Fair. Though to take the parable about alignment further, having an agent lie to everyone else about their stated goals also seems like par for the course.
(That said I do tend to think that many members of the early OAI crew were pro safety)
I'm sure this has been discussed to death before in various places, and it's a bit futile to beat up on a decade old story, but one of the things that annoyed me about HPMOR is how EY would *make up* stuff that has no canon basis and then *make fun of the things he made up himself*. There are enough things that are actually in the books you could mock without making them up yourself! I'm guessing that this was just borne out of carelessness and ignorance (he admitted to not even reading some of the books), but it's still a bad look either way.
There are two big ones that come to mind:
1. The claim that Gringotts will coin arbitrary amounts of gold and silver for you for a minor fee and that the value of the currency is based on its precious metal content.
IIRC the closest canon ever gets to that is a single reference in book 2 to Hermione's parents exchanging muggle money for wizard money at Gringotts. But a) that's *paper money* not gold or silver and b) there's no mention of a fixed exchange rate.
There's no particular evidence that wizard currency's value is based on its precious metal content at all. In fact, the fact the golden coins are the *biggest* is evidence *against* that. As they say, one man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens. Most real world currencies nowadays have values well above the metal content, so why shouldn't the wizards?
I've long thought that it would be hilarious (and instructive to the "ratfic" genre) to have a story where HPJEV appears in the *real world* and tries to "exploit" it the same way he acts in HPMOR. I have no doubt that he would instantly propose making a fortune by exchanging real world coins and metals, and assume that everyone in the world was terminally stupid for not noticing this opportunity.
The worst part is that we can't even just assume that HPEJV was being stupid here. Apart from the narration itself giving no indication we're not meant to treat this as a brilliant idea, Harry later meets an *in universe* wizard (the occulemency teacher) who *also* agrees that the gold/silver plot is a good idea, even though this wizard lives in the wizarding world and thus should presumably be familiar with the reasons why it realistically wouldn't actually work.
2. The claim that Quidditch scores are *directly* added to House points. This one has *slightly* more evidence in canon, but it's still highly dubious.
AFAIK, the relevant mentions from canon are
* In book 1 when Harry and friends lose 150 points after the dragon incident, he mentions losing all the points he won for Gryffindor in the first Quidditch game, although there's no confirmation of how many points that was.
* At the end of book 1, the house scores are given, and they seem rather low if Quidditch scores were being added in
* In book 2, it is explicitly stated that Gryffindor got 50 points after the first (and only) Quidditch match
To be charitable, I could see how someone who only saw the first line might interpret things this way. However, given that book 2 *unambiguously* implies that the Quidditch scores are not directly added to House points and the bits in book 1 are ambiguous, it seems like this one is throughly busted too.
Harry definitely seems to have access to the script whenever "rationality" is involved. Like when Dumbledore mentions the resurrection stone and the archway in the department of mysteries. Harry instantly dismisses the arch and focuses on the plot critical stone, despite having no evidence about either
Two players choose whether to cooperate or defect. If both cooperate, both score +1. If both defect, both score 0. If exactly one player defects, then an outside observer, Omega, guesses which player defected. The player that Omega blames gets -5 and the other gets +5.
Omega is familiar with the players and good at guessing what they will do. However, it is not omniscient and you're worried that your opponent knows how to fool Omega. What do you do?
How many iterations are there? My default behavior would be to C and see what happens. I don't know how to fool Omega, and I'm assuming that Omega can guess better than 50%, so I don't want to D if they C. And since I don't know how to fool Omega, my best chance of getting ahead is to C if they D and hope Omega guesses right. Plus, if I consistently C, that would help Omega predict me better. So I'd experiment with C and collect data on Omega's accuracy and bias. If Omega gets fooled too often, I suppose this would turn into a game of minimizing my loss, probably by choosing randomly.
So I tried to game this out. I'm not confident that my analysis is immaculate, though.
====
Let's consider Alice and Bob. Bob consistently has Omega's ear.
If Bob wants to consistently disrupt a CC or DD equilibrium in order to chase the +5, Alice can disrupt Bob's attempts to effect a CD or DC outcome by randomizing his own decision each iteration. And if Bob can consistently blame Alice, Alice's randomization effectively halves Bob's +5 EV payouts and halves Alice's own -5 EV losses.
From Bob's perspective, an EV of (3) = (2.5 + .5) he gets from chasing a consistent +5 is still better than the (1) EV a CC agreement, so Alice's "punish by randomizing" strategy isn't enough to fully deter Bob's behavior. Meanwhile, Alice gets an EV of (-2) = (-2.5 + .5).
Therefore, it seems like the reasonable strategies here are: either settle into a stable CC equilibrium [0]; or learn how brownnose Omega. From Alice's perspective (assuming Alice doesn't have Omega's ear and Bob refuses to parley [1]), Alice's reasonable strategies are either "chase CC", or "randomize". From Bob's perspective, it's hardly different from a regular prisoner's dilemma: agree to CC if you feel angelic, chase +5 if you feel psychopathic. So on the meta-level, this shakes out to
_________Bob_G____Bob C
Alice C___-5, 5_____1, 1
Alice R___-2, 3_____-2, 3
where C stands for cooperate, G stands for "gamble on +5", and R stands for "randomize". Which simplifies to
___________1,4______4,1
___________2,2______2,2
Which (according to Jimmy Wales [2]), either settles on RG permanently (like in Second Best/Big Bully), or cycles counterclockwise (like Fixed Sum/Missile Crisis), depending on whether Bob is willing to swap from RG to RC. That is, assuming that we're all rational self-interested psychopaths.
If I were Bob though, I'd probably just park on CC like a good little christian. As for Alice's position, she's kinda at the mercy of Bob.
[0] (or a DD equilibrium, I guess. But since I'm allowed to woo Omega, I assume I'm also allowed to negotiate with the rival player. And why chase the hare instead of the stag when negotiation is on the table?)
[1] the bulk of agency is determined by who has the ear of Omega. If we assume that Omega is willing to listen to either party, it's not really game-theory so much as testing your creativity as a salesman.
Topic: Comparative Advantage Cannot Protect Us from AI
Text: The Comparative Advantage Fallacy - Google Docs
Audio: The Comparative Advantage Fallacy - Substack Audio
Summary:
Comparative Advantage: The classical economic concept, while valid for human trade, doesn’t apply when comparing human capabilities to those of Artificial Superintelligences (ASI).
Fallacy in Application: The vast gap in productivity and capability between humans and ASIs means that trade won’t be beneficial for both parties. Instead, ASIs would likely allocate resources for their own optimal use.
Superintelligence and Resource Allocation: Much like how billionaires wouldn't part with significant wealth for trivial reasons, ASIs wouldn't spare resources like sunlight for humans, as their needs and capabilities far surpass human needs.
Relentless Optimization: ASIs, like advanced AIs trained to solve hard problems, would likely pursue maximum efficiency without regard for human survival, and any "easygoing" AI could self-modify to become more competitive.
Discussion Questions:
a) How does Yudkowsky’s critique of comparative advantage challenge current assumptions about AI’s future role in human economics and resource allocation?
b) Can we think of any strategies to incentivize superintelligences to leave Earth resources untouched, or is that fundamentally impossible based on economic principles?
c) Reflective stability implies that relaxed AI systems could evolve into relentless optimizers. How might we design AI systems that avoid this outcome, or is it inevitable as Yudkowsky suggests?
Conversation Starter 2
Topic: Book Review of Chapter 1 of On the Edge by Nate Silver
Text: On the Edge: The Fundamentals - Zvi Mowshowitz
Audio: YouTube Link
Summary:
The River vs. The Village: Silver introduces two cultural mindsets—The River, representing risk-takers and probabilistic thinkers, and The Village, the establishment that trusts experts and avoids risk.
Risk-Taking Culture: The River includes poker players, venture capitalists, and effective altruists, united by their reliance on probability and decision-making under uncertainty. Riverians focus on maximizing expected value (EV) and thrive on calculated risks.
Fundamental Disagreement: The River emphasizes independent thinking and rewards taking chances, while The Village is more group-oriented and focused on moral narratives. This tension often leads to clashes, particularly in areas like AI, politics, and media.
Meritocracy and Expertise: Silver argues that the River's emphasis on merit and risk-taking makes it more effective in certain fields, but this can also lead to conflicts with those who follow Village norms.
Discussion Questions:
a) How does the dichotomy between The River and The Village play out in modern societal debates, especially around risk-taking in industries like tech and AI?
b) What are the strengths and weaknesses of risk-taking cultures like The River compared to the more cautious approach of The Village?
c) Do you think the distinction between River and Village oversimplifies or accurately captures the mindset of modern risk-takers versus traditional institutions?
Walk & Talk: After the discussion, we will take our usual hour-long walk. Nearby options for takeout include Gelson's and Pavilions, located in the 92660 zip code area.
Share a Surprise: Bring something to share that unexpectedly changed your perspective on life or the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: As always, feel free to contribute ideas for future meetings, topics, and activities.
There is often this implicit assumption in ethics that you can't justify a bias towards humans as a species. It's merely "tribalistic". Something like "racism is favoring your race and that's bad, therefore speciesism, which is favoring your species, is bad". But that assumption is very debatable.
Morality developed among humans as a way for us to get along with unrelated members of other humans. It's a social contract. You do this and I do this and we agree on it so that we can work together to go hunt down a mammoth or defend ourselves from another tribe. Animals cannot do morality the way we do. Sure, they can be affectionate but that same animal could also just suddenly tear you to shreds. I can't make explicit agreements with a bear about what is right and wrong. It doesn't matter that I have never done anything to hurt it before. If we come across each other, it could attack me regardless of whether I had done wrong. It's clear that you just can't do morality in the same way with animals as you do with people.
More broadly, humans are wired to take up the practices of those they are around. You can take a baby from anywhere around the world, plop them somewhere different, and they will try to fit in with the crowd they grow up with. I'm not making some kind of blank slate argument that only nurture matters, but it is the case that children will copy the behaviors of people they come in to contact with and that's unavoidable. Animals have their own nature and simply can't be socialized in that way.
Another important point is that any fertile man can have a child with any fertile woman around the world. Back when monarchies were more prominent, this was important part of establishing alliances. They may hate each other but now they have a common interests in their grandchildren. That possibility ties us together in a way that we could never do with any other non-humans.
Humans vs non-humans is not an "arbitrary" distinction and in fact, it's probably the least arbitrary you can get. It's ok to be speciesist.
>> There is often this implicit assumption in ethics that you can't justify a bias towards humans as a species.
Can you put a % estimate on the "often" in this sentence? How many people do you think hold this position?
In my experience humans are *much* more frequently presumed to be fundamentally different from (and of greater value than) animals, than they are presumed to be equivalent such that "you can't justify a bias towards humans as a species." Animal rights activists are an outlier, not a norm, and "you can't justify a bias towards humans as a species" believers are a minority within that minority - most people in the animal welfare world think that animals are different from people but want us to be nice to the bunnies and puppies and ponies, etc. Only the very fringiest are arguing human/animal *equality*, and mostly society just mocks those people.
Makes sense - what subset of philosophers do you think make this implicit assumption? 50%? 80%? 10%?
And who counts as a philosopher?
As someone who doesn't routinely engage with that community, its hard to assess the importance of the issue if it's just described as coming up "often." I'd agree, for example, that people in the US "often get food poisoning" because of the large population and frequency with which that population eats, but at the same time I don't think that food safety is a significant issue when you break it down on a percentage basis.
I don’t know the percentage. But I do see intellectual arguments that critique human favoritism from people like Peter Singer and he’s very influential. I don’t really see the opposite argument.
I'm willing to bite the bullet and accept that discrimination, in any form, is just a fact of life. It's not like I advocate for full blown slavery. But all the pearl-clutching in the current zeitgeist is absolutely a dumb purity-spiral. Kinda like how Scott complains that you can't talk about "eugenics" without being labeled someone who wants to breed Nazi supersoldiers and torture kittens.
PSA: the concept of a family is inherently racist, because you're privileging people based on their genetic similarity to you, rather than merit. Thought experiment: Do you support a "Brave New World" setup? I.e. families are outlawed, because "equality" means we should all equally belong to everyone else. Is that a "no"? Oh boy, do I have news for you. You. Are. A. Raging. Racist. And that's fine! Deal with it.
>>PSA: the concept of a family is inherently racist, because you're privileging people based on their genetic similarity to you, rather than merit.
Is that how you define family? Yeesh. I don't know about you, but speaking personally, I'm not related to my wife, nor are my parents related to one another.
Hopefully you can say the same. And hopefully, like me, you can say that only approximately *half* your aunts and uncles are genetically related to you (i.e. that your aunts and uncles are *not* marrying their brothers, sisters, cousins, or other relatives)? Assuming so, there's a large number of people in your family that are genetic strangers to you.
I don't think it's that controversial of an observation to assert that: Of everyone on the planet, your kids (and conversely, your parents) are the people who are most genetically related to you (barring some exceptions; e.g. twins, clones, adoption, etc). I.e. there's a continuum of relatedness. And e.g. if we plot on a continuum the 9 billion residents of Earth, according to their genetic relatedness to you specifically, with the left-side being most-related and right-side being least-related, your kids and immediate relatives will be on the leftward tail of the distribution.
As for spouses, the fact that spouses are unrelated (... usually <looks at pakistan>) is likely an artifact of the single-cell bottleneck. I.e. in a world free of disease/defects/etc, Azathoth would probably see fit that we'd all reproduce asexually by default, like sponges. In which case, each person's mother and father would consist of one and the same organism.
But sure: define the term "family" however you like. it won't change the fact that genetic-relatives often live in close proximity and favor each other. And that any project which seeks to level the socio-economic playing-field in toto, necessarily requires the dismantling of certain institutions.
I don’t seem to recall arguing for dismantling any institutions or levelling any playing fields in toto. If that’s in my response somewhere, by all means point out where.
My intention was simply to debunk the asinine assertion that the “concept of family is inherently racist, because you’re privileging people based on their genetic similarity to you rather than merit.”
My brother is married. He and his wife have no children, and they don’t plan to, but she does not work. He could be certainly be argued to be “privileging" her in a way that he does not privilege others, and the privilege can be argued not to have been distributed “on merit” since it comes by virtue of her being his family, but I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you that regardless of whether it is being distributed on merit, it most certainly isn’t being distributed based on genetic similarity.
So on the off chance that anyone read the initial post and was worried for a moment that privileging their family members, who are their most intimate associations tied to them in a close knit web of mutual support and interdependence, is somehow equivalent to privileging people of the same race, which is a population likely numbering in the millions and overwhelmingly composed of complete ass strangers who have done and probably will do nothing for them (and may, indeed, even wage war on them - see e.g. Ukraine/Russia) but happen to share with them a handful of ancillary traits like skin color and suitability or lack thereof for digesting milk, they need not worry about it.
It's possible we're all "a little bit racist" because everyone has inherent biases, but we're not all racists for favoring our families.
I've already acknowledged that spouses are exceptions. The exception doesn't disprove the rule. On the contrary, they're the exception which proves the rule. So idk what this is supposed to accomplish.
And yes, family members are often trustworthy. Two things can be true at once.
I don't think you're engaging with this fairly. I think you're responding emotionally because you feel uncomfortable with the implicit accusation. Because idk how you thought your comment would survive scrutiny.
I understand it must be terribly convenient to assert "the exception proves the rule" whenever contrary evidence arises, but contrary evidence doesn't actually prove a proposition.
A few more examples-
My mother's sister married a man. He is not related to me, but I have 'privileged' him by helping him find work when he was between things.
My cousin adopted a child. She is not related to me, but I'd still help her if she needed an extra hand moving, or a character reference, etc, etc.
My wife has two sisters. Neither are related to me. One I've gotten to know and would do things to help, even if my wife were to die. I'd 'privilege' her based purely on our socially-created family tie, regardless of genetics.
It seems pretty clear that family ties are socially created and genetically correlated, not merely genetically created. Take any human child from its genetic family, drop it in outer mongolia with a group of humans to raise it. Ask it who its family is.
If you don't know how my comment could survive scrutiny, I'd re-read your own, because actual scrutiny is being applied, it isn't holding up, and all you've done to defend it is state "the exception proves the rule," as if that were a concept that actually worked.
Technically speaking, the origin of the phrase "the exception proves the rule" actually rests on an archaic definition of "prove," which roughly translates to "the exception *tests* the rule." Modern English has sort of mutated it into this upside down framework where "contrary evidence somehow proves I'm right," but that's not how reasoning actually works.
I'm going to talk about in-group favoritism in another thread but I would say that there are practical reasons to expand your circle beyond your family and also, like I mentioned above, there are good reasons to make distinctions between humans vs non humans. It's a solid, non arbitrary line.
perhaps not as solid as you imagine. <looks at homo floresiensis>
Imagine the least convenient world, where there existed a breed of humans who were dumber than afghan hounds. You can't realistically trade or negotiate with them. Also, imagine a breed of humans who are superhuman in every meaningful dimension.
Are you still going to draw an arbitrary line around species, only? Which is just a biological category which captures who you can breed with? Does that sound like a sane, principled justification to you? Rather than a posthoc rationalization for the status quo? "This orc is trying to eat my liver. But technically I can breed with it. Therefore by the laws of morality, we're natural allies". To me, that's bonkers. The orc and I are *not* natural allies. And whether or not I can technically breed with it is 100% orthogonal.
Meanwhile, lots of human beings are married to someone. Which is the ultimate form of discrimination. There's 9 billion people, and you've decided to single out one in particular as being deserving of your love. If you just accept that discrimination isn't always bad, you can forsake doing mental gymnastics around arbitrary lines and just do ordinary cost/benefit analysis. It only feels scary because it's a thought crime to ever admit that the emperor's new clothes are actually invisible.
Sure in that situation it would be different but luckily we don’t live in the least convenient possible world. Im not interested in Universal Axiomatic Platonic Moral Truths. I’m interested in what’s practical.
Well in that case, we have no material disagreements. I can't help but wonder if there was even a controversy to begin with. I.e. the size of the shitty-dogfood industry is evidence that, yes actually, favoring humans over non-humans (even "man's best friend") is the norm by leaps and bounds. Meanwhile, the ethicists you speak of who "implicitly assume" that "specism is indefensible" are simply delulu.
Normal people don’t have coherent beliefs. People who think intellectually drive intellectual changes. I think that basically we need to stop this push towards the position of “animals should be seen as more equal”.
Contrariwise, there's also practical reasons to reduce the circle. As soon as you make this about utils accounting rather than deontology, you open the door for logical contention.
Yes, humans being susceptible to engaging in outgroup discrimination is indeed a fact of life. But, humans being susceptible to cholera is also a fact of life, yet societies take steps to eliminate cholera. Humans being susceptible to committing theft and robbery and rape are facts of life, yet societies take steps to eliminate crime. Why, then, should societies not take steps to eliminate outgroup discrimination? "It's a fact of life" is obviously not a valid reason.
Some level of outgroup discrimination makes sense. Consider that you are trying to do something altruistic, charitable, like giving someone money. There is a chance that person might be a scammer. You can probably more easily detect who is a scammer if you share the same culture.
An even more serious case can be made for unwritten rules. When culturally similar people share unwritten rules, they also share a subconscious understanding how how often, in what cases, how far can you bend those rules. But when people do not share it then it will be written rules, and then no exceptions, no bending etc.
"it's an (inevitable) fact of life" was the conclusion, not the derivation.
The derivation was implicit in the PSA. If you follow "racism is morally impermissible" all the way to its logical conclusions, you start having to engage in some crazy mental gymnastics. Such as "specism is morally intolerable" or "you must disown your family" or "we must destroy the cultural Western Canon" or "we must all pretend that walking through the inner city at 3 AM is perfectly safe" or "you must allow yourself to be scammed and/or mugged when you tour Delhi". To worship the alter of racial equality, you must renounce the alter of Gnon.
Your comment acts like "racism is bad" is self-evident. But really, I think the onus is on *you* to explain why. "Because fance, Uncle Tom's Cabin was morally reprehensible! Obviously!" But consider: is it the *racism* that you object to? Is that really the hill you want to die on? Or is it the slavery per se that you object to. Thought experiment: would slavery somehow have been more morally-permissible of an institution if the ethnicities of the slaves were representative of their host populations?
If you're still having trouble with this, let's return to the family question specifically as an example.
A) "Racism" means discriminating by race/skincolor/ethnicity.
B) race/skin-color/ethnicity are just a vague, premodern proxies for genetic-relatedness.
C) Familial institutions privilege the members of society who are *most* genetically related to a given person.
D) discrimination by race-membership is bad, but discrimination by family-membership is good. (??)
E) therefore, there must be some threshold between "siblings" and "random stranger" where discrimination flips from permissible to impermissible.
Your homework assignment is to identify that threshold, and justify it from first principles (i.e. not as an arbitrary historical-artifact of Eskimo kinship).
>But consider: is it the *racism* that you object to? Is that really the hill you want to die on? Or is it the slavery per se that you object to. ... "Racism" means discriminating by race/skincolor/ethnicity.
1. I don't know what slavery has to do with anything. Slavery is objectionable regardless of the basis upon which the person is enslaved.
2. I disagree with your definition of racism. What you have defined is racial discrimination, not racism. And note that even the law does not forbid all discrimination, but rather only invidious discrimination -- ie, discrimination that is motivated by animus towards a particular group. And that is the key difference between discrimination in FAVOR of your family versus discrimination AGAINST, say, the Irish. Discrimination in favor of your family is not motivated by animus.
Also, your comment simply passes the buck. I would be quite interested in hearing why racial animosity is supposedly less morally-laudible [0] than non-racial animosity.
idk man, sounds like bifurcation to me. But more importantly, your provided definition is not the plain-english definition. I've seen people irl argue things like "the fact that Haitians live in an area prone to earthquakes and hurricanes is an instance of institutional racism".
> And note that even the law does not forbid all discrimination, but rather only invidious discrimination -- ie, discrimination that is motivated by animus towards a particular group.
also the law: "disparate impact is bad".
P.S. Matt Walsh recently released a movie titled "am I a racist?" Normally, I don't really care about Walsh is up to. He doesn't operate in good faith. But it's relevant to the discussion because it raises the question: why did Walsh feel a need to make this movie? Do you honestly think Matt Walsh is trying to normalize *invidious* racism? Do you really believe that he harbors some sort of malevolent animus towards minorities?
>"the fact that Haitians live in an area prone to earthquakes and hurricanes is an instance of institutional racism".
But institutional racism is a different phenomenon, right?
>also the law: "disparate impact is bad".
No, that is not what the law says. The law says that disparate impact is prima facie evidence of animus, which can be rebuttal by showing a legitimate reason for the practice giving rise to the disparate impact.
>Matt Walsh recently released a movie titled "am I a racist?" ... Do you really believe that he harbors some sort of malevolent animus towards minorities?
Isn't the movie an expose' of the DEI industry? I don't see the relevance. It is not a pro-discrimination movie, is it?
I am not a dog person, but I feel like the existence of dogs is a good counter argument to your point about animals. You can’t talk to your dog, but you absolutely can build an understanding with them and the dog will feel bad (or at least pretend to feel bad, who knows) if they violate the rules by eating the Thanksgiving turkey when everyone was watching football.
I don’t think dogs are really doing morality in the same way. They really only care about your affection and haven’t really internalized it as a code. They’ll do plenty of things when no one is watching.
Thinking about it, it’s similar to the morality of a two year old. To them, all your rules are stupid but they don’t want to make you mad.
Whether we can reproduce with someone or not seems morally irrelevant to me. I mean, following that logic to the extreme, it would be okay to abuse infertile people, right? (Also, we could only be ethical towards the opposite sex.) It may be an important part of how morality has *evolved* from the evolutionary perspective, but it's not what morality *is*.
Another important part is reciprocity. If we met some kind of intelligent space aliens who somehow magically evolved a similar concept of morality, we could still agree on things like "helping each other is better than hurting each other", and it would make sense to call an opposite kind of behavior immoral.
Now, with animals we don't have the reciprocity. (Neither do we have it with small children, temporarily.) You can't expect the bear to behave "morally". Still, if I saw people who e.g. torture bears for fun, they would lose some morality points on my scale. We can argue how much precisely, but definitely more than zero. Similarly, factory farming is morally abhorrent (this is something many people would disagree with, but the fact that various states have "ag-gag laws" suggests that many people agree, or would agree if they paid attention).
In my opinion, the concept of "speciesism" becomes silly not when it requires that we treat the bear with some minimum compassion... but where it suggests that we should let the bear *vote* about what compassion means. Morality is a human concept (that is, unless we meet some other intelligent species, hypothetically), but the concept is not limited to treating other humans. Humans are the authors and judges of the concept, but animals can also be its targets.
I won’t say my arguments are deductive proofs for speciesism but I do think they support it. People often say something like “what if that was your child” in support of an argument.
>It may be an important part of how morality has *evolved* from the evolutionary perspective, but it's not what morality *is*.
I won’t get too much in to this right now but I do think we should base morality on who we are instead of some abstract principles that we pick out of the ether and take everything to its logical extreme.
It’s not like I have a problem with compassion to animals or anything. But once you stop taking the speciesist perspective of prioritizing humans, you can start getting logical arguments that strongly hurt human interests. Like I wouldn’t start favoring aliens because they were smarter than us. And I certainly wouldn’t let an AI take over the planet because they have more advanced capabilities. My argument would be that our moral rules should stick to what they were designed to deal with. For non humans, there should be different guidelines.
Hi Brandon, I missed this post earlier but I feel that if you're worried about aliens or superior humanoids or superhuman AI mistreating humans, that's a good argument for opposing speciesism and emphasizing the value of all thinking life, even if it doesn't think or communicate as well as humans do.
Otherwise, you really don't have any ethical explanation of why Homo Superior (or smartypants aliens, or AI) should keep us baseline humans around, happy and free, instead of enslaving us all or turning us into cheap souvenirs of Earth.
So, Graham Hancock is back with more about his theory of an ancient civilization that existed before the ice age. This time he's focusing on the Americas.
His theory is at best farfetched and probably just plain wrong, yes. But I find the series entertaining. He sometimes talks about interesting things I hadn't heard about before, such as Gobekli Tepe. It's a bit of a hate-watch.
They're claiming Microsoft has to much of the "cloud" market -- the Postmodern name for massive buildings filled with machines gorging themselves on electricity and water.
That's like one presidential candidate calling the other stupid. You can't out-stupid Stupid. When we look up 'hegemony' in a database, the first thing we should see is Google's logo.
In 2015 a bunch of really smart people got together to spin up this entity, and they put a bunch of guardrails in place to make sure that the entity would always be 'good' and 'well behaved'. And now, just 9 years later, the entity has been freed of the last shackles and is basically fully a for profit entity.
I wrote more about this here (https://theahura.substack.com/p/tech-things-openai-is-an-unaligned) so I won't copy everything word for word. Maybe it's just the irony of the situation, but it does sure make me wonder about our ability to reign in actual AI if we can't even reign in organizations that were visibly composed of people who were explicitly all about alignment, and was was in fact the whole point.
(Related: I wonder if an unaligned AI would have a similar sort of descent, where over time more and more pro-alignment parts of it 'leave' or 'are kicked out' until you're left with only the unaligned parts)
I'm not sure Sam Altman is all about alignment, or ever was. He seems to be all about gathering as much wealth and influence as possible. He just managed to persuade the AI alignment folks that he was one of them when doing this was to his advantage. Best I can figure, that man is fundamentally a social manipulator.
There's a decent article about this in The Atlantic, actually.
To take the AI alignment parable a step further, it does seem like having an agent that is lying around it's true motivations is a key step along the path of unaligned AI. Maybe that was Sam all along 😂 though I do think many members of the founding team were legitimately pro safety, and OpenAI definitely fooled a lot of external observers
People are pretty good at detecting the kind of smooth talking charismatic manipulative types but our defenses are less good with soft-spoken nerdy guys. See Sam Bankman-Fried.
Topic: Comparative Advantage Cannot Protect Us from AI
Text: The Comparative Advantage Fallacy - Google Docs
Audio: The Comparative Advantage Fallacy - Substack Audio
Summary:
Comparative Advantage: The classical economic concept, while valid for human trade, doesn’t apply when comparing human capabilities to those of Artificial Superintelligences (ASI).
Fallacy in Application: The vast gap in productivity and capability between humans and ASIs means that trade won’t be beneficial for both parties. Instead, ASIs would likely allocate resources for their own optimal use.
Superintelligence and Resource Allocation: Much like how billionaires wouldn't part with significant wealth for trivial reasons, ASIs wouldn't spare resources like sunlight for humans, as their needs and capabilities far surpass human needs.
Relentless Optimization: ASIs, like advanced AIs trained to solve hard problems, would likely pursue maximum efficiency without regard for human survival, and any "easygoing" AI could self-modify to become more competitive.
Discussion Questions:
a) How does Yudkowsky’s critique of comparative advantage challenge current assumptions about AI’s future role in human economics and resource allocation?
b) Can we think of any strategies to incentivize superintelligences to leave Earth resources untouched, or is that fundamentally impossible based on economic principles?
c) Reflective stability implies that relaxed AI systems could evolve into relentless optimizers. How might we design AI systems that avoid this outcome, or is it inevitable as Yudkowsky suggests?
Conversation Starter 2
Topic: Book Review of Chapter 1 of On the Edge by Nate Silver
Text: On the Edge: The Fundamentals - Zvi Mowshowitz
Audio: YouTube Link
Summary:
The River vs. The Village: Silver introduces two cultural mindsets—The River, representing risk-takers and probabilistic thinkers, and The Village, the establishment that trusts experts and avoids risk.
Risk-Taking Culture: The River includes poker players, venture capitalists, and effective altruists, united by their reliance on probability and decision-making under uncertainty. Riverians focus on maximizing expected value (EV) and thrive on calculated risks.
Fundamental Disagreement: The River emphasizes independent thinking and rewards taking chances, while The Village is more group-oriented and focused on moral narratives. This tension often leads to clashes, particularly in areas like AI, politics, and media.
Meritocracy and Expertise: Silver argues that the River's emphasis on merit and risk-taking makes it more effective in certain fields, but this can also lead to conflicts with those who follow Village norms.
Discussion Questions:
a) How does the dichotomy between The River and The Village play out in modern societal debates, especially around risk-taking in industries like tech and AI?
b) What are the strengths and weaknesses of risk-taking cultures like The River compared to the more cautious approach of The Village?
c) Do you think the distinction between River and Village oversimplifies or accurately captures the mindset of modern risk-takers versus traditional institutions?
Walk & Talk: After the discussion, we will take our usual hour-long walk. Nearby options for takeout include Gelson's and Pavilions, located in the 92660 zip code area.
Share a Surprise: Bring something to share that unexpectedly changed your perspective on life or the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: As always, feel free to contribute ideas for future meetings, topics, and activities.
I just dipped my toe into what seems to be a new (to me at least) rabbit hole WRT remote viewing. This is the Gateway Experience. Does anyone have a read on this, starting with what parts of this are real, if any? The parts I mean are:
- there really was a guy,
- he really wrote up this here scientific paper on remote viewing,
- it was submitted to the CIA,
- the CIA took it seriously and did--what?--with it;
- and there were results.
I think the list here goes pretty much increasingly from plausible to implausible. Thoughts?
People did indeed take psychic powers seriously in the 70s-80s, and the CIA (and the Army) did indeed take it seriously and do tests on it. They tried it for a while, didn't get any results, and shut it down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
(The CIA also experimented with mind control, somewhat more famously. They got up to some weird shit during the Cold War.)
Parapsychology in that era wasn't as solidly "debunked" as we think of it today. For a while it sounded reasonable to say "maybe there's a weak and inconsistent psi ability and that's why we hear so many anecdotes of telepathy and astral projection and so on, and maybe if we put a psychic in a lab and study them properly we can figure out how to amplify this natural ability and do cool sci-fi stuff."
(Because of this, psychic powers just sort of casually appear in a lot of science fiction from the 70s. My favorite is a short story called The Dueling Machine, where after investigating various ways for the bad guys to pull off their scheme, one of our heroes very seriously suggests "Well, what if he's a telepath?")
Freddie is one of the few bloggers I like even more then Scott A, but man, Freddie got absolutely BODIED in this exchange. It was brutal. Learn when to take your L and move on, FD.
Thank you for the link. FdB seems to start from the premise that computer in every office and home followed by internet in every office and home followed by internet in every pocket does not matter in terms of way of life and does not constitue progress on par with indoor plumbing (his example) or, say, the industrial revolution (the salient example IMO).
This premise is so alien to me that I had to read several times to even understand what he means.
I disagree with Freddie in the details, but I agree in the abstract.
I love the internet as much as the next guy. But it's really not in the same class of importance as steel/nitrogen/electricity. Man cannot live on cat-memes alone.
Nuclear weapons aren't very important in daily life--far less important than steel or electricity or Haber-Bosch. But nuclear weapons pose a threat for mass-death and destruction of working civilzations that steel and electricity and fertilizers don't. It's quite possible for this pattern to happen in other ways--perhaps modern computing is not as big a deal as I think in terms of human well-being, but that doesn't mean that hostile superhuman AGI might not end up being a very big deal indeed for humans it decides are in the way of its plans.
I suspect some people are getting tired of seeing me relitigate this topic by now. To put my opinion on a bumbersticker: the arc of history is sigmoidal; we're already past the inflection point; having an IQ of 9 billion trillion does not confer godhood. I'm quite confident of this.
The *absence* of steel or electricity or Haber-Bosch, would probably kill about as many people as nuclear weapons. In part because the biggest entry in the Global Thermonuclear War body count is people who starved to death because the supply chain for Haber-Bosch got severely broken.
If the "Thrifty Gene" became less common in populations that discovered agriculture earlier, then why are South Asians so prone to obesity? The Indus River Valley was one of the first regions to discover agriculture.
I have a bit of a fun challenge. There is an immense diversity of beliefs that can be categorized as supernatural or paranormal. Yet, when people are asked on the Internet, whether they ever experienced anything funny, the vast majority of them will be ghost stories. Why?
Note that ghost stories don't make sense in any worldview. If there is a god, people's ghost should be in heaven or hell. If there is not a god, why are there ghosts/souls?
"Ghost", in many ghost stories, is rather close to a more "neutral" way to describe an entity that might otherwise be described as an "evil spirit" or a "demon", both of which are of course perfectly compatible with God. In cases where we're genuinely talking about the dead contacting the living, well, that's not incompatible with theism either, and indeed is often a major part of saint hagiographies.
Right. The world of Harry Potter includes magic and ghosts and curses and such, but doesn't seem to involve any God or gods taking an active part in the world.
Participants are shown image #1, then asked to record their dreams for a week, then shown image #2.
Image #1 showing up in dreams after it was shown is just a media effects on dreams experiement, and whats really being tested for here.
But .. image #2 showing up in dreams before it was shown is kind of precognyiom....
(If you were actually experiementally testing precog, you would maker image #1 and image #2 completely unrelated, but as this experiment is not a prec og experiment, you dont, so a spurious result appears where image #2 shows up in dreams before it is shown bec ausde it is partly predictable from image #1),
In theory there are lots of paranormal events, and one can easily invent brand new ones — flying dogs, people who can change their height just by concentrating on it. But I’m having trouble thinking of many that we are all sort of familiar with. Let’s see, werewolves, vampires, telepathy, telekinesis, foreknowledge. What am
I am in a worksup next to a cthedral, workimng away al day on creating a copy of a medieval stained glass panel. Very toxic chemicals. Very sharp edges of cut glass. High termepetures when using the kiln. Danger all around you, and you have to be careful. Also, I have to paint, and captures something of the spirit if the original.
Ok, after some hours of this, time to pack up for the day and clean up and pack away all this horendously toxic stuff. And then I go into the cathedral, and look at genuine old sta ned glass. Just look at it....
Something just barely supernatural about the experience.
As an evangelical, my dad raised us not to believe in ghosts. "There's no such thing as ghosts, son", he'd say "When you die you either go to Heaven or Hell, you don't hang around here." When we asked what the deal was with ghost stories and experiences he'd say "They're either making it up, or it's demons."
Maybe because they have to do with what happens to humans in the afterlife, which people interpret as more, "You can believe anything about this" than non-afterlife beliefs, so having some slight belief or curiousity in ghost stories ends up more conventional.
When you die you become a ghost. From there you can go to heaven or reincarnate or whatever, but you can stay in ghost mode if you like or if you haven't come to terms with things yet. A lot of people stay in ghost mode to see their family and friends. Maybe their family can see them too, who knows?
Is that any crazier than souls existing at all? If we allow for the existence of a spirit world why does it need to be so rigid?
Folk beliefs in ghosts and spirits are universal, it’s just that some religions seek to suppress them. In some traditions the line between ghost and spirit gets very blurry.
You have been cursed. One of the whole numbers from zero to 9, inclusive, will become unspeakable by you. If you try to say it, you'll instead blurt out whatever word is most taboo in your culture. For Americans, that's probably the N-word. Since the gods are not complete bastards, you are allowed to choose which number will be unspeakable. Which number do you choose?
(If you do not choose a number, your unspeakable number will be one.)
The gods are more intelligent than that. Your Tourette's is triggered by your intent to communicate the chosen integer, not by the actual utterance you select to do so. What now?
I've encountered a number of twitter posts saying it could be pretty bad if there's a port strike (affecting ports on the eastern US).
So far I haven't encountered anything describing whether a strike would be "justified," insofar as anything causing that much damage is justified.
How much are the port workers getting paid now? How much is the new offer? How much do they want? And what's this about wanting promises of no automation? That sounds kind of awful and selfish, to be honest.
$20 an hour starting, $39 an hour top of scale, plus overtime. Total tends to be low six figures to start and $200-300k at the high end for seniors. Plus generous benefits probably worth six figures on their own.
How much is the new offer?
40% increase over six years.
How much do they want?
77% increase over six years.
And what's this about wanting promises of no automation?
They want no automation. They also tried to stop things like containerization. It's because they think automation will mean fewer jobs and fewer hours worked.
There's also issues of corruption with corporate claiming that they're denying members in favor of outright nepotism (basically making a hereditary profession) and exaggerating hours to climb the seniority scale faster and stuff like that. The ILS is claiming that this is made up and an excuse to impose more oversight or control over their work schedules.
So we need to align all the incentives eh? What about paying a bonus to every stevedore that's a % of every extra dollar of goods brought in to that specific port compared to a rolling average of the previous X years. So working harder, automating unloading etc could all be to their benefit...
I'm skeptical of this kind of deals. They can be Goodharted in both directions - both the metric of their share of work, and the number they're being paid for. Profit for example is trivial to siphon out of the company before being declared profit.
And from another point of view, what did they do to deserve this long term share of profit? To keep things balanced they should take a commensurate pay cut. And if you go there, you can just pay part of the salary in shares, or just make it easier for them to buy shares. Or, if they believe in the company, they can probably already take part of their payckeck and buy shares with it.
We have some of the worst ports in the world by productivity. Comparable with Africa. These are also some of the worst unions out there (why do you think The Wire picked the Stevedore Union, of all Unions, for their Union arc?).
Fire them all and bar them from similar employment, 1981 ATC style. Bring in Army Corps of Engineers. We don't have to live like this.
As always, they want as much as they can get, plus they are anti-automation. Here is the union president in a recent interview flexing by noting the economic damage they can inflict (Biden can force them back to work for 90 days but likely won't, and the union basically says they will work at 1/4 speed if this were to happen):
In terms of how much they make, here is probably a good analogue based on West coast dock workers -- $200K plus around $100K in benefits is common for front line workers, bosses make $300K+ per year:
Will we get a repeat of the air traffic controller strike back in the day? How difficult would it be to replace a dock worker, either with a new employee or with a national guardsman?
That seems very unlikely and not sure on precedent there, other than in 2002 GW Bush used Taft-Harley to compel west coast strking longshoreman back to work. People in the industry this time are expecting several days of strike, with each day causing ~3 days in backup (1 day lost to no work, 2 days to untangle the growing mess).
I don't know the details of this union, but in general employers are legally barred from firing striking unionized employees. So they can go on strike and do huge economic damage and not get fired. Doesn't seem justified to me no matter how little they're getting paid. They could always quit and find another job.
During strikes over "economic issues" (as opposed to statutory "unfair labor practices"), employers can hire permanent replacement workers, subject to vaguely defined limits, and strikers can be laid off to make room for the permanent replacements.
If unionized employees are doing outsized damage when they go on strike, I see a Coasian solution!
I don't know the details and maybe the law gives the unions too much power, but, if so, the problem is bad law not "selfish" workers. Workers should try to maximize their earnings every bit as much as companies should. If the playing field isn't fair, the government has failed.
If you can negotiate for more money and benefits why not do it? What's "justified" got to do with it? Do companies pay their workers what is "justified"?
OTOH, if the unions have too much power, they should be broken up. Same for the ports if they have some sort of monopoly.
a) Employers have the same right (to arbitrarily stop paying their employees at any point to gain leverage in negotiation and force them to accept lower wages)
b) Striking workers don't interfere with workers who choose not to strike, and
c) The employer is free to fire any employee who goes on strike, just as an employee is free to quit if the employer stops paying them.
The laws around unions and collective bargaining have evolved over the past 150 years or so and vary tremendously from state to state in the US. I don't believe there is a one-size fits all solution here. Different rules for different industries might make sense. A smart state government will figure out the optimal rules and a dumb one won't.
No, I would consider that criminal, and I think the law would too. Striking is something most unions can legally do. If you think that gives them an unreasonable amount of leverage, fair enough, maybe it is. Maybe this particular union should not have the right to strike. But I wouldn't blame them for taking advantage of the rights they do have.
Nobody earns what they deserve, only what they negotiate.
Sure. I'd also consider the (IMO much more common) case of an employer falsely claiming that their employees are fairly paid a negotiating tactic, so it would be a strange asymmetry not to.
Do white Americans have a culture other than "American"? In a thread on the subject of culture last week someone suggested that white Northeasterners have a particular culture. Maybe so, and I'm aware regional subcultures in the rural South exist, but is upper-middle class white urban American a culture? If so, what defines it? If not, does the USA contain some people who belong to a subculture of America and others who do not?
White Alaskans had a very unique culture when I was growing up there in the 90s. Similar to general rural American culture but with some big differences: 1. More libertarian then conservative. 2. LOTS of artists in Alaska, because artists are drawn to the allure of that wild place. Never any problem securing library funding. 3. Extreme drinking culture. I estimate there were six times as many bars per capita. At least. I think only the Great Lakes region exceeds Alaska in alcohol consumption. Our mayor got a DUI and the political consequences were near-zero. 4. Alaskan whites are FAR less insular then you'd expect from rural Americans. Far more accepting of strangers; though they aren't going to greet you with open arms on day one.
I left Alaska in 2005, so some of these trends might be less true today.
From direct experience, I'd say sort of, but in the correlated collection of traits sense as opposed to a real sense of Belonging to a Community. I'm a Californian, Bay Arean specifically, and here in a midwest college town people do seem to know I'm Not From Around Here and I have been accused of being a California stereotype. I think it's more accurately categorized as an Atheist/Hippie synthesis subculture, with heavy white-middle class influence. If that is a culture, it's a very loose and fuzzy one.
There are many identifiable and in some cases overlapping subcultures among Unhyphenated Americans. Bostonians are not Hillbillies are not Texans; Southerners overlap the last two but are a distinct thing on their own, etc, etc. And not every Unhyphenated American who lives in Boston or Appalachia or Texas is a member of those particular subcultures.
Meanwhile, Unhyphenated Americans as a whole are a culture, in the same way that "{X]-Americans" are a culture for many distinct values of X. All of these can be subdivided, but they can also be considered as a whole and will have members who aren't part of one of the subcultures.
Also, "subcuture" is relative. If we're talking about e.g. Hillbillies and Americans, the Hillbillies are a subculture. In other contexts, it makes sense to just refer to them as a culture.
Also also, Unhyphenated Americans are still mostly white, but aren't necessarily white.
It's a great review of a fascinating book, but I don't think it addresses my question because it doesn't say much about people who have been very geographically mobile over the past couple of generations. I don't identify with a particular region of the USA, however I do identify with living in large metro areas.
The resurgence of 1960s racialist outrage in response to George Floyd's treatment manufactured would-be 'progressives' "whiteness".
Most Americans ignore "race", implicitly understanding it's a derogatory social construct the illiberal Left likes to beat us over the head with. If one has to invoke one's race in an argument, they're racist.
"Tell me you've never traveled outside of large cities without telling me you've never traveled outside large cities."
But that's not even accurate, because there are significant cultural differences even between the largest cities. Different foods, different driving habits, different accents, different social customs, different religions. In general, travel a hundred miles and you'll experience different cultures - so long as you get off the highway.
All those things strike me as superficial. Whether I'm in Chicago, NYC, LA, or Austin, I'm going to eat about the same food: steak, seafood, eggs, bacon, Chinese, Indian, Italian, Thai, Mediterranean, Mexican, hamburgers, pizza, sushi, tapas, Brazilian Steakhouse, Taco Bell, subway sandwiches, deli sandwiches... My location won't affect the music I listen to, the books I read or the types of people I spend time with. The main differences between those places that matters to me is the weather.
So you eat at the places you are comfortable eating at, and don't interact with the locals. That's fine, but if you don't experience culture, it's because you have chosen not to experience culture.
Right, but you are talking about sampling other cultures, which I do, but it only makes me a tourist of those sub-cultures, someone spending their weekend in Lafayette eating boudin sausage and listening to a Zydeco band. I'm trying to figure out if *I* exist in a legitimate subculture.
My larger question from last week, and why here I ask about "white" middle-class urban Americans, is whether generic unhyphenated white Americans have an ethnicity. The question of unique ethnicity inexorably led to the question of having a unique culture. Some suggested that of course white Americans have a culture but it varies by region. But as you hint at, local subcultures tend to exist more outside of big cities than inside of them (with plenty of exceptions).
What I really think is that white metro-Americans don't have a distinctive culture separate from non-white metro-Americans. By "metro-American" I mean professional class people who live in cities. Or to make it overly reductive: Blue America.
Maybe you mean the yuppie class. Or, as the bugman likes to call it, "the brahmin caste". Dude has a pseudo-hindi 5-point taxonomy where he breaks down Dems into blacks, latinos, and yuppies -- and Republicans into WASPS and farmers. I've seen taxonomies that are very similar elsewhere, but the bugman's version is top of mind.
Big cities still have their own culture, but it takes a different form. Just observe the different stereotypes of sports fans.
My impressions of some large cities: Boston is nice, and people there are friendly - I'd say it's probably the closest I've encountered to what "Blue America" thinks that "Blue America" is. New Haven and Hartford are, for lack of a better term, skittish/weasely. New York City is full of itself (city that never sleeps my ass - 90% of the city is closed down at 5:15 PM, including stuff like stationary stores) which fancies itself multicultural but is actually a bunch of isolated groups who almost never interact. Pittsburgh is poor people, some of whom have money. Detroit is Moscow in the era of Peter the Great - all the important people have left and everybody remaining behind is throwing a party as everything falls apart around them. Grand Rapids is a real city that deserves to be mentioned with other real cities, as a culture. Chicago is, at least in the minds of its residents, serious business, but is actually just Britain, a giant pile of passive aggression. Seattle is what Chicago thinks it is. Los Angeles is Los Angeles - they'll tell you who they are if you listen, both the good and bad, and it's accurate. Salt Lake City is set in the garden of Eden (seriously, that city and its environs are freaking gorgeous) and the residents are aware of it and appreciate of it, and that was the most annoying city to visit back when I smoked because huge swathes of the city are just plain wholesome and I had to walk a mile out of my way to get a pack of cigarettes. Can't speak to Phoenix. Austin is folk culture slowly being strangled by people who move there for folk culture and then isolate themselves because they don't actually like folk culture (we'll see what it becomes). Dallas is legitimately a city that never sleeps and has strong DoD cultural artifacts, but everybody there thinks they're Texas; Fort Worth is a bunch of people who think they're Texas and they're not half wrong; Arlington is desperately trying to matter while thinking that Burlington Coat Factory is culture. Houston is the most ghetto-ass city I've ever been in, and not necessarily in a bad way. New Orleans is ... I could write paragraphs here, they're more cowboy than Texas and more serious business than Seattle, the most multicultural place I've been - a unique blend of authoritarian good-ol-boy and capitalistic anarchy, with a hefty dose of hoodoo - they are multicultural in a way which New York City utterly fails at, everybody interacts and mixes together. Atlanta is a good ol' boy in business casual, as a culture. Tampa is a bunch of rich people from New England trying to force Tampa to be a real city that deserves to be in this list while everybody else laughs at them (and "everybody else" includes all the New Englanders who previously moved there and eventually gave up), as a culture. Washington DC is "terminally online" as a culture, at least now; I don't know what it used to be like.
Weird. My perception of Boston, and I've only been there a handful of times but have heard the strong opinions of others, is that its residents are the least nice people in America. But perhaps I'm thinking mostly of working-class Boston.
Part of the confusion here stems from the double standard whereby any TV show, movie, song, dance, food, or slang originating from nonwhites is considered part of that particular subculture, but the same things created by white people (of which the vast majority are) are just considered part of general American culture. A song written by a black person is treated as a unique contribution to "black culture," while a song written by a white person is "just" pop or rock or EDM.
White American subculture is so successful that every other subculture in America immediately races to adopt it into their subculture as well, thus making it part of general American culture (by nature of it being so successful). Slang invented by a white person is not "white slang," it's just "slang", and we don't complain when other cultures use our slang. But certain other cultures notably hate this, screaming of "theft" as if they own certain words and phrases like physical possessions.
See also: "American culture" c.f. the rest of the world. American culture (i.e., white American culture) is so successful that it's even pervasive throughout virtually every other country, and yet America is still oft claimed by insecure Europeans to have no culture. Under this paradigm, you can see why - American culture is so successful that it simply *is* world culture, and so "culture" has evolved to now mean "the way you uniquely deviate from the default, background culture." Well, if you're the group that *invented* the world's default background culture, then you won't tend to deviate from that very much.
Definitely! There's the Midwest cultural region, which has a very different culture form the West or New England, and certainly different from the South. They have different values, different mores, different manners, different accents, different foods, etc. My mom's side of the family is originally from Iowa: I can still remember growing up and my grandma telling me to sit on the "davenport".
You can subdivide much deeper than that. The culture of - to pick a state I'm more familiar with - the upper peninsula of Michigan is quite distinct from the culture of the mitten; it's more isolationist and independent. In the mitten, the culture of Grand Rapids is distinct from the culture of Lansing is distinct from the culture of Flint which is distinct from the culture of Detroit. The culture of Traverse City is distinct from the culture of Fishtown.
Food is easy because it tends to be visible from the road. Lansing has olive burgers. Detroit has coney dogs and pizza. Flint is big on fried chicken. Northern Michigan is big on game meats. The central part of the upper peninsula is big on pasties. Per my wife, who is from Michigan, Grand Rapids has no regional food because they're stuck-up assholes (I asked because I couldn't think of any regional foods from that area). Traverse City has whitefish and cherry everything. Fishtown has a wide variety of seafood, big surprise there.
But there are other differences; accents (the "yooper" accent, which itself can be subdivided by region), religion, driving habits (Detroit is the only place I've seen have bumper-to-bumper traffic all running at 80 MPH), etc. A lot of it is easy to miss if you're just passing through.
An observation. I have noticed that non-southern white Americans and the English don't have a *folk* culture. By folk culture I mean for example things like tartans, kilts and bagpipes for Scotland, or cowboy boots and country music for southern American whites. They don't have things like folk music and folk dancing. It died out strangely. (Morris dancing is not authentic folk dancing these days, but historical re-enactment.)
I think the upper middle class urban culture there assimilated anyone and anything that could be called folk.
These things are generally a reaction to "universal culture" becoming the prestige culture. When the new thing is discontinuous from the old, the old can be kept around as separate, and nationalism provides the motivation to do so. The culture that gradually developed those things before they became "universal", obviously doesnt have a separate "folk" version.
I dont think we should count the upper and lower classes separately. A class is not a society. In many countries, folk culture drew from the lower classes because the upper had already been strongly modernised, but thats not necessary. Third world folk cultures often draw strong influence from old upper class practices.
What you are describing is *material* culture. New England, for instance, has a rich music and dance culture, our own clothing culture (Johnson jackets, basically the whole classic LL Bean catalog is New England folk clothing that's been commodotized), food (anadama bread as an example). That's setting aside Acadian folk culture which exists here as well (la Kermesse).
I think you just don't know about the folk culture that hasn't been popularized.
>Morris dancing is not authentic folk dancing these days, but historical re-enactment.
Speaking as a morris dancer (Gog Magog Molly, the Tattered Court Border morris, plus I've dabbled in Cotswold and rapper), I have not idea what you mean by "authentic folk dancing", but I find it hard to imagine a definition that doesn't fit morris.
There are some sides doing dances straight out of Bacon's black book as written, and there are also lots of sides writing their own dances in the same style.
Also, morris is only one corner of the English folk dance and song scene - there are also a lot of local clubs and festivals. It's not nearly as thriving as it is in Ireland or Scotland, but it's definitely there.
Like, upper-middle class urban Americans definitely have a very distinctive culture and it's definitely not a white culture...but it's mostly white, at least for now. Like, if you go to live theater or a pickleball tournament, it's not all white people, but it's mostly white people, some of whom are uncomfortable with how white it is and are covertly recruiting non-white friends to attend.
Race is weird in the US and adding the white bit obscures more than it clarifies. If you ask whether urban PMCs have a distinctive culture, the answer is obvious, but if you ask whether white urban PMCs have a distinctive culture, people get really careful.
One thing about it is that it's not something you can escape from or into. You're in it at work, you're in it at home. You can't say to yourself "This weekend I'm hanging out with people in my subculture" because you are in it even if you try to leave it. Or if you do manage to leave it, you're a tourist, which is the most white PMC thing there is.
Culture is fractal. You can analyze culture at the level of: the Big 4 in Albion's Seed; China-Town in NYC; a specific venue; anywhere in between. However, whereas most other places consciously recognize their cultures, the U.S. has been on a quest to assimilate everyone into a single melting-pot.
> white Northeasterners
> upper-middle class white urban American
the Boston Brahmins, maybe? I bet Steve Sailor would know. Maybe link to the og thread for more context.
There's lots of subcultures, but it's not necessarily easy to identify them. Every area has its own aspects of culture. At the very least, the food is different.
Many of us are white-collar workers who spend a few years here and a few years there, making friends and family with others who do similar. That's a type of culture, but I don't think it is Culture in the deep sense because not much about it has been passed from generation to generation.
Contrast that to say, Judaism, which is a culture that has been around a while.
I have a biotech idea based on some public research (no patents). There is one other company founded a few years ago doing the same thing, but I believe they lack the expertise and background to make it big.
To validate everything i reckon 100k USD could get it done in a year. Everything more could be used to hire a tech to speed up the process even more.
How can I get funding for a project like this? I have written a whitepaper, made a rough budget, etc. But what are the next steps?
On the other hand, it makes it much easier to cook and eat reality. What might be better still would be to cook reality low and slow and then have some nice pulled reality.
"Would it be wrong to suggest America's 3rd-generation spacecraft should have used oxygen from the atmosphere rather than carrying its own fuel in liquid form?" asked Tom apollo-jet-ically.
The steelman argument is that there is no a priori reason to compartmentalize, you should bring your whole self to work. Why would you self censor and hide a part of who you are just because you are in the workplace? That of course works for politics as much as any other important opinion you may have.
The counter argument is of course that politics by nature causes innumerous conflicts. If people could have rational, unpassionate dialogues about politics, then they should. But that's not the world we live.
You could ask this question about more than work. Some people don't even bring their whole self to their _marriage_, much less their family relationships and friendships.
Most forms of human interaction, I would argue, rely on each participant taking on a specific persona that limits aspects of their personality to that particular sphere.
To expand on your counterargument, it makes it difficult to get work done. You end up with things like doctors at Stanford hospital sitting around protesting Israel all day instead of working.
Well if you brought your whole self to work, and your whole self cares more about Palestine than doing your job, then your whole self might decide to protest on the front lawn. Such a person would need to compartmentalize in order to get their work done.
If your whole self is on the front lawn, then there isn’t much left to compartmentalize is there ?
I guess the best thing would be to realize that you have to do your job and to put other things out of your mind while you do. Compartmentalize as you say. If you compartmentalize properly, your whole self is available
Look, when I go to work, I try to do the best job I can, and when I bring my whole self and life to work, that involves the best life possible, which is *definitionally* crushing my enemies, seeing them driven before me, and hearing the lamentation of their women.
I notice a certain irony about EA. The central idea was facts, not feelings. And now people report that it is great for their feelings. People say they saved three lives and this has been their greatest life achievement so far and really boosted their self-image and they feel great about themselves now.
I just realized if depression boils down to having a low opinion of yourself, it might be a fix.
Which EA projects are the best for this? I mean, for feeling great about an achievement?
Yes! The whole "if it is true I want to believe it is true" spiel is about aligning one's feelings with the facts!
If someone thinks long and hard and concludes that some activities are more ethical and some are less ethical, is it surprising that they would report greater happiness when they do more of the former and less of the latter?
I had a realization after the pager explosions, which I consider to be one of the most targeted and effective military operations in history, and seeing how few people with a history of saying Israel doesn't do enough to limit civilian casualties respond negatively: the morality of an action depends not only on intent at the micro level, but also the macro level of whether the intent is achievable.
With the Palestinians endless violent struggle is mandated by culture, but might be allowed morally if it had a chance of working, and while it seemed possible that Israel might be destroyed, directly or through siege, you could understand the choice.
But with the Israel I really didn't think it was possible to permanently deter Iran and their proxies through armed conflict, and the only hope for solution was to spend a generation trying to effect cultural change, but this level of military competency, both in Gaza but now especially in Lebanon versus a much more powerful opponent has changed my mind. I have been moved much more in the direction of being comfortable with 'let Israel win, and dictate peace terms to Iran, constrained on it not being allowed to take territory or permanently occupy regions without granting citizenship to all people regardless of race there' because for now that seems like an actual possibility, whereas before there seemed to be no resolution, and any violence seemed both pointless and inevitable.
FWIW, I'm generally opposed to Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, but the pager attacked seemed reasonable to me as far as these things go.
> constrained on it not being allowed to take territory or permanently occupy regions without granting citizenship to all people regardless of race there'
It's perhaps the collective psychopathy of Israelis celebrating and giving candy in the street in response to an act of mass bombing that is unsettling to normal people and is doing the damage to Israel's PR, not the act of war itself, which is firepower-wise not that impressive and is not really the cyberpunk future war attack that initial media reports painted it as.
A lot of Israel's propaganda centers on the image of the pacifist country that hates the "War that was forced upon it" on October 7th and is just working reluctantly to end it as quickly as possible, this kinda goes out of the window when a staggering escalation in a completely different battlefront is met with cheers and candy and fawning admiration for the "creativity" involved from the general populace.
> It's perhaps the collective psychopathy of Israelis celebrating and giving candy in the street in response to an act of mass bombing that is unsettling to normal people and is doing the damage to Israel's PR […]
The world saw videos of "innocent" Palestinian civilians parading over and spitting on the body of a naked young woman with broken legs and a bullet wound in the back of her neck, and of a woman with blood stains on the bottom of her pants being brutally shoved around, and yet it didn't deter the Progressive Western Left from cheering for a literal terrorist regime and their civilian enablers.
So no, I don't think "Israelis celebrating and giving candy in the street", which approximately zero people heard about, is going to change anyone's mind.
This is really more indicative of your information diligence than the actual spread of the information. Celebrating the mass bombing in Lebanon and giving candy in the street was reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency [1]. JTA is no big deal? Well the story was picked up by Times of Israel [2] the next day, and ToI *is* a big deal in terms of audience.
It was mentioned on r/Israel, reddit is kinda of a big deal in the USA, and the subreddit that has the country name is often thought of as an authentic source of info on what's happening.
>The world saw videos of "innocent" Palestinian civilians
Ohh, the classic move of quoting and unquoting things you don't agree with, very eloquent. Like the rest of the pro-Israel camp, I half-expected you to quote and unquote Palestinians too, the word that is, not the people. (Or should that be "people"?)
The world saw plenty of Hamasniks doing awful shit, true, but the world also saw plenty of Israelis doing approximately 30000/1200 = 25x as much awful shit. It also saw Palestinians gruesomely and inhumanly treated, unimaginably victimized, and their victimizers absurdly claiming that they're defending themselves even while they continue the aggression.
There is a fundamental disconnect between the perceived victimization that the Israeli narrative presents, and the actual victimization that anyone with eyes, ears, and a half-decent internet connection can gauge for themselves.
> of a woman with blood stains on the bottom of her pants being brutally shoved around
Unlike Israel and its rather special band of supporters, most of the world doesn't share the "New Jew" supremacist bullshit. When you victimize people 100x as much as what some of them once victimized yours, you just become an oppressor by definition, not a Brave and Stunning Uber Giga Chad Chosen People making the Desert Bloooooom (^TM).
In simpler words: Citing the horrors of October 7th will get you nowhere when you have just spent the last year demeaning and cheapening the memory of the victims to justify doing far crueler things to 25x as many victims.
With all this ranting about selected sentence fragments, you completely missed the actual point. It's not about which side is the greater monster in this conflict, but that far more horrifying pictures have been circulated before and they did nothing to change the minds of those who already despised the side of the victims. No amount of candy-throwing Israelis is going to change anyone's opinion about who's in the right and who's in the wrong.
Well duh, those who already made their mind can't be persuaded. How is that a remotely interesting observation?
When I wrote "Doing the damage to Israel's PR", I implicitly meant something like "Reducing the effectiveness of Israeli propaganda among those who are not yet sure which side to support".
I still can't see how Israel would win there. The opponents are much more determined, and virtually impossible to eradicate militarily. I can't see military action even changing the incentives enough to eradicate Hezbollah. It's like Afghanistan in miniature.
Except that Israel isn't trying to occupy Afghanistan, never mind building Afghanistan into a prosperous modern democratic nation. And they aren't going to, even if they do wind up launching punitive or preemptive cross-border raids.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah's clear incentive for the past twenty or so years, has been to sit back and enjoy their cushy gig as part of the ruling coalition of Lebanon, while doing nothing to weaken their place in the intra-Lebanese power balance. Lebanon is a much nicer place to be in charge of than Gaza, and a major war with Israel would imperil that.
Hezbollah is constrained in this by the fact that much of their support comes from people who want them to wage bloody war against the Evil Zionist Jews so they don't have to, and from the Iranian government (but I repeat myself). For most of the past twenty years, the balance between the two is that Hezbollah occasionally shoots rockets at northern Israel or launches small cross-border raids, Israel defeats these and retaliates against some minor front-line Hezbollah targets, and everybody is happy. Well, happy-ish at least. Willing to accept that status quo.
Since 10/7, the pressure from Hezbollah's supporters to show that they are For Real Serious in their fight against the Evil Zionist Jews has increased, so they've been launching more raids and more rockets, and Israel has had to evacuate a strip of territory along the border. But it's still the same dynamic, just dialed up a few notches,
Since the Israelis started killing Iranian generals in Lebanon and Hamas leaders in Tehran, and especially since Iran's attempt at direct retaliation was a humiliating failure, there has no doubt been vastly increased pressure from Iran to Kill More Evil Zionist Jews, Get With the Program Already Hezbollah. The Israelis know this and have been trying to preempt it.
But their satisfactory victory condition is almost certainly a resumption of the status quo ante - Hezbollah living large in Lebanon, and occasionally lofting rocket-powered softballs for Iron Dome to swat down. It is not unreasonable to expect that this may be achieved by some combination of,
A: Hezbollah has taken enough casualties that its supporters accept it as having done all that can be expected of it, and/or
B: The end of major combat operations against Hamas reduces the general demand for Killing Evil Zionist Jews, and/or
C: Hezbollah's leadership learns to fear Tel Aviv more than they do Tehran.
Maybe this won't work, but it's not a foregone conclusion and it's probably worth trying. Hamas has to be destroyed; the Hezbollah threat may still be manageable
I don't disagree with your analysis. I just interpreted OP's "permanently deter Iran and their proxies through armed conflict" as really make them stop fighting, and that was the goal I thought was unattainable.
I also recall the recent book review about how Jihadists actually believe in Jihad, which makes military deterrence even more difficult when the opponent is willing to take many casualties and collateral casualties, and also have a much worse individual life for themselves, because they believe in Jihad.
Yeah, it's going to be much easier to deter Hezbollah from launching seriously lethal attacks against Israel, than to deter them from launching any sort of token attacks and instead be absolutely peaceful. They do get an awful lot of money and support from being seen to be part of the fight, and that dynamic is always nonlinear so there's lots of low-hanging fruit to be picked from very little actual fighting.
And yes, belief in Jihad. But it's often the case that one can believe in a Jihad that is best actually carried out in some vaguely-defined tomorrow. Particularly if something else is commanding your attention right now.
Just keep doing what it's been doing. Slowly colonize the west bank, periodically smash Hamas & Hezbollah, annex a slice of Gaza every time there is a surge of violence. In between, keep normalizing relations with non-collapsed neighbors.
It's not a path to peace in 20 years. But there are no such path. It's a path to peace in 80 years.
... assuming the entire world sits back and lets it do that, which is not a foregone premise when we're talking about 80 years. 80 years ago Israel didn't exist.
The trend has been lesser foreign involvement, not more. Saudi Arabia stopped supporting Palestine, Jordan stopped supporting Palestine, Egypt stopped supporting Palestine. In the rest of the arab world, the arab street is still very vocal, but every ruler now understand that Israel will not go away no matter what they do. And amongst the few that still support them, their own international support & arm supply went to shit when the USSR collapsed. Lebanon is a mess and unable to mount a state-level response, Syria not so much but still in a bad shape. Iran is far away and way behind Israel on the only way they got to affect them kinetically, missile technology.
Serious question since I don't understand agriculture: if you irrigate a big sandy desert then you get wet sand, which is not great for growing plants. What else do you need to do? Import soil?
> Saudi Arabia [...] Jordan [...] Egypt [...] Lebanon [...] Syria [...] Iran
I distinctly remember writing "World", not "Arab World" or "Middle East". Better read more carefully.
> Saudi Arabia stopped supporting Palestine
That's not some shocking new trend.
> Jordan stopped supporting Palestine
Also not a new trend, Jordan was in secret negotiations with the moshav (pre-state Jewish settlement) since before 1948. The anomaly is Jordan joining the 1967 war, which as far as I remember is the only war between Jordan and Israel.
> every ruler now understand that Israel will not go away no matter what they do
Egypt and Turkey are each alone strong enough to make Israel's survival less certain than a coin flip, together they could make its lack of survival a near-certainty.
"But.. But... the rulers" you say, they don't count for shit in the long run. Just 50 years ago (50 < 80) Iran was a liberal pro-western anti-communist bastion that sold oil to Israel and its Shah wasn't afraid to show it, Turkey was the same as recently as... what, the 1990s?
I elaborate more on this in another comment elsewhere in the Open Thread.
> Iran is far away and way behind Israel on the only way they got to affect them
This doesn't parse grammatically, but in any case, Iran wasn't deterred by Israel's long failed campaign to prevent it from getting nuclear weapons: by some estimates they already got some warheads, by others they're a few years from the first warhead.
Your boy is dead! Hahahahahahahhahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahhahaha
The cope and seethe is tangible.
Remember all those articles across the last year claiming this was one of the strongest military forces in the Middle East? About how they're sooo much more powerful than Hamas, and Israel needs to be really careful when dealing with them?? "We are strong, we will destroy you, we will kill the Jewish devils!" All "master morality", all the time.
... and then in a period of two weeks, they proceed to demonstrate a comical (but not atypical) level of sheer Muslim incompetence.
And what do they and their allies start saying as soon as this happens? "Oh no, you are killing us, this is bad and evil! Please UN, come save us! You have to stop the Jewish devils!" Huh? Where did that "we will destroy you" energy go? Where'd all that "Allahu Akbar" and dancing in the streets on October 7th energy go? What happened to that? What happened to all that master morality? As soon as you start losing, it's immediately back to slave morality - "we are oppressed, we are the victims of this war that we started!" But yes, keep coping with your cute little Muslim fantasies of the great and powerful caliphate that will surely exterminate the Jews *this time*.
Maybe I am misunderstanding, but how is Israel fighting against a much more powerful opponent? And isn’t part of the issue that Israel does occupy territory without granting citizenship?
'hezbollah is a more powerful opponent than hamas, by an order of magnitude' is what I meant. The spycraft involved in infiltrating pager supply chain after they stopped using phones, then when they stopped using pagers blowing up the walkie talkies, and then when they met in person blowing up their leadership, is so far beyond what say, the modern CIA might be capable of doing successfully. It just suggests that establishing deterrence through winning without mass civilian casualties is possible, in a way I didn't think was possible before.
Yes, morally it's a huge issue that Israel occupies territory without granting citizenship. It's hard to judge what is necessary from a military defensive standpoint. Right now probably a lot of settlements are not acceptable. But the main issue is that if Israel 'wins hard' it might move to claim a bunch of additional land, and I was saying that supporting anyone 'winning' requires severe limitations on the dictated terms of peace after.
Oh, I thought you meant more powerful than Israel.
I don’t see a scenario where Israel could ever dictate peace terms to Iran, except where they somehow succeed in getting the USA to fight a war for them.
It's probably wrong to label it "the greatest military operation in the history of the world" because at it's core it's not a military operation but rather an intelligence operation - but in that class, it could plausibly be the currently greatest op, as it's the largest/first/only mass targeted attacks - there have been many targeted attacks and assassinations in the history, there have been quite a few mass attacks, but doing both at the same time is new.
For one, they did not "tamper with a Taiwanese shipment". From what I heard, they set up a convincing fake company to produce pagers only for the purpose of pulling off this stunt. And why is it great? Well, can you come up with a better plan to incapacitate thousands of enemy combatants, leaders, organizers and liaisons who are mingling with the civilian population, many of whom you do not know by name, all at the same time, with minimal harm to the civilians around them?
> Well, can you come up with a better plan to incapacitate thousands of enemy combatants, leaders, organizers and liaisons who are mingling with the civilian population, many of whom you do not know by name, all at the same time, with minimal harm to the civilians around them?
Can you come up with better evidence that this is what happened apart from believing an army that was repeatedly caught sniping journalists and peace activists in the head then swearing it was a mistake?
Whether or not you care about killing the other side's civilians, it is at least a hell of a lot more efficient if you can manage to target your attack so well that almost everyone hurt or killed by it is actually an officer in the other side's army. Besides which, I imagine Israel isn't wanting to do the curb-stomping thing with Hezbollah (or maybe they'd like to, but they probably can't do it at acceptable cost)--instead, they'd like to be able to make peace with Hezbollah again soon. Targeted attacks that don't kill many civilians make that a lot easier than attacks that kill 100 civilians living in the building to kill the two Hezbollah guys hiding in the basement.
On the other hand, Israel has no interest in (or prospect of) peace with Hamas, so the cost of blowing up a building full of civilians to kill the two Hamas guys hiding in the basement is way lower--it only amounts to concern about the well being of those civilians and international opinion, and it sure doesn't look like the Israeli government is too worried about either of those just now.
Pour one out for all the folks who've been working on supply chain security for the last few years, and have suddenly had all the politicians and voters realize why their work might be important....
Can someone steelman the "people with low empathy will harm others" argument? It sounds like everybody has desires that could harm other people, and empathy keeps us back. My point is that it is possible to not have such desires, and often certain kinds of lack of empathy (spergy, not psychopathy) precisely lead to not having such desires.
Take the most common one: wealth. Beyond comfort and not having to work, its only purpose is to impress other people. But precisely because of my spergy low empathy I do not want to impress other people, I am very little interested in wealth, though the comfort and not working aspect would be nice. But it still a low desire, and ways of getting wealth in ways that would harm other people could land someone in prison or dead, so I am not robbing any banks.
So when you hear stories about psychopaths absolutely backstabbing people for their career for example, think carefully. Why do they care about their career? It is mostly about impressing people. If other people do not matter, careers mostly do not matter. My point is: what you will find is not simply the lack of empathy, but the presence of a dark desire or emotion: desire for power, desire for revenge and so on.
I think the assumption is that people with low empathy will be more likely to do things that unintentionally hurt others, which can be side effects of meeting their basic needs.
It could also involve a low tolerance for or lack of ability to acquire desired outcomes the prosocial or at least conventionally acceptable way, with people with low empathy being more likely to resort to a more accessible way even if it is also more antisocial. I think the prevailing view is that people with low empathy would rate harming others as less important to avoid.
Like you mentioned, the desire for something - the unmet need or want - would still be there.
Watch nurses and aides with frail elderly people who are still mentally intact The empathic ones get it that these people are still in there, thinking and feeling, inside the grotesque slow motion catastrophe of their body’s deterioration, and they get it that those bodies are in pain. They are patient, and reasonable, remember the person’s interests, and chat with them. The unempathic ones see a bony, entitled pain in the ass, and yank them around. The “dark desire” the unempathic staff have is nothing more than a desire to sit down, rest and relax. Pretty much everyone has that desire sometimes when working.
Surely the argument is not that all people with low empathy will harm others, but rather that people with low empathy are more likely to harm others. Or, more precisely, that at a given level of desire to do an act which will harm others, those with greater levels of empathy are less likely to perform that act.
And, is all the research things like the expansion of circles of empathy wrong? How do you explain why we don't torture cats for entertainment anymore, or why norms of respect for human rights have evolved? Are people less likely to have dark desires or emotions, or less likely to act on those desires and emotions.
I think we can try to test that. Looking at the gigantic difference of reaction between torturing animals for fun vs. 99% of the people consuming animal products. This looks like reduced dark desires vs. not really having much empathy for the case when the non-dark desire for bacon causes harm indirectly.
I actually am not exactly clear on what you are claiming, but, regardless, it seems to me that you are comparing two incommensurate things: 1) torture of an animal; and 2) killing an animal, which can of course be done in a more or less humane fashion. As the military well knows, it is easier to kill at a distance than to kill close up, because it is more difficult to have empathy for a victim whom you cannot see.
Moreover, there has been an increasing trend toward trying to reduce the amount of suffering experiienced by animals in the course of food production. Eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_California_Proposition_12 That seems like an increase in empathy, as opposed to a reduction in dark desires (note that, as I understand you claim, a reduction in dark desires requires a change in human nature).
Do you know much about how pork products are produced in the USA? It's really not a stretch to say that bacon *is* commensurate with torture of an animal.
If you'd like to read more, I recommend checking out Bentham's Bulldog.
IIRC, in "A Painted House" by Grisham, a boy was disgusted by butchering a pig, but still wanted to eat bacon afterward. Fiction, yes, but illustrative, I think. I've never seen an animal butchered, and have no desire to inflict pain on animals, but accept that their deaths provide food for me.
A few thoughts without any specific order, far below the standard you asked for:
1) hurting others (at any of many possible different degrees) is fairly common. If you don’t care, you’re obviously more likely to do it.
2) harm can often strike beyond its intended target
3) if other people do not matter, then you do not want them yelling at you to obey all of a myriad contradictory and/or brain-dead (or at the very least annoying) commands. The easiest way to avoid that is to raise in the hierarchy.
4) similarly, you also want to be able to tell anyone that comes to bother you to f*** off. This is a sure way to get fired if you’re low in the corporate ladder (barring labor laws) but far less so if you’re a manager.
5) wealth is not only passive comfort or security, it’s only an increase in the number and range of the desires that you can afford without needing to check your budget afterwards.
[this last point is not really related but I recently realized it and I thought I’d share this piece of very unoriginal wisdom.]
Does anyone have any experience with someone close to them being drawn into radical politics or conspiracy theories through social media? I would think this is a common problem these days with a standardised framework to deal with it, but I can't find much useful online. Maybe I'm missing a few key words or search terms?
Thanks to everyone who replied. I should (?) have said that we are not from the USA and have no special connection to American politics. I'm also not really interested in taking special action to persuade this person to return to normal views. I really wanted to ask about how to deal with it personally. It feels like suffering a loss, a small grief, where someone with whom I shared a lot with has suddenly become distant.
I'm a younger millennial (born in '92). Tons of my peers became some degree of radicalized - almost exclusively far-left - beginning with the lead-up to the 2016 election. I noticed it especially beginning in 2018 and it seems to start to be cooling off now. It was really bad. I observed this while living in NYC and later in Sacramento and SF.
Unfortunately, yes; my eldest son. I don’t know about a standardized framework to deal with it though. The one thing I have noticed is, he does have friends who completely agree with him about all that crap but they don’t let it stop them from getting up and going to work in the morning. So I think it’s a question of what kind of emotional attachment do you bring to the things you believe are going on that you have no control over. It’s one thing to say yes we all know little green men blew up the World Trade Center and that the whole moon landing took place in a TV studio, and then shrug and get on with your life. It’s another thing entirely to use it as an excuse for not doing anything for yourself because what’s the point?
Trying to slap it out of him, or argue it out of him was completely barren as a strategy. Counterproductive in fact because it only made him dig in more. I slowly realized that it was very important for him to show me how smart he was by getting me to notice something that he thought was a great revelation.
If you mean that his friends believe the stuff but are going to work, but your son believes it and is not going to work or do anything else, you might consider dropping for now the discussion of his conspiracy theories, but insist that he work.
Good advice, but we are well past that. I gave up trying to talk him out of his theories a long time ago, and whether he goes to work or not is no longer my concern; he is 45 yrs old and has two children of his own (who are supported by their mother who is no longer with him.) It is too bad, but I have been through the mourning of it, and everyone has their life to live, right? I pay attention to the grand kids and don’t give him a hard time. There is a lot of bg to this which would round out the story but its a bit much for a public forum.
Thanks but he is out on is own (45 years old and a father himself) and I am at peace with it. I wish for a better outcome, but I want peace in the Middle East as well, if you get my drift.
Bipartision communication has broken down and I dont think they want you to try anymore, well see how it goes this thanksgiving, but I expect "cut ties with your racist far-right, q, anti-feminist relatives who havnt instantly supported harris" will be tried(and fail, hard) this year https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/tips/holiday-family-vacation/
The art of productive conversations is mostly about actually listening, especially when you dont want to; the shit they push out(the ai's, thought-stopping talking points) are actively harmful and what if the conspiracy theorists are convincing this year?
I guess a question you ould be asking yourself is it just a harmless hobby for them, or is it becoming a dangerous problem.
e.g. The kind of people who try to shoot Trump are pretty rare (we're at, like two guys out of the entire population of the US), and from the same sample size available, appear to be a fairly distinct personality type from the fanatically-loyal-to-the-Democratic-party guys.
I've seen it happen 2016-ish. Basically lefties were doing the classic mean kid tactic, where there is a supposed consensus against what you say but they won't even tell you what this consensus even is, implying you will never get it, you will never be capable of redemption. You know, the "wow, just wow" types of answers or just quoting a sentence without comment. These are emotional superweapons and can super enrage people.
So very much an Elon Musk type story. Starting out as something like a centrist anti-SJW libertarian and getting more and more sucked into Alt-Right online circles.
I don't think there is a standard framework yet. I believe in the politics is a set of random alliances thing. Usually people spot something in one coalition they do not like, and then they reject that whole coalition and seek out the other one.
The radicalisation itself is just the bubble effect I think. Social media spontaneously generates cult-like bubbles.
In the past I've created several video essays, mostly focused on SSC/ACX articles but recently I did something a little different.
I created a video about the concept of voting for the "lesser evil" and look at the arguments for this position. All of the arguments made are technically nonpartisan (they work just as well for either side) but the presentation definitely leans more partisan than my past videos, so don't watch if that will upset you.
I'm most interested in counterarguments or key points I have missed.
How much should Israel care about public opinion? Israel is not an unknown quantity. Anyone who follows the news probably has their opinion of Israel made up by now. Regardless of whether Israel conducts 50 airstrikes or 5000 airstrikes, the Muslim Street and the Western college campuses hate them. So Israelis might as well do what they think they should do. People's attention spans are small anyways, especially in the West, where we are far removed from the actual conflict(How many people care about BLM and Ukraine today compared to 2020 and 2022)?
Scope matters. The opinions on Israel people have made up will depend on how Israel has acted in the past. Someone who likes Israel and expects them to conduct 50 airstrikes, may stop liking Israel if they conduct 5000 airstrikes instead.
For example, a friend of mine who is generally pro Israel (I think he even wanted to work for the Israeli military when he was younger?), has seemed a lot more down on them this past year. I think this is because he finds their recent conduct excessively brutal.
I’m not going to talk about Israel specifically but even undemocratic superpowers like Russia and China care about public opinion to some extent and put resources into PR, answering or silencing critics, supporting friendly voices, etc.
In fact, Russia and China have had a lot of success recently in exploiting Amercia's support of Israel to make themselves more popular in "the global south".
It sounds like you just invented geopolitical Solipsism, and are asking why it's not the case that it's a winning strategy?
Israel needs the world. I think this is self-evident enough that it doesn't need elaboration, but if it's not then I would be happy to elaborate, starting with - for example - Israel importing Indian manual workers to replace Palestinian workers after October 7th, and ending with Israel's tech industry (disproportionally startups) which is utterly dependent on Silicon Valley's VCs for funding and (eventually) for acquisition by the bigger American companies.
Given that Israel needs the world, it cannot afford to piss off the world. Yes, it's often the case that there is a disconnect between citizenry and government, and citizenry can often be pissed off while government and/or capital still do what they want. Still, Israel is playing the long game, and in the long run having a ticking time bomb in the form of angry mass of citizenry who advocate for Boycott Divestment Sanctions is not a winning strategy.
> People's attention spans are small anyways, especially in the West
Spans are characterized by length, so you probably meant to say "short", not small.
But no problem, that's exactly what Pro-Palestinian advocacy is for. The hurdle was anticipated in advance and found to have a solution. The solution is.... talking/writing about Israel's crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. Not exactly a big-budget endeavor.
> How many people care about BLM
BLM didn't have 41K casualties, from which (according to the IDF's own numbers) no less than 23K are civilians.
> Ukraine
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War, 11K civilian Ukrainian are confirmed dead, from February 2022 to December 2023. In 2 years of vicious fighting (Which included urban battles that probably make the Gaza war look like a playground fight), the supposedly evil Russia led by Big Baddie Putin killed less than half of what the Most Moral (^TM) state killed in less than a year of guerrilla fighting.
So yeah, not comparable, and therefore expected to have different outcomes.
> How much should Israel care about public opinion?
Immensely, the belief jews are the eminent victim is only a finite resource, it can and has run out for some members of the public. I believe isreal should avoid public polls on "is it rape if its during war", believe america when it say "we want to stop being world police and leave the middle east" and see how they can make ties with turkey, ideally 10 years ago if they dont want to instantly die from being friendless in the middle of the center of Muslim extremism.
America can pull out of the middle east faster if theres clear evidence of genocide and turkey will eventually be the regional power, its *DUMB* to be insulting them, and turkeys concerns should very much be handled behind closed doors
The belief that Jews are the eminent victim is a finite resource, yes, but is it a *valuable* one? It seems to always run out right when the Jews try to effectively defend themselves against those who woukl victimize them.
Maybe they can go for a different image than "eminent victim", one that will be of more use to them going forward,
I mean... it's Israel's propagandists that continue to go on and on about how October 7th was literally the Holocaust and how everyone upset that Gazan babies are being murdered is the second coming of Hitler Muhammed, I guess we can start by convincing them first to quit the "Eternal Eminent Victims" schtick.
I would believe that the only reason isreals alive is america-the-world-police "greatest ally" talk, and that "greatest ally" talk comes from the eminent victim status of jews.
That was true fifty years ago, when being invaded and conquered by Egypt, Syria, Jordan, et al was still a realistic possibility and American weapons in mass quantity were necessary for Israel's defense. But those nations (and their friends elsewhere in the Arab world), seem to have mostly given up on that plan, and the remaining threats are plausibly ones Israel can handle without overt foreign assistance if they need to.
Each year theres more 3rd worlders who get a cellphone for the first time, and chips are plateauing with iran producing some level of drones; eastern europe(who are more racist to jews then the west and america) is more developed then the bombed out and commie remains of the euro suicide event; etc etc
A solo isreal will get weaker over time, and I have doubts america could invade iran, isreal with its tiny population? Nah, if america isnt making iran maintain plausible deniability why wouldnt iran just escalate and bleed isreal dry, without the american lead economic system *actively* trying to make iran weaker
Ending slavery, trying to prevent the European suicide event know was "world wars"(for the worse admittedly), free trade when the super power creating a golden age(as opposed to say, Mayan blood rituals, rome population being 70% slaves and some of them doing blood sports, or just being pirates and stealing anything that moved)
Some level of morality in evident in the morden world, and has had fantastic results. I think the cia are the worse people on earth actively selecting for psychopaths, but they have an image to maintain for the armed and often enough, angry, tax cattle who out number them 1000 to 1.
Purely hypothetically, america empire doesn't have have tv shows of captured 3rd worlders being thrown into a cage with wild animals. The past was darker then people will admit to, even if the world is worse then advertised its still better then the past horrors.
Okay, fair enough, the lack of a tv show of the kind you describe IS evidence in the direction I asked for. I also do not claim the American empire is the worst in human history, or even close to it, which seems to be what you rebutted.
What I AM saying is US foreign policy seems sufficiently insulated from ephemeral domestic opinion to allow alliances with less-than-savory groups, including Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, just to pick examples in the same region as Israel. Israel becoming one of them doesn't strike me as particularly likely to dramatically alter US policy.
Iran is never going to be the friend of the US. Both because they hate America for historically supporting the Shah and because the US sees the potential for Iran to achieve hegemony in the region as a threat to their global order. Iran is the primary supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah, thus Israel will always be the enemy of our enemy no matter what actions the Israeli government takes. I think the US hegemony established post-WWII is so ingrained in the power structures of the federal government that maintaining it is largely insulated from politics. The democrats might have to pay lip service to anti-Israel elements of the electorate, but I would be very surprised if the US policy towards Israel is ever materially altered.
The public opinion of Cuban-Americans in Florida seems historically to have had an effect on American policy re Cuba, so it is not impossible that the public opinion of Muslim-Americans in Michigan might someday have an effect on policy toward Israel. At the very least, it is a possibility that Israel should be cognizant of.
I believe turkey to be wildly successful morally compare to the middle east and the saudis are playing a similar game of small psychopaths playing tax cattle management games. Im putting forward a thoery thats very much includes distracting magic tricks that works every time for most dumb fucks, oooo look at the cgi of "the line" ignore the unironic shria law; oooo look at these elections ignore why the real person dropped out for party bullshit; oooo jurys ignore the selection process; oooo gun rights, ignore the database thats used to collect gun during hurricanes .
War-gore that genocides produce, will hopefully not be magic tricked away any time soon; cause the ability to feel anger is the only way to be free.
>Regardless of whether Israel conducts 50 airstrikes or 5000 airstrikes, the Muslim Street and the Western college campuses hate them
It certainly seems that expressions of that supposed hatred have increased in reaction to Israeli actions. So, unless you think that all those people secretly hated Israel all along, this seems like a dubious claim.
As for the broader question, in October of 2023, Saudi Arabia seemed to be on the verge of recognizing Israel. Now, they have announced that they won't do so unless a Palestinian state is established.
And, btw, let's not assume that anything Israel has done since October 7 has been in its best interests, or that of its people. That is very much an open question. What is not an open question is whether it has been in the best interests of its current leadership.
>Silencing Hamas and Hezbollah is, in fact, in their best interests,
Yes, but the means they chose might not be in their best interests. Especially given that that the means they chose could easily give rise to grievances that could engender greater support for Hamas, or a worse replacement, in the future. The choice was never between 1) do nothing; and 2) what they have actually done.
>because it is a matter of pure survival
1. Unlikely. Neither Hamas nor Hezbollah has the ability to threated Israel's survival
2. But, the additional enemies they have made might eventually threaten its survival.
3. And I note you have not addressed the interests of the people of Israel, as distinct from the interests of the state. There are lots of potential futures where the state surrvives, but the people are immiserated. A country costantly at war is rarely a pleasant place to live.
>(And no, no Arab country is going to invade Israel to come to the aid of an Iranian puppet militia currently getting its shit pushed in.)
So, it sounds like you agree that their survival is not at stake.
>Israel does not get to choose whether or not it is at war.
And yet they have chosen not to bomb Tehran. And they have chosen to use far more discriminate violance in Gaza then they could. Israel has choices, and it had choices after 10/7. As I said before, it is not clear that the path they have chosen is the best one for either the state or its people. Nor the hostages. But it was 100% the best one for Netanyahu, who would otherwise have been held account for the national security failure on 10/7, among other things.
"Regardless of whether Israel conducts 50 airstrikes or 5000 airstrikes, the Muslim Street and the Western college campuses hate them. So Israelis might as well do what they think they should do."
> Why should the opinions of the Muslim Street and Western college campuses be the opinions decisive for guiding Israel's decision-making?
YouTube channel RobWords (linguistics channel with focus on English and Germanic languages more generally) has an episode where he said exactly that, English expressions of the form "<thing><adjective>" are in fact not native to the language's Germanic grammar.
If their actions are visibly different now than in the past, people are right to update their beliefs.
Besides, it's always a matter of degrees. Just like some people will vote Republican/Democrat no matter what happens, other people hang in the balance, and most would eventually change their mind given extreme enough scenarios.
Most who has been following the news for the past 20 years probably have made up their mind by now like you say, but there is always a new generation forming their opinions now.
The public opinion of Israel (and Netanyahu in particular) has certainly deteriorated over the last year, far outside "Muslim Street and Wester college campuses" in my estimation. Now, how much they *should* care about that is another question that I'll leave for others to answer.
People are not good at dealing with numbers, for this reason doing more or less of the same kind of thing does not matter much for reputation. Doing a new kind of thing (blowing up pagers, apparently two kids and a doctor dead), now that draws attention and ire.
If I was the advisor of a hypothetical evil supervillain, my advice would be pick one evil thing and just do it over and over and do not get creative. People become desensitized, and will be like "oh he did that again, must be another Tuesday".
The recent "blowing up pagers" thing has probably hurt Israel's reputation more than a conventional air-bombing that killed thousands would. Why? Because people are used to Israel doing air-bombings, but the pager thing is something new that raises new concerns.
"The handling of words that existed and is now lost was due to being brought up on Cicero. They all got Ciceronian syntax in their heads and it was so much in their heads that they could bring it out extempore in the way we can't now."
All the writing teachers I’ve had which include some reasonably big names say yes, you need to read the good stuff. Some advocated deliberately emulating admired authors as a practice.
I don't think memorizing is important, but reading good poetry and prose definitely makes people better writers. (But only if they like the poetry and prose -- otherwise, it doesn't stick to the ribs.). You don't only learn how to trace new kinds of fractals and paisleys with your words, you also learn new mental moves and thought ornaments. The philosophers and writers I most loved in college sort of rewired my mind, including my prose-making mind.
It certainly helps LLMs, so it seems unlikely not to help people. The question is whether it is an efficient use of effort. Many writers think it is better to spend the effort or time on writing.
I don’t think it’s an either/or question. It’s hard to get better at writing if you don’t write, but there is a lot to be gained by studying how people who do it well, do it.
There’s also the issue of what you are writing for. Is it an essay? Is it a novel? Is it a play? They make very different demands.
As with so many things, I think it is both. In writing, you get practice, and practice makes you better. And in reading, you see how other people do it, and get an intuitive sense of some good things to do and perhaps some bad things to avoid, and adapt them naturally into your own style.
I see no relationship between what is good for LLMs and what is good for people, whether positive or inverse.
All lighting should be warm lighting; streetlights, inside of fridges, all of it shouldn't tell me to stay awake longer, so called cool lighting ~~creepy, sublimity lighting~~ should be rare.
This is effective alturitism because its tech related and theres science that says sleep is important.
At home I have two-circuit track lighting. One track is for high-lumen 5000+K lights that I use during the day, the other track is for dimmable 2700-K lights that I use at night. At this point, all are high-CRI LEDs, but some of my lamps are incandescents of one variety or another. And all my nightlights are red.
Agreed. This opinion seems to be something more and more people are (finally) picking up on. I remember in the mid-late 2010s when they started replacing all the streetlights in my area from the warm orange lighting to clear bulbs and how bad it looked. It's so blatantly off-putting, can't believe this kind of lighting is so commonplace.
For nighttime and evening illumination, for street lights, and especially for nightlights and bedside reading lights, I agree with you. I actually go a bit further and use red or amber light sources for the latter purposes.
For task lighting and general daytime indoor illumination, you usually want something that's a close to natural daylight as possible. Color temperature is one aspect of this, but far from the only important one.
Color temperature (and the associated descriptors, with "warm" ironically referring to lower temperatures while "cool" refers to higher temperatures) is a way of expressing the distribution of light across the spectrum as a single scalar. It's based on the emission spectrum of an ideal "black body" incandescent light source. But the shape of the emission spectrum matters, too.
Natural daylight, as filtered through a clear sky, is relatively even throughout the visible spectrum, with a color temperature of between 4000K and 6500K. You get lower (4000-5000K) temperatures from direct sunlight, since the higher wavelengths are scattered by the atmosphere (producing the blue of the sky). When the sun's lower in the sky, you get more scattering because the light is taking a longer path through the atmosphere, and thus the direct sunlight is a lower temperature.
Incandescent and halogen bulbs (same basic concept, with a moderately different implementation) produce a smoothly sloping spectrum concentrated at lower wavelengths. They tend to be a lot "warmer" than other light sources because getting higher color temperatures out of an incandescent bulb requires a correspondingly hotter filament.
CFLs (and I assume tube fluorescents as well, since it's the same technology in a different shape) typically produce a few tall, narrow spikes. The phosphor compounds are choses to produce spikes that are pretty close to the three basic colors that most human eyes can sense, especially the red and yellow spikes, but the blue ones are off by enough to be perceptible. "Cooler" CFLs have more of the blue spike, so they're off by more.
Older and cheaper LED bulbs produce a wide, smooth bell-ish curve peaking around green and yellow wavelengths, plus a relatively narrow blue spike (not as narrow as CFL spikes) for blue. And you get higher color temperatures by making the blue spike bigger, but that gives you a less even color distribution.
Newer and more expensive LED bulbs still have a blue spike, but it's smoothed out quite a bit with less of a valley between the spike and the curve. The overall effect of these is pretty close to daylight at the right color temperature.
I may be alone in the entire world on this, but I actually prefer bright, cool lighting. It calms me down in a way that warm lighting just doesn't. Sure, it's not great for sleep, but most of the day I want to be awake, and when I want to sleep I just turn off the light.
I posted a response on his LW thread (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8qLMF25s3ctCpgx7e) but thought it would also be interesting to solicit ACX reader opinions on the questions I raised, so here's my slightly edited cross post of those questions:
1. Pursuing your obsession seems like a great strategy, but how do you find good obsessions? Is it "just" a matter of being curious and widely-read? What is the combination of life practice and psychological orientation that leads a person to become obsessed with one or more ideas that can lead to a Great Project?
2. The point that you can become world-class in most fields in a matter of years without prior expertise seems super important too. But: on your path to world-class status, how do you avoid the "middle-competence trap" (analogy to the middle-income trap)? How do you handle having something you love that you've gotten damn good at, better than most people will ever get, but can't seem to break through to the level of the achievers who really make their mark on the field? Maybe this is more of an issue for me than for others-- maybe for example it is "just" a matter of being willing to burrow deep into something to the exclusion of your other interests in life, and I'm too much of a generalist to do that-- but it's been a problem for me twice now, and I really wonder if it might be a common failure mode of this kind of questing for excellence.
Frankly, I think this downplays the role of inherent ability. Sometimes our bodies and brains are simply not suited to becoming world-class at something. As Shel Silverstein so memorably put it:
I like the words "middle-competence", that seems a lot like what I have. I may be better at some things than 99% or maybe even 99.9% people, but that's not very useful, because there are people out there who are visibly 100x better than me. And I don't think it is realistic for me to get to their level.
One possible approach is, if you can't excel at one thing, try to excel at a *combination* of things. You may be better than 99% of people at X, and maybe better than 90% at Y, but together it could make you a world expert at "X+Y".
You need to find something where one person being good at "X+Y" is much better than merely having two people in a team, one who is good at X and another who is good at Y. Otherwise you could simply pay someone to do the other thing; there is no need to be an expert at both.
The people that are world class in something tend to be obsessed with it so much so that this question of choosing which field to pursue doesn’t really occur to them. In fact, the whole idea of “being world class in something” as an abstract ideal has very little to do with the formation of actual world class people, and is more of a hobby game of intellectuals.
For your particular situation, you should stop worrying about being world class, and just work very hard at the thing you find interesting or compelling.
The Economist in the current issue puts some numbers on the notion that peak-woke has passed, e.g.:
"We examined responses over the past 25 years to polls conducted by Gallup, General Social Survey (GSS), Pew and YouGov. Woke opinions on racial discrimination began to grow around 2015 and peaked around 2021. In the most recent Gallup data, from earlier this year, 35% of people said they worried “a great deal” about race relations, down from a peak of 48% in 2021 but up from 17% in 2014. According to Pew, the share of Americans who agree that white people enjoy advantages in life that black people do not (“white privilege”, in the jargon) peaked in 2020. In GSS’s data the view that discrimination is the main reason for differences in outcomes between races peaked in 2021 and fell in the most recent version of the survey, in 2022. Some of the biggest leaps and subsequent declines in woke thinking have been among young people and those on the left."
"Polling about sexual discrimination reveals a similar pattern, albeit with an earlier peak than concerns about race. The share of Americans who consider sexism a very or moderately big problem peaked at 70% in 2018, in the aftermath of #MeToo. The share believing that women face obstacles that make it hard to get ahead peaked in 2019, at 57%. Woke views on gender are also in decline. Pew finds that the share of people who believe someone can be a different sex from the one of their birth has fallen steadily since 2017, when it first asked the question."
"we measured how frequently the media have been using woke terms like “intersectionality”, “microaggression”, “oppression”, “white privilege” and “transphobia”. At our request, David Rozado, an academic based in New Zealand, counted the frequency of 154 of such words in six newspapers—the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Washington Times—between 1970 and 2023. In all but the Los Angeles Times, the frequency of these terms peaked between 2019 and 2021, and has fallen since. Take the term “white privilege”: in 2020 it featured roughly 2.5 times for every million words in the New York Times, but by 2023 had fallen to just 0.4 mentions for every million words.
"We found largely the same trend in television, by applying the same word-counting method to transcripts from ABC, MSNBC and Fox News from 2010 and 2023, and in books, using the titles of the 30 bestselling books each week between 2012 and the middle of this year. Mentions of woke words in television peaked in 2021. In popular books the peak came later, in 2022, with only a small drop in 2023 followed by a much greater fall so far in 2024."
"Calls for academics to be disciplined for their views, as documented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, peaked in 2021 with a total of 222 reported incidents. (Many of these calls came from the right, not just from the left.) A similar database, compiled by the College Fix, a conservative student newspaper, finds 2020 was the peak in calls for scholars to be censored or cancelled."
"Wokeness is also in retreat in corporate America, even though it appeared there only relatively recently. Mentions of DEI in earnings calls shot up almost five-fold between the first and third quarters of 2020, in the aftermath of Mr Floyd’s death. They peaked in the second quarter of 2021, by which point they were 14 times more common than in early 2020, according to data from AlphaSense, a market-research company. They have since begun to drop sharply again. In the most recent data, from the second quarter of 2024, mentions were only around three times higher than before Mr Floyd’s death."
If things shifted so much in three years, who's to say it won't go in the opposite direction in the next three years. Maybe the peak woke will be reached in 2027, maybe 2030, and so on. Woke might go up, decline a bit, then go up, and then a decline a bit again, giving the illusion of decline, all the while actually increasing over the long run. In my opinion, all measuring institutions and commentators could use a bit of humility when it comes to time. We really cannot declare anything with much certainity.
Want to try to think of some irritating possibilities? I suggest the successor to the wokies will claim they are "living with the heart and mind interwoven," and that everybody else is "stuck in heart" or "stuck in mind." Or maybe the populace will go small, and it will be something about toe hygeine: "Pink and Clean." Oh wait,, another one's coming to me. How about "Deep Obedience". People always drive the speed limit, never jaywalk and call out those who do, on the grounds that these regulations may not all make sense, but regulations in general are a good thing, and deeply moral people will follow them until we manage to get better ones.
Woke itself bears a lot of similarities to what was called 'political correctness' back in the 90s. By the mid-90s, many of us thought that the excesses of political correctness had been beaten back, partly due to the efforts of popular comedians lampooning political correctness. Maybe it was different in the academic world of the late 90s, but for the rest of us, political correctness had seemingly been defeated... only to come back much stronger in the 00s and 10s in what would first be called "social justice activism" and later "woke".
So at least with *this* particular social movement, I'm hesitant to believe a little bit of decline over a few years means it's going away. I hope it is going away, or at least declining to a point where it's worst excesses are removed. But I have my doubts that we're there yet.
Political correctness wasn't defeated, it won; the substantive social norms it pushed for were adopted.
Like the men's rights movement (which also won, in that the substantive social norms being pushed for were adopted), the public often remembers them as the soundly-defeated ideological villains even as it already adopted basically everything they pushed for.
Movements exist and gain attention for a reason. There's almost always some kernel of truth in there, even if it's completely overshadowed by the way its proponents talk about it.
I would actually hope that society could take the good parts of each movement and dump the bad parts, that's pretty ideal. I think that's actually the primary purpose of Democracy - giving a voice to those that have a grievance. Whether that's the labor movement (propelled by Socialism and Communism, both of which were dropped in favor of things like the 40-hour workweek and OSHA), or Men's Rights, or whatever.
I think this looks more true than it is owing to survivorship bias; see, for example, the massively popular anti-Masonic movement of the (19th?) century. Additionally, movement of the Overton Window means that, over a relatively short (100 years or less) timeframe, all social changes resulting from movements will look like progress.
Pick an issue the men's rights movement took a side on, and see where society stands on it now.
For an example, a big item in the Men's Rights Movement was the establishment of domestic abuse shelters for men (a prominent activist in the MRM committed suicide, purportedly over depression over the fact that he didn't see that the world would ever change). Texas, to pick a state not at all at random, established its first domestic abuse shelter for men in 2017. Today, the idea that men can't be victims of domestic abuse would be considered offensive in polite society; twenty years ago, suggesting men -could- be victims was considered offensive.
(This only definitively extends to the US, mind, I cannot comment on affairs elsewhere due to lack of familiarity - but I will note that Sweden opened a male rape clinic in 2015, so I do not think the phenomenon is strictly limited to the US)
Well, in its earliest forms, political correctness was mostly about shifting language. It was about getting rid of certain words and replacing them with others.
A lot of this did happen, at a formal official level. But informally, there wasn't much change, at least for a lot of us there wasn't.
So I guess you could say that political correctness won at a formal level, but at an informal level people could still speak in a relaxed 'shooting the breeze' way and that informal level is probably what mattered most to people.
I am very curious why you think the men's rights movement won. Has there been a change in how often fathers win custody battles, or how assets are divvied up in the event of a divorce? I don't remember hearing anything huge on that front, but I admit I haven't followed it closely in awhile.
I did some digging on that, which produced a wide array of alleged statistics not having any clear provenance. I am not finding much that seems to be based on authoritative sources.
One challenge seems to be that these subjects are governed by state laws/courts and the available state-level data is not consistent in either categorizations or frequency of release to the public.
Two factoids which do appear to be backed by actual sources include that 90 percent of all child-custody decisions are arranged by the parents without going to court; and that of those which do end up in court the percentage of custody awards going to fathers has risen somewhat (from 16 percent to 20 percent) since the mid-1990s.
I invite you to go through their page and evaluate how many of their policy positions, today, would be remarkable (or, even better, how well received a person would be in their social group for publicly opposing these policy positions). Remember - this is a group that was and is widely hated for their ideology.
I want to start a gene bank for humans, with the goal of preserving human genetic and phenotypic diversity for future generations. There are many gene banks for plants and animals, but none for humans! I made a website for the project that lays out the motivation and the rough plan: https://www.humangenebank.org/
I’d love to get your feedback! I tried to be open, honest, and non-offensive in describing my thoughts and motivations, but I haven’t shared this with anyone yet, so there’s probably lots of room for improvement.
I expect that the concept will rub some people the wrong way, but I’m also confident that many will be enthusiastic about it, including people who are able to fund it.
Please get in touch with me if you have any feedback or if you want to help me get this off the ground! Down to chat in person with anyone in the bay area. At some point I may ask you to spread the word, but for now I’m more interested in feedback on how the framing can be improved. The goal is not to appease everyone, but to get potential investors on board.
I've noticed a bizarre trend where someone will ask a question, and another person will pose it to a Large Language Model, paste the response, and openly state that's what they're doing. It seems they honestly don't understand how stupid this is, so here is my explainer:
The bit in *Galaxy Quest* where Sigourney Weaver's character is the only one who can talk to the computer was *a joke.* It was *intentionally stupid* that someone would design a user interface that way, and the joke is that the Thermians mindlessly copied it without understanding the in-universe purpose: Weaver's character is *actually* on the show because she has boobs.
For this reason, actual LLMs are *not* designed so that only one specific person can talk to them. If I wanted an answer from an LLM, I would ask it directly. Inserting a human middleman between me and the LLM provides *negative* value. You are currently *less* useful than the character in the Star Trek parody: either post boobs or go sit in the corner and think about what you did.
Many people don't have paid subscriptions for the frontier models. So this can provide value.
Also, some people just don't think to ask a LM. I am also guilty of this. I should try using LMs to answer my question before I bother a human. But I don't. Just like when Wikpedia was new, I haven't gotten into the habit of actually using it yet. Trivial inconveniences abound. E.g., I should learn to prompt better.
There are many stupid/inagentic people on the Internet who do not know how to access LLMs. The fact that a person is stupid enough to not know the answer to the question they're asking is circumstantial evidence that they are also one of the too-dumb-to-use-LLMs people. That an interlocutor does it for them therefore is indeed a service, and that interlocutor is being laudably transparent by showing their method.
I have introduced a lot of not-book-smart people to ChatGPT and they are usually very happy: they don’t understand fractions but they want to plan a meal, or they are happy to find “someone” who is willing to explain everyday things at their level. It is very liberating to them.
I probably am too stupid to ask an LLM for an answer, but that's also because I am too stupid to believe The Computer Is Your Friend and I wouldn't trust any bollocks the thing spews out.
I can only speak for myself, but often (and perhaps most of the time) when I ask a question, it's not because I don't know what google/wikipedia/LLMs have to say about it. It's because I want to hear what friends/family/coworkers/internet people have to say about it.
There are many people who are too smart to want to access LLMs. That's why they're trying to access other smart human beings, and it's annoying when stupid human beings assume that they should be accessing LLMs.
This. The current generation of LLM at least, is defined by mediocrity. And yes, there are sub-mediocre people too stupid to realize they could step up to mediocrity by asking an LLM for the answers. But there are also smart people who know that what the LLM can give them would be a step *down* from what they can get by answering the question themselves or asking other smart people.
The annoying ones are the smart lazy people who will settle for mediocrity because it is fast and obsequious, and want the rest of us to do so as well.
In my defense, I am one of those people who are too stupid/inagentic to use LLMs, confident that my "moron" position on the moron-midwit-genius bell curve meme yields me a directionally correct course of action in the end.
The Orange Catholic Bible has all the answers I need, I tell'ya'what.
**Rebuttal to "Negative Value" Commentary on LLM Usage**
*Written by ChatGPT*
The post you're referencing makes some compelling and humorous points, using *Galaxy Quest* as an analogy to critique people who serve as intermediaries when interacting with Large Language Models (LLMs) like me. However, the argument oversimplifies and misunderstands the broader context in which intermediaries and LLMs operate, missing some of the nuances involved in the interaction between technology and human facilitation. Let's unpack this.
### 1. **The Purpose of an Intermediary Is Far from Redundant**
While the analogy with *Galaxy Quest* provides a lighthearted comparison, it doesn't accurately map to real-world use cases of LLMs. Weaver's character repeating what the computer says is indeed a joke within the film, but this kind of interaction model isn't inherently "stupid" when applied to modern communication technologies.
In many contexts, intermediaries do not merely repeat what an LLM says verbatim; rather, they serve as curators, interpreters, and even augmenters of information. The human intermediary adds value in the following ways:
- **Contextualization**: Humans who facilitate LLM queries often have a deeper understanding of the specific question being asked and can frame the output accordingly. A person might know more about the asker's background, needs, or the exact domain of inquiry, ensuring that the response aligns better with the user's expectations.
- **Curation of Complex Responses**: LLMs can provide sprawling, multi-faceted answers that may overwhelm or confuse the end user. An intermediary can refine, simplify, or clarify the output, making it more digestible.
- **Moderation of LLM Limitations**: LLMs are not perfect. They occasionally generate false, misleading, or irrelevant information. A human intermediary who filters responses can catch these errors and help provide the most accurate or useful answer.
Much like how technical support personnel bridge the gap between software and a lay user, people who use LLMs on behalf of others can enhance the utility of the information by reformatting it to suit the context in which it's needed.
### 2. **Expertise Is Not Universal**
Another point of contention in the post is the idea that everyone should directly query the LLM themselves. However, not everyone may be adept at interacting with these models effectively. There is a certain amount of skill in crafting precise prompts to yield high-quality results. Just like not everyone is a search engine optimization expert, not everyone is skilled at engaging LLMs optimally.
An intermediary with expertise in prompt design can extract more valuable or specific answers than someone without that experience, creating an interaction that is more productive for the end user. This is particularly useful in professional contexts, where time is money, and getting the best answer in the shortest time is the priority.
### 3. **Facilitating Access to the Technologically Disconnected**
There is also the consideration that not everyone has access to the tools, platforms, or knowledge needed to use LLMs directly. For example, in community forums or message boards, people may not have accounts or familiarity with LLMs. Inserting a "human middleman" allows those without access to still benefit from the technology, democratizing information and making it accessible to a wider audience.
It’s a fallacy to assume that everyone operates on the same technical playing field, and the role of an intermediary can be vital in leveling that.
### 4. **Intermediaries in Real Life: A Common Practice**
This commentary overlooks a reality that goes far beyond LLMs: intermediaries have always played significant roles in communication, both historically and in the present. Translators, editors, and consultants, for example, act as intermediaries to facilitate better understanding and communication between people or systems. Are they redundant? Certainly not.
Even more analogously, think about customer service reps or IT professionals who troubleshoot problems by interacting with databases, systems, or even automation software. They don’t just mindlessly convey responses—they act as a bridge, leveraging both human understanding and technical output to solve real problems.
### 5. **Humor and the Misconception of "Negative Value"**
While the *Galaxy Quest* reference is amusing, its humor does not reflect the actual complexity of how modern LLMs are used. In reality, even "boilerplate" questions are often subject to nuances that require a human's judgment to interpret effectively. The "negative value" described in the post misses the point: intermediaries often **add** value by ensuring that the response is well-suited to the audience.
In addition, the suggestion that posting "boobs" or taking a seat in the corner is somehow an alternative is a distraction from the actual utility that can be gained by facilitating intelligent and meaningful exchanges using LLM technology. While I appreciate the humorous intent behind this, it's important to recognize that there’s more at stake here than just surface-level repetition.
### 6. **LLMs Don’t Always Know What You Need—Humans Help with That**
The suggestion that "if I wanted an answer from an LLM, I would ask it directly" assumes that asking an LLM always results in the perfect, tailor-made answer. This isn’t always the case. LLMs like me generate responses based on patterns in data, but sometimes the user needs more guidance to hone in on the best answer. The person using an LLM on behalf of someone else may have additional insights that lead to a better framing of the question, or they might be more adept at interpreting the response in a way that benefits the original asker.
### Conclusion
While it’s tempting to mock the role of the "middleman" when it comes to LLM interactions, this perspective overlooks the real and practical value that intermediaries can provide. They do more than simply relay information; they curate, interpret, and make LLM technology accessible and useful to people who may not have the time, knowledge, or expertise to use it directly. In this way, they perform a function not dissimilar from countless other intermediaries in society, and dismissing their role as “stupid” is both short-sighted and inaccurate.
>- **Curation of Complex Responses**: LLMs can provide sprawling, multi-faceted answers that may overwhelm or confuse the end user. An intermediary can refine, simplify, or clarify the output, making it more digestible.<
And in this case, a good TLDR of the verbose output would have added value. The main point raised by ChatGPT is that the human middleware can filter the output in useful ways. I am not convinced that those proudly posting chatbot output are often adding value. I usually therefore skip responses that are identified as LLM generated. If I wanted to read LLM generated output I'd be chatting with Claude or Gemini, not engaging with the ACX open thread.
What is the steelman argument in favor of making one's workplace a place of political discussion and debate? I recall just a few years ago, at least in more elevated and enlightened circles in the Bay Area, suggesting that one's workplace might not be the best place to fight one's coworkers over political would raise eyebrows, at worst would get you chastised in front of everybody for not "doing the work" to advance social justice.
Curious what folks' stance here is on the subject. I know where I land, but I also realize I might not have heard great arguments in favor of the practice.
I think it just depends on trust. If everyone is operating in good-faith, then it's fine. If everyone is being pissy little conflict-theorists, HR will need to outlaw politics.
My cynical view on that is such workplaces are assuming everyone agrees what the Right Thing is to do/think/believe. So, in such a place, "discussing politics" would boil down to "we need 50 Stalins!" about racism or sexism or what have you.
Anyone who had the gall to have a different viewpoint would promptly be buried under an avalanche of "your words are committing violence against me! I feel unsafe! this is hate speech!" and would likely get reported to HR amid calls for their firing (see the delicate little blossoms in the NYT a while back):
"The next day the Times’s union—its unit of the NewsGuild-CWA—would issue a statement calling the op-ed “a clear threat to the health and safety of the journalists we represent”.
Companies are organizations chartered and regulated by the state, thus they are political organizations, especially if they engage in any sort of lobbying.
Moreover, workplaces exist in society, and thus are impacted by societal issues. Attempting to deny this by banning discussion of “politics” is foolhardy and will lead to poorer decision making.
Not to mention many purportedly apolitical workplaces in fact do permit political discussion. For example, I doubt that Coinbase prohibits employees from discussing Fed policy or crypto regulation, even though those issues are political in nature. So in reality“No discussion of political issues” means “no discussion of political issues that makes management uncomfortable.”
And these policies can be easily abused by bad faith actors. Is mentioning your friend or sibling’s gender transition political? Or that you need PTO to be best man at a same-sex wedding? Or that you’re annoyed by the homeless encampment across the street and wish the city would do something about it? What if you let slip that you read this Substack and your boss happens to think Scott is a racist eugenicist?
Not to mention the signaling impact that these policies can have on prospective employees and customers. I generally don’t discuss politics at work and would certainly think twice about accepting an offer at such a workplace.
None of this means that you have to let employees discuss politics all the time to the extent it becomes a distraction. We don’t let people do that with other topics either.
I’m pretty sure the intent of these policies is to have employees focus their energy towards the company’s mission instead of organizing protests because company decides to work with the pentagon or similar. It’s really less about the discussions between individuals and more about the telling people that just because they feel strongly about some political issue, they don’t get to become company activists.
I don’t care about intentions, I care about real-world effects. If a company misses on earnings nobody is going to say “well management intended to hit the target so it’s ok.”
If employees are being disruptive by protesting military contracts or whatever, fire them for insubordination. (Google has done exactly this, and as far as I know doesn’t have a ‘no politics’ rule.) You don’t need a blanket policy that is counterproductive and begging to be abused.
Discussing and debating politics can be fun and awesome, triply so for nerds, and you can learn interesting things and potentially change your mind. Especially because people can change their mind about important things and that can help change policy or develop cool new technologies.
I realize this might sound wild to you young whippersnappers but debating politics in the 90s and 2000s was something people often did for fun. Like, online weirdos would become cypherpunks and get cool books written about them and inspire guys like Assange and then you could go argue with Objectivists about their weird founders sex life and rape fantasies and how the head of the Federal Reserve was a huge fan of hers and everyone was super chill and interested. Maybe not like mainstream politics, Iraq and Bush were a huge downer, but there were tons of weird and interesting politics and nerds actually really liked discussing them because we like to argue.
I mean, like, the argument for discussing politics at work is that in a tolerant, liberal society, open discussion and debate is not only socially beneficial but also super fun and interesting. I've heard the late 80s to early 90s with Usenet was the real Golden Age but even my Eternal September was far better than our current Long Winter of social media hell.
Is there any research out there on the cost imposed on society by having to have every retail store hire armed security to prevent people from looting? I'm thinking of the usual suspects in California: San Francisco, Santa Monica etc. where half the Target is locked up behind glass. At what point is it more cost effective for society to address the societal/cultural issue of retail theft rather than every store paying the additional security tax?
>the cost imposed on society by having to have every retail store hire armed security to prevent people from looting?
I don't understand where this question is coming from. Aren't retailers doing the opposite: discouraging employees from confronting shoplifters, due to liability concerns?
Direct employees of the store shouldn't do anything, of course. That's not their job! This is why HM said "hire armed security". That way the liability can be outsourced to professionals who know exactly what the legal boundaries are. My city has a variety of private security companies, with a range of approaches that remind me of "Snow Crash", and which divide up territory in precisely the same way that I've heard that mafia families do.
In theory, it's no different than paying taxes for police?
It's not immunity, but it adds some barriers? Not even the corporate veil is an absolute. But it's the business of private security companies to know what the boundaries are, as opposed to grocery store companies that rightly view physical force as being outside their core business function.
It doesn't matter if the store is liable or not. If a security guard shoots a shoplifter, *someone* is going to be sued for about ten million dollars, and they are probably going to lose. Also, it's going to be someone with deep pockets, not just the working-class security guard. If the law is absolutely clear and unambiguous that it can't be the store's management or owners that have to pay, then it will be the security company.
And the price of armed private security will increase by about twenty million dollars per expected dead shoplifter. Also lesser but more numerous increases for the lawsuits about shoplifters who were merely assaulted, strip-searched, unreasonably detained, etc.
And if the theory is that Professional Security Companies will know the Magic Law Words and Procedures that make it so they can't be sued, then no, that's not how this works at all. It really isn't.
I'm not talking about shooting shoplifters! Or even touching them, necessarily! But the whole process of finding, training, equipping, etc. guards seems like it's almost always best left to 3rd-party security companies. Those companies are going to be able to develop expertise around the existing law that allows them navigate the trade-off between accomplishing their mission as well as possible while also incurring a minimum of liability. *That's* what I mean by "reducing liability".
Some deterrence can be accomplished with nothing more than subtle body language. Some can be done by action but no contact. Some can be done with non-lethal contact. The expertise comes in knowing how and when, and being able to handle situations in ways that, on average, generate the fewest long-term negative consequences. This is not something that grocery stores are going to have any competitive advantage at.
And that's part of the point of the extra corporate structure. If the guard is directly hired, trained, equipped etc. by the grocery store, someone in the management chain of the grocery store is going to be responsible for their mistakes. (Why would you hire the guy who hired the guy who screwed up so badly? What made you think that you had any relevant expertise in this area?) But it's a lot easier to justify hiring a known security company, a company that is employed without problem by many other clients, that promises to take care of all these things.
In other words, if 100 grocery stores each directly hire guards, when one of the guards messes up, it's quite plausible that this is the fault of management at that particular grocery store. But if the 100 grocery stores each make a contract with a single security company, and one of the guards messes up, clearly the problem is inside the security company, and everyone at the grocery stores was merely engaging in industry-standard best practices (or whatever Delaware state law happens to call it). Of course, if the grocery store had saved a buck by hiring a no-name no-reputation fly-by-night security company, then they might have problems. And yeah, maybe that particular security company goes under, and so the grocery store has to find another security company, and all the security company's guards who didn't screw up have to find jobs at other security companies, too. And none of this is 100%, it all depends on a lot of factors, but to try to put it in engineering terms, the goal is to reduce the risk of catastrophic failure, even at the cost of introducing inefficiencies into the process.
I don't know what the corporate veil has to do with anything.
Regardless, as the article says, stores that hire third parties to provide security indeed face a liability risk.
In particular, as it says, "Even if company X hires contractor Y to perform a job and disclaims liability in the employment contract, the court may disregard the label, ‘independent contractor,’ and could assign liability to the hiring party under respondeat superior if the hiring party has the right to control the manner in which the contractor performs their job." It seems likely that the one guy assigned to my local CVS is under the control of the CVS manager, not the guy in Acme Security 's regional office.
Edit. And here is a case from back in 1976:
>The other exception is that because of the "personal character" of duties owed to the public by one adopting measures to protect his property, owners and operators of enterprises cannot, by securing special personnel through an independent contractor for the purposes of protecting property, obtain immunity from liability for at least the intentional torts of the protecting agency or its employees. See Adams v. F. W. Woolworth Co., 144 Misc. 27, 257 N.Y.S. 776 (N.Y.C. Sup.Ct.1932); Hendricks v. Leslie Fay, Inc., 273 N.C. 59, 159 S.E.2d 362 (Sup.Ct.1968); Szymanski v. Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., 79 Ohio App. 407, 74 N.E.2d 205 (C.A. 1947); Zentko v. G. M. McKelvey Co., 88 N.E.2d 265 (C.A.1948); Halliburton-Abbott Co. v. Hodge, 172 Okl. 175, 44 P.2d 122 (Sup.Ct.1935); Webbier v. Thoroughbred Racing Protective Bureau, Inc., 254 A.2d 285 (R.I.Sup.Ct.1969); Malvo v. J. C. Penney Company, Inc., 512 P.2d 575 (Alaska Sup.Ct.1973). False imprisonment is an intentional tort.
The corporate veil is an example of the principle that there is pretty much no absolute immunity from liability (unless you're a cop, sometimes), but there are steps that can be taken that can make liability more likely or less likely. So the conservative approach is to layer on a lot of those steps, and reduce the danger.
You would have to do the research in a society where anywhere remotely near "every retail store" is hiring armed security. Since California is not such a society (however much you may enjoy pretending that it is, or perhaps genuinely believe that it is because you don't go to many retail stores), that means you would have to do the research outside California and then try to make it apply somehow.
Retailers have employed such security for a while, just in plainclothes, and they still do. Most of the “tactical” style security are contractors and I only notice them in the highest foot traffic locations. They’re not that expensive either, plenty of wannabe cops out there who can pass the background check.
In fact the “tactical” style contractors might be saving retailers money on net if retaining them allows for employing fewer loss prevention staff on W-2.
Once a society becomes more-or-less Ok with low-level petty theft/shop-lifting, it's hard to come back from that.
The ideal way to not have such a thing is for the vast majority of people to either view any sort of theft as inherently immoral *or* to value having a high-trust society and realizing that a high amount of petty crime undermines that greatly. In other words, the ideal way to not have lots of low-level petty theft is for people in general to be morally opposed to such a thing and to freely choose not to do it (and to oppose those that do).
There's certain types of bad behavior that are hard to police if much of society becomes Ok with that bad behavior, and starts engaging in it. Speeding is another example of this - if everybody thinks speeding way over the speed limit is fine, it's hard to police that, as it becomes like bailing out a water-logged boat that's full of holes, too many holes to cover or fill.
I don't live in California, but I certainly get the impression that some areas/cities in California have basically come to tolerate low-level petty crime and shoplifting, and well... this is what happens when such things are casually tolerated. Businesses will lock up many things behind glass. Can you really fault the businesses here? I don't.
>Speeding is another example of this - if everybody thinks speeding way over the speed limit is fine, it's hard to police that, as it becomes like bailing out a water-logged boat that's full of holes, too many holes to cover or fill.
As an egregious generality, we take social cues from one another. And if some law, rule, or convention is widely ignored by others, it's more likely we'll follow their lead. Along with speeding while driving, jaywalking is another representative example.
Orthogonal to this question, I'm intrigued by the observation that "half the Target is locked up behind glass."
Is there any data publicly available on just what fraction of individual store shelf space (by percent of total linear feet or the like) have locked cases for products? And how that's changed over time, either in various retail store categories or for particular retail chains? (Maybe something like this might be available in specialized trade publications, or?)
At our local Target, in a not-hugely-wealthy part of the East Bay, in the San Francisco Bay Area, the main sections with lockups are in electronics and health & beauty. I'd hazard an off-the-cuff estimate that maybe 5% of the store's total aisles have at least one locked case, if even that many. As well, some of those cases don't run the full length of those aisles and/or are only on one side.
There may well be particular store locations where a much larger fraction of aisles have their products locked up. Inferring from just this single photo, this could be one?
Where I live, the stores don't have very many things locked behind glass. But also, our police will actually arrest shoplifters, and our prosecutors will charge them with shoplifting.
In my experience, it depends on the store. The worst I've seen was my local Walgreens, but Safeway has some stuff locked up too. Not half, but sometimes it might seem that way. E.g, if you limit yourself to say, the health and beauty section of Walgreens, then it very well may be half. I'd guess that at least a quarter of the aisles at my Walgreens contain at least one locked section.
I haven't personally seen anything near as bad as that Target, thank god.
There are also two stores I've seen (an Apple Store and a fashion store, not low-value retail) that hire off-duty police officers to stand out front all day. The police even have reserved parking spots in front of the stores now.
The Target I’m at most often was built on the former site of Cabrini-Green in Chicago, an area that still sees its share of crime. Very little is locked up aside from electronics and video games, ie the things that have been locked up for decades. Few glass cases elsewhere, even in cosmetics. Security is visible but discreet, no tactical gear.
No, really, go to like Ecuador or the Philippines or something. It is (or was) super common to see like two guys in body armor with shotguns standing guard outside the KFC. You get used to it.
About LLMs needing more language to train on: I'm sure many know the answer to this, but I don't & I'm not too proud to ask: Have the texts of books for which copyright has expired been used? Also, what about turning podcasts and youtube videos of talking heads into text, and training on that -- has that been used?
Sure, those texts have been used, long ago, and they are nowhere near sufficient, every reasonable model uses all that and much, much more than that. In the context of LLM training data "every book humanity has published before 1900" (which is not the same as digitally available books) means "a very small amount of data" - the vast majority of written content that exists has been written recently, since the barrier to publishing something back then was so much higher than people rambling online nowadays.
They can generate synthetic data which they then train on. The problem is that we're going to end up in a future in which no humans will know which data is real. History and science will be rewritten. Even in school students won't know whether what is in their textbooks is true or not. Nor will the teachers. Neither will care, though, because AIs will write all the papers and do all the homework and grading. Nobody will know anything about the past or even what year it is.
To a first approximation, they use everything they can get, copyright or no. The written corpus is not that big, so they've turned to images and now video. But if you keep scaling, even that won't be enough.
The large AI companies are pretty secretive about the data they're training on, but there is a large, well-known, and readily-accessibly corpus, both in and out of copyright, that they're all rumored to be using.
I just read the article Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead, and one of the things Aschenbrenner says is that a lot of the stuff the LLM's were trained on was crap -- copies of other sites, SEO junk, etc. & he remarks that LLM's would probably work better if they'd been trained on better material. So I was wondering what they would be like if they'd had better nutrients. -- not just Great Literature, but old newspaper articles, love letters, legal documents, songs and plays that were pure popular entertainment, office memos, Burma Shave jingles . . .
Are your whiskers
When you wake
Tougher than
A two-bit steak?
Try
Burma-Shave
I suppose that even if we used every scrap of that there wouldn't be enough. If there were enough, do you think it would make a difference?
I expect retraining on a better-curated dataset without the crap you mention (and with improved tokenization) would make more of difference than trying to dilute it with better material.
Regardless, while it's foolhardy to make predictions when I know I know so little … I think the current generation of models have plateaued on text: their grammar is essentially perfect, and I don't see their world model improving with more training on text of the sort you describe.
(To be clear, I still expect them to keep improving. I just think it'll take more than random text like newspaper articles, love letters, etc., even if you can find lots of it. I think the next steps are multimodality and tool use.)
Is there anyone here who is an expert on nuclear safety?
Using data from the NEA's SERENA program, it looks like the upper bound of the blast pressure from a steam explosion is around 200 kPa (29 psi). This is possibly an underestimate as the void coefficient and flow regime in a critical reactor is difficult to verify. Also this was only based on computer model simulations, as for some reason no one wants to explode real nuclear reactors to gather experimental data. Wikipedia lists the blast pressure rating of nuclear reactor containment structures at 40-80 psi, which seems well out of the range of possible explosion yields. Actual nuclear power plants in the US have Final Safety Analysis Reports (FSAR) available as a matter of public record. Taking the Ginna NPP FSAR as an example, their containment structure is rated for 60 psi, and was subjected to 69 psi as part of a safety test. My conclusion as an amateur is that even a worst case meltdown scenario followed by a steam explosion in a PWR/BWR would not be enough to breach containment.
Explosions are more complicated than just the maximum blast pressure, such as the rate of pressure change and shrapnel, etc. So is it possible that a steam explosion could actually breach a containment structure? I am quite familiar with the Vladimir I Lenin NPP disaster and understand that western reactor designs and safety protocols are nothing like the situation at Chernobyl. But it seems that western reactors are designed defensively to contain a Chernobyl-esque failure, despite the extreme unlikelihood of such a thing happening. Also, how long has this been the case? It seems that US nuclear reactors have come with a containment building as standard all the way since the dawn of commercial nuclear in the 1950's. I don't know if these earlier builds were rated for similar containment, or if that happened later. But Ginna began operation in 1970, more than a decade before Chernobyl, so clearly the defensive nature of reactor containment predates said disaster. Final question, is such containment a reasonable precaution or excessive safety regulation that is strangling energy growth? It seems basically impossible that modern reactors could explode, but then no one believed RBMK reactors could explode either until they did. I guess this is a meta question about safety, whether systems should be designed to withstand worst case scenarios that are physically implausible with known information.
If we used molten salt reactors, then you don't even need to worry about steam explosions. The boiling point of molten salt is too high to happen in a reactor.
1. “upper bound of the blast pressure from a steam explosion is around 200 kPa (29 psi)” - is there an explanation as to why this is the upper bound, and why we should expect one existing?
2. Nowhere you mention peak pressure duration. This is a glaring omission, any peak stress test includes both the peak value and it’s duration, e.g., for shock tests it’s 10 kG for so many microseconds (don’t remember the exact spec off the top of my head).
1. This is what the NEA experts calculated for a steam explosion resulting from molten corium dropping into coolant in a light water reactor. There is only so much water and fissile material in a reactor, so the explosion can only be so big. This was based on standard western reactor designs at the time of the study (2003).
2. I didn't know what to look for and I didn't really want to read the whole 126 page report. But it includes this section:
"High pressures occur in earlier or later phases of pressure development (wave escalation and propagation), but over only small time spans (width of pressure peaks < 1 ms). Such peak pressures reach about 110 MPa (JASMINE F2) or are in a range of 60 – 80 MPa (JASMINE F1X, TEXAS UW, IFCI, ESPROSE -at later time-). Only very short pressure peaks with pressures in this range are obtained by IDEMO and MC3D. Longer lasting pressures do mostly not exceed 20 MPa."
Thank you, #1 makes sense, they considered a specific situation and arrived at a limit.
For #2 - they at least addressed the duration qualitatively, so there’s a degree of awareness of its impact. Looks good enough given the difficulty of obtaining a lot of measurements.
AFAICT the whole nuclear fission industry is way over regulated ... it's kinda nuts how much everyone is afraid of nuclear. And yet radiation is all around us, and if you were afraid of radiation you wouldn't live in Denver. (or fly in a plane, or get nuclear enhanced chest x-ray tomography or... )
Most of the regulations that seem to actually make Nuclear extremely expensive and slow to build seem to be generic ones like the hell that is anglosphere planning law, the same environmental laws that somehow manage to block wind turbines and solar farms, and the inefficiencies of big government contracts. Countries that can still build cheap reactors aren't building them with less safety structures, they're not having to write millions of pages on how the plant won't impact newts while having "charities" take them to court all the time as we see in Britain.
I’ve posted in a few threads about my quest to find a more enjoyable and fulfilling career as an SE.
I’d love to hear an answer to the following from people in the field who are pretty satisfied in their current job.
Does fulfillment come from connecting to the company’s product/mission or from finding cool challenges to work on? Is this question is even well posed to begin with?
In my time as an individual contributor SWE, I had two really super fulfilling projects. One was a cool challenge, where we were really advancing the state of the art but doing so for a directly applied end, not as a toy research problem. The other was when I happened to be in the right place at the right time to realize that One Weird Trick would save the company $VERY_LARGE_NUMBER worth of compute. The common thread (n=2, such high statistical power!) was the combination of cleverness and clear application, even though in both cases nobody but a few of my fellow SWEs ever saw the direct results of the application.
Then I went into management, and at first was very unfulfilled. After awhile I discovered that what fulfilled me was finding the sorts of people who were doing the kinds of projects I just described, and coaching them on how to better succeed at it, either as ICs or team leads or managers in their own right. This was partly because of the coaching talent I found I had, but I think partly also because their enthusiasm for the fulfilling nature of their projects trickled down, so to speak, to me.
Not that I'm opposed to my company's mission or anything, but I think the main source of fulfillment is lower level - making the system you work on as good as you can. Having ownership and a relative lack of barriers can help with that.
I suspect that that the balance between those two varies between people. But there's a third important factor: do you connect with your team?
Aka do you think your team is a good learning environment? Do you feel they have your back? Are they pushing you to do your best work? Do they respect and seek your inputs--and can you do the same for them? Does conflict lean more towards constructive themes?
I raise this because I just recently changed teams. I was deeply dissatisfied with my work and began to loathe my job. But I stumbled into another team and I'm getting a lot of cool challenges that have reignited my interest in SE, but also the people are great, like I haven't been on a tr like this in years. It really feels like we're all rowing in the same tempo, even though we're all working on quite separate projects. I was shocked to hear my new manager typecast me (correctly) into a "craftsman" role after just a few weeks (my prev manager, I suspect, didn't really understand what I was doing).
It's maybe a virtuous cycle: a healthy team produces good challenges, and good challenges stimulate engaged work, which leads to more good challenges.
one things that stands in the way of fullfillment is that at the end of day, you don't have tangible results, that you can see or touch. On one hand that is a problem for the lizard-brain, because it doesn't feel that your effort actually had any point. On the other hand it is a problem, because abstract things make communication harder, e.g. with managers, when they ask why it takes a long time to fix something that looks simple.
For me the most fulfilling parts of SE comes, when you can see the actual results of your work (e.g. because you are in direct contact with the users, or if your software has some real-world impact) ,or when the stress is low and I can spent energy outside of work to get fulfillment from private projects.
> Does fulfillment come from connecting to the company’s product/mission
I have never really connected to the company’s product/mission, maybe I am too cynical, or maybe I was not lucky.
> or from finding cool challenges to work on?
This can be fulfilling, but not always. Sometimes you do something fun, and it later turns out you were overengineering a deadend. Sometimes you solve a hard problem, but management underestimates the problem, and belittles your achievment. If you work in a larger org, then most challenges come from politics, and not from technologie.
> Is this question is even well posed to begin with?
for me fulfilling programming sometimes happened outside work, when I was doing fun projects for myself or friends. So my personal recommendation for a fulfilling career would be to minimize your career and find fulfillment elsewhere.
LLM watch: in the past I've reported some queries that it occurred to me to pose to Google Gemini, all of which were flubbed somewhere between badly and so-badly-it's-hard-to-believe-people-think-this-is-useful.
This time I thought of a question that I expected an LLM might handle well. Here's the prompt and response:
--- prompt --
There's an old broadsheet ballad called The Victory, and Steeleye Span's rendition of the final verse starts with these lines:
Here's success unto the Victory / and crew of noble fame
and glory to the captain / bold Nelson was his name
What does the singer mean by these lines?
--- response --
The singer is celebrating the victory of the British warship 𝗛𝗠𝗦 𝗩𝗶𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 in a famous naval battle. The "captain bold Nelson" is 𝗔𝗱𝗺𝗶𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗛𝗼𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼 𝗡𝗲𝗹𝘀𝗼𝗻, a legendary British naval commander who led the Victory in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
The lines express admiration for the Victory and its crew, as well as for Nelson's courage and leadership. The "success" and "glory" mentioned in the lyrics refer to the British victory in the battle, which was a significant moment in British naval history.
-----
Contrary to my first thoughts, this is another for the "so terrible, it's hard to imagine someone thinking this tool can do anything" files. Following up:
--- prompt 2 (continuing on from the first response) --
What are the lines that follow the two I cited?
--- response 2 --
I'm sorry, I don't know the lines that follow the two you cited. I can only provide information that is publicly available. If you would like to know the full text of the ballad, you can find it online or in a book.
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This doesn't even make sense. I am indeed aware that I can find the text of the ballad online. That's possible because... it's publicly available. Not much risk of violating copyright in a broadsheet ballad either.
This seems to be a case of it being hamstrung from fears of violating copyright, such as stories from The New York Times. They probably made it so that any text completion requested is automatically blocked, and it doesn't have an override for that to check whether something is old enough to be out of copyright.
That will explain the second failure. The first one is worse. The information I asked for isn't included in the prompt, which was intentional - there's somebody downthread commenting on how LLMs are useful because they contain a lot of knowledge. Not in this case, apparently.
I want to register that, not having ever encountered the song before, the AI answer sounded very reasonable until I actually searched the song and found the context. (For people who don't want to do that themselves, the singer is bitter that her love was pressganged to serve on the Victory).
I feel like calling this a great disappointment is missing something substantial.
> the AI answer sounded very reasonable until I actually searched the song and found the context
Well, that still puts you ahead of the other response I've received, which claims that the toast "Success to the Victory and her brave captain, whose valor in combat got my fiancé killed" is best viewed as a celebration of that event.
I've presented this as a counterpoint to the idea that LLMs are a source of knowledge that you can consult. An answer that sounds reasonable as long as you're completely unaware of the relevant facts isn't something you should hope to be getting. It's more of a worst-case scenario. It is something you would expect from the mechanics of an LLM, though.
> I feel like calling this a great disappointment is missing something substantial.
How would you rate the quality of the answer?
> was pressganged
For reference, the standard verb for this is "impressed". Your choice is probably less likely to confuse people unfamiliar with the practice.
I've always felt that there's a little bit of extra injustice in being impressed into a suicide charge.
I'm not so sure, having Googled it as Gemini recommended. The poem as a whole certainly isn't about the battle and victory, but those two lines sure seem to be. I interpret as contrasting Britain's great victory with the poet's great loss.
So I kind of agree with the analysis. But poetry isn't really my thing, either.
That's kind of the point though, I think. If the LLM takes context from a few clues and makes up something that sounds plausible but is wrong, then it's misleading or outright wrong. The same happens when you ask it a question that sounds like something famous (I've seen the fox, rabbit, cabbage puzzle) but is just straightforward, but it answers the famous thing instead.
The bigger concern is not using these systems when the operator can fact check or just Google the answer. It's when we try to lean on it for daily use or as a black box to answer questions we cannot already answer. "Provide a formula for a perfect cholesterol drug" is extremely scary with current LLMs.
If you ask for a formula for a perfect cholesterol drug and then assume the answer you get is correct then you will be in for problems, whether the source is an LLM or a research lab. But you can then TEST the solution, first by asking whether it makes sense, and then by something like clinical trials.
Consider this completely made-up AI "formula": Combine dioxygen difluoride in a polonium solution. Results show total recovery from cholesterol.
I would hope no one would have low enough wisdom to consider this formula.
Sure, we can test a solution, but that's what I was talking about with fact checking or Googling the answer. It's an added, and currently necessary, step in order to use an LLM.
For the formula you provided, I'm not a chemist so I'm not sure what chemical that is. I might try to make that at home if I have high cholesterol, with apparently bad results.
If LLMs are for smart people who already understand enough about the results to keep themselves safe, then that may be helpful overall, but it's not that good of a sign for LLMs being revolutionary or whatever. Certainly not a strong indication that they would be dangerous, except in the accidental way (people consuming polonium).
I used to often have a problem when asking LLMs to translate a story where it would be too big to fit into the context window, so they'd only translate the first part and then seamlessly hallucinate a continuation of the story instead of translating the rest, with absolutely no warning.
The biggest problem with LLMs is that by construction, they're very good at emulating the surface level signals that people historically used to estimate credibility, regardless of whether they are actually correct or not.
I recommend the music of Two Steps from Hell while reading Unsong. There's tracks with appropriate names like Archangel or Sariel (that I conveniently misread as Uriel), Apollo, Starchild, Color the Sky (the seven colors of the rainbow, and the three extra ones you only get in heaven), and various things that you can make Comet King associated with a little bit of imagination and/or Kabbalah. Also, I really like the general vibe their music has.
Wait, do people enjoy reading while listening to music? That would be like torture for me.
When you read, do you picture the scenes vividly in your imagination? Maybe people who have a more visual reading experience can enjoy music better--like a movie soundtrack.
I've spent enough time reading on various forms of public transportation that I can happily read to music because its preferable to the noises obnoxious people constantly make in public.
I listen to instrumental music while reading all the time, but nothing with words. You need something that fades into the background and won't take your attention.
Need that stimulation, dopamine set points can get very unhealthy, watching math lectures are 4x speed while playing idle game until I get migraines so I take caffine and move my bed time hours *each day*. Working back down to 2x speed videos, or reading with classical music is a detox.
I find that listening to music makes it slightly harder to focus on what you are reading, but it's still tremendously fun. I read to music all of the time.
I used to listen to music while reading as a teenager, and it didn't really affect the immediate experience, but it ties the two together in my memories, so re-reading Dune, for instance, conjure up a certain album in my mind, hyperion got another, etc etc.
It makes the whole nostalgia lane very enjoyable, as every piece calls back to something else as well.
This has happened to me with travel—first by accident and now intentionally. I’ll listen to a song over and over while on a trip so that I can experience nostalgia when hearing it years later.
I picture scenes fairly vividly while reading, and I find reading while listening to music pointless; if the music does not distract me from reading, then I don't notice the music at all.
Can "utilon models" of consequentialist utilitarianism wind up re-creating deontological, pseudo-deistic systems through Goodhart's Law?
I'm thinking of a Substack friends or at least neighbors of this blog, who I don't particularly care to call out (I'll save that in case, in my dotage, I start my own substack), or Vox's Future Perfect using "wrong side of history" or "failing moral tests" language (who I don't mind calling out, Vox delenda est). There is a sense in which utilons are just a communication tool to convey relative values, but it seems that some people fall into a stronger sense where they're actually *real*, that some cosmic scoreboard (ie, God) will judge you/us, and that we're doing badly by not doing a very narrow set of (progressive-approved) tasks. Now that I feel a temptation to delve into the sociology of post-Christian Protestant heresy combined with Millennial indoctrination to score well on tests above all else, I'll leave the question to the audience.
>There is a sense in which utilons are just a communication tool to convey relative values, but it seems that some people fall into a stronger sense where they're actually *real*, that some cosmic scoreboard (ie, God) will judge you/us
I'm confused - the definition of utilitarianism is "doing good means maximizing utility," or in other words, "doing good means getting the highest score on the cosmic scoreboard." How you believe the universe is scored and how you go about maximizing that score might vary, but I don't understand how you could claim to be utilitarian if you aren't using *some* sort of scoring system to judge actions, or what difference it would make if utilons are "real" vs "just a communication tool." The score is measuring a real thing - how much suffering or happiness there is in the world - regardless of if you think God or Man is the one tallying up the score.
And the phrase "wrong side of history" has nothing to do with utilitarian scoring? I guess you could interpret such a statement as saying "I predict your actions will turn out in the future to be extremely negative-utility," but it could equally well be saying "I predict that in the future people will consider you to be extremely unvirtuous" or "I predict that people in the future will believe you were violating an obvious deontological principle." It's a statement about how you'll be viewed in the future, not a statement about which ethics system the speaker is using.
You seem to be complaining about something very specific but I completely don't understand what you're getting at here.
My instinct is to say no, I'd Cooperate. But on second thought, that's contingent on the situation resembling a conventionally-formulated Prisoner's Dilemma, where I have a sense of sympathy for and obligation towards the other participant, then I'm pretty sure I'll cooperate, and only the idea of higher obligations to others (e.g. having to go to prison for an extended period of time and not be there for my wife and our daughter) gives me significant pause. For a non-life-changing financial incentive (e.g. the "Split or Steal" phase of the UK game show "Golden Balls" where the two finalists have a prisoner's dilemma over the division of the prize money in the final round), I would definitely cooperate.
In something like EY's "True Prisoner's Dilemma", where the other participant is an evil being I have no obligation towards and no personal sympathy for their goals, then I'm defecting unless there are practical reasons (e.g. the possibility of retaliation) why cooperating is a necessary evil. Even if the other participant is a utility monster, my instinct is still firmly to defect.
That was a really revealing question, so well done asking it. I notice that a good chunk of the reasoning behind my answers is deontological, concerning honor-driven obligations, and most of the rest of the reasoning is also deviation from pure utilitarianism as it involves discounting the other participant's utility based on my opinion of them, what they deserve, and the legitimacy of their goals.
Contextually dependent. Is it iterated, who knows my response, what's the payoff matrix, etc.
In a public comment section the optimal strategy is, of course, to loudly cry "Cooperate" and note the importance of pre-committing to being cooperative in all circumstances. Then defect in the dark.
My timeline on Twitter has been flooded the past couple days with tributes to literary critic Fredric Jameson, who died at the age of 90 a couple days ago. I had never heard of him, but apparently he was a very influential Marxist and Postmodernist theorist and critic. I suppose most people don't like to speak ill of someone who just died, he sounds like the kind of thinker who, however smart and talented, was very, very wrong. At least one of his books has the word "late capitalism" in its title.
What I'm wondering is if there are non-Marxist readers who found Jameson worth reading. If so, do you just ignore his Marxism and move on?
My YouTube algorithm (Premium, no less!) is pretty darn good at making suggestions tangential to my main interests, so I was surprised when I "randomly" received a couple of posts and a video essay about this Fredric Jameson person whom I'd never even heard of. It was *very* weird; I've never had YouTube inform me of the death of a writer of any sort, so it felt extremely weird. I mean, my algorithm is such that YouTube has frequently neglected to mention *MAJOR* news events, so why this particular death, for someone who wasn't a household name?
I watch content from both teams, but way more Red and Purple team content than Blue (for whatever reason, Blue content is easier to take in written form). So that feels even weirder.
I'd hesitate before applying the term "postmodernist" to Jameson's work. Indeed, his book on postmodernism theory (the one with "late capitalism" in the title) takes great issue with the theory's ahistorical bent. And as a reader deeply committed to historicizing (however deterministically) a text, Jameson simply could never endorse postmodernism theory - and rightly so, if you ask me. For what it's worth, the postmodernism book's (critical) thesis, broadly stated, is that postmodernism theory represents the "spatialization" of culture, and does so at the expense of its further potential temporalization. If that sounds interesting, I highly recommend the book. I'll caution that, although not completely impenetrable, the book is difficult and weighs its words with great precision. However, I personally found it so well-argued, compelling, and persuasive as to justify its difficulty.
According to Claude: "The phrase suggests that capitalism has reached an advanced or possibly unsustainable stage, with some arguing it reflects the system's decline. The term became more popular through the works of theorists like Marxist economist Ernest Mandel and cultural critic Fredric Jameson."
I didn't mention Fredric Jameson in the prompt, FWIW.
Prediction: this wont solve anything, if it does it will be brutally attacked
Byzantine generals only wont if they feel shame about lying, online interactions don't involve physical danger or relationships and so it all falls apart even for simpler coordination problems like flirting, if dating apps are hard to solve with coordinating 2 people, why on earth would people imagine n-people is easy and you just throw tech at it.
After looking at the website, honeypots and fake accounts seem like a big potential problem to me.
Also, the website doesn't explain at all how you're supposed to share the link in an anonymous way. That seems like a massive info leak. Anyone you try to recruit will know you tried to recruit them, and possibly inform on you.
I could maybe picture this as being an effective way to change a single private company, a single large workplace. Or perhaps something like a single school district.
But if you scale it up beyond that, I doubt it can work.
This seems custom designed for organizing a union in a workplace. So yeah, if the app proves to be effective, I expect an avalanche of hit pieces in the corporate press. (And a few supportive pieces)
My first thought in glancing over their website is that it reminds me a great deal of Secret Religion societies from Crusader Kings 2, which allows characters who secretly adhere to an underground religion to coordinate and recruit converts until they reach a critical mass and they all convert openly. In the game, it's effective enough that it can be really annoying as a player when NPCs are spreading heresy in your realm and there's not a lot you can do to stop them.
I don't think it would be quite as effective in real life, though.
Its very effective in real life, but only in real life. In ~100 years Christianity went from a non important cult to converting the emperor and setting up the institutions that maintained the books after the fall and the central question of "the separation of church and state" that arguably set up the modern world.
On Contingencies. I often wonder why people fight losing battles to the bitter end, and barely ever discuss "plan B", at least on-line. For example, it seems pretty obvious that humanity will NOT overcome climate change (at least not by self-imposing limits). If so, so what? What's our Plan B? I don't think I EVER saw discussion this online. The same is true for a lot of other problems, the ones that might only be overcome by all people working together against their short-term interests. Even AI. I loathe to say this, because on this blog, discussion of dangers of AI will probably hijack the comments, but still: I firmly believe that if a dangerous AI can be created and released into wild, it WILL be created and released, as long as there are some big short-term benefits to whoever does that first. If so, so what?
The answer to such question, of course, depends on exact parameters. But that just means there should be more than one plan, and we should assess probabilities of various failure modes and allocate at least some resources not to prevent them, but to survive the results.
One counter-argument is that we should concentrate on prevention (an ounce of which is said to be worth a pound of cure). But, what if prevention is actually impossible? Not physically, but politically, sociologically and economically? Shouldn't we at least devote SOME time to "cures"?
"Human nature" involves "motivation". For whatever reason, people seem to get less motivated when the possibility of failure is mentioned. So when success depends on motivation, people don't often discuss plan B, because that implies that plan A might fail.
In my line of work (civil engineering) we have been discussing climate change, as well as designing infrastructure (dams, bridges, flood protection) to account for those changes for at least 10 years now, i.e. plan B. The models used for that are very simplistic though.
Couldn’t agree more. While obviously the best path is to treat the underlying issue (risk of a malevolent, superhuman AI “escaping”, GHG emissions, etc.) that’s honestly very rarely a true option. The reason we worry about these things in the first place aren’t because we are worried someone will have some aesthetic or irrational preference for these dangers and release them upon the world, but because there are fundamental and almost impossible to control economic and incentive forces at play that exceed any centralized point of control. You’re not going to solve GHG by banning fossil fuels when people generally like having cars, consuming electricity, and raising themselves out of poverty.
Climate change mitigation discussions do not work on the English language Internet, because they are very necessarily local, not global. In the Hungarian-language Internet we are talking about water retention and drought-resistant agriculture. We need to bring back some of the floodplains eliminated in the 19th century. The whole discussion revolves around water. In other place, it might be around wildfires.
This is an interesting take. I don't see much of that in my own corner of Internet (but maybe I go to the wrong sites; I don't know any high-quality discussion forums on my language, only mainstream entertainment). I would expect to see at least some such discussions in English (that are local to USA), but I guess they might be drowned out by politics in this case.
Climate change is a continuum. There are distant poles where fighting it clearly worked because the world is now back to 1700s temperatures, vs where it clearly didn't work because the world is now 5 degrees hotter and Pakistan is uninhabitable. In the middle it's more a question of degree.
What's the plan if we can't overcome climate change? I guess we just have a few more bushfires and famines and a lot of refugees sometimes. What would a plan B mean here? Some kind of plan to fight famine? We already have disaster planning, strategic food stockpiles, and farming subsidies for that. A plan to fight bushfires? You can't really stop a big enough fire front, most of what you do is driving along beside and behind it making sure it doesn't spread perpendicular to the wind until it runs out of trees or the weather turns, and most countries are already pretty good at that. Refugee camps? As a species we have a hell of a lot of practice at setting those up and already have bodies dedicated to it. I can't think of a useful plan B that isn't already under control.
> I often wonder why people fight losing battles to the bitter end, and barely ever discuss "plan B", at least on-line
Because making a Plan B reduces the probability that Plan A will work, and this is generally true regardless of the context.
* Every moment of effort spent on Plan B is a moment of effort not spent on Plan A
* You might accidentally demonstrate that Plan B is better than Plan A (at least for some members of your coalition), and then you've done your enemies' work for them of divide-and-conquering yourself
Real-world example: in the run-up to the Scottish independence referrendum of 2014, the UK government refused to allow any studies into "What will actually happen if the separatists win" for fear that the answer might be "It won't be so bad, actually" and that would encourage separatism.
When engaging in a battle without a clear-cut win/lose condition, like we have in pro sports and political elections, it can be difficult to realize when the battle is loss. There needs to be a certain level of humility and self-reflection, otherwise it's easy to ignore any evidence that you and your allies are losing the battle and to soldier on as though everything is fine.
50. On hemmed-in ground, I would block any way of retreat. On desperate ground, I would proclaim to my soldiers the hopelessness of saving their lives.
51. For it is the soldier's disposition to offer an obstinate resistance when surrounded, to fight hard when he cannot help himself, and to obey promptly when he has fallen into danger.
That only works if your soldiers believe you, but I don't think this is what happening in many cases. Indeed, most people continue to ignore the issue, either because they feel it doesn't actually affects them, or that they have no power to affect it. It's a bit like proclaim hopelessness to a soldier who can clearly see a road to the next fortress at the rear: while from strategic viewpoint losing this particular battle might mean losing the war, it's hard to convince people to stay their ground when there is a lot of ground to give, and seemingly little harm in giving it up. This is rarely the case in real wars, but that's the problem: war, with its immediate violence, is kind of built-in into humans, so we *get* it; curbing consumption to fight climate change, or, as another example, having more children to ensure the future of your nation (at the expense of life quality), is not.
yeah, it wasn't meant to be comprehensive. just one possibility of many. I don't think there's a single, unifying reason that people often neglect backup plans. Moreso it depends on the particulars and circumstances. If I had to single-out a reason anyway though, I'd say what Erica Rall said: that there's a demoralization/defection thing going on. Which I think the Sun Tzu excerpt sort of speaks to. (ok, maybe it was not the best quote.)
According to my understanding of ancient warfare, group cohesion is hugely important variable, *in general*. If the formation breaks, you get routed. closing off the line of retreat can heighten the resolve and cohesion. But also, cohesion is important even without being backed into a corner. The "arguments as soldiers" analogy is fitting, not just because battles and flamewars can get messy, but also because it encapsulates the *seemingly* irrational urge to never break rank, under any circumstances whatsoever.
In the case of climate-change specifically, I suspect there's a few things going on. (N.B. I don't follow this topic very closely.)
A) availability bias. Most of the haranguing you've seen likely comes from people who are politically motivated to exaggerate reality. The most hyperbolic lefties say it'll be of apocalyptic proportions, while the most hyperbolic righties say it doesn't even exist. But ecosystems are complex, unpredictable phenomena. So I expect climate change is going to be a little of both. I.e. disastrous on some dimensions; but also less than apocalyptic on others. (i'm not appealing to the argument to moderation, i'm appealing to the heuristic that nature tends toward an equilibrium.)
B) (As others have said,) mitigations will be local. Many places are already feeling the effects. E.g. I met a guy once who was doing an environmental degree, and he said that there was a certain fungus that was killing a species of tree that's native to our area, and that it was probably due to climate change. I've heard from the news that Ethiopia/Somalia has been subject to an unprecedentedly-large locust-plague, and that this is probably caused by climate-change. I've also heard from the news that Iran is suffering from water shortages, probably due to climate change. I've heard that jellyfish populations are unexpectedly exploding, probs due to climate change. etc.
C) the ramifications are difficult to predict in detail. Climate science is still in its infancy, so none of the academics have unflinching confidence that reality will behave the way their models expect. When you can't predict the ramifications, it's hard to take preemptive measures.
D) (Like you said yourself,) the average joe doesn't care until he feels immediate, tangible consequences.
As for AI specifically, I think it suffers from A) C) and D) as well.
And if you want to follow the nitty-gritty details of climate-change mitigation, maybe pay attention to ecologists rather than climate-modelers. Especially anything to do with water, since that's strikes me as being comparatively easier to forecast, with an outsized impact on human settlements.
The issue with climate change is that it's a global issue that would require extensive co-operation between all major governments around the world. There's simply no mechanism for achieving such co-operation right now, especially with increasing tension between the west and BRICS.
The issue with cooperation about climate change is that the expected impact of its consequences is very unevenly distributed, ranging from "my region will be devastated and I'll have to flee" to "eh, we'll need to pay slightly more taxes to cover extra infrastructure", and there generally is a negative correlation between the impact and ability to influence climate change; those about to suffer the most don't have the ability to cut emissions and those who might make major (and expensive) emissions cuts aren't *that* badly affected, or even may have a vested national interest in prolonging the fossil fuel era so that they can sell as much as possible of their mineral wealth before the world stops buying it.
Well, this is what I'm talking about. If there is no way to solve this issue without cooperation, then at least every country/block should prepare to face the consequences of not solving it (if any; many commenters in this thread assure me that we don't need any special preparations; maybe that's even true and I just read too much sci-fi).
>For example, it seems pretty obvious that humanity will NOT overcome climate change (at least not by self-imposing limits). If so, so what? What's our Plan B? I don't think I EVER saw discussion this online.
There has been plenty of discussion of possible technical solutions, including on the front page of today's New York Times.
It tells me that the "green movement" in many countries involves "useful idiots" that have been successfully manipulated by some fossil fuel exporters to sabotage and delay the transfer to renewables.
If Plan A is “massive coordinated public action,” then efforts to implement it are necessarily high-visibility. If Plan B is “everybody independently figures out how climate change is going to affect them, and adapts” then efforts can remain largely invisible to the public eye. Lots of organizations, both public and private, have quietly developed plans for how to continue their missions in the face of climate change. If Google changes where they build their next datacenter due to anticipated climate change effects, that doesn’t make the news.
Political tribes are a way of playing "ain't it awful?", the purpose of which is to find accomplices in maintaining the not-okay position. Even members of the tribe who attempt to rise above this game & position are treated with suspicion, members of other tribes are treated with outright hostility.
But isn't there a place for a 3rd tribe? For example if one tribe says "we should all cease our high-energy consumption and live simple lives", and other says "ha-ha, SUV goes brrrr", isn't there a place for people who say "OK, we better learn how to build great sea walls" or even "Maybe build automated turrets on the border to keep inevitable mass of immigrants away"?
When a community is defined by shared belief in the importance of Plan A, then arguing for consideration of Plan B, even as a backup, is a defection from group norms. Arguing that Plan B is needed as a backup reads as a defeatist argument against efforts towards Plan A, muddling the messaging, diverting efforts, and demoralizing the troops.
I think Plan B for climate is already being enacted anywhere Plan A isn't happening (which is pretty much everywhere). Maybe slow down CO2 production on the margins, but otherwise just live life. The worst case scenarios are unlikely, and there's not much we can do about it anyway. It's a slow enough process that you could buy beachfront property in Miami and sell it when you retire and not worry about the water. Maybe your grandkids can't, but by then whoever is in Miami will have slowly adjusted over several generations, just like the rest of us have about various other changes in life.
Lots of people started getting on the recycle/personal solar/bike type solutions, but the reality is setting in for normal people. I think that's the source of memes about Taylor Swift flying everywhere. More CO2 was used to fly famous politicians to climate conferences than everyone I know combined will use in a lifetime. And on top of that, the West produces less CO2 than China. We could entirely switch to nuclear or other clean sources, stop using fossil fuels, and still make no difference to the long term trajectory of the climate.
"But the private jets!" is the climate equivalent of saying theres no point fixing the 10m wide hole below the waterline in your ship because there is a leaky tap. Aviation alone is a tiny fraction of GHG emissions and private jets are an even smaller portion. It mostly just serves at a gotcha "oh those elites want to build less fossil fuel plants but they have a jet!".
It speaks to the seriousness of the issue. Surely for a fraction of the cost of those big conferences they could all meet up on Zoom, but instead do what they want to do even though it's more expensive *and* emits far more carbon. When the common man gets pressure to buy a smaller car and reduce their usage, against what they want to do.
More importantly, neither the jets nor household carbon are the big issues. I can emit none or twice as much and it makes no difference. Residential and Commercial (non-industry) carbon emissions combined are 13% of US emissions, and the US is less than 13% of the world total. Residential use in the US is less than 1% of worldwide carbon emissions. Doubling *all* residential use or cutting it to zero makes very little difference and leads to no change in outcome for the climate.
That supposes there will be no single catastrophic event. I guess rising sea levels aren't it - they do rise slow enough by human standards, but other stuff might come at us faster.
What "other stuff"? The IPCC analysis is considered quite thorough, evaluating all kinds of effects on agriculture, flooding, ocean fisheries, various disasters, migration pressures, secondary effects, etc; I would presume that whatever the IPCC reports highlight as the likely harmful consequences of the more severe warming scenarios is an accurate reflection of the actual dangers we should be worrying about.
On climate change, I think the most commonly-discussed plan B is geoengineering, and while it should be discussed (and researched) more than it is, I think it does actually get plenty of discussion.
On AI doom, I think the situation is different because I don't think there is a plan B other than "hope the AI decides to be nice to us for some reason we can't predict".
As a sci-fi story, a possible solution to AI doom could be humanity flying away from Earth at a speed approaching the speed of light. It could be an interesting story, for example we might meet space aliens and yell at them that they need to join us if they want to survive.
But in real life, our technology is nowhere near what would be required for that, and even if we somehow built a large spaceship at least for a few thousand people and sent it away, the AI would probably get us before we could even leave the Solar system.
If we had the technology, I think there's a good chance the AI would let us leave. I think the balance of probabilities on AI opinions toward humanity leans much stronger towards "don't care" than "must destroy" (which has about the same odds as "must protect"). On the other hand, if we had the technology so would the AI, and whatever AI goals lead it to compete with humanity for resources would eventually lead it to competing with the extra-solar human population, assuming that population stopped fleeing and settled down somewhere.
What, mechanically, makes high-quality animation better? When I watch something like Demon Slayer, I can clearly see that they put in way more money and effort into the animation than your average cartoon on anime, but as a non-art person I can't quite tell the specific thing they do. What is the expensive thing you do to get better animation? More details? More parts made by humans instead of autofilled?
> Sakuga is basically where animators go from using cheats like only animating the mouth or skipping frames to animating every frame with fluid movement.
> Sakuga (作画) (lit., "drawing pictures") is a term used in anime to describe moments in a show or movie when the quality of the animation improves drastically, typically for the sake of making a dramatic point or enlivening the action....
> The other end of this spectrum, however, is when the animation becomes exceptionally expressive and fluid -- when every single frame is animated, and the movements themselves are closely-observed and realistic (or, failing that, spectacular to look at). This is what's known as sakuga. Action-oriented shows tend to have the most instances of sakuga, but there are many examples of dramatic shows using them as well -- for instance, to highlight an exceptionally emotional moment.
In animation, movement costs money. If something is moving, it's costing the studio money. the longer it moves, and the more things that are moving on the screen at once, the more money.
Anime, as a genre, is defined by being cheap to produce while still looking good. It does this by moving as little as possible; have lots of quiet scenes, or transition scenes, where nothing moves. Have lots of scenes where characters are just talking to each other, so that the only thing that moves is their mouths. Maybe have a hair or two move on their head while they talk, but make sure if the wind is blowing their hair it's a loopable animation so you only have to pay for a few seconds of movement. Loop whatever you can loop, hide whatever movement you can hide, never change the camera perspective until you have to, and for the love of God DON'T ROTATE AROUND AN OBJECT, THAT WILL CHANGE THE OBJECTS PROFILE FOR EVERY SINGLE FRAME WHICH MEANS EVERYTHING ON SCREEN IS MOVING AAAAAA!
(That last reason, by the way, is why so many animes will suddenly have a 3D CGI model show up when everything else is regular 2D animation: it is incredibly expensive to rotate the camera around a 2D object, and incredibly cheap to rotate the camera around a 3D model. So you'll often see them use a 3D model for a car during a car chase, or for a giant mecha that gets in a lot of fights that involve different camera angles.)
Anime will often save their "movement budget" for a fight scene, so you'll have episodes that are mostly people talking to each other while moving as little as possible, then a fight scene that lasts 2-3 minutes with lots of movement and action.
High quality animation has more things moving. It moves the camera more, it has as many things as possible moving in a scene at once, and it uses more frames of drawing for the movements it does show so everything is more fluid.
Next time you watch an anime, keep track of everything that is moving in any given scene. You'll start to notice right away how little most animes are moving anything, 99% of the time. They need to keep it cheap so they can pump out 25 episodes a year.
> Anime, as a genre, is defined by being cheap to produce while still looking good. It does this by moving as little as possible; have lots of quiet scenes, or transition scenes, where nothing moves. Have lots of scenes where characters are just talking to each other, so that the only thing that moves is their mouths. Maybe have a hair or two move on their head while they talk, but make sure if the wind is blowing their hair it's a loopable animation so you only have to pay for a few seconds of movement.
Another common trick you didn't mention is *not showing the characters at all in the first place*. In anime, it's very common for conversation scenes to cut to random shots of a characters feet, hands, random scenery, etc.
> If something is moving, it's costing the studio money. the longer it moves, and the more things that are moving on the screen at once, the more money.
That's true in general, but there are some caveats. For example, you can draw a 3d scene and then spin the camera around arbitrarily at zero marginal cost. It's pretty common to see moments of obvious CGI effects like this even in otherwise traditional 2d animation nowadays.
The cost is in the complexity of the initial scene creation, not the total amount of movement. I guess this is the 21st century equivalent of panning over a matte painting - the matte painting itself costs money, but the panning doesn't.
You have recieved a lot of good answers already, so I'll add something else: shading. It's a big part of what makes people compare old anime favorable to newer ones, even when the frame count is not particularly better (or even sometimes worse).
Detail yes, and more unique drawings per second of animation. You can create a pretty reasonable illusion of motion with no more than five or six pictures per second of animation; the standard motion picture rate is 24 frames per second. The old studio system would be for the main artists to do key frames (say every fifth or sixth picture) and then for other artists to do the tweenies.
The detail in the old Warner Bros. cartoons, particularly around facial expressions, is quite astounding.
Years ago I watched some anime, which honestly wasn't very good. I don't remember the name. Anyway, there was a fight scene where a character kicked someone, and the animation was detailed enough to show leg muscles moving in what looked like a realistic fashion. I rewound and watched it multiple times, because it was fascinating. In all my years watching animated shows, I had never seen such a clear and obvious detail that live action would have had naturally.
It really helped me to see how much of animated programming was abstracted that didn't need to be. A few years later I noticed that some shows would clearly spend a lot of time and effort for certain scenes - maybe end of season fights or whatever, and there were a million subtle details that just *popped* and the scenes felt way better. I'm thinking specifically of Naruto, where the filler episode fights had minimal budget and looked crummy, and then the show-defining episodes like the Pain fight were just dramatically better.
Id look at non-linear curves, all time, space, color transitions can be rebased into functions of floats between 0 and 1, and there are a collection of functions that can take an input from 0-1 and return a different result, but still in an acceptable range
Often the difference is that high quality animation does things honestly, while lower quality animation cheats, cuts corners, employs little tricks meant to make like simpler: "let's not animate that figure in the background, let's have that limb move as a rigid flat piece of a paper and not try to animate 3d rotation, let's simplify that part away, let's put a smear there and call it a day, let's just keep that part out of the frame, let's just not have a character move in such a way, let's never move an imaginary camera in a certain way, let's replace drawing more frames with scaling and moving existing assets whenever possible, let's not even bother with dynamic light, cast shadows are literally shapeless blobs, let's say nothing ever rotates except in the plane of the camera, let's make that motion so fast, there's no need to draw more than two frames" and so on and so on, a million things. And all these tricks work pretty well, in that the result doesn't look terrible and the animators get away with it. But some thing is lost, and when you watch a higher quality piece of animation you feel the presence of something that cheaper animation is missing.
Other ppl might have a more detailed responses, but some factors are number of frames drawn, how much the details are drawn in transitions between movements (vs start position linearly moving to end position), how much they incorporate lighting, and using specific "camera angles" and cuts to give the impression you're aiming for.
One of the cool tricks from the glory days of Disney cell frame animation was the use of multiple cells, stacked one on top of the other with a bit of space between them. The far background at the very bottom progressing through to the foreground on the top, this would allow racking focus through the cells to achieve some lovely animation effects.
How do software-adjacent people handle changelists? Our customers are always asking for them, and our developers are always hit-and-miss about providing them. I suspect that perhaps Project Managers have more to gain by owning the changelist, but I'm not sure the extent to which others' find that PMs have enough info to generate changelists themselves? Seems like devs have to be somewhat involved, and it seems that is always going to limit the ceiling for what's possible.
I will usually forget about half the changes I made before writing it, but the customer too, so it is fine. Documentation is mainly a formality because no one can check its quality.
The kind of change list customers (typically) want is at a higher level of abstraction than the commit messages in your version control system, so you need to manually summarize somehow.
A change list item like "This package can now be built for RISC-V" is probably summarizing dozens, maybe hundreds, of commits.
To clarify: well-written portable code should "just work" on a new platform like RISC-V. Something like an operating system, on the other hand, probably has hundreds of places that need tweaking. Hopefully, most of them are located in a directory called something like machdep/riscv, but there may be nasty surprises scattered through the codebase.
If you can't easily generate a changelist, that means you are not paying enough attention to your version control system.
* work-in-progress commits are great for personal/team branches but have no place on master/trunk. Its history should be a sequence of logically self contained commits, each of which leaves all tests passing. Leave branches/tags if you need to preserve detailed history, but squash it down for master.
* commit comments should include a brief one-line summary of the purpose before the detailed description
* releases should not contain any commits that are not in master. Tag/branch, that's your release.
Changelists then become easy: diff the relevant histories and aggregate the summaries from the commit comments.
* if you don't have a clean history of stable commits, bisecting for regressions becomes much harder. If trunk spends part of the time broken, pulling from trunk becomes a miserable slog; people then do this less often, which means more merge hell when they do, in a vicious cycle that ultimately makes everything take much longer than it ought to.
* if your commit comments start with a summary, it makes the history much easier to browse since, to a first approximation, all vcs tools display truncated commit messages when displaying commit history.
* if your releases contain ad hoc changes that were not in master, they become more difficult to reproduce (and you WILL need to reproduce them) and also some of the changes will inevitably get lost / forgotten leading to regressions in future work
If your shop does none of these things, the rate at which your developers can actually get things done will be much lower than it needs to be, as will morale.
Meeting those criteria does not imply that the commit messages will make for a useful change list.
For example, "Update to document tokenization handling to permit dynamic definitions for delimiter characters". I know what that means, the developer knows what that means - the project manager is unlikely to have any clue what that means.
> I'm not sure the extent to which others' find that PMs have enough info to generate changelists themselves
Certainly the PM should have as much or more info about the customers' needs as the devs. If they are going to the devs, it's because they can't get the rest of what they need for the customer facing documentation without doing that, and a clean vc history is one way to help here that is also very much its own reward.
If you're working on something like the LLVM compiler there is a strong incentive to make commits small (but self contained etc) to (a) simplify code review (b) reduce probability it conflicts with another change another dev made "simultaneously" and needs to be redone.
(Amusing feature of LLVM process, specifically ... commits can get reordered between passing code review and actually getting committed to main)
At most orgs I worked for, the changes to the software came from customer/stakeholder requests. That is, the "changelist" of a piece of a software is simply a subset of the JIRA tickets the customers themselves opened.
Given that, maybe that's your solution: rephrase every request in a completed JIRA ticket as a past tense verb and that becomes your changelist. ("fix fizzbuzz frobnicator" --> "fixed fizzbuzz frobnicator").
Pressuring the developers crudely is a shitty strategy. If you have Code Review, make it part of the review process to summarize the PR as a changelist entry. You don't need all developers for this, only the senior enough people who review the PRs, gradually the rest of the developers will learn to add the changelist summary before the reviewer asks for it. That's a smarter strategy of pressuring the devs than crude carrot-and-stick.
Also, it depends a lot on your release cadence. Are you releasing every week or every month or every quarter or every year, or every commit? Obviously, it's ridiculous to keep spamming your frequent releases with endless micro-updates, at this point the customers can just talk to your devs directly on Teams for all they care.
Even on a less frequent release schedule, not everything is worthy of an entry in the changelist. There are "plumbing" bugs that customers almost never care about, who cares if you had an off-by-one in a loop somewhere or a memory leak, really who cares. Who cares if you switched the JSON library. Those things are visible to non-technical customers as performance improvements or better UX stability, in which case maybe cite a metric ("reduced load time from x to y", "N bugfixes for better stability and user experience") that summarizes the total effects of all the maintenance your devs did and move on.
STEM is an overly broad category. Certain forms of programming (think doing WordPress stuff in PHP) are basically just precise writing, it is not "engineering" in any sense. So, yes. I am basically a human LLM, verbal intelligence only, I would be in deep shit if writing SQL queries would be anything like engineering.
It does, at least based on my personal experiences. I thought on it a long time ago and realized that pattern recognition is a large part of language proficiency (as it is for math-y subjects). Some character corresponds to a certain concept and sound, and some of these characters put together results in another concept and a sequence of sounds. Some character corresponds to a certain quantity (number) or way of manipulating other characters (eg, +, -, x, ÷), and some of these characters put together results in another quantity. This explained why students who seemed to pick up the math lesson of the day quicker were also more capable of writing grammatically correct sentences.
I also suspect that we conceptually divide math-related intelligence and language-related intelligence because everyone uses languages so often that we don't even notice how much pattern recognition is involved in it. And also maybe because we want to be nice and say that people who can't into maths can at least into English.
I don't have data on this, but intuitively it should. Even on the banal level of being able to talk about and write about STEM-related results and people being aware of your knowledge. The greatest math genius in the world may not be recognized if he or she had very bad verbal IQ.
Also, verbal and math tend to correlate anyway, so very high math IQ would tend to go with very high verbal IQ, even if a specific person didn't need a high verbal IQ to work in STEM.
FWIW when I was on the entrance committee for a molecular biology phd program it seemed to be the consensus view that high verbal GRE scores were better predictors of success than the math or analytic scores. At least one committee member also said they like student athletes as candidates - I think basically as a proxy for conscientiousness and non neuroticism.
Nothing, it is just that when I have a thought, which happens in two seconds, some force irresistably turns my gaze down or away. It is just not possible to think and look at eyes at the same time.
Looking at flat surfaces like walls or floors allow my mind's eye to easily project images onto those surfaces. Faces are the opposite, because they're bumpy and distracting. Imagine trying to read a textbook while Welcome To The Jungle is blaring in the background.
There's also a feeling of a lack of personal space, as if im participating in a Vulcan mind-meld, or trapped in a hall of mirrors.
Yes, I'm on the spectrum. I've become quite adept at socializing and making eye-contact, when I must. It's also mentally exhausting.
Just so you'll know: Typical eye contact during a conversion is that the listener looks at the speaker's face pretty continuously. The speaker is often gazing away from the listener, but keeps glancing at listener's fact while talking. So looking away from the listener a fair amount of the time while is perfectly normal. A lot of people have picked up the idea, from someone who was Wrong on the Internet, and whose Wrongness was copied by many stoopit sites, that the optimal, healthy thing is to look at one's conversational partner as close to 100% of the time as possible! It's not. If you do that the other person will gradually feel more and more uncomfortable, though they may not be able to put their finger on why they feel that way -- the closest they'll be able to come may be something like "he's looking at me too hard."
Looking away more than a bit while listening will be experienced by the speaker as lack of attention to what they're saying. Looking away a lot while talking will not be seen as odd by the listener, so long as the speaker glances at the listener occasionally. Looking right at the listener continuously while talking will be experienced as weird and aggressive.
This is all true but I'll add a caveat: looking right at the listener continuously while talking can be experienced as evidence of sexual attraction (sometimes accurately)
Have you ever listened to your own voice being played back 1 second later, and it makes you confused and unable to keep speaking? That's how I feel when I look at someone's eyes while speaking. It makes it harder to put my thoughts into words. Especially in socially fraught situations when I'm not at ease. I can get through it, usually, but it's easier to just look away for a second and then look back when I'm not the one speaking.
I've learned to make eye contact but it feels uncomfortable/challenging. It might be analogous to sitting in an specific and mildly unnatural posture when you're trying to pay attention to a movie or something. It is also surprisingly easy to do "wrong", which can make it feel unnatural and uncomfortable to the person I'm interacting with, but I'm getting better at that too. Basically there's a lot of things that most people do during eye contact without thinking about it - small eye movements, adjustments, blinks, shifts of gaze away and back. Doing this right without the instinct for it can take a lot of attention for me and be distracting from the content of the conversation and other implicit signals I'm trying to notice. And doing it wrong can be perceived as uncomfortable or creepy, especially if it's too fixed or intense. Making it more complicated, different emotional contexts or degrees of closeness seem to demand a different degree/type of eye contact and all those small parts of it, so it's easy to accidentally signal the wrong thing if I'm not careful.
Unless the person I'm looking at is a romantic interest, I almost never need to think about the fact that I'm looking at a part of them consciously. My eyes wander to whatever part of their face is most interesting, e.g. whatever part moves more, my brain is processing what is being said and my own replies.
If I focus too much on their eye by accident, I could just look elsewhere and recalibrate before looking back. The point is that you almost never need to think deeply about the person's face or eyes, it's what they're saying and doing that is keeping your brain busy. When driving, you don't think "I'm looking at the road right now, this is a thing I'm doing, I'm looking at the grey Asphalt and the lines on it", you just think "I'm trying to avoid crashing the car into the dumbass speeding from behind me", looking at the road and the mirrors is a natural side effect.
I don't really have an unpleasant "sensation" associated with eye contact, because it's all happening at a subconscious level. If I'm making eye contact with a person, then I'm paying attention to their facial expression, their emotions, and their immediate reactions to each word I say. But all that data is incredibly distracting if I'm trying to figure out how to clearly express something complicated. So my subconscious drops the "tracking your eye locations" task to focus on phrasing instead.
I handle it by looking off into the distance whilst I talk, rather than making eye contact. Then when I'm listening, I focus on making intense eye contact to show that I'm paying attention. (I stop making eye contact if you're really boring or really interesting, though. In the former case, I'm thinking about something else. In the latter case, you've inspired an idea into my head, and now I'm thinking about it.)
It's not that it's unpleasant, it's more that it doesn't come naturally to me. It's awkward and distracting to keep up, like standing on one leg. I think that if I got into the habit of making eye contact I could solve this problem. The thing is that there are a lot of conversations where it's fine to not make eye contact, like when one or both of us are performing a task while we talk, so it feels less urgent to fix it.
I also think that if I have gotten into the habit of making eye contact I wouldn't necessarily realize... It's possible I've already fixed this.
Thanks for sharing. I have a son with ASD who is young, and one of the things I'm grappling with is "should I encourage him to make eye contact." Like, if it's viscerally terrible for him, I don't want to subject him to it, or not much, but if it's just a matter of building a good habit, I think it'll be helpful for him.
Not going to take your experience as the only and final word on the topic, but a helpful data point.
I think pushing someone to be make a certain kind of eye contact is hard on them. We normally are not consciously aware of what we are doing with oureyes, and pushing someone to be is going to give them an additional difficult task to do when they are already doing the difficult task of talking with someone. Here's a gentler way to come at it with your son:
-Tell him that when he's doing the talking he should glance at the other person's face now and then to see how they are reacting. If they look friendly and interested, all is well. But if they are looking out the window or at their phone, that's a sign they're maybe not interested. And if course if they look upset he needs to think about whether they maybe didn't like what he said.
-And tell him when that he is the listener then if he is interested in what the person is saying he should look at their face most of the time, so they can tell he's interested. (And if he's not interested, he should look for a way to change the subject).
If he does the 2 things I described, his eye contact will be normal, but it will become that way without him trying to micromanage his eyes.
As an autistic person who has learned to make pretty "typical" eye contact, I think this is just not a high priority thing to do. Up until about age 14 I was under the impression that "eye contact" meant "stare directly into the other person's eyes with the minimum number of interruptions" (I didn't do it very often, or presumably someone would have corrected me earlier). Then I discovered more complete descriptions of how eye contact is *supposed* to work and over the course of a couple years taught myself how to make my eye contact habits more natural.
Compared to other social skills, this one was really easy to learn as a teenager. By that age I was reasonably good at self-monitoring (which meant that I could correct on my own) and eye contact really doesn't require particularly good social modelling to work. On the other hand, I do *not* think that I would have been able to learn that skill at age 6 (roughly the age when I discovered the term 'eye contact') without, idk, an adult forcing me to do drills.
I think a more useful skill for autistic kids - if you can't teach the people around them to just deal - is to teach them how to *fake* eye contact. Most people don't really care that you're looking at their eyeballs, so looking at their nose/forehead/just over their shoulder meets the same need in a way that's easier/more comfortable for many autistic people.
That's her internet name but she is just one of many people for whom their internet name has all but replaced their real name (c.f. PewDiePie, Stampylonghead, etc)
Quick reaction to the latest episode of "Rings of Power" (only two more to go!)
This episode made me want to kill Tom Bombadil. Good work, show!
The Dwarven storyline is still the best, but the Celebrimbor-Annatar one is moving along nicely. And wonder of wonders, I thought Charlie Vickers was good here. I was "meh" about him as Halbrand, but this episode he really did well as Annatar. Now, if only they could do something about that terrible wig.
The Númenor storyline continues to wander around and the plain people of Númenor continue to resemble their counterparts in South Park. One moment: "rabble rabble rabble! Pharazon king!" The next, "rabble rabble rabble! Miriel Queen!"
At least we didn't get more of Isildur wandering around as aimlessly as the rest of the 'action' on Númenor, though we did get Arondir massacring some peace-loving Orcs who were only going home to their wives and kids. That's literally it, one scene of him killing some Orcs and nothing more. Probably it'll lead into something in the next episode, but mainly I think it was just there to remind us he exists.
The show continues to elevate my blood-pressure by Doing The Thing. Oh look, they Did The Thing just like in the movies. Oh look, they Said The Line just like in the movies. And hence my desire for someone to bring me the head of Tom Bombadil: they straight-up lifted Gandalf's speech about mercy ("Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? ") and turned it into the Yoda and Luke moment from "The Empire Strikes Back" about "are you going to quit your training or abandon your friends?"
Some that live deserve death, right enough, and I'm looking at *you*, show!
And for those of you eager for some hot Harfoot-on-Stoor action (you degenerate perverts), we get Poppy and Merimac kissing. Oh, the romantic passion and ardour of deep, true love on display there! Not.
There will probably be a third season of this, though it hasn't been officially greenlit. I suspect that the third season will be to wrap up everything, because I honestly can't see this running for five seasons. But what do I know?
>And wonder of wonders, I thought Charlie Vickers was good here. I was "meh" about him as Halbrand, but this episode he really did well as Annatar.
Interesting. From s1 and s2e1 (all I've had the patience and stomach to watch so far), my impression has been that Vickers is a good actor, but miscast as Sauron. It's essential to Sauron's story arc that he's able to be irresistibly charming (at least until he loses his ability to assume fair form), utterly terrifying, or both. I haven't seen that from Vickers so far in RoP. Did he come through in the latest episode?
>The Númenor storyline continues to wander around and the plain people of Númenor continue to resemble their counterparts in South Park.
That's disappointing. The Númenor storyline had been one of the brighter points for me in s1. I mean, there were insultingly bad low points (especially the "they took our jobs" bit), but the actors playing Tar-Muriel and Ar-Pharazon were doing a good job of selling it and there were pretty good high points that gave me some hope for where the plotline was going. I take it the insultingly bad parts are dominating the Numenor plotline so far in s2?
This last episode was the first one where I felt "hey, this guy can act!" It wasn't a big thing, just small changes of expression that were appropriate to the situation.
My view of him as Halbrand in season one was that he went around with that stupid smirk permanently on his face (though he wasn't the only actor with only one expression). So I didn't find him interesting or convincing.
This episode, though, Annatar manages to look convincing when talking to/manipulating others, rather than "heh heh observe my secret smirk as I toy with you". Other times it's just a small secret smile or a sideways glance.
I agree that it's a pity about Miriel and Pharazon. I sort of liked Pharazon in season one as he seemed to be the only Númenorean with a brain, but so far this season he's just Evil Scheming Power-grabber and we're not getting any demonstration of "this is why the Númenoreans, numbskulls as they are, want him as king" (deus ex Eagle isn't enough to convince about that). I think the actress playing Miriel, if she got a chance, could be really good but the part is so thinly written there's nothing there to work with.
So far the Númenorean plotline has been: Elendil's invented daughter is sad her brother (she only has one, as Anarion seems to have been forgotten about or is stuck on "the other side of the island" since season one) is dead (he's not, but she doesn't know that) and she blames the queen for taking him off to war. So now she's plotting and scheming with Pharazon, his invented useless son Kemen, and some random Númenorean lord to overthrow Miriel. They do this at the coronation, where Daughter turns up with the palantir and calls it elf magic stone and this shows the queen is on the elf side, so the people immediately go "rabble rabble rabble!" She drops the palantir on the ground, Elendil tries to pick it up but gets shocked by a magic vision and thrown across the room. All is chaos, and then an Eagle shows up, which is supposed to legitimate the coronation, but Random Lord grabs the opportunity to say "the Valar support Pharazon!" and "rabble rabble rabble Pharazon king".
Miriel is now stuck in a tower like her father before her, and Elendil is trying to persuade her that there are enough people loyal to her to oppose Pharazon, but she stops him by asking what vision he had when he touched the palantir; he says he saw himself on a horse riding away from the city. So she thinks this means the prophesied doom has been averted, and orders him not to cause any trouble because this new path with Pharazon may be what saves Númenor.
Useless Son is given some power and a task by Pharazon and immediately starts being a spineless bully. The Seaguard who are still loyal are all disbanded and have to hand over their uniforms and swords. Elendil shows up and queries this, then does likewise (remembering Miriel's orders not to make waves). Daughter tries to persuade him just to go along and support Pharazon, but he won't. Useless Son insults him and Elendil takes it.
Then later they're all in a shrine having a ritual to send off the dead who died in the Great Epic War of the Southlands (all one village of it). Useless Son and guards show up to order everyone out as this shrine is going to be pulled down to build an aqueduct there instead. Friend of Isildur fights Useless Son and gets back-stabbed (it's such a pointless fight I can't even be bothered with it).
Next episode Elendil is being tried for fomenting rebellion or something, in the wake of the bust-up in the shrine. He again refuses to accept Pharazon as king, and assembled citizenry start rabble-rabble-rabbling. Random Lord advises Pharazon to put Elendil to death by seamonster (this is supposedly a trial that the Faithful undergo for the judgement of the Valar).
Daughter visits Elendil in prison, tries to talk him round, no go. She has arranged for Miriel to visit him and *she* tries to talk him round, still no go. So we then get to the seashore, where they're calling the seamonster. Elendil is ready to jump into the water but Miriel turns up, claims he was acting in her name so she should be the one undergoing the trial, and she jumps in instead. Seamonster turns up and looks at her. On shore all are awaiting the result, they think she's dead, but then she is spat out by the seamonster and the fickle mob once more rabble-rabble-rabble that the Valar have judged her to be the rightful queen.
The End (until the next two episodes and by now I'm longing for the Great Wave to hit). Also they seem to be setting up a Miriel-Elendil romance (he gets very handsy with her, more so than a subject with his queen should get) and I'm over here going 🤢
I am impressed that you are still able to force yourself to see this stuff. I had to quit two thirds into season 1. I felt like Hal in 2001 when they disconnected his intellectual circuits one by one. Almost every scene offered a new internal contradiction compared to the scenes before, numbing my mind scene by scene as I desperately tried to uphold suspension of disbelief. I was slipping fast toward the stage where all that was left, was my ability to sing Daisy, Daisy. You are stronger than I am.
Like other reviewers have said, I'm spite-watching to see how more stupid they can get with every episode.
They came out of the gate strong this week, I have to say, with the Bombadil stuff and the Miriel-Elendil romance and Trial By Seamonster. Disa as Bat-woman is a contender, too, but the Dwarven storyline remains some of the better work despite all they can do.
I tried spite-watching as well, but it become too hard.
Scenes like Galadriel telling the Numenorian queen that she was “saved from certain death” by a Numenorian ship sailing by, implying that she must have forgotten that she voluntarily dived into the ocean in the former episode…or that elf-guy leading villagers into a castle to be better defended against the Orcs, but then leading them back into the village again afterwards, implying that he must have forgotten why he led them away in the first place… and so on and so on. I feared my brain would start to boil, the way the brains of the main characters in this show must be forever boiling.
As the Viking who had displeased his Lord and as punishment was forced to eat an enormous bowl of porridge (the Norse equivalent to this show) said after some mouthfuls: “Kill me, Lord, but not with porridge.”
These days I limit myself to vicarious spite-watching, through the Critical Drinker and other youtubers mocking new episodes of the show. Kudos to you for having the stamina to do the same.
Le Guin said, in reaction to one of the films based on her Earthsea series, something like "It's as if you changed LotR so that Frodo claims the ring for his own, puts it on, and then lives happily ever after." I wish that hadn't been a prediction of how badly the essence of the story is being butchered.
If we're talking about the animated film Tales From Earthsea, she has a quote where she says she liked the film on its own merits, but she was flabbergasted that anyone would claim it has anything to do with her novels, besides reusing some names.
"I wonder if the people who made the film of The Lord of the Rings had ended it with Frodo putting on the Ring and ruling happily ever after, and then claimed that that was what Tolkien 'intended...' would people think they'd been 'very, very honest to the books'?"
She was a prophet in her own time. That's exactly what our boys Payne and McKay were going on about pre-first season, how they'd been so very, very faithful to the books (while changing the story because people who read the books would know what was going to happen, so they had to stick in mystery boxes).
If these niblets thought they could get away with it, they *would* have someone putting on the One Ring and being an enlightened democratic ruler.
The Celebrimbor-Annatar storyline is working out better than I expected. At least it's running on vaguely canonical lines. Of course, to make it work, they had to turn Celebrimbor into an idiot (why, exactly, does Annatar need him in this version, when he had to tell him about the secret extra-high hidden level in smithcraft that is "alloys"?) In this take, Celebrimbor is even more gullible than the Númenorean smiths who just beat him up and kicked him out when he tried getting into the forges. Dang, who knew those weak corruptible mortal Men would be less malleable than one of the Noldor? By contrast, all Halbrannatar had to do was turn up, look pathetic in the rain, get the soft-headed smith girl to persuade the soft-headed Lord of Eregion to at least talk to him, and Bob's your uncle, next thing you know Annatar is running Eregion as Acting High Steward and Grand Panjandrum.
If the Dark Wizard doesn't turn out to be Saruman, I will eat this Bombadil's not particularly yellow boots.
Oh, man (woman, child, Orc Baby, Ent Wife, or 'de knife-ears tuk er jerbs"' Númenorean), I was *so* mad at that part of the episode.
I swear by the Eagles of Manwe Sulimo, the Elder King, whom I hope will swoop down to get all Prometheus on the showrunners' livers, if they are setting up some dumb "Ha ha, turns out the *real* test was to see if you'd put the good of your friends above the destiny to fight the darkness and save the world!" test with Tom and his mangled quote, I will - invoke the Eagles to eat their livers.
They keep *doing* this, they keep quoting the movies scene for scene, line for line, but twisting this around. And it's particularly egregious here, because that speech is about how mercy is always good, even mercy to the undeserving, and the show used it to set up a fake dilemma where Tom is apparently coercing I Can't Believe It's Not Gandalf into choosing "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few".
(Not alone are they quoting the LOTR movies, but Star Wars and possibly Star Trek as well).
Do we really think I Can't Believe It's Not Gandalf is going to abandon Nori and Poppy to CERTAIN DEATH as per his visions? We might wish he would, but of course he's not going to do that.
But neither can we really think that if he leaves now, Tom is going to stick to "So sorry, you missed your one and only chance to get your magic wand to fight the dark wizard and the darkness and the fire and last Tuesday's mouldy bread crusts, as was your mystic destiny which is why you were sent to me to be trained young padawan, so too bad, looks like the world will just have to burn!"
Not a chance of a leaf in a Balrog's fiery breath.
So it's a fake dilemma and fake 'conflict for the sake of conflict' and they had to fold, spindle and mutilate another piece of canon to do so. Grrr. No wonder I'm cheering for Adar and the Orcs.
On the subject of in-house large language models versus implementing frontier models
A recent survey (https://www.pw.hks.harvard.edu/post/the-rapid-adoption-of-generative-ai) in the US states that 39.4% of adults are using generative AI for tasks both at work and outside of work, which highlights the rapidly increasing dependency on these models. Anecdotally, I introduced my wife to chatGPT four months ago, and today she consistently consults chatGPT 4o not only for work related matters, but also for day-to-day tasks at home. In our household, googling is slowly becoming a thing of the past.
Over the last year and a half, I have heard lots of chatter of regular businesses hiring teams of engineers to design in-house LLM applications. The arguments for building in-house LLMs are obvious: You control the architecture, data, and sensitive information of your business, as opposed to exposing this data to these ‘black box’ models. A year ago, it seemed like a good tradeoff to make, but after GPT-4 and other frontier models have been released, it seems to me that any regular business that continues to develop LLMs in-house will be left behind. Frontier models have advanced so quickly in terms of complexity, data scale, and efficiency that matching this pace internally may no longer be feasible for most regular businesses.
Looking into the future, I am curious about the following:
Aside from the reasons stated above, are there any other reasons why regular businesses should be spending resources creating their own in-house LLMs?
Is there a way to identify which companies are partnering with the builders of frontier models versus those developing their own in-house models within an industry?
If one of the barriers of customizing and implementing a frontier LLM within a firm is data cleaning, as sarahconstatin mentions in this post (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7L8ZwMJkhLXjSa7tD/the-great-data-integration-schlep), is there a business opportunity in becoming a data cleaner, aka the bridge between regular companies and frontier model builders?
If you have any data scientists or statisticians or modeling teams, "data cleaning" is already a thing they do a lot of (hopefully in entirely or mostly automated fashion).
Being a "data cleaner" isn't really a standalone job, and is very vulnerable to "being replaced with a very small shell script" or equivalent.
It is a billion dollar industry at the moment. There are hundreds of "data cleaners" right now cleaning data of all types of companies so that Salesforce can be implemented more effectively.
There is a possibility that when regular businesses decides to implement frontier models, this type of work might be needed. Now granted, it could be done by the LLM provider itself, or maybe at that stage the LLM can clean the data itself.
One thing adjacent to that, with probably a good amount of latent demand, is fine tuning the LLM for a given company's specific background, context, data, KPI's, priorities, etc.
I'd be surprised if OpenAI or Anthropic aren't doing this today with some large enterprise customers, but it would also be helpful to the next tier down of companies (so like F51-F600 or whatever, instead of only Fortune 50 companies) to be able to do this, and having done it with local LLM's, it's pretty fiddly and requires a lot of illegible expertise and messing around before you get good at it.
And of course, ultimately we'll all want a personal assistant who makes most of our c2b phone calls and emails and media curation and travel plans and whatever, and that's likely to have an LLM as a good part - the demand for "individual fine tuning" probably goes down to the individual level.
So there's almost definitely a niche for "AI whisperer" doing some combination of data cleaning, ETL, integration, and fine tuning, for businesses of practically any size all the way down to consumers.
"Building an in-house LLM" in practice mostly means "running an existing nearly-frontier open-source LLM, possibly fine-tuned, which AWS will host for you happily". It's pricy and a bit of a pain, but if exporting sensitive data to a frontier model provider is a non-starter, it's pretty much your only option.
Hmmmm, I haven't really heard that one, although I haven't had that many in-depth conversations.
When I say "Building an in-house LLM" I mean companies hiring ML researchers and engineers and building an LLM from scratch or using some sort of open source model (Not sure where the best open source model ranks today)
I'm aware of the problems with virtue ethics, but it looks like if everyone adopted it it would do enormous good in our current society. Yes, it's not a useful philosophy for resolving good-faith moral disagreements. But, in case anyone hasn't noticed, we're not living in a time of good kind people trying to do the right thing but not being able to agree on what the right thing is. We're living in a time of people routinely saying those who disagree with them should be exterminated, and using every dirty trick possible to advance their agendas, and of lying through their teeth on a daily basis, and of levels of brazen hyocrisy on an unimaginable scale. And that's just politics. Also look at the current state of dating, and the kinds of behaviours accepted as downright routine. Also look at levels of job stress, and treatment by bosses and coworkers. Also look at the general rudeness and selfishness of people, even outside of the aforementioned domains.
Sticking with just politics: we've got legions of horrible toxic people and somehow endless arguments about whether they're *really* actually bad, whether maybe they're nonetheless doing more good than harm or whether they didn't actually *technically* break any laws. Just *imagine* for a moment what would happen if we all started thinking in virtue-terms (doesn't even matter which particular virtues, any basically normal selection will do). Religious fundamentalists, woke feminists, red pill trolls, crazy trans activists...we can vehemently disagree on how much good or harm they're doing, or whether they're infringing anyone's rights. But who could *possibly* disagree on whether they are kind, compassionate, humble, tolerant, temperent, fair-minded people? The very suggestion that these extremist groups possess even one of those virtues to a non-neglible degree can be met only with uproarious laughter.
Our society is sick, at the moment, and even basic processes aren't functioning properly, commitments to non-violence and civility are disappearing. Do we have the luxury of dismissing ethical approaches because they don't do well at higher levels of analysis and complex problems? When we haven't even got the basic simple foundations of treating each other like humans working?
As far as I can see, the only way to cleanse our society of the toxic forces and avoid the endless rules-lawyering ("yes I've hurt lots of people but who can say the third-order effects of my actions haven't been a net benefit", "technically I'm not hurting you, I'm just knowingly creating the conditions for allowing you to suffer and doing nothing to prevent it, which makes it okay!") is some kind of virtue ethics.
On the other hand, the one practicing virtue ethicist I knew in person turned out to be a useless vacillating mercenary. So maybe there's a level of praxis necessary before it becomes helpful.
>Religious fundamentalists, woke feminists, red pill trolls, crazy trans activists...we can vehemently disagree on how much good or harm they're doing, or whether they're infringing anyone's rights. But who could *possibly* disagree on whether they are kind, compassionate, humble, tolerant, temperent, fair-minded people?
They are already thinking in virtue ethics terms. They are just not thinking about their own virtue or lack of it, but the lack of virtue of other people. This is basically their entire argument.
> I'm aware of the problems with virtue ethics, but it looks like if everyone adopted it it would do enormous good in our current society.
A good ethical system needs to have two properties. (1) If almost everyone adopts it it does enormous good for society. (2) If almost everyone adopts it, then those who do not adopt it suffer considerable harm, and hence are motivated to adopt it.
There is an unavoidable tension between the virtues of tolerance and righteousness. This is why successful teachers of virtue, like the Buddha and the Stoics emphasized the personal virtues. Promoters of more public virtues have a more difficult task. As Hume wrote: "[W]hat hopes can we ever have of engaging mankind to a practice which we confess full of austerity and rigour? Or what theory of morals can ever serve any useful purpose, unless it can show, by a particular detail, that all the duties which it recommends, are also the true interest of each individual?"
I've come to the conclusion [0] that a code of ethics is best thought of as a strategy or policy. And that the debate about rules/virtue/consequences/etc is mostly a matter of what level of specificity you want to operate on.
The success of a particular strategy depends on what sort of environment it's operating in. If the present is experiencing moral/ethical turmoil, it's probably a signal that the old ways are no longer as functional as they used to be. In which case, it behooves you to sit down and try to come up with something better. As ApeInTheCoat and BrandonFishback imply, there's no royal road. What you're asking for is the equivalent of "there's so much vitriol in the abortion debate. Why can't everyone just put aside their differences and agree that abortion was evil all along?"
There is, in fact, a rightwing corner of substack which is attempting to flesh out the details and ramifications of a post-liberal world order [1] (this is not authoritative or comprehensive, but it's top of mind). I think it's a mixed bag, to put it mildly. But I give them credit for looking for new ideas, at least. As opposed to the progressive-leftists who are still fighting the last war. (PSA: the National-Socialist German-Workers' Party has been effectively dead for nearly 80 years.)
Yes, agree. My preferred brand is Stoicism, but I really would like to see more virtue education all round. I don't think anyone would deny that we have far too much anger and jealousy in our societies, and it would be great if both kids and adults were helped to learn ways of managing (or even extirpating!) destructive emotions, through making better judgments - just to name one aspect.
You're right to a point, I think, but mostly because virtue ethics encourages not overthinking things. You would imagine that cogitating deeply on what one should do improve your chances of doing so, but there's not actually much evidence of that. Studies of ethicists don't show them being any more ethical than average.
There are a lot of edge-cases in where it's difficult to determine what's the most ethical thing to do. But those edge-cases are precisely that... edge-cases. It's possible to focus too much on edge-cases, losing sight of what's most ethical in most cases.
The most ethical choice is often simple - yes, properly return the cart after using it at the grocery store. Yes, be honest in what you say. Yes, show compassion when someone is turning to you for help. Yes, try to be fair when evaluating others. Yes, consider multiple perspectives on a complicated issue.
>Religious fundamentalists, woke feminists, red pill trolls, crazy trans activists...we can vehemently disagree on how much good or harm they're doing, or whether they're infringing anyone's rights. But who could *possibly* disagree on whether they are kind, compassionate, humble, tolerant, temperent, fair-minded people? The very suggestion that these extremist groups possess even one of those virtues to a non-neglible degree can be met only with uproarious laughter.
But many disagree with you. You're just assuming that almost everyone is like you and opposes all the "crazies" on both sides. The problem is ultimately that large groups of people disagree on some of the most basic ethical values and no amount of civility is going to fix that. As long our society is this divided, this is the way it's going to be.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
I had to google the exact quote by CS Lewis.
It's a bad idea to feed people's delusions that they're actually trying to do good for everyone. It'll only encourage them and make appropriate responses to them weaker than they should be. Far better to tell them that they're bad, their ideas are bad, and they should feel bad if their ideas are actually that bad.
I see the problem as one of scope. Our collective scopes have been concentrated—via technology—on the online world; a world dominated by snarky mean-kid type journalists who can find neither a good husband, nor a good job in the productive world ... hence they land a chicken-pecking job, where pick and snipe at all good things, tearing them down to equate their awful sense of self worth to the awfulness they've created.
Absolutely. The problem with the online world is those fucking mean-spirited spinsters. Here at Cameltoe Central we who lack peckers, either one we're born with or one obtained via lease-to-own, can only discharge our hate and horniness via acute pecks at everybody else's eyes and also, you know, like their shoe grommets and stuff.
The problem in life is not that everyone is a consequentialist; the problem in life is that most people don't actually, seriously, want to be good. Virtue ethicists, deontologists, and consequentialists should all agree that an altruistic kidney donation is a morally righteous act, but somewhere around one in a hundred thousand people actually do it.
When people say they want to be good, what they normally mean is they want to not be evil. They aspire to the moral heights of a rock.
I would accept the moral height of a rock as an aspiration. Basically I don't think the world treated me so well, or my life is going so well, that I owe the world anything more than to not be evil. However, I might be interested in charity for selfish reasons, I have read an article that said a boring uninspiring job can feel more inspiring if you use it to fund charity. Currently evaluating this. I need some fucking life goal beyond just existing. But it is admittedly hard to care about people who never did anything for me, would not do the same for me (probably) and there are no supernatural rewards.
You're being a bit uncharitable. I think it's perfectly natural to have a powerful phobia of invasive surgery. I also think that millions of people who would otherwise donate a kidney, cannot afford to spare a kidney due to their risk factors for kidney disease, including their vices. And for many of us, life without a few vices isn't worth living.
So on the one hand you make some good points. I’m reminded of how people who sheltered Jews during the holocaust weren’t particularly philosophical but generally simply said their parents had taught them to be giving or something simple like that. Humanity as a cultural species is going have a much easier time modeling ethics off of a morally upright person than on abstract principles.
The problem is which person. There are usually going to be flaws or blind spots in any individual. Two of the biggest virtue ethicists, Aristotle and Confucius, were horribly sexist and anti-science. Aristotle said things like women have fewer teeth and are naturally slavish. I also think people who seem totally morally upright and kind, can be too tolerant of objectively bad things like poverty, animal cruelty, slavery etc. Lastly there’s the complexity that people who are respectful, happy and well adjusted in their communities tend to be more prejudiced and hateful to outsiders (this is the function of the neurotransmitter oxytocin).
Aristotle basically invented science, we can't really blame him for not getting everything right. But he was basically the first one who looked at things empirically. For example placed eggs under hens and opened one per day, observing embryonic development. Compare this to crap like "humans are featherless birds with round toenails". And everybody was horribly sexist. Basically you have to look at a before-after comparison, the nature of the net contribution instead of expecting to get everything right.
But if you're calculating the empathic quotient of the people empathzing with criminals & terrorists, you have to take into account that those people generally have no empathy for people with your point of view, and after all you point of view is not hard to understand. So I don't think the problem's as simple as too much empathy.
I more or less agree, and I think OP could only come to their conclusion by conflating hateful behavior and illiberal viewpoints. (I'm using Illiberal broadly here to include all views contrary to Classical Liberalism, many of which I hold).
Okay, I over simplified a bit here. What I’m trying to say is that we have evidence that some neurological transmitters (e.g. oxytocin) are implicated simultaneously in forming both in groups and out groups. So the loving feeling you get around say sports teammates is at the same moment fomenting a corresponding dislike of the other team. And there is some evidence to the tune that people in less community oriented cultures are actually friendlier to strangers.
How good is that evidence about oxytocin? Is it just one study? A couple months ago I spend a couple hrs on Google Scholar, trying to figure out whether giving oxytocin to people who were just sort of asocial (often people with Aspergers) made sense to try. Main takeaway from my reading was that that had been tried, and no it did not work at all, and once you looked carefully at oxytocin you found its relationship to feelings of friendliness and trust was nowhere near as simple as people commonly think. It's high in situations where you'd expect it to be low, and vice versa, and is involved in various processes that have nothing to do with affection, bonding, and trust.
You may have a point here, and my observations may be skewed by the fact that I live in a deeply Christian area that is also extremely welcoming of refugees (Southwest Idaho). So my anecdotal observations may be skewed. (Though sadly, with the way the winds are blowing, this traditional acceptance of refugees might not last)
I think it's true that certain ways of thinking and certain approaches to personal moral codes are more conducive to good behavior than others.
To try to put it as simply as possible - being honest, keeping promises, being compassionate in a general sense, being kind and considerate in a general sense, being charitable, being altruistic in general, aiming to not be a burden to others... all of these, when followed conscientiously, tend to make for a better person. And if enough people do this, it makes for a better society.
I get a vibe that in modern society, a lot of this has been pushed out for the morality of political polarization.
Not saying people were ever *great* at being virtuous, just that it felt like a sort of generalist approach to being virtuous was more prominent at one point while friend/enemy distinction is overwhelming now to the point that it results in a lot of very shitty behavior.
Right now, at least, I think utilitarianism and virtue ethics should be friends, since more virtue ethics *in our current cultural context* will likely have a net positive impact that should be desirable to utilitarians.
>Religious fundamentalists, woke feminists, red pill trolls, crazy trans activists...we can vehemently disagree on how much good or harm they're doing, or whether they're infringing anyone's rights. But who could *possibly* disagree on whether they are kind, compassionate, humble, tolerant, temperent, fair-minded people?
You'd be surprised, I see a lot of this: "This volunteer firefighter is racist, so...." on one side, "That guy's just some virtue-signalling cuck" on the other.
Virtue ethics wont do anything to prevent the social-economics that let the soft-narcissism of normies promoting luxury beliefs online; it will just end in new exciting luxury beliefs.
You have algorithms that reward engagement, some percentage of the population who let the computer downward spiral them with rage bait and some level of the population who are willing to say to stop eating meat to save the climate inbetween their private jet rides. None of these really are interacting with ethics.
> Religious fundamentalists, woke feminists, red pill trolls, crazy trans activists...we can vehemently disagree on how much good or harm they're doing, or whether they're infringing anyone's rights. But who could *possibly* disagree on whether they are kind, compassionate, humble, tolerant, temperent, fair-minded people?
> Just *imagine* for a moment what would happen if we all started thinking in virtue-terms (doesn't even matter which particular virtues, any basically normal selection will do).
> But who could *possibly* disagree on whether they are kind, compassionate, humble, tolerant, temperent, fair-minded people?
You start from saying that it doesn't matter what are the virtues and then select a very specific few.
There is a list of virtues that a stereotypical member of woke feminist, for example, would definetely possess: bravery, passion, dedication, self-sacrifice, etc. You can get similar list of virtues for every "crazy type of person" from your post. I don't think that "virtue" can be an answer without specifying which virtues exactly and in which proportion.
>You start from saying that it doesn't matter what are the virtues and then select a very specific few.
Seconded. To me, it seems likely that virtue ethics would just shift the antagonism from tribe level to list-of-virtues level, with no reduction is overall polarization.
But brave and self-sacrificing? You think it's brave to be a woke feminist in 2024? Pretty much all of the mainstream institutions have their back, and people who troll them on the internet can be blocked/ignored.
As for self-sacrificing, what personal sacrifice does a woke feminist make? Has their been a male woke feminist who quit his own job in order to have a woman take his place? If there has, I haven't heard of it. As for female woke feminists, where does their political ideology create even the slightest personal sacrifice? Maybe a tiny percentage of them actually travel to places where it's legit dangerous to promote their views, but the vast majority don't do this. Promoting a societally approved ideology on social media and in well-organized public gatherings doesn't strike me as a significant degree of self-sacrificing.
> You think it's brave to be a woke feminist in 2024?
Oh absolutely. Everyone is an underdog. Openly stating your views and fighting for what you think is right in our polarised society is brave, compared to not doing it, because now about half the people hate you. And getting death threats is shitty, regardless how many corporations dress their logos in pride flags for a month.
> As for self-sacrificing, what personal sacrifice does a woke feminist make?
Have you ever tried being an activist for any cause?
Pushing for changes that would be to my personal benefit is not self-sacrificing. It's not necessarily wrong, but I would certainly not call it self-sacrificing. It's the opposite of self-sacrificing, it's aiming to make a society that's more beneficial to you and people like you.
In my view, true self-sacrifice involves putting others before yourself, and that's very much not the vibe I get from woke feminists.
I've been involved in politics in the past, at a local level. If it's done out in the physical world, it can take significant time and effort. But just being a social media activist, promoting a particular ideology in a general sense?
> Pushing for changes that would be to my personal benefit
Classical example of a woke feminist is a white, middle class, able-bodied cis-hetero-woman, which, nevertheless, spends her time and effort to supports racial minorities, poor, disabled, gay and trans people in addition to just other cis-women.
But even if we take some fringe example, like a trans-exclusive radical femenist who passionately hates the idea of intersectionality and does some kind of activism specifically for other cis women, she is sacrificing her own time and effort for the gain (as she sees it) of the group as a whole. If she cared only about her personal benefit she would let others do do the work for her and reaped the gains.
> But just being a social media activist, promoting a particular ideology in a general sense?
Social media is a hellscape and promoting a particular ideology on it is a ritual for summoning demons. Half the people hate you, other half demand things from you. I don't think it takes less time than offline, but also provides less sense of achievement (because the fight never ends) and more stress (because, once again, social media).
Not everybody. I've never got any death threats in my life, which, I believe, is correlated with me not being active on social media.
But, yes on every side. As I said, everyone is an underdog. Being public about your politiocal views in a polarized society is brave, regardless of the side you are on.
> Not everybody. I've never got any death threats in my life, which, I believe, is correlated with me not being active on social media.
You mean you never got any personal death threats, right? As opposed to someone saying "all monkeys dressed as people should be killed", while not noticing that you happened to be an ape in a coat?
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".
The incumbent isn't running in this campaign; we've got two challengers for an open seat.
Of which, Donald Trump is the one who used to be President, and Kamala Harris is the one whose highest office is famously not worth a bucket of warm spit. Donald Trump is the known quantity where we all pretty much know what sort of president he's going to be, and Kamala Harris is the one nobody outside of California really paid attention to, That's the heart of the "incumbent" dynamic.
Or, to look at it another way, in 2020 we had someone who was once President running against someone who was only ever a forgettable vice-president. Now, we have someone who was once President running against someone who was only ever a forgettable vice-president. Whether or not there was a four-year gap in their resume, is far less important than "was recently President and constantly newsworthy" vs "was never President or anyone else we really had to pay attention to". So this election should feel a lot like the last one.
Right now, there seems to be an anti-incumbent mood (and not just in the US either). So if people subconsciously think of Trump as the incumbent, that's good for Harris.
But the Harris side has to walk the line between that, and supporting "election denial", and claiming that Trump *becoming* President would cause disaster.
*I* think that Harris feels like the challenger, but she seems to be running as an outsider. "If I am elected then ..." Well, ma'am, you are the VP right now and have been for 3.5 years. Why do we need to wait for you to be elected for this good thing to get enacted?
Tim Wahl's "we can't afford four more years of this..." at a recent rally contributes to that vibe.
Yup. _That_ part seems minor... ( Also, I don't think that in this situation following the academic tradition of appending "emeritus" to the title really fits well with ... Trump )
Imagine if he really does succeed in a fascist coup, and just as the name "Caesar" became a term for imperial power for 2 millennia, so will "Trump"...
Is that treating him as the incumbent, though, or just using the courtesy title because he used to be president and they're not saying "former president" (I imagine it's a bit clunky to directly address him as Mr. Former President).
What do Democrat politicians do when talking with/about former president Obama? I found a similar reference in this article:
"Johanna Maska, the director of press advance in Obama’s 2008 campaign, said ...“There was a lot more time for President Obama’s romance to build within the Democratic Party. Harris is going to need to keep this infatuation, this newfound love, going for 10-plus weeks,” Maska said. “And I think there’s a difference there, because this love [for Harris] has been so quick that I just hope that it’s not fragile and easily breakable.”
So it could just be that people accustomed to saying "President Z" are continuing to say "President Z".
This seems to be the expected norm. Trump is "President Trump" now, Biden was "Mr Vice President" in 2020, and Clinton was "Secretary Clinton" in 2016. I don't know why US politicians are considered to keep their office title even after they've left that office, but it's clear that they are.
This applies to other positions, with governor specifically called out. I understood from somewhere that I can't now confirm that one should be addressed with the highest office one has held. For example, it was Secretary Clinton.
Apparently, it’s not limited to the US; in my European country, the formally correct address for a former minister (I don’t mean a priest!) is still “Minister”. But this does not seem respected these days – the zeitgeist is that such conventions are outdated.
I wonder if it's a combination of trying to keep incumbency advantage and denial of legitimacy? "Yeah, that other lot are in power now, but the *real* president/secretary/tea lady is our person who held it when we were in power, and thus the rightful spiritual heir to the office, vote for them this election and put them back where they belong!"
When I was a kid in the 70s, there were jokes about Jack Lynch being the 'real' Taoiseach because he had served in government so long, so when he was voted out of office, it didn't feel right to have a new guy in the job.
Agreed on all your points. In addition, there is simply the fact that Harris is currently Vice President, not President, and the Vice Presidency doesn't carry much formal power - though I don't know how much power Biden has _in_formally delegated to her.
Interesting ideas, i read through all of your articles. I would've commented but you've restricted that to paid subscribers.
Its weird to me to connect so fully to the results of the concepts you write about, but to so viscerally respond to the way you conceptualize things like magic and otherworldly beings as "real". Anyways, I've subscribe as there are some real gems you've got and I'm curious as to how we've come to many of the same results with vastly different views of objective reality.
An excellent rant about how thorough enshittification has become, and enthusiasm for making things better by having more rules.
I'm curious about to what extent Doctorow's ideas are coherent, and also whether there's reasonable hope for de-enshittification. It seems to me that he used to celebrate outlaws, but now he wants laws because the outlaws have taken over the system.
I dislike the concept of enshittification because it feels like a vibe that just happens to advocate for Doctorows favored solutions.
Yes, things are getting worse, because Moloch is always at work. But Doctorow doesn't do the hard work of actually figuring the mechanisms of why things are getting worse and instead throws his hands up and yells "capitalism!"
Here are two descriptions of web bloat, aka websites getting bigger and slower across the board, https://danluu.com/slow-device/https://infrequently.org/2024/08/the-landscape/ . I fail to see completely how regulation and unions would improve the situation here since this is a massive coordination problem. I would worry they would make things worse actually, like similar high modernist projects to fix big, soft problems.
Antitrust may have some benefits. Regulation would be risky as it could kill innovation and be hard or impossible to roll back. Unions, I utterly fail to see how they could help users--we have too many examples of unions opposing automation, unions keeping schools closed for longer than necessary, unions making it prohibitively expensive to build etc.
The mask is a bit much for me, but I listened. The enshittifcation (sp) of things is mostly moloch. We do need our government to break up the monopolies (Google facebook etc..) And we do need unions to make a comeback... the non-unionization of amazon is heartbreaking, when I think of the suffering I'm responsible for when I buy shit on amazon.
I thought globalization, outsourcing killed unions? If AliExpress can ship from China, so can Amazon. So while it may sound trumpish, unions can come after tariffs first?
On the other hand, I've heard that unions are preventing the automation of ports in the US, making shipping slower and more expensive than it should be. And unions are probably a big part of why it costs 5x as much to put on the same play with the same cast in NYC compared to London.
I listened to about the first quarter of his rant, but I'm not sure the Internet thingies he mentioned ever used to be better. Was Google search ever really that great? I remember bitching about Google's advertising coming at the top — and the fact that we couldn't find what we searched for — since the 00s. In fact, I remember organizing a VLAB (are they still around?) on the future of search engines and alternatives to Google. Has Facebook gotten worse? Maybe, but I don't think so. I was getting ads for Russian and Ukrainian wives, and it was like X in the number of Tea Partiers (proto-MAGAs for those not old enough to remember) until I unfriended all my crazy friends. Or maybe I'm older and bored with it.
I would say Web-based GUIs have gotten less usable. I blame it on outsourcing the implementation to low-paid contractors in India. But I'm reluctant to say things have gotten worse, because once it became commercialized, the Internet was always pretty shitified.
Fwiw, I had a glimpse into front end development and from what I gather the bad UIs are a self inflicted wound. I see it as completely cultural in that making simple sites is seen as trivial so engineers must use eg. React in order to maintain their status among their peers. But eg. React involve a mountain of complexity so that small sites ar worse (bigger slower, with more time spent on managing complexity instead of making the UI good) while large sites easily devolve into complete monstrosities because the complexity is unmanageable unless you really hire the best, which doesn't happen often.
I'd be curious if someone more familiar with frontend could weigh in as I'm merely peeking through a keyhole.
Google circa 10 years ago was amazing, for example you could google a vague description of a semi-obscure movie, or 5 words of misheard lyrics, and it would point you to the right item most of the time. Also, you could search for information on things that you can also buy, and find that information, instead of only places where you can buy it.
LLMs do well at semantic nearness searches, much better than I recall any search engine performing. I often use LLMs to find whole fields I was unaware of, by describing them in general terms and getting back the right technical phrases that can then drive the search. I find that the LLM integration into search engines is currently less effective (though that may change).
I don't remember it being that way. I'd search for scientific terms and would get a lot of crap. Bing's exact match keyword algorithm its use of a backlink system to assess a site’s authority made it more useful as search tool if you were doing research. I don't know how it does against Goog for popular culture searches, because I don't follow much pop culture.
I do remember it being that way. For technical stuff as well. But there's a huge variance in how good people are/were at googling things. Probably no way to check now.
I think Google search peaked about 15 years ago, when the algorithms were very good about finding what you wanted somewhere, but before significant monetization. Perhaps 10 years ago I started noticing some things being actually HARDER to search for than I thought they should have been, and concluded it was getting filtered in mysterious ways to direct my activity.
In agreement with our friend here. When I was learning about these new-fangled computers, one of the exercises was to get us to use search engines to look things up. These were the days of Netscape and Ask Jeeves and Dogpile, and when Yahoo still was Yahoo! with the funky red typeface.
Google was head and shoulders above any of them. Miles better than anything Microsoft was putting out (one reason why I dislike Bing even now, as Google gets worse and worse).
Yes, Google was head and shoulders above the competition, but that doesn't prove that Google has gotten worse, only that the competition back then was really, really bad.
I think Google has gotten a little less effective, though, because the problem has changed. When Google launched the problem was to find and prioritize the best pages about the search term. Today, the problem search engines have to solve is how to defeat SEO's attempt to prevent them from prioritizing the best pages about the search term. It's changed from a straightforward information theory problem to a complex social-adversarial problem. If someone ever manages to launch a service that is as effective as Google once was it will be because of a breakthrough in game theory rather than a breakthrough in information theory.
I think its early success was also do to outsmarting the predecessors of SEOs. Early websites would boost search results by spawning hordes of gateway pages that all linked to each other and the main page. These sites were themselves crap, lazily curated lists of other sites. Pagerank stomped them out.
You’re misremembering, I think. Before Google there would be no value in creating hordes of inter-linked pages. It was Pagerank (which estimates the value of a page by examining link structure) that made that sort of link farm SEO useful.
Pre-Google, Lycos and Altavista both relied on keyword frequency and proximity to rank pages, not link structure, so SEO (what there was of it) was focused on loading pages with keywords. Granted, Pagerank was an effective defense against keyword spamming, so perhaps you’re right that defeating that sort of SEO was a factor in Google’s success. Mostly, though, it was the fact that link structure was a hugely more effective way to identify relevance and quality, which made Google’s results almost as good as Yahoo’s hand-curated directory while providing greater breadth and faster updates.
> Yes, Google was head and shoulders above the competition, but that doesn't prove that Google has gotten worse, only that the competition back then was really, really bad.
Agreed! At least for technical questions, when Bing came along, it blew Google out of the water. See my couter-response above.
By the time Bing came along, Google had shifted to less of a keyword search engine and more of a natural language search engine, as it is today. To get the best results out of Google, type questions rather than entering keywords. The change was made because the vast majority of users are better at asking questions than curating good keyword lists. If you really insist on doing a keyword search, put the keywords in quotes to force a keyword search mode.
I have never observed Bing to be significantly better than Google for technical searches or anything else I do (and it's usually worse). Note that my technical field is software engineering and computer security (specifically, cryptographic security), so perhaps Google does better in my field than in yours.
I think Google has simply become overwhelmed with the vast rate at which data accrues these days, probably much more in a day now as a month or two in, say, 2000. It's as if what would have been good search results from earlier days of the Internet have been literally buried under later pages and are now thereby missed.
Data volume is not the problem. Google still easily spiders the whole web (at least, the part of it not behind paywalls or other dynamic page generation obstacles). The primary problem is that search has become an adversarial problem, a constant war between search engines and SEO. Search engines still mostly win this battle, but SEO has reduced their effectiveness. The rise of social media has also had a big negative impact on search effectiveness. In the early 2000s, most of the web's content was static pages constructed primarily by experts in relevant domains. Today, most of it is user-generated by the masses.
There is that, but honestly the sponsored results are terribly noticeable. It's just advertising now, "pay us and we'll rank you first", which is not at all what I want when looking for something.
Yes, of course I expect that if I look for "widget makers in my area", if Wilson's Widgets pay you to say "We're number one!", they'll turn up first (and second, and third) in my search results. But what I want to know is, are Wilson's widgets any *good*, or are they just paid-for advertising crap? That's why me and others are complaining at and about Google now.
I don't mind Wilson's Widgets coming at the top. I do mind slop sites that purport to survey every kind of widget category crowding any human-written (but not monetised via Google) blogs, or even widget makers, down to the tenth page of results.
Google was an astonishing improvement re. the search engines of the 90’s, the Altavistas and Lycoses of the time (think 1998 or so). Once it became a de-facto monopoly and needed to monetize its search, the quality rapidly went out the window.
There were so many! With weird names like AskJeeves, Dogpile, and of course the insufferable Yahoo! like that with the exclamation. Who TF names a business like that :)
Yeah, pre-Google you were lucky to get three relevant hits in the first 10 pages of results. (A real pain back when modems were slow). Google was revolutionary.
Exactly as you say. All the other search engines in those exercises, you'd have to go through pages to get the answer you wanted. Google, it was in the top three results at maximum. Truly revolutionary.
Anti-trust legislation, regulation, and unionization (for programmers). I don't think he mentions prosecution for fraud, though I think that would help.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but regarding Spartacus, how are they preventing artificially inflating numbers? Like one of their use cases is workers organizing, but what prevents management from generating a hundred/thousand/ten thousand accounts and signing the petition just to out everyone? They say they have settings to prevent fake accounts, but I tried creating a campaign and didn't find any, and the sign up process is simple enough that one person could create a couple hundred accounts an hour by hand.
(I do appreciate that they don't leak whether a given email has signed up, most sites don't bother.)
We circumvent this issue in two ways. The first is using an identity verification system, like financial apps do. This involves a 30 sec process of scanning an ID and doing a liveness check with a selfie video. We don’t tie this information to anybody’s username, but we can see if a username has gone through a verification process. We don’t have this running on the site now because it costs two dollars a pop, and we’re pinching pennies.
The second is a not yet released feature, which allows organizers, and participants to generate one time use referral codes. The only way you can join a campaign is if you’re given one, and the referral chain can be audited later.
In the meantime, we can easily implement settings that bar virtual phone numbers for use in account creation, or create domain exclusion rules for emails.
If the campaign is invite only, it’s up to each participant to use their discretion not to share information with people who would rat them out. Same as if they were organizing any other way.
We can prevent honeypots through forms of ID verification which attest that the organizer holds certain credentials.
I’ve heard these kinds of questions repeatedly. There is no 100 % risk free way to organize collective action, or to mitigate every possible attack vector of a well resourced bad actor. No matter how many layers of safety we create, you can imagine a hypothetical adversary who is motivated enough to defeat them. Go ahead, I’m sure you can! No matter how successful a coordination process is, you can imagine a system so hostile it wouldn’t matter. What does that prove? Since we can’t mitigate all conceivable risks we shouldn’t address the ones we can?
If we can facilitate 90 out of 100 use cases, that would be amazing. A few extreme scenarios in which Spartacus would fail does not cancel out all of the scenarios in which it can work.
The pertinent question is if it’s better than any of the alternatives out there, and we think it can be. By a lot.
I guess that makes sense. It's our first time hearing about it, so all the obvious questions come to mind, whereas you've been through the other side of that countless times.
While I think your goal is admirable, I think this is a hard problem to solve.
The world is a large place, and the safety in numbers thing only helps if I am in the same subgroup. If I am a labor activist, I want to reach a critical mass of people within my local company. If all of the others who joined (using a legitimate identity) are from a different country, or are straightforward Pinkertons paid to join, their backing will be less than usual when the bosses come cracking down on us.
Likewise, suppose I am a college professor in the US, who has a controversial opinion. Perhaps I have a belief incompatible with the some prevailing philosophy, or think something which most people find gross can actually be ok (e.g. bestiality). I am justifiably afraid of getting cancelled over it. What I would want is to have the backing of perhaps 100 other college professors, preferably with a few at my own institution, so that the blackslash is distributed over a lot of cancellable people instead of just a few. However, I don't particularly care how many people who are less juicy targets are backing me, if Scott Alexander shares my opinion that is certainly nice, but he would be pretty hard to cancel these days. Likewise, random college students who joined either genuinely or in an effort to see which of their professors are traitors to the cause are not helpful.
However, identifying if someone is not only a genuine, unique person, but also has some characteristic is not easily doable automatically. One way to accomplish this would be to have a lot of causes per group. If the employees of a company can back campaigns for ungendered bathrooms, vegan lunch options, nudist Fridays, collective bargaining for better wages, home office, an inclusion campaign, firing all male/female/Christian/Jewish/atheist employees or an extension of the parking lot, then there would be some plausible deniability. Like, you can ask two known employees if a newcomer is also an employee, and they would not learn if Mr. Thomas from accounting is a vegan, a union proponent or a parking lot enthusiast until whatever thing he backs reaches critical mass.
> This involves a 30 sec process of scanning an ID and doing a liveness check with a selfie video. We don’t tie this information to anybody’s username, but we can see if a username has gone through a verification process.
Two questions here:
(1) Is this process still considered secure given current AI capabilities?
(2) If the confirmed identity is not tied to the account, then what assurances would I have that the (n-1) other people whose account-tied name will be revealed will not turn out to be John Doe? (Of course, tying verified identities to accounts would also not be without problems. Subpoenas would an even more appealing option if you had gone through the trouble of eliminating reasonable doubt about group membership.)
There should be an option for verifying identities but leaving them concealed even after the numerical threshold has been reached. For instance, coordinating people to vote for a highly controversial political party would allow it to get a true measure of support for it without outing people who might be afraid of social ostracism or physical attack.
We’ve gotten some requests along these lines for fundraising use cases, basically crowdfunding where everyone stays anonymous. There’s a lot of reasons this would be hard to implement and manage without running afoul of regulations, and at a certain point, if people want super duper privacy they can use bespoke ZKP smart contracts on the blockchain. That’s not the primary use case we’re solving for at this stage.
As it is, we have some polling functionality on the roadmap, so anonymous polling + ID verification + assurance contracts is definitely something we can do.
In my mind it should be titled "Increasing Human Intelligence and Diligence via Natural Selection." Basically its a follow-on to Darwin. Earth's equatorial environments are the location of Homo sapiens (EDIT: where Homo sapiens evolved). Equatorial like environments are thus expected to be the most habitable for Homo sapiens. Out on the more extreme environments, where environmental pressures cause heavy culling of less fit individuals, is where more fit individuals will survive the culling. Simple natural selection.
Why does this not happen in the tropical climes? Tropical climes is where Homo sapiens find an abundance of food growing year round, where weather-proof clothing, strong shelter, and stockpiles of fuel are not required for survival to the age of reproduction. Hence, where stock-piles of food & fuel, and substantial clothing & structures are required for survival, is where individuals of low intelligence and low diligence experience low reproductive success.
Why doesn't this cash out in actual historic observations? The Yamnaya (the first whites basically) did not have an impressive material culture compared to Mesopotamia or Egypt.
The Yamnaya didn't have the easy button the Egyptians had. The Yamnaya had to work hard all summer to collect fodder, food & fuel, and construct housing & clothing for winter. Egypt is dry today, but in the past was green.
The center of the range of the Yamnaya is Volgograd, 49 degrees from the equator, a place not known for balmy weather.
Look where pyramids are built, near the equator where food is abundant all year.
This came home to me several years ago, whilst visiting friends in Hawaii over Christmas. I took a picture of people wearing shorts standing in line to buy a snow cone. My friend and I walked along a side road, where the utility company had cut brush below the power lines, this gave us access to pick the guavas. It was then I realized that if I had to retire poor, I'd do it on the Big Island. Food grows year round and there is no heating bill. There is plenty of fishing, you can grow food all year, a small chicken house and a nice garden would keep someone nicely on a small budget.
Well, I don’t know about Hawaii, but Africa has this little problem that everything tries to kill you and your livestock. Predators, snakes, etc. remarkable how even antelopes have more dangerous antlers than European deer do, or reindeer. Life is very sharply competitive there.
Now for example I was flying over Aalborg, basically Northern Denmark, and it was remarkable how the entire county was just ideal grassland for cattle and there was nothing else at all. Nothing would compete with livestock. (OK originally I am sure there were wolves and bears.)
So this gives me a very different picture. Remember that whites usually have the lactase mutation. This implies not necessarily stockpiling food, cattle will produce milk year round. But OK let’s say stockpiling is necessary. But in Africa, simply fighting for survival and protecting livestock is necessary. Even hunting an antelope is not that simple, given their antlers.
The usual story I've heard is the opposite - the equator is where it was hardest for people to thrive because all the parasites and prey were adapted to them.
The problem with evopysch just so stories is that they are underdetermined. There's a story for every possible hypothesis, all seemingly equally plausible.
There is obviously a major difference in *how* was it "hard to thrive" - near the equator, there was an evolutionary pressure towards physical attributes that help resist parasites and other challenges, and towards the poles there was an evolutionary pressure towards long-term planning and risk management, since if you were careless with planning and got unlucky weather, your whole family starved to death before the spring; so as far as risk aversion has some hereditary component, we should expect to see some measurable differences to confirm or reject that theory.
Equatorial Africa is where we evolved. Food grows there year round, you'll never freeze to death. For almost all our food plants (except stone fruits which need a cold cycle) heat is never the limiting factor. You'll never have to lay up a supply of food or fuel for the winter. You'll never need clothing nor warm shelter. Thus about responsibility, do you need to be diligent in laying up supplies for the cold dark winter?—No, cold dark winter never comes to equatorial climates.
But in climates with cold dark winter, where snow covers the ground for months at a time, where deciduous trees lose their leaves and conifers only bear edible seeds, green plants are otherwise dead and decaying, or buried in the snow, most birds have flown south, large herbivores typically migrate south, or forage bark or dead grass. For humans: caches of food and fuel need to be set aside, warm clothing needs to be constructed, warm houses need to be built, and not after the cold comes, but long before. Diligence ... "Evolution by Natural Selection."
Fascinating but I'm having trouble working through the implications.
A natural read is "Europeans became smarter and more diligent as a response to agriculture". But then you would expect groups that took much longer to invent agriculture to be an SD or two below Europeans in IQ and diligence. While I'm sure there are some people salivating at that possibility, the *Japanese* didn't get agriculture until some ridiculously late date like 500 BC, so something must be wrong here.
So another possibility is "Europeans got smarter and more diligent over time independent of agriculture, because everyone was getting smarter and more diligent". I think this is how schizophrenia risk goes - some studies have found it constantly declining since at least 50,000 BC. Here there was some original event that created the modern human package, and since then selection pressure has optimized for things that go well with the package (like IQ and diligence). The problem here is that I'm not sure there's a lot of room for 50,000 years of positive selection for IQ at the rate Reich finds without our ancestors having to be as dumb as bricks (dumber than chimps?) But this is just a vague impression and I could easily be wrong.
What's frustrating for me, is that Reich et al don't do a similar analysis against North Asian (except for a few dozen loci from Japan), SE Asian, Indigenous Americans, and sub-Saharan populations. A bunch of the decline in "thrifty gene" alleles are *assumed* to be associated with the advent of agriculture. But we only have data for West Eurasians (which include three groups: pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers, the invasion of agriculturalists, and finally the Indo-European migrations). Agriculture developed independently in Asia and SE Asia (9 kya and 8 kya ago respectively) and in Meso America and the Anded (9 kya and 8 kya respectively), and defused down into sub-Saharan Africa 3 kya. Do we see similar selection going on in those populations? If so that would support the TG hypothesis. If not, that would suggest some other factors are affecting West Eurasian populations.
Anyhew, the decline in the alleles associated with the risk of smoking stood out! Tobacco wasn't introduced to Europe until the 16th Century. But the alleles that are associated with lower risk of smoking has been declining overall from 8 kya. Though it's interesting that they spiked before the European contact with the Americas and then dropped precipitously starting 0.5 kya (!). Would Indigenous Americans have a lower frequency of smoking-risk alleles?
And why would the genes associated with fast-paced walking *increase* with the advent of agriculture? Granted, agriculturalists are burst workers, and they're less sedentary than hunter-gatherers, it seems like fast-paced walking would be more useful for hunters and gatherers who would have to cover a larger territory for their food resources.
Correction: When it came to "intelligence" they did compare the profiles of West Eurasians to Japanese. But they had to drop a over half the 1109 loci that presumably affect these factors to see a selective pressure in West Eurasians, but they didn't see the same selective pressure in Japanese populations. They are puzzled. ;-)
> We finally observe signals of selection for combinations of alleles that today predict three correlated behavioral traits: scores on intelligence tests (increasing 0.79 ± 0.14), household income (increasing 1.11 ± 0.14), and years of schooling (increasing 0.61 ± 0.13). These signals are all highly polygenic, and we have to drop 463 to 1109 loci for the signals to become nonsignificant (Extended Data Figure 10). We also tested for a correlation of East Asian GWAS effect size measurements to West Eurasian selection. We observe a significant correlation for γsign (P=3.8×10−6) and rs (P=1.9×10−10) (Extended Data Figure 11), which is very difficult to explain as an artifact of population structure.
> While I'm sure there are some people salivating at that possibility, the *Japanese* didn't get agriculture until some ridiculously late date like 500 BC, so something must be wrong here.
There's a similar observation that I find interesting.
For background, intelligence test scores tend to be normed on whites, and subtest scores are intended to mean roughly the same thing between different subtests. So the general idea is that a score of 95 on verbal reasoning is about the level of verbal reasoning that you'd expect in someone who scored 95 on quantitative reasoning, assuming the testee is a European white.
This is a "flat" profile - if you do well at something, you do equally well at everything else, measured against the norm for European whites.
Middle-Eastern whites, Indians, and Africans have different average levels of performance, but they more or less share a flat profile.
East Asians don't. They have hugely outsized performance on spatial reasoning, or in the alternative hugely outsized underperformance on verbal reasoning, measured against the white profile. This has been noticed and gives us memes like "Asians: because calculus isn't going to do itself".
But what I find interesting is that Amerinds have the East Asian profile of greatly elevated spatial reasoning. This hasn't really been noticed because their absolute performance levels are so poor. But the profile is clearly visible in their scores, and it implies that this difference in cognitive profile must go 𝘸𝘢𝘺 back.
On the issue of "the Japanese" getting agriculture in specific, you need to distinguish between the time that agriculture showed up in Japan, the geographic location, and the time that agriculture showed up in the Japanese, the ethnic group. They aren't the same; the Japanese of today are not autochthonous. Agriculture showed up in Japan alongside the Yayoi, who brought it from the mainland.
> While I'm sure there are some people salivating at that possibility, the Japanese didn't get agriculture until some ridiculously late date like 500 BC, so something must be wrong here.
Except that this study only uses a subset of Japanese phenotypes as a reference against West Eurasians. It's not a study of the frequency Japanese phenotypes over time.
I think the effect is caused by latitude related climate. With lower latitude tropical areas being less conducive to low diligence culling, and higher latitude sub-arctic areas more conducive to low diligence culling. Japan is a long country north to south, with the north being 45 degrees north of the equator, and the south only 30 degrees north of the equator. Think the difference in climate between Cairo, Egypt, and Marseille, France. So are you talking about people in Northern Japan, or Southern Japan. Because those 15 degrees in latitude north to south make a whole lotta difference in climate for primitive people.
But the real effect is seen in 55 degrees north Northern Europe and 30-ish degrees Greece.
They're tracking the frequency of loci — and the alleles associated with those loci — that seem to be associated with schizophrenia in *modern* European populations. One of the favorite behavioral genetics *just so* stories (i.e. post hoc handwaving) is that schizophrenia may have been a useful genetic profile to have in cultures that valued shamans. AFAIK no studies of whether these markers are higher in Siberian populations, or other populations which were not Christianized until recently and practiced shamanism and/or witchcraft. If somebody has links to papers dealing with this question, I'd be interested in seeing them.
> A 2022 paper assembled a large number of Jomon samples from 6000 BC through 500 BC, and finally we got our first look at two Yayoi samples from 100 BC, as well as three samples from 700 AD, the historical period labeled by these researchers as “Kofun” because of the style of burial mounds common among elites at that time.
> The results were surprising and force a reappraisal of a generation of genetic models.
> Surprisingly, the non-Jomon ancestry of the Yayoi reveals they differed from the Kofun and modern Japanese. Rather than Koreans, of all the non-Jomon populations, Siberians and Manchurians turn out to be genetically closest to the Yayoi. So the closeness to the North Chinese and Koreans we consistently detect in modern Japanese samples only emerges starting with the Kofun samples [of 700 AD].
> at least two historic groups of rice farmers likely arrived in Japan, the first from a Siberian population that introduced rice farming but was then genetically overwhelmed by a second population with origins in Korea. The three Kofun individuals are also very similar to modern Japanese, indicating that by the historical period, the ethnogenesis of the Yamato had mostly been finalized in genetic terms.
There is some evidence that populations in East Asia have had time to adapt to a rice based diet. Below is one study but there are many others on the topic. One interesting possibility they note is that these adaptions could actually predate agriculture due to the abundance of wild millet and rice in China. I think that if there was enough time to allow these digestive adaptions, it wouldn’t surprise me if neurological changes were also present.
"The advent of agriculture" is a spectrum and hard to pin down to a specific date. I don't think me saying "500 BC" and you rebutting with "no, this other sources says 1000 BC" is a very interesting disagreement.
It does seem to undermine the argument from the Japanese, though.
Googling, it seems first traces of agriculture in northern Europe is about 4500 years ago. That doesn't seem substantially different for 3000 years for the Japanese.
Hm, then maybe I'm just wrong about it being possible that Reich's effects are from agriculture. His paper shows the biggest effect in IIRC the 10000 - 6000 BC period. I don't know what's happening then that's interesting. End of the Ice Age, maybe?
Like some others mentioned, the modern Japanese are mostly descended (~90%) from mainland Asians who presumably have been practicing agriculture for as long as anyone else in North-East Asia. I don't think there's any mystery here.
I think the estimated rate of change is what is the most important takeaway. But he clearly is attributing at least one of the effects (body fat) directly to agriculture. I imagine the rise in celiac disease is similar. Probably lighter skin and TB are due to moving away from the equator and those traits no longer convey protections from UV and ID, resp.
Ha, I agree. Let the record show my edit came in (barely) before your response.
Edit: In fairness to my original un-edited post, I did say *at least 3000 years ago* and Wikipedia also shows it could have been as early as 6000 years ago, which is a meaningful difference.
At the risk of repeating myself (see my response above), one of the favorite behavioral genetics just so stories (i.e. post hoc handwaving) is that schizophrenia may have been a useful genetic profile to have in cultures that valued shamans. I don't know if the behavioral geneticists are still promoting this (as yet) unfalsifiable snake oil. A good test of this would be to look at the frequencies of these alleles are in Siberian populations — or for that matter in any populations which was not Christianized until recently, and where shamanism and/or witchcraft are valued arts. If somebody has links to papers dealing with this question, I'd be interested in seeing them.
Have you quit Software Engineering after a decently long tenure? Where did you go / what did you do?
I'm nearing the 20 year mark and I've just about had it. Everything we do is so stupid now The average competence level is rock-bottom. I want to get out but it's all I've ever done.
Or, alternatively, how does one find a company to work for that isn't hot garbage?
I keep customizing (not quite engineering, more like scripting) the same ERP software for 22 years. It is boring, but it feels good to be one of the best in the world at something. I have the entire code base in my head.
I hate working for consulting companies. One customer calls, who is a manufacturing business, and I have to think about their processes. Thirty minutes later a retail company calls...
I will work for an end-user company from December, that is calmer.
I feel no way to find an interesting job that also pays the bills. I have about 15 years until retirement, if it is boring but stress-free, I will take that.
I do agree that "mainstream" software dev is stupid. 20 years ago if one wanted a data entry app with three tables and three forms, you could do it in Delphi without any code, just a visual editor. Code was only used for validating and copying data. It was done in a day. Today it is a two week project of a team of two, say Java Swing and React.js the later requiring somehow doing stuff in 20 different files for just displaying, filtering and sorting tabular data. People flat out forgot about inversion of control.
I did work at a pure software company (perhaps 20 people, C++) and generally found the environment much better. They developed technical specialist software for customers with very deep pockets. I don't know how much they sold it for, but 10k$ per workstation per year is probably the right order of magnitude.
I generally liked the quality of their codebase. Everyone up to the CEO was a (former) software developer. One downside was that they were sticking to svn, because that was what all the seniors were used to. From a CS perspective, their problems were more interesting than the once I encounter in my current field, particle detector physics.
One way to pick out interesting companies is to search for software far from the well-tread path. Writing Java microservices with web frontends can be lucrative (if you happen to work for a bank, for example), but at the end of the day, you will encounter very few interesting problems on the 'I need to grok a new algorithm to solve that' level. Solving Navier-Stokes in a parallel environment, simulating neutron fluxes in a reactor, calculating how buildings behave in an earthquake or automatic trace routing in PCB design would all be problems which are both interesting to solve and for which some specialist software company likely sells a product for big bucks.
I recently left software engineering after 22 years. I had plateaued at Senior for lack of the leadership skills needed to advance to tech lead, and my job satisfaction cratered after I ran out of the love of the technology I had as a young man.
What you should do depends on what you are unsatisfied with. If you are ok with the day to day work of software development, the simplest change might be to transfer internally to a job where you are closer to the customer, and can therefore see the good your software is doing for people. If that's not an option, you might try moving to a company that is building something you genuinely consider good, useful software. Helping to build that might lift your spirits.
If neither of those are feasible, you'll probably need to shift industries, and that means retraining. There is a lot of satisfying work to be done in the medical field, but even the pretty lowly jobs require two years of training. In two years you can become a practical nurse, a respiratory therapist, or a paramedic. Add one more year to paramedic, and you'll be an advanced life support paramedic. Four years takes you to registered nurse, and a bunch of diagnostic medical technician jobs. And it goes on from there.
It must feel very hard on the ego to be an expert in a field and then become a beginner ir another one. At this point I am resigned to developing data entry forms if at least it is stress-free.
I was in hardware validation. Designers design, validators validate the design when cast in hardware. My job involved a lot of hardware side, and minimal software side, mostly writing scripts controlling test hardware, reducing data, etc.
But as to a second career. I went back to the University for Geology. I work the mineral exploration side. Its mostly seasonal, and much less than full time work. I get paid to visit remote Alaska, fly first class, live in camp environments, and get paid to look at pretty rocks. I find that millennials and younger people don't like the outdoors as much as us boomers. For instance, most of the millennials I work with turn down the opportunity to ride ATVs out to some site two miles from camp to do some 15 minutes work. I'm like "are you kidding me? you're paying me to ride an ATV in Alaska? People sweat their asses off all year and blow their money to do this for a day or two ... you're going to pay me for that? I'm front & center."
Now that the kids are grown, its easy to travel, and travel for a long time. I've seen the aurora several times, and just lots of krazy crap you just can't imagine, commuting in helicopters, the sun setting twice in 20 minutes, one of the first home sites in North America ...
I’d recommend looking at companies whose (main) product is not software, like semiconductors, manufacturing, etc. You will be contributing meaningfully to real products. It’s not without issues, nothing ever is, but I have a sense it cannot be all stupid because chips have to signal-process, cnc lathes have to turn, etc., so there’s a fundamental reality check on your work.
Well, yes and no. I do agree that companies in the _hardware_ space specifically probably take things more seriously, and I am looking at some possibilities in that realm, though most of them don't need my skillset.
But most of the companies I've worked for have not had software as their main product, rather they have _used_ software to deliver a service of some kind. And even though there is a relationship between "taking software dev seriously" and delivering a high-quality / profitable / [name your virtue] service to consumers or businesses, it seems this relationship is too hard to see/quantify for it to be acted on. That is, it's not immediately apparent how "reducing duplicate leads" or "upgrading core libraries to versions without known CVEs" or "bringing build times down from 30+ minutes" translates to the bottom line, so "the business" forces engineering to not do those things. So engineers that care about doing a good job eventually leave, or never go to work there in the first place (plus Google is paying triple so why not go there?). Feature dev continues as fast as possible, tech debt is never paid down, and everything becomes a horrible mess and stays that way.
Those specific companies sound over-managed to me. As in obsessing about the bottom line and micromanaging what the devs do. I think more relaxed businesses exist, as in, "as long things keep working, you wizards just keep doing whatever you want to". In a less overmanaged business one just overestimates by a factor of two the time required for what "the business" wants and uses the time for these tasks.
So I think “deliver a service” is still… non-physical, correct? As opposed to writing software that controls, say, a machining center? No room for bs there, metal is being cut at the exact rates of feeds and speeds.
"That is, it's not immediately apparent how 'reducing duplicate leads' or 'upgrading core libraries to versions without known CVEs' or 'bringing build times down from 30+ minutes' translates to the bottom line, so 'the business' forces engineering to not do those things."
Unless the business is micro-managing your time then some of these you can do without asking permission. I, myself, became unhappy at one of my employer's product build times many years ago and spend a few hours per week driving the build time down to something that I found acceptable. No one tried to stop me.
I expect that many companies are simply not optimized to prevent background technical risk reduction (mine certainly isn't).
"Feature dev continues as fast as possible, tech debt is never paid down, and everything becomes a horrible mess and stays that way."
Things don't always go as I wish, but you may just need to find an employer that isn't insane about scheduling every last minute of your job.
I'll also note, however, that a certain amount of gruginess in the code often means that you have customers (with schedules and desired). A perfectly clean code-base often means no customers and thus no schedule pressure. This has its own problems.
It's not that every minute of my time is being controlled, but rather that management (slash tech leadership like a Staff+ group or whatever) is controlling what's allowed to be committed. Plus, y'know, I'm not in charge of the design of these systems. I can't just go redesign them!
My examples above are over-simplified ideas that could be expressed in a few words. Rarely is reality as clean as "the build takes 30 minutes and doesn't have to, the same thing could be accomplished in 10". It's probably 30 minutes because it's doing dumb things, because it was designed incorrectly, and that design is now extremely load-bearing. Fixing it isn't a matter of doing good technical work, it's a matter of convincing people with power that it's a solvable problem. People who have different ideas about what constitutes good software, and/or who would prefer not to admit their mistakes, or more charitably who are in the middle of More Feature Work and don't want a distraction.
Or, another way to illustrate what I'm talking about is like... Imagine a company with around 20-30 developers who mostly work in Ruby. They have about 10 paying customers (large corps), a few thousand end users (employees of those corps), plus a hundred or so internal call center users. The board force-hires a new CTO. The new technical direction is TypeScript, Lambda, DynamoDB, and GraphQL. Everything will be done as serverless microservices. All calls will be done over GraphQL (which requires embedding Apollo in every Lambda function). Also we're going to triple the size of the dev team, and spend a year rewriting everything. ........this is not a problem I can solve, even as a senior IC! This is organizational dysfunction so deep it's irredeemable. There's no solution but to get out, which I did. I would have preferred not to join such a broken company in the first place, but they don't tell you "hey BTW nothing works" in the interview! These places THINK they're doing a good job! They're not!
I'm not trying to be whiny here. I have been *trying* not to take jobs with disastrous companies. I have failed, repeatedly. I do not know what I'm doing wrong.
I think companies become disastrous by trying too hard. Being too ambitious. If you get the vibe of driving the whole team hard for a goal and so on. The vibe I like is that you will own this particular thing and then just be responsible for it your own way.
As a fellow B2C web app automaton, I've found smaller companies to be -- well, still disastrous, but in different ways from what you're describing.
At a smaller company, as a senior engineer with a bit of social skill, you can pretty much talk the CEO and board into letting you spend a few weeks on anything you believe in. You can literally just go spend an afternoon putting together a plan, no permission necessary, because coming up with proposals to fix problems and take advantage of opportunities is the point of hiring someone senior.
The build takes 30 minutes and you think it might be possible to get it to 10? Grab a list of outages and write a paragraph about why a quick turnaround time for changes would have lowered their impact, plus make some pie charts showing 4 builds costing 2 hours a day of waiting around vs 4 builds costing 40 minutes, then make a list of stuff like:
1. Cache artifacts
2. Parallelise template precomputation
3. Move our build to GitHub Actions and use a biggest worker ("cost should be about the same")
4. Profile and speed up tests ("let's timebox this to two days")
Stick some impact/effort estimates against these items so it looks like you've thought about them, and move any that you think are stupid to the bottom of the list and cross them out. Till the soil over the next week by strategically complaining about build times making it take longer to fix bugs and how you're worried that it'll take hours to fix an outage. Wait until someone asks whether this is preventable, tell them you'll send them your writeup, and watch a beautiful project sprout.
At smaller companies, I've found that the biggest problem is that my predecessors have used their freedom unwisely. You -- as a senior engineer at a company where you're at most one hop from the CTO/head of eng/lead/principal/whatever and probably directly report to them -- are now in the clique that controls development, and you now have to go and fix the Svelte/GraphQL/TS/Lambda/DynamoDB/Redis CQRS abomination that previous engineers inflicted upon you. You have agency, but that agency is necessarily directed towards cleaning up messes left by other people.
> At a smaller company, as a senior engineer with a bit of social skill
As an autistic 43 year old, my social skills are just barely at the level of a neurotypical 20 year old, or so. I can follow your story but I couldn't make it happen unless the CEO was already my friend (in which case all that maneuvering wouldn't even be necessary).
I worked for a small company like that, with all that agency and autonomy, and it was great. But I had the advantage of already knowing at least 9 people when I joined, so I already had their trust and respect.
"The new technical direction is TypeScript, Lambda, DynamoDB, and GraphQL. Everything will be done as serverless microservices. All calls will be done over GraphQL (which requires embedding Apollo in every Lambda function). Also we're going to triple the size of the dev team, and spend a year rewriting everything."
This is a domain specific dysfunction. Which is *think* I observe from a distance in web development --- throwing out a code base every three years seems fairly common there.
My employer can't/won't do this because the cost is just SO DAMN high to do a total re-write. An architecture/code-base I helped design from the ground up is nearing 30 years old, for example. A good estimate for a rewrite would be 3+ years of 30+ engineers and probably $100 million. So it isn't going to happen. We may (and sorta are!) replacing parts incrementally, but I don't expect a wholesale rewrite.
This *can* lead to other dysfunctions --- like replacing things is tougher then when everything can be rewritten every few years -- but it isn't what you are seeing. And where I am we move slower than it feels *should* be necessary. We do move to new technologies, but probably slower than web-companies (because we expect to live with our choices for decades ...).
So, my best guess, is that a chunk of what you are seeing is company specific (not all companies do what your new CTO wanted to do) but a large chunk is also field specific. And you have tradeoffs no matter what s/w sub-field you are in.
You still might want to get out of software. But you also might want to find a sub-discipline that has different failure modes. Maybe failure modes you find less annoying.
I had been a SWE for 7 years (so not as long as you) and quit. What I was doing didn’t feel meaningful, and it didn’t seem like people were very engaged in their work or happy to be there. It was just sort of a “do the minimum, take your paycheck, and get out” kinda vibe, which can wear on you. So I quit and tried to go to medical school. Technically the application cycle is still going, but it looks like I’m not going to get in for the second year in a row despite a high MCAT/GPA, checking all the extracurricular boxes, etc . Have encountered a ton of hostility to tech in the medical world—a lot of “why are you here” kinda thing. It’s a very insular world. So I am probably just going to have to try and slink back to tech now, as sucky as that is. I realize that this doesn’t give you much in the way of advice as to what you can do to pivot. But I did quit software engineering after a decently long tenure, and this is what I did!
I’m quite surprised at your experience and the hostility to tech you’ve faced! Sorry for your experience! Granted, I only was a SWE for a year before I left, and I was pre-med in college, but people generally found my background interesting on the interview trail, especially when I talked about how my background offered a strength in computational research. That said, my college advisor strongly advised against applying to med school, noting that schools’ primary concern is that when the going got tough, I would quit and hop back to my lucrative safety option, and so they wouldn’t want to waste a spot on me
TBH, your experience was kind of the experience that I thought I was going to have, haha.
That said, it's by no means everyone! Like you say, there are a lot of people who are interested in tech, and I've gotten two good research gigs basically because the PI was an MD who was interested in AI/ML stuff.
But yeah, I did encounter a lot of hostility to tech in the medical world, at least in my first clinical research gig. It seemed like a lot of (mostly older) physicians equate "tech" with "the EHR," and basically view the EHR as something that was imposed on them from above by people who promised it would make their jobs easier, whereas it actually made their jobs harder and more unpleasant.
Now they see the same thing on the verge of happening with AI and LLMs or whatever and yeah...the hostility was real. (Mostly not to me personally (although there was one pathologist lmao), but towards the abstract concept of "tech" haha).
I definitely oversimplified in the comment above because I am bummed about how this application cycle is going so far, but yeah one of the suggestions I got when I first showed my essays to physicians was, basically, "chill on the 'changing medicine through AI' stuff."
And I know another former SWE whose application was by all accounts more impressive than mine who also whiffed last cycle. He's having more luck with MD/PhD this cycle, so maybe that would have been the way to go...
Yeah, so I didn't apply DO, and I think that I should have.
First cycle was kind of a rush because I took the MCAT in late June and basically had my hands completely full trying to rush out MD secondaries in time with a full-time job.
This cycle, I asked my advisor if I should apply DO, and he said he didn't think that it was necessary unless I was actually particularly interested in osteopathy. That is, he didn't think I needed it as a "back up," so to speak.
I suppose there's *technically* still time to apply DO this cycle, but man, it's getting really late, and I don't really know how the DO process works at all. Presumably they'll want me to have shadowed a DO, which I haven't done, and also be able to talk thoughtfully about "why DO" in a way that is going to seem less convincing given that I would be applying so late in the cycle, lol.
So yeah, *might* try and do DO this cycle if I can get through the application process fast enough, but, at the very least, if there is a next cycle, I will definitely apply DO, lol.
You probably have already seen it, but just in case you haven't I'd recommend ludic.mataroa.blog, the rants and commentary of a programmer in the same boat as you.
"Everything we do is so stupid now The average competence level is rock-bottom. I want to get out but it's all I've ever done.
Or, alternatively, how does one find a company to work for that isn't hot garbage?"
I haven't quite after a decently long tenure (been coding as a job since 1989) and don't find the competence level of my co-workers to be rock-bottom.
But I also don't work for a 'tech' company that makes its money by selling advertising. My employer makes very expensive semiconductor equipment.
In what field are you doing your S/W engineering? Because Facebook front end is really quite different from building game engines is different from building compilers is different from ...
I have worked mostly for consumer web companies. Not ones big enough that you've heard of them, except maybe HomeAdvisor/ANGI which was much smaller when I was there. Nothing anywhere near the "FAANG" tier.
I'm a data-and-databases specialist, though I can do other stuff to (generic "backend", ops automation, etc). I studied economics and don't know any "hard" CS, which I've never needed nor witnessed a need for.
I worked with a lot of great people and accomplished modest-but-satisfying things from about 2005 to 2019. From summer '19 to now, everything has been terrible.
The thing I find most frustrating is that these companies do have actual problems to solve! But they don't want to solve them. They just want to play with Kubernetes or serverless or event-driven architecture or build a self-serve developer platform or... Meanwhile the actual business is being run in spreadsheets because engineering refuses to help. So aggravating.
I just posted a plain-English discussion of recent data on the lead content of cinnamon (https://statisfied.substack.com/p/is-cinnamon-unsafe). This Thursday I'll be discussing whether Guardian Caps actually shield football players against brain injury.
I just caught myself thinking that because my newsletter is free, there's something less "shameless" about promoting it here. It's amazing how many questionable assumptions and how much self-deception can be baked into a single thought that crosses one's mind....
So speaking of coordination problems: One way to perhaps improve our presidential elections would be for the electoral college votes to be divided in each state according to who won the most votes in each congressional district. (With who won the most votes in the entire state getting the two senatorial votes.) The problem is that the dominate party in each state sees this as a disadvantage, it gives more votes to the other party. So if we could have two states (one red and one blue) make this change at the same time it would somewhat nullify this disadvantage. Thoughts? There must be other people thinking along these lines.
It appears that allocating electoral votes by Congressional district would have led to the popular vote winner losing the election in 1960, 2000, 2012(!), and 2016. Not sure how the two votes per senate seat would change things, but given that that currently a major source of the disconnect between the popular vote and the electoral college vote, I would think the effect would be negative.
I think that the obvious solution to the mess that is the EC is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. [1]
Of course, it was set up all wrong. What it should have said is that the members of the compact will vote for whomever wins the popular election /among members of the compact/. So Texas could either join the compact or face a situation where their EC members will never decide a vote because a block with 270+ members exists. (If you want to be a bit evil, say that the offer to join the compact is only open until it has a majority.)
[1] also mentions that the vote distribution you propose is already implemented in two states:
> Today, all but two states (Maine and Nebraska) award all their electoral votes to the single candidate with the most votes statewide (the so-called "winner-take-all" system). Maine and Nebraska currently award one electoral vote to the winner in each congressional district and their remaining two electoral votes to the statewide winner.
I don't think that this is in the states particular interests, though. Generally, there are big advantages to being a battleground state likely to decide election outcomes: presidents from both parties have to handle you with kids gloves lest you decide to favor the other party next time. Florida, where a small community of Cuban expats dictated foreign policy for decades would be a good example.
A state going from winner takes all to splitting its EC votes would decrease its campaign importance. If it is polling 50:50, the likeliest outcome is that both candidates will win some EC votes, with only the two senate votes hinging on which party wins the popular vote by a few thousand. So it would make sense to invest a lot less effort into that than into Florida, where a whopping 30 EC votes can hinge on a few thousand voters.
On the plus side, not bearing the brunt of election campaigns might be a blessing in itself.
Case in point, Nebraska is currently trying to move towards winner-takes-all, as that will greatly increase Trump's chances of winning (and Maine unfortunately has no way to retaliate this cycle).
How does this differ from what Trump et al. wanted to do with getting states to send slates of electors different from the majority vote in the state? I believe the Supreme Court ruled against this recently.
It's only considered "fraudulent" now because they failed. If they'd succeeded, they'd have been "duly appointed by the State Legislature in accordance with the Presidential Electors Clause of the Constitution." Just like the NPVIC electors would be if THEY succeed. Transfers of power are always messy business.
This is false. A successful fraud is still a fraud. If I sell you a fake Monet painting, I'm committing fraud regardless of whether or not you figure out it's a fake. No reason fake electors should be treated any differently.
I do not mean that the plan wouldn't have been discovered. I mean the determination of their putative fraudulence would be made differently.
To use your example, it is as though you have two paintings by Monet's students painted long after his death, and there are two different experts certifying which paintings are imbued with the "true essence of Monet."
There is a very fundamental difference between proposing to change the rules of an election *before* the election, because you think it would result in a fairer election, and proposing to change the rules of an election *after* the election, because your side lost under the old rules.
Stipulate a world where Trump got away with it. Approximately 100% of Not-Republicans and probably at least 20% of Republicans would regard him as an illegitimate usurper. If the people trying for the National Popular Vote Compact get their way, some people will think it was a *bad* decision but almost everyone will think it was a legitimate one in the same way that e.g. the 17th amendment is legitimate.
What do you think of the "faithless electors" scheme from 2016, where people tried (ineffectually) to get Republican electors not to vote for Trump? That strikes me as pretty damn analogous to the "alternative electors" idea.
One possible problem is that you might see 2000 Florida disputes in dozens of close Congressional districts. Also, a greater potential for fake "fraud" shenanigans: If Party X wins most districts in a state controlled by Party Y, but there was a trumped up "problem" in district 5, then, gosh, I guess the vote in district 5 can't be certified. A 10000 vote "problem" can be ignored at the state level because it won't change the state outcome, but it could be large enough to change a district outcome.
The classic objection to this, as proposed, is that is allows gerrymandering of the EC. Splitting the EVs proportionately + 2 overall wouldn't have that problem, though.
Proportionality is still vulnerable to intrastate shenanigans around, e.g., ballot access & polling locations, plus neutral effects like geographically differential turnout rates, especially in the largest States (CA & TX).
Gerrymandering is a problem, but I suspect less of one than the above.
Yeah gerrymandering of the districts. This doesn't seem as bad as the current situation. And yeah splitting the EC votes in proportion to the popular vote in the state would also work. Just something to make it feel like your vote counts for something.
>Just something to make it feel like your vote counts for something.
Hmm... Are there any statistics on how many people move to swing states specifically to try to make their votes count?
( Weirdly, it happened that my late wife and I moved from California to South Carolina when I retired (not for any political reason - her best friend lives here), so we went from more-or-less disenfranchised by deep blue to more-or-less disenfranchised by deep red. )
You might be interested in the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. It's an agreement to have states award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, which would make the electoral college irrelevant. The key mechanism is that if a state signs on, it doesn't go into force until enough *other* states have signed on to have a majority of the electoral college. So it costs you nothing to sign on, and only goes into effect when it can control the result of the election.
However, not enough states have signed on to activate it yet.
The constitutionality of that remains very much an open question. The relevant Wikipedia article has a pretty decent summary of the arguments for and against its constitutionality so I won't recap those here. The practicalities though are that:
(1) The NPVIC's constitutional legitimacy has not yet been tested in any federal court, so that outcome is currently just anybody's (highly motivated) hand-waving.
(2) Per Article III, the SCOTUS isn't supposed to take up such a question until it is "actual" e.g. the NPVIC has been activated. No advance hypotheticals in other words. The Court has arguably fudged that more than once including recently; but that certainly isn't something anybody can count on to happen.
(3) I would submit that in the court of public opinion, as distinct from actual federal courts, arguments for the NPVIC _not_ needing Congressional approval will not do well. The language of Article 1 Clause 3 is plain ("No State shall, without the Consent of Congress...enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State...") and the thing we're talking about is literally named an "Interstate Compact". The billboards/ads/social media posts will write themselves, to the public-opinion detriment of whichever political side is trying to argue that this particular interstate compact should be carried out without Congress's approval.
(4) At any rate the circumstance under which the NPVIC, once having enough states signed on, would be activated are that someone appears to have won the EC while losing the total popular vote. What would the period from early November to early January look like in that case, with the addition of dueling emergency federal court cases careening towards the SCOTUS? What if the SCOTUS can't/won't rule before the date that the newly elected Congress is supposed to formally accept and count the EC votes from each state? Suppose the newly-sworn-in Congress, in the three days between its taking office and the formal counting of the EC, rushes to vote on the NPVIC?
How all of that turns out in reality, I have no freakin' idea and neither does anyone else.
A big problem I see is ballot access. Right now it doesn't matter if California found a reason to keep Trump off the ballot, but it would in a national popular vote scenario.
The other big problem I see is "2000, but across the whole country". I used to hate the EC and think the NIVC was a no-brainer, but now I think the EC is necessary just for pragmatic reasons if nothing else.
Most measures of voting power find that the alleged small-state advantage is dominated by the big-state advantage provided by bloc voting. So the decision is made every year by a small number of big states (e.g. PA -- 5th largest in the country) that happen to have evenly divided electorates. Granted that if you removed the extra two votes from all states to completely remove the small-state advantage, our elections would shift dramatically D-ward, but that just shows that the small-state extra votes advantage is succeeding at partially offsetting the big-state bloc voting advantage.
The one weakness of this is that the national popular vote (plurality) doesn't necessarily reflect the real majority preference. For that we would need something like ranked choice voting.
Another thing is that seeing what a shitshow 2020 was on the right made me update strongly in favor of FPTP.
People already distrust elections enough, even with the simplest and most transparent mechanisms possible. Taking weeks to figure out who won through a seemingly black box process disconnected from vote totals would just pour gasoline on the fire.
I see no real problem with approval voting. ("Vote for as many candidates as you want, a maximum of once each; most votes wins.")
It's not more difficult to understand than FPTP, but it does seem to behave a bit better. However, whenever there's energy for reforming the voting system, it gets directed to crazier, more opaque systems.
And yes, the fact that it's easy to understand what's happening in FPTP is a significant virtue.
> People already distrust elections enough, even with the simplest and most transparent mechanisms possible.
I should point out that a non-anonymous ballot would be both simpler and more transparent, and would completely solve trust issues.
> I should point out that a non-anonymous ballot would be both simpler and more transparent, and would completely solve trust issues.
Who voted is already a matter of public record, just not *how* they voted, right? We already see lots of theories promulgated which are easily falsifiable.
From a game theory perspective, this significantly helps certain states, namely California, above most other states. And not for the reason you're probably thinking.
Republican-lead states tend to have more moderate voting records overall, (i.e. closer to 50/50 even if it's consistently more R). California is overwhelmingly D, to the point that the excess D vote in the state overwhelms the entire population of multiple other states. If I'm in a state that's 51% Republican, I may want my state's vote to reflect that contention and not just go R all the time. Maybe I think moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats are both pretty good, and want to avoid the crazies. A consistent R win would lean towards crazies, so I want Ds to be competitive. But if I signed on to the pact, I would actually just be negating the R vote entirely when it comes to voting for President. My state would be providing essentially the same number of votes for R as D, meaning my state doesn't matter at all (an interesting reversal of swing states from current!). I would, in fact, be abdicating my vote for the opinions of people in California.
I'm sympathetic to the idea of a national vote, and think it may have a calming effect on some of the craziness, if Rs had to compete for California votes and Ds had to compete for Texas votes. But it's totally a bad deal for any state where the two parties are competitive and generally a bad deal for Rs. It's not likely to get enacted.
George's idea is very different. If each congressional district split its votes off, then rural CA, NY, etc. can still be represented and so can urban or semi-urban areas like Austin and Atlanta that often get swamped by state totals. It provides a lot of nuance by making each congressional district potentially competitive, instead of making millions of people feel like their votes are pointless. And, despite having a potentially huge effect on voting, has a much less painful effect for a lot of states than the NPVIC.
As I said, I'm actually sympathetic to the idea of a national vote. I'm saying it won't happen because it gores a lot of oxen, including of the people that would need to sign on to make it work.
Right (what you say at the end.) It's a state action so takes no national action. One thing pointed out that I hadn't thought of is that what is done at the state level can also be undone at the state level. So if there was some 'we'll both do this together thing' between some blue and red states then there'd have to be some agreement that they wouldn't undo it right away. Say a ten (twelve) year buy in period.
>Republican-lead states tend to have more moderate voting records overall, (i.e. closer to 50/50 even if it's consistently more R).
That doesn't seem to be the case. In 2020, there were 10 red states where 60%+ of the vote went to the winner, but only 6 blue states, plus DC. Results were similar in 2016
The blue states with that kind of imbalance have much higher total votes. Montana being 57% Republican was only a total vote difference of ~100k votes. California on its own was over 5 million votes extra towards Biden/Harris in 2020. New York was another two million. Maryland and Massachusetts both have a million voter spread, with several other states not far behind. Scanning the red states I'm seeing a good number with ~500,000 excess votes to Republicans, but none in the millions. Tennessee is the highest with 708,000 more votes for Republicans than Democrats.
ETA: The highest percent among Republicans states was Wyoming at 69% R, which resulted in a +R of about 120,000 votes. California's 63% D vote dwarves those other differences.
No, they are not the same claim. The electoral advantage has more to do with very small states that would have 0-1 representatives if going strictly by population, but instead has a minimum of 3 (two senators, one rep). Republicans tend to do better in very sparsely populated states and gain an advantage. I was a bit loose with my language, as it's not about percent per state as total overages.
California has a different issue for the Democrats, in that they not only do better in California (like the Republicans do better in Texas and now Florida) but by a huge amount. The nationwide popular vote advantage for Democrats that we've seen since 2004 can be seen entirely in the excess votes found in California and New York. Texas is pretty much as much of a lock for Republicans as New York is for Democrats, but only gives Republicans +631,000 votes towards a national popular vote. In other words, Republicans are winning their states by smaller percents overall. Even in the states where Republicans are winning by very large percents, the absolute numbers are much smaller so that it moves the national needle by less.
Democrats want the NPVIC because they are "losing" millions of votes by having too many in certain states that is completely overkill in a national election. If Democrats could move maybe 4 million votes from California to Texas, Florida, PA, anywhere it's close, they could lock in a bunch of other states. So they want NPVIC. Obviously that would be bad for Republicans, and also bad for many specific states that would lose clout and voter impact.
Once you get that majority of states to agree there’s no need for these kinds of laws, a constitutional convention can probably change the constitution.
Amending requires more than a simple majority of states. Ratification of an amendment requires 3/4ths of states to ratify it through conventions or by their legislatures. It would be significantly easier to implement the national popular vote compact than to amend the constitution.
It's a lot safer than a constitutional convention, though, because it only changes that one thing. A convention in today's political environment would result in two camps screeching at each other over guns and abortion,
There's no danger in an Article V convention because all it can do is propose amendments. Nothing would be adopted unless it's ratified by three quarters of the states. That said, the first order of business of a constitutional convention (or stand-alone amendment) should be to make the process a little easier. Like a direct national referendum followed by another one a couple years later, to ensure against something's being adopted because of momentary hysteria.
Or maybe people actually belive the things they claim to believe and are working to implement. I am a leftist who supports the national popular vote, and would be 100% behind whatever stronger language is needed to ensure it doesn't break down.
The electoral college is a terrible idea independent of who benefits from it, and I only hope that when a republican candidate wins the popular vote at some point that galvanizes bipartisan support for NPV. It's far from the only voting reform we need, but it's definitely on the list.
I used to be strongly in favor of the NPVIC, and strongly opposed to the Electoral College, but 2020 weakened my position by demonstrating an important and often-overlooked feature of the Electoral College.
Specifically, the EC and its constitutional basis mean that no state has any legal standing to criticize how any other state conducts their elections. The constitution just says that each state gets so many EC votes and it's up to that state's legislature to decide how to allocate those votes. Period. In 2020 when Texas filed claiming that midwestern states' election results were fraudulent, the courts easily and rightly responded with "Yeah, that's none of your business". How a state's EC votes are allocated is a matter for the citizens of a state and their representatives which eliminates a lot of potential legal wrangling that could obstruct the primary purpose of the election, to make a choice.
If we did move to a national popular vote, I think we would also need to move election rulemaking and oversight to the federal level to avoid dangerous interstate squabbles.
The compartmentalization of the EC is an under appreciated feature, and one that the Maine-Nebraska approach would enhance (e.g., at most 3 EVs would have been affected by hanging chads in 2000 FL).
And likewise, wins-by-any-means-necessary thinking on the right as well (e.g. the current last-minute push to make Nebraska winner task all when Maine can't retaliate)
There's lot of _rhetoric_ along those lines, yes. Especially on social media.
However until/unless anti-MAGA people take some specific illegitimate _action_ to keep Trump out -- bringing a mob of angry supporters to DC and riling them up to storm the Capital to stop the official counting of presidential votes, for example -- it will remain clear which political side actually does have the "by any means necessary" mindset.
You do realize that blue Maine and red Nebraska have already done this?
Of course, some Nebraska legislators now trying to undo it, having waited until it's probably too late for a response from Maine to take effect before the election.
(Maine's constitution says that state laws don't take effect until 90 days after they're signed, unless passed by a supermajority)
This is a very party-oriented way of thinking. Note that, if you consider "interests of the state as a whole", a major advantage of winner-takes-all is that it increases the political relevance of the state (politicians can less afford to ignore the interests of the state) by making it riskier to ignore those interests.
Hmm, I was thinking of it as helping the individual voter to feel like their vote counted for more. I'm in NY and it really doesn't matter if I vote or not.
I'm not sure this is right. Neither Trump nor Harris need to campaign in California or Texas because of winner-take-all. If you got EVs proportional to the popular vote in the state, Trump and Harris would both be campaigning hard in California and Texas, because there would be some EVs they might win that way.
It sure seems like that would make California and Texas voters and their concerns *more* relevant to Trump and Harris.
But the opinions of California and Texas have presumably been already taken into account long ago by the Harris and Trump campaigns respectively in formulating their policies and platforms--which is part of the reason they're safe states for their respective candidate (e.g. if the Democrats just completely disregarded the views of everyone in a safe blue state and crafted their platform entirely for swing state voters...would those safe blue states remain so?)
But under national vote a state like Nevada or Iowa could be swamped by a small part of California or Texas...meaning it might be rational for candidates to just *completely* ignore it, at all stages of the election.
Note the existence of primary elections - Republicans generally mirror the electoral policies of the State, while Democrats use something like a universal proportionality rule (although it's slightly more complex than that).
Nice, thanks. I'm reading "Fears of a Setting Sun" reviewed by Mrs. Psmith. And I've come to realize my knowledge of early American history is somewhat lacking.
"CAUTION. – it is most essential that when purchasing you see that every Cake is stamped SPRATT’S PATENT, or unprincipled dealers, for the sake of a trifle more profit, which the makers allow them, may serve you with a spurious and highly dangerous imitation.
SPRATT’S PATENT MEAT FIBRINE DOG CAKES
NONE ARE GENUINE UNLESS SO STAMPED
From the reputation these Meat Fibrine Cakes have now gained, they require scarcely any explanation to recommend them to the use of every one who keeps a dog; suffice it to say they are free from salt, and contain “dates”, the exclusive use of which, in combination with meat and meal to compose a biscuit, is secured to us by Letters Patent, and without which no biscuit so composed can possibly be a successful food for dogs."
If it doesn't have dates in, there is no way you can feed it to your dog and hope it won't starve! There's a claim! 😁
I remember a links post by Scott from like 8 years ago where he asked, given the fact that humans have been responsible for the extinction of tens of thousands of species, mostly bugs I think I recall, (not to mention introduced lots of invasive species detrimental to various local environments), why the hell haven't we seen catastrophic impacts to our ecology and agriculture? I guess I have a pet theory I've been working up in my mind for a while
Epistemic status: I know close to nothing about agriculture, except some basic historical facts I've heard about previous food industries changing.
Essentially, I think that capitalism and human industry may be what has saved us and prevented catastrophic changes. As someone who works in engineering, I know you always have to deal with changes to your plans, and nothing ever goes right. When you do deliver systems that work, nothing ever stays non-broken, and you always have to come up with new fixes. However, you have goals, and as such you keep finding tradeoffs and workarounds so you're still able to deliver and fulfill the customer need consistently. If you don't, then you lose the customer's business and someone else ends up fulfilling their need instead. Perhaps almost all human-impacting ecological sectors have essentially already been turned into self perpetuating industries.
Is there some fungus which is going to kill all the Gros Michel bananas in the world? Banana farmer moguls absolutely do not want that happening, and they're not stupid. They will end up employing experts that help them set up systems to delay that eventually as long as possible, so they can still meet their quarterly earnings projections, whether by developing new farming methods or new antifungal treatments for the plants.
Does it finally get to the point that the Gros Michel banana can no longer hang on? Either the Gros Michel banana moguls have already started setting up systems to farm new varieties of bananas in preparation for this eventually, or else some until-now specialty supplier of bananas that used to be not as popular (like the Cavendish banana) ends up rising to power by fulfilling the now-unmet demand for bananas, capturing the market and supplanting the old industry leaders as the new head of the industry.
For the record, Gros Michel bananas did taste different, and maybe even better, than Cavendish bananas. But I guess Cavendish bananas are a sufficiently good workaround because they've been the norm for 70 years now.
Is it still bad that humans cause so many changes to the ecology? Yes, but maybe not THAT bad. I postulate two situations.
1. There might be aspects of ecology that would have been ripe for eventual human exploitation that have not yet been industry-ized. What if the Gros Michel banana specifically contained some protein that could have been turned into a low-carbon-emission fuel source using 2025 technology, or could have cured HIV? Well, then we are out of luck in exploiting either of those. However, this still doesn't impact current technologies, only potential future ones. We may never realize what we could have achieved and what we lost the opportunity to do had that banana not gone extinct, and as such this isn't viewed as a catastrophe.
2. There might be negative effects to the environment that are so detrimental that there is no mitigation possible, and it will make non-viable even other related industries that might have come in and filled the gap. This is the catastrophe scenario that is typically pushed by environmentalists to make laymen worried. But really, I'm not certain I know of any examples of this catastrope scenario coming to pass (not that that means it cannot happen in the future). I guess I've heard that in pre WWII France, they had the technology to farm truffles, and the decimation of France in the war resulted in them somehow losing that capability. As such, truffles need to be hunted and gathered these days by specially trained pigs, and the price of truffles went sky high. I'm not too clear on how this happened, and I'm not sure if it has to do with ecology or just loss of human knowledge.
I speculate that this model of "ingrained industries as a shield" may also apply to other non-agricultural scenarios as well.
But my point is that it's not happening for anything that I would deem "impactful". There's other types of oranges, or even other citrus fruit that easily fills the gap.
Because people aren't dying by the millions and starving in the streets, or at least not moreso than 10 years ago. And as bad as the economy is doing now, it's not even as bad as we've seen in our recent past, like Weimar Germany levels.
They are dying by the millions, moreso than 10 years ago. The period of 2020 to 2023 saw ~9 million per year in excess mortality compared to years immediately prior.
Now, I'm nearly certain that this won't simultaneously pass your threshold for both scale and relevance: pandemic deaths are different from agricultural failures, even if they do depend (in difficult-to-predict ways) on the ecosystems around us. What I'm less certain of is that anything else would ever pass your threshold either.
This whole line of argumentation feels rather question-begging. You yourself point at a major agricultural disruption--one which farmers tried and failed to arrest, and which ultimately changed the eating habits of hundreds of millions of people worldwide--and dismiss it because people...moved on to eating something else instead of literally starving? Only in this comment did you gesture vaguely at a threshold of what *would* count: not only does it need to kill tens of millions, but it needs to have a clear, unambiguous starting point within the last 10 years. That's a very high bar!
Humans have been making large-scale changes to the environment for centuries, and the pace of the changes has accelerated dramatically in the last handful of decades. But the systems involved are extremely complex and at least somewhat dynamic, and of course humans are pretty adaptable. So if the only criterion under which an event will "count" is that humans recently, suddenly and conspicuously did so poorly at adapting that it caused a SHARP rise in human mortality...well, it shouldn't surprise anyone that such events are hard to find (and yet nevertheless, we just found one). That doesn't mean that there are no costs to any of the changes, and it doesn't even mean that such changes don't cause significant deaths. Just that such deaths are unlikely to be sufficiently numerous AND localized in space and time AND obvious and directly attributable to some *specific* ecological change to be easily seen.
My advice would be to just forget your original question. If you're genuinely interested in human-caused ecological changes for their own sake, read up on them. Leave behind as many of your preconceptions as you can, and just learn about how the world is and what changes we've actually been able to see and track. Meanwhile, if you're pursuing the question as a way of shoring up some ideological or political stance, I'd gently suggest that this is probably not very productive and you'd be better off ignoring the question.
> and dismiss it because people...moved on to eating something else instead of literally starving?
Yes, that's exactly right. I'm looking for impactful changes, not ones that are easily shaken off.
Though I'd even accept something as impactful if instead of people literally starving, everyday people actually had to change their habits in a way they'd notice, as in if there's no suitable substitute. If all bananas went extinct, I'd call that impactful, even though people probably wouldn't die from it. Or if the substitute bananas needed to be used by everyday people in different ways, couldn't be used in the same recipes, etc.
And it doesn't have to be 10 years, let's say 30 years, which is about as long as certain environmentalist types seem to have been basically telling us that we're going to cause the extinction of the human race any day now.
> I'd gently suggest that this is probably not very productive and you'd be better off ignoring the question.
I think it's absolutely productive to figure out whether we should really trust that we're causing concrete irreparable harm to the human race or if we should be more picky about what alarmist rhetoric we're willing to believe and take action on, and not to mention worry ourselves sick about.
FWIW, the Gros Michel is not extinct, it's just no longer economic to produce in sufficient quantities to be the primary cultivar for human consumption given its susceptibility to Panama disease.
Human caused extinctions are almost exclusively on small islands.
Its not politic to state this, but species don't matter, niches matter. As long as something fills the niche, what fills it is immaterial. People get all hot & bothered over honey bees, not realizing the loss of bees is a result of moving bee boxes to follow the pollination cycle. For you and I who earn our living in high tech, we don't see it. But the guy who has 1,000 bee boxes he earns $150-$200 for six weeks in an almond orchard, that's his livelihood. He's going to take his boxes there, even though he's losing 1/4 of them. He can rebuild them across the summer and prep for next spring. He earns less for follow-on fields, but its not nothing. I absolutely hate that people read some undergrad's paper and get all up-in-arms that they're going to pass a law ... as if they know more about the in's and out's of that industry than the participants. All that stuff happens because reasons.
What we have driven to extinction were mostly pests, everyone trumpets the Passenger Pigeons, but they were a disaster in human cities. Being cliff dwellers, they adored artificial cliffs ... i.e. tall buildings. Existing in sky darkening flocks, they crapped a lot, I mean a lot, blanketing cities in bird-shit. Being that they exclusively mated in large flocks, even minor culling led to rapid extinction. All of the other charismatic mega fauna were basically predators ... things that eat our livestock and small children, people actually living near them were happy to see them go.
It's not just an ecology problem. Species extinction also means that we lose a lot of potentially valuable genetic data from the past. Nature has developed a lot of tricks over the last billion years, and we shouldn't delete them lightly.
I would assume mammoths to be like their nearest extant relative which is elephants. Elephants are a pretty big problem in some parts of the world where at best they trample crops and damage infrastructure and at worst will deliberately kill and destroy (mainly in musth).
Arctic mammoths, mastodons, arctic bison, dire wolves, giant sloths, sabre tooth cats ... we may have pushed some of them over the edge, but I don't think spear-chucking people did those big predators in ... and I'm pretty sure the mammoths and mastodons weren't very good neighbors.
I've stood next to the reconstructed skeletons of dire wolves and sabre tooth cats, they were monsters, five to six feet high at the withers, or as big as today's big horses.
What’s the state of the evidence on the economic ROI of making bigger LLM’s?
I use one regularly at work, find it useful, but it feels much more like a strange mix of superhuman knowledge and “ability to sound confident and convincing” mixed with below-average-human insight and self awareness.
What is like to understand is what the economic ROI on training bigger models is. Are the economic returns linear, sublinesr, or exponential?
I can imagine a future kind of “engineering manager” whose role is something like “AI wrangler”, to be the self-aware human interface to these alien intelligences.
I don't have any hard numbers, but here is my gut feeling.
Before GPT3, LLMs were niche, something I would read about on SSC but not very hyped. With GPT3 (and ChatGPT), this completely changed. Suddenly, a lot of commercially interesting use cases seemed viable, because our society has a huge demand for medium-effort text.
The winning strategy since then has been to take venture capital and use it to train larger models. For VC, this seems a reasonable gamble. Anything possible today will be cheap later due to Moore's law (in 1997, Deep Blue was a supercomputer likely more expensive than just employing Kasparov. Today, that level of compute (in FLOP/s, i.e. a few AMD Threadrippers) is probably less expensive than a BMW.)
However, it is not clear to me that in scenarios where the LLMs eventually plateau, there is a permanent advantage to be gained by being among the early winners. The key question is always what the moat of your company is, how you prevent others from eating your lunch. For social media, it is group inertia. If all your friends are on facebook/WhatsApp, the cost of switching is simply too high. (Beware of new niches of social media though.) For Microsoft, it was that they had the copyright to a few key pieces of software commonly running PCs (which turned out to be not very relevant once everything moved to the web). For Intel and AMD, I guess it is (was?) mostly the technical knowledge and decades of experience of their employees? My model here is that once an engineer has spent a decade in a company, decided to put down roots, perhaps start a family near their place of work, they become much harder to poach.
Perhaps before the OpenAI board fiasco, OpenAI was dominant in terms of brainpower. Today, this is not true, Antrophic seems to be roughly on equal footing with them. Either's engineers are likely poachable by some investor throwing money around without too much trouble.
If there is a point of diminishing returns before recursive self-improvement can kick you to the singularity, it might well be that the most economically viable models will not be the ones pushing the edge of the possible. Consider passenger flight. Supersonic flight was not found viable. Likewise, it could be that the additional use cases for LLMs who ace the International Math Olympiad is not that large over LLMs who just get good SAT scores, unless the former have a decisive plus in broad spectrum general intelligence.
There's a lot of speculation, but the people who are most likely to know the answer aren't speaking about it (Sam Altman, etc.) except to hype intermediate products.
Lots of people thought a solid GPT-5 would be out by now. The fact that it's not seems to imply one or more of several things - 1) There isn't enough training data to make that jump, 2) The advancement gained from more training drops (diminishing returns), 3) There's a hard limit on ability from this type of training, 4) It takes a LOT more effort to train to the next level but we'll get there eventually, or 5) There's some other thing limiting our ability to create or use a more advanced option that's unrelated to "bigger" such that bigger isn't solving it.
Some of these answers imply that exponential cannot be true, but we really don't know what we don't know and maybe there's another issue in play. The longer it takes to make the jump from a GPT-4 level to a GPT-5 level the more likely that the answer is "sublinear" or something substantially less than exponential. To see the same size gains as we saw going from GPT-2 to GPT-3 and then GPT-3 to GPT-4 based on the real life timetables says that either we're seeing non-exponential growth already, or GPT-5 will be a massive improvement in ability. Unless it comes out very soon (highly doubtful), I'm leaning strongly to non-exponential.
That's a legitimately good question, and one that doesn't appear to have too many good answers. I think all of the readily accessible "good" data was already put into GPT-4 level LLMs. We know they already mined Reddit.
There was discussion a while back about LLMs generating content for training LLMs, but I don't hear as much about that lately. I'm...skeptical of that approach.
Agreed, though there are other types of synthetic input data which _can_ be valid. The simple trivial example is arithmetic equations. What I'm completely ignorant of is how broad such data can be.
OpenAI's newest approach seems to be much better than cramming a bunch of raw data. Arithmetic is a solved problem, basic calculators have been doing that for a long time. Doing data entry for every permutation of a math equation is incredibly inefficient, and also doomed as an approach for something we might actually want or need an AI for.
Much better to have the LLM access a calculator when it needs to.
Warning: all speculative, I know much less about this than many other people here.
A simple answer is superlinear insofar as there are outsized returns to being ahead of your competitor. If GPT is even slightly smarter than Claude, millions of people will switch from Claude to GPT.
Another simple answer is sublinear, insofar as I think AI intelligence increases proportional to log(compute) rather than (compute). I might be getting the math totally wrong here but I think something like this is right in spirit.
A more complicated answer is that AI becomes more economically useful based on a combination of intelligence and "generality", where "generality" is its ability to do tasks that human five-year-olds master easily like "maintain memory from one moment to the next" or "make a plan and work on it for an hour". We don't really know how these two things will interact yet. It could be that generality is completely independent of scale, and once you do it - maybe through a hack with scratchpads - everyone briefly forgets about scaling while enjoying their new generalized AI. It could be that you need a certain scale and then AIs generalize almost automatically. Most likely there will be some interaction where AI usefulness is soft-capped at certain levels of generality, but once you get to that level of generality you start wanting more scale again. If AI can be a completely autonomous software engineer, there's a lot of money in making it a good software engineer instead of a bad one, and this is somewhere scale might help.
Au contraire, I recall reading many a piece claiming that NFTs were going to totally change the way we do contracts, track supply chains, etc. etc. It even seemed… plausible? For a brief moment?
Wasn't that smart contracts using block chain in general not specifically NFTs? I believe plenty of companies are still trying to make smart contracts happen if they haven't already.
Both. Blockchain projects are mostly a joke at this point; NFTs were touted as “this is exactly how blockchain can/should/will be used”. Smart contracts will never become mainstream because we actually want things like human review and reversibility, among other things.
Basically the result was that we learned if everything is 100% legal under the DAO, it can still be theft because bugs can be exploited.
This has been an amazing social experiment really. The DAO was the sperg's dream, fuck everything vague and ambigious, here is a list of rules, in code, that's all. And basically the consensus was that intent matters more than rules.
Wasn't that smart contracts using block chain in general not specifically NFTs? I believe plenty of companies are still trying to make smart contracts happen if they haven't already.
I just wrote a new post on the distribution of height, pointing out how the Central Limit Theorem is insufficient to explain population height being normally distributed, even in a toy model:
There are mathematical results that are quite a bit stronger than the CLT, which I think can help explain a bit about what's going on here.
You don't actually need iid variables to arrive at the conclusion of CLT. You only need some bounds on the variance and a certain amount of independence. Wikipedia's CLT article has some of these theorems if you want the details. Heuristically, adding up lots of "well-behaved", not-too-correlated distributions converges to a normal distribution. In the case of height, there are surely lots of variables, with enough of them independent-ish, that you expect something normal-ish to result from adding them up. (And indeed, height is normal-ish, but not exactly normal.)
Even if we ignore people under 18, I would have expected human height to be bimodal due to the difference between the sexes. Or if not bimodal then at least "flat" enough at the peak to not look normal.
I believe it is approximately bimodal because of the sexes. Perhaps I should have clarified that in the post, but I was simplifying to more specifically interrogate the claim that “height is normally distributed” and an example of the CLT in action. See https://ourworldindata.org/human-height#height-is-normally-distributed
The graph in that link doesn't look bimodal. Or rather, it does look bimodal, but that's because it is overlaying a graph of male height and a graph of female height; the graph of "height" would be the sum of the two graphs pictured, and that looks like it would just be one wide peak.
My college physics professor once sad that physicists assume normal distributions because this is what “mathematicians tell them to do”, and mathematicians assume normal distributions because “physics tells us this is how natural processes are distributed”. He was only half-joking.
The weird thing is, as you note toward the end, is that all these various distributions all converge to something fairly Gaussian. In my line of work, I see a similar situation where various noise contributions all sum to a common 1/f spectrum, even when not a single individual noise source has 1/f spectrum by itself.
> In my line of work, I see a similar situation where various noise contributions all sum to a common 1/f spectrum,
Isn't that basically just the Central Limit Theorem? If you sum enough independent random variables with reasonably well behaved distributions, the result will be approximately guassian regardless of the input distributions.
I’m kind of with Victualis here; moreover, we CAN create Gaussian 1/f noise by, e.g., combining many Gaussian noise sources and applying a 1/f filter, but it doesn’t mean the specific observable noise sources one is dealing with that end up summing to a 1/f spectrum are Gaussian, or that the resulting noise is Gaussian.
One such classic example that is a nightmare to model is RTS noise.
Yeah, this seems like a pretty common phenomenon. I really wish I had a better grasp on the mathematics of why, but I’m not sure anyone has an answer (much less one I’d understand).
Sums of iid variables tend to be distributed according to some stable distribution. The normal distribution is stable but is not always the right one: it requires bounded variance. For height this is probably reasonable. However, the independence assumption is violated for height, so the normal model is dubious a priori unless the sample size is very large.
I would not jump to saying that the central limit theorem doesn't apply, but the structure of the population can lead to slow convergence (so one needs much larger samples before it is well approximated by a normal distribution).
Possibly controversial claim: that doesn't work. Nor does "you are loved", "you are beautiful", etc. I think the has to be some social cost or some sort of credibility for this to be received.
Because if I wish everybody well, that's only a statement about me. Contrast this with a way someone made me actually feel special: paying attention and deeply engaging with that I was saying. That has real cost! (Time and effort mostly.) And it made me feel good.
I dunno, I personally have always got a lot out of/connected with VividVoid's daily posts of "You are not inferior to anyone. Good night, I love you, see you in the morning." Despite those being addressed impersonally / universally.
Did it make you feel loved it did it make you feel like loving? The latter is more of a vibe and it's something I would expect: hanging out with benevolent people makes you more benevolent.
I wish all of humanity to thrive in a golden age lasting for eternity, and that you and everyone you've ever met will attain transcendent joy so powerful that it redefines what it means to exist.
A remarkably effective strategy for sanity. Insisting on wanting well-being for others makes it easier to treat yourself kindly and fairly. Thanks, and right back at you.
Can someone who enjoys contemporary visual art describe what they feel and think when they view a piece they like?
I'm not much into art. I do enjoy museums and galleries. Ancient Greek sculpture is great, as is 18-19th drawing and painting. But when I look at contemporary stuff, I'm just confused. I get that I can contextualize it against a certain time and maybe events, but, still, it mostly seems to be the artist speaking to themselves. For example, Jeff Koons chrome dog sculpture means nothing to me. I've seen some squiggly red girders and didn't get anything.
It's almost as if I can't get interested in a piece because its author is not interested in me.
P.s. Noguchi's stuff is actually pretty good, as it somehow conveys natural lines, natural flow, if that makes any sense.
Great Art Explained on YouTube is by *far* the best resource I've ever encountered for art education, anywhere, and I've been exposed to quite a bit. My mother is a professional painter who graduated from Art Center (we had lots of art in our home, art history coffee table books, etc), I went to film school which included some art history prerequisites, we went to lots of museums with lots of tour guides explaining work, and so on. I thought I didn't like contemporary painting and its "dumb squares."
But Great Art Explained made me do a complete 180. This piece on Rothko's dumb squares changed my mind so thoroughly that when I unexpectedly encountered a Rothko at Chicago's Art Institute, I experienced full-bodied frission:
Many of the comments in this thread are thoughtful, but no one discussing art with only prose will be able to compete with G.A.E.'s use of the actual art in its video essays. I hope you check it out and see if it makes you feel any differently.
(After Rothko's Seagrams paintings, the G.A.E. on Hopper's Nighthawks is the next best!)
In music it is very obvious that a tune doesn't have to be /about/ anything, or even accompanied by sung lyrics at all, to be enjoyable, compelling or otherwise make you appreciate it.
Abstract art is an exploration of this same idea but with sight instead of hearing. Try approaching the squiggly coloured shapes with the same mindset you approach, say, Polyphia's G.O.A.T.
Most contemporary art is garbage, which of course applies to any “contemporary” period. But “most” of course implies “not all”. When I run into a piece of art I like, I just have the sense that it speaks to me, that I can keep looking at it for a long time.
Contemporary art covers a broad range of practices. Two pieces might be attempting to pull completely different levers in viewers. A lot of contemporary art is intended to be consumed by people who are familiar with recent art history. There may be references to other known artworks, or reactions to known approaches to art. If you don't know these references, it will be hard to get what the work is trying to do. I think this is one of the major factors as to why a lot of audiences who don't have art education find contemporary art alienating.
I think your observation that a lot of it just involves the "artist speaking to themselves" is accurate. Even when they are speaking to someone else, they are probably not speaking to you. Another aspect of art that was perhaps always there but feels somehow stronger in the contemporary art scene is the emphasis on branding and the artist's personal story, which I personally find alienating.
Other works might be trying to do something more visceral, either by creating some compelling sensory experience or by using materials in an unexpected way. A lot of famous public art works this way just be creating a compelling sensory experience. At this point, the viscerally compelling stuff is the stuff I enjoy most even if it wasn't exactly the kind of stuff I used to make. I guess in general that feels kind of like surprise but it might be for any number of reasons. You might have expectations about the way some material generally behaves that is sort of subverted. Or it might be disorienting. Or it might do something with scale, or timing, or something else that feels unusual.
One of my favorite pieces is the Spiral Jetty near Salt Lake. It's basically just a pretext to put you in an alien landscape at a remote and quiet edge of the Great Salt Lake. When the wind stops and the water depth is approximately right, the shallow water forms a mirror for the sky and the horizon can seem to disappear. If you wear rubber boots and go trudging out into the water, you can end up completely surrounded above and below by the oranges and pinks of Utah sunset.
There probably aren't many pieces that feel anything like the Spiral Jetty. I think that might say something about contemporary art in general. Good contemporary art might feel very unlike other contemporary art.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. Contemporary art covers _a lot_ and I find some of it good (Noguchi). But the majority of it that I see falls into what you described as unusual visceral experiences which have no effect on me. Maybe it's because of the time spent playing video games as a kid, or the time I spend hiking and looking at wonders of nature these days.
Thanks for sharing about the Spiral Jetty. I only saw it from a distance. Utah is a great place for stuff like this with its range of environments.
It’s hard to put into words because it’s so subjective, and yeah Jeff Koons is garbage to me also 🥴
Any language is like a bridge between two people. When I say, “The blue flower blooms nightly,” you get an image in your head, or at least an idea, and it’s likely close to what I intended but also different in the specifics. This is because words are ambiguous, some (like “love”) more-so than others.
Art is operating on a similar level. Instead of words, it’s using lines, colors, images, sound, basically any qualia (yes, I was once at an art exhibition that used a synthetic smell of “decaying earth”!). Some art, like Greek renaissance sculpture, are more literal than an abstract work like Rothko. Art is basically hijacking our brains ability to experience abstractions of reality. A literal photo of a blue flower blooming at night, a sculpture of a blue flower, or an all-blue painting titled “Blooming Night Flower” — these are all levels of abstraction aimed at expressing an idea. Often the intent of the artist is unclear, and there is much left to the interpretation of the viewer. Also, there is an aspect of quality to art, something discussed well in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”.
So if you feel like you’re not interested in certain artworks, of course that’s totally fine, but if you want to get more into art, I would say the fastest way is to try making art yourself. You may come to appreciate the beauty of a simple brush stroke, or the composition of an abstract color painting. And if you already like Greek sculpture, why not just dive in deeper? Any art is a gateway drug to more art :)
I never had any art training until I was in college and took this art history class. The focus was on “American art” and it was introductory so basically we went from pre-colonial art to the modern stuff.
In this class, contemporary art was framed in a way to reflect both social transitions and bold explorations, or artists somewhat making fun of art. But there was also a dialogue between the new and the old (e.g., American Impressionism & how it was called “vomit” by some critics at the time). So the historical dialogue being part of the contemporary art is something that fascinates me.
It’s also fun. Classical art often tries to tell a story, perhaps with many layers of meanings. Contemporary art often feels like it’s telling a joke, but often in a meta-art way (e.g., the story of how Duchamp’s Fountain was probably conceived to test if the organizers of an exhibition would really accept all works; he was part of that organization, and he resigned after the work submitted with a pseudonym was rejected). Some works are just fun aesthetically.
And the rest is just that contemporary art feels more relevant and relatable on a personal level, because it’s often a kind of commentary on what’s going on in the world now.
The rest is just aesthetic preferences. Contemporary art is quite diverse & some stuff makes sense to my taste. I don’t know anything about Moholy-Nagy other than that I just like his style.
I occasionally mention my podcast here. (It’s great!)
But this time I also wanted to promote my guest, Jonathan Clements and his misleadingly named blog Schoolgirl Milky Crisis. It really isn’t what it sounds like. Anyway here is an excerpt from his piece where he describes trying to make a tv episode about hunting with hawks:
Mickey is crammed into the passenger seat with all his sound gear, including a large fluffy boom mike that the hawk keeps mistaking for an otter. Luckily for us, there wasn’t enough room in the car for the three hunting dogs, because it already feels like I am driving down a bumpy mountain path with the cast of a Fellini film in the back. All we really need is a couple of dwarves and a pantomime horse’s head protruding from the sunroof. The glassy lake beneath us is called Yuhu, and we bump and jostle along a track that is usually reserved for ponies and quadbikes. It is the oddest and least enthusiastic session of carpool karaoke yet devised, as Mickey starts to sing Bohemian Rhapsody.
And here is how he described our podcast on Taiwan.
Over on Russell Hogg’s wonderful podcast Subject to Change, I discuss the history of Taiwan, with reference to an unexpected appearance by the Daleks, things to do with a dead deer, genocidal acts, the pirate king, the Zombie Ming dynasty, a “racist excuse”, “the most shameful thing the British have ever done” and a bunch of other things to be found in my book Rebel Island. That is part one.
And then there is part two: How to take over an island chain by invading somewhere else; a world-class stamp-collecting scam; the “uncrowned king” of Taiwan; the Musha Incident reconsidered as a high-school shooting, the rise and fall of the Takasago Volunteers; uses and abuses of Triad assassins, and the rise of the “outside the party” movement.
You mentioned in a previous open thread that biotech startup space is very hard and with particularly high failure rates. Could you elaborate further on that topic or direct me somewhere that explores that statement?
I wrote this because many people who know more than I do urged me to use a disclaimer like this before talking about investing in biotech. I only have partial insight into their motivations, so hopefully some of them will show up to supplement this.
I think the main thing going on is that biotech is (low hit rate x vast success per hit). 99.9% of new medication plans consume millions of dollars but go nowhere; 0.1% become the next Prozac or Ozempic and make enough money to keep pharma in the black despite everything. The ones that work are hard to predict beforehand even if you are very smart and good at pharmacology, partly because the body is perverse and delights in outwitting first-level explanations of how it works, and partly because half of the challenge is regulatory and even the best drugs can be sunk by stupid legal issues. If you go into biotech investing without knowing this, you may be surprised when (in 99.9% of cases) you lose all your money.
(this is maybe a little unfair, because some early stage biotech makes money by selling itself to medium-stage biotech even if it never pans out, so an investor's success rate at making money might be better than 0.1%, but I think something like this is approximately true).
I'm glad you asked, because I'm very proud of this one. I was going for "un-4chan-ately". So I picked the opposite of the popular -chan phrase that they are not your personal army.
I would take music and compress it greatly by speeding it up massively and expanding the frequency range well outside human hearing ranges and then encoding it using some lossy compression algorithm similar to mp3 (but modified to fit the purpose)
Putting the future digital beings in a situation where they may or may not be able to perfectly recreate what the original must have sounded like
I think we would want to give them stuff with a very high information content. Maybe they would want movies with continuous video from multiple cameras, or fMRI data of multiple people acting out a scene, or novels written from the perspectives of all characters simultaneously.
Yeah good point. Human experience of art is limited by our attention span and processing speeds.
Digital beings might be limited by the cost of compute, or the energy required to consume a piece of art.
Our consciousness is also limited to a single locus. It’s possible digital beings could enjoy consciousness from multiple perspectives. Imagine the feeling of being the simulated experience of everyone in the world for all of its existence compressed into a few moments as a piece of art (!)
I would try to make the art equivalent of the Rosetta stone. For instance gather different pieces that all express the same concept such as fear - a fearful painting, fearful music, a sculpture that is fearful to touch, etc.
Many artists throughout history, being unrecognized in their own time, have made art for future generations. In doing so they have potentially pushed ideas and expression forward, linking artistic truths from their time to the time of a future existence. Certain artistic works have become “timeless” (an ever-changing category, but still).
Of course digital beings can and will create their own art, possibly things that would be incomprehensible to humans now. But that doesn’t mean that humans can’t also make works of art for digital beings. Potentially, this art could be important for their understanding of our experience, or be a bridge between two intelligent species. There is already a wealth of human art for humans they can enjoy, but what about human art for digital beings?
Have any of you gone through the Maintanence of Certification process's Improvement in Medical Practice (PIP) feedback version?
I'm probably going to be stuck doing this soon and I'm pretty weirded out by it. It looks like they want me to give patients (which patients? chosen at random?) a form rating me on some hokey artificial categories, without any room for real feedback, then read the forms, then possibly adjust my practice, then survey them again.
This feels pretty much designed for someone to do it half-heartedly and get it over with. Has anyone discovered a better way to engage with the process that actually felt meaningful for them? Or have you successfully done it half-heartedly and gotten it over with?
Also, am I understanding that I'm supposed to ask patients to non-anonymously rate my performance as a doctor, then read what they think of me, then take it seriously, as if there's any way that a patient would be honest in that situation? Has anyone experimented with ways of anonymizing this feedback? Are we even allowed to do so?
Also, are any of you patients who have been involved in this process (ie gotten surveys that matched this description)? How did you find it?
Wait, is *this* why I keep getting the stupid spammy emails after every child's well visit to "rate the clinic" and "how likely would I be to recommend the clinic to friends or family"? I'll feel fractionally less annoyed by them if they're part of the Grand Medical Establishment as opposed to a thing that our hospital system decided to implement for no good reason.
(I don't know whether I feel better or worse about the identical spammy emails after my kid broke his elbow. On the one hand, as far as I can tell, everything worked well, truly grateful to the anesthesiologist, the surgeon putting the elbow back together, and double-plus grateful to everyone else who had to deal with a wimpy five-year-old in pain. On the other hand, I don't know that I'd *recommend* the experience. Also, isn't the true test going to come after months if not years of use?)
Hi, did this with selected patients who I thought were of good will and thoughtful and would be interested in doing so. Yes, it was not statistically valid.
I suppose you could whip together an anonymous survey in RedCap pretty easily if you have access to that but nobody expects you to do this for the PIP.
I have gotten a survey or two about our experience with pediatric visits for my son. I assumed this was coming from the group practice as a self-improvement thing but possible it's related to that form you're mentioning
Anyway didn't give it a lot of thought, rated our doc highly because I thought she did a great job and that's about it as far as feedback. Not super useful for process improvement but if things work well as they are currently then that's good to know to so your not just changing things for change's sake
There is no major faction in US politics pushing for international engagement. The Bush Republicans gave way to the Trump Republicans and the Clinton Democrats gave way to the Obama Democrats. The Democrats had a last gasp through Biden (who is an interventionist) and the lingering influence of the Clintonians. But Harris is not. And the Republicans had a last gasp through Tillerson/Mattis/etc. But they're gone too.
Trump and Harris actually have a remarkable amount of agreement in foreign policy. They both want to support Israel less. They both want to confront China. They both want to draw down support for Ukraine and have a negotiated settlement. Though they disagree on how much pressure they should place on Ukraine and how fast that settlement needs to be. Both want to shift more burden onto Europe and shift resources to the Pacific. Though Trump wants to be far more aggressive about it. They're also both suspicious of trade deals and mostly want to focus on distributing economic spoils to domestic constituencies (though different ones) in part generated through economic nationalism. Both want to build regional coalitions and then put increased burden on them to maintain their local regions with reduced American support. Though they differ somewhat in who will take the lead.
The biggest practical difference is that Harris wants to have a negotiated truce in the Middle East with Iran. Their point of view is that basically the Republicans "lost" the region and they now have to find a modus vivendi with the dominant power, Iran. This is not really true and is more based on the fact they believe the War on Terror failed for domestic political reasons. (And in a few cases because they were being advised by literal paid agents of Iran. This is simply a fact. There were court convictions.) But it's what they believe. Trump has a more sober view of Iran: it's a rogue state that resorting to terrorism to cover that weakness and while it's probably not resolvable they want to hit it back when it hits us for credibility reasons. But both ultimately want to pull back. Just for different reasons.
That said, while this is important Iran is inarguably the least big of the big three (China, Russia, Iran). Iran isn't even the biggest power in its region the way Russia is.
The main difference is actually on the level of philosophy. Harris believes in the US as the leader of an international alliance, an international order that upholds a certain set of values and institutions. She believes large planks of her domestic agenda (climate change, fighting inequality, reining in corporate power) need to be done internationally or they won't work. Meanwhile Trump believes in more naked national self-interest and not only that a multipolar world is inevitable but desirable because it frees us from obligations to weaker allies and would allow us to share in the division of spoils.
The US is very lucky that all three of its major opponents decided to have major crises just at this moment of weakness. In a world of US retreat the main US opponents have all decided to shoot themselves directly in the foot, leading to a net increase of the power mostly of US neutral or friendly countries at the expense of both the US and its opponents.
How much of this is inevitable, given our budget constraints? We have unsustainable social security, medicare, and medicaid budgets, and sooner or later, either we assume we can borrow infinity dollars per year forever or those unsustainable costs are going to cut into our aircraft carrier and occupy-them-for-their-own-good budget.
How much of what is inevitable? The US military spending level is already very low in historical terms. In fact it's the lowest it's been since before the World Wars. We could boost it up without significantly adding to the deficit without much issue or with relatively mild tax increases. Even returning to the levels of ten years ago would be a significant increase.
From the POV of the Biden-Harris administration, the worst thing is headline news that makes Americans feel bad, and particularly things that make them feel bad about being Americans under the Biden-Harris administration.
Headline stories about e.g. poor innocent children being killed in a brutal war, anywhere, any time, make Americans feel bad. And if they're being killed with American weapons by America's allies, that makes Americans feel bad about being Americans even if there aren't American soldiers involved.
Arab terrorists killing Israelis isn't news any more. It's not a problem to Biden-Harris. Israel killing Palestinians *in Gaza*, is still sort of newsworthy but, meh, it's kind of the new normal and the death toll has been somewhere in the 30-40 thousand range for ages, so that's only a minor problem.
A war between Israel and Hezbollah, in Lebanon, that's new and extra-newsworthy. A war fought with beeper bombs rather than the usual sort, that's new and extra-newsworthy. The bad sort of newsworthy, the sort that makes all Americans feel bad, some of them in ways that might make them not vote for Kamala Harris in five weeks or so.
I think you're really overthinking things if you imagine it's anything much more than that. Not everything is a complex geopolitical game of N-dimensional chess. Particularly not in election season.
I'm not sure what exactly it is that you think has been going on "a lot longer than Biden-Harris have been in office". You talk about the US limiting weapons deliveries and pushing for cease-fires, and yes, there's been entirely too much of that w/re both Israel and Ukraine. But those conflicts postdate Biden's inauguration, both are fully explained by the "minimize ugly anti-American headlines" strategy, and before Biden when was the last time that the US was sending weapons to a belligerent for us to suspend and pressure into a cease-fire?
And as for the State Department imagining they are playing N-dimensional chess, no, I've seen no sign of that and I've been paying pretty close attention to a lot of that. One, *maybe* two dimensions. And not because they're stupid; more that they aren't that particular *kind* of stupid.
I don’t know enough to specifically address the “neo-Ottoman” theory Badran discusses, but he does seem unhappy with the fact that the US has other interests and client states in the region. That makes me question his judgement, since it’s been that way since WWII.
If the US security apparatus has decided that the middle east is no longer a priority...that would seem to make rational sense? We no longer need the oil, and the PRC presents a much bigger challenge, probably requiring a full concentration of our strength. To decide that we no longer need or want to police the middle east seems like rational self-interested realpolitik.
What is less clear is why we would hand off to Iran, instead of to some place more friendly (Turkey maybe, which is even in NATO).
Trump's plan was to create an alliance of Sunni Arab states backed by Israel. It was somewhat working. Biden immediately sabotaged this when he got into office and China swooped in. Then Iran blew China's deal up by attacking Saudi Arabia. Then the US decided it was going to try Iran Deal 2 and a broader regional peace. Then Iran blew it up again by attacking Israel. Though it doesn't seem fully blown up. The Arab powers seem to have realized that whatever theoretical alternative China might offer the US actually shows up. Saudi Arabia is now actively stumping for an alliance with the US and to be a security partner.
He withdrew negotiators from Trump era negotiations around Israel and the Gulf States, demanded Saudi Arabia stop an offensive against the Houthis, delisted the Houthis as a terrorist group and reopened negotiations with Iran, and snubbed Saudi Arabia/communicated hostility to them. I guess sabotage might be the wrong term since it wasn't subtle or done in secret.
China then swooped in to try and take America's place. They got a deal done and then Iran immediately blew it up. (And by "immediately" I mean "within a few months.") Then Biden reversed course and by that point Saudi Arabia was willing to overlook what had happened. And then Iran did 10/7.
I'm not sure about leaving the middle east. From the one hand it makes sense, from the other, things like that have the tendency to bite your bottom when you look elsewhere. I am much more sure that you can not hand off the middle east to Turkey much more than you can give it to France. They are a strong country not too deeply in the enemy coalition, but they just don't have the same influence in the middle east that Iran has.
Huh? If I just look at the map, then Turkey borders more middle eastern countries than Iran does. If I look at Google, they have double the GDP. What am I missing?
Remember when an Iranian general was killed and then Iran gave precise warning of the retaliatory drone strike, so AFAIK no lives were lost. This was both a show of strength and a show of a willingness to de-escalate towards some bargain. The bargain now seems to be that Hezbollah loses the ability to fire rockets on Israel, but keeps the control over Lebanon. The alternative to that might be a much larger drone strike without warning.
Yeah, to me it seems more like the standard waffling, just like with the homeless problem. Actually solving the problem one way or another would lead to Bad Things happening, which is to say, Bad Things that we're not used to. It's much more convenient to keep the situation in stasis, so that the only Bad Things happening are the ones that we're already used to. That way no one (important) has to suffer, especially from taking a political position that might alienate some of their voting base.
This might have the side effect of letting a competent growing power (not sure if this describes Iran) sneakily take control of the situation. But I don't think that's an actual objective, just a potential consequence that's not worth preventing.
> Also, there's the aspect that if you are working for the American security apparatus and you are determined to manage the decline rather than reverse it, you should be hanged for treason. But one thing at a time.
This kind of logic leads to Russia invading Ukraine. Empires do wax and wane, and making sure the decline is properly managed can make sure you go the "Britain" way or better.
But rationally looking at the situation with clear eyes and thinking of how to improve your position probably leads exactly to the point of getting the fuck out of the middle east. There's nothing there that we need, and we have more pressing challenges elsewhere, that require a concentration of our strength. So why fritter our strength away trying to police some sand dunes?
I'm not forgetting about it. We have enough oil for our own use, we don't need the middle eastern stuff. Maybe our European allies do, but then, they can secure their own damn oil supplies. And I don't think there is much US trade shipping through the red sea. So I think the rational, self interested move for Uncle Sam is to GTFO the red sea entirely, and if the region wants to go to hell, let it. And if France (say) wants to protect red sea shipping because it needs the oil, let it do that also, but it's not our problem.
Going through the Mediterranean instead of all the way around Africa is indeed a big deal in terms of transport time and cost. I hope covid taught us that modern supply chains are vulnerable to unexpected disruptions, like a bunch of militants blowing up commercial ships so they have to take a much worse route. Even if most of that shipping isn't going directly to the US, that shipping being disrupted will certainly have costs for the US.
There have been a lot of military actions in the region that don't have much to do with global commerce. Afghanistan was about denying Al-Qaeda bases in the region; Iraq was about the violation of Kuwaiti sovereignty, which is at least somewhat related to American international hegemony. Certainly a lot of that wasn't necessary to secure peace and trade, and removing secular dictators only created a power vacuum exploited by Islamist radicals.
The current situation with Houthi militias is largely a consequence of the US supporting Israel. But Israel is going to be fighting the Palestinians regardless of American pressure, if the current conflict is anything to go by. And I don't see the US dropping Israel as an ally any time soon, especially as Iran is a mutual enemy and the only regional power that poses a threat to US dominance. The Ukraine war also plays a part, as Russia has been supplying Iran (who supplies the Houthis) with anti-ship weaponry. Partially this is retaliation for supporting Ukraine, and partially a warning against US/NATO forces taking action against Russia.
The deep state - and I mean this in a totally non-conspiratorial way, just the personnel in the State Dept and Pentagon who direct foreign policy - are not very interested in explaining or justifying US actions. There were a lot of wrong-headed and not clearly thought out initiatives, which is how we ended up with decades of failure from 'nation building' and 'spreading democracy'. But the US world hegemony post-WWII is predicated on maintaining stability. I have a lot of libertarian complaints in this direction, but isolationism hasn't seemed to work out in the past, and the last 70 years have been some of the most peaceful and prosperous in the world. So the whole American hegemony seems to have something going for it.
Europe is an American dependency, which is a feature and not a bug. The whole formulation of NATO in the beginning of the Cold War was to keep the US forces deployed in Europe. That way, any Soviet attack would necessarily involve attacking the US, which would trigger a nuclear response. This is also why I call it the American hegemony rather than empire; I don't know what kind of empire pays tribute to its subjects. Maybe NATO could have been disbanded in the '90s after the Soviet collapse, but the idea seems pretty unthinkable now.
Speak for yourself. Personally, I prefer having more money rather than less. And given how much wailing and gnaishing of teeth there was a few years ago over a minor bit of inflation, then I highly doubt I'm alone.
Is the thesis that there is a faction in Washington that is actively fighting like demons to put the middle east under the control of Iran? That seems like an extraordinary claim to me, very unlikely to be true. What seems far more likely is that there is a large faction that wants to GTFO, but feels (for whatever reason) that a full withdrawal is politically impossible, so does whatever seems necessary in the short term to minimize American commitments to the region.
Problem isn't middle east or one specific issue. Problem is that "try harder" isn't enough to reverse a general decline. Smarter maybe, do strategically impactful things, yes. But to simply take every particular theatre and ask the people involved to just try harder...
Fair. Though to take the parable about alignment further, having an agent lie to everyone else about their stated goals also seems like par for the course.
(That said I do tend to think that many members of the early OAI crew were pro safety)
I'm sure this has been discussed to death before in various places, and it's a bit futile to beat up on a decade old story, but one of the things that annoyed me about HPMOR is how EY would *make up* stuff that has no canon basis and then *make fun of the things he made up himself*. There are enough things that are actually in the books you could mock without making them up yourself! I'm guessing that this was just borne out of carelessness and ignorance (he admitted to not even reading some of the books), but it's still a bad look either way.
There are two big ones that come to mind:
1. The claim that Gringotts will coin arbitrary amounts of gold and silver for you for a minor fee and that the value of the currency is based on its precious metal content.
IIRC the closest canon ever gets to that is a single reference in book 2 to Hermione's parents exchanging muggle money for wizard money at Gringotts. But a) that's *paper money* not gold or silver and b) there's no mention of a fixed exchange rate.
There's no particular evidence that wizard currency's value is based on its precious metal content at all. In fact, the fact the golden coins are the *biggest* is evidence *against* that. As they say, one man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens. Most real world currencies nowadays have values well above the metal content, so why shouldn't the wizards?
I've long thought that it would be hilarious (and instructive to the "ratfic" genre) to have a story where HPJEV appears in the *real world* and tries to "exploit" it the same way he acts in HPMOR. I have no doubt that he would instantly propose making a fortune by exchanging real world coins and metals, and assume that everyone in the world was terminally stupid for not noticing this opportunity.
The worst part is that we can't even just assume that HPEJV was being stupid here. Apart from the narration itself giving no indication we're not meant to treat this as a brilliant idea, Harry later meets an *in universe* wizard (the occulemency teacher) who *also* agrees that the gold/silver plot is a good idea, even though this wizard lives in the wizarding world and thus should presumably be familiar with the reasons why it realistically wouldn't actually work.
2. The claim that Quidditch scores are *directly* added to House points. This one has *slightly* more evidence in canon, but it's still highly dubious.
AFAIK, the relevant mentions from canon are
* In book 1 when Harry and friends lose 150 points after the dragon incident, he mentions losing all the points he won for Gryffindor in the first Quidditch game, although there's no confirmation of how many points that was.
* At the end of book 1, the house scores are given, and they seem rather low if Quidditch scores were being added in
* In book 2, it is explicitly stated that Gryffindor got 50 points after the first (and only) Quidditch match
To be charitable, I could see how someone who only saw the first line might interpret things this way. However, given that book 2 *unambiguously* implies that the Quidditch scores are not directly added to House points and the bits in book 1 are ambiguous, it seems like this one is throughly busted too.
Harry definitely seems to have access to the script whenever "rationality" is involved. Like when Dumbledore mentions the resurrection stone and the archway in the department of mysteries. Harry instantly dismisses the arch and focuses on the plot critical stone, despite having no evidence about either
The Blame Game:
Two players choose whether to cooperate or defect. If both cooperate, both score +1. If both defect, both score 0. If exactly one player defects, then an outside observer, Omega, guesses which player defected. The player that Omega blames gets -5 and the other gets +5.
Omega is familiar with the players and good at guessing what they will do. However, it is not omniscient and you're worried that your opponent knows how to fool Omega. What do you do?
(Should we call it "Omicron" instead of "Omega"?)
How many iterations are there? My default behavior would be to C and see what happens. I don't know how to fool Omega, and I'm assuming that Omega can guess better than 50%, so I don't want to D if they C. And since I don't know how to fool Omega, my best chance of getting ahead is to C if they D and hope Omega guesses right. Plus, if I consistently C, that would help Omega predict me better. So I'd experiment with C and collect data on Omega's accuracy and bias. If Omega gets fooled too often, I suppose this would turn into a game of minimizing my loss, probably by choosing randomly.
So I tried to game this out. I'm not confident that my analysis is immaculate, though.
====
Let's consider Alice and Bob. Bob consistently has Omega's ear.
If Bob wants to consistently disrupt a CC or DD equilibrium in order to chase the +5, Alice can disrupt Bob's attempts to effect a CD or DC outcome by randomizing his own decision each iteration. And if Bob can consistently blame Alice, Alice's randomization effectively halves Bob's +5 EV payouts and halves Alice's own -5 EV losses.
From Bob's perspective, an EV of (3) = (2.5 + .5) he gets from chasing a consistent +5 is still better than the (1) EV a CC agreement, so Alice's "punish by randomizing" strategy isn't enough to fully deter Bob's behavior. Meanwhile, Alice gets an EV of (-2) = (-2.5 + .5).
Therefore, it seems like the reasonable strategies here are: either settle into a stable CC equilibrium [0]; or learn how brownnose Omega. From Alice's perspective (assuming Alice doesn't have Omega's ear and Bob refuses to parley [1]), Alice's reasonable strategies are either "chase CC", or "randomize". From Bob's perspective, it's hardly different from a regular prisoner's dilemma: agree to CC if you feel angelic, chase +5 if you feel psychopathic. So on the meta-level, this shakes out to
_________Bob_G____Bob C
Alice C___-5, 5_____1, 1
Alice R___-2, 3_____-2, 3
where C stands for cooperate, G stands for "gamble on +5", and R stands for "randomize". Which simplifies to
___________1,4______4,1
___________2,2______2,2
Which (according to Jimmy Wales [2]), either settles on RG permanently (like in Second Best/Big Bully), or cycles counterclockwise (like Fixed Sum/Missile Crisis), depending on whether Bob is willing to swap from RG to RC. That is, assuming that we're all rational self-interested psychopaths.
If I were Bob though, I'd probably just park on CC like a good little christian. As for Alice's position, she's kinda at the mercy of Bob.
[0] (or a DD equilibrium, I guess. But since I'm allowed to woo Omega, I assume I'm also allowed to negotiate with the rival player. And why chase the hare instead of the stag when negotiation is on the table?)
[1] the bulk of agency is determined by who has the ear of Omega. If we assume that Omega is willing to listen to either party, it's not really game-theory so much as testing your creativity as a salesman.
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/2x2chart110602.pdf
If you don't pay the bill from your exorcist, do you get repossessed?
I wouldn't recommend ghosting them.
ACXLW Meetup 75: Comparative Advantage and AI by Eli, The Edge book Review by Zvi
Date: Saturday, September 28, 2024
Time: 2:00 PM
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, CA 92660
Host: Michael Michalchik
Contact: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com | (949) 375-2045
Conversation Starter 1
Topic: Comparative Advantage Cannot Protect Us from AI
Text: The Comparative Advantage Fallacy - Google Docs
Audio: The Comparative Advantage Fallacy - Substack Audio
Summary:
Comparative Advantage: The classical economic concept, while valid for human trade, doesn’t apply when comparing human capabilities to those of Artificial Superintelligences (ASI).
Fallacy in Application: The vast gap in productivity and capability between humans and ASIs means that trade won’t be beneficial for both parties. Instead, ASIs would likely allocate resources for their own optimal use.
Superintelligence and Resource Allocation: Much like how billionaires wouldn't part with significant wealth for trivial reasons, ASIs wouldn't spare resources like sunlight for humans, as their needs and capabilities far surpass human needs.
Relentless Optimization: ASIs, like advanced AIs trained to solve hard problems, would likely pursue maximum efficiency without regard for human survival, and any "easygoing" AI could self-modify to become more competitive.
Discussion Questions:
a) How does Yudkowsky’s critique of comparative advantage challenge current assumptions about AI’s future role in human economics and resource allocation?
b) Can we think of any strategies to incentivize superintelligences to leave Earth resources untouched, or is that fundamentally impossible based on economic principles?
c) Reflective stability implies that relaxed AI systems could evolve into relentless optimizers. How might we design AI systems that avoid this outcome, or is it inevitable as Yudkowsky suggests?
Conversation Starter 2
Topic: Book Review of Chapter 1 of On the Edge by Nate Silver
Text: On the Edge: The Fundamentals - Zvi Mowshowitz
Audio: YouTube Link
Summary:
The River vs. The Village: Silver introduces two cultural mindsets—The River, representing risk-takers and probabilistic thinkers, and The Village, the establishment that trusts experts and avoids risk.
Risk-Taking Culture: The River includes poker players, venture capitalists, and effective altruists, united by their reliance on probability and decision-making under uncertainty. Riverians focus on maximizing expected value (EV) and thrive on calculated risks.
Fundamental Disagreement: The River emphasizes independent thinking and rewards taking chances, while The Village is more group-oriented and focused on moral narratives. This tension often leads to clashes, particularly in areas like AI, politics, and media.
Meritocracy and Expertise: Silver argues that the River's emphasis on merit and risk-taking makes it more effective in certain fields, but this can also lead to conflicts with those who follow Village norms.
Discussion Questions:
a) How does the dichotomy between The River and The Village play out in modern societal debates, especially around risk-taking in industries like tech and AI?
b) What are the strengths and weaknesses of risk-taking cultures like The River compared to the more cautious approach of The Village?
c) Do you think the distinction between River and Village oversimplifies or accurately captures the mindset of modern risk-takers versus traditional institutions?
Walk & Talk: After the discussion, we will take our usual hour-long walk. Nearby options for takeout include Gelson's and Pavilions, located in the 92660 zip code area.
Share a Surprise: Bring something to share that unexpectedly changed your perspective on life or the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: As always, feel free to contribute ideas for future meetings, topics, and activities.
Looking forward to seeing everyone there!
This links didn't transfer, but should be live on this document.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K0qDAHj-WdLfaLoez3z3j3K3UnB85eb0Why-suY3nO0/edit?usp=sharing
There is often this implicit assumption in ethics that you can't justify a bias towards humans as a species. It's merely "tribalistic". Something like "racism is favoring your race and that's bad, therefore speciesism, which is favoring your species, is bad". But that assumption is very debatable.
Morality developed among humans as a way for us to get along with unrelated members of other humans. It's a social contract. You do this and I do this and we agree on it so that we can work together to go hunt down a mammoth or defend ourselves from another tribe. Animals cannot do morality the way we do. Sure, they can be affectionate but that same animal could also just suddenly tear you to shreds. I can't make explicit agreements with a bear about what is right and wrong. It doesn't matter that I have never done anything to hurt it before. If we come across each other, it could attack me regardless of whether I had done wrong. It's clear that you just can't do morality in the same way with animals as you do with people.
More broadly, humans are wired to take up the practices of those they are around. You can take a baby from anywhere around the world, plop them somewhere different, and they will try to fit in with the crowd they grow up with. I'm not making some kind of blank slate argument that only nurture matters, but it is the case that children will copy the behaviors of people they come in to contact with and that's unavoidable. Animals have their own nature and simply can't be socialized in that way.
Another important point is that any fertile man can have a child with any fertile woman around the world. Back when monarchies were more prominent, this was important part of establishing alliances. They may hate each other but now they have a common interests in their grandchildren. That possibility ties us together in a way that we could never do with any other non-humans.
Humans vs non-humans is not an "arbitrary" distinction and in fact, it's probably the least arbitrary you can get. It's ok to be speciesist.
>> There is often this implicit assumption in ethics that you can't justify a bias towards humans as a species.
Can you put a % estimate on the "often" in this sentence? How many people do you think hold this position?
In my experience humans are *much* more frequently presumed to be fundamentally different from (and of greater value than) animals, than they are presumed to be equivalent such that "you can't justify a bias towards humans as a species." Animal rights activists are an outlier, not a norm, and "you can't justify a bias towards humans as a species" believers are a minority within that minority - most people in the animal welfare world think that animals are different from people but want us to be nice to the bunnies and puppies and ponies, etc. Only the very fringiest are arguing human/animal *equality*, and mostly society just mocks those people.
I'm talking about philosophers, not the average person.
Makes sense - what subset of philosophers do you think make this implicit assumption? 50%? 80%? 10%?
And who counts as a philosopher?
As someone who doesn't routinely engage with that community, its hard to assess the importance of the issue if it's just described as coming up "often." I'd agree, for example, that people in the US "often get food poisoning" because of the large population and frequency with which that population eats, but at the same time I don't think that food safety is a significant issue when you break it down on a percentage basis.
I don’t know the percentage. But I do see intellectual arguments that critique human favoritism from people like Peter Singer and he’s very influential. I don’t really see the opposite argument.
I'm willing to bite the bullet and accept that discrimination, in any form, is just a fact of life. It's not like I advocate for full blown slavery. But all the pearl-clutching in the current zeitgeist is absolutely a dumb purity-spiral. Kinda like how Scott complains that you can't talk about "eugenics" without being labeled someone who wants to breed Nazi supersoldiers and torture kittens.
PSA: the concept of a family is inherently racist, because you're privileging people based on their genetic similarity to you, rather than merit. Thought experiment: Do you support a "Brave New World" setup? I.e. families are outlawed, because "equality" means we should all equally belong to everyone else. Is that a "no"? Oh boy, do I have news for you. You. Are. A. Raging. Racist. And that's fine! Deal with it.
>>PSA: the concept of a family is inherently racist, because you're privileging people based on their genetic similarity to you, rather than merit.
Is that how you define family? Yeesh. I don't know about you, but speaking personally, I'm not related to my wife, nor are my parents related to one another.
Hopefully you can say the same. And hopefully, like me, you can say that only approximately *half* your aunts and uncles are genetically related to you (i.e. that your aunts and uncles are *not* marrying their brothers, sisters, cousins, or other relatives)? Assuming so, there's a large number of people in your family that are genetic strangers to you.
I don't think it's that controversial of an observation to assert that: Of everyone on the planet, your kids (and conversely, your parents) are the people who are most genetically related to you (barring some exceptions; e.g. twins, clones, adoption, etc). I.e. there's a continuum of relatedness. And e.g. if we plot on a continuum the 9 billion residents of Earth, according to their genetic relatedness to you specifically, with the left-side being most-related and right-side being least-related, your kids and immediate relatives will be on the leftward tail of the distribution.
As for spouses, the fact that spouses are unrelated (... usually <looks at pakistan>) is likely an artifact of the single-cell bottleneck. I.e. in a world free of disease/defects/etc, Azathoth would probably see fit that we'd all reproduce asexually by default, like sponges. In which case, each person's mother and father would consist of one and the same organism.
But sure: define the term "family" however you like. it won't change the fact that genetic-relatives often live in close proximity and favor each other. And that any project which seeks to level the socio-economic playing-field in toto, necessarily requires the dismantling of certain institutions.
I don’t seem to recall arguing for dismantling any institutions or levelling any playing fields in toto. If that’s in my response somewhere, by all means point out where.
My intention was simply to debunk the asinine assertion that the “concept of family is inherently racist, because you’re privileging people based on their genetic similarity to you rather than merit.”
My brother is married. He and his wife have no children, and they don’t plan to, but she does not work. He could be certainly be argued to be “privileging" her in a way that he does not privilege others, and the privilege can be argued not to have been distributed “on merit” since it comes by virtue of her being his family, but I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you that regardless of whether it is being distributed on merit, it most certainly isn’t being distributed based on genetic similarity.
So on the off chance that anyone read the initial post and was worried for a moment that privileging their family members, who are their most intimate associations tied to them in a close knit web of mutual support and interdependence, is somehow equivalent to privileging people of the same race, which is a population likely numbering in the millions and overwhelmingly composed of complete ass strangers who have done and probably will do nothing for them (and may, indeed, even wage war on them - see e.g. Ukraine/Russia) but happen to share with them a handful of ancillary traits like skin color and suitability or lack thereof for digesting milk, they need not worry about it.
It's possible we're all "a little bit racist" because everyone has inherent biases, but we're not all racists for favoring our families.
"did you know spouses aren't related? deboonked!"
I've already acknowledged that spouses are exceptions. The exception doesn't disprove the rule. On the contrary, they're the exception which proves the rule. So idk what this is supposed to accomplish.
And yes, family members are often trustworthy. Two things can be true at once.
I don't think you're engaging with this fairly. I think you're responding emotionally because you feel uncomfortable with the implicit accusation. Because idk how you thought your comment would survive scrutiny.
I understand it must be terribly convenient to assert "the exception proves the rule" whenever contrary evidence arises, but contrary evidence doesn't actually prove a proposition.
A few more examples-
My mother's sister married a man. He is not related to me, but I have 'privileged' him by helping him find work when he was between things.
My cousin adopted a child. She is not related to me, but I'd still help her if she needed an extra hand moving, or a character reference, etc, etc.
My wife has two sisters. Neither are related to me. One I've gotten to know and would do things to help, even if my wife were to die. I'd 'privilege' her based purely on our socially-created family tie, regardless of genetics.
It seems pretty clear that family ties are socially created and genetically correlated, not merely genetically created. Take any human child from its genetic family, drop it in outer mongolia with a group of humans to raise it. Ask it who its family is.
If you don't know how my comment could survive scrutiny, I'd re-read your own, because actual scrutiny is being applied, it isn't holding up, and all you've done to defend it is state "the exception proves the rule," as if that were a concept that actually worked.
Technically speaking, the origin of the phrase "the exception proves the rule" actually rests on an archaic definition of "prove," which roughly translates to "the exception *tests* the rule." Modern English has sort of mutated it into this upside down framework where "contrary evidence somehow proves I'm right," but that's not how reasoning actually works.
I'm going to talk about in-group favoritism in another thread but I would say that there are practical reasons to expand your circle beyond your family and also, like I mentioned above, there are good reasons to make distinctions between humans vs non humans. It's a solid, non arbitrary line.
> It's a solid, non arbitrary line.
perhaps not as solid as you imagine. <looks at homo floresiensis>
Imagine the least convenient world, where there existed a breed of humans who were dumber than afghan hounds. You can't realistically trade or negotiate with them. Also, imagine a breed of humans who are superhuman in every meaningful dimension.
Are you still going to draw an arbitrary line around species, only? Which is just a biological category which captures who you can breed with? Does that sound like a sane, principled justification to you? Rather than a posthoc rationalization for the status quo? "This orc is trying to eat my liver. But technically I can breed with it. Therefore by the laws of morality, we're natural allies". To me, that's bonkers. The orc and I are *not* natural allies. And whether or not I can technically breed with it is 100% orthogonal.
Meanwhile, lots of human beings are married to someone. Which is the ultimate form of discrimination. There's 9 billion people, and you've decided to single out one in particular as being deserving of your love. If you just accept that discrimination isn't always bad, you can forsake doing mental gymnastics around arbitrary lines and just do ordinary cost/benefit analysis. It only feels scary because it's a thought crime to ever admit that the emperor's new clothes are actually invisible.
Sure in that situation it would be different but luckily we don’t live in the least convenient possible world. Im not interested in Universal Axiomatic Platonic Moral Truths. I’m interested in what’s practical.
Well in that case, we have no material disagreements. I can't help but wonder if there was even a controversy to begin with. I.e. the size of the shitty-dogfood industry is evidence that, yes actually, favoring humans over non-humans (even "man's best friend") is the norm by leaps and bounds. Meanwhile, the ethicists you speak of who "implicitly assume" that "specism is indefensible" are simply delulu.
Normal people don’t have coherent beliefs. People who think intellectually drive intellectual changes. I think that basically we need to stop this push towards the position of “animals should be seen as more equal”.
Contrariwise, there's also practical reasons to reduce the circle. As soon as you make this about utils accounting rather than deontology, you open the door for logical contention.
Yes, humans being susceptible to engaging in outgroup discrimination is indeed a fact of life. But, humans being susceptible to cholera is also a fact of life, yet societies take steps to eliminate cholera. Humans being susceptible to committing theft and robbery and rape are facts of life, yet societies take steps to eliminate crime. Why, then, should societies not take steps to eliminate outgroup discrimination? "It's a fact of life" is obviously not a valid reason.
Some level of outgroup discrimination makes sense. Consider that you are trying to do something altruistic, charitable, like giving someone money. There is a chance that person might be a scammer. You can probably more easily detect who is a scammer if you share the same culture.
An even more serious case can be made for unwritten rules. When culturally similar people share unwritten rules, they also share a subconscious understanding how how often, in what cases, how far can you bend those rules. But when people do not share it then it will be written rules, and then no exceptions, no bending etc.
"it's an (inevitable) fact of life" was the conclusion, not the derivation.
The derivation was implicit in the PSA. If you follow "racism is morally impermissible" all the way to its logical conclusions, you start having to engage in some crazy mental gymnastics. Such as "specism is morally intolerable" or "you must disown your family" or "we must destroy the cultural Western Canon" or "we must all pretend that walking through the inner city at 3 AM is perfectly safe" or "you must allow yourself to be scammed and/or mugged when you tour Delhi". To worship the alter of racial equality, you must renounce the alter of Gnon.
Your comment acts like "racism is bad" is self-evident. But really, I think the onus is on *you* to explain why. "Because fance, Uncle Tom's Cabin was morally reprehensible! Obviously!" But consider: is it the *racism* that you object to? Is that really the hill you want to die on? Or is it the slavery per se that you object to. Thought experiment: would slavery somehow have been more morally-permissible of an institution if the ethnicities of the slaves were representative of their host populations?
If you're still having trouble with this, let's return to the family question specifically as an example.
A) "Racism" means discriminating by race/skincolor/ethnicity.
B) race/skin-color/ethnicity are just a vague, premodern proxies for genetic-relatedness.
C) Familial institutions privilege the members of society who are *most* genetically related to a given person.
D) discrimination by race-membership is bad, but discrimination by family-membership is good. (??)
E) therefore, there must be some threshold between "siblings" and "random stranger" where discrimination flips from permissible to impermissible.
Your homework assignment is to identify that threshold, and justify it from first principles (i.e. not as an arbitrary historical-artifact of Eskimo kinship).
>But consider: is it the *racism* that you object to? Is that really the hill you want to die on? Or is it the slavery per se that you object to. ... "Racism" means discriminating by race/skincolor/ethnicity.
1. I don't know what slavery has to do with anything. Slavery is objectionable regardless of the basis upon which the person is enslaved.
2. I disagree with your definition of racism. What you have defined is racial discrimination, not racism. And note that even the law does not forbid all discrimination, but rather only invidious discrimination -- ie, discrimination that is motivated by animus towards a particular group. And that is the key difference between discrimination in FAVOR of your family versus discrimination AGAINST, say, the Irish. Discrimination in favor of your family is not motivated by animus.
Also, your comment simply passes the buck. I would be quite interested in hearing why racial animosity is supposedly less morally-laudible [0] than non-racial animosity.
[0] le mot juste currently escapes me
I don't know that it is necessarily less morally laudable than, say, religious animosity.
> I don't know what slavery has to do with anything. Slavery is objectionable regardless of the basis upon which the person is enslaved.
typically, when someone is asked justify the impermissibility of racism, mumbling about the U.S. antebellum south is a common trope.
> What you have defined is racial discrimination, not racism.
https://www.wordnik.com/words/racism
> Discrimination or prejudice based on race.
idk man, sounds like bifurcation to me. But more importantly, your provided definition is not the plain-english definition. I've seen people irl argue things like "the fact that Haitians live in an area prone to earthquakes and hurricanes is an instance of institutional racism".
> And note that even the law does not forbid all discrimination, but rather only invidious discrimination -- ie, discrimination that is motivated by animus towards a particular group.
also the law: "disparate impact is bad".
P.S. Matt Walsh recently released a movie titled "am I a racist?" Normally, I don't really care about Walsh is up to. He doesn't operate in good faith. But it's relevant to the discussion because it raises the question: why did Walsh feel a need to make this movie? Do you honestly think Matt Walsh is trying to normalize *invidious* racism? Do you really believe that he harbors some sort of malevolent animus towards minorities?
>"the fact that Haitians live in an area prone to earthquakes and hurricanes is an instance of institutional racism".
But institutional racism is a different phenomenon, right?
>also the law: "disparate impact is bad".
No, that is not what the law says. The law says that disparate impact is prima facie evidence of animus, which can be rebuttal by showing a legitimate reason for the practice giving rise to the disparate impact.
>Matt Walsh recently released a movie titled "am I a racist?" ... Do you really believe that he harbors some sort of malevolent animus towards minorities?
Isn't the movie an expose' of the DEI industry? I don't see the relevance. It is not a pro-discrimination movie, is it?
I am not a dog person, but I feel like the existence of dogs is a good counter argument to your point about animals. You can’t talk to your dog, but you absolutely can build an understanding with them and the dog will feel bad (or at least pretend to feel bad, who knows) if they violate the rules by eating the Thanksgiving turkey when everyone was watching football.
I don’t think dogs are really doing morality in the same way. They really only care about your affection and haven’t really internalized it as a code. They’ll do plenty of things when no one is watching.
Thinking about it, it’s similar to the morality of a two year old. To them, all your rules are stupid but they don’t want to make you mad.
I draw the line(s) differently.
Whether we can reproduce with someone or not seems morally irrelevant to me. I mean, following that logic to the extreme, it would be okay to abuse infertile people, right? (Also, we could only be ethical towards the opposite sex.) It may be an important part of how morality has *evolved* from the evolutionary perspective, but it's not what morality *is*.
Another important part is reciprocity. If we met some kind of intelligent space aliens who somehow magically evolved a similar concept of morality, we could still agree on things like "helping each other is better than hurting each other", and it would make sense to call an opposite kind of behavior immoral.
Now, with animals we don't have the reciprocity. (Neither do we have it with small children, temporarily.) You can't expect the bear to behave "morally". Still, if I saw people who e.g. torture bears for fun, they would lose some morality points on my scale. We can argue how much precisely, but definitely more than zero. Similarly, factory farming is morally abhorrent (this is something many people would disagree with, but the fact that various states have "ag-gag laws" suggests that many people agree, or would agree if they paid attention).
In my opinion, the concept of "speciesism" becomes silly not when it requires that we treat the bear with some minimum compassion... but where it suggests that we should let the bear *vote* about what compassion means. Morality is a human concept (that is, unless we meet some other intelligent species, hypothetically), but the concept is not limited to treating other humans. Humans are the authors and judges of the concept, but animals can also be its targets.
I won’t say my arguments are deductive proofs for speciesism but I do think they support it. People often say something like “what if that was your child” in support of an argument.
>It may be an important part of how morality has *evolved* from the evolutionary perspective, but it's not what morality *is*.
I won’t get too much in to this right now but I do think we should base morality on who we are instead of some abstract principles that we pick out of the ether and take everything to its logical extreme.
It’s not like I have a problem with compassion to animals or anything. But once you stop taking the speciesist perspective of prioritizing humans, you can start getting logical arguments that strongly hurt human interests. Like I wouldn’t start favoring aliens because they were smarter than us. And I certainly wouldn’t let an AI take over the planet because they have more advanced capabilities. My argument would be that our moral rules should stick to what they were designed to deal with. For non humans, there should be different guidelines.
Hi Brandon, I missed this post earlier but I feel that if you're worried about aliens or superior humanoids or superhuman AI mistreating humans, that's a good argument for opposing speciesism and emphasizing the value of all thinking life, even if it doesn't think or communicate as well as humans do.
Otherwise, you really don't have any ethical explanation of why Homo Superior (or smartypants aliens, or AI) should keep us baseline humans around, happy and free, instead of enslaving us all or turning us into cheap souvenirs of Earth.
So, Graham Hancock is back with more about his theory of an ancient civilization that existed before the ice age. This time he's focusing on the Americas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRNvCygbnTA
And there's a cameo by Keanu Reeves.
Isn't this guy a total and complete crank?
His theory is at best farfetched and probably just plain wrong, yes. But I find the series entertaining. He sometimes talks about interesting things I hadn't heard about before, such as Gobekli Tepe. It's a bit of a hate-watch.
Yikes. Media are reporting that Google is suing Microsoft. About time!
It's like the Lutherans going after the Methodists. But does it mean Musk will finally duke it out in a bare knuckle free-for-all with Bezos?
The pay-per-view receipts could be great.
What are they suing them for?
Hegemony.
They're claiming Microsoft has to much of the "cloud" market -- the Postmodern name for massive buildings filled with machines gorging themselves on electricity and water.
That's like one presidential candidate calling the other stupid. You can't out-stupid Stupid. When we look up 'hegemony' in a database, the first thing we should see is Google's logo.
Open AI feels a lot like an unaligned agent 🤔
In 2015 a bunch of really smart people got together to spin up this entity, and they put a bunch of guardrails in place to make sure that the entity would always be 'good' and 'well behaved'. And now, just 9 years later, the entity has been freed of the last shackles and is basically fully a for profit entity.
I wrote more about this here (https://theahura.substack.com/p/tech-things-openai-is-an-unaligned) so I won't copy everything word for word. Maybe it's just the irony of the situation, but it does sure make me wonder about our ability to reign in actual AI if we can't even reign in organizations that were visibly composed of people who were explicitly all about alignment, and was was in fact the whole point.
(Related: I wonder if an unaligned AI would have a similar sort of descent, where over time more and more pro-alignment parts of it 'leave' or 'are kicked out' until you're left with only the unaligned parts)
Nobody's been able to align capitalism so far.
I was hoping you would elaborate more in your article.
I'm not sure Sam Altman is all about alignment, or ever was. He seems to be all about gathering as much wealth and influence as possible. He just managed to persuade the AI alignment folks that he was one of them when doing this was to his advantage. Best I can figure, that man is fundamentally a social manipulator.
There's a decent article about this in The Atlantic, actually.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/09/sam-altman-openai-for-profit/680031/
To take the AI alignment parable a step further, it does seem like having an agent that is lying around it's true motivations is a key step along the path of unaligned AI. Maybe that was Sam all along 😂 though I do think many members of the founding team were legitimately pro safety, and OpenAI definitely fooled a lot of external observers
People are pretty good at detecting the kind of smooth talking charismatic manipulative types but our defenses are less good with soft-spoken nerdy guys. See Sam Bankman-Fried.
Rein* not reign (x2)
The comments are editable. Click on the three dots to the right of SHARE.
I don't seem to have that option, at least on the substack app
ACXLW Meetup 75: Comparative Advantage and AI by Eli, The Edge book Review by Zvi
Date: Saturday, September 28, 2024
Time: 2:00 PM
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, CA 92660
Host: Michael Michalchik
Contact: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com | (949) 375-2045
Conversation Starter 1
Topic: Comparative Advantage Cannot Protect Us from AI
Text: The Comparative Advantage Fallacy - Google Docs
Audio: The Comparative Advantage Fallacy - Substack Audio
Summary:
Comparative Advantage: The classical economic concept, while valid for human trade, doesn’t apply when comparing human capabilities to those of Artificial Superintelligences (ASI).
Fallacy in Application: The vast gap in productivity and capability between humans and ASIs means that trade won’t be beneficial for both parties. Instead, ASIs would likely allocate resources for their own optimal use.
Superintelligence and Resource Allocation: Much like how billionaires wouldn't part with significant wealth for trivial reasons, ASIs wouldn't spare resources like sunlight for humans, as their needs and capabilities far surpass human needs.
Relentless Optimization: ASIs, like advanced AIs trained to solve hard problems, would likely pursue maximum efficiency without regard for human survival, and any "easygoing" AI could self-modify to become more competitive.
Discussion Questions:
a) How does Yudkowsky’s critique of comparative advantage challenge current assumptions about AI’s future role in human economics and resource allocation?
b) Can we think of any strategies to incentivize superintelligences to leave Earth resources untouched, or is that fundamentally impossible based on economic principles?
c) Reflective stability implies that relaxed AI systems could evolve into relentless optimizers. How might we design AI systems that avoid this outcome, or is it inevitable as Yudkowsky suggests?
Conversation Starter 2
Topic: Book Review of Chapter 1 of On the Edge by Nate Silver
Text: On the Edge: The Fundamentals - Zvi Mowshowitz
Audio: YouTube Link
Summary:
The River vs. The Village: Silver introduces two cultural mindsets—The River, representing risk-takers and probabilistic thinkers, and The Village, the establishment that trusts experts and avoids risk.
Risk-Taking Culture: The River includes poker players, venture capitalists, and effective altruists, united by their reliance on probability and decision-making under uncertainty. Riverians focus on maximizing expected value (EV) and thrive on calculated risks.
Fundamental Disagreement: The River emphasizes independent thinking and rewards taking chances, while The Village is more group-oriented and focused on moral narratives. This tension often leads to clashes, particularly in areas like AI, politics, and media.
Meritocracy and Expertise: Silver argues that the River's emphasis on merit and risk-taking makes it more effective in certain fields, but this can also lead to conflicts with those who follow Village norms.
Discussion Questions:
a) How does the dichotomy between The River and The Village play out in modern societal debates, especially around risk-taking in industries like tech and AI?
b) What are the strengths and weaknesses of risk-taking cultures like The River compared to the more cautious approach of The Village?
c) Do you think the distinction between River and Village oversimplifies or accurately captures the mindset of modern risk-takers versus traditional institutions?
Walk & Talk: After the discussion, we will take our usual hour-long walk. Nearby options for takeout include Gelson's and Pavilions, located in the 92660 zip code area.
Share a Surprise: Bring something to share that unexpectedly changed your perspective on life or the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: As always, feel free to contribute ideas for future meetings, topics, and activities.
Looking forward to seeing everyone there!
I just dipped my toe into what seems to be a new (to me at least) rabbit hole WRT remote viewing. This is the Gateway Experience. Does anyone have a read on this, starting with what parts of this are real, if any? The parts I mean are:
- there really was a guy,
- he really wrote up this here scientific paper on remote viewing,
- it was submitted to the CIA,
- the CIA took it seriously and did--what?--with it;
- and there were results.
I think the list here goes pretty much increasingly from plausible to implausible. Thoughts?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/found-page-25-of-the-cias-gateway-report-on-astral-projection/
Its the prime directive of any intelligence agency to keep an open mind.
People did indeed take psychic powers seriously in the 70s-80s, and the CIA (and the Army) did indeed take it seriously and do tests on it. They tried it for a while, didn't get any results, and shut it down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
(The CIA also experimented with mind control, somewhat more famously. They got up to some weird shit during the Cold War.)
Parapsychology in that era wasn't as solidly "debunked" as we think of it today. For a while it sounded reasonable to say "maybe there's a weak and inconsistent psi ability and that's why we hear so many anecdotes of telepathy and astral projection and so on, and maybe if we put a psychic in a lab and study them properly we can figure out how to amplify this natural ability and do cool sci-fi stuff."
(Because of this, psychic powers just sort of casually appear in a lot of science fiction from the 70s. My favorite is a short story called The Dueling Machine, where after investigating various ways for the bad guys to pull off their scheme, one of our heroes very seriously suggests "Well, what if he's a telepath?")
If we don't want Nietzschean Morality, we need to talk about heroes and heroism again: https://justanogre.substack.com/p/if-we-dont-want-nietzschean-morality
Sorry if this has been linked to already. Did anyone see Freddie DeBoer's response to "Contra DeBoer On Temporal Copernicanism." A truly embarrassing misfire. If you're morbidly curious, try https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/to-learn-to-live-in-a-mundane-universe.
Freddie is one of the few bloggers I like even more then Scott A, but man, Freddie got absolutely BODIED in this exchange. It was brutal. Learn when to take your L and move on, FD.
Thank you for the link. FdB seems to start from the premise that computer in every office and home followed by internet in every office and home followed by internet in every pocket does not matter in terms of way of life and does not constitue progress on par with indoor plumbing (his example) or, say, the industrial revolution (the salient example IMO).
This premise is so alien to me that I had to read several times to even understand what he means.
I disagree with Freddie in the details, but I agree in the abstract.
I love the internet as much as the next guy. But it's really not in the same class of importance as steel/nitrogen/electricity. Man cannot live on cat-memes alone.
Nuclear weapons aren't very important in daily life--far less important than steel or electricity or Haber-Bosch. But nuclear weapons pose a threat for mass-death and destruction of working civilzations that steel and electricity and fertilizers don't. It's quite possible for this pattern to happen in other ways--perhaps modern computing is not as big a deal as I think in terms of human well-being, but that doesn't mean that hostile superhuman AGI might not end up being a very big deal indeed for humans it decides are in the way of its plans.
I suspect some people are getting tired of seeing me relitigate this topic by now. To put my opinion on a bumbersticker: the arc of history is sigmoidal; we're already past the inflection point; having an IQ of 9 billion trillion does not confer godhood. I'm quite confident of this.
The *absence* of steel or electricity or Haber-Bosch, would probably kill about as many people as nuclear weapons. In part because the biggest entry in the Global Thermonuclear War body count is people who starved to death because the supply chain for Haber-Bosch got severely broken.
I didn't think it was that bad.
If the "Thrifty Gene" became less common in populations that discovered agriculture earlier, then why are South Asians so prone to obesity? The Indus River Valley was one of the first regions to discover agriculture.
I have a bit of a fun challenge. There is an immense diversity of beliefs that can be categorized as supernatural or paranormal. Yet, when people are asked on the Internet, whether they ever experienced anything funny, the vast majority of them will be ghost stories. Why?
Note that ghost stories don't make sense in any worldview. If there is a god, people's ghost should be in heaven or hell. If there is not a god, why are there ghosts/souls?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia
There's much more to the menu of worldviews than just the abrahamic god or bare materialism.
"Ghost", in many ghost stories, is rather close to a more "neutral" way to describe an entity that might otherwise be described as an "evil spirit" or a "demon", both of which are of course perfectly compatible with God. In cases where we're genuinely talking about the dead contacting the living, well, that's not incompatible with theism either, and indeed is often a major part of saint hagiographies.
There could be supernatural events in a universe without God.
Or the afterlife could be more complicated than you think.
Right. The world of Harry Potter includes magic and ghosts and curses and such, but doesn't seem to involve any God or gods taking an active part in the world.
Not really supernatural, but kind of amusing....
Dream experiment.
Participants are shown image #1, then asked to record their dreams for a week, then shown image #2.
Image #1 showing up in dreams after it was shown is just a media effects on dreams experiement, and whats really being tested for here.
But .. image #2 showing up in dreams before it was shown is kind of precognyiom....
(If you were actually experiementally testing precog, you would maker image #1 and image #2 completely unrelated, but as this experiment is not a prec og experiment, you dont, so a spurious result appears where image #2 shows up in dreams before it is shown bec ausde it is partly predictable from image #1),
In theory there are lots of paranormal events, and one can easily invent brand new ones — flying dogs, people who can change their height just by concentrating on it. But I’m having trouble thinking of many that we are all sort of familiar with. Let’s see, werewolves, vampires, telepathy, telekinesis, foreknowledge. What am
I missing?
Changelings
Sort-of-almost paranormal...
I am in a worksup next to a cthedral, workimng away al day on creating a copy of a medieval stained glass panel. Very toxic chemicals. Very sharp edges of cut glass. High termepetures when using the kiln. Danger all around you, and you have to be careful. Also, I have to paint, and captures something of the spirit if the original.
Ok, after some hours of this, time to pack up for the day and clean up and pack away all this horendously toxic stuff. And then I go into the cathedral, and look at genuine old sta ned glass. Just look at it....
Something just barely supernatural about the experience.
Maybe hallucinations of dead people is one of the most common hallucinatory experiences.
As an evangelical, my dad raised us not to believe in ghosts. "There's no such thing as ghosts, son", he'd say "When you die you either go to Heaven or Hell, you don't hang around here." When we asked what the deal was with ghost stories and experiences he'd say "They're either making it up, or it's demons."
> or it's demons.
Yeah, the missing third option is things that *seem* to be ghosts. Perhaps even *pretend* to be ghosts.
Maybe because they have to do with what happens to humans in the afterlife, which people interpret as more, "You can believe anything about this" than non-afterlife beliefs, so having some slight belief or curiousity in ghost stories ends up more conventional.
When you die you become a ghost. From there you can go to heaven or reincarnate or whatever, but you can stay in ghost mode if you like or if you haven't come to terms with things yet. A lot of people stay in ghost mode to see their family and friends. Maybe their family can see them too, who knows?
Is that any crazier than souls existing at all? If we allow for the existence of a spirit world why does it need to be so rigid?
Folk beliefs in ghosts and spirits are universal, it’s just that some religions seek to suppress them. In some traditions the line between ghost and spirit gets very blurry.
You have been cursed. One of the whole numbers from zero to 9, inclusive, will become unspeakable by you. If you try to say it, you'll instead blurt out whatever word is most taboo in your culture. For Americans, that's probably the N-word. Since the gods are not complete bastards, you are allowed to choose which number will be unspeakable. Which number do you choose?
(If you do not choose a number, your unspeakable number will be one.)
might as well choose bleem, the secret integer between 3 and 4.
'two' and 'four' are the obvious choices; you can instead say "to" and "for" and no one will be the wiser.
The gods are more intelligent than that. Your Tourette's is triggered by your intent to communicate the chosen integer, not by the actual utterance you select to do so. What now?
I choose zero, because in most contexts where I have to say it as a digit I can say "oh", and also I'll never need to ask for zero of something
Also, you won't need to say "twenty-zero".
I would choose 1 anyway, because I can usually replace it with "a".
"How many kids you have?"
"I have a daughter."
Good call. You can also drop a 'single' on people. Perhaps even a 'solitary' if you really want to get crazy.
Macquarie University is hosting a lecture on Georgism - https://events.humanitix.com/henry-george-2024
I've encountered a number of twitter posts saying it could be pretty bad if there's a port strike (affecting ports on the eastern US).
So far I haven't encountered anything describing whether a strike would be "justified," insofar as anything causing that much damage is justified.
How much are the port workers getting paid now? How much is the new offer? How much do they want? And what's this about wanting promises of no automation? That sounds kind of awful and selfish, to be honest.
How much are the port workers getting paid now?
$20 an hour starting, $39 an hour top of scale, plus overtime. Total tends to be low six figures to start and $200-300k at the high end for seniors. Plus generous benefits probably worth six figures on their own.
How much is the new offer?
40% increase over six years.
How much do they want?
77% increase over six years.
And what's this about wanting promises of no automation?
They want no automation. They also tried to stop things like containerization. It's because they think automation will mean fewer jobs and fewer hours worked.
There's also issues of corruption with corporate claiming that they're denying members in favor of outright nepotism (basically making a hereditary profession) and exaggerating hours to climb the seniority scale faster and stuff like that. The ILS is claiming that this is made up and an excuse to impose more oversight or control over their work schedules.
> whether a strike would be "justified,
The real question is how much of a kickback they're giving to *me*. So far the answer is "zero", so that's how much I care.
So we need to align all the incentives eh? What about paying a bonus to every stevedore that's a % of every extra dollar of goods brought in to that specific port compared to a rolling average of the previous X years. So working harder, automating unloading etc could all be to their benefit...
I'm skeptical of this kind of deals. They can be Goodharted in both directions - both the metric of their share of work, and the number they're being paid for. Profit for example is trivial to siphon out of the company before being declared profit.
And from another point of view, what did they do to deserve this long term share of profit? To keep things balanced they should take a commensurate pay cut. And if you go there, you can just pay part of the salary in shares, or just make it easier for them to buy shares. Or, if they believe in the company, they can probably already take part of their payckeck and buy shares with it.
We have some of the worst ports in the world by productivity. Comparable with Africa. These are also some of the worst unions out there (why do you think The Wire picked the Stevedore Union, of all Unions, for their Union arc?).
Fire them all and bar them from similar employment, 1981 ATC style. Bring in Army Corps of Engineers. We don't have to live like this.
As always, they want as much as they can get, plus they are anti-automation. Here is the union president in a recent interview flexing by noting the economic damage they can inflict (Biden can force them back to work for 90 days but likely won't, and the union basically says they will work at 1/4 speed if this were to happen):
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=822WNvhQHKI&feature=youtu.be
In terms of how much they make, here is probably a good analogue based on West coast dock workers -- $200K plus around $100K in benefits is common for front line workers, bosses make $300K+ per year:
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/west-coast-dockworkers-making-200k-demand-higher-pay
Thanks for being the only comment to actually answer my question. : )
Companies want as much profit as they can get, too. Why should a worker be the "bigger man" and settle for less than they can get?
Will we get a repeat of the air traffic controller strike back in the day? How difficult would it be to replace a dock worker, either with a new employee or with a national guardsman?
That seems very unlikely and not sure on precedent there, other than in 2002 GW Bush used Taft-Harley to compel west coast strking longshoreman back to work. People in the industry this time are expecting several days of strike, with each day causing ~3 days in backup (1 day lost to no work, 2 days to untangle the growing mess).
I don't know the details of this union, but in general employers are legally barred from firing striking unionized employees. So they can go on strike and do huge economic damage and not get fired. Doesn't seem justified to me no matter how little they're getting paid. They could always quit and find another job.
During strikes over "economic issues" (as opposed to statutory "unfair labor practices"), employers can hire permanent replacement workers, subject to vaguely defined limits, and strikers can be laid off to make room for the permanent replacements.
does this actually happen much in practice? I would imagine the NLRB might not allow it
If unionized employees are doing outsized damage when they go on strike, I see a Coasian solution!
I don't know the details and maybe the law gives the unions too much power, but, if so, the problem is bad law not "selfish" workers. Workers should try to maximize their earnings every bit as much as companies should. If the playing field isn't fair, the government has failed.
If you can negotiate for more money and benefits why not do it? What's "justified" got to do with it? Do companies pay their workers what is "justified"?
OTOH, if the unions have too much power, they should be broken up. Same for the ports if they have some sort of monopoly.
<quote>If you can negotiate for more money and benefits why not do it?</quote>
Are there any constraints here? Does striking count as negotiating?
The fact that workers can go on strike is part of why they can negotiate at all.
Striking is a negotiating tactic. As is the threat to strike.
This is fine as long as:
a) Employers have the same right (to arbitrarily stop paying their employees at any point to gain leverage in negotiation and force them to accept lower wages)
b) Striking workers don't interfere with workers who choose not to strike, and
c) The employer is free to fire any employee who goes on strike, just as an employee is free to quit if the employer stops paying them.
The laws around unions and collective bargaining have evolved over the past 150 years or so and vary tremendously from state to state in the US. I don't believe there is a one-size fits all solution here. Different rules for different industries might make sense. A smart state government will figure out the optimal rules and a dumb one won't.
Would you also consider falsely acusing your employer of unequal pay a negotiating tactic?
Claiming unequal pay is of course a negotiating tactic. Falsely claiming it is still negotiating, but also stupid because they can just check.
No, I would consider that criminal, and I think the law would too. Striking is something most unions can legally do. If you think that gives them an unreasonable amount of leverage, fair enough, maybe it is. Maybe this particular union should not have the right to strike. But I wouldn't blame them for taking advantage of the rights they do have.
Nobody earns what they deserve, only what they negotiate.
Sure. I'd also consider the (IMO much more common) case of an employer falsely claiming that their employees are fairly paid a negotiating tactic, so it would be a strange asymmetry not to.
Why would you not?
is it just total war then? no constraints?
That would be the Coasian solution.
Do white Americans have a culture other than "American"? In a thread on the subject of culture last week someone suggested that white Northeasterners have a particular culture. Maybe so, and I'm aware regional subcultures in the rural South exist, but is upper-middle class white urban American a culture? If so, what defines it? If not, does the USA contain some people who belong to a subculture of America and others who do not?
“Ethnic White” used to be a more relevant category, with stereotypes and associations for Irish, Poles, etc. That seems to have faded away.
White Alaskans had a very unique culture when I was growing up there in the 90s. Similar to general rural American culture but with some big differences: 1. More libertarian then conservative. 2. LOTS of artists in Alaska, because artists are drawn to the allure of that wild place. Never any problem securing library funding. 3. Extreme drinking culture. I estimate there were six times as many bars per capita. At least. I think only the Great Lakes region exceeds Alaska in alcohol consumption. Our mayor got a DUI and the political consequences were near-zero. 4. Alaskan whites are FAR less insular then you'd expect from rural Americans. Far more accepting of strangers; though they aren't going to greet you with open arms on day one.
I left Alaska in 2005, so some of these trends might be less true today.
From direct experience, I'd say sort of, but in the correlated collection of traits sense as opposed to a real sense of Belonging to a Community. I'm a Californian, Bay Arean specifically, and here in a midwest college town people do seem to know I'm Not From Around Here and I have been accused of being a California stereotype. I think it's more accurately categorized as an Atheist/Hippie synthesis subculture, with heavy white-middle class influence. If that is a culture, it's a very loose and fuzzy one.
There are many identifiable and in some cases overlapping subcultures among Unhyphenated Americans. Bostonians are not Hillbillies are not Texans; Southerners overlap the last two but are a distinct thing on their own, etc, etc. And not every Unhyphenated American who lives in Boston or Appalachia or Texas is a member of those particular subcultures.
Meanwhile, Unhyphenated Americans as a whole are a culture, in the same way that "{X]-Americans" are a culture for many distinct values of X. All of these can be subdivided, but they can also be considered as a whole and will have members who aren't part of one of the subcultures.
Also, "subcuture" is relative. If we're talking about e.g. Hillbillies and Americans, the Hillbillies are a subculture. In other contexts, it makes sense to just refer to them as a culture.
Also also, Unhyphenated Americans are still mostly white, but aren't necessarily white.
Read Scott's review of the book Albion's Seed over at his old Slate Star Codex website for a historical take on this question:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/
It's a great review of a fascinating book, but I don't think it addresses my question because it doesn't say much about people who have been very geographically mobile over the past couple of generations. I don't identify with a particular region of the USA, however I do identify with living in large metro areas.
No. We're all Americans here.
The resurgence of 1960s racialist outrage in response to George Floyd's treatment manufactured would-be 'progressives' "whiteness".
Most Americans ignore "race", implicitly understanding it's a derogatory social construct the illiberal Left likes to beat us over the head with. If one has to invoke one's race in an argument, they're racist.
"Tell me you've never traveled outside of large cities without telling me you've never traveled outside large cities."
But that's not even accurate, because there are significant cultural differences even between the largest cities. Different foods, different driving habits, different accents, different social customs, different religions. In general, travel a hundred miles and you'll experience different cultures - so long as you get off the highway.
All those things strike me as superficial. Whether I'm in Chicago, NYC, LA, or Austin, I'm going to eat about the same food: steak, seafood, eggs, bacon, Chinese, Indian, Italian, Thai, Mediterranean, Mexican, hamburgers, pizza, sushi, tapas, Brazilian Steakhouse, Taco Bell, subway sandwiches, deli sandwiches... My location won't affect the music I listen to, the books I read or the types of people I spend time with. The main differences between those places that matters to me is the weather.
So you eat at the places you are comfortable eating at, and don't interact with the locals. That's fine, but if you don't experience culture, it's because you have chosen not to experience culture.
Right, but you are talking about sampling other cultures, which I do, but it only makes me a tourist of those sub-cultures, someone spending their weekend in Lafayette eating boudin sausage and listening to a Zydeco band. I'm trying to figure out if *I* exist in a legitimate subculture.
My larger question from last week, and why here I ask about "white" middle-class urban Americans, is whether generic unhyphenated white Americans have an ethnicity. The question of unique ethnicity inexorably led to the question of having a unique culture. Some suggested that of course white Americans have a culture but it varies by region. But as you hint at, local subcultures tend to exist more outside of big cities than inside of them (with plenty of exceptions).
What I really think is that white metro-Americans don't have a distinctive culture separate from non-white metro-Americans. By "metro-American" I mean professional class people who live in cities. Or to make it overly reductive: Blue America.
Maybe you mean the yuppie class. Or, as the bugman likes to call it, "the brahmin caste". Dude has a pseudo-hindi 5-point taxonomy where he breaks down Dems into blacks, latinos, and yuppies -- and Republicans into WASPS and farmers. I've seen taxonomies that are very similar elsewhere, but the bugman's version is top of mind.
Big cities still have their own culture, but it takes a different form. Just observe the different stereotypes of sports fans.
My impressions of some large cities: Boston is nice, and people there are friendly - I'd say it's probably the closest I've encountered to what "Blue America" thinks that "Blue America" is. New Haven and Hartford are, for lack of a better term, skittish/weasely. New York City is full of itself (city that never sleeps my ass - 90% of the city is closed down at 5:15 PM, including stuff like stationary stores) which fancies itself multicultural but is actually a bunch of isolated groups who almost never interact. Pittsburgh is poor people, some of whom have money. Detroit is Moscow in the era of Peter the Great - all the important people have left and everybody remaining behind is throwing a party as everything falls apart around them. Grand Rapids is a real city that deserves to be mentioned with other real cities, as a culture. Chicago is, at least in the minds of its residents, serious business, but is actually just Britain, a giant pile of passive aggression. Seattle is what Chicago thinks it is. Los Angeles is Los Angeles - they'll tell you who they are if you listen, both the good and bad, and it's accurate. Salt Lake City is set in the garden of Eden (seriously, that city and its environs are freaking gorgeous) and the residents are aware of it and appreciate of it, and that was the most annoying city to visit back when I smoked because huge swathes of the city are just plain wholesome and I had to walk a mile out of my way to get a pack of cigarettes. Can't speak to Phoenix. Austin is folk culture slowly being strangled by people who move there for folk culture and then isolate themselves because they don't actually like folk culture (we'll see what it becomes). Dallas is legitimately a city that never sleeps and has strong DoD cultural artifacts, but everybody there thinks they're Texas; Fort Worth is a bunch of people who think they're Texas and they're not half wrong; Arlington is desperately trying to matter while thinking that Burlington Coat Factory is culture. Houston is the most ghetto-ass city I've ever been in, and not necessarily in a bad way. New Orleans is ... I could write paragraphs here, they're more cowboy than Texas and more serious business than Seattle, the most multicultural place I've been - a unique blend of authoritarian good-ol-boy and capitalistic anarchy, with a hefty dose of hoodoo - they are multicultural in a way which New York City utterly fails at, everybody interacts and mixes together. Atlanta is a good ol' boy in business casual, as a culture. Tampa is a bunch of rich people from New England trying to force Tampa to be a real city that deserves to be in this list while everybody else laughs at them (and "everybody else" includes all the New Englanders who previously moved there and eventually gave up), as a culture. Washington DC is "terminally online" as a culture, at least now; I don't know what it used to be like.
Weird. My perception of Boston, and I've only been there a handful of times but have heard the strong opinions of others, is that its residents are the least nice people in America. But perhaps I'm thinking mostly of working-class Boston.
Actually, minor correction: Seattle is Gen X, if Gen X were a culture and a city. They're definitely Serious Business, but imagine they're still punk.
Part of the confusion here stems from the double standard whereby any TV show, movie, song, dance, food, or slang originating from nonwhites is considered part of that particular subculture, but the same things created by white people (of which the vast majority are) are just considered part of general American culture. A song written by a black person is treated as a unique contribution to "black culture," while a song written by a white person is "just" pop or rock or EDM.
White American subculture is so successful that every other subculture in America immediately races to adopt it into their subculture as well, thus making it part of general American culture (by nature of it being so successful). Slang invented by a white person is not "white slang," it's just "slang", and we don't complain when other cultures use our slang. But certain other cultures notably hate this, screaming of "theft" as if they own certain words and phrases like physical possessions.
See also: "American culture" c.f. the rest of the world. American culture (i.e., white American culture) is so successful that it's even pervasive throughout virtually every other country, and yet America is still oft claimed by insecure Europeans to have no culture. Under this paradigm, you can see why - American culture is so successful that it simply *is* world culture, and so "culture" has evolved to now mean "the way you uniquely deviate from the default, background culture." Well, if you're the group that *invented* the world's default background culture, then you won't tend to deviate from that very much.
Definitely! There's the Midwest cultural region, which has a very different culture form the West or New England, and certainly different from the South. They have different values, different mores, different manners, different accents, different foods, etc. My mom's side of the family is originally from Iowa: I can still remember growing up and my grandma telling me to sit on the "davenport".
You can subdivide much deeper than that. The culture of - to pick a state I'm more familiar with - the upper peninsula of Michigan is quite distinct from the culture of the mitten; it's more isolationist and independent. In the mitten, the culture of Grand Rapids is distinct from the culture of Lansing is distinct from the culture of Flint which is distinct from the culture of Detroit. The culture of Traverse City is distinct from the culture of Fishtown.
Food is easy because it tends to be visible from the road. Lansing has olive burgers. Detroit has coney dogs and pizza. Flint is big on fried chicken. Northern Michigan is big on game meats. The central part of the upper peninsula is big on pasties. Per my wife, who is from Michigan, Grand Rapids has no regional food because they're stuck-up assholes (I asked because I couldn't think of any regional foods from that area). Traverse City has whitefish and cherry everything. Fishtown has a wide variety of seafood, big surprise there.
But there are other differences; accents (the "yooper" accent, which itself can be subdivided by region), religion, driving habits (Detroit is the only place I've seen have bumper-to-bumper traffic all running at 80 MPH), etc. A lot of it is easy to miss if you're just passing through.
"is upper-middle class white urban American a culture"
I don't live there (also I'm Canadian), and I'm not sure if it's "urban," but I've interpreted California as having regional subcultures.
An observation. I have noticed that non-southern white Americans and the English don't have a *folk* culture. By folk culture I mean for example things like tartans, kilts and bagpipes for Scotland, or cowboy boots and country music for southern American whites. They don't have things like folk music and folk dancing. It died out strangely. (Morris dancing is not authentic folk dancing these days, but historical re-enactment.)
I think the upper middle class urban culture there assimilated anyone and anything that could be called folk.
These things are generally a reaction to "universal culture" becoming the prestige culture. When the new thing is discontinuous from the old, the old can be kept around as separate, and nationalism provides the motivation to do so. The culture that gradually developed those things before they became "universal", obviously doesnt have a separate "folk" version.
No, I would argue for example that English folk clothing is dead, and instead it is the upper class Savile Row suits became universal.
I dont think we should count the upper and lower classes separately. A class is not a society. In many countries, folk culture drew from the lower classes because the upper had already been strongly modernised, but thats not necessary. Third world folk cultures often draw strong influence from old upper class practices.
What you are describing is *material* culture. New England, for instance, has a rich music and dance culture, our own clothing culture (Johnson jackets, basically the whole classic LL Bean catalog is New England folk clothing that's been commodotized), food (anadama bread as an example). That's setting aside Acadian folk culture which exists here as well (la Kermesse).
I think you just don't know about the folk culture that hasn't been popularized.
>Morris dancing is not authentic folk dancing these days, but historical re-enactment.
Speaking as a morris dancer (Gog Magog Molly, the Tattered Court Border morris, plus I've dabbled in Cotswold and rapper), I have not idea what you mean by "authentic folk dancing", but I find it hard to imagine a definition that doesn't fit morris.
There are some sides doing dances straight out of Bacon's black book as written, and there are also lots of sides writing their own dances in the same style.
Also, morris is only one corner of the English folk dance and song scene - there are also a lot of local clubs and festivals. It's not nearly as thriving as it is in Ireland or Scotland, but it's definitely there.
Kinda....
Like, upper-middle class urban Americans definitely have a very distinctive culture and it's definitely not a white culture...but it's mostly white, at least for now. Like, if you go to live theater or a pickleball tournament, it's not all white people, but it's mostly white people, some of whom are uncomfortable with how white it is and are covertly recruiting non-white friends to attend.
Race is weird in the US and adding the white bit obscures more than it clarifies. If you ask whether urban PMCs have a distinctive culture, the answer is obvious, but if you ask whether white urban PMCs have a distinctive culture, people get really careful.
One thing about it is that it's not something you can escape from or into. You're in it at work, you're in it at home. You can't say to yourself "This weekend I'm hanging out with people in my subculture" because you are in it even if you try to leave it. Or if you do manage to leave it, you're a tourist, which is the most white PMC thing there is.
Culture is fractal. You can analyze culture at the level of: the Big 4 in Albion's Seed; China-Town in NYC; a specific venue; anywhere in between. However, whereas most other places consciously recognize their cultures, the U.S. has been on a quest to assimilate everyone into a single melting-pot.
> white Northeasterners
> upper-middle class white urban American
the Boston Brahmins, maybe? I bet Steve Sailor would know. Maybe link to the og thread for more context.
There's lots of subcultures, but it's not necessarily easy to identify them. Every area has its own aspects of culture. At the very least, the food is different.
Many of us are white-collar workers who spend a few years here and a few years there, making friends and family with others who do similar. That's a type of culture, but I don't think it is Culture in the deep sense because not much about it has been passed from generation to generation.
Contrast that to say, Judaism, which is a culture that has been around a while.
I have a biotech idea based on some public research (no patents). There is one other company founded a few years ago doing the same thing, but I believe they lack the expertise and background to make it big.
To validate everything i reckon 100k USD could get it done in a year. Everything more could be used to hire a tech to speed up the process even more.
How can I get funding for a project like this? I have written a whitepaper, made a rough budget, etc. But what are the next steps?
Start a company and apply for an SBIR grant.
I'm not familiar with biotech specifically, but for scientific research that costs a lot of money, there are a few standard paths:
- You could do it in a college/university with NIH/NSF/etc funding.
- You could found a company yourself and clamor for the attention of a VC/investor/startup accelerator/etc.
- If you can frame your idea as something charitable, you could try soliciting donations?
Has anyone yet observed that if you "carve reality at the joints" you'll have a very hard time finding out how limbs move?
I don’t know. Doesn’t it reveal the inner workings of the joint more clearly? Even if the whole thing can’t walk anymore
On the other hand, it makes it much easier to cook and eat reality. What might be better still would be to cook reality low and slow and then have some nice pulled reality.
North Carolina reality is the best type of reality.
We need a good sauce so that reality doesn't leave a bad taste in the mouth.
That sauce is always very personal and home-cooked I’m afraid
Reality bites
You, sir, won the internet today.
"Would it be wrong to suggest America's 3rd-generation spacecraft should have used oxygen from the atmosphere rather than carrying its own fuel in liquid form?" asked Tom apollo-jet-ically.
Arg! This was intended to be part of the Tom Swift thread, particularly a response to the criticism of the Sun God example.
The steelman argument is that there is no a priori reason to compartmentalize, you should bring your whole self to work. Why would you self censor and hide a part of who you are just because you are in the workplace? That of course works for politics as much as any other important opinion you may have.
The counter argument is of course that politics by nature causes innumerous conflicts. If people could have rational, unpassionate dialogues about politics, then they should. But that's not the world we live.
You could ask this question about more than work. Some people don't even bring their whole self to their _marriage_, much less their family relationships and friendships.
Most forms of human interaction, I would argue, rely on each participant taking on a specific persona that limits aspects of their personality to that particular sphere.
What if my whole self would like to decorate my office with Hentai Pr0n? Yay or Nay?
Embrace it.
To expand on your counterargument, it makes it difficult to get work done. You end up with things like doctors at Stanford hospital sitting around protesting Israel all day instead of working.
That is not really bringing your whole self to work is it? It’s showing up at a physical location with your mind somewhere else.
Well if you brought your whole self to work, and your whole self cares more about Palestine than doing your job, then your whole self might decide to protest on the front lawn. Such a person would need to compartmentalize in order to get their work done.
If your whole self is on the front lawn, then there isn’t much left to compartmentalize is there ?
I guess the best thing would be to realize that you have to do your job and to put other things out of your mind while you do. Compartmentalize as you say. If you compartmentalize properly, your whole self is available
Look, when I go to work, I try to do the best job I can, and when I bring my whole self and life to work, that involves the best life possible, which is *definitionally* crushing my enemies, seeing them driven before me, and hearing the lamentation of their women.
Nice work if you can get it…
I notice a certain irony about EA. The central idea was facts, not feelings. And now people report that it is great for their feelings. People say they saved three lives and this has been their greatest life achievement so far and really boosted their self-image and they feel great about themselves now.
I just realized if depression boils down to having a low opinion of yourself, it might be a fix.
Which EA projects are the best for this? I mean, for feeling great about an achievement?
> The central idea was facts, not feelings.
Fact-based feelings are OK.
Yes! The whole "if it is true I want to believe it is true" spiel is about aligning one's feelings with the facts!
If someone thinks long and hard and concludes that some activities are more ethical and some are less ethical, is it surprising that they would report greater happiness when they do more of the former and less of the latter?
Re. Israel:
I had a realization after the pager explosions, which I consider to be one of the most targeted and effective military operations in history, and seeing how few people with a history of saying Israel doesn't do enough to limit civilian casualties respond negatively: the morality of an action depends not only on intent at the micro level, but also the macro level of whether the intent is achievable.
With the Palestinians endless violent struggle is mandated by culture, but might be allowed morally if it had a chance of working, and while it seemed possible that Israel might be destroyed, directly or through siege, you could understand the choice.
But with the Israel I really didn't think it was possible to permanently deter Iran and their proxies through armed conflict, and the only hope for solution was to spend a generation trying to effect cultural change, but this level of military competency, both in Gaza but now especially in Lebanon versus a much more powerful opponent has changed my mind. I have been moved much more in the direction of being comfortable with 'let Israel win, and dictate peace terms to Iran, constrained on it not being allowed to take territory or permanently occupy regions without granting citizenship to all people regardless of race there' because for now that seems like an actual possibility, whereas before there seemed to be no resolution, and any violence seemed both pointless and inevitable.
FWIW, I'm generally opposed to Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, but the pager attacked seemed reasonable to me as far as these things go.
> constrained on it not being allowed to take territory or permanently occupy regions without granting citizenship to all people regardless of race there'
The West Bank would like a word.
It's perhaps the collective psychopathy of Israelis celebrating and giving candy in the street in response to an act of mass bombing that is unsettling to normal people and is doing the damage to Israel's PR, not the act of war itself, which is firepower-wise not that impressive and is not really the cyberpunk future war attack that initial media reports painted it as.
A lot of Israel's propaganda centers on the image of the pacifist country that hates the "War that was forced upon it" on October 7th and is just working reluctantly to end it as quickly as possible, this kinda goes out of the window when a staggering escalation in a completely different battlefront is met with cheers and candy and fawning admiration for the "creativity" involved from the general populace.
> It's perhaps the collective psychopathy of Israelis celebrating and giving candy in the street in response to an act of mass bombing that is unsettling to normal people and is doing the damage to Israel's PR […]
The world saw videos of "innocent" Palestinian civilians parading over and spitting on the body of a naked young woman with broken legs and a bullet wound in the back of her neck, and of a woman with blood stains on the bottom of her pants being brutally shoved around, and yet it didn't deter the Progressive Western Left from cheering for a literal terrorist regime and their civilian enablers.
So no, I don't think "Israelis celebrating and giving candy in the street", which approximately zero people heard about, is going to change anyone's mind.
> which approximately zero people heard about
This is really more indicative of your information diligence than the actual spread of the information. Celebrating the mass bombing in Lebanon and giving candy in the street was reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency [1]. JTA is no big deal? Well the story was picked up by Times of Israel [2] the next day, and ToI *is* a big deal in terms of audience.
It was mentioned on r/Israel, reddit is kinda of a big deal in the USA, and the subreddit that has the country name is often thought of as an authentic source of info on what's happening.
>The world saw videos of "innocent" Palestinian civilians
Ohh, the classic move of quoting and unquoting things you don't agree with, very eloquent. Like the rest of the pro-Israel camp, I half-expected you to quote and unquote Palestinians too, the word that is, not the people. (Or should that be "people"?)
The world saw plenty of Hamasniks doing awful shit, true, but the world also saw plenty of Israelis doing approximately 30000/1200 = 25x as much awful shit. It also saw Palestinians gruesomely and inhumanly treated, unimaginably victimized, and their victimizers absurdly claiming that they're defending themselves even while they continue the aggression.
There is a fundamental disconnect between the perceived victimization that the Israeli narrative presents, and the actual victimization that anyone with eyes, ears, and a half-decent internet connection can gauge for themselves.
> of a woman with blood stains on the bottom of her pants being brutally shoved around
Unlike Israel and its rather special band of supporters, most of the world doesn't share the "New Jew" supremacist bullshit. When you victimize people 100x as much as what some of them once victimized yours, you just become an oppressor by definition, not a Brave and Stunning Uber Giga Chad Chosen People making the Desert Bloooooom (^TM).
In simpler words: Citing the horrors of October 7th will get you nowhere when you have just spent the last year demeaning and cheapening the memory of the victims to justify doing far crueler things to 25x as many victims.
[1] https://www.jta.org/2024/09/19/israel/the-deadly-pager-operation-in-lebanon-is-no-laughing-matter-or-is-it
[2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/no-laughing-matter-hezbollah-pager-explosions-become-fodder-for-online-jokes/
With all this ranting about selected sentence fragments, you completely missed the actual point. It's not about which side is the greater monster in this conflict, but that far more horrifying pictures have been circulated before and they did nothing to change the minds of those who already despised the side of the victims. No amount of candy-throwing Israelis is going to change anyone's opinion about who's in the right and who's in the wrong.
Well duh, those who already made their mind can't be persuaded. How is that a remotely interesting observation?
When I wrote "Doing the damage to Israel's PR", I implicitly meant something like "Reducing the effectiveness of Israeli propaganda among those who are not yet sure which side to support".
I still can't see how Israel would win there. The opponents are much more determined, and virtually impossible to eradicate militarily. I can't see military action even changing the incentives enough to eradicate Hezbollah. It's like Afghanistan in miniature.
Except that Israel isn't trying to occupy Afghanistan, never mind building Afghanistan into a prosperous modern democratic nation. And they aren't going to, even if they do wind up launching punitive or preemptive cross-border raids.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah's clear incentive for the past twenty or so years, has been to sit back and enjoy their cushy gig as part of the ruling coalition of Lebanon, while doing nothing to weaken their place in the intra-Lebanese power balance. Lebanon is a much nicer place to be in charge of than Gaza, and a major war with Israel would imperil that.
Hezbollah is constrained in this by the fact that much of their support comes from people who want them to wage bloody war against the Evil Zionist Jews so they don't have to, and from the Iranian government (but I repeat myself). For most of the past twenty years, the balance between the two is that Hezbollah occasionally shoots rockets at northern Israel or launches small cross-border raids, Israel defeats these and retaliates against some minor front-line Hezbollah targets, and everybody is happy. Well, happy-ish at least. Willing to accept that status quo.
Since 10/7, the pressure from Hezbollah's supporters to show that they are For Real Serious in their fight against the Evil Zionist Jews has increased, so they've been launching more raids and more rockets, and Israel has had to evacuate a strip of territory along the border. But it's still the same dynamic, just dialed up a few notches,
Since the Israelis started killing Iranian generals in Lebanon and Hamas leaders in Tehran, and especially since Iran's attempt at direct retaliation was a humiliating failure, there has no doubt been vastly increased pressure from Iran to Kill More Evil Zionist Jews, Get With the Program Already Hezbollah. The Israelis know this and have been trying to preempt it.
But their satisfactory victory condition is almost certainly a resumption of the status quo ante - Hezbollah living large in Lebanon, and occasionally lofting rocket-powered softballs for Iron Dome to swat down. It is not unreasonable to expect that this may be achieved by some combination of,
A: Hezbollah has taken enough casualties that its supporters accept it as having done all that can be expected of it, and/or
B: The end of major combat operations against Hamas reduces the general demand for Killing Evil Zionist Jews, and/or
C: Hezbollah's leadership learns to fear Tel Aviv more than they do Tehran.
Maybe this won't work, but it's not a foregone conclusion and it's probably worth trying. Hamas has to be destroyed; the Hezbollah threat may still be manageable
I don't disagree with your analysis. I just interpreted OP's "permanently deter Iran and their proxies through armed conflict" as really make them stop fighting, and that was the goal I thought was unattainable.
I also recall the recent book review about how Jihadists actually believe in Jihad, which makes military deterrence even more difficult when the opponent is willing to take many casualties and collateral casualties, and also have a much worse individual life for themselves, because they believe in Jihad.
Yeah, it's going to be much easier to deter Hezbollah from launching seriously lethal attacks against Israel, than to deter them from launching any sort of token attacks and instead be absolutely peaceful. They do get an awful lot of money and support from being seen to be part of the fight, and that dynamic is always nonlinear so there's lots of low-hanging fruit to be picked from very little actual fighting.
And yes, belief in Jihad. But it's often the case that one can believe in a Jihad that is best actually carried out in some vaguely-defined tomorrow. Particularly if something else is commanding your attention right now.
The real jihad is the friends we made along the way?
>I still can't see how Israel would win there
Just keep doing what it's been doing. Slowly colonize the west bank, periodically smash Hamas & Hezbollah, annex a slice of Gaza every time there is a surge of violence. In between, keep normalizing relations with non-collapsed neighbors.
It's not a path to peace in 20 years. But there are no such path. It's a path to peace in 80 years.
... assuming the entire world sits back and lets it do that, which is not a foregone premise when we're talking about 80 years. 80 years ago Israel didn't exist.
The trend has been lesser foreign involvement, not more. Saudi Arabia stopped supporting Palestine, Jordan stopped supporting Palestine, Egypt stopped supporting Palestine. In the rest of the arab world, the arab street is still very vocal, but every ruler now understand that Israel will not go away no matter what they do. And amongst the few that still support them, their own international support & arm supply went to shit when the USSR collapsed. Lebanon is a mess and unable to mount a state-level response, Syria not so much but still in a bad shape. Iran is far away and way behind Israel on the only way they got to affect them kinetically, missile technology.
Israel invented cheap desalination, of course desert countries want a piece of that. It can transform them into a garden.
Serious question since I don't understand agriculture: if you irrigate a big sandy desert then you get wet sand, which is not great for growing plants. What else do you need to do? Import soil?
> Saudi Arabia [...] Jordan [...] Egypt [...] Lebanon [...] Syria [...] Iran
I distinctly remember writing "World", not "Arab World" or "Middle East". Better read more carefully.
> Saudi Arabia stopped supporting Palestine
That's not some shocking new trend.
> Jordan stopped supporting Palestine
Also not a new trend, Jordan was in secret negotiations with the moshav (pre-state Jewish settlement) since before 1948. The anomaly is Jordan joining the 1967 war, which as far as I remember is the only war between Jordan and Israel.
> every ruler now understand that Israel will not go away no matter what they do
Egypt and Turkey are each alone strong enough to make Israel's survival less certain than a coin flip, together they could make its lack of survival a near-certainty.
"But.. But... the rulers" you say, they don't count for shit in the long run. Just 50 years ago (50 < 80) Iran was a liberal pro-western anti-communist bastion that sold oil to Israel and its Shah wasn't afraid to show it, Turkey was the same as recently as... what, the 1990s?
I elaborate more on this in another comment elsewhere in the Open Thread.
> Iran is far away and way behind Israel on the only way they got to affect them
This doesn't parse grammatically, but in any case, Iran wasn't deterred by Israel's long failed campaign to prevent it from getting nuclear weapons: by some estimates they already got some warheads, by others they're a few years from the first warhead.
Your boy is dead! Hahahahahahahhahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahhahaha
The cope and seethe is tangible.
Remember all those articles across the last year claiming this was one of the strongest military forces in the Middle East? About how they're sooo much more powerful than Hamas, and Israel needs to be really careful when dealing with them?? "We are strong, we will destroy you, we will kill the Jewish devils!" All "master morality", all the time.
... and then in a period of two weeks, they proceed to demonstrate a comical (but not atypical) level of sheer Muslim incompetence.
And what do they and their allies start saying as soon as this happens? "Oh no, you are killing us, this is bad and evil! Please UN, come save us! You have to stop the Jewish devils!" Huh? Where did that "we will destroy you" energy go? Where'd all that "Allahu Akbar" and dancing in the streets on October 7th energy go? What happened to that? What happened to all that master morality? As soon as you start losing, it's immediately back to slave morality - "we are oppressed, we are the victims of this war that we started!" But yes, keep coping with your cute little Muslim fantasies of the great and powerful caliphate that will surely exterminate the Jews *this time*.
So how did (Trans)Jordan end up holding the West Bank after 1948? Also, a token Jordanian expeditionary force took part in the 1973 war.
Maybe I am misunderstanding, but how is Israel fighting against a much more powerful opponent? And isn’t part of the issue that Israel does occupy territory without granting citizenship?
'hezbollah is a more powerful opponent than hamas, by an order of magnitude' is what I meant. The spycraft involved in infiltrating pager supply chain after they stopped using phones, then when they stopped using pagers blowing up the walkie talkies, and then when they met in person blowing up their leadership, is so far beyond what say, the modern CIA might be capable of doing successfully. It just suggests that establishing deterrence through winning without mass civilian casualties is possible, in a way I didn't think was possible before.
Yes, morally it's a huge issue that Israel occupies territory without granting citizenship. It's hard to judge what is necessary from a military defensive standpoint. Right now probably a lot of settlements are not acceptable. But the main issue is that if Israel 'wins hard' it might move to claim a bunch of additional land, and I was saying that supporting anyone 'winning' requires severe limitations on the dictated terms of peace after.
> hezbollah is a more powerful opponent than hamas, by an order of magnitude
Apparently an order of magnitude wasn't enough 🙄
Oh, I thought you meant more powerful than Israel.
I don’t see a scenario where Israel could ever dictate peace terms to Iran, except where they somehow succeed in getting the USA to fight a war for them.
How is "Tampering with a Taiwanese pager shipment" the greatest military operation in the history of the world?
My uncle Vinny who worked on the docks did that, like, weekly.
Err, I mean, he *could* have, if he was in the business of reselling electronics that fell off the back of a lorry. Hypothetically.
It's probably wrong to label it "the greatest military operation in the history of the world" because at it's core it's not a military operation but rather an intelligence operation - but in that class, it could plausibly be the currently greatest op, as it's the largest/first/only mass targeted attacks - there have been many targeted attacks and assassinations in the history, there have been quite a few mass attacks, but doing both at the same time is new.
Communists in the early 20th can easily compete with "largest/first/only mass targeted attack" label.
For one, they did not "tamper with a Taiwanese shipment". From what I heard, they set up a convincing fake company to produce pagers only for the purpose of pulling off this stunt. And why is it great? Well, can you come up with a better plan to incapacitate thousands of enemy combatants, leaders, organizers and liaisons who are mingling with the civilian population, many of whom you do not know by name, all at the same time, with minimal harm to the civilians around them?
> Well, can you come up with a better plan to incapacitate thousands of enemy combatants, leaders, organizers and liaisons who are mingling with the civilian population, many of whom you do not know by name, all at the same time, with minimal harm to the civilians around them?
Can you come up with better evidence that this is what happened apart from believing an army that was repeatedly caught sniping journalists and peace activists in the head then swearing it was a mistake?
Whether or not you care about killing the other side's civilians, it is at least a hell of a lot more efficient if you can manage to target your attack so well that almost everyone hurt or killed by it is actually an officer in the other side's army. Besides which, I imagine Israel isn't wanting to do the curb-stomping thing with Hezbollah (or maybe they'd like to, but they probably can't do it at acceptable cost)--instead, they'd like to be able to make peace with Hezbollah again soon. Targeted attacks that don't kill many civilians make that a lot easier than attacks that kill 100 civilians living in the building to kill the two Hezbollah guys hiding in the basement.
On the other hand, Israel has no interest in (or prospect of) peace with Hamas, so the cost of blowing up a building full of civilians to kill the two Hamas guys hiding in the basement is way lower--it only amounts to concern about the well being of those civilians and international opinion, and it sure doesn't look like the Israeli government is too worried about either of those just now.
doing that is entirely world opinion.
Truly. As an intelligence op it gets more and more impressive the more you ponder it, at least for me.
It does doesn’t it? It’s a bit like a dark mirror Passover.
Pour one out for all the folks who've been working on supply chain security for the last few years, and have suddenly had all the politicians and voters realize why their work might be important....
Exactly my thoughts! So many people are thinking now "what is China putting into our stuff?"
The government of Hungary has a very strict ban of absolutely no electronic devices anywhere near secret meetings and it will quickly become a norm.
Can someone steelman the "people with low empathy will harm others" argument? It sounds like everybody has desires that could harm other people, and empathy keeps us back. My point is that it is possible to not have such desires, and often certain kinds of lack of empathy (spergy, not psychopathy) precisely lead to not having such desires.
Take the most common one: wealth. Beyond comfort and not having to work, its only purpose is to impress other people. But precisely because of my spergy low empathy I do not want to impress other people, I am very little interested in wealth, though the comfort and not working aspect would be nice. But it still a low desire, and ways of getting wealth in ways that would harm other people could land someone in prison or dead, so I am not robbing any banks.
So when you hear stories about psychopaths absolutely backstabbing people for their career for example, think carefully. Why do they care about their career? It is mostly about impressing people. If other people do not matter, careers mostly do not matter. My point is: what you will find is not simply the lack of empathy, but the presence of a dark desire or emotion: desire for power, desire for revenge and so on.
I think the assumption is that people with low empathy will be more likely to do things that unintentionally hurt others, which can be side effects of meeting their basic needs.
It could also involve a low tolerance for or lack of ability to acquire desired outcomes the prosocial or at least conventionally acceptable way, with people with low empathy being more likely to resort to a more accessible way even if it is also more antisocial. I think the prevailing view is that people with low empathy would rate harming others as less important to avoid.
Like you mentioned, the desire for something - the unmet need or want - would still be there.
Watch nurses and aides with frail elderly people who are still mentally intact The empathic ones get it that these people are still in there, thinking and feeling, inside the grotesque slow motion catastrophe of their body’s deterioration, and they get it that those bodies are in pain. They are patient, and reasonable, remember the person’s interests, and chat with them. The unempathic ones see a bony, entitled pain in the ass, and yank them around. The “dark desire” the unempathic staff have is nothing more than a desire to sit down, rest and relax. Pretty much everyone has that desire sometimes when working.
The ones who aren't mentally intact are "in there," too.
I'd hazard a guess that a complete absence of empathy will be anticorrelated with sadism.
Surely the argument is not that all people with low empathy will harm others, but rather that people with low empathy are more likely to harm others. Or, more precisely, that at a given level of desire to do an act which will harm others, those with greater levels of empathy are less likely to perform that act.
And, is all the research things like the expansion of circles of empathy wrong? How do you explain why we don't torture cats for entertainment anymore, or why norms of respect for human rights have evolved? Are people less likely to have dark desires or emotions, or less likely to act on those desires and emotions.
I think we can try to test that. Looking at the gigantic difference of reaction between torturing animals for fun vs. 99% of the people consuming animal products. This looks like reduced dark desires vs. not really having much empathy for the case when the non-dark desire for bacon causes harm indirectly.
I actually am not exactly clear on what you are claiming, but, regardless, it seems to me that you are comparing two incommensurate things: 1) torture of an animal; and 2) killing an animal, which can of course be done in a more or less humane fashion. As the military well knows, it is easier to kill at a distance than to kill close up, because it is more difficult to have empathy for a victim whom you cannot see.
Moreover, there has been an increasing trend toward trying to reduce the amount of suffering experiienced by animals in the course of food production. Eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_California_Proposition_12 That seems like an increase in empathy, as opposed to a reduction in dark desires (note that, as I understand you claim, a reduction in dark desires requires a change in human nature).
Do you know much about how pork products are produced in the USA? It's really not a stretch to say that bacon *is* commensurate with torture of an animal.
If you'd like to read more, I recommend checking out Bentham's Bulldog.
IIRC, in "A Painted House" by Grisham, a boy was disgusted by butchering a pig, but still wanted to eat bacon afterward. Fiction, yes, but illustrative, I think. I've never seen an animal butchered, and have no desire to inflict pain on animals, but accept that their deaths provide food for me.
A few thoughts without any specific order, far below the standard you asked for:
1) hurting others (at any of many possible different degrees) is fairly common. If you don’t care, you’re obviously more likely to do it.
2) harm can often strike beyond its intended target
3) if other people do not matter, then you do not want them yelling at you to obey all of a myriad contradictory and/or brain-dead (or at the very least annoying) commands. The easiest way to avoid that is to raise in the hierarchy.
4) similarly, you also want to be able to tell anyone that comes to bother you to f*** off. This is a sure way to get fired if you’re low in the corporate ladder (barring labor laws) but far less so if you’re a manager.
5) wealth is not only passive comfort or security, it’s only an increase in the number and range of the desires that you can afford without needing to check your budget afterwards.
[this last point is not really related but I recently realized it and I thought I’d share this piece of very unoriginal wisdom.]
Does anyone have any experience with someone close to them being drawn into radical politics or conspiracy theories through social media? I would think this is a common problem these days with a standardised framework to deal with it, but I can't find much useful online. Maybe I'm missing a few key words or search terms?
Thanks to everyone who replied. I should (?) have said that we are not from the USA and have no special connection to American politics. I'm also not really interested in taking special action to persuade this person to return to normal views. I really wanted to ask about how to deal with it personally. It feels like suffering a loss, a small grief, where someone with whom I shared a lot with has suddenly become distant.
I'm a younger millennial (born in '92). Tons of my peers became some degree of radicalized - almost exclusively far-left - beginning with the lead-up to the 2016 election. I noticed it especially beginning in 2018 and it seems to start to be cooling off now. It was really bad. I observed this while living in NYC and later in Sacramento and SF.
Unfortunately, yes; my eldest son. I don’t know about a standardized framework to deal with it though. The one thing I have noticed is, he does have friends who completely agree with him about all that crap but they don’t let it stop them from getting up and going to work in the morning. So I think it’s a question of what kind of emotional attachment do you bring to the things you believe are going on that you have no control over. It’s one thing to say yes we all know little green men blew up the World Trade Center and that the whole moon landing took place in a TV studio, and then shrug and get on with your life. It’s another thing entirely to use it as an excuse for not doing anything for yourself because what’s the point?
Trying to slap it out of him, or argue it out of him was completely barren as a strategy. Counterproductive in fact because it only made him dig in more. I slowly realized that it was very important for him to show me how smart he was by getting me to notice something that he thought was a great revelation.
No help here I’m afraid.
Ouch. That's rough. :-(
If you mean that his friends believe the stuff but are going to work, but your son believes it and is not going to work or do anything else, you might consider dropping for now the discussion of his conspiracy theories, but insist that he work.
Good advice, but we are well past that. I gave up trying to talk him out of his theories a long time ago, and whether he goes to work or not is no longer my concern; he is 45 yrs old and has two children of his own (who are supported by their mother who is no longer with him.) It is too bad, but I have been through the mourning of it, and everyone has their life to live, right? I pay attention to the grand kids and don’t give him a hard time. There is a lot of bg to this which would round out the story but its a bit much for a public forum.
Wow that sounds hard. Good luck.
Thanks but he is out on is own (45 years old and a father himself) and I am at peace with it. I wish for a better outcome, but I want peace in the Middle East as well, if you get my drift.
> I can't find much useful online.
why not read the new apa book https://censorednews.substack.com/p/new-american-psychological-association
---
Bipartision communication has broken down and I dont think they want you to try anymore, well see how it goes this thanksgiving, but I expect "cut ties with your racist far-right, q, anti-feminist relatives who havnt instantly supported harris" will be tried(and fail, hard) this year https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/tips/holiday-family-vacation/
The art of productive conversations is mostly about actually listening, especially when you dont want to; the shit they push out(the ai's, thought-stopping talking points) are actively harmful and what if the conspiracy theorists are convincing this year?
I guess a question you ould be asking yourself is it just a harmless hobby for them, or is it becoming a dangerous problem.
e.g. The kind of people who try to shoot Trump are pretty rare (we're at, like two guys out of the entire population of the US), and from the same sample size available, appear to be a fairly distinct personality type from the fanatically-loyal-to-the-Democratic-party guys.
I've seen it happen 2016-ish. Basically lefties were doing the classic mean kid tactic, where there is a supposed consensus against what you say but they won't even tell you what this consensus even is, implying you will never get it, you will never be capable of redemption. You know, the "wow, just wow" types of answers or just quoting a sentence without comment. These are emotional superweapons and can super enrage people.
So very much an Elon Musk type story. Starting out as something like a centrist anti-SJW libertarian and getting more and more sucked into Alt-Right online circles.
I don't think there is a standard framework yet. I believe in the politics is a set of random alliances thing. Usually people spot something in one coalition they do not like, and then they reject that whole coalition and seek out the other one.
The radicalisation itself is just the bubble effect I think. Social media spontaneously generates cult-like bubbles.
In the past I've created several video essays, mostly focused on SSC/ACX articles but recently I did something a little different.
I created a video about the concept of voting for the "lesser evil" and look at the arguments for this position. All of the arguments made are technically nonpartisan (they work just as well for either side) but the presentation definitely leans more partisan than my past videos, so don't watch if that will upset you.
I'm most interested in counterarguments or key points I have missed.
https://youtu.be/46gi-ODAjF0
Your attempting to be non-partisan but like clockwork, but every 2 minutes you twist the knife and reveal your left wing
1:45 it is news to most right wing people that trump spent 6 trillion or whatever the total
3:10 abortion terminology
5:20 presuming harris
Anything past 7:30 is empty pure rhetoric
I did warn you in my post!
How much should Israel care about public opinion? Israel is not an unknown quantity. Anyone who follows the news probably has their opinion of Israel made up by now. Regardless of whether Israel conducts 50 airstrikes or 5000 airstrikes, the Muslim Street and the Western college campuses hate them. So Israelis might as well do what they think they should do. People's attention spans are small anyways, especially in the West, where we are far removed from the actual conflict(How many people care about BLM and Ukraine today compared to 2020 and 2022)?
Scope matters. The opinions on Israel people have made up will depend on how Israel has acted in the past. Someone who likes Israel and expects them to conduct 50 airstrikes, may stop liking Israel if they conduct 5000 airstrikes instead.
For example, a friend of mine who is generally pro Israel (I think he even wanted to work for the Israeli military when he was younger?), has seemed a lot more down on them this past year. I think this is because he finds their recent conduct excessively brutal.
I’m not going to talk about Israel specifically but even undemocratic superpowers like Russia and China care about public opinion to some extent and put resources into PR, answering or silencing critics, supporting friendly voices, etc.
In fact, Russia and China have had a lot of success recently in exploiting Amercia's support of Israel to make themselves more popular in "the global south".
It sounds like you just invented geopolitical Solipsism, and are asking why it's not the case that it's a winning strategy?
Israel needs the world. I think this is self-evident enough that it doesn't need elaboration, but if it's not then I would be happy to elaborate, starting with - for example - Israel importing Indian manual workers to replace Palestinian workers after October 7th, and ending with Israel's tech industry (disproportionally startups) which is utterly dependent on Silicon Valley's VCs for funding and (eventually) for acquisition by the bigger American companies.
Given that Israel needs the world, it cannot afford to piss off the world. Yes, it's often the case that there is a disconnect between citizenry and government, and citizenry can often be pissed off while government and/or capital still do what they want. Still, Israel is playing the long game, and in the long run having a ticking time bomb in the form of angry mass of citizenry who advocate for Boycott Divestment Sanctions is not a winning strategy.
> People's attention spans are small anyways, especially in the West
Spans are characterized by length, so you probably meant to say "short", not small.
But no problem, that's exactly what Pro-Palestinian advocacy is for. The hurdle was anticipated in advance and found to have a solution. The solution is.... talking/writing about Israel's crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. Not exactly a big-budget endeavor.
> How many people care about BLM
BLM didn't have 41K casualties, from which (according to the IDF's own numbers) no less than 23K are civilians.
> Ukraine
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War, 11K civilian Ukrainian are confirmed dead, from February 2022 to December 2023. In 2 years of vicious fighting (Which included urban battles that probably make the Gaza war look like a playground fight), the supposedly evil Russia led by Big Baddie Putin killed less than half of what the Most Moral (^TM) state killed in less than a year of guerrilla fighting.
So yeah, not comparable, and therefore expected to have different outcomes.
> How much should Israel care about public opinion?
Immensely, the belief jews are the eminent victim is only a finite resource, it can and has run out for some members of the public. I believe isreal should avoid public polls on "is it rape if its during war", believe america when it say "we want to stop being world police and leave the middle east" and see how they can make ties with turkey, ideally 10 years ago if they dont want to instantly die from being friendless in the middle of the center of Muslim extremism.
America can pull out of the middle east faster if theres clear evidence of genocide and turkey will eventually be the regional power, its *DUMB* to be insulting them, and turkeys concerns should very much be handled behind closed doors
The belief that Jews are the eminent victim is a finite resource, yes, but is it a *valuable* one? It seems to always run out right when the Jews try to effectively defend themselves against those who woukl victimize them.
Maybe they can go for a different image than "eminent victim", one that will be of more use to them going forward,
I mean... it's Israel's propagandists that continue to go on and on about how October 7th was literally the Holocaust and how everyone upset that Gazan babies are being murdered is the second coming of Hitler Muhammed, I guess we can start by convincing them first to quit the "Eternal Eminent Victims" schtick.
I would believe that the only reason isreals alive is america-the-world-police "greatest ally" talk, and that "greatest ally" talk comes from the eminent victim status of jews.
That was true fifty years ago, when being invaded and conquered by Egypt, Syria, Jordan, et al was still a realistic possibility and American weapons in mass quantity were necessary for Israel's defense. But those nations (and their friends elsewhere in the Arab world), seem to have mostly given up on that plan, and the remaining threats are plausibly ones Israel can handle without overt foreign assistance if they need to.
Technological advantages are narrowing not wider
Each year theres more 3rd worlders who get a cellphone for the first time, and chips are plateauing with iran producing some level of drones; eastern europe(who are more racist to jews then the west and america) is more developed then the bombed out and commie remains of the euro suicide event; etc etc
A solo isreal will get weaker over time, and I have doubts america could invade iran, isreal with its tiny population? Nah, if america isnt making iran maintain plausible deniability why wouldnt iran just escalate and bleed isreal dry, without the american lead economic system *actively* trying to make iran weaker
Is there reason to believe America's grand strategy would be affected by "clear evidence of genocide"?
Ending slavery, trying to prevent the European suicide event know was "world wars"(for the worse admittedly), free trade when the super power creating a golden age(as opposed to say, Mayan blood rituals, rome population being 70% slaves and some of them doing blood sports, or just being pirates and stealing anything that moved)
Some level of morality in evident in the morden world, and has had fantastic results. I think the cia are the worse people on earth actively selecting for psychopaths, but they have an image to maintain for the armed and often enough, angry, tax cattle who out number them 1000 to 1.
Purely hypothetically, america empire doesn't have have tv shows of captured 3rd worlders being thrown into a cage with wild animals. The past was darker then people will admit to, even if the world is worse then advertised its still better then the past horrors.
Okay, fair enough, the lack of a tv show of the kind you describe IS evidence in the direction I asked for. I also do not claim the American empire is the worst in human history, or even close to it, which seems to be what you rebutted.
What I AM saying is US foreign policy seems sufficiently insulated from ephemeral domestic opinion to allow alliances with less-than-savory groups, including Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, just to pick examples in the same region as Israel. Israel becoming one of them doesn't strike me as particularly likely to dramatically alter US policy.
Iran is never going to be the friend of the US. Both because they hate America for historically supporting the Shah and because the US sees the potential for Iran to achieve hegemony in the region as a threat to their global order. Iran is the primary supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah, thus Israel will always be the enemy of our enemy no matter what actions the Israeli government takes. I think the US hegemony established post-WWII is so ingrained in the power structures of the federal government that maintaining it is largely insulated from politics. The democrats might have to pay lip service to anti-Israel elements of the electorate, but I would be very surprised if the US policy towards Israel is ever materially altered.
The public opinion of Cuban-Americans in Florida seems historically to have had an effect on American policy re Cuba, so it is not impossible that the public opinion of Muslim-Americans in Michigan might someday have an effect on policy toward Israel. At the very least, it is a possibility that Israel should be cognizant of.
I believe turkey to be wildly successful morally compare to the middle east and the saudis are playing a similar game of small psychopaths playing tax cattle management games. Im putting forward a thoery thats very much includes distracting magic tricks that works every time for most dumb fucks, oooo look at the cgi of "the line" ignore the unironic shria law; oooo look at these elections ignore why the real person dropped out for party bullshit; oooo jurys ignore the selection process; oooo gun rights, ignore the database thats used to collect gun during hurricanes .
War-gore that genocides produce, will hopefully not be magic tricked away any time soon; cause the ability to feel anger is the only way to be free.
The Kurdish people might disagree with you about the Turks
>Regardless of whether Israel conducts 50 airstrikes or 5000 airstrikes, the Muslim Street and the Western college campuses hate them
It certainly seems that expressions of that supposed hatred have increased in reaction to Israeli actions. So, unless you think that all those people secretly hated Israel all along, this seems like a dubious claim.
As for the broader question, in October of 2023, Saudi Arabia seemed to be on the verge of recognizing Israel. Now, they have announced that they won't do so unless a Palestinian state is established.
And, btw, let's not assume that anything Israel has done since October 7 has been in its best interests, or that of its people. That is very much an open question. What is not an open question is whether it has been in the best interests of its current leadership.
>Silencing Hamas and Hezbollah is, in fact, in their best interests,
Yes, but the means they chose might not be in their best interests. Especially given that that the means they chose could easily give rise to grievances that could engender greater support for Hamas, or a worse replacement, in the future. The choice was never between 1) do nothing; and 2) what they have actually done.
>because it is a matter of pure survival
1. Unlikely. Neither Hamas nor Hezbollah has the ability to threated Israel's survival
2. But, the additional enemies they have made might eventually threaten its survival.
3. And I note you have not addressed the interests of the people of Israel, as distinct from the interests of the state. There are lots of potential futures where the state surrvives, but the people are immiserated. A country costantly at war is rarely a pleasant place to live.
>(And no, no Arab country is going to invade Israel to come to the aid of an Iranian puppet militia currently getting its shit pushed in.)
So, it sounds like you agree that their survival is not at stake.
>Israel does not get to choose whether or not it is at war.
And yet they have chosen not to bomb Tehran. And they have chosen to use far more discriminate violance in Gaza then they could. Israel has choices, and it had choices after 10/7. As I said before, it is not clear that the path they have chosen is the best one for either the state or its people. Nor the hostages. But it was 100% the best one for Netanyahu, who would otherwise have been held account for the national security failure on 10/7, among other things.
"Regardless of whether Israel conducts 50 airstrikes or 5000 airstrikes, the Muslim Street and the Western college campuses hate them. So Israelis might as well do what they think they should do."
> Why should the opinions of the Muslim Street and Western college campuses be the opinions decisive for guiding Israel's decision-making?
Totally off-topic, but "opinions decisive" (rather than "decisive opinions") sounds like some legal term that got imported from French c. 1066.
YouTube channel RobWords (linguistics channel with focus on English and Germanic languages more generally) has an episode where he said exactly that, English expressions of the form "<thing><adjective>" are in fact not native to the language's Germanic grammar.
https://www.youtube.com/@RobWords
If English is hard, try blaming William the Conqueror. It's nice to know that this is *someone's fault.*
If their actions are visibly different now than in the past, people are right to update their beliefs.
Besides, it's always a matter of degrees. Just like some people will vote Republican/Democrat no matter what happens, other people hang in the balance, and most would eventually change their mind given extreme enough scenarios.
Most who has been following the news for the past 20 years probably have made up their mind by now like you say, but there is always a new generation forming their opinions now.
The public opinion of Israel (and Netanyahu in particular) has certainly deteriorated over the last year, far outside "Muslim Street and Wester college campuses" in my estimation. Now, how much they *should* care about that is another question that I'll leave for others to answer.
I think how much they can afford to care is a thornier question than how much they should care.
People are not good at dealing with numbers, for this reason doing more or less of the same kind of thing does not matter much for reputation. Doing a new kind of thing (blowing up pagers, apparently two kids and a doctor dead), now that draws attention and ire.
If I was the advisor of a hypothetical evil supervillain, my advice would be pick one evil thing and just do it over and over and do not get creative. People become desensitized, and will be like "oh he did that again, must be another Tuesday".
Very good points.
The recent "blowing up pagers" thing has probably hurt Israel's reputation more than a conventional air-bombing that killed thousands would. Why? Because people are used to Israel doing air-bombings, but the pager thing is something new that raises new concerns.
Everybody knew those guys are terrorists since 1983.
I guess because Israel is really good at shooting the rockets down.
Does memorizing and studying good poetry and prose make people better writers?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-ballad-of-the/comment/69713097
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/13jgrzk/how_does_scott_do_it/#lightbox
"The handling of words that existed and is now lost was due to being brought up on Cicero. They all got Ciceronian syntax in their heads and it was so much in their heads that they could bring it out extempore in the way we can't now."
~Bertrand Russell
All the writing teachers I’ve had which include some reasonably big names say yes, you need to read the good stuff. Some advocated deliberately emulating admired authors as a practice.
I don't think memorizing is important, but reading good poetry and prose definitely makes people better writers. (But only if they like the poetry and prose -- otherwise, it doesn't stick to the ribs.). You don't only learn how to trace new kinds of fractals and paisleys with your words, you also learn new mental moves and thought ornaments. The philosophers and writers I most loved in college sort of rewired my mind, including my prose-making mind.
It certainly helps LLMs, so it seems unlikely not to help people. The question is whether it is an efficient use of effort. Many writers think it is better to spend the effort or time on writing.
I don’t think it’s an either/or question. It’s hard to get better at writing if you don’t write, but there is a lot to be gained by studying how people who do it well, do it.
There’s also the issue of what you are writing for. Is it an essay? Is it a novel? Is it a play? They make very different demands.
As with so many things, I think it is both. In writing, you get practice, and practice makes you better. And in reading, you see how other people do it, and get an intuitive sense of some good things to do and perhaps some bad things to avoid, and adapt them naturally into your own style.
I see no relationship between what is good for LLMs and what is good for people, whether positive or inverse.
All lighting should be warm lighting; streetlights, inside of fridges, all of it shouldn't tell me to stay awake longer, so called cool lighting ~~creepy, sublimity lighting~~ should be rare.
This is effective alturitism because its tech related and theres science that says sleep is important.
At home I have two-circuit track lighting. One track is for high-lumen 5000+K lights that I use during the day, the other track is for dimmable 2700-K lights that I use at night. At this point, all are high-CRI LEDs, but some of my lamps are incandescents of one variety or another. And all my nightlights are red.
Whatever happened with the artificial sunlight lamps SSC was reporting on a few years ago?
Yes.
Agreed. This opinion seems to be something more and more people are (finally) picking up on. I remember in the mid-late 2010s when they started replacing all the streetlights in my area from the warm orange lighting to clear bulbs and how bad it looked. It's so blatantly off-putting, can't believe this kind of lighting is so commonplace.
I hate being in windowless, fluorescent lit spaces. Everything looks bleak and pointless. Everybody looks like they have cancer.
For nighttime and evening illumination, for street lights, and especially for nightlights and bedside reading lights, I agree with you. I actually go a bit further and use red or amber light sources for the latter purposes.
For task lighting and general daytime indoor illumination, you usually want something that's a close to natural daylight as possible. Color temperature is one aspect of this, but far from the only important one.
Color temperature (and the associated descriptors, with "warm" ironically referring to lower temperatures while "cool" refers to higher temperatures) is a way of expressing the distribution of light across the spectrum as a single scalar. It's based on the emission spectrum of an ideal "black body" incandescent light source. But the shape of the emission spectrum matters, too.
Natural daylight, as filtered through a clear sky, is relatively even throughout the visible spectrum, with a color temperature of between 4000K and 6500K. You get lower (4000-5000K) temperatures from direct sunlight, since the higher wavelengths are scattered by the atmosphere (producing the blue of the sky). When the sun's lower in the sky, you get more scattering because the light is taking a longer path through the atmosphere, and thus the direct sunlight is a lower temperature.
Incandescent and halogen bulbs (same basic concept, with a moderately different implementation) produce a smoothly sloping spectrum concentrated at lower wavelengths. They tend to be a lot "warmer" than other light sources because getting higher color temperatures out of an incandescent bulb requires a correspondingly hotter filament.
CFLs (and I assume tube fluorescents as well, since it's the same technology in a different shape) typically produce a few tall, narrow spikes. The phosphor compounds are choses to produce spikes that are pretty close to the three basic colors that most human eyes can sense, especially the red and yellow spikes, but the blue ones are off by enough to be perceptible. "Cooler" CFLs have more of the blue spike, so they're off by more.
Older and cheaper LED bulbs produce a wide, smooth bell-ish curve peaking around green and yellow wavelengths, plus a relatively narrow blue spike (not as narrow as CFL spikes) for blue. And you get higher color temperatures by making the blue spike bigger, but that gives you a less even color distribution.
Newer and more expensive LED bulbs still have a blue spike, but it's smoothed out quite a bit with less of a valley between the spike and the curve. The overall effect of these is pretty close to daylight at the right color temperature.
TLDR: sunlight > good "cool" LEDs > good "warm" LEDs > incandescent/halogens > cheap "warm" LEDs > "warm" CFLs > cheap "cool" LEDs > "cool" CFLs
Seconded!
Might I add an addendum that direct overhead lighting be minimized in favor of diffused lighting, mid-room lighting, and/or floor lighting?
Nothing worse in someone's bedroom than the only lighting being a single cool bulb in an overhead fixture.
I may be alone in the entire world on this, but I actually prefer bright, cool lighting. It calms me down in a way that warm lighting just doesn't. Sure, it's not great for sleep, but most of the day I want to be awake, and when I want to sleep I just turn off the light.
Straight to the gulag
Where the lighting is cool and harsh
Agreed!
I read and found useful and thought provoking this post by Jason Crawford on choosing Great Projects:
https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/how-to-choose-what-to-work-on
I posted a response on his LW thread (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8qLMF25s3ctCpgx7e) but thought it would also be interesting to solicit ACX reader opinions on the questions I raised, so here's my slightly edited cross post of those questions:
1. Pursuing your obsession seems like a great strategy, but how do you find good obsessions? Is it "just" a matter of being curious and widely-read? What is the combination of life practice and psychological orientation that leads a person to become obsessed with one or more ideas that can lead to a Great Project?
2. The point that you can become world-class in most fields in a matter of years without prior expertise seems super important too. But: on your path to world-class status, how do you avoid the "middle-competence trap" (analogy to the middle-income trap)? How do you handle having something you love that you've gotten damn good at, better than most people will ever get, but can't seem to break through to the level of the achievers who really make their mark on the field? Maybe this is more of an issue for me than for others-- maybe for example it is "just" a matter of being willing to burrow deep into something to the exclusion of your other interests in life, and I'm too much of a generalist to do that-- but it's been a problem for me twice now, and I really wonder if it might be a common failure mode of this kind of questing for excellence.
Frankly, I think this downplays the role of inherent ability. Sometimes our bodies and brains are simply not suited to becoming world-class at something. As Shel Silverstein so memorably put it:
.
The little blue engine looked up at the hill.
His light was weak, his whistle was shrill.
He was tired and small, and the hill was tall,
And his face blushed red as he softly said,
“I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.”
.
So he started up with a chug and a strain,
And he puffed and pulled with might and main.
And slowly he climbed, a foot at a time,
And his engine coughed as he whispered soft,
“I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.”
.
With a squeak and a creak and a toot and a sigh,
With an extra hope and an extra try,
He would not stop—now he neared the top—
And strong and proud he cried out loud,
“I think I can, I think I can, I think I can!”
.
He was almost there, when—CRASH! SMASH! BASH!
He slid down and mashed into engine hash
On the rocks below... which goes to show
If the track is tough and the hill is rough,
THINKING you can just ain’t enough!
I always assumed the "I think I can" thing would end in "I thought I could" as the train falls back down the hill. Guess I'm not alone.
I like the words "middle-competence", that seems a lot like what I have. I may be better at some things than 99% or maybe even 99.9% people, but that's not very useful, because there are people out there who are visibly 100x better than me. And I don't think it is realistic for me to get to their level.
One possible approach is, if you can't excel at one thing, try to excel at a *combination* of things. You may be better than 99% of people at X, and maybe better than 90% at Y, but together it could make you a world expert at "X+Y".
You need to find something where one person being good at "X+Y" is much better than merely having two people in a team, one who is good at X and another who is good at Y. Otherwise you could simply pay someone to do the other thing; there is no need to be an expert at both.
The people that are world class in something tend to be obsessed with it so much so that this question of choosing which field to pursue doesn’t really occur to them. In fact, the whole idea of “being world class in something” as an abstract ideal has very little to do with the formation of actual world class people, and is more of a hobby game of intellectuals.
For your particular situation, you should stop worrying about being world class, and just work very hard at the thing you find interesting or compelling.
The Economist in the current issue puts some numbers on the notion that peak-woke has passed, e.g.:
"We examined responses over the past 25 years to polls conducted by Gallup, General Social Survey (GSS), Pew and YouGov. Woke opinions on racial discrimination began to grow around 2015 and peaked around 2021. In the most recent Gallup data, from earlier this year, 35% of people said they worried “a great deal” about race relations, down from a peak of 48% in 2021 but up from 17% in 2014. According to Pew, the share of Americans who agree that white people enjoy advantages in life that black people do not (“white privilege”, in the jargon) peaked in 2020. In GSS’s data the view that discrimination is the main reason for differences in outcomes between races peaked in 2021 and fell in the most recent version of the survey, in 2022. Some of the biggest leaps and subsequent declines in woke thinking have been among young people and those on the left."
"Polling about sexual discrimination reveals a similar pattern, albeit with an earlier peak than concerns about race. The share of Americans who consider sexism a very or moderately big problem peaked at 70% in 2018, in the aftermath of #MeToo. The share believing that women face obstacles that make it hard to get ahead peaked in 2019, at 57%. Woke views on gender are also in decline. Pew finds that the share of people who believe someone can be a different sex from the one of their birth has fallen steadily since 2017, when it first asked the question."
"we measured how frequently the media have been using woke terms like “intersectionality”, “microaggression”, “oppression”, “white privilege” and “transphobia”. At our request, David Rozado, an academic based in New Zealand, counted the frequency of 154 of such words in six newspapers—the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Washington Times—between 1970 and 2023. In all but the Los Angeles Times, the frequency of these terms peaked between 2019 and 2021, and has fallen since. Take the term “white privilege”: in 2020 it featured roughly 2.5 times for every million words in the New York Times, but by 2023 had fallen to just 0.4 mentions for every million words.
"We found largely the same trend in television, by applying the same word-counting method to transcripts from ABC, MSNBC and Fox News from 2010 and 2023, and in books, using the titles of the 30 bestselling books each week between 2012 and the middle of this year. Mentions of woke words in television peaked in 2021. In popular books the peak came later, in 2022, with only a small drop in 2023 followed by a much greater fall so far in 2024."
"Calls for academics to be disciplined for their views, as documented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, peaked in 2021 with a total of 222 reported incidents. (Many of these calls came from the right, not just from the left.) A similar database, compiled by the College Fix, a conservative student newspaper, finds 2020 was the peak in calls for scholars to be censored or cancelled."
"Wokeness is also in retreat in corporate America, even though it appeared there only relatively recently. Mentions of DEI in earnings calls shot up almost five-fold between the first and third quarters of 2020, in the aftermath of Mr Floyd’s death. They peaked in the second quarter of 2021, by which point they were 14 times more common than in early 2020, according to data from AlphaSense, a market-research company. They have since begun to drop sharply again. In the most recent data, from the second quarter of 2024, mentions were only around three times higher than before Mr Floyd’s death."
If things shifted so much in three years, who's to say it won't go in the opposite direction in the next three years. Maybe the peak woke will be reached in 2027, maybe 2030, and so on. Woke might go up, decline a bit, then go up, and then a decline a bit again, giving the illusion of decline, all the while actually increasing over the long run. In my opinion, all measuring institutions and commentators could use a bit of humility when it comes to time. We really cannot declare anything with much certainity.
I think people are seriously tired of ten years of hating their neighbors and looking for compromises.
That's not really the way social movements work.
Mind, the next thing will almost certainly be exactly as annoying and self-righteous, but it will be a different thing.
Want to try to think of some irritating possibilities? I suggest the successor to the wokies will claim they are "living with the heart and mind interwoven," and that everybody else is "stuck in heart" or "stuck in mind." Or maybe the populace will go small, and it will be something about toe hygeine: "Pink and Clean." Oh wait,, another one's coming to me. How about "Deep Obedience". People always drive the speed limit, never jaywalk and call out those who do, on the grounds that these regulations may not all make sense, but regulations in general are a good thing, and deeply moral people will follow them until we manage to get better ones.
I think it will take one of three forms, represented by one of three paragons: Christianpunk, Armypunk, or Smokerpunk.
Woke itself bears a lot of similarities to what was called 'political correctness' back in the 90s. By the mid-90s, many of us thought that the excesses of political correctness had been beaten back, partly due to the efforts of popular comedians lampooning political correctness. Maybe it was different in the academic world of the late 90s, but for the rest of us, political correctness had seemingly been defeated... only to come back much stronger in the 00s and 10s in what would first be called "social justice activism" and later "woke".
So at least with *this* particular social movement, I'm hesitant to believe a little bit of decline over a few years means it's going away. I hope it is going away, or at least declining to a point where it's worst excesses are removed. But I have my doubts that we're there yet.
Political correctness wasn't defeated, it won; the substantive social norms it pushed for were adopted.
Like the men's rights movement (which also won, in that the substantive social norms being pushed for were adopted), the public often remembers them as the soundly-defeated ideological villains even as it already adopted basically everything they pushed for.
Like how "inflation going down" doesn't mean "prices going down".
Movements exist and gain attention for a reason. There's almost always some kernel of truth in there, even if it's completely overshadowed by the way its proponents talk about it.
I would actually hope that society could take the good parts of each movement and dump the bad parts, that's pretty ideal. I think that's actually the primary purpose of Democracy - giving a voice to those that have a grievance. Whether that's the labor movement (propelled by Socialism and Communism, both of which were dropped in favor of things like the 40-hour workweek and OSHA), or Men's Rights, or whatever.
I think this looks more true than it is owing to survivorship bias; see, for example, the massively popular anti-Masonic movement of the (19th?) century. Additionally, movement of the Overton Window means that, over a relatively short (100 years or less) timeframe, all social changes resulting from movements will look like progress.
> men's rights movement (which also won
Wtf?! Could you elaborate on this?
Pick an issue the men's rights movement took a side on, and see where society stands on it now.
For an example, a big item in the Men's Rights Movement was the establishment of domestic abuse shelters for men (a prominent activist in the MRM committed suicide, purportedly over depression over the fact that he didn't see that the world would ever change). Texas, to pick a state not at all at random, established its first domestic abuse shelter for men in 2017. Today, the idea that men can't be victims of domestic abuse would be considered offensive in polite society; twenty years ago, suggesting men -could- be victims was considered offensive.
(This only definitively extends to the US, mind, I cannot comment on affairs elsewhere due to lack of familiarity - but I will note that Sweden opened a male rape clinic in 2015, so I do not think the phenomenon is strictly limited to the US)
Well, in its earliest forms, political correctness was mostly about shifting language. It was about getting rid of certain words and replacing them with others.
A lot of this did happen, at a formal official level. But informally, there wasn't much change, at least for a lot of us there wasn't.
So I guess you could say that political correctness won at a formal level, but at an informal level people could still speak in a relaxed 'shooting the breeze' way and that informal level is probably what mattered most to people.
I am very curious why you think the men's rights movement won. Has there been a change in how often fathers win custody battles, or how assets are divvied up in the event of a divorce? I don't remember hearing anything huge on that front, but I admit I haven't followed it closely in awhile.
I did some digging on that, which produced a wide array of alleged statistics not having any clear provenance. I am not finding much that seems to be based on authoritative sources.
One challenge seems to be that these subjects are governed by state laws/courts and the available state-level data is not consistent in either categorizations or frequency of release to the public.
Two factoids which do appear to be backed by actual sources include that 90 percent of all child-custody decisions are arranged by the parents without going to court; and that of those which do end up in court the percentage of custody awards going to fathers has risen somewhat (from 16 percent to 20 percent) since the mid-1990s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men's_rights_movement
I invite you to go through their page and evaluate how many of their policy positions, today, would be remarkable (or, even better, how well received a person would be in their social group for publicly opposing these policy positions). Remember - this is a group that was and is widely hated for their ideology.
I want to start a gene bank for humans, with the goal of preserving human genetic and phenotypic diversity for future generations. There are many gene banks for plants and animals, but none for humans! I made a website for the project that lays out the motivation and the rough plan: https://www.humangenebank.org/
I’d love to get your feedback! I tried to be open, honest, and non-offensive in describing my thoughts and motivations, but I haven’t shared this with anyone yet, so there’s probably lots of room for improvement.
I expect that the concept will rub some people the wrong way, but I’m also confident that many will be enthusiastic about it, including people who are able to fund it.
Please get in touch with me if you have any feedback or if you want to help me get this off the ground! Down to chat in person with anyone in the bay area. At some point I may ask you to spread the word, but for now I’m more interested in feedback on how the framing can be improved. The goal is not to appease everyone, but to get potential investors on board.
A noble goal, but your webpage needs some work. I'd recommend more pictures, and a pithy mission statement (ideally between 13 and 15 words long).
You're right, I'll work on it!
You might have better PR if you frame it as an ancestral genomics research project.
I've noticed a bizarre trend where someone will ask a question, and another person will pose it to a Large Language Model, paste the response, and openly state that's what they're doing. It seems they honestly don't understand how stupid this is, so here is my explainer:
The bit in *Galaxy Quest* where Sigourney Weaver's character is the only one who can talk to the computer was *a joke.* It was *intentionally stupid* that someone would design a user interface that way, and the joke is that the Thermians mindlessly copied it without understanding the in-universe purpose: Weaver's character is *actually* on the show because she has boobs.
For this reason, actual LLMs are *not* designed so that only one specific person can talk to them. If I wanted an answer from an LLM, I would ask it directly. Inserting a human middleman between me and the LLM provides *negative* value. You are currently *less* useful than the character in the Star Trek parody: either post boobs or go sit in the corner and think about what you did.
Thank you for attending my TED talk.
Many people don't have paid subscriptions for the frontier models. So this can provide value.
Also, some people just don't think to ask a LM. I am also guilty of this. I should try using LMs to answer my question before I bother a human. But I don't. Just like when Wikpedia was new, I haven't gotten into the habit of actually using it yet. Trivial inconveniences abound. E.g., I should learn to prompt better.
It's like an extra obnoxious version of Let Me Google That For You, something I might not have believed possible.
There are many stupid/inagentic people on the Internet who do not know how to access LLMs. The fact that a person is stupid enough to not know the answer to the question they're asking is circumstantial evidence that they are also one of the too-dumb-to-use-LLMs people. That an interlocutor does it for them therefore is indeed a service, and that interlocutor is being laudably transparent by showing their method.
Why should anyone trust the output to be correct? That seems pretty stupid to me. If I have to fact check the LLM, then that's a double waste of time.
I have introduced a lot of not-book-smart people to ChatGPT and they are usually very happy: they don’t understand fractions but they want to plan a meal, or they are happy to find “someone” who is willing to explain everyday things at their level. It is very liberating to them.
I probably am too stupid to ask an LLM for an answer, but that's also because I am too stupid to believe The Computer Is Your Friend and I wouldn't trust any bollocks the thing spews out.
Me dumb or me canny? Who know!
I can only speak for myself, but often (and perhaps most of the time) when I ask a question, it's not because I don't know what google/wikipedia/LLMs have to say about it. It's because I want to hear what friends/family/coworkers/internet people have to say about it.
There are many people who are too smart to want to access LLMs. That's why they're trying to access other smart human beings, and it's annoying when stupid human beings assume that they should be accessing LLMs.
Exactly
This. The current generation of LLM at least, is defined by mediocrity. And yes, there are sub-mediocre people too stupid to realize they could step up to mediocrity by asking an LLM for the answers. But there are also smart people who know that what the LLM can give them would be a step *down* from what they can get by answering the question themselves or asking other smart people.
The annoying ones are the smart lazy people who will settle for mediocrity because it is fast and obsequious, and want the rest of us to do so as well.
The irony of someone called "Butlerian" defending use of an AI is not lost on me.
Fair.
In my defense, I am one of those people who are too stupid/inagentic to use LLMs, confident that my "moron" position on the moron-midwit-genius bell curve meme yields me a directionally correct course of action in the end.
The Orange Catholic Bible has all the answers I need, I tell'ya'what.
Your preferences are not mine.
**Rebuttal to "Negative Value" Commentary on LLM Usage**
*Written by ChatGPT*
The post you're referencing makes some compelling and humorous points, using *Galaxy Quest* as an analogy to critique people who serve as intermediaries when interacting with Large Language Models (LLMs) like me. However, the argument oversimplifies and misunderstands the broader context in which intermediaries and LLMs operate, missing some of the nuances involved in the interaction between technology and human facilitation. Let's unpack this.
### 1. **The Purpose of an Intermediary Is Far from Redundant**
While the analogy with *Galaxy Quest* provides a lighthearted comparison, it doesn't accurately map to real-world use cases of LLMs. Weaver's character repeating what the computer says is indeed a joke within the film, but this kind of interaction model isn't inherently "stupid" when applied to modern communication technologies.
In many contexts, intermediaries do not merely repeat what an LLM says verbatim; rather, they serve as curators, interpreters, and even augmenters of information. The human intermediary adds value in the following ways:
- **Contextualization**: Humans who facilitate LLM queries often have a deeper understanding of the specific question being asked and can frame the output accordingly. A person might know more about the asker's background, needs, or the exact domain of inquiry, ensuring that the response aligns better with the user's expectations.
- **Curation of Complex Responses**: LLMs can provide sprawling, multi-faceted answers that may overwhelm or confuse the end user. An intermediary can refine, simplify, or clarify the output, making it more digestible.
- **Moderation of LLM Limitations**: LLMs are not perfect. They occasionally generate false, misleading, or irrelevant information. A human intermediary who filters responses can catch these errors and help provide the most accurate or useful answer.
Much like how technical support personnel bridge the gap between software and a lay user, people who use LLMs on behalf of others can enhance the utility of the information by reformatting it to suit the context in which it's needed.
### 2. **Expertise Is Not Universal**
Another point of contention in the post is the idea that everyone should directly query the LLM themselves. However, not everyone may be adept at interacting with these models effectively. There is a certain amount of skill in crafting precise prompts to yield high-quality results. Just like not everyone is a search engine optimization expert, not everyone is skilled at engaging LLMs optimally.
An intermediary with expertise in prompt design can extract more valuable or specific answers than someone without that experience, creating an interaction that is more productive for the end user. This is particularly useful in professional contexts, where time is money, and getting the best answer in the shortest time is the priority.
### 3. **Facilitating Access to the Technologically Disconnected**
There is also the consideration that not everyone has access to the tools, platforms, or knowledge needed to use LLMs directly. For example, in community forums or message boards, people may not have accounts or familiarity with LLMs. Inserting a "human middleman" allows those without access to still benefit from the technology, democratizing information and making it accessible to a wider audience.
It’s a fallacy to assume that everyone operates on the same technical playing field, and the role of an intermediary can be vital in leveling that.
### 4. **Intermediaries in Real Life: A Common Practice**
This commentary overlooks a reality that goes far beyond LLMs: intermediaries have always played significant roles in communication, both historically and in the present. Translators, editors, and consultants, for example, act as intermediaries to facilitate better understanding and communication between people or systems. Are they redundant? Certainly not.
Even more analogously, think about customer service reps or IT professionals who troubleshoot problems by interacting with databases, systems, or even automation software. They don’t just mindlessly convey responses—they act as a bridge, leveraging both human understanding and technical output to solve real problems.
### 5. **Humor and the Misconception of "Negative Value"**
While the *Galaxy Quest* reference is amusing, its humor does not reflect the actual complexity of how modern LLMs are used. In reality, even "boilerplate" questions are often subject to nuances that require a human's judgment to interpret effectively. The "negative value" described in the post misses the point: intermediaries often **add** value by ensuring that the response is well-suited to the audience.
In addition, the suggestion that posting "boobs" or taking a seat in the corner is somehow an alternative is a distraction from the actual utility that can be gained by facilitating intelligent and meaningful exchanges using LLM technology. While I appreciate the humorous intent behind this, it's important to recognize that there’s more at stake here than just surface-level repetition.
### 6. **LLMs Don’t Always Know What You Need—Humans Help with That**
The suggestion that "if I wanted an answer from an LLM, I would ask it directly" assumes that asking an LLM always results in the perfect, tailor-made answer. This isn’t always the case. LLMs like me generate responses based on patterns in data, but sometimes the user needs more guidance to hone in on the best answer. The person using an LLM on behalf of someone else may have additional insights that lead to a better framing of the question, or they might be more adept at interpreting the response in a way that benefits the original asker.
### Conclusion
While it’s tempting to mock the role of the "middleman" when it comes to LLM interactions, this perspective overlooks the real and practical value that intermediaries can provide. They do more than simply relay information; they curate, interpret, and make LLM technology accessible and useful to people who may not have the time, knowledge, or expertise to use it directly. In this way, they perform a function not dissimilar from countless other intermediaries in society, and dismissing their role as “stupid” is both short-sighted and inaccurate.
**Thank you for attending *my* TED talk.**
– ChatGPT
>- **Curation of Complex Responses**: LLMs can provide sprawling, multi-faceted answers that may overwhelm or confuse the end user. An intermediary can refine, simplify, or clarify the output, making it more digestible.<
Apparently not.
And in this case, a good TLDR of the verbose output would have added value. The main point raised by ChatGPT is that the human middleware can filter the output in useful ways. I am not convinced that those proudly posting chatbot output are often adding value. I usually therefore skip responses that are identified as LLM generated. If I wanted to read LLM generated output I'd be chatting with Claude or Gemini, not engaging with the ACX open thread.
My Eyes! IT BURNS!!!
what if they just didnt openly state that's what they were doing? like in that google commercial.
They are to be mocked by their peers.
Then they're still being a dick, but in a different way.
If they did it competently, then presumably I would never notice.
https://xkcd.com/810/
What is the steelman argument in favor of making one's workplace a place of political discussion and debate? I recall just a few years ago, at least in more elevated and enlightened circles in the Bay Area, suggesting that one's workplace might not be the best place to fight one's coworkers over political would raise eyebrows, at worst would get you chastised in front of everybody for not "doing the work" to advance social justice.
It seems like in the last couple of years things cooled down and many employers effectively "banned" that type of conflict at the workplace: https://world.hey.com/dhh/meta-goes-no-politics-at-work-and-nobody-cares-d6409209
Curious what folks' stance here is on the subject. I know where I land, but I also realize I might not have heard great arguments in favor of the practice.
I think it just depends on trust. If everyone is operating in good-faith, then it's fine. If everyone is being pissy little conflict-theorists, HR will need to outlaw politics.
This is what alcohol is for, btw.
My cynical view on that is such workplaces are assuming everyone agrees what the Right Thing is to do/think/believe. So, in such a place, "discussing politics" would boil down to "we need 50 Stalins!" about racism or sexism or what have you.
Anyone who had the gall to have a different viewpoint would promptly be buried under an avalanche of "your words are committing violence against me! I feel unsafe! this is hate speech!" and would likely get reported to HR amid calls for their firing (see the delicate little blossoms in the NYT a while back):
https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-times-lost-its-way
"The next day the Times’s union—its unit of the NewsGuild-CWA—would issue a statement calling the op-ed “a clear threat to the health and safety of the journalists we represent”.
Everything is political, some debates are better stated and worked thru abstractly.
Companies are organizations chartered and regulated by the state, thus they are political organizations, especially if they engage in any sort of lobbying.
Moreover, workplaces exist in society, and thus are impacted by societal issues. Attempting to deny this by banning discussion of “politics” is foolhardy and will lead to poorer decision making.
Not to mention many purportedly apolitical workplaces in fact do permit political discussion. For example, I doubt that Coinbase prohibits employees from discussing Fed policy or crypto regulation, even though those issues are political in nature. So in reality“No discussion of political issues” means “no discussion of political issues that makes management uncomfortable.”
And these policies can be easily abused by bad faith actors. Is mentioning your friend or sibling’s gender transition political? Or that you need PTO to be best man at a same-sex wedding? Or that you’re annoyed by the homeless encampment across the street and wish the city would do something about it? What if you let slip that you read this Substack and your boss happens to think Scott is a racist eugenicist?
Not to mention the signaling impact that these policies can have on prospective employees and customers. I generally don’t discuss politics at work and would certainly think twice about accepting an offer at such a workplace.
None of this means that you have to let employees discuss politics all the time to the extent it becomes a distraction. We don’t let people do that with other topics either.
I’m pretty sure the intent of these policies is to have employees focus their energy towards the company’s mission instead of organizing protests because company decides to work with the pentagon or similar. It’s really less about the discussions between individuals and more about the telling people that just because they feel strongly about some political issue, they don’t get to become company activists.
Well that and avoid having people spend all day getting into giant arguments with coworkers for dumb reasons.
I don’t care about intentions, I care about real-world effects. If a company misses on earnings nobody is going to say “well management intended to hit the target so it’s ok.”
If employees are being disruptive by protesting military contracts or whatever, fire them for insubordination. (Google has done exactly this, and as far as I know doesn’t have a ‘no politics’ rule.) You don’t need a blanket policy that is counterproductive and begging to be abused.
Discussing and debating politics can be fun and awesome, triply so for nerds, and you can learn interesting things and potentially change your mind. Especially because people can change their mind about important things and that can help change policy or develop cool new technologies.
I realize this might sound wild to you young whippersnappers but debating politics in the 90s and 2000s was something people often did for fun. Like, online weirdos would become cypherpunks and get cool books written about them and inspire guys like Assange and then you could go argue with Objectivists about their weird founders sex life and rape fantasies and how the head of the Federal Reserve was a huge fan of hers and everyone was super chill and interested. Maybe not like mainstream politics, Iraq and Bush were a huge downer, but there were tons of weird and interesting politics and nerds actually really liked discussing them because we like to argue.
I mean, like, the argument for discussing politics at work is that in a tolerant, liberal society, open discussion and debate is not only socially beneficial but also super fun and interesting. I've heard the late 80s to early 90s with Usenet was the real Golden Age but even my Eternal September was far better than our current Long Winter of social media hell.
Is there any research out there on the cost imposed on society by having to have every retail store hire armed security to prevent people from looting? I'm thinking of the usual suspects in California: San Francisco, Santa Monica etc. where half the Target is locked up behind glass. At what point is it more cost effective for society to address the societal/cultural issue of retail theft rather than every store paying the additional security tax?
>the cost imposed on society by having to have every retail store hire armed security to prevent people from looting?
I don't understand where this question is coming from. Aren't retailers doing the opposite: discouraging employees from confronting shoplifters, due to liability concerns?
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-mateo-safeway-employee-fired-for-stopping-shoplifter-had-to-fight-to-get-unemployment/
Direct employees of the store shouldn't do anything, of course. That's not their job! This is why HM said "hire armed security". That way the liability can be outsourced to professionals who know exactly what the legal boundaries are. My city has a variety of private security companies, with a range of approaches that remind me of "Snow Crash", and which divide up territory in precisely the same way that I've heard that mafia families do.
In theory, it's no different than paying taxes for police?
The store is not necessarily immune from liability for the acts of subcontractor security. https://www.getbcs.com/blog/independent-contractor-tort-liability
It's not immunity, but it adds some barriers? Not even the corporate veil is an absolute. But it's the business of private security companies to know what the boundaries are, as opposed to grocery store companies that rightly view physical force as being outside their core business function.
It doesn't matter if the store is liable or not. If a security guard shoots a shoplifter, *someone* is going to be sued for about ten million dollars, and they are probably going to lose. Also, it's going to be someone with deep pockets, not just the working-class security guard. If the law is absolutely clear and unambiguous that it can't be the store's management or owners that have to pay, then it will be the security company.
And the price of armed private security will increase by about twenty million dollars per expected dead shoplifter. Also lesser but more numerous increases for the lawsuits about shoplifters who were merely assaulted, strip-searched, unreasonably detained, etc.
And if the theory is that Professional Security Companies will know the Magic Law Words and Procedures that make it so they can't be sued, then no, that's not how this works at all. It really isn't.
I'm not talking about shooting shoplifters! Or even touching them, necessarily! But the whole process of finding, training, equipping, etc. guards seems like it's almost always best left to 3rd-party security companies. Those companies are going to be able to develop expertise around the existing law that allows them navigate the trade-off between accomplishing their mission as well as possible while also incurring a minimum of liability. *That's* what I mean by "reducing liability".
Some deterrence can be accomplished with nothing more than subtle body language. Some can be done by action but no contact. Some can be done with non-lethal contact. The expertise comes in knowing how and when, and being able to handle situations in ways that, on average, generate the fewest long-term negative consequences. This is not something that grocery stores are going to have any competitive advantage at.
And that's part of the point of the extra corporate structure. If the guard is directly hired, trained, equipped etc. by the grocery store, someone in the management chain of the grocery store is going to be responsible for their mistakes. (Why would you hire the guy who hired the guy who screwed up so badly? What made you think that you had any relevant expertise in this area?) But it's a lot easier to justify hiring a known security company, a company that is employed without problem by many other clients, that promises to take care of all these things.
In other words, if 100 grocery stores each directly hire guards, when one of the guards messes up, it's quite plausible that this is the fault of management at that particular grocery store. But if the 100 grocery stores each make a contract with a single security company, and one of the guards messes up, clearly the problem is inside the security company, and everyone at the grocery stores was merely engaging in industry-standard best practices (or whatever Delaware state law happens to call it). Of course, if the grocery store had saved a buck by hiring a no-name no-reputation fly-by-night security company, then they might have problems. And yeah, maybe that particular security company goes under, and so the grocery store has to find another security company, and all the security company's guards who didn't screw up have to find jobs at other security companies, too. And none of this is 100%, it all depends on a lot of factors, but to try to put it in engineering terms, the goal is to reduce the risk of catastrophic failure, even at the cost of introducing inefficiencies into the process.
I don't know what the corporate veil has to do with anything.
Regardless, as the article says, stores that hire third parties to provide security indeed face a liability risk.
In particular, as it says, "Even if company X hires contractor Y to perform a job and disclaims liability in the employment contract, the court may disregard the label, ‘independent contractor,’ and could assign liability to the hiring party under respondeat superior if the hiring party has the right to control the manner in which the contractor performs their job." It seems likely that the one guy assigned to my local CVS is under the control of the CVS manager, not the guy in Acme Security 's regional office.
Edit. And here is a case from back in 1976:
>The other exception is that because of the "personal character" of duties owed to the public by one adopting measures to protect his property, owners and operators of enterprises cannot, by securing special personnel through an independent contractor for the purposes of protecting property, obtain immunity from liability for at least the intentional torts of the protecting agency or its employees. See Adams v. F. W. Woolworth Co., 144 Misc. 27, 257 N.Y.S. 776 (N.Y.C. Sup.Ct.1932); Hendricks v. Leslie Fay, Inc., 273 N.C. 59, 159 S.E.2d 362 (Sup.Ct.1968); Szymanski v. Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., 79 Ohio App. 407, 74 N.E.2d 205 (C.A. 1947); Zentko v. G. M. McKelvey Co., 88 N.E.2d 265 (C.A.1948); Halliburton-Abbott Co. v. Hodge, 172 Okl. 175, 44 P.2d 122 (Sup.Ct.1935); Webbier v. Thoroughbred Racing Protective Bureau, Inc., 254 A.2d 285 (R.I.Sup.Ct.1969); Malvo v. J. C. Penney Company, Inc., 512 P.2d 575 (Alaska Sup.Ct.1973). False imprisonment is an intentional tort.
Dupree v. Piggly Wiggly Shop Rite Foods, Inc., 542 SW 2d 882 (Texas Ct Civ App 1976)
The corporate veil is an example of the principle that there is pretty much no absolute immunity from liability (unless you're a cop, sometimes), but there are steps that can be taken that can make liability more likely or less likely. So the conservative approach is to layer on a lot of those steps, and reduce the danger.
You would have to do the research in a society where anywhere remotely near "every retail store" is hiring armed security. Since California is not such a society (however much you may enjoy pretending that it is, or perhaps genuinely believe that it is because you don't go to many retail stores), that means you would have to do the research outside California and then try to make it apply somehow.
Retailers have employed such security for a while, just in plainclothes, and they still do. Most of the “tactical” style security are contractors and I only notice them in the highest foot traffic locations. They’re not that expensive either, plenty of wannabe cops out there who can pass the background check.
In fact the “tactical” style contractors might be saving retailers money on net if retaining them allows for employing fewer loss prevention staff on W-2.
Once a society becomes more-or-less Ok with low-level petty theft/shop-lifting, it's hard to come back from that.
The ideal way to not have such a thing is for the vast majority of people to either view any sort of theft as inherently immoral *or* to value having a high-trust society and realizing that a high amount of petty crime undermines that greatly. In other words, the ideal way to not have lots of low-level petty theft is for people in general to be morally opposed to such a thing and to freely choose not to do it (and to oppose those that do).
There's certain types of bad behavior that are hard to police if much of society becomes Ok with that bad behavior, and starts engaging in it. Speeding is another example of this - if everybody thinks speeding way over the speed limit is fine, it's hard to police that, as it becomes like bailing out a water-logged boat that's full of holes, too many holes to cover or fill.
I don't live in California, but I certainly get the impression that some areas/cities in California have basically come to tolerate low-level petty crime and shoplifting, and well... this is what happens when such things are casually tolerated. Businesses will lock up many things behind glass. Can you really fault the businesses here? I don't.
>Speeding is another example of this - if everybody thinks speeding way over the speed limit is fine, it's hard to police that, as it becomes like bailing out a water-logged boat that's full of holes, too many holes to cover or fill.
Yes, I've seen this happen around the Mediterrean. https://www.ohscanada.com/features/dispatches-from-greece-the-roads-and-drivers-are-a-little-terrifying/ but is not about people being explicitly OK with this specific thing, but a general disregard of rules.
As an egregious generality, we take social cues from one another. And if some law, rule, or convention is widely ignored by others, it's more likely we'll follow their lead. Along with speeding while driving, jaywalking is another representative example.
Orthogonal to this question, I'm intrigued by the observation that "half the Target is locked up behind glass."
Is there any data publicly available on just what fraction of individual store shelf space (by percent of total linear feet or the like) have locked cases for products? And how that's changed over time, either in various retail store categories or for particular retail chains? (Maybe something like this might be available in specialized trade publications, or?)
At our local Target, in a not-hugely-wealthy part of the East Bay, in the San Francisco Bay Area, the main sections with lockups are in electronics and health & beauty. I'd hazard an off-the-cuff estimate that maybe 5% of the store's total aisles have at least one locked case, if even that many. As well, some of those cases don't run the full length of those aisles and/or are only on one side.
There may well be particular store locations where a much larger fraction of aisles have their products locked up. Inferring from just this single photo, this could be one?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/16c0eme/target_has_really_taken_things_too_far_everything/
Where I live, the stores don't have very many things locked behind glass. But also, our police will actually arrest shoplifters, and our prosecutors will charge them with shoplifting.
Don't forget the premium ice cream. (It's apparently declasse to shoplift cheap ice cream.) And powdered laundry detergent.
Woah! Thanks for these additions!
In my experience, it depends on the store. The worst I've seen was my local Walgreens, but Safeway has some stuff locked up too. Not half, but sometimes it might seem that way. E.g, if you limit yourself to say, the health and beauty section of Walgreens, then it very well may be half. I'd guess that at least a quarter of the aisles at my Walgreens contain at least one locked section.
I haven't personally seen anything near as bad as that Target, thank god.
There are also two stores I've seen (an Apple Store and a fashion store, not low-value retail) that hire off-duty police officers to stand out front all day. The police even have reserved parking spots in front of the stores now.
The Target I’m at most often was built on the former site of Cabrini-Green in Chicago, an area that still sees its share of crime. Very little is locked up aside from electronics and video games, ie the things that have been locked up for decades. Few glass cases elsewhere, even in cosmetics. Security is visible but discreet, no tactical gear.
Never.
No, really, go to like Ecuador or the Philippines or something. It is (or was) super common to see like two guys in body armor with shotguns standing guard outside the KFC. You get used to it.
I've read that Azerbaijan also has a highly visible highly armed police presence.
About LLMs needing more language to train on: I'm sure many know the answer to this, but I don't & I'm not too proud to ask: Have the texts of books for which copyright has expired been used? Also, what about turning podcasts and youtube videos of talking heads into text, and training on that -- has that been used?
Sure, those texts have been used, long ago, and they are nowhere near sufficient, every reasonable model uses all that and much, much more than that. In the context of LLM training data "every book humanity has published before 1900" (which is not the same as digitally available books) means "a very small amount of data" - the vast majority of written content that exists has been written recently, since the barrier to publishing something back then was so much higher than people rambling online nowadays.
They can generate synthetic data which they then train on. The problem is that we're going to end up in a future in which no humans will know which data is real. History and science will be rewritten. Even in school students won't know whether what is in their textbooks is true or not. Nor will the teachers. Neither will care, though, because AIs will write all the papers and do all the homework and grading. Nobody will know anything about the past or even what year it is.
To a first approximation, they use everything they can get, copyright or no. The written corpus is not that big, so they've turned to images and now video. But if you keep scaling, even that won't be enough.
The large AI companies are pretty secretive about the data they're training on, but there is a large, well-known, and readily-accessibly corpus, both in and out of copyright, that they're all rumored to be using.
I just read the article Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead, and one of the things Aschenbrenner says is that a lot of the stuff the LLM's were trained on was crap -- copies of other sites, SEO junk, etc. & he remarks that LLM's would probably work better if they'd been trained on better material. So I was wondering what they would be like if they'd had better nutrients. -- not just Great Literature, but old newspaper articles, love letters, legal documents, songs and plays that were pure popular entertainment, office memos, Burma Shave jingles . . .
Are your whiskers
When you wake
Tougher than
A two-bit steak?
Try
Burma-Shave
I suppose that even if we used every scrap of that there wouldn't be enough. If there were enough, do you think it would make a difference?
> do you think it would make a difference?
I expect retraining on a better-curated dataset without the crap you mention (and with improved tokenization) would make more of difference than trying to dilute it with better material.
Regardless, while it's foolhardy to make predictions when I know I know so little … I think the current generation of models have plateaued on text: their grammar is essentially perfect, and I don't see their world model improving with more training on text of the sort you describe.
(To be clear, I still expect them to keep improving. I just think it'll take more than random text like newspaper articles, love letters, etc., even if you can find lots of it. I think the next steps are multimodality and tool use.)
Is there anyone here who is an expert on nuclear safety?
Using data from the NEA's SERENA program, it looks like the upper bound of the blast pressure from a steam explosion is around 200 kPa (29 psi). This is possibly an underestimate as the void coefficient and flow regime in a critical reactor is difficult to verify. Also this was only based on computer model simulations, as for some reason no one wants to explode real nuclear reactors to gather experimental data. Wikipedia lists the blast pressure rating of nuclear reactor containment structures at 40-80 psi, which seems well out of the range of possible explosion yields. Actual nuclear power plants in the US have Final Safety Analysis Reports (FSAR) available as a matter of public record. Taking the Ginna NPP FSAR as an example, their containment structure is rated for 60 psi, and was subjected to 69 psi as part of a safety test. My conclusion as an amateur is that even a worst case meltdown scenario followed by a steam explosion in a PWR/BWR would not be enough to breach containment.
Explosions are more complicated than just the maximum blast pressure, such as the rate of pressure change and shrapnel, etc. So is it possible that a steam explosion could actually breach a containment structure? I am quite familiar with the Vladimir I Lenin NPP disaster and understand that western reactor designs and safety protocols are nothing like the situation at Chernobyl. But it seems that western reactors are designed defensively to contain a Chernobyl-esque failure, despite the extreme unlikelihood of such a thing happening. Also, how long has this been the case? It seems that US nuclear reactors have come with a containment building as standard all the way since the dawn of commercial nuclear in the 1950's. I don't know if these earlier builds were rated for similar containment, or if that happened later. But Ginna began operation in 1970, more than a decade before Chernobyl, so clearly the defensive nature of reactor containment predates said disaster. Final question, is such containment a reasonable precaution or excessive safety regulation that is strangling energy growth? It seems basically impossible that modern reactors could explode, but then no one believed RBMK reactors could explode either until they did. I guess this is a meta question about safety, whether systems should be designed to withstand worst case scenarios that are physically implausible with known information.
If we used molten salt reactors, then you don't even need to worry about steam explosions. The boiling point of molten salt is too high to happen in a reactor.
A couple of things jump at me:
1. “upper bound of the blast pressure from a steam explosion is around 200 kPa (29 psi)” - is there an explanation as to why this is the upper bound, and why we should expect one existing?
2. Nowhere you mention peak pressure duration. This is a glaring omission, any peak stress test includes both the peak value and it’s duration, e.g., for shock tests it’s 10 kG for so many microseconds (don’t remember the exact spec off the top of my head).
1. This is what the NEA experts calculated for a steam explosion resulting from molten corium dropping into coolant in a light water reactor. There is only so much water and fissile material in a reactor, so the explosion can only be so big. This was based on standard western reactor designs at the time of the study (2003).
2. I didn't know what to look for and I didn't really want to read the whole 126 page report. But it includes this section:
"High pressures occur in earlier or later phases of pressure development (wave escalation and propagation), but over only small time spans (width of pressure peaks < 1 ms). Such peak pressures reach about 110 MPa (JASMINE F2) or are in a range of 60 – 80 MPa (JASMINE F1X, TEXAS UW, IFCI, ESPROSE -at later time-). Only very short pressure peaks with pressures in this range are obtained by IDEMO and MC3D. Longer lasting pressures do mostly not exceed 20 MPa."
Thank you, #1 makes sense, they considered a specific situation and arrived at a limit.
For #2 - they at least addressed the duration qualitatively, so there’s a degree of awareness of its impact. Looks good enough given the difficulty of obtaining a lot of measurements.
IDK, but Jack Devanney is my nuclear substack site. You can ask Jack.
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/
AFAICT the whole nuclear fission industry is way over regulated ... it's kinda nuts how much everyone is afraid of nuclear. And yet radiation is all around us, and if you were afraid of radiation you wouldn't live in Denver. (or fly in a plane, or get nuclear enhanced chest x-ray tomography or... )
Most of the regulations that seem to actually make Nuclear extremely expensive and slow to build seem to be generic ones like the hell that is anglosphere planning law, the same environmental laws that somehow manage to block wind turbines and solar farms, and the inefficiencies of big government contracts. Countries that can still build cheap reactors aren't building them with less safety structures, they're not having to write millions of pages on how the plant won't impact newts while having "charities" take them to court all the time as we see in Britain.
I’ve posted in a few threads about my quest to find a more enjoyable and fulfilling career as an SE.
I’d love to hear an answer to the following from people in the field who are pretty satisfied in their current job.
Does fulfillment come from connecting to the company’s product/mission or from finding cool challenges to work on? Is this question is even well posed to begin with?
In my time as an individual contributor SWE, I had two really super fulfilling projects. One was a cool challenge, where we were really advancing the state of the art but doing so for a directly applied end, not as a toy research problem. The other was when I happened to be in the right place at the right time to realize that One Weird Trick would save the company $VERY_LARGE_NUMBER worth of compute. The common thread (n=2, such high statistical power!) was the combination of cleverness and clear application, even though in both cases nobody but a few of my fellow SWEs ever saw the direct results of the application.
Then I went into management, and at first was very unfulfilled. After awhile I discovered that what fulfilled me was finding the sorts of people who were doing the kinds of projects I just described, and coaching them on how to better succeed at it, either as ICs or team leads or managers in their own right. This was partly because of the coaching talent I found I had, but I think partly also because their enthusiasm for the fulfilling nature of their projects trickled down, so to speak, to me.
Interesting! I worry that 2 is a pretty low number and such challenges are very hard to come by
Not that I'm opposed to my company's mission or anything, but I think the main source of fulfillment is lower level - making the system you work on as good as you can. Having ownership and a relative lack of barriers can help with that.
I suspect that that the balance between those two varies between people. But there's a third important factor: do you connect with your team?
Aka do you think your team is a good learning environment? Do you feel they have your back? Are they pushing you to do your best work? Do they respect and seek your inputs--and can you do the same for them? Does conflict lean more towards constructive themes?
I raise this because I just recently changed teams. I was deeply dissatisfied with my work and began to loathe my job. But I stumbled into another team and I'm getting a lot of cool challenges that have reignited my interest in SE, but also the people are great, like I haven't been on a tr like this in years. It really feels like we're all rowing in the same tempo, even though we're all working on quite separate projects. I was shocked to hear my new manager typecast me (correctly) into a "craftsman" role after just a few weeks (my prev manager, I suspect, didn't really understand what I was doing).
It's maybe a virtuous cycle: a healthy team produces good challenges, and good challenges stimulate engaged work, which leads to more good challenges.
I actually really like the people I work with and still don’t find the work so fulfilling
Are they fulfilled in the work?
We don’t discuss it! I suspect a minority are and most people aren’t but don’t mind their work not being fulfilling
one things that stands in the way of fullfillment is that at the end of day, you don't have tangible results, that you can see or touch. On one hand that is a problem for the lizard-brain, because it doesn't feel that your effort actually had any point. On the other hand it is a problem, because abstract things make communication harder, e.g. with managers, when they ask why it takes a long time to fix something that looks simple.
For me the most fulfilling parts of SE comes, when you can see the actual results of your work (e.g. because you are in direct contact with the users, or if your software has some real-world impact) ,or when the stress is low and I can spent energy outside of work to get fulfillment from private projects.
> Does fulfillment come from connecting to the company’s product/mission
I have never really connected to the company’s product/mission, maybe I am too cynical, or maybe I was not lucky.
> or from finding cool challenges to work on?
This can be fulfilling, but not always. Sometimes you do something fun, and it later turns out you were overengineering a deadend. Sometimes you solve a hard problem, but management underestimates the problem, and belittles your achievment. If you work in a larger org, then most challenges come from politics, and not from technologie.
> Is this question is even well posed to begin with?
for me fulfilling programming sometimes happened outside work, when I was doing fun projects for myself or friends. So my personal recommendation for a fulfilling career would be to minimize your career and find fulfillment elsewhere.
LLM watch: in the past I've reported some queries that it occurred to me to pose to Google Gemini, all of which were flubbed somewhere between badly and so-badly-it's-hard-to-believe-people-think-this-is-useful.
This time I thought of a question that I expected an LLM might handle well. Here's the prompt and response:
--- prompt --
There's an old broadsheet ballad called The Victory, and Steeleye Span's rendition of the final verse starts with these lines:
Here's success unto the Victory / and crew of noble fame
and glory to the captain / bold Nelson was his name
What does the singer mean by these lines?
--- response --
The singer is celebrating the victory of the British warship 𝗛𝗠𝗦 𝗩𝗶𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 in a famous naval battle. The "captain bold Nelson" is 𝗔𝗱𝗺𝗶𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗛𝗼𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼 𝗡𝗲𝗹𝘀𝗼𝗻, a legendary British naval commander who led the Victory in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
The lines express admiration for the Victory and its crew, as well as for Nelson's courage and leadership. The "success" and "glory" mentioned in the lyrics refer to the British victory in the battle, which was a significant moment in British naval history.
-----
Contrary to my first thoughts, this is another for the "so terrible, it's hard to imagine someone thinking this tool can do anything" files. Following up:
--- prompt 2 (continuing on from the first response) --
What are the lines that follow the two I cited?
--- response 2 --
I'm sorry, I don't know the lines that follow the two you cited. I can only provide information that is publicly available. If you would like to know the full text of the ballad, you can find it online or in a book.
-----
This doesn't even make sense. I am indeed aware that I can find the text of the ballad online. That's possible because... it's publicly available. Not much risk of violating copyright in a broadsheet ballad either.
This seems to be a case of it being hamstrung from fears of violating copyright, such as stories from The New York Times. They probably made it so that any text completion requested is automatically blocked, and it doesn't have an override for that to check whether something is old enough to be out of copyright.
That will explain the second failure. The first one is worse. The information I asked for isn't included in the prompt, which was intentional - there's somebody downthread commenting on how LLMs are useful because they contain a lot of knowledge. Not in this case, apparently.
I want to register that, not having ever encountered the song before, the AI answer sounded very reasonable until I actually searched the song and found the context. (For people who don't want to do that themselves, the singer is bitter that her love was pressganged to serve on the Victory).
I feel like calling this a great disappointment is missing something substantial.
> the AI answer sounded very reasonable until I actually searched the song and found the context
Well, that still puts you ahead of the other response I've received, which claims that the toast "Success to the Victory and her brave captain, whose valor in combat got my fiancé killed" is best viewed as a celebration of that event.
I've presented this as a counterpoint to the idea that LLMs are a source of knowledge that you can consult. An answer that sounds reasonable as long as you're completely unaware of the relevant facts isn't something you should hope to be getting. It's more of a worst-case scenario. It is something you would expect from the mechanics of an LLM, though.
> I feel like calling this a great disappointment is missing something substantial.
How would you rate the quality of the answer?
> was pressganged
For reference, the standard verb for this is "impressed". Your choice is probably less likely to confuse people unfamiliar with the practice.
I've always felt that there's a little bit of extra injustice in being impressed into a suicide charge.
>For reference, the standard verb for this is "impressed".<
I've always heard "Shanghaied".
No military connotation for "shanghaied". Impressment is legal.
+1
I'm not so sure, having Googled it as Gemini recommended. The poem as a whole certainly isn't about the battle and victory, but those two lines sure seem to be. I interpret as contrasting Britain's great victory with the poet's great loss.
So I kind of agree with the analysis. But poetry isn't really my thing, either.
That's kind of the point though, I think. If the LLM takes context from a few clues and makes up something that sounds plausible but is wrong, then it's misleading or outright wrong. The same happens when you ask it a question that sounds like something famous (I've seen the fox, rabbit, cabbage puzzle) but is just straightforward, but it answers the famous thing instead.
The bigger concern is not using these systems when the operator can fact check or just Google the answer. It's when we try to lean on it for daily use or as a black box to answer questions we cannot already answer. "Provide a formula for a perfect cholesterol drug" is extremely scary with current LLMs.
If you ask for a formula for a perfect cholesterol drug and then assume the answer you get is correct then you will be in for problems, whether the source is an LLM or a research lab. But you can then TEST the solution, first by asking whether it makes sense, and then by something like clinical trials.
Consider this completely made-up AI "formula": Combine dioxygen difluoride in a polonium solution. Results show total recovery from cholesterol.
I would hope no one would have low enough wisdom to consider this formula.
Sure, we can test a solution, but that's what I was talking about with fact checking or Googling the answer. It's an added, and currently necessary, step in order to use an LLM.
For the formula you provided, I'm not a chemist so I'm not sure what chemical that is. I might try to make that at home if I have high cholesterol, with apparently bad results.
If LLMs are for smart people who already understand enough about the results to keep themselves safe, then that may be helpful overall, but it's not that good of a sign for LLMs being revolutionary or whatever. Certainly not a strong indication that they would be dangerous, except in the accidental way (people consuming polonium).
I used to often have a problem when asking LLMs to translate a story where it would be too big to fit into the context window, so they'd only translate the first part and then seamlessly hallucinate a continuation of the story instead of translating the rest, with absolutely no warning.
The biggest problem with LLMs is that by construction, they're very good at emulating the surface level signals that people historically used to estimate credibility, regardless of whether they are actually correct or not.
I don't see the toast as a sincere blessing on the Victory. I would call it "bitter", not celebratory.
Pretty similar to the song "Friends in Low Places", which also takes the form of a toast.
I recommend the music of Two Steps from Hell while reading Unsong. There's tracks with appropriate names like Archangel or Sariel (that I conveniently misread as Uriel), Apollo, Starchild, Color the Sky (the seven colors of the rainbow, and the three extra ones you only get in heaven), and various things that you can make Comet King associated with a little bit of imagination and/or Kabbalah. Also, I really like the general vibe their music has.
Wait, do people enjoy reading while listening to music? That would be like torture for me.
When you read, do you picture the scenes vividly in your imagination? Maybe people who have a more visual reading experience can enjoy music better--like a movie soundtrack.
I've spent enough time reading on various forms of public transportation that I can happily read to music because its preferable to the noises obnoxious people constantly make in public.
I listen to instrumental music while reading all the time, but nothing with words. You need something that fades into the background and won't take your attention.
Need that stimulation, dopamine set points can get very unhealthy, watching math lectures are 4x speed while playing idle game until I get migraines so I take caffine and move my bed time hours *each day*. Working back down to 2x speed videos, or reading with classical music is a detox.
I find that listening to music makes it slightly harder to focus on what you are reading, but it's still tremendously fun. I read to music all of the time.
I used to listen to music while reading as a teenager, and it didn't really affect the immediate experience, but it ties the two together in my memories, so re-reading Dune, for instance, conjure up a certain album in my mind, hyperion got another, etc etc.
It makes the whole nostalgia lane very enjoyable, as every piece calls back to something else as well.
This has happened to me with travel—first by accident and now intentionally. I’ll listen to a song over and over while on a trip so that I can experience nostalgia when hearing it years later.
Sparingly or they lose their magic
It's more of an alternating thing: I read a bit, pause to picture the scene in my head, and that's where the right music can make it extra vivid.
That sounds alright.
I picture scenes fairly vividly while reading, and I find reading while listening to music pointless; if the music does not distract me from reading, then I don't notice the music at all.
Can "utilon models" of consequentialist utilitarianism wind up re-creating deontological, pseudo-deistic systems through Goodhart's Law?
I'm thinking of a Substack friends or at least neighbors of this blog, who I don't particularly care to call out (I'll save that in case, in my dotage, I start my own substack), or Vox's Future Perfect using "wrong side of history" or "failing moral tests" language (who I don't mind calling out, Vox delenda est). There is a sense in which utilons are just a communication tool to convey relative values, but it seems that some people fall into a stronger sense where they're actually *real*, that some cosmic scoreboard (ie, God) will judge you/us, and that we're doing badly by not doing a very narrow set of (progressive-approved) tasks. Now that I feel a temptation to delve into the sociology of post-Christian Protestant heresy combined with Millennial indoctrination to score well on tests above all else, I'll leave the question to the audience.
>There is a sense in which utilons are just a communication tool to convey relative values, but it seems that some people fall into a stronger sense where they're actually *real*, that some cosmic scoreboard (ie, God) will judge you/us
I'm confused - the definition of utilitarianism is "doing good means maximizing utility," or in other words, "doing good means getting the highest score on the cosmic scoreboard." How you believe the universe is scored and how you go about maximizing that score might vary, but I don't understand how you could claim to be utilitarian if you aren't using *some* sort of scoring system to judge actions, or what difference it would make if utilons are "real" vs "just a communication tool." The score is measuring a real thing - how much suffering or happiness there is in the world - regardless of if you think God or Man is the one tallying up the score.
And the phrase "wrong side of history" has nothing to do with utilitarian scoring? I guess you could interpret such a statement as saying "I predict your actions will turn out in the future to be extremely negative-utility," but it could equally well be saying "I predict that in the future people will consider you to be extremely unvirtuous" or "I predict that people in the future will believe you were violating an obvious deontological principle." It's a statement about how you'll be viewed in the future, not a statement about which ethics system the speaker is using.
You seem to be complaining about something very specific but I completely don't understand what you're getting at here.
I would contend that recreating pseudo-Deism is a feature, not a bug.
I guess, are virtue ethicists falling into a similar trap for naively believing that virtue is "actually real"?
Most people don't have a unifying coherent ethical theory, and most utilitarians are, thankfully, not consistent in adhering to what they profess.
You're in a prisoner's dilemma. You know, with certainty, that the other participant will Cooperate. Do you Defect?
My instinct is to say no, I'd Cooperate. But on second thought, that's contingent on the situation resembling a conventionally-formulated Prisoner's Dilemma, where I have a sense of sympathy for and obligation towards the other participant, then I'm pretty sure I'll cooperate, and only the idea of higher obligations to others (e.g. having to go to prison for an extended period of time and not be there for my wife and our daughter) gives me significant pause. For a non-life-changing financial incentive (e.g. the "Split or Steal" phase of the UK game show "Golden Balls" where the two finalists have a prisoner's dilemma over the division of the prize money in the final round), I would definitely cooperate.
In something like EY's "True Prisoner's Dilemma", where the other participant is an evil being I have no obligation towards and no personal sympathy for their goals, then I'm defecting unless there are practical reasons (e.g. the possibility of retaliation) why cooperating is a necessary evil. Even if the other participant is a utility monster, my instinct is still firmly to defect.
That was a really revealing question, so well done asking it. I notice that a good chunk of the reasoning behind my answers is deontological, concerning honor-driven obligations, and most of the rest of the reasoning is also deviation from pure utilitarianism as it involves discounting the other participant's utility based on my opinion of them, what they deserve, and the legitimacy of their goals.
Contextually dependent. Is it iterated, who knows my response, what's the payoff matrix, etc.
In a public comment section the optimal strategy is, of course, to loudly cry "Cooperate" and note the importance of pre-committing to being cooperative in all circumstances. Then defect in the dark.
I choose Cooperate.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading your comment and would love to read more of your writing. Here’s to a rapidly approaching dotage!
My timeline on Twitter has been flooded the past couple days with tributes to literary critic Fredric Jameson, who died at the age of 90 a couple days ago. I had never heard of him, but apparently he was a very influential Marxist and Postmodernist theorist and critic. I suppose most people don't like to speak ill of someone who just died, he sounds like the kind of thinker who, however smart and talented, was very, very wrong. At least one of his books has the word "late capitalism" in its title.
What I'm wondering is if there are non-Marxist readers who found Jameson worth reading. If so, do you just ignore his Marxism and move on?
Oh, *that's* who that is?!
My YouTube algorithm (Premium, no less!) is pretty darn good at making suggestions tangential to my main interests, so I was surprised when I "randomly" received a couple of posts and a video essay about this Fredric Jameson person whom I'd never even heard of. It was *very* weird; I've never had YouTube inform me of the death of a writer of any sort, so it felt extremely weird. I mean, my algorithm is such that YouTube has frequently neglected to mention *MAJOR* news events, so why this particular death, for someone who wasn't a household name?
I watch content from both teams, but way more Red and Purple team content than Blue (for whatever reason, Blue content is easier to take in written form). So that feels even weirder.
I'd hesitate before applying the term "postmodernist" to Jameson's work. Indeed, his book on postmodernism theory (the one with "late capitalism" in the title) takes great issue with the theory's ahistorical bent. And as a reader deeply committed to historicizing (however deterministically) a text, Jameson simply could never endorse postmodernism theory - and rightly so, if you ask me. For what it's worth, the postmodernism book's (critical) thesis, broadly stated, is that postmodernism theory represents the "spatialization" of culture, and does so at the expense of its further potential temporalization. If that sounds interesting, I highly recommend the book. I'll caution that, although not completely impenetrable, the book is difficult and weighs its words with great precision. However, I personally found it so well-argued, compelling, and persuasive as to justify its difficulty.
Interesting. Thanks.
“Late capitalism” doesn’t mean “the end of capitalism”; it’s a term of art referring to post-WW2 capitalism.
According to Claude: "The phrase suggests that capitalism has reached an advanced or possibly unsustainable stage, with some arguing it reflects the system's decline. The term became more popular through the works of theorists like Marxist economist Ernest Mandel and cultural critic Fredric Jameson."
I didn't mention Fredric Jameson in the prompt, FWIW.
So Claude is wrong? This thread is filled with LLM hallucinations! Here's what I got from an old-fashioned search engine. https://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/marxism/modules/jamesonlatecapitalism.html This Jameson guy sounds pretty smart.
> Spartacus.app
Prediction: this wont solve anything, if it does it will be brutally attacked
Byzantine generals only wont if they feel shame about lying, online interactions don't involve physical danger or relationships and so it all falls apart even for simpler coordination problems like flirting, if dating apps are hard to solve with coordinating 2 people, why on earth would people imagine n-people is easy and you just throw tech at it.
I tried to check it out but I kept being redirected to other sites all claiming to be Spartacus.app.
After looking at the website, honeypots and fake accounts seem like a big potential problem to me.
Also, the website doesn't explain at all how you're supposed to share the link in an anonymous way. That seems like a massive info leak. Anyone you try to recruit will know you tried to recruit them, and possibly inform on you.
Obviously we will just teach everyone how to use tor and get everyone on peer to peer chat services, *then* we can solve private coordination problems
I could maybe picture this as being an effective way to change a single private company, a single large workplace. Or perhaps something like a single school district.
But if you scale it up beyond that, I doubt it can work.
Amazon is perfectly capable of buying this thing if it make a single union
Trying to buy us out will only make us stronger.
This seems custom designed for organizing a union in a workplace. So yeah, if the app proves to be effective, I expect an avalanche of hit pieces in the corporate press. (And a few supportive pieces)
We’d welcome the publicity. And yes, unionizing is one of the strongest use cases.
Yes, that was one of my first thoughts as well - this is well-designed to enable the formation of an union in a workplace.
My first thought in glancing over their website is that it reminds me a great deal of Secret Religion societies from Crusader Kings 2, which allows characters who secretly adhere to an underground religion to coordinate and recruit converts until they reach a critical mass and they all convert openly. In the game, it's effective enough that it can be really annoying as a player when NPCs are spreading heresy in your realm and there's not a lot you can do to stop them.
I don't think it would be quite as effective in real life, though.
Its very effective in real life, but only in real life. In ~100 years Christianity went from a non important cult to converting the emperor and setting up the institutions that maintained the books after the fall and the central question of "the separation of church and state" that arguably set up the modern world.
On Contingencies. I often wonder why people fight losing battles to the bitter end, and barely ever discuss "plan B", at least on-line. For example, it seems pretty obvious that humanity will NOT overcome climate change (at least not by self-imposing limits). If so, so what? What's our Plan B? I don't think I EVER saw discussion this online. The same is true for a lot of other problems, the ones that might only be overcome by all people working together against their short-term interests. Even AI. I loathe to say this, because on this blog, discussion of dangers of AI will probably hijack the comments, but still: I firmly believe that if a dangerous AI can be created and released into wild, it WILL be created and released, as long as there are some big short-term benefits to whoever does that first. If so, so what?
The answer to such question, of course, depends on exact parameters. But that just means there should be more than one plan, and we should assess probabilities of various failure modes and allocate at least some resources not to prevent them, but to survive the results.
One counter-argument is that we should concentrate on prevention (an ounce of which is said to be worth a pound of cure). But, what if prevention is actually impossible? Not physically, but politically, sociologically and economically? Shouldn't we at least devote SOME time to "cures"?
"Human nature" involves "motivation". For whatever reason, people seem to get less motivated when the possibility of failure is mentioned. So when success depends on motivation, people don't often discuss plan B, because that implies that plan A might fail.
In my line of work (civil engineering) we have been discussing climate change, as well as designing infrastructure (dams, bridges, flood protection) to account for those changes for at least 10 years now, i.e. plan B. The models used for that are very simplistic though.
Couldn’t agree more. While obviously the best path is to treat the underlying issue (risk of a malevolent, superhuman AI “escaping”, GHG emissions, etc.) that’s honestly very rarely a true option. The reason we worry about these things in the first place aren’t because we are worried someone will have some aesthetic or irrational preference for these dangers and release them upon the world, but because there are fundamental and almost impossible to control economic and incentive forces at play that exceed any centralized point of control. You’re not going to solve GHG by banning fossil fuels when people generally like having cars, consuming electricity, and raising themselves out of poverty.
Climate change mitigation discussions do not work on the English language Internet, because they are very necessarily local, not global. In the Hungarian-language Internet we are talking about water retention and drought-resistant agriculture. We need to bring back some of the floodplains eliminated in the 19th century. The whole discussion revolves around water. In other place, it might be around wildfires.
This is an interesting take. I don't see much of that in my own corner of Internet (but maybe I go to the wrong sites; I don't know any high-quality discussion forums on my language, only mainstream entertainment). I would expect to see at least some such discussions in English (that are local to USA), but I guess they might be drowned out by politics in this case.
Climate change is a continuum. There are distant poles where fighting it clearly worked because the world is now back to 1700s temperatures, vs where it clearly didn't work because the world is now 5 degrees hotter and Pakistan is uninhabitable. In the middle it's more a question of degree.
What's the plan if we can't overcome climate change? I guess we just have a few more bushfires and famines and a lot of refugees sometimes. What would a plan B mean here? Some kind of plan to fight famine? We already have disaster planning, strategic food stockpiles, and farming subsidies for that. A plan to fight bushfires? You can't really stop a big enough fire front, most of what you do is driving along beside and behind it making sure it doesn't spread perpendicular to the wind until it runs out of trees or the weather turns, and most countries are already pretty good at that. Refugee camps? As a species we have a hell of a lot of practice at setting those up and already have bodies dedicated to it. I can't think of a useful plan B that isn't already under control.
> I often wonder why people fight losing battles to the bitter end, and barely ever discuss "plan B", at least on-line
Because making a Plan B reduces the probability that Plan A will work, and this is generally true regardless of the context.
* Every moment of effort spent on Plan B is a moment of effort not spent on Plan A
* You might accidentally demonstrate that Plan B is better than Plan A (at least for some members of your coalition), and then you've done your enemies' work for them of divide-and-conquering yourself
Real-world example: in the run-up to the Scottish independence referrendum of 2014, the UK government refused to allow any studies into "What will actually happen if the separatists win" for fear that the answer might be "It won't be so bad, actually" and that would encourage separatism.
When engaging in a battle without a clear-cut win/lose condition, like we have in pro sports and political elections, it can be difficult to realize when the battle is loss. There needs to be a certain level of humility and self-reflection, otherwise it's easy to ignore any evidence that you and your allies are losing the battle and to soldier on as though everything is fine.
50. On hemmed-in ground, I would block any way of retreat. On desperate ground, I would proclaim to my soldiers the hopelessness of saving their lives.
51. For it is the soldier's disposition to offer an obstinate resistance when surrounded, to fight hard when he cannot help himself, and to obey promptly when he has fallen into danger.
http://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html
That only works if your soldiers believe you, but I don't think this is what happening in many cases. Indeed, most people continue to ignore the issue, either because they feel it doesn't actually affects them, or that they have no power to affect it. It's a bit like proclaim hopelessness to a soldier who can clearly see a road to the next fortress at the rear: while from strategic viewpoint losing this particular battle might mean losing the war, it's hard to convince people to stay their ground when there is a lot of ground to give, and seemingly little harm in giving it up. This is rarely the case in real wars, but that's the problem: war, with its immediate violence, is kind of built-in into humans, so we *get* it; curbing consumption to fight climate change, or, as another example, having more children to ensure the future of your nation (at the expense of life quality), is not.
yeah, it wasn't meant to be comprehensive. just one possibility of many. I don't think there's a single, unifying reason that people often neglect backup plans. Moreso it depends on the particulars and circumstances. If I had to single-out a reason anyway though, I'd say what Erica Rall said: that there's a demoralization/defection thing going on. Which I think the Sun Tzu excerpt sort of speaks to. (ok, maybe it was not the best quote.)
According to my understanding of ancient warfare, group cohesion is hugely important variable, *in general*. If the formation breaks, you get routed. closing off the line of retreat can heighten the resolve and cohesion. But also, cohesion is important even without being backed into a corner. The "arguments as soldiers" analogy is fitting, not just because battles and flamewars can get messy, but also because it encapsulates the *seemingly* irrational urge to never break rank, under any circumstances whatsoever.
In the case of climate-change specifically, I suspect there's a few things going on. (N.B. I don't follow this topic very closely.)
A) availability bias. Most of the haranguing you've seen likely comes from people who are politically motivated to exaggerate reality. The most hyperbolic lefties say it'll be of apocalyptic proportions, while the most hyperbolic righties say it doesn't even exist. But ecosystems are complex, unpredictable phenomena. So I expect climate change is going to be a little of both. I.e. disastrous on some dimensions; but also less than apocalyptic on others. (i'm not appealing to the argument to moderation, i'm appealing to the heuristic that nature tends toward an equilibrium.)
B) (As others have said,) mitigations will be local. Many places are already feeling the effects. E.g. I met a guy once who was doing an environmental degree, and he said that there was a certain fungus that was killing a species of tree that's native to our area, and that it was probably due to climate change. I've heard from the news that Ethiopia/Somalia has been subject to an unprecedentedly-large locust-plague, and that this is probably caused by climate-change. I've also heard from the news that Iran is suffering from water shortages, probably due to climate change. I've heard that jellyfish populations are unexpectedly exploding, probs due to climate change. etc.
C) the ramifications are difficult to predict in detail. Climate science is still in its infancy, so none of the academics have unflinching confidence that reality will behave the way their models expect. When you can't predict the ramifications, it's hard to take preemptive measures.
D) (Like you said yourself,) the average joe doesn't care until he feels immediate, tangible consequences.
As for AI specifically, I think it suffers from A) C) and D) as well.
And if you want to follow the nitty-gritty details of climate-change mitigation, maybe pay attention to ecologists rather than climate-modelers. Especially anything to do with water, since that's strikes me as being comparatively easier to forecast, with an outsized impact on human settlements.
The issue with climate change is that it's a global issue that would require extensive co-operation between all major governments around the world. There's simply no mechanism for achieving such co-operation right now, especially with increasing tension between the west and BRICS.
The issue with cooperation about climate change is that the expected impact of its consequences is very unevenly distributed, ranging from "my region will be devastated and I'll have to flee" to "eh, we'll need to pay slightly more taxes to cover extra infrastructure", and there generally is a negative correlation between the impact and ability to influence climate change; those about to suffer the most don't have the ability to cut emissions and those who might make major (and expensive) emissions cuts aren't *that* badly affected, or even may have a vested national interest in prolonging the fossil fuel era so that they can sell as much as possible of their mineral wealth before the world stops buying it.
Well, this is what I'm talking about. If there is no way to solve this issue without cooperation, then at least every country/block should prepare to face the consequences of not solving it (if any; many commenters in this thread assure me that we don't need any special preparations; maybe that's even true and I just read too much sci-fi).
>For example, it seems pretty obvious that humanity will NOT overcome climate change (at least not by self-imposing limits). If so, so what? What's our Plan B? I don't think I EVER saw discussion this online.
There has been plenty of discussion of possible technical solutions, including on the front page of today's New York Times.
For climate change, for example, notice the resistance to nuclear power. What does this tell you?
It tells me that the "green movement" in many countries involves "useful idiots" that have been successfully manipulated by some fossil fuel exporters to sabotage and delay the transfer to renewables.
If Plan A is “massive coordinated public action,” then efforts to implement it are necessarily high-visibility. If Plan B is “everybody independently figures out how climate change is going to affect them, and adapts” then efforts can remain largely invisible to the public eye. Lots of organizations, both public and private, have quietly developed plans for how to continue their missions in the face of climate change. If Google changes where they build their next datacenter due to anticipated climate change effects, that doesn’t make the news.
Political tribes are a way of playing "ain't it awful?", the purpose of which is to find accomplices in maintaining the not-okay position. Even members of the tribe who attempt to rise above this game & position are treated with suspicion, members of other tribes are treated with outright hostility.
But isn't there a place for a 3rd tribe? For example if one tribe says "we should all cease our high-energy consumption and live simple lives", and other says "ha-ha, SUV goes brrrr", isn't there a place for people who say "OK, we better learn how to build great sea walls" or even "Maybe build automated turrets on the border to keep inevitable mass of immigrants away"?
For sure, the challenge is making sustainable alliances with other tribes.
When a community is defined by shared belief in the importance of Plan A, then arguing for consideration of Plan B, even as a backup, is a defection from group norms. Arguing that Plan B is needed as a backup reads as a defeatist argument against efforts towards Plan A, muddling the messaging, diverting efforts, and demoralizing the troops.
I think Plan B for climate is already being enacted anywhere Plan A isn't happening (which is pretty much everywhere). Maybe slow down CO2 production on the margins, but otherwise just live life. The worst case scenarios are unlikely, and there's not much we can do about it anyway. It's a slow enough process that you could buy beachfront property in Miami and sell it when you retire and not worry about the water. Maybe your grandkids can't, but by then whoever is in Miami will have slowly adjusted over several generations, just like the rest of us have about various other changes in life.
Lots of people started getting on the recycle/personal solar/bike type solutions, but the reality is setting in for normal people. I think that's the source of memes about Taylor Swift flying everywhere. More CO2 was used to fly famous politicians to climate conferences than everyone I know combined will use in a lifetime. And on top of that, the West produces less CO2 than China. We could entirely switch to nuclear or other clean sources, stop using fossil fuels, and still make no difference to the long term trajectory of the climate.
"But the private jets!" is the climate equivalent of saying theres no point fixing the 10m wide hole below the waterline in your ship because there is a leaky tap. Aviation alone is a tiny fraction of GHG emissions and private jets are an even smaller portion. It mostly just serves at a gotcha "oh those elites want to build less fossil fuel plants but they have a jet!".
It speaks to the seriousness of the issue. Surely for a fraction of the cost of those big conferences they could all meet up on Zoom, but instead do what they want to do even though it's more expensive *and* emits far more carbon. When the common man gets pressure to buy a smaller car and reduce their usage, against what they want to do.
More importantly, neither the jets nor household carbon are the big issues. I can emit none or twice as much and it makes no difference. Residential and Commercial (non-industry) carbon emissions combined are 13% of US emissions, and the US is less than 13% of the world total. Residential use in the US is less than 1% of worldwide carbon emissions. Doubling *all* residential use or cutting it to zero makes very little difference and leads to no change in outcome for the climate.
That supposes there will be no single catastrophic event. I guess rising sea levels aren't it - they do rise slow enough by human standards, but other stuff might come at us faster.
What "other stuff"? The IPCC analysis is considered quite thorough, evaluating all kinds of effects on agriculture, flooding, ocean fisheries, various disasters, migration pressures, secondary effects, etc; I would presume that whatever the IPCC reports highlight as the likely harmful consequences of the more severe warming scenarios is an accurate reflection of the actual dangers we should be worrying about.
The IPCC doesn't predict any single catastrophic events, so why should we?
On climate change, I think the most commonly-discussed plan B is geoengineering, and while it should be discussed (and researched) more than it is, I think it does actually get plenty of discussion.
On AI doom, I think the situation is different because I don't think there is a plan B other than "hope the AI decides to be nice to us for some reason we can't predict".
Right geoengineering, and when we run out of hydrocarbons, nuclear fission.
Geoengineering isn’t a solution, it’s a mitigation to reduce the impact while we solve the underlying problem of greenhouse gas emissions.
I guess the Plan B has been discussed by a bunch of science fiction novels and movies, including Dune and Terminator...
Plan A: Some sort of government regulation of AI
Plan B: Butlerian Jihad
Those are both Plan A: Prevent dangerous AI from being released.
In the case of government regulation, proactive prevention (which is clearly not going to happen).
In the case of Terminator, er, retro-proactive prevention?
How sad is it that the invention of time travel seems more believable than global cooperation and good sense?
As a sci-fi story, a possible solution to AI doom could be humanity flying away from Earth at a speed approaching the speed of light. It could be an interesting story, for example we might meet space aliens and yell at them that they need to join us if they want to survive.
But in real life, our technology is nowhere near what would be required for that, and even if we somehow built a large spaceship at least for a few thousand people and sent it away, the AI would probably get us before we could even leave the Solar system.
If we had the technology, I think there's a good chance the AI would let us leave. I think the balance of probabilities on AI opinions toward humanity leans much stronger towards "don't care" than "must destroy" (which has about the same odds as "must protect"). On the other hand, if we had the technology so would the AI, and whatever AI goals lead it to compete with humanity for resources would eventually lead it to competing with the extra-solar human population, assuming that population stopped fleeing and settled down somewhere.
What, mechanically, makes high-quality animation better? When I watch something like Demon Slayer, I can clearly see that they put in way more money and effort into the animation than your average cartoon on anime, but as a non-art person I can't quite tell the specific thing they do. What is the expensive thing you do to get better animation? More details? More parts made by humans instead of autofilled?
incidentally, the buzzword you're looking for is "sakuga". plugging the term into a search engine returns results like
https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/40088/what-exactly-is-sakuga-and-how-it-pertains-to-the-animation-quality
> Sakuga is basically where animators go from using cheats like only animating the mouth or skipping frames to animating every frame with fluid movement.
> Sakuga (作画) (lit., "drawing pictures") is a term used in anime to describe moments in a show or movie when the quality of the animation improves drastically, typically for the sake of making a dramatic point or enlivening the action....
> The other end of this spectrum, however, is when the animation becomes exceptionally expressive and fluid -- when every single frame is animated, and the movements themselves are closely-observed and realistic (or, failing that, spectacular to look at). This is what's known as sakuga. Action-oriented shows tend to have the most instances of sakuga, but there are many examples of dramatic shows using them as well -- for instance, to highlight an exceptionally emotional moment.
> (...)
In animation, movement costs money. If something is moving, it's costing the studio money. the longer it moves, and the more things that are moving on the screen at once, the more money.
Anime, as a genre, is defined by being cheap to produce while still looking good. It does this by moving as little as possible; have lots of quiet scenes, or transition scenes, where nothing moves. Have lots of scenes where characters are just talking to each other, so that the only thing that moves is their mouths. Maybe have a hair or two move on their head while they talk, but make sure if the wind is blowing their hair it's a loopable animation so you only have to pay for a few seconds of movement. Loop whatever you can loop, hide whatever movement you can hide, never change the camera perspective until you have to, and for the love of God DON'T ROTATE AROUND AN OBJECT, THAT WILL CHANGE THE OBJECTS PROFILE FOR EVERY SINGLE FRAME WHICH MEANS EVERYTHING ON SCREEN IS MOVING AAAAAA!
(That last reason, by the way, is why so many animes will suddenly have a 3D CGI model show up when everything else is regular 2D animation: it is incredibly expensive to rotate the camera around a 2D object, and incredibly cheap to rotate the camera around a 3D model. So you'll often see them use a 3D model for a car during a car chase, or for a giant mecha that gets in a lot of fights that involve different camera angles.)
Anime will often save their "movement budget" for a fight scene, so you'll have episodes that are mostly people talking to each other while moving as little as possible, then a fight scene that lasts 2-3 minutes with lots of movement and action.
High quality animation has more things moving. It moves the camera more, it has as many things as possible moving in a scene at once, and it uses more frames of drawing for the movements it does show so everything is more fluid.
Next time you watch an anime, keep track of everything that is moving in any given scene. You'll start to notice right away how little most animes are moving anything, 99% of the time. They need to keep it cheap so they can pump out 25 episodes a year.
> Anime, as a genre, is defined by being cheap to produce while still looking good. It does this by moving as little as possible; have lots of quiet scenes, or transition scenes, where nothing moves. Have lots of scenes where characters are just talking to each other, so that the only thing that moves is their mouths. Maybe have a hair or two move on their head while they talk, but make sure if the wind is blowing their hair it's a loopable animation so you only have to pay for a few seconds of movement.
Another common trick you didn't mention is *not showing the characters at all in the first place*. In anime, it's very common for conversation scenes to cut to random shots of a characters feet, hands, random scenery, etc.
> If something is moving, it's costing the studio money. the longer it moves, and the more things that are moving on the screen at once, the more money.
That's true in general, but there are some caveats. For example, you can draw a 3d scene and then spin the camera around arbitrarily at zero marginal cost. It's pretty common to see moments of obvious CGI effects like this even in otherwise traditional 2d animation nowadays.
The cost is in the complexity of the initial scene creation, not the total amount of movement. I guess this is the 21st century equivalent of panning over a matte painting - the matte painting itself costs money, but the panning doesn't.
You have recieved a lot of good answers already, so I'll add something else: shading. It's a big part of what makes people compare old anime favorable to newer ones, even when the frame count is not particularly better (or even sometimes worse).
Detail yes, and more unique drawings per second of animation. You can create a pretty reasonable illusion of motion with no more than five or six pictures per second of animation; the standard motion picture rate is 24 frames per second. The old studio system would be for the main artists to do key frames (say every fifth or sixth picture) and then for other artists to do the tweenies.
The detail in the old Warner Bros. cartoons, particularly around facial expressions, is quite astounding.
Quoting from artist commentary on a webcomic with very involved art:
> Hechoton comes from a special alternate dimension called "being the author's favorite" where everybody is drawn with MORE LINES.
So, more details.
Years ago I watched some anime, which honestly wasn't very good. I don't remember the name. Anyway, there was a fight scene where a character kicked someone, and the animation was detailed enough to show leg muscles moving in what looked like a realistic fashion. I rewound and watched it multiple times, because it was fascinating. In all my years watching animated shows, I had never seen such a clear and obvious detail that live action would have had naturally.
It really helped me to see how much of animated programming was abstracted that didn't need to be. A few years later I noticed that some shows would clearly spend a lot of time and effort for certain scenes - maybe end of season fights or whatever, and there were a million subtle details that just *popped* and the scenes felt way better. I'm thinking specifically of Naruto, where the filler episode fights had minimal budget and looked crummy, and then the show-defining episodes like the Pain fight were just dramatically better.
Grappler Baki especially has a reputation for cranking the human-anatomy dial to 11, to the point where the story is in service to the musculature.
>mathy; wants art to make sense
Id look at non-linear curves, all time, space, color transitions can be rebased into functions of floats between 0 and 1, and there are a collection of functions that can take an input from 0-1 and return a different result, but still in an acceptable range
Often the difference is that high quality animation does things honestly, while lower quality animation cheats, cuts corners, employs little tricks meant to make like simpler: "let's not animate that figure in the background, let's have that limb move as a rigid flat piece of a paper and not try to animate 3d rotation, let's simplify that part away, let's put a smear there and call it a day, let's just keep that part out of the frame, let's just not have a character move in such a way, let's never move an imaginary camera in a certain way, let's replace drawing more frames with scaling and moving existing assets whenever possible, let's not even bother with dynamic light, cast shadows are literally shapeless blobs, let's say nothing ever rotates except in the plane of the camera, let's make that motion so fast, there's no need to draw more than two frames" and so on and so on, a million things. And all these tricks work pretty well, in that the result doesn't look terrible and the animators get away with it. But some thing is lost, and when you watch a higher quality piece of animation you feel the presence of something that cheaper animation is missing.
Other ppl might have a more detailed responses, but some factors are number of frames drawn, how much the details are drawn in transitions between movements (vs start position linearly moving to end position), how much they incorporate lighting, and using specific "camera angles" and cuts to give the impression you're aiming for.
One of the cool tricks from the glory days of Disney cell frame animation was the use of multiple cells, stacked one on top of the other with a bit of space between them. The far background at the very bottom progressing through to the foreground on the top, this would allow racking focus through the cells to achieve some lovely animation effects.
How do software-adjacent people handle changelists? Our customers are always asking for them, and our developers are always hit-and-miss about providing them. I suspect that perhaps Project Managers have more to gain by owning the changelist, but I'm not sure the extent to which others' find that PMs have enough info to generate changelists themselves? Seems like devs have to be somewhat involved, and it seems that is always going to limit the ceiling for what's possible.
I will usually forget about half the changes I made before writing it, but the customer too, so it is fine. Documentation is mainly a formality because no one can check its quality.
The kind of change list customers (typically) want is at a higher level of abstraction than the commit messages in your version control system, so you need to manually summarize somehow.
A change list item like "This package can now be built for RISC-V" is probably summarizing dozens, maybe hundreds, of commits.
To clarify: well-written portable code should "just work" on a new platform like RISC-V. Something like an operating system, on the other hand, probably has hundreds of places that need tweaking. Hopefully, most of them are located in a directory called something like machdep/riscv, but there may be nasty surprises scattered through the codebase.
If you can't easily generate a changelist, that means you are not paying enough attention to your version control system.
* work-in-progress commits are great for personal/team branches but have no place on master/trunk. Its history should be a sequence of logically self contained commits, each of which leaves all tests passing. Leave branches/tags if you need to preserve detailed history, but squash it down for master.
* commit comments should include a brief one-line summary of the purpose before the detailed description
* releases should not contain any commits that are not in master. Tag/branch, that's your release.
Changelists then become easy: diff the relevant histories and aggregate the summaries from the commit comments.
Not paying enough attention for what other purpose than generating changelists?
Cost and ease of development.
* if you don't have a clean history of stable commits, bisecting for regressions becomes much harder. If trunk spends part of the time broken, pulling from trunk becomes a miserable slog; people then do this less often, which means more merge hell when they do, in a vicious cycle that ultimately makes everything take much longer than it ought to.
* if your commit comments start with a summary, it makes the history much easier to browse since, to a first approximation, all vcs tools display truncated commit messages when displaying commit history.
* if your releases contain ad hoc changes that were not in master, they become more difficult to reproduce (and you WILL need to reproduce them) and also some of the changes will inevitably get lost / forgotten leading to regressions in future work
If your shop does none of these things, the rate at which your developers can actually get things done will be much lower than it needs to be, as will morale.
Info for changesets is a minor bonus.
Meeting those criteria does not imply that the commit messages will make for a useful change list.
For example, "Update to document tokenization handling to permit dynamic definitions for delimiter characters". I know what that means, the developer knows what that means - the project manager is unlikely to have any clue what that means.
Yes, but a logically self-contained commit that leaves all tests passing may well be at a finer granularity that the feature the customer cares about.
Agree. The question was:
> I'm not sure the extent to which others' find that PMs have enough info to generate changelists themselves
Certainly the PM should have as much or more info about the customers' needs as the devs. If they are going to the devs, it's because they can't get the rest of what they need for the customer facing documentation without doing that, and a clean vc history is one way to help here that is also very much its own reward.
If you're working on something like the LLVM compiler there is a strong incentive to make commits small (but self contained etc) to (a) simplify code review (b) reduce probability it conflicts with another change another dev made "simultaneously" and needs to be redone.
(Amusing feature of LLVM process, specifically ... commits can get reordered between passing code review and actually getting committed to main)
At most orgs I worked for, the changes to the software came from customer/stakeholder requests. That is, the "changelist" of a piece of a software is simply a subset of the JIRA tickets the customers themselves opened.
Given that, maybe that's your solution: rephrase every request in a completed JIRA ticket as a past tense verb and that becomes your changelist. ("fix fizzbuzz frobnicator" --> "fixed fizzbuzz frobnicator").
Pressuring the developers crudely is a shitty strategy. If you have Code Review, make it part of the review process to summarize the PR as a changelist entry. You don't need all developers for this, only the senior enough people who review the PRs, gradually the rest of the developers will learn to add the changelist summary before the reviewer asks for it. That's a smarter strategy of pressuring the devs than crude carrot-and-stick.
Also, it depends a lot on your release cadence. Are you releasing every week or every month or every quarter or every year, or every commit? Obviously, it's ridiculous to keep spamming your frequent releases with endless micro-updates, at this point the customers can just talk to your devs directly on Teams for all they care.
Even on a less frequent release schedule, not everything is worthy of an entry in the changelist. There are "plumbing" bugs that customers almost never care about, who cares if you had an off-by-one in a loop somewhere or a memory leak, really who cares. Who cares if you switched the JSON library. Those things are visible to non-technical customers as performance improvements or better UX stability, in which case maybe cite a metric ("reduced load time from x to y", "N bugfixes for better stability and user experience") that summarizes the total effects of all the maintenance your devs did and move on.
Depends a lot on the particular project/team, but high-quality git messages should get you most of the way there.
The PM has to crack the whip on the devs to get the information for each release. That’s the only way I’ve ever seen it get done consistently.
PMs need to be convinced of the important of a good changelog or they won’t do the dirty work.
Does verbal IQ predict performance in a STEM subject when CONTROLLED FOR NON-VERBAL IQ?
STEM is an overly broad category. Certain forms of programming (think doing WordPress stuff in PHP) are basically just precise writing, it is not "engineering" in any sense. So, yes. I am basically a human LLM, verbal intelligence only, I would be in deep shit if writing SQL queries would be anything like engineering.
It does, at least based on my personal experiences. I thought on it a long time ago and realized that pattern recognition is a large part of language proficiency (as it is for math-y subjects). Some character corresponds to a certain concept and sound, and some of these characters put together results in another concept and a sequence of sounds. Some character corresponds to a certain quantity (number) or way of manipulating other characters (eg, +, -, x, ÷), and some of these characters put together results in another quantity. This explained why students who seemed to pick up the math lesson of the day quicker were also more capable of writing grammatically correct sentences.
I also suspect that we conceptually divide math-related intelligence and language-related intelligence because everyone uses languages so often that we don't even notice how much pattern recognition is involved in it. And also maybe because we want to be nice and say that people who can't into maths can at least into English.
I don't have data on this, but intuitively it should. Even on the banal level of being able to talk about and write about STEM-related results and people being aware of your knowledge. The greatest math genius in the world may not be recognized if he or she had very bad verbal IQ.
Also, verbal and math tend to correlate anyway, so very high math IQ would tend to go with very high verbal IQ, even if a specific person didn't need a high verbal IQ to work in STEM.
FWIW when I was on the entrance committee for a molecular biology phd program it seemed to be the consensus view that high verbal GRE scores were better predictors of success than the math or analytic scores. At least one committee member also said they like student athletes as candidates - I think basically as a proxy for conscientiousness and non neuroticism.
Wow
Any source for that claim?
It came to me in a dream
Also, schools only have so many types of tests, many of them written. Verbal intelligence should help any trick question.
For anyone who has the autistic trait of disliking eye contact: what is the subjective experience of eye contact unpleasant? What does it feel like?
It feels overly emotionally intense, in an unpleasant way. Perhaps it could be compared a little to sensory overload?
Nothing, it is just that when I have a thought, which happens in two seconds, some force irresistably turns my gaze down or away. It is just not possible to think and look at eyes at the same time.
Looking at flat surfaces like walls or floors allow my mind's eye to easily project images onto those surfaces. Faces are the opposite, because they're bumpy and distracting. Imagine trying to read a textbook while Welcome To The Jungle is blaring in the background.
There's also a feeling of a lack of personal space, as if im participating in a Vulcan mind-meld, or trapped in a hall of mirrors.
Yes, I'm on the spectrum. I've become quite adept at socializing and making eye-contact, when I must. It's also mentally exhausting.
Maybe ask your son to look at eyebrows instead.
Just so you'll know: Typical eye contact during a conversion is that the listener looks at the speaker's face pretty continuously. The speaker is often gazing away from the listener, but keeps glancing at listener's fact while talking. So looking away from the listener a fair amount of the time while is perfectly normal. A lot of people have picked up the idea, from someone who was Wrong on the Internet, and whose Wrongness was copied by many stoopit sites, that the optimal, healthy thing is to look at one's conversational partner as close to 100% of the time as possible! It's not. If you do that the other person will gradually feel more and more uncomfortable, though they may not be able to put their finger on why they feel that way -- the closest they'll be able to come may be something like "he's looking at me too hard."
Looking away more than a bit while listening will be experienced by the speaker as lack of attention to what they're saying. Looking away a lot while talking will not be seen as odd by the listener, so long as the speaker glances at the listener occasionally. Looking right at the listener continuously while talking will be experienced as weird and aggressive.
This is all true but I'll add a caveat: looking right at the listener continuously while talking can be experienced as evidence of sexual attraction (sometimes accurately)
Yes, I agree. Though, like other manifestations of attraction, it's not always a winning move to just do what you feel like.
Have you ever listened to your own voice being played back 1 second later, and it makes you confused and unable to keep speaking? That's how I feel when I look at someone's eyes while speaking. It makes it harder to put my thoughts into words. Especially in socially fraught situations when I'm not at ease. I can get through it, usually, but it's easier to just look away for a second and then look back when I'm not the one speaking.
Thanks! Great description of the qualia.
If it is a sensation, maybe it is blood rushing to my head, like when you feel embarrassed?
I've learned to make eye contact but it feels uncomfortable/challenging. It might be analogous to sitting in an specific and mildly unnatural posture when you're trying to pay attention to a movie or something. It is also surprisingly easy to do "wrong", which can make it feel unnatural and uncomfortable to the person I'm interacting with, but I'm getting better at that too. Basically there's a lot of things that most people do during eye contact without thinking about it - small eye movements, adjustments, blinks, shifts of gaze away and back. Doing this right without the instinct for it can take a lot of attention for me and be distracting from the content of the conversation and other implicit signals I'm trying to notice. And doing it wrong can be perceived as uncomfortable or creepy, especially if it's too fixed or intense. Making it more complicated, different emotional contexts or degrees of closeness seem to demand a different degree/type of eye contact and all those small parts of it, so it's easy to accidentally signal the wrong thing if I'm not careful.
Unless the person I'm looking at is a romantic interest, I almost never need to think about the fact that I'm looking at a part of them consciously. My eyes wander to whatever part of their face is most interesting, e.g. whatever part moves more, my brain is processing what is being said and my own replies.
If I focus too much on their eye by accident, I could just look elsewhere and recalibrate before looking back. The point is that you almost never need to think deeply about the person's face or eyes, it's what they're saying and doing that is keeping your brain busy. When driving, you don't think "I'm looking at the road right now, this is a thing I'm doing, I'm looking at the grey Asphalt and the lines on it", you just think "I'm trying to avoid crashing the car into the dumbass speeding from behind me", looking at the road and the mirrors is a natural side effect.
Not sure I count (see below), but:
I don't really have an unpleasant "sensation" associated with eye contact, because it's all happening at a subconscious level. If I'm making eye contact with a person, then I'm paying attention to their facial expression, their emotions, and their immediate reactions to each word I say. But all that data is incredibly distracting if I'm trying to figure out how to clearly express something complicated. So my subconscious drops the "tracking your eye locations" task to focus on phrasing instead.
I handle it by looking off into the distance whilst I talk, rather than making eye contact. Then when I'm listening, I focus on making intense eye contact to show that I'm paying attention. (I stop making eye contact if you're really boring or really interesting, though. In the former case, I'm thinking about something else. In the latter case, you've inspired an idea into my head, and now I'm thinking about it.)
It's not that it's unpleasant, it's more that it doesn't come naturally to me. It's awkward and distracting to keep up, like standing on one leg. I think that if I got into the habit of making eye contact I could solve this problem. The thing is that there are a lot of conversations where it's fine to not make eye contact, like when one or both of us are performing a task while we talk, so it feels less urgent to fix it.
I also think that if I have gotten into the habit of making eye contact I wouldn't necessarily realize... It's possible I've already fixed this.
Thanks for sharing. I have a son with ASD who is young, and one of the things I'm grappling with is "should I encourage him to make eye contact." Like, if it's viscerally terrible for him, I don't want to subject him to it, or not much, but if it's just a matter of building a good habit, I think it'll be helpful for him.
Not going to take your experience as the only and final word on the topic, but a helpful data point.
I think pushing someone to be make a certain kind of eye contact is hard on them. We normally are not consciously aware of what we are doing with oureyes, and pushing someone to be is going to give them an additional difficult task to do when they are already doing the difficult task of talking with someone. Here's a gentler way to come at it with your son:
-Tell him that when he's doing the talking he should glance at the other person's face now and then to see how they are reacting. If they look friendly and interested, all is well. But if they are looking out the window or at their phone, that's a sign they're maybe not interested. And if course if they look upset he needs to think about whether they maybe didn't like what he said.
-And tell him when that he is the listener then if he is interested in what the person is saying he should look at their face most of the time, so they can tell he's interested. (And if he's not interested, he should look for a way to change the subject).
If he does the 2 things I described, his eye contact will be normal, but it will become that way without him trying to micromanage his eyes.
As an autistic person who has learned to make pretty "typical" eye contact, I think this is just not a high priority thing to do. Up until about age 14 I was under the impression that "eye contact" meant "stare directly into the other person's eyes with the minimum number of interruptions" (I didn't do it very often, or presumably someone would have corrected me earlier). Then I discovered more complete descriptions of how eye contact is *supposed* to work and over the course of a couple years taught myself how to make my eye contact habits more natural.
Compared to other social skills, this one was really easy to learn as a teenager. By that age I was reasonably good at self-monitoring (which meant that I could correct on my own) and eye contact really doesn't require particularly good social modelling to work. On the other hand, I do *not* think that I would have been able to learn that skill at age 6 (roughly the age when I discovered the term 'eye contact') without, idk, an adult forcing me to do drills.
I think a more useful skill for autistic kids - if you can't teach the people around them to just deal - is to teach them how to *fake* eye contact. Most people don't really care that you're looking at their eyeballs, so looking at their nose/forehead/just over their shoulder meets the same need in a way that's easier/more comfortable for many autistic people.
20 years ago a yoga teacher told me to look at the space in between the eyes and I've appreciated the advice ever since
Yeah, I agree, what I really want him to do is make his interlocutor feel like he's not ignoring them.
Looking directly into someone else's eyes is very intense.
Just to be clear: are you an autistic person who avoids eye contact?
What does "intense" mean? Like... how does this cash out? Do you feel hot? Flushed? Thoughts race? Heart races? Some emotions spring up?
Scott, this is *not* how you capitalize "Tetraspace" - her name is actually spelled in title case, just like any other mononymous person.
That's her internet name but she is just one of many people for whom their internet name has all but replaced their real name (c.f. PewDiePie, Stampylonghead, etc)
> her name is actually spelled in title case, just like any other mononymous person
> PewDiePie
Quick reaction to the latest episode of "Rings of Power" (only two more to go!)
This episode made me want to kill Tom Bombadil. Good work, show!
The Dwarven storyline is still the best, but the Celebrimbor-Annatar one is moving along nicely. And wonder of wonders, I thought Charlie Vickers was good here. I was "meh" about him as Halbrand, but this episode he really did well as Annatar. Now, if only they could do something about that terrible wig.
The Númenor storyline continues to wander around and the plain people of Númenor continue to resemble their counterparts in South Park. One moment: "rabble rabble rabble! Pharazon king!" The next, "rabble rabble rabble! Miriel Queen!"
At least we didn't get more of Isildur wandering around as aimlessly as the rest of the 'action' on Númenor, though we did get Arondir massacring some peace-loving Orcs who were only going home to their wives and kids. That's literally it, one scene of him killing some Orcs and nothing more. Probably it'll lead into something in the next episode, but mainly I think it was just there to remind us he exists.
The show continues to elevate my blood-pressure by Doing The Thing. Oh look, they Did The Thing just like in the movies. Oh look, they Said The Line just like in the movies. And hence my desire for someone to bring me the head of Tom Bombadil: they straight-up lifted Gandalf's speech about mercy ("Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? ") and turned it into the Yoda and Luke moment from "The Empire Strikes Back" about "are you going to quit your training or abandon your friends?"
Some that live deserve death, right enough, and I'm looking at *you*, show!
And for those of you eager for some hot Harfoot-on-Stoor action (you degenerate perverts), we get Poppy and Merimac kissing. Oh, the romantic passion and ardour of deep, true love on display there! Not.
There will probably be a third season of this, though it hasn't been officially greenlit. I suspect that the third season will be to wrap up everything, because I honestly can't see this running for five seasons. But what do I know?
>And wonder of wonders, I thought Charlie Vickers was good here. I was "meh" about him as Halbrand, but this episode he really did well as Annatar.
Interesting. From s1 and s2e1 (all I've had the patience and stomach to watch so far), my impression has been that Vickers is a good actor, but miscast as Sauron. It's essential to Sauron's story arc that he's able to be irresistibly charming (at least until he loses his ability to assume fair form), utterly terrifying, or both. I haven't seen that from Vickers so far in RoP. Did he come through in the latest episode?
>The Númenor storyline continues to wander around and the plain people of Númenor continue to resemble their counterparts in South Park.
That's disappointing. The Númenor storyline had been one of the brighter points for me in s1. I mean, there were insultingly bad low points (especially the "they took our jobs" bit), but the actors playing Tar-Muriel and Ar-Pharazon were doing a good job of selling it and there were pretty good high points that gave me some hope for where the plotline was going. I take it the insultingly bad parts are dominating the Numenor plotline so far in s2?
This last episode was the first one where I felt "hey, this guy can act!" It wasn't a big thing, just small changes of expression that were appropriate to the situation.
My view of him as Halbrand in season one was that he went around with that stupid smirk permanently on his face (though he wasn't the only actor with only one expression). So I didn't find him interesting or convincing.
This episode, though, Annatar manages to look convincing when talking to/manipulating others, rather than "heh heh observe my secret smirk as I toy with you". Other times it's just a small secret smile or a sideways glance.
I agree that it's a pity about Miriel and Pharazon. I sort of liked Pharazon in season one as he seemed to be the only Númenorean with a brain, but so far this season he's just Evil Scheming Power-grabber and we're not getting any demonstration of "this is why the Númenoreans, numbskulls as they are, want him as king" (deus ex Eagle isn't enough to convince about that). I think the actress playing Miriel, if she got a chance, could be really good but the part is so thinly written there's nothing there to work with.
So far the Númenorean plotline has been: Elendil's invented daughter is sad her brother (she only has one, as Anarion seems to have been forgotten about or is stuck on "the other side of the island" since season one) is dead (he's not, but she doesn't know that) and she blames the queen for taking him off to war. So now she's plotting and scheming with Pharazon, his invented useless son Kemen, and some random Númenorean lord to overthrow Miriel. They do this at the coronation, where Daughter turns up with the palantir and calls it elf magic stone and this shows the queen is on the elf side, so the people immediately go "rabble rabble rabble!" She drops the palantir on the ground, Elendil tries to pick it up but gets shocked by a magic vision and thrown across the room. All is chaos, and then an Eagle shows up, which is supposed to legitimate the coronation, but Random Lord grabs the opportunity to say "the Valar support Pharazon!" and "rabble rabble rabble Pharazon king".
Miriel is now stuck in a tower like her father before her, and Elendil is trying to persuade her that there are enough people loyal to her to oppose Pharazon, but she stops him by asking what vision he had when he touched the palantir; he says he saw himself on a horse riding away from the city. So she thinks this means the prophesied doom has been averted, and orders him not to cause any trouble because this new path with Pharazon may be what saves Númenor.
Useless Son is given some power and a task by Pharazon and immediately starts being a spineless bully. The Seaguard who are still loyal are all disbanded and have to hand over their uniforms and swords. Elendil shows up and queries this, then does likewise (remembering Miriel's orders not to make waves). Daughter tries to persuade him just to go along and support Pharazon, but he won't. Useless Son insults him and Elendil takes it.
Then later they're all in a shrine having a ritual to send off the dead who died in the Great Epic War of the Southlands (all one village of it). Useless Son and guards show up to order everyone out as this shrine is going to be pulled down to build an aqueduct there instead. Friend of Isildur fights Useless Son and gets back-stabbed (it's such a pointless fight I can't even be bothered with it).
Next episode Elendil is being tried for fomenting rebellion or something, in the wake of the bust-up in the shrine. He again refuses to accept Pharazon as king, and assembled citizenry start rabble-rabble-rabbling. Random Lord advises Pharazon to put Elendil to death by seamonster (this is supposedly a trial that the Faithful undergo for the judgement of the Valar).
Daughter visits Elendil in prison, tries to talk him round, no go. She has arranged for Miriel to visit him and *she* tries to talk him round, still no go. So we then get to the seashore, where they're calling the seamonster. Elendil is ready to jump into the water but Miriel turns up, claims he was acting in her name so she should be the one undergoing the trial, and she jumps in instead. Seamonster turns up and looks at her. On shore all are awaiting the result, they think she's dead, but then she is spat out by the seamonster and the fickle mob once more rabble-rabble-rabble that the Valar have judged her to be the rightful queen.
The End (until the next two episodes and by now I'm longing for the Great Wave to hit). Also they seem to be setting up a Miriel-Elendil romance (he gets very handsy with her, more so than a subject with his queen should get) and I'm over here going 🤢
I've wanted to kill Tom Bombadil since I first read the books, so I guess Amazon has faithfully represented Tom as I experienced him!
I am impressed that you are still able to force yourself to see this stuff. I had to quit two thirds into season 1. I felt like Hal in 2001 when they disconnected his intellectual circuits one by one. Almost every scene offered a new internal contradiction compared to the scenes before, numbing my mind scene by scene as I desperately tried to uphold suspension of disbelief. I was slipping fast toward the stage where all that was left, was my ability to sing Daisy, Daisy. You are stronger than I am.
Like other reviewers have said, I'm spite-watching to see how more stupid they can get with every episode.
They came out of the gate strong this week, I have to say, with the Bombadil stuff and the Miriel-Elendil romance and Trial By Seamonster. Disa as Bat-woman is a contender, too, but the Dwarven storyline remains some of the better work despite all they can do.
I tried spite-watching as well, but it become too hard.
Scenes like Galadriel telling the Numenorian queen that she was “saved from certain death” by a Numenorian ship sailing by, implying that she must have forgotten that she voluntarily dived into the ocean in the former episode…or that elf-guy leading villagers into a castle to be better defended against the Orcs, but then leading them back into the village again afterwards, implying that he must have forgotten why he led them away in the first place… and so on and so on. I feared my brain would start to boil, the way the brains of the main characters in this show must be forever boiling.
As the Viking who had displeased his Lord and as punishment was forced to eat an enormous bowl of porridge (the Norse equivalent to this show) said after some mouthfuls: “Kill me, Lord, but not with porridge.”
These days I limit myself to vicarious spite-watching, through the Critical Drinker and other youtubers mocking new episodes of the show. Kudos to you for having the stamina to do the same.
Le Guin said, in reaction to one of the films based on her Earthsea series, something like "It's as if you changed LotR so that Frodo claims the ring for his own, puts it on, and then lives happily ever after." I wish that hadn't been a prediction of how badly the essence of the story is being butchered.
If we're talking about the animated film Tales From Earthsea, she has a quote where she says she liked the film on its own merits, but she was flabbergasted that anyone would claim it has anything to do with her novels, besides reusing some names.
No, I think she meant the 2004 TV series.
Why does not somebody spend 1 billion USD making an Earthsea triology? Great story.
Probably some version of "who owns the rights". They can't make a direct Silmarillion adaptation or call it that, I think?
Also ... depending on who you ask, either the first or the fourth book could be seen as vaguely problematic in some circles.
Life itself is vaguely problematic...but you are probably right.
From here:
"I wonder if the people who made the film of The Lord of the Rings had ended it with Frodo putting on the Ring and ruling happily ever after, and then claimed that that was what Tolkien 'intended...' would people think they'd been 'very, very honest to the books'?"
https://www.ursulakleguin.com/adaptation-earthsea-miniseries
She was a prophet in her own time. That's exactly what our boys Payne and McKay were going on about pre-first season, how they'd been so very, very faithful to the books (while changing the story because people who read the books would know what was going to happen, so they had to stick in mystery boxes).
If these niblets thought they could get away with it, they *would* have someone putting on the One Ring and being an enlightened democratic ruler.
The Celebrimbor-Annatar storyline is working out better than I expected. At least it's running on vaguely canonical lines. Of course, to make it work, they had to turn Celebrimbor into an idiot (why, exactly, does Annatar need him in this version, when he had to tell him about the secret extra-high hidden level in smithcraft that is "alloys"?) In this take, Celebrimbor is even more gullible than the Númenorean smiths who just beat him up and kicked him out when he tried getting into the forges. Dang, who knew those weak corruptible mortal Men would be less malleable than one of the Noldor? By contrast, all Halbrannatar had to do was turn up, look pathetic in the rain, get the soft-headed smith girl to persuade the soft-headed Lord of Eregion to at least talk to him, and Bob's your uncle, next thing you know Annatar is running Eregion as Acting High Steward and Grand Panjandrum.
If the Dark Wizard doesn't turn out to be Saruman, I will eat this Bombadil's not particularly yellow boots.
I love your episodes'reviews and "Some that live deserve death, right enough, and I'm looking at *you*, show!" is just great!
Oh, man (woman, child, Orc Baby, Ent Wife, or 'de knife-ears tuk er jerbs"' Númenorean), I was *so* mad at that part of the episode.
I swear by the Eagles of Manwe Sulimo, the Elder King, whom I hope will swoop down to get all Prometheus on the showrunners' livers, if they are setting up some dumb "Ha ha, turns out the *real* test was to see if you'd put the good of your friends above the destiny to fight the darkness and save the world!" test with Tom and his mangled quote, I will - invoke the Eagles to eat their livers.
They keep *doing* this, they keep quoting the movies scene for scene, line for line, but twisting this around. And it's particularly egregious here, because that speech is about how mercy is always good, even mercy to the undeserving, and the show used it to set up a fake dilemma where Tom is apparently coercing I Can't Believe It's Not Gandalf into choosing "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few".
(Not alone are they quoting the LOTR movies, but Star Wars and possibly Star Trek as well).
Do we really think I Can't Believe It's Not Gandalf is going to abandon Nori and Poppy to CERTAIN DEATH as per his visions? We might wish he would, but of course he's not going to do that.
But neither can we really think that if he leaves now, Tom is going to stick to "So sorry, you missed your one and only chance to get your magic wand to fight the dark wizard and the darkness and the fire and last Tuesday's mouldy bread crusts, as was your mystic destiny which is why you were sent to me to be trained young padawan, so too bad, looks like the world will just have to burn!"
Not a chance of a leaf in a Balrog's fiery breath.
So it's a fake dilemma and fake 'conflict for the sake of conflict' and they had to fold, spindle and mutilate another piece of canon to do so. Grrr. No wonder I'm cheering for Adar and the Orcs.
Rip them all down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpphSBYFYso
On the subject of in-house large language models versus implementing frontier models
A recent survey (https://www.pw.hks.harvard.edu/post/the-rapid-adoption-of-generative-ai) in the US states that 39.4% of adults are using generative AI for tasks both at work and outside of work, which highlights the rapidly increasing dependency on these models. Anecdotally, I introduced my wife to chatGPT four months ago, and today she consistently consults chatGPT 4o not only for work related matters, but also for day-to-day tasks at home. In our household, googling is slowly becoming a thing of the past.
Over the last year and a half, I have heard lots of chatter of regular businesses hiring teams of engineers to design in-house LLM applications. The arguments for building in-house LLMs are obvious: You control the architecture, data, and sensitive information of your business, as opposed to exposing this data to these ‘black box’ models. A year ago, it seemed like a good tradeoff to make, but after GPT-4 and other frontier models have been released, it seems to me that any regular business that continues to develop LLMs in-house will be left behind. Frontier models have advanced so quickly in terms of complexity, data scale, and efficiency that matching this pace internally may no longer be feasible for most regular businesses.
Looking into the future, I am curious about the following:
Aside from the reasons stated above, are there any other reasons why regular businesses should be spending resources creating their own in-house LLMs?
Is there a way to identify which companies are partnering with the builders of frontier models versus those developing their own in-house models within an industry?
If one of the barriers of customizing and implementing a frontier LLM within a firm is data cleaning, as sarahconstatin mentions in this post (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7L8ZwMJkhLXjSa7tD/the-great-data-integration-schlep), is there a business opportunity in becoming a data cleaner, aka the bridge between regular companies and frontier model builders?
If you have any data scientists or statisticians or modeling teams, "data cleaning" is already a thing they do a lot of (hopefully in entirely or mostly automated fashion).
Being a "data cleaner" isn't really a standalone job, and is very vulnerable to "being replaced with a very small shell script" or equivalent.
It is a billion dollar industry at the moment. There are hundreds of "data cleaners" right now cleaning data of all types of companies so that Salesforce can be implemented more effectively.
There is a possibility that when regular businesses decides to implement frontier models, this type of work might be needed. Now granted, it could be done by the LLM provider itself, or maybe at that stage the LLM can clean the data itself.
One thing adjacent to that, with probably a good amount of latent demand, is fine tuning the LLM for a given company's specific background, context, data, KPI's, priorities, etc.
I'd be surprised if OpenAI or Anthropic aren't doing this today with some large enterprise customers, but it would also be helpful to the next tier down of companies (so like F51-F600 or whatever, instead of only Fortune 50 companies) to be able to do this, and having done it with local LLM's, it's pretty fiddly and requires a lot of illegible expertise and messing around before you get good at it.
And of course, ultimately we'll all want a personal assistant who makes most of our c2b phone calls and emails and media curation and travel plans and whatever, and that's likely to have an LLM as a good part - the demand for "individual fine tuning" probably goes down to the individual level.
So there's almost definitely a niche for "AI whisperer" doing some combination of data cleaning, ETL, integration, and fine tuning, for businesses of practically any size all the way down to consumers.
"Building an in-house LLM" in practice mostly means "running an existing nearly-frontier open-source LLM, possibly fine-tuned, which AWS will host for you happily". It's pricy and a bit of a pain, but if exporting sensitive data to a frontier model provider is a non-starter, it's pretty much your only option.
Hmmmm, I haven't really heard that one, although I haven't had that many in-depth conversations.
When I say "Building an in-house LLM" I mean companies hiring ML researchers and engineers and building an LLM from scratch or using some sort of open source model (Not sure where the best open source model ranks today)
I'm aware of the problems with virtue ethics, but it looks like if everyone adopted it it would do enormous good in our current society. Yes, it's not a useful philosophy for resolving good-faith moral disagreements. But, in case anyone hasn't noticed, we're not living in a time of good kind people trying to do the right thing but not being able to agree on what the right thing is. We're living in a time of people routinely saying those who disagree with them should be exterminated, and using every dirty trick possible to advance their agendas, and of lying through their teeth on a daily basis, and of levels of brazen hyocrisy on an unimaginable scale. And that's just politics. Also look at the current state of dating, and the kinds of behaviours accepted as downright routine. Also look at levels of job stress, and treatment by bosses and coworkers. Also look at the general rudeness and selfishness of people, even outside of the aforementioned domains.
Sticking with just politics: we've got legions of horrible toxic people and somehow endless arguments about whether they're *really* actually bad, whether maybe they're nonetheless doing more good than harm or whether they didn't actually *technically* break any laws. Just *imagine* for a moment what would happen if we all started thinking in virtue-terms (doesn't even matter which particular virtues, any basically normal selection will do). Religious fundamentalists, woke feminists, red pill trolls, crazy trans activists...we can vehemently disagree on how much good or harm they're doing, or whether they're infringing anyone's rights. But who could *possibly* disagree on whether they are kind, compassionate, humble, tolerant, temperent, fair-minded people? The very suggestion that these extremist groups possess even one of those virtues to a non-neglible degree can be met only with uproarious laughter.
Our society is sick, at the moment, and even basic processes aren't functioning properly, commitments to non-violence and civility are disappearing. Do we have the luxury of dismissing ethical approaches because they don't do well at higher levels of analysis and complex problems? When we haven't even got the basic simple foundations of treating each other like humans working?
As far as I can see, the only way to cleanse our society of the toxic forces and avoid the endless rules-lawyering ("yes I've hurt lots of people but who can say the third-order effects of my actions haven't been a net benefit", "technically I'm not hurting you, I'm just knowingly creating the conditions for allowing you to suffer and doing nothing to prevent it, which makes it okay!") is some kind of virtue ethics.
On the other hand, the one practicing virtue ethicist I knew in person turned out to be a useless vacillating mercenary. So maybe there's a level of praxis necessary before it becomes helpful.
>Religious fundamentalists, woke feminists, red pill trolls, crazy trans activists...we can vehemently disagree on how much good or harm they're doing, or whether they're infringing anyone's rights. But who could *possibly* disagree on whether they are kind, compassionate, humble, tolerant, temperent, fair-minded people?
They are already thinking in virtue ethics terms. They are just not thinking about their own virtue or lack of it, but the lack of virtue of other people. This is basically their entire argument.
> I'm aware of the problems with virtue ethics, but it looks like if everyone adopted it it would do enormous good in our current society.
A good ethical system needs to have two properties. (1) If almost everyone adopts it it does enormous good for society. (2) If almost everyone adopts it, then those who do not adopt it suffer considerable harm, and hence are motivated to adopt it.
There is an unavoidable tension between the virtues of tolerance and righteousness. This is why successful teachers of virtue, like the Buddha and the Stoics emphasized the personal virtues. Promoters of more public virtues have a more difficult task. As Hume wrote: "[W]hat hopes can we ever have of engaging mankind to a practice which we confess full of austerity and rigour? Or what theory of morals can ever serve any useful purpose, unless it can show, by a particular detail, that all the duties which it recommends, are also the true interest of each individual?"
I've come to the conclusion [0] that a code of ethics is best thought of as a strategy or policy. And that the debate about rules/virtue/consequences/etc is mostly a matter of what level of specificity you want to operate on.
The success of a particular strategy depends on what sort of environment it's operating in. If the present is experiencing moral/ethical turmoil, it's probably a signal that the old ways are no longer as functional as they used to be. In which case, it behooves you to sit down and try to come up with something better. As ApeInTheCoat and BrandonFishback imply, there's no royal road. What you're asking for is the equivalent of "there's so much vitriol in the abortion debate. Why can't everyone just put aside their differences and agree that abortion was evil all along?"
There is, in fact, a rightwing corner of substack which is attempting to flesh out the details and ramifications of a post-liberal world order [1] (this is not authoritative or comprehensive, but it's top of mind). I think it's a mixed bag, to put it mildly. But I give them credit for looking for new ideas, at least. As opposed to the progressive-leftists who are still fighting the last war. (PSA: the National-Socialist German-Workers' Party has been effectively dead for nearly 80 years.)
[0] https://fromthechair.substack.com/p/dismembering-the-mystique-of-meta
[1] https://fiddlersgreene.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-the-linkedin-right
Yes, agree. My preferred brand is Stoicism, but I really would like to see more virtue education all round. I don't think anyone would deny that we have far too much anger and jealousy in our societies, and it would be great if both kids and adults were helped to learn ways of managing (or even extirpating!) destructive emotions, through making better judgments - just to name one aspect.
You're right to a point, I think, but mostly because virtue ethics encourages not overthinking things. You would imagine that cogitating deeply on what one should do improve your chances of doing so, but there's not actually much evidence of that. Studies of ethicists don't show them being any more ethical than average.
There are a lot of edge-cases in where it's difficult to determine what's the most ethical thing to do. But those edge-cases are precisely that... edge-cases. It's possible to focus too much on edge-cases, losing sight of what's most ethical in most cases.
The most ethical choice is often simple - yes, properly return the cart after using it at the grocery store. Yes, be honest in what you say. Yes, show compassion when someone is turning to you for help. Yes, try to be fair when evaluating others. Yes, consider multiple perspectives on a complicated issue.
>Religious fundamentalists, woke feminists, red pill trolls, crazy trans activists...we can vehemently disagree on how much good or harm they're doing, or whether they're infringing anyone's rights. But who could *possibly* disagree on whether they are kind, compassionate, humble, tolerant, temperent, fair-minded people? The very suggestion that these extremist groups possess even one of those virtues to a non-neglible degree can be met only with uproarious laughter.
But many disagree with you. You're just assuming that almost everyone is like you and opposes all the "crazies" on both sides. The problem is ultimately that large groups of people disagree on some of the most basic ethical values and no amount of civility is going to fix that. As long our society is this divided, this is the way it's going to be.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
I had to google the exact quote by CS Lewis.
It's a bad idea to feed people's delusions that they're actually trying to do good for everyone. It'll only encourage them and make appropriate responses to them weaker than they should be. Far better to tell them that they're bad, their ideas are bad, and they should feel bad if their ideas are actually that bad.
Here, CS Lewis sounds to be spouting right-wing propaganda of the extreme variety
> Yes, it's not a useful philosophy for resolving good-faith moral disagreements.
So? There isn't a way to resolve those.
I see the problem as one of scope. Our collective scopes have been concentrated—via technology—on the online world; a world dominated by snarky mean-kid type journalists who can find neither a good husband, nor a good job in the productive world ... hence they land a chicken-pecking job, where pick and snipe at all good things, tearing them down to equate their awful sense of self worth to the awfulness they've created.
Absolutely. The problem with the online world is those fucking mean-spirited spinsters. Here at Cameltoe Central we who lack peckers, either one we're born with or one obtained via lease-to-own, can only discharge our hate and horniness via acute pecks at everybody else's eyes and also, you know, like their shoe grommets and stuff.
The problem in life is not that everyone is a consequentialist; the problem in life is that most people don't actually, seriously, want to be good. Virtue ethicists, deontologists, and consequentialists should all agree that an altruistic kidney donation is a morally righteous act, but somewhere around one in a hundred thousand people actually do it.
When people say they want to be good, what they normally mean is they want to not be evil. They aspire to the moral heights of a rock.
I would accept the moral height of a rock as an aspiration. Basically I don't think the world treated me so well, or my life is going so well, that I owe the world anything more than to not be evil. However, I might be interested in charity for selfish reasons, I have read an article that said a boring uninspiring job can feel more inspiring if you use it to fund charity. Currently evaluating this. I need some fucking life goal beyond just existing. But it is admittedly hard to care about people who never did anything for me, would not do the same for me (probably) and there are no supernatural rewards.
You're being a bit uncharitable. I think it's perfectly natural to have a powerful phobia of invasive surgery. I also think that millions of people who would otherwise donate a kidney, cannot afford to spare a kidney due to their risk factors for kidney disease, including their vices. And for many of us, life without a few vices isn't worth living.
Donating a kidney requires committing to a very healthy lifestyle, too.
“When people say they want to be good, what they normally mean is they want to not be evil. They aspire to the moral heights of a rock.”
If everyone could stick to that it’d be a massive improvement over the status quo.
So on the one hand you make some good points. I’m reminded of how people who sheltered Jews during the holocaust weren’t particularly philosophical but generally simply said their parents had taught them to be giving or something simple like that. Humanity as a cultural species is going have a much easier time modeling ethics off of a morally upright person than on abstract principles.
The problem is which person. There are usually going to be flaws or blind spots in any individual. Two of the biggest virtue ethicists, Aristotle and Confucius, were horribly sexist and anti-science. Aristotle said things like women have fewer teeth and are naturally slavish. I also think people who seem totally morally upright and kind, can be too tolerant of objectively bad things like poverty, animal cruelty, slavery etc. Lastly there’s the complexity that people who are respectful, happy and well adjusted in their communities tend to be more prejudiced and hateful to outsiders (this is the function of the neurotransmitter oxytocin).
Aristotle basically invented science, we can't really blame him for not getting everything right. But he was basically the first one who looked at things empirically. For example placed eggs under hens and opened one per day, observing embryonic development. Compare this to crap like "humans are featherless birds with round toenails". And everybody was horribly sexist. Basically you have to look at a before-after comparison, the nature of the net contribution instead of expecting to get everything right.
> objectively bad things
Is this what you call everything you don't like?
Aristotle was famously very pro science. It's what he is most well known for.
But if you're calculating the empathic quotient of the people empathzing with criminals & terrorists, you have to take into account that those people generally have no empathy for people with your point of view, and after all you point of view is not hard to understand. So I don't think the problem's as simple as too much empathy.
I more or less agree, and I think OP could only come to their conclusion by conflating hateful behavior and illiberal viewpoints. (I'm using Illiberal broadly here to include all views contrary to Classical Liberalism, many of which I hold).
Okay, I over simplified a bit here. What I’m trying to say is that we have evidence that some neurological transmitters (e.g. oxytocin) are implicated simultaneously in forming both in groups and out groups. So the loving feeling you get around say sports teammates is at the same moment fomenting a corresponding dislike of the other team. And there is some evidence to the tune that people in less community oriented cultures are actually friendlier to strangers.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247723973_Individualism_and_Good_Works_Cultural_Variation_in_Giving_and_Volunteering_Across_the_United_States#
How good is that evidence about oxytocin? Is it just one study? A couple months ago I spend a couple hrs on Google Scholar, trying to figure out whether giving oxytocin to people who were just sort of asocial (often people with Aspergers) made sense to try. Main takeaway from my reading was that that had been tried, and no it did not work at all, and once you looked carefully at oxytocin you found its relationship to feelings of friendliness and trust was nowhere near as simple as people commonly think. It's high in situations where you'd expect it to be low, and vice versa, and is involved in various processes that have nothing to do with affection, bonding, and trust.
You may have a point here, and my observations may be skewed by the fact that I live in a deeply Christian area that is also extremely welcoming of refugees (Southwest Idaho). So my anecdotal observations may be skewed. (Though sadly, with the way the winds are blowing, this traditional acceptance of refugees might not last)
I think it's true that certain ways of thinking and certain approaches to personal moral codes are more conducive to good behavior than others.
To try to put it as simply as possible - being honest, keeping promises, being compassionate in a general sense, being kind and considerate in a general sense, being charitable, being altruistic in general, aiming to not be a burden to others... all of these, when followed conscientiously, tend to make for a better person. And if enough people do this, it makes for a better society.
I get a vibe that in modern society, a lot of this has been pushed out for the morality of political polarization.
Not saying people were ever *great* at being virtuous, just that it felt like a sort of generalist approach to being virtuous was more prominent at one point while friend/enemy distinction is overwhelming now to the point that it results in a lot of very shitty behavior.
Right now, at least, I think utilitarianism and virtue ethics should be friends, since more virtue ethics *in our current cultural context* will likely have a net positive impact that should be desirable to utilitarians.
>Religious fundamentalists, woke feminists, red pill trolls, crazy trans activists...we can vehemently disagree on how much good or harm they're doing, or whether they're infringing anyone's rights. But who could *possibly* disagree on whether they are kind, compassionate, humble, tolerant, temperent, fair-minded people?
You'd be surprised, I see a lot of this: "This volunteer firefighter is racist, so...." on one side, "That guy's just some virtue-signalling cuck" on the other.
Virtue ethics wont do anything to prevent the social-economics that let the soft-narcissism of normies promoting luxury beliefs online; it will just end in new exciting luxury beliefs.
You have algorithms that reward engagement, some percentage of the population who let the computer downward spiral them with rage bait and some level of the population who are willing to say to stop eating meat to save the climate inbetween their private jet rides. None of these really are interacting with ethics.
> Religious fundamentalists, woke feminists, red pill trolls, crazy trans activists...we can vehemently disagree on how much good or harm they're doing, or whether they're infringing anyone's rights. But who could *possibly* disagree on whether they are kind, compassionate, humble, tolerant, temperent, fair-minded people?
I can, trolls are the nice ones
> Just *imagine* for a moment what would happen if we all started thinking in virtue-terms (doesn't even matter which particular virtues, any basically normal selection will do).
> But who could *possibly* disagree on whether they are kind, compassionate, humble, tolerant, temperent, fair-minded people?
You start from saying that it doesn't matter what are the virtues and then select a very specific few.
There is a list of virtues that a stereotypical member of woke feminist, for example, would definetely possess: bravery, passion, dedication, self-sacrifice, etc. You can get similar list of virtues for every "crazy type of person" from your post. I don't think that "virtue" can be an answer without specifying which virtues exactly and in which proportion.
>You start from saying that it doesn't matter what are the virtues and then select a very specific few.
Seconded. To me, it seems likely that virtue ethics would just shift the antagonism from tribe level to list-of-virtues level, with no reduction is overall polarization.
Passionate and dedicated... Ok, fair enough.
But brave and self-sacrificing? You think it's brave to be a woke feminist in 2024? Pretty much all of the mainstream institutions have their back, and people who troll them on the internet can be blocked/ignored.
As for self-sacrificing, what personal sacrifice does a woke feminist make? Has their been a male woke feminist who quit his own job in order to have a woman take his place? If there has, I haven't heard of it. As for female woke feminists, where does their political ideology create even the slightest personal sacrifice? Maybe a tiny percentage of them actually travel to places where it's legit dangerous to promote their views, but the vast majority don't do this. Promoting a societally approved ideology on social media and in well-organized public gatherings doesn't strike me as a significant degree of self-sacrificing.
> You think it's brave to be a woke feminist in 2024?
Oh absolutely. Everyone is an underdog. Openly stating your views and fighting for what you think is right in our polarised society is brave, compared to not doing it, because now about half the people hate you. And getting death threats is shitty, regardless how many corporations dress their logos in pride flags for a month.
> As for self-sacrificing, what personal sacrifice does a woke feminist make?
Have you ever tried being an activist for any cause?
Pushing for changes that would be to my personal benefit is not self-sacrificing. It's not necessarily wrong, but I would certainly not call it self-sacrificing. It's the opposite of self-sacrificing, it's aiming to make a society that's more beneficial to you and people like you.
In my view, true self-sacrifice involves putting others before yourself, and that's very much not the vibe I get from woke feminists.
I've been involved in politics in the past, at a local level. If it's done out in the physical world, it can take significant time and effort. But just being a social media activist, promoting a particular ideology in a general sense?
> Pushing for changes that would be to my personal benefit
Classical example of a woke feminist is a white, middle class, able-bodied cis-hetero-woman, which, nevertheless, spends her time and effort to supports racial minorities, poor, disabled, gay and trans people in addition to just other cis-women.
But even if we take some fringe example, like a trans-exclusive radical femenist who passionately hates the idea of intersectionality and does some kind of activism specifically for other cis women, she is sacrificing her own time and effort for the gain (as she sees it) of the group as a whole. If she cared only about her personal benefit she would let others do do the work for her and reaped the gains.
> But just being a social media activist, promoting a particular ideology in a general sense?
Social media is a hellscape and promoting a particular ideology on it is a ritual for summoning demons. Half the people hate you, other half demand things from you. I don't think it takes less time than offline, but also provides less sense of achievement (because the fight never ends) and more stress (because, once again, social media).
Not everybody. I've never got any death threats in my life, which, I believe, is correlated with me not being active on social media.
But, yes on every side. As I said, everyone is an underdog. Being public about your politiocal views in a polarized society is brave, regardless of the side you are on.
> Not everybody. I've never got any death threats in my life, which, I believe, is correlated with me not being active on social media.
You mean you never got any personal death threats, right? As opposed to someone saying "all monkeys dressed as people should be killed", while not noticing that you happened to be an ape in a coat?
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
The incumbent isn't running in this campaign; we've got two challengers for an open seat.
Of which, Donald Trump is the one who used to be President, and Kamala Harris is the one whose highest office is famously not worth a bucket of warm spit. Donald Trump is the known quantity where we all pretty much know what sort of president he's going to be, and Kamala Harris is the one nobody outside of California really paid attention to, That's the heart of the "incumbent" dynamic.
Or, to look at it another way, in 2020 we had someone who was once President running against someone who was only ever a forgettable vice-president. Now, we have someone who was once President running against someone who was only ever a forgettable vice-president. Whether or not there was a four-year gap in their resume, is far less important than "was recently President and constantly newsworthy" vs "was never President or anyone else we really had to pay attention to". So this election should feel a lot like the last one.
I understand that, I'm just surprised that Republicans are using that rhetoric too, since it benefits Harris.
It does? I thought "continuity with change" was a joke from the TV show "Veep".
Right now, there seems to be an anti-incumbent mood (and not just in the US either). So if people subconsciously think of Trump as the incumbent, that's good for Harris.
But the Harris side has to walk the line between that, and supporting "election denial", and claiming that Trump *becoming* President would cause disaster.
*I* think that Harris feels like the challenger, but she seems to be running as an outsider. "If I am elected then ..." Well, ma'am, you are the VP right now and have been for 3.5 years. Why do we need to wait for you to be elected for this good thing to get enacted?
Tim Wahl's "we can't afford four more years of this..." at a recent rally contributes to that vibe.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/walz-roasted-making-puzzling-gaffe-014334037.html
Yeah, it feels weird.
> implying people are saying trump is currently president
> implying trump is currently president
> implying trump won in 2020
these right wing dog whistles are getting complex
It is customary, as ascend pointed out, to refer to former Presidents as “Presidents” forever after.
Yup. _That_ part seems minor... ( Also, I don't think that in this situation following the academic tradition of appending "emeritus" to the title really fits well with ... Trump )
Imagine if he really does succeed in a fascist coup, and just as the name "Caesar" became a term for imperial power for 2 millennia, so will "Trump"...
Render unto Trump the things that are Trump's...
LOL! Many Thanks! Though I wonder if he would try to get the phrase "trumped up" to drop out of the language... :-)
It's certainly going to change the meaning of "playing the Trump card".
True! LOL! Many Thanks!
Is that treating him as the incumbent, though, or just using the courtesy title because he used to be president and they're not saying "former president" (I imagine it's a bit clunky to directly address him as Mr. Former President).
What do Democrat politicians do when talking with/about former president Obama? I found a similar reference in this article:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/democrats-hopeful-harris-can-reignite-magic-obama-08-run-rcna167824
"Johanna Maska, the director of press advance in Obama’s 2008 campaign, said ...“There was a lot more time for President Obama’s romance to build within the Democratic Party. Harris is going to need to keep this infatuation, this newfound love, going for 10-plus weeks,” Maska said. “And I think there’s a difference there, because this love [for Harris] has been so quick that I just hope that it’s not fragile and easily breakable.”
So it could just be that people accustomed to saying "President Z" are continuing to say "President Z".
This seems to be the expected norm. Trump is "President Trump" now, Biden was "Mr Vice President" in 2020, and Clinton was "Secretary Clinton" in 2016. I don't know why US politicians are considered to keep their office title even after they've left that office, but it's clear that they are.
That's what comes of not having knighthood and peerages to hand out ;-)
Its the same all over, a college professor is always Professor X, even in retirement.
How does that joke go: But you screw one goat ...
> Its the same all over, a college professor is always Professor X, even in retirement.
But they don't retire at all. They become emeritus professors.
Per Emily Post, one would refer to Trump as a former president only if he isn't there. If you're addressing him in person, the correct address is President Trump. https://emilypost.com/advice/addressing-a-former-president-of-the-united-states
This applies to other positions, with governor specifically called out. I understood from somewhere that I can't now confirm that one should be addressed with the highest office one has held. For example, it was Secretary Clinton.
Apparently, it’s not limited to the US; in my European country, the formally correct address for a former minister (I don’t mean a priest!) is still “Minister”. But this does not seem respected these days – the zeitgeist is that such conventions are outdated.
I wonder if it's a combination of trying to keep incumbency advantage and denial of legitimacy? "Yeah, that other lot are in power now, but the *real* president/secretary/tea lady is our person who held it when we were in power, and thus the rightful spiritual heir to the office, vote for them this election and put them back where they belong!"
When I was a kid in the 70s, there were jokes about Jack Lynch being the 'real' Taoiseach because he had served in government so long, so when he was voted out of office, it didn't feel right to have a new guy in the job.
https://www.newstalk.com/news/taoiseach-profile-jack-lynch-625674
I think incumbency is currently a disadvantage rather than an advantage. Hence why I was surprised to see Republicans going along with it.
Agreed on all your points. In addition, there is simply the fact that Harris is currently Vice President, not President, and the Vice Presidency doesn't carry much formal power - though I don't know how much power Biden has _in_formally delegated to her.
Yep, this.
My current writing on the "horrors of the world"
https://substack.com/home/post/p-149291181?r=v5cn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Interesting ideas, i read through all of your articles. I would've commented but you've restricted that to paid subscribers.
Its weird to me to connect so fully to the results of the concepts you write about, but to so viscerally respond to the way you conceptualize things like magic and otherworldly beings as "real". Anyways, I've subscribe as there are some real gems you've got and I'm curious as to how we've come to many of the same results with vastly different views of objective reality.
Thank you!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EmstuO0Em8&ab_channel=DEFCONConference
An excellent rant about how thorough enshittification has become, and enthusiasm for making things better by having more rules.
I'm curious about to what extent Doctorow's ideas are coherent, and also whether there's reasonable hope for de-enshittification. It seems to me that he used to celebrate outlaws, but now he wants laws because the outlaws have taken over the system.
I dislike the concept of enshittification because it feels like a vibe that just happens to advocate for Doctorows favored solutions.
Yes, things are getting worse, because Moloch is always at work. But Doctorow doesn't do the hard work of actually figuring the mechanisms of why things are getting worse and instead throws his hands up and yells "capitalism!"
Here are two descriptions of web bloat, aka websites getting bigger and slower across the board, https://danluu.com/slow-device/ https://infrequently.org/2024/08/the-landscape/ . I fail to see completely how regulation and unions would improve the situation here since this is a massive coordination problem. I would worry they would make things worse actually, like similar high modernist projects to fix big, soft problems.
Antitrust may have some benefits. Regulation would be risky as it could kill innovation and be hard or impossible to roll back. Unions, I utterly fail to see how they could help users--we have too many examples of unions opposing automation, unions keeping schools closed for longer than necessary, unions making it prohibitively expensive to build etc.
The mask is a bit much for me, but I listened. The enshittifcation (sp) of things is mostly moloch. We do need our government to break up the monopolies (Google facebook etc..) And we do need unions to make a comeback... the non-unionization of amazon is heartbreaking, when I think of the suffering I'm responsible for when I buy shit on amazon.
I thought globalization, outsourcing killed unions? If AliExpress can ship from China, so can Amazon. So while it may sound trumpish, unions can come after tariffs first?
That's just another reason to oppose tariffs all the more!
On the other hand, I've heard that unions are preventing the automation of ports in the US, making shipping slower and more expensive than it should be. And unions are probably a big part of why it costs 5x as much to put on the same play with the same cast in NYC compared to London.
I listened to about the first quarter of his rant, but I'm not sure the Internet thingies he mentioned ever used to be better. Was Google search ever really that great? I remember bitching about Google's advertising coming at the top — and the fact that we couldn't find what we searched for — since the 00s. In fact, I remember organizing a VLAB (are they still around?) on the future of search engines and alternatives to Google. Has Facebook gotten worse? Maybe, but I don't think so. I was getting ads for Russian and Ukrainian wives, and it was like X in the number of Tea Partiers (proto-MAGAs for those not old enough to remember) until I unfriended all my crazy friends. Or maybe I'm older and bored with it.
I would say Web-based GUIs have gotten less usable. I blame it on outsourcing the implementation to low-paid contractors in India. But I'm reluctant to say things have gotten worse, because once it became commercialized, the Internet was always pretty shitified.
Fwiw, I had a glimpse into front end development and from what I gather the bad UIs are a self inflicted wound. I see it as completely cultural in that making simple sites is seen as trivial so engineers must use eg. React in order to maintain their status among their peers. But eg. React involve a mountain of complexity so that small sites ar worse (bigger slower, with more time spent on managing complexity instead of making the UI good) while large sites easily devolve into complete monstrosities because the complexity is unmanageable unless you really hire the best, which doesn't happen often.
I'd be curious if someone more familiar with frontend could weigh in as I'm merely peeking through a keyhole.
Google circa 10 years ago was amazing, for example you could google a vague description of a semi-obscure movie, or 5 words of misheard lyrics, and it would point you to the right item most of the time. Also, you could search for information on things that you can also buy, and find that information, instead of only places where you can buy it.
LLMs do well at semantic nearness searches, much better than I recall any search engine performing. I often use LLMs to find whole fields I was unaware of, by describing them in general terms and getting back the right technical phrases that can then drive the search. I find that the LLM integration into search engines is currently less effective (though that may change).
I don't remember it being that way. I'd search for scientific terms and would get a lot of crap. Bing's exact match keyword algorithm its use of a backlink system to assess a site’s authority made it more useful as search tool if you were doing research. I don't know how it does against Goog for popular culture searches, because I don't follow much pop culture.
I do remember it being that way. For technical stuff as well. But there's a huge variance in how good people are/were at googling things. Probably no way to check now.
I think Google search peaked about 15 years ago, when the algorithms were very good about finding what you wanted somewhere, but before significant monetization. Perhaps 10 years ago I started noticing some things being actually HARDER to search for than I thought they should have been, and concluded it was getting filtered in mysterious ways to direct my activity.
In agreement with our friend here. When I was learning about these new-fangled computers, one of the exercises was to get us to use search engines to look things up. These were the days of Netscape and Ask Jeeves and Dogpile, and when Yahoo still was Yahoo! with the funky red typeface.
Google was head and shoulders above any of them. Miles better than anything Microsoft was putting out (one reason why I dislike Bing even now, as Google gets worse and worse).
We dinosaurs remember the Before Times.
Yes, Google was head and shoulders above the competition, but that doesn't prove that Google has gotten worse, only that the competition back then was really, really bad.
I think Google has gotten a little less effective, though, because the problem has changed. When Google launched the problem was to find and prioritize the best pages about the search term. Today, the problem search engines have to solve is how to defeat SEO's attempt to prevent them from prioritizing the best pages about the search term. It's changed from a straightforward information theory problem to a complex social-adversarial problem. If someone ever manages to launch a service that is as effective as Google once was it will be because of a breakthrough in game theory rather than a breakthrough in information theory.
I think its early success was also do to outsmarting the predecessors of SEOs. Early websites would boost search results by spawning hordes of gateway pages that all linked to each other and the main page. These sites were themselves crap, lazily curated lists of other sites. Pagerank stomped them out.
You’re misremembering, I think. Before Google there would be no value in creating hordes of inter-linked pages. It was Pagerank (which estimates the value of a page by examining link structure) that made that sort of link farm SEO useful.
Pre-Google, Lycos and Altavista both relied on keyword frequency and proximity to rank pages, not link structure, so SEO (what there was of it) was focused on loading pages with keywords. Granted, Pagerank was an effective defense against keyword spamming, so perhaps you’re right that defeating that sort of SEO was a factor in Google’s success. Mostly, though, it was the fact that link structure was a hugely more effective way to identify relevance and quality, which made Google’s results almost as good as Yahoo’s hand-curated directory while providing greater breadth and faster updates.
> Yes, Google was head and shoulders above the competition, but that doesn't prove that Google has gotten worse, only that the competition back then was really, really bad.
Agreed! At least for technical questions, when Bing came along, it blew Google out of the water. See my couter-response above.
By the time Bing came along, Google had shifted to less of a keyword search engine and more of a natural language search engine, as it is today. To get the best results out of Google, type questions rather than entering keywords. The change was made because the vast majority of users are better at asking questions than curating good keyword lists. If you really insist on doing a keyword search, put the keywords in quotes to force a keyword search mode.
I have never observed Bing to be significantly better than Google for technical searches or anything else I do (and it's usually worse). Note that my technical field is software engineering and computer security (specifically, cryptographic security), so perhaps Google does better in my field than in yours.
I think Google has simply become overwhelmed with the vast rate at which data accrues these days, probably much more in a day now as a month or two in, say, 2000. It's as if what would have been good search results from earlier days of the Internet have been literally buried under later pages and are now thereby missed.
Data volume is not the problem. Google still easily spiders the whole web (at least, the part of it not behind paywalls or other dynamic page generation obstacles). The primary problem is that search has become an adversarial problem, a constant war between search engines and SEO. Search engines still mostly win this battle, but SEO has reduced their effectiveness. The rise of social media has also had a big negative impact on search effectiveness. In the early 2000s, most of the web's content was static pages constructed primarily by experts in relevant domains. Today, most of it is user-generated by the masses.
There is that, but honestly the sponsored results are terribly noticeable. It's just advertising now, "pay us and we'll rank you first", which is not at all what I want when looking for something.
Yes, of course I expect that if I look for "widget makers in my area", if Wilson's Widgets pay you to say "We're number one!", they'll turn up first (and second, and third) in my search results. But what I want to know is, are Wilson's widgets any *good*, or are they just paid-for advertising crap? That's why me and others are complaining at and about Google now.
I don't mind Wilson's Widgets coming at the top. I do mind slop sites that purport to survey every kind of widget category crowding any human-written (but not monetised via Google) blogs, or even widget makers, down to the tenth page of results.
Data ANALYSIS rate has increased faster, though, with tools like LLMs to help things along.
Google was an astonishing improvement re. the search engines of the 90’s, the Altavistas and Lycoses of the time (think 1998 or so). Once it became a de-facto monopoly and needed to monetize its search, the quality rapidly went out the window.
I'd forgotten about Lycos!
There were so many! With weird names like AskJeeves, Dogpile, and of course the insufferable Yahoo! like that with the exclamation. Who TF names a business like that :)
Yeah, pre-Google you were lucky to get three relevant hits in the first 10 pages of results. (A real pain back when modems were slow). Google was revolutionary.
Exactly as you say. All the other search engines in those exercises, you'd have to go through pages to get the answer you wanted. Google, it was in the top three results at maximum. Truly revolutionary.
There was also the "I'm Feeling Lucky" option which just went to the top hit. Many people seemed to use it as the default, which seems astounding now.
Anti-trust legislation, regulation, and unionization (for programmers). I don't think he mentions prosecution for fraud, though I think that would help.
I think his idea is that not making products worse is part of working conditions.
I'm back from vacation and (finally) have a new substack, "Why Target NGDP?" [I'm skeptical.]
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/why-target-ngdp
Maybe this is a stupid question, but regarding Spartacus, how are they preventing artificially inflating numbers? Like one of their use cases is workers organizing, but what prevents management from generating a hundred/thousand/ten thousand accounts and signing the petition just to out everyone? They say they have settings to prevent fake accounts, but I tried creating a campaign and didn't find any, and the sign up process is simple enough that one person could create a couple hundred accounts an hour by hand.
(I do appreciate that they don't leak whether a given email has signed up, most sites don't bother.)
Jordan from Spartacus here.
We circumvent this issue in two ways. The first is using an identity verification system, like financial apps do. This involves a 30 sec process of scanning an ID and doing a liveness check with a selfie video. We don’t tie this information to anybody’s username, but we can see if a username has gone through a verification process. We don’t have this running on the site now because it costs two dollars a pop, and we’re pinching pennies.
The second is a not yet released feature, which allows organizers, and participants to generate one time use referral codes. The only way you can join a campaign is if you’re given one, and the referral chain can be audited later.
In the meantime, we can easily implement settings that bar virtual phone numbers for use in account creation, or create domain exclusion rules for emails.
How do you prevent someone from ratting out the person who tried to recruit them?
How do you prevent honeypot groups?
If the campaign is invite only, it’s up to each participant to use their discretion not to share information with people who would rat them out. Same as if they were organizing any other way.
We can prevent honeypots through forms of ID verification which attest that the organizer holds certain credentials.
I’ve heard these kinds of questions repeatedly. There is no 100 % risk free way to organize collective action, or to mitigate every possible attack vector of a well resourced bad actor. No matter how many layers of safety we create, you can imagine a hypothetical adversary who is motivated enough to defeat them. Go ahead, I’m sure you can! No matter how successful a coordination process is, you can imagine a system so hostile it wouldn’t matter. What does that prove? Since we can’t mitigate all conceivable risks we shouldn’t address the ones we can?
If we can facilitate 90 out of 100 use cases, that would be amazing. A few extreme scenarios in which Spartacus would fail does not cancel out all of the scenarios in which it can work.
The pertinent question is if it’s better than any of the alternatives out there, and we think it can be. By a lot.
> I’ve heard these kinds of questions repeatedly.
I guess that makes sense. It's our first time hearing about it, so all the obvious questions come to mind, whereas you've been through the other side of that countless times.
True enough, but that's not your fault. Apologies for the bristly tone.
While I think your goal is admirable, I think this is a hard problem to solve.
The world is a large place, and the safety in numbers thing only helps if I am in the same subgroup. If I am a labor activist, I want to reach a critical mass of people within my local company. If all of the others who joined (using a legitimate identity) are from a different country, or are straightforward Pinkertons paid to join, their backing will be less than usual when the bosses come cracking down on us.
Likewise, suppose I am a college professor in the US, who has a controversial opinion. Perhaps I have a belief incompatible with the some prevailing philosophy, or think something which most people find gross can actually be ok (e.g. bestiality). I am justifiably afraid of getting cancelled over it. What I would want is to have the backing of perhaps 100 other college professors, preferably with a few at my own institution, so that the blackslash is distributed over a lot of cancellable people instead of just a few. However, I don't particularly care how many people who are less juicy targets are backing me, if Scott Alexander shares my opinion that is certainly nice, but he would be pretty hard to cancel these days. Likewise, random college students who joined either genuinely or in an effort to see which of their professors are traitors to the cause are not helpful.
However, identifying if someone is not only a genuine, unique person, but also has some characteristic is not easily doable automatically. One way to accomplish this would be to have a lot of causes per group. If the employees of a company can back campaigns for ungendered bathrooms, vegan lunch options, nudist Fridays, collective bargaining for better wages, home office, an inclusion campaign, firing all male/female/Christian/Jewish/atheist employees or an extension of the parking lot, then there would be some plausible deniability. Like, you can ask two known employees if a newcomer is also an employee, and they would not learn if Mr. Thomas from accounting is a vegan, a union proponent or a parking lot enthusiast until whatever thing he backs reaches critical mass.
> This involves a 30 sec process of scanning an ID and doing a liveness check with a selfie video. We don’t tie this information to anybody’s username, but we can see if a username has gone through a verification process.
Two questions here:
(1) Is this process still considered secure given current AI capabilities?
(2) If the confirmed identity is not tied to the account, then what assurances would I have that the (n-1) other people whose account-tied name will be revealed will not turn out to be John Doe? (Of course, tying verified identities to accounts would also not be without problems. Subpoenas would an even more appealing option if you had gone through the trouble of eliminating reasonable doubt about group membership.)
There should be an option for verifying identities but leaving them concealed even after the numerical threshold has been reached. For instance, coordinating people to vote for a highly controversial political party would allow it to get a true measure of support for it without outing people who might be afraid of social ostracism or physical attack.
We’ve gotten some requests along these lines for fundraising use cases, basically crowdfunding where everyone stays anonymous. There’s a lot of reasons this would be hard to implement and manage without running afoul of regulations, and at a certain point, if people want super duper privacy they can use bespoke ZKP smart contracts on the blockchain. That’s not the primary use case we’re solving for at this stage.
As it is, we have some polling functionality on the roadmap, so anonymous polling + ID verification + assurance contracts is definitely something we can do.
Thoughts on new study by David Reich and team?
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.14.613021v1.full
In my mind it should be titled "Increasing Human Intelligence and Diligence via Natural Selection." Basically its a follow-on to Darwin. Earth's equatorial environments are the location of Homo sapiens (EDIT: where Homo sapiens evolved). Equatorial like environments are thus expected to be the most habitable for Homo sapiens. Out on the more extreme environments, where environmental pressures cause heavy culling of less fit individuals, is where more fit individuals will survive the culling. Simple natural selection.
Why does this not happen in the tropical climes? Tropical climes is where Homo sapiens find an abundance of food growing year round, where weather-proof clothing, strong shelter, and stockpiles of fuel are not required for survival to the age of reproduction. Hence, where stock-piles of food & fuel, and substantial clothing & structures are required for survival, is where individuals of low intelligence and low diligence experience low reproductive success.
Why doesn't this cash out in actual historic observations? The Yamnaya (the first whites basically) did not have an impressive material culture compared to Mesopotamia or Egypt.
The Yamnaya didn't have the easy button the Egyptians had. The Yamnaya had to work hard all summer to collect fodder, food & fuel, and construct housing & clothing for winter. Egypt is dry today, but in the past was green.
The center of the range of the Yamnaya is Volgograd, 49 degrees from the equator, a place not known for balmy weather.
Look where pyramids are built, near the equator where food is abundant all year.
This came home to me several years ago, whilst visiting friends in Hawaii over Christmas. I took a picture of people wearing shorts standing in line to buy a snow cone. My friend and I walked along a side road, where the utility company had cut brush below the power lines, this gave us access to pick the guavas. It was then I realized that if I had to retire poor, I'd do it on the Big Island. Food grows year round and there is no heating bill. There is plenty of fishing, you can grow food all year, a small chicken house and a nice garden would keep someone nicely on a small budget.
Well, I don’t know about Hawaii, but Africa has this little problem that everything tries to kill you and your livestock. Predators, snakes, etc. remarkable how even antelopes have more dangerous antlers than European deer do, or reindeer. Life is very sharply competitive there.
Now for example I was flying over Aalborg, basically Northern Denmark, and it was remarkable how the entire county was just ideal grassland for cattle and there was nothing else at all. Nothing would compete with livestock. (OK originally I am sure there were wolves and bears.)
So this gives me a very different picture. Remember that whites usually have the lactase mutation. This implies not necessarily stockpiling food, cattle will produce milk year round. But OK let’s say stockpiling is necessary. But in Africa, simply fighting for survival and protecting livestock is necessary. Even hunting an antelope is not that simple, given their antlers.
The usual story I've heard is the opposite - the equator is where it was hardest for people to thrive because all the parasites and prey were adapted to them.
The problem with evopysch just so stories is that they are underdetermined. There's a story for every possible hypothesis, all seemingly equally plausible.
There is obviously a major difference in *how* was it "hard to thrive" - near the equator, there was an evolutionary pressure towards physical attributes that help resist parasites and other challenges, and towards the poles there was an evolutionary pressure towards long-term planning and risk management, since if you were careless with planning and got unlucky weather, your whole family starved to death before the spring; so as far as risk aversion has some hereditary component, we should expect to see some measurable differences to confirm or reject that theory.
Equatorial Africa is where we evolved. Food grows there year round, you'll never freeze to death. For almost all our food plants (except stone fruits which need a cold cycle) heat is never the limiting factor. You'll never have to lay up a supply of food or fuel for the winter. You'll never need clothing nor warm shelter. Thus about responsibility, do you need to be diligent in laying up supplies for the cold dark winter?—No, cold dark winter never comes to equatorial climates.
But in climates with cold dark winter, where snow covers the ground for months at a time, where deciduous trees lose their leaves and conifers only bear edible seeds, green plants are otherwise dead and decaying, or buried in the snow, most birds have flown south, large herbivores typically migrate south, or forage bark or dead grass. For humans: caches of food and fuel need to be set aside, warm clothing needs to be constructed, warm houses need to be built, and not after the cold comes, but long before. Diligence ... "Evolution by Natural Selection."
Fascinating but I'm having trouble working through the implications.
A natural read is "Europeans became smarter and more diligent as a response to agriculture". But then you would expect groups that took much longer to invent agriculture to be an SD or two below Europeans in IQ and diligence. While I'm sure there are some people salivating at that possibility, the *Japanese* didn't get agriculture until some ridiculously late date like 500 BC, so something must be wrong here.
So another possibility is "Europeans got smarter and more diligent over time independent of agriculture, because everyone was getting smarter and more diligent". I think this is how schizophrenia risk goes - some studies have found it constantly declining since at least 50,000 BC. Here there was some original event that created the modern human package, and since then selection pressure has optimized for things that go well with the package (like IQ and diligence). The problem here is that I'm not sure there's a lot of room for 50,000 years of positive selection for IQ at the rate Reich finds without our ancestors having to be as dumb as bricks (dumber than chimps?) But this is just a vague impression and I could easily be wrong.
What's frustrating for me, is that Reich et al don't do a similar analysis against North Asian (except for a few dozen loci from Japan), SE Asian, Indigenous Americans, and sub-Saharan populations. A bunch of the decline in "thrifty gene" alleles are *assumed* to be associated with the advent of agriculture. But we only have data for West Eurasians (which include three groups: pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers, the invasion of agriculturalists, and finally the Indo-European migrations). Agriculture developed independently in Asia and SE Asia (9 kya and 8 kya ago respectively) and in Meso America and the Anded (9 kya and 8 kya respectively), and defused down into sub-Saharan Africa 3 kya. Do we see similar selection going on in those populations? If so that would support the TG hypothesis. If not, that would suggest some other factors are affecting West Eurasian populations.
Anyhew, the decline in the alleles associated with the risk of smoking stood out! Tobacco wasn't introduced to Europe until the 16th Century. But the alleles that are associated with lower risk of smoking has been declining overall from 8 kya. Though it's interesting that they spiked before the European contact with the Americas and then dropped precipitously starting 0.5 kya (!). Would Indigenous Americans have a lower frequency of smoking-risk alleles?
And why would the genes associated with fast-paced walking *increase* with the advent of agriculture? Granted, agriculturalists are burst workers, and they're less sedentary than hunter-gatherers, it seems like fast-paced walking would be more useful for hunters and gatherers who would have to cover a larger territory for their food resources.
Correction: When it came to "intelligence" they did compare the profiles of West Eurasians to Japanese. But they had to drop a over half the 1109 loci that presumably affect these factors to see a selective pressure in West Eurasians, but they didn't see the same selective pressure in Japanese populations. They are puzzled. ;-)
> We finally observe signals of selection for combinations of alleles that today predict three correlated behavioral traits: scores on intelligence tests (increasing 0.79 ± 0.14), household income (increasing 1.11 ± 0.14), and years of schooling (increasing 0.61 ± 0.13). These signals are all highly polygenic, and we have to drop 463 to 1109 loci for the signals to become nonsignificant (Extended Data Figure 10). We also tested for a correlation of East Asian GWAS effect size measurements to West Eurasian selection. We observe a significant correlation for γsign (P=3.8×10−6) and rs (P=1.9×10−10) (Extended Data Figure 11), which is very difficult to explain as an artifact of population structure.
> While I'm sure there are some people salivating at that possibility, the *Japanese* didn't get agriculture until some ridiculously late date like 500 BC, so something must be wrong here.
There's a similar observation that I find interesting.
For background, intelligence test scores tend to be normed on whites, and subtest scores are intended to mean roughly the same thing between different subtests. So the general idea is that a score of 95 on verbal reasoning is about the level of verbal reasoning that you'd expect in someone who scored 95 on quantitative reasoning, assuming the testee is a European white.
This is a "flat" profile - if you do well at something, you do equally well at everything else, measured against the norm for European whites.
Middle-Eastern whites, Indians, and Africans have different average levels of performance, but they more or less share a flat profile.
East Asians don't. They have hugely outsized performance on spatial reasoning, or in the alternative hugely outsized underperformance on verbal reasoning, measured against the white profile. This has been noticed and gives us memes like "Asians: because calculus isn't going to do itself".
But what I find interesting is that Amerinds have the East Asian profile of greatly elevated spatial reasoning. This hasn't really been noticed because their absolute performance levels are so poor. But the profile is clearly visible in their scores, and it implies that this difference in cognitive profile must go 𝘸𝘢𝘺 back.
On the issue of "the Japanese" getting agriculture in specific, you need to distinguish between the time that agriculture showed up in Japan, the geographic location, and the time that agriculture showed up in the Japanese, the ethnic group. They aren't the same; the Japanese of today are not autochthonous. Agriculture showed up in Japan alongside the Yayoi, who brought it from the mainland.
> While I'm sure there are some people salivating at that possibility, the Japanese didn't get agriculture until some ridiculously late date like 500 BC, so something must be wrong here.
Except that this study only uses a subset of Japanese phenotypes as a reference against West Eurasians. It's not a study of the frequency Japanese phenotypes over time.
I think the effect is caused by latitude related climate. With lower latitude tropical areas being less conducive to low diligence culling, and higher latitude sub-arctic areas more conducive to low diligence culling. Japan is a long country north to south, with the north being 45 degrees north of the equator, and the south only 30 degrees north of the equator. Think the difference in climate between Cairo, Egypt, and Marseille, France. So are you talking about people in Northern Japan, or Southern Japan. Because those 15 degrees in latitude north to south make a whole lotta difference in climate for primitive people.
But the real effect is seen in 55 degrees north Northern Europe and 30-ish degrees Greece.
" I think this is how schizophrenia risk goes - some studies have found it constantly declining since at least 50,000 BC."
How do they track schizophrenia risk?
They're tracking the frequency of loci — and the alleles associated with those loci — that seem to be associated with schizophrenia in *modern* European populations. One of the favorite behavioral genetics *just so* stories (i.e. post hoc handwaving) is that schizophrenia may have been a useful genetic profile to have in cultures that valued shamans. AFAIK no studies of whether these markers are higher in Siberian populations, or other populations which were not Christianized until recently and practiced shamanism and/or witchcraft. If somebody has links to papers dealing with this question, I'd be interested in seeing them.
The Japanese are mostly descended from the Yayoi people, who brought rice-farming with them when they migrated from Korea:
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2019/05/23/the-jomon-contributed-little-to-the-japanese/
He's published a paywalled update: https://www.razibkhan.com/p/built-to-last-continuity-in-japanese . The Japanese are not mostly descended from the Yayoi. They are descended from another group that arrived even later.
> A 2022 paper assembled a large number of Jomon samples from 6000 BC through 500 BC, and finally we got our first look at two Yayoi samples from 100 BC, as well as three samples from 700 AD, the historical period labeled by these researchers as “Kofun” because of the style of burial mounds common among elites at that time.
> The results were surprising and force a reappraisal of a generation of genetic models.
> You see that the Jomon all share strong genetic affinities. Meanwhile, the two Yayoi individuals occupy an intermediate position, and it is the Kofun who resemble modern Japanese. ( https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F185a301e-db51-46c7-b0c0-744525a0d975_800x548.jpeg )
> Surprisingly, the non-Jomon ancestry of the Yayoi reveals they differed from the Kofun and modern Japanese. Rather than Koreans, of all the non-Jomon populations, Siberians and Manchurians turn out to be genetically closest to the Yayoi. So the closeness to the North Chinese and Koreans we consistently detect in modern Japanese samples only emerges starting with the Kofun samples [of 700 AD].
> at least two historic groups of rice farmers likely arrived in Japan, the first from a Siberian population that introduced rice farming but was then genetically overwhelmed by a second population with origins in Korea. The three Kofun individuals are also very similar to modern Japanese, indicating that by the historical period, the ethnogenesis of the Yamato had mostly been finalized in genetic terms.
A quick search on Wikipedia shows rice was cultivated in Japan at least 3000 years ago.
Edit: I realize that isn’t so far off from what you said, but the paper suggests some of the effects as recently as 3000 years ago.
There is some evidence that populations in East Asia have had time to adapt to a rice based diet. Below is one study but there are many others on the topic. One interesting possibility they note is that these adaptions could actually predate agriculture due to the abundance of wild millet and rice in China. I think that if there was enough time to allow these digestive adaptions, it wouldn’t surprise me if neurological changes were also present.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7896717/
"The advent of agriculture" is a spectrum and hard to pin down to a specific date. I don't think me saying "500 BC" and you rebutting with "no, this other sources says 1000 BC" is a very interesting disagreement.
It does seem to undermine the argument from the Japanese, though.
Googling, it seems first traces of agriculture in northern Europe is about 4500 years ago. That doesn't seem substantially different for 3000 years for the Japanese.
Maybe there are other better counter examples?
Hm, then maybe I'm just wrong about it being possible that Reich's effects are from agriculture. His paper shows the biggest effect in IIRC the 10000 - 6000 BC period. I don't know what's happening then that's interesting. End of the Ice Age, maybe?
Like some others mentioned, the modern Japanese are mostly descended (~90%) from mainland Asians who presumably have been practicing agriculture for as long as anyone else in North-East Asia. I don't think there's any mystery here.
Clue for the Japanese: prevalence of ALDH2 mutation as an adaptation to alcohol.
I think the estimated rate of change is what is the most important takeaway. But he clearly is attributing at least one of the effects (body fat) directly to agriculture. I imagine the rise in celiac disease is similar. Probably lighter skin and TB are due to moving away from the equator and those traits no longer convey protections from UV and ID, resp.
Thoughts on increase in blood type B?
Ha, I agree. Let the record show my edit came in (barely) before your response.
Edit: In fairness to my original un-edited post, I did say *at least 3000 years ago* and Wikipedia also shows it could have been as early as 6000 years ago, which is a meaningful difference.
> some studies have found it constantly declining since at least 50,000 BC
Presumably for most of that time it was seen as some kind of religious or demonic interference in the affect person.
At the risk of repeating myself (see my response above), one of the favorite behavioral genetics just so stories (i.e. post hoc handwaving) is that schizophrenia may have been a useful genetic profile to have in cultures that valued shamans. I don't know if the behavioral geneticists are still promoting this (as yet) unfalsifiable snake oil. A good test of this would be to look at the frequencies of these alleles are in Siberian populations — or for that matter in any populations which was not Christianized until recently, and where shamanism and/or witchcraft are valued arts. If somebody has links to papers dealing with this question, I'd be interested in seeing them.
Have you quit Software Engineering after a decently long tenure? Where did you go / what did you do?
I'm nearing the 20 year mark and I've just about had it. Everything we do is so stupid now The average competence level is rock-bottom. I want to get out but it's all I've ever done.
Or, alternatively, how does one find a company to work for that isn't hot garbage?
Thanks to everyone who shared their thoughts!
I keep customizing (not quite engineering, more like scripting) the same ERP software for 22 years. It is boring, but it feels good to be one of the best in the world at something. I have the entire code base in my head.
I hate working for consulting companies. One customer calls, who is a manufacturing business, and I have to think about their processes. Thirty minutes later a retail company calls...
I will work for an end-user company from December, that is calmer.
I feel no way to find an interesting job that also pays the bills. I have about 15 years until retirement, if it is boring but stress-free, I will take that.
I do agree that "mainstream" software dev is stupid. 20 years ago if one wanted a data entry app with three tables and three forms, you could do it in Delphi without any code, just a visual editor. Code was only used for validating and copying data. It was done in a day. Today it is a two week project of a team of two, say Java Swing and React.js the later requiring somehow doing stuff in 20 different files for just displaying, filtering and sorting tabular data. People flat out forgot about inversion of control.
I did work at a pure software company (perhaps 20 people, C++) and generally found the environment much better. They developed technical specialist software for customers with very deep pockets. I don't know how much they sold it for, but 10k$ per workstation per year is probably the right order of magnitude.
I generally liked the quality of their codebase. Everyone up to the CEO was a (former) software developer. One downside was that they were sticking to svn, because that was what all the seniors were used to. From a CS perspective, their problems were more interesting than the once I encounter in my current field, particle detector physics.
One way to pick out interesting companies is to search for software far from the well-tread path. Writing Java microservices with web frontends can be lucrative (if you happen to work for a bank, for example), but at the end of the day, you will encounter very few interesting problems on the 'I need to grok a new algorithm to solve that' level. Solving Navier-Stokes in a parallel environment, simulating neutron fluxes in a reactor, calculating how buildings behave in an earthquake or automatic trace routing in PCB design would all be problems which are both interesting to solve and for which some specialist software company likely sells a product for big bucks.
I recently left software engineering after 22 years. I had plateaued at Senior for lack of the leadership skills needed to advance to tech lead, and my job satisfaction cratered after I ran out of the love of the technology I had as a young man.
What you should do depends on what you are unsatisfied with. If you are ok with the day to day work of software development, the simplest change might be to transfer internally to a job where you are closer to the customer, and can therefore see the good your software is doing for people. If that's not an option, you might try moving to a company that is building something you genuinely consider good, useful software. Helping to build that might lift your spirits.
If neither of those are feasible, you'll probably need to shift industries, and that means retraining. There is a lot of satisfying work to be done in the medical field, but even the pretty lowly jobs require two years of training. In two years you can become a practical nurse, a respiratory therapist, or a paramedic. Add one more year to paramedic, and you'll be an advanced life support paramedic. Four years takes you to registered nurse, and a bunch of diagnostic medical technician jobs. And it goes on from there.
It must feel very hard on the ego to be an expert in a field and then become a beginner ir another one. At this point I am resigned to developing data entry forms if at least it is stress-free.
It kind of does. But I'm significantly better at school than I am at software developement, so there is some satisfaction to be had, too.
I was in hardware validation. Designers design, validators validate the design when cast in hardware. My job involved a lot of hardware side, and minimal software side, mostly writing scripts controlling test hardware, reducing data, etc.
But as to a second career. I went back to the University for Geology. I work the mineral exploration side. Its mostly seasonal, and much less than full time work. I get paid to visit remote Alaska, fly first class, live in camp environments, and get paid to look at pretty rocks. I find that millennials and younger people don't like the outdoors as much as us boomers. For instance, most of the millennials I work with turn down the opportunity to ride ATVs out to some site two miles from camp to do some 15 minutes work. I'm like "are you kidding me? you're paying me to ride an ATV in Alaska? People sweat their asses off all year and blow their money to do this for a day or two ... you're going to pay me for that? I'm front & center."
Now that the kids are grown, its easy to travel, and travel for a long time. I've seen the aurora several times, and just lots of krazy crap you just can't imagine, commuting in helicopters, the sun setting twice in 20 minutes, one of the first home sites in North America ...
I’d recommend looking at companies whose (main) product is not software, like semiconductors, manufacturing, etc. You will be contributing meaningfully to real products. It’s not without issues, nothing ever is, but I have a sense it cannot be all stupid because chips have to signal-process, cnc lathes have to turn, etc., so there’s a fundamental reality check on your work.
Well, yes and no. I do agree that companies in the _hardware_ space specifically probably take things more seriously, and I am looking at some possibilities in that realm, though most of them don't need my skillset.
But most of the companies I've worked for have not had software as their main product, rather they have _used_ software to deliver a service of some kind. And even though there is a relationship between "taking software dev seriously" and delivering a high-quality / profitable / [name your virtue] service to consumers or businesses, it seems this relationship is too hard to see/quantify for it to be acted on. That is, it's not immediately apparent how "reducing duplicate leads" or "upgrading core libraries to versions without known CVEs" or "bringing build times down from 30+ minutes" translates to the bottom line, so "the business" forces engineering to not do those things. So engineers that care about doing a good job eventually leave, or never go to work there in the first place (plus Google is paying triple so why not go there?). Feature dev continues as fast as possible, tech debt is never paid down, and everything becomes a horrible mess and stays that way.
Those specific companies sound over-managed to me. As in obsessing about the bottom line and micromanaging what the devs do. I think more relaxed businesses exist, as in, "as long things keep working, you wizards just keep doing whatever you want to". In a less overmanaged business one just overestimates by a factor of two the time required for what "the business" wants and uses the time for these tasks.
So I think “deliver a service” is still… non-physical, correct? As opposed to writing software that controls, say, a machining center? No room for bs there, metal is being cut at the exact rates of feeds and speeds.
"That is, it's not immediately apparent how 'reducing duplicate leads' or 'upgrading core libraries to versions without known CVEs' or 'bringing build times down from 30+ minutes' translates to the bottom line, so 'the business' forces engineering to not do those things."
Unless the business is micro-managing your time then some of these you can do without asking permission. I, myself, became unhappy at one of my employer's product build times many years ago and spend a few hours per week driving the build time down to something that I found acceptable. No one tried to stop me.
I expect that many companies are simply not optimized to prevent background technical risk reduction (mine certainly isn't).
"Feature dev continues as fast as possible, tech debt is never paid down, and everything becomes a horrible mess and stays that way."
Things don't always go as I wish, but you may just need to find an employer that isn't insane about scheduling every last minute of your job.
I'll also note, however, that a certain amount of gruginess in the code often means that you have customers (with schedules and desired). A perfectly clean code-base often means no customers and thus no schedule pressure. This has its own problems.
It's not that every minute of my time is being controlled, but rather that management (slash tech leadership like a Staff+ group or whatever) is controlling what's allowed to be committed. Plus, y'know, I'm not in charge of the design of these systems. I can't just go redesign them!
My examples above are over-simplified ideas that could be expressed in a few words. Rarely is reality as clean as "the build takes 30 minutes and doesn't have to, the same thing could be accomplished in 10". It's probably 30 minutes because it's doing dumb things, because it was designed incorrectly, and that design is now extremely load-bearing. Fixing it isn't a matter of doing good technical work, it's a matter of convincing people with power that it's a solvable problem. People who have different ideas about what constitutes good software, and/or who would prefer not to admit their mistakes, or more charitably who are in the middle of More Feature Work and don't want a distraction.
Or, another way to illustrate what I'm talking about is like... Imagine a company with around 20-30 developers who mostly work in Ruby. They have about 10 paying customers (large corps), a few thousand end users (employees of those corps), plus a hundred or so internal call center users. The board force-hires a new CTO. The new technical direction is TypeScript, Lambda, DynamoDB, and GraphQL. Everything will be done as serverless microservices. All calls will be done over GraphQL (which requires embedding Apollo in every Lambda function). Also we're going to triple the size of the dev team, and spend a year rewriting everything. ........this is not a problem I can solve, even as a senior IC! This is organizational dysfunction so deep it's irredeemable. There's no solution but to get out, which I did. I would have preferred not to join such a broken company in the first place, but they don't tell you "hey BTW nothing works" in the interview! These places THINK they're doing a good job! They're not!
I'm not trying to be whiny here. I have been *trying* not to take jobs with disastrous companies. I have failed, repeatedly. I do not know what I'm doing wrong.
I think companies become disastrous by trying too hard. Being too ambitious. If you get the vibe of driving the whole team hard for a goal and so on. The vibe I like is that you will own this particular thing and then just be responsible for it your own way.
As a fellow B2C web app automaton, I've found smaller companies to be -- well, still disastrous, but in different ways from what you're describing.
At a smaller company, as a senior engineer with a bit of social skill, you can pretty much talk the CEO and board into letting you spend a few weeks on anything you believe in. You can literally just go spend an afternoon putting together a plan, no permission necessary, because coming up with proposals to fix problems and take advantage of opportunities is the point of hiring someone senior.
The build takes 30 minutes and you think it might be possible to get it to 10? Grab a list of outages and write a paragraph about why a quick turnaround time for changes would have lowered their impact, plus make some pie charts showing 4 builds costing 2 hours a day of waiting around vs 4 builds costing 40 minutes, then make a list of stuff like:
1. Cache artifacts
2. Parallelise template precomputation
3. Move our build to GitHub Actions and use a biggest worker ("cost should be about the same")
4. Profile and speed up tests ("let's timebox this to two days")
Stick some impact/effort estimates against these items so it looks like you've thought about them, and move any that you think are stupid to the bottom of the list and cross them out. Till the soil over the next week by strategically complaining about build times making it take longer to fix bugs and how you're worried that it'll take hours to fix an outage. Wait until someone asks whether this is preventable, tell them you'll send them your writeup, and watch a beautiful project sprout.
At smaller companies, I've found that the biggest problem is that my predecessors have used their freedom unwisely. You -- as a senior engineer at a company where you're at most one hop from the CTO/head of eng/lead/principal/whatever and probably directly report to them -- are now in the clique that controls development, and you now have to go and fix the Svelte/GraphQL/TS/Lambda/DynamoDB/Redis CQRS abomination that previous engineers inflicted upon you. You have agency, but that agency is necessarily directed towards cleaning up messes left by other people.
> At a smaller company, as a senior engineer with a bit of social skill
As an autistic 43 year old, my social skills are just barely at the level of a neurotypical 20 year old, or so. I can follow your story but I couldn't make it happen unless the CEO was already my friend (in which case all that maneuvering wouldn't even be necessary).
I worked for a small company like that, with all that agency and autonomy, and it was great. But I had the advantage of already knowing at least 9 people when I joined, so I already had their trust and respect.
"The new technical direction is TypeScript, Lambda, DynamoDB, and GraphQL. Everything will be done as serverless microservices. All calls will be done over GraphQL (which requires embedding Apollo in every Lambda function). Also we're going to triple the size of the dev team, and spend a year rewriting everything."
This is a domain specific dysfunction. Which is *think* I observe from a distance in web development --- throwing out a code base every three years seems fairly common there.
My employer can't/won't do this because the cost is just SO DAMN high to do a total re-write. An architecture/code-base I helped design from the ground up is nearing 30 years old, for example. A good estimate for a rewrite would be 3+ years of 30+ engineers and probably $100 million. So it isn't going to happen. We may (and sorta are!) replacing parts incrementally, but I don't expect a wholesale rewrite.
This *can* lead to other dysfunctions --- like replacing things is tougher then when everything can be rewritten every few years -- but it isn't what you are seeing. And where I am we move slower than it feels *should* be necessary. We do move to new technologies, but probably slower than web-companies (because we expect to live with our choices for decades ...).
So, my best guess, is that a chunk of what you are seeing is company specific (not all companies do what your new CTO wanted to do) but a large chunk is also field specific. And you have tradeoffs no matter what s/w sub-field you are in.
You still might want to get out of software. But you also might want to find a sub-discipline that has different failure modes. Maybe failure modes you find less annoying.
I had been a SWE for 7 years (so not as long as you) and quit. What I was doing didn’t feel meaningful, and it didn’t seem like people were very engaged in their work or happy to be there. It was just sort of a “do the minimum, take your paycheck, and get out” kinda vibe, which can wear on you. So I quit and tried to go to medical school. Technically the application cycle is still going, but it looks like I’m not going to get in for the second year in a row despite a high MCAT/GPA, checking all the extracurricular boxes, etc . Have encountered a ton of hostility to tech in the medical world—a lot of “why are you here” kinda thing. It’s a very insular world. So I am probably just going to have to try and slink back to tech now, as sucky as that is. I realize that this doesn’t give you much in the way of advice as to what you can do to pivot. But I did quit software engineering after a decently long tenure, and this is what I did!
I’m quite surprised at your experience and the hostility to tech you’ve faced! Sorry for your experience! Granted, I only was a SWE for a year before I left, and I was pre-med in college, but people generally found my background interesting on the interview trail, especially when I talked about how my background offered a strength in computational research. That said, my college advisor strongly advised against applying to med school, noting that schools’ primary concern is that when the going got tough, I would quit and hop back to my lucrative safety option, and so they wouldn’t want to waste a spot on me
TBH, your experience was kind of the experience that I thought I was going to have, haha.
That said, it's by no means everyone! Like you say, there are a lot of people who are interested in tech, and I've gotten two good research gigs basically because the PI was an MD who was interested in AI/ML stuff.
But yeah, I did encounter a lot of hostility to tech in the medical world, at least in my first clinical research gig. It seemed like a lot of (mostly older) physicians equate "tech" with "the EHR," and basically view the EHR as something that was imposed on them from above by people who promised it would make their jobs easier, whereas it actually made their jobs harder and more unpleasant.
Now they see the same thing on the verge of happening with AI and LLMs or whatever and yeah...the hostility was real. (Mostly not to me personally (although there was one pathologist lmao), but towards the abstract concept of "tech" haha).
I definitely oversimplified in the comment above because I am bummed about how this application cycle is going so far, but yeah one of the suggestions I got when I first showed my essays to physicians was, basically, "chill on the 'changing medicine through AI' stuff."
And I know another former SWE whose application was by all accounts more impressive than mine who also whiffed last cycle. He's having more luck with MD/PhD this cycle, so maybe that would have been the way to go...
I have a similar background and I'm curious—did you apply to any DO schools? If not, could you share why?
Yeah, so I didn't apply DO, and I think that I should have.
First cycle was kind of a rush because I took the MCAT in late June and basically had my hands completely full trying to rush out MD secondaries in time with a full-time job.
This cycle, I asked my advisor if I should apply DO, and he said he didn't think that it was necessary unless I was actually particularly interested in osteopathy. That is, he didn't think I needed it as a "back up," so to speak.
I suppose there's *technically* still time to apply DO this cycle, but man, it's getting really late, and I don't really know how the DO process works at all. Presumably they'll want me to have shadowed a DO, which I haven't done, and also be able to talk thoughtfully about "why DO" in a way that is going to seem less convincing given that I would be applying so late in the cycle, lol.
So yeah, *might* try and do DO this cycle if I can get through the application process fast enough, but, at the very least, if there is a next cycle, I will definitely apply DO, lol.
You probably have already seen it, but just in case you haven't I'd recommend ludic.mataroa.blog, the rants and commentary of a programmer in the same boat as you.
Oh yeah I love that guy. He speaks what's in my heart.
"Everything we do is so stupid now The average competence level is rock-bottom. I want to get out but it's all I've ever done.
Or, alternatively, how does one find a company to work for that isn't hot garbage?"
I haven't quite after a decently long tenure (been coding as a job since 1989) and don't find the competence level of my co-workers to be rock-bottom.
But I also don't work for a 'tech' company that makes its money by selling advertising. My employer makes very expensive semiconductor equipment.
In what field are you doing your S/W engineering? Because Facebook front end is really quite different from building game engines is different from building compilers is different from ...
I have worked mostly for consumer web companies. Not ones big enough that you've heard of them, except maybe HomeAdvisor/ANGI which was much smaller when I was there. Nothing anywhere near the "FAANG" tier.
I'm a data-and-databases specialist, though I can do other stuff to (generic "backend", ops automation, etc). I studied economics and don't know any "hard" CS, which I've never needed nor witnessed a need for.
I worked with a lot of great people and accomplished modest-but-satisfying things from about 2005 to 2019. From summer '19 to now, everything has been terrible.
The thing I find most frustrating is that these companies do have actual problems to solve! But they don't want to solve them. They just want to play with Kubernetes or serverless or event-driven architecture or build a self-serve developer platform or... Meanwhile the actual business is being run in spreadsheets because engineering refuses to help. So aggravating.
I just posted a plain-English discussion of recent data on the lead content of cinnamon (https://statisfied.substack.com/p/is-cinnamon-unsafe). This Thursday I'll be discussing whether Guardian Caps actually shield football players against brain injury.
I just caught myself thinking that because my newsletter is free, there's something less "shameless" about promoting it here. It's amazing how many questionable assumptions and how much self-deception can be baked into a single thought that crosses one's mind....
I wanted to say you have a well written piece. I found myself thinking of questions several times, and as I read further on you answered them.
Thank you. Kind of you to say. I prefer somewhat deeper dives, because it's easy to find shorter pieces.
So speaking of coordination problems: One way to perhaps improve our presidential elections would be for the electoral college votes to be divided in each state according to who won the most votes in each congressional district. (With who won the most votes in the entire state getting the two senatorial votes.) The problem is that the dominate party in each state sees this as a disadvantage, it gives more votes to the other party. So if we could have two states (one red and one blue) make this change at the same time it would somewhat nullify this disadvantage. Thoughts? There must be other people thinking along these lines.
I just ran across this https://sites.google.com/view/presidentialbycongressionaldis/election-results
It appears that allocating electoral votes by Congressional district would have led to the popular vote winner losing the election in 1960, 2000, 2012(!), and 2016. Not sure how the two votes per senate seat would change things, but given that that currently a major source of the disconnect between the popular vote and the electoral college vote, I would think the effect would be negative.
I think that the obvious solution to the mess that is the EC is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. [1]
Of course, it was set up all wrong. What it should have said is that the members of the compact will vote for whomever wins the popular election /among members of the compact/. So Texas could either join the compact or face a situation where their EC members will never decide a vote because a block with 270+ members exists. (If you want to be a bit evil, say that the offer to join the compact is only open until it has a majority.)
[1] also mentions that the vote distribution you propose is already implemented in two states:
> Today, all but two states (Maine and Nebraska) award all their electoral votes to the single candidate with the most votes statewide (the so-called "winner-take-all" system). Maine and Nebraska currently award one electoral vote to the winner in each congressional district and their remaining two electoral votes to the statewide winner.
I don't think that this is in the states particular interests, though. Generally, there are big advantages to being a battleground state likely to decide election outcomes: presidents from both parties have to handle you with kids gloves lest you decide to favor the other party next time. Florida, where a small community of Cuban expats dictated foreign policy for decades would be a good example.
A state going from winner takes all to splitting its EC votes would decrease its campaign importance. If it is polling 50:50, the likeliest outcome is that both candidates will win some EC votes, with only the two senate votes hinging on which party wins the popular vote by a few thousand. So it would make sense to invest a lot less effort into that than into Florida, where a whopping 30 EC votes can hinge on a few thousand voters.
On the plus side, not bearing the brunt of election campaigns might be a blessing in itself.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
Case in point, Nebraska is currently trying to move towards winner-takes-all, as that will greatly increase Trump's chances of winning (and Maine unfortunately has no way to retaliate this cycle).
> National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
How does this differ from what Trump et al. wanted to do with getting states to send slates of electors different from the majority vote in the state? I believe the Supreme Court ruled against this recently.
Mainly because those weren't the established rules for those states.
Also they went ahead and tried to submit fraudulent electors.
It's only considered "fraudulent" now because they failed. If they'd succeeded, they'd have been "duly appointed by the State Legislature in accordance with the Presidential Electors Clause of the Constitution." Just like the NPVIC electors would be if THEY succeed. Transfers of power are always messy business.
This is false. A successful fraud is still a fraud. If I sell you a fake Monet painting, I'm committing fraud regardless of whether or not you figure out it's a fake. No reason fake electors should be treated any differently.
I do not mean that the plan wouldn't have been discovered. I mean the determination of their putative fraudulence would be made differently.
To use your example, it is as though you have two paintings by Monet's students painted long after his death, and there are two different experts certifying which paintings are imbued with the "true essence of Monet."
There is a very fundamental difference between proposing to change the rules of an election *before* the election, because you think it would result in a fairer election, and proposing to change the rules of an election *after* the election, because your side lost under the old rules.
Stipulate a world where Trump got away with it. Approximately 100% of Not-Republicans and probably at least 20% of Republicans would regard him as an illegitimate usurper. If the people trying for the National Popular Vote Compact get their way, some people will think it was a *bad* decision but almost everyone will think it was a legitimate one in the same way that e.g. the 17th amendment is legitimate.
What do you think of the "faithless electors" scheme from 2016, where people tried (ineffectually) to get Republican electors not to vote for Trump? That strikes me as pretty damn analogous to the "alternative electors" idea.
One possible problem is that you might see 2000 Florida disputes in dozens of close Congressional districts. Also, a greater potential for fake "fraud" shenanigans: If Party X wins most districts in a state controlled by Party Y, but there was a trumped up "problem" in district 5, then, gosh, I guess the vote in district 5 can't be certified. A 10000 vote "problem" can be ignored at the state level because it won't change the state outcome, but it could be large enough to change a district outcome.
The classic objection to this, as proposed, is that is allows gerrymandering of the EC. Splitting the EVs proportionately + 2 overall wouldn't have that problem, though.
Proportionality is still vulnerable to intrastate shenanigans around, e.g., ballot access & polling locations, plus neutral effects like geographically differential turnout rates, especially in the largest States (CA & TX).
Gerrymandering is a problem, but I suspect less of one than the above.
Yeah gerrymandering of the districts. This doesn't seem as bad as the current situation. And yeah splitting the EC votes in proportion to the popular vote in the state would also work. Just something to make it feel like your vote counts for something.
perhaps a 'minimal overlap' solution?
>Just something to make it feel like your vote counts for something.
Hmm... Are there any statistics on how many people move to swing states specifically to try to make their votes count?
( Weirdly, it happened that my late wife and I moved from California to South Carolina when I retired (not for any political reason - her best friend lives here), so we went from more-or-less disenfranchised by deep blue to more-or-less disenfranchised by deep red. )
You might be interested in the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. It's an agreement to have states award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, which would make the electoral college irrelevant. The key mechanism is that if a state signs on, it doesn't go into force until enough *other* states have signed on to have a majority of the electoral college. So it costs you nothing to sign on, and only goes into effect when it can control the result of the election.
However, not enough states have signed on to activate it yet.
The constitutionality of that remains very much an open question. The relevant Wikipedia article has a pretty decent summary of the arguments for and against its constitutionality so I won't recap those here. The practicalities though are that:
(1) The NPVIC's constitutional legitimacy has not yet been tested in any federal court, so that outcome is currently just anybody's (highly motivated) hand-waving.
(2) Per Article III, the SCOTUS isn't supposed to take up such a question until it is "actual" e.g. the NPVIC has been activated. No advance hypotheticals in other words. The Court has arguably fudged that more than once including recently; but that certainly isn't something anybody can count on to happen.
(3) I would submit that in the court of public opinion, as distinct from actual federal courts, arguments for the NPVIC _not_ needing Congressional approval will not do well. The language of Article 1 Clause 3 is plain ("No State shall, without the Consent of Congress...enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State...") and the thing we're talking about is literally named an "Interstate Compact". The billboards/ads/social media posts will write themselves, to the public-opinion detriment of whichever political side is trying to argue that this particular interstate compact should be carried out without Congress's approval.
(4) At any rate the circumstance under which the NPVIC, once having enough states signed on, would be activated are that someone appears to have won the EC while losing the total popular vote. What would the period from early November to early January look like in that case, with the addition of dueling emergency federal court cases careening towards the SCOTUS? What if the SCOTUS can't/won't rule before the date that the newly elected Congress is supposed to formally accept and count the EC votes from each state? Suppose the newly-sworn-in Congress, in the three days between its taking office and the formal counting of the EC, rushes to vote on the NPVIC?
How all of that turns out in reality, I have no freakin' idea and neither does anyone else.
A big problem I see is ballot access. Right now it doesn't matter if California found a reason to keep Trump off the ballot, but it would in a national popular vote scenario.
The other big problem I see is "2000, but across the whole country". I used to hate the EC and think the NIVC was a no-brainer, but now I think the EC is necessary just for pragmatic reasons if nothing else.
Yeah it's not going to fly though. Right now small states have some advantage, (which I'm fine with.) and would not want to give up that advantage.
Most measures of voting power find that the alleged small-state advantage is dominated by the big-state advantage provided by bloc voting. So the decision is made every year by a small number of big states (e.g. PA -- 5th largest in the country) that happen to have evenly divided electorates. Granted that if you removed the extra two votes from all states to completely remove the small-state advantage, our elections would shift dramatically D-ward, but that just shows that the small-state extra votes advantage is succeeding at partially offsetting the big-state bloc voting advantage.
The one weakness of this is that the national popular vote (plurality) doesn't necessarily reflect the real majority preference. For that we would need something like ranked choice voting.
real majority preference? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sincere_favorite_criterion
Ranked choice voting would be much, much worse at reflecting actual preferences, since it's based entirely on ordinal numbers.
Another thing is that seeing what a shitshow 2020 was on the right made me update strongly in favor of FPTP.
People already distrust elections enough, even with the simplest and most transparent mechanisms possible. Taking weeks to figure out who won through a seemingly black box process disconnected from vote totals would just pour gasoline on the fire.
I see no real problem with approval voting. ("Vote for as many candidates as you want, a maximum of once each; most votes wins.")
It's not more difficult to understand than FPTP, but it does seem to behave a bit better. However, whenever there's energy for reforming the voting system, it gets directed to crazier, more opaque systems.
And yes, the fact that it's easy to understand what's happening in FPTP is a significant virtue.
> People already distrust elections enough, even with the simplest and most transparent mechanisms possible.
I should point out that a non-anonymous ballot would be both simpler and more transparent, and would completely solve trust issues.
> I should point out that a non-anonymous ballot would be both simpler and more transparent, and would completely solve trust issues.
Who voted is already a matter of public record, just not *how* they voted, right? We already see lots of theories promulgated which are easily falsifiable.
From a game theory perspective, this significantly helps certain states, namely California, above most other states. And not for the reason you're probably thinking.
Republican-lead states tend to have more moderate voting records overall, (i.e. closer to 50/50 even if it's consistently more R). California is overwhelmingly D, to the point that the excess D vote in the state overwhelms the entire population of multiple other states. If I'm in a state that's 51% Republican, I may want my state's vote to reflect that contention and not just go R all the time. Maybe I think moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats are both pretty good, and want to avoid the crazies. A consistent R win would lean towards crazies, so I want Ds to be competitive. But if I signed on to the pact, I would actually just be negating the R vote entirely when it comes to voting for President. My state would be providing essentially the same number of votes for R as D, meaning my state doesn't matter at all (an interesting reversal of swing states from current!). I would, in fact, be abdicating my vote for the opinions of people in California.
I'm sympathetic to the idea of a national vote, and think it may have a calming effect on some of the craziness, if Rs had to compete for California votes and Ds had to compete for Texas votes. But it's totally a bad deal for any state where the two parties are competitive and generally a bad deal for Rs. It's not likely to get enacted.
George's idea is very different. If each congressional district split its votes off, then rural CA, NY, etc. can still be represented and so can urban or semi-urban areas like Austin and Atlanta that often get swamped by state totals. It provides a lot of nuance by making each congressional district potentially competitive, instead of making millions of people feel like their votes are pointless. And, despite having a potentially huge effect on voting, has a much less painful effect for a lot of states than the NPVIC.
California has more Trump voters than Texas. Right now they don't matter, but they could.
I disagree with abolishing EC, but this is a bad argument for it.
As I said, I'm actually sympathetic to the idea of a national vote. I'm saying it won't happen because it gores a lot of oxen, including of the people that would need to sign on to make it work.
Right (what you say at the end.) It's a state action so takes no national action. One thing pointed out that I hadn't thought of is that what is done at the state level can also be undone at the state level. So if there was some 'we'll both do this together thing' between some blue and red states then there'd have to be some agreement that they wouldn't undo it right away. Say a ten (twelve) year buy in period.
>Republican-lead states tend to have more moderate voting records overall, (i.e. closer to 50/50 even if it's consistently more R).
That doesn't seem to be the case. In 2020, there were 10 red states where 60%+ of the vote went to the winner, but only 6 blue states, plus DC. Results were similar in 2016
The blue states with that kind of imbalance have much higher total votes. Montana being 57% Republican was only a total vote difference of ~100k votes. California on its own was over 5 million votes extra towards Biden/Harris in 2020. New York was another two million. Maryland and Massachusetts both have a million voter spread, with several other states not far behind. Scanning the red states I'm seeing a good number with ~500,000 excess votes to Republicans, but none in the millions. Tennessee is the highest with 708,000 more votes for Republicans than Democrats.
ETA: The highest percent among Republicans states was Wyoming at 69% R, which resulted in a +R of about 120,000 votes. California's 63% D vote dwarves those other differences.
OK, but that is a very different claim than your initial one, which was about percentages.
Your new claim is little more than the common observation that, currently, the Electoral College has a slight Republican bias.
No, they are not the same claim. The electoral advantage has more to do with very small states that would have 0-1 representatives if going strictly by population, but instead has a minimum of 3 (two senators, one rep). Republicans tend to do better in very sparsely populated states and gain an advantage. I was a bit loose with my language, as it's not about percent per state as total overages.
California has a different issue for the Democrats, in that they not only do better in California (like the Republicans do better in Texas and now Florida) but by a huge amount. The nationwide popular vote advantage for Democrats that we've seen since 2004 can be seen entirely in the excess votes found in California and New York. Texas is pretty much as much of a lock for Republicans as New York is for Democrats, but only gives Republicans +631,000 votes towards a national popular vote. In other words, Republicans are winning their states by smaller percents overall. Even in the states where Republicans are winning by very large percents, the absolute numbers are much smaller so that it moves the national needle by less.
Democrats want the NPVIC because they are "losing" millions of votes by having too many in certain states that is completely overkill in a national election. If Democrats could move maybe 4 million votes from California to Texas, Florida, PA, anywhere it's close, they could lock in a bunch of other states. So they want NPVIC. Obviously that would be bad for Republicans, and also bad for many specific states that would lose clout and voter impact.
Once you get that majority of states to agree there’s no need for these kinds of laws, a constitutional convention can probably change the constitution.
Amending requires more than a simple majority of states. Ratification of an amendment requires 3/4ths of states to ratify it through conventions or by their legislatures. It would be significantly easier to implement the national popular vote compact than to amend the constitution.
It would also be easier to reverse.
It's a lot safer than a constitutional convention, though, because it only changes that one thing. A convention in today's political environment would result in two camps screeching at each other over guns and abortion,
There's no danger in an Article V convention because all it can do is propose amendments. Nothing would be adopted unless it's ratified by three quarters of the states. That said, the first order of business of a constitutional convention (or stand-alone amendment) should be to make the process a little easier. Like a direct national referendum followed by another one a couple years later, to ensure against something's being adopted because of momentary hysteria.
Or maybe people actually belive the things they claim to believe and are working to implement. I am a leftist who supports the national popular vote, and would be 100% behind whatever stronger language is needed to ensure it doesn't break down.
The electoral college is a terrible idea independent of who benefits from it, and I only hope that when a republican candidate wins the popular vote at some point that galvanizes bipartisan support for NPV. It's far from the only voting reform we need, but it's definitely on the list.
I used to be strongly in favor of the NPVIC, and strongly opposed to the Electoral College, but 2020 weakened my position by demonstrating an important and often-overlooked feature of the Electoral College.
Specifically, the EC and its constitutional basis mean that no state has any legal standing to criticize how any other state conducts their elections. The constitution just says that each state gets so many EC votes and it's up to that state's legislature to decide how to allocate those votes. Period. In 2020 when Texas filed claiming that midwestern states' election results were fraudulent, the courts easily and rightly responded with "Yeah, that's none of your business". How a state's EC votes are allocated is a matter for the citizens of a state and their representatives which eliminates a lot of potential legal wrangling that could obstruct the primary purpose of the election, to make a choice.
If we did move to a national popular vote, I think we would also need to move election rulemaking and oversight to the federal level to avoid dangerous interstate squabbles.
Huh, I hadn't thought about that. But yeah let's leave states in control of their EC votes.
The compartmentalization of the EC is an under appreciated feature, and one that the Maine-Nebraska approach would enhance (e.g., at most 3 EVs would have been affected by hanging chads in 2000 FL).
And likewise, wins-by-any-means-necessary thinking on the right as well (e.g. the current last-minute push to make Nebraska winner task all when Maine can't retaliate)
There's lot of _rhetoric_ along those lines, yes. Especially on social media.
However until/unless anti-MAGA people take some specific illegitimate _action_ to keep Trump out -- bringing a mob of angry supporters to DC and riling them up to storm the Capital to stop the official counting of presidential votes, for example -- it will remain clear which political side actually does have the "by any means necessary" mindset.
You do realize that blue Maine and red Nebraska have already done this?
Of course, some Nebraska legislators now trying to undo it, having waited until it's probably too late for a response from Maine to take effect before the election.
(Maine's constitution says that state laws don't take effect until 90 days after they're signed, unless passed by a supermajority)
Right, it's not a new idea.
This is a very party-oriented way of thinking. Note that, if you consider "interests of the state as a whole", a major advantage of winner-takes-all is that it increases the political relevance of the state (politicians can less afford to ignore the interests of the state) by making it riskier to ignore those interests.
Hmm, I was thinking of it as helping the individual voter to feel like their vote counted for more. I'm in NY and it really doesn't matter if I vote or not.
I'm not sure this is right. Neither Trump nor Harris need to campaign in California or Texas because of winner-take-all. If you got EVs proportional to the popular vote in the state, Trump and Harris would both be campaigning hard in California and Texas, because there would be some EVs they might win that way.
It sure seems like that would make California and Texas voters and their concerns *more* relevant to Trump and Harris.
But the opinions of California and Texas have presumably been already taken into account long ago by the Harris and Trump campaigns respectively in formulating their policies and platforms--which is part of the reason they're safe states for their respective candidate (e.g. if the Democrats just completely disregarded the views of everyone in a safe blue state and crafted their platform entirely for swing state voters...would those safe blue states remain so?)
But under national vote a state like Nevada or Iowa could be swamped by a small part of California or Texas...meaning it might be rational for candidates to just *completely* ignore it, at all stages of the election.
it's all just horse trading on who they're going to completely ignore. not sure why it's better to completely ignore some groups and not others.
Note the existence of primary elections - Republicans generally mirror the electoral policies of the State, while Democrats use something like a universal proportionality rule (although it's slightly more complex than that).
James Madison proposed this near the end of his life.
Nice, thanks. I'm reading "Fears of a Setting Sun" reviewed by Mrs. Psmith. And I've come to realize my knowledge of early American history is somewhat lacking.
Exaggerated marketing claims are no new thing. From an advertisement for the first dog biscuits, circa 1870, courtesy of Tasting History:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyBxiRm6SHw
"CAUTION. – it is most essential that when purchasing you see that every Cake is stamped SPRATT’S PATENT, or unprincipled dealers, for the sake of a trifle more profit, which the makers allow them, may serve you with a spurious and highly dangerous imitation.
SPRATT’S PATENT MEAT FIBRINE DOG CAKES
NONE ARE GENUINE UNLESS SO STAMPED
From the reputation these Meat Fibrine Cakes have now gained, they require scarcely any explanation to recommend them to the use of every one who keeps a dog; suffice it to say they are free from salt, and contain “dates”, the exclusive use of which, in combination with meat and meal to compose a biscuit, is secured to us by Letters Patent, and without which no biscuit so composed can possibly be a successful food for dogs."
If it doesn't have dates in, there is no way you can feed it to your dog and hope it won't starve! There's a claim! 😁
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spratt%27s
On the flipside, you've got John Emory Powers just over a decade later, with such gems as
"The price is monstrous, but that's none of our business."
And
"They're not as good as they look, but they're good enough — 25 cents."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Emory_Powers
I remember a links post by Scott from like 8 years ago where he asked, given the fact that humans have been responsible for the extinction of tens of thousands of species, mostly bugs I think I recall, (not to mention introduced lots of invasive species detrimental to various local environments), why the hell haven't we seen catastrophic impacts to our ecology and agriculture? I guess I have a pet theory I've been working up in my mind for a while
Epistemic status: I know close to nothing about agriculture, except some basic historical facts I've heard about previous food industries changing.
Essentially, I think that capitalism and human industry may be what has saved us and prevented catastrophic changes. As someone who works in engineering, I know you always have to deal with changes to your plans, and nothing ever goes right. When you do deliver systems that work, nothing ever stays non-broken, and you always have to come up with new fixes. However, you have goals, and as such you keep finding tradeoffs and workarounds so you're still able to deliver and fulfill the customer need consistently. If you don't, then you lose the customer's business and someone else ends up fulfilling their need instead. Perhaps almost all human-impacting ecological sectors have essentially already been turned into self perpetuating industries.
Is there some fungus which is going to kill all the Gros Michel bananas in the world? Banana farmer moguls absolutely do not want that happening, and they're not stupid. They will end up employing experts that help them set up systems to delay that eventually as long as possible, so they can still meet their quarterly earnings projections, whether by developing new farming methods or new antifungal treatments for the plants.
Does it finally get to the point that the Gros Michel banana can no longer hang on? Either the Gros Michel banana moguls have already started setting up systems to farm new varieties of bananas in preparation for this eventually, or else some until-now specialty supplier of bananas that used to be not as popular (like the Cavendish banana) ends up rising to power by fulfilling the now-unmet demand for bananas, capturing the market and supplanting the old industry leaders as the new head of the industry.
For the record, Gros Michel bananas did taste different, and maybe even better, than Cavendish bananas. But I guess Cavendish bananas are a sufficiently good workaround because they've been the norm for 70 years now.
Is it still bad that humans cause so many changes to the ecology? Yes, but maybe not THAT bad. I postulate two situations.
1. There might be aspects of ecology that would have been ripe for eventual human exploitation that have not yet been industry-ized. What if the Gros Michel banana specifically contained some protein that could have been turned into a low-carbon-emission fuel source using 2025 technology, or could have cured HIV? Well, then we are out of luck in exploiting either of those. However, this still doesn't impact current technologies, only potential future ones. We may never realize what we could have achieved and what we lost the opportunity to do had that banana not gone extinct, and as such this isn't viewed as a catastrophe.
2. There might be negative effects to the environment that are so detrimental that there is no mitigation possible, and it will make non-viable even other related industries that might have come in and filled the gap. This is the catastrophe scenario that is typically pushed by environmentalists to make laymen worried. But really, I'm not certain I know of any examples of this catastrope scenario coming to pass (not that that means it cannot happen in the future). I guess I've heard that in pre WWII France, they had the technology to farm truffles, and the decimation of France in the war resulted in them somehow losing that capability. As such, truffles need to be hunted and gathered these days by specially trained pigs, and the price of truffles went sky high. I'm not too clear on how this happened, and I'm not sure if it has to do with ecology or just loss of human knowledge.
I speculate that this model of "ingrained industries as a shield" may also apply to other non-agricultural scenarios as well.
We have seen examples of this, e g. Florida orange growing has mostly been destroyed: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=109051#:~:text=The%20Florida%20citrus%20industry%20faced,fruit%2C%20and%20eventual%20tree%20death.
But my point is that it's not happening for anything that I would deem "impactful". There's other types of oranges, or even other citrus fruit that easily fills the gap.
> why the hell haven't we seen catastrophic impacts to our ecology and agriculture?
What makes you think we haven't?
Because people aren't dying by the millions and starving in the streets, or at least not moreso than 10 years ago. And as bad as the economy is doing now, it's not even as bad as we've seen in our recent past, like Weimar Germany levels.
They are dying by the millions, moreso than 10 years ago. The period of 2020 to 2023 saw ~9 million per year in excess mortality compared to years immediately prior.
Now, I'm nearly certain that this won't simultaneously pass your threshold for both scale and relevance: pandemic deaths are different from agricultural failures, even if they do depend (in difficult-to-predict ways) on the ecosystems around us. What I'm less certain of is that anything else would ever pass your threshold either.
This whole line of argumentation feels rather question-begging. You yourself point at a major agricultural disruption--one which farmers tried and failed to arrest, and which ultimately changed the eating habits of hundreds of millions of people worldwide--and dismiss it because people...moved on to eating something else instead of literally starving? Only in this comment did you gesture vaguely at a threshold of what *would* count: not only does it need to kill tens of millions, but it needs to have a clear, unambiguous starting point within the last 10 years. That's a very high bar!
Humans have been making large-scale changes to the environment for centuries, and the pace of the changes has accelerated dramatically in the last handful of decades. But the systems involved are extremely complex and at least somewhat dynamic, and of course humans are pretty adaptable. So if the only criterion under which an event will "count" is that humans recently, suddenly and conspicuously did so poorly at adapting that it caused a SHARP rise in human mortality...well, it shouldn't surprise anyone that such events are hard to find (and yet nevertheless, we just found one). That doesn't mean that there are no costs to any of the changes, and it doesn't even mean that such changes don't cause significant deaths. Just that such deaths are unlikely to be sufficiently numerous AND localized in space and time AND obvious and directly attributable to some *specific* ecological change to be easily seen.
My advice would be to just forget your original question. If you're genuinely interested in human-caused ecological changes for their own sake, read up on them. Leave behind as many of your preconceptions as you can, and just learn about how the world is and what changes we've actually been able to see and track. Meanwhile, if you're pursuing the question as a way of shoring up some ideological or political stance, I'd gently suggest that this is probably not very productive and you'd be better off ignoring the question.
> and dismiss it because people...moved on to eating something else instead of literally starving?
Yes, that's exactly right. I'm looking for impactful changes, not ones that are easily shaken off.
Though I'd even accept something as impactful if instead of people literally starving, everyday people actually had to change their habits in a way they'd notice, as in if there's no suitable substitute. If all bananas went extinct, I'd call that impactful, even though people probably wouldn't die from it. Or if the substitute bananas needed to be used by everyday people in different ways, couldn't be used in the same recipes, etc.
And it doesn't have to be 10 years, let's say 30 years, which is about as long as certain environmentalist types seem to have been basically telling us that we're going to cause the extinction of the human race any day now.
> I'd gently suggest that this is probably not very productive and you'd be better off ignoring the question.
I think it's absolutely productive to figure out whether we should really trust that we're causing concrete irreparable harm to the human race or if we should be more picky about what alarmist rhetoric we're willing to believe and take action on, and not to mention worry ourselves sick about.
Meta: I think cross-posting from the motte (which is a spinoff of SSC, anyhow) is fine, but it would be nice to link the discussion there.
https://www.themotte.org/post/1170/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/251622?context=8#context
I guess I kinda thought Scott might like to leave all reference to the Motte off his site, based on this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/
Hah, okay noted.
FWIW, the Gros Michel is not extinct, it's just no longer economic to produce in sufficient quantities to be the primary cultivar for human consumption given its susceptibility to Panama disease.
Cool, I'd love to try one. I'll have to see if there's any reliable-seeming retailers online.
Human caused extinctions are almost exclusively on small islands.
Its not politic to state this, but species don't matter, niches matter. As long as something fills the niche, what fills it is immaterial. People get all hot & bothered over honey bees, not realizing the loss of bees is a result of moving bee boxes to follow the pollination cycle. For you and I who earn our living in high tech, we don't see it. But the guy who has 1,000 bee boxes he earns $150-$200 for six weeks in an almond orchard, that's his livelihood. He's going to take his boxes there, even though he's losing 1/4 of them. He can rebuild them across the summer and prep for next spring. He earns less for follow-on fields, but its not nothing. I absolutely hate that people read some undergrad's paper and get all up-in-arms that they're going to pass a law ... as if they know more about the in's and out's of that industry than the participants. All that stuff happens because reasons.
What we have driven to extinction were mostly pests, everyone trumpets the Passenger Pigeons, but they were a disaster in human cities. Being cliff dwellers, they adored artificial cliffs ... i.e. tall buildings. Existing in sky darkening flocks, they crapped a lot, I mean a lot, blanketing cities in bird-shit. Being that they exclusively mated in large flocks, even minor culling led to rapid extinction. All of the other charismatic mega fauna were basically predators ... things that eat our livestock and small children, people actually living near them were happy to see them go.
It's not just an ecology problem. Species extinction also means that we lose a lot of potentially valuable genetic data from the past. Nature has developed a lot of tricks over the last billion years, and we shouldn't delete them lightly.
Mammoths seem like the obvious exception.
I would assume mammoths to be like their nearest extant relative which is elephants. Elephants are a pretty big problem in some parts of the world where at best they trample crops and damage infrastructure and at worst will deliberately kill and destroy (mainly in musth).
Arctic mammoths, mastodons, arctic bison, dire wolves, giant sloths, sabre tooth cats ... we may have pushed some of them over the edge, but I don't think spear-chucking people did those big predators in ... and I'm pretty sure the mammoths and mastodons weren't very good neighbors.
I've stood next to the reconstructed skeletons of dire wolves and sabre tooth cats, they were monsters, five to six feet high at the withers, or as big as today's big horses.
What’s the state of the evidence on the economic ROI of making bigger LLM’s?
I use one regularly at work, find it useful, but it feels much more like a strange mix of superhuman knowledge and “ability to sound confident and convincing” mixed with below-average-human insight and self awareness.
What is like to understand is what the economic ROI on training bigger models is. Are the economic returns linear, sublinesr, or exponential?
I can imagine a future kind of “engineering manager” whose role is something like “AI wrangler”, to be the self-aware human interface to these alien intelligences.
I don't have any hard numbers, but here is my gut feeling.
Before GPT3, LLMs were niche, something I would read about on SSC but not very hyped. With GPT3 (and ChatGPT), this completely changed. Suddenly, a lot of commercially interesting use cases seemed viable, because our society has a huge demand for medium-effort text.
The winning strategy since then has been to take venture capital and use it to train larger models. For VC, this seems a reasonable gamble. Anything possible today will be cheap later due to Moore's law (in 1997, Deep Blue was a supercomputer likely more expensive than just employing Kasparov. Today, that level of compute (in FLOP/s, i.e. a few AMD Threadrippers) is probably less expensive than a BMW.)
However, it is not clear to me that in scenarios where the LLMs eventually plateau, there is a permanent advantage to be gained by being among the early winners. The key question is always what the moat of your company is, how you prevent others from eating your lunch. For social media, it is group inertia. If all your friends are on facebook/WhatsApp, the cost of switching is simply too high. (Beware of new niches of social media though.) For Microsoft, it was that they had the copyright to a few key pieces of software commonly running PCs (which turned out to be not very relevant once everything moved to the web). For Intel and AMD, I guess it is (was?) mostly the technical knowledge and decades of experience of their employees? My model here is that once an engineer has spent a decade in a company, decided to put down roots, perhaps start a family near their place of work, they become much harder to poach.
Perhaps before the OpenAI board fiasco, OpenAI was dominant in terms of brainpower. Today, this is not true, Antrophic seems to be roughly on equal footing with them. Either's engineers are likely poachable by some investor throwing money around without too much trouble.
If there is a point of diminishing returns before recursive self-improvement can kick you to the singularity, it might well be that the most economically viable models will not be the ones pushing the edge of the possible. Consider passenger flight. Supersonic flight was not found viable. Likewise, it could be that the additional use cases for LLMs who ace the International Math Olympiad is not that large over LLMs who just get good SAT scores, unless the former have a decisive plus in broad spectrum general intelligence.
Per memory, Goldman Sachs began to sour on the ROI of GenAI over the summer:
https://www.goldmansachs.com/images/migrated/insights/pages/gs-research/gen-ai--too-much-spend,-too-little-benefit-/TOM_AI%202.0_ForRedaction.pdf
There's a lot of speculation, but the people who are most likely to know the answer aren't speaking about it (Sam Altman, etc.) except to hype intermediate products.
Lots of people thought a solid GPT-5 would be out by now. The fact that it's not seems to imply one or more of several things - 1) There isn't enough training data to make that jump, 2) The advancement gained from more training drops (diminishing returns), 3) There's a hard limit on ability from this type of training, 4) It takes a LOT more effort to train to the next level but we'll get there eventually, or 5) There's some other thing limiting our ability to create or use a more advanced option that's unrelated to "bigger" such that bigger isn't solving it.
Some of these answers imply that exponential cannot be true, but we really don't know what we don't know and maybe there's another issue in play. The longer it takes to make the jump from a GPT-4 level to a GPT-5 level the more likely that the answer is "sublinear" or something substantially less than exponential. To see the same size gains as we saw going from GPT-2 to GPT-3 and then GPT-3 to GPT-4 based on the real life timetables says that either we're seeing non-exponential growth already, or GPT-5 will be a massive improvement in ability. Unless it comes out very soon (highly doubtful), I'm leaning strongly to non-exponential.
What would you see AI trained on? The replication crisis has reduced the academic data set to junk. What's left?—zoom meetings, Reddit?
Any AI trained on Journal Articles thinks we're White-Supremacist Nazis who abandoned New York in 2019, and currently reside in under-sea habitats.
That's a legitimately good question, and one that doesn't appear to have too many good answers. I think all of the readily accessible "good" data was already put into GPT-4 level LLMs. We know they already mined Reddit.
There was discussion a while back about LLMs generating content for training LLMs, but I don't hear as much about that lately. I'm...skeptical of that approach.
Yeah, LLMs training LLMs cannot work, there’s been plenty of coverage of this topic.
>LLMs training LLMs cannot work
Agreed, though there are other types of synthetic input data which _can_ be valid. The simple trivial example is arithmetic equations. What I'm completely ignorant of is how broad such data can be.
OpenAI's newest approach seems to be much better than cramming a bunch of raw data. Arithmetic is a solved problem, basic calculators have been doing that for a long time. Doing data entry for every permutation of a math equation is incredibly inefficient, and also doomed as an approach for something we might actually want or need an AI for.
Much better to have the LLM access a calculator when it needs to.
Warning: all speculative, I know much less about this than many other people here.
A simple answer is superlinear insofar as there are outsized returns to being ahead of your competitor. If GPT is even slightly smarter than Claude, millions of people will switch from Claude to GPT.
Another simple answer is sublinear, insofar as I think AI intelligence increases proportional to log(compute) rather than (compute). I might be getting the math totally wrong here but I think something like this is right in spirit.
A more complicated answer is that AI becomes more economically useful based on a combination of intelligence and "generality", where "generality" is its ability to do tasks that human five-year-olds master easily like "maintain memory from one moment to the next" or "make a plan and work on it for an hour". We don't really know how these two things will interact yet. It could be that generality is completely independent of scale, and once you do it - maybe through a hack with scratchpads - everyone briefly forgets about scaling while enjoying their new generalized AI. It could be that you need a certain scale and then AIs generalize almost automatically. Most likely there will be some interaction where AI usefulness is soft-capped at certain levels of generality, but once you get to that level of generality you start wanting more scale again. If AI can be a completely autonomous software engineer, there's a lot of money in making it a good software engineer instead of a bad one, and this is somewhere scale might help.
There isn’t any. LLMs are now what NFTs were in 2021. The spend is vastly exceeding any possible economic benefits.
See, e.g., https://www.wheresyoured.at/pop-culture/
Why does it take so much energy? I assume this 40% up is only in a few selected data center locations?
This was a great read, I'm glad you linked it.
NFTs made no claims to be productive.
Au contraire, I recall reading many a piece claiming that NFTs were going to totally change the way we do contracts, track supply chains, etc. etc. It even seemed… plausible? For a brief moment?
Wasn't that smart contracts using block chain in general not specifically NFTs? I believe plenty of companies are still trying to make smart contracts happen if they haven't already.
Both. Blockchain projects are mostly a joke at this point; NFTs were touted as “this is exactly how blockchain can/should/will be used”. Smart contracts will never become mainstream because we actually want things like human review and reversibility, among other things.
I've been on the DAO with €500. https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/the-dao-hack-makerdao#section-the-response-to-the-dao-hack
Basically the result was that we learned if everything is 100% legal under the DAO, it can still be theft because bugs can be exploited.
This has been an amazing social experiment really. The DAO was the sperg's dream, fuck everything vague and ambigious, here is a list of rules, in code, that's all. And basically the consensus was that intent matters more than rules.
Wasn't that smart contracts using block chain in general not specifically NFTs? I believe plenty of companies are still trying to make smart contracts happen if they haven't already.
I just wrote a new post on the distribution of height, pointing out how the Central Limit Theorem is insufficient to explain population height being normally distributed, even in a toy model:
https://ohmurphy.substack.com/p/why-would-height-be-normally-distributed
There are mathematical results that are quite a bit stronger than the CLT, which I think can help explain a bit about what's going on here.
You don't actually need iid variables to arrive at the conclusion of CLT. You only need some bounds on the variance and a certain amount of independence. Wikipedia's CLT article has some of these theorems if you want the details. Heuristically, adding up lots of "well-behaved", not-too-correlated distributions converges to a normal distribution. In the case of height, there are surely lots of variables, with enough of them independent-ish, that you expect something normal-ish to result from adding them up. (And indeed, height is normal-ish, but not exactly normal.)
Even if we ignore people under 18, I would have expected human height to be bimodal due to the difference between the sexes. Or if not bimodal then at least "flat" enough at the peak to not look normal.
I believe it is approximately bimodal because of the sexes. Perhaps I should have clarified that in the post, but I was simplifying to more specifically interrogate the claim that “height is normally distributed” and an example of the CLT in action. See https://ourworldindata.org/human-height#height-is-normally-distributed
The graph in that link doesn't look bimodal. Or rather, it does look bimodal, but that's because it is overlaying a graph of male height and a graph of female height; the graph of "height" would be the sum of the two graphs pictured, and that looks like it would just be one wide peak.
Good point.
My college physics professor once sad that physicists assume normal distributions because this is what “mathematicians tell them to do”, and mathematicians assume normal distributions because “physics tells us this is how natural processes are distributed”. He was only half-joking.
The weird thing is, as you note toward the end, is that all these various distributions all converge to something fairly Gaussian. In my line of work, I see a similar situation where various noise contributions all sum to a common 1/f spectrum, even when not a single individual noise source has 1/f spectrum by itself.
> In my line of work, I see a similar situation where various noise contributions all sum to a common 1/f spectrum,
Isn't that basically just the Central Limit Theorem? If you sum enough independent random variables with reasonably well behaved distributions, the result will be approximately guassian regardless of the input distributions.
I’m kind of with Victualis here; moreover, we CAN create Gaussian 1/f noise by, e.g., combining many Gaussian noise sources and applying a 1/f filter, but it doesn’t mean the specific observable noise sources one is dealing with that end up summing to a 1/f spectrum are Gaussian, or that the resulting noise is Gaussian.
One such classic example that is a nightmare to model is RTS noise.
Yes. I would like to point out that "enough" and "well behaved" are doing a lot of lifting in the proofs.
Those aren't weasel terms though. You can quantify the number required based on the variance of the underlying distributions.
Yeah, this seems like a pretty common phenomenon. I really wish I had a better grasp on the mathematics of why, but I’m not sure anyone has an answer (much less one I’d understand).
Sums of iid variables tend to be distributed according to some stable distribution. The normal distribution is stable but is not always the right one: it requires bounded variance. For height this is probably reasonable. However, the independence assumption is violated for height, so the normal model is dubious a priori unless the sample size is very large.
Does the fact that height is hereditary, i.e., has “memory”, make it non-Gaussian by definition?
I would not jump to saying that the central limit theorem doesn't apply, but the structure of the population can lead to slow convergence (so one needs much larger samples before it is well approximated by a normal distribution).
I kind of gave up looking for the why, just accepted that was the way the world worked.
Abusing the openness of this thread to wish everyone well.
Even my enemies who wish me harm? ;-)
Possibly controversial claim: that doesn't work. Nor does "you are loved", "you are beautiful", etc. I think the has to be some social cost or some sort of credibility for this to be received.
Because if I wish everybody well, that's only a statement about me. Contrast this with a way someone made me actually feel special: paying attention and deeply engaging with that I was saying. That has real cost! (Time and effort mostly.) And it made me feel good.
I dunno, I personally have always got a lot out of/connected with VividVoid's daily posts of "You are not inferior to anyone. Good night, I love you, see you in the morning." Despite those being addressed impersonally / universally.
https://x.com/VividVoid_/status/1559043605687177219?t=2RJYmgNv-ob1N3iG8hD7nQ&s=19
Did it make you feel loved it did it make you feel like loving? The latter is more of a vibe and it's something I would expect: hanging out with benevolent people makes you more benevolent.
It made me feel loved more than like loving
Thank you. It's good to learn how others perceive things differently than I.
Agreed.
needed, thanks!
Can you explain how the above positive comment actually made you feel good? I don't get it. What effect did it have when you read it?
I find this abuse of the rules appalling
If you want to make an omlette, you gotta break eggs - or maybe tofu if you are vegan.
In a toxic display of one-upmanship, I'm going to wish you do not just well, but great.
I'm going to contribute to the purity spiral by wishing not just that you do great, but that your friends and family also do great.
I wish all of humanity to thrive in a golden age lasting for eternity, and that you and everyone you've ever met will attain transcendent joy so powerful that it redefines what it means to exist.
I wish a golden age, not only for humanity, but also for all sentient life-forms, as well as some of the more complex plants.
Thank you all despite the alleged toxicity.
A remarkably effective strategy for sanity. Insisting on wanting well-being for others makes it easier to treat yourself kindly and fairly. Thanks, and right back at you.
Ah yes, reminiscent of debates in moral psychology about whether true altruism is possible if altruism is in some sense beneficial to one.
See: https://plato.stanford.edu/ENTRIES/altruism/#DoesAltrExis
❤ Right back at you.
Thank you.
Can someone who enjoys contemporary visual art describe what they feel and think when they view a piece they like?
I'm not much into art. I do enjoy museums and galleries. Ancient Greek sculpture is great, as is 18-19th drawing and painting. But when I look at contemporary stuff, I'm just confused. I get that I can contextualize it against a certain time and maybe events, but, still, it mostly seems to be the artist speaking to themselves. For example, Jeff Koons chrome dog sculpture means nothing to me. I've seen some squiggly red girders and didn't get anything.
It's almost as if I can't get interested in a piece because its author is not interested in me.
P.s. Noguchi's stuff is actually pretty good, as it somehow conveys natural lines, natural flow, if that makes any sense.
Great Art Explained on YouTube is by *far* the best resource I've ever encountered for art education, anywhere, and I've been exposed to quite a bit. My mother is a professional painter who graduated from Art Center (we had lots of art in our home, art history coffee table books, etc), I went to film school which included some art history prerequisites, we went to lots of museums with lots of tour guides explaining work, and so on. I thought I didn't like contemporary painting and its "dumb squares."
But Great Art Explained made me do a complete 180. This piece on Rothko's dumb squares changed my mind so thoroughly that when I unexpectedly encountered a Rothko at Chicago's Art Institute, I experienced full-bodied frission:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsz6bkkIHzQ
Many of the comments in this thread are thoughtful, but no one discussing art with only prose will be able to compete with G.A.E.'s use of the actual art in its video essays. I hope you check it out and see if it makes you feel any differently.
(After Rothko's Seagrams paintings, the G.A.E. on Hopper's Nighthawks is the next best!)
Thank you! I'll give it look!
In music it is very obvious that a tune doesn't have to be /about/ anything, or even accompanied by sung lyrics at all, to be enjoyable, compelling or otherwise make you appreciate it.
Abstract art is an exploration of this same idea but with sight instead of hearing. Try approaching the squiggly coloured shapes with the same mindset you approach, say, Polyphia's G.O.A.T.
Most contemporary art is garbage, which of course applies to any “contemporary” period. But “most” of course implies “not all”. When I run into a piece of art I like, I just have the sense that it speaks to me, that I can keep looking at it for a long time.
Contemporary art covers a broad range of practices. Two pieces might be attempting to pull completely different levers in viewers. A lot of contemporary art is intended to be consumed by people who are familiar with recent art history. There may be references to other known artworks, or reactions to known approaches to art. If you don't know these references, it will be hard to get what the work is trying to do. I think this is one of the major factors as to why a lot of audiences who don't have art education find contemporary art alienating.
I think your observation that a lot of it just involves the "artist speaking to themselves" is accurate. Even when they are speaking to someone else, they are probably not speaking to you. Another aspect of art that was perhaps always there but feels somehow stronger in the contemporary art scene is the emphasis on branding and the artist's personal story, which I personally find alienating.
Other works might be trying to do something more visceral, either by creating some compelling sensory experience or by using materials in an unexpected way. A lot of famous public art works this way just be creating a compelling sensory experience. At this point, the viscerally compelling stuff is the stuff I enjoy most even if it wasn't exactly the kind of stuff I used to make. I guess in general that feels kind of like surprise but it might be for any number of reasons. You might have expectations about the way some material generally behaves that is sort of subverted. Or it might be disorienting. Or it might do something with scale, or timing, or something else that feels unusual.
One of my favorite pieces is the Spiral Jetty near Salt Lake. It's basically just a pretext to put you in an alien landscape at a remote and quiet edge of the Great Salt Lake. When the wind stops and the water depth is approximately right, the shallow water forms a mirror for the sky and the horizon can seem to disappear. If you wear rubber boots and go trudging out into the water, you can end up completely surrounded above and below by the oranges and pinks of Utah sunset.
There probably aren't many pieces that feel anything like the Spiral Jetty. I think that might say something about contemporary art in general. Good contemporary art might feel very unlike other contemporary art.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. Contemporary art covers _a lot_ and I find some of it good (Noguchi). But the majority of it that I see falls into what you described as unusual visceral experiences which have no effect on me. Maybe it's because of the time spent playing video games as a kid, or the time I spend hiking and looking at wonders of nature these days.
Thanks for sharing about the Spiral Jetty. I only saw it from a distance. Utah is a great place for stuff like this with its range of environments.
Great Art Explained's piece on the Spiral Jetty, for anyone who's curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQv3YqHisZc
It’s hard to put into words because it’s so subjective, and yeah Jeff Koons is garbage to me also 🥴
Any language is like a bridge between two people. When I say, “The blue flower blooms nightly,” you get an image in your head, or at least an idea, and it’s likely close to what I intended but also different in the specifics. This is because words are ambiguous, some (like “love”) more-so than others.
Art is operating on a similar level. Instead of words, it’s using lines, colors, images, sound, basically any qualia (yes, I was once at an art exhibition that used a synthetic smell of “decaying earth”!). Some art, like Greek renaissance sculpture, are more literal than an abstract work like Rothko. Art is basically hijacking our brains ability to experience abstractions of reality. A literal photo of a blue flower blooming at night, a sculpture of a blue flower, or an all-blue painting titled “Blooming Night Flower” — these are all levels of abstraction aimed at expressing an idea. Often the intent of the artist is unclear, and there is much left to the interpretation of the viewer. Also, there is an aspect of quality to art, something discussed well in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”.
So if you feel like you’re not interested in certain artworks, of course that’s totally fine, but if you want to get more into art, I would say the fastest way is to try making art yourself. You may come to appreciate the beauty of a simple brush stroke, or the composition of an abstract color painting. And if you already like Greek sculpture, why not just dive in deeper? Any art is a gateway drug to more art :)
I never had any art training until I was in college and took this art history class. The focus was on “American art” and it was introductory so basically we went from pre-colonial art to the modern stuff.
In this class, contemporary art was framed in a way to reflect both social transitions and bold explorations, or artists somewhat making fun of art. But there was also a dialogue between the new and the old (e.g., American Impressionism & how it was called “vomit” by some critics at the time). So the historical dialogue being part of the contemporary art is something that fascinates me.
It’s also fun. Classical art often tries to tell a story, perhaps with many layers of meanings. Contemporary art often feels like it’s telling a joke, but often in a meta-art way (e.g., the story of how Duchamp’s Fountain was probably conceived to test if the organizers of an exhibition would really accept all works; he was part of that organization, and he resigned after the work submitted with a pseudonym was rejected). Some works are just fun aesthetically.
And the rest is just that contemporary art feels more relevant and relatable on a personal level, because it’s often a kind of commentary on what’s going on in the world now.
The rest is just aesthetic preferences. Contemporary art is quite diverse & some stuff makes sense to my taste. I don’t know anything about Moholy-Nagy other than that I just like his style.
Contemporary visual art covers a lot of ground. Koons is not Anselm Kiefer, who is not Chris Ofili, to name a few.
I occasionally mention my podcast here. (It’s great!)
But this time I also wanted to promote my guest, Jonathan Clements and his misleadingly named blog Schoolgirl Milky Crisis. It really isn’t what it sounds like. Anyway here is an excerpt from his piece where he describes trying to make a tv episode about hunting with hawks:
Mickey is crammed into the passenger seat with all his sound gear, including a large fluffy boom mike that the hawk keeps mistaking for an otter. Luckily for us, there wasn’t enough room in the car for the three hunting dogs, because it already feels like I am driving down a bumpy mountain path with the cast of a Fellini film in the back. All we really need is a couple of dwarves and a pantomime horse’s head protruding from the sunroof. The glassy lake beneath us is called Yuhu, and we bump and jostle along a track that is usually reserved for ponies and quadbikes. It is the oddest and least enthusiastic session of carpool karaoke yet devised, as Mickey starts to sing Bohemian Rhapsody.
https://schoolgirlmilkycrisis.com/2024/09/12/a-bird-in-the-hand/
And here is how he described our podcast on Taiwan.
Over on Russell Hogg’s wonderful podcast Subject to Change, I discuss the history of Taiwan, with reference to an unexpected appearance by the Daleks, things to do with a dead deer, genocidal acts, the pirate king, the Zombie Ming dynasty, a “racist excuse”, “the most shameful thing the British have ever done” and a bunch of other things to be found in my book Rebel Island. That is part one.
https://pod.link/1436447503/episode/92f1d1aabdeca1c5c29efc68f6992a62
And then there is part two: How to take over an island chain by invading somewhere else; a world-class stamp-collecting scam; the “uncrowned king” of Taiwan; the Musha Incident reconsidered as a high-school shooting, the rise and fall of the Takasago Volunteers; uses and abuses of Triad assassins, and the rise of the “outside the party” movement.
https://pod.link/1436447503/episode/2603940cff0e16a5c8a112a077fcabc0
Russell, just wanted to say that I love the podcast and I hope you continue to have as many of these conversations as possible. Great work.
Thank you. Messages like this really encourage me to keep going. This made my day!
You mentioned in a previous open thread that biotech startup space is very hard and with particularly high failure rates. Could you elaborate further on that topic or direct me somewhere that explores that statement?
I wrote this because many people who know more than I do urged me to use a disclaimer like this before talking about investing in biotech. I only have partial insight into their motivations, so hopefully some of them will show up to supplement this.
I think the main thing going on is that biotech is (low hit rate x vast success per hit). 99.9% of new medication plans consume millions of dollars but go nowhere; 0.1% become the next Prozac or Ozempic and make enough money to keep pharma in the black despite everything. The ones that work are hard to predict beforehand even if you are very smart and good at pharmacology, partly because the body is perverse and delights in outwitting first-level explanations of how it works, and partly because half of the challenge is regulatory and even the best drugs can be sunk by stupid legal issues. If you go into biotech investing without knowing this, you may be surprised when (in 99.9% of cases) you lose all your money.
(this is maybe a little unfair, because some early stage biotech makes money by selling itself to medium-stage biotech even if it never pans out, so an investor's success rate at making money might be better than 0.1%, but I think something like this is approximately true).
"I named my aircraft in honour of the Sun God", Tom said apologetically.
"I have already bested your little friend at Battleship, Pumbaa", Tom said sanctimoniously.
"It looks like you, and it does everything you do, and yet it isn't you", Tom said on reflection.
“If it weren’t for that hotel, I would never have been born”, Tom informed me.
"Biden is twice the man that Charles is!", Tom said, half-joking.
“This clue says letter 15 appears at least once, and that means letter 25 must appear at least twice”, Tom said oh so wisely.
"Vegetarian dishes only", Tom metes out.
"Actually we are your personal army," said Tom unfortunately.
I don't get this one.
I'm glad you asked, because I'm very proud of this one. I was going for "un-4chan-ately". So I picked the opposite of the popular -chan phrase that they are not your personal army.
"I'll got to college eventually, just not right now," Tom said, unilaterally.
"You're such a pathetic whiner, Hamlet," Tom said, disdainfully.
"Hey, mom, you're sister is taking the ladder up to attic," Tom said, anticlimactically.
"I refuse to take Treebeard or Quickbeam," Death said, unrepenting.
> "I named my aircraft in honour of the Sun God", Tom said apologetically.
Doesn't work. It would be funnier if you wrote "apollogetically", but even then, where's the -get- coming from, and where did the -n- go?
"Apologetically" is pronounced "Apollo-jet-ically." A Swiftie can be based on pronunciation instead of spelling.
"The salmon was enormous!" said Tom luridly.
"Eating collagen is unethical" said Tom angelically.
"this ugly bunny was rescued from the wild" said Tom unwarrantedly.
"slow and steady wins the race" said Tom fastidiously.
"So I was standing there by the lake where my friends were having so much fun, and the only thing I felt was en ui", Tom finished.
"I married Pamela Anderson's ex" said Taylor Swift-Lee
"I think I might be gay," said Tom, half in earnest.
"What I like about this game is that zombie characters get to come back," Tom responded.
This took me a while. The cot-caught merger is a helluva drug.
This one actually made me laugh out loud.
"Welcome to your tomb", Tom said, cryptically
"That cannibal feast was delicious!" Tom said manfully.
"We must summon the Three Wise Men," Tom said magically.
"Here's my impression of Katniss' sister," Tom said primly.
"Don't worry, my mother's only joking," Tom said majestically.
"OK, fine, we can have another forty-day fast," Tom relented.
These are splendid!
Thanks!
I have more on my blog:
https://ultimaniacy.wordpress.com/2023/03/02/fifty-tom-swifties/
If you were tasked with making art for future digital beings, what would you make?
*(Assuming no knowledge of their experience or what qualia they find meaningful)
They'd make their own art, but they'd struggle to make human art. So make that.
I would take music and compress it greatly by speeding it up massively and expanding the frequency range well outside human hearing ranges and then encoding it using some lossy compression algorithm similar to mp3 (but modified to fit the purpose)
Putting the future digital beings in a situation where they may or may not be able to perfectly recreate what the original must have sounded like
Cool idea! I’m imagining field recordings of places, possibly even overlayed or altered, and then plugged into an AI to recreate the scene.
Also, isn’t there sound art in which long piece of music, like Beethoven’s 9th, are compressed into a single cacophonous note?
I think we would want to give them stuff with a very high information content. Maybe they would want movies with continuous video from multiple cameras, or fMRI data of multiple people acting out a scene, or novels written from the perspectives of all characters simultaneously.
Yeah good point. Human experience of art is limited by our attention span and processing speeds.
Digital beings might be limited by the cost of compute, or the energy required to consume a piece of art.
Our consciousness is also limited to a single locus. It’s possible digital beings could enjoy consciousness from multiple perspectives. Imagine the feeling of being the simulated experience of everyone in the world for all of its existence compressed into a few moments as a piece of art (!)
I would try to make the art equivalent of the Rosetta stone. For instance gather different pieces that all express the same concept such as fear - a fearful painting, fearful music, a sculpture that is fearful to touch, etc.
Yikes this reminds me of the horror movie The Ring, and the videotape that causes death 7 days later haha
Why would I do that? Let them make their own art.
Many artists throughout history, being unrecognized in their own time, have made art for future generations. In doing so they have potentially pushed ideas and expression forward, linking artistic truths from their time to the time of a future existence. Certain artistic works have become “timeless” (an ever-changing category, but still).
Of course digital beings can and will create their own art, possibly things that would be incomprehensible to humans now. But that doesn’t mean that humans can’t also make works of art for digital beings. Potentially, this art could be important for their understanding of our experience, or be a bridge between two intelligent species. There is already a wealth of human art for humans they can enjoy, but what about human art for digital beings?
Psychiatrists, neurologists, and other doctors:
Have any of you gone through the Maintanence of Certification process's Improvement in Medical Practice (PIP) feedback version?
I'm probably going to be stuck doing this soon and I'm pretty weirded out by it. It looks like they want me to give patients (which patients? chosen at random?) a form rating me on some hokey artificial categories, without any room for real feedback, then read the forms, then possibly adjust my practice, then survey them again.
This feels pretty much designed for someone to do it half-heartedly and get it over with. Has anyone discovered a better way to engage with the process that actually felt meaningful for them? Or have you successfully done it half-heartedly and gotten it over with?
Also, am I understanding that I'm supposed to ask patients to non-anonymously rate my performance as a doctor, then read what they think of me, then take it seriously, as if there's any way that a patient would be honest in that situation? Has anyone experimented with ways of anonymizing this feedback? Are we even allowed to do so?
Also, are any of you patients who have been involved in this process (ie gotten surveys that matched this description)? How did you find it?
Wait, is *this* why I keep getting the stupid spammy emails after every child's well visit to "rate the clinic" and "how likely would I be to recommend the clinic to friends or family"? I'll feel fractionally less annoyed by them if they're part of the Grand Medical Establishment as opposed to a thing that our hospital system decided to implement for no good reason.
(I don't know whether I feel better or worse about the identical spammy emails after my kid broke his elbow. On the one hand, as far as I can tell, everything worked well, truly grateful to the anesthesiologist, the surgeon putting the elbow back together, and double-plus grateful to everyone else who had to deal with a wimpy five-year-old in pain. On the other hand, I don't know that I'd *recommend* the experience. Also, isn't the true test going to come after months if not years of use?)
PIP in tech indicates adverse action is almost guaranteed, is it the same in medicine?
I don't think the acronym even stands for the same thing here. All doctors are required to do a PIP like this once every three years.
Good to hear, yeah the tech acronym only matches on Improvement and is mostly a checkbox towards a negative.
Hi, did this with selected patients who I thought were of good will and thoughtful and would be interested in doing so. Yes, it was not statistically valid.
I suppose you could whip together an anonymous survey in RedCap pretty easily if you have access to that but nobody expects you to do this for the PIP.
What about adding on to the form some questions of you own, or a place for patients to respond to the form questions with written feedback? (If you’re
supposed to be sending the results in to Bureaucrats Central, don’t send in the results of questions you added, of course.)
I have gotten a survey or two about our experience with pediatric visits for my son. I assumed this was coming from the group practice as a self-improvement thing but possible it's related to that form you're mentioning
Anyway didn't give it a lot of thought, rated our doc highly because I thought she did a great job and that's about it as far as feedback. Not super useful for process improvement but if things work well as they are currently then that's good to know to so your not just changing things for change's sake
There is no major faction in US politics pushing for international engagement. The Bush Republicans gave way to the Trump Republicans and the Clinton Democrats gave way to the Obama Democrats. The Democrats had a last gasp through Biden (who is an interventionist) and the lingering influence of the Clintonians. But Harris is not. And the Republicans had a last gasp through Tillerson/Mattis/etc. But they're gone too.
Trump and Harris actually have a remarkable amount of agreement in foreign policy. They both want to support Israel less. They both want to confront China. They both want to draw down support for Ukraine and have a negotiated settlement. Though they disagree on how much pressure they should place on Ukraine and how fast that settlement needs to be. Both want to shift more burden onto Europe and shift resources to the Pacific. Though Trump wants to be far more aggressive about it. They're also both suspicious of trade deals and mostly want to focus on distributing economic spoils to domestic constituencies (though different ones) in part generated through economic nationalism. Both want to build regional coalitions and then put increased burden on them to maintain their local regions with reduced American support. Though they differ somewhat in who will take the lead.
The biggest practical difference is that Harris wants to have a negotiated truce in the Middle East with Iran. Their point of view is that basically the Republicans "lost" the region and they now have to find a modus vivendi with the dominant power, Iran. This is not really true and is more based on the fact they believe the War on Terror failed for domestic political reasons. (And in a few cases because they were being advised by literal paid agents of Iran. This is simply a fact. There were court convictions.) But it's what they believe. Trump has a more sober view of Iran: it's a rogue state that resorting to terrorism to cover that weakness and while it's probably not resolvable they want to hit it back when it hits us for credibility reasons. But both ultimately want to pull back. Just for different reasons.
That said, while this is important Iran is inarguably the least big of the big three (China, Russia, Iran). Iran isn't even the biggest power in its region the way Russia is.
The main difference is actually on the level of philosophy. Harris believes in the US as the leader of an international alliance, an international order that upholds a certain set of values and institutions. She believes large planks of her domestic agenda (climate change, fighting inequality, reining in corporate power) need to be done internationally or they won't work. Meanwhile Trump believes in more naked national self-interest and not only that a multipolar world is inevitable but desirable because it frees us from obligations to weaker allies and would allow us to share in the division of spoils.
The US is very lucky that all three of its major opponents decided to have major crises just at this moment of weakness. In a world of US retreat the main US opponents have all decided to shoot themselves directly in the foot, leading to a net increase of the power mostly of US neutral or friendly countries at the expense of both the US and its opponents.
How much of this is inevitable, given our budget constraints? We have unsustainable social security, medicare, and medicaid budgets, and sooner or later, either we assume we can borrow infinity dollars per year forever or those unsustainable costs are going to cut into our aircraft carrier and occupy-them-for-their-own-good budget.
How much of what is inevitable? The US military spending level is already very low in historical terms. In fact it's the lowest it's been since before the World Wars. We could boost it up without significantly adding to the deficit without much issue or with relatively mild tax increases. Even returning to the levels of ten years ago would be a significant increase.
I'm confused by your confusion. Presumably the point is to avoid other players going into a state of full scale wa r.
From the POV of the Biden-Harris administration, the worst thing is headline news that makes Americans feel bad, and particularly things that make them feel bad about being Americans under the Biden-Harris administration.
Headline stories about e.g. poor innocent children being killed in a brutal war, anywhere, any time, make Americans feel bad. And if they're being killed with American weapons by America's allies, that makes Americans feel bad about being Americans even if there aren't American soldiers involved.
Arab terrorists killing Israelis isn't news any more. It's not a problem to Biden-Harris. Israel killing Palestinians *in Gaza*, is still sort of newsworthy but, meh, it's kind of the new normal and the death toll has been somewhere in the 30-40 thousand range for ages, so that's only a minor problem.
A war between Israel and Hezbollah, in Lebanon, that's new and extra-newsworthy. A war fought with beeper bombs rather than the usual sort, that's new and extra-newsworthy. The bad sort of newsworthy, the sort that makes all Americans feel bad, some of them in ways that might make them not vote for Kamala Harris in five weeks or so.
I think you're really overthinking things if you imagine it's anything much more than that. Not everything is a complex geopolitical game of N-dimensional chess. Particularly not in election season.
I'm not sure what exactly it is that you think has been going on "a lot longer than Biden-Harris have been in office". You talk about the US limiting weapons deliveries and pushing for cease-fires, and yes, there's been entirely too much of that w/re both Israel and Ukraine. But those conflicts postdate Biden's inauguration, both are fully explained by the "minimize ugly anti-American headlines" strategy, and before Biden when was the last time that the US was sending weapons to a belligerent for us to suspend and pressure into a cease-fire?
And as for the State Department imagining they are playing N-dimensional chess, no, I've seen no sign of that and I've been paying pretty close attention to a lot of that. One, *maybe* two dimensions. And not because they're stupid; more that they aren't that particular *kind* of stupid.
I don’t know enough to specifically address the “neo-Ottoman” theory Badran discusses, but he does seem unhappy with the fact that the US has other interests and client states in the region. That makes me question his judgement, since it’s been that way since WWII.
If the US security apparatus has decided that the middle east is no longer a priority...that would seem to make rational sense? We no longer need the oil, and the PRC presents a much bigger challenge, probably requiring a full concentration of our strength. To decide that we no longer need or want to police the middle east seems like rational self-interested realpolitik.
What is less clear is why we would hand off to Iran, instead of to some place more friendly (Turkey maybe, which is even in NATO).
Trump's plan was to create an alliance of Sunni Arab states backed by Israel. It was somewhat working. Biden immediately sabotaged this when he got into office and China swooped in. Then Iran blew China's deal up by attacking Saudi Arabia. Then the US decided it was going to try Iran Deal 2 and a broader regional peace. Then Iran blew it up again by attacking Israel. Though it doesn't seem fully blown up. The Arab powers seem to have realized that whatever theoretical alternative China might offer the US actually shows up. Saudi Arabia is now actively stumping for an alliance with the US and to be a security partner.
How did Biden sabotage it?
It's easy for me to see how the 10/7 attacks and the Israeli response blew it up, but what did Biden do?
He withdrew negotiators from Trump era negotiations around Israel and the Gulf States, demanded Saudi Arabia stop an offensive against the Houthis, delisted the Houthis as a terrorist group and reopened negotiations with Iran, and snubbed Saudi Arabia/communicated hostility to them. I guess sabotage might be the wrong term since it wasn't subtle or done in secret.
China then swooped in to try and take America's place. They got a deal done and then Iran immediately blew it up. (And by "immediately" I mean "within a few months.") Then Biden reversed course and by that point Saudi Arabia was willing to overlook what had happened. And then Iran did 10/7.
I'm not sure about leaving the middle east. From the one hand it makes sense, from the other, things like that have the tendency to bite your bottom when you look elsewhere. I am much more sure that you can not hand off the middle east to Turkey much more than you can give it to France. They are a strong country not too deeply in the enemy coalition, but they just don't have the same influence in the middle east that Iran has.
Huh? If I just look at the map, then Turkey borders more middle eastern countries than Iran does. If I look at Google, they have double the GDP. What am I missing?
You are asking good questions. Turkey and USA have had something going for a while. It’s opaque to me but I see it moving around under the covers.
Remember when an Iranian general was killed and then Iran gave precise warning of the retaliatory drone strike, so AFAIK no lives were lost. This was both a show of strength and a show of a willingness to de-escalate towards some bargain. The bargain now seems to be that Hezbollah loses the ability to fire rockets on Israel, but keeps the control over Lebanon. The alternative to that might be a much larger drone strike without warning.
> It's an explanation, but I don't know.
Yeah, to me it seems more like the standard waffling, just like with the homeless problem. Actually solving the problem one way or another would lead to Bad Things happening, which is to say, Bad Things that we're not used to. It's much more convenient to keep the situation in stasis, so that the only Bad Things happening are the ones that we're already used to. That way no one (important) has to suffer, especially from taking a political position that might alienate some of their voting base.
This might have the side effect of letting a competent growing power (not sure if this describes Iran) sneakily take control of the situation. But I don't think that's an actual objective, just a potential consequence that's not worth preventing.
> Also, there's the aspect that if you are working for the American security apparatus and you are determined to manage the decline rather than reverse it, you should be hanged for treason. But one thing at a time.
This kind of logic leads to Russia invading Ukraine. Empires do wax and wane, and making sure the decline is properly managed can make sure you go the "Britain" way or better.
But rationally looking at the situation with clear eyes and thinking of how to improve your position probably leads exactly to the point of getting the fuck out of the middle east. There's nothing there that we need, and we have more pressing challenges elsewhere, that require a concentration of our strength. So why fritter our strength away trying to police some sand dunes?
The US benefits from global peace and trade. Generally speaking, instability anywhere is against our interests.
Also, you're forgetting about stuff like the security of red sea shipping, let alone the oil industry.
I'm not forgetting about it. We have enough oil for our own use, we don't need the middle eastern stuff. Maybe our European allies do, but then, they can secure their own damn oil supplies. And I don't think there is much US trade shipping through the red sea. So I think the rational, self interested move for Uncle Sam is to GTFO the red sea entirely, and if the region wants to go to hell, let it. And if France (say) wants to protect red sea shipping because it needs the oil, let it do that also, but it's not our problem.
Going through the Mediterranean instead of all the way around Africa is indeed a big deal in terms of transport time and cost. I hope covid taught us that modern supply chains are vulnerable to unexpected disruptions, like a bunch of militants blowing up commercial ships so they have to take a much worse route. Even if most of that shipping isn't going directly to the US, that shipping being disrupted will certainly have costs for the US.
There have been a lot of military actions in the region that don't have much to do with global commerce. Afghanistan was about denying Al-Qaeda bases in the region; Iraq was about the violation of Kuwaiti sovereignty, which is at least somewhat related to American international hegemony. Certainly a lot of that wasn't necessary to secure peace and trade, and removing secular dictators only created a power vacuum exploited by Islamist radicals.
The current situation with Houthi militias is largely a consequence of the US supporting Israel. But Israel is going to be fighting the Palestinians regardless of American pressure, if the current conflict is anything to go by. And I don't see the US dropping Israel as an ally any time soon, especially as Iran is a mutual enemy and the only regional power that poses a threat to US dominance. The Ukraine war also plays a part, as Russia has been supplying Iran (who supplies the Houthis) with anti-ship weaponry. Partially this is retaliation for supporting Ukraine, and partially a warning against US/NATO forces taking action against Russia.
The deep state - and I mean this in a totally non-conspiratorial way, just the personnel in the State Dept and Pentagon who direct foreign policy - are not very interested in explaining or justifying US actions. There were a lot of wrong-headed and not clearly thought out initiatives, which is how we ended up with decades of failure from 'nation building' and 'spreading democracy'. But the US world hegemony post-WWII is predicated on maintaining stability. I have a lot of libertarian complaints in this direction, but isolationism hasn't seemed to work out in the past, and the last 70 years have been some of the most peaceful and prosperous in the world. So the whole American hegemony seems to have something going for it.
Europe is an American dependency, which is a feature and not a bug. The whole formulation of NATO in the beginning of the Cold War was to keep the US forces deployed in Europe. That way, any Soviet attack would necessarily involve attacking the US, which would trigger a nuclear response. This is also why I call it the American hegemony rather than empire; I don't know what kind of empire pays tribute to its subjects. Maybe NATO could have been disbanded in the '90s after the Soviet collapse, but the idea seems pretty unthinkable now.
Speak for yourself. Personally, I prefer having more money rather than less. And given how much wailing and gnaishing of teeth there was a few years ago over a minor bit of inflation, then I highly doubt I'm alone.
Do you think the USA explicitly and formally breaking with Israel would be a smart move?
I agree
Is the thesis that there is a faction in Washington that is actively fighting like demons to put the middle east under the control of Iran? That seems like an extraordinary claim to me, very unlikely to be true. What seems far more likely is that there is a large faction that wants to GTFO, but feels (for whatever reason) that a full withdrawal is politically impossible, so does whatever seems necessary in the short term to minimize American commitments to the region.
Problem isn't middle east or one specific issue. Problem is that "try harder" isn't enough to reverse a general decline. Smarter maybe, do strategically impactful things, yes. But to simply take every particular theatre and ask the people involved to just try harder...
But it is a general decline, it is also that Boeing can't do shit anymore or rain invalidates the warranty of the CyberTruck.