One of the remarkable aspects of the campaign is how Trump feels like the incumbent and Harris feels like the challenger. It's not surprising that Democrats would encourage this, but I was surprised to come across an article full of quotes of even *congressional Republicans* referring to Trump as "the President".
It's getting rough out there: it appears the would-be conservative James Lileks at National Review is poised to defect.
In what is obviously a scheme to impress Ms. Harris, he published a sample of his special application of rhetorical cadence and circular logic in a proposed speech Ms. Harris might want to use in addressing, say, a gaggle of communists:
"The workers. Of the World. There is a world, and there are workers in it. The work of the world is worker's work. . . " (October, 2024)
Good riddance, James Lileks. We hope you enjoy your new speechwriting job.
". . . and they work when they are working. Work is called work for a reason. It is work! Often hard work. And the hardworking workers know it is hard, because they are feeling the hardness of it . . ."
To some degree that is them being trapped by having drunk their own kool-aid (about the 2020 election having been stolen). They are used to referring to Trump as simply "the president" rather than "former president" because that has been the political correctness within GOP circles for three years now.
First, cool personal story. Second, a good heuristics; not perfect, but something that is easy to remember and evaluate. Can you take a break from your group, at least for a week, so that no one will bother you, check on you, remind you of your duties, etc.? Are you free (and mentally capable) to meet people who are not fans of your group, specifically critics and former members, and talk to them? Given your current knowledge about the group, if you reflect on the process how you joined the group, would you describe it as "informed consent", or do you now see that you were given misleading information on purpose?
This matches my intuition of a cult as a group that makes you join under false premises and then keeps you under constant pressure to prevent clear thinking. On joining, you get the information by little pieces, because it is obvious in hindsight that your old self would never agree to join if they could see the situation you are in today. Leaving the group abruptly is a horrifying idea. Not only because you will end up in Hell, or the world will be destroyed and it will all be your fault... but *more importantly*, on the personal level, *all* the friends you currently have will instantly turn into enemies. And there are mechanisms that prevent you from leaving gradually, from slowly finding friends outside the group and starting to spend more time with them, and slowly reducing your involvement with the group.
I think it is useful to have a mental category for this; separate from someone merely being obsessed about something weird, in absence of a social mechanism to keep them trapped. Many people ignore this. I think the cults are bad not because their ideas are bad (though, incidentally, their ideas usually *are* bad), but because they create this kind of trap for people who otherwise might be attracted to the idea for a while, but then would probably change their minds and leave.
This also has obvious applications for the rationalist community. Like, if someone says "Less Wrong is a cult", that's obviously stupid: a *website* cannot be a cult. If you decide to stop reading the website for a week, what exactly is the website doing to do about it? If in your free time you talk to people critical of the website, how would the website know, and how could it prevent you from talking to them? One could argue that the ideas on Less Wrong are bad, or even dangerous, but there is a difference between bad ideas and bad *social mechanisms*. Meetups are potentially different, because there people meet in person, but they happen once in a long time, no one checks you between them, and if you stop visiting them, it's over.
The situation can be different with some groups near the rationalist community, such as Leverage Research or Nonlinear. If people need to show high commitment and have little free time to spend away from the group (to meet other people, to see things from a different perspective), then yes, it can become this kind of social trap. The trap does not have to be designed on purpose; a group of people pressuring each other to show high commitment can generate it naturally. I think it happens more likely when there is a charismatic leader, or someone with actual power (e.g. financial) over the others, who can declare high commitment as a desirable thing, and the lower-status members of the group do not feel free to push back and fight for their free time.
Not everything applies here the same way. Sometimes the members are not explicitly forbidden to talk to the outsiders and critics, they simply... don't have time for that. Or they joined the group voluntarily and had a mostly correct idea about how it works in general, they just... underestimated how difficult such high-intensity environment could be; and when it becomes exhausting, they have no good way to reduce the intensity to a bearable level. They have no mental capacity left to calmly reflect on their situation, and no good way to disengage that wouldn't burn the bridges. So the effect on them can be similar.
Here is something that my autistic ass has been chewing on:
NEUROTYPICALS DO NOT MAKE SOCIAL BLUNDERS.
They may appear to blunder, they may appear to make gaffes of one form or another; however, this all has a higher, often inscrutable and indescribable Purpose. Someone who makes a boorish comment at a party does so intentionally, or rather chooses not to filter himself when he could have, on purpose. It has the function of injecting stress and randomness into the system, as well as sending any number of plausibly deniable signals - some of which are only visible to the graceful or the perceptive.
Take political gaffes, for example: they only LOOK to us - the uninitiated - to be blunders; they may in fact be extremely subtle signals for political operatives as well as distractions from their political machinations. There's the same thing going on when someone angrily talks about "dumb r3tarded people" in front of their special-education teacher friend": it isn't a mistake. It's more like bird augury: deliberately using a poor-quality filtering process to introduce randomness and therefore make you more difficult to read. It's also a political move or power play.
I mean - every word and gesture that the average person makes is flawless, and the average person is every bit as dedicated to being graceful as the average Mongol horse archer was in his time, or the Japanese samurai or European knights were to skill at arms. The only real difference between the average person and an Obama or a Clinton or even someone like Hong Xiuquan is GENETICS and OPPORTUNITY, not worldview. I believe most people secretly believe that gracefulness is quite literally worth dying over, and that a single blunder - a true blunder - can ruin your career or life. The average person can choose - instinctually, gracefully, subtly - to throw a single subtle facial expression in a bar and tell seven other people "I think this guy rocks" or "I think he sucks"; if he opens his mouth to speak, a single sentence can have four different meanings, three of which are understood by everyone and one of which is only able to be parsed by the talented or lucky.
Nope. Social blunders happen all the time, to everyone. The hope is that you learn from them and stop making so many, but every single person on the planet Earth has multiple stories about how they put their foot in their mouth.
As a general rule, anything that involves most of the population of Earth being constantly graceful and purposeful at all times, unfailingly, is unlikely to be true. Humans just aren't sophisticated enough for that.
Yeah, no, not even close. Yes, most apparent blunders have an explanation - but that doesn't mean they're not mistakes. The fact that something has a purpose does not imply it serves that purpose well at all. Everyone makes lots and lots and lots and lots of social blunders. But for most people they disproportionately take place in childhood. The closest plausible neighbor to your claim is something like "neurotypicals do not repeatedly make the same social blunders in adulthood", which is trueish, though not quite true.
Good point. I looked it up, and it seems he did actually claim the title of Pharaoh and is included on modern lists of Pharaohs. It sounds like there's some doubt as to whether he actually had himself anointed and crowned in Egypt or not.
"The comments were made under the username minisoldr, a moniker Robinson used frequently online. Robinson listed his full name on his profile for Nude Africa, as well as an email address he used on numerous websites across the internet for decades....On the Nude Africa website in both comments and his profile, minisoldr offered numerous details that align precisely with Robinson’s personal history."
Ideally the guy would resign from public life on the grounds of comical stupidity. He is instead going with the MAGA strategy of denying everything no matter what the evidence is.
Your next governor of the great state of North Carolina folks!
Wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. It reminds me of the Access Hollywood tape, which wound up damaging Trump far less than the media elite thought it would. It might even make normal men sympathize with him; they don't want their porn history released either. Will probably hurt him with women. Access Hollywood was Trump confessing to alpha male behavior, not weird low-status porn stuff.
The far more damaging thing is his past support for banning abortion without an exception for rape. That's just politically toxic and only a complete 180 to supporting fully legal abortion would make people forget it.
It is politically toxic, but internally consistent: if you believe that a fetus (at any stage) has the same value as a living human being, it is a logical position to hold.
Trump just ignored the Access Hollywood recording though, with a couple of moments of shrugging about "locker room stuff". He didn't loudly/repeatedly deny having said what he obviously did say. That's the part that will stick in the public mind regarding Robinson.
A day later and the guy is still loudly denying all. He's hand-waving the idea that "it could be AI", and/or all faked by malicious libs, etc.
Trump meanwhile is not commenting about it but has just uninvited Robinson from his rally scheduled in NC tomorrow evening. (Robinson, who is both the state's Lt. Governor and the GOP nominee for governor, had appeared in several previous Trump rallies.)
U.S. Senator Thom Tillis, currently the GOP's highest-level officeholder in North Carolina, posted on X that Thursday “was a tough day, but we must stay focused on the races we can win.”
NC's deadline for a nominee to withdraw from the November ballot has passed, and it appears that the state GOP has no legal way to push him off at this point even if they want to.
The Dems think Robinson is now toxic to however many persuadable voters still exist in NC. From the Associated Press an hour ago: "Harris’ campaign rolled out a new ad Friday it calls the first to link Trump to a down-ballot candidate. The commercial alternates between Trump’s praise for Robinson and the lieutenant governor’s comments which his critics have argued show his support for a statewide abortion ban without exceptions. Robinson’s campaign has argued that’s not true. The Democratic National Committee is also running billboards in three major cities showing a photo of Robinson and Trump and comments Trump has said about him. And a fundraising appeal Friday by Jeff Jackson, Democratic attorney general candidate, also includes a past video showing Republican opponent Dan Bishop saying he endorsed Robinson."
Maybe too soon, but on the lighter side: some Israeli food company ought to start using "flavor explosion" as a slogan. Also, I want to see a spy movie where someone assembles a binary-explosive bomb using only Israeli food products bought in an ordinary grocery store.
Would it be possible to make a food ingredient that explodes when mixed with non-kosher food ingredients, but is perfectly safe to eat when mixed with kosher food ingredients?
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On a whim, I decided to look up "Israel" on LessWrong. I don't know why it didn't occur to me to do this until now, it just did today, while I'm at work, waiting for a dog slow compile job.
Surprisingly little in search results show up, mostly account names and meetup proceedings or location info. Expected, LessWrong hates contemporary traditional politics with a passion. The one political post that showed up is an AMA by a user named Yovel Rom on the 10th of October [1], explaining the October 7th attack and the general background. But tracing the comments eventually gets you a far better prize: user Yair Halberstadt, who reviewed the book __1948__[2] by Israeli historian Benny Morris on 3rd of December 2023, and later reviewed its semi-sequel, __Righteous Victims - A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict__[3], in June 2024. The last review was actually written with the intention of being an ACX review, but wasn't selected as a finalist.
Benny Morris, as a person, is of course disgusting as a maggot, perhaps even more given my soft spot for insects. Cosplaying as a "Liberal Zionist", one of his opinions is that Israel should have expelled all Arab Israelis in 1948, and that Arab Israelis even today are/should be viewed as terrorist sympathizer 5th column. Regardless, I will never not be amazed by his ability to say what his sources lead him to, EXACTLY as he thinks it, no sugarcoating.
Everybody should read [2] and [3], with priority given to [3] more than [2] if you don't have time. I want to give them a shoutout here, and will possibly signal boost them more in future Open Threads.
Perhaps what sounds too good to be true for me is how much of the pro-Israel narrative is a transparent lie that even a Zionist historian can casually demolish while in the middle of doing scholarship. There are no punches pulled, no myth spared, no piece of bullshit left unturned. Benny actually comes right out and say the "Ethnic Cleansing" word, the big No No that gets all the antisemitism accusations running on overdrive in modern day discussions. Yair (the reviewer) says at the end of [3]:
>>> If you go into this book believing standard Hasbara talking points about how the IDF is the most moral army on earth, Israel only wants peace, the Palestinians only want war, and Israel has simply no choice in what it does, you’re likely to find it makes for very uncomfortable reading.
The proto-IDF in __Righteous Victims__ violates truces, commits war crimes, and protects and aids population transfer to conquered territory (against international law, forbidding states to transfer their civilians to war zones for settlement).
If this was written by an Arab, Palestinian, Western/American leftist, or Muslim author, I would have quit reading because it's too unchallenging, too non-deviating from what I already believe. What's interesting is how both the author and the person reviewing him are Jewish Israelis, one of them (Morris) trespassing into disgusting anti-Arab racism sometimes, and the reviewer himself being no radical leftist, although LessWrongers are perhaps less common than radical leftist.
On the other hand, [2] and [3] also contains plenty of challenging facts deliberately left out and obfuscated in mainstream pro-Palestinian narratives. Chief among which is of course the Mizrahim forced exodus from Arab and Muslim countries following 1948 and well into the 1990s, and the generally greater readiness of the Israeli populace - minus the settler scum - to compromise for peace.
Overall: Interesting, accessible, as truthful as it ever gets. Must be first-read for anyone who wants to write more than 10 words on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in public.
I applause LessWrong user Yair: this is what I wish to be on this conflict as well, hopefully successfully, however many failings. I grudgingly applause Benny Morris' commitment to facts despite his horrible opinions.
"If you go into this book believing standard Hasbara talking points about how the IDF is the most moral army on earth, Israel only wants peace, the Palestinians only want war, and Israel has simply no choice in what it does, you’re likely to find it makes for very uncomfortable reading."
misses the next sentence
"On the other hand I don’t think it would be wise to update too far in the other direction."
More or less a representative of the average IQ and empathy level of pro-Israel supporters, but it's never not funny when my case is made for me, very visibly.
I actually think that wokeness isn't a saint here. I will never forget the dumbassery of feminists who scour history for some female historical figure, say some woman who sold poison to wives wanting to kill their husbands (can't remember the name, but it's a real figure), and then celebrate it as a feminist icon. "Slay Queen"-ing themselves into standard old 20 IQ atrocity-celebration.
I will never forget when I was commenting on some reddit about a black guy who punched and killed an aging white old man because the white man said a slur to him, and the redditor horde dogpiled me because - apparently - it's completely ok when BlAcK foLx (^TM) take the law into their own hands and simply decree the death penalty for anyone (without a trial!) who says the naughty words, however reprehensible the naughty word is.
I have since disavowed and became thoroughly disillusioned from head to toes by wokism, even now I always avoid pro-Palestinian advocacy if I sniff woke shibboleths like "Privilege" and "White Supremacy". Of course the Pro-Israel like Scott Aaronson latch into those pro-Palestinians like there is literally nobody but them because they like the easy target of disproving that Israel is a White Supremacy, missing the forest for the trees as usual.
All of this to say, I'm extremely skeptical whenever somebody says "$IDEOLOGY makes my enemies bullies !". I don't disagree that the bullies and scumbags and dumbasses gravitate towards certain ideologies and not others (and that this differ across time and space), I just don't think that there is something inherent in an ideology that makes someone a dumbass bully.
I'm afflicted - you could say - by deep misanthropy: in a certain sense, the default state of an uneducated human is to be a dumbass bully, especially toward people that don't look like them. Liberal kindness, the morality that stems from Rawls' Veil of Ignorance, which treats all humans as black boxes with unknown identity to enforce radical justice and identity-agnosticism, is as rare as life in space, and it's always fragile, always the underdog, always subject to vicious attacks from nearly all angles from staunch Communism to medieval Islamism.
That said, I believe satire and merciless mocking is a very effective tool to defend Liberal Kindness, I don't miss the irony but it is what it is.
> when I see people who can read the book review that you posted detailing Israel’s behavior of open ethnic cleansing and conclude that it was “based”
Wow wow wait, let's not get ahead of ourselves here, we have no actual evidence that SR have read the review I posted before commenting "based", or indeed if she has the capacity to read LessWrong-grade material, or even really read anything at all. Didn't Scott post recently about improved LLM models increasingly doing human-like things? The flipside is humans doing increasingly NPC-like things.
On a more serious note, SR71 once confided to me that she is kind of obsessed with me... that I - quoting her - am "The most annoying guy on this forum", indeed that she would vote for Donald Trump specifically just to annoy me, no other reason. Truly one of my most zealous fans, you can say. I don't even live in the USA, but I live in her head rent-free.
Given this confession, I don't think you could take anything about or from this fundamentally unserious person seriously. Would you not agree?
> I know that such a viewpoint is common in the mainstream of society as well as among people in power
Well, that is indeed true. But it's beside my point about wokism: no amount of detailing the crimes of organized religion across history would excuse support of repressive communism, even if repressive communism happens to also repress organized religion, among the countless others it represses.
Wokism is not quite communism, but I was exaggerating for effect. Wokism does weaken **some** types of bullies (not even reliably at that) at the cost of strengthening other types of bullies, and my impression is that if you measure the total amount of all bullying in the system you hardly feel any change at all.
I get that feelings aren't rational and I admit I sometimes also want to trigger the likes of SR71 with wokism-adjacent things just to see the reactions, but ultimately it's not worth it, and there are other ways of responding to dumbassery other than inverted dumbasserty.
If you look at something with your eyes open, what exactly is the thing you're seeing? I'd love to get a sense of the opinion spread here (I suspect lots of disagreement), if you wouldn't mind answering this straw poll: https://strawpoll.com/XOgOVQbdQn3
Note that you can answer more than one thing. The "other" option is mostly intended for if none of the five seemed correct.
(People's "other" responses stick around as options to be voted on; this was not intended, but I can't change it. The first 5 are the official responses.)
I didn't find the options very complete. I went for other: "There is a data structure in my brain which approximately corresponds to the external object, and I experience it as qualia".
Thanks for this answer. Your option was intended to fit 2+4, i.e., "There's an abstract data structure in the brain (e.g., a 2d array) that corresponds precisely to the image I'm seeing" and "The image I see is made of qualia, which is a well-defined non-material thing, but its causal behavior is reducible/equivalent to a physical description of the brain".
I see why you don't think this fits, but with "corresponds precisely to the image I'm seeing", I meant that it precisely corresponds to the qualia, not to the external object. The match between what you're seeing and the external object is not something I'm asking about.
Thanks for the question. It prompted me to to give
"I suffer the illusion of seeing the thing, and if there was something "wrong" with me, like my eyes being smashed, then this illusion would not happen despite me looking with my eyes open at that thing."
as the answer. Which is the best I've ever come up with.
I haven't read Nate Silver's latest book but have read enough about it to know he distinguishes between those he calls The River, who are big risk takers like poker players and venture capitalists and The Village, academics and such who work by consensus. He thinks more highly of The River.
Maybe he gets round to it in his book, but when I think of the biggest risk takers I've known I find myself hoping they finally found the peace they sought and hope they Rest in Peace.
But what is a risk-taker? I can more easily say who is not than who is. If you are a CPA, you are not a risk taker unless you legitimately fear going to prison. If you are an actuary, you are not a risk taker. If you have a degree in physics from MIT and trade for a hedge fund, you are not a risk taker unless you do a lot of blow or junk. If you graduated with a degree in math and spent the next year playing poker full time, you are not a risk taker. You haven't burned any bridges.
My prior is that risk-taker are usually losers. Some are very smart and also lucky and happen to be very successful but the great majority are dying early without much savings.
My question is whether Nate Silver's dichotomy means anything. And, if you can define it clearly, whether being a risk-taker is more or less good or bad compared to not being one.
I think the best interpretation of what they mean by "risk-taker" has less to do with risk, per se, and is entirely to do with the idea behind "**** or get off the pot".
Suppose, for a moment, there is a card game tournament, in which everybody puts in $1,000, gets $1,000 worth of chips, and then must either play until they run out of chips or win the tournament. (They can also forfeit their chips, I guess, whatever.)
Here's the thing: The actual risky maneuver is *entering the tournament at all*. You're betting $1,000 that you'll end up with the entire pot.
However, in between entering the tournament and either winning or losing, you can win or lose slowly - what, I think, gamblers think of as "not taking risks" - or you can win or lose quickly - "taking risks". Apparently gamblers prefer to play with the people who win or lose quickly, rather than having to play against somebody who draws out the game by, say, refusing to ever raise.
This applies more generally, as well. When they're talking about "taking risks", they're not talking about taking actual risks (actual risks are so far outside their social script they don't even notice them - they'll talk up gamblers but I doubt either would mortgage their house and put it all on a single roulette spin), but rather, about finishing the game you are already committed to quickly, win or lose.
If so, something to bear in mind is that for almost everybody, investing a lot of time and energy on a project that's very unlikely to succeed is a bad dumb move. In poker it's called chasing. So I don't think it makes sense to make a poster of somebody who spent 5 years waiting tables & auditioning (or whatever) and eventually became a star (or what ever a highly successful person is called in their field), with a caption underneath saying "NEVER GIVE UP ON YOUR DREAMS."
Agree it's almost impossible to be a superstar without taking big risks. Perhaps there are some Nobel Prize winners who didn't but were just really good and lucky in their field? Or some professional athletes who had no other skills and the choice to pursue their sport was obvious.
I've also heard it said that really successful people tend to spend decades keeping their heads down. If you want to climb the corporate ladder, just do your job really well year after year and play office politics wisely. A leader like Angela Merkel was known as a non-risk-taker who bided her time while her political competition kept sticking their necks out and getting them cut.
I'd guess that because our society generally discourages risk-taking that the median person is better off erring on the side trying not to err. Although the US probably doesn't discourage risk taking as much as Western Europe or most of Asia.
And by discourage I mean actively, brutally punish. Quit your job to start your own business which failed after three years? You're going to have a hard time getting that corporate job back. Got a felony for selling weed in college? Hope you're happy driving a truck the rest of your life.
This is something the software industry handles really well. It is considered quite reasonable to quit your job with a major company to try to build a startup. And if it fails, as most do, you're not an untouchable loser. You can quite reasonably apply for another job at the level you left, or even a bit higher, particularly if you managed to keep things running for some years, since you now have some serious management experience.
This means starting a new company doesn't have all that much downside. On the up-side, you have a small chance of making a fortune. On the downside, you have a large chance of losing a few years of career progression, and maybe not even that.
Yeah, the main cost is opportunity cost since you could be paid so much money at big companies, or you could work at a startup and be paid only in lottery tickets.
If the EV was high, then either the variation is even higher or it's not much of a risk. I would think that definitionally, a "risk taker" is someone who either chases many/all risks, in which case they'll eventually lose to the house, or someone who takes high EV/high risk bets. High risk means most fail, even if the few that succeed become exceptionally rich. So yes, risk takers are usually losers. Smart risk takers will on average win, but the median of that same group will be losers.
Risk takers are very good for society though, as they create new businesses and invent things. It's so good, in fact, that we should incentive them by helping them land softly and try again. Maybe their third restaurant will be a success!
I remember an episode of the (UK) Apprentice where a contestant used casino imagery to sell a fragrance for men, and the feedback was "sorry to have to tell you, but gambling = debts = misery". So...I get what you mean. Sometimes risks can't be avoided though. Perhaps returning to the language of fortitude as a virtue would be helpful as it includes sub-virtues like patience.
Girls here in the Sonoran Desert are taking up flag football, which seems to me a good thing. Kids are cursed by their smart phones and social media -- and deserve the time and experience of a healthier childhood and puberty.
In our county of a million, two local high schools established girls' flag football teams last year, and now find their players mentoring six new teams. Girls need more than quinceaneras. Imagine the experiences they'll have if they develop programs in parity with the boys' programs. It could be big.
For the SAT, how does the median score correlate with the test-taker's age? What is the median score for a 14-year old, a 15-year-old, a 16-year-old, a 17-year-old, and an 18-year old?
Power companies are pushing back against the steeply increasing power requirements of data centers (read AI).
"Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta are fighting a proposal by an Ohio power company to significantly increase the upfront energy costs they’ll pay for their data centers, a move the companies dubbed “unfair” and “discriminatory” in documents filed with Ohio’s Public Utility Commission last month. American Electric Power Ohio said in filings that the tariff increase was needed to prevent new infrastructure costs from being passed on to other customers such as households and businesses if the tech industry should fail to follow through on its ambitious, energy intensive plans."
The article is behind the WaPo paywall, but you get a few free reads a month. It's worth reading if you're interested in the problem of powering AI.
Not discussed in the article, but In California, the utilities seem to be passing along the costs to consumers, which is causing angst among consumers and business owners as their rates climb.
The WSJ of yesterday, the 18th, published an essay in its opinion pages by Sean Patrick Cooper titled 'Data Centers Make Terrible Neighbors,' regarding the politics of 'non-disclosure' agreements between tech companies and municipalities. It's pretty revealing.
"But what if we build an oversized and ultra-reliable power grid, lifting us away from increasingly common brownouts and blackouts, and it was all for nothing?"
(Personally I think the data center operators should build their own power plants, although I expect the state bureaucracy involved would be nightmarish.)
"Build their own power plants" is being actively explored. Data centers are among the more promising potential early customers for small modular fission reactors.
Why would they want to use nuclear reactors that don't exist and will take many many years to get past legal when they do exist, rather than just buying gas turbines off the shelf from GE or whomever? I am very, very confident that a gigawatt of COTS gas turbines will be *much* cheaper than a gigawatt of "small modular fission reactors", and available next year rather than (maybe) next decade. Fuel costs won't eat up the difference on a timescale of less than a decade - by which point I am assured that the new ASI will have built us all quantum zero-point energy generators or whatnot.
Is it just that they're irrationally technophilic nerds who will pay any price to use the shiniest new technology even though the old stuff still does everything they need? Or is there some practical advantage that I am missing.
That's a good question. The articles I've seen are light on details, so it's not clear that any of the potential buyers (Google, Microsoft, and Oracle are the names I've seen most often) are actually committing to buy anything, or if they're just doing planning for how they'd use SMRs if/when NuScale or whoever has some to sell.
I did see something about Oracle having applied for and gotten some kind of permit to install three SMRs, but I can't find details on if this is a stage in the NRC approval process or a local building permit or what. And it seems odd that they could get a permit to install a nuclear reactor that doesn't actually exist yet.
Oh good, let's add federal bureaucracy on top of that. :-/
Not bagging on you, I think this is a great idea and I'm glad to hear that it's being explored, but I just hope that a bureaucratic miracle occurs so we don't have to wait forty years to actually build the stupid things.
Yes, but somewhere in the article, one of the power company spokespersons asked (and I'm paraphrasing) what if they built out the infrastructure and then the data centers are shut down? — with the implication this would happen if the AI bubble bursts. Then the power companies would be left holding the amortized buildout costs without any income to cover them.
It would if they charged the data centers up front for the costs of upgrading their infrastructure. But that's why the data center owners are screaming. LOL!
Yes. I was just thinking that utilities, telephone companies and cable companies have always operated on the idea that they will hook you up at their expense and make it up on the fees afterwards. I got the impression that model does not scale into the demands of data centers and their power needs and infrastructure needs.
Africans paid $4 an hr tag images so that AI can respond to verbal prompts with appropriate images . Maybe they'll hire some Africans to generate power via Stairmasters or some such. To get hired to tag images Africans must have a college degree and speak fluent English, but these qualifications are unnecessary for the stairmaster, so they can be paid considerably less
than the smart fluent people who went to the trouble of getting a college degree.
Yes. It’s an awful job though. There are rules that have to do with keeping the data they have secure. They must work alone, and cannot tell anyone details about what they do, and keep their pace brisk, and pass periodic accuracy checks. I keep picturing somebody making it through college, full of pride and hope because they have fluent English and a BS, and then winding up with this.
Bears some resemblance to more than a few bartenders I’ve met in my time. Cab drivers as well, but not so much anymore.
I had a cab ride in NYC back in the 80’s, got chatting with the driver (it started with him telling me I couldn’t smoke pot in the car- tobacco was still ok ) and it turned out he was a fully qualified physician. He was a Russian…
And then there was the young woman who used to keep me in red wine who was graduated as an architect with about $200,000 of student debt. Full of hopes and dreams, and consumed by disillusionment…
On the brighter side, she was replaced by a young Irish girl who kept me in red wine and eventually moved back to Ireland and is working for Google last I heard. But you could tell by the way she tended bar that she had a future.
Anyway, it won’t be long before an AI will be able to tag images for another AI and then they will all be out of work. And taxis will be self driving, so they’ll be screwed there as well. In a world of super-intelligent AI, what is the point of getting a really good formal education? it started with slide rules and then graduated to calculators, and the next step is coming. Isn’t the logical extension of getting someone else to work for you slavery?
Oh, they did very much profitably do it. look back to when the Spaniards were exploiting the gold mines in South America with slave labor.
They needed to be constantly drained. Which meant a bunch of men on a big wheel turning it to run the pump. They were kept in traces, and when one dropped dead, they just cut him out of the traces and put it in another one.
And the mine next door that's just dumping the Purina Slave Kibble straight into the boiler of the steam engine, pumps more water and so mines more gold at less cost. Probably winds up buying the first mine and then freeing the slaves because the steam engine is cheaper.
The now-freedmen may then of course starve for lack of kibble, see also Henry, John. So there are potential pitfalls. But that sort of brute-force industrial slavery went out of style when decent steam engines became available.
"The things that really matter in this civilization are done by professionals (as opposed to amateurs.)"
I'm thinking that's about 90% true. The main exception that comes to mind is parenting, which is in fact done by amateurs, but even that is increasingly professionalized, through day care and full-day schooling.
"Really matters" is a problem here, because it's undefined. I think, based on the 90% metric, that you referring to the vital infrastructure functions of society - power, food, logistics, construction and repair, etc., and not things that "matter" to people but are not in those fields (such as friendship, love, entertainment and a bunch of other things). If you are further defining "professional" to be anyone paid to do a thing, or at least paid for regular work, that pulls in most of the people working in that field, even if they are bad at it or could never maintain the vital functions on their own. Excluding those two huge caveats, I would say that it's at least directionally true. We would never have a percent that would be fully accepted, but it would be high.
I disagree that parenting is done by amateurs. Parenting is mostly about transferring knowledge on how to independently exist in the world, so that your child can eventually independently exist in the world. The core relevant experience required is "existing in the world". A lot of the transfer of knowledge is done implicitly, by your child observing what you do.
Some people do better at existing in the world than others, but no-one is an amateur. 18 year-olds have babies and do fine. Whereas if you gave my 5 year-old a baby he would be a terrible parent, because he really is an amateur.
Parenting is the big exception, yes. Going by your definition of professionals (people that are paid to do something, not necessarily trained to do something), volunteer organizations are probably another significant exception. Some volunteers are in fact trained, but they're not paid (at least not anything approaching a normal salary).
Taking these exceptions into consideration... I'd maybe say that your statement is 75-to-80% true.
But amateurs typically do things better. Ask any beer judge, they'll tell you amateur beer events have better beers than commercial events. Amateurs are in love with their craft, sparing no expense nor inconvenience, pride and love are the driving forces. Professionals on the other hand have budgets, deadlines, deliverables, all the impediments to quality.
I think parenting is big enough that you can't fit your "90% true" in the same room with it. Possibly related, there's a lot of noncommercial sex that I'd say really matters to a whole lot of people.
But for most other things, the Ferengi 13th Rule of Acquisition applies: "Anything worth doing is worth doing for money". And anything that "really matters", there will be probably people willing to pay to have it done and done right. There will be hobbyists, yes, but the people who do it right and do it at scale will probably have found a way to do it professionally.
No, but it doesn't have to be symmetric. Simplistically (and excluding e.g. parenthood as already noted), all the stuff worth doing will be done by professionals, and some stuff that's not worth doing will also be done by professionals. And even stuff that's not worth doing, often still *matters*.
I wonder what you mean by "matters" versus "worth doing". The way I typically math it out, "worth doing" includes anything where the return or savings in $$ exceeds the cost, but also includes things that are hard to measure in $$, but nevertheless are so important to someone that they'd rather give up some amount of $$ than do without (e.g. spend another year with grandma), so they're effectively measurable in $$ after all. Or perhaps more fundamentally, measurable in the portion of one's life spent pursuing it.
I can't think of anything I would call "mattering" that I couldn't measure that way, but maybe I'm just low on coffee. (Cost: about 30 seconds, spread over about 600.)
To take an extreme example, The invasion of Ukraine by Russia's professional army is clearly not worth doing, even for Russia. But it even more clearly *matters*.
And a thing need not be actively destructive to qualify here. Large vanity projects like e.g. building extravagant skyscrapers in the desert, are mostly a waste of resources and I would argue not worth doing. But they do matter, only in part because they are a massive waste of resources that could have been put to better use. And, again, are mostly done by professionals.
It isn’t symmetric. I agree. And I also agree that stuff “not worth doing“ still matters. And there are people who do stuff that’s “not worth doing” really really well.
The whole thing is a bit of a rabbit hole because professional and amateur are really slippery words . Amateur originally meant just what it sounds like; for the *love of it. It has a very different connotation in its current form. It usually implies a lesser capability.
Similarly, professional implies “better.” I guess you could argue [whatever the issue is] anyway you wanted, depending on how you define those two words.
I might think of “professional” as doing something in the most pragmatic and efficient way possible; this is particularly applicable when talking about how one earns a living. Being an amateur frees one from those conditions. Pragmatism and efficiency are not part of the calculation.
As an aside, I don’t think parenting has any place in this discussion. All the professions that have been discussed here associated with parenting should be considered resources for the parent, not an alternative. Parenting is neither a vocation nor a profession. It’s something you do when you have a child, one way or the other, meaning you do it to the best of your ability with the resources available, or you don’t and walk away.
What do you mean by "really matter," though? If someone with no professional skills is enjoying life and thriving, doesn't that matter? If it doesn't, what's the point of the professionals who manage the production and transport of food, water, power, etc. to the person, the doctors who treat the person's illnesses, etc? Why do the professionals matter, beyond the good they do for humanity as a whole?
If I rephrase as , "The things we consider really important in this civilization are done by professionals," does that clarify anything? I'm not suggesting that "really matter" has to be somehow objectively evaluated.
"really matter" and your rephrase are pretty subjective and vary for each individual. For many artists/musicians and their fans the art really matters, and many artists/musicians are not professionals. AKA - "day job".
I still don't agree. If the wellbeing of humanity doesn't matter, what does? It seems like there's a buried assumption somewhere that the higher level of intelligence and training required for professionals' tasks matters in and of itself. Why does it, though? We're not in high school any more, and the universe doesn't give a shit about our SAT scores. There's an attitude I pick up a lot on here that smart people just matter more. They're better. There could even be a formula: Everyone's value is one, multiplied by the number of standard deviations above or below the mean their IQ is.
Oh, by "professionals," I don't mean highly-trained (typically college-educated) people. I just mean people who are doing what they do, for a living. Professional, as opposed to amateur, not professional as opposed to unskilled labor or trades-work.
I think I still don't agree, and I'm really not into disagreeing for sport.
I agree that if you poll people about what activities really matter, they will name jobs, including blue collar jobs -- house painters, garbage men, etc. But if you ask people who really matters to *them,* you get the names of the people who understand them & care about them. Parents, siblings, friends and also empathic and kind strangers, hold the world together in a way that people aren't aware of. that’s why when the subject of eugenics comes up I always say
if we can only select for one thing, let’s select for empathy. Here's a story from my life: I was on vacation and got a migraine. It was so awful that I went to the ER, where they gave me a shot of imitrex that just erased the thing over the course of 20 mins of so. But what sticks in my mind is the nurse who took care of me. He checked in on me often before the shot, and also while it was taking effect, and every time he did he was profoundly comforting, mostly because I felt sure he genuinely sympathized. They was something he did when he asked me how I was doing -- I forget what it was now, something like cupping my cheek in his hand -- that was very tender. (And it did not seem at all sexual -- and judging by his manner, he was a gay man anyhow, and I'm a woman). That nurse has stuck in my mind for decades, overshadowing even the miracle of imitrex. Even now when I think of him I feel the ghost of a warm glow.
What constitutes "this civilization"? If only the professionals are following the law, or having fun, you don't have a civilization. You have a fortress surrounded by barbarians.
"Peace Love and Understanding are done by professionals."
Although I think the OP meant "really important *positive* things in this civilization," I immediately thought of all the negative things done by professionals. A professional military can cause a lot of negative impacts on a lot of people (military and civilian) when they go into action. Of course, unprofessional armies such as Hamas and the Russian army do lots of damage, too. Professional financial criminals can do a lot of damage to individuals and damage the faith in our financial institutions.
And by professionals, does the OP mean someone with a professional degree or certification? Farm laborers with no degrees or certifications harvest our crops. That's pretty important work! And I don't think civilzation would function very smoothly without construction workers, meat packers, garbage collectors, cashiers, fast food workers, janitors (etc.).
Well then the question is just whether people are willing to pay money for things they want, which seems trivially true. Every professional is in a line of work someone values, because otherwise there wouldn't be enough support for it to be a profession.
It’s not easy to remain optimistic about the long term progress of humanity when the events of the present day make it feel like we might be slipping backwards.
Matthew Yglesias had a link in his Substack post today that brightened my outlook at least a bit.
The link is to a transcript of a 2019 podcast episode with Jonathon Capehart and California Congresswoman Barbara Lee
In the post he suggests that the overt racism of George Wallace was largely instrumental and that a visit from black Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm while he was in a hospital bed recovering from an attempted assassin’s bullets affected a sincere change of heart in Wallace toward black people.
This part is from a speech by Wallace’s daughter in a majority black church in 1979.
WALLACE KENNEDY: When Congresswoman Chisholm sat by my daddy’s bed, he asked her, “What are your people going to say about your coming here?” Shirley Chisholm replied, “I know what they’re going to say but I wouldn’t want what happened to you to happen to anyone.” Daddy was overwhelmed by her truth, and her willingness to face the potential negative consequences of her political career because of him — something he had never done for anyone else.
Shirley Chisholm had the courage to believe that even George Wallace could change. She had faith in him. And there would be others who followed. In 1972, Shirley Chisholm planted a seed of new beginnings in my father’s heart. A chance to make it right. An opportunity for a better way for the seven-year journey he would take from there to this very church.
On a Sunday in 1979, Daddy’s arrival to this church was unannounced and unexpected. But for an attendant rolling his wheelchair to the front of this sanctuary, he was alone. What the congregation must have thought when he said,
“I’ve learned what suffering means in a way that was impossible. I think I can understand something of the pain that black people have come to endure. I know I contributed to that pain and I can only ask for your forgiveness.”
As he was leaving the church, the congregation began singing “Amazing Grace.”
________
Link to
Opinions | How segregationist George Wallace became a model for racial reconciliation: ‘Voices of the Movement’ Episode 6
Nah. Come on. Listen to The Drive-By Truckers great album "Southern Rock Opera" which is about George Wallace, Neil Young and Lynard Skynyrd. According to the Truckers from Alabama, whom I'd trust with my life, Wallace only became a segregationist for opportunistic reasons in '68. His prior stance was relatively progressive for Alabama at the time. He just sold his soul for what seemed like a populist position at the time.
Really, Southern Rock Opera is one of the greatest albums ever made and will give you more truth than that podcast.
> Wallace only became a segregationist for opportunistic reasons in '68
That’s what Matthew Yglesias means by: “the overt racism of George Wallace was largely instrumental”. Wallace had tried “build better roads and better schools” in his campaigning but it didn’t work. The “segregation now, segregation forever” stuff did.
Half of the podcast was a speech by George Wallace’s own daughter.
As a piece, the podcast was a story of redemption from havIng “sold his soul for what seemed like a populist position at the time.”
I might check out Drive by Truckers but I think I’ll always remain an Allman Brothers guy listening to Richard Betts pickin’ on that red guitar.
Your side is actively shooting presidents, criminally prosecuting your political opponents, taking your political opponents off the ballot, burning down cities, and firebombing churches, but yes, of course, the mean tweets are the REAL Threat To Democracy!!!
And the guy caught on the golf course was a Trump voter who'd recently soured on that and had supported Haley and a fringe candidate in this year's GOP primaries. Not sure which "side" that puts him on but it sure isn't the Dems.
Fortunately, in our modern, enlightened era we have recognized that it's impossible for people to grow out of their retrograde viewpoints, so no need to worry about this scenario taking place again in the near future.
This is referring to digging up evidence of ‘transgressions’ that were not considered wrong or bad in the past and retroactively holding them to a new standard I assume.
If that’s what you are getting at, I agree that’s idiotic and wrong.
An alternative hypothesis is that Wallace was following his political incentives. When black voters were effectively disenfranchised, he espoused policies that appealed to the dominant voting bloc. After black voters became an effective voting bloc, he adjusted to the new incentive structure.
Total non sequitur except that it's an upper: Cat's really like these interactive toys from China. They're like roombas -- zoom around randomly, and so maintain the cats' interest.
They can get themselves out of corners, etc. All are designed so that they turn on once an hour for 5 or 10 mins. After that they doze, but wake up instantly if jiggled by a paw. I bought a couple because I felt bad about leaving my cats alone for hours when I went in to the office.
They seem to be irresistible to cats. Mine take one sniff and walk away from many things, but this thing, the day I presented it, they followed around all evening. My timid cat was scared of it at first. You can make them less daunting by putting them in a box or in the bathtub, or inside a cat tunnel if you have one.
I’m checking the link out and considering getting one now. If I have trouble locating the shyer of my two cats I just have to pick up the laser pointer that projects the red dot. He recognizes the sound of the attached key ring rattling and comes running.
I have heard that laser pointers are actually not that great a cat toy because they can never catch it, so they get frustrated. Better for them to sometimes succeed.
Yeah, I’ve wondered about the frustration factor. They probably have more fun when I use the fabric ‘kite tail’ at the end of a plastic stick, kind of a fly rod casting action involved with that one.
They get to grab the fabric and kick the hell out of it so it seems like it appeals to their hunter instinct.
Yeah, they love that red dot. The trouble is, they need you to make it come alive. (Actually, I've seen gizmos on Amazon pets section that will project and randomly move a red dot. Did not get one because I was worried about it shining into cats' eyes when they come up to investigate the device. Do you think it makes sense to worry about that?). Here's a video of my cats with one of the devices zooming in and around their cat tunnels. https://vimeo.com/1010343326/01f745df2e?share=copy
They're pretty new to it and the more timid one, the black one, is still just watching. Orange guy's having a ball.
Yeah, I usually get tired of moving the dot before the cat tires of playing. Not sure how dangerous it is to vision but I am careful not to shine it into their eyes.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems is really, really looking to fill this scientific software position. You would be the software expert working with scientists to improve the architecture / usability / integration of physics codes. The pay is probably less than what you could get in silicon valley, but it is more than academia. Plus it's really cool to be working on fusion energy with a bunch of other very talented people at a place that is delivering results.
I interviewed for a different software position at CFS (on the SPARC I&C team) about three years ago. I didn't get the job, but I came away with a favorable impression of the people I talked to. I had been following them for a while before applying, after coming across a YouTube video of one of Professor Whyte's talks some time in 2018.
I don't know what the situation in fusion is like, but in my current scientific field we do sometimes have to use hastily written, not entirely user-friendly software, though we also see more polished software being developed as the field grows and some techniques start to mature. I've been learning software development in such an environment...
Feel free to ignore this but the non-technical parts of this (the job description, not what you wrote) sound really off-putting to me. This kind of marketing speech is the furthest one can get from "authentic", it's so transparently made to sound impressive that it sets off all of my bullshit sensors, deservedly or not.
Might just be me, and if anyone wants to tell me that, no, this is in fact how you reach the most people I'll probably believe you.
hahaha fair enough. I actually do agree with you that the written description is poor (I didn't write it but maybe I can help get it updated to something better).
The best I can say is that there really are some very brilliant people working there. And that CFS has made groundbreaking progress in HTS magnets such as the 20T toroidal model field coil (search on youtube) and that the high field approach to fusion that CFS has adopted has some real advantages (there's some discussion in the comments here https://www.construction-physics.com/p/will-we-ever-get-fusion-power, but for the technical I would recommend the SPARC Physics Basis papers in Journal of Plasma Physics).
If you have further recs on how to improve the description to land better with software people then I'd appreciate it. We're in an interesting position of physicists trying to recruit outside our normal networks so it can be rocky.
Does anyone know why Nate's model is so bullish on Trump?
All the way back in August, he had the person who won Pennsylvania as having a 90+% chance to win the election (https://www.natesilver.net/p/welcome-to-the-bizarre-world-of-conditional). He currently has Harris narrowly ahead in Pennsylvania (D+0.2, https://www.natesilver.net/p/nate-silver-2024-president-election-polls-model). If we assume it's a 50-50 probability split (seems a reasonable approximation for a 0.2 point lead) and do a simple math calculation using the numbers from the conditional probabilities, then this would suggest Harris currently has a 48% chance of winning. There's probably some wiggle room here for variations in other details, changes in what "winning in PA means" (e.g. less scenarios where it's a polling error in R's favor, resulting in D+4 in PA), etc, but Trump's odds seem much bigger than I'd expect from those two numbers.
Silver said he was discounting the post-convention bump that Harris got because he expected it would be temporary. But the bump seems to be holding. I noticed that some people on TwiXter were asking when and if he'd update his forecast. I don't think he has, yet.
D+0.2% is the average of polls of PA voters. That's a big part of Silver's model for who's likely to win PA, but far from the only part.
In 2020, Biden won PA by 1.2%, which is 3.3 percentage points less than his national popular vote. And in 2016, Clinton lost PA by 0.7% while winning the national popular vote by 2.1%, so she underperformed in PA by 2.8%. So in the last two elections, Democrats have underperformed national popular votes in PA by about 3%. Apply this as an adjustment to Harris's 2.2% lead in national polls, and that implies Trump is actually ahead in PA by 0.8%. Last I checked, Silver's model uses a weighted average of adjusted national polls (using a similar calculation to my illustration but probably not exactly the same) and state polls to estimate who's currently leading in that state. The relative weights depend on how many good recent polls there are of the state in question.
The same mechanism is applied in reverse, using adjusted state polls as an additional signal of the national popular vote. This is used along with the national polling average to determine the input to state averages I described in the previous paragraph. So if Trump is overperforming what we'd expect from national polls in polls of other states, then the model's estimate of national popular vote is going to get adjusted upwards a little.
And there's also @DangerouslyUnstable's point: just looking at current polls gives you what Silver calls a "now-cast", but there are further fiddly bits in the model to account for how things are likely to change between now and election day. In addition to the convention bounce adjustment, I think there's also stuff forecasting how people currently polling as undecided or third-party supporters are likely to vote on election day. I think there's also a "fundamentals" factor where there's a prior for how each state is likely to vote based on demographics and past election results which is weighed more heavily early in the election cycle and gradually declines to zero by election day.
His model takes what the _current_ polls are, and then does a lot of work to figure out what it _expects_ the polls to be on election day. I couldn't tell you the exact reason (although a week ago it was most likely the convention bounce adjustments, and it might still be the tail end of that), but whatever it is, the model must expect the polls to regress for Harris a bit.
He's probably doing some kind of data correction for the polls or something like that. The polls were bullish on Clinton and Biden both compared to the final results. I know he does that for the nationwide percent, such that a +3% Harris is something like a 50/50 for the chance to win. California is a big part of that (Clinton ran up a big lead there while losing a few states by small amounts), but he may be doing the same for individual states. I'm not a paid subscriber, so I don't know if he talks about those corrections in detail anywhere.
The overall point he keeps repeating is that the swing states are all that matter in assessing the POTUS election-outcome odds, and that good-quality polling of those individual states has been fairly scarce until just this calendar month.
I have recently written about Benthan's Bulldog's argument for God, which Scott recently linked. I argue that his claim that the number of possible people is Beth-2 (that is, the same cardinality as the powerset of the real numbers, or the powerset of the powerset of the integers) is implausible, and that we can likely enumerate all meaningfully distinct human-like brain states in universes which have roughly the same physical foundation as ours.
Stepping a bit back, I also look at the root claim that the number of universes should be Beth-2, which can be traced back to Quine's Democritian worlds. I think that from a physical perspective, the modelling with f:R^4->{0,1} where f(r,t)=1 iff a particle occupies position r at time t is not well suited to gain knowledge about the possible configurations a universe can have, because almost all functions f would seriously break physics.
I end up giving tips about how to run universes with pre-determined lifetime with finite resources in a way which the inhabitants will not notice, and rant a bit that the central example of an irrational number should be some uncomputable, undescribable monstrosity rather than sqrt(2) or pi.
If this sounds like your cup of tea, read the whole thing (or parts of it) here:
I had an odd thought. We've all been reading of the danger of AI doing most of its training off the Internet, which is increasingly full of AI-generated content. This leads to a kind of poisoning of the training, so that AI's responses are dumber to the extent it's been exposed to this mix of material, so that AI thinking in general is increasingly handicapped by a data version of mad cow disease.
It just occurred to me now that we humans who live primarily in a built environment, surrounded by things designed to be useful or to convince, may be (in a much longer loop) slowly diminished in ways we can't really see.
Moral, I guess? Get out into the woods, the woods aren't going to try to convince you of anything.
The city I live in is packed with things and people that challenge me, delight me, and expand my worldview, many times every day.
I do love being in nature but it's not at all mentally stimulating in the same way. A life spent in the woods may be peaceful and wholesome but, on its own, will not lead to a brilliant mind.
Moral, for me? Have as many experiences as possible. City, woods, other cities, deserts, all of it.
I agree on AI's capacity for compounding and accelerating the spread of bad data.
It certainly happens without the effect of validating the internet's own 'narratives', though. In at least one regard, AI is simply a more advanced form of gaslighting, which worked for Sam Adams, and still does for countless promoters of gadgets and products on cable TV, and today's suburban 'actvists'. It may just give performative social movements and bad political ideas more traction.
The greed of politics and consumerism will no doubt trivialize AI -- at the same time it improves some technology and aids in helping make some medical advances and such.
I should have said, 'Along with its many useful and helpful applications, AI will likely also be used for more effective gaslighting.' I don't want to contribute to the noise. Sorry.
There's a more fundamental problem with AI training - what do we want the AI to do? Training on AI-generated data may be a recursive problem as you suggest, but we're also training AIs on Reddit and other human-generated output of dubious worth. But, if we want the AI to act like a human and use normal human speech, maybe Reddit is a great place to go. Of course, if Reddit is abnormal in any systematic way, you are also teaching it to be similarly abnormal - political opinions, humor, grammar, whatever.
If we train it on scientific papers, we might be happy with the rigorous responses it provides (although with the replication crisis, maybe not), but maybe the way it talks to people is stilted and off-putting. We could train it on classic novels, but then it uses biases from hundreds of years ago and talks like an 18th century Englishman.
The current goal seems to be to train it on everything humans have ever done, and help it identify when it should talk like Lord Cumberland or Genghis Khan and when it should use modern slang.
We don't have to use the same AI for everything. We could train one AI on conversation and use it in call centers. Train another AI on scientific papers and use it in research.
I go questing for the enchanted forest a lot and have had many good epiphanies. Speaking to the original post question - yes living primarily in a built environment does diminish life experience - there are people who don't know that some of the food they eat grows from the ground or was once an animal.
I regret the facebook link, but I can't find the video on youtube.
From the link: "Recently, Google has released a massive upgrade to this tool that allows you to generate a spoken word podcast-style discussion of the input material. The output that it generates is nearly indistinguishable from normal human conversation and it is able to critique the input material in a novel and surprisingly insightful manner. While I realize that these tools do not represent 'true' intelligence, they still do demonstrate a stunning simulacrum of the real thing."
The voices are better than most computer voices, and there's an impression of human personalities, but with less emotional variation.
It gets at least two things blatantly wrong about the story. The reporter died from a sign falling on him. It was the young couple which was killed by a car. Getting this right would have taken minimal attention. Or was the ai imitating human errors?
It would take a little more processing to grasp that the insurance companies hired assassins to kill Pinero. The ai said it was a mystery.
>It gets at least two things blatantly wrong about the story. The reporter died from a sign falling on him. It was the young couple which was killed by a car. <
I'm assuming from this that they decided to test their AI by making it give commentary on the Final Destination series, in which the concept of death hunts down teenagers for the pettiest vengeance possible.
Not an AI, a highly limited oracle. I recommend reading the story, it's not very long, has a number of good features, and is very impressive for a first story.
The device is looks down the four-dimensional time line for a person, and identifies when the end happens.
The sign falling isn't intended as slapstick, it's an accident which couldn't plausibly be arranged.
Here is a question I have wondered about for a while. Years ago, while hanging out with friends, one asked: During an erotic encounter, what is the ideal ratio of kissing to intercourse? I thought to myself, "that sounds like a false dichotomy. Shouldn't they happen simultaneously during intercourse?" But I have subsequently noticed in the media that, when intercourse is depicted, the couple is rarely seen kissing. So I am curious what the norm actually is, and what people's preferences are.
By coincidence I just read an interview with an expert on kissing this week. Two bits from that are related to your question:
- Kissing is not a biological instinct, but it is a social convention. Only about half of the cultures all over the world kiss, and not all those kiss in sexual context.
- In Hollywood there was a "production code" formulated in 1934, which determined what could or couldn't be shown on screen. Part of the code was that kisses could last at most 3 second. Since it was still the most intimate form of interaction, it played a huge role, and people would pay for a movie ticket just to see a kiss between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr. But the production code eroded in the 60s, and since then love scenes became a lot more explicit and kissing has lost significance. First in movies, but also (at least that is what he claimed) in Western societies in general.
Oh, and his answer on whether kissing makes sex better:
"I can't answer that scientifically, personally I would say: sex mostly gets better when it lasts longer. And kissing is a good way to prolong the activity."
EDIT: Slight correction, only half of societies have *romantic-sexual* kisses. Parents kissing their children is much more wide-spread and maybe universal. From the authors of the original study:
"We looked at 168 cultures and found couples kissing in only 46 percent of them. Societies with distinct social classes are usually kissers; societies with fewer or no social classes, like hunter-gatherer communities, are usually not."
See _Sex Is Not a Natural Act and Other Essays_, which argues that sex is as much a cultural production as music, and that people are done a grave disservice by being told that sex is both natural and it's important to just get it right.
Interresting. Are you on the taller side, at leaat relative to the height of your partner? (Or, if you are referring to being on the receiving end, are you on the shorter side?)
My first substack! Explaining how kink and BDSM are not about "weird sex", but adapting to the dating marketplace as a boring guy. Essentially it is a "honest, consensual PUA" where the exciting stuff are explicitly negotiated:
Judging how hard it actually is to find a kinky guy, I am very much not convinced by this argument.
And I've tried dating vanilla guys and teaching them what I like and they're just not into it, so saying it's something other than innate really doesn't make sense.
And I've hear it's similarly difficult the other way around.
Men outnumber women on Fet 4:1, the issue is 95% of "Doms" will be completely fake, either just thinks kinky women are easy, or just likes rough sex, or wants to jump into things without investing time into building trust and figuring out risk-awareness and specific consent. But this is just why it works well for the 5%.
Interestingly, real life events work less well, even though everybody on Fet seems to say the opposite! I wonder if location/culture plays a role, I distinctly remember the part in Desperate Housewives that a couple moves into a house and the neighbors come to greet them, and I thought how completely creepy people would find that in Austria that some stranger knocks on your door just because they live nearby.
I'm not sure that has anything to do with your initial hypothesis, which seems to imply kink is done to make one more interesting, but if that were the case it would be something people could choose, rather than the majority of people on Fet or Feeld being fakes.
I admit it is a little confusing and not very clearly thought out. I think I meant it at some point that there has to be an actual passion for it. Then this passion has the very nice side effect of becoming more interesting.
I don't know that Fetlife is a great measure of interest in kink, either in ratios of men to women wanting kink, or in how many men on Fet are kinky.
In my experience, a *tremendous* number of men on Fet are straight vanilla dudes there for the free amateur vanilla porn (which is why the "Explore" page's photos and videos almost always are and almost always have been entirely conventionally attractive women nude or in vanilla porn poses).
I think it depends if the first attempt was one of the "cry for help" types, i.e. not really wanting to die but wanting attention/help, or if it was a genuine attempt to kill oneself and was foiled.
If you do the "cry for help" overdose attempt and finally get to see a psychiatrist to get your anti-depressant prescription, then you will feel better and less likely to try again, because you got what you were looking for.
Conversely, if you really wanted to die but someone found you and called the ambulance, I think you are more likely to have a second go and plan better to have it be successful.
People who’ve attempted suicide and lived are at a much higher risk of eventually completing suicide.
I’m sure some people who unsuccesfully attempt suicide are glad they survived and feel like they’ve got a second lease on life. But research shows that surviving suicide indicates a significantly increased likelihood that the survivor will attempt again, not a decreased likelihood.
“Are there data on the life satisfaction of people who seriously attempted suicide but were rescued or otherwise survived?”
If I exclude people who attempt suicide from my answer and focus on “mentally healthy” people like you suggest, I’m literally not answering the poster’s question.
He didn’t ask about “mentally healthy people.” He asked about people who seriously attempt suicide.
There is and you can find it online pretty easily. From memory, most attempts are one-off, most are unsuccessful and most survivors report higher life satisfaction a few years later. Something like 30% are completely psychologically normal a few years after the event. Even delaying an attempt by a few minutes or hours make it very unlikely that the average person will try again.
Does this differentiate between those who "seriously attempted" and those whose attempts were something else? I imagine it's a pretty touchy subject formally categorizing someone's suicide as Serious or a Cry For Help or whatever.
Intuitively, I would expect people who were serious to try again and not become happier soon, while people looking for help or attention would have a pretty good chance of getting to a better place.
Again working off of memory here, but a lot of the research gets around this by specifically studying only one type of suicide. There was a particularly searing one that looked at survivors of blunt force trauma type attempts (i.e. jumping off bridges, driving into bridges, just bridges in general) and even then most reported being happier a few years later.
The repeat offenders tend to be more successful overall - most people (like 90% of attempts) are just going through a sort of mental valley and once they pass through the other side never try again. A few try over and over, slowly escalating until they kill themselves. So the 'cry for help' thing can actually subvert itself there.
Side note: men are generally more 'successful' than women, because men prefer guns, ropes and cars and women prefer pills. Suicide is also very prone to spikes and fads caused by media attention - we had a local one a few years back where someone jumped over the counter at a butchers' and sawed their own head off. Then there were a spate of them and now the butchers keep the saws out of sight.
One of the remarkable aspects of the campaign is how Trump feels like the incumbent and Harris feels like the challenger. It's not surprising that Democrats would encourage this, but I was surprised to come across an article full of quotes of even *congressional Republicans* referring to Trump as "the President".
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/20/house-gop-trump-shutdown-00180243
It's getting rough out there: it appears the would-be conservative James Lileks at National Review is poised to defect.
In what is obviously a scheme to impress Ms. Harris, he published a sample of his special application of rhetorical cadence and circular logic in a proposed speech Ms. Harris might want to use in addressing, say, a gaggle of communists:
"The workers. Of the World. There is a world, and there are workers in it. The work of the world is worker's work. . . " (October, 2024)
Good riddance, James Lileks. We hope you enjoy your new speechwriting job.
". . . and they work when they are working. Work is called work for a reason. It is work! Often hard work. And the hardworking workers know it is hard, because they are feeling the hardness of it . . ."
There you go. It's not that hard.
Such is the rhetoric of Reality TV Politicians. One doesn't even need a GED, much less a law degree. Some goofy medication would be cheating.
To some degree that is them being trapped by having drunk their own kool-aid (about the 2020 election having been stolen). They are used to referring to Trump as simply "the president" rather than "former president" because that has been the political correctness within GOP circles for three years now.
Wanted to share this video I found recently:
Steve Hassan at TEDx "How to tell if you’re brainwashed?"
https://www.yout-ube.com/watch?v=JzSwZpHDAaU
First, cool personal story. Second, a good heuristics; not perfect, but something that is easy to remember and evaluate. Can you take a break from your group, at least for a week, so that no one will bother you, check on you, remind you of your duties, etc.? Are you free (and mentally capable) to meet people who are not fans of your group, specifically critics and former members, and talk to them? Given your current knowledge about the group, if you reflect on the process how you joined the group, would you describe it as "informed consent", or do you now see that you were given misleading information on purpose?
This matches my intuition of a cult as a group that makes you join under false premises and then keeps you under constant pressure to prevent clear thinking. On joining, you get the information by little pieces, because it is obvious in hindsight that your old self would never agree to join if they could see the situation you are in today. Leaving the group abruptly is a horrifying idea. Not only because you will end up in Hell, or the world will be destroyed and it will all be your fault... but *more importantly*, on the personal level, *all* the friends you currently have will instantly turn into enemies. And there are mechanisms that prevent you from leaving gradually, from slowly finding friends outside the group and starting to spend more time with them, and slowly reducing your involvement with the group.
I think it is useful to have a mental category for this; separate from someone merely being obsessed about something weird, in absence of a social mechanism to keep them trapped. Many people ignore this. I think the cults are bad not because their ideas are bad (though, incidentally, their ideas usually *are* bad), but because they create this kind of trap for people who otherwise might be attracted to the idea for a while, but then would probably change their minds and leave.
This also has obvious applications for the rationalist community. Like, if someone says "Less Wrong is a cult", that's obviously stupid: a *website* cannot be a cult. If you decide to stop reading the website for a week, what exactly is the website doing to do about it? If in your free time you talk to people critical of the website, how would the website know, and how could it prevent you from talking to them? One could argue that the ideas on Less Wrong are bad, or even dangerous, but there is a difference between bad ideas and bad *social mechanisms*. Meetups are potentially different, because there people meet in person, but they happen once in a long time, no one checks you between them, and if you stop visiting them, it's over.
The situation can be different with some groups near the rationalist community, such as Leverage Research or Nonlinear. If people need to show high commitment and have little free time to spend away from the group (to meet other people, to see things from a different perspective), then yes, it can become this kind of social trap. The trap does not have to be designed on purpose; a group of people pressuring each other to show high commitment can generate it naturally. I think it happens more likely when there is a charismatic leader, or someone with actual power (e.g. financial) over the others, who can declare high commitment as a desirable thing, and the lower-status members of the group do not feel free to push back and fight for their free time.
Not everything applies here the same way. Sometimes the members are not explicitly forbidden to talk to the outsiders and critics, they simply... don't have time for that. Or they joined the group voluntarily and had a mostly correct idea about how it works in general, they just... underestimated how difficult such high-intensity environment could be; and when it becomes exhausting, they have no good way to reduce the intensity to a bearable level. They have no mental capacity left to calmly reflect on their situation, and no good way to disengage that wouldn't burn the bridges. So the effect on them can be similar.
Here is something that my autistic ass has been chewing on:
NEUROTYPICALS DO NOT MAKE SOCIAL BLUNDERS.
They may appear to blunder, they may appear to make gaffes of one form or another; however, this all has a higher, often inscrutable and indescribable Purpose. Someone who makes a boorish comment at a party does so intentionally, or rather chooses not to filter himself when he could have, on purpose. It has the function of injecting stress and randomness into the system, as well as sending any number of plausibly deniable signals - some of which are only visible to the graceful or the perceptive.
Take political gaffes, for example: they only LOOK to us - the uninitiated - to be blunders; they may in fact be extremely subtle signals for political operatives as well as distractions from their political machinations. There's the same thing going on when someone angrily talks about "dumb r3tarded people" in front of their special-education teacher friend": it isn't a mistake. It's more like bird augury: deliberately using a poor-quality filtering process to introduce randomness and therefore make you more difficult to read. It's also a political move or power play.
I mean - every word and gesture that the average person makes is flawless, and the average person is every bit as dedicated to being graceful as the average Mongol horse archer was in his time, or the Japanese samurai or European knights were to skill at arms. The only real difference between the average person and an Obama or a Clinton or even someone like Hong Xiuquan is GENETICS and OPPORTUNITY, not worldview. I believe most people secretly believe that gracefulness is quite literally worth dying over, and that a single blunder - a true blunder - can ruin your career or life. The average person can choose - instinctually, gracefully, subtly - to throw a single subtle facial expression in a bar and tell seven other people "I think this guy rocks" or "I think he sucks"; if he opens his mouth to speak, a single sentence can have four different meanings, three of which are understood by everyone and one of which is only able to be parsed by the talented or lucky.
>Take political gaffes, for example: they only LOOK to us - the uninitiated - to be blunders;<
...are you not old enough to remember Howard Dean? Dude made a loud noise at a political rally and it tanked his career.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6i-gYRAwM0
>NEUROTYPICALS DO NOT MAKE SOCIAL BLUNDERS.
Nope. Social blunders happen all the time, to everyone. The hope is that you learn from them and stop making so many, but every single person on the planet Earth has multiple stories about how they put their foot in their mouth.
As a general rule, anything that involves most of the population of Earth being constantly graceful and purposeful at all times, unfailingly, is unlikely to be true. Humans just aren't sophisticated enough for that.
Hello Pine.
> NEUROTYPICALS DO NOT MAKE SOCIAL BLUNDERS.
Yeah, no, not even close. Yes, most apparent blunders have an explanation - but that doesn't mean they're not mistakes. The fact that something has a purpose does not imply it serves that purpose well at all. Everyone makes lots and lots and lots and lots of social blunders. But for most people they disproportionately take place in childhood. The closest plausible neighbor to your claim is something like "neurotypicals do not repeatedly make the same social blunders in adulthood", which is trueish, though not quite true.
More like "neurotypicals do not make social blunders sober more than once per decade or so as adults".
How many pharaohs can you name?
I can't get past seven.
Djoser, Narmer, Khufu, Ramesses, Akhenaten, Tutankhamun, Cleopatra.
If Cleopatra counts, then Alexander the Great should too.
Rameses, Ptolemy, Amenhotep, Akhenaten, Tutankhamun, Cleopatra, Hatshepsut, Khufu, Thutmose.
Am I cheating by including the female pharaohs? Also some of those names appear repeatedly iirc.
Rameses and Ptolemy get you to about 20 I think
Cleopatra and Thutmose combine for another ten or eleven.
If Cleopatra counts, then Alexander the Great should too.
Good point. I looked it up, and it seems he did actually claim the title of Pharaoh and is included on modern lists of Pharaohs. It sounds like there's some doubt as to whether he actually had himself anointed and crowned in Egypt or not.
Seem unfair to name pharaohs who only differ by number, if that's all you know about them.
Or maybe the better rule would be to omit pharaohs who you only know as a name.
To be fair, you didn't ask how many pharaohs we know trivia about, you just asked how many we could name.
To answer your new, entirely different question, like three? Ish? Depends on how much I have to know about them
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/19/politics/kfile-mark-robinson-black-nazi-pro-slavery-porn-forum/index.html
"The comments were made under the username minisoldr, a moniker Robinson used frequently online. Robinson listed his full name on his profile for Nude Africa, as well as an email address he used on numerous websites across the internet for decades....On the Nude Africa website in both comments and his profile, minisoldr offered numerous details that align precisely with Robinson’s personal history."
Ideally the guy would resign from public life on the grounds of comical stupidity. He is instead going with the MAGA strategy of denying everything no matter what the evidence is.
Your next governor of the great state of North Carolina folks!
Wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. It reminds me of the Access Hollywood tape, which wound up damaging Trump far less than the media elite thought it would. It might even make normal men sympathize with him; they don't want their porn history released either. Will probably hurt him with women. Access Hollywood was Trump confessing to alpha male behavior, not weird low-status porn stuff.
The far more damaging thing is his past support for banning abortion without an exception for rape. That's just politically toxic and only a complete 180 to supporting fully legal abortion would make people forget it.
It is politically toxic, but internally consistent: if you believe that a fetus (at any stage) has the same value as a living human being, it is a logical position to hold.
Trump just ignored the Access Hollywood recording though, with a couple of moments of shrugging about "locker room stuff". He didn't loudly/repeatedly deny having said what he obviously did say. That's the part that will stick in the public mind regarding Robinson.
A day later and the guy is still loudly denying all. He's hand-waving the idea that "it could be AI", and/or all faked by malicious libs, etc.
Trump meanwhile is not commenting about it but has just uninvited Robinson from his rally scheduled in NC tomorrow evening. (Robinson, who is both the state's Lt. Governor and the GOP nominee for governor, had appeared in several previous Trump rallies.)
U.S. Senator Thom Tillis, currently the GOP's highest-level officeholder in North Carolina, posted on X that Thursday “was a tough day, but we must stay focused on the races we can win.”
NC's deadline for a nominee to withdraw from the November ballot has passed, and it appears that the state GOP has no legal way to push him off at this point even if they want to.
The Dems think Robinson is now toxic to however many persuadable voters still exist in NC. From the Associated Press an hour ago: "Harris’ campaign rolled out a new ad Friday it calls the first to link Trump to a down-ballot candidate. The commercial alternates between Trump’s praise for Robinson and the lieutenant governor’s comments which his critics have argued show his support for a statewide abortion ban without exceptions. Robinson’s campaign has argued that’s not true. The Democratic National Committee is also running billboards in three major cities showing a photo of Robinson and Trump and comments Trump has said about him. And a fundraising appeal Friday by Jeff Jackson, Democratic attorney general candidate, also includes a past video showing Republican opponent Dan Bishop saying he endorsed Robinson."
Maybe too soon, but on the lighter side: some Israeli food company ought to start using "flavor explosion" as a slogan. Also, I want to see a spy movie where someone assembles a binary-explosive bomb using only Israeli food products bought in an ordinary grocery store.
Here's a site about building weapons using only items bought at an airport.
http://terminalcornucopia.com/
Would it be possible to make a food ingredient that explodes when mixed with non-kosher food ingredients, but is perfectly safe to eat when mixed with kosher food ingredients?
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---- A Review of a Review
On a whim, I decided to look up "Israel" on LessWrong. I don't know why it didn't occur to me to do this until now, it just did today, while I'm at work, waiting for a dog slow compile job.
Surprisingly little in search results show up, mostly account names and meetup proceedings or location info. Expected, LessWrong hates contemporary traditional politics with a passion. The one political post that showed up is an AMA by a user named Yovel Rom on the 10th of October [1], explaining the October 7th attack and the general background. But tracing the comments eventually gets you a far better prize: user Yair Halberstadt, who reviewed the book __1948__[2] by Israeli historian Benny Morris on 3rd of December 2023, and later reviewed its semi-sequel, __Righteous Victims - A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict__[3], in June 2024. The last review was actually written with the intention of being an ACX review, but wasn't selected as a finalist.
Benny Morris, as a person, is of course disgusting as a maggot, perhaps even more given my soft spot for insects. Cosplaying as a "Liberal Zionist", one of his opinions is that Israel should have expelled all Arab Israelis in 1948, and that Arab Israelis even today are/should be viewed as terrorist sympathizer 5th column. Regardless, I will never not be amazed by his ability to say what his sources lead him to, EXACTLY as he thinks it, no sugarcoating.
Everybody should read [2] and [3], with priority given to [3] more than [2] if you don't have time. I want to give them a shoutout here, and will possibly signal boost them more in future Open Threads.
Perhaps what sounds too good to be true for me is how much of the pro-Israel narrative is a transparent lie that even a Zionist historian can casually demolish while in the middle of doing scholarship. There are no punches pulled, no myth spared, no piece of bullshit left unturned. Benny actually comes right out and say the "Ethnic Cleansing" word, the big No No that gets all the antisemitism accusations running on overdrive in modern day discussions. Yair (the reviewer) says at the end of [3]:
>>> If you go into this book believing standard Hasbara talking points about how the IDF is the most moral army on earth, Israel only wants peace, the Palestinians only want war, and Israel has simply no choice in what it does, you’re likely to find it makes for very uncomfortable reading.
The proto-IDF in __Righteous Victims__ violates truces, commits war crimes, and protects and aids population transfer to conquered territory (against international law, forbidding states to transfer their civilians to war zones for settlement).
If this was written by an Arab, Palestinian, Western/American leftist, or Muslim author, I would have quit reading because it's too unchallenging, too non-deviating from what I already believe. What's interesting is how both the author and the person reviewing him are Jewish Israelis, one of them (Morris) trespassing into disgusting anti-Arab racism sometimes, and the reviewer himself being no radical leftist, although LessWrongers are perhaps less common than radical leftist.
On the other hand, [2] and [3] also contains plenty of challenging facts deliberately left out and obfuscated in mainstream pro-Palestinian narratives. Chief among which is of course the Mizrahim forced exodus from Arab and Muslim countries following 1948 and well into the 1990s, and the generally greater readiness of the Israeli populace - minus the settler scum - to compromise for peace.
Overall: Interesting, accessible, as truthful as it ever gets. Must be first-read for anyone who wants to write more than 10 words on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in public.
I applause LessWrong user Yair: this is what I wish to be on this conflict as well, hopefully successfully, however many failings. I grudgingly applause Benny Morris' commitment to facts despite his horrible opinions.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zJCKn4TSXcCXzc6fi/i-m-a-former-israeli-officer-ama
[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jiL95tPaSWJnx5xpB/book-review-1948-by-benny-morris
[3] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Th4SeayGQyF6pYmZ6/book-review-righteous-victims-a-history-of-the-zionist-arab-1
Your quote
"If you go into this book believing standard Hasbara talking points about how the IDF is the most moral army on earth, Israel only wants peace, the Palestinians only want war, and Israel has simply no choice in what it does, you’re likely to find it makes for very uncomfortable reading."
misses the next sentence
"On the other hand I don’t think it would be wise to update too far in the other direction."
I read [3], very interesting and informative. Good find.
Fuckkkkk, Israel is even more based than I thought....
More or less a representative of the average IQ and empathy level of pro-Israel supporters, but it's never not funny when my case is made for me, very visibly.
I actually think that wokeness isn't a saint here. I will never forget the dumbassery of feminists who scour history for some female historical figure, say some woman who sold poison to wives wanting to kill their husbands (can't remember the name, but it's a real figure), and then celebrate it as a feminist icon. "Slay Queen"-ing themselves into standard old 20 IQ atrocity-celebration.
I will never forget when I was commenting on some reddit about a black guy who punched and killed an aging white old man because the white man said a slur to him, and the redditor horde dogpiled me because - apparently - it's completely ok when BlAcK foLx (^TM) take the law into their own hands and simply decree the death penalty for anyone (without a trial!) who says the naughty words, however reprehensible the naughty word is.
I have since disavowed and became thoroughly disillusioned from head to toes by wokism, even now I always avoid pro-Palestinian advocacy if I sniff woke shibboleths like "Privilege" and "White Supremacy". Of course the Pro-Israel like Scott Aaronson latch into those pro-Palestinians like there is literally nobody but them because they like the easy target of disproving that Israel is a White Supremacy, missing the forest for the trees as usual.
All of this to say, I'm extremely skeptical whenever somebody says "$IDEOLOGY makes my enemies bullies !". I don't disagree that the bullies and scumbags and dumbasses gravitate towards certain ideologies and not others (and that this differ across time and space), I just don't think that there is something inherent in an ideology that makes someone a dumbass bully.
I'm afflicted - you could say - by deep misanthropy: in a certain sense, the default state of an uneducated human is to be a dumbass bully, especially toward people that don't look like them. Liberal kindness, the morality that stems from Rawls' Veil of Ignorance, which treats all humans as black boxes with unknown identity to enforce radical justice and identity-agnosticism, is as rare as life in space, and it's always fragile, always the underdog, always subject to vicious attacks from nearly all angles from staunch Communism to medieval Islamism.
That said, I believe satire and merciless mocking is a very effective tool to defend Liberal Kindness, I don't miss the irony but it is what it is.
> when I see people who can read the book review that you posted detailing Israel’s behavior of open ethnic cleansing and conclude that it was “based”
Wow wow wait, let's not get ahead of ourselves here, we have no actual evidence that SR have read the review I posted before commenting "based", or indeed if she has the capacity to read LessWrong-grade material, or even really read anything at all. Didn't Scott post recently about improved LLM models increasingly doing human-like things? The flipside is humans doing increasingly NPC-like things.
On a more serious note, SR71 once confided to me that she is kind of obsessed with me... that I - quoting her - am "The most annoying guy on this forum", indeed that she would vote for Donald Trump specifically just to annoy me, no other reason. Truly one of my most zealous fans, you can say. I don't even live in the USA, but I live in her head rent-free.
Given this confession, I don't think you could take anything about or from this fundamentally unserious person seriously. Would you not agree?
> I know that such a viewpoint is common in the mainstream of society as well as among people in power
Well, that is indeed true. But it's beside my point about wokism: no amount of detailing the crimes of organized religion across history would excuse support of repressive communism, even if repressive communism happens to also repress organized religion, among the countless others it represses.
Wokism is not quite communism, but I was exaggerating for effect. Wokism does weaken **some** types of bullies (not even reliably at that) at the cost of strengthening other types of bullies, and my impression is that if you measure the total amount of all bullying in the system you hardly feel any change at all.
I get that feelings aren't rational and I admit I sometimes also want to trigger the likes of SR71 with wokism-adjacent things just to see the reactions, but ultimately it's not worth it, and there are other ways of responding to dumbassery other than inverted dumbasserty.
Every day I'm less worried about AI than the day before:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/openai-threatens-bans-for-probing-new-ai-models-reasoning-process/
This story, whatever the reason behind this behaviour is, makes a mockery of OpenAI's mission statements.
"OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company. Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity."
Yeah maybe, but definitely shareholders first.
"We are building safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome."
So that's why they try to exclude competitors.
I don't get the connection between your first sentence and the remaining comment.
If you look at something with your eyes open, what exactly is the thing you're seeing? I'd love to get a sense of the opinion spread here (I suspect lots of disagreement), if you wouldn't mind answering this straw poll: https://strawpoll.com/XOgOVQbdQn3
Note that you can answer more than one thing. The "other" option is mostly intended for if none of the five seemed correct.
(People's "other" responses stick around as options to be voted on; this was not intended, but I can't change it. The first 5 are the official responses.)
I didn't find the options very complete. I went for other: "There is a data structure in my brain which approximately corresponds to the external object, and I experience it as qualia".
Thanks for this answer. Your option was intended to fit 2+4, i.e., "There's an abstract data structure in the brain (e.g., a 2d array) that corresponds precisely to the image I'm seeing" and "The image I see is made of qualia, which is a well-defined non-material thing, but its causal behavior is reducible/equivalent to a physical description of the brain".
I see why you don't think this fits, but with "corresponds precisely to the image I'm seeing", I meant that it precisely corresponds to the qualia, not to the external object. The match between what you're seeing and the external object is not something I'm asking about.
Thanks for the question. It prompted me to to give
"I suffer the illusion of seeing the thing, and if there was something "wrong" with me, like my eyes being smashed, then this illusion would not happen despite me looking with my eyes open at that thing."
as the answer. Which is the best I've ever come up with.
I have a terrible understanding of consciousness.
I haven't read Nate Silver's latest book but have read enough about it to know he distinguishes between those he calls The River, who are big risk takers like poker players and venture capitalists and The Village, academics and such who work by consensus. He thinks more highly of The River.
Maybe he gets round to it in his book, but when I think of the biggest risk takers I've known I find myself hoping they finally found the peace they sought and hope they Rest in Peace.
But what is a risk-taker? I can more easily say who is not than who is. If you are a CPA, you are not a risk taker unless you legitimately fear going to prison. If you are an actuary, you are not a risk taker. If you have a degree in physics from MIT and trade for a hedge fund, you are not a risk taker unless you do a lot of blow or junk. If you graduated with a degree in math and spent the next year playing poker full time, you are not a risk taker. You haven't burned any bridges.
My prior is that risk-taker are usually losers. Some are very smart and also lucky and happen to be very successful but the great majority are dying early without much savings.
My question is whether Nate Silver's dichotomy means anything. And, if you can define it clearly, whether being a risk-taker is more or less good or bad compared to not being one.
Zvi, IIRC, also talks about this a lot.
I think the best interpretation of what they mean by "risk-taker" has less to do with risk, per se, and is entirely to do with the idea behind "**** or get off the pot".
Suppose, for a moment, there is a card game tournament, in which everybody puts in $1,000, gets $1,000 worth of chips, and then must either play until they run out of chips or win the tournament. (They can also forfeit their chips, I guess, whatever.)
Here's the thing: The actual risky maneuver is *entering the tournament at all*. You're betting $1,000 that you'll end up with the entire pot.
However, in between entering the tournament and either winning or losing, you can win or lose slowly - what, I think, gamblers think of as "not taking risks" - or you can win or lose quickly - "taking risks". Apparently gamblers prefer to play with the people who win or lose quickly, rather than having to play against somebody who draws out the game by, say, refusing to ever raise.
This applies more generally, as well. When they're talking about "taking risks", they're not talking about taking actual risks (actual risks are so far outside their social script they don't even notice them - they'll talk up gamblers but I doubt either would mortgage their house and put it all on a single roulette spin), but rather, about finishing the game you are already committed to quickly, win or lose.
> but I doubt either would mortgage their house and put it all on a single roulette spin
Some people do that to start a restaurant, which is similar except with worse odds of success.
Nearly every prominent person of note is a risk taker. Look at actors who spend years waiting tables hoping they'll get a break one day.
If so, something to bear in mind is that for almost everybody, investing a lot of time and energy on a project that's very unlikely to succeed is a bad dumb move. In poker it's called chasing. So I don't think it makes sense to make a poster of somebody who spent 5 years waiting tables & auditioning (or whatever) and eventually became a star (or what ever a highly successful person is called in their field), with a caption underneath saying "NEVER GIVE UP ON YOUR DREAMS."
Agree it's almost impossible to be a superstar without taking big risks. Perhaps there are some Nobel Prize winners who didn't but were just really good and lucky in their field? Or some professional athletes who had no other skills and the choice to pursue their sport was obvious.
I've also heard it said that really successful people tend to spend decades keeping their heads down. If you want to climb the corporate ladder, just do your job really well year after year and play office politics wisely. A leader like Angela Merkel was known as a non-risk-taker who bided her time while her political competition kept sticking their necks out and getting them cut.
I'd guess that because our society generally discourages risk-taking that the median person is better off erring on the side trying not to err. Although the US probably doesn't discourage risk taking as much as Western Europe or most of Asia.
And by discourage I mean actively, brutally punish. Quit your job to start your own business which failed after three years? You're going to have a hard time getting that corporate job back. Got a felony for selling weed in college? Hope you're happy driving a truck the rest of your life.
This is something the software industry handles really well. It is considered quite reasonable to quit your job with a major company to try to build a startup. And if it fails, as most do, you're not an untouchable loser. You can quite reasonably apply for another job at the level you left, or even a bit higher, particularly if you managed to keep things running for some years, since you now have some serious management experience.
This means starting a new company doesn't have all that much downside. On the up-side, you have a small chance of making a fortune. On the downside, you have a large chance of losing a few years of career progression, and maybe not even that.
Yeah, the main cost is opportunity cost since you could be paid so much money at big companies, or you could work at a startup and be paid only in lottery tickets.
<quote>My prior is that risk-taker are usually losers.</quote>
Doesn't this need to be true?
If the EV was high, then either the variation is even higher or it's not much of a risk. I would think that definitionally, a "risk taker" is someone who either chases many/all risks, in which case they'll eventually lose to the house, or someone who takes high EV/high risk bets. High risk means most fail, even if the few that succeed become exceptionally rich. So yes, risk takers are usually losers. Smart risk takers will on average win, but the median of that same group will be losers.
Risk takers are very good for society though, as they create new businesses and invent things. It's so good, in fact, that we should incentive them by helping them land softly and try again. Maybe their third restaurant will be a success!
Risk is associated with variance of outcomes rather than expected outcomes, so I wouldn't say that risk-takers have to be losers.
I remember an episode of the (UK) Apprentice where a contestant used casino imagery to sell a fragrance for men, and the feedback was "sorry to have to tell you, but gambling = debts = misery". So...I get what you mean. Sometimes risks can't be avoided though. Perhaps returning to the language of fortitude as a virtue would be helpful as it includes sub-virtues like patience.
Girls here in the Sonoran Desert are taking up flag football, which seems to me a good thing. Kids are cursed by their smart phones and social media -- and deserve the time and experience of a healthier childhood and puberty.
In our county of a million, two local high schools established girls' flag football teams last year, and now find their players mentoring six new teams. Girls need more than quinceaneras. Imagine the experiences they'll have if they develop programs in parity with the boys' programs. It could be big.
That has to be tons better for their emotional health than social media.
Absolutely. But even better is spending long summer days wandering around outside and playing with the neighborhood kids.
Does anyone have data or experience at the intersection of aphantasia and DMT?
For the SAT, how does the median score correlate with the test-taker's age? What is the median score for a 14-year old, a 15-year-old, a 16-year-old, a 17-year-old, and an 18-year old?
I can't find the data broken down by age.
I found an article about SAT scores for
13 year olds. It’s here: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Participants-are-separated-into-quartiles-based-on-their-age-13-SAT-M-SAT-V-Composite_fig2_24410681
I doubt there’s enough data on scores
for people younger than 16. Few
take the SAT that young, and the ones that do are not representative of typical kids their age— most kids who take the SAT at a very
young age are very bright
Here is some old data on the ACT by grade level of test taker https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/Info-Brief-2014-21.pdf
And this...
Power companies are pushing back against the steeply increasing power requirements of data centers (read AI).
"Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta are fighting a proposal by an Ohio power company to significantly increase the upfront energy costs they’ll pay for their data centers, a move the companies dubbed “unfair” and “discriminatory” in documents filed with Ohio’s Public Utility Commission last month. American Electric Power Ohio said in filings that the tariff increase was needed to prevent new infrastructure costs from being passed on to other customers such as households and businesses if the tech industry should fail to follow through on its ambitious, energy intensive plans."
The article is behind the WaPo paywall, but you get a few free reads a month. It's worth reading if you're interested in the problem of powering AI.
Not discussed in the article, but In California, the utilities seem to be passing along the costs to consumers, which is causing angst among consumers and business owners as their rates climb.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/13/data-centers-power-grid-ohio/
The WSJ of yesterday, the 18th, published an essay in its opinion pages by Sean Patrick Cooper titled 'Data Centers Make Terrible Neighbors,' regarding the politics of 'non-disclosure' agreements between tech companies and municipalities. It's pretty revealing.
"But what if we build an oversized and ultra-reliable power grid, lifting us away from increasingly common brownouts and blackouts, and it was all for nothing?"
(Personally I think the data center operators should build their own power plants, although I expect the state bureaucracy involved would be nightmarish.)
"Build their own power plants" is being actively explored. Data centers are among the more promising potential early customers for small modular fission reactors.
Why would they want to use nuclear reactors that don't exist and will take many many years to get past legal when they do exist, rather than just buying gas turbines off the shelf from GE or whomever? I am very, very confident that a gigawatt of COTS gas turbines will be *much* cheaper than a gigawatt of "small modular fission reactors", and available next year rather than (maybe) next decade. Fuel costs won't eat up the difference on a timescale of less than a decade - by which point I am assured that the new ASI will have built us all quantum zero-point energy generators or whatnot.
Is it just that they're irrationally technophilic nerds who will pay any price to use the shiniest new technology even though the old stuff still does everything they need? Or is there some practical advantage that I am missing.
That's a good question. The articles I've seen are light on details, so it's not clear that any of the potential buyers (Google, Microsoft, and Oracle are the names I've seen most often) are actually committing to buy anything, or if they're just doing planning for how they'd use SMRs if/when NuScale or whoever has some to sell.
I did see something about Oracle having applied for and gotten some kind of permit to install three SMRs, but I can't find details on if this is a stage in the NRC approval process or a local building permit or what. And it seems odd that they could get a permit to install a nuclear reactor that doesn't actually exist yet.
Oh good, let's add federal bureaucracy on top of that. :-/
Not bagging on you, I think this is a great idea and I'm glad to hear that it's being explored, but I just hope that a bureaucratic miracle occurs so we don't have to wait forty years to actually build the stupid things.
That's my attitude, too.
The particular objection here, as I understand it, is not about whether or not to build out the infrastructure, but about who should pay for it.
Yes, but somewhere in the article, one of the power company spokespersons asked (and I'm paraphrasing) what if they built out the infrastructure and then the data centers are shut down? — with the implication this would happen if the AI bubble bursts. Then the power companies would be left holding the amortized buildout costs without any income to cover them.
No pricing model scales perfectly, right?
It would if they charged the data centers up front for the costs of upgrading their infrastructure. But that's why the data center owners are screaming. LOL!
Yes. I was just thinking that utilities, telephone companies and cable companies have always operated on the idea that they will hook you up at their expense and make it up on the fees afterwards. I got the impression that model does not scale into the demands of data centers and their power needs and infrastructure needs.
Africans paid $4 an hr tag images so that AI can respond to verbal prompts with appropriate images . Maybe they'll hire some Africans to generate power via Stairmasters or some such. To get hired to tag images Africans must have a college degree and speak fluent English, but these qualifications are unnecessary for the stairmaster, so they can be paid considerably less
than the smart fluent people who went to the trouble of getting a college degree.
> Maybe they'll hire some Africans to generate power via Stairmasters or some such
I am afraid this has already been done.
My guess would be they would probably prefer tagging images.
Yes. It’s an awful job though. There are rules that have to do with keeping the data they have secure. They must work alone, and cannot tell anyone details about what they do, and keep their pace brisk, and pass periodic accuracy checks. I keep picturing somebody making it through college, full of pride and hope because they have fluent English and a BS, and then winding up with this.
Bears some resemblance to more than a few bartenders I’ve met in my time. Cab drivers as well, but not so much anymore.
I had a cab ride in NYC back in the 80’s, got chatting with the driver (it started with him telling me I couldn’t smoke pot in the car- tobacco was still ok ) and it turned out he was a fully qualified physician. He was a Russian…
And then there was the young woman who used to keep me in red wine who was graduated as an architect with about $200,000 of student debt. Full of hopes and dreams, and consumed by disillusionment…
On the brighter side, she was replaced by a young Irish girl who kept me in red wine and eventually moved back to Ireland and is working for Google last I heard. But you could tell by the way she tended bar that she had a future.
Anyway, it won’t be long before an AI will be able to tag images for another AI and then they will all be out of work. And taxis will be self driving, so they’ll be screwed there as well. In a world of super-intelligent AI, what is the point of getting a really good formal education? it started with slide rules and then graduated to calculators, and the next step is coming. Isn’t the logical extension of getting someone else to work for you slavery?
Wasn't there a Black Mirror episode about poor people being forced to spend their days on exercise bikes to power civilization?
They used to run mines in South America exactly like this. It’s not Science Fiction.
Roman galleys as well.
I doubt you could profitably do it. The Food->Human->Turbine will be more expensive to run than Fuel->Combustor->Turbine
Oh, they did very much profitably do it. look back to when the Spaniards were exploiting the gold mines in South America with slave labor.
They needed to be constantly drained. Which meant a bunch of men on a big wheel turning it to run the pump. They were kept in traces, and when one dropped dead, they just cut him out of the traces and put it in another one.
And the mine next door that's just dumping the Purina Slave Kibble straight into the boiler of the steam engine, pumps more water and so mines more gold at less cost. Probably winds up buying the first mine and then freeing the slaves because the steam engine is cheaper.
The now-freedmen may then of course starve for lack of kibble, see also Henry, John. So there are potential pitfalls. But that sort of brute-force industrial slavery went out of style when decent steam engines became available.
How true do we think this statement is?
"The things that really matter in this civilization are done by professionals (as opposed to amateurs.)"
I'm thinking that's about 90% true. The main exception that comes to mind is parenting, which is in fact done by amateurs, but even that is increasingly professionalized, through day care and full-day schooling.
"Really matters" is a problem here, because it's undefined. I think, based on the 90% metric, that you referring to the vital infrastructure functions of society - power, food, logistics, construction and repair, etc., and not things that "matter" to people but are not in those fields (such as friendship, love, entertainment and a bunch of other things). If you are further defining "professional" to be anyone paid to do a thing, or at least paid for regular work, that pulls in most of the people working in that field, even if they are bad at it or could never maintain the vital functions on their own. Excluding those two huge caveats, I would say that it's at least directionally true. We would never have a percent that would be fully accepted, but it would be high.
I disagree that parenting is done by amateurs. Parenting is mostly about transferring knowledge on how to independently exist in the world, so that your child can eventually independently exist in the world. The core relevant experience required is "existing in the world". A lot of the transfer of knowledge is done implicitly, by your child observing what you do.
Some people do better at existing in the world than others, but no-one is an amateur. 18 year-olds have babies and do fine. Whereas if you gave my 5 year-old a baby he would be a terrible parent, because he really is an amateur.
Trivially false, nobody is a professional parent.
Parenting is the big exception, yes. Going by your definition of professionals (people that are paid to do something, not necessarily trained to do something), volunteer organizations are probably another significant exception. Some volunteers are in fact trained, but they're not paid (at least not anything approaching a normal salary).
Taking these exceptions into consideration... I'd maybe say that your statement is 75-to-80% true.
But amateurs typically do things better. Ask any beer judge, they'll tell you amateur beer events have better beers than commercial events. Amateurs are in love with their craft, sparing no expense nor inconvenience, pride and love are the driving forces. Professionals on the other hand have budgets, deadlines, deliverables, all the impediments to quality.
I think parenting is big enough that you can't fit your "90% true" in the same room with it. Possibly related, there's a lot of noncommercial sex that I'd say really matters to a whole lot of people.
But for most other things, the Ferengi 13th Rule of Acquisition applies: "Anything worth doing is worth doing for money". And anything that "really matters", there will be probably people willing to pay to have it done and done right. There will be hobbyists, yes, but the people who do it right and do it at scale will probably have found a way to do it professionally.
> Anything worth doing is worth doing for money.< true.
Is anything worth doing for money worth doing?
No, but it doesn't have to be symmetric. Simplistically (and excluding e.g. parenthood as already noted), all the stuff worth doing will be done by professionals, and some stuff that's not worth doing will also be done by professionals. And even stuff that's not worth doing, often still *matters*.
I wonder what you mean by "matters" versus "worth doing". The way I typically math it out, "worth doing" includes anything where the return or savings in $$ exceeds the cost, but also includes things that are hard to measure in $$, but nevertheless are so important to someone that they'd rather give up some amount of $$ than do without (e.g. spend another year with grandma), so they're effectively measurable in $$ after all. Or perhaps more fundamentally, measurable in the portion of one's life spent pursuing it.
I can't think of anything I would call "mattering" that I couldn't measure that way, but maybe I'm just low on coffee. (Cost: about 30 seconds, spread over about 600.)
To take an extreme example, The invasion of Ukraine by Russia's professional army is clearly not worth doing, even for Russia. But it even more clearly *matters*.
And a thing need not be actively destructive to qualify here. Large vanity projects like e.g. building extravagant skyscrapers in the desert, are mostly a waste of resources and I would argue not worth doing. But they do matter, only in part because they are a massive waste of resources that could have been put to better use. And, again, are mostly done by professionals.
It isn’t symmetric. I agree. And I also agree that stuff “not worth doing“ still matters. And there are people who do stuff that’s “not worth doing” really really well.
The whole thing is a bit of a rabbit hole because professional and amateur are really slippery words . Amateur originally meant just what it sounds like; for the *love of it. It has a very different connotation in its current form. It usually implies a lesser capability.
Similarly, professional implies “better.” I guess you could argue [whatever the issue is] anyway you wanted, depending on how you define those two words.
I might think of “professional” as doing something in the most pragmatic and efficient way possible; this is particularly applicable when talking about how one earns a living. Being an amateur frees one from those conditions. Pragmatism and efficiency are not part of the calculation.
As an aside, I don’t think parenting has any place in this discussion. All the professions that have been discussed here associated with parenting should be considered resources for the parent, not an alternative. Parenting is neither a vocation nor a profession. It’s something you do when you have a child, one way or the other, meaning you do it to the best of your ability with the resources available, or you don’t and walk away.
Are farmers professionals?
Because they do the thing that almost certainly matters the most in our civilization.
The moment you pay someone they become a professional. There are people in love with farming and there are people who just go through the motions.
As long as those motions result in food in my pantry I'm fine if they've lost the passion.
Most, but not all of them. The "Gentleman Farmer" (hobby) is a thing - I know one.
Yes they are. I've edited the statement to address what was a common point of misunderstanding or miscommunication.
What do you mean by "really matter," though? If someone with no professional skills is enjoying life and thriving, doesn't that matter? If it doesn't, what's the point of the professionals who manage the production and transport of food, water, power, etc. to the person, the doctors who treat the person's illnesses, etc? Why do the professionals matter, beyond the good they do for humanity as a whole?
If I rephrase as , "The things we consider really important in this civilization are done by professionals," does that clarify anything? I'm not suggesting that "really matter" has to be somehow objectively evaluated.
"really matter" and your rephrase are pretty subjective and vary for each individual. For many artists/musicians and their fans the art really matters, and many artists/musicians are not professionals. AKA - "day job".
I still don't agree. If the wellbeing of humanity doesn't matter, what does? It seems like there's a buried assumption somewhere that the higher level of intelligence and training required for professionals' tasks matters in and of itself. Why does it, though? We're not in high school any more, and the universe doesn't give a shit about our SAT scores. There's an attitude I pick up a lot on here that smart people just matter more. They're better. There could even be a formula: Everyone's value is one, multiplied by the number of standard deviations above or below the mean their IQ is.
Oh, by "professionals," I don't mean highly-trained (typically college-educated) people. I just mean people who are doing what they do, for a living. Professional, as opposed to amateur, not professional as opposed to unskilled labor or trades-work.
Do you mean work, as opposed to plain fucking around?
I think I still don't agree, and I'm really not into disagreeing for sport.
I agree that if you poll people about what activities really matter, they will name jobs, including blue collar jobs -- house painters, garbage men, etc. But if you ask people who really matters to *them,* you get the names of the people who understand them & care about them. Parents, siblings, friends and also empathic and kind strangers, hold the world together in a way that people aren't aware of. that’s why when the subject of eugenics comes up I always say
if we can only select for one thing, let’s select for empathy. Here's a story from my life: I was on vacation and got a migraine. It was so awful that I went to the ER, where they gave me a shot of imitrex that just erased the thing over the course of 20 mins of so. But what sticks in my mind is the nurse who took care of me. He checked in on me often before the shot, and also while it was taking effect, and every time he did he was profoundly comforting, mostly because I felt sure he genuinely sympathized. They was something he did when he asked me how I was doing -- I forget what it was now, something like cupping my cheek in his hand -- that was very tender. (And it did not seem at all sexual -- and judging by his manner, he was a gay man anyhow, and I'm a woman). That nurse has stuck in my mind for decades, overshadowing even the miracle of imitrex. Even now when I think of him I feel the ghost of a warm glow.
What constitutes "this civilization"? If only the professionals are following the law, or having fun, you don't have a civilization. You have a fortress surrounded by barbarians.
"Peace Love and Understanding are done by professionals."
Although I think the OP meant "really important *positive* things in this civilization," I immediately thought of all the negative things done by professionals. A professional military can cause a lot of negative impacts on a lot of people (military and civilian) when they go into action. Of course, unprofessional armies such as Hamas and the Russian army do lots of damage, too. Professional financial criminals can do a lot of damage to individuals and damage the faith in our financial institutions.
And by professionals, does the OP mean someone with a professional degree or certification? Farm laborers with no degrees or certifications harvest our crops. That's pretty important work! And I don't think civilzation would function very smoothly without construction workers, meat packers, garbage collectors, cashiers, fast food workers, janitors (etc.).
Many artists and all children are amateurs. Surely they matter.
> And by professionals, does the OP mean someone with a professional degree or certification?
No, this is "professional" as opposed to "amateur" or "volunteer".
Well then the question is just whether people are willing to pay money for things they want, which seems trivially true. Every professional is in a line of work someone values, because otherwise there wouldn't be enough support for it to be a profession.
It’s not easy to remain optimistic about the long term progress of humanity when the events of the present day make it feel like we might be slipping backwards.
Matthew Yglesias had a link in his Substack post today that brightened my outlook at least a bit.
The link is to a transcript of a 2019 podcast episode with Jonathon Capehart and California Congresswoman Barbara Lee
In the post he suggests that the overt racism of George Wallace was largely instrumental and that a visit from black Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm while he was in a hospital bed recovering from an attempted assassin’s bullets affected a sincere change of heart in Wallace toward black people.
This part is from a speech by Wallace’s daughter in a majority black church in 1979.
WALLACE KENNEDY: When Congresswoman Chisholm sat by my daddy’s bed, he asked her, “What are your people going to say about your coming here?” Shirley Chisholm replied, “I know what they’re going to say but I wouldn’t want what happened to you to happen to anyone.” Daddy was overwhelmed by her truth, and her willingness to face the potential negative consequences of her political career because of him — something he had never done for anyone else.
Shirley Chisholm had the courage to believe that even George Wallace could change. She had faith in him. And there would be others who followed. In 1972, Shirley Chisholm planted a seed of new beginnings in my father’s heart. A chance to make it right. An opportunity for a better way for the seven-year journey he would take from there to this very church.
On a Sunday in 1979, Daddy’s arrival to this church was unannounced and unexpected. But for an attendant rolling his wheelchair to the front of this sanctuary, he was alone. What the congregation must have thought when he said,
“I’ve learned what suffering means in a way that was impossible. I think I can understand something of the pain that black people have come to endure. I know I contributed to that pain and I can only ask for your forgiveness.”
As he was leaving the church, the congregation began singing “Amazing Grace.”
________
Link to
Opinions | How segregationist George Wallace became a model for racial reconciliation: ‘Voices of the Movement’ Episode 6
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/16/changed-minds-reconciliation-voices-movement-episode/
Nah. Come on. Listen to The Drive-By Truckers great album "Southern Rock Opera" which is about George Wallace, Neil Young and Lynard Skynyrd. According to the Truckers from Alabama, whom I'd trust with my life, Wallace only became a segregationist for opportunistic reasons in '68. His prior stance was relatively progressive for Alabama at the time. He just sold his soul for what seemed like a populist position at the time.
Really, Southern Rock Opera is one of the greatest albums ever made and will give you more truth than that podcast.
> Wallace only became a segregationist for opportunistic reasons in '68
That’s what Matthew Yglesias means by: “the overt racism of George Wallace was largely instrumental”. Wallace had tried “build better roads and better schools” in his campaigning but it didn’t work. The “segregation now, segregation forever” stuff did.
Half of the podcast was a speech by George Wallace’s own daughter.
As a piece, the podcast was a story of redemption from havIng “sold his soul for what seemed like a populist position at the time.”
I might check out Drive by Truckers but I think I’ll always remain an Allman Brothers guy listening to Richard Betts pickin’ on that red guitar.
> the events of the present day make it feel like we might be slipping backwards
Yes, and exclusively due to one side. Speaking of assassins...
Two things can be true at the same time:
“1. This potential assassination attempt on Donald Trump is horrible and should be strongly condemned by ALL of us.”
“2. There is no politician in America today who spews as much hate or incites as much violence with reckless/dangerous rhetoric as Donald Trump does.”
Former congressman Joe Walsh (R-Ill.)
Your side is actively shooting presidents, criminally prosecuting your political opponents, taking your political opponents off the ballot, burning down cities, and firebombing churches, but yes, of course, the mean tweets are the REAL Threat To Democracy!!!
It's far from clear what side Thomas Crooks was on. I'm not sure he can even be said to have been on his own side.
And the guy caught on the golf course was a Trump voter who'd recently soured on that and had supported Haley and a fringe candidate in this year's GOP primaries. Not sure which "side" that puts him on but it sure isn't the Dems.
Honestly my default guess for both men is team nutcase.
Fortunately, in our modern, enlightened era we have recognized that it's impossible for people to grow out of their retrograde viewpoints, so no need to worry about this scenario taking place again in the near future.
This is referring to digging up evidence of ‘transgressions’ that were not considered wrong or bad in the past and retroactively holding them to a new standard I assume.
If that’s what you are getting at, I agree that’s idiotic and wrong.
An alternative hypothesis is that Wallace was following his political incentives. When black voters were effectively disenfranchised, he espoused policies that appealed to the dominant voting bloc. After black voters became an effective voting bloc, he adjusted to the new incentive structure.
Possibly, but I think it is also possible that a life changing personal setback can cause someone to develop more empathy for others in need.
Total non sequitur except that it's an upper: Cat's really like these interactive toys from China. They're like roombas -- zoom around randomly, and so maintain the cats' interest.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083DRQ96Y?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title&th=1
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CJNV3752?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title&th=1
They can get themselves out of corners, etc. All are designed so that they turn on once an hour for 5 or 10 mins. After that they doze, but wake up instantly if jiggled by a paw. I bought a couple because I felt bad about leaving my cats alone for hours when I went in to the office.
Just ordered mine. I have two cats and they play with each other, but it wouldn't hurt for them to get more play.
More play, more gainz (Starting Meow program).
Thanks for the tip! Just ordered the first one hopefully my cats aren't too old and lazy to enjoy it
They seem to be irresistible to cats. Mine take one sniff and walk away from many things, but this thing, the day I presented it, they followed around all evening. My timid cat was scared of it at first. You can make them less daunting by putting them in a box or in the bathtub, or inside a cat tunnel if you have one.
I’m checking the link out and considering getting one now. If I have trouble locating the shyer of my two cats I just have to pick up the laser pointer that projects the red dot. He recognizes the sound of the attached key ring rattling and comes running.
I have heard that laser pointers are actually not that great a cat toy because they can never catch it, so they get frustrated. Better for them to sometimes succeed.
Yeah, I’ve wondered about the frustration factor. They probably have more fun when I use the fabric ‘kite tail’ at the end of a plastic stick, kind of a fly rod casting action involved with that one.
They get to grab the fabric and kick the hell out of it so it seems like it appeals to their hunter instinct.
Yeah, they love that red dot. The trouble is, they need you to make it come alive. (Actually, I've seen gizmos on Amazon pets section that will project and randomly move a red dot. Did not get one because I was worried about it shining into cats' eyes when they come up to investigate the device. Do you think it makes sense to worry about that?). Here's a video of my cats with one of the devices zooming in and around their cat tunnels. https://vimeo.com/1010343326/01f745df2e?share=copy
They're pretty new to it and the more timid one, the black one, is still just watching. Orange guy's having a ball.
Yeah, I usually get tired of moving the dot before the cat tires of playing. Not sure how dangerous it is to vision but I am careful not to shine it into their eyes.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems is really, really looking to fill this scientific software position. You would be the software expert working with scientists to improve the architecture / usability / integration of physics codes. The pay is probably less than what you could get in silicon valley, but it is more than academia. Plus it's really cool to be working on fusion energy with a bunch of other very talented people at a place that is delivering results.
https://jobs.lever.co/cfsenergy/45e11564-57db-4059-9557-2adbb137d146
I interviewed for a different software position at CFS (on the SPARC I&C team) about three years ago. I didn't get the job, but I came away with a favorable impression of the people I talked to. I had been following them for a while before applying, after coming across a YouTube video of one of Professor Whyte's talks some time in 2018.
Thanks for posting. I am considering applying.
I don't know what the situation in fusion is like, but in my current scientific field we do sometimes have to use hastily written, not entirely user-friendly software, though we also see more polished software being developed as the field grows and some techniques start to mature. I've been learning software development in such an environment...
Please do apply! Yes this is quite a common problem.
Feel free to ignore this but the non-technical parts of this (the job description, not what you wrote) sound really off-putting to me. This kind of marketing speech is the furthest one can get from "authentic", it's so transparently made to sound impressive that it sets off all of my bullshit sensors, deservedly or not.
Might just be me, and if anyone wants to tell me that, no, this is in fact how you reach the most people I'll probably believe you.
hahaha fair enough. I actually do agree with you that the written description is poor (I didn't write it but maybe I can help get it updated to something better).
The best I can say is that there really are some very brilliant people working there. And that CFS has made groundbreaking progress in HTS magnets such as the 20T toroidal model field coil (search on youtube) and that the high field approach to fusion that CFS has adopted has some real advantages (there's some discussion in the comments here https://www.construction-physics.com/p/will-we-ever-get-fusion-power, but for the technical I would recommend the SPARC Physics Basis papers in Journal of Plasma Physics).
If you have further recs on how to improve the description to land better with software people then I'd appreciate it. We're in an interesting position of physicists trying to recruit outside our normal networks so it can be rocky.
For no particularly good reason, I did a bit of dive into the recently-released Chinese AI Security Governance Framework.
https://solresol.substack.com/p/the-chinese-government-understands
I'm no expert in Chinese politics (although I know a bit about AI security and governance) but I thought a few people here might like it.
Does anyone know why Nate's model is so bullish on Trump?
All the way back in August, he had the person who won Pennsylvania as having a 90+% chance to win the election (https://www.natesilver.net/p/welcome-to-the-bizarre-world-of-conditional). He currently has Harris narrowly ahead in Pennsylvania (D+0.2, https://www.natesilver.net/p/nate-silver-2024-president-election-polls-model). If we assume it's a 50-50 probability split (seems a reasonable approximation for a 0.2 point lead) and do a simple math calculation using the numbers from the conditional probabilities, then this would suggest Harris currently has a 48% chance of winning. There's probably some wiggle room here for variations in other details, changes in what "winning in PA means" (e.g. less scenarios where it's a polling error in R's favor, resulting in D+4 in PA), etc, but Trump's odds seem much bigger than I'd expect from those two numbers.
Update: Silver now has it as a toss-up again. Sounds like recent polls were good for Harris.
Silver said he was discounting the post-convention bump that Harris got because he expected it would be temporary. But the bump seems to be holding. I noticed that some people on TwiXter were asking when and if he'd update his forecast. I don't think he has, yet.
It sounds like the big problem is that there haven't been many high quality recent state polls so the old ones are overweighted.
D+0.2% is the average of polls of PA voters. That's a big part of Silver's model for who's likely to win PA, but far from the only part.
In 2020, Biden won PA by 1.2%, which is 3.3 percentage points less than his national popular vote. And in 2016, Clinton lost PA by 0.7% while winning the national popular vote by 2.1%, so she underperformed in PA by 2.8%. So in the last two elections, Democrats have underperformed national popular votes in PA by about 3%. Apply this as an adjustment to Harris's 2.2% lead in national polls, and that implies Trump is actually ahead in PA by 0.8%. Last I checked, Silver's model uses a weighted average of adjusted national polls (using a similar calculation to my illustration but probably not exactly the same) and state polls to estimate who's currently leading in that state. The relative weights depend on how many good recent polls there are of the state in question.
The same mechanism is applied in reverse, using adjusted state polls as an additional signal of the national popular vote. This is used along with the national polling average to determine the input to state averages I described in the previous paragraph. So if Trump is overperforming what we'd expect from national polls in polls of other states, then the model's estimate of national popular vote is going to get adjusted upwards a little.
And there's also @DangerouslyUnstable's point: just looking at current polls gives you what Silver calls a "now-cast", but there are further fiddly bits in the model to account for how things are likely to change between now and election day. In addition to the convention bounce adjustment, I think there's also stuff forecasting how people currently polling as undecided or third-party supporters are likely to vote on election day. I think there's also a "fundamentals" factor where there's a prior for how each state is likely to vote based on demographics and past election results which is weighed more heavily early in the election cycle and gradually declines to zero by election day.
His model takes what the _current_ polls are, and then does a lot of work to figure out what it _expects_ the polls to be on election day. I couldn't tell you the exact reason (although a week ago it was most likely the convention bounce adjustments, and it might still be the tail end of that), but whatever it is, the model must expect the polls to regress for Harris a bit.
He's probably doing some kind of data correction for the polls or something like that. The polls were bullish on Clinton and Biden both compared to the final results. I know he does that for the nationwide percent, such that a +3% Harris is something like a 50/50 for the chance to win. California is a big part of that (Clinton ran up a big lead there while losing a few states by small amounts), but he may be doing the same for individual states. I'm not a paid subscriber, so I don't know if he talks about those corrections in detail anywhere.
He does, yes.
The overall point he keeps repeating is that the swing states are all that matter in assessing the POTUS election-outcome odds, and that good-quality polling of those individual states has been fairly scarce until just this calendar month.
Shameless self-plug:
I have recently written about Benthan's Bulldog's argument for God, which Scott recently linked. I argue that his claim that the number of possible people is Beth-2 (that is, the same cardinality as the powerset of the real numbers, or the powerset of the powerset of the integers) is implausible, and that we can likely enumerate all meaningfully distinct human-like brain states in universes which have roughly the same physical foundation as ours.
Stepping a bit back, I also look at the root claim that the number of universes should be Beth-2, which can be traced back to Quine's Democritian worlds. I think that from a physical perspective, the modelling with f:R^4->{0,1} where f(r,t)=1 iff a particle occupies position r at time t is not well suited to gain knowledge about the possible configurations a universe can have, because almost all functions f would seriously break physics.
I end up giving tips about how to run universes with pre-determined lifetime with finite resources in a way which the inhabitants will not notice, and rant a bit that the central example of an irrational number should be some uncomputable, undescribable monstrosity rather than sqrt(2) or pi.
If this sounds like your cup of tea, read the whole thing (or parts of it) here:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cEq2ZMSJ88gyTryio/keeping-it-less-than-real-against-possible-people-or-worlds
I had an odd thought. We've all been reading of the danger of AI doing most of its training off the Internet, which is increasingly full of AI-generated content. This leads to a kind of poisoning of the training, so that AI's responses are dumber to the extent it's been exposed to this mix of material, so that AI thinking in general is increasingly handicapped by a data version of mad cow disease.
It just occurred to me now that we humans who live primarily in a built environment, surrounded by things designed to be useful or to convince, may be (in a much longer loop) slowly diminished in ways we can't really see.
Moral, I guess? Get out into the woods, the woods aren't going to try to convince you of anything.
City people tend to be much more neurotic, though more educated.
Or maybe it’s what we call “folk wisdom“
The city I live in is packed with things and people that challenge me, delight me, and expand my worldview, many times every day.
I do love being in nature but it's not at all mentally stimulating in the same way. A life spent in the woods may be peaceful and wholesome but, on its own, will not lead to a brilliant mind.
Moral, for me? Have as many experiences as possible. City, woods, other cities, deserts, all of it.
I agree on AI's capacity for compounding and accelerating the spread of bad data.
It certainly happens without the effect of validating the internet's own 'narratives', though. In at least one regard, AI is simply a more advanced form of gaslighting, which worked for Sam Adams, and still does for countless promoters of gadgets and products on cable TV, and today's suburban 'actvists'. It may just give performative social movements and bad political ideas more traction.
The greed of politics and consumerism will no doubt trivialize AI -- at the same time it improves some technology and aids in helping make some medical advances and such.
> AI is simply a more advanced form of gaslighting,
I so agree with you. I think it is still very significant, however.
I should have said, 'Along with its many useful and helpful applications, AI will likely also be used for more effective gaslighting.' I don't want to contribute to the noise. Sorry.
There's a more fundamental problem with AI training - what do we want the AI to do? Training on AI-generated data may be a recursive problem as you suggest, but we're also training AIs on Reddit and other human-generated output of dubious worth. But, if we want the AI to act like a human and use normal human speech, maybe Reddit is a great place to go. Of course, if Reddit is abnormal in any systematic way, you are also teaching it to be similarly abnormal - political opinions, humor, grammar, whatever.
If we train it on scientific papers, we might be happy with the rigorous responses it provides (although with the replication crisis, maybe not), but maybe the way it talks to people is stilted and off-putting. We could train it on classic novels, but then it uses biases from hundreds of years ago and talks like an 18th century Englishman.
The current goal seems to be to train it on everything humans have ever done, and help it identify when it should talk like Lord Cumberland or Genghis Khan and when it should use modern slang.
We don't have to use the same AI for everything. We could train one AI on conversation and use it in call centers. Train another AI on scientific papers and use it in research.
I've been into the woods a lot, I don't recall having any great epiphanies. I got my cornea scratched out one time though.
I go questing for the enchanted forest a lot and have had many good epiphanies. Speaking to the original post question - yes living primarily in a built environment does diminish life experience - there are people who don't know that some of the food they eat grows from the ground or was once an animal.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/heinleinforum/posts/10163156148575695
I regret the facebook link, but I can't find the video on youtube.
From the link: "Recently, Google has released a massive upgrade to this tool that allows you to generate a spoken word podcast-style discussion of the input material. The output that it generates is nearly indistinguishable from normal human conversation and it is able to critique the input material in a novel and surprisingly insightful manner. While I realize that these tools do not represent 'true' intelligence, they still do demonstrate a stunning simulacrum of the real thing."
The voices are better than most computer voices, and there's an impression of human personalities, but with less emotional variation.
It gets at least two things blatantly wrong about the story. The reporter died from a sign falling on him. It was the young couple which was killed by a car. Getting this right would have taken minimal attention. Or was the ai imitating human errors?
It would take a little more processing to grasp that the insurance companies hired assassins to kill Pinero. The ai said it was a mystery.
>It gets at least two things blatantly wrong about the story. The reporter died from a sign falling on him. It was the young couple which was killed by a car. <
I'm assuming from this that they decided to test their AI by making it give commentary on the Final Destination series, in which the concept of death hunts down teenagers for the pettiest vengeance possible.
This is the future we've all hoped for.
Not an AI, a highly limited oracle. I recommend reading the story, it's not very long, has a number of good features, and is very impressive for a first story.
The device is looks down the four-dimensional time line for a person, and identifies when the end happens.
The sign falling isn't intended as slapstick, it's an accident which couldn't plausibly be arranged.
Here is a question I have wondered about for a while. Years ago, while hanging out with friends, one asked: During an erotic encounter, what is the ideal ratio of kissing to intercourse? I thought to myself, "that sounds like a false dichotomy. Shouldn't they happen simultaneously during intercourse?" But I have subsequently noticed in the media that, when intercourse is depicted, the couple is rarely seen kissing. So I am curious what the norm actually is, and what people's preferences are.
By coincidence I just read an interview with an expert on kissing this week. Two bits from that are related to your question:
- Kissing is not a biological instinct, but it is a social convention. Only about half of the cultures all over the world kiss, and not all those kiss in sexual context.
- In Hollywood there was a "production code" formulated in 1934, which determined what could or couldn't be shown on screen. Part of the code was that kisses could last at most 3 second. Since it was still the most intimate form of interaction, it played a huge role, and people would pay for a movie ticket just to see a kiss between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr. But the production code eroded in the 60s, and since then love scenes became a lot more explicit and kissing has lost significance. First in movies, but also (at least that is what he claimed) in Western societies in general.
Oh, and his answer on whether kissing makes sex better:
"I can't answer that scientifically, personally I would say: sex mostly gets better when it lasts longer. And kissing is a good way to prolong the activity."
EDIT: Slight correction, only half of societies have *romantic-sexual* kisses. Parents kissing their children is much more wide-spread and maybe universal. From the authors of the original study:
"We looked at 168 cultures and found couples kissing in only 46 percent of them. Societies with distinct social classes are usually kissers; societies with fewer or no social classes, like hunter-gatherer communities, are usually not."
https://www.sapiens.org/culture/is-romantic-kissing-a-human-universal/
See _Sex Is Not a Natural Act and Other Essays_, which argues that sex is as much a cultural production as music, and that people are done a grave disservice by being told that sex is both natural and it's important to just get it right.
Fascinating.
I am re-examining my whole relationship to kissing at the moment
From personal experience it can be physically awkward to perform both simultaneously
Interresting. Are you on the taller side, at leaat relative to the height of your partner? (Or, if you are referring to being on the receiving end, are you on the shorter side?)
My first substack! Explaining how kink and BDSM are not about "weird sex", but adapting to the dating marketplace as a boring guy. Essentially it is a "honest, consensual PUA" where the exciting stuff are explicitly negotiated:
https://justanogre.substack.com/p/kink-is-not-weird-sex-vanilla-dating
Or in other words the realization that you don't have to BE exciting, just DO something exciting.
Judging how hard it actually is to find a kinky guy, I am very much not convinced by this argument.
And I've tried dating vanilla guys and teaching them what I like and they're just not into it, so saying it's something other than innate really doesn't make sense.
And I've hear it's similarly difficult the other way around.
Men outnumber women on Fet 4:1, the issue is 95% of "Doms" will be completely fake, either just thinks kinky women are easy, or just likes rough sex, or wants to jump into things without investing time into building trust and figuring out risk-awareness and specific consent. But this is just why it works well for the 5%.
Interestingly, real life events work less well, even though everybody on Fet seems to say the opposite! I wonder if location/culture plays a role, I distinctly remember the part in Desperate Housewives that a couple moves into a house and the neighbors come to greet them, and I thought how completely creepy people would find that in Austria that some stranger knocks on your door just because they live nearby.
I'm not sure that has anything to do with your initial hypothesis, which seems to imply kink is done to make one more interesting, but if that were the case it would be something people could choose, rather than the majority of people on Fet or Feeld being fakes.
I admit it is a little confusing and not very clearly thought out. I think I meant it at some point that there has to be an actual passion for it. Then this passion has the very nice side effect of becoming more interesting.
I don't know that Fetlife is a great measure of interest in kink, either in ratios of men to women wanting kink, or in how many men on Fet are kinky.
In my experience, a *tremendous* number of men on Fet are straight vanilla dudes there for the free amateur vanilla porn (which is why the "Explore" page's photos and videos almost always are and almost always have been entirely conventionally attractive women nude or in vanilla porn poses).
hm. but why when free vanilla porn is ubiquitous?
Are there data on the life satisfaction of people who seriously attempted suicide but were rescued or otherwise survived?
Did their lives improve after the attempt? Are they happy that they did not end up committing suicide?
Honestly, if they survived, it was not a "serious" suicide attempt. There is no shortage of ways to reliably kill yourself, especially in the US.
You might find this article called “Jumpers” from the New Yorker 2003 interesting-
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/10/13/jumpers
They finally did install a net of sorts on the Golden Gate Bridge, didn’t they?
Not a nice comfy trapeze artist fabric one, but a metal one that would bruise a potential thrill seeker enough to think twice?
It’s been a while since I checked on that actually, I’m not sure
I thought I had read about them installing one.
Googling show an article saying it’s had one since January 1, 2024.
Edit
They did design it to discourage thrill seekers and dopey attention seekers.
“Jumping into the net is designed to be painful and may result in significant injury.”
https://www.goldengate.org/district/district-projects/suicide-deterrent-net/
I think it depends if the first attempt was one of the "cry for help" types, i.e. not really wanting to die but wanting attention/help, or if it was a genuine attempt to kill oneself and was foiled.
If you do the "cry for help" overdose attempt and finally get to see a psychiatrist to get your anti-depressant prescription, then you will feel better and less likely to try again, because you got what you were looking for.
Conversely, if you really wanted to die but someone found you and called the ambulance, I think you are more likely to have a second go and plan better to have it be successful.
People who’ve attempted suicide and lived are at a much higher risk of eventually completing suicide.
I’m sure some people who unsuccesfully attempt suicide are glad they survived and feel like they’ve got a second lease on life. But research shows that surviving suicide indicates a significantly increased likelihood that the survivor will attempt again, not a decreased likelihood.
https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/suicide-attempt-a-stronger-predictor-of-completed-suicide-than-previously-thought/
https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-017-1317-z
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2787969
"a significantly increased likelihood that the survivor will attempt again"
Compared to mentally healthy people? That's not surprising and doesn't say much.
The poster’s question was:
“Are there data on the life satisfaction of people who seriously attempted suicide but were rescued or otherwise survived?”
If I exclude people who attempt suicide from my answer and focus on “mentally healthy” people like you suggest, I’m literally not answering the poster’s question.
He didn’t ask about “mentally healthy people.” He asked about people who seriously attempt suicide.
There is and you can find it online pretty easily. From memory, most attempts are one-off, most are unsuccessful and most survivors report higher life satisfaction a few years later. Something like 30% are completely psychologically normal a few years after the event. Even delaying an attempt by a few minutes or hours make it very unlikely that the average person will try again.
Does this differentiate between those who "seriously attempted" and those whose attempts were something else? I imagine it's a pretty touchy subject formally categorizing someone's suicide as Serious or a Cry For Help or whatever.
Intuitively, I would expect people who were serious to try again and not become happier soon, while people looking for help or attention would have a pretty good chance of getting to a better place.
Again working off of memory here, but a lot of the research gets around this by specifically studying only one type of suicide. There was a particularly searing one that looked at survivors of blunt force trauma type attempts (i.e. jumping off bridges, driving into bridges, just bridges in general) and even then most reported being happier a few years later.
The repeat offenders tend to be more successful overall - most people (like 90% of attempts) are just going through a sort of mental valley and once they pass through the other side never try again. A few try over and over, slowly escalating until they kill themselves. So the 'cry for help' thing can actually subvert itself there.
Side note: men are generally more 'successful' than women, because men prefer guns, ropes and cars and women prefer pills. Suicide is also very prone to spikes and fads caused by media attention - we had a local one a few years back where someone jumped over the counter at a butchers' and sawed their own head off. Then there were a spate of them and now the butchers keep the saws out of sight.
One theory is that men use the more violent (and effective) methods because women are trained not to make a mess.
Yikes…where was that?
Thanks!