natural" may not be "perfect", it is at least "good enough" and there's no point changing it or condemning it.
This theory is called 'lindy' among people who hold it to be true or useful. Google might help you explore it more.
Some examples: walking is Lindy. Sitting on the floor is Lindy. Wine and bread are Lindy.
And if God is the greatest entity of all, he must exist because non-existence is a flaw.
I think that argument took "begging the question" to a new level. If I imagine the greatest entity possible, then yes, this would involve me imagining an entity that exists, but it's *still in my imagination.* It hasn't crawled its way out of my brain like the girl from "The Ring".
I still find it hard to believe that people took that argument seriously.
<I still find it hard to believe that people took that argument seriously.
Yeah, I felt that way too when I first heard it. It seemed like absolutely naked sophistry. But I think it has some appeal because it resonates with the structure of people's instinctive sense that there is somebody big in charge. That being has been there in their imagination since before they ever had any religious teaching. And then if they are exposed to any religion, even a dilute version of one, they have a name for the being, and a bit of clothing to dress him in.
So for many people god long ago crawled out of their brain into the universe. If somebody says maybe he does not exist, they experience that as an attempt to deny what god is like: along with being all knowing, all powerful, all that stuff, he also is *real.* Existing is just another of his impressive traits.
I think this is giving too much credit to logic behind it instead of plain old demands for people to conform. Rarely do you see someone appealing to nature curious about the exact culture or history of innovation X (eating brown rice, having a nuclear family, socially accepting homosexuality), and rather thinking up specific yay moments or tats reasons for why the thing they're advocating for is good. If I am deeply concerned about what works being what exists, I would want to know if this kind of thing has stopped existing in the past! Yet people will be content essentially just saying "This worked at least once" and then move on, implying this is mostly a status based reflex, rather than something well reasoned.
I was being a bit silly there, extrapolating from some justifications to an absurd conclusion.
Mostly I think it's just an old and popular meme, and when people need to rationalize something to themselves, they pick from the memes that are popular in the social group that they want to be part of.
You say this but unfortunately I patterned matched to other just world fallacies! Whoops.
There was another commentator who appeared to believe this unironically you see.
Does anyone live in the rhein main area germany and wants to hang out?
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.
> Nice Guys are hated because they are a threat and they're trying to take something from you
Why are they uniquely a threat compared to other men, and what are they trying to take that other men are not?
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.
> you don't know what they might be going to do nex
Are you trying to imply that they "might be violent", which would supposedly repel women? Do you happen to be aware of the statistics around violent crime and its effect on number of sexual partners and fertility?
> They're trying to take (right now) your time and your energy and (hopefully soon) your companionship and your body
Surely other men do this too, no?
> none of those are things you want to give
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.
> A competent guy on the other hand is either clearly interested
Hold on - you just said that the thing nice guys do wrong is that they want to take your time and energy and companionship and body. But now non-nice guys are actively getting credit for doing that? So it's just about 'being clear about it'? Is there any evidence that nice guys who openly confess their love are considered more acceptable by females?
> 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
You're contradicting yourself again - you just said being clear and open was the critical virtue, but now it's about being subtle and not confessing. What was bad for nice guys is now good for non-nice guys. It's starting to sound like females just simply hate nice guys.
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism
Anyway, yes, obviously you can play the game and force yourself to not be a nice guy. It's quite obvious that a strategy of being nice is unsuccessful across nearly every dimension of life. But that strategic decision is separate from the original topic, which is asking *why* females hate nice guys.
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.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/
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!
being dangerous is an asset, because a capacity to harm is also a capacity to protect (e.g. from other strange men).
There's a line somewhere in LOTR where Bilbo mentions that Gandalf isn't dangerous. And Ganfdalf says something to the effect of "you numbskull, of course I'm dangerous!"
It's not a question of trust, it's a question of virtue.
Who would you trust more not to hurt you, a peer, or a corpse?
I think a certain amount of risk-taking is necessary to create a society of responsible adults.
You know, the answer is not obvious. I've been practicing MMA for some time, and find the crowd to be quite non-violent, maybe because once you learn how to fight you're less likely to need to prove it? Domestic abusers, for that matter, don't need to know how to throw a proper hook or a roundhouse kick to do what they do.
When I did Tae Kwon Do, first rule of fight club was "run the fuck away". second rule of fight club was "run the fuck away".
pretty sure this attitude is universal in martial arts, these days.
Yep, any self-defense instructor who doesn't teach this as the first and most powerful self-defense technique is full of it. MMA can be different because it's actually a competition sport so there isn't a strong emphasis on the self-defense aspects.
Well I think your premise is wrong.
> 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.
I think there probably is a fair amount of "status game" overlap in your simplified schema, though. This shouldn't be surprising, because most socially mediated games are status games, and these games are deeply entwined in our brains, motivations, and social lives, and have been from the time before we were human.
I just reread Will Storr's The Status Game, and in it he elucidates 7 common status rules of hunter gatherer societies, so essentially what's been directly wired in over 200k years or so:
“One survey of sixty premodern societies uncovered seven common rules of play that are thought to be universal: help your family; help your group; return favors; be brave; defer to superiors; divide resources fairly; respect others’ property.”
The one that "be strong" falls down on is "be brave," and the ones that "be kind" falls down on is nearly all the others except the libertarian ideal of respecting property.
The nerds and other people you're calling out in particular are probably most bad at being brave (nerds, teachers, and feminists), deferring to superiors (nerds, although feminists and teachers do this one), and if selfish, dividing resources fairly (nerds, feminists), and any deficits in theses areas ping the radars of 200ky-embedded mental expectations in those nearby.
> The one that "be strong" falls down on is "be brave," and the ones that "be kind" falls down on is nearly all the others except the libertarian ideal of respecting property.
Could you go into this a bit more? I don't quite follow.
While a bit ironic given the topic and given the position you're taking, I still feel like asking... do you have any studies or statistical data backing up your assertions here?
Ok, this is an interesting point. It makes some sense.
That being said, I think you might be overstating how violent/criminal normies are.
> "You could also look at property values around university campuses and such"
I would expect this to reflect the value of renting property to students every year or staff wanting to live near work far more than any preference for nerdiness.
I would even say to specifically look at Silicon Valley or other places tech companies are headquartered.
The seasons of American retail, according to the Seasonal aisle of a supermarket I used to live by.
Valentine's Day/Superbowl
Easter
Independence Day
Back to School
Halloween
Thanksgiving
Christmas/New Year
This is from memory. I may have missed one or two. But they had this stuff down to a science. The day after Halloween, all the Halloween stuff was gone, replaced by Thanksgiving stuff.
Were Cinquo de Mayo or St Patrick's Day represented? Not sure.
Dads & Grads is a retail season too but maybe not in supermarkets, not enough dad-centric food items perhaps.
Is Pumpkin Spice a season?
Christmas retailing is starting now in August in some places, so there's a lot of overlap in these "seasons". And after New Year we have things like "new year's resolutions that can last one to eight weeks", tax preparation season, and some things where you sell stuff like barbecue merchandise, or crops that actually do have something of a season.
> Christmas retailing is starting now in August in some places
Looks like the war on Christmas has been an abysmal failure.
It depends on how you look at it. I don't consider it the Christmas season until after Thanksgiving, and Christmas stuff earlier is a little irritating, more irritating the earlier. Early Christmas merchandising has nothing really to do with Christmas.
And no, I'm not religious.
I'm trying to think of creative ways you could clandestinely filter people by intelligence.
This is following a conversation where it was suggested that one useful function universities once provided was to promote assortative mating by IQ.
But eugenics is a hard sell and at least in Britain it's not the done thing to announce your mating-related intentions explicitly.
So what wacky institutions/traditions/cultural practises could one come up with to indirectly achieve the same effect?
Hobbies that require cleverness: Tang dynasty poetry, geocaching, DIY vehicles?
Leetcode
I just had a thought yesterday that common superstitions might be a filter for intelligence. "If a man's big toe is longer than all other of his toes, he will outlive his wife." Supposedly a traditional chinese saying. Imagine repeating this saying in your social circle and just observing peoples reactions:
1. The devout Believer = stupid
2. The Ignorant or Undecided, with maybe some doubts in either direction = "normie"
3. Ironic or sarcastic reaction = intelligent.
This is just a quick and dirty analysis. Maybe you can add some layers and detect other dimensions too. For example, depending on how people react you could also test their kindness.
"Ironic or sarcastic reaction = intelligent."
Until somebody does a study, finds toe length is correlated to testosterone, and if your big toe is longer than your second toe, that means less testosterone, which means less testosterone-related diseases, giving life expectancy on a par with women and so he may indeed outlive his wife 😁
https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2011-14971-003.html
"AN EXPLORATORY STUDY OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SECOND TOE LENGTH AND ANDROGEN-LINKED BEHAVIORS
...Of the present hypotheses, some did receive support. There was an association between left-handedness and having a longer second toe for both men and women. As this trait has been connected with androgenization (Geschwind & Galaburda, 1985) and with a lower 2D:4D (Manning, Trivers, Thornhill, & Singh, 2000; Voracek, et al., 2006), this is evidence for a relationship between second toe length and androgenization.
Other results were mixed. There was a relationship between having a longer second toe and self-ratings of competitiveness in women as indicated by total COI score and the sub-scores that demonstrate a competitive and a winning orientation. In contrast, there were no such relationships found for men. Competitiveness is a trait associated with androgenization and with a masculinized 2D:4D (Manning & Taylor, 2001), and therefore a link between this trait and a longer second toe may be indicative of second-toe androgenization.
For women, analyses also revealed a relationship between having a longer toe compared to one’s other toes and self-ratings of physical aggression as indicated by this subscore on the BPAQ-SF. This was not found for men. The finding of a relationship between purportedly androgenized second toe morphology and some androgenized behaviors/traits for women but not for men is not entirely surprising, as Fink, Manning, and Neave (2004) and others have shown significant associations between digit lengths and androgenized behaviors for females and not males. Fink et al. (2004) explain this as resulting from males generally possessing a more competitive and aggressive personality type. Therefore, a greater within-sex variation in prenatal androgen exposure and circulating androgens is likely seen in females, thereby increasing the effectiveness of statistical comparisons. Further, it is suggested that females have a greater sensitivity to testosterone and may therefore have a lower threshold of response to the hormone (Bancroft, 2002); this may explain the behavioral correlates witnessed in the present study."
(I swear, I had no idea such a study existed before I decided to look it up on the off-chance that hey, maybe somebody has done that, wouldn't that be funny?)
EDIT: Your test question reminds me of the IQ Bell Curve Meme, so combining that with the Toe Study (if you'll forgive me):
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/iq-bell-curve-midwit
"A version of the meme featuring three different Wojaks arrayed on an IQ Bell Curve chart gained increasing popularity in the early 2020s. At the lowest IQ level is a variant of Brainlet, in the middle of the curve is a Midwit crying Wojak and at the top end is a monk-like Wojak wearing a cloak. In this version, the Monk Wojak and the Brainlet Wojak agree with one another while the Midwit Wojak offers an unnecessarily complicated analysis."
On left (idiots/devout Believer): "If a man's big toe is longer than all of his other toes, he will outlive his wife"
Middle of curve (normie) "Noooo! That's just a dumb superstition!"
Right of curve (intelligent): "If a man's big toe is longer than all of his other toes, he will outlive his wife"
Literal LOL.
This is hilarious! To honor your research into this, I created the meme:
https://ibb.co/Y2PFN1Y
Greek toe or Morton’s toe considered an idealized form in Greek sculpture. The aesthetic standards persisted the Roman and Renaissance period. It appears in neoclassical works as well. The Statue of Liberty displays Greek toe.
My second toe is a bit longer than my great toe but I have to look pretty carefully to notice at
Regarding association with testosterone levels, mmmh, I’m not particularly furry but my DNA profile shows that a lot of my ancestors came from the Eurasian steppe and I have vaguely Asian features so I prefer to think that’s because of my ferocious Horse People forebears.
Congratulations! You passed the filter with ease!
I think a lot of that happens in cultures naturally. Find some niches which are hard to enjoy without high intelligence, to deter people from joining for the signaling value. Have workplaces where smart people of different genders can meet each other. Whatever the Ashkenazi did.
Is this not just how most peoples lives are setup? If you are intelligent you find an appropriate white collar job for your personality and intelligence and well primarily be exposed to similar people then you go to events and functions that suit your level of intelligence. Going to the jazz festival is going to expose you to a different band of intelligence and personality than going to a cheap nightclub.
Smart people looking for smart partners is not considered eugenics. It's pretty common to want to be with someone intelligent.
You big old racist you.
But yes, our intuitions are badly designed on this. It's perfectly acceptable for a single individual to want a smart partner. I suspect there would be a lot more pushback ("elitism", "discrimination", etc) for an institution who wants only smart members. Grammar schools in my country are under constant fire; imo the only reason the unis escape this is because they're not for smart people any more.
Drop a Rick and Morty in-joke and see if they chuckle.
...seriously though, inside references are how you do it.
bridge clubs & similar
I think the secret sauce is the conversation. The activity may filter out people below a threshold, but it's the ability to engage in intelligent conversation that really allows people to shine, and activities like card games provide an easy opening. (Compare to the person who plays well and usually wins, but never says much.)
It's a pity that some of us aren't very good at generating speech on the fly. :-( Maybe there's something that allows for other forms of spontaneous creative expression?
If you're decent at bridge, though, you can also judge how good somebody else's bridge is. There's competent, there's clever, & there's brilliant.
Absolutely! And there's the layer of trying to win while only seeming like you care about winning in the precisely socially acceptable amount. Plus there's the randomization factor, which on the surface can disguise who's doing well over the short term, but even without score-keeping, it's possible to notice that someone played a bad hand well, or a good hand sub-optimally...
Perhaps we need an intellectually sophisticated TTRPG, or something similar.
Nice idea. But how do you make it equally attractive to both sexes? The more autistic it is, the smarter the guys you get, the fewer girls are interested in playing.
If I may lean on stereotype for a moment, guys wanna fight and gals wanna scheme. Most RPGs lean way toward the fight side of the spectrum, with robust rules for combat and just some brief rules for social interactions. Try for a game system that equalizes that. And for a setting, maybe send The Three Musketeers careening into the Jane Austen novels.
I like this line of thinking. How do we allow for scheming in a game? Naively my mind just goes to encouraging people to make and break alliances, but there's probably much more to it than that.
Maplestory used to have a party quest where you and 4 other people have to stand on the correct set of 5 boxes out of a total of 9, which is determined solely through trial and error.
There were actually two large benefits to this: one, stupid people couldn't do it and got filtered out of the pool of people you might meet, and two, there was a lot of downtime during this process where you'd just chat with the rest of the group.
Would you like an invitation to my gaming/dating/sleeping-around club, "Chess Game and Chill"?
I think this is the best suggestion yet.
I once read about the Betrayer's Banquet - a long thin table where multiple small courses are served, where the quality deteriorates as you travel down the table - fois gras and caviar at the top end, a cold chicken's foot in a bowl at the bottom. After every course you play Prisoner's Dilemma with the person opposite to determine who moves up or down the table for the next course.
Now I'm thinking how could you do something similar with sex, and how much of a car crash would it be.
> So what wacky institutions/traditions/cultural practises could one come up with to indirectly achieve the same effect?
If it's just "assortative mating" you're after, I thought the evidence was that it was getting increasingly stronger? There's a study on 47k parent pairs showing genetic evidence of stronger assortative mating, where 9 out of 16 traits were strongly selected, including educational attainment. (Sunde, Eftedal 2024).
I think people are mostly figuring it out - "intelligence" is one of the most sought-after traits by both genders when pairing. I mean, generally undergrads date undergrads, grad students date grad students, and so on, right? Even if undergrad is becoming diluted as a macro signal, the higher ranks aren't, and any individual looking for intelligence in a partner can still evaluate via conversation and whatever.
But taking your question as posed, it's incredibly easy to find clusters of high-IQ men - just look here in the comments section, or in tech, or in any physics lab, or in finance, or in board game groups, or many other places. If women really want to find them, it's pretty easy, because pretty much all those things are 70-90% male and they can join and enjoy that favorable ratio.
I think the real question is - where do high IQ women cluster? What organizations or groups or practices are they a part of, outside of academia and research?
> where do high IQ women cluster?
Actually, yes, that is a very very good question.
Men very naturally stratify and cluster themselves by intelligence, and they're strongly incentivised to demonstrate it when they have it. So it's really really easy to see.
Girls are very much more conform-and-get-along with each other. I would naively expect they'd still self-sort into friendship groups of similar IQ - but those groups would be social groups, not organised around a central goal or function like men would do.
Say you're a high IQ man. And say you're too old to have children, or otherwise don't plan to have children. Is having a matching high IQ woman partner or wife really a big value--compared to say, other personality traits? Asking for a friend.
I think one should look to Jack Spratt and his wife for advice here.
If you're going to spend the rest of your life together, and grow old together, and experience mental decline together, I think it helps if you can see each other as roughly an intellectual peer? Don't end up like Mr. Bennet!
Mr. Bennet was really a terrible father. I know Mrs. Bennet was flighty and scatty and gossipy and obsessed with finding husbands for her daughters, but he pretty much abandoned the responsibility to her. He spoiled Lizzie because she was smart and agreed with his opinions, so she was his favourite. For all his 'education' of her, she isn't trained in anything that will help her to earn a living when the money from the estate goes. She might be able to get a position as a governess or as a paid companion to a wealthy widow, but her father is no help at all in planning a future for her.
But the minute he dies, his wife and children are out the door with no support other than what remains of Mrs. Bennet's dowry, since the estate is entailed. They don't have independent wealth, they don't have wealthy relatives who will help them out. If she doesn't get her two eldest daughters married off to suitable men, who will be able to step in and help support the younger girls, then the family is stuck when the inevitable happens and he dies.
And what does Mr. Bennet do? Retreat to his library, be insulting about his wife to Lizzie, and teach her to have contempt for her mother, who is the only one of the two parents doing *something* to hold the family together.
Very much indeed, don't end up like Mr. Bennet!
> Is having a matching high IQ woman partner or wife really a big value--compared to say, other personality traits?
Isn't this purely a matter of personal taste?
I imagine it varies widely, depending on how much you value "the life of the mind" at the hourly basis, how much intellectual stimulation you already get from your friend group and job, how important said "personality traits" are to you in your daily life and long-term picture, and much else.
And even if you can guess based on what you know of yourself, you can still be surprised by an "actuality" either way.
I think at the end of it all, the best you can do is try it either way and see.
Segregating old money, new money, and the poor.
How do you expect to segregate old money and new money?
They do it themselves, that's the beauty of it.
If you have to ask, darling, you'll never know.
Possibly, but my impression is that when old money is on the way down (likely to happen for various reasons), it marries new money.
Sometimes. And sometimes the grandsons of the man who made the money invest the family fortune in some damnfool thing and watch it all melt away.
Meet Jessica, the average American. She is 38, has a couple years of post-secondary education, works in health care or public education, is Christian but only goes to church a couple of times per year, and has a positive opinion of Taylor Swift.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEDXVGHW4Gg
Interesting
I enjoy playing a game while taking a break from work, but I don't know what to play at the moment. I used to play Hearthstone (Battlegrounds) and Legends of Runeterra (Path of Champions), but it doesn't need to be a card game.
Noita
Rimworld
Factorio
(Less casual:
Dwarf Fortress. Rimworld is ~Dwarf Fortress Light
Kerbal Space Program
Some would argue that Factorio hardly could be described as "Casual", and they'd be right, but it does lend itself to a casual, on-off playstyle)
Dawncaster
Balatro! If you missed it, it’s slay the spire joker poker
Super Auto Pets probably works; it's basically a deck-builder with Hearthstone Arena goals, ten wins before three losses.
I'd recommend Slay the Spire and Monster Train, but to play during a break you'd probably have to save partway through a run. Same with Brotato.
Thanks, Super Auto Pets is fun!
I've played Slay the Spire and Monster Train already. :)
I've never been part of the "school is child prison" camp. School was OK for me - I was liked by teachers but not very popular, though with a few good friends.
But this year for the first time I'm trying to put my child (~3 yo) in daycare, and the adjustment process just seems savage. Why would we create attachment to new figures by leaving the child crying with them without help from his parents, to make him understand they can provide consolation? It's not the way I created his attachment to his grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins. It's not the way I imagine attachment happened in the ancestral environment, with other relatives. I know it won't scar him for life, or anything, but why would we do it?
And I get that people have constraints, and need to get back to work, and that's fine. But why deny that this is the reason and turn it into an ideology? Like it builds ability or something. We don't think that a child getting a too-large bunch of difficult math/gym exercises thrown at him right as he starts daycare/kindergarten/school so he cries but eventually overcomes them builds his resilience, then why the same with separation from parents?
Does your daycare not allow the parent to stick around for a while on the first day?
It does, for a few days. But then implicit pressure starts. And a few days, let alone one, is not enough.
Depends on the kid, I guess. Sorry your kid is having a tough time adjusting.
I think we create this narrative because as parents we don’t want to feel like we are doing a practical job, making decisions on a spectrum of good/neutral/bad inputs that eventually lead to an outcome that is hard to predict. We want to feel like we are making the best decisions at every turn and being the greatest parents we can 100% of the time to try to manage a positive outcome. Or at least be able to feel like we did everything “right.” This leads to justification existing for almost every choice as a parent. And not just practical justification, but one where opposite choices are both inherently superior with no trade offs. The practical justification for daycare knows that, we have to use daycare, the child will eventually adjust and this moment of discomfort will be forgotten and not impact long term development. The “my choice is inherently better” justification says I am giving my child resiliency, socialization, and superior academics that give him a leg up. While at the same time staying at home is not just a practical choice to save money or align with your chosen family philosophy, but instead inherently better for your child’s attachment and development. As a daycare mom I’ve seen both sides and felt myself slipping into the inherently better choice side to shield myself from the inherently better stay at home narrative I see. I don’t want to say, I chose daycare and my son is having a rocky time adjusting but I’m mostly sure this won’t impact him too negatively. I want to say, oh we chose this daycare because it has xyz superiority metrics and will help him build xyz qualities.
> This leads to justification existing for almost every choice as a parent. And not just practical justification, but one where opposite choices are both inherently superior with no trade offs.
This dynamic feels like one of the core things wrong with modern politics. :-/
Agreed. And once we determine our choice is inherently superior it then becomes a value we must vociferously defend, entrenching us further.
Regarding your last point, I think it's easier psychologically on the parents who need to put their kids in daycare to say that preschool is better than home. I had a daycare sales administrator say it was for academic reasons, and that the kids would be busy all day...then the kids napped two hours a day (might have been state law). I have friends who teach daycare, and they are not convinced it is better than being at home for the kids. Preschool, where the kids are not at school full time, is different. I thought it gave me a bruef enough break from parenting to see the forest for the trees, and helps teach customs and holidays and socialisation and rules . Regarding crying when being lwft, if the classroom has a high window you can see in but the child can't see out, often they are playing happily 5 minutes after crying for their parents not leave. If they are not, they might not be ready for daycare. A good daycare is certified by an organisation that willl let you drop in any time.
I used to work in a daycare as a substitute teacher (the school district had got into the daycare biz). It made me sad that outdoor time was so limited, and what there was, just a little fenced area with those very small play structures for very little children, whose possibilities are soon exhausted, as the other playgrounds were full of big kids and it was the custom that the school-aged kids and the daycare little ones never mixed. Once in awhile I saw the kids piled into a sort of buslike stroller and taken for a walk, which I would have enjoyed as a child, but I don't remember getting to do that. Like with anything, most adults are always more comfortable indoors, in their office, essentially.
The ladies who worked with me were mostly young, very sweet, with messy personal lives. Nearly all had children of their own. They weren't bright, but they passed the test of finding children interesting, and liking them. Once, one of the mothers dropped off a kid, and I heard them discussing whether the mom "speaks European". It gives me a pang, or rather a pain, when I hear nonsense about how daycare workers need to be super-educated so that it will all be "high-quality". Ain't gonna happen and not sure why it's thought desirable.
It seemed to me that 8, potentially ten hours spent in a classroom was a pretty unstimulating way to spend the day. But then - in other ways - too stimulating. How crabby some of the kids would get later in the day, and the ladies would ply them with carbs.
They couldn't design classes for gender parity and it seemed that parents sought daycare more for boys than girls. And some of the kids seemed depressed or had behavioral problems, and maybe that was part of the reason they were there (it was not the case that *all* the parents were working; a few of the parents had older children at the school, and saw the daycare as an extension of school but for the younger ones; one of the few times I saw the ladies exhibit judgment was when I inquired what one particular mom's career was: the answer was shopping and working out).
Garden of children stuff aside, it seemed like *a lot* for children the same age to be trapped together all day long, from sunup to sundown.
And some of them had to endure the sight of mothers who routinely came earlier than the absolute latest point, while theirs never came early. Some of the moms were teachers in the district so, especially with babies, whom they missed, they would come pretty soon after school let out.
Waiting is a skill, I guess.
I think the center right will be fighting a losing battle against the far right to maintain the sacrosanctity of Boomer icons like Churchill in right wing circles. I think our zeitgeist in general is that of poking holes, questioning things, rewriting narratives etc. Usually it's the left who leads the way, and they have done a good job removing almost the holiness associated with historical national figures in the West. Its only natural that the right which by its nature is 10 years behind the left, will also adopt some of these ideas.
I am not sure how they are seen in left wing circles, but I assume most Center left people don't really care about Churchill(at least as compared to Center Right) and the far left is pretty hostile to him(but for the opposite reason as the far right lol)
I think the left and the right are approaching their criticism of Churchill from different angles, so I'm not sure if it's fair to say that this is a case of the right catching up. The left tends to criticize historical figures for their moral failings, judging them by modern standards, like Jefferson owning slaves or Columbus brutalizing the indigenous people.
There are some elements of that with Churchill, like his antisemitism and treatment of India. But I think the biggest criticism coming from the right is that Churchill escalated and prolonged the war. The whole saving-the-world-from-Nazis thing is foundational to the modern US. Busting that myth is like crack to the anti-establishment right.
Yes I agree, I probably worded it incorrectly but you captured what I was trying to get across.
Is criticising Churchill really a big thing among the far right?
It has gone from the fringe far right to more "mainstream far right"(Tucker recently interviewed some historian who criticized Churchill for right wing reasons which set of a lot of panic amongst the center right). Churchill is not remotely the primary focus of far right by any means, but more about delegitimizing the icons of boomer center right liberal conservatism to shift the Right into a more "rightward" direction if it makes sense.
Tucker interviewed some dude with a rightwing podcast not a "historian" in any academic or literary sense of the word. He's one of these guys who "does his own research" and concludes the lamestream mainstream historians are all wrong.
My impression that even that guy & Pat Buchanan mix together left & right wing critiques of Churchill rather opportunistically.
Yeah, the right's getting more white-nationalist and the left's getting more anti-white-nationalist, so politically incorrect figures who fought fascism are going to fall from grace.
Can't say I approve either, but I have no idea how you would fight it. Conservative antifascism relied at least in part on the need to gain the approval of legacy media gatekeepers who are no longer able to function as gatekeepers.
In 10 years, it's going to be woke or fascist, take your pick. Unless something else happens nobody had predicted, which it often does.
? That’s all clearly receding.
Hard to see the right getting more white-nationalist when they fawn over Vivek Ramanswamy and Tulsi Gabbard lol
You might be right.... but people are weird and are known to come up with new ideas.
> In 10 years, it's going to be woke or fascist, take your pick.
A plague on both their houses.
I agree.
Or more likely, both plagues descend on your house.
Unfortunately, I agree as well!
Great line.
Center left here. I think Churchill found himself in a historical situation where his particular combination of virtues and vices worked well.
Probably.
My instinct is mostly to object to the statue removing of the last few years, but I also find the idea that I should see Churchill (for example) as a ”holy figure” irritating and tedious. In fact such an attitude is very vulnerable to attacks by the ”woke”.
If you accept the stance that the Second World War is the foundation myth of modern liberal democratic society then keeping figures like Churchill sacred is vital for the British system (and similar for figures in other countries for their respective nation). If the right rejects Churchill as they believe the country would have been better appeasing Hitler and the left rejects Churchill because they think World War 2 was fought to further colonialism then the whole foundation of Liberal Democracy being something that was fought for tooth and nail and worth the sacrifice is eroded since you have discarded the idea that it *was* fought for and wasn't just an excuse. Perhaps this is a necessary step in improving modern society but the people driving it wish for more brutal forms of government.
Not that there is anything wrong with criticising Churchill (or other figures) in an academic or intellectual context, the man was deeply flawed but large scale iconoclasm can have unintended results.
Well, sure, if the right starts to believe Churchill had the wrong policy concerning Hitler, that would be a major shift in political culture, but what does that issue have to do with keeping Churchill "sacred"? That is putting the cart before the horse.
"the left rejects Churchill because they think World War 2 was fought to further colonialism"
Afaik this isn't the main criticism of Churchill from the left. Almost all the criticsm I've seen is that he was a terrible person, a racist and colonist and disaster for the world who happened to get exactly one thing right which was to vigorously oppose Hitler.
*colonialist. Not the same thing as colonist.
Enabling people in their fifties to have children is doing the resulting children a great disservice. It should be banned.
Consider an American woman aged 55.*
She has been sedentary for forty years. She is likely overweight, if not obese, and prediabetic or diabetic. She has a high chance (compared to a twentysomething woman) of having hypertension, and/or cardiovascular, pulmonary, musculoskeletal, joint and tendon, and/or peripheral nervous system dysfunctions, and/or other degenerative diseases like arthritis or osteoporosis. Cancer is also a salient threat in her next twenty years. She has difficulty lifting twenty kilograms, let alone doing it twenty times a day.
This is not a person equipped for the physical demands of raising a child.
She cannot count on friends or family for physical help. Siblings are similar ages, and her parents are in their eighties. By their fifties, her friends and siblings have fairly fixed preferences and routines and are not going to be enthusiastic about forgoing their cruises and trips to Europe to help her raise her child. Any life partner who has not acted on the desire to raise a child before her or his fifties is unlikely to want to participate. The woman will be on her own.
So she will lean heavily on early childhood childcare. This will permanently damage the child's psyche (read about John Bowlby's infant attachment theory, which is not subject to the replication crisis) as well as making the child physically sick with infectious diseases about one-third of the time.
The child will be ill during childhood, and anxious, depressed, and/or avoidant as an adult. The child is at risk of both cluster A and cluster B psychiatric disorders as well.
Finally, there is a salient risk of the child's mother dying, quickly or slowly and agonisingly, leaving the child an orphan at any time before the age of 18.
(*) Since people here insist on having everything spoon-fed to them: understand that I am talking in terms of characteristics of populations, not those of some exceptional individual(s). Don't take my word for it: you won't anyway. Look up the statistics yourself and do your own calculations.
Your example is basically representing a poor, old, single unhealthy woman. Literally the opposite of “characteristic populations” but an exceptionally unfit individual for raising a child.
Unless you’re saying that most people over 50 who would consider having a child would be single, poor, unhealthy women.
Sixty percent of American women are overweight or obese. This number would be higher for over-fifities.
Edit: we ban high-speed driving through city streets, and buying high excplosives and poisons like strychnine over the counter. Some people would be responsible with these, but that doesn't matter.
What’s the obesity rate of women making less than $30,000 in the US? Should we ban any demographic that has expected less than average childrearing credentials?
Using population level statistics won’t be too useful without also considering who are the women within that bracket considering having children at this age? Considering that post-menopause would require expensive fertility treatments, my assumption (and I admit I could be wrong about this) would be they would be wealthy and healthy compared to their age bracket.
I assume the point though is mostly aimed at women, rather than men, which would be a whole different thing than to the statistics you reference.
No, because there is no active intervention. What you propose amounts to a licensing scheme, which is undesirable.
I agree. Very undesirable.
I’m trying to follow your reasoning to where it leads and why this demographic should be banned from having children, while others that might have similar, or worse expected outcomes should not.
So your mental model of who shouldn't be getting kids in their fifties is actually very specific: it's a single, lonely, sedentary woman.
That's what you should have started with. There's a ton of statistics showing that, at least on the average, it's not great to be a child of a single mother, no matter what age. There are also many people who would support this with their anecdata. (Still, I imagine most people would agree that banning this would be going too far.)
But if you're assuming that that's the most likely kind of person who's going to want to have kids in their fifties, you might be completely wrong. Why would a typical single, lonely, sedentary woman in her fifties either give up her comfortable life to have a kid, or bring a kid into an already very uncomfortable life? If I was to guess, I'd guess the target demographic are mostly couples with reasonably good lives who for whatever reason failed to get their kids earlier.
I worry about Baron Trump too.
Men have been able to sire children at that age for millennia. Seems to have been fine.
Men don't raise children.
Do you have data to support this assertion? Otherwise it's not better than anecdotes
Also, there would probably some selection issues, most people in their fifties - whether with or without children - most likely wouldn't want children
I agree that this does the children a great disservice. I do not know what the original commenter’s reasoning is, but mine is that:
1) Children require physical energy and mobility to properly raise. It’s a physical mismatch between children who need to run around outdoors and parents whose strength will be failing as soon as the children need it.
2) The natural mode of life is that kids are raised by the parents, have a period where they and their parents can work side by side to begin raising the grandkids, and then as the parents begin to fail, the kids can take care of them. This creates a pattern where just when the kids will want to have grandkids, the parents will need much more care.
3) Kids should have the benefits of living and sharp parents later into their lives rather than aged and demented parents before middle age.
This is not inexcusable when it happens occasionally—an occasional geriatric father or middle-aged mother—but as a common societal pattern it would be atrocious and selfish.
>Children require physical energy and mobility to properly raise. It’s a physical mismatch between children who need to run around outdoors and parents whose strength will be failing as soon as the children need it.
1. Do you also think that disabled people should be barred from having children? Of all the things needed to properly raise children, physical energy and mobility are probably the least important. Being able to
2. I think you are greatly underestimating the strength and mobility of 50-60 year olds, and greatly overestimating the energy of little kids, who tucker out quite quickly.
At no point did I suggest some sort of dictatorial birth licensing regime for the old or any other group. I suggest that deferring reproduction does children a disservice. Immediately leaping from “this will probably be bad” to “this ought to be illegal” is the sign of an authoritarian mind.
You greatly underestimate how much energy and mobility contribute to healthy and well-raised children. It is no coincidence that your opinion arises commonly from the palest, fattest, most indolent culture in history. The public health crisis starts with people thinking it’s normal for kids and adults to couch-crash after 10 minutes of running around. Au contraire I have young kids and they’re perfectly capable of staying on their feet and sweating all day in tropical heat.
Sorry, I confused you with the original poster, who said "it should be banned."
But I am not sure that all the ad hominem material is warranted.
>You greatly underestimate how much energy and mobility contribute to healthy and well-raised children.
Do you have actual evidence for the claim that parental energy and mobility contribute to healthy and well-raised children? Because it seems to me that inculcating values and good habits and behaviors (including habits and behaviors related to health) do not require energy and mobility beyond that exhibited by most people in their 50s.
And, since it sounds like you are from a non-Western culture, is it possible that your view of what people in their 50s are capable of? 60 is quite old in many places, as it was in the West a few decades ago, but it really isn't in the West any more.
I am not from a non-Western culture. I just have a clear-eyed view of my own culture, and I live in a place that has tropical heat, and I keep my kids moving all day because it’s good for them!
My evidence I’ve already cited. This is the palest, fattest, most indolent generation in written memory: the empirical public health crisis is everywhere around you; our own institutions have been ringing the alarm bells for decades, and the things we die of and our very appearances are enough to conclude we’re not doing well.
I challenge you to explain why, if energy and mobility are not required, the steep drop in outside time, exercise, etc. has resulted in sky-high levels of myopia, depression, anxiety, suicide, obesity (and all its attendant ills, which are many and multifarious). I suppose there is the crazy Slime Mold Time Mold-type approach that it is lithium, or seed oils, or cell phone towers… or maybe it’s just that our whole culture is teaching its children that it is normal to sit on the couch and eat from dawn to dusk while squinting at a 6.1” to 6.6” drama toy.
Is your idea to just to prevent old people from having kids, or do you want a licensing scheme in general?
I can see the appeal of a licensing scheme, which filters depending on frailty, substance abuse, history of child abuse, stable relationship, emotional stability, resilience. Depending on your politics, you might also want to throw in 'ability to adequately support the kid' (where 'adequately' is highly cultural dependent), 'likelihood of genetic diseases', or 'correct parental ideology' (you would not want a kid raised by Nazis, would you?).
The problem is that unlike other licence-restricted activities, such as flying big airplanes, making babies is kind of hard to restrict without modifying the bodies of your citizens.
This is an area where, upon seeing the skulls of the victims of previous attempts of regulation, I would conclude that it is generally a bad idea if the state enforces limitations on who can have babies.
The most a state should do is to provide positive incentives for whatever people the state thinks should have more kids, and the option of free abortion for anyone who accidentally got pregnant.
No, I do not want a licensing scheme. An outright ban on post-menopausal pregnancy is far preferable to matters being at the whim of some bureaucrat.
I think we can agree that the fact that men can sire children at 80 while women go into menopause is not particularly fair. If we want to establish a cut-off age for having kids, we should have a better standard than 'in the ancestral environment, a woman your age would have had greater reproductive success by taking care of her many kids and grandkids than risking giving birth with her aging body again'.
Banning post-menopausal pregnancy would be like banning glasses in some annual eye test for car drivers to get rid of old drivers. Yes, there is a significant overlap between old age and having bad uncorrected eyesight, but the reason one might not want to have elderly drivers (like limited reaction speed) are mostly orthogonal to what strength of glasses they require.
> making babies is kind of hard to restrict without modifying the bodies of your citizens.
I mean, it's pretty easy to imagine a totalitarian state which will just execute you and your kids for having children without permission. It's not that easy to hide a baby, or even a pregnancy. But yeah, not that relevant for plausible near term future America.
I mean, I see the argument against it. But *banned*? We don't ban an awful lot of things in this country. Is it really so common it needs a law?
Also the people are doing it are usually probably wealthy enough to at least hire a sitter or something.
(I am in my forties and not planning to try.)
My father was 61 when I was born and my mother died when I was young despite being younger than him.
If grown up to be a happy, well adjusted person, and a lot of the temperance in my life can be directly attributed to being raised by someone who was older, and has been through a lot of life already.
You’re going to have to elaborate on your claim otherwise it’s completely ridiculous.
The utterly predictable anecdote.
I mean, obviously? If you’re going to make a claim, support it with literally nothing, and I have personal experience that directly contradicts your claim, it’s hard to take you very seriously.
Considering I’m quite happy and satisfied with my life, and see certain advantages in having been raised by a retirement aged man, you’ll have to support your claim with at least something.
You're making strong and controversial assertions without giving reasoning, then criticizing people when they make an assertion which is at least backed by an anecdote. Consider this your warning before being banned.
Time for you to share your anec-data.
"Anecdote v. Gut feeling" - the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate,
Throughout history much child raising has been done by older adults, commonly grandmothers. On what are you basing your call for a ban?
Not grandmothers by themselves though. Honestly I think childrearing was more done by older sisters and cousins. Sample size of 1, but my maternal grandmother mostly raised her younger siblings while her paternal grandmother spent most of her time siting and doing nothing. Women in general were not particularly physically active after late 50s at max, with most of the household work being done by the many daughters, daughters in law, granddaughters etc. You honestly can't be very physically active after a certain age in an era where food was very limited.
If you have to ask, then children are a nebulous theoretical concept to you.
Go on: have several, then check back in twenty or twenty-two years.
I have an actual non-theoretical child and I still don't understand what you're on about. Maybe actually make an argument instead of just dismissing anyone who doesn't exactly share your beliefs.
I do think I understand your angle, but I suggest you don't post things in the form "If you have to ask, you're missing details I'm not going to supply. Do research on your own and then get back to me," as it's generally off-putting. People here are generally interested in information they don't have, and if you think them ignorant, the best thing you can do is to enlighten them at least briefly. Even if you don't think it'll reach the person you're addressing, there are other people reading along that might be sincerely interested.
Do proponents of EA typically require that the target metric be some variant of “lives saved” or are they content with other metrics/goals so long as they are deliberately selected and applied?
There are definitely a number of worldviews within EA. For example, those prioritizing animal welfare are probably not optimizing for human lives saved.
Some reading that might be helpful here:
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/worldview-diversification/
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hOQf6Ug1WpoicMyFDGoqH7tmf3Njjc15Z1DGERaTbnI/edit
The second one. I agree with 20WS below that QALYs are an improvement over life-saved and potentially cover a lot of things. But some people prefer things more measurable than QALYs, and other people have their own things they're interested in that aren't necessarily linked to QALYs at all.
The standard metric is QALYs (quality-adjusted life years). It counts the years of life saved, adjusted for any change in quality of life.
> The standard metric is QALYs
QALY is a purely philosophical concept with no basis in reality. This disqalyfies it as a "metric", which – as the term implies – has to be measurable.
There is a spectrum of 'easy to measure' and 'good goal to optimize', with 'count of warm bodies at midnight' being easy to measure, and QALY being a good optimization target.
If you just optimize the number of lives saved today, you would prefer to rescue ten kids which were exposed to a lethal dose of radiation to one healthy kid. This seems like a bad move.
Of course, with QALY you have a lot more wiggle room, depending on your model. Nobody knows what the life expectancy of someone born in some specific country is going to be.
If QALY was dependent on socio-economic status (so 20 years living as a median westerner is worth more than 20 years living at median income a developing country), that would be bad. But just taking medical conditions impacting quality of life seems fine to me.
Years are also a philosophical concept, you've just gotten used to them! Someday we'll make you get used to QALYs!
Happy birthday Scott (I did the calculation - you're a natural number of QALYs old)
I'm not sure how to interpret your comment. It's not the "life years" part I object to, but the "quality-adjusted" part. You can measure years, you cannot measure QALYs.
I thought being able to measure (or at the very least, predict) the effectiveness of an intervention was _the_ most fundamental tenet of EA. How does that square with an unmeasurable pseudo-metric?
I'm not sure what you mean. When I type QALYs into Google I get a bunch of papers like eg this one (https://www.valueinhealthjournal.com/article/S1098-3015(18)34857-5/pdf) arguing that renal denervation for hypertension produces 0.31 QALYs, for a cost-effectiveness of €33,741 per QALY gained. You can't measure this without doing calculations. But the ancients couldn't measure regular years without building Stonehenge.
See also https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its-worth-doing-with-made-up-statistics/
> But the ancients couldn't measure regular years without building Stonehenge.
This is backwards; building Stonehenge to astronomical standards requires, rather than enabling, the ability to measure years.
The reason it's used is that there isn't really any another other way to measure effectiveness. The "quality-adjusted" component is of course an estimate, and I'm sure lots of smart people have Opinions on the values chosen. That doesn't mean it can't be used at all - it just means nobody knows a better way to do it.
I disagree. Bullshit data is usually worse than no data, because bullshit data gives a wrong sense of accuracy and reliability.
Is "making people happy" (opposed to "making happy people") a variant of "lives saved" for you?
I'm not asking for myself. More just wondering why more critics of EA don't just adopt it with a different target metric (IE "get x elected" or "help homless people" or "save puppies").
But I would tend towards optimizing for QALY/$, in which happiness (for certain definitions of happy) would certainly be a factor.
There is a round of arguments on HBD on Substack, and I think it is really beating about the bush, because what everybody wants to know is two things: is white superiority true or black inferiority true.
And think we can answer that without genetics. Basically Yamnaya civ did not look very impressive, Egypt, Mesopotamia, China was more impressive. Mycenean Greece did not look very impressive, Greece started to get interesting after that collapsed. Scandinavians did not do anything truly interesting before the Viking Age. I don't see early whites doing anything galaxy brain like.
As for black, it is hard to tell, because in Africa everything tries to kill you and your cattle. It takes significant effort to just stay alive. The thing is, if a place is generally good for life, it is bad for human life. If it is generally bad for life, it is good for human life. I was looking at the landscape in Aalborg, Denmark from an airplane. It is one giant grassland, for cattle to eat. It is not generally good for life, it does not do much biodiversity, but it is really good for human life. Africa is really good for life, and that is not good for human life. Much of that life is hostile.
The pro-HBD arguments I've heard about "whether a place is good for life or not" are about the necessity of planning.
The argument goes that cold places (Europe) more often required planning for the winter.
Africa, so it is argued, is easier to live in, intellect-wise. Long-term planning (they say) isn't as necessary if you really just need to beat the environment in the moment.
I have heard this argument, and I think it sounds more like an argument for self-control, marshmallow test like (which seems largely disproven now), than for intelligence. Or for social organisation and enforcement.
Still… hunting is possible in the winter.
Arguing for/against HBD by pointing to various civilization’s achievements is just another kind of HBD, though. The arguments about the unique features of European civilization predate the genetic arguments by centuries.
Civilizations can be regarded as differing by culture rather than genes. Most people understand that ancient civilizations differ from modern ones in the same location for reasons other than genetics.
In fact, we have very obvious controlled experiments in Germany and Korea. The real question is whether there's any residual left to be explained by genes.
Communist regimes have controlled a number of countries. Most of those countries haven't been able to create nukes.
I think trying to judge ethnic genetic intelligence based on the achievements of historical states is an fraught with danger.
It kinda works for early hominids: archaeological evidence of tool production, art, burial customs are all taken as signs of intelligence.
For example, I don't think you need an IQ of 120 to be a really good horse archer, it is a vocation which probably can be done fine with an IQ of 100, to historically very impressive results.
From my understanding, the genetics of the population in England in 1600 was mostly similar to the population in 1850. No aliens decided to CRISPR the English to uplift them towards the industrial revolution. The brain capacity (i.e. having a few very smart people) for the industrial revolution was likely there in 1600, but the circumstances were not right to use achieve great feats.
So while you can conclude from impressive civilizational feats that a people must have had (a subgroup of some) minimal intelligence, you can't really conclude the negation from a lack of such feats.
An IQ of 100 might be enough to be an horse archer, though possibly we should be looking at physical coordination quotients.
How smart does some small fraction of the group need to be to invent horse archery?
I would say that if you have archery (which has been around for 50-80k years) and horseback riding (perhaps around for some 3-5k years), the idea to shoot a bow while on a horse does not sound more genius than the idea to combine a car and a gun to do a drive-by shooting.
The hard part is in the execution, and honing it to the point where it becomes a viable military strategy. If you scale down a long bow for use on horseback, the result will not pack much of a punch. So either you need a path with more slack (perhaps you hunt rabbits on horseback, whose armor is much easier to defeat) or you have already developed composite bows for other reasons.
I don't think that raw intelligence is the bottleneck. Likely, it requires agility, non-conformity and luck. Probably, the first 100 times someone tried it, their tribes said: 'look at John, trying to fire his puny boy's bow from horseback, instead of learning to use a spear or how to quickly dismount to shoot a proper bow', and they ended up being right, until they were not.
The real trick is that it requires training from an early age, and hence it requires people who live a nomadic hunting lifestyle. You aren't going to get horseback archers out of farmers no matter how you try.
You could and did get horseback archers out of mounted aristocrats, but there are only so many of those to go around.
It's dumb online argument filled with fake beliefs. One example among money: No one really believes the IQ arguments otherwise you'd see race-neutral IQ supremacists all over.
Race-neutral IQ Supremacists is not a good brand, Supremacist has a history of being used by evil groups. We usually just call ourselves Meritocratics. But a good meritocracy is essentially going to want to be race neutral and value things like IQ. I am interested in HBD as a way to fight Affirmative Action, which is currently the most anti-meritocratic policy in place.
I’m clearly not the only one with this position, 50% of Americans are against using race as a criteria in admissions which only one third supporting it. I’m sure the average American does not think about HBD, but it is a useful tool to explain why without affirmative action some races get admitted at different rates. And if you think that I harbor some secret racist motive, that’s unlikely since I’m mixed race. Which of my ancestors races is supreme? I couldn’t care less. I just want smart doctors and other important positions.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/16/americans-and-affirmative-action-how-the-public-sees-the-consideration-of-race-in-college-admissions-hiring/
You've never met a race-neutral IQ supremacist? How long have you been in this comment section?
Heh, you've gotta post a link to your weekly race-neutral IQ supremacist open thread.
Can't say I have one, but honorable mention to Richard Hanania for this tweet: https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1824251869343973697
I didn't want to listen to the whole thing, but it does raise an interesting question. Is sports betting destructive? If so, how destructive? It doesn't just take up a lot of money, it takes up a lot of attention.
I think the book you're looking for is Guns, Germs, and Steel. Its thesis is that macro-scale pre-modern differences in tech level were primarily about how much agriculture every region had.
The Yamnaya weren't impressive because you basically couldn't do agriculture on the steppe during their reign, and you had to rely on some combination of horses (until you evolved lactase persistance) and cows (I'm going off memory, read Razib Khan for the details).
The Scandinavians weren't impressive because Scandinavia was marginal for agriculture until people invented cold-resistant crops in the Middle Ages.
The sub-Saharan Africans weren't impressive because the standard bundle of crops invented in Mesopotamia didn't translate very well to the sub-Saharan African climate, plus because humans evolved in Africa there were many more germs and parasites evolved to prey on humans there.
The Greeks, Middle Easterners, Indians, and Chinese *were* impressive because there's a latitude-spanning band of basically similar friendly climates in those regions, so everyone could exchange crops and domestic animals - mostly the bundle invented in Mesopotamia, but also stuff like rice from the other direction. That meant they had agriculture a long time, which gave them more time to invent the cultural package of civilization and (more controversially) the genetic package of self-domestication to civilization (the most established versions of this hypothesis are lactase persistence in the Yamnaya, which required them to have cattle for a long time, and alcohol resistance in various groups but especially the South Chinese).
If you want to add genetic stuff as epicycles to this basic story, I think this would be a combination of more speculative genetic self-domestication (cf. the deep roots literature), latitude as a proxy for parasite load during evolutionary time (I think either Cochran or Harpending had a theory that high parasite load makes it harder to select for complex traits because they introduce too much noise), and a bunch of accidental eugenics/dysgenics programs (eg the jizya tax forcing everyone who couldn't pay out of Middle Eastern Christian minorities, leaving them enriched for the most successful genes). You would also have to trace a lot of weird migrations (the pre-classical Greeks, classical Greeks, and modern Greeks are pretty different people). Of course, all of these things add enough degrees of freedom that it's hard to turn these into hypotheses even if you wanted to.
From following Razib's blog over the years, it seems that Mycenaeans, classical Greeks, and modern Greeks are actually pretty much the same people. The biggest difference comes from a noticeable influx of Slavic ancestry during the Middle Ages (when most of mainland Greece was conquered by Slavs, only to be reconquered and assimilated by the Byzantine Empire).
"Of course, all of these things add enough degrees of freedom that it's hard to turn these into hypotheses even if you wanted to."
What about Gregory Clark's theory that market economies were selecting for IQ/conscientiousness? It's a single variable and it fits well for England, the Ashkenazim and East Asia, and he has a bunch of supporting data.
Today half the world speaks an Indo-European language, because the Yamnaya were good at conquering. I'd say that's pretty impressive.
One theory is that conquest doesn't necessarily lead to the spread of a language. The deciding factor is how easy the language is to learn as an adult.
One pretty clear way a language can spread by conquest is if the conquerers just kill off most of the people speaking the old language.
> The deciding factor is how easy the language is to learn as an adult.
This is not a normal theory. You're more likely to hear that languages become easier to learn as adults when adults find themselves compelled to learn them.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone advance the idea that some languages are learned by more people because of the ease of learning those particular languages.
How would we test this?
You wouldn't, but the simplification process has been documented everywhere. We know it happens to languages that become widespread. We don't know the causes.
John McWhorter wrote a paper, "What happened to English?", documenting that simplification in English occurred well before any significant spread of the language, and attributing this to the need of Norsemen settling in the Danelaw to learn English.
You can also easily observe that nobody ever learns a language just because it's there, which seems to block the idea that a language might spread through greater learnability. Language learning is always driven by an external need to learn that language in particular.
I've heard a theory of the *reverse*. Languages that spread widely become more regularized because they are learned by lots of second language speakers.
Isn't that exactly the same thing I said? Adults find that they need to learn a language -> that language becomes easier to learn.
The big counterexample to conquest leading to language spread would appear to be the Dutch East India company not bother to spread Dutch. And, conversely, there's Aramaic spreading via its popularity among scribes rather than conquerors. I recall Nicholas Ostler's "Empires of the Word" discussing those examples, and I could have sworn I wrote a blog post saying he doth protest too much about the association between conquest and language spread, but I can't find it (or even an entry in my list of books I've read since I started keeping track).
> And, conversely, there's Aramaic spreading via its popularity among scribes rather than conquerors.
Empires of the Word did have a lot of discussion of Sanskrit spreading in a non-coercive way. I don't remember this point about Aramaic, but it seems fundamentally flawed - a language being taken up by scribes tells you nothing about whether the language is in use. The world norm at the time was to write in languages that were long dead. One major boost to the spread of written Aramaic was that the Persian Empire made it the official language of all government documents. It was not the language of government officials, just documents.
It clearly did in this case, consider cognates like English name and Bengali nam, from opposite ends of the Indo-European language space.
> what everybody wants to know is two things: is white superiority true or black inferiority true
I think I count as part of "everybody", and that's not my main concern. Britain has, in the last 200 years, been at war with China, Japan, and Ashkenazi Jews, all peoples that plausible have higher genetic intelligence than the British. As a result I'd like to see a programme of (entirely non-coercive) genetic counselling offered to all couples who want to have a baby. This might include use of donated sperm/eggs from people with desirable traits (intelligence, conscientiousness, etc).
As for black people, a lot of black Africans live in English-speaking countries and it is in the interests of the English-speaking world that these countries be successful and prosperous. If genetic counselling helps achieve that, I'm for it. Note that that applies equally whether blacks are superior/same/inferior to whites intellectually.
Ashkenazi Jews on average likely have a higher intelligence than Brits but not Chinese, Japanese, (or Indians). Its just the type of person to move from these countries to the Anglosphere is selected for intelligence but that doesn't apply to their countrymen. I imagine Brits living in China, Japan, and India probably work in white collar professions as well and are thus more intelligent than the average Chinese/Japanese/Indian. But that doesn't mean the average Brit is more intelligent than the average Japanese.
Should you add India to the peoples Britain as been at war with?
I doubt that Indians/Pakistanis/Bangladeshis are particularly more genetically intelligent than Brits.
Viking Age was not anything interesting. There were numerous periods throughout prehistory where waves of raider tribes came out of that region. Neither were all those Scandinavian raiders all that impressive compared to hosts of raider tribes throughout Eurasia. The only thing "interesting" about Vikings is that it occurred at a time when written culture had entrenched itself in Western Europe so those raids could be recorded for posterity.
For what it's worth I think there is a time and place where each civilization punches above its weight. No one in 924 AD would think of Northern Europeans as the master race but by 1924 they had achieved enough in quite a small span of time that many could come to that conclusion. But since 1945, I think Europe has been decline or at least growing slower than in past, allowing other regions to catch up. It's not evident now, but who knows sub-Saharan Africa could be the Northern Europe of 3024. Just like Northern Europe by about 1000 AD after a century of Christianization had the basic building blocks for prosperity in place like writing, state structure etc. It was still poor but over time it caught up to the more establishment centers of civilization to its South. Africa too has the basic structure in place. Over time they will be fine. The youthful dynamism with all its flaws will still set them well in comparison to the hospice of a continent that is Europe.
> Viking Age was not anything interesting.
Some of their legal culture was quite interesting, especially as it manifested in Iceland. And overall they had an ethos of "go out and DO stuff, don't sit around and wait for permission" that, while not unique in the world, added a healthy sense of entrepreneurship back to a Roman/Christian-dominated continent.
One could perhaps even make a not-particularly-plausible argument that the whole "age of exploration" "colonialism" thing was Viking expeditions writ large. Get some dudes together, sail out, maybe make a settlement, if you find people either trade with them, or subjugate them and take their stuff, make some flowery speeches about how it's all for the glory of God and country, unless you can pull off independence...
Age of exploration was kickstarted by Europeans least influenced by the Vikings. Spaniards and Portuguese(with a lot of Italians in the beginning), which spread to the French, Dutch and English. Scandinavians barely did anything during the whole Age of Discovery period. If Vikings had any influence, you would expect this list to flow in the opposite direction.
Yup, that's why it's not particularly plausible. Unless there's a way to connect the Vikings to the reconquista, which seems more like the direct inspiration for Spain and Portugal.
You can connect the Vikings to the Spanish/Italian Explorers by noting that Christopher Columbus appears to have spent some time hanging out with Vikings in Iceland, just a few years before he started promoting the idea of sailing west from Europe to find interesting destinations within easy reach.
Of course, there were presumably a fair number of English mariners with experience in Iceland, and none of the discovered the new world. So either the Age of Exploration was fundamentally shaped by the personal idiosyncrasies of one man, or there was something about Spanish culture of the time that made it more receptive to such ideas. Maybe elements of both.
Yup. Fun fact, which I recently learned from the Rest is History podcast(highly recommend). Columbus was in Granada with Ferdinand and Isabella's entourage when the last Muslim ruler surrendered the keys of the city to them. 1492 was truly a cinematic year for Spain. A victorious end to a chapter spanning hundreds of years and a thrilling start to a chapter that would span hundreds of years.
If we're looking at the timescale of 3024 then I don't think you can make any reference at all to current fertility and birth rates. Subsaharan Africa will soon be 50%, 60%, 70% of new births, but is already undergoing the same demographic transition and will, like Europe and Asia, become a hospice in the near future. What depends to be seen is whether the non SSA areas will become overwhelmingly SSA in the short term (false I think). But to discuss the relative proportions of ethnic groups in 3024 based on current numbers is a bit like trying to predict the path of a double pendulum. A thousand years is plenty of time for birth rates to collapse, rise again, collapse again, and rise again.
Viking ships were stable enough to raid during the winter, yet light enough to carry them in portage, and shallow enough to land on any beach. I think this was very unusual.
I think his argument is that those features are similar enough to, say, advances in horse archer's equipment, that it's the same general sense. The Vikings weren't building large stable structures or whatever. Not that they weren't unique or interesting.
Yes, Vikings were about as interesting as say the Khitans. The only reason anyone cares about the Vikings is because the English and then the Germans who actually did achieve great things in the 18th and 19th centuries, idealized the Scandinavians and their ancestors for reasons.
Particularly weird for the English, since Alfred the Great fought against them, and the Normans didn't have that much genetic impact.
I would say that the Vikings were historically important, but as you say because of how they affected future civilizations. I would say that a lot of future success and likely the willingness of northern European countries to create empires and fight major wars descends (at least partially) from inherited aggression and conquest/strength memes from the Vikings. That this would happen is definitely not something we could have predicted a priori and would not have been obvious when they were active.
The last thing I blogged about is a theory that the multidirectional raider threats (such as vikings) faced by Europeans resulted in them developing differently compared to Chinese states that faced a unidirectional threat from steppe horse nomads: https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2024/08/15/how-chinese-vs-europeans-responded-to-horse-nomads/
As I pointed out in a in another comment, the Europeans who started the process of conquering the world, Spaniards and Portuguese(employing a lot of Italians) had little to no Viking influence. The French, Dutch, and the English followed a hundred years later, but it really wasn't until the 1800s that Northern Europeans became dominant. So why such a long gap for the agressive Viking genes to get to work. When Cortes was conquering Mexico and Clive was conquering Madras, it's more likely they were thinking of the Alexander, Romans and perhaps the Crusaders rather than the Vikings. Viking fan boys are a product of 19th century romanticism. Even the only time Scandinavia was geopolitically relevant in the last 1000 years, under the Swedish Empire in the 17th century, they were motivated by muscular Protestantism rather than Thor and Valhalla.
I think a better way to put it, would be saying that humans are invasive species outside of Africa, where everything evolved along with us and therefore is adapted to deal with us much better.
Your claim is really weird and obviously falls apart as soon as you actually think about it. Antarctica is bad for life, and for humans. Even relatively "mild" places like Denmark require humans to survive winters, which implies fire, shelter, food storage, and all the planning that goes with it.
Also, the stereotypical places that are "good for life" are the tropics, not Africa. Seems to me you're spinning a contorted narrative to avoid reaching certain conclusions.
Why stop there? Space is REALLY bad for life and so--by your interpretation of JustAnOgre--it must be REALLY good for human life.
It's clear that JustAnOgre is trying to lay out a heuristic, not define an absolute rule. Jumping to the most extreme possible counterexample to show that a heuristic is...well...a heuristic isn't charitable or even particularly reasonable.
It's not hard to find the sense in the heuristic, if you look for it. As a species, humans' superpower is intelligence which, among other things, confers a LARGE advantage in adaptability. All species are adapted for a niche, but humans are better than almost anything on the planet at surviving outside their niche. And the more generally hostile the biome, the fewer other species--including species of parasites, diseases and large predator--will be adapted to it. So humans can improve their relative fitness by moving from the biome to which they were evolutionarily adapted--certain parts of Africa--to any of a number of more hostile biomes. When you say "even relatively "mild" places like Denmark require humans to survive winters, which implies fire, shelter, food storage, and all the planning that goes with it." that is EXACTLY THE POINT. Humans can manage all of that. And pre-industrial humans are much, much better at managing fire, shelter and food storage than they are at battling diseases and parasites, so there is real advantage in trading the ancestral biome for that one.
Thank you. Humans and our livestock can be usefully modeled as invasive species, agriculture and pastoralism displacing natural ecosystems. When that happens, it is useful if the local species are not very good at fighting back, but of course there is a trade-off at the extremes, some real estate is not worth having.
I made a mistake of talking about Africa as if it would be one biome. What I had in mind is tropical climates everywhere - those are the ones that are good at resisting humans.
Does southeast Asia really resemble sub-Saharan Africa in that way?
I recently started a substack! Based on some conversation on the discord, I wrote a piece on why I don’t think robots will be replacing human domestic labor any time soon. Currently I the works: a followup addressing the 1X NEO, which was announced just as I published the piece, and a look at what happens when a scientific paper isn’t massively flawed, but misrepresents itself, using the Nature Mexican Biobank paper.
If any of that sounds interesting, please read and subscribe!
https://nicoroman.substack.com/p/against-humanoid-robots
What's the status on flow batteries? On the surface, they sound like the perfect solution for utility scale energy storage. Need more capacity? Just add some tanks. Need more power? Just add some fuel cells and pumps.
So why aren't they everywhere already? Is it cost of the fuel cells, cost of the liquids, durability? Neither mass nor volume should play a role for grid storage.
Poor marketing, indifferent calibre of engineers. Lithium chemistries are fashionable; pumped hydro is doing the actual work.
> Poor marketing, indifferent calibre of engineers.
Whose marketing? What engineers?
Storage for intermittent, renewable energy sources is set to be a billion dollar market, I'm sure there are "a few" engineers inspired to work on this.
Siemens, for one; other large engineering companies operating in the flow battery space (Hitachi? Fujitsu Heavy Industries? Bosch? I can't remember. There are a few tens of megawatts of flow batteries in China, but I can't remember the name of those companies either.)
Yes there are, and there is renewed work on flow batteries; it just hasn't amounted to much (yet), because there are three or five orders of magnitude less money behind it than is behind lithium chemistries. (And closely related chemistries, like sodium-ion. Oh, and sodium-sulfur.)
Batteries-News and Energy Storage News are useful resources.
I am interest in this too, would love to have some indepth explanation from someone who is familiar with the industry,
My personal undestanding is that flow battery is too expensive upfront mainly due to the cost of the membrane exchange.
IIRC Redflow battery from australia is making some flow batteries that are only slightly [10-20%] more expensive than lithium-ion on a per life time kwh stored, but that is mainly because of the long expected life time of flow battery, so time to recoup investment is much longer than lithium-ion. They also need to be fully discharged every few days.
According to their financial report approx 1 year ago they were having problem bringing the cost of membrane manufacturing down.
Public flow battery companies that I tracked [redflow, gellion] all have their stock price fall precipitously. So I assumed that either scaling up is not as easy as the founders expected or the market is aware of some flaws in their designs.
bhauth wrote a bit about it here:
https://www.bhauth.com/blog/energy/CAES%20and%20flow%20batteries.html
Now that the AI trend has died down, I'm wondering about what keeps sticking.
How are people actually using AI now?
Are there AI-tools, that actually worth it, beyond their novelty?
(I am curious both about small personal anecdotes, and about big society-level observations, and everything inbetween)
I use ChatGPT mostly for personal use. I've created a custom GPT to be my Assistant Game Master for a Wild West Werewolf (White Wolf games is the publisher) campaign that I am running. I create every scene guide with the bot, have generated most of the home brew setting with the bot, and weekly engage with the bot to give it the recap of the last session and build what I am going to run for the next session. It is really helpful and at this point (I'm building session 14 right now) I don't see how I could do this without the bot! The art generation capabilities have been extremely helpful in helping the players visualize scenes and NPCs. I did some work with animated gifs and ai voice over videos early in the session to create some "shared dreams" and other content, but since then its just been scene guides and images.
I'm also using the bot for some personal coding projects, and to make macro enabled spreadsheets for work.
All in all I think the hype is overblown, but pair a skilled/creative user with a fine tuned bot and it really does act as a force multiplier. IMO
If anyone's interested here are the videos created, the first one used stock images that came with the service, and for the second two I replaced the stock footage with Dall-E 3 images or aitubo animated gifs.
Intro to the campaign
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JDgxZfEJz5AG8Ub-3DwMYW36FC-DixX_/view?usp=drive_link
Introduction of all the player characters:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1merrKcLBvnwQw8OIJ8boLOIwU14ffTHT/view?usp=drive_link
The shared dream:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1U8jngf_iEMyjMOiW_UiE9jaak4sd4AEo/view?usp=drive_link
I use AI all the time as an improved sort of search engine, to help formulate routine missives, to create illustrations, and to act as a sounding board for creative pursuits.
I occasionally create images on Bing to amuse my kids. I also at times ask ChatGPT if I want a list of 20 best SF authors or something, not so as to get recommendations but to get some "neutral" approximation what *others* might consider the best ones.
I don't think you can say "the AI trend has died down." The hype is certainly deflating, but the products are still improving every day.
The only "AI" product I use is ChatGPT, and only on occasion for personal interests. I work for the government, and about a year ago, I also used it to proofread draft papers. Then, my agency banned all use of LLMs due to privacy concerns. A committee was created to make LLM use rules and requirements and to find a model that met those, but it has yet to finish.
I strongly believe GPT-4 could do a large fraction of the tasks that my teammates and I do, and could provide useful feedback on most of the other tasks. It would not surprise me if GPT-5 could 75% replace some of us.
>but the products are still improving every day.
They better had, because outside of industrial-scale copyright infringement it's still pretty bad:
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2680-1.html
"By some estimates, more than 80 percent of AI projects fail — twice the rate of failure for information technology projects that do not involve AI. "
Personal anecdote: I really like AI art for "set dressing" - art for projects where the art isn't really the *point* of the project, and you don't need *great* art, but you need *some* kinda art to meet the expectations of the medium. For instance, CYOAs often need one image per choice, and you generally want the images to have a consistent style, but none of the individual images need to be standout works of art. AI is very good at meeting that need.
When Microsoft Copilot was announced, I realized it was sophisticated enough that I could fire the 6 employees underneath me, and me and my Lead could do the entire job ourselves. When I inquired up the chain about that possibility, I was told that an exploratory committee would look into it, and see if they could negotiate a secure contract. They assured me that no one would lose their job, and that it would take 5 years minimum to consider the possibility. I was also told to not use AI for anything at my job yet, since there were privacy concerns, and if I was discovered using AI, I would be reprimanded.
This is the federal government, so I wasn’t really surprised at this answer, but it definitely deflated the hype. I asked that answer again recently, and got the same answer, complete with them the 5 year timeline despite a year going by. It doesn’t matter how the technology improves as long as people are skeptical on adopting it.
Sounds like even without Copilot or any other AI tools, your department could have improved productivity substantially, and fire maybe 3 out of 6 employees underneath you. But that haven't happened - so not that surprising that AI adoption is not happening anytime soon :-)
Maybe, but I probably could only cut one and keep my productivity at where it needs to be. There is an incredible amplitude of writing that needs to be done for my subordinates jobs, and some of my employees IQ isn’t even 100. They take days to write a 10 page letter and either my lead or I have to make heavy edits afterwards.
If we paid 50% more, we could probably poach top talent from the private sector and fire half the staff, saving money overall, but that takes congressional action, so much, much less likely than the singularity occurring in my lifetime.
From a institutional perspective they do need to take these kinds of things slow. They have to consider the possibility that you're wrong. They also have to consider the possibility that you, personally, can handle the change but a future replacement for you could not.
They also have to consider the possibility that the technology messes something else up or gets shut down in a few years. Rehiring your six employees two years from now may end up being a bigger issue than what's saved in the meantime.
That's obviously putting aside the standard concerns - if these are union employees or have other job protections (federal employees, so the answer is yes even without a union), the fact that the positions are budgeted for and reducing positions helps no one in the organization, the fact that these employees could be tasked with other items as needed (general slack in the department), etc.
Yes, that is all logical. What my actual proposal was to roll out AI first and see how much it increased productivity, and then evaluate if the FTE would be better off moved elsewhere. A RIF was always unlikely. But since the first step of roll out AI is liable to take a decade, it’s no surprise my AI enthusiasm has been depleted. There’s a fair chance the singularity will occur before the government widely adopts AI.
Hah, you may be right. When you look at the institutional incentives for federal employees, it doesn't exactly look like a model designed for efficiency. And honestly, it's not and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Efficiency is not the most important thing. I would put longevity over efficiency at the federal level, actually. I do not think Copilot is going to be around in the same form a few years from now, which means institutionally that could cause a lot of problems in areas from contract negotiations to loss of service. Even counting on having you there to update the system when Copilot doesn't exist is a bad bet. You could change jobs, get promoted, retire, die, whatever before that happens. They have to make sure that the process continues even if the person who replaces you is less capable than you.
I ask factual questions about economic trends and sectors, statistics, population demographics, ancestral hominids, genetics, and more on a daily basis, and am usually very happy with the amount of time saved.
I use Perplexity and G4 for this and other things daily, and just estimating from the time it would take me to find the data, put the data in a dataframe, and do the analysis or graph, I think I probably save an hour or two a day.
I do know enough about each of these things to know if they're wrong, but the "meaningful mistake" rate is well below 10%, maybe below 5% now.
If you use them like you would use a bright intern or fresh-out-of-college direct report, I think they're great. Trust but verify, know the scope and pitfalls of what you're asking for, etc.
I even use G4 for things like "look at the pictures of hotels in the X area and tell me which ones have a real power rack, not a smith machine," which is a fairly unique use case you can't do with text descriptions, and which also saves significant time.
I think the biggest downside of them is I want them to actually work for me as a virtual assistant - I want to be able to book flights using them, or have them call businesses on my behalf, and they're just not there yet, even for any subscription ones. I think that's the killer app, and the one that should honestly be here today as long as you're willing to assume the risk of them using your credit cards, and which I'm disappointed don't exist yet.
Do you do these things for money? That is the key point here.
I retired after my last startup a few years ago, but if I were doing another, yes, I'd absolutely be using them in domains that would usually cost or make me money.
It has not died down, just picking up steam. Why do you think it has? New models show up all the time, incrementally better and better. Hallucinations are rarer, fingers are fiver, videos are longer, games are doomer.
the hype was very strong last year. The hype is much weaker this year.
> Why do you think it has?
My own impression. (I used it a lot early on, and less as time went on). And goldman sachs seems to think so https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-return-investment-disappointing-goldman-sachs-report-2024-6 And blogs I read, seem to think so (some think it was similar to the bitcoin-bubble in some sense)
> New models show up all the time, incrementally better and better. Hallucinations are rarer, fingers are fiver, videos are longer, games are doomer.
That's all nice, but do you personally use any of this? Or are there artists, who were actually impacted by this? (Last year many artists feared AI. I am wondering how many of theses fears actually manifested in a tangible sense)
What I am asking is: Do these steps forward come with a tangible impact, or are they just more hype-fuel?
AI has not died down, and that Goldman Sachs report is currently being roundly mocked for extraordinary levels of analytic incompetence and ignorance, like reporting that ChatGPT usage has collapsed to near-zero (while actually it's kept growing dramatically) because they use a measure of domain name traffic... and OA changed the domain name a while back. (Which every ChatGPT user with two neurons to rub together noticed, implying either that the GS analysts and everyone reviewing the report don't use ChatGPT at all or lack even two neurons, in addition to the stunning level of out of touchness necessary to look at such a datapoint and not immediately go 'that can't be right, there must be something wrong with this traffic number, I'd better double and triple-check this'). Oops.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/05/nyregion/nc-man-charged-ai-fake-music.html?unlocked_article_code=1.IU4.x-NF.FAQAKEkTAVhb
Well, this guy made thousands of fake songs with AI. Then he used a bot network to stream all of his "music" thousands of times a day so he could collect royalties. All told, he made more than $10MM. I wonder how much money he could've made if he only spammed a bunch of AI songs, without creating fraudulent listeners. Obviously nowhere near as much, but he was uploading "thousands a week". If each song would organically make $.50, that still comes out to $1,000 a week.
Also, who wouldn't listen to a band called Calvinistic Dust?
What exactly do you mean by "fake song"? Like, you press Play and nothing comes out of the speakers? If you mean the songs were falsely attributed to human writers/performers, the fakeness is an attribute of the attribution, not the song itself.
Also, "Calvinistic Dust" sounds like something from His Dark Materials.
The songs actually exist, but they don't have a coherent sound design or lyrics. If you've ever seen an AI-generated video where everything lacks permanence and kind of blends together, this is the audio version of that.
I would describe such a song as "bad," not "fake."
Inventing new scams will be the only work left for people.
If each song only makes $.50 he's deeply in the red. It costs money to publish - anywhere from $0.99 per song to $10 per album. Streams make a fraction of a penny per.
I see. There must also be a cost for generation - and he partnered with an AI firm to generate thousands of songs a week and gave them a cut, so obviously they weren't working for free. I guess that explains why no one else is flooding the market with sketchy AI songs, it loses money.
Yes, the economics of this is absolutely brutal, which is why he had to create all these streaming bots to get literally billions of plays of his artificial drek. Getting organic streams requires heavy promotion. When an unknown artist publishes new music it just... sits there. Nobody will stream it (ask me how I know :) ). So this is why I'm not worried about AI-generated music displacing that of actual artists.
But what is going to happen - nah, happening already - is that livelihoods of session musicians, jingle / gaming / movie music creators will be, already being, destroyed. Example: I just recorded a song where I felt a piano track would sound good, and, not having nearly the proficiency on the instrument to play it myself, I poked around Garage Band app's piano samples until something I liked came out. This is awesome for me, and terrifying for someone who invested a decade+ into learning to play the instrument hoping to make a living out of it.
> So this is why I'm not worried about AI-generated music displacing that of actual artists.
Unfortunately it's already happening, through the roundabout route of major streaming companies producing (or having their "friends" produce) huge amounts of bottom-of-the-barrel AI music slop, and using their control of the algorithm to steer distracted people's auto-playing feeds to that crap, so they save on royalties. Ted Gioia's been writing about it repeatedly on his substack.
As I keep saying, automated, personalized feeds are digital crack and the mother of all that's gone wrong with the internet. They deserve nothing less than a full ban.
Oh yes, forgot about that one.... your are correct. All that "coffee-shop music", "soft jazz for quiet evening" crap. I avoid it like the plague, which is I guess why I keep forgetting it exists.
lol, that is amazing
> Mr. Smith, prosecutors said, flatly lied to music distribution companies. In October 2018, one company informed Mr. Smith that it had received “multiple reports of streaming abuse” and that it planned to remove his songs from all stores.
> Mr. Smith, the charges said, responded with a strongly worded denial: “This is absolutely wrong and crazy!,” he said. “There is absolutely no fraud going on whatsoever! How can I appeal this?”
I have a feeling, that he could have walked away right there with what he gained so far (I guess couple million at that point?)
my own perspective :
I myself and some of my coworkers use AI to help with programming. We usually just ask a chat bot to generate some boilerplate, or ask it for ideas to solve some specific error message. Full blown AI-Assistant coding seems too risky, since that would involve opening the codebase up to external forces, and that seems legally questionable. (for personal/private projects I do this though)
I have observed non-technical people who trust in AI a little too much. e.g. in one particular instance they asked the same question to a doctor and chatgpt, and gave chatgpt's answer more weight than the doctors. Am not worried about society-level changes though, because posers and fakers have been around for ages, so having an automated charlatans around shouldnt make too much of a difference, especially since that charlatans doesn't seem to have an agenda.
tools: I currently use perplexity. Before that I used openai-playground (it's about 2€ per month for about the same value as chatgpt for 20€ per month)
The biggest issue to me is that when AIs hallucinate, it's harder to spot because they don't have the signals that we use to estimate credibility in prior contexts. An AI's output always looks superficially similar whether it is correct or not.
Why do we as a society spend ~very little resources on developing new medications/interventions to make people more productive/hard working? Yes, there's Adderall, there's Vyvanse, Ritalin, Modafinil... but these are all based off decades-old research. The biggest problem with all of today's "ADHD" medications is that they don't necessarily make people more productive - they just make it *easier* to be more productive but are unable to give people that deep internal desire to work hard that's present inside of every self-made millionaire out there.
It seems like a literal trillion-dollar bill on the sidewalk: just imagine how insane GDP growth could get if *everyone* had the same drive and motivation as Elon Musk or whoever is your favorite example of a hard working person. Obviously this would no longer matter in a post-AGI world but until that happens the economy needs productive people and there's a big shortage of them.
Or maybe I'm wrong and we do invest lots of resources into this problem? Perhaps there's numerous labs out there trying to tweak the prefrontal cortex of mice to get them to work harder on solving mazes?
We've had that for over a century, it's called coffee.
I have generally been very hostile towards this idea (for what I think are good reasons), but I'd like to offer something a little more positive. Both your suggestion and the suggestions Performative Bafflement makes can be broadly described as "trying to engineer human biology to allow greater productivity," and while I think that entire area is a minefield, I'm not hostile to "we should look for ways to increase productivity" as a general statement. I think it's very, very important to keep productivity an instrumental goal and not confuse it with a terminal goal, but I think there's quite a number of ways to approach the question of how to increase productivity that don't impinge nearly as much on most peoples' terminal goals as engineering human biology does.
In particular, I'd like to suggest that there are potentially MASSIVE gains in productivity to be made just by figuring out better systems of education and allocation of labour. The engines of capitalism are supposed to be well-tuned to attack the problem of optimal allocation of resources, but I think the labour market is pretty plainly a special case. Workers in modern, industrialized nations need long and costly job training that in many cases never really ends: an engineer with 20 years of experience is often much more valuable than an engineer with only 10, for example[1]. The market demand can change significantly on timescales as short as a few years or even a few months, so there's a clear mismatch here. But more even than those, the fundamental problem is that to a first approximation NONE of the suppliers of labour--that is, the workers themselves--act much like Homo Econimus in way that corporations do (or at least try to). People make career choices to a whole lot of reasons that aren't easily legible to the market and get priced in only imperfectly. Even in a world where they were priced in perfectly, labourers-in-training rarely have good information on the market: how many incoming college freshmen do you suspect have a good, or even modest handle on which careers are in-demand, what the requirements are, where those jobs are located and what kind of job security they have? And perhaps more significant than any of these is the problem that often NOBODY has a good sense of where a particular person's comparative advantage lies: not educators, not career councillors, not parents, not employers and not the workers themselves. There are some mechanisms for trying to figure this out, but they're weak.
I think there are quite a lot of gains to be made in figuring out how to get training programs to match up better with industry demand, how to train and retrain people for various jobs efficiently and how to help people figure out what they SHOULD[2] be doing career-wise. Every person who pays $100,000 for a degree that they don't end up using in their career is an inefficiency in the system, as is everyone who drops out of college after three years, as is everyone who has the talent and mindset to become a brilliant engineer but ends up stocking shelves because they either don't have the opportunity to learn that about themselves or don't have the resources to follow that path.
Probably nothing here is going to look like a lone, trillion-dollar bill lying on the sidewalk. But remember the joke about an economist who sees a $20 lying on the ground. You should be very, VERY suspicious if you think you've discovered a trillion dollar bill sitting ANYWHERE: the odds that it's real don't compare favourably to the odds that it's a fake, a mirage or a trap. I think if you were suggesting somewhere to look for a fruitful cluster of incremental improvements--which is what I'm trying to gesture at above--people would be much less alarmed.
[1] In a way that's not especially true of, for example, someone digging ditches in a per-industrial society.
[2] with "should" being determined by some combination of personal aptitude, desire and market demand.
I think a significant portion of the pushback you're getting on this can be neatly summed up in one comic:
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/556
I'm sure you don't conceive of your position as "we should throw all our efforts into inventing a pill that turns men into orcs," but it's hard not to see it in what you wrote. Regardless of how legally "voluntary" such a pill might be, I have a quite a strong preference for such a thing not to exist in the first place.
If the most workaholic humans scanned their brains as emulations and took over the labor force, would you regard that as a bad thing?
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/are-workaholics-humanhtml
Here's a recent essay by Stephen Wolfram, whom I deeply admire for his productivity: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/08/five-most-productive-years-what-happened-and-whats-next/. Does he sound like an 'orc'? Or what about Scott Aaronson, the quantum computing scientists? Or... Scott Alexander himself, who's writing output has been incredibly large for close to 20 years now?
Would a pill that gives us all the same passion and enjoyment from productive work as experienced by Stephen Wolfram such a bad thing to exist?
"Would a pill that gives us all the same passion and enjoyment from productive work as experienced by Stephen Wolfram such a bad thing to exist?"
I suspect you and are modelling human psychology in very fundamentally different ways. I'm can't peer inside any of these peoples' heads, but I'm at least a little skeptical that "passion and enjoyment for productive work" is something that any of these people *actually have.* I don't know anything about Wolfram, but the sense I've gotten from both of the Scotts is that they have passion and enjoyment for the specific subset of productive work *that they are actually engaged in.* You seem to be imagining they have passion for productivity *in the fully general sense* which I doubt is correct. Even if these three exceptional individuals do have such passion, I doubt it's especially common even among highly productive people.
Speaking from my own personal experience, I have HUGELY different amounts of drive and motivation for doing some sorts of work than other sorts. I've probably worked a greater number and variety of different jobs than 95% of humans, and the difference in my motivation between when I was selling T-shirts to tourists and when I was working in a physics lab is really, really extreme. Part of my career struggles have stemmed from the fact that my ADHD (long undiagnosed and untreated) made it harder to be effective even at the jobs that I enjoyed. But a LARGE part have stemmed from the fact that finding work that meets and acceptable threshold of achievable, lucrative and enjoyable is *actually quite hard.* I think, for example, that there are quite a lot of humans who would enjoy the job Scott Alexander has and work quite hard at it, but there simply isn't enough money in the field to support all of them.
When you talk about a pill that gives people a deep internal desire for productive work, I cannot help but understand that as giving people a desire for ALL or at least most productive work. Someone who's doing work that they enjoy probably has all the motivation they need. Someone who's doing work that they don't especially enjoy (but also don't hate), but is clearly getting them closer to their life goals is probably also pretty good on motivation. A pill that would make someone like Scott Alexander just as happy (or even 60% as happy) working on an assembly line or a call centre as he is writing about interesting things on the internet sounds like an abomination. It sounds like not a hair short of offering people the opportunity to self-mutilate in exchange for money.
> there are quite a lot of humans who would enjoy the job Scott Alexander has and work quite hard at it, but there simply isn't enough money in the field to support all of them.
It's not just the money. I run a small blog (on a different account) and very much enjoy writing there. I have a small audience that I'm perfectly content with and have a couple dozen ideas for future posts. My biggest obstacle is that writing is fun but it's less fun than going for a hike with my friends on the weekend, even though in the long term writing delivers far more satisfaction than hiking ever could. My hypothetical magic productivity pill would rewire my brain to optimize for the long-term instead of the short-term.
> A pill that would make someone like Scott Alexander just as happy (or even 60% as happy) working on an assembly line or a call centre as he is writing about interesting things on the internet sounds like an abomination
The most productive people that I've met were able to deliver excellent work even when they actively disliked their assigned task, as they had excellent self-control and were very high in conscientiousness. It would be perfectly fine if the magical productivity pill didn't change your perception of how much you enjoy doing the work, instead giving you the cognitive resources to fight through the boredom and deliver a good job despite being bored to death. If your only job option at the moment is to work in a call center, wouldn't you feel better knowing you at least did a great job at it?
I have a general suspicion that some of the negative response is to simply allowing people to modify themselves to become "better" than average at something. Reflexive anti-trans-humanism, maybe?
We seem fine with bringing people up to baseline, but when it comes to enhancements to let people be better than average, it's like a switch flips. And it's even worse if we let people do this to themselves with no approval and oversight.
One answer - it's illegal to give people medication-tier drugs without FDA approval, and the FDA only approves things for specific diseases, not for people who want to be more productive.
This isn't entirely right, because if you had a great intervention like this, you could use it for ADHD. I think the main answer here is that the FDA doesn't want more addictive substances for people to abuse, so to stay safe pharma companies focus on non-stimulant drugs, which are generally weak. I bet chemists could come up with lots of varieties of super-cocaine quickly, but they would go the same way as regular cocaine, so Big Pharma doesn't try.
That leaves supplements. Here there's lots of demand for performance enhancers and an easy regulatory environment, but two problems. First, in order to be sold as a supplement, a product needs to be at least sort of natural, and it's hard to get something in the sweet spot of "natural" and "not basically cocaine". Second, most fancy stuff works less well than just giving someone a giant dose of caffeine, so most energy drinks are giant doses of caffeine plus some other random stuff to make it look like it's fancy and high-tech and not just a giant dose of caffeine. Sabroxy is the only thing in this space that has ever impressed me, and it builds tolerance very quickly.
What's left is gray market nootropics. I have heard good things about bromantane and pramiracetam, but neither is 100% safe and both (are claimed by some, but not all) to have the potential for tolerance buildup. I think these are useful data points, because if I ask you whether you want bromantane (instead of the magical productivity drug you're imagining) you probably have lots of other considerations, are correctly nervous about taking something outside of the normal medical system, and eventually decide against.
Thanks!
Do you think that a "magical productivity drug" (if one could even exist) would necessarily be a stimulant? Extremely productive people that I've met in person were often quite calm and lacked the sort of hypomania that you see in people taking stimulants.
I don't know. There are lots of extremely happy pain-free people I know, but a drug that makes *you* extremely happy and pain-free is probably addictive and tolerance-building. I'm not sure why this is.
“Everyone” shouldn’t and doesn’t want to be like Elon Musk, or the average driven startup founder.
There are a lot of people who would want such a drug though. My guess is it’s a lot harder to develop a drug that effects “focus” than one that directly effects “desire for this specific thing.”
I’ve personally had success with nicotine during reading (something I used to really struggle with) and now I feel the urge to read, nicotine or not. Something like what you’re describing is probably not just a chemical, but maybe chemical + specific habit + mental conditioning.
The trillion dollar bill on the sidewalk is helping people learn to work together, not against each other, no new drugs needed. Well, maybe, but the drug would have to cure jealousy and envy.
There was a thing called religion, but it stopped working.
The newer versions are much less impressive.
This take is pretty historically ignorant.
It was at least partially tongue-in-cheek.
Obviously religion is still around in a lot of places, and didn't do that perfectly and caused lots of wars. But it is funny he mentioned goals most of the world's major religions claim to aim toward.
Sounds like the "Big Gods" hypothesis.
> The trillion dollar bill on the sidewalk is helping people learn to work together, not against each other, no new drugs needed.
Technology and popping pills is way easier and more likely than somehow figuring out how to beat Moloch.
And how would this cooperation shake out, operationally, in a way that increases productivity? We already cooperate at the levels of individual businesses and corporations to drive economic outcomes, and further cooperation at that level is either conspiracy or price fixing, and wouldn't necessarily increase productivity.
So what does super-cooperation look like? Better political cooperation? That seems as likely to reduce productivity as it does to increase it. If everyone is pulling on the same team, but that team wants to pass out UBI and let people play video games all day, it seems like productivity takes a big hit?
I'm struggling to see how better cooperation actually turns out to be a trillion dollar bill, or to positively affect productivity at all.
"Technology and popping pills is way easier and more likely than somehow figuring out how to beat Moloch."
Easier, yes. But if you buckle down and do the hard thing, what you have at the end is a WAY TO BEAT MOLOCH. If you do the easy thing, all you end up doing is handing Moloch another weapon.
I think "productivity" here is suffering from about the worst case of Goodhart's law I've ever seen. I don't want an ascended economy, or a global paperclip maximizer, or an economy of carefully designed ems so perfectly optimized that they don't even *need* to be enslaved because they're just oh-so-happy to toil away endlessly for their overseers. All of those things would likely be vastly more productive than our current economy, and yet I'd rather regress all the way to the bronze age than "advance" to any one of them.
What I do want is human flourishing. Increased productivity *can* help improve human flourishing, but it's the measure, not the target, and some would do well to remember that.
What does "flourishing" mean? Population expansion?
Imagine you had a powerful-but-not-omnipotent genie that you could make unlimited wishes of. You knew this genie to be friendly and reasonable and that the wishes weren't traps: if some wish had big unforeseen (to you) negative consequences, the genie would just tell you, and work with you to find a way to get what you wanted without them.
As for powerful-but-not-omnipotent, let's describe it as follows: the genie will not make large, sweeping changes to the Earth or the universe. The genie will not violate the laws of physics in any large, repeated or detectable way. Once you are finished with the genie, the world-at-large will not look significantly different. But the genie can significantly tilt probabilities in ways that help you. If you want a winning lottery ticket, you'll find one in the parking lot. If there's a job you've always dreamed of doing, you'll be scouted by a recruiter tomorrow, and hired for it next week (training provided as-needed). If your mother is dying of incurable cancer, the doctor will discover an error in the tests and announce that it's easily treatable. If your biggest problems are with your own psychology, you'll find robust, easy treatments (possibly discovering that you've been misdiagnosed) very quickly.
You have use of the genie for a limited time, a few weeks to a few months, say. But the changes will persist. Can you think of any changes you'd make to your life, and to the lives of your friends and family? Can you think of any ways you expect your life could be persistently better, even after you've lost use of the genie?
If "yes," you now know what "human flourishing" looks like for TGGP specifically, and probably for many of those in your circle of concern. Expand that general idea to everyone in the world--keeping in mind that people will want different things--and there's a sufficient-but-not-necessary picture of "human flourishing." People are happier, healthier and living more of the lives they want to live (whatever form that takes).
Obviously we don't have genies, but technology has managed things only barely short of that level of miraculousness, and done it at scale. There are people living happy, healthy lives with previously untreatable diseases. There are people doing satisfying work in jobs that never even existed before, enjoying hobbies that were impossible 100 years ago, finding satisfying friendships and relationships that could never have happened when most humans spend their whole lives stuck in one place. Obviously there have been problems introduced as well, but "improving human flourishing" is clearly not impossible.
So, it increases utility? Although it seems the hypothetical only applies to existing people, so I guess average rather than total utility. Can the genie create a Fire-the-CEO market, or would that violate the bit about the world seeming different?
"The biggest problem with all of today's "ADHD" medications is that they don't necessarily make people more productive - they just make it *easier* to be more productive but are unable to give people that deep internal desire to work hard that's present inside of every self-made millionaire out there."
This sentence relies on a number of assumptions that look (to my eye) extremely shaky.
1. All "self-made millionaires" have a "deep internal desire to work hard." Are you basing this assumption on the empirical observation that they DO work hard? If so, why assume that this is the result of a deep internal desire for hard work specifically, or even that it's the result of any deep desire at all?
2. Most people who are not self-made millionaires lack the same deep internal desire to work hard. How could you know this? Is it because they aren't millionaires, or because you think they work less hard? Are there alternate possibilities you are failing to consider?
3. The lack of such a deep internal desire is a problem. Admittedly, this is partially a value judgment, but medications are usually taken voluntarily. Do you think everybody wants to self-modify to having a brain that is not just comfortable but eager to work 80-90 hour weeks? Do you think they should want that? Do you see any potential downsides to offering that self-modification as an option in a world where a substantial fraction of people don't want it?
I can speak to some experience as a great beneficiary of ADHD medication. From my personal experience, you are exactly correct that for a person with ADHD, finding and taking the right medication will make it *easier* to be productive. Something that perhaps you hadn't considered is that "making it easier for someone to be productive" and "making that person more productive" are very likely a distinction without a difference. When you make something cheaper, people buy more of it. When you make productivity cost less (in terms of mental effort) people do more of it. The world you want is the world we already have.
The minor reason that getting proper treatment for my ADHD didn't turn me into Elon Musk is that the treatment isn't perfect: it works pretty well but I'm still sometimes at a disadvantage. The major reason that ADHD treatment didn't turn me into Elon Musk is that I don't WANT to be Elon Musk. I cannot emphasize strongly enough just HOW MUCH I don't want to be Elon Musk. If, at the point I started looking for ADHD treatment, a genie had appeared to me with a pill, telling me that is was the only treatment that would work at all for my ADHD, but in addition to permanently curing my attention and executive function issues, it would give me a nearly irrepressible drive to work, that I'd plunge myself into my career to the near-exclusion of everything else, I'd walk away with out a second though. Better to live a life of frustrating mediocrity than sacrifice my soul to Moloch.
As it is, I have become much more productive since I found the right ADHD medication, and SOME of that extra productivity has gone into getting my career back on track. But some has also gone into the many other things that are important to me. I cannot strongly enough express the depths of contempt and revulsion I feel towards any worldview that would say that I ought to sacrifice most of who I am in order to make a line go up, or that others should do the same.
> I cannot strongly enough express the depths of contempt and revulsion I feel towards any worldview that would say that I ought to sacrifice most of who I am in order to make a line go up, or that others should do the same.
Why does everyone assume that myst_05 meant "what can we force the entire population to do to make line go up?"
It sounded like he's advocating for a fully voluntary model of productivity enhancement, and just bemoaning the fact that the array of options is so limited.
I personally agree with him - for all the good that things like Adderall can do, it seems like the menu of options available to people who want to increase their own productivity or economic or societal impact is really limited. That's a bad thing. We *should* work harder to make it easier for more people to increase their productivity and impact if that's what they want.
And given that this is one of those "positive externality" situations where society as a whole benefits from any increases in those things, we probably should be pouring significant resources into this from the top down.
I really don't understand why "let's give people who want to be more productive more options and affordances" is so controversial. Given how lopsided the responses are here, *obviously* it's not going to turn into people voting to make it mandatory from infancy.
"It sounded like he's advocating for a fully voluntary model of productivity enhancement, and just bemoaning the fact that the array of options is so limited. "
While I'd object rather strongly to the phrase "fully voluntary" I also didn't read his comment as "forcing people to take drugs." See point 3 which (I hope) is quite clear on that. There are two problems here, but only one is easy to explain.
The simple problem is that there's no such thing as a "fully voluntary" performance enhancing drug: not when it's enhancing performance in a highly-competitive domain. If such a drug were developed and made freely available, it wouldn't NEED to be made mandatory in the legal sense. Employers would simply set job requirements that the average person could not meet without it: anyone who wanted to stay employed would converge pretty quickly on taking this wonder-drug. The labour movement of centuries past fought long and hard for things like weekends, 40 hour weeks and overtime rules specifically because there's a strong tendency for employers to do this *even without* having a bottled-solution that they can nudge people towards. Cultural inertia has kept these improvements in place (the modern labour movement is certainly too weak to defend them at the society-wide level), but it's also the thing responsible for the generally dim view towards performance enhancing drugs. If we're trying to bring about a future where performance enhancing drugs are freely available, it seems safe to assume that the culture that allows that also isn't doing much to protect anyone against the soft coercion towards taking them: the current hostility towards them is *part of how it does that.*
The more complicated problem is one of worldview and mindset and how one understands human beings generally. It is probably difficult to communicate clearly and concisely. The best I think I can do is to point at the gap that myst_05 seems to see between "mak[ing] it easier to be more productive" and "giv[ing] people the deep, internal desire to work hard."
Imagine somebody who badly wants to improve their life circumstances but finds maintaining productivity difficult. Suppose that person takes some currently-available ADHD medication (and finds it effective). The medication makes it easier for them to be more productive. Will they become actually more productive as a result? I imagine that very probably it would: they want things that productivity can (usually) help people get, they now have decreased barriers to productivity, so why wouldn't they get more done?[1]
Now imagine a different person who has similar difficulties with high productivity, but has found a path through life that they find generally satisfying, that works well with the abilities they have. If they were to take ADHD medication, what could it actually do for them? It might make them a bit better at doing the things they were already doing, it might even open up some new opportunities, but by presumption, they're content where they are and not likely to take big risks or make big changes. The best I can read myst_05's position is that they want a medication that will turn this second sort of person into the first sort of person. To which myself (and it seems others) respond "holy cow, why would ANYBODY want that to exist? What possible benign use could it even HAVE?"
As far as I can tell, most humans have complex motivations and value a lot of different things. We have physical and mental limitations that somewhat determine how much energy we can put into tasks, but within those limitations, I think most people will already work very hard *in circumstances that make the tradeoffs worth it.* The reasons for most people to not be workaholic zombies isn't brain chemistry, it's that they value things that being a workaholic zombie won't get them, and don't sufficiently value the things it will get them. It seems like myst_05 is just sort of...glossing over all that, and rounding it off to "the most people have a deep, underlying desire to be workaholic zombies, they're just lacking the right tool and its very, very important for us to give it to them" Part of the revulsion I feel is not for the suggestion itself, but for this sort of worldview that seems to come through in what myst_05 writes: it a little like conversing with a paperclip maximizer who's not-so-subtly sizing me up for raw materials even as its trading small-talk.
[1] I can think of a few circumstance-dependent reasons, but none of those reasons are something a better medication could help with.
Thanks for explaining your view more comprehensively.
I do think we're probably coming at this from opposite ends of the spectrum. Your solution to me sounds more like "let's permanently cap human potential, because we don't want any tall poppies out there making us look bad."
You're thinking of the impact on the average person, and I'm thinking of the impact on high performers. I feel like your model is "if PED's are available, all the common people will be forced to take them and run on treadmills for their bosses 12 hours a day," which I really think there's no historic evidence for.
My model is "if PED's are available, the people at the outer edge of what's possible will take them and push that frontier further."
If you're worried about employers taking advantage of productivity drugs, legislation and regulation is the place for that, just like the legislation around 40 hour weeks. Do you seriously think Europe, for example, is going to be fine with employers redlining everybody and forcing them to take Productisin every day to make 60 hour mandatory work weeks? Not even America would be fine with that.
I mean, you know cocaine was legal during the industrial revolution right? Did US or UK employers mandate that everyone take it, or even pass it out for free to those who wanted it? No, not really.
When more people were doing manual labor, were employers of the 40's-60's forcing their employees to take testosterone, or passing it out for free, so they could lift and move more boxes or whatever easily? Of course not.
I don't see where you're getting "if performance enhancers existed, employers nation / worldwide would force their employees to take them." We have no historical evidence of that, and lots of evidence of people increasingly limiting employers' practices to make life easier.
I'm more of a libertarian "human potential maximalist." More choices is better. I'm 100% for individually-chosen PED's, in any domain, including work, sport, or recreation. Because if you're at the edges of what's possible, a 10% or 5% or even 1% bump is a huge deal.
Hell, I'm 100% for legalizing all drugs too, yes even opiates. You know right now, because of illegality, overdoses are the number one cause of death for people under 40? 100k young people a year die because of opiate policy, but the actual chemicals cost literal pennies. If America legalized and allowed them to be sold at 2x cost, it would save 100k lives a year. Sure, more people would be addicted, but that's their choice. And being illegal and expensive is the source of all the negative externalities anyways - if it's legal and cheap, who *cares* if people are addicted? That's up to them, and the health consequences of pharmaceutically pure opiates is basically "constipation." And more pople being addicted / constipated is worth saving 100k young people a year.
If somebody wants to work harder or be more productive, it's a good thing if they can get PED's that help them do this. I think that actually leads to more human flourishing overall, because it allows people to push the envelope and achieve more and BE more.
"But people will feel compelled to take them if other people are taking them." Isn't that a good thing?? You're bemoaning the fact that ultra competitive people want to compete harder. It's still an individual choice, and the net result is more high performers, and more people pushing the boundaries of human performance.
And there's not enough competitive people this is gonna be a society-wide problem. Burger flippers and cashiers aren't going to feel compelled to take them to flip more burgers or ring up more people per hour, they don't care enough, and the benefits of "winning" aren't exciting enough.
I think worrying that employers will abuse PED's and force everybody to take them is mistaken, there's basically no evidence of that. Work is a MUCH less competitive domain than sport, for example. And even in sport, do you see team managers forcing their people to take steroids?
Instead, you advocate policies that cap human potential, out of some nebulous fear employers will take advantage.
I think people should be free to live better through chemistry, and that high performers should be free to push the boundaries of what's possible.
There's quite a lot I could say in response to this when I have more time. But by far the most important thing I see is that we have a very large disagreement over what's actually being proposed here.
"My model is 'if PED's are available, the people at the outer edge of what's possible will take them and push that frontier further.'"
I think it's possible that this could be true of *some* performance-enhancing drugs, but it seems very much NOT true of the specific thing myst_05 is suggesting. He's not suggesting something that pushes 5 sigma people out to 7 sigmas, he's suggesting (AFAICT) something for the express purpose of pushing approximately average people significantly towards the right side. It seems like such a drug would be mostly useless for somebody who was already a workaholic: it can't give you more than 24 hours in a day, after all. The *entire idea* is to turn people who value non-work things into people who value work above all else. Again, I see very little benign use for that sort of thing: people who WANT to work hard (and don't have issues like ADHD or depression, which can be treated by other means) WILL work hard. A drug that specifically messes with peoples' basic personality and desires seems like a far more alarming notion than one that just gives you more energy, or wakes you up or whatever.
I guess that's fair.
My particular interpretation was more along the lines of "this is an important class of drugs / interventions that is really limited today, but could have a lot of positive externalities if there were more options, why aren't we pouring more top-down money and effort into this?"
But you're right in his subsequent paragraphs, he touts broad-scale GDP benefits, with presumably broad-scale adoption, and that could be interpreted as "give it to everybody."
He did clarify in another comment that he meant for it to be fully voluntary, and would abhor a society forcing everybody to take it, for what it's worth.
> The *entire idea* is to turn people who value non-work things into people who value work above all else.
And I interpreted this more as allowing people suffering from akrasia (ie everyone at some point) to transform "desire" to "actions" when they deem it valuable enough, by taking a PED.
You say the people who want to work hard are working hard - I disagree. Lots of people WANT to work harder, or wish they accomplished more, or wish they didn't waste 12 hours of their weekend on TV and video games or whatever. I would definitely heavily bet there's many, many times more of these people than workaholics, or even people who don't accomplish much but are happy about it because they value other, non-productive values (the target audience you're describing who you don't want to change).
This is for people with akrasia, who individually want to do better and change their actions by their own lights, not the people who are happy with their current work life balance and productivity, or the Stephen Wolframs or Scotts of the world who are already very productive.
And akrasia is a big enough deal I actually could see it meaninfully impacting GDP if you had a widely available "take a pill" solution to it. Sure, most of it will go into hobbies or blog posts or whatever, but a decent chunk will probably spill over into economic impacts, and that chunk is probably pretty meaningful given how prevalent akrasia is.
"Why does everyone assume that myst_05 meant "what can we force the entire population to do to make line go up?""
Because his example of "how things would be better if we all were Elon Musk-levels of workaholic" is " just imagine how insane GDP growth could get if *everyone* had the same drive and motivation as Elon Musk or whoever is your favorite example of a hard working person" and not "imagine the happier, more contented society!" as the result.
Yes, I'm sure the FAANGs would love an extra trillion or so on their market cap, but does that really make *my* life better? No, I don't own stocks or shares, I'm not in a job that grants options, etc. so "the company shares are worth more means my potential wealth has increased" does not apply to me and a whole lot of other people.
Sorry, you are right, I didn't mean to imply that the drug will be mandatory for people to take. I just assumed that a lot of people would take such a drug willingly, given how many people complain about "Sunday scaries" or otherwise suffer from ADHD, procrastination and lack of motivation.
But yes, I would hate to live in a world where this drug is mandatory or where you basically can't survive if you don't take it.
I mean, forget adderall, why aren't we offering to CRISPR the "sleep 2-3 hours less a day" SNP into anyone who asks for it, for free? There should literally be space-race level funding for this, because it's something we could do today, it doesn't even require massively parallel CRISPR-ing like all the massively polygenic traits.
That's ~500M+ hours of productivity we could unlock basically tomorrow in just America. And yes, 99% of people will just waste it on binging another couple of episodes or rage-posting on Twitter or whatever, but even if only 1% of people use it productively, it's still many millions of hours of additional productivity!
Or, harking back to a recent SSC subreddit thread, why don't we infect everyone who wants to be an entrepreneur with toxoplasmosis? In a ~50k+ sample of negative and positive tested women, that increased the chances of doing a startup and the chances of being a serial entrepreneur 20-30%. That's probably the biggest possible single-point "entrepreneurship" lever in the literature.
Everyone is complaining that whatever surplus productivity unlocked will just end up being snaffled up by big corporations - so do your own thing! Start a company, run a small business, join a startup - do something where those hours of productivity actually directly positively impact both the world and your own bottom line.
Also, having worked in finance - make cocaine literally legal instead of just "defacto legal as long as you're an educated white person."
But you know, just looking at the responses here, obviously people just hate productivity fully generally.
Other people can handle the rest, I'll just address this: we can't CRISPR a gene into adult people's whole brains and have no idea if it would do anything positive even if we could (whatever gene you're referring to may affect development rather than the ongoing function of a developed brain). If we could do something like that, then there's about a billion more useful things to fix before you get to "make people sleep less".
"But you know, just looking at the responses here, obviously people just hate productivity fully generally. "
You understand other humans very, very poorly if this is actually what you think. Reread your post again, please. Are any of the things you suggested--reduced sleep, toxoplamosis, cocaine--are any of these things necessary for productivity-in-general?
If the answer is "no," then perhaps there are other reasons why people are disdainful of myst_05s suggestion. I'll wager most of those people would be equally disdainful of your suggestions: I know I certainly am. There is a big, BIG difference between thinking productivity is important and valuable, and the sort of thinking you are engaging in here.
> Are any of the things you suggested--reduced sleep, toxoplamosis, cocaine--are any of these things necessary for productivity-in-general?
No single factor is really necessary for a specific individual's productivity, or "productivity in general" - I understood myst_05's post to be looking for aggregate, societal level levers we could pull to increase productivity, and I think all of the ones I suggested qualify.
It seems like the menu of options available to people who want to increase their own productivity or economic or societal impact is really limited. That's a bad thing. We *should* work harder to make it easier for more people to increase their productivity and impact if that's what they want.
Sure, my suggestions are all outside the Overton window but I think that just shows how limited the options really are.
And it's fine with me if people are disdainful of my suggestions. If it's possible, I'm gonna pay to put the "sleep less" SNP into my own kids, and will do whatever I can (like owning cats! Dun dun dun!) to give them a better chance of being an entrepreneur, like me, and will be quite happy that they'll have those advantages against a background of people disdainful of taking advantage of them for themselves and their kids.
"I understood myst_05's post to be looking for AGGREGATE, SOCIETAL LEVEL LEVERS WE COULD PULL to increase productivity, and I think all of the ones I suggested qualify." (Emphasis mine.)
The highlighted part is exactly the problem. Both you and myst_05 are imagining these as transformative technologies applying on a society-wide level. To your credit you don't suggest they should be involuntary (except to your own kids, which is kind of horrifying) but you do at least imagine them seeing extremely widespread use.
In political terms I'm not a conservative. In fact, I end up loathing most political positions identified by that word. But I do consider myself "conservative" in the more fundamental meaning of the word: something like "careful and somewhat risk-averse." I think that sort of conservatism is EXTREMELY important at the level of entire societies; there are millions of mouldering corpses in the graveyards of the world that can attest to the consequences of eschewing it. In fact, I think the combination of Capitalism + Industrialization is have already caused our technological progress to far outpace our ability to recognize and mitigate risks. The fact that we've unlocked multiple new types of X-risk in the past century, without any especially convincing ways for dealing with any of them speaks to that.
All of the things you're proposing carry risks and tradeoffs. When the LEAST risky item on the list is "allow and maybe encourage copious cocaine use," that should be a bit of a red flag. But at least if somebody discovers that cocaine is harming them, they can (in theory) just stop taking it. There are, as you say, lots of factors that influence productivity in general, and it's been steadily improving for decades thanks to various incremental technology improvements. I'm thoroughly unconvinced that squeezing out ever more productivity is a goal so urgent and unarguably good that it's worth throwing any half-baked idea we can at it, no matter how risky, uncertain or irreversible.
Re: toxoplasmosis and your contention that "In a ~50k+ sample of negative and positive tested women, that increased the chances of doing a startup and the chances of being a serial entrepreneur 20-30%"
Global prevalence of toxoplasmosis:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33597463/
"African countries had the highest average seroprevalence rate of 61.4%, followed by Oceania with 38.5%, South America with 31.2%, Europe with 29.6%, USA/Canada with 17.5%, and Asia with 16.4%."
So you tell me which are the most economically successful countries and is that down to toxoplasmosis. And remember, correlation does not imply causation; how many of the infected women are the "single childless cat ladies" who are starting up small businesses like hair and nail salons of their own? In which case it may not be the toxoplasmosis that is responsible.
If you are serious and not trolling us about "I'm going to own cats to infect my kids", then make sure you wait until *after* pregnancy and birth to get those cats, because infection during pregnancy can have serious side effects. And that your kids never have any immune system weakness. You may get more side effects than just junior entrepreneurs!
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/toxoplasmosis/symptoms-causes/syc-20356249
"The toxoplasma parasites may infect tissues of the inner eye. This can occur in people with healthy immune systems. But the disease is more serious in people with weakened immunity. An infection in the eye is called ocular toxoplasmosis. Symptoms may include:
Eye pain.
Poor vision.
Floaters, which are specks that seem to swim in your vision.
Untreated eye disease can cause blindness.
Effect on people with weakened immune systems
People with weakened immune systems are likely to have more-serious disease from toxoplasmosis. A toxoplasmosis infection from earlier in life may become active again. People at risk include those living with HIV/AIDS, people receiving cancer treatment and people with a transplanted organ.
In addition to serious eye disease, toxoplasmosis can cause severe lung or brain disease for a person with weakened immunity. Rarely, the infection can show up in other tissues throughout the body.
Lung infection may cause:
Breathing problems.
Fever.
Cough.
Toxoplasmosis may cause inflammation of the brain, also called encephalitis. Symptoms may include:
Confusion.
Poor coordination.
Muscle weakness.
Seizures.
Changes in alertness.
Effect on fetus or infant
Toxoplasmosis can pass from the mother to the fetus during a pregnancy. This is called congenital toxoplasmosis.
Infection during the first trimester often causes more-severe disease. It also may result in miscarriage. For some babies with toxoplasmosis, serious disease may be present at birth or appear early in infancy. Medical problems may include:
Too much fluid in or around the brain, also called hydrocephalus.
Severe eye infection.
Irregularities in brain tissues.
An enlarged liver or spleen.
Symptoms of severe disease vary. They may include:
Problems with mental or motor skills.
Blindness or other vision problems.
Hearing problems.
Seizures.
Heart disorders.
Yellowing of the skin and whites of the eyes, also called jaundice.
Rash.
Most babies with toxoplasmosis do not show symptoms. But problems may show up later in childhood or teenage years. These include:
Return of eye infections.
Problems with motor skill development.
Problems with thinking and learning.
Hearing loss.
Slowed growth.
Early puberty."
And why the fuck do I care about turning people into worker ants so GDP line go up and "economy booming!", yet people are finding it harder to stretch a dollar?
The problem is that the big megacorps aren't rich enough yet, so everyone must toil 24 hours of the day for Mammon!
Who *are* the productive people, tell me? The guys using AI to help them code to write yet another app to persuade people to spend money on useless crap?
There's a saying: "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath". Similarly, the economy should serve us, not we be the cogs for the economy.
Why is it so important that GDP go up? Why not try to maximize comfort and leisure instead?
Because you can’t get leisure time without a productive economy. If we 10x the global economy one more time we’ll get many, many hours of leisure.
No, we won't, since now everyone is going to spend those leisure hours on work, due to the drug-induced drive to work hard all the time. The hamster wheel just keeps turning faster and faster.
This assumes I won't spend my leisure time coming down from the drugs I took in order to be more productive and get more leisure time.
You can easily have leisure time without a productive economy. What you don't have is security: production buys security against famine, against drought, against wild beasts and angry neighbours.
But even that is now moot - you just need to be productive enough to build and maintain a few atom bombs, and then you have all the security you need.
> But even that is now moot - you just need to be productive enough to build and maintain a few atom bombs, and then you have all the security you need.
Not really working out for North Korea or Pakistan, is it?
I mean, would you rather be a farmer or regular citizen in either of those two places, or non-nuclear-power Germany, Japan, South Korea, Italy, or any country in South America?
Fair point, but all of those countries you mention are protected by nuclear weapons indirectly and all are nuclear threshold states (i.e., they could each build a nuclear weapon very quickly if the need arose).
And its also the case that most of them sacrifice at least some potential GDP in the name of leisure time.
Probably the people who work on antidepressants would have discovered a drug like that if it is discoverable with any reasonable effort.
Because a society of Elon Musks would be hopelessly non-functional?
Or are you assuming that you can get the 'driven' part without also getting a whole population of thin-skinned sociopaths who don't play nicely with others?
I think Elon's ability to run multiple companies successfully indicates some ability to cooperate with others, even if those others are selected for their willingness to work with him.
If you don’t like Elon, think of the most hardworking person you know instead. Wouldn’t it be great if everyone were capable of being as productive as her or him?
The hardest working people I know are doctors in public healthcare. They're working insane hours because the system itself is broken and cuts funding at the sharp end in favour of hiring more middle managers. They don't look after themselves properly and survive mainly on stimulants.
Meanwhile Elon nominally works 4 jobs (and gets paid insane amounts to do so), yet appears to have plenty of time to shitpost online, go to the gym and pursue relationships with women he will subsequently fall out with.
"Working hard" is a relative term. I'd prefer that doctors can work 40 hour weeks, earn good salaries and take time to care for themselves. I suspect that, if you could magically force everyone to work 100 hours a week, all that would happen is that you'd create enormous amounts of busywork, oversight work, compliance work etc.
Fix the system rather than trying to hammer people into better cogs for it.
What about someone like Stephen Wolfram? He wrote a wonderful essay about how he spends his days, with numerous graphs and charts to illustrate his daily activities: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/08/five-most-productive-years-what-happened-and-whats-next/
He lives a pretty simple lifestyle but doesn't seem like a 'cog' to me?
Drugging everyone to be better workers does not sound like the kind of thing that would make them happier, healthier, nicer, stable people. GDP growth is meaningless if it doesn't actually come with the things people value, and more drug use seems counterproductive.
Just because we want, it doesn't mean we can. No guarantee that by spending trillion dollars on research we will be able to discover something better than what we already have.
I tried nootropics, they didn't work for me. Apparently I don't have ADHD or any other condition that could be treated to enable me to function better. Maybe when I am older I would benefit more but who knows. I wouldn't bet on this.
At the risk of being a bit conspiracy-theorist, I wonder if part of the reason is because it wouldn't work if everyone was a compulsive innovator or massively driven. The people who do menial labour, for example, wouldn't be substantially better served if they were spending their downtime coming up with better tools - if they because let's say 10x more productive, they wouldn't be 10x better off, their employer would just take the improved productivity as profit, paying the laborer as little as they could get away with in order to maximise their own personal profit. And that's ignoring the downstream effects - if you're a menial laborer doing menial labor, you're probably not doing it because you have a deep passionate love of menial labour. You're doing it because that's all you can do due to any number of factors. Lifting everyone up wouldn't change the fact that menial labour needs to be done, now you've just got (to use your example) Elon Musks doing it. Until you get robots and AI, but that changes the game so much that I doubt this would be helpful in that situation either.
And I wouldn't say that there is a shortage of productive people - what we have is a insane surplus of demand for extreme productivity in order to serve ever more power- or money-hungry interests who want to push people to do more and more for as little as possible. Add in governments who are growing ever more expansive (necessitating higher taxes) and invasive (necessitating ever more efficient forms of control and surveillance), and even if you increased people's productivity by 10x, the system would just adjust and we'd be back where we started real fast.
More widely, what other effects would we see? If the, for want of a better term, "willingness to disrupt the status quo" of people also increased, would this lead to lesser satisfaction with the status quo, leading to more social upheaval? Or do they just work hard but not change things, in which case you're in the above situation at best, or created a race of slaves at worst?
And of course that's assuming you can rigorously define what you're trying to improve in the first place, which I think you gloss over the difficulty of.
Agreed that, if nothing else was changed, just making people work harder would only result in better dividends to shareholders, not any improvements for the workers themselves.
"The people who do menial labour"
Are not the people OP means by "productive", rather they mean "people like me in some kind of vaguely STEM-related job where my office job labour somehow adds a fraction of a cent to the share price and that means Me Productive!
Cleaning the office, sweeping the streets, making the desks at which OP sits - that's not productive, that's just toil by the little people which can be outsourced and then automated away. Maybe if the office desk is five dollars cheaper because the menial workers are drugged up to work 10 times harder on the production line, that makes the expenses of the employer furnishing the office for the Me Productives! cheaper, so that is contributing - but the *real* productive people are, of course, those whose backsides are plonked down on the chair in front of that cheaper desk.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-u-s-gdp-by-industry-in-2023/
"Service-based industries, including professional and business services, real estate, finance, and health care, make up the bulk (70%) of U.S. GDP.
...Professional and business services is the largest industry with $3.5 trillion in value added. It comprises establishments providing legal, consulting, design, administration, and other services. This is followed by real estate at $3.3 trillion, which has consistently been an integral part of the economy."
So what OP is visualising turns out to be "if real estate agents are 10x more productive" then the economy is shooting for the moon!
This, 100%
Hey there! Travis here, one of the co-founders of Ovelle and longtime reader of ACX. For a little background on our effort I would echo what Metacelsus said on his blog "Ovelle’s mission is to develop and deploy advanced biological technologies to help people become parents. Our approach will mainly center on using synthetic biology tools to identify factors that can rapidly generate our cells of interest. Our first goal will be to grow eggs from stem cells derived from biological women, as that’s the main unmet need today."
Achieving our mission will be hard and we face enormous scientific and practical hurdles. But imagine a world where family dreams come true with a simple swab!
Thanks for the shoutout Scott - it means the world to have voices like yours amplifying our mission.
P.S. If you're as excited about this as we are, we're always looking for brilliant minds and bold investors to help on our mission. Email us at contact@ovelle.bio
On your website you're not sharing any details about open positions, so it is very difficult to gauge both what kind of person you're still looking for, and whether you actually have the resources to employ them full- or even just part-time.
Hi RenOS, sorry about that! We just started. We do have the resources to employ people and were just about to start looking for people. We need somone with a PhD to help us differentiate human iPSCs, someone with experience with animal cell cultures to work on IVM of ovarian follicles, and a couple of research assistants to help with all of this. All the positions would be full time in Boston.
Molecular biologist here. I'm super excited by the potential of this technology, both as a scientist, and as an early-30s woman who is unpartnered and undecided about having kids.
I'm sure you've put a great deal of thought into this, and I'm wondering if you'd be willing to share at least on a basic level what your strategy is for managing the epigenetic state of human oocytes produced in vitro, including their RNA payload. I'd be concerned about incomplete erasure of epigenetic marks (10.1038/nbt.1667; 10.1016/j.diff.2014.09.001) from (presumably) fibroblasts during iPSC generation resulting in oocytes with some inappropriate epigenetic marks, which may or may not matter because they might get stripped during that early-cleavage epigenetic mopfest anyway. I'd also have questions about RNA payload - I did a quick lit search and dug up a lot more stuff about sperm RNA payload vs egg RNA payload but I'm aware that it's a huge deal for embryogenesis in Drosophila at least. Sorry I'm a little rusty on some of these exact mechanisms and don't have a huge amount of time to commit to looking for more sources, but very interested in your thoughts. I'm also not meaning to imply that these issues will sink your idea, quite the opposite - if you get on top of them they might be one of the biggest advantages of it. If I conceive naturally, I have no option but to pass along the epigenetic detritus of my life, not all of which is positive; it would be very interesting to have an alternative to that.
Yes, we are definitely focusing on the epigenetics of our cells, although I can't say too much publicly yet about our specific plans.
Hi Laura, thanks for the interest! Getting the correct epigenetic state is probably one of the most challenging parts of IVG, but there has been significant progress on this. For example see the recent work by Saitou et al. in 'In vitro reconstitution of epigenetic reprogramming in the human germ line' which used Bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) signaling https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07526-6. There are also new methods for directly manipulating the epigenetic state most notably demonstrated by a group using targeted DNA methylation rewriting in the paper 'Viable offspring derived from single unfertilized mammalian oocytes' https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2115248119. Happy to chat more over email if you want at travis@ovelle.bio.
I wrote a post in which I speculate about whether some kinds of obnoxious people (like the stereotypical "Karen") might be a load-bearing element of society.
https://soupofthenight.substack.com/p/karen-shrugged
It's a good point. Not that I value customer service all that much frankly--I hate people and don't blame anyone else for being grumpy. In general my assumption is the European equilibrium is better than the American, because I don't share the enthusiasm for dynamism and growth of most people on here.
As for the protesters...well, do you agree with the cause?
well, do you agree with the cause?
I’m inclined to disagree with the apocalyptic, norm-superceding urgency of it, then again I don’t have a good baseline on what a situation warranting such urgency would look like
Oh, it was a generic statement. People are more likely to disapprove of being disrupted by a cause they disagree with than a cause they agree with.
"Multiply this event by a few orders of magnitude and you can see how this imposes costs not only on this particular McDonald’s, but also on all other McDonald’ses and on the restaurant industry as a whole. Because everyone knows how bad Karen encounters are, employee turnover goes up, the applicant pool is reduced and you might have to increase wages to keep people interested. It’s that, or you make super extra sure that the number of pickles incidents is kept to an absolute minimum.
The Eternal Karen gets what she wants. I mean, what can you do? Will you refuse to make improvements to your restaurant purely out of principle? Your competitors sure won’t. You submit, or you perish."
What will happen in reality is that hell no, we're not upping wages, this is a burger-flipping job, what do you expect? So the manager yells at the cashier, who decides - as you say - to hell with this, I'm quitting. Wages are not increased to compensate for dealing with Karens, so the applicant pool is reduced, again as you say. So the end result is that the McDonalds franchise here hires either teenagers (increasingly I've seen this) or the people who can't get better jobs, with the concomitant quality of service that means, which means more Karen incidents.
High turnover, worse service, more stress all around - but since everyone is doing the same (the Burger King franchise is sure not going to start paying high wages to get better staff for the same reason you're not paying higher wages), nobody perishes (unless and until they get *really* crappy to the point no-one goes there anymore). The individual Karen may get what she wants, the rest of us get reduced and worse service and have to put up with it (see any of the customer services online, which is where they mostly are, because trying to get through to a human on the phone is made as difficult as possible).
Customer services for most companies are now call centre agents who are working off scripts, and increasingly "Hi, I'm ToBI your AI assistant! how can I help you?" online chatbots. Karens provide a useful service when they act as whistleblowers, but the median result of someone throwing a strop is to make things worse for everyone.
To take the example you used of the nurse, yes they *are* shields there to protect upper levels, and a shield you can punch through is no use as a shield. So the nurse who lets the Karen get through to the surgeon gets reprimanded, and the layers of shielding are upped.
I refer you to a very sad case in Ireland, where a teenage girl died in University Hospital Limerick. Despite all the attempts to "punch through" the shield, nothing happened. The ultimate cause for this was the decision to shut down regional hospitals, as is often a recommendation when planning healthcare resources. But this decision put massive pressure on the major hospital for the region, which resulted in long-term over-demand for services, and there is still nothing being done right now. Jam tomorrow, when more beds are allocated, but no jam today. You can yell at the nurses all you like, it won't help in that situation.
https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2024/0427/1445941-aoife-johnston/
Suprising fact: US law makes it llegal for the government to provide foreign aid to Israel, because of Israel's nuclear weapons.
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/israel-nuclear-weapons/
I thought that was widely known. It's why Israel's nukes don't officially exist.
My favorite quote about this goes something like, "We do not classify as a "weapon" a device which has never been tested and is not last of any military doctrine."
And adultery is illegal in Maryland.
If they won't enforce Section 6201 why would they enforce Symington-Glenn?
Strategic ambiguity is the required fig leaf.
(starts reading)
(see accusation of Israel committing genocide)
(closes page)
At this point, I don't understand how you can think it's not.
Because I'm capable of comparing the conflict there with, say, the Sudanese civil war, in which villages are regularly exterminated and civilians are deliberately gunned down.
Compared to Israel's (very flawed) attempts to minimise casualties - they haven't, for example, carpet-bombed the entirety of Gaza even though that would be a far more effective and efficient way of killing Gazans - in a war *they did not start*.
If Israel is doing a genocide, they're doing the most incompetent genocide on the planet. And say what you will about Israel's military, but "incompetent" is not *generally* how I'd describe it. Callous towards Palestinians? Sure. Prone to over-kill? Maybe. Oppressive? Arguably. But not incompetent.
"Villages" have not been exterminated - *all of Gaza* is being exterminated. Half of the hospitals are gone. 80% of the housing is gone. And still it continues.
Civlians are absolutely being targeted, there are countless stories of this happening. Two clear-cut cases include the World Central Kitchen airstrikes, and the 3 Israeli hostages waving a white flag. And tens of thousands of Palestinian children.
They're not failing to commit a genocide. They're doing it as fast as they possibly can, while managing the negative press from Israelis who want the hostages rescued. Just today they admitted that back in December they'd killed another 3 hostages by destroying the building they were in. Why haven't they mentioned it until now? Because Israelis would be horrified, and they would lose social license for the "war".
Israel is I believe presently killing Gazans at a rate well below that with which Gazans are creating new Gazans. If they are indeed "doing it as fast as they can", then it is mathematically impossible for them to commit actual genocide and accusing them of even attempted genocide would require an assumption that the Israelis are complete idiots,
If you want to accuse the Israelis of mass murder, that could lead to a discussion of collateral damage in a just war and, if you bring a good enough argument with proper supporting evidence, maybe a broad conclusion that the Israelis are in fact committing mass murder. I don't think that's the case, but it's at least possible. If you want to accuse the Israelis of genocide, that gets you the unthinking approval of your entire bubble, and everyone else rolling their eyes and moving on without you.
I'd encourage you to spend some time absorbing this article:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide
One thing that sticks out is the survey of US scholsrs of the Middle East where 75% say Israel is committing "genocide" or "major war crimes akin to genocide".
Because genocide requires the intent to exterminate a group. The genocide claim just isn't plausible, and frankly it is counterproductive: people know their own intent, so if you accuse me of genocide, I can know that you are wrong, and hence I can dismiss you.. OTOH, if you instead accuse me of the crime of violating the principle of proportionality https://casebook.icrc.org/a_to_z/glossary/proportionality I cannot dismiss your arguments.
What other intention could Israel possibly have? Its stated military goals are essentially 1. Destroy Hamas, 2. Save hostages. Goal 1 is not achievable, and pursuing it makes Goal 2 impractical. It's a fig leaf for exterminating Muslims, I suspect ahead of a proposed one-state solution with apartheid. None of the West Bank terrorism relates to either of the stated goals, but it's still happening. Why?
Totally happy to accuse Israel of violating the principle of proportionality, but I don't know why I would need to do that. Everybody can compare death toll numbers, so I expect we're already on the same page.
(Ignoring the "how could Israel possibly be taking preventative measures to respond to the mass-rape, mass-murder, and mass-kidnapping that the enemy perpetrated, rather than just being on a hate-filled campaign to kill Muslims"...) It sounds like you have some empirical predictions here:
1. Israel will not successfully destroy Hamas.
2. The hostages will not be successfully saved.
3. The population of Gaza will be exterminated, or at least drastically reduced. (Or, at the very least, reduced at least some amount.)
4. Israel will formally annex Gaza (and the West Bank?), and allow Israelis to live there.
Is that correct? And if so, if none of these happen, would it be clear that you were wrong more generally?
Yes, I feel confident making all these predictions except 4, which is a bit more speculative but still i
possible.
The only one of your statements that remains in question even at this moment is 4.
Israel will not destroy Hamas. I feel confident in saying this not because I'm clairvoyant but because no one to my knowledge has put forward a definition of destroying Hamas. Maybe it will kill Sinwar (and Deif, again). Maybe it will destroy some of the battalions of the armed wing. Does Hamas cease to exist then? Does PIJ? Does the whole concept of Palestinian armed resistance?
The hostages will not be, in the main, successfully saved because the pattern of Hamas murdering them as soon as the IDF closes in will continue. That's inherent in the concept of a hostage. The IDF has rescued 8 over a year of war. Perhaps 40 have died, 100 remain. The extrapolation looks simple.
The population of Gaza is already reduced, by as much as 10%. Assuming a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths for every direct death (as per the Lancet analysis) the total of excess deaths from Israel's assault on Gaza stands now on the order of two hundred thousand. The coefficient should probably be quite a bit higher, owing to the way famine and sanitary disasters compound in such a densely populated setting.
As to your fourth statement – what the Israeli government's political plans are, I don't know. I don't think this particular government does, either, beyond hanging on to power. I don't think Israelis will live in Gaza, because Gaza has been rendered unlivable. But piecemeal annexation of the West Bank continues, and given the climate of sharpened hostility to Palestinians, the settlers are more emboldened to grab land... sorry, assert property rights in Judea and Samaria... than ever. The West Bank as the basis of a state is on the brink of unviability. So... yes? Already happening?
The alternative for Israel is to agree a ceasefire and recover hostages by trading away Palestinian prisoners, who, if history is any guide, can often be recaptured by Israel again. Then, after that, preventing the next 10/7 by the usual means of border surveillance. This alternative has the merit of not involving genocide, or whatever not-quite-but-come-on definition of mass killing of civilians we're working with here.
Ideally, down the road, an Israeli government might come to power farsighted enough to actually concede something that can be dignified with the term 'Palestinian state', to normalise relations with the Arabs, and to achieve a modus vivendi with Iran, whereupon any point of Palestinian resistance will cease. That is how this ends. The question is only how many mostly-Palestinians die until it does.
At the very least, "genocide" tends to imply the population going down, rather than continuing to grow.
Additionally... Well, it's pretty obvious that Israel could wipe out the entire Gazan population in a matter of hours, even without using the nukes, if they wanted to. Instead, an absurd amount of effort has made it such that nearly half of all casualties have been terrorists, at the cost of hundreds of Israeli soldiers' lives and an absolute disaster for the Israeli economy, as a large portion of the population needs to stick around in an awful warzone full of hostile people.
Fundamentally, this isn't really a normal war. If Hamas had behaved like a government interested in protecting civilians, they would have evacuated the civilian population, moved all their fighting forces away from them, and gotten bombed to bits instantly. Zero civilian casualties, poof. Or, more reasonably, surrendered as soon as it became clear that they didn't have the ability to actually fight the IDF. Hamas's *only* real weapon is that they can get Gazans killed, and they're using it as much as they can. Hamas is responsible for every death in Gaza, for refusing to surrender in a war they started and lost.
"Hamas is responsible for every death in Gaza"
I don't understand why this is not more widely disseminated. Hamas started this with the attack on Israel, and is using their own citizens as shields. It looks highly unsympathetic, objectively.
And yes, I know one can say Israel oppressed Gaza, which caused Hamas to launch 10/7. This doesn't hold water for sympathy. If one is oppressed, one holds peaceful protests. One does not go and kill and kidnap a bunch of innocent people as a protest.
> If one is oppressed, one holds peaceful protests.
And then one continues to be oppressed.
In 1776, some people decided to no longer be ruled by another country. The declaration led to war, for the oppressors to continue to hold power. But the oppressed did not kill a bunch of innocent people to protest.
Israel does not and did not rule Gaza. Their objective was not to escape oppression, but to hurt their perceived enemies. To escape any oppression, they only needed to run their own country, from which Israel wasn't stopping them.
Using this term is not helpful for quality discourse, assuming you care about that.
Do you have a preferred term?
When there is an intentional permanent displacement of population, it may match "ethnic cleansing". Some of it is happening in West Bank. Not so much in Gaza, though the hawks in the Netanyahu's cabinet certainly talk about it.
When you discuss the IDF barely or not at all caring about civilian casualties when fighting Hamas, you can call it that. "Genocide" is best reserved for unambiguous and extreme cases, not unfortunate excesses of an ongoing war, be it in Gaza, in Ukraine or elsewhere.
When in doubt, use less connotation and more denotation.
A terribly inefficient one, is it not? Why not go faster?
Not at all - the vast majority of Gazans have been displaced, all of their hospitals have been damaged, and... you know what, just read the wiki page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide
Having said that, it's clearly not in Netanyahu's interests to go faster, given he'll have to face his corruption trial as soon as it's over. There are also the hostages he's pretending to care about, protests might ramp up if the Palestinians were destroyed any faster.
Kuwait could not tolerate having Palestinians. Lebanon could not. Syria could not. Jordan could not. Egypt refuses. There is a common factor here: Palestinians.
I would never dream of suggesting that people fleeing a humanitarian crisis are a "problem" simply because of their race. Remember that most countries didn't accept Jewish refugees during the rise of the Nazis. Ideas like yours are exactly why genocides happen.
If you google around a bit, you will find it is not that they dislike palestinians, but that they think if they would take them in, Israel would force them in, build settlements and basically never give the palestinians their land back.
How much of the increase in autism (1/140 boys profoundly autistic in the USA) is due to changes in reporting? How much is due to increased parental age? What are the other plausible contributing factors?
Profoundly autistic cannot be confused with nerdy. It's clearly a disability. "Profound autism is characterized by severe impairment and developmental challenges that interfere with the individual's ability to function independently"
Back then we just called it nerdy/geeky/dork, or "typical computer kids". Could also say "typical D&D players".
I sort of feel like the D&D demographic has changed *somewhat*, a lot of those guys play Call of Duty or Fortnite now, and you have more theater kids who, of course, love pretending to be someone else. (A lot of LGBTQ, which overlaps.)
It's why the old grognards and the newer generation often don't get along.
Also we used to call it AD&D, I mean 2nd ed. And then it was renamed D&D back again with 3rd ed, and the thing is, in 2nd ed the whole mood was set by a serious kind of graphics, artwork. Something like Boris Vallejo. 3rd ed and on, the artwork got cartoonish and I think that attracted a different demo.
> Also we used to call it AD&D, I mean 2nd ed.
First edition was already called AD&D. It's on all the sourcebooks.
Am I nitpicking D&D ed...yeah, this is ACX.
There was Basic (or BECMI D&D) for a younger audience and they kept the split up until 2000 when 3rd ed came out.
3rd ed was when the cheesecake and chainmail bikinis went out, everyone started looking more punky, and the adventurers started looking more diverse, so that's kind of the dividing line.
Interestingly the OSR (Old School Reniassance) came out a few years after, and attracted some more conservative players, though a lot of OSR was about old-style play ('rulings, not rules' and 'we explore dungeons, not characters') rather than the culture war per se. I don't think there was really much of a culture war in D&D until the Great Awokening hit in the mid-2010s like it did everywhere else.
I think last time this came up on ACX, there are two potential ways in which diagnosis might have been broadened..
a) Including people with mild versions of the symptoms, such that mosf ACX contributers are probably diagnosable
b) Allowing a more diverse range of symptoms at the heavily disabled end of the spectrum, so what was previously dx;d as some kind of mental retardation now gets dxed as autsim.
How accurate is the number?
I really hope we get an AI really good at figuring out exactly what's the best product to try to sell you before we get an AI that is really good at convincing you to buy any arbitrary product. Do you guys think either of those are likely to happen a meaningfully long time before AGI?
Like, I really hate that even though ad companies gather worrying amounts of data on consumer behaviour that data seems seldom used to actually figure out what people want most.
I would be ok with this level of data collection if it was used to, say, have and AI design clothes maximally optimized for me to like.
To paraphrase the meme: you guys watch ads??
Post my exposure to TLP, I watch ads because I'm interested in what my dossier looks like. the funniest ones are the rare ads that think I speak spanish or chinese.
So true. When I get an ad that’s actually relevant to me, I’m willing to tolerate that ad or even welcome it. If I’m forced to watch 30 seconds of something I know I’m not going to buy, or would never possibly have any use for (ex. Women’s products) it’s the definition of a complete waste of time.
It seems like most ads now are for drugs, insurance, law firms, or (for now) politicians.
For my own entertainment, I try to pronounce the chemical names, not the brand names, of the drugs while I can still see them. This is why I can type empagliflozin and semaglutide without looking them up.
> Like, I really hate that even though ad companies gather worrying amounts of data on consumer behaviour that data seems seldom used to actually figure out what people want most.
disclaimer: this my personal opinion / my best guess.
the goal is not to give people what they want most. The goal is also not to get a perfect match between a specific product and a specific consumer.
The goal for ad-marketing is this: "for a given product, find the consumer most likely to buy it after watching the ad."
And using Bayesian Priors, this boils down to "Find the most gullible consumer."
So when deciding on a product, it comes down to "What product would the most gullible consumer buy?"
If you are a gullable consumer, then you will find many products and ads tailored for your desires. If you are a responsible and frugal consumer, you will very few ads targeted at you, and fewer companies will tailor products to your needs.
On the other hand: If you are a more responsible consumer, than you are probably less likely to respond to ads, in the first place. So there is even less incentive for ad-marketing to analyse your needs.
I am not excpecting AI to change too much about this overall dynamic.
"The goal for ad-marketing is this: 'for a given product, find the consumer most likely to buy it after watching the ad.'
And using Bayesian Priors, this boils down to 'Find the most gullible consumer.'"
I disagree, in most cases this boils down to "Find a consumer who was just about to buy this product anyway". That's why Google is such a successful advertising company - they're basically standing outside your store, handing out ads for your store.
(This is useless at generating sales, but that's fine for Google.)
oh wow. I never thought about it this way, but now that you mentioned it, it kinda seems obvious. Thanks for this thought.
> Like, I really hate that even though ad companies gather worrying amounts of data on consumer behaviour that data seems seldom used to actually figure out what people want most.
Second that. It's always shocked me how overwhelmingly BAD Google and Facebook, the online-ad worldwide duopoly, is at targeting ads.
With the tens of thousands of Phd's and data scientists they have working on your digital cookie and behavior trail, and the unbelievable amount of data they have on everyone alive, they should literally know you better than you know yourself. As in, you go to a new part of downtown for a meeting, and they should be able to predict with 90%+ accuracy which lunch place you'll end up going to "serendipitously" and with no planning aforethought.
If FB or GOOG did dating apps and you were looking for a LTR, they should be able to instantly pick a partner with much higher chance of LTR success than both of you could yourselves, swiping for months. All the information is there, with certainty. An ASI would have no problem doing any of these things, and I'd even bet GPT-5 or 6 could do this with high fidelity.
And yet, with the collective brainpower of tens of thousands of Phd's working around the clock, and a surfeit of individualized data that would make the NSA jealous if they didn't snaffle it all for themselves anyways, FB and GOOG routinely fail to show me ANY advertisements that are even tangentially related to anything I care about and would buy.
And I'm a comparatively heavy spender in relation to the USA median - I have some pretty expensive hobbies, and for the non-expensive hobbies, I'm more than willing to throw down hundreds or thousands on a whim. Do FB or GOOG, the literal worldwide online advertisement monopoly tap into any of that? Not at all.
Of course, this just argues that they're almost certainly NOT going to try to get good at that, but will instead focus all of their collective brainpower + AI on getting you to buy whatever random crap has bid the highest for their ad slots.
The conflict here is between "I, the manufacturer/producer of the goods/services need to sell more to more customers at the cheapest cost to produce and highest price to retail" versus "I, the consumer, want something that serves me best in what I require at the least cost to me".
Since it's the producers using the AI, it's in their interests to get it to persuade people "buy my crap!" and not to tell people "don't buy this crap, it's crap, buy our competitors product instead, it'll be cheaper and do more for you".
AIs can't get *arbitrarily* good at convincing you to buy an arbitrary product. What makes you think they'll be substantially better than current ads?
> AIs can't get *arbitrarily* good at convincing you to buy an arbitrary product. What makes you think they'll be substantially better than current ads?
Speaking from experience, I think there's some headroom in both "rhetoric" and better targeting.
First, rhetoric. So the deal with current marketing, even for the really sophisticated operations, where they get tons of data and build sophisticated predictive acquisition and segmentation models, and where millions are spent on the data science marketing teams, the actual rhetoric and content is still completely fly-by-night, and you're optimizing between rhetorical options that are just whatever some given creative came up with because they seemed nice or like they might work.
I feel like when the world has artificial minds powerful enough to emulate (even partially) human minds, the empirics of rhetoric are really going to take off, because you could just Monte Carlo a combinatorial array of rhetorical strategies and find the ones that work the best for your target person or segment.
I actually think there's pretty significant headroom here when you take it out of "some random creative's best effort" and into the realm of "massively A/B tested or RL'd."
Second, better targeting. Right now, targeting is pretty dumb, even for these million dollar teams - you target your modeled segments with various channels whose response rates have been modeled, sometimes you do a little bit of optimizing the day or time of targeting, but it's *very* rare to have an intelligent targeting that takes into account your segment PLUS things you've clicked or searched for in the recent past PLUS your last-hour clickstream PLUS day and time of day, PLUS whatever else a G4 or G5 level model could learn or infer about you from an aggregated data source with all of your info and behaviors.
Again, I think there is quite a lot of lift here that you could drive, to the effect of many multiples of current conversion rates. And that effect size is HUGE - at Google or FB or F100 size, a couple of basis points can drive millions of dollars, so just imagine how much twos and fours and eight hundreds of percent can drive. There's going to be massive financial incentives to get smarter and unlock these two avenues with better intelligence, as well as many other avenues we haven't even thought to discuss here.
From the point of view of companies selling things, those are the same thing. Actually, the second is preferable, since it's probably more profitable to sell people any arbitrary thing than only sell them specific things. Which means that's where the money is going, which means all else being equal that's likely to happen first.
To be blunt, I'm extremely skeptical of the value of so-called privacy legislation. I'm not saying it's literally zero, but I'd strongly prefer solutions which make it extremely difficult to gather that information in the first place. So strong encryption that makes surveillance by ISPs and other observers more difficult, more widespread availability of pseudonymity tools like e-mail and phone aliasing, better firewalls like Portmaster to limit on-device spying, using cash, actually accepted and usable cryptocurrencies that make it harder to track my spending, and suchlike. Some laws might be helpful, for example things like not requiring me to hand over identifying information unless there's a damn good reason (and no, money laundering does not count as "a damn good reason"), but frankly what we've seen of how the existing laws are enforced I'm extremely doubtful
Ask Pavel Durov about how privacy laws are enforced. Apparently, providing an encrypted communications service makes you a child pornography distributor and drug dealer. Maybe also a terrorist, depending on how frisky the prosecutor feels.
Honestly, Telegram has never impressed me. It does some things well, but it does other things extremely poorly. Not encrypting chats by default, major downer. Being able to be added to groups without consent drove me off.
But to your main point, yes. Governments, especially authoritarian ones, are obviously not a fan of privacy - look at the UK's Online Safety Bill, or Australia's TAN law, or just the entirety of the US's law enforcement/intelligence entity's behavior, or many other examples. Another reason why I'm leery of laws. Laws can change, or governments can (and do) ignore their own laws when inconvenient. But the laws of mathematics and physics? No changing those.
OK. Let's do this. It's not uncommon to see the assertion that most people who are anti-Trump are for reasons that have nothing to do with policy. But his intended policies are bloody horrible! He wants to continue to raise tariffs and make it hard for US manufacturers to even import components that aren't made in the US. Is that good for the US economy? You've just raised the prices of products made in America. You've made it harder for US businesses to compete in foreign markets. If Donald Trump was a man of great probity and integrity, I still wouldn't want him to be POTUS because of this horrible economic platform. He's also floated the notion of putting a quack economist as head of the Federal Reserve, which could lead to disaster. On foreign policy, he's unlikely to continue to support Ukraine against Russia. He's suggested using the US miltary to fight Mexican drug gangs in Mexico.
Is it just TDS to believe those would all be goddawful policies?
Is there any good reason to believe that tariffs are worse for the economy than say income taxes?
The more distortionary a tax for a given amount of revenue raised, the worse it is for the economy.
Some things that make taxes more distortionary: elastic supply, smaller base / higher rates.
Imports are a subset of all sources of income, so the base is definitely smaller & you'd need higher rates to collect the same amount; but imports also have more elastic supply than sources of income in general, so you'd need *even higher* rates.
Absolutely. Tariffs will slow global trade, from which a lot of US wealth stems. US manufacturers will become less competitive in the short run from Buy America provisions and in the longer run from isolation from foreign competition.
> Absolutely. Tariffs will slow global trade, from which a lot of US wealth stems
Isn't that just like saying that income tax stymies labour, from which a lot of US wealth stems?
Not at all. Hardly anyone stops working due to income taxes (they mostly encourage professional women to take more time off when they have kids, which might not be a bad thing), whereas tariffs really do and will stop the value created by the exchange of goods. And the likely result will be a tit-for-tat snowballing trade war between America and her allies in Europe and South America and maybe even way down under. Once enough damage has been done I suspect saner heads will prevail and agree to end it. But how long will that take? I don't know.
Everybody stops working eventually, and it is no longer the case (if it ever was) that this happens automatically on one's 65th birthday. And when someone is pondering whether they ought to retire this year, or go out and look for a new job to replace the one they were just laid off from or whatever, it is almost certainly the case that their expected take-home pay if they were to keep working is a significant factor in that decision.
So, yeah, at the margin, increased income taxes mean fewer people working. And at the margin is where economics happens.
Fair. The original question was how bad are tariffs vs. income taxes and of course the magnitude matters but given equal magnitudes tariffs are significantly worse for the economy.
> Hardly anyone stops working due to income taxes (they mostly encourage professional women to take more time off when they have kids, which might not be a bad thing)
Why do you think Europeans do so much less work than Americans?
Labor laws. It's much harder to fire a worker in most European countries. If it's harder to fire employers are more cautious to hire. As for # hours of the day and days year the workers do work, that also comes down to labor laws, I think.
Oh, I agree with that. Trump wants to put tariffs on all imports (NAFTA countries likely excluded). It's not strategic, it's stupid.
Part of the problem here is a lot of people think he's a liar who has no intention of actually doing whatever policy proposals he might throw out in speeches.
Now, thinking someone is a liar is a sound reason for not voting for someone. But if you think he's just lying, getting too caught up in the specifics of the lies is missingvthe point.
I don't understand how you think you can vote for a politician who is NOT a liar. Any honest politicians get weeded out by better liars early on.
Thinking he's strategically lying cuts both ways, of course.
Here in the UK, Liz Truss literally wrote a book on exactly what she would do if handed power, and when handed power proceeded to do precisely what she said she would - to surprised Pikachu faces all around, because the rest of her party had thought she'd been uttering platitudes to appeal to fringe beliefs like everyone else, rather than being a true believer herself.
What a person says they will do may only provide for a tenuous relationship between map and territory, but it is arguably better than discounting their words entirely and being left with no relationship between your model of them and reality at all.
No skin in the game here, but for an outside observer, the only real and potentially lasting harm is his attempt to undermine the elections. The rest is basically meh, some good, some bad. His supreme court picks turned out surprisingly decent so far.
Definitely nearly not as horrible as GWB, who turned a surplus into a series of bottomless deficits, destroyed 2 overseas countries, resulted in deaths of countless young Americans, and picked Alito as a Supreme Court judge (the only worse one is Thomas, picked by his dad). And he was not even the worst post-WWII president.
So... could America do better? Probably. Would another 4 years of Trump be a disaster? Not if he does not go after the basics of the system, which he might or might not. Would Harris be better? Well, she would leave the institutions alone, that is a plus. The rest is up in the air.
Disagree on the Supreme Court picks, Trump v. United States strikes me as one of the worst decisions I've seen in quite some time, both in its potential impacts and its reasoning.
Also delaying Ukraine aid is very meaningful, which he has done both as President and effectively as a candidate as well.
If you're concerned he might overthrow the government, its not clear thats an objections to actual *policies*. Well, I guess its an objection to the policy proposal of replacing US democracy with King Donald...
No specific objection to actual policies, at least not compared to Harris. Mostly because neither will do what they are promising.
He is also too old to try to overthrow the democracy that overtly. But he could kick a few load-bearing beams.
>"But he could kick a few load-bearing beams."
I'm far more concerned about his opponent trying that sort of thing (e.g., attacking the filibuster, trying to pack the Court), especially since she's likely to be more competent at executing her bad ideas.
Anyone who believes in Trump Derangement Syndrome after he became the first and only president to try to illegally overturn an election and orchestrate an attempt to at the very least prevent Congress and the vice president from performing their Constitutional duties (and, let's be real, murder them in the process), after he specifically formed his COVID response policies around killing as many people in blue districts as possible, after he very clearly leaked the identities of American spies to the Russians, and now during his active Project 2025 campaigning is simply too far gone to be reasoned with. They'll be happy to tell you why 100% tariffs on China are good actually, or why school shootings are facts of life, or why Ukraine should be allowed to be conquered by Russia, and no rational conversation can be had with any of them.
You've got trump derangement.
That's nice dear.
Good comment.
"after he specifically formed his COVID response policies around killing as many people in blue districts as possible"
Wow, the monster! If only he had a moustache, he would be the perfect archetype of a villain!
Remind me again, wasn't it the Blue Party that began with "you don't need masks, Covid is no worse than a cold, the right to attend a BLM street protest over-rides any silly contagion fears but you must not go to church because singing hymns will spread this lethal disease"?
Uh, no? I mean, other than the hyperbole, the third one was Democrats. The initial "don't wear masks" guidance was from the Trump administration, most notably Jerome Adams. And Trump himself repeatedly said it was basically just the flu.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/09/10/all-the-times-trump-compared-covid-19-to-the-flu-even-after-he-knew-covid-19-was-far-more-deadly/
AFAICT, COVID IS the flu. Fever, cough, aching...the only new symptom I know of is the loss of taste and smell. The death rate is apparently quite a bit higher for reasons I don't know, but people DO die from the flu, and some even from colds.
I did my own research on masking against diseases in 2020, looking specifically for data from BEFORE 2020, and found that masks would negligibly reduce transmission, and studies were often contradictory.
To the points on Trump, it is nonsense to accuse Trump of trying to kill blue-district people, leaking spy information to the Russians, and any association with Project 2025.
For starters, there are two very different viruses involved, yes?
The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus (which has some variants) causes the COVID-19 disease. In contrast, either of a set of three different influenza viruses (A and B, most commonly, and C, more rarely, each of which also have subtypes) can cause flu.
Because these are distinctly different viruses, symptoms of COVID differ from those of the flu. COVID symptoms uniquely include – but are not limited to – loss of smell (and hence taste), as you mentioned.
Some of COVID's baffling set of symptoms are related to that fact that, unlike influenza viruses, the virus that causes COVID can sometimes damage blood vessels.
From the British Heart Foundation (ttps://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-magazine/news/coronavirus-and-your-health/is-coronavirus-a-disease-of-the-blood-vessels):
"When Covid-19 first emerged, it was initially thought that ... it mainly caused lung problems. But as the outbreak progressed, case studies began to suggest that some of the most severe complications of the disease affected more than just the lungs. From reports of ‘sticky blood’ raising the risk of deep vein thrombosis, heart attack or stroke, to neurological effects, many complications seemed to be affecting the blood vessels. In particular, these problems can be caused by the way that Covid-19 affects the lining of the blood vessels, called the endothelium."
That's in part why COVID's death rate is higher. In its earlier days, it was 2x to 5x the rate of deaths from seasonal flu. (Note: also varying widely by age.)
Since then, we've gotten better at treating COVID, its variants have become less deadly, and far more people have some immune system resistance (via past infection, vaccination, or both) which helps protect them from severe disease and death, so it's likely the two rates have converged more closely.
I synthesized these stats from various reports in May 2020. They compare the hospitalization and death rates of COVID versus flu. Note: this comparison is between the original Wuhan (aka wildtype) variant, during the deadliest early months of the pandemic, to "normal" seasonal influenza. So the corresponding COVID numbers today may be considerably lower. (And as well, certain influenza subtypes can be especially virulent, compared with "normal" ones.)
For COVID-19 (in the early days of the pandemic)
- Hospitalization ~3+%
- Death (IFR) ~0.12-1.0% (but likely somewhere in 0.3-0.8%)
For seasonal flu (in normal years):
- Hospitalization ~1.5%
- Death ~0.05-0.15%
https://x.com/aronro/status/1264428797316624384
It's TDS to act like basically normal if bad policies justify freaking out about Trump being Hitler.
It's also TDS to take random Trump quotes out of context* and use it to exaggerate what "might" happen if he gets elected.
On a practical policy level, 4 years of Trump was barely distinguishable from any other president. The economy before covid hit was at an all-time high, and covid would've wrecked any other president too, in fact Trump's Project Warp speed was possibly the most impactful thing he did and better than anything proposed by his competitors.
All that said, none of the things you say here are "godawful" and it's TDS to be performatively emotional about them.
*which you're not even putting in the effort to actually do.
"The economy before covid hit was at an all-time high"
What metrics are you looking at for that "all-time high" claim, Drethelin?
During the four years of the Trump Administration, approximately from 2017 1Q to 2020 4Q, three key indicators that most readily come to mind in describing the state of the US economy ranged from average-to-good (growth) to excellent (unemployment + stock market), but none were at an all-time high:
1. Economic growth.
Quarterly growth in GDP and GDI (gross domestic income) was around recent multi-decade averages, and far below the growth rates of many periods prior to around 2003.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PE0000091Q156NBEA
(This excludes the sharp fall during 2020 and subsequent sharp spike, specifically related to COVID-era restrictions.)
2. Unemployment.
The unemployment rate (U3) was quite low during Trump's Administration. (Again, setting aside the COVID pandemic period.)
Yet it was still higher than it was within various past periods in the 1950s and 1960s.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
Also, as seen in that chart, the steady falls in that rate during the Trump Administration (again, pre-COVID) were a continuation along roughly the same slope of Obama-era reductions in that rate. That trend started in 2010, reflecting recovery from the Great Recession.
3. Stock market indexes.
The inflation-adjusted S&P 500 index reached higher levels at various points during the Biden Administration, than during the Trump Administration. And various past periods saw higher *rates* of rises in that index.
https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-data
Update: Yes the inflation-adjusted S&P 500 reached an all-time high during the Trump Admin. But it also was at an all-time high (for its time) during the Clinton Administration (in large part due to the Dotcom Bubble). And similarly reached all-time highs during both the Obama and Biden Administrations. Albeit with many peaks and valleys along the way, broad-based indexes of US stock prices have been an upward march since the depths of the Great Depression.
The worst part of your response is replying to my claim of an all-time high by comparing it to a FUTURE TIME.
Nevertheless, this weaselly bullshit merely serves to back up my point that Trump is obviously not likely to be horrible for the economy.
> The worst part of your response is replying to my claim of an all-time high by comparing it to a FUTURE TIME.
No, I think you misunderstood Aron's point, which is that _many_ former US presidents can point to such an "all-time high" during their incumbency. It's not a badge of merit in particular.
Thanks, Adrian, for this clear summary! That was exactly the point I was trying to make, even if my verbosity might have gotten in the way.
I revised my third point, about US stock indexes, to clarify that all-time highs were similarly reached during the Clinton and Obama administrations. (So that wasn't just a "future time" phenomenon, but also a "past time" one. Multiple Presidents presided over all-time highs in that index, since the 1930s.)
Beyond that, do you have any specific objections to the data I shared, or my characterizations of that data, on how the Trump Administration didn't reach all-time highs in either economic growth or the unemployment rate? (Other than referring to them as "weaselly bullshit"?)
That was your original claim, before the goal posts got moved. Are you willing to put in the work to support that "all-time high economy" claim with your own data and arguments?
"My point that Trump is obviously not likely to be horrible for the economy."
From a pure economic policy perspective, Trump's first term wasn't *that* anomalous. I agree with you that "on a practical policy level, 4 years of Trump was barely distinguishable from any other president." (As well, the Biden Administration carried over a number of Trump Administration policies, including many of its tariffs and 'Made in USA' preferences for Federal purchasing.)
It's still worth considering that in Trump's prospective second term, he's likely to be advised by a very different group of people than those surrounding him in his first term.
For instance, during his first term, he didn't attempt a mass deportation of 10 million or more unauthorized aliens living in the USA; that's a policy plank for his second term:
https://www.justsecurity.org/97146/trumps-immigration-agenda/
He's also floated ideas like replacing the income tax outright with tariffs, or raising tariffs to replace revenue losses from cutting income taxes:
https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/2024/can-trump-replace-income-taxes-tariffs
Either or both of those policies, if carried out vigorously, would have far reaching economic impacts that would make his second term far different than his first.
And yes, just in case this comes up, several of Harris's proposed economic policies could also be extremely problematic, as I've noted here:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-346/comment/68313085
The obvious answer is everything in politics is relative. The other potential option wants to tax unrealized gains and floated price controls. This would also be an economic disaster. So everyone has to pick which choice is possibly less horrible to them, which is why this is such a close race. Supporting Ukraine is hardly an uncontroversial topic where one side is clearly correct. Personally I don't think anything other than a direct NATO intervention will prevent Russia from winning, so sending more support just drags the whole affair out and gets more people killed.
As a side note on tariffs, what is the correct policy when other countries intentionally manipulate prices? Say China subsidizes half the cost for all their aluminum producers, who then flood the market with artificially cheap aluminum. A tariff in that scenario matching the price difference of the subsidy would remove a market distortion, not make it worse. Of course no one who makes tariff policy actually does it like this, but maybe they should?
Yes, Harris's flirtation with imposing a minimum tax rate on high income taxpayers (which would factor in unrealized gains), as well as her vague proposals about going after "price gouging," could both be extremely problematic:
https://taxfoundation.org/blog/harris-unrealized-capital-gains-tax/
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/09/01/richard-nixon-kamala-harris-economy-00176374
Taxing unrealized gains is fundamentally unsound. It is possible that could cause one to be forced to sell some of those assets to pay the tax.
I know this is for people worth more than $100 million, but what makes $100 million special? Suppose you have the rookie Kamala Harris collectible card, of which only three now exist. You bought it for $1, and now it's worth $1 billion. You really like having the card, and have no wish sell it, even for $1 billion. But the rest of your assets are only worth about $300k, because you aren't wealthy. If the card goes up only 5%, you must now pay taxes on that, which would mean you are forced to sell the card.
This idea, in principle, of taxing money you don't actually have only because people are jealous of your possessions, is wrong. Warren Buffet makes billions in unrealized capital gains almost every year, but it is only paper profits. If he's keeping those assets, it's because he thinks it's better to have the assets than to have the money. If he were taxed on those unrealized gains, he would be forced to make some of the gains realized.
Absolutely. Unrealized gains ("paper profits") on various items are always ephemeral; they're never guaranteed. And for many such items, they're often hard to calculate. (Not just collectables, which give a very clear example, but also, say, one's share of a family business or farm.)
Plus, as you note, paying those taxes can inflict harms on personal, family, or business finances.
I'm not sure what the optimal game-theoretical strategy is for dealing with a situation like China subsidizing and dumping, so I can't judge how good or bad a tit-for-tat strategy is against a single country like China.
What is more obviously egregious is a Made in America type policy which places tariffs on everything not made in America regardless of whether it comes from China, India, Germany, The UK, Brazil, etc.
China dumping goods for less than it costs to make is good for consumers. Of course, if it drives American businesses out of business so they later hike up prices then this is bad, and is standard monopoly practice.
Tariffs are only really for protection of the importing countries' industries, not so much for revenue generation. One could achieve the same effect by subsidizing the protected industry, so they can lower their prices to be competitive. Every country needs its own industries of various sorts so as not to rely on a foreign power for something crucial, so some subsidies may be appropriate. But if China can produce things actually better and/or cheaper than the US, then the US should import from China what it can.
> But if China can produce things actually better and/or cheaper than the US, then the US should import from China what it can.
Disagree, I think that the US and all other democracies should not trade with China at all until the CCP is overthrown.
That's certainly one argument, though a political one, not economic. I think it's similar to not buying what a particular company sells because you don't like the way they operate. As a consumer, this is your prerogative.
Some of those sound like clickbait (quack Fed economist or invading Mexico) but tariffs and Ukraine are absolutely serious policy positions that sensible people can disagree on, even if there would be dramatic consequences to some of those policies.
But....that's not why 99% of TDS sufferers hate Trump. Like, we can see them, we've talked with them for 8 years, we can hear the inflection and the hate when they talk about him and that kind of hate has nothing to do with his decision to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2016-2017.
Like, I'm sure there's a few people who feel deep, abiding hate for a man over suboptimal trade policy, and if I were gonna meet them anywhere it'd be here, but that's simply not plausible for 99.9% of the TDS I observe.
The so-called TDS sufferers may pick up on the fact that he's a very loony guy who comes up with very loony policy positions. Maybe they focus on the looney things he says which inflame the culture war bullshit, but they are picking up on something real and important about the man: that he's fundamentally a whacko and they don't want a whacko for Commander in Chief. His whacko economic ideas come from the same place as his whacko statements meant to inflame the culture wars.
It's like a situation where you are interviewing someone for a job and perhaps they present themselves well and appear talented in some ways, but they also say some things that raise big red flags simply because they sound really weird. They give you a bad feeling about the person even if you can't put your finger on what that bad thing is. Others at your company interview the same person and some of them thing he'd make a great hire. You tell them, no way. This guy is nuts. The position is too important to hire someone who might be a maniac and who shows some signs of being a maniac.
Is it irrational to not want someone for an important position because he just *seems a lot like a maniac*? I don't think it is. Some people have a good sense for someone being really off. I think most of the so-called TDS sufferers simply correctly sense that the guy is really off and that he is likely to do bad things.
Yeah but this, this is TDS. You say it's about concrete policies but then pivot immediately to "They give you a bad feeling about the person even if you can't put your finger on what that bad thing is." and "Is it irrational to not want someone for an important position because he just *seems a lot like a maniac*?".
That's just vibes. That's fine, I think Kamala Harris is a lizard person, that's vibes, that's "character". People have voted on it forever. Why are you trying to convince me that's it's based on a sober assessment of his policies?
I said in my original post that even if he were a man of great probity, which he isn't, his economically illiterate platform is enough to disqualify him. (Harris's are bad too, but not nearly as bad.) For instance, Bernie Sanders is a man of integrity, I believe, but I wouldn't vote for him because of his wacko economic positions. The same goes for Trump.
Trump probably benefits politically from his low character because too many people see that and nothing else and miss how horrible his policy positions are. Most of his defenders miss that too.
I think "I just don't like the guy, he gives me a bad impression" is perfectly fine as a reason not to vote for someone (I don't much like Kamala, though I can't say I actively dislike her, she just doesn't give me much of a sincere impression).
It's when we get into (and first let me say I know it wasn't Hank said this) "and he deliberately used covid to kill off people in blue districts!" that we're getting into the derangement/tinfoil hat territory.
That's probably fair and it was probably wrong of me to say Hank had TDS just on that post. Voting on vibes is fair. I'm sure there's plenty of people who just think Trump gives off dumb conman vibes and that's it, cool.
But, again, it feels like we're discussing...highly theoretical populations. Like, some people might deeply care about Trump's trade policy and some people might just dispassionately judge his poor character but that's, like, a sub-10% minority of Trump discourse in person or online. They're rare like seeing someone driving a Corvette; I've seen quite a few but it's not a daily or even weekly occurrence.
Better tone it down a bit, you read like your next stop is a roof top with a rifle.
One thing that's going to come up as a counter-argument for this is that even if everything you just said is true, it wouldn't begin to make a dent in "most people". Most people can hardly read, let alone have educated opinions on tariff policy.
Thank you, department of education.
>and maybe (this is still speculative) allow gay couples to have biological children
Only lesbian couples, surely? Gay couples are not currently lacking in gametes, they’re lacking in wombs.
Yes, a uterus would still be required. This would be a surrogate in the case of a gay male couple. For older women, the uterus is still functional even after the ovaries aren't, so in that case a surrogate would not be required. See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erramatti_Mangamma (although I would say 73 is probably too old to have kids, it's not biologically impossible)
Am I missing something? If I, a woman, wanted to have children with another woman, we wouldn't need egg cells, we'd need sperm cells. Is it implied you're working on both?
I really really hope you succeed, either way!
Both lesbian and gay couples can already have biological children. I think what is meant there is "combine the genetic material of both partners, instead of using donor sperm and donor eggs from outsiders".
For the gay couple, that still means you need a surrogate to gestate the pregnancy as is current practice. But if we're going to have women who spent the years since they turned 16 desperately avoiding becoming pregnant, because that would ruin their lives, via artificial means and then once they turn 50 desperately trying to become pregnant now, via artificial means, why baulk at mere surrogacy?
Presumably our 50 year old primigravida who is well-off enough to afford this procedure will also be well-off enough to get a younger surrogate to gestate and deliver the baby, and then of course nanny can be hired to do the looking-after in terms of feeding, nappy changing and so forth, and then of course childcare and kindergartens, so the physical labour of raising a child can be avoided and not strain the older mother.
I realise the above is very wet-blanket. I don't protest the effort to help the infertile conceive, but I've seen that same song-and-dance around IVF before, and now we've turned fertility into an entire industry where you can, at least if you have enough money, theoretically outsource the entire thing to someone else to provide donor eggs (healthy young college students preferred), donor sperm (only the best), surrogate (Third World women happy - or at least economically stressed enough - to rent out their wombs as human incubators until we solve the practicalities of artificial womb) and deliver the baby all on your behalf, so you need never have any physical involvement until the bought-and-paid for product is delivered.
And now, with embryo selection, and the range of options fertility clinics are already offering, the sufficiently wealthy can make sure the product is according to their list of preferences, no chances taken on the random shuffling of genetic material as has been done all throughout human history. What is progress for, if not to give us what we want exactly as we want it, or a refund if it disappoints?
(Yes, I *am* very damn cynical about human nature).
I'm not seeing an actual problem with any of this. If it makes you feel bad don't think about it.
Turning babies into commodities? I suppose that is how we've gone, yes.
For those who are infertile, it may be a solution. But for the "I'll wait to have a kid till I'm 50 and over", it just seems - rather foolish, you know? During peak fertility years avoid pregnancy by all the means they can, then when fertility is naturally ended, go for extra effort and expense to become pregnant. Rather like saying "I want to be an athlete, so I'm going to eat until I'm five stone overweight, then wait twenty years until I decide to diet and exercise back to the figure I could have had all along and then start training to be a hurdler".
Oh, it's the height of foolishness. Eugenics supporters have been pointing that out for many years. But it needs to be compared to the alternative, which is often a low-IQ couple who had kids in their 20s because they were too shortsighted and horny to use birth control. "You're childless" is the one thing poor losers can say to rich winners which can actually get under their skin and hurt their feelings. And that's not a small thing, either, which is why there was so much anger at J.D. Vance for his cat lady comment. Some of those poor losers oppose assisted reproductive technology because it threatens to take away the one source of superiority they have.
I think you're coming from a Catholic perspective that values the natural order of 'biological parents make offspring in the old-fashioned way' as something created by God, and people here aren't likely to share that.
(Not a criticism, BTW.)
Oh yeah, it's Catholicism all the way down, but I was struck by the irony of "it would allow women to circumvent menopause by creating eggs at any age (women can safety become pregnant well into their 50s, they just lose the ability to create eggs naturally)" due to "I spent 35 years of my fertility doing my best to not get pregnant, now I am no longer at risk of becoming pregnant, I'm doing my best to do so".
Wombs can be rented, eggs from gay men are hard to come by.
Ah, I see: to have kids that are related to both of them. That makes sense.
I built this art installation, it's called The Church of the Infinite Game, I'm going to be setting it up in Sacramento and the Bay. I'm looking for people who would be interested in hosting an art event, the link is a rough explainer video, any feedback would be appreciated 🙏🏼
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GNtxKDo4UFO-eHnkhCXRjqgT6UI0_DCD/view?usp=drivesdk
This google drive link is requiring access, at the moment.
Nowhere near California, but I found it a fun trip down memory lane. I used to believe in a lot of that science-will-save-the-world stuff.
The only thing I can say is it's a little pre-Great Awokening; making fun of religion on behalf of science a la Richard Dawkins no longer is cool because it's all about LGBTBIPOC vs MAGA, and all the New Atheists are now evil white men.
Of course, you may not care what's cool, in which case more power to you. :)
I hope you find some place that will approve your installation.
I am going to agree with Deiseach on one thing, though. Of the four New Atheists, only Hitchens smoked. He's now dead at 62 from esophageal cancer. Dennett died at 82; the other two are still alive. Something to consider.
Religious nit-picking here: a bit shaky on what constitutes an icon.
His piece of the exploded launch base would be a RELIC.
The t-shirt with the slogan might be an ICON.
His model Starship is a STATUE.
The Eastern Orthodox have very rigorous rules about permissibility of icons versus statues:
https://www.byzcath.org/forums/ubbthreads.php/topics/102843/statues-and-iconss
(That part of the video really was 'tell me you were raised Protestant or Protestant-adjacent without telling me you're Protestant' 😁 "Churches have icons, don't they?" depends on the church/denomination, depends what you consider an icon).
Oh, I'm sure you're right! But he is American and not from the Catholic part of America, so it's to be expected.
Re: the T-shirt, you can wear that on your hospital bed as you're screaming in pain from the lung cancer caused by smoking because the morphine patches are not cutting it anymore and it's now time for you to be drugged into insensibility as your family wait around the bedside for your inevitable, quick yet somehow drawn-out, death.
Went through that with a close family member, so forgive me for not thinking you're so bold and daring and convention-breaking unlike the sheeple.
I will add that in addition to health problems that it's fairly common for people who aren't former smokers to find second/third hand smoke totally disgusting, especially someone like me with allergic asthma. Smokers also seem to like to crowd around entrances to buildings and subject non-smokers to their disgusting habit, and when finished, throw butts on the ground as if somehow that doesn't count as littering.
All the 'daring' and 'convention-breaking' people would see him as a middle-aged white male techbro and attack him for this reason.
I realise everyone is free to make their own choices, but I'm very sensitive about smoking due to family circumstances. If it were a dumb 17 year old who thought smoking was cool and transgressive, I'd roll my eyes. A grown adult though should know better. Lung cancer is not fun and cool.
For some people (like my family member) it's hellishly addictive and they tried and failed to quit or even reduce smoking countless times. Others can successfully give it up and not go back. Best of all, of course, is not to start in the first place.
Oh definitely, smoking is bad (it basically increases the frequency of every type of cancer) and you should always encourage people to quit. It does seem to be severely declining back here in the USA at least.
Why has nobody investigated the link between brain injuries and domestic violence?
1. We know that brain injuries cause aggression and reduce self control.
2. We also know that professions with a high risk of brain injury (army vet, police, football players) have higher rates of domestic violence.
But it seems nobody has investigated a causal link here. Why not? If the link exists, wouldn't taking steps to reduce brain injury help reduce domestic violence (and violence overall) which would be a great thing?
Whenever people bring up that army vets / police / football players have higher rates of domestic violence, it seems only because they want to assert some kind of moral failing of people who choose those professions, without considering that the risks of the profession itself could be in any way causal.
(Scott: is there anything about this in the psychiatric literature?)
There’s a really big literature about this, most of it observational. The tricky part is that there are a *lot* of confounders: substance abuse is the classic example of a factor that increases both injury risk and violence risk.
I think that a well-designed widely available intervention for young people with TBI would be a very good thing, but it’s an indirect way of addressing interpersonal violence.
https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/wnl.46.5.1231
Right, I know the link with violence *in general* is established. But somehow it never gets mentioned in the case of *domestic* violence, even though it is often mentioned that certain groups with high rates of TBI (army vets / police / football players) have higher rates of domestic violence.
I think that would remove some agency from them and lessen the whole 'DV is men being bad to women' aspect everyone is so fond of--it wouldn't be entirely their 'fault'.
So we're just ignoring good science (and a possible route to treatment and prevention!) in the service of ideology?
No, it's because there are people who suffered concussions and brain injuries who are not domestic abusers, and there are domestic abusers who did not suffer brain injury. Women can be domestic violence abusers, too.
You know as well as I that the first thing a defence lawyer in a court case involving domestic violence would do is plead mitigation due to diminished responsibility because "my client played contact sports in high school" (even if said client was never concussed once, much less repeatedly).
See the Twinkie Defense:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinkie_defense
""Twinkie defense" is a derisive label for an improbable legal defense. It is not a recognized legal defense in jurisprudence, but a catch-all term coined by reporters during their coverage of the trial of defendant Dan White for the murders of San Francisco city Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. White's defense was that he suffered diminished capacity as a result of his depression, a symptom of which was a change in diet from healthy food to Twinkies and other sugary foods. Contrary to common belief, White's attorneys did not argue that the Twinkies were the cause of White's actions, but that their consumption was symptomatic of his underlying depression. The product itself was only mentioned in passing during the trial. White was convicted of voluntary manslaughter rather than first-degree murder, and served five years in prison."
> there are people who suffered concussions and brain injuries who are not domestic abusers, and there are domestic abusers who did not suffer brain injury
Of course, causation is often multi-factorial. There are unvaccinated people who don't get Covid, and there are vaccinated people who do get Covid, but it's still good to get the vaccine!
There are drugs that reduce aggression in people with TBIs, and making more people with TBIs (men *or* women can have TBIs) aware of the problem and getting them to take those drugs could help reduce domestic violence on a population scale, but we're just ignoring that because we're worried about the "Twinkie defense"?
I loved making AI art using DALL-E 2, but it’s been discontinued in favour of DALL-E 3 and I’ve found the results of the latter unimpressive—they seem to lack artistic character and even when I request a particular style, all I seem to get is something that looks like an overly polished Deviantart piece.
What is the best way that I can continue creating DALL-E 2-quality AI art? Should I try the Pytorch implementation? Is there a specific way to prompt DALL-E 3 to circumvent these issues? Are there other websites or AI art generators that offer similar functionality as DALL-E 2?
I like Ideogram which is particularly good for combining images and text.
Some recent LW discussion: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zHLbnekuQnYotDhHz/please-stop-using-mediocre-ai-art-in-your-posts?commentId=giHnGwG5MMHmeKzkK#giHnGwG5MMHmeKzkK
SD/SDXL are probably the best choices right now if you have the hardware and are willing to get your hands dirty learning and you want ultimate control and flexibility and would make use of the advanced tools like Controlnet or Lora stacks. (Flux models may be better eventually, but they aren't necessarily now, and you'd need to do a lot of the same learning anyway.)
If you aren't interested in making that sort of investment, MJ is pretty viable for nice images *if* you don't just use it in the braindead default way a lot of people do. You can try using the `chaos`/`stylize` parameters and personalization to greatly reduce the MJ look and ramp up novelty you can select from and explore with variations. You can also try using DALL-E 2 samples as 'reference' images to generate 'in the style of', as well as using `/describe` to try to reverse-engineer the DALL-E 2 'look' you like in terms of MJ-comprehensible text descriptions.
The online AI websites are handy in that they have user friendly UI and offload generation so the user doesn't have to worry about it, but you don't have very much control over image creation. If you do want more control, you might consider running an AI locally - if your computer can handle it. I recently switched to an updated SDXL model and it's much more impressive than SD1.5
I understand Flux is even better in lots of ways.
It does look really cool, but is ~10x slower than SDXL with the hardware I have. Plus it's new enough that there aren't a lot of tools developed/ported yet.
In case people missed it, Kalshi won their lawsuit against the CFTC, effectively legalizing prediction markets on elections in the US (as long as the CFTC doesn't win an appeal)!
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2024/09/06/kalshi-cleared-to-offer-congressional-prediction-markets-in-victory-against-cftc/
So shall I start throwing money at Predictit again?
Why is working in biotech terrible and soul-sucking?
My guess:
Biotech is the part of technology that has the most need for human labour and the least need for human creativity. Your work is to very carefully carry out a defined set of steps over a period of many years which almost always results in your new treatment failing to hit the market.
I suspect that might be An Joke on Scott's part.
Otherwise, uninformed speculation off the top of my head suggests:
- It works in mice. It works great in mice! It don't work in humans.
- Lots and lots and lots of cell cultures. And then some more. And do it all over again.
- It works in humans! If we dose them up with a lot of drugs that have terrible side-effects.
- It's biology, it does what the hell it wants in vivo instead of the nice, neat, reproducible results we got in vitro.
- YES I HAVE HEARD OF THERANOS, THIS IS NOT LIKE THAT.
Hi, I have made an ultra-realistic AI chatting platform:
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French ACXers - can you explain more to me about what's going on in your country?
My understanding is that the Left got the most votes in the election, but Macron picked the Right to form the government. Is this legal? Is it something that's precedented and normal, or is it considered an abuse of power?
Macron says that if he had selected the Left, they would have immediately lost a no-confidence vote. Is this true? If so, why didn't he do that, let them lose the vote, and then he could have given the government to the Right without anyone being able to blame him?
Do I understand correctly that Le Pen's party is now in government? Is this the breaching of some kind of important firewall precedent against the far right?
What is the prevailing public opinion about this in France? Is it a stable situation? What happens next?
>My understanding is that the Left got the most votes in the election,
No, the Left won the most seats (180 out of 577) but not the most votes; they got 26% of the vote, versus 37% for the National Rally and its allies, and 25% for Macron's party
You are using the votes on the 2nd round here which is strange, given that many candidates from the left and Macron's party dropped out to have more chances against Rassemblement national.
1st round results are much more informative and give a better indication on the results if France had a proportional system:
1st RN (Le Pen) + Ciotti: 33%
2nd NFP (Union of the left): 28% with other far left/center left/ left regionalist doing few additional percentages
3rd Ensemble (Macron's coalition): 20%
4th Les Republicains (New prime minister's party): 6.5%
Regardless of which round you look at, the National Rally et al got more votes than the Left.
PS. It's fairly clear that the candidate for prime minister that the Left finally agreed upon - an admittedly high-ranking civil servant whose public profile was so low that she did not have her own Wikipedia page - was a sacrificial lamb, in that it was already understood she would not be accepted by Macron. How Macron sees his appointee to prime minister (Barnier) is much less clear. Methinks it will be hard for Macron to distance himself from Barnier if the latter founders.
What would have been truly astral-level trolling on part of the Left would have been to put forward a member of the Communist Party as candidate to PM. After all, the official line of Macron and his previous PM (Attal) has been that Socialists, Greens and Communists are OK, and that it is LFI that is unacceptable. (This is basically a paraphrase of something Attal has actually said.)
Would that I can be a chavista sacrificial lamb, she did all her campaigning on paid leave from her well paid job and is now entitled to quit that job with a promise that she can return within 10 years including any promotions that she might ordinarily have expected whilst the 95% taxpayer funded far left LFI pay her and her staff generous salaries.
I agree that putting forward a non-LFI would have been much better, but if they could not agree to throw the LFI program out it would have been the same.
Your understanding is wrong.
First, a piece of background: the left in France has been very disjointed in the past few years. The historicaly dominant socialist party (PS) had been gutted in 2017 by the somewhat more radical LFI, but LFI was a tad too far left to get the full support of center left electors, who'd turn to macron. It gave a lot of power to the centrists, who only had the radical left LFI and the far right RN as heavy weight opponents, and these two would only align in what they were opposed to, not what they agreed on (which is nearly nothing. Even demographic shifts, one calls replacement, the other calls "creolizing").
Then the European élection happened. Being almost purely proportional, r
It allows electors to eschew usual political calculation caused by first-past-the-post, revolving around vote wasting. The left was disjointed, but the PS overtook LFI, almost-14% to almost-10%. The far right RN won handily with 31% (plus 5% to an even extreme offshoot that would rejoin the fold after). The center took a beating, with 14%, barely more than the PS. Turns out that Macron's politics were rather unpopular after all
So of course, having just received support of just 14% of the voters, but still having a very favorable parliament (with the trad right -LR- supporting them, they had a majority), Macron did the only sensible thing and dissolved the parliament. We're still puzzled as to why.
During the blitz campaign, the left managed to unite in a coalition (NFP), and split amongst the parties which areas they'd send a candidate to. LFI had most of the candidates, but the PS had a larger share than what they currently held in parliament.
The legislative elections are held on 2 rounds, with the candidates of the first round that pass a certain threshold being qualified for the 3rd. It can leads to a 3 or 4-way 2nd round, in which they leader get the seat. Often, the weaker of the participants in these 3-ways would quit, to ensure the candidate closer to them would overtake the leader (or to secure their lead).
At the end of the first round, the RN was leading in nearly every area, but had only a few elected on the first round. It led to a 2nd round where the left would give up the 3-ways they were going to lose to vote for the centrists, and the centrists returning the favor, albeit not as much. The result was an election that everybody lost and won at the same time.
The RN was the largest party, had the most electors, but while predictions gave them close to 50% of the seats, they only had 20%.
The center lost a lot, but avoided annihilation thanks to the votes of leftists voters.
The left won a lot of seats, but divided evenly between LFI and the PS.m, and not nearly enough to have 50%.
Why having 50% matters? The parliament can vote to fire the government ("censor"). Having 50% ensure you win such a vote. Having 30% means that the 2 other blocs can kill you anytime you fail to satisfy the closest to you. And if the parliament don't vote for a law proposed by the government, the government can force it's way (art. 49.3) by tying it to a no-confidence vote (you don't want the law, but do you not want it so much you'd want to fire the government over it?). It's generally accepted that if a parliament did that, the president would probably dissolve it in turn (do you hate the govt more than you love your seat?). But now it's been done, and cant be redone for a year, so the parliament hold much more power than usual.
Who get to be PM? The president decide, but he better be someone who don't get censored instantly.
Now it get a bit on the opinion side.
The left claimed victory in the election, and clamored they would apply their program, all their program, only their program, and the rest could suck on it. So of course, even the centrists were ready to censor that. A lot of names were thrown on the left, but the division between LFI and PS kinda resurfaced, or the division between those who wanted a government and those who were fine avoiding this nest of trouble, realizing that it's going to be hard to be effective and popular with a parliament 30% centrist and 30% far right.
The result is macron nominating a LR PM (a party that has nearly no seats left), but which the center will vote for, and the far right will agree to. The left feels cheated, in my opinion because they forgot it's a multiplayer game, and their opponent is allowed to act contrary to their wish.
This sounds a lot like how Bennet became PM in Israel despite leading a 6 seat (5% of the votes) party, since he was right wing enough to appease some right leaning factions and not-bibi enough to appease the left.
The alternative to 'the Left forgot how the system works' is 'this is a gambit on the part of the Left', or rather on the part of its center-of-mass: the rational goal for the Left clearly ought to be a coalition government with the Left dominant and the center or part of it as junior coalition partner, but this is palatable neither to much of LFI nor to Macron; proposing to put forward its unmodified program and predictably failing amounts to "we tried" and makes the rational goal more palatable to LFI (but not to Macron, who would have always detested the outcome, partly for ego reasons).
This seems less of a stretch than, say, seeing Macron's choice of PM as a complicated gambit on the part of Macron (to what purpose?), except that nobody can tell what is on Macron's mind these days, so all bets that are based on his intentions are off.
All the background is needed to understand that the left didn't have the power to force a PM, even with one of their greatest electoral success in a decade. Macron had no reason to risk an opposed PM, even one who could do nothing, rather than a somewhat aligned one, which would be under threat if he failed to deliver to the center (or to the far right).
The RN is not in government yet, and I don't think they want to be.
I think the public is mostly dissatisfied with how long it took. Other than that, it's divided along party lines, the left is pissed, the far right is somewhat happy, the center is dodging the bullet of an extremist government
This is basically right, based on my experience of living here for the past 10 years and having followed French politics for 20.
Thanks. I lived and followed that shitshow for over 30 years and all I got to show for it was an effortpost.
😆
As a long term observer of French politics, and a voter in French elections, I have tried to respond to this as succinctly as possible:
1. Main actors
Macron - the President. He is often called right wing but he is literally from the socialist party, he represents the center left.
This is the current far-right party led by former essayist Eric Zemmour and, sometimes, Marine Le Pen’s niece, Marion Marechal Le Pen. Their platform includes expulsion of current non-citizen residents at the drop of a hat, essentially.
RN / Rassemblement National or National Rally, this is the former “Front National”, led by the daughter of that party. The daughter, Marine Le Pen, has conducted an extensive “de-far-right-ification” campaign and as some commenters have observed this party is now just the plain old right.
LR / Les Republicans. The former right now split between the RN-adjacent and the EN-adjacent. Call them center-right.
Renaissance, formerly formerly En Marche, Macron’s pet party. Centre-left. In the recent elections campaigned as "Ensemble" or Together, so EN, an alliance of vaguely centrist left wing parties.
PS / Parti Socialiste. Basically what is says on the tin, but in France, this counts as “the left”
EELV or the socialist European greens. Not watermelons because they are explicitly socialist, policies are sadly offensive to anyone who passed 10th year science however
LFI / La France Insoumise or the Unsubmitted. Jean-Luc Melenchon’s pet party. One of France’s most cultured and erudire politicians with a long career as a cultural conservative socialist, he created LFI as part of his pivot around 10 years ago to cultivating the radical protest vote, including (unfortunately) the Islamist vote. Ironically, whereas in the past Front National, the far-right party, clearly had a lot of antisemites, they are all gone now and the most antisemitic party by a long way is LFI. One point to horseshoe theory. They are also explicit fans of Chavez, Maduro and the Castros, and prefer Hamas (literally hamas, not just the Palestinians) to Israel. Unsurprisingly they are anathema to the centre-right and far right and increasingly to the centre-left and even the genuine socialist party left.
NFP / Nouvelle Front Populaire. The Alliance of the previous 3 and another dozen micro-parties created for the last parliamentary elections in order to stave off the eradication that the European elections suggested was coming.
2. Legal framework
The President, Macron, appoints the Prime Minister. Parliament can however pass a vote of no confidence which is essentially sacking the PM. Normally, and in every case until now, there is a party or grouping with a clear majority and they basically tell the President who they want as PM if they are not the President’s party, or if the President controls the parliament as Macron has until now, he names whoever he wishes.
3. Electoral background
The European elections held in June resulted in a relative rout for the right-wing RN. Consistent with trends across much of Europe, they “won” in France. This is what appears to have triggered Macron’s dissolution of Parliament, with the following two notable features: (1) the entire non-centre left and far-left reformed their on-again-off-again “union”, this time called NFP, and in the second round, they were joined in a tactical alliance with the centre-left (RE) in the cases where there were two mainstream left candidates against a right-wing one.
The French voting looked like this:
Parti | % EU election | % 1st round | % 2nd round | seats
Reconquete 5.5% | 0.8% | - | -
RN 31.4% | 33.2% | 24.6% | 142
LR 7.3% | 6.6% | 6.7% | 39
right-wing others 27
centrist others 29
ENS 14.6% | 20.0% | 26% | 150
left-wing others 12
NFP n/a | 28.1% | 30.8% | 178
PS 13.8% | within NFP | within NFP |
EELV 5.5% | within NFP | within NFP |
LFI 9.9% | within NFP | within NFP |
I have shown NFP and its main constituent parties separately because they are a very fragile alliance. The main voting blocs that emerge are:
- center and far left broad church: impossible given LFI's toxicity
- right and center: what happened
4. Post election
Macron first punted, saying that he would not name a PM until after the Olympics. The NFP attempted to pretend that they had won, and after two weeks of private and public arguments, eventually named a senior and suitably far-left public servant as their candidate, who was clearly aligned LFI but as a public servant was not a member of any party (although she then went to campaign for three weeks which seems clearly illegal). If this tactic was to have any success they would have had to name her in the first day or two. As it is, the right-wing and centre-right, RN and LR.
Post Olympics, he conducted what seemed a lot like a stage comedy, interviewing basically every vaguely centrist washed up politician for the job. This was made a bit harder by the fact that anyone who had any real political ambitions did not want it. After this had dragged on for quite a while, he nominated Michel Barnier, center-rightist with buckets of experience in statism at nearly every level of government possible. Astute readers here will recall that he was the EU point man for Brexit.
Whilst the far left hate him, and the current right do not much like him, the centre right and left are pretty positive and it is unlikely he will fail a no confidence vote (at least for now). The left will probably request one for the photo ops but it literally will not matter.
5. Way forward
With the parliamentary configuration as it is Michel Barnier is likely a pretty stable choice but is unlikely to be able to pass much other than "more spending" (since all parties support that).
The most interesting dynamic will be if there is a far left at the next Presidential elections or if they have destroyed themselves, and if there will be any strong centrist candidate who marks themselves out over the next year or so.
- Yes it's totally legal, the president can pick anyone he wants. It's unprecedented, but at the same time it's the whole situation is unprecedented as since the start of the 5th republic there has been some clear majority. The left only got a plurality of seats, but not a majority. Obviously the left considers it an abuse of power but they were the ones that were snubbed.
- Would the left have instantly lost a no confidence vote? Probably. But it's not 100%. Maybe he didn't want to roll the dice? Especially since one of the first things the left wanted to do was undoing Macron's signature pension reform, which he sees as his legacy. But honestly, I'm pretty sure only Macron really knows why he does things.
- Le Pen's party is not in government (yet), at least not officially. I doubt she will be given any cabinet positions. However there has obviously, mathematically been some kind of assurances for a sort of supply-and-confidence agreement. This to me obviously weekens the "front républicain" the firewall against the far right. But it's too early to say.
My understanding was:
RN were doing very well and about to gain power. In response, every major left-wing party collaborated in order to block them - deliberately standing their own candidates up and down to ensure RN's opponent never had any other competition on a province-by-province level. This worked and RN was mostly blocked.
But that level of collaboration was torn from them by pure desperation, and all the Left parties in question hate each other and would never work together under nornal circumstances.
So, the Left is a fragile alliance that's very obviously unstable. The only reason they're there at all is because the "country" actually "wants" RN and everyone knows it.
That's the context for picking someone like Barnier - there was no one the Left would have accepted, because the Left didn't even want to accept each other. Meanwhile M. Brexit is Right enough to (hopefully) mollify the proles who could easily consider themselves cheated by this election.
EDIT: I'm not French. We were over there during the election though, hearing a lot of French-flavoured TDS from our neighbours. The province ultimately swung RN.
The Left is not so unstable that a government by it would be unstable by definition. It took forever to put forward a candidate, but, on the other hand, the Socialists refused to break the alliance when Macron was very obviously courting them to do so.
Something that is missing in this discussion is that Macron is very obviously caught in his own rhetoric (which he may or may not believe in fully): "the far left is as bad as the far right" (meaning, tacitly: at least as bad) is his motto. His (large) faction of the center can't ally with a united left block if its leadership insists it can't do so.
Note that the left instructed its candidates to step down in favor of the center even though the center reciprocated only very partially.
Um, the left is not so unstable as that, but they are so minoritaire as that. There was _never_ going to be a left wing candidate that was acceptable to the center and the far left, so there was never going to be a (more) left wing PM.
It is not just Macron but most of his party and quite a few further left that don't want to associate with LFI.
But why would it need to be acceptable to the center and the far-left? The center, center-right and center-left (Socialist Party and affiliates) have a majority together. If the Ecologists count as center-left, they don't need the center-right either.
>But why would it need to be acceptable to the center and the far-left? The >center, center-right and center-left (Socialist Party and affiliates) have a >majority together.
Macron either thinks that way or pretends to. The issue is that, despite Macron's repeated entreaties, the Socialist Party will clearly not break ranks with the left alliance it has just committed itself to. For one thing, that would be long-lasting electoral poison - the PS would be portrayed (not unreasonably) as a party of backstabbers, opportunists, enemies of left unity, etc.
The ecologists certainly don't, they are just far left who care slightly more about degrowth than Hamas.
And that center block does in theory have a majority but, as I wrote above, they cannot use it because the system does not require a majority. So the impossible alliances (the French center left and center right have spent 40 years thinking that they are the diametric opposite of each other, notwithstanding the largely superficial actual differences) are not made, and the center remains fragmented, whilst Rassemblement National with a third of the votes are quite united, and can easily muster another 10-12% of unaffiliated right and center right for key votes even before reaching out to center right.
So they are the largest voting bloc in a minority parliament, and large enough to have effectively a veto, again, assuming that no-one _has_ to form a majority and so no-one is forced to speak unpopular truths.
The Left didn’t win anything close to a majority.
My understanding is that the president can appoint anyone he wants, the choice has to be approved.
Le Pen's party is not in government, as in, it doesn't have any ministers (yet; no ministers have been definitely named yet, AFAIK). What Macron has done is selected a minister that is just to the left of Le Pen - a (particularly conservative?) member of the collapsed non-Le Pen right. Le Pen's people are not likely to move immediately to remove him, whereas the Left would surely move to remove him (for one thing, the Left (quite reasonably) does not see him as legitimate).
Essentially, Macron is now ruling with the unenthusiastic consent of the far right.
The answers to the other questions are less clear. I'll leave the floor to people who have figured it out more than I have. Two possibilities:
(a) Macron is playing four-dimensional chess (as badly as he did in June?), hoping that this new cabinet will be short-lived and that that somehow will be good for him; this seems unreasonable, but who knows;
(b) Macron has genuinely drifted to the hard right (but then, as you said, it would have been cleverer to appoint someone from the Left and then work behind the scenes to have the center (which is composed of several parties) vote to depose the new Left cabinet quickly).
Any other takes?
(On your first questions: it's legal, it's abnormal, it's certainly seen as arrogant and quite possibly an abuse of power, and I do not know what the closest precedent would be.)
Barnier is a long way to the left of Le Pen, he is a career politician and very centrist right winger who has been a French and European "minister" for various things over the past three decades.
Abuse of power is a ridiculous term, it is literally his power to name a PM and the only constraint is that parliament does not censure the PM, this is what drove the choice.
I don't understand the system. The President selects the Prime Minister, but the National Assembly can remove the Prime Minister if they don't like them?
Why not just get the National Assembly to select the Prime Minister on its own? I suppose because there's no guarantee that they'd ever agree on anyone, whereas if the choice is between "the guy the President selected or the next guy the President might select" then it's a narrower choice.
Also is it still fair to call the RN the "Far Right" given their level of popularity? Aren't they just the mainstream right at this point?
The "literate middle-of-the-road" (as in Le Monde, not as in Macron) informal definition makes RN 'Extreme Right' (i.e. Far Right) and La France Insoumise 'Radical Left' (less than extreme) irrespective of their number of voters. It would go something as follows: RN is extreme because it proposes measures that are openly unconstitutional and against EU law; FI proposes radical changes and uses fiery rhetoric, but, even when it has proposed (in the past) calling for an assembly to write a new constitution ("Sixth Republic"; not part of the current plans of the left coalition), it has in effect proposed overturning the current framework using means that are legal within that very framework.
What unconstitutional measures does RN propose?
Even Macron's (softer) proposed policies on immigration have been declared unconstitutional by the constitutional council. The RN proposes banning foreigners from all civil service positions, including all university positions, for instance, with no exceptions. There's a clear intention to extend that to dual citizens (whom Marine Le Pen seems to detest particularly).
If Macron's policies are also unconstitutional doesn't that make Macron a member of the Far Left/Right?
In other countries, that kind of de jure constitutional arrangement, where the Head of State (President or Monarch) appoints the Head of Government (Prime Minister, Premier, or Chancellor) subject to a constraint that the latter must be able to command majority support (or at least passive toleration) in the legislature, produces varying results. Ranging from the Head of State having close to free choice of Head of Government (e.g. Imperial Germany) to the Head of State having little more than a ceremonial role and the real choice belonging to the internal institutions of the legislature.
Things that tend to lead to the appointment power having a real effect:
1. Informal constitutional norms, particularly how legitimate it's considered for the President or King to insist on a particular Prime Minister, and conversely how legitimate it is for legislative leaders to "storm the closet" (the term for the process in 18th century Britain) by refusing to accept any but their own choice of PM.
2. Whether or not there's a clear majority party or coalition in the legislature. In order to storm the closet effectively, the would-be government needs to have a majority locked up. If nobody has a majority, the President or King has a lot more room to act.
3. Whether or not the Head of State controls or influences a significant faction of the legislature. This is usually the case for elected Presidents unless the position is understood to be mostly ceremonial, and can also be the case for monarchs who can influence legislatures with patronage and honors and who have in some times and places ventured overtly into partisan electoral politics.
4. The independent authority of the Head of State and his appointees to act despite the legislature. The extreme case is something like late Weimar Germany, where the President and Chancellor could dissolve the legislature (preventing no-confidence votes) and govern by "emergency decrees" until new elections took place.
I don't have a good feel for the details of 1 with respect to modern France. I get the impression that the President usually has a fair degree of latitude in appointing the PM (much, much more so than modern British monarchs) but this is subject to some constraints in terms of respecting the will of voters in recent elections, and it's far from unheard of for the President to feel compelled to appoint a PM from a rival party.
Currently, there's definitely no dominant coalition. There are three big coalitions with between a quarter and a third of the seats, with the biggest coalition (Popular Front) having little internal cohesion between its constituent parties. And the second-biggest is Macron's own party and their current allies, which gives Macron a fair amount of leverage.
The French President has more power than any other head of state you are familiar with. Pretty much the only real constraint for a President who controls the assembly is demonstrations, which is what happened with Macron.
In the specific terms of reference for 1, the convention is that if the President controls the parliament, he names whoever he likes (see eg Macron's last several PMs or indeed Hollande's before that) and if he does not, he pretty much has to name whoever the majority propose.
The two issues here, which Garald and other "abuse of power" hyperventilators seem unwilling to deal with, are
(1) that the current situation has not happened in the 5th Republic, because there are no acceptable alliances to form a majority, and since the French system does <i>not/i> require any parliamentary majority, the unacceptable alliances are not made (as eg has happened in Germany and the Netherlands).
(2) as a result of the current economic situation and the previous point, <i>no-one with any ambition wants the job except the ones that not even their allies will support</i> so it turns out that the President's formal power gives him basically all the initiative back.
Because that is not the system. The President appoints the PM. It’s like asking why doesn’t the US Senate select the Supreme Court justices itself.
> Also is it still fair to call the RN the "Far Right" given their level of popularity? Aren't they just the mainstream right at this point?
Terms like "far right" evolve over time, but I think they average over a larger time period and geographic area than just France in one election (or even a few elections). If far-right parties remain popular for a long time, and become more popular in more places, I'm sure they'll eventually lose that label.
There is something to this. They have become very popular indeed, mainly because the parties have shifted left faster than the population.
It might be worth it to point out that political labels don't exactly flow from a neutral, scientific place. They flow from the mouth or pen of whoever is ascribing the label, not a calculator or yardstick.
Yes, but that river flows both ways, and left wing European politicians are discovering that calling 30-40%,of the population "far right" is not a clearly winning move.
Unfortunately it still wins votes in inner city left wing enclaves so they keep doing it, slaves to the political version of the hedonic hamster wheel 🙄
Does anyone have thoughts on the issue of greatness in writing, specifically questions like "who's the greatest living author" or "who is the best screenwriter"? I'm currently with a piece on this topic, and I'd like input/feedback from anyone with knowledge of the landscape. I'm sure there's some voracious readers here, given Scott's output and interests.
Bottom line: meaningless question, but fun to talk about!
I would pick Cormac McCarthy as the ideal blend of popular and critical success plus he had a great movie made of one of his best books.
But real talk: I think art forms have a life cycle and the modern novel is in the terminal phase of its cycle. Like opera or classical symphonies or musicals, we might still get a great one now and then but the form is played out.
"Meaningless" is harsh, but I appreciate the honesty and the engagement. I have a list and Atwood is on it. Not sure she's top of the heap tho.
Sorry, but Cormac McCarthy is dead!
Oh God, that’s right.
(After checking Wikipedia for deaths) I would pick Margaret Atwood for the same reasons of critical/popular appeal and hit movie/TV.
I love Pynchon and Delillo but they are both weird white dudes without a big popularly accessible hit.
I am the greatest author in all of history. This will be discovered long after my death, when they scan my brain with futuristic technology and use it to reconstruct all the works I would have written if I wasn't such a lazy, easily distracted piece of shit.
"all the works I would have written if I wasn't such a lazy, easily distracted piece of shit"
That reminds me of this extract from a longer poem by W.H. Auden:
From “The Cave of Making"
You hope, yes,
your books will excuse you,
save you from hell;
nevertheless,
without looking sad,
without in any way
seeming to blame
(He doesn’t need to,
knowing well
what a lover of art
like yourself pays heed to),
God may reduce you
on Judgment Day
to tears of shame,
reciting by heart
the poems you would
have written, had
your life been good.
Writing is a conversation; I doubt anyone who hasn't actually written would be considered even in a simulation to be potentially great. Sorry.
I can only judge great writing by how much it enchants me, how much pleasure it gives me both in the moment of reading and hours, days, months, and maybe years---which means I continue to reread it---later. I like to always be in the middle of reading a good book because the words, images, ideas and personalities stay with me and reappear in my imagination as I go throughout my day, the way music you've heard recently will continue to revisit your mind.
I mostly read dead authors, but my favorite living ones are Karl Ove Knausgaard (although not every book he's written is great), Elena Ferrante (same. Her novellas are vastly superior to her famous quartet IMO, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Thomas Pynchon (particularly his early work), Antonio Lobo Antunes, and Mircea Cartarescu.
Regarding the Shakespear discussion below, I judge Shakespear the same way I judge any contemporary writer, and the question is the same: how much his writing enchants me. I think he's as great as the greatest of living writers today, as great as the greatest of any generation of writers so far. I'm particularly fond of Shakespear's Histories but don't honestly care much for his Comedies.
A writer like J.K. Rowling doesn't interest me at all, but I was already an adult when she started publishing novels. I've read a number of her pages, but they don't evoke anything in me.
Thoughts on Pynchon vs DeLillo?
I've never read DeLillo. Perhaps it's because I got into Pynchon first and when later I heard people compare DeLillo to him, I was over my Pynchon obsession and so wasn't enticed by this other Pynchonesque guy. I don't like Pynchon nearly as much now as when I read him when I was 20---I don't reread Pynchon---but I still count him among the greats because he has written so many amazing pages. His great weakness is character development. He creates all these wonderful, strange characters in fascinating, often hilarious situations, but the characters often don't grow and get fleshed out further.
One would have to come up with a list of criteria and "preregister" them before applying, to avoid bias.
I do have that, actually. Amongst the many things I tried to assess, and weigh (sometimes unevenly) against each other were: Activity level or prolificity, age, creative styles, critical reception & awards, financial success, genres and specialties, historic significance, influence on their field(s) & peers, name recognition, personal scandals, popularity with the public, and preferred vocation.
I find the Shakespeare question clarifying - it would be bizarre if Shakespeare was the greatest playwright ever (or even particularly good) given that there were so few people alive during his day, so there must be some kind of historical bias. But Shakespeare was, indeed, incredibly good. So when we say "greatest writer", we must mean something partway between "highly competent" and "pioneered new ways of doing things", and Shakespeare must get extra points for pioneering even above his competence (such that if I wrote a Shakespearean play today, it wouldn't make me as great as Shakespeare even if they play was just as good).
But I also find that most of the "original, pioneering" art of today seems - sorry to say this - kind of bad (except maybe in genre fiction, which is much younger and where the space has been less exhausted). Once you pick the low-hanging fruit of things that are both popularly-enjoyable and pioneering, in order to be pioneering you have to do some really weird stuff. My more culturally sophisticated friends tell me that if you really truly understand the whole history of literature, then what seem to me like bizarre experimental novels stand out as works of genius that react to everything that has come before and put it in a different light. That might be true, but the number of people who truly understand every piece of literature that has come before is small (and necessarily shrinking, as the mountain of literature you have to master grows ever higher).
What is the balance of pioneering vs. enjoyable for JK Rowling vs. Knausgaard? I'm not sure. Does it depend on how sophisticated you are (but can't even extremely sophisticated people enjoy Rowling for what it is?) I can never really get past this point because I don't have enough Quality Literature Appreciation Ability to 100% "get" the best and most sophisticated authors of today.
There are more rocket scientists and brain surgeons than there are great writers. It's the smallest and most extreme outlier group of talent imaginable.
Premodern Iceland never had more than ~40k people at a time. Sagas written there during a window of a few hundred years are an enduring (admittedly niche) treasure of human literature. Most Ancient Greek literature of note was written by Athenians born in the 5th century BC. Likewise with Russian lit and the 19th century.
Why? There are too many potential variables involved in a question like this. Culture, subculture, zeitgeist, education, environment (will not the barren majesty of Iceland inspire greater art than suburban strip malls?), religion, innate talent, things to do or lack thereof. The list could go on.
And in almost every variable except population, modern civilization is lacking. We may have more potential Shakespeares, but they're wasting their time on dopaminergic mindkillers, or crushing their spirits in an office job, or both.
Why not apply this type of argument to Plato? I've never been convinced that other writers are not in the same league as Shakespeare (Spanish speakers talk about Cervantes, French speakers about Voltaire, etc.).
Plato's achievement does seem to be on another level: he lived in the 4th century BC, language is not an issue. As per Whitehead, all subsequent philosophers have contributed footnotes to philosophy. I don't think there's a single credible competitor for most important philosopher (in the Western tradition). Is there any academic discipline where one person is so dominant?
> So when we say "greatest writer", we must mean something partway between "highly competent" and "pioneered new ways of doing things", and Shakespeare must get extra points for pioneering even above his competence
I think this fundamentally misunderstands what we mean by "great writer". A great writer is someone who wrote a great work. A great work is a work that everyone is expected to be familiar with. That's it. It's about shared culture, not quality of writing. Quality can get you into the canon, but what keeps you in the canon is the fact that you're already there. That is why great writers come from the past. They have to come from the past. A new writer hasn't had time for people to agree that he's great, and the agreement is what makes him great.
Shakespeare was the best at one particular thing -- writing plays in which the characters speak in poetry. This was fashionable at the time, but later the fashion changed towards more realistic dialogue and it has never changed back. It's not surprising that nobody has outdone him in the last century in his particular genre, because his particular genre is deeply out of fashion and nobody bothers to try. But the genre is still considered the most prestigious form of literature, so Shakespeare as the best practitioner of the most prestigious form of literature gets to be the greatest writer of all time.
(Similarly, Beethoven and symphonies.)
The interesting question is why the most prestigious art forms are the ones in which the artists of today refuse to actually work. I'm not sure which way the causation goes -- are they unfashionable because they're prestigious or prestigious because they're unfashionable? I wonder if this is what it was like in pre-Renaissance Europe when everybody acknowledged that the Greeks and Romans were better at this and that but refused to even try to compete with them.
I think it's actually not surprising that Shakespeare is going to remain one of the "greatest" for the same reason that all of the greatest physicists lived at the turn of the 20th century. Shakespeare lived at a time when the field was developing and was able to take all of the low hanging fruit (Except the novel), he codified most of the greatest plots so as long as he remains in the canon that others learn, they will continue to reference him and add to his prestige.
The genre-fiction-contains-the-innovation stance gets weirder when you take into account that the people who are most concerned about "what is the great, innovative literature of today" question tend to hate the stuff, or at least not include it in the discussion.
Which gets worse again when you find that the people talking about that question at an official, newspaper-and-magazine sanctioned level mostly want LGBTQ+/race driven stuff which is more about checked-box innovation than it is about the actual words that make up the story.
So you have sort of two rough groups:
1. People doing really interesting new stuff with pokemon fanfic, isekai, or whatever
2. People writing about non-binary vampire haitian-canadian immigrant families, which fuck me I'd actually read that just to see what it was like, but you get what I'm saying.
And one almost can't produce good work, because the filter isn't set to "Good words" in the first place, and one can't get recognition even when it does good work (which, to be fair, is rarer than it doing really bad work).
The end result being that if there were great, generation defining books being written right now, neither you or I would be likely to ever find them.
"non-binary vampire haitian-canadian immigrant families"
Yeah, done right (by someone culturally informed from the inside who can quote from folklore, legend and traditional practice) that could be really good, but done in the usual I AM SO OPPRESSÉD YA literature style, I'd rather spork my eyes out.
Returning to Hugo spats past, I thought the 'magic water' story was well-written, but it needed (1) to own up to being a literary fiction story and dump the very thin veneer of SF/Fantasy and (2) some better editing to filter out a lot of the whining gay Chinese guy was doing about his sister. The story by itself - gay Chinese guy struggles with coming out to traditional parents about not alone being gay, but his boyfriend is (gasp!) white - was not bad, if a little trite by now (which is why it probably got trotted out with a SF veneer for the Hugos, as it wouldn't be sufficiently novel for a literary fiction magazine), and the writing was good*. But it did need more editing and if you're gonna write a SF story, then for Klono's sake *put some SF in it* and 'magic water' that gets used once and then forgotten about ain't that.
*Certainly *way* better than the dinosaur story.
“The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” by John Chu is the 'magic water' story that won a Hugo in 2014. "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love" by Rachel Swirsky won a Nebula in 2013 and was nominated for the 2014 Hugos.
This is a tangent, but have you found pokemon fanfic or isekai that you'd call innovative? I consume RoyalRoad genre fiction the way nightclub patrons consume tiny bags of white powder in the disabled toilets, i.e. with great joy straight from my phone screen, and would happily read at least the first five chapters of anything that impressed you.
I write it as a living these days (isekai/litRPG stuff, I mean), I find my own stuff to be fine-to-pretty-good. Most of what's out there is very-bad-to-bad, and I don't think much of it is transcendent. I sort of threw it in as an example of genre. Right now if I was recommending stuff, I think I'd recommend Slumrat Rising or Unintentional Cultivator, if I wasn't recommending my stuff, which I wouldn't recommend here.
Right now I think Isekai is sort of where UFC fighting was for me fifteen to twenty years ago. It's very fun to watch, it delivers a certain kind of thing pretty well to the people who want that thing, but Chuck Liddell is competititve still. It's going to be another ten or fifteen years before the real pro athletes show up.
I enjoyed the first volumes of Slumrat Rising. I dropped it in volume 4 as I felt the story was stretching out a little and I was sick of the turnover of characters, but his earlier Black Parade stuff was great and I took guilty pleasure in reading Weeaboo's Unfortunate Isekai, so I might give it a read through now it's finished.
In terms of web serials with similar themes, Pale Lights is really good (same author as APGtE), and I dropped Godslayers during its hiatus but it has a similar vibe. Neither is exactly litrpg/isekai/cultivation, but both are in the neighbourhood. Sticking to genre and leaving theme to the side, I think The Game at Carousel applies litrpg mechanics to horror in a novel way but could use an editor, and Blue Core had an interesting and surprisingly well executed take on a isekai + litrpg + dungeon builder (content warning for the author's decision to make tentacle sex a major though infrequent plot point).
Fiction that takes risks can be more fun than fiction without flaws. It's like leaving a garden to wander through the forest instead: you have to wander for hours to find flowers, but there's a hell of a lot more surprises in what you do find, and after a while you begin to appreciate all those trees and shrubs too.
This reminds me that I haven't read all the way through Unsong either, which I really should do.
I think in terms of risky fiction, I could point you at 1% lifesteal by robert blaise, which is risky both because his (pretty good) writing style is nonstandard enough that not everyone will like it, and because he keeps having psych problems that keep him from writing.
Another is deadworld isekai, which is a really limited cast/wasteland setting that shouldn't have really worked as well as it did.
Replying to add: and when the pro athletes show up, it might ruin in. But I think it's going to be a golden period in there somewhere.
You shouldn't take that kind of statistical expectation logic too far. You can draw the reference categories to make any event you want as surprising as you want.
Only about 7% of the historical human population is alive today; is it weird for the greatest genius in some field to be alive now? Only 16% of the world is white; is it suspicious if the best X in the world is white? Less than 2% of America is named Joe; should we be surprised that the PotUS is?
Or to get really absurd; the mechanics of conception make any given exact combination of genes very unlikely. Should we assume that therefore nobody has ever been born?
The best anything has to be born somewhere, sometime, and in some body. And all categories are, in the grand scheme, minorities. Everything that happens anywhere is, in a cosmic sense, extremely unlikely.
So sure, it's surprising that we got Shakespeare from that background. But it would've been surprising to get him from any background. (And of course, it's a mistake to see him as The Best Writer. He's as good a candidate for the title as you're likely to find, but there isn't really a Best Writer.)
I think these arguments miss that we should be using conditional odds. The odds against a writer as great as Shakespear having lived when he did may be enormous *if you don't know that one existed*! Given that *we do know* a writer as great as Shakespear existed when he did, the odds of such a great writer existing in Elizabethan times is 100%.
Plenty of things that were astronomically unlikely to have happened have happened.
That's an interesting question. I think the original criticism of Shakespeare being the best discarded novelty and trailblazing, but if we added those items in, when would we expect to see the first best playwriter?
Not necessarily the best, and not necessarily the first, but the first that would be a contender for best ever. I think we would have a tough time saying Elizabethan England, but I wouldn't be surprised if we did narrow it down to a 200 year period in Northern Europe, with German, French, and English being top contenders.
Populations were growing very quickly and education was greatly expanded, meaning that the number of potentials was growing extremely quickly compared to previous generations. That it would happen sooner in that process makes sense if we value originality/novelty/low hanging fruit over substance, which I think is accurate. So a naive estimate might put the number around 1600AD, with a pretty wide range of maybe 100 years on either side, as a likely contender for best ever even with no prior knowledge that such a person existed.
Most of the human population who ever worked in field X are living today. Not for every X, but for example for X=physics or X = playwrights.
If you restrict to dead people, most professional playwrights who wrote in English (because the discussion won't consider Goethe and Chekhov, let alone all the great Chinese writers) have been male and white, so of course you would expect the best one to be male and white.
Like I said, you can make these things as surprising, or as unsurprising, as you want by meddling with the parameters.
All excellent points, and I broadly agree. Two authors being suggested for greatest alive in 2024 are Stephen King and Don DeLillo. They couldn't be more different, and there's a distinct argument that the latter exemplifies your archetype of the "pioneering but bad" art of today.
It's a distinct and good argument :)
Give me Elena Ferrante any day, she is more one dimensional than Stephen King but probably says much more within that dimension.
I read Shakespeare's greatness in the context of the time and place he lived in. It was a moment ripe for the creation of a new language, the public were open to new and daring phrases.
It seems reasonable to me that there's a diminishing return to the size of population as far as culture goes, more a matter of concentration than scale. I notice the generation before me had a lively artistic life at my age (late twenties), while I can't economically survive in the inner city that was a fringe in their day. Now those friends are out on the far periphery and struggle just to get together for a jam.
So while it's still odd that Shakespeare stands so far above nearly any playwright you can name, it's plausible if you suppose that great minds emerge from great circumstances, and no amount of scale is to the better without equal forces of concentration for the best, freedom in their collaboration, and an audience willing and able to receive and support them.
I personally think the decline in personal patronage is to blame, along with population centres too large for effective networking.
From what I've heard, you can make Pikachu with any image generator.
I just tried with Firefly and couldn't. The word Pikachu was blocked from the prompt.
I was able to get something vaguely reminiscent of Pikachu but not recognizably the same character with the prompt "Cute yellow mouse monster with electricity powers" and "doodle drawing" selected under the effects settings.
Because they were all written by electro-rationalists?