I'm sorry, are they seriously mad that the NYT isn't left-wing enough? If even they aren't partisan enough for them, they're free to go get their news from some leftist echo chambers instead.
The guffawing in my Substack/Notes feed this morning is about the discovery that Trump's special "All-American" Bible+American-founding-documents book is in fact printed in China. For my money however that pales next to the revelation that in putting it together they _edited_ the fucking UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION to reflect MAGA wet dreams.
They left out every part of the Constitution added since 1791, with no indication of having done so. Hence the version of the Constitution which MAGAts are now reading does not include any of the following:
-- the abolition of slavery
-- the guarantee of due process
-- that Americans are entitled to vote without regard to race or religion or having previously been enslaved, and can't be made to pay a fee in order to vote
-- that women have the right to vote
-- how Congress certifies the Electoral College votes
-- the POTUS being limited to two terms
-- that persons who've engaged in insurrection are banned from public office
Photos are being posted online of the last page of the Trump book's Constitution and the first page of the section following it. The Trumpified Constitution ends with the batch of amendments that are unofficially known as the Bill of Rights.
So....just in case anybody thought Trump was kidding when (December 4 2022) he publicly proposed "the termination" of "rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution" -- he's put it in writing.
In my experience, it is useful as an autocomplete-on-steroids that often saves time while typing code, but people who claim it will replace human software engineers have no idea what they're talking about.
:- The position (zero'th derivative, if you like) of AI is frankly unimpressive - if AI doesn't get massively better at a range of things than it currently is, it won't be a big deal.
:- The first derivative of AI over the past few years has been very impressive indeed. computers can do things now that seemed unimaginable just a few years ago.
:- The question is what the higher derivatives will look like. If AI goes on improving at the rate it has been over the past 3 years for the next 20 then yes, it really will be revolutionary, but we absolutely shouldn't be confident that that will happen - in fact, I think its more likely, although far from certain, that the current rapid rate of progress will slow long before then (and the question is how soon and by how much.
Predictions about the far future are hard, so how about this? I think is is unlikely that software engineer employment will be lower 25 years from now due to automation. Conditional on it being lower, I think it's more likely to be due to some disaster or economic depression rather than AI takeover.
(a) Bob Woodward claims in his new book that Trump secretly shipped to Putin, during the first weeks of the COVID-19 shutdowns when most Americans couldn't get their hands on COVID tests, several Abbott Point of Care Covid test machines for his personal use.
(b) Hours after that's reported, Trump tells ABC News that the above is "false" and "a made-up story."
(c) A day after Trump's denial, the Kremlin's regular media spokesman confirms that yes "of course" President Trump sent the testing machines to President Putin.
I know, nobody cares about this stuff, it's just "TDS", politicians have always spun and dissembled so what's new, blah blah blah. And after all Vance is still, now, repeating the Haitians-eating-cats thing and nobody gives a crap who didn't already dislike him. Fine, stipulated.
Still though....call me stubborn or something but somehow this level of blunt bald-faced (as my father would call it) lying to the public with no consequences still surprises me.
It *bothers* me. And, clearly, you. I would argue (admittedly conveniently) that continuing to be bothered is a sign of good mental health. But surely it's a bit late still to be surprised?
I just loved the coincided of the following two entries on Liz Lovelaces's twitter:
"yesterday drank 350ml vodka and then:
- climbed a mountain
- accidentally fell into a pool of radioactive water
- climbed DOWN the mountain while wet and cold and radioactive
- got punched in the face for the first time in my life
- drank even more vodka at brat bar"
"decided to install Ubuntu instead. "
Yes I remember reading Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's _Roadside Picnic_.
a) i, too, have tried getting WIFI to work on Ljnux. No experience with falling into a radioactive cooling pond and then getting into a bar fight in a former USSR country, but I imagine that sucks nearly as badly as getting WiFi to work on Linux.
====
Snark aside, how I redally got WiFi to work on Linux:
Me to our usual supplier of computers: "I'd like a WiFi card thgat works on Linux.W
Their tech guy: "Aww, that's horrible. I mean, even cards that have the same model number sometimes use different chipsets..."
Me: "You guys have a stock of different wifi cards and an Ubunti test maxchine in your workshop. If yiu can get a a card to work well enough that it can connect to an access point, I will buy it"
I honestly haven't had any trouble getting WiFi to work on Linux in the past 15 years. The one time I did, it was because I was trying to install some random distro for fun and the solution was booting Ubuntu long enough to turn the card on.
Chris Williamson's most recent guest is Calley Means, who argues the regulatory systems that are supposed to protect the American food supply and healthcare are fundamentally captured by big food processors and the pharmaceutical industry, and that's why Americans are so obese and unhealthy, and die years before their peers in Europe despite being heavily medicated.
What regulations has Europe put in place that make European food less obesifying than American food? I've visited many European countries, and I seem to recall them having the same range of junk food as the US available for anyone who wants it. But I wasn't studying the issue closely, so maybe I missed something.
Note that I am *not* asking for examples or arguments of typical European diets being healthier than American ones. Nor about the regulation of foods for potential harms other than obesity. I't specifically the "regulation makes Europeans slim" part of this that doesn't ring true to me, and I'm not going to wade into a 2-hour Youtube video to resolve that.
I'm not going to wade into a 2-hour Youtube video either, but I would like to point out that to argue "regulatory capture in the US causes Americans to be unhealthier and die sooner than Europeans" is not necessarily to argue "stricter regulations in Europe cause Europeans to be healthier and die later than Americans." An argument could be made, for example, that Europeans are less in need of regulation to provide guardrails against obesity (etc.) because they are more likely to adhere to traditional regional dietary practices that provide those guardrails.
(I have no idea whether Calley Means is actually making that argument--see above re: wading into 2-hour Youtube videos)
If that were the case, then regulatory capture by Big Food would not be the reason "why Americans are so obese". The reason would be that Americans have different traditional regional dietary practices. Yes, at this point, McDonalds, fried chicken and everything else, and Doritos with a supersized Coke count as "traditional", and nobody had to capture any regulators to make it so.
No, that's not logical. None of those sentences is logical. Please slow down and think.
>If that were the case, then regulatory capture by Big Food would not be the reason "why Americans are so obese".
That simply doesn't follow. If Americans' ad libitum diet is one that would make them obese and unhealthy, and it is one that coulde be meaningfully changed by regulation, then it would be perfectly sensible to argue that lack of regulation leads to poorer health outcomes in Americans *independently of Europe's regulatory regime or lack of it*. In other words, in that case, it could be that America's lack of regulation leads to poorer health outcomes because Europeans' diets are more strictly regulated by their governments, but it also could be that America's lack of regulation leads to poorer health outcomes because Europeans' diets are more strictly regulated by the Europeans themselves, voluntarily!
> The reason would be that Americans have different traditional regional dietary practices
The reason would be that Americans have different dietary practices. It does not follow, at all, from any of the foregoing assumptions that those differences have to do with tradition or with region. The differences under our hypothetical *could* have to do with tradition or region partially, or entirely, or not at all.
(This is, of course, also true of the Europeans' dietary practices. I offered "traditional regional dietary practices" as an *example* of something other than European government regulation that could explain a difference in outcomes; I am not asserting outright that it explains the differences. I simply wanted to show you where, and how, you are jumping to conclusions.)
>Yes, at this point, McDonalds, fried chicken and everything else, and Doritos with a supersized Coke count as "traditional", and nobody had to capture any regulators to make it so.
This is simply irrelevant. Whether a diet "counts" as traditional or regional makes no difference as to whether government regulation could meaningfully slow, stop, or reverse its adoption. Either it could, or it couldn't. Again, I want to stress that what I am doing here is offering you a *****hypothetical****** *****example****** of a situation in which American diets could drift toward unhealthiness due to lack of government regulation (and possibly due to lack of countervailing healthier traditional dietary practices, although that need not be a factor) while European diets remain healthier without such government regulation because Europeans make healthier choices on their own.
It is a thing that could happen. I make no claim as to whether it has happened. If you want to know what I really suspect, or even if you don't want to know, I suspect that it's a complex combination of voluntary healthy dietary choices AND stricter regulations on certain obesity-fueling food ingredients AND better access to non-emergency health care AND more walking AND other things that makes Europeans less fat and longer-lived.
Failing to prevent some change, and causing that change, are two different things. In your hypothetical, it is the dietary practices of Americans (which, yes, are traditional and regional) that are the *cause* of America's excess obesity. Government regulation is merely one of several things that could in theory have prevented that outcome, but didn't.
If there were some regulatory body whose default behavior would have been to prevent Americans from adopting obesity-inducing dietary practices, then possibly interference with that regulatory body would qualify. But I don't think that's the case here - at the time the relevant dietary processes were adopted, American food regulation was limited to basically "is it contaminated or actually poisonous?", and no, fattening did not count as poisonous.
And if we imagine that "Big Food" was pushing some profitable but fatteningly healthy dietary practices on Americans and could only have been stopped by regulation, then presumably "Big Food" would have wanted to do the same in Europe, because twice the profit. So, again, what are the regulations that Europe has adopted that prevented "Big Food" from overriding traditional, regional European dietary practices with endless Big Macs and Supersize Fries like they allegedly did in the United States?
I came across this analysis of the backgrounds of Nobel Laureates. I found his analysis interesting. But he's concerned that our society isn't doing enough to find and support kids from non-Nobelist-generating backgrounds to reach their potential as scientists who could fix all our problems. Except from an equity perspective, I don't think this is a critical problem. After all, there are more scientists now than ever before who are publishing more papers than ever before, but scientific advancements have stagnated (yes, I believe John Horgan is correct).
I came across a reference to the relics of St Anthony of Padua today, and if you take a look at the reliquary of his lower jaw, I think you will understand the aesthetics of Guillermo del Toro's movies better 😀
I work for Otherbranch, a tech hiring startup founded and staffed by former Triplebyte employees. Surprisingly enough, our list of clients offering open roles is currently outpacing the growth of our candidate pool. So if you're a software engineer, we want to get you hired for them!
When you sign up and tell us what you're looking for, we keep an eye out for incoming roles that match your interests and skills. Then we'll schedule you for a 90-minute technical interview. Based on your performance, we can vouch for your skills directly to employers and expedite you through the first few steps of their application process. Some other perks:
- You only need to interview once, and we'll use it to match you with subsequent roles.
- It's free. Our paycheck comes from the employer's side.
- Whether you pass, fail, or crush our interview, you'll get detailed feedback on every section so you know exactly how you did.
(If you want us to help you hire engineers for your company, we're of course happy to work with you as well! You can learn more about that side of the process at https://www.otherbranch.com/landing-j-employers.)
> You only need to interview once, and we'll use it to match you with subsequent roles.
I don't know about your company, but when I went through Triplebyte (in the early days, before it turned into a generic jobs site), I still had to interview at the client companies in addition to the Triplebyte interview.
I should clarify: you only need to interview with *Otherbranch* once. There are almost always going to be subsequent rounds of interviews with a prospective employer before they hire a candidate, but the Otherbranch interview will often take the place of the first-round tech interview at a given company. At the very least, your application gets shown directly to the hiring manager instead of languishing in the resume slush pile. (The additional steps required by each company are listed clearly on the job postings we publish.)
The benefit is that you'll get to save time and hassle on additional round-1 interviews if you're applying to multiple roles through Otherbranch at once, or if you find yourself back on the job market down the road and want to use our service again.
There was (is?) a Mongol word "tümen" meaning 10 000. There was an Old Slavic word "t'ma" meaning the same. The obvious question is whether these two are etymologically related.
I asked ChatGPT, and it said that Mongols brought the word to Slavs during their invasions to Europe in the 13th century.
And now I wonder whether I have learned an interesting historical fact... or just made ChatGPT produce another hallucination.
Perhaps this is a glimpse to the future of education -- all information will be instantly available and made very easy to understand. But we will always doubt whether the answer is actually true, or was just made up on the spot. Or maybe my generation will always doubt it, but the next generations will probably accept everything as a fact. I mean, what other options will they have: trust the machine, or trust a book written by a human who probably just asked the machine?
Probably shouldn't believe anything on the basis of just ChatGPT's say-so. At the very least ask for a source. As the internet proceeds from a hobbyist playground to corporate ad-world to steaming pools of AI-generated sludge, maybe curated information sources like encyclopedias will come back in style.
Is there any reason, apart from being politically well-connected, why Robin Gunningham aka Banksy couldn't be prosecuted under the UK Proceeds of Crime Act?
Have criminal complaints been filed against Banksy? And is there an open police inquiry as to the identity of Banksy? Other than legal disputes about the ownership of his work, I haven't heard of any.
Is there any proof other than that provided by the Daily Mail (which I grant you is a very very highly super reliable journalistic enterprise) that Gunningham is Banksy? Other potential Banksy candidates have been outed.
And to whom is Gunningham politically well-connected? I think I would need more the Daily Mail to be convinced of his well-connected connections.
Was anyone around Silicon Valley, specifically in tech or close to tech, around 2010?
I have a theory that that's the year when tech/nerd culture began to ingest great numbers of people that would otherwise have gone into law, medicine, or finance--which changed the cultural landscape forever. I'm wondering if anyone has any observations or stories related to this. I'd be curious to see to what extent this theory is true.
I used to hangout in online tech spaces, but only came closer to the industry side of things around 2011-2012, and finally joined the industry in 2013. I think I observe that more non-geek people are working in tech than it used to be. The humor and references have changed quite a bit. There's less Lord of the Rings and Philip K. Dick in the air than there used to be, although these remain landmarks that even folks who went to Ivy League schools at least know of. There's a lot more people from the Ivies for sure. Very smooth, very good at presenting themselves.
As a former member of the board of VLAB (back in 2003), I can assure you that non-techies were infiltrating Silicon Valley long before 2010. "Free" money has always been a great attractor in Silicon Valley. If there has been a change, it's the fact that techies are available in vast quantities overseas, and the Internet allowed the finance, marketing, and legal crew to kick back in Palo Alto while outsourcing product development to India, China, and Eastern Europe.
Outsourcing had begun before the Dot Com bubble burst. It picked up steam afterward. Around 2005, my company bought a small tech company in Romania with a few dozen engineers. They killed the product it made, but reassigned the engineers to work on our competing product and some other projects, and then some other projects. By 2010 our little company (1200 employees worldwide) was the largest hi-tech employer in Romania (500 employees). I was told (I don't know if it's true) that in 2010 we had hired most of all the EE graduates of the Polytechnic University of Bucharest (UPB). The Romania Gov gave our company an award, and it became aware that it could play in the global hi-tech market. Suddenly big-name tech companies arrived and started stealing our employees. We remained at about 500, but a whole tech ecosystem grew in Romania from a little seed.
Concur with Johan below. I worked in academia largely prior to joining Bell Labs in the late 70s. Prior to about the mid-70s computers involved wires and plugs, card punching programs on cards, and submitting jobs to an rjet facility and picking up the results the next day. In the 80s computers became much smaller and migrated from major labs to personal computers. At the same time some folks were working on better operating systems (e.g. Unix at Bell, which soon became a widely used os or the Bourne shell) and better communication procedures among computers. Mid to late 80s saw massive improvements in data communications among devices. The result was in the 90s an exponential growth in the number of computers dedicated solely to managing communication among computers, what we now call the internet. The 2001 time frame Johan speaks of coincides with the emergence of being able to work on computers anywhere and communicate with other computers anywhere. At the same time lots of software was being integrated from special purpose mainframe programs (like Fortran, LINPACK and EISPACK) into stuff for everyone everywhere like MATLAB and Python. The Apple macintosh graphical interface (which Microsoft basically copied in Windows) made working on a computer lots easier and more intuitive. So I think the nurturing medium matured between 2000 and 2010 so that techie work no longer was done in big labs by hardened geeks, but could be done by anybody. That sweet mixture is I think what lured all the flies and bugs into the tech field and things got a bit juicy after that.
Thanks for the detailed story! I guess I'm one of the kids ruining the lawn then :).
There's a few books about computing in the 60's, 70's, 80's, and early 90's, but precious little about anything later, minus some about Linux/OSS and one or two about very very specific companies like Facebook. Wish there was more about the later period.
I was never perhaps what one would call, "in the industry" as much as an active, participating user of the industry as it matured. I have spent my life in the field of physics (my nickname is a clue for the specialization area.) Now I am retired, but in the sense of the Mummy's view of death, retirement is only the beginning. I am still teaching a bit at university (in a sort of emeritus status) and consulting on various problems that some folks have.
My work with computers has always been aimed at that crucial part of physics, comparing the predictions of theory with experimental or observational outcomes and trying to visualize the results. So I just happened to use whatever were the best calculational capabilities as they came to exist. When I was an undergraduate (when dinosaurs roamed the earth) there were no computers in common use except in very specialized facilities. We depended on paper and pencil and slide rules. There were in those days slide rule contests for students to see who could best and fastest calculate results. When hand held scientific calculators first became available (for about $400+ in olden dollars for one that did what a $10 calculator does today) they were banned from use on tests for fear they gave too great an advantage to students who could afford them. The first device I recall using that was called a computer (apart from some specialized "computers" I used prior to that time, which were actually analog computers, that use switches and variable resistors to do specific calculations, for example, Turing's machine in WW2 that broke Enigma was based on his earlier analog computer) was as a lab assistant using an early PDP device that controlled an experiment. It had a glorious 8K of memory, was housed in a person sized rack, and was programmed using paper tapes (or mylar for frequently used programs) with holes punched in it for the coding. Some of the coding was also done wiring plugs on its backside. The interface device was one of those teletypes that made a great pounding noise when in use. Around that time began more common implementation the so-called mainframes, CDCs, IBMs, and later the Crays.
All the "social" stuff with computers has never interested me. There were some early computer games (first text driven, with statements like "you are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike" then simple character-graphic display games, called names like Zork I think) that the hard core computer folks had fun with but it was not until the communication bandwidth and memory miniaturization boomed after the 90s that it became practical to play with audio-visual stuff like movies, photos and the like. Those things take GB and more, TB for half serious video, of memory and bandwidth to be fun not frustrating. Gone are the days when we worked over 300 or later a glorious 1200 baud modems. When was the last time anyone you know got a DVD from a Redbox or Blockbuster store? In the GB and even TB world we live in a communicating computer can hit a pleasure spot with a large number of people, particularly those who somehow otherwise feel alienated from the main stream a bit or just want attention, neither of which applies to me anymore.
I got into the industry in 2001, and as far as I can tell the change you speak of had already happened by then. There were a lot of folk around who were more businessy than techy, and more preppy than nerdy. My theory is that they started to show up during and after the internet boom.
Thanks for sharing. It looks like my perspective is rooted in becoming aware of the culture of the industry when I began to interact with it, ie. 2010 is year for me and the kids are ruining my lawn!
Kurzgesagt released a new video. It's corny, naive, and overly simplistic in its optimism, but fuck, that's just what I need right now. On the off chance that you do too, here's the link:
That really pulled me down a science rabbit hole. Nice.
though I liked it, I keep thinking of the theme of CS Lewis' Abolition of Man. We in the present have a vast power over they of the future, and once we decide we should edit them, we make them less than they could be (and subject to our whim.. and we've got some pretty serious whims these days, and I don't see that abating any time soon). Okay, okay, they avoided saying any such thing. I just hear that whenever I hear 'we can make utopia right here'. I think we can't, without editing ourselves and kids. And we can't do that without making them lesser in some way. (You're gonna say, diseases. Sure. But the step after that.)
Again, liked it. Also liked the we-are-full-of-friendly-viruses one. Sent the tattoo one to a tattooed friend. Continuing the rabbit hole...
Can anyone suggest reliable historic records regarding:
Thomas Jefferson, North Africa, and pirates?
I'm not sure if there's a connection, but Jefferson's purported interactions with pirates may be -- rightly or wrongly -- associated with a militia movement called Sovereign Citizen. I'm not real familiar with the ideology, but they appear to be separatists a la the 1980s, and refuse taxes, driver licenses, license plates and such. Or is the connection to Jefferson bogus?
'Sovereign Citizens' reference a treaty with Morocco. Is it mythical?
If real, what does Jefferson have to do with it? And who were the pirates?
I can vaguely see a connection between the Sovereign Citizen movement and Thomas Jefferson's ideal of minarchist democracy, with the caveat that Thomas Jefferson was ideologically coherent and the Sovereign Citizens are very much not. Which means studying any coherent body of political thought is unlikely to give you any real insight there.
I'm not seeing any connection with the Barbary Pirates issue; that was Jefferson coming to the realization that, yes, even minarchist democracies will sometimes need to fight a war, even if nobody is literally invading us right this minute. To which end he imposed taxes and raised a navy and did all the usual stuff that annoys sovereign citizens but enables one to actually win a war, but being Jefferson did less of it than say John Adams would have,
The Barbary Wars should be more well known, they hit so many recent political moments in interesting ways.
Basically the English had treaties with the Muslim states in the Mediterranean saying they wouldn't raid english ships and take the crews as slaves. Once America declared independence American ships were no longer under the protection of those treaties.
So American merchant ships started being captured and having their crews auctioned off at slave markets. The US needed a navy to put a stop to it.
They pirates weren't criminals in their countries so they don't really fit the normal use of the term.
I think there's a great mini series to be made exploring the hypocrisy of the US being enraged by slave raids while slavery being legal, as well as the history of conflict with the Islamic world.
"The hypocrisy of the US being enraged by slave raids while slavery being legal."
Its hypocritical but not uncommon. Perhaps that has always been the most common position when it comes to slavery throughout history. "I don't want my own family/tribe/countrymen/religious brethren to be enslaved but I support enslaving the enemy." The Arabs the Americans fought against most likely felt the same(they opposed Arab Muslims being enslaved while enslaving European Christians and African Pagans). Whats uncommon is extending that anti-slavery principle to all people not just your own "tribe". The Northern US was in the beginning stage of that process closely following Great Britain.
Don't bother with the Sovereign Citizenship stuff, it's all pseudo-law/history and not worth the pixels. Do look into the Barbary Wars, as it's a fascinating bit of US history that not many people know about and laid the foundations for the US navy.
The United States in Jefferson's time did fight Morocco (and the other North African states) over Barbary piracy; piracy was a big part of the economy of Algeria, Tunis, Morocco, and Tripolitania at the time. Treaties were surely involved in ending the conflicts and freeing prisoners and such, and would have been negotiated during the Jefferson administration. The search term you want is "Barbary Wars".
Sovereign Citizens are a very deep rabbit hole of crackpottery and I have no idea what claims they're currently making about this aspect of American history.
In my opinion, the Sovereign Citizen belief-system is a literally insane ideology, and you shouldn't attempt to understand it, lest you suffer the fate of a Lovecraft protagonist.
It redefines common words to mean very specific things, and then exploits the confusion between the common and specific definitions. As with any good manifesto, there's lots of capitalized words, and the cores is a bizarre theory of common law going back to England, which I don't think has anything to do with actual law as practiced anywhere (but I am not a lawyer). It's almost like cargo-cult law - they believe that if they say the right words in the right way in court, they can get off free. In actuality, they simply annoy judges by spouting non-stop nonsense.
I don't think Sovereign Citizens are a "militia" by any normal definition, and from what I understand, one of the major places the meme spreads is in prison, where gullible or unintelligent people think it's a way to make appeals. I suppose some subgroups of SCs who aren't in prison might form militias, but that's not the same thing as the entire group being a militia.
I don't know about a direct connection with Thomas Jefferson.
The pirates are almost certainly the Barbary Pirates, who operated out of North Africa in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I don't know how they're relevant to SCs, except that SCs make a big deal about "Admiralty Law".
[edit: But moonshadow's link below suggest another meaning: on the theory that Canadian law only applies to the sea around Canada and not to the land, therefore when Canadian courts attempt to enforce rules on land, they're acting as "pirates".]
I encountered this phenomenon while providing legal services to inmates in lockdown. Librarians were obliged to photocopy legal documents without charge if they were "qualified", i.e., Habeas, Conditions of Confinement, Civil Rights, etc., according to the Lewis v. Casey Supreme Court decision. When I refused to copy an inmate's documents because they were about Sovereign Citizens' gibberish, this particular inmate went on a racist rant. I later ran into him working at a Salvation Army store where I was stuffing some furniture into my compact car. He remembered me and tried to pick a fight. What was unusual is the inmate was black, and apparently didn't understand that if he showed up to a meeting of Sovereign Citizens on the prison yard, he would not be well received. You picks your delusion and take your chances, I guess.
It sounds like you have a lot more contact with them than I do. But the occasional instances that come to my attention have been skewing more and more black over the last decade. *shrug* And I hadn't noticed a racist connection, but I suppose that's also something you'd have a lot more visibility into.
> In my opinion, the Sovereign Citizen belief-system is a literally insane ideology, and you shouldn't attempt to understand it, lest you suffer the fate of a Lovecraft protagonist.
*gasps and appalled*
They are fantastic, adorable, people on the right side of the debate; they may not be the brightest knife on a shed. But they have a wonderful sense of right and wrong, are so nonviolent in their advocacy in the face of overwhelming pressure.
I have no idea whether you're joking or not... But I do kinda sorta agree; they seem non-violent and willing to solve problems with talk and passive resistance, which is frankly amazing in this day and age. I think with a more sane belief-system they could possibly be an actual force for good. But as is, they're just nuts. It's like dealing with an LLM AI that's been *told* to give you meaningless slop. :-/
The insanity is optimism and the optimism is the cause of non violence. Sovereign citizens are people who picked up individualistic anarchism ideas but generally have not accepted the hard truth, politics is violence. I imagine we could debate for hours about when and where violence is acceptable, but taxation is theft and given a proud american face to face with a cop there to steal their money(/or other example of state violence hidden under layers of lawyer bullshit) its a hard pill to shallow to pick between martyrdom or cowardice. The untrained human mind often trys to bargain with reality, qed they pick an irrational nonsensical 3rd "options".
"just world fallacy" leads poeple with my personality to hope that you can assert your freedom(which clearly exists, the rural guns outnumber the federal agents 1000:1) to a cop and they will go away without a big mess of violence.
>Sovereign citizens are people who picked up individualistic anarchism ideas but generally have not accepted the hard truth, politics is violence.
Plenty of people pick up individualistic anarchism ideas without accepting the idea that politics is violence. However, most of those people do not also believe a very specific laundry list of demonstrably untrue and extremely silly things about U.S. history, English common law, money, contracts, taxation, the Uniform Commercial Code, etc., etc., etc. Sovcits are a very particular and somewhat rare kind of weird.
> It's almost like cargo-cult law - they believe that if they say the right words in the right way in court, they can get off free.
It's hard to blame them for this; it's a completely correct view of how the law works. We have plenty of examples, as when police testify that they were put in fear when they observed someone reach for his waistband. This is accepted, every time, despite the facts that (1) every cop ever called into court gives the same testimony and (2) we know that that they are specifically trained to provide those exact words.
> In actuality, they simply annoy judges by spouting non-stop nonsense.
That's not the fault of the nonsense. It just reflects that judges don't like them.
The problem isn't that there are a magic words in law that win you court cases, there absolutely are. The problem is that Sovereign Citizens have the wrong magic words and subscribe to an understanding of the law that will never generate the right ones.
Isn’t that the same as the case of the cargo cult: it is literally the case that if you build an airstrip lots of good stuff will arrive (if you are the US airforce and/or the US government likes you enough to send you stuff). The thing about the cargo cult is thinking that if you take the same action when the bracketed condition isn’t true that you’ll still get the benefit.
I guess, but I see the airplane deliveries as being performed by the same people who build the airstrips. They're building the airstrips as part of their air freight system, so that their airplanes can land on them. This makes for a significant difference between those people, and other people who build airstrips because airstrips attract airplanes. Airstrips do not in fact attract airplanes. One group sees the airstrips as a channel by which they can deliver something, and the other sees the airstrips as a natural resource, like a fruit tree, which occasionally produces something.
I don't see this type of difference between "people who use magic incantations in ways that the courts feel warmly toward" and "people who are too stupid to realize that the law isn't about magic incantations". I have cast that second perspective uncharitably, but it is not rare, and I think it is incorrect - the law 𝗶𝘀 about magic incantations, but courts feel that it's important to deny this. These two groups are viewing the law in the same way, but it's only working for one of them, for external reasons.
Viewed from one perspective the words about fear when someone reached for their waistband would seem like a magic incantation. But from another perspective those words are a shorthand for an argument that the judge will find persuasive. A non-police-officer probably wouldn’t get off a charge by using the same words, or would a police office get off a different charge (corruption, say) by using those words.
It is of course true that the building of airstrips doesn’t in itself attract cargo. That’s a genuine misunderstanding of the mechanisms involved. But to steelman the cargo cultist, it really is true that the magic words ‘please send us this week’s shipment’ attracts cargo. But it still wouldn’t work for the cargo cultist to send that message using the right magic words: the reason the magic words work is that the people hearing them think they should respond in a particular way.
A little while ago, there was an internal memo from the YouTuber Mr. Beast, which made the rounds. It had some interesting things about how his production system worked. But one part jumped out at me:
> This is what dictates what we do for videos. “I Spent 50 Hours In My Front Yard” is lame and you wouldn’t click it. But you would hypothetically click “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”. Both are relatively similar in time/effort but the ketchup one is easily 100x more viral. An image of someone sitting in ketchup in a bathtub is exponentially more interesting than someone sitting in their front yard. Titles are equally as important for getting someone to click. A simple way to up that CTR even more would be to title it “I Survived” instead of “I Spent”. That would add more intrigue and make it feel more extreme. In general the more extreme the better. “I Don’t Like Bananas” won’t perform the same as “Bananas Are The Worst Food On Earth”.
I think that this is how Trump should be interpreted. All of his "best" and "worst" and "greatest" and "all" and "none", all of the exaggerations, even my "all"s ... it's all showmanship to hook his audience.
Yes, he speaks in hyperbole. I'm not sure that's the way he actually operates, but certainly how he speaks, and he thinks it works, at least for his target audience.
Am seeing commentary on the Nobel Prize in physics along the lines of `c'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre,' and thought as one of the SSC-sphere's resident physicists I should weigh in. I'm going to weigh in on the side of `this is definitely physics, quit complaining.' My reasons are two-fold. (1) I (and many other physicists) like to condescendingly believe that ultimately, all scientific fields are just physics (possibly applied), and we should be consistent in our convictions, and (2) the `disordered systems and neural networks' sub-arxiv is one I've read religiously (and contributed to) for over a decade. I've always thought that most of the stuff on there is physics, and it would be bizarre to declare `this subarxiv is physics, but some of the papers that founded it are not.'
Alors, c'est magnifique, et c'est la guerre. And evaluated as statistical physics, it seems to me to be a completely worthy choice of award.
Seeing how I learned about Hopfield's work doing my diploma thesis at the Chair for Computational Physics at the Physics Department of my university - I don't have an issue with the Nobel Prize. It's at the outer edges of what physics is, but it's so much more important than most of what's going on in more traditional fields, so it's fine.
I’m a young adult male who does a lot of hard cardiovascular exercise (usually every day). I just got double-vaccinated for flu and covid. I’ve heard about risk of myocarditis among young adult males who just got vaccinated. Should I lay off the exercise for a few days? When I googled about exercise and vaccination, I found studies saying exercise is helpful, but I’m not sure if these studies considered the myocarditis risk.
There isn't strong evidence that directly links exercise to an increased risk of post-vaccination myocarditis. But intense physical activity can sometimes exacerbate underlying heart conditions. And a bout of myocarditis could further increase your risk. Since you're young, you probably haven't had anything like an ECG or EKG, have you? IANAMD, but it might be worthwhile to have a workup done on your heart (if your insurance covers it).
What would be the downside of not exercising for a few days after the vaccination?
I haven’t had a heart workup done. I use an Apple Watch a lot of the time when doing cardio, and it has some kind of irregular heart beat detection.
Working out is part of my routine, and I get a little stir-crazy if I don’t. I think the kids call it “zoomies”. I also feel like I haven’t earned the right to eat dinner if I haven’t broken a sweat yet. I do occasionally skip the workout in rare scenarios, like if I’m on a plane or working late.
If the damage was done it lasts longer then a few days and "myocarditis" is just the signal. Your bargaining politics and well that just aint how reality works(at least when your not debating with a person); Im pretty sure it wont have an effect. If you rolled the dice badly and spike protein got into your heart you should probably not heavily exercise for a year or 3(and plan on dying a decade earlier); heart damage is no joke and if it happens for an unknown reason from a shot in your arm a very strange cascade of events happened
The advice I got was to not exercise for a few days. For one, I was told that increased blood flow in the muscles where the vaccine was injected could reduce its effecticeness; the other aspect was myocarditis. From what I remember, the odds of getting it are somewhere in the 1/1000 to 1/10000 range, but it's not worth risking anything. (Besides, there's a fair chance that the vaccine hits you hard enough that the question becomes moot. Listen to your body.)
IMHO Moby Dick isn't a techno-thriller because most of that detail about whales and whaling isn't a relevant part of the story or plot in any way - instead, there's a (not that commonly used) literary technique, where at certain points in the story there are months of mundane routine travel where the protagonist stares at the sea and nothing happens other than months of suspenseful waiting which is key to establishing their mood when the whale is noticed again - and in order to provide a similar feeling and mood to the reader, instead of just saying "x time passed", the author has a long chapter that thoroughly describes vaguely related facts in excruciating detail. And it works, achieving that effect.
I'll admit, I haven't read many techno-thrillers and I have no idea what contemporary ones are like, but I'd be very surprised if they included passages such as these:
"While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed in dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated ere going to the try-works, of which anon.
It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others, I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times this sperm was such a favourite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener! such a delicious molifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralise.
As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,—literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti."
I think it might be more fun to read it as an alternate-history techno-thriller, by a reader who was ignorant that whaling was ever a real practice.
I think most of it would sound incredibly contrived. How could anyone possibly catch a whale with 19th century technology? "Well y'see, you just wait for it to surface then you chuck in a spear on a rope!" And what could possibly make this whole activity economically worthwhile? "Well, y'see, there's a goo in a sperm whale's head which you can use in cosmetics." It all sounds completely implausible.
Whale oil as lighting source. Before petroleum products were refined, animal-fat derivatives or plant oils lwere what you had to burn for light.
So commercial whale hunting in the 19th century was more like oil prospecting in the 20th century, regarding economic returns, than merely "the oil in the head can be used for cosmetics".
I tend to associate him and Michael Crichton with the start of the genre. I can't point to anyone more recent, but I'd probably recognize the names due to time spent shelving in a mystery/thriller section.
Would Stieg Larsson's _Girl With the Dragon Tattoo_ trilogy count as a techno thriller? Lots of hacking and violence. But geez that's almost two decades old now!
By September 2022, US intelligence reports deemed “exquisite” revealed a “deeply unnerving assessment” of Putin — that he was so desperate about battlefield losses that he might use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
Based on the alarming new intelligence reports, the White House believed there was a 50% chance Russia would use a tactical nuclear weapon — a striking assessment that had skyrocketed up from 5% and then 10%, Woodward reports.
“On all channels, get on the line with the Russians,” Biden instructed his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. “Tell them what we will do in response,” he said, according to Woodward.
The book recounts a tense phone call between Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and his Russian counterpart in October 2022.
“If you did this, all the restraints that we have been operating under in Ukraine would be reconsidered,” Austin said to Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, according to Woodward. “This would isolate Russia on the world stage to a degree you Russians cannot fully appreciate.”
“I don’t take kindly to being threatened,” Shoigu responded.
“Mr. Minister,” Austin said, according to Woodward, “I am the leader of the most powerful military in the history of the world. I don’t make threats.”
Two days later, the Russians requested another call. This time, the Russian defense minister dramatically claimed the Ukrainians were planning to use a “dirty bomb” — a false story the US believed the Kremlin was pushing as a pretext to deploy a nuclear weapon.
“We don’t believe you,” Austin said firmly in response, according to Woodward. “We don’t see any indications of this, and the world will see through this.”
Haven't we always known intuitively that this is the reason the Biden administration wants Ukraine to fight Russia with one arm tied behind its back? Other commentators have expressed this idea. Their mistake has been that they see Putin as a leader of a nation-state motivated by nationalist impulses. They expected Putin would eventually realize that he's destroying his nation's economic and military capacity by continuing the war. But Putin is more like a mafia leader. Even though he's assassinated all the other pretenders to the throne, he can't show weakness. And like a mafia boss, he can't go into retirement. That would immediately put a target on his head. Russia can go down the tubes, but Putin has to keep trying. And with all the yes-men surrounding him, he may not realize how much things are deteriorating around him.
This doesn't really make sense. Putin wants to annex the industrial eastern parts of Ukraine and turn the western part into some sort of demilitarized buffer state between Russia and NATO. He would in effect be nuking the territory he wants to control, and the prevailing winds would blow the radiation into Russia anyway. I also don't think it would serve the interest of keeping NATO out at all; nothing is more likely to lead to foreign intervention than dropping a nuke.
Tactical nuclear weapons don't even work very well against enemy troops. They aren't concentrated enough in the theatre. It makes more sense if the nukes are trying to stop hundreds of Soviet divisions from pouring into western Europe over limited routes. The only real target in Ukraine would be Kiev. That wouldn't destroy the Ukrainian military, but it would destroy all the people that the Russians would need to negotiate a surrender with.
The Russians might try to look tough with their nuclear policy, but Ukraine has violated their red lines in the past. The updated Russian nuclear doctrine states that attacks on their nuclear detection or launch infrastructure can trigger nuclear retaliation. But Ukraine partially destroyed the over-the-horizon early warning radar in Armavir this May with a drone strike, and the Russians did nothing.
1. The proper and effective way to use what are generally called "tactical" nuclear weapons is to engage critical logistics and C3I (or whatever) targets. The bit where, ha ha, tanks are so tough and spread out that your fancy nuclear warhead only destroyed six of them, you silly fool who thought nuclear weapons could stop tanks, falls apart when you learn that the nuke didn't destroy any tanks but now all of the tanks aren't getting any more fuel, ammunition, or orders. Assuming the Russians are not *completely* incompetent, the modest use of tactical nuclear weapons would probably have given them a decisive advantage in Ukraine.
2. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rebuilt on their original sites, starting weeks after the attacks. They were somewhat less healthy places to live than they had been, but not to an extent that would seriously concern a Russian, or anyone else whose risk tolerance has been recalibrated to wartime standards. Fallout does not render vast tracts of valuable land inhabitable for any great length of time.
Re: 1, a lot of the Ukrainian command/logistics is already very spread out and decentralized to mitigate conventional strikes from drones/bombs/missiles. And they don't really have local production of much besides drones, most of their supplies are shipped in from NATO neighbors. Nuking Poland or Romania is fully into WW3/MAD territory. I don't doubt that the Russians using tactical nukes against Ukraine would be devastating, but it isn't the same scenario as a typical Cold War era wargame.
Re: 2, see my comment below about grain exports. It's a major pillar of the Ukrainian economy and the public is hysterical about radiation far beyond the factual harms. I imagine the deployment of nuclear weapons there would destroy the export market. Maybe this isn't something Putin or the Duma care about very much, but it would be against their own interest if they want to occupy the land they are conquering (which presumably is the whole reason they are using nukes in the first place).
Also, depending on the time of year where they dropped the nuke, they'd risk fallout blowing back on their territory. I remember when Putin first rattled his nuclear saber (the first of many rattles), I checked the winds in Kyiv and they happened to be blowing towards Moscow. But for much of the year, they blow up towards Poland and the Baltic.
The nuclear strike was being considered specifically in view of the Kherson garrison being surrounded and cut off from supply in late October '22. There might have been adequate troop and armour concentrations west of Kherson for it to make tactical sense.
In the event, Sergei Surovikin, in a remarkable display of political sangfroid and military skill, surrendered Kherson and pulled out the 49th CAA in relatively good order (not remotely as good as the MoD claimed, but better than could have been expected).
Maybe? This would still contradict official Russian nuclear doctrine at the time. The equivalent of a division being cut off doesn't qualify as the sort of existential threat to the Russian state needed to invoke it. And this was an offensive operation, so it doesn't invoke the defensive aspect of the nuclear doctrine either.
It was most of an army, not a division. The Kherson garrison fluctuated between 30,000 and 70,000 men since the city fell to the Russians, though I grant you it was closer to the lower bound in October.
And a month earlier, as I'm sure you know, Russia had annexed the Kherson oblast de jure. Doctrinally, the Kherson garrison was defending Russian territory, as Russia saw it.
ETA: Which is not to say that the pollution concerns you bring up in your other replies are wrong. Kherson controls the North Crimean Canal, which supplies water to Crimea from the Kakhovka reservoir.
I must have got the timeline mixed up; Kherson being annexed at the time does make it plausible that Russia could invoke the nuclear doctrine. I still think it's unlikely for other reasons, but I have updated from the story being nonsense.
The fallout from a small number of "tactical" strikes would be pretty limited, I think. Probably not worth worrying about for someone who already had troops camping in Chernobyl exclusion zone.
And I think the ship has sailed on annexing anything useful industrially, since the war has been so grindingly destructive that nothing you take by force will end up intact. The only real goal remaining is to claim enough territory to declare victory without it being a total embarrassment, and you can still do that even if the territory you seized is glowing slightly.
I agree that it would draw foreign intervention and be unlikely to end the war, but that's exactly what this phone call is signaling! I don't think it's fair to dismiss this news as "they would never do it" if one of the reasons they wouldn't do it is "the US explained why it would be a bad idea."
The exclusion zone mostly isn't dangerously radioactive; of course the coffin site is, and some other places like the red forest and equipment dumps from the liquidation effort. But people have been living there for decades now with only moderately higher background radiation. Of course there is also a big difference between irradiating some Russian troops and fallout blowing through Rostov.
The industrial infrastructure and urban agglomerations probably are pretty destroyed after the fighting. But a major part of the Ukrainian economy is grain export, and a nuclear strike would cripple that. Even if it was mostly safe to consume, no one would want to buy it on the market. I don't know how much this matters to the Russian command, but it would be against their own long term interests.
This last part I don't find credible. Putin isn't stupid or insane, I think he grasps that launching a nuclear strike would have enormous repercussions. Similarly, I don't think the Russian Minister of Defense needs America to tell him that it would be a bad idea. I don't doubt that the call happened or that the threat of American retaliation was made clear, but that doesn't mean the Russians couldn't figure that part out on their own.
I am continually in awe at how quickly the rationalizations in support of the current doctrine in Ukraine come pouring out in response to claims that go against the accuracy of the doctrine. It doesn't matter how reliable the countervailing information is. It seems nothing will force some of you guys reconsider the soundness of the current doctrine. The response is always more self-serving rationalizations to shore up confidence.
But to what end? This is not how one maintains an accurate view of the world. What good is served by maintaining the reality-distortion field for as long as possible?
I suspect someone here is trying to juice up the story to make elements of the Biden Administration (e.g. SecDef Austin and/or APNSA Sullivan) into the Voices of Wisdom and Prudence who negotiated a time of Great Peril and so Saved the World from Armageddon.
I think it likely that phone calls from Beijing to Moscow had rather more impact than those from Washington to Moscow, and I never assessed the probability of nuclear weapons use in Ukraine at higher than 20% in part because I was confident Beijing was making those phone calls.
I don't know why they would care about China more than the US. If Putin ends up using nuclear weapons, it will only be for one reason: to drag as many people as possible into the grave with him. Strategic considerations are irrelevant at that point.
Putin doesn't much care about the US, because the US has already done pretty much everything it is plausibly going to do to threaten his regime. Putin cares about China because Putin is absolutely dependent on China to keep the Russian economy from outright collapsing (and taking the Putin regime with it). And China is very much not in favor of a world where nuclear warfighting is in any way normalized, even less in favor of a world where China gets any of the blame for a nuclear war and the West starts talking about secondary sanctions.
Having Russia as a client state does benefit China, but almost certainly not enough to justify the cost or risk of opening that can of worms. If Xi tells Putin "no nukes or we're cutting you off", that's a credible and very substantial threat. And I have a hard time thinking of a good reason why Xi would *not* have long since made that phone call.
He already has absolute power nationally. What he wants is international power, and more importantly, to bring back to life a Russian empire. If he fails in that... what's even the point? He would just be a king of nothing. If Russia is doomed to be an irrelevant, impoverished country, then there is no reason for it to continue existing. May as well put it out of its misery.
If all he cared about was maintaining local power, there are far less risky ways to do so. He could've cut his losses a long time ago. This is more than that.
Yes, he wants international power, but dropping nukes won't get him that. Having nukes gets him more of that than ever using them would.
If he could drop a nuke and have the West back down and let him get his way, I'm sure he would do that. Dropping a nuke so the West collectively takes him out doesn't help.
I do think that Putin would consider "Russia is much stronger than when I took over" to be a viable win condition. That he stood up to the West and Russia didn't get destroyed economically or militarily is already pretty good for bragging rights. He also will almost certainly exit the current war with more territory than he started with and a more demoralized and weakened Ukraine.
Nobody lives forever, and conquering the world was never on the table for Russia. I take Putin's end game to be territorial and power gains, which he has achieved. Russia may be a backwater compared to the West, but it's powerful and influential compared to say, Italy. It's more influential than France, Germany, or Britain as well, despite a smaller economy. I think Putin would say that he's winning, but if he were honest not winning by as much as he hoped.
Going nuclear would, for Putin, be a desperation move to forestall a defeat that would *cost* him a great deal of power internationally, and possibly domestically. Putin wouldn't "win" a nuclear war, but he might lose one by less than he would the alternate conventional war.
Also note that these are Vladimir Putin's potential losses we are talking about, not Russia's.
China is on his doorstep and doesn't give a rattling damn about how it is perceived by bleeding-heart liberals in the West or pesky things like "you can't do that, it's a crime against humanity" (see the allegations about how it sources a plentiful supply of donor organs if you want to pay for surgery and skip queues here in the West). If Premier Xi tells Putin "if you do this, we will not take it well", that's a more credible threat than some American blowing hard about "We are the biggest gorilla in the world".
Putin might have thought tactical nukes could be used in Ukraine without escalation to global thermonuclear war. Ukraine is after all not covered by the American nuclear umbrella. In which case the reaction of his patron and chief supplier would be highly relevant.
I had put up some posts objecting to the indefinite ban on LearnedHebrewHatesIP, but I no longer object to the ban. People have linked to some posts of his that were deeply out of line, and I get it. But I have also seem some contemptuous talk that seems unfounded and unfair — for instance, someone saying his apologies were fake, various people saying things along the lines of good riddance. I myself saw very little of his bad side, probably because I avoid threads that are at all political. And his good side was great. So here are my 3 most vivid memories of good encounters with him.
Some time in the first month after 10/7/23 some furious rando put up a post saying that Israelis thirst for the blood of Palestinian children. I posted some sort of objection, and LHHIP, who at that time called himself LearnedHebrewHatesIsrael, defended rando, basically saying that rando’s statement was at least metaphorically true. We then had a long, intense but civil exchange and finally a reached a point that hinged on *syntax,* oddly. He was saying that rando was talking about the Israeli military, I was saying that there was no reason to take rando to mean that. I then wrote a whole obsessive paragraph about syntax: under what circumstances and in what kind of sentences “the Israelis” would be taken as shorthand for “Israeli military,” and when native speakers would naturally take it to mean all Israeli citizens. There was a pause, and then he wrote back that he’d thought it over and yeah, I was right. That impressed me — that he’d be willing, when so furious about the Palestine/Israel situation, to think about such a dry matter, and then concede that I was right, and then concede that rando’s statement would normally be taken to apply to all Israelis, and that when taken that way it was obviously false and inflammatory.
Maybe 6 months ago I asked on here whether someone would give me a consult about future geopolitical matters for a novel I am writing. Nobody responded, and I thought about contacting LHHIP directly even though I had never spoken with him anywhere except here on the forum. I just had the feeling that he was the kind of person who might do it. I hesitated for a while, but then finally did, and he wrote back that he had actually been thinking about offering, and said he’d be happy to. He wrote long, thoughtful answers to my 3 questions about future alliances, hostilities and ways they might play out. In fact, the answers were *too* thoughtful and inventive. I’d have had to change the plot of my novel to accommodate them. So then, feeling awkward and sort of rude, I told him that, and asked for simpler answers that would fit with the basic storyline, and he, without complaint, wrote 3 new answers that this time were just I’d asked for.
Pretty recently we had a long exchange about AI, and questions it prompted for us, having to do with consciousness, and complexity -- for instance is evolution a dumb, in fact mindless, process, or is it then genius of a wordless universe? I think about stuff like that, and he could meet me there. Also sent me to a great paper.
I have also read many posts of his on a variety of subjects, and they seemed to me to stand out in their intelligence and fair-mindedness, even among this crew. But I rarely read political threads, and clearly it was on that subject that he really lost it, over and over. To his credit, he also apologized at length multiple times, and I am sure those apologies were real. Still, you can’t get away with losing it over and over, especially if losing it takes the form of actually arguing that we should assassinate Trump. So I withdraw my protest of his ban. But I do wish more people would speak up about his good side, which was very substantial, and also consider that, as Moon Moth wrote somewhere on this thread, he might have been struggling with a huge ball of anger roiling around his insides I don’t know a thing about his life, but his user name already tells part of the story. Seems like he put substantial effort into bridging the gap between his point of view — I assume he’s Palestinian — and the Israeli one; learned Hebrew as part of that effort; and somehow all that came to nothing. And who knows what he’s been through, or had loved ones go through. People with interior fractures like his are often trauma victims, and by “trauma” I don’t mean something like being poor and lonesome, I mean savage beatings by a parent, witnessing extreme violence, etc.
I think this is about more than just an individual person. His presence was very important for the epistemic health of this space this last year. (Which, otherwise, significantly more Jewish, and significantly less Arabic/Muslim than average. And the people most emotionally invested in Israel are, quite naturally, the best informed about it. He was actively pushing back against what would otherwise - and at times did - become an epistemic bubble, in a way most of us wouldn't be able to, while keeping the discussion civil and factually grounded. Well, usually, the banworthy post was... well, banworthy.)
Hmmm yes, it is a very jewish place, but also pretty liberal place. A jew from LA may be pro-Israeli in the sense that she is more invested in "Israeli jews won't just disappear", but is often very much not what come to the Israeli's mind when thinking about "pro israel"
This was my first thought as well. I'd wanted to write something like that, but a) I share his views on Israel's response to 10/7 so it would just look tribal; and b) I'm an infrequent commenter, and non-central on all axes except my gender.
I assume there's nothing stopping him from LHHIP coming back with a new username? I believe that's what Carateca/Trebuchet did (not that that worked out long-term).
If he similarly feels like the discussion here was interesting and valuable (and especially if he happens to read this commentary) then I'm all for it
Trebuchet? Huh. I actually had a horrid exchange with Trebuchet early on in my time here. I posted saying I was wondering whether my daughter and her boyfriend (both about 30, and planning to marry) would be better off in New Zealand or elsewhere. Described their work skills and personal tastes in lifestyle, hobbies etc, and asked for suggestions of places to move. For some reason this question infuriated Trebuchet. They asked for my reasons for wondering whether my daughter and her partner should move to another country, and I mentioned Jan6 , very high level of hostility between factions in US, disappearance of the middle class and the then-recent abortion ruling. Trebuchet fastened on the abortion issue, furiously informed me that many countries did not permit abortion (as though I did not know that), then went on a long gruesome riff about my apparent acceptance of abortion on demand. All I remember from it was that Trebuchet was talking about a plentitude of dead fetal grandchildren. WTF? I reported the post.
Ouch. That someone as smart, educated, and usually insightful as you believes that the middle class is disappearing is utterly depressing. (I almost understand Trebuchet's reaction.) Or maybe it is *because* (not despite) you are smart and educated that you believe that.
(Side note: for what it's worth, I disagree with most of the bans, especially LHHIP and Carateca.)
Politics and economics are areas of great ignorance for me, and always will be. Occasionally I try to improve myself, and read a book on some subject in that area, and the info just slides out of my head over the next year. It's like I have no mental hooks to hang it on. I don't mentally go over it, the way you do the info in books about things that deeply interest you. I'm interested in a lot of very concrete practical things and some very abstract things, but I am not wired to attend to, sort and store info from the middle realm. I shouldn't even have made a comment, but to be honest I have seen that stuff about the disappearing middle class in many many places, many of them not scuzzy, that I thought it was true -- possible to interpret in various ways, but not open to question. There must be some data that has persuaded a lot of people, though it may be that it is misinterpreted data over which a certain sort of thinker likes to wail.
From 1967 to 2022 the share of the population earning $35,000 or less (in 2022 dollars) dropped from 32% to 23%, while the share earning $100,000 or more increased from 13% to 37%.
> fraction of US population that’s middle class has shrunk significantly in past 50 yrs
Where have they gone?
I know the US tends to use a three-class classification (lower, middle, upper) rather than a four-class classification (lower, working, middle, upper). So where have all these middle class people from 1974 gone? I'm assuming you think they went to the lower class rather than to the upper? What fraction of people were lower class in 1974 versus today?
The current classifications seem to be the loss of "good union jobs" so people in manufacturing/heavy industry dropped down a class or took a reduction in their income and lifestyle; combine that with the Rust Belt and the children of those who used to work in those factory jobs now don't have any factory jobs, so are now lower class/working poor.
Then the children/grand-children of the middle class who went to college are now engaged in gig economy/the precariat jobs, so while they expected the same lifestyle as their parents, they can't achieve it.
So there's a section of the former middle class who have seen reduction in opportunities, income, lifestyle, etc. both at the traditionally working class end and the middle-middle end. They may technically still be counted as "middle class", but by comparison with the days of 1974, they haven't achieved what their parents/grandparents did; the 'permanent pensionable union job'/'a degree will get you a good white collar job' days are pretty much over (unless you're part of the knowledge economy, and AI may be threatening some of that, too).
I don't know Melvin. Maybe some went up and some went down. I am really not knowledgeable about these things, and it's possible I'm repeating an urban myth, except one that much of the news media has bought into anyhow. If you think I'm wrong I'm, not going to argue with you.
The good news is that wages at the bottom actually rose the fastest over the last few years, so there was some partial progress there. After decades of hearing about increasing inequality, it was very unusual to see.
No clue. I sort of assumed male, though. And it looks like in this thread I let my normal gender-neutral references lapse for carateca/trebuchet and LHHI.
I would be astounded if LHHIP was a woman. But Trebuchet -- there was something she said in an exchange with me. Can't remember whether said she was a woman, or something that strongly implied it. Trebuchet/whatever the other name was seemed to have affect that ranged from irritated to furious. That irritable, I'm-mad-about-SO-many things tone was just always there. But women can be dysphoric, smart and rude too! Just look at me! Not that I'm always grouchy and down, but I don't hesitate to go there.
First, my disclaimer: There are a lot of comments posted that I don't read, I accept Scott's right to be dictator here, and I agree that generally a low threshold for banning is needed to keep a piece of the internet from descending into garbage. I cannot and will not speak to whether someone deserves a ban or not.
That said, I agree that LHHI/IP demonstrated admirable qualities. I posted as much in reply to at least one of LHHI/IP's comments, but I haven't noticed other similar examples of an online partisan being open to an alternative perspective and making a real adjustment.
FWIW, my understanding is that LHHIP is Egyptian and (started) learning Hebrew to get access to the internal Israeli conversation.
> FWIW, my understanding is that LHHIP is Egyptian and (started) learning Hebrew to get access to the internal Israeli conversation.
Yeah. An atheist Egyptian, living in an Islamic country ruled by a secular-ish dictator. And the Gazan war must be especially galling because Egypt is right there, sharing a border, and yet the Egyptian government cooperates with Israel and the US, and unofficial corruption aids Hamas, leaving the Gazan civilians to just ... die.
What am I missing? It seemed to me that his fury at Israel must come from something more direct and immediate than what you describe -- something like having family and friends in Palestine.
Well, I'm a heartless bstrd with a lump of coal in place of wherever emotions come from who leans toward Israel, but even so, I feel bad for the kids in Gaza. It isn't hard for me to imagine someone with a couple degrees closer connection feeling rage at Israel.
That said, the emotion behind the anti-Trump post that drew the ban did surprise me, for someone without apparent direct connections to the US.
Yeah, I think the official death toll (from Hamas, not Israel, so probably not understated) is that > 1% of the population of Gaza has died in the war. That doesn't tell you who is right or wrong, but it does tell you that people with a lot of family/friends in Gaza are likely to know people who have died, and almost certain to know people who've been displaced from their homes, had their home or school wrecked, etc.
I seem to be a lot less shocked by his Trump posts than others, though I do see that they are bannable. Most people I know joked about the assassination attempts, saying things along the same lines as LHHIP's remarks -- "damn, so near and yet so far." I personally wish the man would drop dead. Assassinating him is a terrible idea, though, because it would further weaken the norm of lawful and peaceful transfer of power, which Trump himself put a big dent in. I think we would have something between a long period of riots, and outright civil war. It's odd that LHHIP didn't see that, but I think his thinking goes awry when he's furious.
As someone quite in the thick of things (I'm the Rabbi who first created Hasbara as a sincere outreach organisation and left when powerful folk decided it would be more efficient as a propaganda organization, and I then moved to Egypt where I currently live in order to see what influence I might be able to have upon the conversation from here) and it seemed fairly obvious to me that he wasn't an actual Palestinian
(born or living in the area) but despite his sincere attempt to inform me about Egyptian anti-semitism and how careful I ought to be not to disclose my heritage, I didn't get the impression that he himself was living in Egypt. Possibly born in Egypt, but it just didn't seem like he was living here. I guess I was wrong.
I haven't been able to achieve the very large scale results that I was hoping for in Egypt so I might not be here much longer but if he (or someone else reading this) is currently in Egypt and would like to meet please stop by my page and let me know. If possible, it would be great to meet!
Actually you can email or whatsapp me directly as I shared them both in the following video I put up last week.
"Egypt's Only Rabbi Makes Dramatic Plea to Arabs: Help Me Bring Brotherhood to Mankind الحاخام المصري"
I dunno. My first guess is that LHHIP is smart and passionate and intellectually curious and concerned with ethical behavior, but he's stuck with horrible institutions, and can't be fully open to strangers because of the atheism. And here's this online community full of people who'd be a good match, but most of them treat the nearby ongoing tragedy as a football for their own local politics, which might still be tolerable except that it's the politics of the global superpower that contributes to the tragedy.
Or at least, I imagine that's how I might feel. Maybe I'm just projecting. I wouldn't normally talk like this about someone else, not in public, but I suppose he's not coming back. :-(
As for Israel specifically, it's not a monoculture, and there are some horrible people there, including high up in the government. It seems like normal human nature to take the worst things that the worst people in a group say, and judge the entire group by them. :-( But he got better, at least about that.
I don't know where the anger about Trump came from, which is why I started wondering whether the anger wasn't completely about Israel, but more about abstract injustice in the world. And bringing in the anarchism, the abuse of power by governments and rulers. But that's all just guesswork.
<As for Israel specifically, it's not a monoculture, and there are some horrible people there, including high up in the government
I try not to even read the news about Israel and related matters. But my oldest and closest friend is married to an Israeli woman, and spends maybe a quarter of the year in Israel. His wife's family are all intellectuals and liberals, but Mark says people in the US don't fully get that there are factions in Israel that are sort of like the lowest kind of Trump supporters, real hate-filled morons, and they fucking hate the Palestinians,, and see nothing wrong with killing as many as possible. So yeah, it's not all Fiddler on the Roof over there.
I was living and intensely involved in Israel 20 years ago but have only been there was since (hosted by the Kahana Chai organization of all people) and have pointedly refused thus far to return since the start of the war that I have been pushing very very hard against.
Here's what I published (as rhe founding Rabbi of Hasbara) on October 10th last year.
I acknowledged that within the context of world culture as it currently exists Israel has no choice but to plow ahead with no plan whatsoever until they've killed ≥ X multiple Arabs as Jews who were killed.
But that before they start doing so they should consider the alternate option of ME DOING MY THING.
Nobody likes to hear from someone who claims that he knows and can do better than the official machine in charge of a country and my lack of funds made it impossible for me to reach as wide an audience as would be necessary to turn ancient violent hatreds into empathy and friendship so despite my numerous (quite risky) efforts on every front, from contacting the mother of a hostage to attempting to deliver food baskets to the Israeli ambassador in Cairo on Purim https://youtu.be/yOFGF7PqzLY I have not succeeded.
Realizing that funding was the simple thing that waa missing I caved in and made a public call for funding in a video called: "Dear Jewish Philanthropist"
where I excerpt from the article I published last year in the immediate aftermath of the massacre to point out my prediction has been proven accurate and that every day of murder (on all sides) makes it harder for me to eventually succeed so will some brave and ballsy wealthy person please drop a few hundred thousand dollars on me.
Of course to even reach the attention of people who can do so means that my video would need to be seen by tens of thousands of people, and, as YouTube is very much a pay-to-play for people whose content doesn't fit the algorithm's conception of a clearly defined demographic it only received 100 views in total, which obviously has nearly zero odds of reaching my target audience.
Which is a shame because the ratio of 👍 to views is higher than for any similarly sized video of mine indicating that if it only got more play it might have succeeded.
Yeah, he was an interesting character. I got on his case early on, arguing that his “Hates Israel” name makes it impossible to take anything he says on the matter seriously. He defended it right up to moment when he agreed and changed it. That was… unusual… to say the least.
He also had interesting things to say about all kinds of tech matters.
Yeah, it’s like he had no middle ground between digging his heels in about his right to hate and fury, and being an unusually smart, fair minded guy. Even his username, either version of it, summarizes that doubleness: He went to the effort of *learning Hebrew•, presumably to improve his communication with Israelis and demonstrate his interest in their point of view. But now he hates them (or maybe just their military)
I think it's pretty common to have people who are sensible and careful thinkers in many areas in their lives, but who have other areas where they are so upset/committed/obsessed/whatever that they can't really have a decent conversation in those areas. LHIP could have a decent conversation on many topics, but not on all topics.
Well I think he originally just noticed that as an Arabic speaker he could learn Hebrew really quickly and perhaps do some good defeating The Nazis.
As I mentioned in the comment that started the whole discussion about his value and whether his ban should perhaps be more limited, I recognized his ever-so-rare desire to change his mind through seeking out information against his own beliefs.
He was still of the rabid assumption that Israelis were monsters when I wrote to him but it was obvious to me that as a genuine individualist free thinker his intense hatred was motivated in part by misunderstandings that could be rectified and which many of his subsequent posts show have indeed been rectified.
I don't read many Israel related posts here because as you know from my own Substack and YouTube I am an active third party opposed to the ENTIRE underpinning of what causes war in the first place.
So it never really mattered to me what LHHI had to say about the subject except for its demonstration of his maturing quality of loving Truth over Tribe.
I don't remember the first version of his name (maybe KnowsHebrew?), but when I asked about how much Hebrew he actually knew (not much, he has trouble with the lack of vowels), he changed his name.
As the de facto Chief Rabbi of Egypt I can tell you that of all the Arabics, Egyptian Arabic is pronounced most similarly to Israeli Hebrew for historical reasons related to the closness of both the Jewish and Arab communities of Egypt and the Holy Land over the past few centuries.
Try not to stress conversations here that much, it's not that serious. The mighty gaze of Scott Alexander is one of a human being who also laughs and eats soup (I assume he sometimes eats soup, that seems like a regular human thing to do, and he is a regular human being).
All of the commenters are also regular human beings, like me. We all laugh and eat soup, these are regular human being things to do.
Yes, well I have a sense of humor too, and enjoy joking around here. But this particular event is actually pretty important to me, not because I think, like a little ninny, that Scott is god, but because someone I liked quite a lot has gotten kicked off, and in fact did things that merited that. I made a serious comment about how he was really good and really awful both at once, and you said something you didn't bother to formulate clearly. But it seemed like you meant that LHHIP's learning Hebrew allowed him to rationalize bad behavior. If that's what you really think then say it clearly. If it's not, but you just found it amusing to spray some random scorn and cynicism on some people who are distressed and talking seriously, that seems boorish to me, not lighthearted.
But many (I wouldn't be surprised if most) Americans don't eat soup! Many seem to have a childhood trauma caused by their parents feeding them soup instead of something else they wanted and view any offer of soup as a personal insult - to be dealt with by muttering (or thinking) the incantation "thin soup, thin soup" and pouring the soup down the sink in the full view of the person who put non-trivial effort into cooking it, to make sure the message sinks in.
But maybe the commenters here differ from Americans in general in that they all eat soup?
There's presumably a fair amount of people who have gone out of their way to learn Russian (and not just due to being forced to do so due to growing up in the Soviet Union or East Block in general) and who hate Russia, and also some who have studied Arabic despite hating various Arab systems.
Have you heard that there are only 20,000 serious and consistent readers of literary fiction in the US?
It's a number that's been going around, but what's the evidence?
"The editor-in-chief of an independent publishing house recently told me that she believes there are about 20,000 serious and consistent readers of literary fiction in America and publishing any novel of quality is a matter of getting that book to them by any means necessary."
So there's no evidence, though this might be an educated guess.
How would you even find out? How would you define literary fiction? Should the number be viewed with alarm?
This is a discussion of marketing. It's actually about how many read (possibly just those who buy) literary fiction, and possibly just new literary fiction. I expect that literary fiction readers actually include a high proportion of people who are reading older books.
I'm sort of a doomer about literary fiction, for two reasons:
First, I think that although it's a worthy genre, and in theory the pinnacle of literature, it's also succumbed to the post-modern aesthetic in a way that's cut it off from its proper audience. I think there's sort of a progression that people can go through, where first they read fiction because it's about exciting things like rocketships and knights and romance and sex, and then they may grow to appreciate good writing and characterization, and at that point they're ready to take the next step to literary fiction. But it's gone off into its own tangled pocket universe, and become weird and self-referential and self-consciously elite, and that severs the intake path. And with the decline of reading overall, the intake path is important.
Second, it's been eaten by political correctness. It used to be a genre that eschewed "excitement and adventure and really wild things", as being the added sugar of literature. But now it seems that more and more of what gets called "literary fiction" is consciously written to push right-thinking politics and Take A Stand on Important Issues. And I think that is to adventure as high fructose corn syrup is to sugar.
So what these quotes make me wonder about is, how much of that audience is reading the books because they want to be seen to have read the books, because of what the status of "having read the books" will say about them?
There's something I call bad optimization. I think Scott calls it Moloch, and it's at least part of what people on the left call late stage capitalism. Or it's Goodhart.
After a while, a new and lively artistic movement gets simplified and stylized because it's easier to imitate superficial characteristics.
See also a passage from Perelandra-- on a paradisal ocean Venus, there are berries. Most of them are pleasant and wholesome like bread, but occasionally there's one with a red center that tastes wonderful. Ransome, a visiting man from earth, thinks that, on earth, they'd be bred to have exclusively red centers, and that wouldn't be as good.
I'm put in mind of a great quote from a review of a video game that I've never played:
> "Capitalism is a Faustian procedure. It is an excellent tool for creating wealth, inspiring innovation, and improving technology, but it also has a tendency to drain the soul from whatever it squeezes its tentacles into. After the initial flourish, the process of sucking out value for profit's sake begins. This principle applies to virtually any commodity you can name, but nowhere is it more pronounced than in art. Capitalism is the process by which Nirvana becomes Nickelback, journalism becomes gossip, The Simpsons becomes Zombie Simpsons, and meaningful art becomes meaningless crap.
> Art cannot sustain itself without capital. Art loses its value when too much capital is involved. And this is precisely what we're seeing in the video game industry now."
I think it's halfway. Both suffer from pressure to conform to institutional demands, especially when there's any type of scale involved. But when art goes on a market, or rather, an artist repeatedly faces market incentives, there's also a form of dumbing down that can happen - corners get cut, shortcuts get taken, less attention is paid, the demand for familiarity and consistency stifles innovation, and overall the quality declines.
The references in the quote are about popular music, journalism, TV, and video games, which are all things that involve teams of people and scale. An individual artist making unique art and selling it isn't necessarily affected, but it's an old story when a patron starts getting pushy for "more of the same". And the proverbial starving artist in a ghetto clearly has a lot less capital invested than anything involving a multi-million-dollar corporation.
It's at least a good start, but I was tickled by this quote from John Updike.
"In an interview, John Updike lamented that "the category of 'literary fiction' has sprung up recently to torment people like me who just set out to write books, and if anybody wanted to read them, terrific, the more the merrier ... I'm a genre writer of a sort. I write literary fiction, which is like spy fiction or chick lit."[27] Likewise, on The Charlie Rose Show, Updike argued that this term, when applied to his work, greatly limited him and his expectations of what might come of his writing, so he does not really like it. He suggested that all his works are literary, simply because "they are written in words."[28]"
I will yet again recommend _How Fiction Works_ by James Wood. From what I read of it, it proposes that our ideas of literary fiction were invented something like a century or two ago. The ideas of detailed description and character development and realism are an ideal, possibly from Flaubert) and if you look at actual classics (Jane Austen who does little description, Melville who has a fascinating monomaniac), they don't follow the rules of literary fiction.
I get bogged down in the book because there are long examples from stories I would never read, but I value the ideas I got from it. If nothing else, remember that so much of our environment (like that there's such a thing as literary fiction) were invented by people.
There are 163 literary magazines, but that list includes ~30 that are inactive. Those magazines are the main way that you advertise a novel to “serious literary readers” (I feel a little pretentious just typing that phrase). Out of the ~130 actively publishing, most of them have a few hundred subscribers. The big ones are in the thousands. But the Paris Review claims to have 100,000 on their list and that’s the biggest by far. I bet Ploughshares is only in the thousands and that’s an incredibly prestigious literary magazine. So if you use that for your census, I’d say 100k max, but many of those are going to be international. So somewhere in the five-figures sounds accurate.
> How would you define literary fiction?
The typical career for a literary writer is to publish a series of short stories, hopefully moving their way up that list, which is treated as near-canonical because of the prestige of the Pushcart. Once they have enough stories published in magazines at the top of the list (8 - 12), they’ll submit their collection to prizes that are organized by academic presses. If they win the prize, then their collection of short stories is published by the press. These usually sell a few hundred copies at most. If they sell a few thousand that’s considered wildly successful. If they went to a top MFA program, they can network their way to get connections at presses and get published without a prize as well. Once they have a book out, they’re eligible to apply for tenure-track professorships but those are competitive to get. To finally answer your question: “Literary fiction” is defined as whatever the editors for those magazine and the professors who run top MFA programs and the Pushcart Prize say it is.
To stick with novels for a moment, they typically won’t get an agent or be able to be considered by a literary press until they have a sufficient number of stories published at top journals and that’s when they’ll be able to get a top press to publish their novel. My point is that using those magazine subscribers is probably a reasonable way to get the ballpark figure.
> Should the number be viewed with alarm?
No. It’s a very intellectually incestuous process. It produces a lot of fiction that all sounds the same because it’s largely produced in MFA workshops where it comes out as if it was written by committee. Everyone says the same thing and all the stories blur together and the stories take no risks.
Seriously, the Catholic Church is one of the few organizations to maintain an intellectual establishment outside of the current one. You're probably better off reading Catholic writers.
Now here's an opinion that (as a Catholic myself) I'm not privy to. Who would you recommend? (I've only read Chesterton and Mary Doria Russell, oh and just found out R. A. Lafferty is Catholic)
Probably over a thousand authors in that space. There are some diamonds in the rough. Breece D’J Pancake. Anne Carson. Wells Tower, even though he’s kind of one-hit wonder. George Saunders. Anthony Doerr, although these days he famous and mainstream. But these days most of the authors doing interesting work need to do it pseudonymously, like Scott Alexander with Unsong before he was doxxed.
> Why is it you say that doing it pseudonymously is necessary?
Good question. If you don’t mind a longer answer, there seems to be some confusion in the thread over what exactly literary fiction is, but some strong opinions about it. I think a brief history of the novel might help clarify how we got into the current situation and answer your question about pseudonyms.
Every art form has a “high art” and “low art” distinction. Think about how four hundred years ago a wealthy patron might go to an opera while a poor person might go hear someone sing a bawdy song in a tavern. But this distinction didn't really exist for novels because until a couple hundred years ago, no one except the wealthy could read. So this distinction of “literary” versus “genre” fiction is a relatively new concept for novels compared with other art forms.
The latter half of the 19th century was dominated by what was now called Realism. In the early part of the 1800s, literacy rates were very low and printing was prohibitively expensive. The industrial revolution made printing much cheaper over the course of the century and literacy rates skyrocketed. You had the first Penny Press newspapers in the early 1800s. Novels at that time were largely produced in a serial format with a chapter released each week or month, often as part of a newspaper. This is how much of the novels were produced at the time. It also explains the length of so many novels of that period: If an author hooked an audience with a story, they would continue the story for as long as possible to make as much as money as they could. They were literally paid by the length, so of course they were long. Most of the authors writing novels were also journalists, like Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.
But there’s a reason why I bring this up. Because these novels were released in serial form, in order to get the audience to buy the next installment, they would want to end each chapter with a cliffhanger. They needed a strong plot in order to hook the audience and keep them coming back the following week. This was how novels consumed by both wealthy and working class readers were written.
But remember that printing continued to get cheaper over the course of the century. Then, in the early 20th century, you had the rise of the movement now known as Modernism. This was a broader philosophical and artistic movement, but the part that is relevant to novels is that the Modernist critique of Realist novels was that they weren’t actually very realistic. In particular, modernist authors, alleged that real life doesn't follow neatly structured plots. They argued that good art must be more realistic and eschew plot. You began to have authors like Hemingway and Faulkner who wrote novels with very limited plots. Around this same time you had the birth of genre magazines, like Amazing Stories, first published in 1926. These were largely referred to as pulp fiction because of the quality of the paper (A friend of mine collects them and has them preserved because they’re literally disintegrating).
Early genre fiction came from executions in the late 1700s and early 1800s, where vendors would go around executions selling pamphlets describing the crimes of the condemned, which were often exaggerated to make better stories. They gradually went from exaggerated accounts of real life crime to the murder mysteries we know today, and these were the earliest forms of what we now call the crime fiction genre. By the latter nineteenth century you had Dime Novels, which were some of the first mass produced books where you purchased the entire book at once.
But it wasn’t until the early twentieth century that buying the whole book at once was the common thing to do. This change in purchasing also changed the narrative structure. The authors weren’t forced to have such a strong plot. The combination of the Modernist critique of the Realist plot (saying that real life doesn’t actually follow a neatly structured plot) with the change in distribution dramatically changed the narrative structure. So finally, in the Modernist period we see novels have a clear bifurcation between their “High Art” and “Low Art” forms.
This distinction widened in the postwar period when we have the Postmodern critique of Modernism. To see a good example of this style, take a look at David Foster Wallace’s “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” [https://www.theparisreview.org/fiction/1225/brief-interviews-with-hideous-men-david-foster-wallace]. (Also, to circle around to my previous post, note that it was published in The Paris Review). When done well, I enjoy Postmodern short stories, but not Postmodern novels. They’re fun for a few pages, but not for a few hundred pages, because there’s no plot.
Also, in the 1950s was the creation of the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. At the time someone pointed out that other art forms all have schools for their art, particularly in visual art for painters and sculptures. And music schools as well. But there were no schools for writers. The workshop was very successful and the MFA programs multiplied. I have mixed feelings about the work produced from these workshops. At times it can be very good. But often it feels like it was produced by committee and over the decades has become increasingly bland.
But there’s something else that changed. It created a professional path for people who do nothing but write and teach fiction. They don’t have to actually sell large amounts of fiction to be successful. They just have to get tenure. The writing they produce is successful if it wins awards from other writers, not if it sells a lot of copies. I mentioned that the Modernist period was the first clear bifurcation of High Art (literary) versus Low Art (genre fiction) but the Postmodernist period took that much farther. Hemingway still made his living purely as a writer. But most of the top Postmodernist writers make their living as professors who occasionally sell a few thousand copies of a book.
This brings us to today and to finally answer your question about pseudonyms. The hardliners say that genre fiction has terrible prose written for the half-literate and degrades the mind. But I think this misses that science fiction / fantasy can have allegories that make you think differently about society. Contemporary literary fiction emphasizes that stories must have a social justice message. The environment is very competitive because there are very few tenure track slots for every graduate. Writers attempt to cancel each other over anything they can find in their stories that are perceived as offensive. So people respond by writing stories that take no risks and are incredibly inoffensive. Currently, the standard story that is published over and over again in those magazines I listed above goes something like this: A person sits alone in a room. They think about a childhood tragedy. The tragedy involves a social justice moral message. Then they walk outside and smoke a cigarette.
There is nothing offensive there. No one can accuse you of writing a plot (I should note that plots are actually making a comeback but this has gotten way too long already for that tangent).
Consider this quote from Sherman Alexie, a social-justice oriented writer who is one of the top literary writers alive:
“I've been publishing books for 30 years. I'm close friends with approximately twenty writers. I'm casual friends with a few dozen writers. I'm professionally friendly with dozens of other writers. At least 80% of my close, casual, and professional writer friends are politically left of center and at least 80% of them have privately expressed fear about saying or writing the "wrong" thing. And we're talking about some big name writers whom you might assume are immune from such pressures. Self-censorship among writers is a real and serious problem in this era. To believe otherwise either means you live and work in a very small circle of like-minded friends or that you think this self-censorship is a good thing.” [https://substack.com/profile/1727692-sherman-alexie/note/c-14880242]
The result of all this is that much of literary fiction feels lifeless. Increasingly, the interesting writing is coming from people sidestepping this self censorship.
[sorry if there are a lot of typos, I had to dictate this quickly]
That was a wonderful description, thank you for sharing!
There's just one thing:
> Then they walk outside and smoke a cigarette.
> There is nothing offensive there.
That almost made me laugh out loud! :-) The other year I streamed a sci-fi movie that basically opens with the destruction of an entire planet of sapient beings, but of all the obligatory warnings to go up front, the only one was "depicts smoking".
You know, ironically (or perhaps appropriately), they cancelled Sherman Alexie for 'sexual harassment' in 2018, whatever that means these days? It seems like he...made a few women uncomfortable?
This is why I always say if I decide to write anything I'm cultivating a right-wing audience!
"Currently, the standard story that is published over and over again in those magazines I listed above goes something like this: A person sits alone in a room. They think about a childhood tragedy. The tragedy involves a social justice moral message. Then they walk outside and smoke a cigarette."
The impression that comes to mind when I think of modern American literary fiction, in short story form, is: take a couple of de-racinated people, somewhere in the middle class, probably upper-middle or near to it. Have them travelling though the American landscape, describing the long stretches of road, the barren landscape (desert for choice but you can have acres of giant agricultural landscapes, or passing through decaying towns that once were hotspots of the glorious industrial past but are now shells). The journey doesn't matter much, the destination is uncertain, their purpose in going on the journey is ambiguous or unclear.
Have them stop along the way and stay at motels or cheap hotels. Describe the cheapness, the blandness, the uniformity where any hotel of the chain could be located anywhere but yet look identical to how this room looks.
The couple are, of course, dissatisfied. Maybe they're in their forties, maybe in their twenties. Childless (increasingly, formerly there might be a mention of one adult child who lives far away and is no longer part of their lives). He is unhappy (increasingly, it is she who is unhappy). With his/her life, career (if they have one), marriage (if that is what this relationship is), their partner.
Maybe he is having an affair (told from her point of view). Maybe he suspects she is, or wishes he was having one (told from his point of view). Don't have any such a thing as a definite ending, just that they set out the next morning (or will set out) on the remainder of the pointless, meaningless journey and at the end, they'll break up (maybe). Hint that she may ask for that divorce, but don't make it definite. Hint that he will leave her for that younger woman he may (or may not) be having the affair with.
And lard all this with anvil-heavy discussion about how this is a metaphor for the Modern American Condition. We all live like this now, Jake.
EDIT: Why are they driving instead of hopping on a plane to get where they're going fast? Yes, Jake, but then we couldn't have the Fine Writing descriptions of the barrenness of the featureless landscape, the tedium of the hours spent in the car, the pathetic fallacy where the exterior conditions are reflections of the interior lives, or lack thereof, of the couple in the dust, tedium, repetition, boredom, commodification, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all.
You may be allowed one (1) moment of natural beauty in the story, but watch it, buster: this is not there for you to intimate that maybe life is not always a heap of shit, but rather to show (a) once upon a time she (used to be he, but mostly is she now) had dreams, hopes, a vision of a better, higher life - but that's all gone now (b) to fool the reader with a momentary glimpse of optimism or, you know, beauty before you hit them with that anvil again about the bleak reality of the quotidian small lives the couple (and everyone they know, and society at large) is living in the prosperous yet desolate American milieu of today.
But cool it on the beauty, what do you think you are, writing to give joy in the use of language? Nah, bro, it's about Deepity.
I actually buy most of my stuff secondhand, to avoid giving money to left-wing publishing cartels. I'll even drive out of the city center to give money to the neckbeard with the giant pulp collection over the feminist yuppies. Though I'm kind of on the border between a literary and genre reader; I'll read litfic, but also bad Lovecraft pastiches.
Over in the SF field, Analog and Asimov's, two of the leading short-story magazines in the field, have roughly 15,000 subscribers each. While not all of those are in the US, and some are institutional subscriptions, having a subscription to either one is generally the mark of a very serious SF reader, though exceptions do exist. This leads me to suspect there are at least 10,000 serious SF readers in the US.
SF, and almost every other sort of genre fiction, is generally written with the intent of actually *entertaining* readers in the target audience, and anyone standing vaguely near the target audience just in case. That may not be the sole intent, but it's usually a big part of the intent.
That strikes me as likely to have broader appeal for a style of fiction that disclaims "mere" entertainment, and instead seems intended at marking the author and the readers as being part of the Artistic Elite with the intellectual chops to Actually Appreciate Great Art.
That sort of elitism will coalesce into a fairly small bubble, and 20,000 feels about right to me. Two thousand in a core community that talks to one another about this stuff, and maybe ten times that who read in solitude on the fringes? Anything more than 2,000 would I think mean the core community doesn't feel elite enough, and I suspect it isn't terribly rewarding to read lit-fic if you've got no one to talk to about it.
Science fiction, and mystery and romance and all the rest, are read for fun as light entertainment - and sometimes not so light, but the genre's numbers will be driven by the easy fun stuff.
God forbid anyone should write with intelligence, purpose, and style, only to have the misfortune of becoming popular. I am amazed by the insight so many commentators here have into the motives of others, the elites…
Thank goodness for us common folk who can paint such a bright line between entertainment and all that other stuff.
> SF, and almost every other sort of genre fiction, is generally written with the intent of actually *entertaining* readers in the target audience, and anyone standing vaguely near the target audience just in case.
Moby Dick is adventure fiction ( a genre if you will), only times have changed, and now (apparently) it’s a long-winded parable that sullen high-schoolers are forced to pick through. Melville wrote because he needed to make a living. He definitely wanted to entertain people. He didn’t have many other big commercial successes, but that one struck a chord, and he had a potential audience of tv/movie/internet-free people who had to read if they wanted to be entertained. The rest is luck of the draw.
More importantly, what exactly is meant by being entertained, and how broad a brush can one use to put a line between it and what is “intended at marking the author and the readers as being part of the Artistic Elite with the intellectual chops to Actually Appreciate Great Art.”
Pretentiousness comes in many forms and they’re all ugly.
I think "literary fiction" has become a category really only in the 20th century. Certainly, critics in the 19th century would have turned up their noses at "popular" novels which by our time have become Classic Literature.
But I also think there is a definite cleavage between "novels written for entertainment, even if well-written" and "self-consciously high-brow and apart from whatever is piled up on the bookstore Best Seller table".
Look at the current New York Times best seller list, I don't see anything on the fiction that counts as "literary fiction".
You have to look for that in the little magazines (Granta was the big name in British publishing), the heavyweight reviews by the big name critics in the likes of the Times Literary Supplement (if that's still going) etc. The prizewinners, though some of those can cross over to best-sellerdom (some 90s Booker Prize winners did so, for example Anita Brookner with "Hotel du Lac"). The kind of thing written by artists who go to Yaddo on a bursary to produce the next Great American Novel 😁
I think it's been twenty years or more since I last read literary fiction, because the stylisation of novels and short stories which crystallised into a particular set of themes and tropes just turned me off (I dubbed such things the Hampstead Adultery Novel).
Ursula Le Guin, may the heavens be her bed, had a wonderful tart take on the attitude:
"Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it."*
— Ruth Franklin
(Slate, 8 May 2007)
Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs — somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly... but who? And why wet shoes? It hadn't rained. There, again, the heavy, soggy sound. But it hadn't rained for weeks, it was only sultry, the air close, with a cloying hint of mildew or rot, sweet rot, like very old finiocchiona, or perhaps liverwurst gone green. There, again — the slow, squelching, sucking steps, and the foul smell was stronger. Something was climbing her stairs, coming closer to her door. As she heard the click of heel bones that had broken through rotting flesh, she knew what it was. But it was dead, dead! God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing? Had he paid no attention at all to the endless rituals of the serious writers and their serious critics — the formal expulsion ceremonies, the repeated anathemata, the stakes driven over and over through the heart, the vitriolic sneers, the endless, solemn dances on the grave? Did he not want to preserve the virginity of Yaddo? Had he not even understood the importance of the distinction between sci fi and counterfactual fiction? Could he not see that Cormac McCarthy — although everything in his book (except the wonderfully blatant use of an egregiously obscure vocabulary) was remarkably similar to a great many earlier works of science fiction about men crossing the country after a holocaust — could never under any circumstances be said to be a sci fi writer, because Cormac McCarthy was a serious writer and so by definition incapable of lowering himself to commit genre? Could it be that that Chabon, just because some mad fools gave him a Pulitzer, had forgotten the sacred value of the word mainstream? No, she would not look at the thing that had squelched its way into her bedroom and stood over her, reeking of rocket fuel and kryptonite, creaking like an old mansion on the moors in a wuthering wind, its brain rotting like a pear from within, dripping little grey cells through its ears. But its call on her attention was, somehow, imperative, and as it stretched out its hand to her she saw on one of the half-putrefied fingers a fiery golden ring. She moaned. How could they have buried it in such a shallow grave and then just walked away, abandoning it? "Dig it deeper, dig it deeper!" she had screamed, but they hadn't listened to her, and now where were they, all the other serious writers and critics, when she needed them? Where was her copy of Ulysses? All she had on her bedside table was a Philip Roth novel she had been using to prop up the reading lamp. She pulled the slender volume free and raised it up between her and the ghastly golem — but it was not enough. Not even Roth could save her. The monster laid its squamous hand on her, and the ring branded her like a burning coal. Genre breathed its corpse-breath in her face, and she was lost. She was defiled. She might as well be dead. She would never, ever get invited to write for Granta now.
*NOTE: The rest of Ruth Franklin's review of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union is quite thoughtful, generally positive, and not dismissive of his longing to destroy phony divisions between “genre” and “literature.” I just couldn't resist the all too familiar image of her first sentence."
Did you ever read "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt? I remember when it came out there were some "sidelong glances" at how she was violating the boundaries of literary fiction by adding too much excitement. I think some of her later books got a bit of the same treatment, but it died down, I suppose because standards changed, and because she was just that good.
"I suspect it isn't terribly rewarding to read lit-fic if you've got no one to talk to about it"
I get that a lot of people are in fact snobs, and maybe having read the latest Ferrante or whatever is required to survive certain kinds of cocktail party in America. Fine.
But you're being way too cynical about the sheer pleasure of experiencing language performed at a very high level. Same with arrangements of theme, metaphor, and symbol rather than clever plot logic. Maybe it's because I'm actually bad at writing myself, and so the corresponding sense of awe is greater, but there are some scraps of prose out there that have given me as much aesthetic pleasure as anything else in life. And that's without any kind of background in the arts that might have value-primed me for this.
> But you're being way too cynical about the sheer pleasure of experiencing language performed at a very high level. Same with arrangements of theme, metaphor, and symbol rather than clever plot logic.
Those aren't special to literary fiction. That's just good writing. Good genre fiction will have that 𝗮𝘀 𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹 as having a plot. There's no reason you'd want to go without the plot.
In American Gods, arrangements of theme, metaphor, and symbol are very cleverly worked into the plot!
If you want linguistic virtuosity for its own sake, I think The 13 Clocks is the best example I know, though it's more of a fairy tale than a novel.
I like many genre novels. I agree without reservation that incredible writing does show up in many genre novels. Some physicists are also exceptionally good pure mathematicians. These added blessings are mostly incidental. Genre novelists are bound by genre conventions and their energies are, correctly and decorously, focused on delivering the usual genre payoffs.
The reason you might not want a plot, or to have a very weak plot (a guy wandering around Dublin; an adman trying to make his first feature; two cousins in love) or a very contrived, near-paceless plot, is that plot constrains. It interferes with the formal puzzles and symmetries and requires too many dead sentences whose only duty is to schlep the plot forward, weakening the overall enchantment.
On reflection, this is really a recasting of Anthony Burgess's old "A-type Novel vs B-type Novel" distinction from Re Joyce. And even back in 1965 he seemed to concede that the B-type novel, the kind focused on language, is severely on the wane. So maybe there's something to that 20,000 number after all.
I would agree that Analog and Asimov's subscribers are serious sf readers, but there's so much other sf that the number of subscribers would be a very low floor for the number of sf readers.
New Yorker also covers current events, and I'm willing to bet people have subscriptions to look fashionable in left-leaning upper-middle and upper-class milieus, as well as middle-class people with pretensions and working-class people who just think that stuff's cool.
If you subscribe it’s very inexpensive, has a great listing of things that are going on in town, and at least one cartoon that can make you chuckle. They’re ideal in the bathroom.
The National Booksellers Association tracks book sales (and they've been increasing over the past decade, BTW), but I can't find any data on literary fiction as a category. On the fiction side of things, depending on how you slice and dice your numbers, and depending on which source you use, "contemporary fiction" tracks third or fourth as a genre. I suspect that this editor may be talking about the type of literary fiction that English Lit academics read, though. Titles like _Lincoln in the Bardo_ come to mind. But that made the NYTimes bestseller list — and a rule of thumb is that sales have to be in the range of 5-10k copies a week to have a chance of hitting the list. That suggests there are more than 20k readers of literary fiction.
I feel like this number could vastly increase or decrease depending on how you define "serious and consistent reader" and "literary fiction". But if your use a relatively narrow definition of litfic and define the reader as "someone who is actively looking for newly published litfic books to read", then I guess the number is somewhat plausible.
Is Anne Tyler in the literati? When I went back to university in the 1980s, an English professor compared her with Jane Austen. Yet lately, many folks we assume are literate don't know her work.
What does a woman have to do ? Stab her spouse with a Boy Scout knife (Mailer)? Commit suicide (Hemingway)? The popularitati elevated Alice Munro in public regard on her death, only to tear her down a few weeks later. She couldn't pass the Left's Political Correctness standard.
Both are writers of qualified substance, but I don't think they meet the definition of self-consciously Literary writers. In this 21st-century environment of cosplay posturing, I doubt either wants the mantle. It's a role vain men are more susceptible to. Most people who demand to be taken seriously don't have the goods.
I think the claim wrt Munro was that she was complicit in child abuse. I have no idea if this claim is true or not, but it's not quite the same as failing a political correctness standard.
I agree that it's not quite the same. But why bring up her alleged complicity in "protecting" an alleged abuser immediately after her death? Self-proclaimed 'progressives' never miss an opportunity to tear down a heroine, and if their accusations are mistaken, they don't apologize. Running roughshod over someone's reputation is all in a day's work. Munro should be held to account, certainly, but the timing of the Thought Police is performative and self-serving.
Ken Burns is doing a biography of DaVinci. I'm curious to see how he'll deal with the hero's homosexual pedophilia, and if the Burns team's examination of DaVinci's history will be as vigorous. Maybe we'll find out if Munro is no DaVinci.
The literary world is mostly female now. Roth and Updike are long in the ground.
It's still full of vain people, but instead of professors sleeping with their students, it's yuppie women forcing their husband to accept polyamory. Whether you think this an improvement depends on who you are, I think.
I assume that publisher estimates this by "the number of serious works of literature our imprint sells". If they're only selling 20,000 books a year across all their authors, then that means there are only 20,000 serious readers, it couldn't possibly be that our stuff is boring or another publisher has the market cornered because they're one of the mega-imprints and we're an indie.
Eh, very few people are consistently reading books nowadays, and even fewer are bothering with the dreck that is modern litfic. I think the number is plausible; it's nothing more than an extremely niche hobby. But given how cheap it is to produce books compared to other media, it's probably still sustainable.
Except that sales of non-fiction and fiction in all formats (included print books) have been increasing over the past decade. There was a big bump during the COVID pandemic, but the trend is continuing.
Google the keywords: national booksellers association book sales increasing
Anecdata: other than Half-Priced Books we didn't have a bookstore in our town since Barnes and Noble shut its doors a decade ago. But a non-chain bookstore that sells new books (not used) opened in my neighborhood two years ago, and they seem to be doing rather well (according to the owner).
Increases until 2008. Steep decreases 2009 to 2012. Slow increases 2013 to 2019. Notable increases 2020 and 2021, and decreases in 2022 and 20023.
I'm seeing a post-2008 crash, with a slow recovery starting in 2013, and then a (probably temporary) spike in 2020-21, and probably a corresponding post-COVID return to the underlying trend in 22 and 23.
It should be the sum of book sales AND how many novels are checked out at public libraries. I hardly ever buy novels. I borrow them from the library instead, on the assumption that I will read it once and that will be enough. I'm much more likely to buy nonfiction books (plus a few novels by authors I really like that I know I will want to reread).
If "serious and consistent" means >1 book a year, and "literary fiction" is referring to new books in what is effectively a particular marketing category, that number actually seems plausible to me. I would have estimated <1 million for sure. I know people who read a lot, but I don't think I've ever met someone of that description..
It's a dumb number. I don't know whether it's dumb on purpose to make you click, or whether it's dumb by accident because you don't get to be the editor-in-chief of an independent publishing house by being good with numbers, but it's not worth thinking too deeply about.
The number wants you to engage with it. The number wants you to huff about it and talk about how implausibly small it is and what silly assumptions must have gone in, and how you are personally a serious and consistent reader of literary fiction but you only read out-of-copyright books on Project Gutenberg. Don't let the number have its way.
Acne is increasing everywhere in the world, except apparently my country of New Zealand.
Why? It is suggested that switching from requiring a specialist doctor (dermatologist) to only a nurse-practitioner (a nurse that can generally prescribe medicines) increased the rate of treatment. The medicine in question being isotretinoin.
According to the article, what's increasing is people who visit a doctor or dermatologist about acne. We don't even know if acne itself is increasing in the rest of the world, nor whether it's decreasing in New Zealand, let alone whether the decrease is because of successful treatment. A better way to study the rate of acne would be to survey a random sample of the population and ask about the severity (if any) of their acne.
Here's my COVID update for epidemiological weeks 37-40 of 2024. Note: I skipped my last biweekly update for personal reasons. This will summarize the past month of COVID activity—plus some updates on H5N1 and some other pathogens of concern.
So far in 2024 COVID has dropped to 14th place in the top 15 causes of death—below septicemia and above nutritional deficiencies.
No sign of increased heart attacks due to Long COVID. And no sigh that the cancer rate is increasing due to Long COVID. In fact both causes of death are down approx 5% from pre-pandemic numbers. I suggest a likely explanation.
And H5N1 is killing dairy cows at much higher rate than expected. But this may be due to the recent heat wave in the West combined with the H5N1 infection.
So I want to share with you all this wonderful creature that I recently learned about, so obscure that it doesn't even have an English Wikipedia page. They're called Eumyrmococcus smithii, or ari-no-takara-kaigaramushi in Japanese (literally "ant's treasure scale insect"). They look like this: https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/antroom/imgs/2/7/27efcc1e.jpg (The grub-like appendage isn't its head, that's its abdomen. Its "head", if you can even call it that, is on the opposite side.) These cute little fuzzy pearls are blind and completely incapable of moving around on their own. So how the hell do they survive? Well, they're exclusively found in the nests of a specific species of ant. The ants pick them up and attach them to the healthy roots of plants such as sugarcane and cogongrass, at which point the scale insect starts sucking the sap out of the roots. https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/antroom/imgs/9/f/9fd7414d.jpg Any excess nutrients are released out of the abdomen as honeydew, and the ants subsist entirely on this honeydew for their entire lives. ...Yes, these bugs somehow evolved into living taps for ants. (actually, they're even better than taps, since they also process the sap as well!) Oh yeah, and when a new queen is born and leaves the nest to start a new one, they bring with them a single pregnant scale insect with them so it can breed a new population of them for the new nest. https://www.nhk.jp/static/assets/images/newblogposting/ts/8M52YNKXZ4/8M52YNKXZ4-editor_06fe7c8398402c3e35a1c79b6a21a861.png
Seeing stuff like this really makes you wonder about the potential of bioengineering to revolutionize industry and agriculture. Self-sufficient machines of flesh, far more economical, adaptable, and robust than metal... Unfortunately, even if the technology is available, I'm pretty sure creating complex lifeforms is too difficult for humans to accomplish in a reasonable amount of time. Maybe AI will change that.
The ending remark in your note quite literally disturbed me. In regards to AI and Humans integrating, this is inevitable in my view, considering we are already in the process with mobile phones.
> They're called Eumyrmococcus smithii, or ari-no-takara-kaigaramushi in Japanese (literally "ant's treasure scale insect")
Good-ant-seed, for the non-Japanese version. Though the "seed" should probably be translated as "scale insect" too.
I harbor some suspicions that the "ant" root should be -myrmec- and not just -myrm-. This would produce benefits in etymological soundness and in the humor value of the word "eumyrmecococcus".
I learned while looking this up that the same root also refers to warts, apparently because warts are named after anthills.
Many aphids can reproduce asexually by parthenogenesis, effectively just making themselves pregnant. I don't know if it's the case for this species in particular, but I wouldn't be surprised.
I'm assuming so, yes. New queens seem to be able to tell which Eumyrmococcus are female and pregnant. The other ants can probably recognize the sex and fertility of them as well. (Though, how they do that is still unknown.) The ants also take the time to clean their Eumyrmococcuses. Cute!
It looks to me like the California Apartment Association got tired of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation using its money and influence to lobby against building housing, so now they're sponsoring a ballot measure to force them to not do that. The AIDS Healthcare Foundation is of course opposing this amendment through their front group Housing Is A Human Right. This superficially healthcare related law that is really a proxy war for housing policy is perhaps the most California thing I have ever seen.
Why does the AIDS Healthcare foundation, which is presumably a foundation dedicated to Healthcare for AIDS patients, have a policy stance on housing at all? (I realize the answer may simply be "because California")
They might just need something to do. To what extent is there an AIDS-healthcare-related problem that they could help with if they redirected their efforts?
"In recent years, AHF has spent more than $150 million on ballot initiatives – including rent control measures in 2018 and 2020. The nonprofit’s annual budget is about $2.5 billion. The vast majority of the nonprofit’s revenue comes from its network of 62 pharmacies – largely a result of that 340B drug discount program."
Actually, speaking of nonprofits making their tax info public, I just grabbed their most recent public 990, part of which included the following language on housing. So, at least in their words, this is why they're doing it:
SUSTAINABLE AFFORDABLE HOUSING FOR THE HOMELESS AND LOWINCOME POPULATIONS. IN RESPONSE TO WIDESPREAD GENTRIFICATION AND RISING HOUSINGCOSTS, WHICH DISPLACES AHF PATIENTS THROUGHOUT CALIFORNIA, FLORIDA, AND ELSEWHERE, THE FOUNDATION HAS LAUNCHED THE HEALTHY HOUSING FOUNDATION (HHF) TO FULFILL ITS PUBLIC HEALTH MISSION. HHF PROVIDES DECENT HOUSING UNITS AT AN AFFORDABLE COST TO LOWINCOME PEOPLE, INCLUDING FAMILIES WITH CHILDREN AND THOSE PREVIOUSLY UNSHELTERED OR HOMELESS. AHF BELIEVES THAT A STABLE AND AFFORDABLE HOUSING SITUATION IS CRITICAL FOR INDIVIDUALS WITH CHRONIC HEALTH CONDITIONS, INCLUDING HIV/AIDS.THE FOUNDATION ALSO CREATES AND IMPLEMENTS NEW PROGRAMS IN COMMUNITIES ACROSS THE U.S. AND ABROAD, AND EXPANDS DELIVERY OF HEALTHCARE AND INFLUENCE OVER POLICY WITH THE AIM OF SAVING MORE LIVES.
Well, housing is pretty expensive in California. And the AIDs medical expenses can add up (especially in the end stages of life). This may be stereotyping a bit, but gay men tend to live in urban areas (SF and LA), where renting is a big deal. The AHF got an initiative on the 2024 ballot to allow communities to bring back rent control. And now the California Apartment Association is taking their revenge for the temerity of the AHF to try to gore their real estate cash cow.s...
> The AHF got an initiative on the 2024 ballot to allow communities to bring back rent control.
Not just 2024. They got rent control on the ballot in 2018 and 2020 too. The 2024 version is especially extreme and destructive though, to the point where it could potentially result in de-facto bans on renting entirely.
Extreme and destructive are loaded adjectives. Do you have links to some neutral economic analyses to support such dramatic language? Rent control was around for decades and decades in New York City and SF (and probably many other cities) without "destructive" effects (other than to the pockets of landlords). But we then had the dissolution of rent controls and horror stories about elderly and vulnerable tenants being displaced by drastic rent hikes.
I don't think we're going to agree on anything, since there's basically universal consensus in economics that NYC-style rent control is a disaster. This isn't something that the kind of people who read ACX would normally even dispute.
But for the sake of anyone else following along, the 2024 version is *even worse* than usual rent control precisely because the ballot measure does not contain any numbers. All it says is that the government cannot place *any restrictions at all* on local rent control measures.
This means that NIMBYist communities could say, cap rents at $1 in order to de-facto ban renting, and there's absolutely nothing anyone could do to stop them. Does anyone really think that the kind of city that declared itself a mountain lion sanctuary in an attempt to get out of their housing obligations would not pull stuff like this?
It's been my experience that whenever someone falls back on the consensus argument, they really haven't dug into the question. Dropping the consensus bomb in the middle of an argument is a sure sign that they'd prefer not to be challenged on the facts of their case. So, I suspect the consensus whereof you speak is a lot less consensed than you claimed. Never having investigated this subject myself, I decided to see what The Chat sez...
Me:
Is there a universal consensus that rent controls have negative consequences?
ChatGPT:
There is no universal consensus that rent controls always have negative consequences, but many economists and housing experts express significant concerns about their long-term effects. The debate around rent control policies involves complex trade-offs, with arguments both for and against them.
Arguments Against Rent Control:
Reduced Supply of Rental Housing: Critics argue that rent controls can discourage new housing construction and lead to a reduction in available rental units over time. Developers may find it less profitable to build new rental properties if they cannot charge market rates.
Maintenance and Quality Decline: Landlords may reduce spending on maintenance and property improvements because the cap on rent limits their ability to recoup these investments.
Inefficient Allocation: Rent-controlled units may be occupied by tenants who don’t need the reduced rent, preventing others in greater need from accessing affordable housing. Tenants may also stay in rent-controlled apartments for longer than they otherwise would, reducing housing mobility.
Black Markets: Rent control can sometimes lead to informal markets, where landlords demand under-the-table payments or tenants sublet apartments at higher, unregulated rates.
Distortion of Market Signals: By keeping rents artificially low, rent control may lead to an inefficient distribution of resources, as prices do not reflect actual supply and demand conditions in the housing market.
Arguments in Favor of Rent Control:
Protection from Rent Hikes: Supporters of rent control argue that it helps prevent displacement by protecting tenants from sudden rent increases, especially in cities with rapidly rising housing costs.
Stabilization of Communities: Rent control can help maintain community stability by allowing long-term residents to remain in their homes, preventing gentrification and the displacement of low-income and vulnerable populations.
Immediate Relief: In housing crises where rents are skyrocketing, rent control can offer immediate protection and relief to renters who might otherwise be forced out of their homes.
Social Equity: Proponents suggest that rent control can act as a tool for promoting social equity, ensuring that lower-income households have access to affordable housing in desirable urban areas.
Empirical Evidence and Mixed Results:
Empirical studies on rent control have produced mixed results. For example, studies from places like San Francisco and New York City, which have long-standing rent control policies, suggest some negative side effects, such as reduced housing supply. However, advocates argue that without rent control, these cities would face even worse affordability crises.
Recent Studies: A 2019 study on rent control in San Francisco found that it helped incumbent tenants but reduced the overall housing supply and increased rents in the uncontrolled sector, creating unintended consequences. However, another study might find that rent control provides necessary relief during housing shortages, helping to maintain socio-economic diversity in expensive urban areas.
In sum, while many economists tend to view rent controls skeptically due to concerns about long-term effects on housing supply and market efficiency, there is no universal agreement. The outcome of rent control policies depends on how they are designed and the context in which they are implemented.
What are people's best arguments against free immigration? I read Caplan's _Open Borders_ a while ago and generally agree with it, but it is obviously a piece intended to persuade and I don't have the expertise necessary to identify subtle flaws.
For the sake of avoiding a motte-and-bailey, I'll say that I believe both that immigration levels should be kept the same or increased and that (per Caplan's arguments) removing most if not all restrictions would be good long-term. However, my confidence in both of these positions is pretty low.
I think the Swedish experience provides the best argument. Sweden has not had free immigration but has had an unusually liberal immigration regime. The result has been an explosion in gang rapes, in organized crime, in gun homicides and so on. The situation has gotten so bad that Denmark (which has had open borders with Sweden since the 1950s) has imposed border controls to limit the spillover effects.
Pretty much the only reason that nations like e.g. the United States are appealing enough that large numbers of people want to immigrate to them, is that they are high-trust societies. Everything else is downstream of that, and not from the Magic Prosperity Rays that emanate from the American soil or whatever.
Unassimilated immigrants, degrade public trust. In part because so many of them come from low-trust societies, as that's where the gains from migration are greatest. But even immigrants from high-trust foreign nations will have different norms and customs for maintaining that trust, which do not translate nearly as well as mere words.
Immigrants who assimilate into the broader culture will generally add to the vitality and prosperity of a nation, even if they do still celebrate quaint ethnic holidays and eat exotic ethnic food. Strike that - *especially* if they eat exotic ethnic food, so long as some of them open restaurants the rest of us can eat at/
Wholly unassimilated immigrants, will degrade social trust in a way that makes pretty much everything worse. A modest population of not-yet-assimilated immigrants is a reasonable and necessary price to pay for the long-term benefits of immigration, but don't push it. Don't encourage, and probably don't allow, immigration at a rate faster than your society can reliably do assimilation. And if you are anywhere close to the limit, prioritize immigration from high-trust societies and of people who are most likely to assimilate,
If you feel bad about all the tired, poor, huddled masses in excess of your society's ability to assimilate, and you want to make sacrifices to help them, then pass the hat and set up a fund to help them build their own countries into something better.
I had a look through the other responses. Here's one that didn't come up.
Today, there's a lot of diversity between different countries. Everyone has a different political system in some way, a different blend of people, a different culture, differing supply chains, more internal than external trade, and so on. This is inefficient, but it increases the resilience of the system to shocks.
I haven't read Open Borders, but I bet Caplan's main arguments are for efficiency and morality. Efficiency is great! However, it comes at the cost of fault tolerance, and I would argue that abandoning fault tolerance is immoral. Check out this excellent wikipedia page for who produces what agricultural commodities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_producing_countries_of_agricultural_commodities. If social or political problems take down lentil production in Canada, then India and Australia might have a surplus, or Brazillian and USAian soybeans might be substituted. I bet that if every country reaches an equilibrium, they'll all have basically the same demographics, in which case social problems will spread in a similar way.
My idealism died during corona, I now believe you should dismantle systems in a order that prevents issues; its a problem that theres bans on herion, age limits of beer and the idea you need prove to some useless buecrate that you know to drive to drive on roads that shouldn't be "public". But I should probaly let drunk driving laws stand until after other evils are fixed.
The poor have many evils to navigate; income taxes, college debt not being written off in bankrupcy, zoning laws preventing housing. Yes, nation state boarders are stupid evils. But I dont understand how you can throw even more people into this mess and not have the poor suffer.
Excess immigration leads to populist politics with incompetent leaders who do great harm and increase corruption. At least, that's my experience in my lifetime. It kind of went the other way in the Gilded Age, with the corruption coming first, but you'll notice the Progressive Era also ended in immigration restriction shortly afterward. As Level 50 Lapras says, this has happened before, and immigration waves lead to backlashes and bans on immigration. I can't say that bothers me; seems kind of like homeostasis. Immigration rises, the natives get restless and decrease it, the remaining immigrants assimilate, we have a unitary country again in a few decades, with all the last wave of immigrants' kids complaining about the newcomers. :)
But, less rationally, I've never seen someone try to raise a mob to overthrow an election he lost in this country before in my lifetime, and I don't recall reading about it in the history books either. We're in a bad place, let's go back.
That comment was about me appreciating a somewhat absurd chain of "logic" that ends in the exact opposite place that conventional wisdom would expect. I happen to enjoy that stuff.
But to the object level, yes, I agree? We appear to be living through another period of backlash, and I don't like it.
It seems like a fairly normal political logic to me. The core reasoning is "this policy is too unpopular to work, so we should give up on it before it takes us down with it".
I agree that that isn't the approach actually being taken, and it's not necessarily correct, but I don't see anything unusual about the reasoning.
This seems off base. Non-refugee Immigrants are going to be majority working age adults with a smattering of families that come in with their own resources or as a package with a bread winner.
Historically and currently, they are extremely low on the useless eater population (old people).
> Non-refugee Immigrants are going to be majority working age adults with a smattering of families that come in with their own resources or as a package with a bread winner.
Currently, that is the case. But you have to consider what would happen under a hypothetical "open borders" system instead.
Given how porus the border is, I think it won't change at all. The major difficulty for people who have productive potential but no money isn't getting into the states, it's getting to the states in the first place.
Then again, we won't know until we actually do it so ???
I was referring to the official refugee program, which is extremely selective.
If you're talking about illegal immigrants, there are filters there too, but the filters are different, mostly related to the risk and difficulty of sneaking into the country (including, as you alluded to, even reaching the border in the first place - walking through the Darien Gap isn't for the faint of heart).
I know allota dudes that got into a place somehow, and most of them are of the opinion that it gets easier the longer you are from where you are running from regardless of where you are running to, because if you are bothering to run the situation is not good to begin with.
What is here the difference between refugee and non refugee migrants? If you had open borders they would all be classified as migrants, and the majority would probably be young people from poor countries, exactly the people who right now are counted as refugees and have been shown to be a net fiscal loss in welfare states.
That said, I am myself troubled whether having a welfare state or open borders it would not be the most humane choice to choose open borders.
Because refugees don't want to be there, so there is less self selection, and I don;t want to make any WAGs cause I've never seen any data on refugees post ww2 that I think would generalize well.
EG, Vietnamese refugees post war were mondo hyper productive, but of course they were, only the creme de la creme got a spot on the helicopter, type of thing.
> only the creme de la creme got a spot on the helicopter, type of thing
In the case of the US, that's true of most refugees though. We only take in tiny numbers of official refugees (compared to the total number of refugees).
That's non obvious. Why are we assuming the new immigrants are going to take more out of the welfare state than their productivity puts in? Maybe you can make that case, but you're pulling out studies of expected productivity levels for immigrants, what they're putting into the real, productive economy, and what welfare state benefits they're expected to claim, all of which can of course be contested. It's not a simple proof.
>Why are we assuming the new immigrants are going to take more out of the welfare state than their productivity puts in?
Most countries in Europe have lots of data showing that non-EU immigrants take out (vastly) more than they put in. This Dutch study comes to mind (https://unherd.com/newsroom/dutch-study-immigration-costs-state-e17-billion-per-year/); non-Western immigrants cost The Netherlands on average $17 billion dollars per year, while Western immigrants net-benefit $1 billion.
I agree that immigrants are a net positive *now*. But that's because it's very hard to immigrate. If you open the floodgates, then people will in fact come here just for the welfare.
Well, I think if you take a nice European country (~5 million population, relatively high wages and reasonable welfare policy) and tell everyone in the world they can come there, I think that there will be millions of immigrants. Once there are more migrants than natives, I can imagine three outcomes
1) This country's culture and institutions become more similar to the countries of origin of the migrants (Afghanistan, Nigeria, etc)
2) Separation into mostly migrant underclass and mostly native elite with the latter living in gated communities and governing by undemocratic means (this can have different flavours: feudalism, millet system, apartheid)
3) Civil war or a lower-intensity conflict
What I don't find likely is 4) all the migrants adopting the culture and institutions of the destination country which made it attractive in the first place. If it were possible then adopting right laws would've immediately fixed a country like Iraq and there would've been no insurgency.
I absolutely believe in assimilation over time but it necessarily requires the natives (including the previous waves of migrants) to be a dominant majority and prevent concentrations of migrants preventing their assimilation.
That's why I think that it should be regulated, with some countries needing less of it. Btw I've myself migrated to a new country, so this is partially based on my own experiences.
I don't know if this happens in reality, but if a dominant factor in institution development is resources? E.g. nice European country has lots of land, and has access to lots of oil/wind power/whatever resources, and those are what enabled its niceness?
Then it's possible immigrants can assimilate and/or not damage the good institutions, because it was the lack of those same resources that made it impossible to fix a country like Iraq, even with good laws.
> Then it's possible immigrants can assimilate and/or not damage the good institutions, because it was the lack of those same resources that made it impossible to fix a country like Iraq, even with good laws.
South Africa tends to undermine this idea.
Actually, all of sub-Saharan Africa severely undermines your main idea, because that appears to be just that natural resources are what determine a country's potential, and Africa is rich in those. It was conventional wisdom in the mid-20th century that Africa would shortly grow rich while South Korea stayed impoverished forever.
But South Africa started out with good infrastructure and institutions, and systematically trashed them.
Is that a widespread belief? I think some corners of the left argue that but I think if polled "Do you think it's good to assimilate into the US" you'd get 60+% agreeing.
Or do you mean politicians are anti-assimilation? I haven't really heard much of that either
It might not just be what's in the ground, but also the ability to transport it. Africa is weak on convenient rivers and has a rather flat coastline and a lack of good bays.
I recall reading somewhere that Africa's great rivers are largely shallow and interrupted by rapids, making them poorly navigable, with the exception of the lower Nile
There are quite a few countries that have lots of land and lots of resources, and yet are, by and large, oppressive authoritarian hellholes - Saudi Arabia comes to mind. The only European country I can think of that qualifies as "lots of land and lots of resources" would be Norway, and the main reason that they are not like Saudi Arabia is that they have a fairly homogeneous, high-trust society - much like Sweden did before they imported Muslim immigrants en masse. (Emphasis on DID.)
There's a lot that's unknown about how good institutions develop, but we do have some case studies like East/West Germany and North/South Korea that rule out the most flippant "it's just resources" hypotheses.
Agree that it's definitely not ever JUST resources. But I think your short list of outcomes doesn't take into account the possibility that a large number of pople transplanted into a different environment could actually perform differently.
As an example - I believe 2 million Irish immigrants came to the US in a 10 year period around 1840, when the total US population was 17M. Ireland was going through a famine, in part due to agricultural practices. But the US survived that without turning into Ireland.
Ok re-reading this thread I see that my response #1 to you is off-topic. The person I was responding to was talking about a scenario of massive migration due to open borders, not the current state of US immigration. I agree we don't have a historic example of what happens if the number of first-gen immigrants literally exceeds the number of 2nd+ generation population ("natives"). In those circumstances it's possible institutions would be disrupted.
1. Migrants don't outnumber the us today, far from it. They're only 13% of the us population.
2. The 2 million number is JUST from Ireland. Total immigration during that period was likely higher.
3. In any case, my point was about assimilation vs "making their new country like their old country". I think the Irish immigration example where large influxes did not make the US like Ireland; the fact that was a nativist backlash doesn't change that.
But absolutely the huge influx of Irish had a big negative reaction! (there's a reason there were common ethnic slurs against Irish people) But I think that reaction was incorrect then (in fact that wiki link says that the riots were based on misinformation about Bibles) and I think it's incorrect now.
Yeah, the problem is when too many people come at the same time, especially if they create ghettos that perpetuate parts of the culture they were originally running away from.
Maybe we could prevent the ghettos by having some kind of rule that there can be at most one immigrant family per street (or other unit of space that makes most sense locally). Something like, if you come to a new country, for the next 10 years you are in a database, and when you want to move somewhere, you ask the database keepers whether that street is available for you or not. Importantly, no one is telling you were you should live, no one is sending you away from the place you currently live at, they are just giving you a list of streets you cannot move to. After 10 years you are removed from the database and you can go wherever you want to (if you didn't assimilate until then, you are probably hopeless).
Singapore also comes to mind with their ethnic quotas in public housing.
The history of this program in Denmark and the rarity of such programs (at least I haven't heard about anything like it in the West) hints at the issues with it. These countries have laws and values that make it hard to establish and enforce rules like the one you described. Imagine someone coming to a new country and staying with their relatives. Now there are two families on the street, and enforcing the ban would most likely be pretty bad optics. Again, it's not *bad* that there are human rights defenders and human rights laws, this is what makes this country a nice and attractive place to live.
So I'm not saying it can't be done, but you need to take into account dynamic effects: the laws can be changed or not enforced if there is a constituency that benefits from it.
This was also a major policy of the Roman Empire, and it mattered. When the system broke down and tribes were allowed to stay together after admission, they organized and went marauding.
Yeah, I think there were some similarities but also major differences.
Like most of modern migrants, the German tribes coming to the Roman Empire didn't want to destroy it, they fled from various calamities, their leaders aspired to become and often became members of the Roman elite.
Still, I think that the notion that the movement of these tribes *caused* the disintegration of the Western Empire is not held by many historians nowadays. As long as the state capacity remained strong, as in the Eastern Empire, the incomers could cause troubles but were eventually made part of the system one way or another.
This was true of the Roman army, but not civilians.
If you joined the Roman army, it was absolutely mandatory to assimilate into the army's culture. Hiring barbarian armies without making them join the Roman army caused huge problems.
But for the general population, assimilation happened organically rather than being a policy. It certainly didn't involve splitting up tribes; rural populations were (and still are) largely descended from whoever was there before the Romans.
It's great if you want a permanent serf class. Free or unlimited immigration means anyone and everyone can come. American agriculture seems to rely heavily on migrant labour to be cheap during the harvesting season, then you can kick them back over the border until it's time for them to come back during the next harvest. (I don't know if anyone else shares the experience during the late 70s and early 80s of every damn act with a guitar in local talent shows singing "Deportees" until I was heartily sick of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportee_(Plane_Wreck_at_Los_Gatos)
(Ireland seemingly has a lot of Brazilians involved in the meat-processing industry, don't ask me how that started, so we can't look down our noses at anyone. But at the same time, we too were migrant labourers who were good for work during the season, then expected to go back home when not wanted).
Labour costs are thus (artificially) low, the migrants will live in slum conditions, and it's a great time to be a slumlord. Now if Caplan is happy to be a slumlord, then fine for him, but it's really enshrining "the major benefit from this is for The Sacred and Divine and Ineffable Economy, so having two-tier or more sets of 'this is a person with full rights, this is someone lower down the socio-economic rung, and these are the immigrant workers who don't even deserve hot water in the overcrowded hovels they inhabit*', and I'm fine with that because GDP! GDP! GDP!" as social structure.
(Maybe Caplan isn't saying this, I haven't read his book. Maybe he thinks everyone who comes to America will end up solidly middle-class in a profitable blue-collar trade and then their assimilated kids will be white-collar professionals who went to college).
*We had this sort of argument way back on here, and I got in trouble arguing with the guy saying 'if migrants are happy to work for buttons and live in a room with five other guys and no running water, why should we stop them?'
I think Caplan forgets how bad conditions used to be. There used to be tenements where you didn't have an entire family living in one room, you had several families living in a room, everyone taking one corner. If AI and the wonderful future of automation is coming, then the surplus low-skill/semi-skilled labour has nothing to do. I think manual work like construction and harvesting crops will remain, but even there automation is raising its head.
What happens then to all the workers that have no work? Let them remain in the country? Not feasible unless things *really* change so that money for all! is the magic fairy godmother AI waving its wand to create something out of nothing. Send them home after you've extracted the benefit of their labour, like the Gulf States?
What is Caplan's model of "let as many low-skilled manual workers come into the country as can physically get themselves here" and how that works out in reality? Low wages and slumlords, or "the magic of America makes everyone prosperous"? Because I'm going to ask the obvious question: how many Felipes from South America that work picked up on the corner for day labour in manual work does he know, and associate with, as distinct from "the kind of migrants I know are all my research students"?
I definitely recognize the pattern, I used to work cleaning at a Danish hotel, everyone except me where either eastern european or African refugees.
But to give Caplan his due, all of my coworkers preferred being there instead of working in their home countries. The Easterners could save up considerable money (for their countries) by working one summer season. On couple was saving for the deposit of a house. They would have been worse of if they hadn't been able to migrate.
I know you don’t live in the US and I don’t know how they do things over there, but the USA already has a quasi-caste system with big parts of the economy dependent on foreign workers who are here illegally and theoretically could be deported, but also have lived here for decades and have kids, houses, opinions, etc.
You seem to be using the experiences of temporary seasonal workers as proof that permanent immigrants will have the same problems, but those seem like pretty different categories.
Are there a lot of native-born poor people in the US who are stuck living six to a room without running water? Whatever economic force is protecting them from such a fate, why wouldn't it protect immigrants as well? Are you just expecting that there will be so many immigrants that incomes for native and immigrant alike will plummet?
It doesn't do anything to solve the problems in the source country and is probably making them worse by draining talent. At the same time it decreases the general trust level in the recipient country, a key metric in ensuring an efficient economy and pleasant society. The adjustment period for new migrants can be very long, potentially even two generations.
Solving the problems in the source country first is a better strategy.
Argument-wise, what's the difference between letting people freely move into a country's borders and letting them freely move into an individual's house?
My house is ~3000 square feet. The united states is 3.8 million square miles (ignoring multi-level buildings), equivalent to 105 million million square feet. I think something like 5% of US land is actually used for human living, so let's say 5 million million square feet.
On a per-space basis, letting one additional person live in my house is the equivalent of 1.7 billion people into the country. I think most people agree we shouldn't do either of those things.
This is the second response about it being a question of scale. Why do you think it's a question of scale? If a random person spends 5 uninvited seconds in your house per week, are you okay with it, because of the low impact?
I... guess? Because I'm often not at home and so the random 5 seconds per week is likely to be completely unnoticed and not affect my life? Which is pretty much how 1 million additional immigrants would feel in the US. I probably wouldn't notice.
Seriously, I'm struggling to see the analogy.
Is your point that you have a *sense* of ownership/attachment to the whole country similar to how I have a *sense* of ownership/attachment of my house? If so I think that's quite unusual - I'd imagine most people aren't as horrified about a murder happening in a small town 1000 miles away as you do in your town, let alone your house. Tribal attachment naturally weakens with scale and distance.
*my* point is that it's pointless to argue about a position no one understands. So far the difference between countries and homes are feelings, of ownership and scale. Are there principles to be drawn around them, or are we just chasing people's gut instincts? If most people are less horrified by murders far away, is it then alright to take actions that increase murders far away? I imagine most people say no. So what lines are we actually drawing?
I'm responding to your question: "what's the difference between letting people freely move into a country's borders and letting them freely move into an individual's house?"
The difference is two fold:
- Pragmatically, people in your home have much more impact on your life
- Emotionally, I think (and you seem to agree) that people care a lot more about their house boundary lines than their country's.
So I don't think the house analogy is a useful lens through which to talk about immigration. That's the extent of what I'm trying to say.
If you want to now have a conversation about principles, feel free - what principles would you start from, on the actual question of country-level immigration?
It's interesting that sorting territories by how strongly people feel about them -- house, country, city -- is *not* the same as sorting them by size.
Most people don't care about someone moving from one city to another. It's perfectly legal, unless you are in Soviet Russia. House, I get it, the small scale is too personal. Also, you probably paid for it, so you own it.
The fact that people care more about letting strangers enter their state than about letting strangers enter their city, is in my opinion a result of successful propaganda. The kind that can convince you that people who live 1000 miles away from you in one direction are "just like you", but people who live 10 miles away from you in the opposite direction are dangerous strangers.
Well, I suppose it makes intuitive sense if you live somewhere near the geographical middle of your state. But if you live near the border, especially if you occasionally walk to the other side, the lie becomes transparent.
> But if you live near the border, especially if you occasionally walk to the other side, the lie becomes transparent.
I dunno, I've been on several sides of West Virginia, and the prejudice is palpable. Maybe it's *because* of the lack of other differences, which requires exaggeration of the labels. But sadly enough, this kind of prejudice really does seem like human nature. :-(
i'd say that freely moving into another person's country is much worse than freely moving into someone's house, personally. My nationality is much more important to me than the building in which I happen to live, and rebuilding a nation-state is much more difficult than finding a new house.
What's the difference between the government building an army base and quartering soldiers in your house?
While it's obvious that allowing random people to enter your house is infringing on your property rights, it's not clear why the same would hold for access to the country as a whole. "The country" is not the property of an individual, nor is "citizenship," those are purely defined by the state.
Doesn't Yug have a point? You can't compare one person into the country vs one person into your house. The foreign born rate in the US is ~14%, and in places like Sweden ~20% or one in five.
In my family, one person in my house is equivalent to the foreign-born population in Sweden.
I don't think that any reasonable person could read YesNoMaybe's comment and think that they only wanted one person to be allowed into the country. Yug Gnirob is pretty clearly acting in bad faith here.
As for the question you brought up about population proportions, *that's not a point that Yug ever brought up*. It's possible that *you* have a point, but either way, Yug didn't.
Public education in California is already a wasteful black hole of funding and injecting more children from illegal immigrants exacerbates the problem.
I guess the standard concern is that, if we got a bunch of low-skilled immigrants, they would mostly fail to get jobs, and go on welfare, and many of them would end up as criminals.
When you post "what are your best arguments against (low-skilled) immigration?" it sort of feels like you think it's my job to prove that low-skilled immigration is bad. I guess from my perspective I think it's Caplan's job to prove that it's good -- and I'd be more interested in case studies than in thought experiments. You can prove anything with thought experiments.
I was just reading https://mattlakeman.org/2024/03/30/notes-on-el-salvador/ (linked from the Milei article). I haven't read all of it, but there's a chapter in there about how a bunch of Salvadoran immigrants settled in Los Angeles and a startling number of their children wound up in brutal street gangs. This seems like a point of evidence that low-skilled immigration can sometimes have bad consequences.
>startling number of their children wound up in brutal street gangs.
What is a "startling number"? Because the pct of children who actually ended up being in "brutal street gangs" has to be very low; if it weren't, given the hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans who live in the LA metro area, the crime rate in Los Angeles would be vastly higher than it is.
Only if you take law enforcement estimates of gang membership seriously. For example, the LAPD claims that there were 38k gang members in the City of Los Angeles in 2005. https://www.laalmanac.com/crime/cr03v.php#google_vignette. If that is true, and if they are all "brutal," then why weren't there more murders? Either the numbers are inflated, or most "gang members" are hangers-on, at most. And it is definitely in part the latter (source: testimony I have read from LAPD and LASD gang experts in cases where I have helped defend gang members, including MS-13 members). And, plenty of gang members are also productive citizens most of the time -- it isn't a full-time job, for the vast majority. Most gang crime is committed by a tiny pct of members.
PS: As the article you link notes, Salvadoran gangs started as defense against predation by existing gangs. There is far less danger of that repeating itself now, when crime is much lower.
Caplan cites stats that show immigrants commit fewer crimes, but other people here have already pointed out a selection effect (the system filters out the criminal ones).
Middle eastern migrants commit crimes at about 3 times the levels of natives, controlled for age and gender. This seems to be what you would expect if you looked at the crime rates in their former countries.
BUT this higher rate is still lower than the american rate, so you might actually be able to lower US crime rates by importing more refugees. And this fact should also make us wary of putting too much weight on crime rates, an ordinary person in the US probably lives almost the same life as an European person, so if the main drawback of migration wad this change in crime it might be a deal worth taking.
I don't know specifically which stats Caplan refers to, but many papers on immigration and crime look at crime rates *controlled for education and/or income*. The new wave of stats does it implicitly, for example by looking at crime rates in locales (e.g. counties) that have a sudden increase in immigration.
The problems with that are:
1- The decrease in crime *rates* is due to the very high rates of the native (often black) population that is displaced. This is also the case when you control for education or income. Immigrants often don't even have a high-school degree and they are, almost by definition, poor. The corresponding native population is typically African-American and very prone to crime. Latinos maybe commit crime at 2 to 3x the rate of white non-immigrants while blacks do at maybe 5-8x, so there is "dilution".
2- The second and third generations may be (and in fact are) more prone to crime.
3- The rates may go down, but number of crimes still goes up.
These may or may not be a problem for you or Caplan. But the discussion about crime and immigration feels a bit disingenuous to me. *Of course* more immigration increase crime. Crime correlates with poverty and immigrants are typically poor. Sure, crime gets diluted or pushed to another neighborhood when they take over a locale, but that's not at all what is implied by Caplan and others.
I'm extremely skeptical of the kind of stats Caplan cites. Is it that immigrants themselves actually commit fewer crimes, or is it that victims *report* fewer crimes (either because they're likely to themselves be immigrants, and/or they're natives who who believe reporting the *crime* is futile, eg, hit-and-run car accidents in border states), and/or because the perpetrators of certain crimes are rarely identified, and/or the police subtly discourage or are overwhelmed by certain kinds of crime and don't factor in the states at all and/or crime stats are cherry-picked to deliberately leave out high-crime regions?
Insurance company stats are probably going to be accurate when it comes to property-related crimes, I'm guessing.
The best argument I've come across is this - rich countries are rich because of a set of very unique and fragile institutions/rules - they limit the power of govt, they protect property rights and encourage trade and competition, both internal and external. This is not a particularly stable equilibrium, it depends on a set of shared values that are very rare in both temporal and spatial distributions - rich countries are few in history, and few in the world today. Being reckless about inviting in people who do not have the shared cultural basis for this wealth is dangerous.
The people who are already there don't like it. If you can convince them, as Caplan attempts to do, fine. But there is a strong tendency in a lot of current governments to ignore the wishes of the public, and for defenders to act like it is a moral imperative to ignore the wishes of the public.
This could go very badly, and if they do, I'm going to blame the people who are creating the problem today.
Well, I'm a member of the public, not a government. We're agreed, I think, that governments generally shouldn't do wildly unpopular things. But that argument only works for governments, not people. "The citizenry doesn't want it" is a good argument for the government not doing something, but I am trying to decide if *I* want it.
I lean towards simplifying the immigration process to make it easier to immigrate legally, and deporting everybody in the country illegally (they can try again, although any crimes committed while here would make the process harder / less likely to succeed). If given dictatorial power, I'd also impose a five year moratorium on -all- immigration, after the deportations, to give people time to calm down and get angry about something else.
Mostly this comes down to a hypothesis I have that the last five decades of economic growth have been slower than it could be because globalization has meant that the lowest-hanging economic fruit is in developing lagging economies - it is much harder for rich countries to get richer while poor countries exist. And one of the ways of subverting this, if you're strictly interested in improving your own country, is importing a bunch of poor people. I'd also pair it with economic development zones - areas with greatly reduced regulatory burdens, in particular labor laws / minimum wages.
Can I ask what you envisage first-world countries as looking like in an open-borders world?
Do you imagine it being "a bit like now, but browner and denser"? Or do you envisage it as "three billion desperately poor wretches living in massive shanty towns surrounding the ruins of what were once wealthy cities"? Do you imagine that, say, Nuremberg (to pick a random picturesque mid-sized city) would look more like Nuremberg or like Lagos?
If you envisage the first then I think we have a disagreement about likely outcomes. If you envisage the latter but think it's worthwhile due to fairness then we have a disagreement about morality.
Where are these three billion people coming from? The entire population of Nigeria is 218 million. The population of all of the Middle East is about 380 million, all of South America is 442 million, the population of all of Africa is about 1.37 billion.
Are you envisioning that, in an open borders world, third-world countries will be literally emptied down to the last man, woman and child? Or do you think things might reach an equilibrium somewhere below 3 billion migrants?
There's another 2.8 billion in India and China, another 700 million in South East Asia. Not all of them want to leave, but a lot will.
You're right, there might be an equilibrium somewhere, after all the nice parts of the world are just as ruined as the worst parts of the world. Note that the Third World is still pretty crap even after you remove 90% of the population, so the equilibrium will be a lot closer to the current level of Nigeria than the current level of Switzerland.
Speculatively, many of the former residents of the civilised world might find a way to go off and found their own city-states, escaping the ruins of their old countries.
A bit of both? I'm talking about a vastly overpopulated urban area where the majority of people are desperately poor and living in vast shanty towns of makeshift dwellings on the outskirts. There's other cities like that in the world, but Lagos springs to mind.
For someone looking to join their first religion, what would be the most objective way for them to choose? Based on what criteria?
A case could be made for choosing the one with the most severe punishments for nonbelievers or, similarly, the one that promises the greatest rewards for the faithful, but most religions are pretty strong on both counts.
Eventually, it seems inevitable that the free agent will want to narrow their choices to the ones that are most likely true. If our pilgrim instead picked one on vibes or convenience, and it turned out to be one of the countless false ones, that’d be a catastrophic outcome. Better to pick one that might feel wrong or uncomfortable, but is backed by genuine divine authority. Divinity is after all the meat of the sandwich. But what are its indicators? Internal consistency? Historical consistency? Predictive power? Compatibility with Occam’s Razor?
Edit: The free agent is not me. I’m old and already been through more religious adventures than most. Sorry for any confusion.
Have them read up on the perennial philosophy (ex. thru Aldous Huxley) and aim for the spiritual intuition that is the real core of most religions. No need to believe anyone's narratives literally, they're not meant for that - that saves them from the pain and the arbitrariness of having to choose one. If the core intuition fits, then you can feel right at home wherever it is being celebrated, no matter the form or ritual.
This sounds good, and is a practical perspective in many respects, but theologians do often insist that the narratives are truth. A religious follower eventually bumps into the ceiling (or floor) of this insistence the more dedicated they become in their faith (by definition their complete trust or confidence in something). And if one insists that nevertheless it doesn’t matter because religion is personal, this is completely at odds with the missionary aspects of at least Christianity, Islam and many other religions, though notably not Buddhism and Judaism.
I guess the practical answer to that is that what matters is the attitude of the group you're actually joining, not so much the theoretical creed of the wider religion. Abrahamic religions are theoretically exclusivistic at their root, but plenty of their followers and groups on the ground are not. I've personally met a Christian nun who is the leader of her congregation and who is qualified a Zen master at the same time... there's being open minded, and then there's that, and it's really inspiring to see how it makes 100% sense for her and her group. I've also seen plenty of Christian-Buddhists, Judeo-Buddhists, Buddhist-Hindus, Christian-Hindus, and even the odd Sufi-Buddhist, even though such combinations are theoretically impossible.
Note that plenty of Christian academic theologians have defended inclusivistic positions, and somehow they didn't get themselves excommunicated. The Indian religions are generally known for their inclusivism, but that never prevented some Buddhist groups from saying that the guys at the monastery over there didn't have the right view or practice for nirvana. It's really a question of who you associate with.
OTOH, if some group is actively participating in the missionary attempt to convert the whole world to their view, I don't think I'd want to join them in any case.
That’s understandable, but the free agent isn’t an atheist. They are unaffiliated with a religion and open to accepting one. I don’t think the free agent’s behavior implies he thinks religion is bunk. What gave you that impression?
As an atheist: most of these are social clubs anyway. (Not really a criticism as most people need those and at least you get a prosocial peer group--a church is going to be better for you than those guys hanging out on the street corner smoking.) Find one that has people you like and join that one.
As a guy, one should choose a religion that has the best ratio of women to men. Even if he ends up in Hell, at least he will have some fun on the Earth.
It doesn't really make sense to pick any kind of religion at all unless you believe it, so I guess I'd just start reading religious texts until you believe one of them and then live in accordance to what you believe. But if you don't believe it then just find a good routine or life philosophy that you like and follow that. Adding in a spiritual aspect that you don't believe is true is just being false and then you live a lie, so it doesn't really matter how good of a life it leads to because the whole thing will be fake. It just sounds ridiculous to be half spiritual/religious/whatever. I hope this free agent ends up recognizing the truth.
I'm curious, what have you found in your many religious adventures?
Edit: In your many religious adventures you have most definitely heard about Jesus. What do you really know about him/why do you not believe that he's the truth?
Considering it is then, why does networking as “the relevant criterion” obviously outweigh ethical compatibility? Even if the free agent doesn’t believe in the possibility of divinity, which you’ve determined they don’t, they might reasonably favor the religion they think is most ethical.
Hot Take: religions are fan-fictions. This probably comes off as especially flippant toward theists. But conversely, it can also be looked at as especially reverent toward the value of fiction [0]. Because truth isn't just about accuracy, but also about ramifications of your behavior.
> Where religion comes into play, is when a community forms around the values promoted by the story. These shared values means it's easier to form a culture, which means it becomes easier for the members to reap the economies of scale from cooperative behavior. And this is why I've become more interested in literature as of late. The quality of your literary diet influences the quality of your value-system, which may also influence the quality of the community you find yourself in. Choose wisely.
So for me, shopping for a religion is a matter of shopping for a community which cultivates the sort of values you'd like to prioritize. So you can, to paraphrase Gandhi, "be the algorithm you want to see in the world".
It sure is. But if our pilgrim can’t zero in on it, and one of the religions is actually backed by it as they all claim, he’s damned. Our pilgrim doesn’t want to be damned. And he doesn’t want to live at odds with the fundamental purpose of the universe, either.
> Our pilgrim doesn’t want to be damned. And he doesn’t want to live at odds with the fundamental purpose of the universe, either.
You might want to look into Orthodox theology. They pretty much consider those two things to be equivalent, which means, in my idiosyncratic interpretation at least, that you can forget about the "damned" bit and simply (hah) aim toward alignment with the highest good. (And the Catholics explicitly accept Orthodox theology as a valid perspective on the same underlying reality that their theology attempts to describe. And a lot of Protestants tacitly accept the Catholic teachings, except where they explicitly diverge.)
In that case, I think being some flavor of Christian and trying hard to be genuinely righteous is the way to go:
That way, you get the seal of approval from Christianity and also might count as a “person of the book” in Islam and a “righteous gentile” in Judaism. It sounds simple, but it’s not.
Sorry for the late reply, but where I come from, the whole question of reward and punishment is a huge red herring and should be entirely discounted, for two reasons:
1. You can easily account for those in terms of cultural evolutionary incentives. Any group that adds talk of rewards and punishments to their story will likely have an edge over their neighbors in terms of gathering new recruits and keeping them, so any successful religion is likely to accrue these things like barnacles. And once you can account for the emergence of a belief in a way that doesn't require it to have any basis in reality, the voice of those proffering it loses all its authority.
2. More importantly, I want to argue that religious rewards and punishments are spiritually bankrupt. It basically amounts to bartering with the Deity, offering some of your attention and expecting it to massage your ego in return. If you're going to be a spiritual materialist, might as well drop all pretenses and just be a materialist.
I’m confused as to where exactly you stand. In regards to your posts in this thread, when there is an aspect of scripture that could be viewed as constrictive, manipulative or distasteful, you seem to indicate it doesn’t represent the true nature of the religion. Consequently, every claim god or his prophets or his trained representatives make (even in regards to god’s own existence) is thrown into doubt and our pilgrim is left to just follow his spiritual intuition, in violation of most religions’ doctrines. I respect your right to hold whatever view on religion you like, which clearly includes pluralism and the rejection of much scripture, but when you claim your approach is at the core of religion, I see little historical evidence or religious scholarship or teachings that support that. Perhaps that will change over time. You are free to believe it, and no doubt you are not alone as you’ve pointed to some people combing faiths that are mutually exclusive based on their scripture and the teachings of the majority of the churches’ leadership. But our pilgrim, as I stated, sees value in truth, sees that most religions’ claim to see this value as well, and since our pilgrim is without religion at the moment, he must rely on the secular tools that we all rely on to seek that out (evidence, reason, etc.).
We don't have any examples of confirmed true religions, so we're working with a data set with zero pieces of information. We thus start and end with our priors - we could use the principle of indifference to say that every religion is equally likely as the next.
So I wouldn't try to figure out which one is most likely to be true - I don't think you'll get too far.
Instead, just look at the data we do have. Every religious follower lives a life that can be observed - that gives us tons of data to use! Presumably you'd want to pick the religion that maximizes some utility function that takes lots of inputs for vibes, convenience, or whatever else is important to you. Then pick that religion - it's just as likely to be true as any other one.
> Presumably you'd want to pick the religion that maximizes some utility function that takes lots of inputs for vibes, convenience, or whatever else is important to you. Then pick that religion - it's just as likely to be true as any other one.
Sounds good but I’m not sure about that last bit. Why can’t the free agent assess the claims of the faiths’ various doctrines (which are nearly all in the form of scripture) the same way we generally assess the claims of any other texts and then choose the text that holds up best to scrutiny? Do stuff like verify its description of past events with multiple sources. Look for internal inconsistencies that could suggest a lack of authority or forthrightness. If it’s old and it predicted future outcomes, check to see if those outcomes came to pass as predicted. Consider the motive of the author(s) and their credentials, and weigh the arguments they make against what’s known to be true. Test any methodologies to see if their results are reproducible. Isn’t this how we usually assess written truth claims? Nobody wants their religion to be the one invented by a charlatan or a delusional prophet but by process of elimination, most (if not all) must be and surely it’s best for the free agent to critically look into how a doctrine holds up before they choose it.
It's not a bad idea, but I worry that divine truth is so far removed from secular truth as to be unrecognizable.
Internal consistency and predictive power are really, really good measurements for secular truth. But divine truth? It's totally possible (and maybe even expected) that God sometimes changes His mind. That what was permitted today is forbidden tomorrow. Or that seeming contradictions in scripture are actually divine mysteries beyond human comprehension.
I'm not totally convinced that humans are equipped to discover divine truths in the first place. After all, dogs probably will never learn calculus - they just aren't capable of understanding certain kinds of mathematical truth. Even assuming humans *can* learn divine truths, it's totally possible that such revelations haven't happened yet and won't happen in my lifetime - millions of intelligent humans lived and died without learning calculus because it hadn't been discovered yet. I know some calculus, but there are almost certainly mathematical truths that will be discovered long after I'm gone - I see no reason why I should be able to access the divine while there are still secular truths that elude me.
Regardless, I'm ultimately faced with one difficult question (the nature of divine truth) and one simpler question (what is a good life). I choose to assume that my efforts to solve the difficult question will be fruitless, and so I focus my efforts on the second question. By analogy, I'm giving up my quest for canine calculus and focusing instead on playing fetch and being a good boy.
I have a huge amount of respect for people who want to engage with the infinite - the same way I respect Newton and Leibniz for discovering calculus. But I'm not even a Newton or Leibniz, and I'm supposed to figure out who made the universe?
> Why can’t the free agent assess the claims of the faiths’ various doctrines (which are nearly all in the form of scripture) the same way we generally assess the claims of any other texts and then choose the text that holds up best to scrutiny?
Because "we don't have any examples of confirmed true religions" - in the thousands of years religions have existed, not a single one has shown itself to be as true as, say, heliocentrism or evolution. Some, indeed, claim that this is as expected - do not put your God to the test, you must ask for faith to be granted it, etc etc; we call testable, repeatable, verifiable miracles "science" and most people file them in a different file to "religion", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-vDhYTlCNw notwithstanding.
You can use the texts to /rule out/ religions, absolutely - if you find things in the text you cannot bring yourself to claim or live with, that religion is not for you. This process is necessary - but it's not sufficient; you're very unlikely indeed to end up with The One Text That Holds Up Best To Scrutiny at the end of it if rigorously followed; otherwise there would only be one widely followed religion in the world today. Once you've ruled out everything you possibly can, there is still a leap of faith to go - where there is not, we do not call that religion.
(edit: note also, incidentally, that the very concept of a set of scriptures that everyone agrees on that you can read and verify already massively narrows down your set of options; compare, e.g., east asian animistic religions, where the existence of the supernatural is widely accepted, and there are some very broadly specified parameters most agree on, but pretty much all detail is specific to your local circumstance / spirits / deities / environment and you will not be able to firmly pin down any testable specifics that are supposed to be universally true at all).
Why is this person looking to "join their first religion"? Usually you join with the community / activities because you've come to believe the claims, not the other way around. The best strategy is likely to pin down what, exactly, it is that the person is looking to get from the experience - unlike all the other questions, this should at least be one that, with some effort and introspection, it is possible to satisfyingly answer! - and try joining in with groups / activities that look like they will provide lots of those things.
If the Divine is unknowable, if the Spirit does not move you -- which religions seems to help you achieve the good life? Do you think that the good life is contemplation and contentedness? Buddhism. Is the good life helping others? Probably some flavour of Christianity, or maybe Sikhism. Does the good life come from living in a loving community? Take your pick, but consider one that would get you into a commune / kibbutz if you're willing to make that leap.
Don't know what the good life is? Neither do I, so I cannot help you. Read, talk, pray / meditate / think about it. Take solace in the fact that people have been documenting the difficulty of this task for at least 2,400 years.
Oh, and if you place a strong value on truth, be a deist or agnostic atheist until you find something else to be more truthful.
Up until a few hundred years ago, we humans thought the universe revolved around us, and that our world was what we see day to day, and divine entities cared about us individually and made things happen to suit us and their whims. Around 1600 Galileo, then Newton who was born the day Galileo died, showed us that we were just one of many worlds that went around the sun. About a hundred years ago Hubble and others showed us that we were just one world going around one star in a group of stars called a galaxy of which there were many galaxies. In the past 50 years or so we have come to the point where it seems the universe we live in may be infinite (or not, still TBD) but the observable universe extends about 10 to the 80th power km out and holds about 10 to the 50th power or so kg of mass. Much of what we see has been happening for billions of years at speeds up to the speed of light and power interchanges exceeding those we experience by up to around 48 orders of magnitude. Meanwhile, living entities like us (which includes animals and plants of all sizes down to microbial and viral entities) each comprise about Avogadro’s number of atoms (about 10 to the 23rd power) all interacting via electrodynamics several powers of the number of atoms of times at every instant of our existence to comprise our living interaction with the universe. And inside all of this, your mind seeks the Truth, which must somehow encompass, organize, understand, predict, and know it all from beginning to end. And somehow that seeking is driven by the same thing that every other living thing seeks as long as it lives. And sometimes you wonder what it is that you are seeking. If it is Truth, it must encompass all the above and yet somehow fit within your finite existence.
"...how much greater and more wonderful God is, then, that despite me being such an infinitesimal part of creation, He cares deeply and desires a direct, personal relationship!"
You could choose to attend different religious gatherings for different religions. See which ones feel the most welcoming to you, see which of these gatherings resonate with you the most. You could visit a service at a mosque, a synagogue, a cathedral, a buddhist temple, etc...
You could also pray about it, leaving your prayer open-ended, addressing "the divine".
A couple general ideas I'd add to this:
1. I think there's some value in both size and age when it comes to religion. Or, to be clearer about it, I think the smaller and newer you get, the more you risk falling into a cult-like community and/or something that feels like a LARP. So this would likely be an edge for the major world religions and for the larger/older denominations/sects within those major world religions.
2. There is practical value in having the same belief system as close relatives and close friends. It can make such relationships a lot smoother. So if there's already a religion that is predominant in your family, that would be an edge for that religion.
I'm not saying 1 or 2 or even both combined should be totally decisive factors, but they're probably worth considering.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. That seems really accommodating, but implying it’s fine for everyone to come to different conclusions as to divine truth is at odds with the actual doctrine of nearly every major faith. None of them leave room for religious pluralism in their scripture, except maybe Buddhism in its classical forms. Each major religion asserts their specific doctrine applies to all people, not just the ones who are down with it. Because of this when a believer says that everybody can believe in whatever faith they choose, which all the major faiths expressly forbid, it seems disingenuous and patronizing. It makes that person appear either as if they don’t understand basic principles of their faith’s doctrine, or they choose to ignore it when it’s inconvenient, despite its explicit sanctity.
None of this is in judgment of you, obviously, because you didn’t identify with any particular religious doctrine. But I am surprised that most people who believe their god is the one true god won’t just come out and explain what convinced them of that god’s singular, consequential claim and compel other people to save themselves and join them since the stakes are so high.
"Each major religion asserts their specific doctrine applies to all people, not just the ones who are down with it"
this isn't true- a great many religions (probably the large majority) are ethnic religions that are for a particular ethnic group, and not only do they not actively seek out converts, they'd be kind of baffled by the concept.
> implying it’s fine for everyone to come to different conclusions as to divine truth is at odds with the actual doctrine of nearly every major faith. None of them leave room for religious pluralism in their scripture, except maybe Buddhism in its classical forms.
There are non-major faiths that have room for religious pluralism. An argument could be made that such an attitude is desirable because the "we are the only truth" doctrine is hubris, elitist, and lacks epistemic humility.
I sometimes wonder how effective evangelism can be in our modern internet age. Actively evangelizing a religion in a modern 1st world nation is a bit like doing door-to-door sales in the age of amazon and ebay. I mean, if people want a particular good, it's never been easier to try to shop for it online. Likewise, if people are open to joining a religion, it's never been easier to read up on that religion and find what followers of that religion are saying online. When the early Christians evangelized the Christian faith in ancient Rome, for many it was something new that they genuinely never heard of before. Who in the west has never heard of Christianity? And Google is right there for anybody who wants to learn more about it.
I might regret this, but I'll come out and say that I am a Christian. It's clear that my position is a minority one here on Scott's blog, and I learned a long time ago to never get into online debates in places where the solid majority is against you. Simply reading the viewpoints and opinions of people with different beliefs and life experiences than yourself can often be highly informative and give you a greater sense of the world around you, and that's one of the reasons I'm on this blog.
I could say that you and your friend need Jesus, and I basically believe that, but saying that will probably just make you think I'm Ned Flanders given I get a strong materialist vibe from you, like I get from most people on this blog. So, what benefit is there in me doing that, for either you or your friend or me? In fact, this is why I have mixed feelings about writing this right now, since it will probably result in some people here just dismissing my opinion on any other topic based on their views of religious people.
But... yes, I would be completely failing to live in accordance with my faith if at this point I didn't put it out there. So there you go, choose to do with it what you want.
The advice I gave you before was sincere, to be clear. Within our natural life, there really are benefits to belonging to a religion that is the same as our friends and relatives. Newer/smaller religions often do seem cult-like and/or LARPy to me. And if you're going to join a religion, it really helps to be a member of a physical religious community that you find friendly and welcoming. Even many atheists here know that, it's why some try to replicate it through purely secular means.
I'll leave it at this. I hope your friend finds what they're looking for. Have a good day.
I am Christian (fairly recent conversion) and believe that all religions are fundamentally true, and that Moses, Buddha and Mohammed were enlightened beings the same as Jesus.
I find Christianity more powerful and more personally compelling because Jesus literally died for us - he believed so strongly in what he preached that he was willing to die for the truth.
But if someone is Muslim or Jewish or Buddhist or Hindu I’m not interested in trying to convert them - I would rather them embody the tenets of their faith, which seem to me to be fundamentally similar to mine.
Hey Turtle, I encourage you to read the Gospels of Matthew and John in the Bible. I understand why you would believe what you're saying as a recent-ish convert, but it is important to know what Jesus actually said and who he is, as well as what he did for the world.
He makes it clear that he alone is the gateway to God and forgiveness of sins, and that we have to accept his sacrifice alone to pay the penalty for our sins (death) and as a result we owe our life to serving him and obeying him. He tells us that whoever is not with him is against him, and that those who love him do what he says. Those who don't do what he says do not love him.
What makes a Christian is someone who recognizes Jesus as the son of God and sees their own evil and imperfection, and then accepts the sacrifice that Jesus made and has faith in him that he purifies them and will take them to live with him for eternity. A Christian gives up his own life to follow and obey Jesus and out of love for God and his fellow man, shares the truth with others in obedience to God's command and in hopes that they will recognize the truth and be united with God and all His children.
Jesus says to do what he says, so that requires knowing what he says. So please, I urge you to read God's word and believe it. It may be more immediately helpful to start with the New Testament, but all of it is very important and it is so wonderful.
> I am Christian (fairly recent conversion) and believe that all religions are fundamentally true
...then, I am sorry, but you are not a (mainstream) Christian. Christianity is incompatible with those other religions; the Nicene Creed makes some very specific claims, as does the bible itself, and these are at odds with claims the other religions you list make. When you join a mainstream church, you will be required to affirm your agreement with some version of the Nicene creed on a regular basis as one of the terms of your membership.
If you have not already, you might like to investigate your local unitarian or quaker communities, as they hold to a smaller (and therefore less exclusive) set of core beliefs and are more tolerant of a wider range of views; though John 14:6 will still be hard to wrestle with.
Is it growing? Are its members relatively happy and healthy? How has it dealt with the historical problems it faced? When it had to make tough decisions, how often did it come down on the side that you think is right? Nothing involving humans is perfect; does it recover from human-caused errors? What kind of things do you have to agree to do, and what are the reasons for them?
How much crazy stuff is there in the backstory that needs to be interpreted away? Is its global organizational model scalable? How do you feel about it participating in politics? It's going to have factions; are the factions you like ascendant or declining? After you've joined, is it OK to have a crisis of faith?
I was part of a team advocating for a revision of SB 1308 [1], a California bill that would have prevented the use of far-UV [2] in California, as a side effect of banning ozone-producing indoor air cleaners. I'm seeing now that there's a measure on the Berkeley ballot [3] that mandates raising air standards in buildings owned or leased by the city to meet ASHRAE 241 [4] air quality requirements, but specifically NOT by using whole-room far-UV ("the City…shall not install any ultraviolet light disinfection technology in such a manner that the light will come into contact with human skin").
ASHRAE 241 is a solid standard, and it would be good for Berkeley to adopt it, so at first glance, I mostly want this to pass if it seems realistic for it to actually be upheld. However, it could be impractical to meet the standard without using germicidal UV, depending on the typical occupancy of the city-owned/leased buildings (of which I'm unsure). I just don't understand the antipathy toward germicidal UV here. Does anyone know how this measure was developed and why it excludes the use of whole-room far-UV? (Very possibly the authors of the language have never heard of far-UV and just want to guard against the use of carelessly installed upper-room germicidal UV.)
I guess you had to ban LearningHebrewHatesIsrael but it's a shame.
First of all I get it. Not only was (new-name) LearnsHebrewHatesIP pro-assassination but (excepting his imagination of Yahweh's hell - source?) he sounded serious too. Not serious enough to do it himself of course but you know he kind of sounded like he really really wanted Trump dead.
Even so, while I obviously agree that anyone who feels so strongly about something so silly as a president is making a very unfortunate error for themselves and their emotions, it should be fine to "wish" for whatever you like and to say so.
I support the ban because obviously that sort of talk ends up spiraling with back talk and eventually leads to a whole lot of hate among real people who can hear each other (rather than for Trump or dead-dude who can not) and actually cause a great deal of unhappiness even if it's just about what I regard as fighting over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
In addition, I think you had to do it not just for the good of anyone who might get caught up in it, but for the tone of the whole platform if that kind of thing is allowed.
And finally, considering how badly people behave on the internet that would not surprise me if his own colorful wishes ended up with bad people counting you personally as responsible for allowing it and not banning him for it, and using it as a cudgle against you who definitely doesn't deserve it (not that he would but he seems to be cool with whatever response might come from that comment).
At the same time, as you can see from the above I don't take it all that seriously and I think that you don't take it all that seriously either (other than for its potentially deleterious second-hand effects), so, while a ban makes a lot of sense (based at least on the criteria of the local snitches) I think he's also someone worth having around and that therefore perhaps has been for a shorter period I don't know what periods you usually use but I would think a week or a month if need be.
This isn't because I found that particular comment something that anyone in the world really needs to read but because I remember when he showed up shortly after October 7th last year. He was very angry and very violent but I realized that he was also sincere.
And sincere people can grow.
I wrote him at some length not expressly dealing with the accusations or hatreds or whatnot but pointing out that he seems to not have all the information or to have considered all the perspectives but would probably want to do so.
He seemed logic-based rather than team-based, *even if he was* shouting for the bloody murder of one particular team.
It's true that he's more colorful and passionate than most but (from the admittedly limited number of comments of his that I have read) he seems to be someone who actually cares. About people and about truth, and about checking his presumptions in his own head so that he can change them if rationality and heart recommend him doing so.
Anyhow, the commentariot here is a diverse bunch. But while I can't say that I've learned much information about the outside world from those comments of his that I've read, I do feel like I learned about him enough for him to distinguish himself here as a good bloke whose passion doesn't only fire outward, but also inward. In other words, a (loud but) humble fellow.
That's a rare quality.
It may be a quality more highly represented here than on the general internet, but even here it's rare.
He even went so far as to change his nom when he realized that Jews/Israelis aren't the devils he thought they were and that their enemies aren't quite so innocent as he had priorly felt.
That's an impressive thing. It's humility.
Anyway, he seemed like one of those few dudes on the internet who might turn into a publicly helpful high quality person given some time to explore and grow.
If this is an epitaph, so be it, but I liked him (even at his most genocidal against my own tribe and self) so I wish him well.
I don't think it's a bannable comment, period. It was obviously an expression of emotion, not a statement of LHHIP's actual views about the best strategy for those who strongly oppose Trump. He ends up by talking about how he can't stand the fucking Cheeto one second longer. That's not how people speaking up in favor or assassination as a strategy sound! Come on, it's an emotional rant.
I don't think it would have been a civil war, not immediately. But it would have been enormously bad for American democracy. If you're up on late Republican Roman history, there's a tiny meme that "he's not either Caesar, he's Tiberius Gracchus", and that would have sealed it in.
I don't think it would have happened, but the implication is that Trump's supporters would lose faith in the process itself. First they steal the election, and then they kill the candidate to make sure he can't win again. If they can do that to a wealthy former president, they can do it to anyone.
Whoever "they" are in this scenario, they would obviously control most or all possible candidates, regardless of party (they might cite Kamala being endorsed by pretty much Bush's entire leadership team), so they can't trust a Rubio or DeSantis either.
This is a group with strong independent streaks and lots of weapons, as well as a significant number of supporters in the rank and file military. If any non-majority in the US could fight or win a civil war, that's likely the one.
First off, LHHIP's comment was not "calling for assassination", it was wishing that an already-happened assassination had succeeded. It is a subtle distinction, but relevant in that, for example, it was not a call to action like your comment implies.
It's been months, but that reads to me like an absurd joke, given the absurd question that it answered. If it were serious, I would have issued a warning or a ban, depending on circumstances. Since it's joking, nowadays it's more likely to get a warning:
He surprised me with his sincerity and humility: I'd argue with him and would write him off as a troll, and then he'd write a mea culpa and ask the community for forgiveness. Certainly a remarkable fellow.
But I support the ban, and it's a long time coming. Quite frankly, he often came off as an unhinged and aggressive crank, because, well, he was one. A remarkable and surprisingly humble unhinged crank, but a crank nonetheless. He couldn't keep up the level of civility expected for this comment section, and if you don't pull weeds you don't have a garden (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/)
I read most of his posts, even on threads I wasn't very interested in, and don't recall any that sounded unhinged, after the early era when he was incandescent with rage, and his name was LearnedHebrewHatesIsrael. When has he sounded unhinged recently?
"Trump's shooter did nothing wrong except not wielding the weapon accurately enough, and everybody who finds this sentiment so intolerable that it invites summary immediate dismissal is buckling under an immense amount of peer pressure."
"Trump in particular is a low-value human that absolutely no one is capable of missing if their life depended on it. He's the archetypical "Unsympathetic Victim" that gets killed by the sympathetic character in shows like CSI and NCIS and the audience forgives and even cheers for the sympathetic character....For all of those reasons and possibly more that I'm too lazy to articulate, I think that the rule "Killing is bad unless the target is in the exception list" and adding Trump and Trump-like insects as entries in the exceptions list is basically a good compromise. I think that "Acts like Trump" is a very good and unambiguous exception condition that would almost never harm a good person."
"Killing Trump is not bad because it can be done surgically, with 0 casualties other than Trump (who, I argue, isn't a "casualty" at all). This reminds me: I have wrongly said that Trump's shooter did nothing wrong, I retract that. He did one major crime: he murdered an innocent man. That man was "collateral damage", to use the favorite word of Israel's defenders, but I would still have supported trialing the shooter on charges of murder, if he survived....In summary: Trump (and all politicians who directly or indirectly kill people) are valid targets of assassination because assassination by its very nature is surgical, in fact it's an often-presented alternative to wars like the one in Gaza. "
Problem is the "the shooter did wrong in that he killed an innocent man". The kinds of views about Trump on display here (shit, less than human, should be shot) that I see online also encompass his supporters (and indeed, in these comments we get 'acting like Trump' is enough for someone to deserve having their brains blown out).
Those people would not think that man was innocent. If he went to a rally for Trump then he too deserved to die, because supporting Trump means you are as evil and less than human and shit and so forth as Trump.
I don't think anyone should die for going to a political rally, not even the loo-lahs who went to the Democratic convention soirée about how fabulosa they were for being Harris supporters:
I have to say, I think that last comment you link to is high quality, when considered in full, and I only wish that we (well, you) hadn't had to go through the low quality parts of the previous comments to get to it. Replacing war with assassination of leaders is a classic if fringe position, especially among anarchists. And given that LHHI lives close to a current war, and is subject to a dictator, I can't particularly fault him for it. :-/
I suppose since I'm complimenting people, I shouldn't except those who are still here, so: you're great, thank you for being here, I hope you keep it up. :-) Despite the nice things I said about LHHI, I don't think I could have engaged with him the way you did there.
It was false contrition - how many times did he issue the same fake apology, rake in all the respect for "changing his mind" then go straight back to the same murderous unhinged takes the next day?
I believe there was only one major time when he apologized, changed his user name, and changed dramatically. What's *your* count of how many "fake apologies" he issued ?Can name some other times he did that? -- I'm not talking about something like, "sorry, I was a bit harsh" but a long, thoughtful-seeming post in which he apologized and vowed to change?
Is it possible to simulate quantum computing with (slower) regular computing?
If not, then does this mean the we-are-living-in-a-simulation hypothesis has to be wrong because quantum computing exists? Or maybe the computer simulating us is a quantum computer?
Yes, absolutely, but it's exponentially harder: the state of n entangled cubits requires 2^n complex numbers to track (clever tricks can reduce this, but not by much), and even if a gate only acts on two wires it can still have to perform a calculation using all those numbers.
Which means if (a) quantum computing works (b) we are in a universe simulated by a classical computer… then we can cause a big performance problem for whoever is running the simulation.
You'll also need a source of randomness for the important last step of "actually get a measurement", since the final quantum state basically acts as a probability distribution over N-bit strings. But otherwise yes, a quantum computer can be simulated by a Turing machine with the ability to call a random number generator at the end of the computation (at the cost of exponential time/space).
If this universe is a simulation, how can you use it to draw conclusions about what's possible in the external universe? I mean really, only 3 spacial dimensions and 1 time dimension? Once that's off the table what does your question even mean?
Thanks for this, I had an unconsidered assumption that the simulating computer was in a universe like ours. Which led me to think that the simulation hypothesis has infinitesimal odds of correctness because the simulating computer must be larger than our simulated universe, where larger doesn't mean length or volume but number of component pieces. E.g. - To simulate our universe at the level of detail of elementary particles (which is needed to give the substrate upon which our consciousness can arise as an emergent phenomenon) the simulating computer must consist of more elementary particles than the number of elementary particles in our universe. Which seems highly improbable. But in a different kind of universe that we cannot imagine, things could be different - their computers could be made of something different from our elementary particles. I think the concept that the simulator must be larger then the simulated would still be true, that's a part of computer science which is applied math, and I think math is independent of universes.
Oh there are ideas like having part of the server decide whether to combine some high-level parts of the simulation into low-level, so that instead of simulating (say) atoms of stars more than 1AU away from Earth, you just simulate "a star", editing telescope images as needed. It's also argued that some people are lightly simulated NPCs, which allows for near infinite contempt against anyone inconvenient to believers.
I'm not advocating for the simulation theory. It feels like utter bunk. Especially the "trillion-to-one odds against this being the first world" hypothesis.
There's a trend over the last few years of trying to reshore industrialization. So far the focus is on chips (which makes sense, since they're both a critical security need and something America was a world leader on at one point and so plausibly could be again), and ships and anything government infrastructure related (including trains, dredges, steel and buses) which is understandable (the government can much more easily enforce buy america through government programs) but altogether a terrible idea (America has never been especially good at building them and the subsidies and restrictions that exist can't possibly get it to even make a serious attempt, just harm our infrastructure).
What other areas are an especially good idea to be focuses of reshoring industry (given that America can't be a global manufacturing hub for literally everything and does actually need to pick)? And what focuses have been suggested that are especially terrible ones?
I don't think any of these are a good idea, but if I was going to prop up one industry I'd prop up raw materials refining. Oils, metals, gases, pretty much everything. It could be mined anywhere but all refined products would be subject to tariffs.
Why that one? It actually seems like not a very good one for the US, which has an advantage on higher value parts of the production chain? (Specifically steel is one of those things the US has never been good at and offshored to Japan as early as it could).
There exists only one country powerful enough to not sell to the US.
China has a deep hold on refined metals and so when subsidising an industry that is the one I'd pick. By contrast leading edge microprocessors are mostly made in Taiwan, Korea, and the US. Why is it so necessary for the US to make the very best chips in the US instead of Taiwan? Being one year behind Taiwan doesn't seem to pose any national security risk to me.
But when China refines 95% of the world's rare earth elements or 80% of its cobalt? That's a supply chain security risk. (Don't quote me on the exact figures, going off old memory here.)
Drug production. I mean medicinal ones, especially generics. According to a 2014 study, about 40% of generic drugs in the US have only one manufacturer. This has likely become worse since then. Supply chain failures for basic drugs have already become much more common.
Solar panels and wind turbines. America's rise to a preeminent global superpower also coincided with American preeminence in fossil fuel production. If America had been dependent on other countries for such fuels (e.g. Germany or Japan), the world might have been totally different.
Robots. As manufacturing becomes more and more robot-based and less dependent on human wages, you want to be the place where all the robots are being manufactured.
Not only do you get to sell the robots, you also get to sell everything else, because the most convenient place to set up the everything-else factories is right next to the robot factories.
I know that robots have been used in manufacturing for decades, but I think they're due for a big step function increase. At some point we get the GPT-3 of robots, which turns them from hyper-specialised tools for use in narrow circumstances into tools that you can use for pretty much any basic manufacturing task. And you really want that to happen in your country, not in China.
Also solar panels, to power all the everything factories.
> Robots. As manufacturing becomes more and more robot-based and less dependent on human wages, you want to be the place where all the robots are being manufactured.
That's a great one. GOOG definitely jumped the gun by a decade when acquiring Boston Dynamics. Now Hyundai has them, and is explicitly using them to carve out a niche in automation robotics.
Somebody needs to tell NVIDIA to stop open sourcing their Eureka code, too.
"The AI agent taps the GPT-4 LLM and generative AI to write software code that rewards robots for reinforcement learning. It doesn’t require task-specific prompting or predefined reward templates — and readily incorporates human feedback to modify its rewards for results more accurately aligned with a developer’s vision."
I agree on solar, but China literally manufacturers 90% of the world's solar panels, and it's a steep climb from here, especially with our environmental laws.
Cars - plenty of good cars are manufactured in fully developed countries, including all the arguably best ones.
We still manufacture Teslas and Corvettes and whatever domestically, and used to manufacture all the cars sold in America domestically (40's). We're down to about 45% with offshoring and "American" brands being manufactured in Mexico.
And don't cars have absolutely huge trickle-down effects in first, second, and third string parts suppliers and domestic jobs? Isn't that why we bailed the Big 3 out?
If "45%" was enough to bail out the Big 3, how much more domestic jobs and GDP would result in bringing the 55% back? Seems like a win.
But is there evidence we get either strong strategic benefits from it (I think not, since most of the offshored parts are in allied countries) or good bang for your buck job wise (I think not so much since there's a pretty good split now, though not very confident about that). The question isn't just "do we get jobs back with arbitrary cost" but "do we get good jobs and valuable production in return for our cost". Cars seem fairly replacement level on that front - not an especially terrible idea, but also not the most efficient way to turn government subsidies to jobs and domestic production.
It seems a good tradeoff to me - the 45% represents 4-5M jobs across primary manufacturing and first, second, third string suppliers, so bringing back another 45% would bring back 4-5M jobs. That's a solid 3% of the total workforce, and they're all "good, honest manufacturing jobs" that could revitalize Rust Belt towns and whatever.
But as to strategic benefits, yeah, I think we should be doubling and tripling down on chip fabs, large transformer and electrical plant manufacturing (while machete-ing regulation that prevents expansion and new builds with abandon), solar panel production, and so on.
From a strategic standpoint, we should also definitely stop wasting our country's finest minds in eyeball / attention mines and finance. The amount of brainpower that goes into online ads has to be the biggest waste of intellectual horsepower ever known, and they're *really bad at it* on top of it. But the scale of GOOG and FB is enough they're still trillion dollar companies while being really bad at serving relevant ads.
But all those Phd's and brilliant people wasting their talents to create more CDO's and irrelevant ads should be working in cybersecurity and preventing corporate espionage or something actually strategically useful.
If I were in charge, I'd be offering TSMC employees FAANG and OpenAI style compensation packages to incentivize as many of them to come over as possible and start building new factories yesterday, and I'd be "national security lettering" like 10-20% of FAAMG workforces to go do something actually useful instead, but that's all pretty pie in the sky.
But I think jobs-wise, all those things combined would barely move the needle - maybe 20% as much as the cars thing.
We'd be gaining automotive jobs and losing other jobs. Mexico sells us cars so that they can buy other stuff from us, if we stop buying cars from them, they won't have money to buy the other stuff, and some of the people who make the other stuff will be out of a job. And the principle of comparative advantage says that the trade of sacrificing other jobs to gain automotive jobs will make us net poorer. Seems like a loss.
> Mexico sells us cars so that they can buy other stuff from us, if we stop buying cars from them, they won't have money to buy the other stuff, and some of the people who make the other stuff will be out of a job.
I don't think that's true. The biggest categories of Mexico's US-origin imports are electrical machinery and equipment, computers, vehicles, oil, plastics, and agriculture.
Most of those are probably at an efficient frontier in terms of US labor-hours going into them vs automation, and the marginal change from Mexico buying less (which tops out at 20-100B per category) is unlikely to result in a substantial reduction of jobs versus the overall production volumes.
In other words, if Mexico buys less corn or soybeans, it's not going to affect jobs because "farming" is basically fully automated and <2% of US jobs are farmers, and because Mexico is buying <1% of our overall farming output.
Same with oil, computers, etc.
I mean yes, I get what the theory of comparative advantage says, I'm just pointing out in the actual empirical world, I doubt we'd see these effects. The gap between theory and practice in economics can be noticeably wide due to regulations, social and business dynamics, etc.
Versus there's 4-5M automotive jobs in the US, considering direct manufacturing and first, second, and third tier suppliers, and that's at the current 45% US-origin manufacturing. I would personally bet on adding 5M manufacturing jobs to the US being more net positive empirically than Mexico buying a little less oil, agricultural products, and computers.
If you think poorer-but-with-more-jobs is a good trade, why not undo automation? Ban tractors and farming machinery etc. That will also add jobs (while impoverishing us) same as autarky will.
Sure, and if enrichening us is the main goal, let's eliminate all social welfare, eliminate corporate and capital gains taxes, get rid of most regulation, etc. GDP will go up noticeably, along with Gini index and whatever.
But you know, we'd probably have a Terror or Revolution if we went that route.
I think there's always a tradeoff between aggregate social qualiity of life and economic productivity, and although those 5M jobs would in some sense be "welfare" because it's not the strictly maximally-economically optimal thing to do, I think the amount of "GDP and good jobs in the US for average people" tradeoff is fine and probably net positive overall vs the "some corporations / stockholders will make 0.5% more annually."
And just imagine the political capital from whoever did this! "I brought back 5M jobs to the US, good manufacturing jobs, revitalizing entire Rust Belt towns, etc." I mean, whichever side did it would cement a good chunk of those votes for the next 10-20 years, I'm surprised it's not in the Overton Window of stuff being discussed.
>> Sure, and if enrichening us is the main goal, let's eliminate all social welfare, eliminate corporate and capital gains taxes, get rid of most regulation, etc. GDP will go up noticeably, along with Gini index and whatever.
Your terms are acceptable.
What's the logic here? We've made bad decisions in the past, so we must make more bad decisions in the future?
"Reshoring" refers to bringing industrialization back from other countries. Boeing's largest and now-most-infamous outside supplier has been Spirit AeroSystems. That company, which was previously Boeing's own division before being spun off in 2005, is headquartered in Wichita and was doing virtually all of its Boeing assembly within the US. Boeing is now retaking control of Spirit Aero and its work, having agreed this summer on reacquiring all of those US operations.
Boeing in 2017 had off-shored the detailed-design and operational control of the extremely-complex manufacturing of its planes to software from a French company called Dassault Systèmes. As Boeing planes lately began falling apart and failing to fly safely, Congresscritters and others have seized upon that Dassault decision as "the problem". An awkward fact however is that Boeing's primary competitor, Airbus, made the exact same change to the same software from the same company, Dassault. AirBus planes however are not having anywhere near the problems that Boeing planes now are.
If I recall correctly, Peter Zeihan thought our best move (not that we have to do much moving about it, he thought it would happen naturally) would be to take the light industry we offshored to China and move it to Mexico. Mexico has cheap labor, a large population, is not a geopolitical threat, and is right next door.
Why does the brain age so much slower than the rest of the body? Physical decline (eg. muscle loss) is near-universal amongst the elderly, but many elderly people seem roughly as sharp as they've always been, with relatively little cognitive decline - for example, Korchnoi was still in the top 30 chess players worldwide at age 68. Even if he had exceptional ability, no athletes are still competitive at 68 (except in less physical sports like archery)
I'd challenge the idea that the rest of the body ages faster than the brain just because of the distribution of top performers in chess vs physical sports. First off, the brain isn't just a doing organ, it's a learning organ--if we were teaching everybody involved a new game the advantages of youth would be more obvious. Don't kids tend to dominate in video games? I don't think it's just because their little fingers are faster. Or the phenomenon where younger people are responsible for more groundbreaking discoveries in math and physics, cognitively demanding domains where you benefit less from experience than you do in chess, I'd think. Second, there are more organs in the body than those relevant for sports, and moreover one of the sports-relevant organs is actually the brain--one reason for decline is sports performance with age is slower reaction times, which is a brain (and rest of the nervous system) thing. Third, is either of these things even a good proxy for something like 'rate of aging'?
To me the interesting angle is more like, why don't we seem to lose cognitive skills faster as we age? Apparently you can damage a lot of neural tissue before symptoms of a neurodegenerative problem (Alzheimer's, say, I'm generalizing but we're all implicating cortical tissue, which has this property) are obvious. As @pangsofmacha said below, cognitive development requires neural pruning for optimization, so more isn't necessarily better, but brain tissue is metabolically expensive so we must be netting other benefits from neurons we don't strictly "seem to need" to get (what we perceive to be) the cognitive job done. Redundancy enabling longevity might be part of the answer.
I don’t have time to look up references right now, so I’ll just state it as I remember: muscle loss is primarily related to inactivity, not age. Ultrasonic scans of 70 y.o. active triathletes show no signs of muscle loss. There are other aspects of physical decline, such as arthritis, but one can maintain the muscle mass well into old age.
> muscle loss is primarily related to inactivity, not age.
Yeah, I second this. Hunter Gatherers are about 5x more active than Westerners.
If you study Hunter Gatherers vs Western sedentaries, older hunter gatherer women and men in their 60-70’s in general are on par with Westerners in their 40-50’s.
There’s no decline in walking speed among Hadza women as they age (whereas Western women go from 3 feet per second at under 50yo to 2fps by the time they’re over 60.)
Grip strength remains notably higher in both hunter gatherer men and women into their 70’s relative to Westerners, and more.
I think that's the case, because I've run with a lot of people over 70, and many of them are still in very good shape. They might be the lucky few, but I suspect it's more a lifetime of being active that does it.
I suspect these 70+ year old runners started from a higher baseline or didn't realise their (decreasing with age) potential in their youth. Regarding the study mentioned above, without seeing it I'm skeptical - was the study comparing them to the average, or to their younger selves?
I'm not sure looking at world records is the best way to judge decline. I wouldn't dispute that absolute peak levels decline with age, but very few people ever reach that level at any age. It's actually quite extraordinary to me that any 70 year old can run 100m in 12.8s - which would outpace many 18 year olds.
This is a really interesting question. Here’s a few ideas that might be relevant, all off the top of my head, so I haven’t double checked them.
- there is less cell turnover in the brain than most other organs which may affect rate of aging.
- the brain is metabolically different than most other organs, and it seems plausible that it’s metabolic demands continue to be (relatively) adequately met later in life, whereas the same may not be true for other parts of the body eg. skeletal muscle.
- “something-something brain plasticity”, it’s an easy idea to mock because it’s been hijacked by pop psychology, but the ability of the brain to compensate for injuries, adapt, and “rewire“ to some limited extent may help explain it’s robustness.
- just based on what I know about evolutionary theory and genetics I’m not a big fan of group selection and related theories, but that said, it doesn’t seem crazy to think it’s an advantage for our species to have mentally sharp grandmothers and grandfathers. I’m not exactly sure how the actual genetic/mechanistic part would work, but the concept seems reasonable.
I’d speculate that activities showing less decline with age are those that benefit most from experience.
I don’t know that there’s a definition of tissue aging that incorporates brain and body that shows the brain generally ages more slowly than the body. I would expect a priori that different tissue material properties change at different rates in different tissues. There are evolutionary theory reasons to expect that the impact of different aging trajectories for these properties on reproductive fitness will be similar no matter which you look at. But success in sport, chess, etc. isn’t identical to reproductive fitness, of course.
This is likely because the plasticity of learning means the brain is more sensitive to homeostatic feedback. Both brain and body persist for much longer than dead organic tissue because both are open to feedback processes that resist entropic decline. However, this is (relatively) slow in the case of non-cortical tissue due to the feedback mechanisms being coarser and less sensitive. Learning, however, requires highly sensitive on-the-fly re-weighting of neural connections, so any decline in function can be detected and compensated. (When I notice that I'm getting hazy on something I know, I relearn it––and familiarity means I do so efficiently.) So while the brain likely physically declines at the same rate, the cognitive pathways can be 're-routed' before they are lost. Of course, there will eventually come a point where they can't, and this is when permanent cognitive decline sets in.
Does the ability to 're-rout' cognitive pathways not decline much with age? Or is it that it starts from a high enough baseline that the decline has little effect -i.e. that people start with more than they need
I think the answer is yes. Synaptic pruning actively removes extra cortical structure in childhood and makes cognition more effective. This obviously isn't the same as age-related cognitive decline, but it certainly shows that "more is better" doesn't hold true for cortical connectivity. That said, the ability to 're-route' probably does decline a little with age, and it may well be that the skills best preserved are those that have been reinforced by repetition. (Cue elderly stats professor who can to maximum likelihood estimation in her sleep, but does no better than age-related controls on everything else.)
To follow up on the discussion of homeless people, drug addiction, mental health, institutionalization, and "housing first", here's a video about how the current policies are playing out. I am informed that it is accurate.
Around the 29:26 mark, one man she is interviewing says that housing first "sucks" because "they say they'll have this and this and this, they say they'll help you, but only they'll only help you to a certain point" and at 30:19 it's corroborated by staff that there's a period around the 25th of each month where the population has run out of money, and thus is out of drugs, and people begin to sober up and ask for help, but there are no resources to help them: "They want help. I tried, but there was no bed space, I couldn't get people any kind of treatment... I couldn't find bed space, I didn't know where to put them... If I could get them a bed somewhere... there [were] no beds... every month it was the same thing."
Then a few minutes later at 37:49, the program contrasts a housing first model for a model that begins with arrest, which seems to be presented favorably because arrest forces a state of sobriety after which people can be helped. The host interviews a police officer who describes how "it was awesome to see these women, former convicts, get up on stage and tell their story, and every single one of them attributed their success to having been arrested and then being led towards a personal accountability perspective... I would like people to think, and consider, that the most compassionate thing we could do would be to interrupt that cycle of addiction and then provide real meaningful care for those people without the opportunity to go back" and the host agrees "during incarceration, during that separated time, separation, services, and accountability."
That seems to imply that the question isn't one of housing first vs arrest first, but so much as it's one of resources and support services, and whether there is sufficient funding to make those available. Housing first is critiqued for promising but not delivering on support services, while arrest is offered as valuable because it can connect people "separation, services, and accountability." So it seems like the "services" part is the key, which would mean either approach can be effective if it can route someone to support services, and both will be ineffective insofar as there are no support services at the end of the bridge.
And I'm very skeptical that local governments would actually be willing to pay for those kinds of services, so it seems like while we may be debating whether arrest-first or housing-first creates better outcomes, practically speaking what we're choosing between is concentrating the ills of poverty into a single toxic space, or running those ills through a revolving door.
Can someone steel man the case for seed oil for an anti-scientism prospective?
Food science is one of the more publicly corrupt; my trust of experts is close to that of flat-earthers; and health outcomes are getting worse not better so unlike say physics making better computer chips, I see no evidence of food science not making everyone sicker.
Id have to look up meme but butter steps to make is 1. shake cream; while seed oils are gaint walls-o-text with many many scary chemicals.
But Im worried that picking up a butter-based diet maybe an overcorrection
"and health outcomes are getting worse not better so unlike say physics making better computer chips, I see no evidence of food science not making everyone sicker."
It is interesting to me that at a time when we have more food science than ever before, we also have a lot of obesity, and not much sign of people being healthier on the basis of what we eat. At least, I personally haven't seen much evidence of food science resulting in a healthier populace.
Perhaps this is down to people simply not following up-to-date food science? Still, if this is the case, I find it a bit weird that I haven't heard of much food education efforts by the government or health authorities, especially given increasing weight issues throughout the population.
I haven't studied food science in detail, but just from looking at the world around me, I don't get an impression that it's had much positive impact. I'd genuinely be curious to hear from strong supporters of food science on why we're not reaping as much obvious benefit from food science as we are from computer science or physics or chemistry.
>>I see no evidence of food science not making everyone sicker.
>I haven't studied food science in detail...curious
When I last looked into it its a bunch of population studies making dubious and reductionist assumptions; while your stomach is a bioreactor that evolves over your life time. I expect that your need a micro boime test, adding some strains, and only then a standard diet can exist.
Unlike skincolor its unlikely you get half your mircoboime from your father, so I dont even understand how its possible to detect diet requirements based on race
> I haven't studied food science in detail, but just from looking at the world around me, I don't get an impression that it's had much positive impact.
I've been friends with a few food scientists over the years, and food science is fully adversarial, at least in regards to general health and well being.
The things being optimized are creating superstimuli with tastiness and "morishness" where people want more, because those are the things that sells more units, and selling more units is what the companies employing food scientists want to do.
It's not that they WANT to make their customers fat and unhealthy, that's just a side effect of the tastiness and morishness right now. When we get to a point we can legitimately create truly biologically-neutral taste-conveying "food," I'm sure they'll pivot to those.
Why in particular should oils derived from squeezing seeds be bad, but oils derived from squeezing fruits (or a cow's tits) be good? Why not the other way around?
Telos. Fruits and milk want to be consumed. Seeds do not. So, a priori it makes sense that the first two would be more likely to be helpful to their consumer than the latter, due to evolution.
> Do you think meta-analyses of seed oil studies are trustworthy?
No, probably would even assign it a negative weight with big obvious conflict of interests and the flip flopping on if a food is considered healthy each decade. The food pyramid story is public knowledge and there just is a "sugar lobby".
> If not, what kind of study would convince you?
> study
>> my trust of experts is close to that of flat-earthers
Im pretty sure nothing worth a damn exists in food science with it all being delayed, slow effects over large populations and no proper experiments
Assuming your unwilling to burn the university to the ground just yet, I suggest at least sounding like experimental history:
> probably would even assign it a negative weight with big obvious conflict of interests
Can you tell me what these conflicts of interest are? Do you actually have evidence of them, or are you just alleging that they exist?
> study
>> my trust of experts is close to that of flat-earthers
I didn't ask you to trust experts. If you designed a study yourself and conducted it yourself, what would it look like? If it showed you that seed oils aren't bad, would you then believe that seed oils aren't bad?
> Can you tell me what these conflicts of interest are? Do you actually have evidence of them, or are you just alleging that they exist?
The americain government is onto its 5th food pyramid, Im treating it as given prior that *at least* the 1st one was corrupt.
"In April 1991, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) halted publication of its Eating Right Pyramid, due to objections raised by meat and dairy lobbying groups concerning the guide’s display of their products." -wikipedia
> If you designed a study yourself and conducted it yourself, what would it look like?
Take samples of mirco boimes of non urbanized populations with low modernization in their diet, mad science up some pills with stains of bacteria that are high in the non-modern groups that eat a specific food like 90% seal fat in the winter, give them to people with food sensitivity's; see if their digestion improves.
My strategy: Don't worry about any particular food stuff. Fall back on heuristics so old they came from our evolutionary environment - find the healthiest and most physically vital person or people you can, and eat what they eat, and avoid what they avoid.
That meme is horsefeathers, or at least severely overstated. You can make most seed oils by grinding up seeds and squeezing and filtering the oil out of the mash. Some you can just let the mash settle and pour the oil off the top, like with natural-style peanut butter. Industrially produced seed oils do get postprocessed for various reasons, but it isn't essential to seed oils.
Yes, I would add “cold-pressed” to my description above if I could edit it, although I’m not sure how important that is vs. for example buying better meat.
Hexane is used as a solvent in large-scale commercial extraction of some oils, especially canola, corn, and soybean oil. It's used because you can get a lot more oil out of a given quantity of raw ingredients with a solvent than via cold-pressing.
"Rarely fully removed" is technically true, but "fully" is doing a lot of work there. One of the reasons hexane is the chosen solvent is because it has a very low boiling point (155ºF or 68ºC) so you can distill it out of the finished product efficiently. The EU's limit for hexane residue is 1 ppm. The FDA does not have a specific limit, but in practice most oil on the market seems to be much less than EU's limit. I don't have any particular insight into whether the EU's limit is appropriately set.
My original point was the issue, if there is one, is with processing rather than inherent to the source. Hexane gets used because it's more efficient, not because it's strictly necessary. They can make hexane-free seed oils, but you usually only see it in premium varieties of oil like olive or grapeseed, not stuff like canola or soybean.
I am very good at super quickly looking things up. For this particular question, I did a few google searches on variations of "hexane contents of food oils", "hexane residue canola oil", and the like. I pulled most of the info on my reply from a combination of wikipedia articles (hexane, canola oil), FDA and EPA explainers about hexane in food oil, a few journal articles about hexane residue testing and alternatives to hexane, and an article on the use hexane in oil extraction from a company (Anderson International) that makes equipment for high-yield mechanical extraction of seed oils. I also poked around on some grocery shopping websites to see what I could find in terms of oils labelled "cold pressed" or otherwise indicating mechanical extraction without solvents; I already know about cold-pressed olive oil because I have some in my kitchen, and I found cold-pressed grapeseed oil, but I didn't find canola, soybean, etc in a few minutes of looking (closest I found was "organic", which is pretty close to meaningless).
It helps that I have pretty strong concept-level background knowledge of a wide range of things (product of a good memory, inconsistently-managed ADHD, and good luck in the lottery of fascinations), which helps me quickly skim for and recognize important information and fit it together into a coherent conclusion. It also makes it easier to concoct good search terms.
In this particular case, one useful area of background info is that my father is a chemical engineer/salesman by trade. Most of his career has focused on silica gel and molecular sieves, but he's also worked in industrial food processing, and I've picked up a fair amount listening to him talk about work. I didn't remember specifics until being prompted by the articles I was skimming, but once prompted I realized that I had a 3/4 forgotten framework of understanding that I was able to fit pieces of info into.
For the bit about Republican bloggers hating IRV in another thread of this post, that was about 3/4 from memory. I looked up details, like exactly how many rounds the NYC Democratic Primary went in 2021, who the candidates were running against LePage in 2010 and 2014, and the exact vote totals. But the overall sequence of events and the complaints people had about them I mostly remembered from reading various political blogs at the time. It had stuck in my mind particularly because I generally favor voting system reform and I though the complaints I was hearing were interesting but not entirely fair.
On topics where I don't know where to start looking things up productively, or don't have enough background knowledge to synthesize looked-up info constructively, I usually try to stay quiet. By picking my battles thus, I (hopefully) come off as more knowledgable than I actually am.
"Hexane is used as a solvent in large-scale commercial extraction of some oils, especially canola, corn, and soybean oil. It's used because you can get a lot more oil out of a given quantity of raw ingredients with a solvent than via cold-pressing."
I remain astounded by what the hell Americans do to food. I buy rapeseed (canola) oil from a local supermarket which is its own-brand stuff, and that manages to be cold-pressed (which I only learned now by looking it up after reading the above). It's €3.29 for 500 ml, that comes (at current exchange rates) to $3.61 in American money. I don't know if that's considered expensive or not, or what the cheapest American processed seed oils go for.
EDIT: Quick looking up online, Walmart sells Crisco canola oil for $3.28/16 fl oz, which is around 473 ml. Its own-brand "Great Value" canola oil retails at $4.33/48 fl oz, which is around 1.5 litres. So the equivalent from my grocery would be $10.83, more or less.
So yes, somewhat more expensive, but according to one online blog, Crisco do use hexane extraction (can't find out if Walmart do, but at that price I'm guessing "yes").
But yeah, any American grocery stuff which is on sale over here (some of it has crossed the Atlantic) seems - to my untutored view - to be *full* of sugar and chemicals to a degree that equivalent mass-market processed foods here aren't. Of course, some things don't have local equivalents, so that's why I'm trying American products, but goodness me. The things the great American pubic willingly consumes! 😃
I've been to England briefly and visited the "American" sections of a few grocery stores and, while I wouldn't by any means claim that our food is generally healthy, it seems like only the most sugary things make it over there. Like pop tarts.
Here's what I've noticed you can get in one place but not the other:
That's one of the reasons for postprocessing, but it varies by the type of oil and isn't a problem unique to seed oil. Butter, for instance, goes rancid quite a bit faster than raw peanut oil.
The difference is that we accept that butter goes rancid quickly. That's why butter comes in small refrigerated packages while cooking oils are sold in larger bottles on unrefrigerated shelves, even though most households go through butter a lot faster than cooking oil.
An anti-science perspective can't be convinced by science, so one must use other methods. Maybe something like that the oils in seeds were eaten by hunter-gatherers for millions of years, and seeds are good for you because plants generate whole plants with seeds to start with, and the oil helps with that. The oil is the concentrated good part of the seed, packed full of nutrients.
Note no citations supporting any of this, as I'm making it up as I go along. Best not to use this paragraph in your argument!
I don't understand why you would ask for a steel-manned anti-science argument from rationalists, who are supposed to do rational things, like use science-based evidence.
Sadly while theres some distrust of experts, he doesn't actually come to a strong conclusion; its all just a big mess of reasons to be confused and he seems to trust science much more then me.
I think you may lack even a basic understanding of anyone anti-science
The data isnt even in yet, but I predict that the long term health of the bone-lost drugs will not be great; and would attempt to lose weight with nicotine and high doses of caffeine before this decades pill.
They are highly correlated with ultraprocessed foods, which is by itself a reason to avoid them. Beyond that, there is no need to get high levels of omega-6 PUFAs in the diet; the 0.5-1.5%% of calories that were obtained in more primitive societies is adequate (compare to 8-10% in the SAD diet currently).
My assumption for a long time has been they are, on net, neutral or slightly harmful (60% chance), or at least moderately harmful (20% chance). However, some of the mechanisms by which they are harmful requires chronic exposure, while the literature exonnerating them relies on either low-duration RCTs or on longer term observational studies where I'm not convinced confounding effects are suitably accounted for.
In terms of mechanisms, the fear is they oxidized easily and can cause inflammation if you don't offset with enough omega-3. OTOH l, there are indications omega-6 PUFAs may lower inflammation by other mechanisms.
So I'm very skeptical about them but I very much agree based on my limited reading that there isn't any smoking gun proving they are harmful.
It seems nothing is too simple about this, but when I was looking into it, vaguely recall that a metabolic product of omega-6 PUFAs are lipoxins that can modulate the immune system away from inflammatory pathways.
It's not exactly anti-scientism, but I wrote a bit about this before at https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/10/for-then-against-high-saturated-fat-diets/ . I don't think you can really do this in an anti-scientism way - your prior on any given nutrient being bad is low, you have to introduce some science and evidence in order to even start worrying, and I think this leaves you open to accusations of selective credulity.
> you have to introduce some science and evidence in order to even start worrying,
Didnt the ancient greeks care about which foods caused increased ratios of black/yellow bile? Or the bible describe the cleanliness of food?
I think every culture has comments on food. Its hard to process what they say and apply it outside their narrow focus, but Id expect an opinion from everyone.
I didn't mean you literally couldn't worry, I meant that without any science you should assume your worries are groundless (as were the Greeks' worries about bile and so on)
If an ancient greek asserts that you should apply virtue ethics to food, you should eat enough to feel full but not eat too much and your a gluten, is that a "groundless" assertion with zero predictive power?
I think you're using modern scientific foresight to pick out one specific ancient Greek belief that makes sense to you, whereas at the time that would look no better or worse than other ones like "don't eat black bile" or whatever.
I also think things like "don't eat more than your body wants" are very different from "this one specific nutrient which tastes as good as any other nutrient is evil".
You can just get seed oils by themselves, and I highly recommend doing that. I do think there are better options out there (olive, and avocado for high heat) but I am dubious that seed oils are particularly toxic.
You said seed oils have “many scary chemicals in them” and I was responding to that. My understanding is that seed oils are often associated with ultra processed foods, and that’s why they get a bad rap.
Seed oils by themselves are ultraprocessed, if McDonalds is ultra processed, they probably add some ~~sawdust~~ soy flour to the meat sure; and theres some emulsifying salt in the cheese, but the real consern is the 10 step process of the rape seeds.
I'm not especially a fan of the UPF thing but my understanding is that seed oils count as Nova level 2, where 1 is unprocessed and 4 is ultra processed
I have no idea what a nova level is, but I instantly distrust it with that single suggestion.
a quick google sreach says rapeseed processing includes "Solvent extraction using hexane", wikipedia say "In industry, hexanes are used in the formulation of glues for shoes, leather products, and roofing."
I feel whoever they are are lying using the same old tricks
Life expectancies in the western world increased significantly from adult as well as childhood starting ages. For example in England+Wales from 1850 to 2000, life expectancy for a 20-year-old increased from 60 to 82. For a 40-year-old the increase was from 67 to 84.
The reduction in childhood death during that period has of course been even greater, making it the largest single factor in the overall increase in life expectancy at birth. That change is among humanity's greatest achievements, and improvement in childhood nutrition is very much one of the elements of it. It is far from being the only such improvement though.
Starting from earlier than 1850 the changes in rates of young-adult death are even more startling, something that everyone who's done serious family-tree research for any length of time learns from the data that we assemble from records. My 17th/18th century ancestral households had _far_ higher rates of young-adult death than my 20th century ones. The causes when noted in the records are largely infectious diseases, accidents, childbirth for women and war for men, with the order of those varying a bit across specific locales/time periods. (For women childbirth is a strong #1 throughout the 17th-19th centuries everywhere that I have ancestors.)
It would take extreme evidence to convince me that general health isnt in decline; "kinetic" deaths(keep blood on the inside and cleanish) are declining with clean running water and wealth, this is related to war, childbrith and being born; and I view this a low hanging fruit; slower causes of death seem mixed and confusing and its not even a "conspiracy theory" to talk about the theory of conspiracy of corruption around the food pyramids .
I'm a mid thirties secular jew moving from Canada to NYC next week. If anyone can host me for post yom Kippur - breaking of the fast meal (or knows of a secular group event to attend), id love to be included. You can learn more about me at danfrank.ca.
OH lol I can see that now. To be honest, the thread looks more like colored spackle or toothpaste or something. Not that it's that important. I've always wondered what it was supposed to be, though. Mystery solved :D
EDIT: I tried using Google Lens. Most of the search results are either for this very blog, for r/slatestarcodex, or for vaguely similar-shaped blue things with holes, which is unsurprising.
It is my impression that the public attitude to improving voting methods over FPTP ranges from complete disinterest to something like "Huh, neat." But has anyone considered advocating for better voting systems as a potential way to mitigate existential risk?
Government bodies have access to the most powerful tools available to mankind and their policies dictate how we deal with existential threats like AI regulation, climate change, use of nuclear weapons etc. Systems like FPTP seem to promote governments that represent the more extreme views of a population who are more likely to enact extreme and catastrophic policies.
If voting systems that benefitted more centrist politicians (approval, etc.) were commonplace globally, would this not reduce the risk of extreme policies?
Star voting is my choice, mostly for simplicity and understandability, and second for their evidence that it performs well under tactical voting: https://www.starvoting.org/
One (weak) anecdote against it is that platforms like YouTube and Netflix switched from star voting to approval voting, presumably because it works better in practice.
YouTube and Netflix don’t have the task of coming up with a single winner.
A major advantage of score voting is that in a polarized election it still allows a 3rd candidate to meaningfully participate.
For example, imagine that 51% of the people vote:
Triden 5/5, Bump 0/5, Shaked Koplewitz 3/5
And 49% vote:
Triden 0/5, Bump 5/5, Shaked Koplewitz 3/5
Then the vote reveals that this Shaked Koplewitz guy is not that bad in the mind of the average voter. Pure score voting would let him win, STAR would still give the win to Triden which I don’t think is right.
In that very artificial situation I think you're right.
But then all the Triden voters are going to look at that result and say "Silly me! If only a few percent of us had given Koplewitz a 0/5 instead of a 3/5 then Triden would have won, I'm not going to make that mistake again". And pretty soon everyone is either voting 0/5 or 5/5 on all candidates... just like they used to on youtube videos.
Sadly, improved voting systems seem to be well on their way to becoming a partisan issue, with Republicans aligning firmly against them.
As far as I know, this starts with Maine adopting IRV by ballot measure in 2016. The incumbent governor at the time, Paul LePage, was a Tea Party Republican who had won in 2010 and 2014 with pluralities (37% and 48% respectively) and had less than 40% approval rating at the time. In both elections, there had been a strong third-party showing by Eliot Cutler (36% in 2010 and 8.5% in 2014), a Democrat running as an Independent, and Democrats blamed LePage's victories on the Democratic vote being split between Cutler and the respective Democratic nominees in both elections. Partisans of both sides saw the measure as a way of changing the rules to keep someone like LePage from winning future elections.
Then there was the 2021 NYC Democratic Primary for mayor. The voting took over a month to process, since it took eight rounds to get to a result and there wasn't a suitably streamlined process in place for counting IRV ballots. The eventual winner, Eric Adams, had plurality support in every round's results, often by substantial margins, but he only won the final round by less than 1%. I remember Republican bloggers at the time (many of whom at least partially bought into Trump's claims about the 2020 election being stolen) complaining that the counting process was opaque and could hide fraud. They also picked up and echoed some complaints by supporters of Adams's opponents about the very narrow margin in the final round.
Then there was the 2022 Alaska special election, where there was an IRV final round between one Democrat (Mary Peltola) and two Republicans (Nick Begich and Sarah Palin). Peltola has a plurality (39.7%) in the first round and won the second round count by about 3%, but Republicans objected that 60% of voters had voted for a Republican candidate and Peltola's margin of victory (about 5k votes) was more than covered by the 15k voters who voted only for Begich and left their second choice blank, and thus abstained from the second round between Peltola and Palin. I've heard two theories underlying these complaints: that some Begich supporters failed to cast a second-choice vote by mistake and in a traditional non-instant runoff election would have voted for Palin, and that the sequence of elimination in IRV is not robust, and Begich (who finished behind Palin by a relatively narrow but nontrivial margin) would very likely have won the second round had Palin been eliminated instead.
Observing this has made me update a bit against IRV (which still think is an improvement over single-round plurality voting (*)) and Condorcet (my traditional first-choice preference) in favor of a system where the counting process is more legible, such as approval voting or Borda count, despite their known flaws.
Tangentially, MAGA Republicans (and Tea Party Republicans before them) opposing IRV seems to weigh towards your main thesis, that improved voting systems incline results away from extremism relative to the current system of two-round plurality elections where the first round is either separate partisan primaries or a top-two "jungle" primary. I.e. that the reform is being most intensely opposed by supporters of extreme candidates who have been winning some elections under the old system.
(*) I strongly object to referring to the current US system as "First Past the Post" because it does a terrible job of describing the system. The key defining feature is that there's no "post" of a specific level of support that a candidate needs to reach to win, by contrast to something like IRV where the first candidate to reach 50% support during the elimination process wins.
In a two-party system, any change to the election procedure will benefit one party more than the other, so there’s going to be a lot of friction to make any kind of change.
Yes, and Institute for Election Science occasionally gets some EA money. I think less than it used to, because many people's timelines have gotten too short for things that only pay off after long political campaigns.
That argument is made all the time, among those who are interested, at places like ACX.
However,
-- many citizens of OECD nations nowadays have a lot of accumulated threat fatigue. For decades now voters have been hearing and reading about X and Y and Z and ten more things that are each an existential threat etc etc. It all runs together for a lot of people now and they mostly tune it out. Many of them don't even vote and this is one key reason they don't. So appeals based on existential threats, particularly regarding relatively arcane things like voting systems, aren't going to ring those folks' bells anymore.
-- meanwhile citizens who have become fully animated by a particular existential threat don't want voting systems that would benefit more centrist politicians. Those convinced that immigration is now the existential threat to their nation/society/culture/racial group _want_ to elect people who will enact extreme responses to it. Ditto those who are obsessed with climate, or who've drunk the woke Koolaid, or who are card-carrying Libertarians, etc etc. For them the urgent objective is to get their own specific fellow obsessives into political power. "Benefitting more centrist politicians" sounds to them like "watering everything down and never dealing with the REAL PROBLEM!!"
The first group outnumbers the second, but the second group is more likely to show up and vote. They don't want fewer extreme views winning elections unless of course it is others' extreme views. Rather they focus on winning the battle, getting their extreme views into office and others' out.
> meanwhile citizens who have become fully animated by a particular existential threat don't want voting systems that would benefit more centrist politicians.
Most people have *zero* knowledge of a single way the structure of a system effects its outcomes, gerry-manning is a mere tip of the iceberg yet people treat it as if its wildly complicated math.
Go beyond mere advocacy of a single position, look for it everywhere; consider it always.
How big of a change was jury selection to american justice?
How much did the halving rate of bitcoin effect its price? With hindight what would you have picked, for what goals?
In ancient china mentioning someones name in a suicide note caused the state to investigate your treatment of them, how would this effect every socail interaction?
If I understand correctly, your implication is that government systems are too complex to reliable predict what effect a better voting system would have on their policy.
I agree, charting out all downstream effects is likely impossible. But is the chain of *better voting system -> more centrist politicians -> more centrists policies -> lower p(doom)* perhaps likely, or at least plausible? Could you come up with a hypothetical counterfactual outcome?
> If I understand correctly, your implication is that government systems are too complex to reliable predict what effect a better voting system would have on their policy.
No, nor should you give up on impossible (knowledge) tasks
> *better voting system -> more centrist politicians -> more centrists policies -> lower p(doom)*
> Could you come up with a hypothetical counterfactual outcome?
Well, yes; Im anti-centerist.
A boring, polite politics, makes for boring polite people in power, ai doom increases as we sleep walk into many problems.
Saw an ad that made me laugh this morning, and it has the advantage of being for FIRE, which is a great organization, so I'm sharing it here since it doubles as entertaining and getting their name out there.
At first I thought you meant an ad for Financial Independence/Retire Early.
Anyway, the ad did make me laugh too. This is what "free speech" actually means in politics - "I get to say whatever I want, and the other side is forced to shut up".
When this commercial first dropped, I saw numerous non-partisan political science-y types noting this is a much better model of the average voter's political beliefs than a "centrist" voter model (who picks the median position between the two sides).
I'm not sure the Carateca ban was warranted. The one linked comment seems to follow this pattern:
Person A: Kill all the Blacks!
Person B: You're evil for saying that. Your sick attitude has led to so much suffering, and the world would be better without you and your ilk.
Person C: "Sick" is ableist. And your whole comment is ad hominem.
Moderator D: C has a good point. B deserves a ban. Maybe we'll ban A too, for unrelated reasons.
User Carateca said that the user he was talking to (LearnsHebrewHatesIsrael/IP) didn't care about pogroms of Jews by Muslims. That's "ad hominem," but a fair comment about a user who spent a year denying or apologizing for pogroms of Jews by Muslims, denying elements of them, while regularly both-sidesing them and justifying them, often based on complete fabrications.
E.g. a week after the October 7 massacre, said user was still insisting (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-297/comment/41837470) there was no evidence Hamas killed children, after the identities of various children they killed (and kidnapped) had already been published, while also insisting that if Israel is justified in airstrikes that have civilian casualties, then Hamas is also justified in killing children.
Agree, I really like Carateca, and banning him is like banning Carl Pham, a mistake. His specific comment wasn't worth banning, and if you look at his posting history overall, his signal-to-noise is better than many, and his civility is fine.
I was intending to stay out of this, but seeing so many defenses of Carateca makes me want to publicly take Scott's side and thank him for the ban. For quite awhile now, when I saw a comment from Carateca I immediately clicked on that thin vertical line (I read ACX in my browser) to hide the rest of that discussion. I also used to do this a long time ago with a certain irritating marxist, who also eventually got banned.
LHHI's views had evolved over the last year, so I don't think going back that far in time gives an accurate picture of him today. Still, the Trump comment was bad, and not what I would have expected from him on that subject. I worry that he's got a free-floating ball of anger that latches onto different subjects, and when that happens, there's no filter between anger and keyboard. As someone who's closer to that than I'd like, I appreciated seeing how he cools off after lengthy engagement. It gives me hope for myself. And when he's not angry, he's great.
I also would like carateca back. He mellowed it a bit in the 4.5 months, since the comment, and I appreciate his perspective.
The Trump comment seems like a rant to me, not a substantive post where he's giving his views on how to handle the problem of Trump. I mean, he's writing things like "I can't stand the orange guy, the fucking Cheeto, one more second." It's as though someone had written that if they hear one more nutso story about Vance they're gonna fucking kill themselves, but not before making sure Vance gets shut up in the loony bin.
I think LHHI had sometimes been using this space to rant and vent, and that sometimes involved personal attacks, and I can see why Scott doesn't want that in his virtual living room. It's not the sort of thing that will inspire good discussion afterward. :-/
Neither Carateca or LHHIP said things that seem to me like as nearly as clear an example of pointless, empty-headed savage attacks as a couple tings I reported. Worst one was a comment to a trans woman who was friendly and articulate: "Surgery didn't make you a woman, any more than bending over and putting feathers up your ass would make you a chicken." (This commentator was not banned.) I thought LHHIP was a wonderful commentator, and a want him back. Carateca always struck me as an unpleasant person -- every comment seemed full of angry, contemptuous vibes -- but they made good, substantive comments, and are welcome back as far as I'm concerned.
Carl Pham was banned and never came back. He was a smart, consistently kind and civil commentator who lost his temper at a rando: He disagreed with rando's point, rando told Carl he had terrible reading comprehension, Carl responded that rando was an excellent example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Overall, I get the feeling that Scott doesn't read enough of the comments to see the big picture about a lot of people -- what kind of commentator they are overall.
> Overall, I get the feeling that Scott doesn't read enough of the comments to see the big picture about a lot of people -- what kind of commentator they are overall.
This seems like something that could be fixed by making a program that extracts e.g. user's 50 most recent comments.
Yes, maybe if Scott used it just for cases where there was a report. If someone is seriously arguing that we should shoot Trump, the other 49 posts don’t matter, but in a lot of cases the context matters. There was a guy posting a bunch of egregiously racist stuff about blacks, generally backed up by links that did not show what he claimed they did. I pointed that out a few times in posts, but in one post I just lost my temper and called him a racist jackass. I don’t think that particular post made any attempt to justify my judgment - but earlier posts about his bogus scientific “proofs” did. Technically the jackass post should get me banned, but in
context that’s not reasonable.
Seems to me the same with the bannings of beowulf888, CarlPham and Gunflint, all
of whom had long histories of really good posts, then lost their temper and snapped at somebody on one occasion
I'm still unclear about what can earn a ban. I like clearly stated rules, and I find myself overthinking my behavior in loosey-goosey social environments.
I confess that I used vicious sarcasm in the post that got me banned — IIRC I mentioned something about immigrants secretly sapping the vital fluids of an overtly racist Trump supporter. I guess Scott wants us to play nice, and I was punching down, but I had been viciously sarcastic to these types in the past, so I was a bit surprised that I received my ban. I make a point of not lobbing ad hominem attacks at people, but I guess someone must have flagged my post as being offensive or nasty, and Scott agreed. Oh well.
I canceled my subscription to AC10, though. Although the subscription doesn't cost much, I'm now retired and on a fixed income —and it would irk me to get permanently banned and not be able to recoup even a pro-rated subscription fee.
I’m going to bring this issue up on the next hidden thread, which I guess as a non-subscriber you won’t see, but I will pass on your thoughts. If there’s anything else you’d like me to mention on the subject, let me know.
A related matter is the handling of review ratings. Scott mentioned that he keeps the scoring going until the least-read reviews have 5 ratings. Then he tops up their ratings to give them at total of at 9 or 10, and the way he does is to put in 4 or 5 scores that are the average of all scores given to all reviews, which he sees as a fair way to handle the absence of enough info about people’s judgments of the review. I am positive it is not, and wrote him a post explaining why. I did it in conceptual terms, not mathematical ones, because he’s not mathy and my memory of the details of stats isn’t good enough to give a simple proof. What I said was that if you don’t have the real info about real ratings, you don’t have it,, and there is no way to fill in the blanks that gives a result equivalent to real info. And that if you are going to fill in the blanks yourself, the best thing to do is to give the person a bunch of scores that are midway between the average of their real scores and the mean, since the likeliest trend is that later scores will have the effect of moving the person’s average score closer to the mean . Can you add anything to this? I’m pretty sure I’m right, drawing on a good instinctive grasp of math and some half-remembered formulas but would like to strengthen the argument.
Overall, seems to me that about 2 important matters, bannings and review ratings, the systems in place are terrible, extremely weak-handed attempts to grasp the phenom in question.
> There was a guy posting a bunch of egregiously racist stuff about blacks, generally backed up by links that did not show what he claimed they did.
Yeah, I remember. That's the type of situation where each individual infraction seems relatively innocent (perhaps he misunderstood something in the article?), but when you see the same "mistake" made three times, it's an obvious pattern.
I guess different feedback systems have different effects. Karma system like the one on Less Wrong hides individual comments, but rewards or punishes the user based on their *average* contribution. Comment-reporting system punishes the *worst* contribution. If each of us had the same "standard deviation", the effect would be the same; but the systems treat very differently the people who are "mostly good, but sometimes very bad" or the people who are "mostly bad, but never too much".
>But it's of no use, the Parasitic Meme has already taken hold of the Internet Commenter, now the only thing that gives him erections and wet dreams are the sight of armed drones whizzing by in a foreign sun-burnt sky, and casualty numbers on the screens. That's the high, and it must be chased at all costs, even at the cost of the lives of their neighbors, siblings, and - indeed - children, children of children, children of children of children.
Yeah, that's pretty rude, but it is at least embedded in a post where LHHIP states his views and his reasons for seeing the "parasitic meme" view as absurd and destructive of fair-minded thinking. During the last couple month I reported something I think was a far worse instance of abuse of another poster: A trans woman, who was amiable, polite and articulate throughout, was describing her experience as a woman, and a commenter said that surgery had not made OP a woman any more than bending forward and sticking feathers up her ass would make her a chicken. I think there was another angry sentence or two along with the chicken feather sentence, but none of it was substantive, just diffuse anger. Chicken-feather-up-the-ass commenter was not banned. That comment seems to me like a far clearer example of flunking kind, true and necessary than LHHIP's, which is part of a long train of thought about how others end up seeing things in ways the LHHIP does not.
That chicken and feather stuff sounds terrible, as well. I think we need more active moderation, including faster response times, and more bans (that is, I think there are more users who aren't banned, who should be, than vice versa). As other commenters have suggested, it would seem to make sense for Scott to find someone else to assist with moderation, as he's already doing so much.
On the other hand, if someone said "if some random person left this comment I'd report it, but I like having you around, so please ease off because I don't want you to get banned", that might work. I think I might even have said that to someone in the past.
I wonder if there are things ordinary commenters like us could do. I worry that anything in the neighborhood of "chill out" would just have the opposite effect.
I personally find Carateca irritating -- regularly and severely. May actually have muted them TBH, and also I reeeally dislike ad hominem crap in particular.
All that said -- have to agree with this critique of the ban if it is based on the specific example that was linked. Carateca's comment about that other user was unpleasant. But it can't be the case that an extreme blanket description of a person who has regularly and consistently justified that specific description, is a disqualifying ad hominem attack. E.g. the fact that "fascist" is wildly overused can't end up meaning that there is _never_ an instance in which the word is in fact a reasonable individual descriptor.
Do any (US) substackers who have turned on paid subscriptions know: Is there some kind of sales tax involved? My assumption is no (since I was never charged tax for any of my subscriptions), but that seems counterintuitive.
I intend to keep giving away all the content for free, and only enable payments so that strangers who take pity on me can inexplicably give me money; so if this involves a lot of financial calculation or bookkeeping headaches I am perfectly willing to bag the idea. But if the answer others give is "I have never charged sales tax and not been arrested" then I am all for it!
If this helps in the answer, I live in Connecticut.
Sales tax (as well as use tax) is imposed at the state, not federal/US, level. Sales and use taxes typically apply only to transactions involving tangible personal property and not to services. But "typical" is doing lots of work -- services are sometimes taxed. In any event, you need to refer to state statutes to know for sure. (And lots of potential wrinkles here, like sourcing (which jurisdiction can tax the transaction) and incidence (who, seller or purchaser, owes the tax).)
It sounds like the transaction you describe is more like a gift. That might be subject to a gift tax, another creature of state law. My work deals in sales and use taxes; I don't know as much about gift taxes, but I think they generally apply only to relatively large gifts.
Also, nonpayment of sales tax leads to an assessment and then, if unpaid, to collection efforts (e.g., garnishment). You're unlikely to be arrested for nonpayment of sales tax. (At least in my jurisdiction...)
Yes! I think you have it! Im giving them nothing for their money, so how could anyone want me to tax it?
Like a character from a Taoist fable, I have once again escaped from my difficulty by being so useless that the rules I feared do not apply to me! Thank you!
I believe sell tax laws are now enforced by state on the user side; I dont understand how subscriptions would be treated differently then any other sell.
I doubt whatever substack does automatically is wrong; if taxes were actually hard to comply with no one would. The only reason I have ever paid taxes is that employers snitch, and they mostly snitch because the theres software to do it for them.
Alternative history question- how would the world be a different place if the US had not granted China MFN status in 2000, followed by China joining the WTO soon after? Interpret the question however you want, imagine an alternate universe where hawkish elements of the Republican party distrusted China and blocked MFN normalization in the early 2000s. (Pretend for the sake of the exercise that this wasn't reversed by Obama in 2008- that China staying out of the WTO was permanent).
Much higher manufacturing employment in the US, at least for a time? Presumably higher prices throughout the developed world as we'd have lacked a lower-cost manufacturing center? Maybe much higher growth in Mexico as factories moved there instead? A weaker recovery post-GFC as a smaller Chinese economy couldn't help power the world out of it? Presumably a weaker China, but a more hostile one too? Would be interested to discuss 2nd & 3rd order effects
I remember when Nike used to make sneakers in Indonesia and the likes of Michael Moore used to complain about the working conditions. Then all the sneaker manufacturing moved into China, and the working conditions remained the same, and people like Michael Moore shut up about it.
I see no reason why India wouldn't have been self-genosidal urbanization and communistic in the same way china was, maybe there's important details I miss in asain politics but my understanding is that theres several highly collectivist cultures that had zero immunity to western cultural illnesses and there's several ways to draw sea trade lines that make sense in that part of the world; when American world police says to make tech.
> The one-child policy (which I assume is what you mean by self-genocidal)
India did mass sterilization as well; you can debate the details about the details, but both highly populated, highly collectivist states; practiced eugenics within decades of each other. Both very very far away from Malthus.
> was enacted to stop starvation, not because of “western cultural illnesses”
Marx comes from germany, not china. So maoist china...
This links to a discussion of whether people need to have read the King James Version to get the references in SFF.
A discussion of *how much* of the KJV people might need to read is missing, and probably needed.
While there's a lot of discussion of the actual topic. it also turned up a number of people who hated the bible and/or hated religion in general. I didn't do a strict count, but it may have been as much as 10% of the people in the discussion. (I did make a list to see whether it was a bunch of different names rather than a few persistent posters. It was probably 20 or 30 people.)
I realized I've seen surveys that track the number of non-religious people, but never a survey that distinguishes between atheists and angry atheists. Has anybody seen one?
My assumption is that anti-religion people have mostly had abusive religious upbringings. A friend said, no, it's mostly people who are foolishly hanging on to radical views they adopted when they were young.
I have no idea how to find out, aside from whether the radical views are wrong. I told her I'd post about it here-- it's a place with a good mix of religious and non-religious people, and also people who are interested in statistics.
Anecdotally, the most firmly antireligious people I've encountered are people who come from nonreligious families but who have lived in an area with a strong, controlling presence of some particular religious grouping (ie. strong enough that the group exerts an influence on politics, schools etc.) Atheists who come from a religious background like that often hate the *particular* religious group so much that they don't have enough energy to hate other religious groups, atheists who come from a secularized area (a major city etc.) just tend towards apatheism.
Extremely religious upbringing, now atheist (solid atheist, not agnostic) sympathetic to Christianity. I feel that my time as a Christian helped strengthen some good habits for me such as honesty and forgiveness, and my time as an atheist may have contributed to losing my wonder at the beauty of nature.
And no, the NIV version or many others will do fine for getting most if not all of the references.
Also: English literature teachers (e.g. in High School) have the problem that the nineteenth century classics they might want to teach assume a familiarity with the Bible that today’s students no longer have.
Of course, if you’re teaching Shakespeare plays, they assume the reader gets a whole lot of in jokes that no-one has got since the Elizabethan era.
Consider this a first whack at the question. The usual sorts of abuse-- arbitrary rules strictly enforced, physical assault, constant insults, all with a religious claim that the parents are correct because they're obeying God. In addition, there can be fear of hell and/or apocalypse from the religion.
That’s what I suspected. You’ve defined abuse in a way that parents who literally believe in Christianity, are devout adherents and want to pass it down to their children cannot do so without being “abusive”. For example, the existence of hell, and the obvious implication of avoiding it, is an essential doctrine for almost every single Christian denomination. If you don’t want your children in hell, as any decent parent should, then you would tell them about it.
No, I am a counterexample. In fact, constant insults are an indication that the parents are not such devout adherents as to actually follow the rules themselves.
Arbitrary rules strictly enforced - Vague
Physical assault - Again vague
Constant insults - A failure of the parents to follow Christ's teachings
Claim of obeying God - Anyone who calls themselves a Christian is claiming they at least attempt to obey God. Some with more humility than others.
Fear of Hell/Apocalypse - While belief in Hell is a standard doctrine of Christianity, fear of it is not a requirement. My pastor's position was that as soon as you accept Jesus, you can be absolutely certain you are saved. Motivation to do good should come from a desire to please God and help others, not from a fear of what will happen to you otherwise.
Some of the news stories about [charming little darlings and how they turned out now they're adults] that I read make me think a bit more smacking with rulers wouldn't have gone astray.
Not for just being left-handed, though. Things like this, where I think a good smacking all round before they did anything stupid would have benefited the parties involved:
We were talking in another post about Cultural Christianity, yes? Well now we have the happy secular world where you can shack up with your stepmother, and if the woman is stupid enough to think she's somehow got a bargain there, how did she ignore the history of him being a violent little thug all along? "Oh yes I know he's not supposed to have contact with me while he's out on bail, but I let him stay in my house and now I'm surprised, totally surprised, he was violent again yet another time".
Don't tell me nuns with rulers would be a bad thing there.
My first reaction, before digging slightly further into that story, was to ask how you know that he wasn't the recipient of corporal punishment. But then *after* digging slightly further, it's clear (at a minimum) that a parental authority did in fact punish him with violence; yet, still, he turned out to be dysregulated and vaguely incestuous. I don't trust most people to decide when it's appropriate to hit kids, especially if that's the best example a semi-literate person can cite.
Deputizing untrained civilians with the authority to use force is already a recipe for abuse, doubly so when the victims are going to be children. In practice, children will (and did) get beaten for offenses that are comparably minor or shouldn't be offenses at all. The choice to use violence in most situations selects for people who are too boorish and unimaginative to think of anything else, meaning that it will often be applied when it's unnecessary. I hope we share the assumption that this is worse than other punishments being applied unnecessarily: e.g., if a parent capriciously withholds a toy from a child, it doesn't have the same effect as a parent capriciously using violence.
Of course parents (and those acting in loco parentis) have to be given broad latitude to select appropriate punishments for misbehaving children. But we've evolved to have strong norms against certain punishments because they're cruel and probably ineffective. It's never okay to molest a child as a last resort form of punishment, yet it's unclear how your post would be different if you were endorsing molestation instead.
That's half true. I think rather that Nancy's category is a mix of the basically Christian and the genuinely abusive.
For example, "arbitrary rules strictly enforced": some parents hold their children to biblical standards in love, and others are harshly legalist; by my reading, Nancy would view these both as arbitrary. (I welcome correction if I'm mistaken.) And there are families where constant insults are a thing, and some of them are religious; I have never seen one where parental atheism would have solved the problem, though.
Most rules feel arbitrary to a kid and if you think they are arbitrary, it’s probably because you are not a conservative Christian. What you call “legalism”, they would call “living a life in accordance with Christ”. It’s always the non Christians who think they know what that means, and it’s always “do the stuff that I, an atheist, think is good”.
There is also this weird development over the last couple decades where many of the things parents did that was considered normal is now “abusive”. Devout Christians are generally more traditional in parenting so that separates them from other parents.
>What you call “legalism”, they would call “living a life in accordance with Christ”. It’s always the non Christians who think they know what that means, and it’s always “do the stuff that I, an atheist, think is good”.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding, but I’m sure you already see how non-Christians would make the obvious counterargument that Christians are just as guilty of dictating to them “do the stuff that I, a Christian think is good.” The difference, an atheist might argue, is an atheist doesn’t believe that their methods are dictated by divine law or necessitate a missionary approach, whereas Christians might, so it’s imperative and justified for the Christian to persuade the atheist parent to change their approach so souls are saved in agreement with god’s will.
I am a conservative evangelical. I live in a socially progressive state, and I see the phenomena you describe all the time, so you'll get no argument from me on that front.
When I say legalism, I mean things like forbidding card playing without gambling, Christian rock, and so on; I don't mean teaching sexual virtue, the creation order, etc. This kind of legalism is much less common than atheists tend to assume, but it does happen.
Ive never seen a good survey on the subject, to throw a wrench in far right wing politics is debating embracing paganism and there always was "esoteric fascism" that will come out of left-field(teehee) for this community. You should *also* try to ask for "esoteric"-ness
> My assumption is that anti-religion people have mostly had abusive religious upbringings.
I find this very unlikely, you may as well be claiming that both "college educated adult produce less college-children"(the bible is a book that you do need to read slowly to children) and "children of alcoholics avoid drinking out of anger"(treating it as a vice... and well no)
I doubt anyone has ever tracked this explicitly, and measuring "angry" atheists would be a nightmare, but I think the agnostic/atheist split is a reasonable place to start. Just colloquially, agnostic seems to be "non-confrontational atheism" and I can't imagine an "angry agnostic". So
I used to call myself agnostic, in that "I didn't know", but eventually it felt more honest to say "I didn't believe". Ironically, that honesty probably has something to to with a religious upbringing.
It seems like a person who genuinely believes there is a 50% chance God exists would probably keep praying and giving money to church, because a 50% chance of eternal torture in hell is not fun.
So if you are not doing any of the things that religion demands of you to be saved, then I guess you believe that the chance is too small to worry about. Which makes you an atheist.
The word "agnostic" should properly refer to religious people who have doubts about their faith, but they continue following the rules just in case. When they stop following the rules, it seems they have already made up their mind.
I've tended to divide things into big-A Agnostic (it is unknowable whether God exists), little-a agnostic (I don't know whether God exists), big-A Atheist (God does not exist), and little-a atheist (I don't think God exists). I'm sort of with you on agnostic, but I wouldn't expect it to be a precisely 50% chance, or require any specific actions. (I think Pascal's Wager is silly.) I suppose it's more about the approach we take to the question, and how we think about it, when we notice that we're thinking about it. It's sort of descriptive of an internal process, if that makes sense?
That reminds me of a book I read for a research paper in college on the Moral Majority etc. The book has a chart of a moral education, which led to truth, beauty, love, etc, and thence to Peace, Prosperity, etc. In contrast, a secular humanist education led to hate, anger, etc; and thence to war, famine, genocide, ... and Keynesian economics.
Why the KJV in particular? I don't know exactly what version was used in the Anglophone Catholic church in my youth, it was something with fewer thous and thees than the King James Version, but it's not tricky to understand a Biblical reference from a slightly different translation.
The big one that always tripped me up as a kid was why protestants put an "H" on "Alleluia".
I think all of the classic (say, pre-1960 mainstream) translations are roughly equally quotable. I mean,
"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life."
John 3:16 . Possibly the most quoted verse in Christendom. And is anyone not going to recognize that, or say that I got it wrong, because I didn't cite it exactly as,
"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life"?
Revised Standard Version vs King James Version, if anyone is wondering.
Would add it's the one with the most impact on the literary world (eg "when the Bible is quoted in a cultural work that is not as a religious exercise, they are usually quoted KJV".
Agreed that the exact version isn't important when it comes to content rather than a specific quotation (and in fact more accessible translations might be better for understanding).
I don't know its etymological history in Christendom but I do believe that the "H" in "Hallelujah" better tracks its Hebrew pronunciation.
FWIW, I consider the history of Christianity (from dominance in Rome) to be a decent argument against Christianity "as we know it up until around 1900". The more modern version seems to be significantly more acceptable, and some people really seem to need that crutch.
OTOH, I'm not an atheist. I just have a wildly divergent idea of what the gods are. And one of their characteristics is that only act through biological entities, and they are distributed through gene-pools. (Consider that as the thing that Jungian archetypes were trying to describe.)
That said, I can be quite angry when forced to endure "traditional" Christian ceremonies. Usually, though, I'm not. Also I didn't have an abusive religious upbringing (except I had to read the Bible). My anger at traditional Christian symbols is due to a study of history, and an identification as an adult with a minority religious group...before I analyzed just what I actually believed about the gods. (P.S.: The minority religion was explicitly intended NOT to be taken seriously. And was generally tolerant of divergent beliefs.)
Christians have seen continuity there since the time of the New Testament; consider, for example, the book of Hebrews. Unless you want to go full Marcionite, you've got to bite the bullet and accept that God's commands to Joshua were just and in accord with his eternal character.
Anybody else immediately go and see what the banned comments were? I remember snitching about one because is was so discordant at the time, but reading them all in a row is morbidly fascinating.
I like many of the banned comments because it's easier to understand what someone beleives and why when they don't filter themselves. Like the one about wishing the first Trump assassin had not missed: it's useful to know the guy who said that beleived it in evaluating his other opinions and general worldview.
Of course, I have an unusually detached attitude about my own beliefs, so such comments don't bother me--and I actually enjoy a little toxic sewage in the comments section. (I also understand why Scott has the moderation rules he does; his house, his rules, and all that)
The Learn Hebrew guy was obnoxious. Every comment was self righteously performative and how everyone who believed differently from him was a bad person.
I also think it's useful to know what people believe, but a _lot_ of world views (even ones that I consider pretty horrible) can theoretically be expressed in respectful enough ways that I'm pretty sure Scott wouldn't ban for them. Generally, it seems to me that Scott is banning not for having, or even expressing, a particular view, but rather for saying it in a way that increases noise, decreases quality of conversation, etc. And I think that's pretty reasonable.
-edit- note that _several_ of the bans have an explanation from Scott that it's only being banned because the user appended an insult on the end, not for the view/opinion being expressed.
I do not need LHHI's diatribes to know that a great many people hate Israel in approximately all of the ways and with all of the justifications that he cites. Nor to know that some of these people have read widely and deeply to find ammunition for their online holy war. I think one would have to live in a fairly isolated bubble not to have learned that much by now.
And I don't much care that LHHI specifically is one of the many, many people who hold that approximate set of beliefs, nor to know exactly how he's tailored his personal expression of those beliefs. If he's going to be a member of this community, then yes, it's good to know that there is a member of this community that really hates Israel. But there's also the option of *not* needing to know that such a person is a member of this community, because he isn't a member of this community.
I prefer that state of affairs. We can if necessary send scouts to report back on the sorts of hate being expressed beyond the walls of this garden.
> Generally, it seems to me that Scott is banning not for having, or even expressing, a particular view, but rather for saying it in a way that increases noise, decreases quality of conversation, etc. And I think that's pretty reasonable.
> note that _several_ of the bans have an explanation from Scott that it's only being banned because the user appended an insult on the end, not for the view/opinion being expressed.
According to Scott's reply, it fails the "must be at least two of true, necessary, and kind".
It wasn't _unkind_, and I think neutral gets a pass on that one. I feel comfortable saying it "wasn't true", although that's obviously the thing being contented. So the killer was that it was unnecessary. Starting a debate on whether or not the holocaust is real was completely unnecessary. That's obviously a judgement call. I happen to agree with Scott in this case. I'm not _inherently_ against that discussion (although I agree with the other commenter that, for me personally, it would be a waste of time, so I have no interest in participating), but just deciding to spring that discussion in a barely tangentially related thread is a recipe for bad discussion.
Yes, Scott is careful about his stated reasons for bans. I would just go so far as to say personal insults can also be useful discourse, at least for how I parse opinions and arguments.
What are your personal experiences contemplating AI and whatever degree of existential risk you perceive from it?
For me, I've mostly seen gen AI as an exciting new wave of technology and an interesting career opportunity, similar to the Internet and mobile. I'm also sympathetic to x-risk arguments such as it being a bad idea to create entities potentially much more capable than humans, and every once in a while I fall into a meaningful amount of worry about the future, especially for my young daughter. Reflecting on OpenAI's o1 model has been a notable trigger, probably the biggest since GPT-4. Of course, there's very little I can do to affect the course of history, and we all have to die of something. So I mostly put it out of mind.
That aspect reminds me a bit of what it felt like thinking about nuclear weapons while I was growing up in the 80's. The periodic feeling of dread followed by resignation and turning back to more practical concerns. I imagine a lot of people feel that way about climate change these days as well, although personally I think we now have the technology to address that, hopefully without too much damage in the interim.
I think that 'normie' AI-risks: white-collar unemployment, election capture by superstimulus propaganda, automated warfighting, etc, are nothingburgers. Whereas I think 'Yudkowsky-doomposting' AI-risks are basically guaranteed and we're all at a ~95% probability of being paperclipped.
I'm bullish on the majority of the normie risks because "We already have that at home". Elections are already fake and gay, jobs are already fake and gay (see: Graeber), and conscripted humans are already capable of systematic brutality to each other. AI ain't gonna bring anything new to the table here.
But to not get paperclipped, you have to get alignment right, first time with no practice. Good luck with that. The doom-skeptic crowd might crow "But LLMs are dumb!", and they're right: I'm not expecting to get paperclipped this decade, but whenever (even if it's in centuries) the kicked can gets to the end of the road and AI achieves superintelligence, the proplem rears its ugly head again and I have only 5% confidence that even future humans will be able to solve it.
I remain convinced that AI will not be the problem, it'll be the humans using AI (and putting all their trust in it, and encouraging the rest of us that we can believe and trust our new robot overlords) who will be the problem.
I don't think we're ever going to get superintelligence or post-scarcity utopia, but neither do I think we'll all be living in the cyberpunk dystopia (unless our current world is it).
If the vast changes feared/hoped for do come, they will be of such a kind that it's impossible for us to forecast what the world of that day will be like. Think of all the futurology of the past which said that "by the year X, the world will be like this" and it's not.
Me, I think that it'll just be same old "the rich get richer and the poor stay poor".
I believe some British historian from 1860s or thereabout predicted that in a hundred years and counting, slavery would be abolished everywhere, even women would get the vote, child mortality would almost vanish, longevity would increase, most deadly diseases would find cures, travel would be so cheap that even ordinary people would regularly travel abroad, and prosperity would generally keep on improving and improving.
Could not locate his name on a quick internet search, but it shows that not everyone who made predictions about the future back then were mistaken. We just happen to give more press to scholars from the past who predicted doom and gloom than those who predicted “nah, for most indicators it will keep getting better and better.” Same today, I guess.
But did he predict rock'n'roll, the Sexual Revolution, the end of the British Empire, the Swinging Sixties and men on the moon?
That's the kind of huge social, technological and cultural changes that Scott predicts will come about if we get super-smart AI, and the kind of things we cannot simply extrapolate from trends of today. The British historian of 1860 may have been able to extrapolate "travel is getting so efficient and cheap that soon even ordinary people will be able to afford it", but I'm betting he did not foresee that respectable young women would be having sex before marriage and this would be deemed acceptable by society at large.
So trying to predict "if we get god-level AI, the future will be magic" based on our current experience with the economy, with government, with work, with people in or not in work, etc. is not going to get us anywhere; we will be like the futurologists of the past who confidently predicted that in the far-flung year of 1980 people would only be working three days a week for a few hours a day and would have so much leisure they would not be able to fill it all and in the 21st century there would be tourism on the Moon with people taking trips to stay in the lunar hotels and resorts.
You refer (implicitly) to Keynes, and his often-ridiculed 1930 prediction that:
“… a hundred years hence we are all of us, on the average, eight times better off in the economic sense than we are to-day.…three hours [work] a day is quite enough”
But you’ll have to give it to Keynes that he sort-of predicted the sexual revolution in the same essay:
“When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues.”
...that’s Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and (a few weeks later) Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, both in the summer-of-love anno 1967, where it all started!
(Keynes by the way did his fair personal share to bring about a less Victorian code of sexual morals, but that is a digression.)
Be that as it may, it is hard to be too crabby toward a man who writes so well:
"We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good
to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour
and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of
taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin."
...even though his whiggish-type predictions were, well, a bit much on the sunny side:
....but none the less, with the benefit of hindsight, should we not say that he has at least been a bit more right in his predictions than the doom-and-gloom people among his contemporaries (at least once the significant bump of WW2 was overcome...). As Angus Deaton illustrates in his book "The great escape" [from absolute poverty], the old Whiggish way to interpret history & predict the future has not been totally off the mark.
Not least, perhaps, since the warnings of the doom-and-gloom people help us to correct the course as history marches along. Influential negative predictions are a societal self-correction mechanism.
Let's put aside the idea of AI killing us. Even in an optimistic scenario, AI development means that it will increasingly take on more tasks in our society, and it will do so in a way that no one understands. Someone will question why it does something, then it perfectly executes its task. We won't know why it does something, but we will know that it's extraordinary in whatever it does. Humanity will relinquish its autonomy to these entities because of their capabilities. What if they start acting weird and we try to change them, but they won't let us?
The current generation of AI has only the risk of causing extreme economic disorder. Some few will benefit.
We already have sufficient weaponry that a lunatic government is an existential risk, and over time if people keep running things we will get a lunatic government.
An AI is probably a one time risk. A superhuman AI is definitely an existential risk, but it eliminates the risk of a lunatic government. It's probably a better bet if we're reasonably careful. But if it fails, it may lead to a quicker existential termination event. (The "lunatic government" is a x%/year risk, the AI is a y% during the singularity. After a while x%/year is larger than y%.)
FWIW, I put the risk of AI being an existential termination event at 50%, but without any real basis for that estimate...and the exact number doesn't matter anyway. We can't figure it closely without more idea of what the AI will evolve into after it "immanentizes the eschaton". The best security is to design AIs that like people.
Since moving to the UK in 2019, I've really struggled to find reliable legal and accounting services. Broadly: my experience has been of high fees and unreliable service, e.g. a 400 GBP/hour lawyer from a top firm who doesn't reply to email or answer the phone, one accountant who agreed to take me on as a client and then completely ghosted me, and another who charged me 500 GBP to resolve an issue for me without telling me that I could have done the same for myself with a 5 minute call to HMRC.
When I mention this to my British colleagues, their response is generally "yes that's my experience of accountants and solicitors as well: you have to babysit them to make sure they do the work." I hesitate to attribute this to UK versus US cultural stereotypes, but my experiences with US accountants and lawyers have been much more positive. In short: if you're willing to pay for quality, you get it.
So here's my question for you: my US accountant is fantastic but cannot advise me on the UK side of my taxes. How can I go about finding someone who I won't have to babysit, who is familiar with ex-patriot issues, and (ideally) who doesn't charge an arm and a leg? (I'm willing to compromise on the third if I can have the first two!)
Any direct professional or firm recommendations would also be most welcome. Thanks for your help!
Irish not British, but my Lord yes. When my father died, it took a solid year of me nagging the solicitor to get the estate probated, and it wasn't huge sums of money or a complicated will involved. He was plainly just dragging it out so he could charge me for "you phoned me, that's a charge; I wrote a letter, that's a charge; you called in to the office and I passed a message on via the secretary, that's a charge".
I suppose the upside of America being a litigious society is that the lawyers are efficient. I will say that our current accountants (at work) are very good, but the last lot... weren't.
I've always had crap experiences with solicitors and most people I know have similar. The people I know who praise their solicitors are wealthy and got in touch with them through personal connections.
Just adding my thanks for this - I wasn't sure if the hidden threads were still being published and I wasn't getting them, or if it was only a semi-regular thing. I also like reading them.
I'm an upper-year undergraduate studying philosophy. I enjoy some aspects of analytic philosophy (Quine, Davidson) and OLP (Austin, Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell), but overall I find myself more drawn to Continental thinkers. Especially Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, and also others like Gadamer and Derrida. My impression is that many philosophy enthusiasts on this blog are more influenced by analytic philosophy that more explicitly models itself on science. Many commenters actually seem very hostile to continental philosophy. So some questions I have are 1) which philosophers do you admire 2) why do you admire them 3) what philosophers don't you find value in 4) why don't you find them valuable? 5) what are your impressions of continental philosophy? 6) If you are hostile, why?
When you talk about "enjoying some aspects of analytic philosophy" or being "drawn to Continental thinkers"— that makes me curious as to what problems in philosophy interest you. What draws you in?
I ask because some people seem drawn to this or that philosophical tradition because they think it's really getting at the truth, or maybe they like the writing style, or something about the "approach to life" of the authors appeals to them, etc etc.
Hi Martin, thank you for your reply. By drawn to I mean getting at the truth. I am especially convinced by Heidegger’s dismantling of skepticism and the whole subject-object divide, which many Anglo-American philosophers (though not OLP philosophers) can’t seem to get over. I love and agree with pretty much everything Arendt’s written (she’s my favourite philosopher). Most especially her accounts of labour/work/action in The Human Condition and thinking/judging in her later work. I appreciate Gadamer’s (and Heidegger and Blanchot) insistence on the non-aesthetic truth of art. But like you say, it’s not just that I think they’re more true. I think what I find most compelling in a philosopher is creative problem solving, or rethinking the terms of the question (I don’t agree with a lot of Quine, but I think this is very compelling). I think that’s what brings together the thinkers I’m interested in.
How about you Martin, what draws you to a philosopher?
I think it's changed over the years, and I come back to the same philosopher for different reasons at different times. Definitely a feeling that they're getting at the truth of things is important, but my sense of what that means isn't the same as it was 10 or 15 years ago either. I was never drawn to the modern continental tradition mostly because it seemed intentionally obscure or stylistically impenetrable but maybe that's just me. I think I'm naturally drawn to philosophers who have a certain humaneness and appreciation for real life problems (or at least it seems like that to me) eg. the Hellenistic thinkers, Seneca, Augustine, Montaigne, Pascal, Hume. I tried getting into Heidegger multiple times but even when he's translated into English it feels like we're still speaking very different languages. That said, I've always been interested in Chan/Zen and I think they've got a lot of similar ideas to Heidegger but approached from almost an anti-philosophy perspective.
Hi Martin, that's very interesting, especially the idea of coming back to philosophers for different reasons at different times. I admire your interest in authors that deal with human problems. Of the authors you list I've found myself very moved by Augustine. Initially I thought that if I just truly knew what was good I would do it, and reading Confessions made me realize that practicing goodness was a question of willing as well as knowing, which so far I've found really profound. Are there any insights from these thinkers that especially influence(d) how you act? Interestingly Heidegger himself said that he found a lot of confluence between his thought and zen - but he was committed to dismantling the Western tradition from inside (Destruktion) rather than from outside by adopting Eastern ways of thinking. What do you think of that idea?
Dang that's a hard question, and a good one. Off the top of my head, in terms of practical/real world effects, I'd say Sissela Bok's book on lying did a lot to convince me that lying is almost never ethically permissible in normal circumstances (it should almost be considered as being on the continuum of the use of force).
re: Heidegger, first I should say I'm no expert in his thought. But I'm not sure I'd want to dismantle the Western tradition from the inside or without. I think it's shown itself to be a healthily progressive enterprise that is capable of change and growth, even if we often get stuck in conceptual ruts. But I think the tradition has shown, and is starting to show more, openness to ideas from south and east Asia.
Hi Martin, that sounds interesting, I am excited to read it.
re: Heidegger - I tend to agree, Heidegger exaggerates his departure from Western Philosophy, and in some very meaningful ways his departure is dramatic (especially his idea of truth-as-revealing and rejection of substance ontology), but in other ways he's more continuous with it than he credits. With that said, even when he's committed to dismantling the tradition, on my reading it's never as simple as rejecting it, but rather learning from its mistakes and impact on us.
1) which philosophers do you admire 2) why do you admire them
- I'll add another vote for Stanley Cavell. Hugely underrated. Has anyone else written so insightfully on the relationship between philosophical questions and affective life? He remains underappreciated, I think, because he doesn't fit comfortably into either the "analytic" or the "continental" categories, so he gets treated as a marginal figure by both.
- Among contemporary US philosophers, writers on aesthetic topics (e.g. Sianne Ngai, C. Thi Nguyen), seem particularly successful at identifying and exploring interesting new questions.
- Like many people, I admire Robert Brandom more than I actually read him, but I see a lot of value in his insistence on working across different (Euro-American) philosophical traditions, rather than just picking one and working within it. Also in his adoption of a "system building" rather than a "problem solving" approach, not because system-building is an inherently superior way to do philosophy, but because this approach is now so unfashionable that its philosophical potential goes unrecognized and unexploited.
3) what philosophers don't you find value in 4) why don't you find them valuable?
- Most of post-1970 analytic metaphysics. Wittgenstein shows the fly how to escape from the bottle, but apparently now the fly wants to go back in? I don't get it.
5) what are your impressions of continental philosophy? 6) If you are hostile, why?
- The "one big thing" continentals understand better than analytics is how much history is embedded into "philosophical" questions. They quite frequently offer inaccurate and tendentious accounts of that history, but at least they recognize that it matters. As for particular thinkers: some, like Foucault or the Frankfurt School, can offer valuable perspectives. (Take them seriously but not literally!) Some, like Derrida, just seem like they are wasting my time.
Hello, thank you for your reply. I haven’t heard of those aestheticians, I will be sure to research them, thank you. I agree for sure on Stanley Cavell. I haven’t read much Frankfurt School beyond Walter Benjamin, do you have any suggestions for where I should start?
More broadly, what draws you to philosophy, or what do you think connects the thinkers you’re keen on?
Adorno's *Minima Moralia* is a good entry point, since it's aphoristic and you can browse through it for the bits that connect to your own concerns. It's a bit like Nietzsche in that respect, but just as with Nietzsche, you eventually need to spend some time thinking through the bits that initially seem to make no sense, or you'll come away with a mistaken impression of the whole.
After that, Adorno + Horkheimer's *Dialectic of Enlightenment* is the big programmatic statement, and it's the main thing that comes to mind when I hear "Frankfurt School." Habermas' *The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere* is quite accessible, and it's not quite the book you might expect if you have only heard about it from second-hand sources. It's helpful for seeing the continuities between Adorno + Horkheimer's concerns and Habermas' later work.
At some point, a good intellectual history like Jay's *The Dialectic Imagination* helps put the whole movement in perspective, particularly for filling in any gaps in your background understanding of Hegel, Marx, and Freud.
>"what draws you to philosophy"
I think my own tendencies to philosophize are mostly just a bad habit, so I appreciate philosophers who are looking outward at the world rather than inward at yet another deeper layer of philosophy. This is why I don't tend to spend too much time reading Brandom, despite my admiration for his overall vision and his patience in working though the details: he's very much a philosophers' philosopher, and I suspect his writings may be a siren song luring me to my doom. It's also why I think Cavell was so great: he didn't see philosophy as a way to demonstrate his own intellectual superiority, but as a way to make (partial!) sense of a wide range of human experience.
These are great recommendations, thank you. That's interesting on the point of being a bad habit, in what way do you mean that? I sometimes wonder that about myself too - I notice that in day to day conversations I have a bad habit of linking everything back to philosophy, which I assume is grating for the people around me. On the other hand, I feel like I've gotten a lot of important insights out of philosophy, and I find it so exhilarating.
What philosophers, other than Cavell, do you think of as having this outward rather than inward focus?
Well, I became a historian of science after coming to the conclusion that a lot of philosophical questions are better addressed in the archive than in the armchair. Ian Hacking, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison are some of the best examples of that sort of work. Also Shigehisa Kuriyama's philosophically inspired work on the history of medicine, which is not nearly as well known as it should be.
Ethics: Bernard Williams explored the "Limits of Philosophy" for our understanding of moral life, and drew extensively on literary examples as material for thinking with. (I believe Martha Nussbaum is known for adopting a similar approach, but I haven't read much of her stuff.)
Philosophy of mind: Peter Godfrey-Smith does a good job of thinking through the philosophical implications of comparative neurobiology, and also teaches you a lot of fascinating facts about octopuses. Hard to beat that!
This is very interesting. I am excited to look into all of these. Thank you for the advice. Do you have any advice about what mistakes I should look out for when I think about the history of science coming mostly from philosophical interpretations of it (Logical Positivism, Kuhn...)?
The problem with Analytic philosophy is that it really wants to be ultra rigorous in a way that leaves no doubt to the claims they make but you can't really do that. We figured out how to make valid arguments a long time ago, the arguments are almost always about the premises but the premises can't be 100% proven. Analytic philosophers then confine themselves to narrow problems.
Continental philosophy is more open, and quite frankly, less boring, but it can get carried away in layers of abstraction that you need to peel to understand and often start with questionable, unstated premises.
Personally, I think continental philosophy has more potential in that it's trying to talk about questions that we care about. It just has this historical baggage that gets in the way.
That’s very interesting, I tend to agree. Do you find any people fruitfully bringing the two together? And more broadly, what draws you to philosophy/what are your “questions we actually care about?”
I’d say that the things I care about are questions of values, like ethics and questions about our society. Ethics is an active discipline in analytic philosophy but I find most of it just wrong. Nick Bostrom does philosophy but it’s very different from traditional questions but it involves futures which we obviously should care about.
I got a lot out of reading The Society of the Spectacle, which is about how our society uses images to alienate us from each other. Written in 1967, it is even more relevant in the social media age.
That is interesting, I was first drawn to philosophy for very similar reasons. Are there any ethicist philosophers that you find for yourself insightful? and what do you find limited about analytic ethics?
Contemporary ethics is essentially trying to find the Universal Platonic Truths about ethics as if it written in to the fabric of the universe. If we just reason hard enough, we'll eventually figure out, as if solving a math problem. There's no reason to believe this is true and the arguments they give are bad. On the other side, you have people who say that aren't any objective moral truths, and I don't think that really bears out either. If you had a tribe that made an obligation out of drinking arsenic, that tribe is clearly doing something wrong. They're going to do die out. It's weird to give their morality equal status to a tribe that doesn't do that.
I'm going to write a longer post about this issue sometime in the next week. I'm pulling more from moral psychology than philosophy, specifically:
Moral Tribes by Joshua Greene
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
The Weirdest People in the World by Joseph Henrich
Especially the last one, because it argues that some beliefs are just clearly better in that they help their members succeed.
I think there has been a lot of crossover in the last decade or so. I remember being the same kind of boat as someone contemplating grad school options, with enjoying the analytical/Anglo philosophy methods but believing there was really interesting ideas in the Continental side. I can't recall the list of thinkers I ended up finding who did this well as I ended up going into another dismal discipline ;).
Canadian thinkers, perhaps because of the dual inheritance of English and French, do a good job crossing the two including Joseph Heath (particularly his more academic work), Charles Taylor, and Ian Hacking.
More classicaly, I think Habermas is very underrated and is maligned as a critical theorist in the same vein as Marcuse. In reality, he seems to be extremely capital L liberal in a manner closer to Arendt.
I also think a lot of conservatives convientently forget how much their favourite Jewish emigres (Strauss, Hayek or Morgenthau) are actually closer to their Marxist Jewish fellow emigres.
Hi Skelton, thank you for your reply. That’s very interesting, I find myself in the same boat (and actually descend from a similar, though less famous, cohort of Jewish emigres). Where do you recommend starting with Habermas? And more broadly, what drew you to philosophy, and what caused you to go into a different discipline instead?
I was equally interested in the empricial side and theory side of political science, so that was how I got into philosophy generally (and as you can see, all my references or recs are in social or political philosophy!).
I think Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action is the best bet but I think more invested readers delineate between different periods of his work. Its elegant (for Habermas at least) and if you close your eyes, some parts dont seem that different from game theory or analytic philosophy - although nothing of the sort of like min-max discussions found in Rawls.
I went from studying and wanting to focus on political science and philosophy to political science and economics - mainly because I needed to be more risk averse in my career outcomes for family reasons, but also because I realized that economics was more philosophically loaded than I initially thought.
Thank you for the recommendation, I will be sure to check it out (I have a seminar on Rawls and Liberalism next term, so it will be a nice compliment). I hear you on the point of career risk, I am constantly debating whether I should go to grad school for philosophy, which I find exhilarating, or play it safer and go to law school. I am glad that you found a career that bridged the two for yourself :)
"I also think a lot of conservatives convientently forget how much their favourite Jewish emigres (Strauss, Hayek or Morgenthau) are actually closer to their Marxist Jewish fellow emigres."
Do you mind developing this a bit more? Closer than what?
Closer than their political alignments (marxist and anti-marxist) and their politcal/intellectual heirs would suggest.
The conservative emigres were equally Continental in the themes they were seized by (modernity, power, rationality). They were part of the same intellectual circles that studied the same German thinkers (i.e, Nietzche, Weber) back in Europe and also were being part of the same social circles once they arrived to the US (New School, UofChicago). In some sense, like cohorts of investors who were respectively scarred by the Great Depression or the Great Inflation, the generational scarring of Nazism and WWII also probably helped.
I don't want to stress this too much, they were very different but they shared the same fount and that matters at least some.
I was talking to some people this past weekend about how doctors have become so reliant on pharmaceuticals when dealing with patients that they can overlook all kinds of issues with the patient or with the pharmaceuticals or both. I made the statement "human beings are by nature lazy and mendacious" and one person objected vehemently. What do you think?
We live in an age of miracles where there are effective drugs for many things. You can still be unlucky and have some weird thing where they either don’t know what it is or don’t have a good treatment for it, but, often, you’re in luck.
Last time I was in the ER, after being diagnosed by an actual doctor, they send in a medical student to practise on me
The student, who doubtless going to be questioned about this afterwards, is even more thorough on asking questions…
Med student “your hands are kind of blue. You don’t spill blue dye or anything on them, did you?
Me: “No, that is not blue dye.”
(I don’t want to be mean to the poor med student here. He was actually doing pretty well at noting relevant observations. If you’re wondering, my blood oxygen sp02 was down below 80% at one point during this adventure).
Medicine is a big field and your comment is broad.
I can comment within the ER/urgent care realm. What folks might find interesting is how often people get *really pissed off* if they don't get prescribed antibiotics for their viral URI (or insert pointless treatment for benign condition that would just resolve on its own here). I can't give a percentage, and a pretty big chunk of them ultimately get it after you sit down and explain everything, but some people just really want a z-pac.
Elsewhere in the thread Anonymous Dude mentioned the fun that we get to have with EMRs (I've used almost all the major ones, Epic and Cerner are actually probably the two best). Once you add the significant time pressure found in the above environments and patient expectations of receiving some sort of prescription, and you can see why there are issues like over prescribing antibiotics.
So, I am not sure of your "lazy and mendacious" argument. One of the good things about our host's writing, and indeed many of the comments here, is the emphasis looking at the system and sets of incentives in whatever is being discussed. Again, your initial comment was pretty broad and talking about all doctors. You may have had a bad interaction with a specialist of some sort. But at least within the world of generalists, I don't think most docs or midlevels are lazy liars (although like within any large group of people there are some of those I am sure). I think there is a combination of patient expectations to being given a prescription for something, combined with significant time constraints and systemic inefficiencies that leads to providers going down a path of least resistance.
Edit: I just realized I should make it clear that I actually agree that overprescribing is a problem, more taking issue with your reason for why. Would also make clear that this is important issue, off the top of my head for antibiotic resistance reasons, not to mention the low but real amount of side effects even in commonly used meds.
> What folks might find interesting is how often people get *really pissed off* if they don't get prescribed antibiotics for their viral URI (or insert pointless treatment for benign condition that would just resolve on its own here).
In China the pointless treatment would be an IV drip of saline solution. People will visit the hospital for that if they have a cold. It's insane.
I saw a former student once post on Wechat about how she'd been sick and visited her university medical center for an IV, only to be told that they wouldn't do that for her because it wouldn't help. She was very upset, complaining that this made her feel like they didn't even care that she was sick.
I would say that this at least has some advantages in not promoting antibiotic resistance, but I'm pretty sure that at least some antibiotics are available over the counter.
It's probably true that doctors rely a bit too much on pharmaceuticals, but to be fair, I get why pharmaceuticals would be considered a "first resort" for doctors. *When they work*, pharmaceuticals are fantastic. Very quick, very efficient, both for the doctor and for the patient. It's win/win *when it works*. And it works often enough that I can understand why a doctor might choose to turn to it first.
That being said, possible side-effects should never be skimmed over, and in some cases the side-effects can be worse than what's actually being treated. Patients should make informed decisions here.
I do think human beings in general aim for quick/easy solutions. Laziness is sometimes a factor here, but other times it's simply about wanting to be as efficient as possible with one's time.
I think it's probably true. We're monkeys made to reproduce and survive, ethics and reason are bolted on later.
There is some aspect of cognitive saturation in that particular example, I think. Not that doctors aren't corruptible or greedy (I'm always willing to think the worst of anyone), but having looked at some of these systems like Epic and Cerner, they are incredibly baroque and complicated, set up for billing rather than patient care, and full of endless redundant alerts that waste time. They also have a huge load of documentation in directly patient-facing specialties, with one I knew a while back having to go back and work on patient notes for hours after her shift was over. So I'm not surprised they tend to get into a pharmaceutical-fix mentality; there's just so much extra regulatory documentation to do.
Medical school probably selects against laziness, though I don't know about mendaciousness.
"Humans are by nature X" seems generally false for any X that describes personalities, since we describe X relative to a human baseline (Humans are lazy relative to who? Ground sloths? Other humans?) And it seems false in this narrow group (doctors are probably significantly more conscientious and hardworking than the average human). So I'd say a description of "looking into potential issues with the patient or pharmaceutical is hard work most doctors don't have the spare resources or motivation to do" is a more accurate description.
Obviously a person must be conscientious to make it all the way through, but after doing the job for 20 years anyone would get whittled down a bit, no? My experience tells me this is the case for all professions. All I'll add is that as you grow older learn to take whatever a doctor tells you with skepticism.
I agree with the lazy part, preserving calories used to be important for us. I don't think the lying part is borne out by psychology research. Or I guess, it depends on where you draw the boundary between gross negligence in rigorous thinking and lying. The former is certainly quite common.
I feel the opposite; I don't celebrate bans but they do show that Scott is actively maintaining the system he's described wanting to govern this community.
A country can have a beautifully drafted constitution, full of rights, protections, and separation of powers, but nevertheless be a barely-organized swirl of chaos, coups, and countercoups because said constitution isn't followed.
There needs to be a line somewhere, and there will always be people too close to the line, so that the decision feels arbitrary. But if you move the line, soon there will be people too close to the new line.
I would prefer a system where the bans are coming *more quickly*, but they are *shorter*. (And yes, a certain number of short bans results in a permaban.) But that would mean more work for Scott... unless he could somehow delegate that job.
That tracks- I'd welcome something like that as well, if Scott has the bandwidth or could figure out trustworthy surrogates. Seems like frequent short bans could serve as teachable moments for people and (where possible) could correct behavior rather than just weeding them out of the garden root-and-branch.
Definitely more resource intensive, but the richer option if it's feasible.
Pretty sure he doesn't, given the kids. And even if he does, I think it would be more pleasant both for him and for us if he spent his free time writing new articles rather than moderating comments.
Substack probably doesn't provide support for this kind of moderation. But I can imagine something like the moderators having a shared online document where they nominate the bans and vote for them, and Scott just announces the bans at each Open Thread.
The shared document could contain the hyperlinks and quotes from the offending comments; optionally with an explanation why that is a bad thing (sometimes not obvious from the comment itself without context). Then each moderator would vote "ok", "warning", "ban", or "permaban" (in the most extreme cases), optionally with a short explanation why. The median vote would then happen (of course, Scott can override any of this). Kinda similar to how Wikipedia handles voting about problems. There should be enough moderators so that each proposal gets at least three votes.
Another document would contain a *history* of users and their warning and bans. First, so that multiple warnings result in user being given a ban instead of yet another warning. Second, the length of the ban could depend on how many previous bans there were, for example: "one week", "two weeks", "one month", "two months", "three months", "permaban"; maybe automatically increasing at each ban, and automatically decreasing after six months with no bans nor warnings (so that the moderators only vote for "ok / warning / ban / permaban" rather than argue about the specific length of the ban).
Scott, if you happen to read this and like the idea, I volunteer to do the related bureaucracy (count the votes, prepare the summary for each Open Thread) *without* voting on the bans myself (better separation of powers). Just make an empty Google Drive folder and share it with me and the moderators; I will do the rest, and we will figure out the details as we go.
I would greatly appreciate it if you could you give a source for this saying. I'm either not familiar with it or have forgotten it, and it sounds like something I should know.
Yes, I always get a sinking feeling when I see one of these banning sessions, too. I'll miss Carateca.
My reaction doesn't quite rise to the level of "dread," but I get your sentiment. I'm bummed out; I enjoyed both LearnsHebrewHatesIP and Carateca. They often had tremendously fun spicy posts, and I don't think either post they were actually banned over necessarily rose to the level of "deadly poisonous."
Admittedly pretty high; I once dissuaded my co-moderators of a 20k+ regional group on a different site from banning a member who repeatedly directly insulted me and then publicly solicited that I be raped. I considered it a victory.
LLHIP's comment struck me as very deliberate hyperbole intended to express a tremendous frustration with a person who is arguably the most polarizing figure of our time. Weighed against many previous posts which were calm and provided sources, I didn't take the emotional one particularly seriously.
And I was also advocating for both of them; if I had to choose, Carateca is the bigger loss.
Which US city over 50,000 residents has the strictest enforcement of minor law violations? For example, are there any cities where the police will bother stopping and fining every single car that blasts loud music from their stereo system?
I tried arguing I'm eligible for vaccination ion grounds I have Grvaes disease (thyroid conditiin) and, in my case, the effect of the thyroid condition on my heart gets me an official diagnosis of atrial fibrilation, which is on the NHS official list of things that make you eligible for vaccination. That got accepted no problem; probably, they'll vaccinate you with any sort of plausible reason.
(Downside: atrial fibrilation is way more likely to kill me than covid, so I am not winning here...)
Huh? Why would you need to argue that you're eligible? The Walgreens down the street from me seemed like it was giving them to everyone who walks in and asks.
I thought that the j redding ban was a bit harsh. Good commentator.
I was largely a cynic about AI and its potential and cynical also about OpenAI and its finances, admittedly from a position of general ignorance, but that cynicism is widespread. I also never believed in crypto, blockchain and other tech fads.
Now that I’ve used ChatGPT in work a bit I can definitely see the use. Of course it will be wrong sometimes, which is actually the best of both worlds, more productive humans but humans still needed.
It’s also useful at home, I’ve used it to create recipes, and while I could google that kind of thing it’s the interactive nature of the conversation that’s more interesting, (ie I actually have 3 not 2 breasts of chicken, redo the recipe).
But I want to talk about the finances. There’s been a lot of ink spilled and keyboards bashed about the losses that OpenAI is making right now, with fairly simplistic maths leads to the company running out of runway by late next year, all of them basing todays monthly losses into known funded capital minus previous losses.
The obvious problem with that analysis is that revenue is also growing and being discounted. In fact revenue is going to increase to $11.6B next year. And if that rate of growth continues (or even abates but growth continues) we are talking about very valuable company.
Of course costs might accelerate too, and I know there is some talk about the costs ballooning to multiple billions or a trillion.
Dwarkesh Patel's latest podcast, with Dylan Patel partially covers the economics of OpenAI and AI scaling. In part, new money is needed to build the data centers and infrastructure to host and train the next models. GPUs are expensive to buy, servers must be set up and deployed into *really* large clusters of tens of thousands of sometimes scarce GPUs. There are race dynamics where OpenAI, via Microsoft partnership wants the biggest GPU centered data centers as does X-AI, etc. These data centers use GigaWatts of power, and so they also require power infrastructure. There is also a lag dynamic where the money is needed for the next generation of AI models, which will then make it's money back via API and product monetization so they need to raise money up front for infrastructure for future models. Oh, also everyone wants to have the latest chips for power efficiency reasons, which are also getting better to. Many companies are heavily invested, and for better or worse, many believe in AI as a very big product that can be won via scaling to the biggest, fastest, most compute heavy data centers.
> I thought that the j redding ban was a bit harsh
Yeah. It was a very bad comment for the type of discussion that this space is for, but if their other comments were better, it doesn't seem worthy of a permaban? *sigh* I also don't want to discourage Scott from moderating.
I think it's moderately likely that we've almost reached the limits of what you can do with LLMs, and the benefits wont be big enough to justify the huge investment needed to get us here.
But that could just be me being optimistic, as "OpenAI looses money" is the least bad option at this point.
Much worse: they actually do succeed to creating AGI, but fail on alignment.
Well Open AI is still trying to eke out gains. Having access to all the models I think there’s a clear increase in functionality since 3.5. Not as spectacular as 2.5 to 3.5 no doubt (I never used the very old models but there’s a general consensus that there was a step change in ability there), but impressive enough.
Kind of bad: AI causes some medium scale disaster of the rough magnitude as tye World Trade Center, and everyone goes Dune-style Butlerian Jihad on the AI companies.
Most of their costs are on research, no? If they just stuck with their current products they'd be pretty profitable, but it makes sense to spend more money on research given that's what their investors want (pretty reasonably imo).
Yes. And I think, I’m not sure, that the greatest costs are in training the model not using the model. Which isn’t that different from other software. R&D is the major cost.
Typical AI Google search result which I got last week explains the end of the film Heaven's Gate; Averill is shown on the deck of his yacht; Jim stands on his boat. Jim Averill is just the one guy, played by Kris Kristofferson. This is one of the most discussed films on the internet. The AI has presumably read all the discussion, possibly seen the film, and thinks Averill and Jim are two people.
This is not hallucination. Thinking a purple dragon showed up at the battle would be hallucination. It's what we would call extreme stupidity, in a human being.
We have allowed the entire internet to be enshittified by this sort of thing in the bare 2 years since ChatGPT was released. Somewhat analogously we have allowed Musk and others to kesslerise the night sky with satellites (if you haven't stargazed for a couple of years, do so. You will be amazed). On these precedents if AI becomes a thing (and I don't see LLM as being on the path to AI) I expect Big Capital to have its way irrespective of any attempts to control it
> we have allowed Musk and others to kesslerise the night sky with satellites
Calling it 'kesslerizing' isn't really accurate because starlink satellites aren't actually in stable orbits - they'll decay naturally if not maintained, there isn't really much threat of a long-term Kessler syndrome.
Yes, it affects stargazing a bit, but also I kinda think if I lived in a remote area (or an area where the internet was strictly regulated by the powers-that-be, or an area where I felt that was a significant risk) the trade of "slightly worse stargazing" is probably worth it.
(I also don't see how either of these points is connected)
It's virtual kesslerization because we know they will be replaced at least as fast as they burn up.
I did say the connection was only "somewhat analogous" but I think it's there. It's the tragedy of the commons in both cases, universal goods (clear skies and hallucination-free internet) ruined by thoughtless self-interest.
The danger of Kessler syndrome is some runaway, (nigh) unstoppable cascade - the idea that there will continue to be satellites in orbit because we'll continue to find that to be a useful thing to keep doing is IMO a very different concept. Calling that "kesllerization" feels like watering down a term with a specific meaning to make a much weaker complaint.
And, yeah, I agree in principal that the night sky is a shared resource... but I think the problem with tragedy of the commons arguments in the specific is that nobody can ever agree on which things are worth doing - for me, the existence of affordable, non-terrestrial internet access is pretty clearly worthwhile.
(And I think more people would be in favor of Starlink if it wasn't associated with Elon Musk)
I was going to post about this today: I’ve been using ChatGPT a lot to brainstorm recipes and I’ve been impressed at its ability to come up with good ones despite presumably not being able to cook or taste food or appreciate qualia.
I asked it about that and it said that it has a deep knowledge of recipes in different cultures and eras and also knowledge of how different ingredients work together.
I know you can’t take an LLM’s statements at face value, especially about itself, but it was interesting and, combined with the advanced voice, makes it really feel like chatting with a food nerd friend.
Where I live you can't see virtually any stars except the "evening star". I was thus struck dumb one night I happened to look out (since I seldom do, there being no reward) to the west and saw a very bright object moving quickly toward me, then wink out. I had paid no attention to Musk or his doings, so went to reddit (if we could only get a reddit dedicated exclusively to answering questions about various phenomena, or why the Thunderbirds flew over, or why the police are all over the street) and learned that it was Starlink. I was quite delighted, though obviously it didn't compare to the night sky in the desert or something like that.
I am a city boy, and the first time I slept in a forest I was shocked how *many* stars were up there. I always assumed it was just a few dozens (about a dozen constellations with about a dozen stars each), but if you are at a dark place away from cities and the sky is clear, there are myriads of stars.
Like, I was aware of the fact that there are many stars in the galaxy, I just assumed that you cannot see too many of them with your eyes.
No it isn't. Or rather it is if you are trying to disguise the inadequacy of LLM. Hallucinating would be imagining there are dragons in the battle scene in Heaven's Gate, and would be an interesting thing for a LLM to do. Thinking Averill is not Jim is stupidity.
Here's a gem from Google AI: "The next dividend date for Vanguard FTSE 100 UCITS ETF (VUKE.L) is projected to be 11.69% from September 24, 2023 to September 24, 2024." Genuine response to a genuine query of mine last week, not something I found on the internet. I can't imagine hallucinating that dates can be expressed as percentages. This is not hallucination, it's just shit.
Agreed. "Hallucination" is pure branding (supplanting the more accurate previous term, "egregiously wrong", with one that inaccurately flatters LLM's abilities) and I'm annoyed that essentially everyone immediately bought into a misrepresentative terminology change. If anyone asked me to point to an example of "NPCs receive software update", it would be exactly this.
I think it's a mistake to treat the current generation of LLMs as being conscious and having "seen the film" and "read the discussion". I think their output is more on the order of vivid dreaming, where sometimes things seem to just happen using "dream logic" and associations. But they're getting better and better.
I stargaze, and I think the satellites are fine. I want humans to colonize the rest of the universe. I'd love to be able to look up and see orbital habitats and space elevators and a ring city.
Yes sorry that was shorthand, I don't think LLMs are or will be conscious. In fact I think their more enthusiastic supporters are in an analogous position to someone proclaiming in 1900 "Air travel is bound to revolutionise 20th century life, look how close to perfection the hydrogen dirigible is."
The stars is a nice idea but they are awfully far away. And Elon's satellites are inward looking, making sure every square inch of the globe has high speed access to the information that Heaven's Gate is about Averill and Jim.
No, *I'm* sorry, I'm pretty sure I understood you but I guess my response was unclear. :-) I got that you were using those as metaphors, and I was trying to say that those metaphors are counterproductive.
Upthread, I mention that I've read the entire King James Version of the Bible. I haven't memorized it, I can't recite more than tiny fragments, there's probably lots of mistakes in my memory. If I'm prompted to talk about heave offerings vs wave offerings, I really can't go much deeper, and I'm only 90% sure that those are actual things in the first place. So I'll try to answer questions either with explicit acknowledgement of my limits, or more usually, in a very casual way that should make it clear that I'm talking off the cuff and shouldn't be relied on. ;-)
I think part of what happens with hallucinations is that we force AIs to respond even when they don't have strong associations. And the less signal there is, the more the surrounding noise can be misinterpreted as signal. Which is what I think is going on with human dreaming, too.
Time and space are relative. I mean not in the physics sense, but rather in a perception sense. The stars are indeed far away for a person, but for humanity?
E. Coli reproduces, under ideal conditions, in about 20 minutes. It's hard to tell how long it lives, but it looks like about 2 hours to a few months (unsure if this is only how long it can survive, while waiting for better conditions). If people were experiencing time like bacteria, it would seem like much more time must pass for anything to happen. Yet colonies of bacteria eat, grow, and spread out, over (for them) fantastically long periods of time.
When we start building multi-generation colonization ships, humanity will spread throughout the galaxy, though it may take hundreds of years to get from system to system. But individuals may only see one star system, or none.
I've published several books and short stories online, and in order to get them more views, I opened a Youtube channel, dealing mainly with media analysis and political philosophy. I want to make videos about things that A. will get me a decent viewership and B. I genuinely care about.
Following that logic, I'm considering doing a video summery of one of the top articles by Scott.
What article would you like to see in video-essay form? Whether because you'd enjoy watching it yourself or because you could send it to the same friends that refused to read a long ass paper about neuroscience.
I'm thinking about Moloch, or maybe the notes The hungry brain?
Sample (How No Country for Old Men Does Symbolism Right):
Titles and thumbnails are the main reason why people click on a video.
If you have subscribers, they're more likely to watch whatever you post, but for everyone else, you have to have a compelling reason why they should click on your video as opposed to the millions of others. Your title isn't bad but there are lots of videos about the movie's symbolism. Maybe try taking a provocative claim and making that the title instead.
It seems like the main way channels grow is trying to find a "gimmick" and then making a lot of videos using it. There is a youtuber who made a video about the unemployment rate in a video game town. He just walked around and tried to figure out whether they worked or not. Funny idea, successful video. Then he made a few more of those and now is one of the biggest video game youtube channels.
Making videos about whatever is in the news can get your subscribers up.
Commentaries on well known pop culture artifacts can work pretty well, although it's best to seem like you have novel take.
If you find a niche that no one else is doing and some people are interested in, you can get a small but loyal audience.
I'd consider demographics when applying this kind of analysis. The open mouthed faced is the subject of endless memes, and many crowds find it fake and unappealing (myself included). I will baselessly claim that people who are into literally analysis will prefer something slightly more sophisticated. Also, y'all don't what I look like. Are you sure this face is a net positive?
Did I dream this, or was there some sort of mystery series that followed a detective from case to case, with the twist being that the detective was the one committing all the murders and then framing other people for them?
This is also a shocking twist in one of the "Father Brown" stories by Chesterton, where the namesake priest detective reveals this horrible truth in a large company of friends. My shock when I first read it was quite significant. Father Brown, of course, continutes to explain that he meant "he killed them" in a sense that he gets into the mind of a killer in each specific case so well, that...
Reminds me of Dead Air by Ian Banks, though if I recall this is only one plausible interpretation. I'm not sure, ut was a long time since I read it. Great book, great author.
There's a famous horror movie that ends with the detective being killed, and in the source material (which I haven't read) the ending instead reveals the detective committed the murder or murders he's investigating. I can't, of course, reveal any titles as that would spoil them.
You mean, other than Murder, She Wrote? You of course noticed that suspicious deaths in coastal Maine decreased 26% since the passing of Angela Lansbury.
Sherlock had an episode where someone staged things to make it look like he'd been doing that all along. I don't know if anything has played it straight though
In my ongoing quest to consistently conceptualize perception I'm falling back on a not new idea.
(beowulf888 said I should just enjoy the ride. thanks, but I can't.)
The idea is that whether one is awake or dreaming, one is conscious of, let's call it, temporarily, stuff.
I know I'm not the only one who was once woken up by an alarm clock while dreaming. In one of my dreams I was doing some gardening, in a bar, and suddenly one of the sheep begins baaing. Baa, baa, baa! I woke up and realized it's the alarm clock.
So being awake is like dreaming but with one's body putting more of what actually happens in the content of one's dreams.
But this means the following:
While I dreamed, in the usual sense of that sentence, it was *not me* who really "heard" the alarm clock, and what I heard was *not the alarm clock*.
My body "heard" the alarm clock, like a computer with Siri or Alexa running on it might "hear" an alarm clock, and it, my body, made/caused/produced that I in and as part of the dream heard the sheep. (The latter being something that I presume a computer, unlike a human body, doesn't do.)
My body of course also made/caused/produced everything else in the dream, including me.
I'm one of the fictions or models my body makes based on the reality of it being a physical thing among other physical things.
So one really needs different words for what happens when one's body "hears", "feels", "smells", "sees" or "tastes" something -- these are all physical processes -- and when one oneself hears, feels, smells, sees or tastes something -- those aren't. Those happen in the dream.
I used to want to identify myself with my body, but I'm at a point where it seems to me that I just can't do that consistently.
This idea here removes the trouble of wondering what it is that one is seeing with one's eyes.
One does not see anything with one's eyes.
One is not a real thing and one's presumed eyes, that what you see in a mirror, aren't real eyes (and the mirror isn't real too). One's body is a real thing and "sees" real things with his real eyes, but it itself has no clue about it. Just like my phone has no clue about anything. I'm the one, the one of whom my body is "dreaming", who has a clue about it.
The only reason my body is not just a zombie, like most other things, is because of the simulation it is running, in which I'm trapped and experience everything.
As to the nature of the simulation: Maybe it's somewhat like when electrons accelerate. They just produce waves in some electromagnetic field. If all the matter in a brain moves like it does, it might just produce some waves that *are* the simulation. That might be a reason why computer, as we built them, can never be conscious. The matter moves too differently from how matter in a brain moves, irrespective of any information processing similarities.
I wanted to identify with my body, so that it's me who makes decisions, whether one calls them free or not, but in this conceptualisation my body just makes/causes/produces a dream in which I feel, as a part of the dream, like I'm making decisions.
I hope you don’t mind me asking a few questions? In your understanding, what is thought? Is it something you perceive too (the voice in your head)? Anything you perceive is not you. Whenever you attach a “self” label to something, what is doing the attaching? What are you, really?
Thoughts, not as the physical processes in my brain, but "their content", I do perceive.
Otherwise I would not know that I'm thinking :D
I either think in speech imagination, and pretty similar stuff then happens in my brain as would happen when I were actually speaking. Or I think in visual imagination.
> Whenever you attach a “self” label to something, what is doing the attaching?
With this you touch a big point, I guess. That was something that prevented me for a long time from buying all the "I am a fiction" talk.
But consider it like this:
I am clearly that thing lying on the sofa. I feel it beneath me and I see the ceiling above me. I can move my arms and legs but all else, the pillows, I can only move with them.
But if everything I'm perceiving is only a fictional model of a thing, not the thing itself, then that body is only a fiction of the real one too.
I'm not the one doing the attaching of the self label on that fictional body with which I can soooo easily identify. I even cry when it gets cut.
It is my *real* body that is doing the attaching.
It is the one who is doing *everything*. Even the thinking of which I have explained how "I" do it. It makes it seem to me I'm doing something, just like it makes *everything* seem to me.
I really hate this. From an intellectual perspective. I don't cry about it. But I want to find a way out of this idea.
You see areas, not just lines, of certain colors in these pictures.
And these areas aren't there. They do not exist.
Not like the other parts of the pictures, which exist as real parts of the physical thing on which the picture is rendered. That is, as pigmented paper or in that color shining pixels.
What you see is a fiction.
And I conclude all my seeing is like that, and you too, I guess.
It only seems to me, when I open my eyes, that I see things. But I don't see them. I see fictions of them ... or, as such optical illusions show, in some cases: of nothing.
My seeing is just most strong imagination. A simulation of aspects of reality. And this simulation is not always, in it's own special way -- birds may have a different one -- "correct" or "true" to reality.
And since I'm a part of what I perceive, I'm a part of that simulation.
It's a bit like what Kant said about not being able to know anything about the real things, or physical things, or things in themselves -- except that I think my body belongs to these things too, and that I think we can know something about them, for example that our bodies are able to generate fictions of themselves, which we are.
And I still don't like this. I would prefer to identify with my body.
When you say that your body is creating fictions, that's a different statement from your body is perceiving fictions. The way I see it, the sense of self may very well be a fiction created by the body, but the perceiver (at least in certain mental states) can exist without a sense of self. And are you really part of what you perceive? You and I can observe a couch sitting in the middle of the room. The definition of a couch as a type of object, the material that makes up the couch, and the underlying physics of the material that makes up the couch may all be abstracted into a placeholder we conveniently call a couch — but there's nothing in that formulation that says we both can't sit on the couch at the same time. If OTOH you don't believe the couch is real, and our selves aren't real, then you have to come up with a way for two unreal entities can perceive an unreal object — but that unreal object continues to be there when we're not in the room with it.
That's why I distinguish between what our bodies do, and what we do.
> When you say that your body is creating fictions, that's a different statement from your body is perceiving fictions.
It doesn't. I, inside and as part of the model of all it really "perceives" and constructs the model of, do perceive those fictions.
I put the terms like seeing and perceiving in quotes when I say my body is doing it, because it does it in the way an elevator "sees" that someone is blocking its doors.
Would the elevator have something that's enough like a human brain, then a fiction of the elevator, which would then accompany the doings of the elevator's physical parts, would see that someone who's blocking its doors. It might be different though, its resolution would consist of just one pixel, on or off, because it has just a light barrier with which to "see".
> And are you really part of what you perceive? You and I can observe a couch sitting in the middle of the room. The definition of a couch as a type of object, the material that makes up the couch, and the underlying physics of the material that makes up the couch may all be abstracted into a placeholder we conveniently call a couch — but there's nothing in that formulation that says we both can't sit on the couch at the same time.
Our bodies can sit on the same couch, but we sit on different "couches" in our bodies respective models of reality.
Since *all* I'm perceiving, including all I attribute to being a part of me -- that is, the "body" I see -- is part of the fictional model my (real) body creates, I am part of what I perceive. A part of that model.
Even my thoughts I perceive, I'm aware of them as imaginations of speech acts or sight of things. All not real therefore.
> If OTOH you don't believe the couch is real, and our selves aren't real, then you have to come up with a way for two unreal entities can perceive an unreal object — but that unreal object continues to be there when we're not in the room with it.
I believe in the existence of (real) things, the world, to explain all the regularities of "the world", that is the fiction I live in.
And I only go through this complication, through all this hassle, because direct realism is false. This idea here is the only alternative conception I find to make sense.
OK. I think I understand what you're saying. It sounds to me like you're an idealist. But I'm not quite sure why you're uncomfortable being an idealist. You're in good company. Neils Bohr was an idealist (along with a lot of his colleagues). And from your response to my couch analogy, I would call you a "consensus idealist" (a term of my own coinage for the idea that conscious entities work together to create reality). Donald Hoffman has been advocating something like that lately (a couple of Youtube links below).
I'm not an idealist (although I think the physicalists would say I am). I'm a Middle-Way peep. I believe there is a universe outside ourselves, but I see consciousness as being an emergent property from the constants that define our physical realm. The universe came before consciousness, and consciousness does not create reality as we go along, but it can interact with reality and the universe can respond in a limited pan-psychic way. Whoah! I hope a crowd of rationalists with torches and pitchforks doesn't come after me for saying that!
People make too much of optical illusions, and the fact that we can’t see everything. That’s true, we can’t see as well as an eagle, and what we see is an approximation. A bat sees less, an eagle more. But what we is a reflection of reality at the level we need to see it.
Isn't that like the thing they emphasize in defensive driving - only in reverse - you decided to stop, then you initiate stopping some nontrivial time later?
I guess I'm a safety-first geek, because when I see people on e.g. the freeway following 10 feet behind the next car, I feel like that's not a cushion I'd be comfortable with.
At least, I get that it happens in traffic, from time to time even to me, but lots of folks on the interstate seem like they are driving all 300 miles that way.
Wow, I read your comment, thought of something that might be related - at least it genuinely popped into my mind - but then who came along and turned it into an earnest PSA?
Kaj Sotala on LessWrong.com has written a series of essays exploring existence. Based on what you've written here, I think you might find the series interesting. Here's the first essay:
"I used to want to identify myself with my body, but I'm at a point where it seems to me that I just can't do that consistently."
This is called the Mind Body Problem and has exercised philosophers since the beginning of philosophy or at least since Descartes. Google it to learn how greater minds than ours have equally failed to resolve it.
The awareness simulation is real to you and you can talk about it so it's real to your reasoning processes which are in turn real to the outside world. (Anyway, the outside world is a simulation created by atoms which are in turn simulations created by subatomic particles which are merely simulations (aka emergent properties) of quantum foam.)
So the real/simulation split is just a simulation - it isn't real :)
How do you know there's only one you inside you? I don't mean multiple personalities, but multiple awarenesses sharing the same thoughts and experiences.
PS: there is a different word, at least a collective term: qualia.
That's not how I use that word. Only physical things are real, not how they seem.
I just replied to Neurology For You in this thread with a link to Wikipedia about neon-like color spreading.
If I see a pink ring on a wall with not the tinyest amount of pink pigment on it, then I see something that isn't there, that is not real, and just because it seems to me that it is there does not make it real ... to me or anyone.
Just to explain where I'm coming from.
> How do you know there's only one you inside you? I don't mean multiple personalities, but multiple awarenesses sharing the same thoughts and experiences.
If they share all the same thoughts and experiences then I do it like the mathematicians: I put an equal sign between those awarenesses, as you call them, and count them as one, not multiple.
> Only physical things are real, not how they seem.
I'd argue that we only perceive physical things as they seem not as they are.
But further up, you argue hat we don't perceive things as they are, so I'm not sure if I'm arguing with you or against you. ;-) And I'm with Malcolm on this when he says "The outside world is a simulation created by atoms which are in turn simulations created by subatomic particles..."
Say you see a chair painted with red enamel (which would probably use Quinacridone Red as a pigment) — do you think the enamel is inherently red? If so, how about we do the following thought experiment?...
Say you had a microscope that could magnify down to the atomic level. You scrape a sample of the pigment off that chair and bring the magnification of your microscope up to full magnification to the point where you can see the atoms of the Quinacridone molecule (C₂₀H₁₂N₂O₂) arranged around three benzene rings. Would you see the color red at that level of magnification? As you reduced the magnification at what point would you see red?
A little more info for our thought experiment... According to ChatGPT, a Quinacridone molecule is about 10-15 angstroms across at its widest length. Now what is the wavelength of red light? It ranges from 6200 to 7500 angstroms (or about 620 to 750 nanometers). So at what point would a clump of Quinacridone molecules seem to be red? I would guess that when we would need to look at a sample of at least 62,000 to 75,000 of those molecules across — or about 0.65 microns to 0.75 microns (squared?) before we'd begin to see the red color of Quinacridone pigment.
There are no colors at the atomic level because the wavelength of light in the visible range for humans is far longer than the size of atoms. This should be the first hint that the way you perceive reality is only a convenient illusion provided by your qualia. There are probably other animals that perceive the 620 to 750 nm wavelengths. Should we assume they perceive the quality of red the same way we perceive it? If they have the same types of cones and rods in their eyes, maybe they do. But what if their brains are wired differently? Maybe they perceive red the way we perceive green and vice versa?
Oh, and about the red! Exactly that is a reason to call our perceptions or percept or qualia fictions.
There is -- really -- no red. Not on an apple and not in the brain.
Just apples with a surface such and such that in such and such atmosphere under such and such lighting our bodies make us, under such and such further conditions, see a red apple -- not the real one, the real one is only in this sense "red", but a fictional model of it.
> I'd argue that we only perceive physical things as they seem not as they are.
> But further up, you argue hat we don't perceive things as they are, so I'm not sure if I'm arguing with you or against you. ;-)
I don't know yet too :D
"We only perceive physical things as they seem not as they are."
I say, things do not seem in any way on their own. They seem to someone.
When "something seems to be somehow", then there is always some animal, a body, that has created a model of it by what is happening in its brain.
Daniel Dennett has put that very baffling, when he's written a dialog with someone who is suffering the illusion of a pink ring being on the surface of a white painting with black and red lines on it. (Neon color spreding)
The guy says: "But how come I see that ring?"
Dennett answers: "Which ring?"
"Well, the ring there."
"There is no ring. It just seems to you there is one."
So I say, we do not perceive things at all, it's not even right to say we perceive them only as they seem.
They do not seem, our bodies make they seem, and sometimes our bodies make even nothing seem to be somehow.
And, thankfully, we -- eh, our bodies -- are all descendants of tried and tested "perceivers", and most of us -- again, really our bodies -- quite good at that ourselves.
I don't understand the point that Dennett was trying to make — but most of Dennett's arguments about the nature of consciousness seemed full of contradictions to me — i.e. consciousness is an illusion, but it's real. If I were the guy seeing the pink phosphene ring, I'd tell Dennett to take a hike. After all, how dare the Dennett P-Zombie tell me what I'm experiencing isn't real?!
If you think consciousness is an illusion, why would you trust your qualia to tell you anything useful about the external world?
Note: I separate the idea of self from consciousness. I think my "I" is an illusion. But I think consciousness is a real phenomenon. And I think it's possible to be conscious without self-identity (heck, I've experienced that state through psychedelics and meditation). I also believe in free will (within the constraints of physical laws and the constraints of our body). Indeed, free will is an important element of consciousness.
As Malcolm Storey above has commented, this problem has exercised many philosophers since at least Descartes!
I believe, If I give it enough contemplation to come up with an awesome solution, something no one has ever achieved before, revolutionizing all human understanding, I get laid.
Quoting: "In terms of ethics, if this version of Open Individualism is true, it’d be deep justification for utilitarianism: let’s be good to each other, because We Are The Same Thing."
> I'm one of the fictions or models my body makes based on the reality of it being a physical thing among other physical things.
> So one really needs different words for what happens when one's body "hears", "feels", "smells", "sees" or "tastes" something -- these are all physical processes -- and when one oneself hears, feels, smells, sees or tastes something
Take all this with a huge grain of salt, but... Coming at this from a non-expert Buddhist standpoint, I think the second quote is where you start diverging from more standard Buddhist thought. If the self is a fiction, then don't go forward as though the self is a base concept, but instead continue to deconstruct the fictional self and work with lower-level concepts. Perhaps, and this is for the specific purpose of gaining understanding of the system, don't identify with the fictional self, because that locks in a viewpoint and brings in outside assumptions. (And then when you're done, you can go right back to identifying with the fictional self and even with your body.) I ... think that's fairly safe?
You're already doing part of it, by thinking of the self as a fiction. So instead of saying "I want", maybe try looking at it as "the fictional self wants", and see if that gives you any new questions to think about?
I'd suggest reading a few things, here and there, and see if anything strikes a chord. And then come back and read it again 6 months later, and see how it feels. It's a cool feeling to come back and see that the thing that was fascinating before, is now mundane, and the thing that was obscure and confusing before, is now fascinating. (My favorite introductory overview is "The Way of Zen" by Alan Watts.)
Why is climate change almost entirely absent from the US political discourse? I understand that it's not appealing to politicians or the average citizen to think about lifestyle changes, but it seems to me that not even intellectuals talk about it.
Most economic analyses just focus on GDP growth ignoring the cost (and the opportunities) of completely transforming the energy system or the trillions needed to adapt to extreme events.
(I'm not American and I don't live there and while I think I follow American politics pretty closely, I'm very happy to be told I got this wrong by somebody more in the know)
They do discuss it in newspapers and media but I think it isn’t a useful topic to bring up for the Democrats in the current political environment.
Judging by some of the comments though, I get the impression that some Americans don’t care because they are used to spending all their time in air conditioned rooms and cars and so they don’t think there will be any difference.
I've never understood why conservation related things - even at its simplest, conservation in the Amory Lovins negawatt-sense - do not qualify as innovation in the ordinary way that will result in jobs, money! I've always figured that Exxon has in a file drawer a plan for how to keep reliably making money After Fossil Fuels. Or at least during the long transition. So I don't understand the failure of imagination by everyone else, in this regard. And it's not sudden. I was wondering this about 1990. This fear of change seems too widespread to be attributable to something rational like everybody knowing the energy density of gasoline.
In each case a needless expense is being imposed on someone, and passed off as a good thing. If you believe the solar panel is necessary, make *that* argument-- not tell us that the cost is a good thing regardless.
To the extent global warming environmentalism had taken hold in the US, it seems many favored policies are not actually helpful: anti-nuclear power, pro-CAFE, very little effort put into pushing a carbon tax (admittedly a bit of a loser election issue if not carefully packaged), anti-fracking (despite it resulting in massive reductions of CO2 emissions in the US, though one can argue about the scale of methane leakage), anti-carbon capture, anti-geoengineering, etc. From these deficiencies, it's clear many "environmentalists" don't actually care about fixing any problems but instead wish to use the issue to attack perceived social injustices and political rivals.
It’s relevant but not really a debate point since one of the two parties is largely in denial. Also the US is a rich country that is more able to absorb the shocks than most.
Yes, it takes two to debate. The last presidential debate did have a question on climate change, but Trump's answer had nothing to do with climate change.
The emission pro capita of the US are still much higher than most countries in the world and their global share of investment in clean energy is much lower than their share of GDP. So at the moment the US is contributing more to the problem than to the solution
A lot of the current quiet is because there needs to be bipartisan collaboration for anything that isn’t an administration’s capstone policy, even when the same party controls the legislative and executive branches. The Republican Party initially took an anti-climate-change stance and made it part of the culture war. Since then, it’s become clear that a) they’ve lost on that front and b) it’s serious enough that adhering to their position would cause actual problems as a result of carbon emissions/lack of preparation for climate-related disasters/etc. They have to rehabilitate their stance to allow for bipartisan work on the problem, but can’t be seen to change on a dime.
The result is that they’ve reduced messaging on it and slowly tried to cede that ground in the culture war. The Democrats want to work with them on this, so they’re largely not trying to bring it to the forefront and make them fight battles they still feel they would have to. In 5, maybe 10 years at the worst it’ll be far enough in the past that they can work together on this. In the meantime, the Republicans are trying to look the other way while the Democrats do what they can solo. Efforts from the left wing of the Democrats in 2019-2021 to make climate change an issue that the party would fight to achieve without bipartisan support failed. Since then, it’s basically been minor stuff and waiting for the Republicans to be ready to work together.
Plenty of people care about it, but it’s been obvious since late 2021 that nothing major was going to happen for a while. That combined with letting it fade from the culture war has led to a period of quiet at both the high-brow and low-brow levels.
The fact that the US is a large country with a lot of internal climatic diversity probably has something to do with it: it makes us less susceptible to the notion of the status quo being the one correct climate. All the more so when we have for generations been voting with our feet for warmer weather. The guy in Chicago who they're trying to scare with the specter of missing the arbitrary 2C warming target, has probably at least been toying with the idea of moving to Florida.
The internal migration statistics suggest that people aren't too worried about that. You can argue that they ought to be, but what we're trying to do in this thread is explain the attitudes they actually have. (ETA: Swap in Arizona if you like. People have been moving there too.)
You may just be confused by the terminology. US political discourse has a lot of talk about "Green Energy" and "Carbon Free Energy" because supporting those are seen as the solution to climate change.
You ask why they don't think about "lifestyle changes" and that's because they are not promoting "lifestyle changes" as the solution to climate change. The solution the political discourse talks about is to maintain and continually improve our lifestyle while combating climate change by developing new technologies that don't emit as much carbon dioxide.
I guess the problem for those of us who happen to be interested in conservation, and just so happen to also be on the "towards simpler" end of the spectrum is that we don't agree about what the best parts of "our lifestyle" are.
For instance, the early spread of Covid among the jetsetting elite caused me to grouse that all this air travel is way overrated and out of control.
On the other hand, to me, plumbing is the greatest thing in the world and I would be astonished (and heartbroken) at losing it, even in my worst imaginings about the future (which are indeed grim, and more so every day).
I mean, the Democrats believe it and talk about it. As myst_05 says, the country's further right than Europe at least and each party has only so many things they can talk about. I feel like the identity issues are taking center stage, but that may just be my personal beef so take it with a grain of salt.
I'd guess in the last couple of elections the Green New Deal didn't work out as everyone expected and the Democrats are really worried about working-class white guys in swing states who tend to overlap with the Rust Belt that suffered from deindustrialization and tend to blame environmentalism in general. But it's always tricky to know exactly what politicians are thinking, they are the least likely people to tell you.
I thought the IRA was mostly a success? And isn't the answer to deindustrialisation bringing green technologies to the US (as the IRA is trying to do)? I find there's a huge opportunity lost with China now being the leader on all the key green technologies...
Climate change is luckily not a zero sum game. China being the leader and rapidly switching to solar/nuclear/hydro is amazing news because it results in a rapid reduction of total CO2 emitted on the planet. If they then sell a bunch of cheap solar panels to the entire world and decarbonize the rest of us, that's a win-win for all.
In the geopolitical realm, though, that does improve China's position vis-a-vis our own. Arguably European industrialization wound up helping the world in terms of living standards in the long run, but it was pretty bad for China between about 1830 and 1980.
It's a global problem and there is only so much the US can do. It doesn't really matter what the GHG emissions per capita are in the states when China is building a new coal plant every week, and all of the developing countries are experiencing a population boom with the requisite energy demands. Not to mention current political systems are really bad at dealing with long term problems that have short term costs, even over a few decades, and this is an issue on the scale of centuries.
Personally I think the overt and laughably false doomerism from certain people also turned a lot of the public off. When you've been told that the world is going to end from global warming in the next 5/10 years unless we Do Something, and people have been saying that for the last 40 years, they lose a lot of credibility. The public tunes out and starts to wonder if the whole thing is bunk. Climate change is a good case study in the perils of overstating alarmism to try and raise awareness of an issue. Hans Rosling covers this in Factfulness, which is a good read.
Well, it is ending for plenty of species, but that's owing (also, and more heavily) to habitat loss. As soon as the environmental movement was co-opted by the humanist left - it became impossible to describe the problems of climate change in terms of environmental impacts, rather than "people" impacts. And of course, there are always cynical libertarians standing by to leverage that. You want to save the planet (e.g. like people largely uncontroversially and bipartisanly wanted to do for decades, up until the 80s)? You must hate people! And I saw you driving a car! And I saw Emerson's wife doing Thoreau's laundry! QE-Dumb-D!
Probably this has to do with the fact that a lot fewer people care about impact on the environment than about impact on people. "Lots of insect and plant species will die if we don't do something" << "Lots of humans will die if we don't do something," at least in the eyes of most voters.
Also, there does seem to be a strain of the hairshirt in American environmental rhetoric, probably derived from our Puritan heritage. (You see lots of that in antiracism as well.) I think that strain is actively harmful. We are not going to reduce CO2 emissions in the US (or probably most democracies) by way of getting voters to accept a big drop in quality of life--even in the stuff that you think was frivolous and they shouldn't have wanted anyway. But we can still substantially reduce CO2 emissions by improved technology and switching over to that technology when it becomes available.
We've largely switched over to LEDs for lighting, we're largely switching over to heat pumps for electric heating, code requirements for insulation have gone up substantially over time, appliances have efficiency requirements that seem to be up to the point where they impose a trafeoff between {electrical/water} efficiency and doing their job, electric cars are becoming more and more common and seem to me to obviously be the future, etc. I think in terms of actually taking action that will help reduce CO2 emissions, we've done a fair bit. OTOH, it's a partisan issue in the US, so even when Republicans are okay with regulations requiring more insulation or efficient appliances or whatever, they usually don't talk about AGW as a reason for it.
It's also notable that environmentalists tend to be pretty hostile to nuclear power, and also very often environmental arguments are used for why solar plants, wind farms, high-efficiency transmission lines, and the like can't be built in a given place. (Though that may just be because environmental regulations are the easiest tool to block them for the people who want those things built far from their backyards.)
It’s pretty sorry to put wind towers in the path of migratory bird fallout in the Gulf. Or at least, to do it without - for once - even “studying” it.
And too - rooftops. It may be that grassland is opportune for solar panels, but it’s too bad to place them on habitat when we’ve got all these flat roofs.
The efficiency gains used to be celebrated but not so much anymore. Now we are rolling goal recreationally. Of course some people will say we plowed our savings on our refrigerators, into more energy-intensive TVs.
I am not keen for nuclear, certainly (though not worried the market is about to supply it). I feel like I can maintain that as long as e.g. whatever city I live in lights its buildings up all night &etc. Give Amory Lovins a chance.
I think human-caused climate change is real, and is significantly warming our planet. But alarmism really was overstated, at least in a time-frame sense. And most people lose patience with that pretty fast.
Adding to your point on "it's a global problem", a lot of people are noticing that diplomatically our world is increasingly breaking down to an US/EU/NATO sphere and a BRICS+ sphere with BRICS growing quite rapidly. It's not talked about a whole lot, but we're increasingly a divided planet, making it much harder to tackle an issue like climate change.
Prediction: The breakdown of the global order will make it easier to fight climate change; as everyone will be for nuclear and there wont be externalizing the cost of production to china.
... no comment of if it will be to late to save this civilization without american world police; but everyone will at least believe they could've been different and it was easy now
The baseline scenarios of climate change depend heavily on what happens to the global order. That's why there are five SSPs with different climate projections for each. A fun exercise is to pick which SSP you think is most likely based on the description, then see what it implies for (a) the default magnitude of climate change and (b) the ability to deal with or change that path.
I agree that alarmism might be overstated, but from a purely economic point it makes sense to try to reduce emissions faster than under the current trajectory (global emissions haven't peaked yet). If you account for the cost of dealing with the impact of climate change, as well as the loss of lives due to pollution and extreme events, rationally we would do more. The problem, as you suggest, it's that it's a global issue so being the only country taking action doesn't make sense and diplomacy doesn't seem to be working in a very divided planet
' If you account for the cost of dealing with the impact of climate change, as well as the loss of lives due to pollution and extreme events, rationally we would do more.'
From a purely economic point, it would make sense to reduce emissions if the costs (including externalities) exceed the benefits. I am sure this is the case for some emissions, but I seriously doubt it is the general case. What is often ignored are the life saving and enhancing benefits of energy use.
I agree that it is a global issue, and would add that reduced emissions in one part of the world may even result in higher emissions elsewhere, thus undermining most or even any local reductions. The more effective solution is primarily technology, supplemented with adaptation. Think investments in solar, geothermal, nuclear, and carbon sequestration and cloud seeding.
I work for the UK government, which has developed a methodology to assess the societal cost of emitting a tonne of carbon (I imagine the US might have a similar document somewhere)
The current cost is more than 300 dollars and is estimated to go up over time. This implies that, once we account for externalities, we should stop most emissions. It would make sense to keep using fossil fuels just in a few hard to abate sectors and then, as you say, we could consider adaptation measures and carbon sequestration.
The US has taken steps to solve this. But the countries that matter, aren't following. As noted upthread, US carbon emissions have been trending steadily downward for twenty years. India is still growing geometrically, and China's graph looks like the classic hockey stick on account of e.g. the *hundred* or so new coal-fired power plants they build every year.
You're being fooled by someone's propaganda, and so you're doing the opposite of helping to solve this problem.
China is by far the greatest polluter. The US is second place but slowly going down. India is growing rapidly - assuming current trends hold they should take over by 2028. Overall trend is that China+India should account for 50% of global emissions by 2030.
Because America is to the right of every country in Europe, so the Left has to pick their battles and climate change has to compete with questions like abortion or gun control.
A bigger puzzle is why countries like Germany care about it at all, given that they're far enough north and high enough in elevation to not suffer any negative consequences in the next 100 years. Netherlands? Sure, I'd panic loud and clear. But Berlin? You get to save on heating in winter while paying a little bit for AC in the summer.
> A bigger puzzle is why countries like Germany care about it at all, given that they're far enough north and high enough in elevation to not suffer any negative consequences in the next 100 years.
In the last 6 years, Germany had two once-in-a-hundred-years floods and two once-in-a-hundred-years drouths. The floods killed some people and created billions of EUR in property damage. The drouths created damages >30 billion EUR in 2018 and 2019 .
here is an articles from 3 years ago, in case you want to compare it to this years flood-news:
If one plotted flood heights and drought durations for the past 150 years in Germany, is there a clear pattern of increasingly dramatic weather? Without a proper historical plot its impossible to make any inferences.
Such a plot is easily available for temperature - and yes, its getting warmer.
John, I agree with you that its a pain for many households today, especially given the numerous restrictions on installing visible AC units in many cities. But air conditioning is not particularly expensive - a portable window unit is $200 and works really well for me every summer in the Pacific Northwest. A proper split unit with installation is $5,000 around here and it could easily last for 20-30 years with minor maintenance.
So... if governments allow everyone to install visible AC units (save perhaps for the most important historical buildings), wouldn't that be a solved problem? $5,000 split over 20 years is peanuts for the vast majority of German households.
The issue is not just higher temperatures and sea water level though, extreme weather events are more likely and more extreme because of climate change. So I don't know specifically about Germany, but in the long term it makes economic sense if the world reduced carbon emissions (also because there are opportunities in green technologies).
Your point about America being more on the right compared to Europe makes lots of sense, thanks
The eastern block indeed does not care all that much about climate change. But the U.S. is rather to the right than even the most right wing EU member, for the most member.
Which version of the left-right spectrum do you believe in? Whats your "basis-vector" for the furthest right opinion?
I dont see how the massive blob of "america" doesn't regress to the mean to be moderately right when compared to several smaller segments of a "European country".
Let’s consider the classic economic-social spectrum.
Economics
1. US has the lowest taxes as a share of GDP among all OECD countries, except for Ireland, which is a tax haven.
2. As a result, income taxes are lower overall, even compared to Ireland. Sales tax in the U.S. is under 10%, in the EU VAT is around 20%.
3. "At-will employment" exists in the U.S. but is entirely non-existent in Europe.
4. The U.S. has much lower rates of unionization and collective bargaining. The recent port workers strike was a HUGE event in the States, but would be just another Tuesday in France.
5. There are fewer regulations on goods and services in the U.S. on average, though exceptions exist (sunscreen).
Social
1. At-will abortion is now banned in several U.S. states. In Europe its only banned in Poland and is not discussed much in other countries.
2. US is the only country *in the world* where anyone can buy semi-automatic handguns or long guns without a permit. Concealed carry is legal by default in most states and thanks to the SC carry permits are now "shall-issue" nationwide. Even Harris said that she owns a gun in the last debate.
3. The First Amendment uniquely protects *all* speech, including "hate speech" and most forms of libel against public figures. Used to be left-coded but is now right-coded.
4. Homeschooling is illegal or heavily restricted in most EU countries.
5. No single payer healthcare in the US.
So climate change agenda has to compete against many other issues which are long resolved in the EU. You only get a handful of items to put front and center in your agenda and the American left has chosen to give climate change much less priority.
Isn't abortion more restricted in most of Europe than it was in the US before Roe was overturned, and still more restricted than it is in (say) California or New York now?
> A bigger puzzle is why countries like Germany care about it at all, given that they're far enough north and high enough in elevation to not suffer any negative consequences in the next 100 years. Netherlands? Sure, I'd panic loud and clear. But Berlin? You get to save on heating in winter while paying a little bit for AC in the summer.
This seems similar to the "puzzle" while immigration over the Mexican border is a topic in US politics while Washington DC is thousands (?) of miles away from the border and presumably does not get to see that many immigrants.
How much does Germany actually care about climate change though? Of course there is this overall view that the country cares a lot of environment and has been historically a stronghold of ecologist parties in Europe, but regarding specifically anti-climate change policies the results aren't really there
I'm not claiming anything about whether Germans care more or less than other countries. But that the CO2 emissions are higher than that of Western neighbours is mostly due to historical coincidences that have nothing to do with climate politics. They were already much higher than in the UK or France in the 70s, when no one talked about CO2 emissions.
Germany has traditionally large coal deposits, and built an infrastructure based on coal. France built its infrastructure around nuclear power (not just electricity, also heating), which in hindsight is convenient because it is less CO2 intense. If you look at Germany's Eastern neighbours Poland and Czechia with the same deposit of brown coal, the emissions are higher than for Germany. Likewise, the car industry was one of Germany's main industrial pillars long before CO2 emissions were a thing.
It's also a strong simplification that the German automotive industry is lobbying for longer combustion fuel. Volkswagen (VW) does, the other German car producers lobby in the other direction. And even VW simply lobbies for the timeline that is optimal for VW, which still includes a complete EU ban of combustion car in 2035. VW CEO Blume has publicly opposed politicians who want to push back this deadline or soften it.
I completely agree that the amount of coal available in the country (vs France for example) was what triggered this difference at first. But still, in the last decades, Germany could have aimed to reduce more drastically its CO2 emissions rather than aiming to completely shut down all its nuclear power plants and use gas as a "transition energy".
>"France built its infrastructure around nuclear power (not just electricity, also heating)"
I'm not sure what you mean here with nuclear power heating, isn't it just that the heating is powered with electricity (generated at 80% by nuclear power plants)?
I am very happy that you provided more insights about the German automotive industry as while writing my previous message I indeed felt I had only a superficial knowledge of what was happening and was probably oversimplifying things. I remember reading that German (not only though) car manufacturers were trying to push against the ban combustion cars after 2035, but indeed it seems it's not the case for VW. However from what I was just reading online it seems that Mercedes and BMW indeed push for that.
More generally my understanding was that the German car manufacturers preferred gathering profits from the sells of combustion cars rather than reinvesting them in R&D for electric cars, leading (of course together with the subsidizing, cheaper labor cost, and great investment of China in this direction) to the situation we have now where many European electric cars are imported from China (and growing). Would you say that this is a misconception?
> Germany could have aimed to reduce more drastically its CO2 emissions rather than aiming to completely shut down all its nuclear power plants and use gas as a "transition energy".
Yes, I also think it's a mixed bag. The shutdown of nuclear power plants did show that CO2 emissions are not the highest priority. On the other hand, they are also not the lowest priorities, and there is a transition that is still pretty fast. For example, electricity production in Germany was already at 65% renewables in the first 6 months of 2024. Personally I think Germany is not doing so bad overall, but certainly not the front runner as many Germans believe. All this is a matter of perspective though.
> "France built its infrastructure around nuclear power (not just electricity, also heating)." Isn't it just that the heating is powered with electricity?
Yes exactly, but that is a notable difference. By far most households in Germany are directly heated by oil or by gas, and only a tiny fraction by electricity. That's what I meant.
> More generally my understanding was that the German car manufacturers preferred gathering profits from the sells of combustion cars rather than reinvesting them in R&D for electric cars, leading (of course together with the subsidizing, cheaper labor cost, and great investment of China in this direction) to the situation we have now where many European electric cars are imported from China (and growing). Would you say that this is a misconception?
Hm, I wouldn't agree with that. I think especially VW has invested huge amounts and has bet strongly on electric cars. I have just checked, and for electric cars (including plug-in hybrids) VW was the third-largest producer in 2023 (1st BYD: 3m cars, 2nd Tesla: 1.8m, 3rd VW: 1m). BMW was place 6 with 0.57m, Mercedes place 10 with 0.4m. The top-selling VW model ID.4 already reached >100,000 car sales in 2021. So the German manufacturers haven't been completely idle.
The issue is that they have not managed to reduce costs as fast as Chinese producers. Their cars cost something like 30,000-40,000€. They do try to get down to around 20k, but the Chinese companies are already there. This means that German manufacturers are selling much fewer cars right now than they had anticipated two years ago. (Also for other reasons. The prime market for cars in China has been down for a while.) Which means that the German manufacturers are fighting an uphill battle at the moment. The plan was always to subsidize this fight with their profits from combustion models, and they do lobby for it, but I don't think they plan with that in the long run. Though I think you are right that Mercedes and BMW would like to have more than 10 years left, and have tried to push back the 2035 deadline.
For VW, the situation is even more special. Since they sell fewer electric cars than anticipated, their whole strategy just falls apart at the moment. They will likely not meet the EU emission criteria for 2025, which is an average over all sold cars. In their predictions that had worked out fine, but with so few electric car sales it doesn't. This will likely lead to a fine of several billion euros. Other manufacturers don't have this problem, so right now VW is somewhat desperately trying to lobby against this fine for next year. But the overarching strategy of VW is and has been to switch to electric cars.
I won't do the number crunching for you though, and I do not know what level of statistic sophistication you are expecting.
For the north-eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the years 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 count as 5 drought years in a row. Everybody living there kind of agrees that this is exceptional. You can either believe the people there, or you will have to do some historic hydrology, which I will again not do for you.
My initial comment was mainly about pointing out that there are consequences beyond the rise of sea level which can people can find concerning. You can of course think that all the people concerned about drought have fallen prey to fake news, but even then, it remains a valid explanation why people are concerned about climate change, even in the absence of imminent risk from rising sea level.
Thanks! Cliff Mass famously crunched the numbers for north western U.S. and found that both forest fires and droughts will become less likely over time thanks to climate change. He also (perhaps unsurprisingly) foind that the risk of cold snaps will go down when the media claimed it would go up.
So the statistical data crunching angle is very important, because it often shows that some regions will indeed not be affected at all in the next 100 years or even benefit from the changes.
Couldn't find Cliff's writeup after a few minutes of googling. Did he take into account the effect of higher temperatures in producing faster snowmelt and evaporation and lengthening the wildfire season?
I believe it's wrong to look only in the change in average precipitation for this matter.
Increased level of temperature increases the rate of water evaporation from the plants/soil.
Also, rising temperatures increase the rate of extreme climatic events, so for the same average in precipitation you can have longer periods of drought followed by heavy rains which then cannot be effectively be absorbed by the soil.
Variability is, well, too variable to be able to tell whether there's a climate-driven trend from most local observations, but climate models predict an increase in precipitation variability on the monthly and seasonal scale over most land areas.
It would take a large positive precipitation trend to overcome the effects on drought of warming and variability. "How large?" is a complicated question.
for the record, I remember that already in my high school years in the 90's, there was a map showing drought risk for north eastern Germany as a possible consequence of climate change, which left me as puzzled then as you are probably now. But the predictions from then seem to bear out.
The city of Berlin is thinking about tapping into the Elbe river system to get extra water (in addition to the Spree/Havel system), but the Elbe people fight back since they want the water for themselves
One think I don't understand about Hanania when he says that the rise of the temperature is unprecedented in human history is that he omits to mention that industrial revolution is also unprecedented in human history.
Our ancestors lived in poor conditions, without air conditioning and heating was very inefficient. They suffered from heat in the summer and cold in winter.
We have never had this good in whole history (in the rich western countries at least).
My point is that our technologies are more than capable to deal and mitigate the effects of climate change. While not negating that we should switch from fossil fuels to other sources of energy that is less damaging to the environment, scare tactics are unnecessary. In fact, the best course would be continue to develop more technologies to help with this transition. The GDP growth is the best indicator that we will be able to do this successfully.
I like that Americans are smart by being reasonably concerned that environmentalists and de-growth activists can do more damage. In Germany environmentalists have done a lot of damage by closing nuclear power stations prematurely.
Overall electricity consumption decreasing is damage. That's what damage looks like.
Also, I don't see what the contrast is supposed to be between "energy production has decreased... BUT energy consumption has also decreased!". What else would happen?
These are net figures; are the gross consumption numbers also indicating a decrease? The solar share in summer seems high, and a lot of that could have been used locally and not passed back to the grid, for instance. In addition there could have been a decrease as increased costs of gas-powered electricity generation has shifted domestic heating more to biomass and gas. I don't think a conclusion "decrease is damage" is necessarily warranted, not without a lot more analysis.
There is no such concept as "net energy consumption". Production and consumption don't cancel out; if they did, net consumption would always be zero.
(I do see that the linked chart is labeled "public net electricity generation", but that doesn't stop "net electricity generation" from being a malformed concept. I assume the intention of the graph is to confuse somebody.)
I'm assuming that they mean "total bought from the public generation pool" but I could not find anything on the site that would confirm this. A large industrial user that also generates a lot of solar power in summer, or a household with solar panels, is the case that would need to be quantified.
In 2023, German energy consumption was 10735 PJ, down 8.1% from the previous year. Main reasons were weak economy (that's what you mean with "damage"?), warm weather, high energy prices (you wouldn't believe how much energy the industry can save if they really want to) and CO2 emission cost. First quarter 2024 is down again another 4.6%.
> One thing I don't understand about Hanania when he says that the rise of the temperature is unprecedented in human history is
The bigger problem with this claim is that it appears to be nothing but a barefaced lie. Hanania isn't exactly opposed to those.
For example, here's Li Feng's Early China: A Social and Cultural History:
> Even when we are talking only about the areas that can be considered as part of Early China, back in a time when "China" as a nation was still in her infancy, we find that more cultural developments had taken place in the valleys and strips of plains that are surrounded by the mountains and plateaus on the second step mentioned above ["1,000 - 2,000 m above sea level"], or on the transitional belts along the major mountain ranges, but not at the centers of the floodplains located in the east. The reason for this development was simply ecological, given the fact that in the second millennium BC most of the eastern China plains were still covered by marshes and lakes, and the coastline in some sections was at least 150 km inland from today's seashores.
> Over the past thirty years, Chinese paleoclimatologists have made significant progress through fieldwork in understanding long-term climate changes in China across multiple ecological zones. By correlating data from different locations, the researchers were able to isolate a number of periods of important change in the temperature fluctuations over some 11,000 years. As the world was moving out from the last Glacial Age at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch in about 11,000 BP, the temperature in North China climbed up to a level of 3-4 °C higher than the average temperature of the present years, and the precipitation was 40% [] more than today's.
> This high temperature continued from 8,000 BP to 5,000 BP with wide fluctuations in the later millennia until the arrival of the third millennium BP when the temperature suddenly dropped down to below the present-day level. In historical chronology this drop corresponded with the end of the Shang Dynasty (1554 - 1046 BC) and the early Western Zhou (1045 - 771 BC) period. But even during most of the Shang Dynasty, the temperature in North China was still about 2 °C higher than today's.
Our technology, or more precisely our society's practical implementation of technology, is presently not capable of completely mitigating the effects of extreme weather, nor will it be able to do so for the foreseeable future. Given that, it will be (and is) even less capable of mitigating the effects of climate-change-enhanced extreme weather.
Somewhere there might be a tradeoff between improved technology and reduced climate change, but we don't seem to be anywhere near having to make that tradeoff. We are doing both.
Isn't it true though that all-cause disaster death tolls have gone down over the last century?
I've also heard that disaster expenses have gone up, but the citation said this was adequately explained by the rise in real estate and building on land that had previously been left alone for good reason.
Robb - Yes, death tolls have gone down tremendously. We now have things like severe weather warnings, flood control reservoirs...lots of things that didn't exist a century ago.
Disaster expenses have increased from the fact that infrastructure has greater cash value and there's more of it. Weather warnings are great, but most infrastructure can't get out of the way of a hurricane that will be arriving in two days.
But what would have happened if extreme weather frequency and intensity hadn't changed? Deaths would have gone down, and damages would have gone up.
So how do you adjust for the improved forecasting and the more expensive infrastructure and figure out whatever residual trends are caused by changes in extreme events? For deaths, you don't. Nobody has a way to do it. For infrastructure, there are various ways, but none is clearly accurate enough to isolate the climate-change trend, whatever it is.
So climate scientists study the extreme events themselves. For example, I published a paper earlier this year quantifying the observed trend in single-day 100-year rainfall amounts across the south and southeast US. They've increased (best estimate: 19% increase in intensity over four decades, which corresponds to over a doubling in frequency if you hold the intensity cutoff constant). Other studies, defining extreme event thresholds their own ways and analyzing data across the United States in their own way, find small increases or large increases in extreme events, depending on the region.
So why all the talk about deaths and damages? In one sense, they're cheat codes for skipping the complex reality during arguments. "Look, deaths are way down!" "No look, damages are way up!"
But still, deaths and damages are relevant, because you can take the deaths and damages, combine them with the climate change trend magnitudes, and estimate the portion attributable to climate change. Or for the future, estimate the amount of deaths and damages that could be avoided if future climate change is limited. The fractional benefits are relatively insensitive to changes in warnings or infrastructure, even as the total numbers change wildly due to other factors.
With Helene, my estimate for climate change's enhancement of the heavy rain is at least 20%. I've seen another group come up with 50%, and at least one other estimate will come out just in the next few days. We can blame deaths on people ignoring warnings, we can blame damages on infrastructure built in vulnerable locations, but the fact remains that, given the actual choices of individuals and society, some fraction of the actual deaths and damages would not have occurred if the rainfall was 20%-50% less.
We don't need to mitigate completely. That is a false target.
We won't be able to mitigate climate change either. But I don't understand your point that we are not making tradeoff? Is this because we are not discussing about this tradeoff? I agree and that is a big problem.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that complete mitigation was an appropriate target. But given incomplete mitigation, technologies cannot eliminate the additional impacts of climate change. At least, that's what I interpreted your "technologies are more than capable to deal and mitigate the effects of climate change" to mean.
Regarding the tradeoff, I don't see anyone advocating for reducing technological innovation in order to fight climate change.
I see that as different from the tradeoff between economic growth and climate change mitigation, which is indeed a challenging topic.
That's not really true. Europe generally has very low air-con use. Now with raising temperatures air-con can make the life even better than before warming.
Those specific environmentalists that are anti-nuclear have scored a massive own goal. Nuclear energy should be a big part of *the solution* for "providing sufficient energy to humans while also making serious attempts to combat climate change."
Energy forms that have less risk or are cleaner than nuclear simply aren't yet up to the task of providing humans with our modern energy needs. Of the forms of energy that *are* up to the task, nuclear is arguably the best. It's certainly better than fossil fuel-based energy. And from what I've read elsewhere, Germany is increasingly turning to fossil fuel-based energy as a result of shutting down nuclear power stations. It's a horrific lose/lose.
Going entirely wind/solar at some point might be a good goal, but we're far from reaching it, and nuclear would probably be ideal for filling the gap until we can reach that goal.
> Have you considered that they may be lying about their goals? If "de-growth" is what they want, their actions make perfect sense.
My mother has repeatedly implemented decisions for the family that are strongly counterproductive to her stated goals. But I tend to believe that her stated goals, mostly to do with the well-being of the family, are honest, and she's just very bad at considering whether the decisions that society recommends are actually beneficial.
I think that model ("I support policy X because someone told me it advances my goals, and I don't want to put any thought into it") can explain most environmentalists well. In the case of e.g. endangered species protection lawsuits that target specific developments, "they're lying about their goals" looks like a better explanation, largely because the participants in those tend not to engage in similar activism against similar, but faraway, targets.
(Given the larger conversation, it's worth noting that a large contingent of the environmentalist movement explicitly states that what it wants is degrowth.)
Of professional necessity I associate with anti-nuclear activists, have for years. I do not at all share their views on the topic which sharply limits how much and how well I can work with them and also frankly how much I want to.
Anyway to the specific hypothesis you're advancing: no, not at all. Their motivations are exactly what they say they are, they are entirely sincere in viewing nuclear power as an inherently unsafe and horrifying genie that needs to go back into its bottle. They are pretty comprehensively wrong on that, and unfortunately are just as dug-in and immune to new information as MAGAs talking about nonwhite immigration. But that is what they genuinely believe.
I did come across a conspiracy theory online that the Russians were funding environmentalists in Germany to go against nuclear energy in the hopes of making Germany more reliant on Russian gas imports. Of course, this is arguably moot given everything that's happened since Russia invaded Ukraine.
I never saw much evidence presented for this conspiracy theory, but it's an interesting thought anyway. It would make sense for Russia, and it's not unthinkable that a group might simply sell out for money.
If China and Russia aren’t funding environmental and anti-nuclear and anti growth initiatives in the West then they are missing a golden opportunity. There is nothing that they could do to that would provide them as much bang for the buck as funding the internal anti-growth initiatives of their perceived enemies.
You don’t need to kill someone who is drawn to suicide.
Just not the case that we have the technology to deal with climate change, unless you can give me some examples I don't know about. Physical processes tend to be asymmetrical: give yourself cancer by smoking cigarettes, easy. Reversing the situation not so easy: having caused something doesn't confer a privileged ability to uncause it. Nor does a whole heap of lung cancer specific technology in our hospitals
What technologies we don't have? Air conditioning? Heating?
People didn't smoke in Middle Ages and yet lived shorter lives. I don't expect any meaningfully shorter life expectancy if any at all due to climate change.
Yes, and we have technologies to mitigate this. In general warming climate is better for agriculture. The only problem is the change. That will be challenge that we will solve with technologies and science.
Tell this to the people in North Carolina after hurricane Helene, or the people in Florida anticipating Milton, or anybody who got burnt out by wildfires last summer.
I understand why you banned him for that post, but that's unfortunate. carateca's posts usually brought a "down-to-earth sanity" to discussions here (although I might be biased, because I often agreed with his point of view).
That post is a couple of months old, maybe there's a case to be made that he's become more civil by now?
> carateca's posts usually brought a "down-to-earth sanity" to discussions here (although I might be biased, because I often agreed with his point of view).
I usually disagreed with his point of view, and found him to be the worst poster on the site. I definitely think there's bias at play here (and I'm not claiming to be immune either).
I'm also going to note that I'll miss Carateca. He contributed a lot to many of the discussions around here, especially when he was wrong.
Someone upthread mentioned using the report button for what struck me as an exceedingly petty personal taste, which makes me think comment likes might be incredibly useful for tracking an otherwise (potential) silent majority who weren't offended.
I was not a fan of Carateca -- there is a fine line between "down to earth sanity" and "assertion of one's unsupported priors", and they were more often on the wrong side of that line than on the right side -- but I don't understand why that post merited a ban. It was very mildly intemperate, at worst.
I agree with you and Rothwed on Carateca. "Down-to-earth sanity" is a good way to describe a lot of his posts. And in a community that can get very abstract/theoretical in its thinking, I think that it's quite nice to have someone that can provide a sort of practical feedback to that.
I'm not aware of an appeals process, but I've only been active here a few months. A good number of people are commenting on the Carateca ban and wanting that ban undone. For myself, I just hope that Scott is reading all of these comments on the Carateca ban and it might give him a change of heart?
If anybody starts up a formal appeal, I'll sign on to it.
Carateca had a long history of aggressive comments, so I'm not surprised they ate a ban. Still, it's sad to see them go. They had some interesting views, and were a good balance against the leftist majority on here.
I'll miss him; he's got an interesting mixture of positions I very much agree with and positions I very much don't. And yeah, that post was bad, but it was also four and a half months ago. :-/
I suppose the problem was saying that the other person was fine with pogroms, and not in an "you advocated for A here and B there, which together logically seem to imply C" sort of way (which I think is probably OK), but instead more in an "personal attack" sort of way. Like, asking "do you have a problem with that" is better than asserting "not that you have a problem with that", when it's not something that the person has said explicitly. Especially when it's saying that the person is fine with genocide.
Yeah I don't think it's 0% problematic, just doesn't seem banworthy (I could see like "one third of a ban" if Scott's still doing those, or "one month ban"). It's a couple steps short of the other ban-inspiring comments on the list.
For any indie sci fi fans, I am analysing the entries of the fourth Self Published Science Fiction competition (my book Our Vitreous Womb is also an entry). So far I have filtered the titles, cover images, and blurbs to analyse what factors make some books stand out. Moving on to reading all 188 sample chapters, then hoping to read a handful of novels in full and interview the authors. The Introduction episode is linked below.
It was their last meal together, and it was genius.
Literally. This tumor made her the smartest person in history. It didn't talk, just made the next step obvious and undeniable. Like the miniaturized tokamak or the Starship redesign or the simple cancer cure that made her immortal.
She had a future to protect, now. No one would interfere or even observe. The virus was highly infectious, with no symptoms until suddenly 100% lethal in a year. She had time to prepare.
Meanwhile her husband couldn't interfere, or even observe. The meal was genius. The poison obvious and undeniable.
“Quick announcement: I didn't think I would have to say this, but this is a reminder that Secret Santa gifts are not to contain flammable or explosive materials of any kind, including matches or any amount of gasoline. It's Secret Santa, not Secret Krampus.
In related news, the doctors have given Vanessa a clean bill of health, she should be back to work tomorrow. If you would like to get her a return gift, please add it to the pile by tomorrow morning. If you don't know where the gift pile is... look for the scorch marks. Thank you.”
It wasn't me man, I'm telling you. That little gobli- LOOK at that smug little punk! He's smiling right now. Well no, not now, but I mean, before you looked. Yeah see, he keeps glancing back, all sneaky. I'm telling you, it wasn't me. I mean I get it, normally yeah I would be the guy. It's your fault for sleepin' on the bench though man. 'Course some little twerp is gonna come along. It looks pretty good though, just sayin'. Yeah totally! I always said you'd look good with a 'stache. Glitter glue just makes it pop.
almost 10 years ago I was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. I am fortunate to respond well to the standard treatment (Levadopa), and my progression has been relatively slow. However a clock is ticking; I take 3X the amount of levadopa I started with, and I have to take it almost hourly to avoid "down" periods that turn me into a tired lobster. Eventually, barring an unlikely deviation from the typical course of the disease, I will eventually start suffering further disabilities, including cognitive impairment, dyskinesia (jerky involuntary motions) and distonia (random painful cramps of various muscles).
For several years, evidence has been growing that certain GLP-1 agonists (same class as Ozembic) may be the first legitimate, statistically defensible disease-modifying treatment for Parkinson's. In several studies published in journals such as The Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine, phase-2 double-blind studies show that under certain metrics the degeneration typical of PD is stopped cold. The most comprehensive study so far, a phase 3, multi-center, double-blind study over almost 2 years (previous studies were for at most 1 year) has wrapped up, and is awaiting the unmasking of treatment/placebo and publication of findings (search for trial NCT04232969).
The institute in charge of producing the final report (University College of London) keeps pushing the publication date into the future, with the most recent date set for July 31, 2025.
OK, this being the Internet, here's where I might wax a wee bit conspiratorial. I am posting on this forum with the meager hope that focused minds committed to rational analysis and decision-making will prevail upon me to look at things with some semblance of subjectivity.
My first nit is that the first trial of this hypothesis dates to 2017. The weird thing about that is, as a techie/rationalist sort living with the disease, as you might guess I have been very proactive doing my own research for potential new treatments (ie googling and vetting) but strangely, this approach, considerably more promising (to my layman's eyes) than any other proposed treatment, never came up on my radar. I mean, it feels like it was scrubbed, or at least there was a very intentional campaign to avoid any public examination or discussion of this potentially life-changing drug going through the gauntlet of trials and studies, and looking ever more promising with each new year.
Perhaps there were many candidates for the "silver bullet" and this one emerged as a front-runner only in the last few years. The head of the phase 3 study has reportedly mentioned that the Covid pandemic made enlisting subjects and keeping them engaged much more difficult than usual. I just can't understand why I didn't notice the previous phase 2 trial that apparently published their results in May of 2023 (started in 2017, so 6 years in the making).
Anyway, the question that is really on my mind is, when the fuck will I be taking a drug that puts the brakes on this slow boiling frog of a malady? Because every year that passes raises the temperature in the pot (the one with the frog). I just re-read this paragraph and popped another Levodopa so I can lift the brain fog and make a concise point. (Those of us at around the same stage as I am have settled on a protocol of "Dr, just give me a friggin' huge pill bottle of the stuff and let me take it as needed, the way my dad smoked cigarettes).
All of the potential drugs tested have been approved for either diabetes or weight loss, meaning their safety and side-effect profiles are well known. So, for example, why in hell should I not be taking once-weekly slow-release Exenatide? Oh wait, AstraZeneca took it off the market, presumably to put all oars in the water for an Ozempic-killer oral semaglutide they are reported as pursuing).
So after some research, and a bit of logical deduction, I am seriously considering dosing myself with daily shots of Liraglutide, if I can source it (it's not too competitive with the daily injection vs Ozempic weekly dosing).
Oh, I rambled on and now have left little of your patience to discuss price, insurance, and availability. I'm trying to imagine what the state of affairs will be like next year, assuming the phase 3 trial is as successful as the numerous phase 2 trials would lead us to expect.
Aside from financial (looks to be around $1K / month, very unlikely to be covered by most insurance) there is a reasonable argument that it would be preferable to wait for a solid consensus on which medication has the desired effect, what the dosage and overall protocol should be, and to have a trained doctor (who has bought into the treatment, as opposed to tolerating what could be seen as a patient's naive self-directed research) monitor the situation. For example, there is evidence that these medications increase one's chances of getting pancreatitis or pancreatic cancer.
It's really just a question of whether it makes sense to be conservative and wait for the new drugs to be developed and distributed to the overall medical community, versus basically experimenting on myself.
I've seen a similar BS story around the MAPs Crohn's vaccine, which finished a Phase II trial more than a year ago but still refuses to publish any results from it, supposedly because "its in peer review". I'm guessing it failed but then why not just say so openly?
have you tried contacting the authors directly? (maybe with promise of confidentiallity)
I can imagine, that privatly funded medical research is subject to much more potent NDAs, so maybe the authors are not free to discuss any results beforehand. But it shouldn't hurt to try.
I’ve been stuck in peer review for years at a time before, due to the reviewers being stubborn and confused rather than the results being bad. What makes you think that’s implausible here?
My hunch is that the results confirm the phase-2 research, and glp-1 agonists may in fact be the silver bullet we've all been waiting for -- and then the authors have to contend with a barrage of press and cries for immediate dissemination of the drug in the study (Bydureon, slow-release Exenatide) -- which is not even presently on the market.
I hope they are just trying to get their ducks in a row to deal with this.
Alternatively, the study was a wash-out and they are reluctant to publish the bad news, so they are rummaging for a pony in the cesspool.
I would put it on arxiv beforehand, but not everyone always does that. I don’t know how strong of a norm that is in medicine. But if they were comfortable submitting it to a journal then I see no reason why them not putting it on some arxiv would mean they’re hiding it.
Probably not once it's begun the peer review route? But they could have made it available first (medRxiv is the relevant preprint server). I think some journals may still discourage preprints, but in my opinion that just crosses them off my list of places to submit to.
It was originally intended for the ACX book review contest (for which I missed the deadline) and later submitted to Adam Mastroianni's blogpost contest (which it didn't win). I spend an embarrassing amount of time on it. It is over 15,000 words long, and while I think I could have made it shorter (the section "Borges and I" is probably too self-indulgent and might have been better off left out) I still decided to publish it in mostly unedited form because if I kept working on it I might have lost to the temptation to keep expanding it.
As a spoiler-sensitive person myself, I think the spoilers in the review don't matter much and it's fine for you to read it without having read the actual book first. (Of course, I WOULD say that.)
I'll be honest: this might be the best thing I have written in my life so far (at least outside of university assignments and such). So even if you're disappointed by it, it might be interesting for you to see what a mediocre writer considers his best work.
When I write anything for publication I have a vision of all the people who'll ever sit down to attempt to read it, their frustrations and incomprehension and boredom, stretching out to infinity. Why is your time more valuable than theirs? Which is to say that the heart of writing is editing, and a piece of writing is complete when the meaning is communicated clearly and there's nothing left to remove.
I like Borges and I like what you wrote, but you're right about 'Borges and I'. I frankly skipped the story reviews after the first two, because the seemed blow-by-blow retellings of the originals. I really liked the section on evolutionary psychology though its relation to the rest of the essay is unclear - I think you could develop that as a separate post. Your list of conceptions about art were too long for me - I think I get the point, but I don't understand the connection back to Borges, or it's not expressed sufficiently clearly. Your conclusion is underwhelming.
Overall, I liked the essay - there's way too much peripheral material there. Interweaving one or two conceptions on art with (less revealing) snippets of stories would be effective. There's a message in there which could make a fine book review, on a par with any of the ones I read on this site. But it's 2000 meaningful words interspersed with 13000 others. Oh... it's a Library of Babel thing... (sorry).
I think most of your criticisms are fairly reasonable, but when I look at the writing process that went into this piece I don't think it could have turned out much different.
As I said in the essay, I set out to write it before I knew what the conclusion would be ("thinking by writing"). As I kept working on it, it only grew longer, not shorter, and if it wasn't for the deadline (remember that I missed my first one; and I barely met my second one) I might never have finished it. So maybe this entire approach to writing is not for me?
If I was a slightly better writer, I perhaps could have killed more of my darlings and reduced it to, say, 12,000 words, but reducing it to 2000 just wasn't in the cards. I'm not sure I agree it's THAT bloated, but if it is then this is pretty humbling for me.
I agree that the conclusion is underwhelming. That said, I do give myself props for resisting the temptation to write a more exciting but dishonest one.
>I frankly skipped the story reviews after the first two, because the seemed blow-by-blow retellings of the originals.
But this criticism I don't agree with at all. This approach might have been wrong for most books, but in this particular case, if you look at the originals and the retellings side by side, you might be more inclined to agree that I made the right call. Winky face emoji.
Take my criticisms with a grain of salt - you're writing for yourself, not for me! I have a different edition of Borges' short stories, and I read the reviews of the ones I remembered. I'll go back and read the rest.
Personally, I spend much more time rewriting than writing. Often low level stuff: what if we put this paragraph after that one? This sentence and that one make the same point - cut and paste them side by side. Let's rewrite the fifth paragraph as the introduction, etc. But also higher level: once I figure out what I want to say, the whole thing gets rewritten from scratch. This could happen more than once. My coauthors hate it, and it's slow. But I get to where I want to be eventually.
Honestly, if we're looking at the long-con, probably Trump. He would be significantly more likely than his opposition to cause global destabilization that would very likely cripple AI research efforts, giving humanity more time, to, well... figure something out. Still only delaying the inevitable of course (unless some irreversible societal collapse happens), but it would still be more concrete than some half-measure policies that probably won't even be fully enforced due to the need to compete with other countries.
I would think the level of global destabilisation required for it to cripple AI research instead of causing an arms race would be in the order of a limited nuclear exchange depleting the population and infrastructure of various powerful countries. Nothing short of AI datacentres no longer being a possible investment is going to stop further research in the event that the planet destabilises.
Yet the Biden years have brought a fair share of global destabilization. I think it's a mistake to equate destablization with Trump just because he says crazy things all the time. His actual performance during his presidency was relatively good on this front.
My guess is Kamala, because the AIXR people have managed to get more inroads into the Democratic policy establishment than the Republican one (mostly because they themselves are liberal Californians associated with NGOs and this is easier for them), and they'll have an easier time making their voice heard during a Harris administration than a Trump one. EG Biden's Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo appointed Paul Christiano (personal friend of mine, probably AI safety community's #1 choice) as head of the US AI Safety Institute; I don't know if this was because of her own opinion or because we have good lobbyists somewhere in this process, but either way it's a really impressive victory that's given me some loyalty to the Democrats here and that would be hard for GOP to match. Also, a lot of x-risk responses will probably look (on a zoomed-out view) like "regulate AI", and Democrats love regulating things. And I also think that ability to be stable and listen to people and make good decisions is a good quality here (even if we accept that Trump's from-the-gut style of decision-making is better for some things like foreign policy where it's sometimes good to keep your opponents uneasy).
Counterargument is that Ivanka Trump is possibly in the process of getting AI-pilled (https://x.com/IvankaTrump/status/1839002887600370145 , but I can't tell if this is a real endorsement, vs. someone told her it would be cool/profitable/good PR to tweet about this and she did, vs. she read about it and will forget about it in another 15 minutes). Another counterargument is that Musk could probably be a big influence on the Trump administration and he is somewhat AI-pilled (though I think dumb about specific strategic considerations) and takes advice from Dan Hendrycks (who I think is smarter about it). Samuel Hammond has a longer counterargument at https://www.secondbest.ca/p/the-ea-case-for-trump-2024.
I would also add that Trump is a wild card but sometimes has an Emperor's New Clothes esque ability to think of things in an untaught common-sense way when nobody else can, and if he got convinced that AI was dangerous (eg to him, his family, and America) he would have an appropriate emotional reaction and get angry/scared, whereas everyone else would be going through 50-step strategic thought processes of how to turn this to their political advantage. But it would be tough to get him to that point.
I still think probably Harris is better, mostly because I have high opinions of some of the specific people who have made their way into the Democratic policy network.
Musk is I think dumb about specific strategic (AI) considerations …
I don’t know what “specific strategic (AI) considerations are, but I would think that if anyone does, it would be Elon Musk. After all, he co-founded OpenAI, founded XAI, and his company Tesla has developed Full Self Driving to the point of almost being able to operate unsupervised. Then, there is Optimus, the humanoid robot. What are you trying to say?
Trump also says he would repeal the Biden executive order that set up the US AI Safety Institute. This is a clear case of Trump advocating for bad AI x-risk policy (by my lights).
A bit off-topic but I keep trying to game out why Musk, A16Z, Thiel et al are so pro-Trump, and the only reason that I find defensible is that 1) they think they can control him because, you know, superior IQ and 2) now they have their boy JD a hamburger away, they can afford to play the long game.
So getting back to the topic, if you want AI policy to be decided by ultra-rich tech bros with simple-minded Ayn Rand-inspired memes in their head to decide on AI safety measures, go with Team Red.
Warning for the second paragraph, try for a higher insight-to-insult ratio.
I think their stated reasons - they're anti-woke, anti-regulation, and anti-blob-of-smug-cultural-elites-telling-everyone-what-to-do - seem simple and plausible enough. Thiel has been conservative/libertarian since at least college and thinks civilization is slowly stagnating. Musk was apparently pretty radicalized by his kid transitioning; if you look at the text messages between him and his ex-wife, they both seem genuinely freaked out by wokeness. But I think he also feels like the Democrats weren't grateful enough for his electric car work and frustrated his Mars work with stupid regulations, and got in a nasty cycle where he criticized them, they criticized him back, and that offended his ego and made him hate them even more.
Can you explain the motives of VC investors such as A16Z and the All-in folk? They were supposedly horrified by 1/6 and swore DT should never get power again. Now they are, pardon the pun, All In.
What explains such a radical about-face?
Sorry about the snark, sometimes forget where I'm posting and fail to curate the proper tone for the venue.
I don't know as much about A16Z, but I think https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/ is probably their real opinion and you can see how it might make someone lean Republican. I didn't read whatever they had to say about 1/6 so I can't speak to that.
Democrats have been disgusted by Elon for a long time, and over the last few years Elon has gotten antagonistic enough that they just openly call him hitler or veppers or satan. I think it is the fact that he’s a weird nerd who is successful, which activates some bully gene.
So I think part of Elons trump support is just that democrats hate him.
> Democrats have been disgusted by Elon for a long time
Have they been? I seem to remember him being quite well-liked for the EV/climate change angle. It seems more like the anti-Elon sentiment on the left side of the political spectrum is much more to do with his, well, current positions on almost every political question.
(Amusingly, he has not been brainrotted on climate change or solar yet.)
Searching for "the problem with elon musk" pulls up a lot of pre-2022 articles, which was the year he bought twitter. Of course he didn't help himself with his bad jokes on twitter and his very awkward Joe Rogan interview in 2018. But I would say his awkwardness and bad jokes marks him as a weird nerd, and that is a big part of why people don't like him. But you are right, certainly his anti-woke stuff in years past did not endear him to anyone.
It's hard to separate it all out, but Steve Jobs was basically the charismatic, socially adept version of Elon, who treated people horribly. Steve would be the Chad who doesn't get HR called on him for flirting with his coworker, and Elon is the nerd who gets slapped.
I think this seems pretty much right on the nose, and that the negative feedback loop Scott describes is not only applicable here but to plenty of people I know personally.
Serious question: do you think re-electing Trump will lead to more or less wokeness?
FWIW I believe his election in 2016 was a giant catalyst to wokeness, which happened to peak shortly after Biden assumed the office in 21, and has been precipitously declining lately.
I could quote not-Zhou Enlai and say it's too early to tell. ;)
Seriously, it's hard to say. My money would be on 'less, but potentially with equally or more dangerous freedom of speech threats on the right'. But he could also flub things so badly he enrages and empowers the left, and they return with a vengeance. Frankly the range of outcomes is so huge I wouldn't say anything except that a Trump victory is probably the higher-variance option...which is basically impossible to falsify and therefore useless.
Kamala, well, on the one hand you're going to empower the left and they may try to restrict freedom of speech like they love. But then again they've seen how sick everyone is of living with woke commissars and they may have to dial it down a bit. Or, they may figure "it just really hasn't been tried!"
tl;dr: Dunno, man.
My argument for Kamala is that it's better to defeat Trump for reasons outside of wokeness (I have serious concerns about his power hunger and complete lack of ethics even for a politician), but that wasn't the question.
I'd say less, but it really depends on how ambitious Trump and the GOP are. Trump really does have nothing to lose at this point, so he's much more likely to use the full extent of his powers. The real question is, what are the GOP's plans? They have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take *actual* power using Trump. If they follow through with Project 2025, a full ideological purge of government workers and prosecution of dissidents is very much within their reach. And I'd doubt the liberals would meaningfully fight back, spineless as they are.
More. And this is good for the current GOP. If woke ideology, which as you say appears to be declining, doesn’t remain a primary political issue, it hurts GOP candidates’ chances at winning office. And I don’t think it’s controversial to presume winning office is a greater concern for most politicians than systematically solving societal problems.
Elon Musk, specifically, has been in the crosshairs of left-wing intelligentsia (including friends of mine!) for at least three years, maybe longer. I suppose he finally gave up on hoping they'd reverse course. (I suspect they were hoping that he'd reverse course when faced with criticism by the best and brightest.)
I don't recall Musk talking about taxes much. His 3 top issues might be 1) free speech (under constant attack by Democrats), 2) regulation (e.g. FAA is hobbling SpaceX, and 3) wokeism
The FCC chair redefining their requirements for rural Internet subsidy to favor "fiber eventually" and disqualify Starlink *now* over the objection of her own co missioner https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-105A2.pdf supports this view.
The Biden not acknowledging / tax-breaking Tesla isn’t an anti-Elon thing. It’s a UAW Ford/GM union workers political thing. Unfortunately, union votes are key political calculus because they’re so crucial in some of the swing states, even though Tesla is moving the US industry forward a lot better than Ford/GM have. Of course Elon hates that, but I also think he’s somehow too blind to see why it’s happening.
There are well-known colloquial names for the most notable variants of COVID-19, e.g., Delta and Omicron, but there doesn't seem to be a name for the original virus that distinguishes it from the later variants. Is there any good way to refer specifically to the original virus without causing confusion? I've seen Wikipedia refer to it as "wild-type SARS-CoV-2" but I'm not sure many people would understand that.
(Wouldn't it have made more sense to reserve Alpha for the wild-type virus and start naming the variants from Beta?)
Wildtype is the standard name for how something was before it mutated. "The original virus" is a little ambiguous, but if you mean the one that first crossed into humans, try "covid lineage A". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variants_of_SARS-CoV-2#Nomenclature for the full gory details.
Fun very minor substack bug: when I refresh this page on my phone (chrome on android), the datestamp on this post very briefly changes to "Oct 07" before reverting back to "Oct 06".
With overwhelming e/acc energy and techno-prosperity gospel sure to be the dominant vibe across the mostly AI-centric menu of events, instead come to one that won't shy away from seriously discussing AI safety and other coordination dilemmas. Hopefully, some feathers get ruffled.
Since no one is active on this thread I'll bump it up myself.
It turns out that Boston grew to its present size by annexing 6 other towns - namely, Brighton, Roxbury, Dorchester, Hyde Park, West Roxbury, and Charlestown - as well as the (formerly uninhabited?) areas of South and East Boston. (Plus what is now the Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood, which formerly was part of Brookline.)
In 1912 someone called Daniel J. Kiley proposed a bill that would merge 32 other cities and towns into Boston to create "Greater Boston". Needless to say, this did not pass.
Assuming literacy is a range (from 'doesn't know his letters' at the bottom, through the sort that in the old days only ever read the papers, up to the very well-read, indeed, at the top), and if we knew where everyone fell on this scale, I wonder what global literacy rates would look like. There's a repugnant conclusion that it's better to have everyone at a 1 or a 2 than have most at 0 and some at 9 and 10; presumably most of us believe that no such trade-off is taking place, and that literacy is a tide that is lifting all boats.
But I wonder. And I'd love to see a prediction market of what the numbers will look like in 20, 50, and 100 years.
> There's a repugnant conclusion that it's better to have everyone at a 1 or a 2 than have most at 0 and some at 9 and 10; presumably most of us believe that no such trade-off is taking place, and that literacy is a tide that is lifting all boats.
I'm not sure it would be assuming that the 1 or 2 literacy also comes with inability to do more complex jobs. At best a society with universal poor literacy is going to be technology and developmentally stagnant while at bas a society with some excellent literacy and most non-existent can at least have people do critical but complex jobs like engineering and medicine. There isn't really a historical comparison since the "9 or 10" precludes feudal periods. I suppose there would be some sort of threshold for the percentage of complete illiterates in this thought experiment, 51% would almost certainly be superior to universal poor literacy but it would be hard to argue that 1% would be superior You could probably analyse economic class and employment data and figure out the percentage of jobs that would require baseline good to great literacy.
There's been an enormous amount of work on this. Many countries have scales - they're normally ordered by age, and they're not directly comparable. So the OECD developed the PISA test to make international comparisons. Yes, this only measures 15 year olds, but it's a reasonable assumption that by 15 you've acquired most of the literacy you will ever have. Yes, it's not global, but it captures Europe, most of North and South America and a good part of South East Asia.
All the evidence suggests that most people have adequate literacy skills. But literacy isn't measured like IQ - there's a 'satisfactory' bar and most people reach and it an no-one measures beyond that.
The skills required to crunch through a text on postmodernism and extract meaning from it aren't really called literacy anymore. There's been work on the acquisition of complex concept at third level and beyond, but it's not called literacy anymore. Maybe that's what you want? But you'll need to quantify your argument rather better before it would be possible to make a prediction.
With the usual definition of literacy, there's a large literature that I pointed to.
I can't think of any measure of human ability where everyone or almost everyone measures at 0,1,2 but some people measure at 10. Most measures of ability tend to be normally distributed, and scales tend to reflect that. So maybe I just don't understand what you're asking.
He's using the word "literacy", but if you look at his examples, he's referring to the amount of reading that people do, not to their ability to do it.
Oh, no indeed. A person who, in 1950, reads the whole of the newspaper every day might very well take in a large number of words, but this indicates nothing about his ability to read anything harder.
Today, a kid who can read the words on a tiktok and who sends and receives very many words of text via discord every day is in some ways more 'literate' than the authors of classical antiquity who appear not to have been able to read silently to themselves.
I think I see now what you mean - the ability to read 'Ulysses' or some other complex texts, and extract ideas and meaning from them?
I think that most people would regard this as very subject specific. Someone who can read the latest research in chemistry probably can't get through a book on critical theory or vice versa. And if you remove subject knowledge from the equation, I think you're left with something similar to IQ...
Well, yeah, having everyone able to communicate with written words is significantly better than only having a few people able to do that.
Past the bottom tier of learning how to read, there's no trade-off; people will sort themselves by interest. There will always be 9's and 10's unless you're out there physically stopping people from reading at higher levels. I don't see any conclusions that would think that's a thing worth doing.
Weird to even think along these lines though, like "what if there was conservation of fire and we had to worry about how to share it?"
You're also conflating the repugnant conclusion with...any scenario where you might want to distribute a resource more evenly, I think. The repugnant conclusion isn't that sometimes it's better to share.
I conflate nothing, friend. It's an analogy, which you can tell is two separate (non-conflated) things because otherwise it wouldn't be an analogy.
I wish I'd have thought of this as a kind of meta-troll on the nature of literacy, but I didn't and award myself no points for the hilarious responses I've received. For sure the problem with people not understanding one another on Twitter was never the character limit.
LOL no, the implication is that this goes both ways. The experience of communicating well to people who can't read probably isn't something I can distinguish from the experience of communicating poorly.
Here's what I've been wondering lately: what should be the goal of humanity?
Like, in sci-fi books, many paint the future as kinda utopian where automation does everything and no one really needs to work. People like Musk think we need to colonize other planets to extend the species. Environmentalists would prefer we limit our impact on the natural earth (and maybe, in some sense, humanity isn't as important.)
Is this something that has been discussed much in some corners of the world?
Humanity should have 8,181,186,780 distinct goals as of this writing. Presumably with quite a bit of overlap, in many cases with only marginal differences. Anybody talking about "the" goal for humanity, is missing the point. If they won't take a hint, they should be tactfully ignored, ridiculed, or invited to decrement the active human goal count by one at their earliest convenience, depending on how pushy they are about it.
Just wanted to say, despite our earlier disagreements on pharmaceutical pricing, how strongly I agree with this statement. Every human gets to pick what their goal is. Nobody should be making goals for all of humanity, whether it's a rationalist commenter or any of the infinitely more evil people who have tried throughout the centuries.
Setting aside that different humans will have different, non-exclusive goals, isn't this a rephrasing of "what is the meaning of life" as applied to humanity?
It seems obvious to me that, to oversimplify a bit, any part of humanity that basically only values "continued existence" will outcompete any part of humanity that values basically anything else.
We conquered aging? Great let's go multiplanetary. Done that? Colonize other star systems. Have colonies that live, laugh, and love on giant space ships in the void between superclusters.
If you're worried about the quality of our qualia, don't, much - those with compatible qualia will outcompete those without. I expect we'll be able to choose our qualia by then so this won't be a problem.
Step one would be to end human suffering and ensure every human experiences a state of permanent, unblemished, uninterrupted bliss. After that... who knows, maybe make more humans? But that would definitely be step one.
As a an atheist (ie a cultural Catholic) I rejected belief in religion because of the afterlife. Not just hell but heaven. Any place where I’m just feeling bliss all the time without earning it would not be heaven, and I would not be me.
What if you could feel bliss where it felt like you did earn it? It's obviously impossible today because we don't have such tech, but what if we did? What if everyone could feel like Elon Musk (presumably) did when the first SpaceX mission launched successfully?
This post gets to the heart of the issue. It's not whether or not you earned bliss that's valuable, it's the feeling of having earned it that's valuable, regardless of whether someone acknowledges this or not. The idea of unearned bliss is only instinctually repugnant because we imagine it feeling unearned, because that's how it would feel without the sensation of earnedness also being present. So if we reach a point where emotional states are engineerable, then it will be perfectly possible to not just instantiate positive emotional states, but also the state of fully believing any emotional state was properly earned. Therefore, there should be no opposition to engineered emotional states due to a lack of earnedness.
> The idea of unearned bliss is only instinctually repugnant because we imagine it feeling unearned, because that's how it would feel without the sensation of earnedness also being present.
Some people find it abhorrent because they care about the external world and actual impacts and outcomes of other people.
Feeling earned bliss means positive impacts and outcomes for other people actually happened - surely this is better for all of us? Surely we should indeed incentivize this form of bliss over unearned, both for our collective good and for our civilizational and aggregate capacity to solve real-world problems and survive and thrive as a species overall?
While it may be true that at the present, earned bliss is instrumentally more useful, I still hold that bliss itself should be the ultimate end of human striving, and that therefore this bliss achieved as a terminal value in and of itself doesn't need to be "earned" to still be valuable as a final outcome.
At this exact point, where we can engineer a sense of “earned” bliss, we have achieved a state of lying to ourselves about our own actions and our freedom to determine them that I cannot help but despise. I look on the hedonic experience machine and I respond with despair for my own agency. I regard the mental state you describe as qualitatively different from anything I have experienced in my life, so I cannot grasp for a more personal metaphor.
If you learned that your current happiness set point was higher than 90% of people's, would you take prodepressant drugs to make you sadder until you were at the exact average?
If you learned that your happiness set point was in the lowest 10% of people, would you take antidepressant drugs until it was back at average? If you could take even more antidepressants and get higher than average, would you?
If you learned that 50000 years ago, happiness set points were higher, but agriculture had metabolic effects that drove them lower, would you take the antidepressants until you reached the current average set point, or the 50000 years ago set point?
After thinking about questions like this I stop caring about this kind of stuff too much and whatever, I'll just take the perma-happiness.
(I think many people assume perma-happiness must mean you're not capable of acting, or feeling worse or better depending on whether good or bad things are happening, but I'm assuming that's not true and you can just copy the mental state of someone with a much higher happiness set point than you)
Not the OP here, but I feel some deep-seated unease at this kind of rhetoric because I sense that this spectrum of hypothetical bliss is only possible in the mental model of a rationalist, where utilitarian notions of happiness mean that everything is fungible, including mental states. If you were offered the “eternal bliss” pill right now, would you take it? Would you eagerly take the soma?
I know I am hopelessly incapable of articulating my thought process here, but it seems like your rhetoric is only possible in the kind of a philosopher with no preferential regard for the status quo; I understand that this is most utilitarians, but I personally derive a sense of – not comfort or contentment, but stability? acceptance? – from the notion that things are as they are because of how they have been. I am capable of experiencing intense joy and deep sorrow, and when I do, it is the result of some causal precipitating chain of events that are in some sense self-determined… to the extent that I am capable of taking any self-determined action whatsoever (many people are, of course, incapacitated in some manner as to render them unable to comprehend the causal impacts of their own actions). I feel a wrenching sense of incapacity as well when contemplating this kind of scenario.
The freedom of the utilitarian is to be governed by their internal rule, an ideal so internal that the objects of value are themselves internal, the qualities of consciousness itself. Nothing is left to chance, and everything comes from within and only has value therein. This is more authentic perhaps than the psychological illusion of making a choice spontaneously, like Libet's delay. It also makes more sense than valuing a choice merely because it was spontaneous.
The utilitarian would prefer to give up free will entirely, and to have all their future actions be the best ones, whichever those are. But I could see why you'd think utilitarianism would be so dreary. It doesn't tell a story, and it doesn't have characters. It has no ulterior motives, no moments of character development. But alongside Buddhism no other living system sees how deeply serious our situation is, no other system condemns the world so totally and wages such a war against it. In other systems with positive precepts, even in Christian Gnosticism, there is always a note of apologetics, of theodicy or cosmodicy. In utilitarianism and Buddhism the desire to make peace with the world and befriend it has totally vanished, and the world is beyond forgiveness.
>If you were offered the “eternal bliss” pill right now, would you take it? Would you eagerly take the soma?
If this was quite literally what you describe it as being, it would be wildly irresponsible for me not to take it. That, and that I would be caving into fear to protect my petty sense of normality, would be too shameful for words. It's really a repugnant thought.
"Just taught Nozick’s Experience Machine for the hundredth time. All but one student were immediately and unreservedly in favor of entering the machine for life. Never had that happen before, rather threw off my lesson plan!"
I just refreshed my memory of the Experience Machine, and I think people today have different perceptions of the thought experiment than previously, because of the march of technology. For example, which students considered the possibility of any errors in the machine, from which no recovery could even be possible because the machine operators think it's running just fine?
Another issue is the definition of happiness. Everyone knows what happiness is, but that may differ from person to person. The machine may customize the experience to the individual, but without feedback from the individual, how can the machine provide consistent happiness? In a thought experiment, such concerns can be waved away, but only up to a point. For instance, if you enjoy eating a certain food, so the machine simulates you eating that food, diminishing marginal utility indicates, at some point, that that food is no longer what it should be simulating.
I was raised Catholic. I remember learning that in the "afterlife" -- heaven anyway -- was described similarly. Want for nothing, etc.
When I was in 5th grade, I had a crush on a girl who had no interest in me. I imagined how much she would like me in "heaven". But it occurred to me that that might not be how she imagined heaven.
Today, the US is a wealthy nation by any historic standards. Yet the rate of anxiety and depression are really high. Particularly in young people.
I can understand the idea that feeding an housing everyone is a good baseline goal for humanity. But I don't think that would be enough to make everyone happy. We could medicate, I guess. But that doesn't seem fulfilling either. (Reminds me of the movie Wall-E).
So to me that seems like an unachievable goal -- and the wrong one anway.
Why couldn't you, in heaven, be with that girl? And also the girl, in HER heaven, never meet you again, if such is ideal for her? Heaven could be a kind of Hilbert space, so that everyone's ideal state is achieved.
Not that I believe in heaven, as it sounds like wishful thinking with no evidence for or against it.
As a hedonic utilitarian, I personally think the end goal of humanity should be to convert the universe's matter into as many minds experiencing sublime happiness as possible. We can tell from direct experience that pleasure is a good in and of itself, and therefore it is something we should try to maximize. When we really think about this, we realize that we don't have to limit ourselves to increasing happiness in already existing minds, but we can create even greater pleasure by creating new minds that have been engineered to feel a maximum level of happiness in perpetuity. If creating such minds is even theoretically possible, then the clear end goal that presents itself is to create as many such minds as possible from the majority unthinking matter of the universe. I forsee a future where Von Neumann probes spread out across the cosmos, converting all matter in their path into minds that will continue to feel rapturous pleasure until the heat death of the universe. That is what I believe the end goal of human progress should be.
It's probably good to strike a deal with the existing lifeforms, so that they'll go along with this plan. Probably good to assure humans they won't be converted into hedonium cores.
That's why I say that it's the majority unthinking matter of the universe that gets converted. We can leave humanity and any other systems containing life alone, as a sort of "hedge" in case there's some more existential meaning to life that pure hedonism doesn't fulfill. The vast majority of the universe not containing life would be converted either way.
This goal you’ve proposed fills me with a sense of reflexive and overwhelming revulsion.
I suspect that, if democratic impulses are to have anything to do with the determination of our long-term goals as a species, you may see more opposition than you might expect.
I wrote a detailed reply to this that the Substack app appears to have eaten, so I'll briefly restate it. I can understand why you might feel instinctual revulsion at the idea of humans being put into experience machines, but that's not actually what I'm proposing. I think that humanity and any other intelligent life can be left alone, to provide an outlet for more existentially diverse modes of existence, as a hedge in case there is more meaning to life than pure pleasure maximization. It would only be the inert, unthinking matter that makes up the majority of the universe that would be converted. So it wouldn't be a case of human experience being replaced by maximized pleasure, but rather lifelessness being replaced by maximized pleasure. I hope you find this idea less off-putting knowing that humanity would still be able to exist in all its experiential diversity.
First of all, let me say that I can deeply empathize on the Substack vanishing point. I have experienced the same thing at several times and there are few things more frustrating.
The discussion here has actually been quite interesting for me in a personal sense, because I’m slightly surprised to notice how much I oppose the idea of even converting inert space to “bliss”. I hope you’ll grant me some license to ramble here.
I have a lot I could say in terms of articulating minutiae related to my sense of opposition, but I think there are several sort of overarching beliefs I hold that are more foundational; I notice that I believe deeply in the inestimably complex nature of systems (as in, that systems in nature are often far more complex than we recognize, and that we tend to minimize our estimation of remaining unacknowledged complexity every time we make an iterative step in the direction of discovering some additional complex facet of a given system. i.e. we habitually lack the humility necessary to comprehend system complexity), and I am concerned about the possibility of knock-on effects from the conversion of inert space. Just as a universal assumption, I think I tend to model some sort of James C. Scott-style skepticism of any paradisiacal top-down scheme to radically transform natural systems; take German scientific forestry, if you will, as the parallel. In other words I feel absolutely no compulsion to enact some sweeping scheme to spread consciousness to “inert space”, and I feel some concern about potential downsides, so on net I feel no desire to do it. A pure utilitarian (with different assumptions about the legibility of natural systems) may feel otherwise.
I am also fairly skeptical of the notion of fungible or replicable consciousness, as a concept divorced of humanity; like Erik Hoel, I am AI-pilled on the threat and capabilities (and imminence) of AGI whilst not granting it any claim to consciousness. On this point I will not elaborate too much, given that other people much smarter than I have already articulated the various permutations and consequences of this assumption.
I think that if I consider myself even more deeply, there is some core belief even more foundational that perhaps ties the previous two beliefs together – that it is best for the human race not to try and play God. On this assumption I have nothing more to say, other than to acknowledge it seems a silly thing in light of rationalist or utilitarian arguments because it is frustratingly unmoored from these kinds of philosophical approaches. Nevertheless.
I'll be posting a review of Nick Bostrom's "Deep Utopia" sometime in the next month or so.
My position is that AI and the possibility of superintelligence make everything else irrelevant. Either it takes over, or it produces such dramatic changes (eg humans near obsolete, technology advances at the rate of centuries per year) that - ironically - stories about humans leisurely colonizing the solar system and building dome cities on Mars and having wars with little spaceships - are science fiction only insofar as they're too *normal* and *boring*. In the real world everything explodes in some kind of crazy way and the aftermath is either extreme ever-expanding utopia or nothing human-looking at all. I think even if there's somehow no such thing as superintelligence or recursive self-improvement, just one or two AI generations beyond what we have now is enough to make the future really different from the Star Wars version where you still have human pilots, soldiers, merchants, etc. Accelerando is the only sci-fi book I've read that really grapples with this, though there are probably others I've missed.
This makes the "goal" of humanity hard to reason about - with enough far future tech, instead of worrying about environment-tech tradeoffs, we can just give Earth to the animals and live on the outside surface of the Dyson Sphere or whatever. At that point the question is less normal environment-tech tradeoffs and more what happens at the extreme extreme limits of environmentalism - should we end wild animal suffering and genetically engineer predators into herbivores? If biodiversity is good, should we accelerate evolution to create billions of new species on paradise-worlds scattered across the solar system? If we want to expand to other planets, should we form a colonization shockwave expanding at lightspeed throughout the galaxy to create trillions of trillions of humans teeming across every solid surface, or is that the astronomical equivalent of spam? (cf. Asimov's Spacers and Settlers, and the Repugnant Conclusion literature)
Bostrom has some thoughts on this, but I think it's probably safe to leave the details to future superintelligences that are vastly smarter than we are. Although I realize that intelligence =/ wisdom or good values, I don't think our moral reasoning / philosophy would be very good if it had been done entirely by sub-70-IQ retarded people, and that's the closest equivalent to trying to solve these issues today instead of leaving them to future intelligence-amplified philosophers. I think we solve the minimum number of philosophical problems necessary to value-align superintelligence, then let it tell us more (I would trust it most if it says that it's going to create genetically engineered humans or human-AI cyborgs to combine superintelligence with natural human thought processes).
You are a smart guy and I’m going to assume here that something like AGI and super-intelligence can happen but..
> technology advances at the rate of centuries per year
That’s just not possible. Maybe in theory science can advance at centuries per year. I doubt it but let’s go with it - but technology as an applied science will be subject to the laws of physics, economics, commerce and - not least - the supply chain.
Which proves nothing about the future. If anything, as I’ll reply to Scott later, we may be one the top of the S curve for a lot of technologies we already have, and the smartest super intelligence will have no ability to do anything but eke out a few percentages.
I'd instead say that speedup depends on things like feedback from physical world stuff, the parallelizable proportion of a task, the efficiency with which you prune branches in exploring combinatorial hypothesis space etc, which would lead to anywhere from "not much speedup" to "well beyond hundreds of times". No idea what this extreme heterogeneity in speedup nets out to though.
I think any technology powerful enough to do that could also do much better things (like https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/profile-the-far-out-initiative), and that any civilization powerful enough to deploy this technology would know things we don't that would let them make this decision better than we can (eg the nature of consciousness and suffering, what it feels like to be a snake, etc). So to some degree I reject this hypothetical.
If you force me to accept it, I want to know other things, like if humans are planning to expand through space and colonize those planets or not, and how good a job humans are doing with their own civilization/biosphere.
If you put a gun to my head and force me to answer either yes or no without answering any of these things, I'd take the [strikethrough]bullet to the head[/strikethrough] deal.
Thank you for your thoughts. I agree 100%. Let's get wiser first before going toe-to-toe against evolution.
To make things massivlely more grounded, though, I have to confess that the idea of " genetically engineer[ing] predators into herbivores" is something that I get less grip on the more I think about it. What is a lion without predation, males fighting to the death for domination a a pride, and so on. Could humans ever be wise enough to "fix this" and leave anything worthwhile other than a quasi-human with fur? (Though I'm pessimstic, I'll give an encouraging thought by noting that what we did with dogs, even if inadvertently, isn't the worst precedent.)
> I'll give an encouraging thought by noting that what we did with dogs, even if inadvertently, isn't the worst precedent.
It's pretty likely dogs self-domesticated, so you could consider it them-driven rather than us-driven. You start with wolves scavenging near human camps 40kya, and the ones with less reactive aggression and fear reflexes are able to go deeper / stay longer / get more food and leave more descendants. The ones who compound on that to be able to actually get closer as humans are discarding bones or gristle or whatever, and act friendly while closer do still better.
You compound this for tens of thousands of years. By 15-20kya dogs are morphologically distinct from wolves. Now they're tame enough to be near humans full time and humans probably start breeding them into some of the oldest breeds like Basenjis and Salukis and such.
As an aside that's not directly relevant, domestication can happen surprisingly quickly when actively selected for - it took us probably 200-400k years to self domesticate, dogs around 20k years, but when Byalev deliberately set out to breed domesticated foxes, it only took 3 generations until they had no aggression response, within 4 generations some kits would approach humans wagging, like puppies. At the sixth generation, they essentially had the full dog behavioral package.
Then the “domesticated elite” went from 18% of the population at 10 generations to 80% in 35 generations, very fast fixation when selected for.
The thing about the Singularities is afterwards, someone or something else is calling the shots, so to paraphrase “1066 and all that”, it would be THE END of history from our perspective.
Stross has multiple times strongly disavowed the stance in Accelerando, though. As far as I can tell current-Stross sees AI more along the lines of Rule 34, strange and humanly inexplicable and beyond control like any optimization engine, creating big changes but Internet-scale, not singularity-scale.
It’s funny that the authors opinion (seemingly, I didn’t read it) guessed the trend correctly in the past but is now failing to guess it correctly in the future. Foresight is 20/20 in his case?
I think Stross has come to believe that singularitarianism is essentially a Fyodorovian religion. As far as I understand the reasoning (this might be wrong and I don't necessarily share these beliefs), it is therefore politically dangerous, in the sense of being an opiate and a dampener of action, and perhaps also likely to be encouraged by people who benefit from the status quo. His blog archives contain more detail about this.
> "creating big changes but Internet-scale, not singularity-scale"
I don't understand this perspective. I understand and appreciate (though on balance disagree with) people saying AI will take so long to become superintelligent that we shouldn't worry about it in our lifetimes/the near term. But I don't understand how you're a sci-fi author happy to write about 2100 or 3000 and don't think this consideration dominates, unless you think that the normal human IQ is as fixed as the lightspeed limit (in which case, how do we get human geniuses?)
Hey Scott, just curious whether you've come across (and presumably rejected) David Deutsch's 'universal explainer' theory? He thinks there is a discrete jump between e.g. humans and chimps, but the concept of a higher level superintelligence is incoherent—humans are in principle capable of understanding any knowledge that is explicable, even if we have to do so more slowly due to differences in hardware (processing speed, working memory). The heart of all knowledge creation is the ability to come up with explanations, and this is a binary attribute: humans have it, animals don't, AIs don't have it (yet). Once they do, they will be people like us, who can be persuaded by reason.
It's a very counterintuitive idea and I'm not sure if it fully resolves all the AI doom concerns even if true, but it is really interesting IMO and worth looking into.
Specifically about AI doom, I don't think this argument goes far. It's only considering the quality of the intelligence, not the speed. Even if human geniuses represent the most intelligent form of life possible (unlikely, but let's imagine it) the speed of execution remains a determining factor in what can be achieved by them.
A strong example of this is that any person with mediocre chess skills could quite easily beat the world's best chess player, if they got to spend 10 years thinking about each move for every 1 minute that the chess master did.
An AI that could think hundreds or thousands of times faster than us wouldn't need to be qualitatively more intelligent than us in order to hand us our asses at practically every task. Moreover, it could also run in parallel. It could effectively be like a team of hundreds or thousands of people thinking at once. Putting some theoretical ceiling on intelligence that makes humans the most intelligent things possible doesn't actually keep us safe from any of that.
Yeah this is where my remaining concerns lie. I'm pretty sure Deutsch would reject the orthogonality thesis: morality also stems from the ability to generate and critique explanations—which is the key attribute of 'personhood'—so we wouldn't end up with totally inscrutable paperclip-style mismatches. But there would still be a lot of time for an AGI to make major and irreversible moral mistakes, in the same way that humans have made lots of moral mistakes (and continue to make them) despite being universal explainers.
I haven't read it. Gut reaction is that I deny the premise - I think of humans as more like 1000x the IQ of chimps rather than a step change. I feel like LLMs sort of back this up - as you go from GPT-1 to GPT-4.5, you see a lot of what you might think of as human reason emerging gradually.
Language is obviously great, but I think of it as the same type of thing as mathematics - just an incredibly useful tool that opens up lots of new opportunities. Could there be another equally-interesting tool that you only get at IQ 5000 and above? I would guess no, but I'm not sure.
(maybe formal logic, statistics, or the scientific method were tools like this which we got in historical times?)
Re: chimps, it's interesting that they have roughly the same brain size and structure as us, and even have more oomph in some respects (e.g. superior working memory) but are, as you put it, 1000x less intelligent. To me that fits much better with the idea that we are running a different software program that lets us do a completely novel type of mental move, rather than on some kind of continuum of ability.
Language is downstream of the trait that Deutsch is interested in, which is something like the ability to come up with creative conjectures about the world, and which leads to all the various behaviours that only humans can do. Simon Baron-Cohen has a very similar idea which he frames as the ability to systematise, although AFAIK he is unaware of Deutsch. Baron-Cohen runs through the anthropological and animal behaviour evidence in 'The Pattern Seekers'—I'm not an expert but it at least passed the sniff test for me (I reviewed it in this year's contest if you're interested).
LLMs are a whole other can of worms which I'm still kinda confused about. It seems like they're smart in the same way as chimps - they have superhuman intuition and memory (System 1), but are fundamentally limited in the ability to synthesise solutions to novel problems on the fly (System 2). It's really hard to operationalise a test for this, and AI people will quite rightly be frustrated about endlessly moving goalposts.
But Deutsch's arguments are very compelling and I still lean towards him probably being right. Again, if you're interested I cover them briefly in the Pattern Seekers review. Otherwise Deutsch's book The Beginning of Infinity is a great read which I think you'd enjoy in its own right, even if you disagree with the universal explainer theory.
Quibble: Stross' most recent novels that include AI (Rule 34 is probably the best one) are near-future SF police procedurals, set 10-20 years in the future. He's also pretty much abandoned the idea of writing near-to-medium-term SF because the future is too hazy and uncertain, although he's thinking more about sociopolitical uncertainty, not primarily AI.
You may be familiar with it already, but I'd also recommend Vernor Vinge's work generally, and especially his "Rainbows End," which is set on the cusp of a singularity. Rainbows End does a particularly good job of suckering you in to think it's a story about everything being _about_ to go crazy, and then realizing that, no, it's actually a story of a world where everything _already_ went crazy, and people are doing their best to cope.
I mean, are we counting almost philosopher since Socrates?
More seriously Hegel and his students/followers can be seen as among the most serious answers to this, and considering what it would mean to set a goal for all humanity in the presence of freedom.
> The goal of humanity should be for all humans to get to enjoy the benefits of modern society, to end global poverty in other words, not just extreme $1/day poverty but any living standards that people in the rich world would consider poor.
Yes, let's all of humanity aspire to being 300lb sedentary moderns glued to screens both tiny and large for 10+ hours a day.
This is surely the highest and best purpose humanity as a whole should aspire to.
I mean, I actually agree we should raise global GDP per capita and automate production enough that everyone can be physically comfortable, but that's not going to happen without actual vision and aspirations beyond becoming Wall-E.
Also, making everyone comfortable isn't actually a good thing for human flourishing and happiness and mental health. Just look at "comfortable" Western depression, anxiety and suicide rates, life satisfaction, etc.
“We imagined ourselves as samurai sword VR pirate pioneers, but it turns out we’re pointless argument vegetables growing in walled gardens, harvested for the benefit of robots that serve us ads.”
Also, "lifting people out of poverty" only happens via economic growth, which only happens when you let rich people create businesses and jobs without taxing and disincentivizing them into oblivion. The way we lifted ~800M people out of <$5 a day poverty in the last 40 years was via China going capitalist, after all.
But all I ever hear from the "make everyone comfortable" crowd is to increase taxes, guillotine billionaires, etc. 70% of billionaries on the Forbes lists are self-made - they created a TON of jobs and economic growth, the main thing we want / need for the end goal. But no, they're just trying to make Elysium.
> Yes, let's all of humanity aspire to being 300lb sedentary moderns glued to screens both tiny and large for 10+ hours a day.
That's an extremely uncharitable interpretation of what Nikuruga wrote. And the rest of your comment makes me think that you set up this strawman merely as an excuse for that libertarian-flavored rant.
What I wrote was actually more tactful than my initial reaction - I think the things he's advocating for are completely opposite day, literally the wrong direction for either end, and I think it was upsetting to me because I actually agree with the end goal.
I agree with Nikuruga that we should lift as much of the world out of <$5 a day poverty as we can. I think that we should indeed try to increase human flourishing and the potential for people to use their talents to the fullest in the pursuit of excellence. The methodologies he's suggesting are explicitly pulling in the wrong direction for those ends.
"Enjoying the benefits of modern [Western] society" is almost certainly a mistake. Western society is fat, sick, and unhappy, with below replacement fertility, significant political divisions, declining state and civilizational capacity, and more. This is because everyone is comfortable and lazy and stares at big and / or small screens for 5-12 hours a day, and are basically adversarially captured by various FAANG eyeball and attention mines. Putting this as an end goal is pretty much explicitly a program to turn the entire world into 300 pound argument vegetables.
"Comfort" should never be an end, it's a stasis and the death of vitality and individual and civilizational capability. It's also explicitly *anti-correlated* with human flourishing and happiness, pace "comfortable" Western depression and anxiety rates, suicide rates, etc.
"Billionaires shouldn't try to go to Mars, they should give money to the poor" is ALSO not even wrong, even by his own lights. A), they've already done more than anyone else in terms of creating jobs and economic growth, the ONLY thing that permanently lifts poor people out of poverty in the aggregate. B) deciding we can't try to do anything cool or exciting until everyone on earth is "comfortable" is explicitly a program to turn us all into 300 pound argument vegetables and never achieve anything. C) billionaires became billionaires by DOING aspirational, cool things - trying to eliminate them (or trying to tax the crap out of billionaires-to-be to give to the poor) is just going to end with much less economic growth, and so many fewer poor people being permanently lifted out of poverty.
If you ACTUALLY want to lift more of the global poor out of poverty, we need dynamics that create a whole lot MORE billionaires. When China went capitalist and lifted 800M people out of poverty? That created a TON of billionaires - who are right now driving up real estate prices in Vancouver and NYC and London and whatever. Now we need a wave of economic dynamism similar to China's that will create the next wave of non-political-leader African billionaires. Because they'll become billionaires by building companies that create a lot of jobs and employ a metric buttload of people, and which drive a lot of GDP creation and economic growth.
The satisfaction of knowing that all of the items I use or food I eat were produced by people who were paid enough to live a pleasant life. Freedom from the negative feelings involved in knowing that other people are suffering because of resource distribution. The cultivation of compassion for other people. Moral and ethical goodness.
I'm guessing those things are not motivators for you the way they are for me and, probably, Nikuruga.
I wouldn't take everything written about Putin's kids at face value. I'm sure they live a great life but I doubt this part specifically:
> None of them dares to argue with the children, so they grow up knowing that they are exceptional. Any whim is fulfilled, and they perceive all the residences they live in as their personal domains.
Putin has been managing people for over 30 years now, I'm sure he understands that some degree of discipline is important to raise a proper heir.
These statements do not contradict each other. Even if Putin knows discipline is important, that does not mean that someone else would dare to apply said discipline to his child.
This is a quote from an investigation, during which they supposedly managed to talk to several of the staff members. So, not just a baseless conjecture.
I think, any assumption about Putin capable of understanding anything at this point is just an assumption. We truly don't know the damage this amount of power can do to a person holding it.
Also, if that were true, then surely very few actual princes and princesses from history would be spoiled arrogant idiots, which is not the case.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1844385928527384727.html
A list of misleading or negligent NYT headlines.
For unclear reasons, I find it hilarious that both this blog and the progressive metafilter.com loathe the NYT.
I'm sorry, are they seriously mad that the NYT isn't left-wing enough? If even they aren't partisan enough for them, they're free to go get their news from some leftist echo chambers instead.
You don't have to be very far left to detest Trump. There are Republicans/conservatives who detest Trump.
The guffawing in my Substack/Notes feed this morning is about the discovery that Trump's special "All-American" Bible+American-founding-documents book is in fact printed in China. For my money however that pales next to the revelation that in putting it together they _edited_ the fucking UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION to reflect MAGA wet dreams.
They left out every part of the Constitution added since 1791, with no indication of having done so. Hence the version of the Constitution which MAGAts are now reading does not include any of the following:
-- the abolition of slavery
-- the guarantee of due process
-- that Americans are entitled to vote without regard to race or religion or having previously been enslaved, and can't be made to pay a fee in order to vote
-- that women have the right to vote
-- how Congress certifies the Electoral College votes
-- the POTUS being limited to two terms
-- that persons who've engaged in insurrection are banned from public office
Photos are being posted online of the last page of the Trump book's Constitution and the first page of the section following it. The Trumpified Constitution ends with the batch of amendments that are unofficially known as the Bill of Rights.
So....just in case anybody thought Trump was kidding when (December 4 2022) he publicly proposed "the termination" of "rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution" -- he's put it in writing.
Sabine Hossenfelder summarizes several recent papers that suggest that AI isn't very useful as a coding tool...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A-gqHJ1ENI
In my experience, it is useful as an autocomplete-on-steroids that often saves time while typing code, but people who claim it will replace human software engineers have no idea what they're talking about.
You mean within a certain timeframe right? It seems abundantly obvious that before very long it will absolutely replace humans
You confidence seems massively unfounded.
:- The position (zero'th derivative, if you like) of AI is frankly unimpressive - if AI doesn't get massively better at a range of things than it currently is, it won't be a big deal.
:- The first derivative of AI over the past few years has been very impressive indeed. computers can do things now that seemed unimaginable just a few years ago.
:- The question is what the higher derivatives will look like. If AI goes on improving at the rate it has been over the past 3 years for the next 20 then yes, it really will be revolutionary, but we absolutely shouldn't be confident that that will happen - in fact, I think its more likely, although far from certain, that the current rapid rate of progress will slow long before then (and the question is how soon and by how much.
Predictions about the far future are hard, so how about this? I think is is unlikely that software engineer employment will be lower 25 years from now due to automation. Conditional on it being lower, I think it's more likely to be due to some disaster or economic depression rather than AI takeover.
(a) Bob Woodward claims in his new book that Trump secretly shipped to Putin, during the first weeks of the COVID-19 shutdowns when most Americans couldn't get their hands on COVID tests, several Abbott Point of Care Covid test machines for his personal use.
(b) Hours after that's reported, Trump tells ABC News that the above is "false" and "a made-up story."
(c) A day after Trump's denial, the Kremlin's regular media spokesman confirms that yes "of course" President Trump sent the testing machines to President Putin.
I know, nobody cares about this stuff, it's just "TDS", politicians have always spun and dissembled so what's new, blah blah blah. And after all Vance is still, now, repeating the Haitians-eating-cats thing and nobody gives a crap who didn't already dislike him. Fine, stipulated.
Still though....call me stubborn or something but somehow this level of blunt bald-faced (as my father would call it) lying to the public with no consequences still surprises me.
Well, one of Putin or Trump is lyingm
It *bothers* me. And, clearly, you. I would argue (admittedly conveniently) that continuing to be bothered is a sign of good mental health. But surely it's a bit late still to be surprised?
Fair. Maybe "surprised" is really just my self euphemism for "disturbed".
I just loved the coincided of the following two entries on Liz Lovelaces's twitter:
"yesterday drank 350ml vodka and then:
- climbed a mountain
- accidentally fell into a pool of radioactive water
- climbed DOWN the mountain while wet and cold and radioactive
- got punched in the face for the first time in my life
- drank even more vodka at brat bar"
"decided to install Ubuntu instead. "
Yes I remember reading Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's _Roadside Picnic_.
a) i, too, have tried getting WIFI to work on Ljnux. No experience with falling into a radioactive cooling pond and then getting into a bar fight in a former USSR country, but I imagine that sucks nearly as badly as getting WiFi to work on Linux.
====
Snark aside, how I redally got WiFi to work on Linux:
Me to our usual supplier of computers: "I'd like a WiFi card thgat works on Linux.W
Their tech guy: "Aww, that's horrible. I mean, even cards that have the same model number sometimes use different chipsets..."
Me: "You guys have a stock of different wifi cards and an Ubunti test maxchine in your workshop. If yiu can get a a card to work well enough that it can connect to an access point, I will buy it"
(Ten minutes later)
Their tech guy: "Here's your wifi card"
I honestly haven't had any trouble getting WiFi to work on Linux in the past 15 years. The one time I did, it was because I was trying to install some random distro for fun and the solution was booting Ubuntu long enough to turn the card on.
Chris Williamson's most recent guest is Calley Means, who argues the regulatory systems that are supposed to protect the American food supply and healthcare are fundamentally captured by big food processors and the pharmaceutical industry, and that's why Americans are so obese and unhealthy, and die years before their peers in Europe despite being heavily medicated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE4c5NO7XWQ
What regulations has Europe put in place that make European food less obesifying than American food? I've visited many European countries, and I seem to recall them having the same range of junk food as the US available for anyone who wants it. But I wasn't studying the issue closely, so maybe I missed something.
Note that I am *not* asking for examples or arguments of typical European diets being healthier than American ones. Nor about the regulation of foods for potential harms other than obesity. I't specifically the "regulation makes Europeans slim" part of this that doesn't ring true to me, and I'm not going to wade into a 2-hour Youtube video to resolve that.
I'm not going to wade into a 2-hour Youtube video either, but I would like to point out that to argue "regulatory capture in the US causes Americans to be unhealthier and die sooner than Europeans" is not necessarily to argue "stricter regulations in Europe cause Europeans to be healthier and die later than Americans." An argument could be made, for example, that Europeans are less in need of regulation to provide guardrails against obesity (etc.) because they are more likely to adhere to traditional regional dietary practices that provide those guardrails.
(I have no idea whether Calley Means is actually making that argument--see above re: wading into 2-hour Youtube videos)
If that were the case, then regulatory capture by Big Food would not be the reason "why Americans are so obese". The reason would be that Americans have different traditional regional dietary practices. Yes, at this point, McDonalds, fried chicken and everything else, and Doritos with a supersized Coke count as "traditional", and nobody had to capture any regulators to make it so.
No, that's not logical. None of those sentences is logical. Please slow down and think.
>If that were the case, then regulatory capture by Big Food would not be the reason "why Americans are so obese".
That simply doesn't follow. If Americans' ad libitum diet is one that would make them obese and unhealthy, and it is one that coulde be meaningfully changed by regulation, then it would be perfectly sensible to argue that lack of regulation leads to poorer health outcomes in Americans *independently of Europe's regulatory regime or lack of it*. In other words, in that case, it could be that America's lack of regulation leads to poorer health outcomes because Europeans' diets are more strictly regulated by their governments, but it also could be that America's lack of regulation leads to poorer health outcomes because Europeans' diets are more strictly regulated by the Europeans themselves, voluntarily!
> The reason would be that Americans have different traditional regional dietary practices
The reason would be that Americans have different dietary practices. It does not follow, at all, from any of the foregoing assumptions that those differences have to do with tradition or with region. The differences under our hypothetical *could* have to do with tradition or region partially, or entirely, or not at all.
(This is, of course, also true of the Europeans' dietary practices. I offered "traditional regional dietary practices" as an *example* of something other than European government regulation that could explain a difference in outcomes; I am not asserting outright that it explains the differences. I simply wanted to show you where, and how, you are jumping to conclusions.)
>Yes, at this point, McDonalds, fried chicken and everything else, and Doritos with a supersized Coke count as "traditional", and nobody had to capture any regulators to make it so.
This is simply irrelevant. Whether a diet "counts" as traditional or regional makes no difference as to whether government regulation could meaningfully slow, stop, or reverse its adoption. Either it could, or it couldn't. Again, I want to stress that what I am doing here is offering you a *****hypothetical****** *****example****** of a situation in which American diets could drift toward unhealthiness due to lack of government regulation (and possibly due to lack of countervailing healthier traditional dietary practices, although that need not be a factor) while European diets remain healthier without such government regulation because Europeans make healthier choices on their own.
It is a thing that could happen. I make no claim as to whether it has happened. If you want to know what I really suspect, or even if you don't want to know, I suspect that it's a complex combination of voluntary healthy dietary choices AND stricter regulations on certain obesity-fueling food ingredients AND better access to non-emergency health care AND more walking AND other things that makes Europeans less fat and longer-lived.
Failing to prevent some change, and causing that change, are two different things. In your hypothetical, it is the dietary practices of Americans (which, yes, are traditional and regional) that are the *cause* of America's excess obesity. Government regulation is merely one of several things that could in theory have prevented that outcome, but didn't.
If there were some regulatory body whose default behavior would have been to prevent Americans from adopting obesity-inducing dietary practices, then possibly interference with that regulatory body would qualify. But I don't think that's the case here - at the time the relevant dietary processes were adopted, American food regulation was limited to basically "is it contaminated or actually poisonous?", and no, fattening did not count as poisonous.
And if we imagine that "Big Food" was pushing some profitable but fatteningly healthy dietary practices on Americans and could only have been stopped by regulation, then presumably "Big Food" would have wanted to do the same in Europe, because twice the profit. So, again, what are the regulations that Europe has adopted that prevented "Big Food" from overriding traditional, regional European dietary practices with endless Big Macs and Supersize Fries like they allegedly did in the United States?
I came across this analysis of the backgrounds of Nobel Laureates. I found his analysis interesting. But he's concerned that our society isn't doing enough to find and support kids from non-Nobelist-generating backgrounds to reach their potential as scientists who could fix all our problems. Except from an equity perspective, I don't think this is a critical problem. After all, there are more scientists now than ever before who are publishing more papers than ever before, but scientific advancements have stagnated (yes, I believe John Horgan is correct).
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1844045388241915960.html
I came across a reference to the relics of St Anthony of Padua today, and if you take a look at the reliquary of his lower jaw, I think you will understand the aesthetics of Guillermo del Toro's movies better 😀
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/st-anthonys-tongue
I work for Otherbranch, a tech hiring startup founded and staffed by former Triplebyte employees. Surprisingly enough, our list of clients offering open roles is currently outpacing the growth of our candidate pool. So if you're a software engineer, we want to get you hired for them!
When you sign up and tell us what you're looking for, we keep an eye out for incoming roles that match your interests and skills. Then we'll schedule you for a 90-minute technical interview. Based on your performance, we can vouch for your skills directly to employers and expedite you through the first few steps of their application process. Some other perks:
- You only need to interview once, and we'll use it to match you with subsequent roles.
- It's free. Our paycheck comes from the employer's side.
- Whether you pass, fail, or crush our interview, you'll get detailed feedback on every section so you know exactly how you did.
If this sounds appealing to you, check out https://www.otherbranch.com/landing-j-engineers to learn more and sign up. You can also send me an email at jonah@otherbranch.com if you have additional questions.
(If you want us to help you hire engineers for your company, we're of course happy to work with you as well! You can learn more about that side of the process at https://www.otherbranch.com/landing-j-employers.)
> You only need to interview once, and we'll use it to match you with subsequent roles.
I don't know about your company, but when I went through Triplebyte (in the early days, before it turned into a generic jobs site), I still had to interview at the client companies in addition to the Triplebyte interview.
I should clarify: you only need to interview with *Otherbranch* once. There are almost always going to be subsequent rounds of interviews with a prospective employer before they hire a candidate, but the Otherbranch interview will often take the place of the first-round tech interview at a given company. At the very least, your application gets shown directly to the hiring manager instead of languishing in the resume slush pile. (The additional steps required by each company are listed clearly on the job postings we publish.)
The benefit is that you'll get to save time and hassle on additional round-1 interviews if you're applying to multiple roles through Otherbranch at once, or if you find yourself back on the job market down the road and want to use our service again.
There was (is?) a Mongol word "tümen" meaning 10 000. There was an Old Slavic word "t'ma" meaning the same. The obvious question is whether these two are etymologically related.
I asked ChatGPT, and it said that Mongols brought the word to Slavs during their invasions to Europe in the 13th century.
And now I wonder whether I have learned an interesting historical fact... or just made ChatGPT produce another hallucination.
Perhaps this is a glimpse to the future of education -- all information will be instantly available and made very easy to understand. But we will always doubt whether the answer is actually true, or was just made up on the spot. Or maybe my generation will always doubt it, but the next generations will probably accept everything as a fact. I mean, what other options will they have: trust the machine, or trust a book written by a human who probably just asked the machine?
Probably shouldn't believe anything on the basis of just ChatGPT's say-so. At the very least ask for a source. As the internet proceeds from a hobbyist playground to corporate ad-world to steaming pools of AI-generated sludge, maybe curated information sources like encyclopedias will come back in style.
Wiktionary has it: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%82%D1%8C%D0%BC%D0%B0#Old_Church_Slavonic
I don't think wiktionary is yet corrupted with AI-generated crap, but give it time.
Is there any reason, apart from being politically well-connected, why Robin Gunningham aka Banksy couldn't be prosecuted under the UK Proceeds of Crime Act?
Have criminal complaints been filed against Banksy? And is there an open police inquiry as to the identity of Banksy? Other than legal disputes about the ownership of his work, I haven't heard of any.
Is there any proof other than that provided by the Daily Mail (which I grant you is a very very highly super reliable journalistic enterprise) that Gunningham is Banksy? Other potential Banksy candidates have been outed.
And to whom is Gunningham politically well-connected? I think I would need more the Daily Mail to be convinced of his well-connected connections.
Heh, I'd need more than the Daily Mail in order to be convinced that the King isn't from the fourth planet of Alpha Centauri.
Prosecutorial discretion.
Was anyone around Silicon Valley, specifically in tech or close to tech, around 2010?
I have a theory that that's the year when tech/nerd culture began to ingest great numbers of people that would otherwise have gone into law, medicine, or finance--which changed the cultural landscape forever. I'm wondering if anyone has any observations or stories related to this. I'd be curious to see to what extent this theory is true.
I used to hangout in online tech spaces, but only came closer to the industry side of things around 2011-2012, and finally joined the industry in 2013. I think I observe that more non-geek people are working in tech than it used to be. The humor and references have changed quite a bit. There's less Lord of the Rings and Philip K. Dick in the air than there used to be, although these remain landmarks that even folks who went to Ivy League schools at least know of. There's a lot more people from the Ivies for sure. Very smooth, very good at presenting themselves.
In a way, it's an Eternal September kind of deal.
As a former member of the board of VLAB (back in 2003), I can assure you that non-techies were infiltrating Silicon Valley long before 2010. "Free" money has always been a great attractor in Silicon Valley. If there has been a change, it's the fact that techies are available in vast quantities overseas, and the Internet allowed the finance, marketing, and legal crew to kick back in Palo Alto while outsourcing product development to India, China, and Eastern Europe.
Do you think there is more outsourcing now than, say, in 2000 or 2010?
Outsourcing had begun before the Dot Com bubble burst. It picked up steam afterward. Around 2005, my company bought a small tech company in Romania with a few dozen engineers. They killed the product it made, but reassigned the engineers to work on our competing product and some other projects, and then some other projects. By 2010 our little company (1200 employees worldwide) was the largest hi-tech employer in Romania (500 employees). I was told (I don't know if it's true) that in 2010 we had hired most of all the EE graduates of the Polytechnic University of Bucharest (UPB). The Romania Gov gave our company an award, and it became aware that it could play in the global hi-tech market. Suddenly big-name tech companies arrived and started stealing our employees. We remained at about 500, but a whole tech ecosystem grew in Romania from a little seed.
Concur with Johan below. I worked in academia largely prior to joining Bell Labs in the late 70s. Prior to about the mid-70s computers involved wires and plugs, card punching programs on cards, and submitting jobs to an rjet facility and picking up the results the next day. In the 80s computers became much smaller and migrated from major labs to personal computers. At the same time some folks were working on better operating systems (e.g. Unix at Bell, which soon became a widely used os or the Bourne shell) and better communication procedures among computers. Mid to late 80s saw massive improvements in data communications among devices. The result was in the 90s an exponential growth in the number of computers dedicated solely to managing communication among computers, what we now call the internet. The 2001 time frame Johan speaks of coincides with the emergence of being able to work on computers anywhere and communicate with other computers anywhere. At the same time lots of software was being integrated from special purpose mainframe programs (like Fortran, LINPACK and EISPACK) into stuff for everyone everywhere like MATLAB and Python. The Apple macintosh graphical interface (which Microsoft basically copied in Windows) made working on a computer lots easier and more intuitive. So I think the nurturing medium matured between 2000 and 2010 so that techie work no longer was done in big labs by hardened geeks, but could be done by anybody. That sweet mixture is I think what lured all the flies and bugs into the tech field and things got a bit juicy after that.
Thanks for the detailed story! I guess I'm one of the kids ruining the lawn then :).
There's a few books about computing in the 60's, 70's, 80's, and early 90's, but precious little about anything later, minus some about Linux/OSS and one or two about very very specific companies like Facebook. Wish there was more about the later period.
Are you still in the industry?
I was never perhaps what one would call, "in the industry" as much as an active, participating user of the industry as it matured. I have spent my life in the field of physics (my nickname is a clue for the specialization area.) Now I am retired, but in the sense of the Mummy's view of death, retirement is only the beginning. I am still teaching a bit at university (in a sort of emeritus status) and consulting on various problems that some folks have.
My work with computers has always been aimed at that crucial part of physics, comparing the predictions of theory with experimental or observational outcomes and trying to visualize the results. So I just happened to use whatever were the best calculational capabilities as they came to exist. When I was an undergraduate (when dinosaurs roamed the earth) there were no computers in common use except in very specialized facilities. We depended on paper and pencil and slide rules. There were in those days slide rule contests for students to see who could best and fastest calculate results. When hand held scientific calculators first became available (for about $400+ in olden dollars for one that did what a $10 calculator does today) they were banned from use on tests for fear they gave too great an advantage to students who could afford them. The first device I recall using that was called a computer (apart from some specialized "computers" I used prior to that time, which were actually analog computers, that use switches and variable resistors to do specific calculations, for example, Turing's machine in WW2 that broke Enigma was based on his earlier analog computer) was as a lab assistant using an early PDP device that controlled an experiment. It had a glorious 8K of memory, was housed in a person sized rack, and was programmed using paper tapes (or mylar for frequently used programs) with holes punched in it for the coding. Some of the coding was also done wiring plugs on its backside. The interface device was one of those teletypes that made a great pounding noise when in use. Around that time began more common implementation the so-called mainframes, CDCs, IBMs, and later the Crays.
All the "social" stuff with computers has never interested me. There were some early computer games (first text driven, with statements like "you are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike" then simple character-graphic display games, called names like Zork I think) that the hard core computer folks had fun with but it was not until the communication bandwidth and memory miniaturization boomed after the 90s that it became practical to play with audio-visual stuff like movies, photos and the like. Those things take GB and more, TB for half serious video, of memory and bandwidth to be fun not frustrating. Gone are the days when we worked over 300 or later a glorious 1200 baud modems. When was the last time anyone you know got a DVD from a Redbox or Blockbuster store? In the GB and even TB world we live in a communicating computer can hit a pleasure spot with a large number of people, particularly those who somehow otherwise feel alienated from the main stream a bit or just want attention, neither of which applies to me anymore.
I got into the industry in 2001, and as far as I can tell the change you speak of had already happened by then. There were a lot of folk around who were more businessy than techy, and more preppy than nerdy. My theory is that they started to show up during and after the internet boom.
Thanks for sharing. It looks like my perspective is rooted in becoming aware of the culture of the industry when I began to interact with it, ie. 2010 is year for me and the kids are ruining my lawn!
Kurzgesagt released a new video. It's corny, naive, and overly simplistic in its optimism, but fuck, that's just what I need right now. On the off chance that you do too, here's the link:
Is Our World Broken? – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1nYtX-NUsc
That really pulled me down a science rabbit hole. Nice.
though I liked it, I keep thinking of the theme of CS Lewis' Abolition of Man. We in the present have a vast power over they of the future, and once we decide we should edit them, we make them less than they could be (and subject to our whim.. and we've got some pretty serious whims these days, and I don't see that abating any time soon). Okay, okay, they avoided saying any such thing. I just hear that whenever I hear 'we can make utopia right here'. I think we can't, without editing ourselves and kids. And we can't do that without making them lesser in some way. (You're gonna say, diseases. Sure. But the step after that.)
Again, liked it. Also liked the we-are-full-of-friendly-viruses one. Sent the tattoo one to a tattooed friend. Continuing the rabbit hole...
Can anyone suggest reliable historic records regarding:
Thomas Jefferson, North Africa, and pirates?
I'm not sure if there's a connection, but Jefferson's purported interactions with pirates may be -- rightly or wrongly -- associated with a militia movement called Sovereign Citizen. I'm not real familiar with the ideology, but they appear to be separatists a la the 1980s, and refuse taxes, driver licenses, license plates and such. Or is the connection to Jefferson bogus?
'Sovereign Citizens' reference a treaty with Morocco. Is it mythical?
If real, what does Jefferson have to do with it? And who were the pirates?
I can vaguely see a connection between the Sovereign Citizen movement and Thomas Jefferson's ideal of minarchist democracy, with the caveat that Thomas Jefferson was ideologically coherent and the Sovereign Citizens are very much not. Which means studying any coherent body of political thought is unlikely to give you any real insight there.
I'm not seeing any connection with the Barbary Pirates issue; that was Jefferson coming to the realization that, yes, even minarchist democracies will sometimes need to fight a war, even if nobody is literally invading us right this minute. To which end he imposed taxes and raised a navy and did all the usual stuff that annoys sovereign citizens but enables one to actually win a war, but being Jefferson did less of it than say John Adams would have,
The Barbary Wars should be more well known, they hit so many recent political moments in interesting ways.
Basically the English had treaties with the Muslim states in the Mediterranean saying they wouldn't raid english ships and take the crews as slaves. Once America declared independence American ships were no longer under the protection of those treaties.
So American merchant ships started being captured and having their crews auctioned off at slave markets. The US needed a navy to put a stop to it.
They pirates weren't criminals in their countries so they don't really fit the normal use of the term.
I think there's a great mini series to be made exploring the hypocrisy of the US being enraged by slave raids while slavery being legal, as well as the history of conflict with the Islamic world.
Why is it hypocritical? It's just dog-eat-dog. I try to get you and you try to get me. Hopefully I win.
"The hypocrisy of the US being enraged by slave raids while slavery being legal."
Its hypocritical but not uncommon. Perhaps that has always been the most common position when it comes to slavery throughout history. "I don't want my own family/tribe/countrymen/religious brethren to be enslaved but I support enslaving the enemy." The Arabs the Americans fought against most likely felt the same(they opposed Arab Muslims being enslaved while enslaving European Christians and African Pagans). Whats uncommon is extending that anti-slavery principle to all people not just your own "tribe". The Northern US was in the beginning stage of that process closely following Great Britain.
As a side note, the Barbary Wars are referenced in the Marine Corps Hymn ("The shores of Tripoli")
Don't bother with the Sovereign Citizenship stuff, it's all pseudo-law/history and not worth the pixels. Do look into the Barbary Wars, as it's a fascinating bit of US history that not many people know about and laid the foundations for the US navy.
The United States in Jefferson's time did fight Morocco (and the other North African states) over Barbary piracy; piracy was a big part of the economy of Algeria, Tunis, Morocco, and Tripolitania at the time. Treaties were surely involved in ending the conflicts and freeing prisoners and such, and would have been negotiated during the Jefferson administration. The search term you want is "Barbary Wars".
Sovereign Citizens are a very deep rabbit hole of crackpottery and I have no idea what claims they're currently making about this aspect of American history.
In my opinion, the Sovereign Citizen belief-system is a literally insane ideology, and you shouldn't attempt to understand it, lest you suffer the fate of a Lovecraft protagonist.
It redefines common words to mean very specific things, and then exploits the confusion between the common and specific definitions. As with any good manifesto, there's lots of capitalized words, and the cores is a bizarre theory of common law going back to England, which I don't think has anything to do with actual law as practiced anywhere (but I am not a lawyer). It's almost like cargo-cult law - they believe that if they say the right words in the right way in court, they can get off free. In actuality, they simply annoy judges by spouting non-stop nonsense.
I don't think Sovereign Citizens are a "militia" by any normal definition, and from what I understand, one of the major places the meme spreads is in prison, where gullible or unintelligent people think it's a way to make appeals. I suppose some subgroups of SCs who aren't in prison might form militias, but that's not the same thing as the entire group being a militia.
I don't know about a direct connection with Thomas Jefferson.
The pirates are almost certainly the Barbary Pirates, who operated out of North Africa in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I don't know how they're relevant to SCs, except that SCs make a big deal about "Admiralty Law".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_pirates#18th%E2%80%9319th_centuries
[edit: But moonshadow's link below suggest another meaning: on the theory that Canadian law only applies to the sea around Canada and not to the land, therefore when Canadian courts attempt to enforce rules on land, they're acting as "pirates".]
I encountered this phenomenon while providing legal services to inmates in lockdown. Librarians were obliged to photocopy legal documents without charge if they were "qualified", i.e., Habeas, Conditions of Confinement, Civil Rights, etc., according to the Lewis v. Casey Supreme Court decision. When I refused to copy an inmate's documents because they were about Sovereign Citizens' gibberish, this particular inmate went on a racist rant. I later ran into him working at a Salvation Army store where I was stuffing some furniture into my compact car. He remembered me and tried to pick a fight. What was unusual is the inmate was black, and apparently didn't understand that if he showed up to a meeting of Sovereign Citizens on the prison yard, he would not be well received. You picks your delusion and take your chances, I guess.
It sounds like you have a lot more contact with them than I do. But the occasional instances that come to my attention have been skewing more and more black over the last decade. *shrug* And I hadn't noticed a racist connection, but I suppose that's also something you'd have a lot more visibility into.
> In my opinion, the Sovereign Citizen belief-system is a literally insane ideology, and you shouldn't attempt to understand it, lest you suffer the fate of a Lovecraft protagonist.
*gasps and appalled*
They are fantastic, adorable, people on the right side of the debate; they may not be the brightest knife on a shed. But they have a wonderful sense of right and wrong, are so nonviolent in their advocacy in the face of overwhelming pressure.
I have no idea whether you're joking or not... But I do kinda sorta agree; they seem non-violent and willing to solve problems with talk and passive resistance, which is frankly amazing in this day and age. I think with a more sane belief-system they could possibly be an actual force for good. But as is, they're just nuts. It's like dealing with an LLM AI that's been *told* to give you meaningless slop. :-/
The insanity is optimism and the optimism is the cause of non violence. Sovereign citizens are people who picked up individualistic anarchism ideas but generally have not accepted the hard truth, politics is violence. I imagine we could debate for hours about when and where violence is acceptable, but taxation is theft and given a proud american face to face with a cop there to steal their money(/or other example of state violence hidden under layers of lawyer bullshit) its a hard pill to shallow to pick between martyrdom or cowardice. The untrained human mind often trys to bargain with reality, qed they pick an irrational nonsensical 3rd "options".
"just world fallacy" leads poeple with my personality to hope that you can assert your freedom(which clearly exists, the rural guns outnumber the federal agents 1000:1) to a cop and they will go away without a big mess of violence.
>Sovereign citizens are people who picked up individualistic anarchism ideas but generally have not accepted the hard truth, politics is violence.
Plenty of people pick up individualistic anarchism ideas without accepting the idea that politics is violence. However, most of those people do not also believe a very specific laundry list of demonstrably untrue and extremely silly things about U.S. history, English common law, money, contracts, taxation, the Uniform Commercial Code, etc., etc., etc. Sovcits are a very particular and somewhat rare kind of weird.
Whats your disagreement with the premise?
> It's almost like cargo-cult law - they believe that if they say the right words in the right way in court, they can get off free.
It's hard to blame them for this; it's a completely correct view of how the law works. We have plenty of examples, as when police testify that they were put in fear when they observed someone reach for his waistband. This is accepted, every time, despite the facts that (1) every cop ever called into court gives the same testimony and (2) we know that that they are specifically trained to provide those exact words.
> In actuality, they simply annoy judges by spouting non-stop nonsense.
That's not the fault of the nonsense. It just reflects that judges don't like them.
The problem isn't that there are a magic words in law that win you court cases, there absolutely are. The problem is that Sovereign Citizens have the wrong magic words and subscribe to an understanding of the law that will never generate the right ones.
Isn’t that the same as the case of the cargo cult: it is literally the case that if you build an airstrip lots of good stuff will arrive (if you are the US airforce and/or the US government likes you enough to send you stuff). The thing about the cargo cult is thinking that if you take the same action when the bracketed condition isn’t true that you’ll still get the benefit.
I guess, but I see the airplane deliveries as being performed by the same people who build the airstrips. They're building the airstrips as part of their air freight system, so that their airplanes can land on them. This makes for a significant difference between those people, and other people who build airstrips because airstrips attract airplanes. Airstrips do not in fact attract airplanes. One group sees the airstrips as a channel by which they can deliver something, and the other sees the airstrips as a natural resource, like a fruit tree, which occasionally produces something.
I don't see this type of difference between "people who use magic incantations in ways that the courts feel warmly toward" and "people who are too stupid to realize that the law isn't about magic incantations". I have cast that second perspective uncharitably, but it is not rare, and I think it is incorrect - the law 𝗶𝘀 about magic incantations, but courts feel that it's important to deny this. These two groups are viewing the law in the same way, but it's only working for one of them, for external reasons.
Viewed from one perspective the words about fear when someone reached for their waistband would seem like a magic incantation. But from another perspective those words are a shorthand for an argument that the judge will find persuasive. A non-police-officer probably wouldn’t get off a charge by using the same words, or would a police office get off a different charge (corruption, say) by using those words.
It is of course true that the building of airstrips doesn’t in itself attract cargo. That’s a genuine misunderstanding of the mechanisms involved. But to steelman the cargo cultist, it really is true that the magic words ‘please send us this week’s shipment’ attracts cargo. But it still wouldn’t work for the cargo cultist to send that message using the right magic words: the reason the magic words work is that the people hearing them think they should respond in a particular way.
This remains the best reading on the subject of sovereign citizens I am aware of: https://www.canlii.org/en/ab/abqb/doc/2012/2012abqb571/2012abqb571.html
A little while ago, there was an internal memo from the YouTuber Mr. Beast, which made the rounds. It had some interesting things about how his production system worked. But one part jumped out at me:
> This is what dictates what we do for videos. “I Spent 50 Hours In My Front Yard” is lame and you wouldn’t click it. But you would hypothetically click “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”. Both are relatively similar in time/effort but the ketchup one is easily 100x more viral. An image of someone sitting in ketchup in a bathtub is exponentially more interesting than someone sitting in their front yard. Titles are equally as important for getting someone to click. A simple way to up that CTR even more would be to title it “I Survived” instead of “I Spent”. That would add more intrigue and make it feel more extreme. In general the more extreme the better. “I Don’t Like Bananas” won’t perform the same as “Bananas Are The Worst Food On Earth”.
I think that this is how Trump should be interpreted. All of his "best" and "worst" and "greatest" and "all" and "none", all of the exaggerations, even my "all"s ... it's all showmanship to hook his audience.
tropisms
Yes, he speaks in hyperbole. I'm not sure that's the way he actually operates, but certainly how he speaks, and he thinks it works, at least for his target audience.
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Am seeing commentary on the Nobel Prize in physics along the lines of `c'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre,' and thought as one of the SSC-sphere's resident physicists I should weigh in. I'm going to weigh in on the side of `this is definitely physics, quit complaining.' My reasons are two-fold. (1) I (and many other physicists) like to condescendingly believe that ultimately, all scientific fields are just physics (possibly applied), and we should be consistent in our convictions, and (2) the `disordered systems and neural networks' sub-arxiv is one I've read religiously (and contributed to) for over a decade. I've always thought that most of the stuff on there is physics, and it would be bizarre to declare `this subarxiv is physics, but some of the papers that founded it are not.'
Alors, c'est magnifique, et c'est la guerre. And evaluated as statistical physics, it seems to me to be a completely worthy choice of award.
> Am seeing commentary on the Nobel Prize in physics along the lines of `c'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre,'
The commentary I saw was more along the lines of "nobody ever cared about that research, nor did it ever lead to anything of note".
Seeing how I learned about Hopfield's work doing my diploma thesis at the Chair for Computational Physics at the Physics Department of my university - I don't have an issue with the Nobel Prize. It's at the outer edges of what physics is, but it's so much more important than most of what's going on in more traditional fields, so it's fine.
I’m a young adult male who does a lot of hard cardiovascular exercise (usually every day). I just got double-vaccinated for flu and covid. I’ve heard about risk of myocarditis among young adult males who just got vaccinated. Should I lay off the exercise for a few days? When I googled about exercise and vaccination, I found studies saying exercise is helpful, but I’m not sure if these studies considered the myocarditis risk.
There isn't strong evidence that directly links exercise to an increased risk of post-vaccination myocarditis. But intense physical activity can sometimes exacerbate underlying heart conditions. And a bout of myocarditis could further increase your risk. Since you're young, you probably haven't had anything like an ECG or EKG, have you? IANAMD, but it might be worthwhile to have a workup done on your heart (if your insurance covers it).
What would be the downside of not exercising for a few days after the vaccination?
I haven’t had a heart workup done. I use an Apple Watch a lot of the time when doing cardio, and it has some kind of irregular heart beat detection.
Working out is part of my routine, and I get a little stir-crazy if I don’t. I think the kids call it “zoomies”. I also feel like I haven’t earned the right to eat dinner if I haven’t broken a sweat yet. I do occasionally skip the workout in rare scenarios, like if I’m on a plane or working late.
If the damage was done it lasts longer then a few days and "myocarditis" is just the signal. Your bargaining politics and well that just aint how reality works(at least when your not debating with a person); Im pretty sure it wont have an effect. If you rolled the dice badly and spike protein got into your heart you should probably not heavily exercise for a year or 3(and plan on dying a decade earlier); heart damage is no joke and if it happens for an unknown reason from a shot in your arm a very strange cascade of events happened
The advice I got was to not exercise for a few days. For one, I was told that increased blood flow in the muscles where the vaccine was injected could reduce its effecticeness; the other aspect was myocarditis. From what I remember, the odds of getting it are somewhere in the 1/1000 to 1/10000 range, but it's not worth risking anything. (Besides, there's a fair chance that the vaccine hits you hard enough that the question becomes moot. Listen to your body.)
I've got a friend who thinks Moby Dick is a techno-thriller because it's got so much detail about whales and whaling.
I think it's not a techno-thriller because they have imaginary tech which at least sounds plausible.
Is there any contemporary fiction with that sort of detail about real tech?
IMHO Moby Dick isn't a techno-thriller because most of that detail about whales and whaling isn't a relevant part of the story or plot in any way - instead, there's a (not that commonly used) literary technique, where at certain points in the story there are months of mundane routine travel where the protagonist stares at the sea and nothing happens other than months of suspenseful waiting which is key to establishing their mood when the whale is noticed again - and in order to provide a similar feeling and mood to the reader, instead of just saying "x time passed", the author has a long chapter that thoroughly describes vaguely related facts in excruciating detail. And it works, achieving that effect.
I'll admit, I haven't read many techno-thrillers and I have no idea what contemporary ones are like, but I'd be very surprised if they included passages such as these:
"While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed in dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated ere going to the try-works, of which anon.
It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others, I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times this sperm was such a favourite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener! such a delicious molifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralise.
As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,—literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti."
> I think it's not a techno-thriller because they have imaginary tech which at least sounds plausible.
The whaling tech is imaginary? Just trying to clarify.
I think it might be more fun to read it as an alternate-history techno-thriller, by a reader who was ignorant that whaling was ever a real practice.
I think most of it would sound incredibly contrived. How could anyone possibly catch a whale with 19th century technology? "Well y'see, you just wait for it to surface then you chuck in a spear on a rope!" And what could possibly make this whole activity economically worthwhile? "Well, y'see, there's a goo in a sperm whale's head which you can use in cosmetics." It all sounds completely implausible.
Whale oil as lighting source. Before petroleum products were refined, animal-fat derivatives or plant oils lwere what you had to burn for light.
So commercial whale hunting in the 19th century was more like oil prospecting in the 20th century, regarding economic returns, than merely "the oil in the head can be used for cosmetics".
I'm sorry, I meant that Moby Dick isn't a techno-thriller because techno-thrillers have fake tech, while Moby Dick has real tech.
Ok, gotcha.
I'd classify early Tom Clancy as "techno-thriller", and he almost entirely stuck to real military tech?
I think he did his major work in the 80s. Is there anyone more recent?
I tend to associate him and Michael Crichton with the start of the genre. I can't point to anyone more recent, but I'd probably recognize the names due to time spent shelving in a mystery/thriller section.
Would Stieg Larsson's _Girl With the Dragon Tattoo_ trilogy count as a techno thriller? Lots of hacking and violence. But geez that's almost two decades old now!
Whoa.....
====
By September 2022, US intelligence reports deemed “exquisite” revealed a “deeply unnerving assessment” of Putin — that he was so desperate about battlefield losses that he might use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
Based on the alarming new intelligence reports, the White House believed there was a 50% chance Russia would use a tactical nuclear weapon — a striking assessment that had skyrocketed up from 5% and then 10%, Woodward reports.
“On all channels, get on the line with the Russians,” Biden instructed his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. “Tell them what we will do in response,” he said, according to Woodward.
The book recounts a tense phone call between Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and his Russian counterpart in October 2022.
“If you did this, all the restraints that we have been operating under in Ukraine would be reconsidered,” Austin said to Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, according to Woodward. “This would isolate Russia on the world stage to a degree you Russians cannot fully appreciate.”
“I don’t take kindly to being threatened,” Shoigu responded.
“Mr. Minister,” Austin said, according to Woodward, “I am the leader of the most powerful military in the history of the world. I don’t make threats.”
Two days later, the Russians requested another call. This time, the Russian defense minister dramatically claimed the Ukrainians were planning to use a “dirty bomb” — a false story the US believed the Kremlin was pushing as a pretext to deploy a nuclear weapon.
“We don’t believe you,” Austin said firmly in response, according to Woodward. “We don’t see any indications of this, and the world will see through this.”
“Don’t do it,” he said to Shoigu.
“I understand,” Shoigu replied.
====
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/08/politics/bob-woodward-book-war-joe-biden-putin-netanyahu-trump/index.html
Haven't we always known intuitively that this is the reason the Biden administration wants Ukraine to fight Russia with one arm tied behind its back? Other commentators have expressed this idea. Their mistake has been that they see Putin as a leader of a nation-state motivated by nationalist impulses. They expected Putin would eventually realize that he's destroying his nation's economic and military capacity by continuing the war. But Putin is more like a mafia leader. Even though he's assassinated all the other pretenders to the throne, he can't show weakness. And like a mafia boss, he can't go into retirement. That would immediately put a target on his head. Russia can go down the tubes, but Putin has to keep trying. And with all the yes-men surrounding him, he may not realize how much things are deteriorating around him.
This doesn't really make sense. Putin wants to annex the industrial eastern parts of Ukraine and turn the western part into some sort of demilitarized buffer state between Russia and NATO. He would in effect be nuking the territory he wants to control, and the prevailing winds would blow the radiation into Russia anyway. I also don't think it would serve the interest of keeping NATO out at all; nothing is more likely to lead to foreign intervention than dropping a nuke.
Tactical nuclear weapons don't even work very well against enemy troops. They aren't concentrated enough in the theatre. It makes more sense if the nukes are trying to stop hundreds of Soviet divisions from pouring into western Europe over limited routes. The only real target in Ukraine would be Kiev. That wouldn't destroy the Ukrainian military, but it would destroy all the people that the Russians would need to negotiate a surrender with.
The Russians might try to look tough with their nuclear policy, but Ukraine has violated their red lines in the past. The updated Russian nuclear doctrine states that attacks on their nuclear detection or launch infrastructure can trigger nuclear retaliation. But Ukraine partially destroyed the over-the-horizon early warning radar in Armavir this May with a drone strike, and the Russians did nothing.
1. The proper and effective way to use what are generally called "tactical" nuclear weapons is to engage critical logistics and C3I (or whatever) targets. The bit where, ha ha, tanks are so tough and spread out that your fancy nuclear warhead only destroyed six of them, you silly fool who thought nuclear weapons could stop tanks, falls apart when you learn that the nuke didn't destroy any tanks but now all of the tanks aren't getting any more fuel, ammunition, or orders. Assuming the Russians are not *completely* incompetent, the modest use of tactical nuclear weapons would probably have given them a decisive advantage in Ukraine.
2. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rebuilt on their original sites, starting weeks after the attacks. They were somewhat less healthy places to live than they had been, but not to an extent that would seriously concern a Russian, or anyone else whose risk tolerance has been recalibrated to wartime standards. Fallout does not render vast tracts of valuable land inhabitable for any great length of time.
Re: 1, a lot of the Ukrainian command/logistics is already very spread out and decentralized to mitigate conventional strikes from drones/bombs/missiles. And they don't really have local production of much besides drones, most of their supplies are shipped in from NATO neighbors. Nuking Poland or Romania is fully into WW3/MAD territory. I don't doubt that the Russians using tactical nukes against Ukraine would be devastating, but it isn't the same scenario as a typical Cold War era wargame.
Re: 2, see my comment below about grain exports. It's a major pillar of the Ukrainian economy and the public is hysterical about radiation far beyond the factual harms. I imagine the deployment of nuclear weapons there would destroy the export market. Maybe this isn't something Putin or the Duma care about very much, but it would be against their own interest if they want to occupy the land they are conquering (which presumably is the whole reason they are using nukes in the first place).
Also, depending on the time of year where they dropped the nuke, they'd risk fallout blowing back on their territory. I remember when Putin first rattled his nuclear saber (the first of many rattles), I checked the winds in Kyiv and they happened to be blowing towards Moscow. But for much of the year, they blow up towards Poland and the Baltic.
The nuclear strike was being considered specifically in view of the Kherson garrison being surrounded and cut off from supply in late October '22. There might have been adequate troop and armour concentrations west of Kherson for it to make tactical sense.
In the event, Sergei Surovikin, in a remarkable display of political sangfroid and military skill, surrendered Kherson and pulled out the 49th CAA in relatively good order (not remotely as good as the MoD claimed, but better than could have been expected).
Maybe? This would still contradict official Russian nuclear doctrine at the time. The equivalent of a division being cut off doesn't qualify as the sort of existential threat to the Russian state needed to invoke it. And this was an offensive operation, so it doesn't invoke the defensive aspect of the nuclear doctrine either.
It was most of an army, not a division. The Kherson garrison fluctuated between 30,000 and 70,000 men since the city fell to the Russians, though I grant you it was closer to the lower bound in October.
And a month earlier, as I'm sure you know, Russia had annexed the Kherson oblast de jure. Doctrinally, the Kherson garrison was defending Russian territory, as Russia saw it.
ETA: Which is not to say that the pollution concerns you bring up in your other replies are wrong. Kherson controls the North Crimean Canal, which supplies water to Crimea from the Kakhovka reservoir.
I must have got the timeline mixed up; Kherson being annexed at the time does make it plausible that Russia could invoke the nuclear doctrine. I still think it's unlikely for other reasons, but I have updated from the story being nonsense.
The fallout from a small number of "tactical" strikes would be pretty limited, I think. Probably not worth worrying about for someone who already had troops camping in Chernobyl exclusion zone.
And I think the ship has sailed on annexing anything useful industrially, since the war has been so grindingly destructive that nothing you take by force will end up intact. The only real goal remaining is to claim enough territory to declare victory without it being a total embarrassment, and you can still do that even if the territory you seized is glowing slightly.
I agree that it would draw foreign intervention and be unlikely to end the war, but that's exactly what this phone call is signaling! I don't think it's fair to dismiss this news as "they would never do it" if one of the reasons they wouldn't do it is "the US explained why it would be a bad idea."
The exclusion zone mostly isn't dangerously radioactive; of course the coffin site is, and some other places like the red forest and equipment dumps from the liquidation effort. But people have been living there for decades now with only moderately higher background radiation. Of course there is also a big difference between irradiating some Russian troops and fallout blowing through Rostov.
The industrial infrastructure and urban agglomerations probably are pretty destroyed after the fighting. But a major part of the Ukrainian economy is grain export, and a nuclear strike would cripple that. Even if it was mostly safe to consume, no one would want to buy it on the market. I don't know how much this matters to the Russian command, but it would be against their own long term interests.
This last part I don't find credible. Putin isn't stupid or insane, I think he grasps that launching a nuclear strike would have enormous repercussions. Similarly, I don't think the Russian Minister of Defense needs America to tell him that it would be a bad idea. I don't doubt that the call happened or that the threat of American retaliation was made clear, but that doesn't mean the Russians couldn't figure that part out on their own.
I am continually in awe at how quickly the rationalizations in support of the current doctrine in Ukraine come pouring out in response to claims that go against the accuracy of the doctrine. It doesn't matter how reliable the countervailing information is. It seems nothing will force some of you guys reconsider the soundness of the current doctrine. The response is always more self-serving rationalizations to shore up confidence.
But to what end? This is not how one maintains an accurate view of the world. What good is served by maintaining the reality-distortion field for as long as possible?
Whose doctrine are you criticizing? Like Rothwed, I too have no idea what you mean.
I have no idea what this means.
I suspect someone here is trying to juice up the story to make elements of the Biden Administration (e.g. SecDef Austin and/or APNSA Sullivan) into the Voices of Wisdom and Prudence who negotiated a time of Great Peril and so Saved the World from Armageddon.
I think it likely that phone calls from Beijing to Moscow had rather more impact than those from Washington to Moscow, and I never assessed the probability of nuclear weapons use in Ukraine at higher than 20% in part because I was confident Beijing was making those phone calls.
I don't know why they would care about China more than the US. If Putin ends up using nuclear weapons, it will only be for one reason: to drag as many people as possible into the grave with him. Strategic considerations are irrelevant at that point.
Putin doesn't much care about the US, because the US has already done pretty much everything it is plausibly going to do to threaten his regime. Putin cares about China because Putin is absolutely dependent on China to keep the Russian economy from outright collapsing (and taking the Putin regime with it). And China is very much not in favor of a world where nuclear warfighting is in any way normalized, even less in favor of a world where China gets any of the blame for a nuclear war and the West starts talking about secondary sanctions.
Having Russia as a client state does benefit China, but almost certainly not enough to justify the cost or risk of opening that can of worms. If Xi tells Putin "no nukes or we're cutting you off", that's a credible and very substantial threat. And I have a hard time thinking of a good reason why Xi would *not* have long since made that phone call.
I don't often agree with John, but I think your analysis is spot on.
I think this is a bad misreading of Putin. He's not an egomaniac nor suicidal. He's a calculating autocrat who wants to gain power.
This is another reason to rate the chances of nuclear weapon use as very low.
He already has absolute power nationally. What he wants is international power, and more importantly, to bring back to life a Russian empire. If he fails in that... what's even the point? He would just be a king of nothing. If Russia is doomed to be an irrelevant, impoverished country, then there is no reason for it to continue existing. May as well put it out of its misery.
If all he cared about was maintaining local power, there are far less risky ways to do so. He could've cut his losses a long time ago. This is more than that.
Yes, he wants international power, but dropping nukes won't get him that. Having nukes gets him more of that than ever using them would.
If he could drop a nuke and have the West back down and let him get his way, I'm sure he would do that. Dropping a nuke so the West collectively takes him out doesn't help.
I do think that Putin would consider "Russia is much stronger than when I took over" to be a viable win condition. That he stood up to the West and Russia didn't get destroyed economically or militarily is already pretty good for bragging rights. He also will almost certainly exit the current war with more territory than he started with and a more demoralized and weakened Ukraine.
Nobody lives forever, and conquering the world was never on the table for Russia. I take Putin's end game to be territorial and power gains, which he has achieved. Russia may be a backwater compared to the West, but it's powerful and influential compared to say, Italy. It's more influential than France, Germany, or Britain as well, despite a smaller economy. I think Putin would say that he's winning, but if he were honest not winning by as much as he hoped.
Going nuclear would, for Putin, be a desperation move to forestall a defeat that would *cost* him a great deal of power internationally, and possibly domestically. Putin wouldn't "win" a nuclear war, but he might lose one by less than he would the alternate conventional war.
Also note that these are Vladimir Putin's potential losses we are talking about, not Russia's.
China is on his doorstep and doesn't give a rattling damn about how it is perceived by bleeding-heart liberals in the West or pesky things like "you can't do that, it's a crime against humanity" (see the allegations about how it sources a plentiful supply of donor organs if you want to pay for surgery and skip queues here in the West). If Premier Xi tells Putin "if you do this, we will not take it well", that's a more credible threat than some American blowing hard about "We are the biggest gorilla in the world".
I can see him testing the waters to see what he might get away with. That could be considered strategic. China’s take would matter to him.
Putin might have thought tactical nukes could be used in Ukraine without escalation to global thermonuclear war. Ukraine is after all not covered by the American nuclear umbrella. In which case the reaction of his patron and chief supplier would be highly relevant.
I had put up some posts objecting to the indefinite ban on LearnedHebrewHatesIP, but I no longer object to the ban. People have linked to some posts of his that were deeply out of line, and I get it. But I have also seem some contemptuous talk that seems unfounded and unfair — for instance, someone saying his apologies were fake, various people saying things along the lines of good riddance. I myself saw very little of his bad side, probably because I avoid threads that are at all political. And his good side was great. So here are my 3 most vivid memories of good encounters with him.
Some time in the first month after 10/7/23 some furious rando put up a post saying that Israelis thirst for the blood of Palestinian children. I posted some sort of objection, and LHHIP, who at that time called himself LearnedHebrewHatesIsrael, defended rando, basically saying that rando’s statement was at least metaphorically true. We then had a long, intense but civil exchange and finally a reached a point that hinged on *syntax,* oddly. He was saying that rando was talking about the Israeli military, I was saying that there was no reason to take rando to mean that. I then wrote a whole obsessive paragraph about syntax: under what circumstances and in what kind of sentences “the Israelis” would be taken as shorthand for “Israeli military,” and when native speakers would naturally take it to mean all Israeli citizens. There was a pause, and then he wrote back that he’d thought it over and yeah, I was right. That impressed me — that he’d be willing, when so furious about the Palestine/Israel situation, to think about such a dry matter, and then concede that I was right, and then concede that rando’s statement would normally be taken to apply to all Israelis, and that when taken that way it was obviously false and inflammatory.
Maybe 6 months ago I asked on here whether someone would give me a consult about future geopolitical matters for a novel I am writing. Nobody responded, and I thought about contacting LHHIP directly even though I had never spoken with him anywhere except here on the forum. I just had the feeling that he was the kind of person who might do it. I hesitated for a while, but then finally did, and he wrote back that he had actually been thinking about offering, and said he’d be happy to. He wrote long, thoughtful answers to my 3 questions about future alliances, hostilities and ways they might play out. In fact, the answers were *too* thoughtful and inventive. I’d have had to change the plot of my novel to accommodate them. So then, feeling awkward and sort of rude, I told him that, and asked for simpler answers that would fit with the basic storyline, and he, without complaint, wrote 3 new answers that this time were just I’d asked for.
Pretty recently we had a long exchange about AI, and questions it prompted for us, having to do with consciousness, and complexity -- for instance is evolution a dumb, in fact mindless, process, or is it then genius of a wordless universe? I think about stuff like that, and he could meet me there. Also sent me to a great paper.
I have also read many posts of his on a variety of subjects, and they seemed to me to stand out in their intelligence and fair-mindedness, even among this crew. But I rarely read political threads, and clearly it was on that subject that he really lost it, over and over. To his credit, he also apologized at length multiple times, and I am sure those apologies were real. Still, you can’t get away with losing it over and over, especially if losing it takes the form of actually arguing that we should assassinate Trump. So I withdraw my protest of his ban. But I do wish more people would speak up about his good side, which was very substantial, and also consider that, as Moon Moth wrote somewhere on this thread, he might have been struggling with a huge ball of anger roiling around his insides I don’t know a thing about his life, but his user name already tells part of the story. Seems like he put substantial effort into bridging the gap between his point of view — I assume he’s Palestinian — and the Israeli one; learned Hebrew as part of that effort; and somehow all that came to nothing. And who knows what he’s been through, or had loved ones go through. People with interior fractures like his are often trauma victims, and by “trauma” I don’t mean something like being poor and lonesome, I mean savage beatings by a parent, witnessing extreme violence, etc.
I think this is about more than just an individual person. His presence was very important for the epistemic health of this space this last year. (Which, otherwise, significantly more Jewish, and significantly less Arabic/Muslim than average. And the people most emotionally invested in Israel are, quite naturally, the best informed about it. He was actively pushing back against what would otherwise - and at times did - become an epistemic bubble, in a way most of us wouldn't be able to, while keeping the discussion civil and factually grounded. Well, usually, the banworthy post was... well, banworthy.)
Hmmm yes, it is a very jewish place, but also pretty liberal place. A jew from LA may be pro-Israeli in the sense that she is more invested in "Israeli jews won't just disappear", but is often very much not what come to the Israeli's mind when thinking about "pro israel"
This was my first thought as well. I'd wanted to write something like that, but a) I share his views on Israel's response to 10/7 so it would just look tribal; and b) I'm an infrequent commenter, and non-central on all axes except my gender.
If this is a sort of wake for LHHIP, then I'd like to share this comment of his which stuck with me, about functional programming:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-328/comment/55888266
I do think of it as a wake . . .
I was about to chime in to say you wrote a lovely eulogy for the guy...
I assume there's nothing stopping him from LHHIP coming back with a new username? I believe that's what Carateca/Trebuchet did (not that that worked out long-term).
If he similarly feels like the discussion here was interesting and valuable (and especially if he happens to read this commentary) then I'm all for it
Trebuchet? Huh. I actually had a horrid exchange with Trebuchet early on in my time here. I posted saying I was wondering whether my daughter and her boyfriend (both about 30, and planning to marry) would be better off in New Zealand or elsewhere. Described their work skills and personal tastes in lifestyle, hobbies etc, and asked for suggestions of places to move. For some reason this question infuriated Trebuchet. They asked for my reasons for wondering whether my daughter and her partner should move to another country, and I mentioned Jan6 , very high level of hostility between factions in US, disappearance of the middle class and the then-recent abortion ruling. Trebuchet fastened on the abortion issue, furiously informed me that many countries did not permit abortion (as though I did not know that), then went on a long gruesome riff about my apparent acceptance of abortion on demand. All I remember from it was that Trebuchet was talking about a plentitude of dead fetal grandchildren. WTF? I reported the post.
"disappearance of the middle class"
Ouch. That someone as smart, educated, and usually insightful as you believes that the middle class is disappearing is utterly depressing. (I almost understand Trebuchet's reaction.) Or maybe it is *because* (not despite) you are smart and educated that you believe that.
(Side note: for what it's worth, I disagree with most of the bans, especially LHHIP and Carateca.)
Politics and economics are areas of great ignorance for me, and always will be. Occasionally I try to improve myself, and read a book on some subject in that area, and the info just slides out of my head over the next year. It's like I have no mental hooks to hang it on. I don't mentally go over it, the way you do the info in books about things that deeply interest you. I'm interested in a lot of very concrete practical things and some very abstract things, but I am not wired to attend to, sort and store info from the middle realm. I shouldn't even have made a comment, but to be honest I have seen that stuff about the disappearing middle class in many many places, many of them not scuzzy, that I thought it was true -- possible to interpret in various ways, but not open to question. There must be some data that has persuaded a lot of people, though it may be that it is misinterpreted data over which a certain sort of thinker likes to wail.
disappearance of the middle class?
fraction of US population that’s middle
class has shrunk significantly in past
50 yrs. there are more people
who are rich or poor, fewer in the middle. fewer people are able to buy a house, not a fancy one just your basic modest house
From 1967 to 2022 the share of the population earning $35,000 or less (in 2022 dollars) dropped from 32% to 23%, while the share earning $100,000 or more increased from 13% to 37%.
https://x.com/cafreiman/status/1775189496021025051
50 years ago, the home ownership rate was 64.8%. Today, it is 65.6%.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
> fraction of US population that’s middle class has shrunk significantly in past 50 yrs
Where have they gone?
I know the US tends to use a three-class classification (lower, middle, upper) rather than a four-class classification (lower, working, middle, upper). So where have all these middle class people from 1974 gone? I'm assuming you think they went to the lower class rather than to the upper? What fraction of people were lower class in 1974 versus today?
The current classifications seem to be the loss of "good union jobs" so people in manufacturing/heavy industry dropped down a class or took a reduction in their income and lifestyle; combine that with the Rust Belt and the children of those who used to work in those factory jobs now don't have any factory jobs, so are now lower class/working poor.
Then the children/grand-children of the middle class who went to college are now engaged in gig economy/the precariat jobs, so while they expected the same lifestyle as their parents, they can't achieve it.
So there's a section of the former middle class who have seen reduction in opportunities, income, lifestyle, etc. both at the traditionally working class end and the middle-middle end. They may technically still be counted as "middle class", but by comparison with the days of 1974, they haven't achieved what their parents/grandparents did; the 'permanent pensionable union job'/'a degree will get you a good white collar job' days are pretty much over (unless you're part of the knowledge economy, and AI may be threatening some of that, too).
I don't know Melvin. Maybe some went up and some went down. I am really not knowledgeable about these things, and it's possible I'm repeating an urban myth, except one that much of the news media has bought into anyhow. If you think I'm wrong I'm, not going to argue with you.
The good news is that wages at the bottom actually rose the fastest over the last few years, so there was some partial progress there. After decades of hearing about increasing inequality, it was very unusual to see.
Carateca was Trebuchet? I did not know that but it makes sense.
A little while ago, someone guessed, and he confirmed.
I think Trebuchet was a woman. Are you sure they were male?
No clue. I sort of assumed male, though. And it looks like in this thread I let my normal gender-neutral references lapse for carateca/trebuchet and LHHI.
I would be astounded if LHHIP was a woman. But Trebuchet -- there was something she said in an exchange with me. Can't remember whether said she was a woman, or something that strongly implied it. Trebuchet/whatever the other name was seemed to have affect that ranged from irritated to furious. That irritable, I'm-mad-about-SO-many things tone was just always there. But women can be dysphoric, smart and rude too! Just look at me! Not that I'm always grouchy and down, but I don't hesitate to go there.
First, my disclaimer: There are a lot of comments posted that I don't read, I accept Scott's right to be dictator here, and I agree that generally a low threshold for banning is needed to keep a piece of the internet from descending into garbage. I cannot and will not speak to whether someone deserves a ban or not.
That said, I agree that LHHI/IP demonstrated admirable qualities. I posted as much in reply to at least one of LHHI/IP's comments, but I haven't noticed other similar examples of an online partisan being open to an alternative perspective and making a real adjustment.
FWIW, my understanding is that LHHIP is Egyptian and (started) learning Hebrew to get access to the internal Israeli conversation.
> FWIW, my understanding is that LHHIP is Egyptian and (started) learning Hebrew to get access to the internal Israeli conversation.
Yeah. An atheist Egyptian, living in an Islamic country ruled by a secular-ish dictator. And the Gazan war must be especially galling because Egypt is right there, sharing a border, and yet the Egyptian government cooperates with Israel and the US, and unofficial corruption aids Hamas, leaving the Gazan civilians to just ... die.
What am I missing? It seemed to me that his fury at Israel must come from something more direct and immediate than what you describe -- something like having family and friends in Palestine.
Well, I'm a heartless bstrd with a lump of coal in place of wherever emotions come from who leans toward Israel, but even so, I feel bad for the kids in Gaza. It isn't hard for me to imagine someone with a couple degrees closer connection feeling rage at Israel.
That said, the emotion behind the anti-Trump post that drew the ban did surprise me, for someone without apparent direct connections to the US.
Yeah, I think the official death toll (from Hamas, not Israel, so probably not understated) is that > 1% of the population of Gaza has died in the war. That doesn't tell you who is right or wrong, but it does tell you that people with a lot of family/friends in Gaza are likely to know people who have died, and almost certain to know people who've been displaced from their homes, had their home or school wrecked, etc.
Maybe he lives in the US?
I seem to be a lot less shocked by his Trump posts than others, though I do see that they are bannable. Most people I know joked about the assassination attempts, saying things along the same lines as LHHIP's remarks -- "damn, so near and yet so far." I personally wish the man would drop dead. Assassinating him is a terrible idea, though, because it would further weaken the norm of lawful and peaceful transfer of power, which Trump himself put a big dent in. I think we would have something between a long period of riots, and outright civil war. It's odd that LHHIP didn't see that, but I think his thinking goes awry when he's furious.
I'm not shocked by the Trump posts. As you wrote, it is an understandable sentiment. I was just surprised that LHHIP felt it so strongly.
As someone quite in the thick of things (I'm the Rabbi who first created Hasbara as a sincere outreach organisation and left when powerful folk decided it would be more efficient as a propaganda organization, and I then moved to Egypt where I currently live in order to see what influence I might be able to have upon the conversation from here) and it seemed fairly obvious to me that he wasn't an actual Palestinian
(born or living in the area) but despite his sincere attempt to inform me about Egyptian anti-semitism and how careful I ought to be not to disclose my heritage, I didn't get the impression that he himself was living in Egypt. Possibly born in Egypt, but it just didn't seem like he was living here. I guess I was wrong.
I haven't been able to achieve the very large scale results that I was hoping for in Egypt so I might not be here much longer but if he (or someone else reading this) is currently in Egypt and would like to meet please stop by my page and let me know. If possible, it would be great to meet!
Actually you can email or whatsapp me directly as I shared them both in the following video I put up last week.
"Egypt's Only Rabbi Makes Dramatic Plea to Arabs: Help Me Bring Brotherhood to Mankind الحاخام المصري"
https://youtu.be/Zws85K7EkIg
I dunno. My first guess is that LHHIP is smart and passionate and intellectually curious and concerned with ethical behavior, but he's stuck with horrible institutions, and can't be fully open to strangers because of the atheism. And here's this online community full of people who'd be a good match, but most of them treat the nearby ongoing tragedy as a football for their own local politics, which might still be tolerable except that it's the politics of the global superpower that contributes to the tragedy.
Or at least, I imagine that's how I might feel. Maybe I'm just projecting. I wouldn't normally talk like this about someone else, not in public, but I suppose he's not coming back. :-(
As for Israel specifically, it's not a monoculture, and there are some horrible people there, including high up in the government. It seems like normal human nature to take the worst things that the worst people in a group say, and judge the entire group by them. :-( But he got better, at least about that.
I don't know where the anger about Trump came from, which is why I started wondering whether the anger wasn't completely about Israel, but more about abstract injustice in the world. And bringing in the anarchism, the abuse of power by governments and rulers. But that's all just guesswork.
I DM’d him and he was responsive and friendly
<As for Israel specifically, it's not a monoculture, and there are some horrible people there, including high up in the government
I try not to even read the news about Israel and related matters. But my oldest and closest friend is married to an Israeli woman, and spends maybe a quarter of the year in Israel. His wife's family are all intellectuals and liberals, but Mark says people in the US don't fully get that there are factions in Israel that are sort of like the lowest kind of Trump supporters, real hate-filled morons, and they fucking hate the Palestinians,, and see nothing wrong with killing as many as possible. So yeah, it's not all Fiddler on the Roof over there.
I was living and intensely involved in Israel 20 years ago but have only been there was since (hosted by the Kahana Chai organization of all people) and have pointedly refused thus far to return since the start of the war that I have been pushing very very hard against.
Here's what I published (as rhe founding Rabbi of Hasbara) on October 10th last year.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/a-point
I acknowledged that within the context of world culture as it currently exists Israel has no choice but to plow ahead with no plan whatsoever until they've killed ≥ X multiple Arabs as Jews who were killed.
But that before they start doing so they should consider the alternate option of ME DOING MY THING.
Nobody likes to hear from someone who claims that he knows and can do better than the official machine in charge of a country and my lack of funds made it impossible for me to reach as wide an audience as would be necessary to turn ancient violent hatreds into empathy and friendship so despite my numerous (quite risky) efforts on every front, from contacting the mother of a hostage to attempting to deliver food baskets to the Israeli ambassador in Cairo on Purim https://youtu.be/yOFGF7PqzLY I have not succeeded.
Realizing that funding was the simple thing that waa missing I caved in and made a public call for funding in a video called: "Dear Jewish Philanthropist"
https://youtu.be/OR67EQNvc1k
where I excerpt from the article I published last year in the immediate aftermath of the massacre to point out my prediction has been proven accurate and that every day of murder (on all sides) makes it harder for me to eventually succeed so will some brave and ballsy wealthy person please drop a few hundred thousand dollars on me.
Of course to even reach the attention of people who can do so means that my video would need to be seen by tens of thousands of people, and, as YouTube is very much a pay-to-play for people whose content doesn't fit the algorithm's conception of a clearly defined demographic it only received 100 views in total, which obviously has nearly zero odds of reaching my target audience.
Which is a shame because the ratio of 👍 to views is higher than for any similarly sized video of mine indicating that if it only got more play it might have succeeded.
"Dear Jewish Philanthropist"
https://youtu.be/OR67EQNvc1k
Yeah, he was an interesting character. I got on his case early on, arguing that his “Hates Israel” name makes it impossible to take anything he says on the matter seriously. He defended it right up to moment when he agreed and changed it. That was… unusual… to say the least.
He also had interesting things to say about all kinds of tech matters.
Yeah, it’s like he had no middle ground between digging his heels in about his right to hate and fury, and being an unusually smart, fair minded guy. Even his username, either version of it, summarizes that doubleness: He went to the effort of *learning Hebrew•, presumably to improve his communication with Israelis and demonstrate his interest in their point of view. But now he hates them (or maybe just their military)
I think it's pretty common to have people who are sensible and careful thinkers in many areas in their lives, but who have other areas where they are so upset/committed/obsessed/whatever that they can't really have a decent conversation in those areas. LHIP could have a decent conversation on many topics, but not on all topics.
Well I think he originally just noticed that as an Arabic speaker he could learn Hebrew really quickly and perhaps do some good defeating The Nazis.
As I mentioned in the comment that started the whole discussion about his value and whether his ban should perhaps be more limited, I recognized his ever-so-rare desire to change his mind through seeking out information against his own beliefs.
He was still of the rabid assumption that Israelis were monsters when I wrote to him but it was obvious to me that as a genuine individualist free thinker his intense hatred was motivated in part by misunderstandings that could be rectified and which many of his subsequent posts show have indeed been rectified.
I don't read many Israel related posts here because as you know from my own Substack and YouTube I am an active third party opposed to the ENTIRE underpinning of what causes war in the first place.
So it never really mattered to me what LHHI had to say about the subject except for its demonstration of his maturing quality of loving Truth over Tribe.
I don't remember the first version of his name (maybe KnowsHebrew?), but when I asked about how much Hebrew he actually knew (not much, he has trouble with the lack of vowels), he changed his name.
> I asked about how much Hebrew he actually knew (not much, he has trouble with the lack of vowels)
That doesn't sound like a likely problem for an Egyptian to have with Hebrew...?
As the de facto Chief Rabbi of Egypt I can tell you that of all the Arabics, Egyptian Arabic is pronounced most similarly to Israeli Hebrew for historical reasons related to the closness of both the Jewish and Arab communities of Egypt and the Holy Land over the past few centuries.
The early version might have been LovesHebrewHatesIsrael. At least the parallelism makes some sense.
IIRC, it was LearnsHebrewHatesIsrael.
That sounds right.
The effort becomes a justification, once subjected to rationalization.
I said that I agreed he should be banned. What’s your point here. Is it that you are offended by someone having some sympathy for him?
I sought to explain the apparent contradiction.
Try not to stress conversations here that much, it's not that serious. The mighty gaze of Scott Alexander is one of a human being who also laughs and eats soup (I assume he sometimes eats soup, that seems like a regular human thing to do, and he is a regular human being).
All of the commenters are also regular human beings, like me. We all laugh and eat soup, these are regular human being things to do.
Yes, well I have a sense of humor too, and enjoy joking around here. But this particular event is actually pretty important to me, not because I think, like a little ninny, that Scott is god, but because someone I liked quite a lot has gotten kicked off, and in fact did things that merited that. I made a serious comment about how he was really good and really awful both at once, and you said something you didn't bother to formulate clearly. But it seemed like you meant that LHHIP's learning Hebrew allowed him to rationalize bad behavior. If that's what you really think then say it clearly. If it's not, but you just found it amusing to spray some random scorn and cynicism on some people who are distressed and talking seriously, that seems boorish to me, not lighthearted.
But many (I wouldn't be surprised if most) Americans don't eat soup! Many seem to have a childhood trauma caused by their parents feeding them soup instead of something else they wanted and view any offer of soup as a personal insult - to be dealt with by muttering (or thinking) the incantation "thin soup, thin soup" and pouring the soup down the sink in the full view of the person who put non-trivial effort into cooking it, to make sure the message sinks in.
But maybe the commenters here differ from Americans in general in that they all eat soup?
There's presumably a fair amount of people who have gone out of their way to learn Russian (and not just due to being forced to do so due to growing up in the Soviet Union or East Block in general) and who hate Russia, and also some who have studied Arabic despite hating various Arab systems.
I didn’t say learning
Hebrew qualified him for sainthood, just that it
summarized his doubleness. And I am not saying his doubleness should earn him the right not to be banned, either.
https://leighstein.substack.com/p/20000-readers-of-literary-fiction
Have you heard that there are only 20,000 serious and consistent readers of literary fiction in the US?
It's a number that's been going around, but what's the evidence?
"The editor-in-chief of an independent publishing house recently told me that she believes there are about 20,000 serious and consistent readers of literary fiction in America and publishing any novel of quality is a matter of getting that book to them by any means necessary."
So there's no evidence, though this might be an educated guess.
How would you even find out? How would you define literary fiction? Should the number be viewed with alarm?
This is a discussion of marketing. It's actually about how many read (possibly just those who buy) literary fiction, and possibly just new literary fiction. I expect that literary fiction readers actually include a high proportion of people who are reading older books.
Just as a general thing, I think many people who say they like literary fiction actually like literary fiction. It's not just status-seeking.
In my experience about half the people who say they like literary fiction actually read it. It's not so much status-seeking as aspirational.
I'm sort of a doomer about literary fiction, for two reasons:
First, I think that although it's a worthy genre, and in theory the pinnacle of literature, it's also succumbed to the post-modern aesthetic in a way that's cut it off from its proper audience. I think there's sort of a progression that people can go through, where first they read fiction because it's about exciting things like rocketships and knights and romance and sex, and then they may grow to appreciate good writing and characterization, and at that point they're ready to take the next step to literary fiction. But it's gone off into its own tangled pocket universe, and become weird and self-referential and self-consciously elite, and that severs the intake path. And with the decline of reading overall, the intake path is important.
Second, it's been eaten by political correctness. It used to be a genre that eschewed "excitement and adventure and really wild things", as being the added sugar of literature. But now it seems that more and more of what gets called "literary fiction" is consciously written to push right-thinking politics and Take A Stand on Important Issues. And I think that is to adventure as high fructose corn syrup is to sugar.
So what these quotes make me wonder about is, how much of that audience is reading the books because they want to be seen to have read the books, because of what the status of "having read the books" will say about them?
There's something I call bad optimization. I think Scott calls it Moloch, and it's at least part of what people on the left call late stage capitalism. Or it's Goodhart.
After a while, a new and lively artistic movement gets simplified and stylized because it's easier to imitate superficial characteristics.
See also a passage from Perelandra-- on a paradisal ocean Venus, there are berries. Most of them are pleasant and wholesome like bread, but occasionally there's one with a red center that tastes wonderful. Ransome, a visiting man from earth, thinks that, on earth, they'd be bred to have exclusively red centers, and that wouldn't be as good.
I'm put in mind of a great quote from a review of a video game that I've never played:
> "Capitalism is a Faustian procedure. It is an excellent tool for creating wealth, inspiring innovation, and improving technology, but it also has a tendency to drain the soul from whatever it squeezes its tentacles into. After the initial flourish, the process of sucking out value for profit's sake begins. This principle applies to virtually any commodity you can name, but nowhere is it more pronounced than in art. Capitalism is the process by which Nirvana becomes Nickelback, journalism becomes gossip, The Simpsons becomes Zombie Simpsons, and meaningful art becomes meaningless crap.
> Art cannot sustain itself without capital. Art loses its value when too much capital is involved. And this is precisely what we're seeing in the video game industry now."
- "Pitchfork", at http://socksmakepeoplesexy.net/index.php?a=sr
So, if this is true, it seems like nonprofit/grant funded art should have more soul in it than market-funded art. I'm not so sure that's the case.
I think it's halfway. Both suffer from pressure to conform to institutional demands, especially when there's any type of scale involved. But when art goes on a market, or rather, an artist repeatedly faces market incentives, there's also a form of dumbing down that can happen - corners get cut, shortcuts get taken, less attention is paid, the demand for familiarity and consistency stifles innovation, and overall the quality declines.
The references in the quote are about popular music, journalism, TV, and video games, which are all things that involve teams of people and scale. An individual artist making unique art and selling it isn't necessarily affected, but it's an old story when a patron starts getting pushy for "more of the same". And the proverbial starving artist in a ghetto clearly has a lot less capital invested than anything involving a multi-million-dollar corporation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_fiction
It's at least a good start, but I was tickled by this quote from John Updike.
"In an interview, John Updike lamented that "the category of 'literary fiction' has sprung up recently to torment people like me who just set out to write books, and if anybody wanted to read them, terrific, the more the merrier ... I'm a genre writer of a sort. I write literary fiction, which is like spy fiction or chick lit."[27] Likewise, on The Charlie Rose Show, Updike argued that this term, when applied to his work, greatly limited him and his expectations of what might come of his writing, so he does not really like it. He suggested that all his works are literary, simply because "they are written in words."[28]"
I will yet again recommend _How Fiction Works_ by James Wood. From what I read of it, it proposes that our ideas of literary fiction were invented something like a century or two ago. The ideas of detailed description and character development and realism are an ideal, possibly from Flaubert) and if you look at actual classics (Jane Austen who does little description, Melville who has a fascinating monomaniac), they don't follow the rules of literary fiction.
I get bogged down in the book because there are long examples from stories I would never read, but I value the ideas I got from it. If nothing else, remember that so much of our environment (like that there's such a thing as literary fiction) were invented by people.
> How would you even find out?
This is a ranking of literary magazines by Pushcart Prize winners: https://cliffordgarstang.com/2024-literary-magazine-ranking-fiction/
There are 163 literary magazines, but that list includes ~30 that are inactive. Those magazines are the main way that you advertise a novel to “serious literary readers” (I feel a little pretentious just typing that phrase). Out of the ~130 actively publishing, most of them have a few hundred subscribers. The big ones are in the thousands. But the Paris Review claims to have 100,000 on their list and that’s the biggest by far. I bet Ploughshares is only in the thousands and that’s an incredibly prestigious literary magazine. So if you use that for your census, I’d say 100k max, but many of those are going to be international. So somewhere in the five-figures sounds accurate.
> How would you define literary fiction?
The typical career for a literary writer is to publish a series of short stories, hopefully moving their way up that list, which is treated as near-canonical because of the prestige of the Pushcart. Once they have enough stories published in magazines at the top of the list (8 - 12), they’ll submit their collection to prizes that are organized by academic presses. If they win the prize, then their collection of short stories is published by the press. These usually sell a few hundred copies at most. If they sell a few thousand that’s considered wildly successful. If they went to a top MFA program, they can network their way to get connections at presses and get published without a prize as well. Once they have a book out, they’re eligible to apply for tenure-track professorships but those are competitive to get. To finally answer your question: “Literary fiction” is defined as whatever the editors for those magazine and the professors who run top MFA programs and the Pushcart Prize say it is.
To stick with novels for a moment, they typically won’t get an agent or be able to be considered by a literary press until they have a sufficient number of stories published at top journals and that’s when they’ll be able to get a top press to publish their novel. My point is that using those magazine subscribers is probably a reasonable way to get the ballpark figure.
> Should the number be viewed with alarm?
No. It’s a very intellectually incestuous process. It produces a lot of fiction that all sounds the same because it’s largely produced in MFA workshops where it comes out as if it was written by committee. Everyone says the same thing and all the stories blur together and the stories take no risks.
I'd never even heard of the Pushcart Prize, that's how off the radar I've dropped with lit-fic 😁
Seriously, the Catholic Church is one of the few organizations to maintain an intellectual establishment outside of the current one. You're probably better off reading Catholic writers.
Now here's an opinion that (as a Catholic myself) I'm not privy to. Who would you recommend? (I've only read Chesterton and Mary Doria Russell, oh and just found out R. A. Lafferty is Catholic)
It sounds like you have read quite a few of them.
Probably over a thousand authors in that space. There are some diamonds in the rough. Breece D’J Pancake. Anne Carson. Wells Tower, even though he’s kind of one-hit wonder. George Saunders. Anthony Doerr, although these days he famous and mainstream. But these days most of the authors doing interesting work need to do it pseudonymously, like Scott Alexander with Unsong before he was doxxed.
Well it’s good you have found some to your liking. It’s hard work sifting out the dross.
Why is it you say that doing it pseudonymously is necessary? I am curious.
> Why is it you say that doing it pseudonymously is necessary?
Good question. If you don’t mind a longer answer, there seems to be some confusion in the thread over what exactly literary fiction is, but some strong opinions about it. I think a brief history of the novel might help clarify how we got into the current situation and answer your question about pseudonyms.
Every art form has a “high art” and “low art” distinction. Think about how four hundred years ago a wealthy patron might go to an opera while a poor person might go hear someone sing a bawdy song in a tavern. But this distinction didn't really exist for novels because until a couple hundred years ago, no one except the wealthy could read. So this distinction of “literary” versus “genre” fiction is a relatively new concept for novels compared with other art forms.
The latter half of the 19th century was dominated by what was now called Realism. In the early part of the 1800s, literacy rates were very low and printing was prohibitively expensive. The industrial revolution made printing much cheaper over the course of the century and literacy rates skyrocketed. You had the first Penny Press newspapers in the early 1800s. Novels at that time were largely produced in a serial format with a chapter released each week or month, often as part of a newspaper. This is how much of the novels were produced at the time. It also explains the length of so many novels of that period: If an author hooked an audience with a story, they would continue the story for as long as possible to make as much as money as they could. They were literally paid by the length, so of course they were long. Most of the authors writing novels were also journalists, like Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.
But there’s a reason why I bring this up. Because these novels were released in serial form, in order to get the audience to buy the next installment, they would want to end each chapter with a cliffhanger. They needed a strong plot in order to hook the audience and keep them coming back the following week. This was how novels consumed by both wealthy and working class readers were written.
But remember that printing continued to get cheaper over the course of the century. Then, in the early 20th century, you had the rise of the movement now known as Modernism. This was a broader philosophical and artistic movement, but the part that is relevant to novels is that the Modernist critique of Realist novels was that they weren’t actually very realistic. In particular, modernist authors, alleged that real life doesn't follow neatly structured plots. They argued that good art must be more realistic and eschew plot. You began to have authors like Hemingway and Faulkner who wrote novels with very limited plots. Around this same time you had the birth of genre magazines, like Amazing Stories, first published in 1926. These were largely referred to as pulp fiction because of the quality of the paper (A friend of mine collects them and has them preserved because they’re literally disintegrating).
Early genre fiction came from executions in the late 1700s and early 1800s, where vendors would go around executions selling pamphlets describing the crimes of the condemned, which were often exaggerated to make better stories. They gradually went from exaggerated accounts of real life crime to the murder mysteries we know today, and these were the earliest forms of what we now call the crime fiction genre. By the latter nineteenth century you had Dime Novels, which were some of the first mass produced books where you purchased the entire book at once.
But it wasn’t until the early twentieth century that buying the whole book at once was the common thing to do. This change in purchasing also changed the narrative structure. The authors weren’t forced to have such a strong plot. The combination of the Modernist critique of the Realist plot (saying that real life doesn’t actually follow a neatly structured plot) with the change in distribution dramatically changed the narrative structure. So finally, in the Modernist period we see novels have a clear bifurcation between their “High Art” and “Low Art” forms.
This distinction widened in the postwar period when we have the Postmodern critique of Modernism. To see a good example of this style, take a look at David Foster Wallace’s “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” [https://www.theparisreview.org/fiction/1225/brief-interviews-with-hideous-men-david-foster-wallace]. (Also, to circle around to my previous post, note that it was published in The Paris Review). When done well, I enjoy Postmodern short stories, but not Postmodern novels. They’re fun for a few pages, but not for a few hundred pages, because there’s no plot.
Also, in the 1950s was the creation of the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. At the time someone pointed out that other art forms all have schools for their art, particularly in visual art for painters and sculptures. And music schools as well. But there were no schools for writers. The workshop was very successful and the MFA programs multiplied. I have mixed feelings about the work produced from these workshops. At times it can be very good. But often it feels like it was produced by committee and over the decades has become increasingly bland.
But there’s something else that changed. It created a professional path for people who do nothing but write and teach fiction. They don’t have to actually sell large amounts of fiction to be successful. They just have to get tenure. The writing they produce is successful if it wins awards from other writers, not if it sells a lot of copies. I mentioned that the Modernist period was the first clear bifurcation of High Art (literary) versus Low Art (genre fiction) but the Postmodernist period took that much farther. Hemingway still made his living purely as a writer. But most of the top Postmodernist writers make their living as professors who occasionally sell a few thousand copies of a book.
This brings us to today and to finally answer your question about pseudonyms. The hardliners say that genre fiction has terrible prose written for the half-literate and degrades the mind. But I think this misses that science fiction / fantasy can have allegories that make you think differently about society. Contemporary literary fiction emphasizes that stories must have a social justice message. The environment is very competitive because there are very few tenure track slots for every graduate. Writers attempt to cancel each other over anything they can find in their stories that are perceived as offensive. So people respond by writing stories that take no risks and are incredibly inoffensive. Currently, the standard story that is published over and over again in those magazines I listed above goes something like this: A person sits alone in a room. They think about a childhood tragedy. The tragedy involves a social justice moral message. Then they walk outside and smoke a cigarette.
There is nothing offensive there. No one can accuse you of writing a plot (I should note that plots are actually making a comeback but this has gotten way too long already for that tangent).
Consider this quote from Sherman Alexie, a social-justice oriented writer who is one of the top literary writers alive:
“I've been publishing books for 30 years. I'm close friends with approximately twenty writers. I'm casual friends with a few dozen writers. I'm professionally friendly with dozens of other writers. At least 80% of my close, casual, and professional writer friends are politically left of center and at least 80% of them have privately expressed fear about saying or writing the "wrong" thing. And we're talking about some big name writers whom you might assume are immune from such pressures. Self-censorship among writers is a real and serious problem in this era. To believe otherwise either means you live and work in a very small circle of like-minded friends or that you think this self-censorship is a good thing.” [https://substack.com/profile/1727692-sherman-alexie/note/c-14880242]
The result of all this is that much of literary fiction feels lifeless. Increasingly, the interesting writing is coming from people sidestepping this self censorship.
[sorry if there are a lot of typos, I had to dictate this quickly]
From 1897 kind of addressing some of these issues;
Whatt would you have me do?
Seek for the patronage of some great man,
And like a creeping vine on a tall tree
Crawl upward, where I cannot stand alone?
No thank you! Dedicate, as others do,
Poems to pawnbrokers? Be a buffoon
In the vile hope of teasing out a smile
On some cold face? No thank you! Eat a toad
For breakfast every morning? Make my knees
callous, and cultivate a supple spine,-
Wear out my belly grovelling in the dust?
No thank you! Scratch the back of any swine
That roots up gold for me? Tickle the horns
of Mammon with my left hand, while my right
Too proud to know his partner's business
Takes in the fee? No thank you! Use the fire
God gave me to burn incense all day long
Under the nose of wood and stone? No thank you!
Shall I go leaping into ladies laps
And licking fingers?-or-to change form-
Navigating with madrigals for oars,
My sails full of the sighs of dowagers?
No thank you! Publish verses at my own
Expense? No thank you! Be the patron saint
Of a small group of leterary souls
Who dine together every Tuesday? No
I thank you! Shall I labor night and day
To build a reputation on one song,
And never write another? Shall I find
True genius only among Geniuses,
Palpitate over little paragraphs,
And struggle to insinuate my name
In the columns of the Mercury?
No thank you! Calculate, scheme, be afraid,
Love more to make a visit than a poem,
Seek introductions, favors, influences?-
No thank you! No, I thank you! And again
I thank you
That was a wonderful description, thank you for sharing!
There's just one thing:
> Then they walk outside and smoke a cigarette.
> There is nothing offensive there.
That almost made me laugh out loud! :-) The other year I streamed a sci-fi movie that basically opens with the destruction of an entire planet of sapient beings, but of all the obligatory warnings to go up front, the only one was "depicts smoking".
Thanks for this. It’s very interesting to me. I appreciate your taking the time.
You know, ironically (or perhaps appropriately), they cancelled Sherman Alexie for 'sexual harassment' in 2018, whatever that means these days? It seems like he...made a few women uncomfortable?
This is why I always say if I decide to write anything I'm cultivating a right-wing audience!
"Currently, the standard story that is published over and over again in those magazines I listed above goes something like this: A person sits alone in a room. They think about a childhood tragedy. The tragedy involves a social justice moral message. Then they walk outside and smoke a cigarette."
The impression that comes to mind when I think of modern American literary fiction, in short story form, is: take a couple of de-racinated people, somewhere in the middle class, probably upper-middle or near to it. Have them travelling though the American landscape, describing the long stretches of road, the barren landscape (desert for choice but you can have acres of giant agricultural landscapes, or passing through decaying towns that once were hotspots of the glorious industrial past but are now shells). The journey doesn't matter much, the destination is uncertain, their purpose in going on the journey is ambiguous or unclear.
Have them stop along the way and stay at motels or cheap hotels. Describe the cheapness, the blandness, the uniformity where any hotel of the chain could be located anywhere but yet look identical to how this room looks.
The couple are, of course, dissatisfied. Maybe they're in their forties, maybe in their twenties. Childless (increasingly, formerly there might be a mention of one adult child who lives far away and is no longer part of their lives). He is unhappy (increasingly, it is she who is unhappy). With his/her life, career (if they have one), marriage (if that is what this relationship is), their partner.
Maybe he is having an affair (told from her point of view). Maybe he suspects she is, or wishes he was having one (told from his point of view). Don't have any such a thing as a definite ending, just that they set out the next morning (or will set out) on the remainder of the pointless, meaningless journey and at the end, they'll break up (maybe). Hint that she may ask for that divorce, but don't make it definite. Hint that he will leave her for that younger woman he may (or may not) be having the affair with.
And lard all this with anvil-heavy discussion about how this is a metaphor for the Modern American Condition. We all live like this now, Jake.
EDIT: Why are they driving instead of hopping on a plane to get where they're going fast? Yes, Jake, but then we couldn't have the Fine Writing descriptions of the barrenness of the featureless landscape, the tedium of the hours spent in the car, the pathetic fallacy where the exterior conditions are reflections of the interior lives, or lack thereof, of the couple in the dust, tedium, repetition, boredom, commodification, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all.
You may be allowed one (1) moment of natural beauty in the story, but watch it, buster: this is not there for you to intimate that maybe life is not always a heap of shit, but rather to show (a) once upon a time she (used to be he, but mostly is she now) had dreams, hopes, a vision of a better, higher life - but that's all gone now (b) to fool the reader with a momentary glimpse of optimism or, you know, beauty before you hit them with that anvil again about the bleak reality of the quotidian small lives the couple (and everyone they know, and society at large) is living in the prosperous yet desolate American milieu of today.
But cool it on the beauty, what do you think you are, writing to give joy in the use of language? Nah, bro, it's about Deepity.
I actually buy most of my stuff secondhand, to avoid giving money to left-wing publishing cartels. I'll even drive out of the city center to give money to the neckbeard with the giant pulp collection over the feminist yuppies. Though I'm kind of on the border between a literary and genre reader; I'll read litfic, but also bad Lovecraft pastiches.
Over in the SF field, Analog and Asimov's, two of the leading short-story magazines in the field, have roughly 15,000 subscribers each. While not all of those are in the US, and some are institutional subscriptions, having a subscription to either one is generally the mark of a very serious SF reader, though exceptions do exist. This leads me to suspect there are at least 10,000 serious SF readers in the US.
https://locusmag.com/2023/02/year-in-review-2022-magazine-summary/
Could the market for litfic be only twice that size? Sounds like an underestimate.
Meanwhile, the New Yorker, which I tend to think of as the very breeding pool of the litfic types, has 1.2 million subscribers.
https://mediamakersmeet.com/new-yorker-plans-double-paid-circulation-2-million/
I have trouble believing the market for litfic is only one sixtieth the size of the subscriber base of the New Yorker.
SF, and almost every other sort of genre fiction, is generally written with the intent of actually *entertaining* readers in the target audience, and anyone standing vaguely near the target audience just in case. That may not be the sole intent, but it's usually a big part of the intent.
That strikes me as likely to have broader appeal for a style of fiction that disclaims "mere" entertainment, and instead seems intended at marking the author and the readers as being part of the Artistic Elite with the intellectual chops to Actually Appreciate Great Art.
That sort of elitism will coalesce into a fairly small bubble, and 20,000 feels about right to me. Two thousand in a core community that talks to one another about this stuff, and maybe ten times that who read in solitude on the fringes? Anything more than 2,000 would I think mean the core community doesn't feel elite enough, and I suspect it isn't terribly rewarding to read lit-fic if you've got no one to talk to about it.
Science fiction, and mystery and romance and all the rest, are read for fun as light entertainment - and sometimes not so light, but the genre's numbers will be driven by the easy fun stuff.
God forbid anyone should write with intelligence, purpose, and style, only to have the misfortune of becoming popular. I am amazed by the insight so many commentators here have into the motives of others, the elites…
Thank goodness for us common folk who can paint such a bright line between entertainment and all that other stuff.
> SF, and almost every other sort of genre fiction, is generally written with the intent of actually *entertaining* readers in the target audience, and anyone standing vaguely near the target audience just in case.
Moby Dick is adventure fiction ( a genre if you will), only times have changed, and now (apparently) it’s a long-winded parable that sullen high-schoolers are forced to pick through. Melville wrote because he needed to make a living. He definitely wanted to entertain people. He didn’t have many other big commercial successes, but that one struck a chord, and he had a potential audience of tv/movie/internet-free people who had to read if they wanted to be entertained. The rest is luck of the draw.
More importantly, what exactly is meant by being entertained, and how broad a brush can one use to put a line between it and what is “intended at marking the author and the readers as being part of the Artistic Elite with the intellectual chops to Actually Appreciate Great Art.”
Pretentiousness comes in many forms and they’re all ugly.
"God forbid anyone should write with intelligence, purpose, and style, only to have the misfortune of becoming popular."
That sounds like a pretty good description of a successful writer of genre fiction, for any non-"literary" genre.
I think "literary fiction" has become a category really only in the 20th century. Certainly, critics in the 19th century would have turned up their noses at "popular" novels which by our time have become Classic Literature.
But I also think there is a definite cleavage between "novels written for entertainment, even if well-written" and "self-consciously high-brow and apart from whatever is piled up on the bookstore Best Seller table".
Look at the current New York Times best seller list, I don't see anything on the fiction that counts as "literary fiction".
https://westportlibrary.libguides.com/NYTimesbestsellers
You have to look for that in the little magazines (Granta was the big name in British publishing), the heavyweight reviews by the big name critics in the likes of the Times Literary Supplement (if that's still going) etc. The prizewinners, though some of those can cross over to best-sellerdom (some 90s Booker Prize winners did so, for example Anita Brookner with "Hotel du Lac"). The kind of thing written by artists who go to Yaddo on a bursary to produce the next Great American Novel 😁
I think it's been twenty years or more since I last read literary fiction, because the stylisation of novels and short stories which crystallised into a particular set of themes and tropes just turned me off (I dubbed such things the Hampstead Adultery Novel).
Ursula Le Guin, may the heavens be her bed, had a wonderful tart take on the attitude:
https://www.ursulakleguin.com/on-serious-literature
"Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it."*
— Ruth Franklin
(Slate, 8 May 2007)
Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs — somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly... but who? And why wet shoes? It hadn't rained. There, again, the heavy, soggy sound. But it hadn't rained for weeks, it was only sultry, the air close, with a cloying hint of mildew or rot, sweet rot, like very old finiocchiona, or perhaps liverwurst gone green. There, again — the slow, squelching, sucking steps, and the foul smell was stronger. Something was climbing her stairs, coming closer to her door. As she heard the click of heel bones that had broken through rotting flesh, she knew what it was. But it was dead, dead! God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing? Had he paid no attention at all to the endless rituals of the serious writers and their serious critics — the formal expulsion ceremonies, the repeated anathemata, the stakes driven over and over through the heart, the vitriolic sneers, the endless, solemn dances on the grave? Did he not want to preserve the virginity of Yaddo? Had he not even understood the importance of the distinction between sci fi and counterfactual fiction? Could he not see that Cormac McCarthy — although everything in his book (except the wonderfully blatant use of an egregiously obscure vocabulary) was remarkably similar to a great many earlier works of science fiction about men crossing the country after a holocaust — could never under any circumstances be said to be a sci fi writer, because Cormac McCarthy was a serious writer and so by definition incapable of lowering himself to commit genre? Could it be that that Chabon, just because some mad fools gave him a Pulitzer, had forgotten the sacred value of the word mainstream? No, she would not look at the thing that had squelched its way into her bedroom and stood over her, reeking of rocket fuel and kryptonite, creaking like an old mansion on the moors in a wuthering wind, its brain rotting like a pear from within, dripping little grey cells through its ears. But its call on her attention was, somehow, imperative, and as it stretched out its hand to her she saw on one of the half-putrefied fingers a fiery golden ring. She moaned. How could they have buried it in such a shallow grave and then just walked away, abandoning it? "Dig it deeper, dig it deeper!" she had screamed, but they hadn't listened to her, and now where were they, all the other serious writers and critics, when she needed them? Where was her copy of Ulysses? All she had on her bedside table was a Philip Roth novel she had been using to prop up the reading lamp. She pulled the slender volume free and raised it up between her and the ghastly golem — but it was not enough. Not even Roth could save her. The monster laid its squamous hand on her, and the ring branded her like a burning coal. Genre breathed its corpse-breath in her face, and she was lost. She was defiled. She might as well be dead. She would never, ever get invited to write for Granta now.
*NOTE: The rest of Ruth Franklin's review of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union is quite thoughtful, generally positive, and not dismissive of his longing to destroy phony divisions between “genre” and “literature.” I just couldn't resist the all too familiar image of her first sentence."
Hah! Thx for this. Very amusing. I used to subscribe to Granta sometime in the 90’s. They published quite a few things I would not call fiction iirc.
The irony is that Ursula Le Guin's writing is better quality then much literary fiction.
Did you ever read "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt? I remember when it came out there were some "sidelong glances" at how she was violating the boundaries of literary fiction by adding too much excitement. I think some of her later books got a bit of the same treatment, but it died down, I suppose because standards changed, and because she was just that good.
I haven’t, I’m afraid. I kind of fell off the fiction bus a while back.
If you ever get back on, she's worthwhile. Writes about one book a decade, with presumably her fourth due any year now.
"I suspect it isn't terribly rewarding to read lit-fic if you've got no one to talk to about it"
I get that a lot of people are in fact snobs, and maybe having read the latest Ferrante or whatever is required to survive certain kinds of cocktail party in America. Fine.
But you're being way too cynical about the sheer pleasure of experiencing language performed at a very high level. Same with arrangements of theme, metaphor, and symbol rather than clever plot logic. Maybe it's because I'm actually bad at writing myself, and so the corresponding sense of awe is greater, but there are some scraps of prose out there that have given me as much aesthetic pleasure as anything else in life. And that's without any kind of background in the arts that might have value-primed me for this.
> But you're being way too cynical about the sheer pleasure of experiencing language performed at a very high level. Same with arrangements of theme, metaphor, and symbol rather than clever plot logic.
Those aren't special to literary fiction. That's just good writing. Good genre fiction will have that 𝗮𝘀 𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹 as having a plot. There's no reason you'd want to go without the plot.
In American Gods, arrangements of theme, metaphor, and symbol are very cleverly worked into the plot!
If you want linguistic virtuosity for its own sake, I think The 13 Clocks is the best example I know, though it's more of a fairy tale than a novel.
I like many genre novels. I agree without reservation that incredible writing does show up in many genre novels. Some physicists are also exceptionally good pure mathematicians. These added blessings are mostly incidental. Genre novelists are bound by genre conventions and their energies are, correctly and decorously, focused on delivering the usual genre payoffs.
The reason you might not want a plot, or to have a very weak plot (a guy wandering around Dublin; an adman trying to make his first feature; two cousins in love) or a very contrived, near-paceless plot, is that plot constrains. It interferes with the formal puzzles and symmetries and requires too many dead sentences whose only duty is to schlep the plot forward, weakening the overall enchantment.
On reflection, this is really a recasting of Anthony Burgess's old "A-type Novel vs B-type Novel" distinction from Re Joyce. And even back in 1965 he seemed to concede that the B-type novel, the kind focused on language, is severely on the wane. So maybe there's something to that 20,000 number after all.
+1
I would agree that Analog and Asimov's subscribers are serious sf readers, but there's so much other sf that the number of subscribers would be a very low floor for the number of sf readers.
Sure, but the bigger the number of serious SF readers, the less credible the claim that there are only 20,000 serious litfic readers becomes.
New Yorker also covers current events, and I'm willing to bet people have subscriptions to look fashionable in left-leaning upper-middle and upper-class milieus, as well as middle-class people with pretensions and working-class people who just think that stuff's cool.
If you subscribe it’s very inexpensive, has a great listing of things that are going on in town, and at least one cartoon that can make you chuckle. They’re ideal in the bathroom.
“Literary fiction” might exclude genre fiction like sf and fantasy, so maybe it’s plausible.
The National Booksellers Association tracks book sales (and they've been increasing over the past decade, BTW), but I can't find any data on literary fiction as a category. On the fiction side of things, depending on how you slice and dice your numbers, and depending on which source you use, "contemporary fiction" tracks third or fourth as a genre. I suspect that this editor may be talking about the type of literary fiction that English Lit academics read, though. Titles like _Lincoln in the Bardo_ come to mind. But that made the NYTimes bestseller list — and a rule of thumb is that sales have to be in the range of 5-10k copies a week to have a chance of hitting the list. That suggests there are more than 20k readers of literary fiction.
I feel like this number could vastly increase or decrease depending on how you define "serious and consistent reader" and "literary fiction". But if your use a relatively narrow definition of litfic and define the reader as "someone who is actively looking for newly published litfic books to read", then I guess the number is somewhat plausible.
According to this one Gematria site, 20,000 equals “Cabal Not Welcome in Heaven.”
This is now canon.
Is Anne Tyler in the literati? When I went back to university in the 1980s, an English professor compared her with Jane Austen. Yet lately, many folks we assume are literate don't know her work.
What does a woman have to do ? Stab her spouse with a Boy Scout knife (Mailer)? Commit suicide (Hemingway)? The popularitati elevated Alice Munro in public regard on her death, only to tear her down a few weeks later. She couldn't pass the Left's Political Correctness standard.
Both are writers of qualified substance, but I don't think they meet the definition of self-consciously Literary writers. In this 21st-century environment of cosplay posturing, I doubt either wants the mantle. It's a role vain men are more susceptible to. Most people who demand to be taken seriously don't have the goods.
I think the claim wrt Munro was that she was complicit in child abuse. I have no idea if this claim is true or not, but it's not quite the same as failing a political correctness standard.
I agree that it's not quite the same. But why bring up her alleged complicity in "protecting" an alleged abuser immediately after her death? Self-proclaimed 'progressives' never miss an opportunity to tear down a heroine, and if their accusations are mistaken, they don't apologize. Running roughshod over someone's reputation is all in a day's work. Munro should be held to account, certainly, but the timing of the Thought Police is performative and self-serving.
Ken Burns is doing a biography of DaVinci. I'm curious to see how he'll deal with the hero's homosexual pedophilia, and if the Burns team's examination of DaVinci's history will be as vigorous. Maybe we'll find out if Munro is no DaVinci.
First guess is lawsuits. The dead can't have a reputation to be sured over.
The cancellation mechanisms with all their pathologies and zeal for airbrushing people out of history are there, but the motives are a bit different.
Its a common trope that artists come in and out of fashion. The best you can hope for is to be in fashion at least once.
The literary world is mostly female now. Roth and Updike are long in the ground.
It's still full of vain people, but instead of professors sleeping with their students, it's yuppie women forcing their husband to accept polyamory. Whether you think this an improvement depends on who you are, I think.
I assume that publisher estimates this by "the number of serious works of literature our imprint sells". If they're only selling 20,000 books a year across all their authors, then that means there are only 20,000 serious readers, it couldn't possibly be that our stuff is boring or another publisher has the market cornered because they're one of the mega-imprints and we're an indie.
Eh, very few people are consistently reading books nowadays, and even fewer are bothering with the dreck that is modern litfic. I think the number is plausible; it's nothing more than an extremely niche hobby. But given how cheap it is to produce books compared to other media, it's probably still sustainable.
Except that sales of non-fiction and fiction in all formats (included print books) have been increasing over the past decade. There was a big bump during the COVID pandemic, but the trend is continuing.
Google the keywords: national booksellers association book sales increasing
Anecdata: other than Half-Priced Books we didn't have a bookstore in our town since Barnes and Noble shut its doors a decade ago. But a non-chain bookstore that sells new books (not used) opened in my neighborhood two years ago, and they seem to be doing rather well (according to the owner).
I got this graph:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/422595/print-book-sales-usa/
Increases until 2008. Steep decreases 2009 to 2012. Slow increases 2013 to 2019. Notable increases 2020 and 2021, and decreases in 2022 and 20023.
I'm seeing a post-2008 crash, with a slow recovery starting in 2013, and then a (probably temporary) spike in 2020-21, and probably a corresponding post-COVID return to the underlying trend in 22 and 23.
It should be the sum of book sales AND how many novels are checked out at public libraries. I hardly ever buy novels. I borrow them from the library instead, on the assumption that I will read it once and that will be enough. I'm much more likely to buy nonfiction books (plus a few novels by authors I really like that I know I will want to reread).
If "serious and consistent" means >1 book a year, and "literary fiction" is referring to new books in what is effectively a particular marketing category, that number actually seems plausible to me. I would have estimated <1 million for sure. I know people who read a lot, but I don't think I've ever met someone of that description..
It's a dumb number. I don't know whether it's dumb on purpose to make you click, or whether it's dumb by accident because you don't get to be the editor-in-chief of an independent publishing house by being good with numbers, but it's not worth thinking too deeply about.
The number wants you to engage with it. The number wants you to huff about it and talk about how implausibly small it is and what silly assumptions must have gone in, and how you are personally a serious and consistent reader of literary fiction but you only read out-of-copyright books on Project Gutenberg. Don't let the number have its way.
Acne is increasing everywhere in the world, except apparently my country of New Zealand.
Why? It is suggested that switching from requiring a specialist doctor (dermatologist) to only a nurse-practitioner (a nurse that can generally prescribe medicines) increased the rate of treatment. The medicine in question being isotretinoin.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/529770/why-is-acne-decreasing-in-new-zealand
According to the article, what's increasing is people who visit a doctor or dermatologist about acne. We don't even know if acne itself is increasing in the rest of the world, nor whether it's decreasing in New Zealand, let alone whether the decrease is because of successful treatment. A better way to study the rate of acne would be to survey a random sample of the population and ask about the severity (if any) of their acne.
Here's my COVID update for epidemiological weeks 37-40 of 2024. Note: I skipped my last biweekly update for personal reasons. This will summarize the past month of COVID activity—plus some updates on H5N1 and some other pathogens of concern.
So far in 2024 COVID has dropped to 14th place in the top 15 causes of death—below septicemia and above nutritional deficiencies.
No sign of increased heart attacks due to Long COVID. And no sigh that the cancer rate is increasing due to Long COVID. In fact both causes of death are down approx 5% from pre-pandemic numbers. I suggest a likely explanation.
And H5N1 is killing dairy cows at much higher rate than expected. But this may be due to the recent heat wave in the West combined with the H5N1 infection.
On X...
https://x.com/beowulf888/status/1843415371434602589
On Threadreader...
https://t.co/hawwRInh4j
So I want to share with you all this wonderful creature that I recently learned about, so obscure that it doesn't even have an English Wikipedia page. They're called Eumyrmococcus smithii, or ari-no-takara-kaigaramushi in Japanese (literally "ant's treasure scale insect"). They look like this: https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/antroom/imgs/2/7/27efcc1e.jpg (The grub-like appendage isn't its head, that's its abdomen. Its "head", if you can even call it that, is on the opposite side.) These cute little fuzzy pearls are blind and completely incapable of moving around on their own. So how the hell do they survive? Well, they're exclusively found in the nests of a specific species of ant. The ants pick them up and attach them to the healthy roots of plants such as sugarcane and cogongrass, at which point the scale insect starts sucking the sap out of the roots. https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/antroom/imgs/9/f/9fd7414d.jpg Any excess nutrients are released out of the abdomen as honeydew, and the ants subsist entirely on this honeydew for their entire lives. ...Yes, these bugs somehow evolved into living taps for ants. (actually, they're even better than taps, since they also process the sap as well!) Oh yeah, and when a new queen is born and leaves the nest to start a new one, they bring with them a single pregnant scale insect with them so it can breed a new population of them for the new nest. https://www.nhk.jp/static/assets/images/newblogposting/ts/8M52YNKXZ4/8M52YNKXZ4-editor_06fe7c8398402c3e35a1c79b6a21a861.png
Seeing stuff like this really makes you wonder about the potential of bioengineering to revolutionize industry and agriculture. Self-sufficient machines of flesh, far more economical, adaptable, and robust than metal... Unfortunately, even if the technology is available, I'm pretty sure creating complex lifeforms is too difficult for humans to accomplish in a reasonable amount of time. Maybe AI will change that.
The ending remark in your note quite literally disturbed me. In regards to AI and Humans integrating, this is inevitable in my view, considering we are already in the process with mobile phones.
So we are the scale insect. nice. Good to know.
> They're called Eumyrmococcus smithii, or ari-no-takara-kaigaramushi in Japanese (literally "ant's treasure scale insect")
Good-ant-seed, for the non-Japanese version. Though the "seed" should probably be translated as "scale insect" too.
I harbor some suspicions that the "ant" root should be -myrmec- and not just -myrm-. This would produce benefits in etymological soundness and in the humor value of the word "eumyrmecococcus".
I learned while looking this up that the same root also refers to warts, apparently because warts are named after anthills.
That's really cool! I'd known about aphids, but this is even more so!
How do they reproduce? Do the ants carry them to their mates as well?
This is one of the most interesting and weird things I've read in a while, thank you!
Many aphids can reproduce asexually by parthenogenesis, effectively just making themselves pregnant. I don't know if it's the case for this species in particular, but I wouldn't be surprised.
I'm assuming so, yes. New queens seem to be able to tell which Eumyrmococcus are female and pregnant. The other ants can probably recognize the sex and fertility of them as well. (Though, how they do that is still unknown.) The ants also take the time to clean their Eumyrmococcuses. Cute!
This is what the robots did in the Matrix, except without the Matrix itself...
Super interesting, thanks for sharing
Here's a fun link: https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_34,_Require_Certain_Participants_in_Medi-Cal_Rx_Program_to_Spend_98%25_of_Revenues_on_Patient_Care_Initiative_(2024)
It looks to me like the California Apartment Association got tired of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation using its money and influence to lobby against building housing, so now they're sponsoring a ballot measure to force them to not do that. The AIDS Healthcare Foundation is of course opposing this amendment through their front group Housing Is A Human Right. This superficially healthcare related law that is really a proxy war for housing policy is perhaps the most California thing I have ever seen.
Why does the AIDS Healthcare foundation, which is presumably a foundation dedicated to Healthcare for AIDS patients, have a policy stance on housing at all? (I realize the answer may simply be "because California")
They might just need something to do. To what extent is there an AIDS-healthcare-related problem that they could help with if they redirected their efforts?
Seems like "because California" might be your best answer-
FWIW though I've been googling this myself too because it just seems weird, and if this article is accurate (https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/kcrw-features/prop34-aids-healthcare-foundation-rent-control), which it probably is since non-profits' tax info is made public every year, it seems like AHF just has a large bankroll.
"In recent years, AHF has spent more than $150 million on ballot initiatives – including rent control measures in 2018 and 2020. The nonprofit’s annual budget is about $2.5 billion. The vast majority of the nonprofit’s revenue comes from its network of 62 pharmacies – largely a result of that 340B drug discount program."
Actually, speaking of nonprofits making their tax info public, I just grabbed their most recent public 990, part of which included the following language on housing. So, at least in their words, this is why they're doing it:
SUSTAINABLE AFFORDABLE HOUSING FOR THE HOMELESS AND LOWINCOME POPULATIONS. IN RESPONSE TO WIDESPREAD GENTRIFICATION AND RISING HOUSINGCOSTS, WHICH DISPLACES AHF PATIENTS THROUGHOUT CALIFORNIA, FLORIDA, AND ELSEWHERE, THE FOUNDATION HAS LAUNCHED THE HEALTHY HOUSING FOUNDATION (HHF) TO FULFILL ITS PUBLIC HEALTH MISSION. HHF PROVIDES DECENT HOUSING UNITS AT AN AFFORDABLE COST TO LOWINCOME PEOPLE, INCLUDING FAMILIES WITH CHILDREN AND THOSE PREVIOUSLY UNSHELTERED OR HOMELESS. AHF BELIEVES THAT A STABLE AND AFFORDABLE HOUSING SITUATION IS CRITICAL FOR INDIVIDUALS WITH CHRONIC HEALTH CONDITIONS, INCLUDING HIV/AIDS.THE FOUNDATION ALSO CREATES AND IMPLEMENTS NEW PROGRAMS IN COMMUNITIES ACROSS THE U.S. AND ABROAD, AND EXPANDS DELIVERY OF HEALTHCARE AND INFLUENCE OVER POLICY WITH THE AIM OF SAVING MORE LIVES.
Well, housing is pretty expensive in California. And the AIDs medical expenses can add up (especially in the end stages of life). This may be stereotyping a bit, but gay men tend to live in urban areas (SF and LA), where renting is a big deal. The AHF got an initiative on the 2024 ballot to allow communities to bring back rent control. And now the California Apartment Association is taking their revenge for the temerity of the AHF to try to gore their real estate cash cow.s...
https://www.aidshealth.org/2023/11/ahf-files-to-halt-california-apartment-association-bogus-ballot-initiative/
> The AHF got an initiative on the 2024 ballot to allow communities to bring back rent control.
Not just 2024. They got rent control on the ballot in 2018 and 2020 too. The 2024 version is especially extreme and destructive though, to the point where it could potentially result in de-facto bans on renting entirely.
Extreme and destructive are loaded adjectives. Do you have links to some neutral economic analyses to support such dramatic language? Rent control was around for decades and decades in New York City and SF (and probably many other cities) without "destructive" effects (other than to the pockets of landlords). But we then had the dissolution of rent controls and horror stories about elderly and vulnerable tenants being displaced by drastic rent hikes.
I don't think we're going to agree on anything, since there's basically universal consensus in economics that NYC-style rent control is a disaster. This isn't something that the kind of people who read ACX would normally even dispute.
But for the sake of anyone else following along, the 2024 version is *even worse* than usual rent control precisely because the ballot measure does not contain any numbers. All it says is that the government cannot place *any restrictions at all* on local rent control measures.
This means that NIMBYist communities could say, cap rents at $1 in order to de-facto ban renting, and there's absolutely nothing anyone could do to stop them. Does anyone really think that the kind of city that declared itself a mountain lion sanctuary in an attempt to get out of their housing obligations would not pull stuff like this?
It's been my experience that whenever someone falls back on the consensus argument, they really haven't dug into the question. Dropping the consensus bomb in the middle of an argument is a sure sign that they'd prefer not to be challenged on the facts of their case. So, I suspect the consensus whereof you speak is a lot less consensed than you claimed. Never having investigated this subject myself, I decided to see what The Chat sez...
Me:
Is there a universal consensus that rent controls have negative consequences?
ChatGPT:
There is no universal consensus that rent controls always have negative consequences, but many economists and housing experts express significant concerns about their long-term effects. The debate around rent control policies involves complex trade-offs, with arguments both for and against them.
Arguments Against Rent Control:
Reduced Supply of Rental Housing: Critics argue that rent controls can discourage new housing construction and lead to a reduction in available rental units over time. Developers may find it less profitable to build new rental properties if they cannot charge market rates.
Maintenance and Quality Decline: Landlords may reduce spending on maintenance and property improvements because the cap on rent limits their ability to recoup these investments.
Inefficient Allocation: Rent-controlled units may be occupied by tenants who don’t need the reduced rent, preventing others in greater need from accessing affordable housing. Tenants may also stay in rent-controlled apartments for longer than they otherwise would, reducing housing mobility.
Black Markets: Rent control can sometimes lead to informal markets, where landlords demand under-the-table payments or tenants sublet apartments at higher, unregulated rates.
Distortion of Market Signals: By keeping rents artificially low, rent control may lead to an inefficient distribution of resources, as prices do not reflect actual supply and demand conditions in the housing market.
Arguments in Favor of Rent Control:
Protection from Rent Hikes: Supporters of rent control argue that it helps prevent displacement by protecting tenants from sudden rent increases, especially in cities with rapidly rising housing costs.
Stabilization of Communities: Rent control can help maintain community stability by allowing long-term residents to remain in their homes, preventing gentrification and the displacement of low-income and vulnerable populations.
Immediate Relief: In housing crises where rents are skyrocketing, rent control can offer immediate protection and relief to renters who might otherwise be forced out of their homes.
Social Equity: Proponents suggest that rent control can act as a tool for promoting social equity, ensuring that lower-income households have access to affordable housing in desirable urban areas.
Empirical Evidence and Mixed Results:
Empirical studies on rent control have produced mixed results. For example, studies from places like San Francisco and New York City, which have long-standing rent control policies, suggest some negative side effects, such as reduced housing supply. However, advocates argue that without rent control, these cities would face even worse affordability crises.
Recent Studies: A 2019 study on rent control in San Francisco found that it helped incumbent tenants but reduced the overall housing supply and increased rents in the uncontrolled sector, creating unintended consequences. However, another study might find that rent control provides necessary relief during housing shortages, helping to maintain socio-economic diversity in expensive urban areas.
In sum, while many economists tend to view rent controls skeptically due to concerns about long-term effects on housing supply and market efficiency, there is no universal agreement. The outcome of rent control policies depends on how they are designed and the context in which they are implemented.
What are people's best arguments against free immigration? I read Caplan's _Open Borders_ a while ago and generally agree with it, but it is obviously a piece intended to persuade and I don't have the expertise necessary to identify subtle flaws.
For the sake of avoiding a motte-and-bailey, I'll say that I believe both that immigration levels should be kept the same or increased and that (per Caplan's arguments) removing most if not all restrictions would be good long-term. However, my confidence in both of these positions is pretty low.
I think the Swedish experience provides the best argument. Sweden has not had free immigration but has had an unusually liberal immigration regime. The result has been an explosion in gang rapes, in organized crime, in gun homicides and so on. The situation has gotten so bad that Denmark (which has had open borders with Sweden since the 1950s) has imposed border controls to limit the spillover effects.
Pretty much the only reason that nations like e.g. the United States are appealing enough that large numbers of people want to immigrate to them, is that they are high-trust societies. Everything else is downstream of that, and not from the Magic Prosperity Rays that emanate from the American soil or whatever.
Unassimilated immigrants, degrade public trust. In part because so many of them come from low-trust societies, as that's where the gains from migration are greatest. But even immigrants from high-trust foreign nations will have different norms and customs for maintaining that trust, which do not translate nearly as well as mere words.
Immigrants who assimilate into the broader culture will generally add to the vitality and prosperity of a nation, even if they do still celebrate quaint ethnic holidays and eat exotic ethnic food. Strike that - *especially* if they eat exotic ethnic food, so long as some of them open restaurants the rest of us can eat at/
Wholly unassimilated immigrants, will degrade social trust in a way that makes pretty much everything worse. A modest population of not-yet-assimilated immigrants is a reasonable and necessary price to pay for the long-term benefits of immigration, but don't push it. Don't encourage, and probably don't allow, immigration at a rate faster than your society can reliably do assimilation. And if you are anywhere close to the limit, prioritize immigration from high-trust societies and of people who are most likely to assimilate,
If you feel bad about all the tired, poor, huddled masses in excess of your society's ability to assimilate, and you want to make sacrifices to help them, then pass the hat and set up a fund to help them build their own countries into something better.
I had a look through the other responses. Here's one that didn't come up.
Today, there's a lot of diversity between different countries. Everyone has a different political system in some way, a different blend of people, a different culture, differing supply chains, more internal than external trade, and so on. This is inefficient, but it increases the resilience of the system to shocks.
I haven't read Open Borders, but I bet Caplan's main arguments are for efficiency and morality. Efficiency is great! However, it comes at the cost of fault tolerance, and I would argue that abandoning fault tolerance is immoral. Check out this excellent wikipedia page for who produces what agricultural commodities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_producing_countries_of_agricultural_commodities. If social or political problems take down lentil production in Canada, then India and Australia might have a surplus, or Brazillian and USAian soybeans might be substituted. I bet that if every country reaches an equilibrium, they'll all have basically the same demographics, in which case social problems will spread in a similar way.
My idealism died during corona, I now believe you should dismantle systems in a order that prevents issues; its a problem that theres bans on herion, age limits of beer and the idea you need prove to some useless buecrate that you know to drive to drive on roads that shouldn't be "public". But I should probaly let drunk driving laws stand until after other evils are fixed.
The poor have many evils to navigate; income taxes, college debt not being written off in bankrupcy, zoning laws preventing housing. Yes, nation state boarders are stupid evils. But I dont understand how you can throw even more people into this mess and not have the poor suffer.
PC: You'll get lots of people coming in to get the welfare state.
Also, low-skill immigrants may not be as good a deal as previously anticipated.
Non-PC: They'll change the culture of the country. Also, it annoys nativist natives.
Frankly after watching Trump get elected that's enough reason for me.
> Also, it annoys nativist natives. Frankly after watching Trump get elected that's enough reason for me.
So, "high immigration" -> "nativist politics" - > Trump, and Trump is bad, therefore high immigration is bad? I love that chain of reasoning. :-)
You want the SAT-word version:
Excess immigration leads to populist politics with incompetent leaders who do great harm and increase corruption. At least, that's my experience in my lifetime. It kind of went the other way in the Gilded Age, with the corruption coming first, but you'll notice the Progressive Era also ended in immigration restriction shortly afterward. As Level 50 Lapras says, this has happened before, and immigration waves lead to backlashes and bans on immigration. I can't say that bothers me; seems kind of like homeostasis. Immigration rises, the natives get restless and decrease it, the remaining immigrants assimilate, we have a unitary country again in a few decades, with all the last wave of immigrants' kids complaining about the newcomers. :)
But, less rationally, I've never seen someone try to raise a mob to overthrow an election he lost in this country before in my lifetime, and I don't recall reading about it in the history books either. We're in a bad place, let's go back.
It's happened multiple times though. The late 19th century immigration wave led to a massive backlash and bans on immigration.
That comment was about me appreciating a somewhat absurd chain of "logic" that ends in the exact opposite place that conventional wisdom would expect. I happen to enjoy that stuff.
But to the object level, yes, I agree? We appear to be living through another period of backlash, and I don't like it.
It seems like a fairly normal political logic to me. The core reasoning is "this policy is too unpopular to work, so we should give up on it before it takes us down with it".
I agree that that isn't the approach actually being taken, and it's not necessarily correct, but I don't see anything unusual about the reasoning.
For one, if this is paired with a welfare state that the new immigrants are entitled to, the welfare state won't have enough resources for all.
This seems off base. Non-refugee Immigrants are going to be majority working age adults with a smattering of families that come in with their own resources or as a package with a bread winner.
Historically and currently, they are extremely low on the useless eater population (old people).
> Non-refugee Immigrants are going to be majority working age adults with a smattering of families that come in with their own resources or as a package with a bread winner.
Currently, that is the case. But you have to consider what would happen under a hypothetical "open borders" system instead.
Given how porus the border is, I think it won't change at all. The major difficulty for people who have productive potential but no money isn't getting into the states, it's getting to the states in the first place.
Then again, we won't know until we actually do it so ???
I was referring to the official refugee program, which is extremely selective.
If you're talking about illegal immigrants, there are filters there too, but the filters are different, mostly related to the risk and difficulty of sneaking into the country (including, as you alluded to, even reaching the border in the first place - walking through the Darien Gap isn't for the faint of heart).
That was my meaning, yeah.
I know allota dudes that got into a place somehow, and most of them are of the opinion that it gets easier the longer you are from where you are running from regardless of where you are running to, because if you are bothering to run the situation is not good to begin with.
What is here the difference between refugee and non refugee migrants? If you had open borders they would all be classified as migrants, and the majority would probably be young people from poor countries, exactly the people who right now are counted as refugees and have been shown to be a net fiscal loss in welfare states.
That said, I am myself troubled whether having a welfare state or open borders it would not be the most humane choice to choose open borders.
Because refugees don't want to be there, so there is less self selection, and I don;t want to make any WAGs cause I've never seen any data on refugees post ww2 that I think would generalize well.
EG, Vietnamese refugees post war were mondo hyper productive, but of course they were, only the creme de la creme got a spot on the helicopter, type of thing.
> only the creme de la creme got a spot on the helicopter, type of thing
In the case of the US, that's true of most refugees though. We only take in tiny numbers of official refugees (compared to the total number of refugees).
That's non obvious. Why are we assuming the new immigrants are going to take more out of the welfare state than their productivity puts in? Maybe you can make that case, but you're pulling out studies of expected productivity levels for immigrants, what they're putting into the real, productive economy, and what welfare state benefits they're expected to claim, all of which can of course be contested. It's not a simple proof.
>Why are we assuming the new immigrants are going to take more out of the welfare state than their productivity puts in?
Most countries in Europe have lots of data showing that non-EU immigrants take out (vastly) more than they put in. This Dutch study comes to mind (https://unherd.com/newsroom/dutch-study-immigration-costs-state-e17-billion-per-year/); non-Western immigrants cost The Netherlands on average $17 billion dollars per year, while Western immigrants net-benefit $1 billion.
I agree that immigrants are a net positive *now*. But that's because it's very hard to immigrate. If you open the floodgates, then people will in fact come here just for the welfare.
Well, I think if you take a nice European country (~5 million population, relatively high wages and reasonable welfare policy) and tell everyone in the world they can come there, I think that there will be millions of immigrants. Once there are more migrants than natives, I can imagine three outcomes
1) This country's culture and institutions become more similar to the countries of origin of the migrants (Afghanistan, Nigeria, etc)
2) Separation into mostly migrant underclass and mostly native elite with the latter living in gated communities and governing by undemocratic means (this can have different flavours: feudalism, millet system, apartheid)
3) Civil war or a lower-intensity conflict
What I don't find likely is 4) all the migrants adopting the culture and institutions of the destination country which made it attractive in the first place. If it were possible then adopting right laws would've immediately fixed a country like Iraq and there would've been no insurgency.
I absolutely believe in assimilation over time but it necessarily requires the natives (including the previous waves of migrants) to be a dominant majority and prevent concentrations of migrants preventing their assimilation.
That's why I think that it should be regulated, with some countries needing less of it. Btw I've myself migrated to a new country, so this is partially based on my own experiences.
I don't know if this happens in reality, but if a dominant factor in institution development is resources? E.g. nice European country has lots of land, and has access to lots of oil/wind power/whatever resources, and those are what enabled its niceness?
Then it's possible immigrants can assimilate and/or not damage the good institutions, because it was the lack of those same resources that made it impossible to fix a country like Iraq, even with good laws.
> Then it's possible immigrants can assimilate and/or not damage the good institutions, because it was the lack of those same resources that made it impossible to fix a country like Iraq, even with good laws.
South Africa tends to undermine this idea.
Actually, all of sub-Saharan Africa severely undermines your main idea, because that appears to be just that natural resources are what determine a country's potential, and Africa is rich in those. It was conventional wisdom in the mid-20th century that Africa would shortly grow rich while South Korea stayed impoverished forever.
But South Africa started out with good infrastructure and institutions, and systematically trashed them.
That's fair. Perhaps path dependency? Once you *have* good institutions, strong resources can enable assimilation of large new populations?
The main example I'm thinking of is of course the US, over most of its history.
I would argue that assimilation is itself an institution, and that's what you need to be good if you want to assimilate large populations.
On a related note, the US has developed a strong official orthodoxy that assimilation is Bad, which is unlikely to promote any assimilation.
Is that a widespread belief? I think some corners of the left argue that but I think if polled "Do you think it's good to assimilate into the US" you'd get 60+% agreeing.
Or do you mean politicians are anti-assimilation? I haven't really heard much of that either
It might not just be what's in the ground, but also the ability to transport it. Africa is weak on convenient rivers and has a rather flat coastline and a lack of good bays.
The rivers seem fine and are historically important, supporting high volumes of trade in the manner you'd expect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Congobasinmap.png
I recall reading somewhere that Africa's great rivers are largely shallow and interrupted by rapids, making them poorly navigable, with the exception of the lower Nile
That's a very hypothetical hypothetical.
There are quite a few countries that have lots of land and lots of resources, and yet are, by and large, oppressive authoritarian hellholes - Saudi Arabia comes to mind. The only European country I can think of that qualifies as "lots of land and lots of resources" would be Norway, and the main reason that they are not like Saudi Arabia is that they have a fairly homogeneous, high-trust society - much like Sweden did before they imported Muslim immigrants en masse. (Emphasis on DID.)
Right - but I think "european" here is a stand in for "stable western democracy" and the one I was thinking of that's resource-rich is... the US.
There's a lot that's unknown about how good institutions develop, but we do have some case studies like East/West Germany and North/South Korea that rule out the most flippant "it's just resources" hypotheses.
Agree that it's definitely not ever JUST resources. But I think your short list of outcomes doesn't take into account the possibility that a large number of pople transplanted into a different environment could actually perform differently.
As an example - I believe 2 million Irish immigrants came to the US in a 10 year period around 1840, when the total US population was 17M. Ireland was going through a famine, in part due to agricultural practices. But the US survived that without turning into Ireland.
2 million added to 17 million is ~10%, so that's far from the "migrants outnumber natives" scenario. It did cause quite a lot of disturbances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_nativist_riots
Ok re-reading this thread I see that my response #1 to you is off-topic. The person I was responding to was talking about a scenario of massive migration due to open borders, not the current state of US immigration. I agree we don't have a historic example of what happens if the number of first-gen immigrants literally exceeds the number of 2nd+ generation population ("natives"). In those circumstances it's possible institutions would be disrupted.
1. Migrants don't outnumber the us today, far from it. They're only 13% of the us population.
2. The 2 million number is JUST from Ireland. Total immigration during that period was likely higher.
3. In any case, my point was about assimilation vs "making their new country like their old country". I think the Irish immigration example where large influxes did not make the US like Ireland; the fact that was a nativist backlash doesn't change that.
But absolutely the huge influx of Irish had a big negative reaction! (there's a reason there were common ethnic slurs against Irish people) But I think that reaction was incorrect then (in fact that wiki link says that the riots were based on misinformation about Bibles) and I think it's incorrect now.
Yeah, the problem is when too many people come at the same time, especially if they create ghettos that perpetuate parts of the culture they were originally running away from.
Maybe we could prevent the ghettos by having some kind of rule that there can be at most one immigrant family per street (or other unit of space that makes most sense locally). Something like, if you come to a new country, for the next 10 years you are in a database, and when you want to move somewhere, you ask the database keepers whether that street is available for you or not. Importantly, no one is telling you were you should live, no one is sending you away from the place you currently live at, they are just giving you a list of streets you cannot move to. After 10 years you are removed from the database and you can go wherever you want to (if you didn't assimilate until then, you are probably hopeless).
Denmark is trying to do something along these lines. I just checked Wikipedia and it turns out they started this policy in 1986 (!) with varying degrees of strictness and success. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Denmark#Geographic_dispersion
Singapore also comes to mind with their ethnic quotas in public housing.
The history of this program in Denmark and the rarity of such programs (at least I haven't heard about anything like it in the West) hints at the issues with it. These countries have laws and values that make it hard to establish and enforce rules like the one you described. Imagine someone coming to a new country and staying with their relatives. Now there are two families on the street, and enforcing the ban would most likely be pretty bad optics. Again, it's not *bad* that there are human rights defenders and human rights laws, this is what makes this country a nice and attractive place to live.
So I'm not saying it can't be done, but you need to take into account dynamic effects: the laws can be changed or not enforced if there is a constituency that benefits from it.
This was also a major policy of the Roman Empire, and it mattered. When the system broke down and tribes were allowed to stay together after admission, they organized and went marauding.
Yeah, I think there were some similarities but also major differences.
Like most of modern migrants, the German tribes coming to the Roman Empire didn't want to destroy it, they fled from various calamities, their leaders aspired to become and often became members of the Roman elite.
Still, I think that the notion that the movement of these tribes *caused* the disintegration of the Western Empire is not held by many historians nowadays. As long as the state capacity remained strong, as in the Eastern Empire, the incomers could cause troubles but were eventually made part of the system one way or another.
This was true of the Roman army, but not civilians.
If you joined the Roman army, it was absolutely mandatory to assimilate into the army's culture. Hiring barbarian armies without making them join the Roman army caused huge problems.
But for the general population, assimilation happened organically rather than being a policy. It certainly didn't involve splitting up tribes; rural populations were (and still are) largely descended from whoever was there before the Romans.
> But for the general population, assimilation happened organically rather than being a policy. It certainly didn't involve splitting up tribes
Both of these sentences are false.
This all makes sense.
It's great if you want a permanent serf class. Free or unlimited immigration means anyone and everyone can come. American agriculture seems to rely heavily on migrant labour to be cheap during the harvesting season, then you can kick them back over the border until it's time for them to come back during the next harvest. (I don't know if anyone else shares the experience during the late 70s and early 80s of every damn act with a guitar in local talent shows singing "Deportees" until I was heartily sick of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportee_(Plane_Wreck_at_Los_Gatos)
(Ireland seemingly has a lot of Brazilians involved in the meat-processing industry, don't ask me how that started, so we can't look down our noses at anyone. But at the same time, we too were migrant labourers who were good for work during the season, then expected to go back home when not wanted).
Labour costs are thus (artificially) low, the migrants will live in slum conditions, and it's a great time to be a slumlord. Now if Caplan is happy to be a slumlord, then fine for him, but it's really enshrining "the major benefit from this is for The Sacred and Divine and Ineffable Economy, so having two-tier or more sets of 'this is a person with full rights, this is someone lower down the socio-economic rung, and these are the immigrant workers who don't even deserve hot water in the overcrowded hovels they inhabit*', and I'm fine with that because GDP! GDP! GDP!" as social structure.
(Maybe Caplan isn't saying this, I haven't read his book. Maybe he thinks everyone who comes to America will end up solidly middle-class in a profitable blue-collar trade and then their assimilated kids will be white-collar professionals who went to college).
*We had this sort of argument way back on here, and I got in trouble arguing with the guy saying 'if migrants are happy to work for buttons and live in a room with five other guys and no running water, why should we stop them?'
I think Caplan forgets how bad conditions used to be. There used to be tenements where you didn't have an entire family living in one room, you had several families living in a room, everyone taking one corner. If AI and the wonderful future of automation is coming, then the surplus low-skill/semi-skilled labour has nothing to do. I think manual work like construction and harvesting crops will remain, but even there automation is raising its head.
What happens then to all the workers that have no work? Let them remain in the country? Not feasible unless things *really* change so that money for all! is the magic fairy godmother AI waving its wand to create something out of nothing. Send them home after you've extracted the benefit of their labour, like the Gulf States?
What is Caplan's model of "let as many low-skilled manual workers come into the country as can physically get themselves here" and how that works out in reality? Low wages and slumlords, or "the magic of America makes everyone prosperous"? Because I'm going to ask the obvious question: how many Felipes from South America that work picked up on the corner for day labour in manual work does he know, and associate with, as distinct from "the kind of migrants I know are all my research students"?
You know, not that long ago we didn’t want the Irish here, and just look at Boston now
I definitely recognize the pattern, I used to work cleaning at a Danish hotel, everyone except me where either eastern european or African refugees.
But to give Caplan his due, all of my coworkers preferred being there instead of working in their home countries. The Easterners could save up considerable money (for their countries) by working one summer season. On couple was saving for the deposit of a house. They would have been worse of if they hadn't been able to migrate.
I know you don’t live in the US and I don’t know how they do things over there, but the USA already has a quasi-caste system with big parts of the economy dependent on foreign workers who are here illegally and theoretically could be deported, but also have lived here for decades and have kids, houses, opinions, etc.
You seem to be using the experiences of temporary seasonal workers as proof that permanent immigrants will have the same problems, but those seem like pretty different categories.
Are there a lot of native-born poor people in the US who are stuck living six to a room without running water? Whatever economic force is protecting them from such a fate, why wouldn't it protect immigrants as well? Are you just expecting that there will be so many immigrants that incomes for native and immigrant alike will plummet?
It doesn't do anything to solve the problems in the source country and is probably making them worse by draining talent. At the same time it decreases the general trust level in the recipient country, a key metric in ensuring an efficient economy and pleasant society. The adjustment period for new migrants can be very long, potentially even two generations.
Solving the problems in the source country first is a better strategy.
Argument-wise, what's the difference between letting people freely move into a country's borders and letting them freely move into an individual's house?
My house is ~3000 square feet. The united states is 3.8 million square miles (ignoring multi-level buildings), equivalent to 105 million million square feet. I think something like 5% of US land is actually used for human living, so let's say 5 million million square feet.
On a per-space basis, letting one additional person live in my house is the equivalent of 1.7 billion people into the country. I think most people agree we shouldn't do either of those things.
This is the second response about it being a question of scale. Why do you think it's a question of scale? If a random person spends 5 uninvited seconds in your house per week, are you okay with it, because of the low impact?
I... guess? Because I'm often not at home and so the random 5 seconds per week is likely to be completely unnoticed and not affect my life? Which is pretty much how 1 million additional immigrants would feel in the US. I probably wouldn't notice.
Seriously, I'm struggling to see the analogy.
Is your point that you have a *sense* of ownership/attachment to the whole country similar to how I have a *sense* of ownership/attachment of my house? If so I think that's quite unusual - I'd imagine most people aren't as horrified about a murder happening in a small town 1000 miles away as you do in your town, let alone your house. Tribal attachment naturally weakens with scale and distance.
*my* point is that it's pointless to argue about a position no one understands. So far the difference between countries and homes are feelings, of ownership and scale. Are there principles to be drawn around them, or are we just chasing people's gut instincts? If most people are less horrified by murders far away, is it then alright to take actions that increase murders far away? I imagine most people say no. So what lines are we actually drawing?
I'm responding to your question: "what's the difference between letting people freely move into a country's borders and letting them freely move into an individual's house?"
The difference is two fold:
- Pragmatically, people in your home have much more impact on your life
- Emotionally, I think (and you seem to agree) that people care a lot more about their house boundary lines than their country's.
So I don't think the house analogy is a useful lens through which to talk about immigration. That's the extent of what I'm trying to say.
If you want to now have a conversation about principles, feel free - what principles would you start from, on the actual question of country-level immigration?
...or letting them freely move into a different city?
Yes. What's the difference?
It's interesting that sorting territories by how strongly people feel about them -- house, country, city -- is *not* the same as sorting them by size.
Most people don't care about someone moving from one city to another. It's perfectly legal, unless you are in Soviet Russia. House, I get it, the small scale is too personal. Also, you probably paid for it, so you own it.
The fact that people care more about letting strangers enter their state than about letting strangers enter their city, is in my opinion a result of successful propaganda. The kind that can convince you that people who live 1000 miles away from you in one direction are "just like you", but people who live 10 miles away from you in the opposite direction are dangerous strangers.
Well, I suppose it makes intuitive sense if you live somewhere near the geographical middle of your state. But if you live near the border, especially if you occasionally walk to the other side, the lie becomes transparent.
> But if you live near the border, especially if you occasionally walk to the other side, the lie becomes transparent.
I dunno, I've been on several sides of West Virginia, and the prejudice is palpable. Maybe it's *because* of the lack of other differences, which requires exaggeration of the labels. But sadly enough, this kind of prejudice really does seem like human nature. :-(
i'd say that freely moving into another person's country is much worse than freely moving into someone's house, personally. My nationality is much more important to me than the building in which I happen to live, and rebuilding a nation-state is much more difficult than finding a new house.
What's the difference between the government building an army base and quartering soldiers in your house?
While it's obvious that allowing random people to enter your house is infringing on your property rights, it's not clear why the same would hold for access to the country as a whole. "The country" is not the property of an individual, nor is "citizenship," those are purely defined by the state.
Would you approve of Russia building an army base in California?
Would you approve of the US government building an army base in California?
Practically speaking one more person in the country will affect me a whole lot less than one more person in my house, as my house is a lot smaller
Maybe you can argue that in principle they are the same thing, I just don't find that all that important given the large practical difference
Are you saying we should allow exactly one more person into the country?
Less of this, please.
"Less of this, please."
Doesn't Yug have a point? You can't compare one person into the country vs one person into your house. The foreign born rate in the US is ~14%, and in places like Sweden ~20% or one in five.
In my family, one person in my house is equivalent to the foreign-born population in Sweden.
I don't think that any reasonable person could read YesNoMaybe's comment and think that they only wanted one person to be allowed into the country. Yug Gnirob is pretty clearly acting in bad faith here.
It's not just this comment either. All of Yug's comments in this thread are just as bad. For example, look here https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-350?r=izqzp&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=71850493, where Yug completely ignored Beleester's point and changed the subject in a way that superficially looks like a comeback, hoping noone would notice the sleight of hand.
As for the question you brought up about population proportions, *that's not a point that Yug ever brought up*. It's possible that *you* have a point, but either way, Yug didn't.
Public education in California is already a wasteful black hole of funding and injecting more children from illegal immigrants exacerbates the problem.
I'm in favor of high-skilled immigration.
I guess the standard concern is that, if we got a bunch of low-skilled immigrants, they would mostly fail to get jobs, and go on welfare, and many of them would end up as criminals.
When you post "what are your best arguments against (low-skilled) immigration?" it sort of feels like you think it's my job to prove that low-skilled immigration is bad. I guess from my perspective I think it's Caplan's job to prove that it's good -- and I'd be more interested in case studies than in thought experiments. You can prove anything with thought experiments.
I was just reading https://mattlakeman.org/2024/03/30/notes-on-el-salvador/ (linked from the Milei article). I haven't read all of it, but there's a chapter in there about how a bunch of Salvadoran immigrants settled in Los Angeles and a startling number of their children wound up in brutal street gangs. This seems like a point of evidence that low-skilled immigration can sometimes have bad consequences.
>startling number of their children wound up in brutal street gangs.
What is a "startling number"? Because the pct of children who actually ended up being in "brutal street gangs" has to be very low; if it weren't, given the hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans who live in the LA metro area, the crime rate in Los Angeles would be vastly higher than it is.
You can find some good details in the linked article. Seems to be "hundreds of thousands" of immigrants and "tens of thousands" of gang members.
Many gang members were deported in 2005-2015, and I would guess that that has solved a lot of LA crime.
>"tens of thousands" of gang members.
Only if you take law enforcement estimates of gang membership seriously. For example, the LAPD claims that there were 38k gang members in the City of Los Angeles in 2005. https://www.laalmanac.com/crime/cr03v.php#google_vignette. If that is true, and if they are all "brutal," then why weren't there more murders? Either the numbers are inflated, or most "gang members" are hangers-on, at most. And it is definitely in part the latter (source: testimony I have read from LAPD and LASD gang experts in cases where I have helped defend gang members, including MS-13 members). And, plenty of gang members are also productive citizens most of the time -- it isn't a full-time job, for the vast majority. Most gang crime is committed by a tiny pct of members.
PS: As the article you link notes, Salvadoran gangs started as defense against predation by existing gangs. There is far less danger of that repeating itself now, when crime is much lower.
Caplan cites stats that show immigrants commit fewer crimes, but other people here have already pointed out a selection effect (the system filters out the criminal ones).
Middle eastern migrants commit crimes at about 3 times the levels of natives, controlled for age and gender. This seems to be what you would expect if you looked at the crime rates in their former countries.
BUT this higher rate is still lower than the american rate, so you might actually be able to lower US crime rates by importing more refugees. And this fact should also make us wary of putting too much weight on crime rates, an ordinary person in the US probably lives almost the same life as an European person, so if the main drawback of migration wad this change in crime it might be a deal worth taking.
I don't know specifically which stats Caplan refers to, but many papers on immigration and crime look at crime rates *controlled for education and/or income*. The new wave of stats does it implicitly, for example by looking at crime rates in locales (e.g. counties) that have a sudden increase in immigration.
The problems with that are:
1- The decrease in crime *rates* is due to the very high rates of the native (often black) population that is displaced. This is also the case when you control for education or income. Immigrants often don't even have a high-school degree and they are, almost by definition, poor. The corresponding native population is typically African-American and very prone to crime. Latinos maybe commit crime at 2 to 3x the rate of white non-immigrants while blacks do at maybe 5-8x, so there is "dilution".
2- The second and third generations may be (and in fact are) more prone to crime.
3- The rates may go down, but number of crimes still goes up.
These may or may not be a problem for you or Caplan. But the discussion about crime and immigration feels a bit disingenuous to me. *Of course* more immigration increase crime. Crime correlates with poverty and immigrants are typically poor. Sure, crime gets diluted or pushed to another neighborhood when they take over a locale, but that's not at all what is implied by Caplan and others.
I'm extremely skeptical of the kind of stats Caplan cites. Is it that immigrants themselves actually commit fewer crimes, or is it that victims *report* fewer crimes (either because they're likely to themselves be immigrants, and/or they're natives who who believe reporting the *crime* is futile, eg, hit-and-run car accidents in border states), and/or because the perpetrators of certain crimes are rarely identified, and/or the police subtly discourage or are overwhelmed by certain kinds of crime and don't factor in the states at all and/or crime stats are cherry-picked to deliberately leave out high-crime regions?
Insurance company stats are probably going to be accurate when it comes to property-related crimes, I'm guessing.
The best argument I've come across is this - rich countries are rich because of a set of very unique and fragile institutions/rules - they limit the power of govt, they protect property rights and encourage trade and competition, both internal and external. This is not a particularly stable equilibrium, it depends on a set of shared values that are very rare in both temporal and spatial distributions - rich countries are few in history, and few in the world today. Being reckless about inviting in people who do not have the shared cultural basis for this wealth is dangerous.
The people who are already there don't like it. If you can convince them, as Caplan attempts to do, fine. But there is a strong tendency in a lot of current governments to ignore the wishes of the public, and for defenders to act like it is a moral imperative to ignore the wishes of the public.
This could go very badly, and if they do, I'm going to blame the people who are creating the problem today.
Well, I'm a member of the public, not a government. We're agreed, I think, that governments generally shouldn't do wildly unpopular things. But that argument only works for governments, not people. "The citizenry doesn't want it" is a good argument for the government not doing something, but I am trying to decide if *I* want it.
Sure! I can't tell you the "correct" answer.
I lean towards simplifying the immigration process to make it easier to immigrate legally, and deporting everybody in the country illegally (they can try again, although any crimes committed while here would make the process harder / less likely to succeed). If given dictatorial power, I'd also impose a five year moratorium on -all- immigration, after the deportations, to give people time to calm down and get angry about something else.
Mostly this comes down to a hypothesis I have that the last five decades of economic growth have been slower than it could be because globalization has meant that the lowest-hanging economic fruit is in developing lagging economies - it is much harder for rich countries to get richer while poor countries exist. And one of the ways of subverting this, if you're strictly interested in improving your own country, is importing a bunch of poor people. I'd also pair it with economic development zones - areas with greatly reduced regulatory burdens, in particular labor laws / minimum wages.
Can I ask what you envisage first-world countries as looking like in an open-borders world?
Do you imagine it being "a bit like now, but browner and denser"? Or do you envisage it as "three billion desperately poor wretches living in massive shanty towns surrounding the ruins of what were once wealthy cities"? Do you imagine that, say, Nuremberg (to pick a random picturesque mid-sized city) would look more like Nuremberg or like Lagos?
If you envisage the first then I think we have a disagreement about likely outcomes. If you envisage the latter but think it's worthwhile due to fairness then we have a disagreement about morality.
Where are these three billion people coming from? The entire population of Nigeria is 218 million. The population of all of the Middle East is about 380 million, all of South America is 442 million, the population of all of Africa is about 1.37 billion.
Are you envisioning that, in an open borders world, third-world countries will be literally emptied down to the last man, woman and child? Or do you think things might reach an equilibrium somewhere below 3 billion migrants?
There's another 2.8 billion in India and China, another 700 million in South East Asia. Not all of them want to leave, but a lot will.
You're right, there might be an equilibrium somewhere, after all the nice parts of the world are just as ruined as the worst parts of the world. Note that the Third World is still pretty crap even after you remove 90% of the population, so the equilibrium will be a lot closer to the current level of Nigeria than the current level of Switzerland.
Speculatively, many of the former residents of the civilised world might find a way to go off and found their own city-states, escaping the ruins of their old countries.
Does his point change at all if only 1 billion people come to the US?
Are you using “Lagos” as a symbol of all that is wrong with the world, or are you talking about the bustling megacity itself? I can’t tell.
A bit of both? I'm talking about a vastly overpopulated urban area where the majority of people are desperately poor and living in vast shanty towns of makeshift dwellings on the outskirts. There's other cities like that in the world, but Lagos springs to mind.
Oh, yeah, I forgot: consent. Of the governed, sure, but the metaphors should suggest themselves to your mind anyway.
For someone looking to join their first religion, what would be the most objective way for them to choose? Based on what criteria?
A case could be made for choosing the one with the most severe punishments for nonbelievers or, similarly, the one that promises the greatest rewards for the faithful, but most religions are pretty strong on both counts.
Eventually, it seems inevitable that the free agent will want to narrow their choices to the ones that are most likely true. If our pilgrim instead picked one on vibes or convenience, and it turned out to be one of the countless false ones, that’d be a catastrophic outcome. Better to pick one that might feel wrong or uncomfortable, but is backed by genuine divine authority. Divinity is after all the meat of the sandwich. But what are its indicators? Internal consistency? Historical consistency? Predictive power? Compatibility with Occam’s Razor?
Edit: The free agent is not me. I’m old and already been through more religious adventures than most. Sorry for any confusion.
Have them read up on the perennial philosophy (ex. thru Aldous Huxley) and aim for the spiritual intuition that is the real core of most religions. No need to believe anyone's narratives literally, they're not meant for that - that saves them from the pain and the arbitrariness of having to choose one. If the core intuition fits, then you can feel right at home wherever it is being celebrated, no matter the form or ritual.
This sounds good, and is a practical perspective in many respects, but theologians do often insist that the narratives are truth. A religious follower eventually bumps into the ceiling (or floor) of this insistence the more dedicated they become in their faith (by definition their complete trust or confidence in something). And if one insists that nevertheless it doesn’t matter because religion is personal, this is completely at odds with the missionary aspects of at least Christianity, Islam and many other religions, though notably not Buddhism and Judaism.
I guess the practical answer to that is that what matters is the attitude of the group you're actually joining, not so much the theoretical creed of the wider religion. Abrahamic religions are theoretically exclusivistic at their root, but plenty of their followers and groups on the ground are not. I've personally met a Christian nun who is the leader of her congregation and who is qualified a Zen master at the same time... there's being open minded, and then there's that, and it's really inspiring to see how it makes 100% sense for her and her group. I've also seen plenty of Christian-Buddhists, Judeo-Buddhists, Buddhist-Hindus, Christian-Hindus, and even the odd Sufi-Buddhist, even though such combinations are theoretically impossible.
Note that plenty of Christian academic theologians have defended inclusivistic positions, and somehow they didn't get themselves excommunicated. The Indian religions are generally known for their inclusivism, but that never prevented some Buddhist groups from saying that the guys at the monastery over there didn't have the right view or practice for nirvana. It's really a question of who you associate with.
OTOH, if some group is actively participating in the missionary attempt to convert the whole world to their view, I don't think I'd want to join them in any case.
My impression of the real world is that you don't get atheists making calculations, you get people finding a good emotional fit with a religion.
That’s understandable, but the free agent isn’t an atheist. They are unaffiliated with a religion and open to accepting one. I don’t think the free agent’s behavior implies he thinks religion is bunk. What gave you that impression?
As an atheist: most of these are social clubs anyway. (Not really a criticism as most people need those and at least you get a prosocial peer group--a church is going to be better for you than those guys hanging out on the street corner smoking.) Find one that has people you like and join that one.
As a guy, one should choose a religion that has the best ratio of women to men. Even if he ends up in Hell, at least he will have some fun on the Earth.
Wonder which religion that would be?
Probably Wicca, but depending on the region, Christianity might also be a good choice.
It doesn't really make sense to pick any kind of religion at all unless you believe it, so I guess I'd just start reading religious texts until you believe one of them and then live in accordance to what you believe. But if you don't believe it then just find a good routine or life philosophy that you like and follow that. Adding in a spiritual aspect that you don't believe is true is just being false and then you live a lie, so it doesn't really matter how good of a life it leads to because the whole thing will be fake. It just sounds ridiculous to be half spiritual/religious/whatever. I hope this free agent ends up recognizing the truth.
I'm curious, what have you found in your many religious adventures?
Edit: In your many religious adventures you have most definitely heard about Jesus. What do you really know about him/why do you not believe that he's the truth?
At least what you (or the friend you are asking for) are looking for is truth, and not convenience or what will give them warm fuzzies.
I hear it’s a narrow path. My balance is poor and I’m easily distracted by roadside attractions. But there’s hope for our pilgrim.
> For someone looking to join their first religion, what would be the most objective way for them to choose? Based on what criteria?
The relevant criterion is "who do you want to form social connections with?".
I see. Why do you prefer the networking over finding true salvation and avoiding some brand of eternal misery?
Probably because the networking is real and the true salvation is fiction?
I thought you might have been asking the question in good faith.
I apologize for not assuming divinity is false.
Considering it is then, why does networking as “the relevant criterion” obviously outweigh ethical compatibility? Even if the free agent doesn’t believe in the possibility of divinity, which you’ve determined they don’t, they might reasonably favor the religion they think is most ethical.
Hot Take: religions are fan-fictions. This probably comes off as especially flippant toward theists. But conversely, it can also be looked at as especially reverent toward the value of fiction [0]. Because truth isn't just about accuracy, but also about ramifications of your behavior.
> Where religion comes into play, is when a community forms around the values promoted by the story. These shared values means it's easier to form a culture, which means it becomes easier for the members to reap the economies of scale from cooperative behavior. And this is why I've become more interested in literature as of late. The quality of your literary diet influences the quality of your value-system, which may also influence the quality of the community you find yourself in. Choose wisely.
So for me, shopping for a religion is a matter of shopping for a community which cultivates the sort of values you'd like to prioritize. So you can, to paraphrase Gandhi, "be the algorithm you want to see in the world".
[0] https://fromthechair.substack.com/p/the-descartography-of-mythopoesis
What is your pilgrim looking for? “Genuine divine authority” is hard to verify.
It sure is. But if our pilgrim can’t zero in on it, and one of the religions is actually backed by it as they all claim, he’s damned. Our pilgrim doesn’t want to be damned. And he doesn’t want to live at odds with the fundamental purpose of the universe, either.
> Our pilgrim doesn’t want to be damned. And he doesn’t want to live at odds with the fundamental purpose of the universe, either.
You might want to look into Orthodox theology. They pretty much consider those two things to be equivalent, which means, in my idiosyncratic interpretation at least, that you can forget about the "damned" bit and simply (hah) aim toward alignment with the highest good. (And the Catholics explicitly accept Orthodox theology as a valid perspective on the same underlying reality that their theology attempts to describe. And a lot of Protestants tacitly accept the Catholic teachings, except where they explicitly diverge.)
In that case, I think being some flavor of Christian and trying hard to be genuinely righteous is the way to go:
That way, you get the seal of approval from Christianity and also might count as a “person of the book” in Islam and a “righteous gentile” in Judaism. It sounds simple, but it’s not.
I have thought of a simpler solution:
1) Worship the Norse pantheon.
2) Die in glorious battle.
You seem to think all religions are about salvation or punishment. That's very Abrahamic of you.
I agree. I’m overgeneralizing. But in regards to most theistic religions at least, reward and punishment do seem to play a key role.
Sorry for the late reply, but where I come from, the whole question of reward and punishment is a huge red herring and should be entirely discounted, for two reasons:
1. You can easily account for those in terms of cultural evolutionary incentives. Any group that adds talk of rewards and punishments to their story will likely have an edge over their neighbors in terms of gathering new recruits and keeping them, so any successful religion is likely to accrue these things like barnacles. And once you can account for the emergence of a belief in a way that doesn't require it to have any basis in reality, the voice of those proffering it loses all its authority.
2. More importantly, I want to argue that religious rewards and punishments are spiritually bankrupt. It basically amounts to bartering with the Deity, offering some of your attention and expecting it to massage your ego in return. If you're going to be a spiritual materialist, might as well drop all pretenses and just be a materialist.
I’m confused as to where exactly you stand. In regards to your posts in this thread, when there is an aspect of scripture that could be viewed as constrictive, manipulative or distasteful, you seem to indicate it doesn’t represent the true nature of the religion. Consequently, every claim god or his prophets or his trained representatives make (even in regards to god’s own existence) is thrown into doubt and our pilgrim is left to just follow his spiritual intuition, in violation of most religions’ doctrines. I respect your right to hold whatever view on religion you like, which clearly includes pluralism and the rejection of much scripture, but when you claim your approach is at the core of religion, I see little historical evidence or religious scholarship or teachings that support that. Perhaps that will change over time. You are free to believe it, and no doubt you are not alone as you’ve pointed to some people combing faiths that are mutually exclusive based on their scripture and the teachings of the majority of the churches’ leadership. But our pilgrim, as I stated, sees value in truth, sees that most religions’ claim to see this value as well, and since our pilgrim is without religion at the moment, he must rely on the secular tools that we all rely on to seek that out (evidence, reason, etc.).
We don't have any examples of confirmed true religions, so we're working with a data set with zero pieces of information. We thus start and end with our priors - we could use the principle of indifference to say that every religion is equally likely as the next.
So I wouldn't try to figure out which one is most likely to be true - I don't think you'll get too far.
Instead, just look at the data we do have. Every religious follower lives a life that can be observed - that gives us tons of data to use! Presumably you'd want to pick the religion that maximizes some utility function that takes lots of inputs for vibes, convenience, or whatever else is important to you. Then pick that religion - it's just as likely to be true as any other one.
> Presumably you'd want to pick the religion that maximizes some utility function that takes lots of inputs for vibes, convenience, or whatever else is important to you. Then pick that religion - it's just as likely to be true as any other one.
Sounds good but I’m not sure about that last bit. Why can’t the free agent assess the claims of the faiths’ various doctrines (which are nearly all in the form of scripture) the same way we generally assess the claims of any other texts and then choose the text that holds up best to scrutiny? Do stuff like verify its description of past events with multiple sources. Look for internal inconsistencies that could suggest a lack of authority or forthrightness. If it’s old and it predicted future outcomes, check to see if those outcomes came to pass as predicted. Consider the motive of the author(s) and their credentials, and weigh the arguments they make against what’s known to be true. Test any methodologies to see if their results are reproducible. Isn’t this how we usually assess written truth claims? Nobody wants their religion to be the one invented by a charlatan or a delusional prophet but by process of elimination, most (if not all) must be and surely it’s best for the free agent to critically look into how a doctrine holds up before they choose it.
It's not a bad idea, but I worry that divine truth is so far removed from secular truth as to be unrecognizable.
Internal consistency and predictive power are really, really good measurements for secular truth. But divine truth? It's totally possible (and maybe even expected) that God sometimes changes His mind. That what was permitted today is forbidden tomorrow. Or that seeming contradictions in scripture are actually divine mysteries beyond human comprehension.
I'm not totally convinced that humans are equipped to discover divine truths in the first place. After all, dogs probably will never learn calculus - they just aren't capable of understanding certain kinds of mathematical truth. Even assuming humans *can* learn divine truths, it's totally possible that such revelations haven't happened yet and won't happen in my lifetime - millions of intelligent humans lived and died without learning calculus because it hadn't been discovered yet. I know some calculus, but there are almost certainly mathematical truths that will be discovered long after I'm gone - I see no reason why I should be able to access the divine while there are still secular truths that elude me.
Regardless, I'm ultimately faced with one difficult question (the nature of divine truth) and one simpler question (what is a good life). I choose to assume that my efforts to solve the difficult question will be fruitless, and so I focus my efforts on the second question. By analogy, I'm giving up my quest for canine calculus and focusing instead on playing fetch and being a good boy.
I have a huge amount of respect for people who want to engage with the infinite - the same way I respect Newton and Leibniz for discovering calculus. But I'm not even a Newton or Leibniz, and I'm supposed to figure out who made the universe?
> Why can’t the free agent assess the claims of the faiths’ various doctrines (which are nearly all in the form of scripture) the same way we generally assess the claims of any other texts and then choose the text that holds up best to scrutiny?
Because "we don't have any examples of confirmed true religions" - in the thousands of years religions have existed, not a single one has shown itself to be as true as, say, heliocentrism or evolution. Some, indeed, claim that this is as expected - do not put your God to the test, you must ask for faith to be granted it, etc etc; we call testable, repeatable, verifiable miracles "science" and most people file them in a different file to "religion", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-vDhYTlCNw notwithstanding.
You can use the texts to /rule out/ religions, absolutely - if you find things in the text you cannot bring yourself to claim or live with, that religion is not for you. This process is necessary - but it's not sufficient; you're very unlikely indeed to end up with The One Text That Holds Up Best To Scrutiny at the end of it if rigorously followed; otherwise there would only be one widely followed religion in the world today. Once you've ruled out everything you possibly can, there is still a leap of faith to go - where there is not, we do not call that religion.
(edit: note also, incidentally, that the very concept of a set of scriptures that everyone agrees on that you can read and verify already massively narrows down your set of options; compare, e.g., east asian animistic religions, where the existence of the supernatural is widely accepted, and there are some very broadly specified parameters most agree on, but pretty much all detail is specific to your local circumstance / spirits / deities / environment and you will not be able to firmly pin down any testable specifics that are supposed to be universally true at all).
Why is this person looking to "join their first religion"? Usually you join with the community / activities because you've come to believe the claims, not the other way around. The best strategy is likely to pin down what, exactly, it is that the person is looking to get from the experience - unlike all the other questions, this should at least be one that, with some effort and introspection, it is possible to satisfyingly answer! - and try joining in with groups / activities that look like they will provide lots of those things.
Shotgun approach. Try everything, and when God starts putting his thumb on the scale, follow that one.
Assuming you're after divine truth. If you're just looking for a social club, then use social club standards.
If the Divine is unknowable, if the Spirit does not move you -- which religions seems to help you achieve the good life? Do you think that the good life is contemplation and contentedness? Buddhism. Is the good life helping others? Probably some flavour of Christianity, or maybe Sikhism. Does the good life come from living in a loving community? Take your pick, but consider one that would get you into a commune / kibbutz if you're willing to make that leap.
Don't know what the good life is? Neither do I, so I cannot help you. Read, talk, pray / meditate / think about it. Take solace in the fact that people have been documenting the difficulty of this task for at least 2,400 years.
Oh, and if you place a strong value on truth, be a deist or agnostic atheist until you find something else to be more truthful.
Up until a few hundred years ago, we humans thought the universe revolved around us, and that our world was what we see day to day, and divine entities cared about us individually and made things happen to suit us and their whims. Around 1600 Galileo, then Newton who was born the day Galileo died, showed us that we were just one of many worlds that went around the sun. About a hundred years ago Hubble and others showed us that we were just one world going around one star in a group of stars called a galaxy of which there were many galaxies. In the past 50 years or so we have come to the point where it seems the universe we live in may be infinite (or not, still TBD) but the observable universe extends about 10 to the 80th power km out and holds about 10 to the 50th power or so kg of mass. Much of what we see has been happening for billions of years at speeds up to the speed of light and power interchanges exceeding those we experience by up to around 48 orders of magnitude. Meanwhile, living entities like us (which includes animals and plants of all sizes down to microbial and viral entities) each comprise about Avogadro’s number of atoms (about 10 to the 23rd power) all interacting via electrodynamics several powers of the number of atoms of times at every instant of our existence to comprise our living interaction with the universe. And inside all of this, your mind seeks the Truth, which must somehow encompass, organize, understand, predict, and know it all from beginning to end. And somehow that seeking is driven by the same thing that every other living thing seeks as long as it lives. And sometimes you wonder what it is that you are seeking. If it is Truth, it must encompass all the above and yet somehow fit within your finite existence.
"...how much greater and more wonderful God is, then, that despite me being such an infinitesimal part of creation, He cares deeply and desires a direct, personal relationship!"
"When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?
For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour."
I like the framing. I look forward to your post about choosing your second religion.
"That's me in the corner
That's me in the spot-light
Choosing my religion"
You could choose to attend different religious gatherings for different religions. See which ones feel the most welcoming to you, see which of these gatherings resonate with you the most. You could visit a service at a mosque, a synagogue, a cathedral, a buddhist temple, etc...
You could also pray about it, leaving your prayer open-ended, addressing "the divine".
A couple general ideas I'd add to this:
1. I think there's some value in both size and age when it comes to religion. Or, to be clearer about it, I think the smaller and newer you get, the more you risk falling into a cult-like community and/or something that feels like a LARP. So this would likely be an edge for the major world religions and for the larger/older denominations/sects within those major world religions.
2. There is practical value in having the same belief system as close relatives and close friends. It can make such relationships a lot smoother. So if there's already a religion that is predominant in your family, that would be an edge for that religion.
I'm not saying 1 or 2 or even both combined should be totally decisive factors, but they're probably worth considering.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. That seems really accommodating, but implying it’s fine for everyone to come to different conclusions as to divine truth is at odds with the actual doctrine of nearly every major faith. None of them leave room for religious pluralism in their scripture, except maybe Buddhism in its classical forms. Each major religion asserts their specific doctrine applies to all people, not just the ones who are down with it. Because of this when a believer says that everybody can believe in whatever faith they choose, which all the major faiths expressly forbid, it seems disingenuous and patronizing. It makes that person appear either as if they don’t understand basic principles of their faith’s doctrine, or they choose to ignore it when it’s inconvenient, despite its explicit sanctity.
None of this is in judgment of you, obviously, because you didn’t identify with any particular religious doctrine. But I am surprised that most people who believe their god is the one true god won’t just come out and explain what convinced them of that god’s singular, consequential claim and compel other people to save themselves and join them since the stakes are so high.
"Each major religion asserts their specific doctrine applies to all people, not just the ones who are down with it"
this isn't true- a great many religions (probably the large majority) are ethnic religions that are for a particular ethnic group, and not only do they not actively seek out converts, they'd be kind of baffled by the concept.
You’re talking about the major ones? Because I was in your quote.
> implying it’s fine for everyone to come to different conclusions as to divine truth is at odds with the actual doctrine of nearly every major faith. None of them leave room for religious pluralism in their scripture, except maybe Buddhism in its classical forms.
There are non-major faiths that have room for religious pluralism. An argument could be made that such an attitude is desirable because the "we are the only truth" doctrine is hubris, elitist, and lacks epistemic humility.
I sometimes wonder how effective evangelism can be in our modern internet age. Actively evangelizing a religion in a modern 1st world nation is a bit like doing door-to-door sales in the age of amazon and ebay. I mean, if people want a particular good, it's never been easier to try to shop for it online. Likewise, if people are open to joining a religion, it's never been easier to read up on that religion and find what followers of that religion are saying online. When the early Christians evangelized the Christian faith in ancient Rome, for many it was something new that they genuinely never heard of before. Who in the west has never heard of Christianity? And Google is right there for anybody who wants to learn more about it.
I might regret this, but I'll come out and say that I am a Christian. It's clear that my position is a minority one here on Scott's blog, and I learned a long time ago to never get into online debates in places where the solid majority is against you. Simply reading the viewpoints and opinions of people with different beliefs and life experiences than yourself can often be highly informative and give you a greater sense of the world around you, and that's one of the reasons I'm on this blog.
I could say that you and your friend need Jesus, and I basically believe that, but saying that will probably just make you think I'm Ned Flanders given I get a strong materialist vibe from you, like I get from most people on this blog. So, what benefit is there in me doing that, for either you or your friend or me? In fact, this is why I have mixed feelings about writing this right now, since it will probably result in some people here just dismissing my opinion on any other topic based on their views of religious people.
But... yes, I would be completely failing to live in accordance with my faith if at this point I didn't put it out there. So there you go, choose to do with it what you want.
The advice I gave you before was sincere, to be clear. Within our natural life, there really are benefits to belonging to a religion that is the same as our friends and relatives. Newer/smaller religions often do seem cult-like and/or LARPy to me. And if you're going to join a religion, it really helps to be a member of a physical religious community that you find friendly and welcoming. Even many atheists here know that, it's why some try to replicate it through purely secular means.
I'll leave it at this. I hope your friend finds what they're looking for. Have a good day.
I am Christian (fairly recent conversion) and believe that all religions are fundamentally true, and that Moses, Buddha and Mohammed were enlightened beings the same as Jesus.
I find Christianity more powerful and more personally compelling because Jesus literally died for us - he believed so strongly in what he preached that he was willing to die for the truth.
But if someone is Muslim or Jewish or Buddhist or Hindu I’m not interested in trying to convert them - I would rather them embody the tenets of their faith, which seem to me to be fundamentally similar to mine.
Hey Turtle, I encourage you to read the Gospels of Matthew and John in the Bible. I understand why you would believe what you're saying as a recent-ish convert, but it is important to know what Jesus actually said and who he is, as well as what he did for the world.
He makes it clear that he alone is the gateway to God and forgiveness of sins, and that we have to accept his sacrifice alone to pay the penalty for our sins (death) and as a result we owe our life to serving him and obeying him. He tells us that whoever is not with him is against him, and that those who love him do what he says. Those who don't do what he says do not love him.
What makes a Christian is someone who recognizes Jesus as the son of God and sees their own evil and imperfection, and then accepts the sacrifice that Jesus made and has faith in him that he purifies them and will take them to live with him for eternity. A Christian gives up his own life to follow and obey Jesus and out of love for God and his fellow man, shares the truth with others in obedience to God's command and in hopes that they will recognize the truth and be united with God and all His children.
Jesus says to do what he says, so that requires knowing what he says. So please, I urge you to read God's word and believe it. It may be more immediately helpful to start with the New Testament, but all of it is very important and it is so wonderful.
> I am Christian (fairly recent conversion) and believe that all religions are fundamentally true
...then, I am sorry, but you are not a (mainstream) Christian. Christianity is incompatible with those other religions; the Nicene Creed makes some very specific claims, as does the bible itself, and these are at odds with claims the other religions you list make. When you join a mainstream church, you will be required to affirm your agreement with some version of the Nicene creed on a regular basis as one of the terms of your membership.
If you have not already, you might like to investigate your local unitarian or quaker communities, as they hold to a smaller (and therefore less exclusive) set of core beliefs and are more tolerant of a wider range of views; though John 14:6 will still be hard to wrestle with.
Aside from Truth...
Is it growing? Are its members relatively happy and healthy? How has it dealt with the historical problems it faced? When it had to make tough decisions, how often did it come down on the side that you think is right? Nothing involving humans is perfect; does it recover from human-caused errors? What kind of things do you have to agree to do, and what are the reasons for them?
How much crazy stuff is there in the backstory that needs to be interpreted away? Is its global organizational model scalable? How do you feel about it participating in politics? It's going to have factions; are the factions you like ascendant or declining? After you've joined, is it OK to have a crisis of faith?
What happens if you leave?
I was part of a team advocating for a revision of SB 1308 [1], a California bill that would have prevented the use of far-UV [2] in California, as a side effect of banning ozone-producing indoor air cleaners. I'm seeing now that there's a measure on the Berkeley ballot [3] that mandates raising air standards in buildings owned or leased by the city to meet ASHRAE 241 [4] air quality requirements, but specifically NOT by using whole-room far-UV ("the City…shall not install any ultraviolet light disinfection technology in such a manner that the light will come into contact with human skin").
ASHRAE 241 is a solid standard, and it would be good for Berkeley to adopt it, so at first glance, I mostly want this to pass if it seems realistic for it to actually be upheld. However, it could be impractical to meet the standard without using germicidal UV, depending on the typical occupancy of the city-owned/leased buildings (of which I'm unsure). I just don't understand the antipathy toward germicidal UV here. Does anyone know how this measure was developed and why it excludes the use of whole-room far-UV? (Very possibly the authors of the language have never heard of far-UV and just want to guard against the use of carelessly installed upper-room germicidal UV.)
[1] astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-333
[2] vox.com/the-highlight/23972651/ultraviolet-disinfection-germicide-far-uv
[3] acvote.alamedacountyca.gov/acvote-assets/02_election_information/PDFs/20241105/en/Measures/26%20-%20Measure%20HH%20-%20City%20of%20Berkeley%20-%20Indoor%20Air%20Quality.pdf
[4] drive.google.com/file/d/1kmDyJEkcCi0U-WV2YZDg-X7N2Sr4_6wC/view
I guess you had to ban LearningHebrewHatesIsrael but it's a shame.
First of all I get it. Not only was (new-name) LearnsHebrewHatesIP pro-assassination but (excepting his imagination of Yahweh's hell - source?) he sounded serious too. Not serious enough to do it himself of course but you know he kind of sounded like he really really wanted Trump dead.
(Unlike my own offering of simply giving Mencken a voice: https://ydydy.substack.com/p/some-thoughts-are-better-left-unsaid )
Even so, while I obviously agree that anyone who feels so strongly about something so silly as a president is making a very unfortunate error for themselves and their emotions, it should be fine to "wish" for whatever you like and to say so.
I support the ban because obviously that sort of talk ends up spiraling with back talk and eventually leads to a whole lot of hate among real people who can hear each other (rather than for Trump or dead-dude who can not) and actually cause a great deal of unhappiness even if it's just about what I regard as fighting over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
In addition, I think you had to do it not just for the good of anyone who might get caught up in it, but for the tone of the whole platform if that kind of thing is allowed.
And finally, considering how badly people behave on the internet that would not surprise me if his own colorful wishes ended up with bad people counting you personally as responsible for allowing it and not banning him for it, and using it as a cudgle against you who definitely doesn't deserve it (not that he would but he seems to be cool with whatever response might come from that comment).
At the same time, as you can see from the above I don't take it all that seriously and I think that you don't take it all that seriously either (other than for its potentially deleterious second-hand effects), so, while a ban makes a lot of sense (based at least on the criteria of the local snitches) I think he's also someone worth having around and that therefore perhaps has been for a shorter period I don't know what periods you usually use but I would think a week or a month if need be.
This isn't because I found that particular comment something that anyone in the world really needs to read but because I remember when he showed up shortly after October 7th last year. He was very angry and very violent but I realized that he was also sincere.
And sincere people can grow.
I wrote him at some length not expressly dealing with the accusations or hatreds or whatnot but pointing out that he seems to not have all the information or to have considered all the perspectives but would probably want to do so.
He seemed logic-based rather than team-based, *even if he was* shouting for the bloody murder of one particular team.
It's true that he's more colorful and passionate than most but (from the admittedly limited number of comments of his that I have read) he seems to be someone who actually cares. About people and about truth, and about checking his presumptions in his own head so that he can change them if rationality and heart recommend him doing so.
Anyhow, the commentariot here is a diverse bunch. But while I can't say that I've learned much information about the outside world from those comments of his that I've read, I do feel like I learned about him enough for him to distinguish himself here as a good bloke whose passion doesn't only fire outward, but also inward. In other words, a (loud but) humble fellow.
That's a rare quality.
It may be a quality more highly represented here than on the general internet, but even here it's rare.
He even went so far as to change his nom when he realized that Jews/Israelis aren't the devils he thought they were and that their enemies aren't quite so innocent as he had priorly felt.
That's an impressive thing. It's humility.
Anyway, he seemed like one of those few dudes on the internet who might turn into a publicly helpful high quality person given some time to explore and grow.
If this is an epitaph, so be it, but I liked him (even at his most genocidal against my own tribe and self) so I wish him well.
Yeah he was a valuable commenter and it’s a shame he’s banned
I don't think it's a bannable comment, period. It was obviously an expression of emotion, not a statement of LHHIP's actual views about the best strategy for those who strongly oppose Trump. He ends up by talking about how he can't stand the fucking Cheeto one second longer. That's not how people speaking up in favor or assassination as a strategy sound! Come on, it's an emotional rant.
Yeah, if Trump had died that day there would have been a civil war in America. Not something to wish for. I do believe that God saved him.
I don't think it would have been a civil war, not immediately. But it would have been enormously bad for American democracy. If you're up on late Republican Roman history, there's a tiny meme that "he's not either Caesar, he's Tiberius Gracchus", and that would have sealed it in.
Why would there have been civil war? I don't get that at all. What would be the two sides?
I don't think it would have happened, but the implication is that Trump's supporters would lose faith in the process itself. First they steal the election, and then they kill the candidate to make sure he can't win again. If they can do that to a wealthy former president, they can do it to anyone.
Whoever "they" are in this scenario, they would obviously control most or all possible candidates, regardless of party (they might cite Kamala being endorsed by pretty much Bush's entire leadership team), so they can't trust a Rubio or DeSantis either.
This is a group with strong independent streaks and lots of weapons, as well as a significant number of supporters in the rank and file military. If any non-majority in the US could fight or win a civil war, that's likely the one.
I cannot think of a comment that would be more bannable than calling for the assassination of a political candidate during an election.
First off, LHHIP's comment was not "calling for assassination", it was wishing that an already-happened assassination had succeeded. It is a subtle distinction, but relevant in that, for example, it was not a call to action like your comment implies.
Second, I don't know about ACX, but over on the sister site Data Secrets Lox, rightwingers can openly cheer on politically-motivated murder with no bans in sight: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,11572.msg512555.html#msg512555
It's been months, but that reads to me like an absurd joke, given the absurd question that it answered. If it were serious, I would have issued a warning or a ban, depending on circumstances. Since it's joking, nowadays it's more likely to get a warning:
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,12324.msg572810.html#msg572810
And left or right has nothing to do with it (as evidenced by the number of complaints we get from each side for being biased in the other direction).
Emotional rants have no place in this comment area. They are neither kind, nor necessary, and if you’re right this one wasn’t even true.
He surprised me with his sincerity and humility: I'd argue with him and would write him off as a troll, and then he'd write a mea culpa and ask the community for forgiveness. Certainly a remarkable fellow.
But I support the ban, and it's a long time coming. Quite frankly, he often came off as an unhinged and aggressive crank, because, well, he was one. A remarkable and surprisingly humble unhinged crank, but a crank nonetheless. He couldn't keep up the level of civility expected for this comment section, and if you don't pull weeds you don't have a garden (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/)
Yes, I agree. Your links to some of his really bad posts convinced me. I
put a post about now
supporting the ban, here: https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-350?utm_source=direct&r=3d8y5&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=71859288
I read most of his posts, even on threads I wasn't very interested in, and don't recall any that sounded unhinged, after the early era when he was incandescent with rage, and his name was LearnedHebrewHatesIsrael. When has he sounded unhinged recently?
He often wasn't unhinged, but when he was he was *really* unhinged. Also, seemed to have a particular hangup on killing Trump. Some receipts:
"Trump is to humans as shit is to food. He is refuse. The world would be better if everyone would shoot the likes of Trump."
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-338?r=fczlp&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=62235080
"Trump's shooter did nothing wrong except not wielding the weapon accurately enough, and everybody who finds this sentiment so intolerable that it invites summary immediate dismissal is buckling under an immense amount of peer pressure."
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/some-practical-considerations-before?r=fczlp&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=63034035
"Trump in particular is a low-value human that absolutely no one is capable of missing if their life depended on it. He's the archetypical "Unsympathetic Victim" that gets killed by the sympathetic character in shows like CSI and NCIS and the audience forgives and even cheers for the sympathetic character....For all of those reasons and possibly more that I'm too lazy to articulate, I think that the rule "Killing is bad unless the target is in the exception list" and adding Trump and Trump-like insects as entries in the exceptions list is basically a good compromise. I think that "Acts like Trump" is a very good and unambiguous exception condition that would almost never harm a good person."
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/some-practical-considerations-before?r=fczlp&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=63154954
"Killing Trump is not bad because it can be done surgically, with 0 casualties other than Trump (who, I argue, isn't a "casualty" at all). This reminds me: I have wrongly said that Trump's shooter did nothing wrong, I retract that. He did one major crime: he murdered an innocent man. That man was "collateral damage", to use the favorite word of Israel's defenders, but I would still have supported trialing the shooter on charges of murder, if he survived....In summary: Trump (and all politicians who directly or indirectly kill people) are valid targets of assassination because assassination by its very nature is surgical, in fact it's an often-presented alternative to wars like the one in Gaza. "
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/some-practical-considerations-before?r=fczlp&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=63187830
Problem is the "the shooter did wrong in that he killed an innocent man". The kinds of views about Trump on display here (shit, less than human, should be shot) that I see online also encompass his supporters (and indeed, in these comments we get 'acting like Trump' is enough for someone to deserve having their brains blown out).
Those people would not think that man was innocent. If he went to a rally for Trump then he too deserved to die, because supporting Trump means you are as evil and less than human and shit and so forth as Trump.
I don't think anyone should die for going to a political rally, not even the loo-lahs who went to the Democratic convention soirée about how fabulosa they were for being Harris supporters:
https://www.wired.com/story/hotties-for-harris-influencers-dnc/
I have to say, I think that last comment you link to is high quality, when considered in full, and I only wish that we (well, you) hadn't had to go through the low quality parts of the previous comments to get to it. Replacing war with assassination of leaders is a classic if fringe position, especially among anarchists. And given that LHHI lives close to a current war, and is subject to a dictator, I can't particularly fault him for it. :-/
I suppose since I'm complimenting people, I shouldn't except those who are still here, so: you're great, thank you for being here, I hope you keep it up. :-) Despite the nice things I said about LHHI, I don't think I could have engaged with him the way you did there.
> "Trump's shooter did nothing wrong except not wielding the weapon accurately enough
This sadly seems pretty typical of internet commentary. I'm pretty sure I could dig up similar comments from rightwingers on DSL if I tried.
It’s pretty bad. America came a couple of inches from a civil war
It was false contrition - how many times did he issue the same fake apology, rake in all the respect for "changing his mind" then go straight back to the same murderous unhinged takes the next day?
Good riddance!
I believe there was only one major time when he apologized, changed his user name, and changed dramatically. What's *your* count of how many "fake apologies" he issued ?Can name some other times he did that? -- I'm not talking about something like, "sorry, I was a bit harsh" but a long, thoughtful-seeming post in which he apologized and vowed to change?
I don't have the time to find all of them, but I'm aware of at least three "long, thoughtful-seeming post in which he apologized and vowed to change" that he put out. One was to me in particular! (https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-318?r=fczlp&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=50980216)
Spread light, not heat.
The heat keeps me warm in the long lonely nights of being single at home.
Is it possible to simulate quantum computing with (slower) regular computing?
If not, then does this mean the we-are-living-in-a-simulation hypothesis has to be wrong because quantum computing exists? Or maybe the computer simulating us is a quantum computer?
Yes, absolutely, but it's exponentially harder: the state of n entangled cubits requires 2^n complex numbers to track (clever tricks can reduce this, but not by much), and even if a gate only acts on two wires it can still have to perform a calculation using all those numbers.
Which means if (a) quantum computing works (b) we are in a universe simulated by a classical computer… then we can cause a big performance problem for whoever is running the simulation.
Kind of like those protests in massively mul
.. massively multi player games.
You'll also need a source of randomness for the important last step of "actually get a measurement", since the final quantum state basically acts as a probability distribution over N-bit strings. But otherwise yes, a quantum computer can be simulated by a Turing machine with the ability to call a random number generator at the end of the computation (at the cost of exponential time/space).
If this universe is a simulation, how can you use it to draw conclusions about what's possible in the external universe? I mean really, only 3 spacial dimensions and 1 time dimension? Once that's off the table what does your question even mean?
Thanks for this, I had an unconsidered assumption that the simulating computer was in a universe like ours. Which led me to think that the simulation hypothesis has infinitesimal odds of correctness because the simulating computer must be larger than our simulated universe, where larger doesn't mean length or volume but number of component pieces. E.g. - To simulate our universe at the level of detail of elementary particles (which is needed to give the substrate upon which our consciousness can arise as an emergent phenomenon) the simulating computer must consist of more elementary particles than the number of elementary particles in our universe. Which seems highly improbable. But in a different kind of universe that we cannot imagine, things could be different - their computers could be made of something different from our elementary particles. I think the concept that the simulator must be larger then the simulated would still be true, that's a part of computer science which is applied math, and I think math is independent of universes.
Oh there are ideas like having part of the server decide whether to combine some high-level parts of the simulation into low-level, so that instead of simulating (say) atoms of stars more than 1AU away from Earth, you just simulate "a star", editing telescope images as needed. It's also argued that some people are lightly simulated NPCs, which allows for near infinite contempt against anyone inconvenient to believers.
I'm not advocating for the simulation theory. It feels like utter bunk. Especially the "trillion-to-one odds against this being the first world" hypothesis.
But I can't prove it.
There's a trend over the last few years of trying to reshore industrialization. So far the focus is on chips (which makes sense, since they're both a critical security need and something America was a world leader on at one point and so plausibly could be again), and ships and anything government infrastructure related (including trains, dredges, steel and buses) which is understandable (the government can much more easily enforce buy america through government programs) but altogether a terrible idea (America has never been especially good at building them and the subsidies and restrictions that exist can't possibly get it to even make a serious attempt, just harm our infrastructure).
What other areas are an especially good idea to be focuses of reshoring industry (given that America can't be a global manufacturing hub for literally everything and does actually need to pick)? And what focuses have been suggested that are especially terrible ones?
I don't think any of these are a good idea, but if I was going to prop up one industry I'd prop up raw materials refining. Oils, metals, gases, pretty much everything. It could be mined anywhere but all refined products would be subject to tariffs.
Why that one? It actually seems like not a very good one for the US, which has an advantage on higher value parts of the production chain? (Specifically steel is one of those things the US has never been good at and offshored to Japan as early as it could).
There exists only one country powerful enough to not sell to the US.
China has a deep hold on refined metals and so when subsidising an industry that is the one I'd pick. By contrast leading edge microprocessors are mostly made in Taiwan, Korea, and the US. Why is it so necessary for the US to make the very best chips in the US instead of Taiwan? Being one year behind Taiwan doesn't seem to pose any national security risk to me.
But when China refines 95% of the world's rare earth elements or 80% of its cobalt? That's a supply chain security risk. (Don't quote me on the exact figures, going off old memory here.)
Rare earth elements specifically makes sense, yeah. (Other forms of refinement are more common in US allies and would make less sense)
Drug production. I mean medicinal ones, especially generics. According to a 2014 study, about 40% of generic drugs in the US have only one manufacturer. This has likely become worse since then. Supply chain failures for basic drugs have already become much more common.
Here are some charts: https://qualitymatters.usp.org/geographic-concentration-pharmaceutical-manufacturing
And an article arguing in favor or reshoring: https://theconversation.com/blame-capitalism-why-hundreds-of-decades-old-yet-vital-drugs-are-nearly-impossible-to-find-206848
Solar panels and wind turbines. America's rise to a preeminent global superpower also coincided with American preeminence in fossil fuel production. If America had been dependent on other countries for such fuels (e.g. Germany or Japan), the world might have been totally different.
We already lost to China on solar panels -
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-opinion-how-us-lost-solar-power-race-to-china/
Robots. As manufacturing becomes more and more robot-based and less dependent on human wages, you want to be the place where all the robots are being manufactured.
Not only do you get to sell the robots, you also get to sell everything else, because the most convenient place to set up the everything-else factories is right next to the robot factories.
I know that robots have been used in manufacturing for decades, but I think they're due for a big step function increase. At some point we get the GPT-3 of robots, which turns them from hyper-specialised tools for use in narrow circumstances into tools that you can use for pretty much any basic manufacturing task. And you really want that to happen in your country, not in China.
Also solar panels, to power all the everything factories.
> Robots. As manufacturing becomes more and more robot-based and less dependent on human wages, you want to be the place where all the robots are being manufactured.
That's a great one. GOOG definitely jumped the gun by a decade when acquiring Boston Dynamics. Now Hyundai has them, and is explicitly using them to carve out a niche in automation robotics.
Somebody needs to tell NVIDIA to stop open sourcing their Eureka code, too.
"The AI agent taps the GPT-4 LLM and generative AI to write software code that rewards robots for reinforcement learning. It doesn’t require task-specific prompting or predefined reward templates — and readily incorporates human feedback to modify its rewards for results more accurately aligned with a developer’s vision."
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/eureka-robotics-research/
I agree on solar, but China literally manufacturers 90% of the world's solar panels, and it's a steep climb from here, especially with our environmental laws.
Cars - plenty of good cars are manufactured in fully developed countries, including all the arguably best ones.
We still manufacture Teslas and Corvettes and whatever domestically, and used to manufacture all the cars sold in America domestically (40's). We're down to about 45% with offshoring and "American" brands being manufactured in Mexico.
And don't cars have absolutely huge trickle-down effects in first, second, and third string parts suppliers and domestic jobs? Isn't that why we bailed the Big 3 out?
If "45%" was enough to bail out the Big 3, how much more domestic jobs and GDP would result in bringing the 55% back? Seems like a win.
But is there evidence we get either strong strategic benefits from it (I think not, since most of the offshored parts are in allied countries) or good bang for your buck job wise (I think not so much since there's a pretty good split now, though not very confident about that). The question isn't just "do we get jobs back with arbitrary cost" but "do we get good jobs and valuable production in return for our cost". Cars seem fairly replacement level on that front - not an especially terrible idea, but also not the most efficient way to turn government subsidies to jobs and domestic production.
It seems a good tradeoff to me - the 45% represents 4-5M jobs across primary manufacturing and first, second, third string suppliers, so bringing back another 45% would bring back 4-5M jobs. That's a solid 3% of the total workforce, and they're all "good, honest manufacturing jobs" that could revitalize Rust Belt towns and whatever.
But as to strategic benefits, yeah, I think we should be doubling and tripling down on chip fabs, large transformer and electrical plant manufacturing (while machete-ing regulation that prevents expansion and new builds with abandon), solar panel production, and so on.
From a strategic standpoint, we should also definitely stop wasting our country's finest minds in eyeball / attention mines and finance. The amount of brainpower that goes into online ads has to be the biggest waste of intellectual horsepower ever known, and they're *really bad at it* on top of it. But the scale of GOOG and FB is enough they're still trillion dollar companies while being really bad at serving relevant ads.
But all those Phd's and brilliant people wasting their talents to create more CDO's and irrelevant ads should be working in cybersecurity and preventing corporate espionage or something actually strategically useful.
If I were in charge, I'd be offering TSMC employees FAANG and OpenAI style compensation packages to incentivize as many of them to come over as possible and start building new factories yesterday, and I'd be "national security lettering" like 10-20% of FAAMG workforces to go do something actually useful instead, but that's all pretty pie in the sky.
But I think jobs-wise, all those things combined would barely move the needle - maybe 20% as much as the cars thing.
We'd be gaining automotive jobs and losing other jobs. Mexico sells us cars so that they can buy other stuff from us, if we stop buying cars from them, they won't have money to buy the other stuff, and some of the people who make the other stuff will be out of a job. And the principle of comparative advantage says that the trade of sacrificing other jobs to gain automotive jobs will make us net poorer. Seems like a loss.
> Mexico sells us cars so that they can buy other stuff from us, if we stop buying cars from them, they won't have money to buy the other stuff, and some of the people who make the other stuff will be out of a job.
I don't think that's true. The biggest categories of Mexico's US-origin imports are electrical machinery and equipment, computers, vehicles, oil, plastics, and agriculture.
Most of those are probably at an efficient frontier in terms of US labor-hours going into them vs automation, and the marginal change from Mexico buying less (which tops out at 20-100B per category) is unlikely to result in a substantial reduction of jobs versus the overall production volumes.
In other words, if Mexico buys less corn or soybeans, it's not going to affect jobs because "farming" is basically fully automated and <2% of US jobs are farmers, and because Mexico is buying <1% of our overall farming output.
Same with oil, computers, etc.
I mean yes, I get what the theory of comparative advantage says, I'm just pointing out in the actual empirical world, I doubt we'd see these effects. The gap between theory and practice in economics can be noticeably wide due to regulations, social and business dynamics, etc.
Versus there's 4-5M automotive jobs in the US, considering direct manufacturing and first, second, and third tier suppliers, and that's at the current 45% US-origin manufacturing. I would personally bet on adding 5M manufacturing jobs to the US being more net positive empirically than Mexico buying a little less oil, agricultural products, and computers.
If you think poorer-but-with-more-jobs is a good trade, why not undo automation? Ban tractors and farming machinery etc. That will also add jobs (while impoverishing us) same as autarky will.
Sure, and if enrichening us is the main goal, let's eliminate all social welfare, eliminate corporate and capital gains taxes, get rid of most regulation, etc. GDP will go up noticeably, along with Gini index and whatever.
But you know, we'd probably have a Terror or Revolution if we went that route.
I think there's always a tradeoff between aggregate social qualiity of life and economic productivity, and although those 5M jobs would in some sense be "welfare" because it's not the strictly maximally-economically optimal thing to do, I think the amount of "GDP and good jobs in the US for average people" tradeoff is fine and probably net positive overall vs the "some corporations / stockholders will make 0.5% more annually."
And just imagine the political capital from whoever did this! "I brought back 5M jobs to the US, good manufacturing jobs, revitalizing entire Rust Belt towns, etc." I mean, whichever side did it would cement a good chunk of those votes for the next 10-20 years, I'm surprised it's not in the Overton Window of stuff being discussed.
>> Sure, and if enrichening us is the main goal, let's eliminate all social welfare, eliminate corporate and capital gains taxes, get rid of most regulation, etc. GDP will go up noticeably, along with Gini index and whatever.
Your terms are acceptable.
What's the logic here? We've made bad decisions in the past, so we must make more bad decisions in the future?
Boeing used to be able to build excellent jets until they outsourced everything. Now they will either reshore or fail.
"Reshoring" refers to bringing industrialization back from other countries. Boeing's largest and now-most-infamous outside supplier has been Spirit AeroSystems. That company, which was previously Boeing's own division before being spun off in 2005, is headquartered in Wichita and was doing virtually all of its Boeing assembly within the US. Boeing is now retaking control of Spirit Aero and its work, having agreed this summer on reacquiring all of those US operations.
Boeing in 2017 had off-shored the detailed-design and operational control of the extremely-complex manufacturing of its planes to software from a French company called Dassault Systèmes. As Boeing planes lately began falling apart and failing to fly safely, Congresscritters and others have seized upon that Dassault decision as "the problem". An awkward fact however is that Boeing's primary competitor, Airbus, made the exact same change to the same software from the same company, Dassault. AirBus planes however are not having anywhere near the problems that Boeing planes now are.
If I recall correctly, Peter Zeihan thought our best move (not that we have to do much moving about it, he thought it would happen naturally) would be to take the light industry we offshored to China and move it to Mexico. Mexico has cheap labor, a large population, is not a geopolitical threat, and is right next door.
Just two this week: "Fairness for Harris"
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/fairness-for-harris in which I mildly disagree with Noah Smith for his too relaxed attitude to Harris's too relaxed attituded to deficits.
and "Interest Rate Targeting"
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/interest-rate-targeting in which I think Sumner is confusing (probably not himself confused) about the difference between interest rates as an instrument of policy vs a target of policy.
Comments welcome.
Why does the brain age so much slower than the rest of the body? Physical decline (eg. muscle loss) is near-universal amongst the elderly, but many elderly people seem roughly as sharp as they've always been, with relatively little cognitive decline - for example, Korchnoi was still in the top 30 chess players worldwide at age 68. Even if he had exceptional ability, no athletes are still competitive at 68 (except in less physical sports like archery)
<quote> for example, Korchnoi was still in the top 30 chess players worldwide at age 68.</quote>
I question this is a good example, as it is comparing Korchnoi to opponents, not to his younger brain.
Additionally it may be an extreme outlier. How do most elite players ability relate to their age?
I'd challenge the idea that the rest of the body ages faster than the brain just because of the distribution of top performers in chess vs physical sports. First off, the brain isn't just a doing organ, it's a learning organ--if we were teaching everybody involved a new game the advantages of youth would be more obvious. Don't kids tend to dominate in video games? I don't think it's just because their little fingers are faster. Or the phenomenon where younger people are responsible for more groundbreaking discoveries in math and physics, cognitively demanding domains where you benefit less from experience than you do in chess, I'd think. Second, there are more organs in the body than those relevant for sports, and moreover one of the sports-relevant organs is actually the brain--one reason for decline is sports performance with age is slower reaction times, which is a brain (and rest of the nervous system) thing. Third, is either of these things even a good proxy for something like 'rate of aging'?
To me the interesting angle is more like, why don't we seem to lose cognitive skills faster as we age? Apparently you can damage a lot of neural tissue before symptoms of a neurodegenerative problem (Alzheimer's, say, I'm generalizing but we're all implicating cortical tissue, which has this property) are obvious. As @pangsofmacha said below, cognitive development requires neural pruning for optimization, so more isn't necessarily better, but brain tissue is metabolically expensive so we must be netting other benefits from neurons we don't strictly "seem to need" to get (what we perceive to be) the cognitive job done. Redundancy enabling longevity might be part of the answer.
I don’t have time to look up references right now, so I’ll just state it as I remember: muscle loss is primarily related to inactivity, not age. Ultrasonic scans of 70 y.o. active triathletes show no signs of muscle loss. There are other aspects of physical decline, such as arthritis, but one can maintain the muscle mass well into old age.
> muscle loss is primarily related to inactivity, not age.
Yeah, I second this. Hunter Gatherers are about 5x more active than Westerners.
If you study Hunter Gatherers vs Western sedentaries, older hunter gatherer women and men in their 60-70’s in general are on par with Westerners in their 40-50’s.
There’s no decline in walking speed among Hadza women as they age (whereas Western women go from 3 feet per second at under 50yo to 2fps by the time they’re over 60.)
Grip strength remains notably higher in both hunter gatherer men and women into their 70’s relative to Westerners, and more.
I think that's the case, because I've run with a lot of people over 70, and many of them are still in very good shape. They might be the lucky few, but I suspect it's more a lifetime of being active that does it.
The stats seem to show that significant decline is universal; eg. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Senior-and-Master-World-Record-Performance-100m-run-and-Long-Jump-of-male-and-female_tbl1_334901609
I suspect these 70+ year old runners started from a higher baseline or didn't realise their (decreasing with age) potential in their youth. Regarding the study mentioned above, without seeing it I'm skeptical - was the study comparing them to the average, or to their younger selves?
I think in general power decreases more significantly with age than endurance.
I'm not sure looking at world records is the best way to judge decline. I wouldn't dispute that absolute peak levels decline with age, but very few people ever reach that level at any age. It's actually quite extraordinary to me that any 70 year old can run 100m in 12.8s - which would outpace many 18 year olds.
Found it: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22030953/
Comparison to peers. Obviously couldn’t directly compare to younger selves :)
Clarification - by study mentioned above I meant the ultrasound scans mentioned by 1123581321
This is a really interesting question. Here’s a few ideas that might be relevant, all off the top of my head, so I haven’t double checked them.
- there is less cell turnover in the brain than most other organs which may affect rate of aging.
- the brain is metabolically different than most other organs, and it seems plausible that it’s metabolic demands continue to be (relatively) adequately met later in life, whereas the same may not be true for other parts of the body eg. skeletal muscle.
- “something-something brain plasticity”, it’s an easy idea to mock because it’s been hijacked by pop psychology, but the ability of the brain to compensate for injuries, adapt, and “rewire“ to some limited extent may help explain it’s robustness.
- just based on what I know about evolutionary theory and genetics I’m not a big fan of group selection and related theories, but that said, it doesn’t seem crazy to think it’s an advantage for our species to have mentally sharp grandmothers and grandfathers. I’m not exactly sure how the actual genetic/mechanistic part would work, but the concept seems reasonable.
There is some research going on about synaptic pruning that occurs at puberty and at menopause .
I’d speculate that activities showing less decline with age are those that benefit most from experience.
I don’t know that there’s a definition of tissue aging that incorporates brain and body that shows the brain generally ages more slowly than the body. I would expect a priori that different tissue material properties change at different rates in different tissues. There are evolutionary theory reasons to expect that the impact of different aging trajectories for these properties on reproductive fitness will be similar no matter which you look at. But success in sport, chess, etc. isn’t identical to reproductive fitness, of course.
This is likely because the plasticity of learning means the brain is more sensitive to homeostatic feedback. Both brain and body persist for much longer than dead organic tissue because both are open to feedback processes that resist entropic decline. However, this is (relatively) slow in the case of non-cortical tissue due to the feedback mechanisms being coarser and less sensitive. Learning, however, requires highly sensitive on-the-fly re-weighting of neural connections, so any decline in function can be detected and compensated. (When I notice that I'm getting hazy on something I know, I relearn it––and familiarity means I do so efficiently.) So while the brain likely physically declines at the same rate, the cognitive pathways can be 're-routed' before they are lost. Of course, there will eventually come a point where they can't, and this is when permanent cognitive decline sets in.
Does the ability to 're-rout' cognitive pathways not decline much with age? Or is it that it starts from a high enough baseline that the decline has little effect -i.e. that people start with more than they need
I think the answer is yes. Synaptic pruning actively removes extra cortical structure in childhood and makes cognition more effective. This obviously isn't the same as age-related cognitive decline, but it certainly shows that "more is better" doesn't hold true for cortical connectivity. That said, the ability to 're-route' probably does decline a little with age, and it may well be that the skills best preserved are those that have been reinforced by repetition. (Cue elderly stats professor who can to maximum likelihood estimation in her sleep, but does no better than age-related controls on everything else.)
To follow up on the discussion of homeless people, drug addiction, mental health, institutionalization, and "housing first", here's a video about how the current policies are playing out. I am informed that it is accurate.
https://youtu.be/yTNyQVWX5nU
"Behind Closed Doors" by V Ginny Burton
(It's 49 minutes; there's also a 30-minute version that edits out the less vital stuff. But I like context.)
Good documentary - one thing that struck me:
Around the 29:26 mark, one man she is interviewing says that housing first "sucks" because "they say they'll have this and this and this, they say they'll help you, but only they'll only help you to a certain point" and at 30:19 it's corroborated by staff that there's a period around the 25th of each month where the population has run out of money, and thus is out of drugs, and people begin to sober up and ask for help, but there are no resources to help them: "They want help. I tried, but there was no bed space, I couldn't get people any kind of treatment... I couldn't find bed space, I didn't know where to put them... If I could get them a bed somewhere... there [were] no beds... every month it was the same thing."
Then a few minutes later at 37:49, the program contrasts a housing first model for a model that begins with arrest, which seems to be presented favorably because arrest forces a state of sobriety after which people can be helped. The host interviews a police officer who describes how "it was awesome to see these women, former convicts, get up on stage and tell their story, and every single one of them attributed their success to having been arrested and then being led towards a personal accountability perspective... I would like people to think, and consider, that the most compassionate thing we could do would be to interrupt that cycle of addiction and then provide real meaningful care for those people without the opportunity to go back" and the host agrees "during incarceration, during that separated time, separation, services, and accountability."
That seems to imply that the question isn't one of housing first vs arrest first, but so much as it's one of resources and support services, and whether there is sufficient funding to make those available. Housing first is critiqued for promising but not delivering on support services, while arrest is offered as valuable because it can connect people "separation, services, and accountability." So it seems like the "services" part is the key, which would mean either approach can be effective if it can route someone to support services, and both will be ineffective insofar as there are no support services at the end of the bridge.
And I'm very skeptical that local governments would actually be willing to pay for those kinds of services, so it seems like while we may be debating whether arrest-first or housing-first creates better outcomes, practically speaking what we're choosing between is concentrating the ills of poverty into a single toxic space, or running those ills through a revolving door.
Can someone steel man the case for seed oil for an anti-scientism prospective?
Food science is one of the more publicly corrupt; my trust of experts is close to that of flat-earthers; and health outcomes are getting worse not better so unlike say physics making better computer chips, I see no evidence of food science not making everyone sicker.
Id have to look up meme but butter steps to make is 1. shake cream; while seed oils are gaint walls-o-text with many many scary chemicals.
But Im worried that picking up a butter-based diet maybe an overcorrection
"and health outcomes are getting worse not better so unlike say physics making better computer chips, I see no evidence of food science not making everyone sicker."
It is interesting to me that at a time when we have more food science than ever before, we also have a lot of obesity, and not much sign of people being healthier on the basis of what we eat. At least, I personally haven't seen much evidence of food science resulting in a healthier populace.
Perhaps this is down to people simply not following up-to-date food science? Still, if this is the case, I find it a bit weird that I haven't heard of much food education efforts by the government or health authorities, especially given increasing weight issues throughout the population.
I haven't studied food science in detail, but just from looking at the world around me, I don't get an impression that it's had much positive impact. I'd genuinely be curious to hear from strong supporters of food science on why we're not reaping as much obvious benefit from food science as we are from computer science or physics or chemistry.
>>I see no evidence of food science not making everyone sicker.
>I haven't studied food science in detail...curious
When I last looked into it its a bunch of population studies making dubious and reductionist assumptions; while your stomach is a bioreactor that evolves over your life time. I expect that your need a micro boime test, adding some strains, and only then a standard diet can exist.
Unlike skincolor its unlikely you get half your mircoboime from your father, so I dont even understand how its possible to detect diet requirements based on race
> I haven't studied food science in detail, but just from looking at the world around me, I don't get an impression that it's had much positive impact.
I've been friends with a few food scientists over the years, and food science is fully adversarial, at least in regards to general health and well being.
The things being optimized are creating superstimuli with tastiness and "morishness" where people want more, because those are the things that sells more units, and selling more units is what the companies employing food scientists want to do.
It's not that they WANT to make their customers fat and unhealthy, that's just a side effect of the tastiness and morishness right now. When we get to a point we can legitimately create truly biologically-neutral taste-conveying "food," I'm sure they'll pivot to those.
I see. Thanks a lot for the reply! It does explain a lot.
Why in particular should oils derived from squeezing seeds be bad, but oils derived from squeezing fruits (or a cow's tits) be good? Why not the other way around?
Telos. Fruits and milk want to be consumed. Seeds do not. So, a priori it makes sense that the first two would be more likely to be helpful to their consumer than the latter, due to evolution.
Milk does not want to be consumed by humans
Yeah, but it wants to be consumed by a large mammal, which is pretty close. A human is much closer to a calf than a canola seedling.
Or, maybe seeds want to be consumed by humans, so that they can be cultivated in large numbers?
Do you think meta-analyses of seed oil studies are trustworthy? Why or why not? If not, what kind of study would convince you?
> Do you think meta-analyses of seed oil studies are trustworthy?
No, probably would even assign it a negative weight with big obvious conflict of interests and the flip flopping on if a food is considered healthy each decade. The food pyramid story is public knowledge and there just is a "sugar lobby".
> If not, what kind of study would convince you?
> study
>> my trust of experts is close to that of flat-earthers
Im pretty sure nothing worth a damn exists in food science with it all being delayed, slow effects over large populations and no proper experiments
Assuming your unwilling to burn the university to the ground just yet, I suggest at least sounding like experimental history:
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/there-are-no-statistics-in-the-kingdom
> probably would even assign it a negative weight with big obvious conflict of interests
Can you tell me what these conflicts of interest are? Do you actually have evidence of them, or are you just alleging that they exist?
> study
>> my trust of experts is close to that of flat-earthers
I didn't ask you to trust experts. If you designed a study yourself and conducted it yourself, what would it look like? If it showed you that seed oils aren't bad, would you then believe that seed oils aren't bad?
> Can you tell me what these conflicts of interest are? Do you actually have evidence of them, or are you just alleging that they exist?
The americain government is onto its 5th food pyramid, Im treating it as given prior that *at least* the 1st one was corrupt.
"In April 1991, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) halted publication of its Eating Right Pyramid, due to objections raised by meat and dairy lobbying groups concerning the guide’s display of their products." -wikipedia
> If you designed a study yourself and conducted it yourself, what would it look like?
Take samples of mirco boimes of non urbanized populations with low modernization in their diet, mad science up some pills with stains of bacteria that are high in the non-modern groups that eat a specific food like 90% seal fat in the winter, give them to people with food sensitivity's; see if their digestion improves.
My strategy: Don't worry about any particular food stuff. Fall back on heuristics so old they came from our evolutionary environment - find the healthiest and most physically vital person or people you can, and eat what they eat, and avoid what they avoid.
That meme is horsefeathers, or at least severely overstated. You can make most seed oils by grinding up seeds and squeezing and filtering the oil out of the mash. Some you can just let the mash settle and pour the oil off the top, like with natural-style peanut butter. Industrially produced seed oils do get postprocessed for various reasons, but it isn't essential to seed oils.
Yes, I would add “cold-pressed” to my description above if I could edit it, although I’m not sure how important that is vs. for example buying better meat.
Aren't most seed oils extracted with hexane which is rarely fully removed?
Hexane is used as a solvent in large-scale commercial extraction of some oils, especially canola, corn, and soybean oil. It's used because you can get a lot more oil out of a given quantity of raw ingredients with a solvent than via cold-pressing.
"Rarely fully removed" is technically true, but "fully" is doing a lot of work there. One of the reasons hexane is the chosen solvent is because it has a very low boiling point (155ºF or 68ºC) so you can distill it out of the finished product efficiently. The EU's limit for hexane residue is 1 ppm. The FDA does not have a specific limit, but in practice most oil on the market seems to be much less than EU's limit. I don't have any particular insight into whether the EU's limit is appropriately set.
My original point was the issue, if there is one, is with processing rather than inherent to the source. Hexane gets used because it's more efficient, not because it's strictly necessary. They can make hexane-free seed oils, but you usually only see it in premium varieties of oil like olive or grapeseed, not stuff like canola or soybean.
Excuse me, Erica.
I've been noticing you knowing practically everything.
Are you just very good at super quickly looking things up, or what's your secret?
I am very good at super quickly looking things up. For this particular question, I did a few google searches on variations of "hexane contents of food oils", "hexane residue canola oil", and the like. I pulled most of the info on my reply from a combination of wikipedia articles (hexane, canola oil), FDA and EPA explainers about hexane in food oil, a few journal articles about hexane residue testing and alternatives to hexane, and an article on the use hexane in oil extraction from a company (Anderson International) that makes equipment for high-yield mechanical extraction of seed oils. I also poked around on some grocery shopping websites to see what I could find in terms of oils labelled "cold pressed" or otherwise indicating mechanical extraction without solvents; I already know about cold-pressed olive oil because I have some in my kitchen, and I found cold-pressed grapeseed oil, but I didn't find canola, soybean, etc in a few minutes of looking (closest I found was "organic", which is pretty close to meaningless).
It helps that I have pretty strong concept-level background knowledge of a wide range of things (product of a good memory, inconsistently-managed ADHD, and good luck in the lottery of fascinations), which helps me quickly skim for and recognize important information and fit it together into a coherent conclusion. It also makes it easier to concoct good search terms.
In this particular case, one useful area of background info is that my father is a chemical engineer/salesman by trade. Most of his career has focused on silica gel and molecular sieves, but he's also worked in industrial food processing, and I've picked up a fair amount listening to him talk about work. I didn't remember specifics until being prompted by the articles I was skimming, but once prompted I realized that I had a 3/4 forgotten framework of understanding that I was able to fit pieces of info into.
For the bit about Republican bloggers hating IRV in another thread of this post, that was about 3/4 from memory. I looked up details, like exactly how many rounds the NYC Democratic Primary went in 2021, who the candidates were running against LePage in 2010 and 2014, and the exact vote totals. But the overall sequence of events and the complaints people had about them I mostly remembered from reading various political blogs at the time. It had stuck in my mind particularly because I generally favor voting system reform and I though the complaints I was hearing were interesting but not entirely fair.
On topics where I don't know where to start looking things up productively, or don't have enough background knowledge to synthesize looked-up info constructively, I usually try to stay quiet. By picking my battles thus, I (hopefully) come off as more knowledgable than I actually am.
:-D
"Hexane is used as a solvent in large-scale commercial extraction of some oils, especially canola, corn, and soybean oil. It's used because you can get a lot more oil out of a given quantity of raw ingredients with a solvent than via cold-pressing."
I remain astounded by what the hell Americans do to food. I buy rapeseed (canola) oil from a local supermarket which is its own-brand stuff, and that manages to be cold-pressed (which I only learned now by looking it up after reading the above). It's €3.29 for 500 ml, that comes (at current exchange rates) to $3.61 in American money. I don't know if that's considered expensive or not, or what the cheapest American processed seed oils go for.
EDIT: Quick looking up online, Walmart sells Crisco canola oil for $3.28/16 fl oz, which is around 473 ml. Its own-brand "Great Value" canola oil retails at $4.33/48 fl oz, which is around 1.5 litres. So the equivalent from my grocery would be $10.83, more or less.
So yes, somewhat more expensive, but according to one online blog, Crisco do use hexane extraction (can't find out if Walmart do, but at that price I'm guessing "yes").
But yeah, any American grocery stuff which is on sale over here (some of it has crossed the Atlantic) seems - to my untutored view - to be *full* of sugar and chemicals to a degree that equivalent mass-market processed foods here aren't. Of course, some things don't have local equivalents, so that's why I'm trying American products, but goodness me. The things the great American pubic willingly consumes! 😃
I've been to England briefly and visited the "American" sections of a few grocery stores and, while I wouldn't by any means claim that our food is generally healthy, it seems like only the most sugary things make it over there. Like pop tarts.
Here's what I've noticed you can get in one place but not the other:
US
- Alfredo sauce
UK
- Marrowfat peas
- Jaffa cookies
- Digestives
Is the rancidity of raw seed oils over stated?
That's one of the reasons for postprocessing, but it varies by the type of oil and isn't a problem unique to seed oil. Butter, for instance, goes rancid quite a bit faster than raw peanut oil.
Cubed butter seems to be exactly what I expect, are these labels wrong/lying?
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Sweet-Cream-Salted-Butter-Twin-Pack-16-oz-2-Count/24269854?classType=REGULAR&athbdg=L1600&from=/search
The difference is that we accept that butter goes rancid quickly. That's why butter comes in small refrigerated packages while cooking oils are sold in larger bottles on unrefrigerated shelves, even though most households go through butter a lot faster than cooking oil.
An anti-science perspective can't be convinced by science, so one must use other methods. Maybe something like that the oils in seeds were eaten by hunter-gatherers for millions of years, and seeds are good for you because plants generate whole plants with seeds to start with, and the oil helps with that. The oil is the concentrated good part of the seed, packed full of nutrients.
Note no citations supporting any of this, as I'm making it up as I go along. Best not to use this paragraph in your argument!
> Best not to use this paragraph in your argument!
Its me, Im antiscience
> An anti-science perspective can't be convinced by science, so one must use other methods.
Thats pretty reductionist.
> The oil is the concentrated good part of the seed
This is the weakest link in your argument, fiber is in theory important and im pretty sure you cant grow plants in seed oils.
I don't understand why you would ask for a steel-manned anti-science argument from rationalists, who are supposed to do rational things, like use science-based evidence.
This is the "post-rationalist" threads, and theres a shortage of intelligent *and* open conversation on the current internet
Dynomight's written about it arguing the case against is fairly weak and I found his takes reasonable at the time, though I haven't looked into the matter myself. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DHkkL2GxhxoceLzua/thoughts-on-seed-oil
Sadly while theres some distrust of experts, he doesn't actually come to a strong conclusion; its all just a big mess of reasons to be confused and he seems to trust science much more then me.
Outcomes have stopped getting worse due to semaglutides.
I think you may lack even a basic understanding of anyone anti-science
The data isnt even in yet, but I predict that the long term health of the bone-lost drugs will not be great; and would attempt to lose weight with nicotine and high doses of caffeine before this decades pill.
They are highly correlated with ultraprocessed foods, which is by itself a reason to avoid them. Beyond that, there is no need to get high levels of omega-6 PUFAs in the diet; the 0.5-1.5%% of calories that were obtained in more primitive societies is adequate (compare to 8-10% in the SAD diet currently).
My assumption for a long time has been they are, on net, neutral or slightly harmful (60% chance), or at least moderately harmful (20% chance). However, some of the mechanisms by which they are harmful requires chronic exposure, while the literature exonnerating them relies on either low-duration RCTs or on longer term observational studies where I'm not convinced confounding effects are suitably accounted for.
In terms of mechanisms, the fear is they oxidized easily and can cause inflammation if you don't offset with enough omega-3. OTOH l, there are indications omega-6 PUFAs may lower inflammation by other mechanisms.
So I'm very skeptical about them but I very much agree based on my limited reading that there isn't any smoking gun proving they are harmful.
Is there a simple causal mechanism for how it interacts with inflammation your aware of?
It seems nothing is too simple about this, but when I was looking into it, vaguely recall that a metabolic product of omega-6 PUFAs are lipoxins that can modulate the immune system away from inflammatory pathways.
It's not exactly anti-scientism, but I wrote a bit about this before at https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/10/for-then-against-high-saturated-fat-diets/ . I don't think you can really do this in an anti-scientism way - your prior on any given nutrient being bad is low, you have to introduce some science and evidence in order to even start worrying, and I think this leaves you open to accusations of selective credulity.
> you have to introduce some science and evidence in order to even start worrying,
Didnt the ancient greeks care about which foods caused increased ratios of black/yellow bile? Or the bible describe the cleanliness of food?
I think every culture has comments on food. Its hard to process what they say and apply it outside their narrow focus, but Id expect an opinion from everyone.
I didn't mean you literally couldn't worry, I meant that without any science you should assume your worries are groundless (as were the Greeks' worries about bile and so on)
If an ancient greek asserts that you should apply virtue ethics to food, you should eat enough to feel full but not eat too much and your a gluten, is that a "groundless" assertion with zero predictive power?
I think you're using modern scientific foresight to pick out one specific ancient Greek belief that makes sense to you, whereas at the time that would look no better or worse than other ones like "don't eat black bile" or whatever.
I also think things like "don't eat more than your body wants" are very different from "this one specific nutrient which tastes as good as any other nutrient is evil".
>Or the bible describe the cleanliness of food?
Yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unclean_animal
You can just get seed oils by themselves, and I highly recommend doing that. I do think there are better options out there (olive, and avocado for high heat) but I am dubious that seed oils are particularly toxic.
> You can just get seed oils by themselves, and I highly recommend doing that.
What do you suppose this does?
> olive
Olive oil from a "oh my god what the hell chemical fake food nonsense is this" would get a pass as its in old diets and has some short step processes.
You said seed oils have “many scary chemicals in them” and I was responding to that. My understanding is that seed oils are often associated with ultra processed foods, and that’s why they get a bad rap.
Seed oils by themselves are ultraprocessed, if McDonalds is ultra processed, they probably add some ~~sawdust~~ soy flour to the meat sure; and theres some emulsifying salt in the cheese, but the real consern is the 10 step process of the rape seeds.
I'm not especially a fan of the UPF thing but my understanding is that seed oils count as Nova level 2, where 1 is unprocessed and 4 is ultra processed
I have no idea what a nova level is, but I instantly distrust it with that single suggestion.
a quick google sreach says rapeseed processing includes "Solvent extraction using hexane", wikipedia say "In industry, hexanes are used in the formulation of glues for shoes, leather products, and roofing."
I feel whoever they are are lying using the same old tricks
Until very recently life expectancies were going up.
Mostly on the child death side, not the not being fat side
Life expectancies in the western world increased significantly from adult as well as childhood starting ages. For example in England+Wales from 1850 to 2000, life expectancy for a 20-year-old increased from 60 to 82. For a 40-year-old the increase was from 67 to 84.
The reduction in childhood death during that period has of course been even greater, making it the largest single factor in the overall increase in life expectancy at birth. That change is among humanity's greatest achievements, and improvement in childhood nutrition is very much one of the elements of it. It is far from being the only such improvement though.
Starting from earlier than 1850 the changes in rates of young-adult death are even more startling, something that everyone who's done serious family-tree research for any length of time learns from the data that we assemble from records. My 17th/18th century ancestral households had _far_ higher rates of young-adult death than my 20th century ones. The causes when noted in the records are largely infectious diseases, accidents, childbirth for women and war for men, with the order of those varying a bit across specific locales/time periods. (For women childbirth is a strong #1 throughout the 17th-19th centuries everywhere that I have ancestors.)
It would take extreme evidence to convince me that general health isnt in decline; "kinetic" deaths(keep blood on the inside and cleanish) are declining with clean running water and wealth, this is related to war, childbrith and being born; and I view this a low hanging fruit; slower causes of death seem mixed and confusing and its not even a "conspiracy theory" to talk about the theory of conspiracy of corruption around the food pyramids .
Thought I'd ask one more time:
I'm a mid thirties secular jew moving from Canada to NYC next week. If anyone can host me for post yom Kippur - breaking of the fast meal (or knows of a secular group event to attend), id love to be included. You can learn more about me at danfrank.ca.
Daniel 🤘mm🤘 frank at Gmail (but with no emojis)
Robi runs the NYC ACX meetups. Try emailing him: robirahman94[at]gmail[dot]com
I'm involved with the Philly group, so I personally can't help you. But the NYC group is pretty great. Someone should be able to host you.
What is the open thread thumbnail?
The camera is supposed to be looking through the opening in a spool of thread, such that you can see the background behind it.
And here I was seeing a keyhole!
Is the background supposed to be a chess piece? That's what I always thought.
I see a lake with mountains reflected in it.
OH lol I can see that now. To be honest, the thread looks more like colored spackle or toothpaste or something. Not that it's that important. I've always wondered what it was supposed to be, though. Mystery solved :D
Huh. Is this a stock image?
EDIT: I tried using Google Lens. Most of the search results are either for this very blog, for r/slatestarcodex, or for vaguely similar-shaped blue things with holes, which is unsurprising.
AI art.
It is my impression that the public attitude to improving voting methods over FPTP ranges from complete disinterest to something like "Huh, neat." But has anyone considered advocating for better voting systems as a potential way to mitigate existential risk?
Government bodies have access to the most powerful tools available to mankind and their policies dictate how we deal with existential threats like AI regulation, climate change, use of nuclear weapons etc. Systems like FPTP seem to promote governments that represent the more extreme views of a population who are more likely to enact extreme and catastrophic policies.
If voting systems that benefitted more centrist politicians (approval, etc.) were commonplace globally, would this not reduce the risk of extreme policies?
FPTP is already uncommon globally, at least in developed countries.
Hi, I'm a voting nerd that is actively opposed to moving away from FPTP. People underestimate the importance of simplicity and legibility.
Yeah, I make this point often, and people just don't seem to want to nerd hard enough to discuss it
Star voting is my choice, mostly for simplicity and understandability, and second for their evidence that it performs well under tactical voting: https://www.starvoting.org/
One (weak) anecdote against it is that platforms like YouTube and Netflix switched from star voting to approval voting, presumably because it works better in practice.
YouTube and Netflix don’t have the task of coming up with a single winner.
A major advantage of score voting is that in a polarized election it still allows a 3rd candidate to meaningfully participate.
For example, imagine that 51% of the people vote:
Triden 5/5, Bump 0/5, Shaked Koplewitz 3/5
And 49% vote:
Triden 0/5, Bump 5/5, Shaked Koplewitz 3/5
Then the vote reveals that this Shaked Koplewitz guy is not that bad in the mind of the average voter. Pure score voting would let him win, STAR would still give the win to Triden which I don’t think is right.
In that very artificial situation I think you're right.
But then all the Triden voters are going to look at that result and say "Silly me! If only a few percent of us had given Koplewitz a 0/5 instead of a 3/5 then Triden would have won, I'm not going to make that mistake again". And pretty soon everyone is either voting 0/5 or 5/5 on all candidates... just like they used to on youtube videos.
But why would Triden voters be that unhappy with Koplewitz, who’s presumably some kind of centrist candidate that’s acceptable to both sides?
I think you missed “STAR would still give the win to Triden”.
STAR does not have that weakness you are describing.
It might not have the problem Melvin describes, but I don’t think it’s a problem at all. In my example, who do you think should win?
Sadly, improved voting systems seem to be well on their way to becoming a partisan issue, with Republicans aligning firmly against them.
As far as I know, this starts with Maine adopting IRV by ballot measure in 2016. The incumbent governor at the time, Paul LePage, was a Tea Party Republican who had won in 2010 and 2014 with pluralities (37% and 48% respectively) and had less than 40% approval rating at the time. In both elections, there had been a strong third-party showing by Eliot Cutler (36% in 2010 and 8.5% in 2014), a Democrat running as an Independent, and Democrats blamed LePage's victories on the Democratic vote being split between Cutler and the respective Democratic nominees in both elections. Partisans of both sides saw the measure as a way of changing the rules to keep someone like LePage from winning future elections.
Then there was the 2021 NYC Democratic Primary for mayor. The voting took over a month to process, since it took eight rounds to get to a result and there wasn't a suitably streamlined process in place for counting IRV ballots. The eventual winner, Eric Adams, had plurality support in every round's results, often by substantial margins, but he only won the final round by less than 1%. I remember Republican bloggers at the time (many of whom at least partially bought into Trump's claims about the 2020 election being stolen) complaining that the counting process was opaque and could hide fraud. They also picked up and echoed some complaints by supporters of Adams's opponents about the very narrow margin in the final round.
Then there was the 2022 Alaska special election, where there was an IRV final round between one Democrat (Mary Peltola) and two Republicans (Nick Begich and Sarah Palin). Peltola has a plurality (39.7%) in the first round and won the second round count by about 3%, but Republicans objected that 60% of voters had voted for a Republican candidate and Peltola's margin of victory (about 5k votes) was more than covered by the 15k voters who voted only for Begich and left their second choice blank, and thus abstained from the second round between Peltola and Palin. I've heard two theories underlying these complaints: that some Begich supporters failed to cast a second-choice vote by mistake and in a traditional non-instant runoff election would have voted for Palin, and that the sequence of elimination in IRV is not robust, and Begich (who finished behind Palin by a relatively narrow but nontrivial margin) would very likely have won the second round had Palin been eliminated instead.
Observing this has made me update a bit against IRV (which still think is an improvement over single-round plurality voting (*)) and Condorcet (my traditional first-choice preference) in favor of a system where the counting process is more legible, such as approval voting or Borda count, despite their known flaws.
Tangentially, MAGA Republicans (and Tea Party Republicans before them) opposing IRV seems to weigh towards your main thesis, that improved voting systems incline results away from extremism relative to the current system of two-round plurality elections where the first round is either separate partisan primaries or a top-two "jungle" primary. I.e. that the reform is being most intensely opposed by supporters of extreme candidates who have been winning some elections under the old system.
(*) I strongly object to referring to the current US system as "First Past the Post" because it does a terrible job of describing the system. The key defining feature is that there's no "post" of a specific level of support that a candidate needs to reach to win, by contrast to something like IRV where the first candidate to reach 50% support during the elimination process wins.
In a two-party system, any change to the election procedure will benefit one party more than the other, so there’s going to be a lot of friction to make any kind of change.
Yes, and Institute for Election Science occasionally gets some EA money. I think less than it used to, because many people's timelines have gotten too short for things that only pay off after long political campaigns.
That argument is made all the time, among those who are interested, at places like ACX.
However,
-- many citizens of OECD nations nowadays have a lot of accumulated threat fatigue. For decades now voters have been hearing and reading about X and Y and Z and ten more things that are each an existential threat etc etc. It all runs together for a lot of people now and they mostly tune it out. Many of them don't even vote and this is one key reason they don't. So appeals based on existential threats, particularly regarding relatively arcane things like voting systems, aren't going to ring those folks' bells anymore.
-- meanwhile citizens who have become fully animated by a particular existential threat don't want voting systems that would benefit more centrist politicians. Those convinced that immigration is now the existential threat to their nation/society/culture/racial group _want_ to elect people who will enact extreme responses to it. Ditto those who are obsessed with climate, or who've drunk the woke Koolaid, or who are card-carrying Libertarians, etc etc. For them the urgent objective is to get their own specific fellow obsessives into political power. "Benefitting more centrist politicians" sounds to them like "watering everything down and never dealing with the REAL PROBLEM!!"
The first group outnumbers the second, but the second group is more likely to show up and vote. They don't want fewer extreme views winning elections unless of course it is others' extreme views. Rather they focus on winning the battle, getting their extreme views into office and others' out.
> meanwhile citizens who have become fully animated by a particular existential threat don't want voting systems that would benefit more centrist politicians.
Oh, I like this theory. :-)
Most people have *zero* knowledge of a single way the structure of a system effects its outcomes, gerry-manning is a mere tip of the iceberg yet people treat it as if its wildly complicated math.
Go beyond mere advocacy of a single position, look for it everywhere; consider it always.
How big of a change was jury selection to american justice?
How much did the halving rate of bitcoin effect its price? With hindight what would you have picked, for what goals?
In ancient china mentioning someones name in a suicide note caused the state to investigate your treatment of them, how would this effect every socail interaction?
If I understand correctly, your implication is that government systems are too complex to reliable predict what effect a better voting system would have on their policy.
I agree, charting out all downstream effects is likely impossible. But is the chain of *better voting system -> more centrist politicians -> more centrists policies -> lower p(doom)* perhaps likely, or at least plausible? Could you come up with a hypothetical counterfactual outcome?
Why do you assume that 'centrist' = better?
> If I understand correctly, your implication is that government systems are too complex to reliable predict what effect a better voting system would have on their policy.
No, nor should you give up on impossible (knowledge) tasks
> *better voting system -> more centrist politicians -> more centrists policies -> lower p(doom)*
> Could you come up with a hypothetical counterfactual outcome?
Well, yes; Im anti-centerist.
A boring, polite politics, makes for boring polite people in power, ai doom increases as we sleep walk into many problems.
In case anyone missed the news, the prediction market site Kalshi now has election markets that Americans are legally allowed to trade on:
https://kalshi.com/markets/pres/presidential-elections
Here's an article on the court case:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-federal-court-upholds-ruling-letting-kalshiex-list-election-betting-contracts-2024-10-02/
Interactive Brokers has election markets now as well: https://forecasttrader.interactivebrokers.com/eventtrader/#/markets
Saw an ad that made me laugh this morning, and it has the advantage of being for FIRE, which is a great organization, so I'm sharing it here since it doubles as entertaining and getting their name out there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O67dGv5kIOU&t=115s
Perfect.
That was a breath of fresh air, thanks.
At first I thought you meant an ad for Financial Independence/Retire Early.
Anyway, the ad did make me laugh too. This is what "free speech" actually means in politics - "I get to say whatever I want, and the other side is forced to shut up".
When this commercial first dropped, I saw numerous non-partisan political science-y types noting this is a much better model of the average voter's political beliefs than a "centrist" voter model (who picks the median position between the two sides).
Great
Nothing threatens our flat earth like... climate change!
I'm not sure the Carateca ban was warranted. The one linked comment seems to follow this pattern:
Person A: Kill all the Blacks!
Person B: You're evil for saying that. Your sick attitude has led to so much suffering, and the world would be better without you and your ilk.
Person C: "Sick" is ableist. And your whole comment is ad hominem.
Moderator D: C has a good point. B deserves a ban. Maybe we'll ban A too, for unrelated reasons.
User Carateca said that the user he was talking to (LearnsHebrewHatesIsrael/IP) didn't care about pogroms of Jews by Muslims. That's "ad hominem," but a fair comment about a user who spent a year denying or apologizing for pogroms of Jews by Muslims, denying elements of them, while regularly both-sidesing them and justifying them, often based on complete fabrications.
E.g. a week after the October 7 massacre, said user was still insisting (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-297/comment/41837470) there was no evidence Hamas killed children, after the identities of various children they killed (and kidnapped) had already been published, while also insisting that if Israel is justified in airstrikes that have civilian casualties, then Hamas is also justified in killing children.
While also casually referencing the fact the Israel wants to genocide all Arabs (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-299/comment/42483520).
Insisting he doesn't support Hamas, but pushing back on calling them terrorists, and insisting that they're no different from "West Bank settlers" (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-301/comment/43412429).
And then continuing for a year in that pattern.
Agree, I really like Carateca, and banning him is like banning Carl Pham, a mistake. His specific comment wasn't worth banning, and if you look at his posting history overall, his signal-to-noise is better than many, and his civility is fine.
Personally, Carateca was my least favorite of all the regular commenters here.
I was intending to stay out of this, but seeing so many defenses of Carateca makes me want to publicly take Scott's side and thank him for the ban. For quite awhile now, when I saw a comment from Carateca I immediately clicked on that thin vertical line (I read ACX in my browser) to hide the rest of that discussion. I also used to do this a long time ago with a certain irritating marxist, who also eventually got banned.
I still miss Carl Pham.
> The one linked comment seems to follow this pattern
Actually, that pattern seems like a much closer match to the linked comments of Henry Rodger Beck. Bring back Henry Rodger Beck.
The pattern for Joe Potts is that he politely stated a (factual) opinion and linked a source that was presumably his basis.
LHHI's views had evolved over the last year, so I don't think going back that far in time gives an accurate picture of him today. Still, the Trump comment was bad, and not what I would have expected from him on that subject. I worry that he's got a free-floating ball of anger that latches onto different subjects, and when that happens, there's no filter between anger and keyboard. As someone who's closer to that than I'd like, I appreciated seeing how he cools off after lengthy engagement. It gives me hope for myself. And when he's not angry, he's great.
I also would like carateca back. He mellowed it a bit in the 4.5 months, since the comment, and I appreciate his perspective.
Am I the only one who wants them both back?
The Trump comment seems like a rant to me, not a substantive post where he's giving his views on how to handle the problem of Trump. I mean, he's writing things like "I can't stand the orange guy, the fucking Cheeto, one more second." It's as though someone had written that if they hear one more nutso story about Vance they're gonna fucking kill themselves, but not before making sure Vance gets shut up in the loony bin.
I think LHHI had sometimes been using this space to rant and vent, and that sometimes involved personal attacks, and I can see why Scott doesn't want that in his virtual living room. It's not the sort of thing that will inspire good discussion afterward. :-/
I'd like to see both of them back. Of all the names on the list of bans, they were the two that stood out to me as the most regrettable.
I agree
Neither Carateca or LHHIP said things that seem to me like as nearly as clear an example of pointless, empty-headed savage attacks as a couple tings I reported. Worst one was a comment to a trans woman who was friendly and articulate: "Surgery didn't make you a woman, any more than bending over and putting feathers up your ass would make you a chicken." (This commentator was not banned.) I thought LHHIP was a wonderful commentator, and a want him back. Carateca always struck me as an unpleasant person -- every comment seemed full of angry, contemptuous vibes -- but they made good, substantive comments, and are welcome back as far as I'm concerned.
Carl Pham was banned and never came back. He was a smart, consistently kind and civil commentator who lost his temper at a rando: He disagreed with rando's point, rando told Carl he had terrible reading comprehension, Carl responded that rando was an excellent example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Overall, I get the feeling that Scott doesn't read enough of the comments to see the big picture about a lot of people -- what kind of commentator they are overall.
> Overall, I get the feeling that Scott doesn't read enough of the comments to see the big picture about a lot of people -- what kind of commentator they are overall.
This seems like something that could be fixed by making a program that extracts e.g. user's 50 most recent comments.
Yes, maybe if Scott used it just for cases where there was a report. If someone is seriously arguing that we should shoot Trump, the other 49 posts don’t matter, but in a lot of cases the context matters. There was a guy posting a bunch of egregiously racist stuff about blacks, generally backed up by links that did not show what he claimed they did. I pointed that out a few times in posts, but in one post I just lost my temper and called him a racist jackass. I don’t think that particular post made any attempt to justify my judgment - but earlier posts about his bogus scientific “proofs” did. Technically the jackass post should get me banned, but in
context that’s not reasonable.
Seems to me the same with the bannings of beowulf888, CarlPham and Gunflint, all
of whom had long histories of really good posts, then lost their temper and snapped at somebody on one occasion
I'm still unclear about what can earn a ban. I like clearly stated rules, and I find myself overthinking my behavior in loosey-goosey social environments.
I confess that I used vicious sarcasm in the post that got me banned — IIRC I mentioned something about immigrants secretly sapping the vital fluids of an overtly racist Trump supporter. I guess Scott wants us to play nice, and I was punching down, but I had been viciously sarcastic to these types in the past, so I was a bit surprised that I received my ban. I make a point of not lobbing ad hominem attacks at people, but I guess someone must have flagged my post as being offensive or nasty, and Scott agreed. Oh well.
I canceled my subscription to AC10, though. Although the subscription doesn't cost much, I'm now retired and on a fixed income —and it would irk me to get permanently banned and not be able to recoup even a pro-rated subscription fee.
https://youtu.be/evj24bXakqg?t=231
I’m going to bring this issue up on the next hidden thread, which I guess as a non-subscriber you won’t see, but I will pass on your thoughts. If there’s anything else you’d like me to mention on the subject, let me know.
A related matter is the handling of review ratings. Scott mentioned that he keeps the scoring going until the least-read reviews have 5 ratings. Then he tops up their ratings to give them at total of at 9 or 10, and the way he does is to put in 4 or 5 scores that are the average of all scores given to all reviews, which he sees as a fair way to handle the absence of enough info about people’s judgments of the review. I am positive it is not, and wrote him a post explaining why. I did it in conceptual terms, not mathematical ones, because he’s not mathy and my memory of the details of stats isn’t good enough to give a simple proof. What I said was that if you don’t have the real info about real ratings, you don’t have it,, and there is no way to fill in the blanks that gives a result equivalent to real info. And that if you are going to fill in the blanks yourself, the best thing to do is to give the person a bunch of scores that are midway between the average of their real scores and the mean, since the likeliest trend is that later scores will have the effect of moving the person’s average score closer to the mean . Can you add anything to this? I’m pretty sure I’m right, drawing on a good instinctive grasp of math and some half-remembered formulas but would like to strengthen the argument.
Overall, seems to me that about 2 important matters, bannings and review ratings, the systems in place are terrible, extremely weak-handed attempts to grasp the phenom in question.
> There was a guy posting a bunch of egregiously racist stuff about blacks, generally backed up by links that did not show what he claimed they did.
Yeah, I remember. That's the type of situation where each individual infraction seems relatively innocent (perhaps he misunderstood something in the article?), but when you see the same "mistake" made three times, it's an obvious pattern.
I guess different feedback systems have different effects. Karma system like the one on Less Wrong hides individual comments, but rewards or punishes the user based on their *average* contribution. Comment-reporting system punishes the *worst* contribution. If each of us had the same "standard deviation", the effect would be the same; but the systems treat very differently the people who are "mostly good, but sometimes very bad" or the people who are "mostly bad, but never too much".
Agreed on all of the above.
I agree too
4th'd
A year of ranting, raving, lying, and abusing more than justifies a ban. But even the user's later posts were hardly models of polite discourse.
E.g. from this week (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-349/comment/71285846), in reference to another user:
>But it's of no use, the Parasitic Meme has already taken hold of the Internet Commenter, now the only thing that gives him erections and wet dreams are the sight of armed drones whizzing by in a foreign sun-burnt sky, and casualty numbers on the screens. That's the high, and it must be chased at all costs, even at the cost of the lives of their neighbors, siblings, and - indeed - children, children of children, children of children of children.
That comment started out OK, but turned into a rant making a personal attack. :-(
Yeah, that's pretty rude, but it is at least embedded in a post where LHHIP states his views and his reasons for seeing the "parasitic meme" view as absurd and destructive of fair-minded thinking. During the last couple month I reported something I think was a far worse instance of abuse of another poster: A trans woman, who was amiable, polite and articulate throughout, was describing her experience as a woman, and a commenter said that surgery had not made OP a woman any more than bending forward and sticking feathers up her ass would make her a chicken. I think there was another angry sentence or two along with the chicken feather sentence, but none of it was substantive, just diffuse anger. Chicken-feather-up-the-ass commenter was not banned. That comment seems to me like a far clearer example of flunking kind, true and necessary than LHHIP's, which is part of a long train of thought about how others end up seeing things in ways the LHHIP does not.
That chicken and feather stuff sounds terrible, as well. I think we need more active moderation, including faster response times, and more bans (that is, I think there are more users who aren't banned, who should be, than vice versa). As other commenters have suggested, it would seem to make sense for Scott to find someone else to assist with moderation, as he's already doing so much.
On the other hand, if someone said "if some random person left this comment I'd report it, but I like having you around, so please ease off because I don't want you to get banned", that might work. I think I might even have said that to someone in the past.
I wonder if there are things ordinary commenters like us could do. I worry that anything in the neighborhood of "chill out" would just have the opposite effect.
I personally find Carateca irritating -- regularly and severely. May actually have muted them TBH, and also I reeeally dislike ad hominem crap in particular.
All that said -- have to agree with this critique of the ban if it is based on the specific example that was linked. Carateca's comment about that other user was unpleasant. But it can't be the case that an extreme blanket description of a person who has regularly and consistently justified that specific description, is a disqualifying ad hominem attack. E.g. the fact that "fascist" is wildly overused can't end up meaning that there is _never_ an instance in which the word is in fact a reasonable individual descriptor.
I didn't know that it was possible to mute people, or I might have muted Carateca as well.
In my experience the muting of users does not work anyway :/
It does now, yea. Both in Substack-hosted comment sections like this, and in Notes which is Substack's social-media app.
How do you mute someone? Is this something that only applies to e-mails? I read ACX in my browser.
I concur with all parts of this comment.
Do any (US) substackers who have turned on paid subscriptions know: Is there some kind of sales tax involved? My assumption is no (since I was never charged tax for any of my subscriptions), but that seems counterintuitive.
I intend to keep giving away all the content for free, and only enable payments so that strangers who take pity on me can inexplicably give me money; so if this involves a lot of financial calculation or bookkeeping headaches I am perfectly willing to bag the idea. But if the answer others give is "I have never charged sales tax and not been arrested" then I am all for it!
If this helps in the answer, I live in Connecticut.
Sales tax (as well as use tax) is imposed at the state, not federal/US, level. Sales and use taxes typically apply only to transactions involving tangible personal property and not to services. But "typical" is doing lots of work -- services are sometimes taxed. In any event, you need to refer to state statutes to know for sure. (And lots of potential wrinkles here, like sourcing (which jurisdiction can tax the transaction) and incidence (who, seller or purchaser, owes the tax).)
It sounds like the transaction you describe is more like a gift. That might be subject to a gift tax, another creature of state law. My work deals in sales and use taxes; I don't know as much about gift taxes, but I think they generally apply only to relatively large gifts.
Also, nonpayment of sales tax leads to an assessment and then, if unpaid, to collection efforts (e.g., garnishment). You're unlikely to be arrested for nonpayment of sales tax. (At least in my jurisdiction...)
Yes! I think you have it! Im giving them nothing for their money, so how could anyone want me to tax it?
Like a character from a Taoist fable, I have once again escaped from my difficulty by being so useless that the rules I feared do not apply to me! Thank you!
My understanding is that in the US, sales tax is generally not levied on services. Goods only. I'm not sure why that would be the case.
I believe sell tax laws are now enforced by state on the user side; I dont understand how subscriptions would be treated differently then any other sell.
Yeah, that makes sense and is exactly what I'm afraid of!
But if Scott charged me sales tax for my ACX subscription, it's invisibly built in, VAT-style?
I doubt whatever substack does automatically is wrong; if taxes were actually hard to comply with no one would. The only reason I have ever paid taxes is that employers snitch, and they mostly snitch because the theres software to do it for them.
Alternative history question- how would the world be a different place if the US had not granted China MFN status in 2000, followed by China joining the WTO soon after? Interpret the question however you want, imagine an alternate universe where hawkish elements of the Republican party distrusted China and blocked MFN normalization in the early 2000s. (Pretend for the sake of the exercise that this wasn't reversed by Obama in 2008- that China staying out of the WTO was permanent).
Much higher manufacturing employment in the US, at least for a time? Presumably higher prices throughout the developed world as we'd have lacked a lower-cost manufacturing center? Maybe much higher growth in Mexico as factories moved there instead? A weaker recovery post-GFC as a smaller Chinese economy couldn't help power the world out of it? Presumably a weaker China, but a more hostile one too? Would be interested to discuss 2nd & 3rd order effects
Presumably a lot more poverty in China.
Manufacturing would be spread out.
I remember when Nike used to make sneakers in Indonesia and the likes of Michael Moore used to complain about the working conditions. Then all the sneaker manufacturing moved into China, and the working conditions remained the same, and people like Michael Moore shut up about it.
I thought manufacturing was currently moving out of China and into e.g. Vietnam because wages in China have gotten so high.
I see no reason why India wouldn't have been self-genosidal urbanization and communistic in the same way china was, maybe there's important details I miss in asain politics but my understanding is that theres several highly collectivist cultures that had zero immunity to western cultural illnesses and there's several ways to draw sea trade lines that make sense in that part of the world; when American world police says to make tech.
> The one-child policy (which I assume is what you mean by self-genocidal)
India did mass sterilization as well; you can debate the details about the details, but both highly populated, highly collectivist states; practiced eugenics within decades of each other. Both very very far away from Malthus.
> was enacted to stop starvation, not because of “western cultural illnesses”
Marx comes from germany, not china. So maoist china...
https://www.facebook.com/groups/FantasyFaction/posts/3428663157442854/
This links to a discussion of whether people need to have read the King James Version to get the references in SFF.
A discussion of *how much* of the KJV people might need to read is missing, and probably needed.
While there's a lot of discussion of the actual topic. it also turned up a number of people who hated the bible and/or hated religion in general. I didn't do a strict count, but it may have been as much as 10% of the people in the discussion. (I did make a list to see whether it was a bunch of different names rather than a few persistent posters. It was probably 20 or 30 people.)
I realized I've seen surveys that track the number of non-religious people, but never a survey that distinguishes between atheists and angry atheists. Has anybody seen one?
My assumption is that anti-religion people have mostly had abusive religious upbringings. A friend said, no, it's mostly people who are foolishly hanging on to radical views they adopted when they were young.
I have no idea how to find out, aside from whether the radical views are wrong. I told her I'd post about it here-- it's a place with a good mix of religious and non-religious people, and also people who are interested in statistics.
Anecdotally, the most firmly antireligious people I've encountered are people who come from nonreligious families but who have lived in an area with a strong, controlling presence of some particular religious grouping (ie. strong enough that the group exerts an influence on politics, schools etc.) Atheists who come from a religious background like that often hate the *particular* religious group so much that they don't have enough energy to hate other religious groups, atheists who come from a secularized area (a major city etc.) just tend towards apatheism.
Extremely religious upbringing, now atheist (solid atheist, not agnostic) sympathetic to Christianity. I feel that my time as a Christian helped strengthen some good habits for me such as honesty and forgiveness, and my time as an atheist may have contributed to losing my wonder at the beauty of nature.
And no, the NIV version or many others will do fine for getting most if not all of the references.
Mildly religious non-abusive upbringing, currently a non-angry atheist.
And I read the whole KJV years ago, on my own initiative, purely for the language and references.
Also: English literature teachers (e.g. in High School) have the problem that the nineteenth century classics they might want to teach assume a familiarity with the Bible that today’s students no longer have.
Of course, if you’re teaching Shakespeare plays, they assume the reader gets a whole lot of in jokes that no-one has got since the Elizabethan era.
Define "abusive religious upbringing".
Consider this a first whack at the question. The usual sorts of abuse-- arbitrary rules strictly enforced, physical assault, constant insults, all with a religious claim that the parents are correct because they're obeying God. In addition, there can be fear of hell and/or apocalypse from the religion.
That’s what I suspected. You’ve defined abuse in a way that parents who literally believe in Christianity, are devout adherents and want to pass it down to their children cannot do so without being “abusive”. For example, the existence of hell, and the obvious implication of avoiding it, is an essential doctrine for almost every single Christian denomination. If you don’t want your children in hell, as any decent parent should, then you would tell them about it.
No, I am a counterexample. In fact, constant insults are an indication that the parents are not such devout adherents as to actually follow the rules themselves.
Arbitrary rules strictly enforced - Vague
Physical assault - Again vague
Constant insults - A failure of the parents to follow Christ's teachings
Claim of obeying God - Anyone who calls themselves a Christian is claiming they at least attempt to obey God. Some with more humility than others.
Fear of Hell/Apocalypse - While belief in Hell is a standard doctrine of Christianity, fear of it is not a requirement. My pastor's position was that as soon as you accept Jesus, you can be absolutely certain you are saved. Motivation to do good should come from a desire to please God and help others, not from a fear of what will happen to you otherwise.
My dad got smacked by the nuns for being left-handed. Would you say this is mandatory to a Christian upbringing?
Some of the news stories about [charming little darlings and how they turned out now they're adults] that I read make me think a bit more smacking with rulers wouldn't have gone astray.
Not for just being left-handed, though. Things like this, where I think a good smacking all round before they did anything stupid would have benefited the parties involved:
https://www.sundayworld.com/crime/courts/23-year-old-man-accused-of-choking-partner-who-used-to-be-his-stepmum/a374592796.html
We were talking in another post about Cultural Christianity, yes? Well now we have the happy secular world where you can shack up with your stepmother, and if the woman is stupid enough to think she's somehow got a bargain there, how did she ignore the history of him being a violent little thug all along? "Oh yes I know he's not supposed to have contact with me while he's out on bail, but I let him stay in my house and now I'm surprised, totally surprised, he was violent again yet another time".
Don't tell me nuns with rulers would be a bad thing there.
My first reaction, before digging slightly further into that story, was to ask how you know that he wasn't the recipient of corporal punishment. But then *after* digging slightly further, it's clear (at a minimum) that a parental authority did in fact punish him with violence; yet, still, he turned out to be dysregulated and vaguely incestuous. I don't trust most people to decide when it's appropriate to hit kids, especially if that's the best example a semi-literate person can cite.
Deputizing untrained civilians with the authority to use force is already a recipe for abuse, doubly so when the victims are going to be children. In practice, children will (and did) get beaten for offenses that are comparably minor or shouldn't be offenses at all. The choice to use violence in most situations selects for people who are too boorish and unimaginative to think of anything else, meaning that it will often be applied when it's unnecessary. I hope we share the assumption that this is worse than other punishments being applied unnecessarily: e.g., if a parent capriciously withholds a toy from a child, it doesn't have the same effect as a parent capriciously using violence.
Of course parents (and those acting in loco parentis) have to be given broad latitude to select appropriate punishments for misbehaving children. But we've evolved to have strong norms against certain punishments because they're cruel and probably ineffective. It's never okay to molest a child as a last resort form of punishment, yet it's unclear how your post would be different if you were endorsing molestation instead.
That's half true. I think rather that Nancy's category is a mix of the basically Christian and the genuinely abusive.
For example, "arbitrary rules strictly enforced": some parents hold their children to biblical standards in love, and others are harshly legalist; by my reading, Nancy would view these both as arbitrary. (I welcome correction if I'm mistaken.) And there are families where constant insults are a thing, and some of them are religious; I have never seen one where parental atheism would have solved the problem, though.
Most rules feel arbitrary to a kid and if you think they are arbitrary, it’s probably because you are not a conservative Christian. What you call “legalism”, they would call “living a life in accordance with Christ”. It’s always the non Christians who think they know what that means, and it’s always “do the stuff that I, an atheist, think is good”.
There is also this weird development over the last couple decades where many of the things parents did that was considered normal is now “abusive”. Devout Christians are generally more traditional in parenting so that separates them from other parents.
>What you call “legalism”, they would call “living a life in accordance with Christ”. It’s always the non Christians who think they know what that means, and it’s always “do the stuff that I, an atheist, think is good”.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding, but I’m sure you already see how non-Christians would make the obvious counterargument that Christians are just as guilty of dictating to them “do the stuff that I, a Christian think is good.” The difference, an atheist might argue, is an atheist doesn’t believe that their methods are dictated by divine law or necessitate a missionary approach, whereas Christians might, so it’s imperative and justified for the Christian to persuade the atheist parent to change their approach so souls are saved in agreement with god’s will.
I am a conservative evangelical. I live in a socially progressive state, and I see the phenomena you describe all the time, so you'll get no argument from me on that front.
When I say legalism, I mean things like forbidding card playing without gambling, Christian rock, and so on; I don't mean teaching sexual virtue, the creation order, etc. This kind of legalism is much less common than atheists tend to assume, but it does happen.
Ive never seen a good survey on the subject, to throw a wrench in far right wing politics is debating embracing paganism and there always was "esoteric fascism" that will come out of left-field(teehee) for this community. You should *also* try to ask for "esoteric"-ness
> My assumption is that anti-religion people have mostly had abusive religious upbringings.
I find this very unlikely, you may as well be claiming that both "college educated adult produce less college-children"(the bible is a book that you do need to read slowly to children) and "children of alcoholics avoid drinking out of anger"(treating it as a vice... and well no)
I doubt anyone has ever tracked this explicitly, and measuring "angry" atheists would be a nightmare, but I think the agnostic/atheist split is a reasonable place to start. Just colloquially, agnostic seems to be "non-confrontational atheism" and I can't imagine an "angry agnostic". So
-not every atheist is an angry atheist
-every agnostic is not an angry atheist
To attempt to quantify this a bit, just filtering the ACX survey data, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2024:
-There are 4304 atheists or agnostic respondents
--1084 of them are agnostic
--495 of them are "Atheist but spiritual"
--2725 of them are "Atheist and not spiritual"
So roughly 1/3 are almost certainly not "angry atheists" and 2/3 could be and avoided the more...nonconfrontational options.
I used to call myself agnostic, in that "I didn't know", but eventually it felt more honest to say "I didn't believe". Ironically, that honesty probably has something to to with a religious upbringing.
I'm a militant agnostic (I don't know and you don't either) except that I'm polite about it.
:-)
It seems like a person who genuinely believes there is a 50% chance God exists would probably keep praying and giving money to church, because a 50% chance of eternal torture in hell is not fun.
So if you are not doing any of the things that religion demands of you to be saved, then I guess you believe that the chance is too small to worry about. Which makes you an atheist.
The word "agnostic" should properly refer to religious people who have doubts about their faith, but they continue following the rules just in case. When they stop following the rules, it seems they have already made up their mind.
I've tended to divide things into big-A Agnostic (it is unknowable whether God exists), little-a agnostic (I don't know whether God exists), big-A Atheist (God does not exist), and little-a atheist (I don't think God exists). I'm sort of with you on agnostic, but I wouldn't expect it to be a precisely 50% chance, or require any specific actions. (I think Pascal's Wager is silly.) I suppose it's more about the approach we take to the question, and how we think about it, when we notice that we're thinking about it. It's sort of descriptive of an internal process, if that makes sense?
Thanks.
One approach would be a checklist for greatest evil(s) in the world. Capitalism, communism, religion, cruelty....
If they check off religion, they hate religion.
That reminds me of a book I read for a research paper in college on the Moral Majority etc. The book has a chart of a moral education, which led to truth, beauty, love, etc, and thence to Peace, Prosperity, etc. In contrast, a secular humanist education led to hate, anger, etc; and thence to war, famine, genocide, ... and Keynesian economics.
Why the KJV in particular? I don't know exactly what version was used in the Anglophone Catholic church in my youth, it was something with fewer thous and thees than the King James Version, but it's not tricky to understand a Biblical reference from a slightly different translation.
The big one that always tripped me up as a kid was why protestants put an "H" on "Alleluia".
Because it's been the most popular in the Anglosphere for a long time and so far as I know, it's still the most quotable.
I think all of the classic (say, pre-1960 mainstream) translations are roughly equally quotable. I mean,
"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life."
John 3:16 . Possibly the most quoted verse in Christendom. And is anyone not going to recognize that, or say that I got it wrong, because I didn't cite it exactly as,
"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life"?
Revised Standard Version vs King James Version, if anyone is wondering.
Would add it's the one with the most impact on the literary world (eg "when the Bible is quoted in a cultural work that is not as a religious exercise, they are usually quoted KJV".
Agreed that the exact version isn't important when it comes to content rather than a specific quotation (and in fact more accessible translations might be better for understanding).
I don't know its etymological history in Christendom but I do believe that the "H" in "Hallelujah" better tracks its Hebrew pronunciation.
FWIW, I consider the history of Christianity (from dominance in Rome) to be a decent argument against Christianity "as we know it up until around 1900". The more modern version seems to be significantly more acceptable, and some people really seem to need that crutch.
OTOH, I'm not an atheist. I just have a wildly divergent idea of what the gods are. And one of their characteristics is that only act through biological entities, and they are distributed through gene-pools. (Consider that as the thing that Jungian archetypes were trying to describe.)
That said, I can be quite angry when forced to endure "traditional" Christian ceremonies. Usually, though, I'm not. Also I didn't have an abusive religious upbringing (except I had to read the Bible). My anger at traditional Christian symbols is due to a study of history, and an identification as an adult with a minority religious group...before I analyzed just what I actually believed about the gods. (P.S.: The minority religion was explicitly intended NOT to be taken seriously. And was generally tolerant of divergent beliefs.)
On the other hand, the basic proposition of Christianity is that God had a sudden change of mind about a bunch of stuff. (Or else we’s still be Jews).
Christians have seen continuity there since the time of the New Testament; consider, for example, the book of Hebrews. Unless you want to go full Marcionite, you've got to bite the bullet and accept that God's commands to Joshua were just and in accord with his eternal character.
Anybody else immediately go and see what the banned comments were? I remember snitching about one because is was so discordant at the time, but reading them all in a row is morbidly fascinating.
I always do that. It's good to know what gets you banned here.
I like many of the banned comments because it's easier to understand what someone beleives and why when they don't filter themselves. Like the one about wishing the first Trump assassin had not missed: it's useful to know the guy who said that beleived it in evaluating his other opinions and general worldview.
Of course, I have an unusually detached attitude about my own beliefs, so such comments don't bother me--and I actually enjoy a little toxic sewage in the comments section. (I also understand why Scott has the moderation rules he does; his house, his rules, and all that)
The Learn Hebrew guy was obnoxious. Every comment was self righteously performative and how everyone who believed differently from him was a bad person.
He sure was, and though I am a hardliner in favor of Israel, I did enjoy some of his comments.
People like that degrade the forum of everywhere they go.
I disagree. I think he made some good points, even if I didn’t always agree with him
I also think it's useful to know what people believe, but a _lot_ of world views (even ones that I consider pretty horrible) can theoretically be expressed in respectful enough ways that I'm pretty sure Scott wouldn't ban for them. Generally, it seems to me that Scott is banning not for having, or even expressing, a particular view, but rather for saying it in a way that increases noise, decreases quality of conversation, etc. And I think that's pretty reasonable.
-edit- note that _several_ of the bans have an explanation from Scott that it's only being banned because the user appended an insult on the end, not for the view/opinion being expressed.
I do not need LHHI's diatribes to know that a great many people hate Israel in approximately all of the ways and with all of the justifications that he cites. Nor to know that some of these people have read widely and deeply to find ammunition for their online holy war. I think one would have to live in a fairly isolated bubble not to have learned that much by now.
And I don't much care that LHHI specifically is one of the many, many people who hold that approximate set of beliefs, nor to know exactly how he's tailored his personal expression of those beliefs. If he's going to be a member of this community, then yes, it's good to know that there is a member of this community that really hates Israel. But there's also the option of *not* needing to know that such a person is a member of this community, because he isn't a member of this community.
I prefer that state of affairs. We can if necessary send scouts to report back on the sorts of hate being expressed beyond the walls of this garden.
> Generally, it seems to me that Scott is banning not for having, or even expressing, a particular view, but rather for saying it in a way that increases noise, decreases quality of conversation, etc. And I think that's pretty reasonable.
> note that _several_ of the bans have an explanation from Scott that it's only being banned because the user appended an insult on the end, not for the view/opinion being expressed.
How would you explain the Joe Potts ban?
According to Scott's reply, it fails the "must be at least two of true, necessary, and kind".
It wasn't _unkind_, and I think neutral gets a pass on that one. I feel comfortable saying it "wasn't true", although that's obviously the thing being contented. So the killer was that it was unnecessary. Starting a debate on whether or not the holocaust is real was completely unnecessary. That's obviously a judgement call. I happen to agree with Scott in this case. I'm not _inherently_ against that discussion (although I agree with the other commenter that, for me personally, it would be a waste of time, so I have no interest in participating), but just deciding to spring that discussion in a barely tangentially related thread is a recipe for bad discussion.
Reminds me of this great meme: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/282/683/8e4.jpg
Don't be like the guy on the left.
Yes, Scott is careful about his stated reasons for bans. I would just go so far as to say personal insults can also be useful discourse, at least for how I parse opinions and arguments.
Did the same (reading, not reporting).
What are your personal experiences contemplating AI and whatever degree of existential risk you perceive from it?
For me, I've mostly seen gen AI as an exciting new wave of technology and an interesting career opportunity, similar to the Internet and mobile. I'm also sympathetic to x-risk arguments such as it being a bad idea to create entities potentially much more capable than humans, and every once in a while I fall into a meaningful amount of worry about the future, especially for my young daughter. Reflecting on OpenAI's o1 model has been a notable trigger, probably the biggest since GPT-4. Of course, there's very little I can do to affect the course of history, and we all have to die of something. So I mostly put it out of mind.
That aspect reminds me a bit of what it felt like thinking about nuclear weapons while I was growing up in the 80's. The periodic feeling of dread followed by resignation and turning back to more practical concerns. I imagine a lot of people feel that way about climate change these days as well, although personally I think we now have the technology to address that, hopefully without too much damage in the interim.
I think that 'normie' AI-risks: white-collar unemployment, election capture by superstimulus propaganda, automated warfighting, etc, are nothingburgers. Whereas I think 'Yudkowsky-doomposting' AI-risks are basically guaranteed and we're all at a ~95% probability of being paperclipped.
I'm bullish on the majority of the normie risks because "We already have that at home". Elections are already fake and gay, jobs are already fake and gay (see: Graeber), and conscripted humans are already capable of systematic brutality to each other. AI ain't gonna bring anything new to the table here.
But to not get paperclipped, you have to get alignment right, first time with no practice. Good luck with that. The doom-skeptic crowd might crow "But LLMs are dumb!", and they're right: I'm not expecting to get paperclipped this decade, but whenever (even if it's in centuries) the kicked can gets to the end of the road and AI achieves superintelligence, the proplem rears its ugly head again and I have only 5% confidence that even future humans will be able to solve it.
I remain convinced that AI will not be the problem, it'll be the humans using AI (and putting all their trust in it, and encouraging the rest of us that we can believe and trust our new robot overlords) who will be the problem.
I don't think we're ever going to get superintelligence or post-scarcity utopia, but neither do I think we'll all be living in the cyberpunk dystopia (unless our current world is it).
If the vast changes feared/hoped for do come, they will be of such a kind that it's impossible for us to forecast what the world of that day will be like. Think of all the futurology of the past which said that "by the year X, the world will be like this" and it's not.
Me, I think that it'll just be same old "the rich get richer and the poor stay poor".
I believe some British historian from 1860s or thereabout predicted that in a hundred years and counting, slavery would be abolished everywhere, even women would get the vote, child mortality would almost vanish, longevity would increase, most deadly diseases would find cures, travel would be so cheap that even ordinary people would regularly travel abroad, and prosperity would generally keep on improving and improving.
Could not locate his name on a quick internet search, but it shows that not everyone who made predictions about the future back then were mistaken. We just happen to give more press to scholars from the past who predicted doom and gloom than those who predicted “nah, for most indicators it will keep getting better and better.” Same today, I guess.
But did he predict rock'n'roll, the Sexual Revolution, the end of the British Empire, the Swinging Sixties and men on the moon?
That's the kind of huge social, technological and cultural changes that Scott predicts will come about if we get super-smart AI, and the kind of things we cannot simply extrapolate from trends of today. The British historian of 1860 may have been able to extrapolate "travel is getting so efficient and cheap that soon even ordinary people will be able to afford it", but I'm betting he did not foresee that respectable young women would be having sex before marriage and this would be deemed acceptable by society at large.
So trying to predict "if we get god-level AI, the future will be magic" based on our current experience with the economy, with government, with work, with people in or not in work, etc. is not going to get us anywhere; we will be like the futurologists of the past who confidently predicted that in the far-flung year of 1980 people would only be working three days a week for a few hours a day and would have so much leisure they would not be able to fill it all and in the 21st century there would be tourism on the Moon with people taking trips to stay in the lunar hotels and resorts.
You refer (implicitly) to Keynes, and his often-ridiculed 1930 prediction that:
“… a hundred years hence we are all of us, on the average, eight times better off in the economic sense than we are to-day.…three hours [work] a day is quite enough”
But you’ll have to give it to Keynes that he sort-of predicted the sexual revolution in the same essay:
“When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues.”
...that’s Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and (a few weeks later) Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, both in the summer-of-love anno 1967, where it all started!
(Keynes by the way did his fair personal share to bring about a less Victorian code of sexual morals, but that is a digression.)
Be that as it may, it is hard to be too crabby toward a man who writes so well:
"We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good
to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour
and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of
taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin."
...even though his whiggish-type predictions were, well, a bit much on the sunny side:
www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
....but none the less, with the benefit of hindsight, should we not say that he has at least been a bit more right in his predictions than the doom-and-gloom people among his contemporaries (at least once the significant bump of WW2 was overcome...). As Angus Deaton illustrates in his book "The great escape" [from absolute poverty], the old Whiggish way to interpret history & predict the future has not been totally off the mark.
Not least, perhaps, since the warnings of the doom-and-gloom people help us to correct the course as history marches along. Influential negative predictions are a societal self-correction mechanism.
J Elfreth Watkins did pretty well, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Elfreth_Watkins
Let's put aside the idea of AI killing us. Even in an optimistic scenario, AI development means that it will increasingly take on more tasks in our society, and it will do so in a way that no one understands. Someone will question why it does something, then it perfectly executes its task. We won't know why it does something, but we will know that it's extraordinary in whatever it does. Humanity will relinquish its autonomy to these entities because of their capabilities. What if they start acting weird and we try to change them, but they won't let us?
The current generation of AI has only the risk of causing extreme economic disorder. Some few will benefit.
We already have sufficient weaponry that a lunatic government is an existential risk, and over time if people keep running things we will get a lunatic government.
An AI is probably a one time risk. A superhuman AI is definitely an existential risk, but it eliminates the risk of a lunatic government. It's probably a better bet if we're reasonably careful. But if it fails, it may lead to a quicker existential termination event. (The "lunatic government" is a x%/year risk, the AI is a y% during the singularity. After a while x%/year is larger than y%.)
FWIW, I put the risk of AI being an existential termination event at 50%, but without any real basis for that estimate...and the exact number doesn't matter anyway. We can't figure it closely without more idea of what the AI will evolve into after it "immanentizes the eschaton". The best security is to design AIs that like people.
Calling all fellow US expats living in the UK!
Since moving to the UK in 2019, I've really struggled to find reliable legal and accounting services. Broadly: my experience has been of high fees and unreliable service, e.g. a 400 GBP/hour lawyer from a top firm who doesn't reply to email or answer the phone, one accountant who agreed to take me on as a client and then completely ghosted me, and another who charged me 500 GBP to resolve an issue for me without telling me that I could have done the same for myself with a 5 minute call to HMRC.
When I mention this to my British colleagues, their response is generally "yes that's my experience of accountants and solicitors as well: you have to babysit them to make sure they do the work." I hesitate to attribute this to UK versus US cultural stereotypes, but my experiences with US accountants and lawyers have been much more positive. In short: if you're willing to pay for quality, you get it.
So here's my question for you: my US accountant is fantastic but cannot advise me on the UK side of my taxes. How can I go about finding someone who I won't have to babysit, who is familiar with ex-patriot issues, and (ideally) who doesn't charge an arm and a leg? (I'm willing to compromise on the third if I can have the first two!)
Any direct professional or firm recommendations would also be most welcome. Thanks for your help!
Don't have a solution for you, but I was in the same boat for a while. It is frustrating.
I have a contact. Will PM you when I got a hold of the email address.
Fantastic! Thanks so much.
Irish not British, but my Lord yes. When my father died, it took a solid year of me nagging the solicitor to get the estate probated, and it wasn't huge sums of money or a complicated will involved. He was plainly just dragging it out so he could charge me for "you phoned me, that's a charge; I wrote a letter, that's a charge; you called in to the office and I passed a message on via the secretary, that's a charge".
I suppose the upside of America being a litigious society is that the lawyers are efficient. I will say that our current accountants (at work) are very good, but the last lot... weren't.
I've always had crap experiences with solicitors and most people I know have similar. The people I know who praise their solicitors are wealthy and got in touch with them through personal connections.
Any new hidden open threads anytime soon? I actually really like them.
Sorry I keep forgetting. The plan is to do them every week. I'll try to actually remember this time.
Just adding my thanks for this - I wasn't sure if the hidden threads were still being published and I wasn't getting them, or if it was only a semi-regular thing. I also like reading them.
Thanks!
I'm an upper-year undergraduate studying philosophy. I enjoy some aspects of analytic philosophy (Quine, Davidson) and OLP (Austin, Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell), but overall I find myself more drawn to Continental thinkers. Especially Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, and also others like Gadamer and Derrida. My impression is that many philosophy enthusiasts on this blog are more influenced by analytic philosophy that more explicitly models itself on science. Many commenters actually seem very hostile to continental philosophy. So some questions I have are 1) which philosophers do you admire 2) why do you admire them 3) what philosophers don't you find value in 4) why don't you find them valuable? 5) what are your impressions of continental philosophy? 6) If you are hostile, why?
When you talk about "enjoying some aspects of analytic philosophy" or being "drawn to Continental thinkers"— that makes me curious as to what problems in philosophy interest you. What draws you in?
I ask because some people seem drawn to this or that philosophical tradition because they think it's really getting at the truth, or maybe they like the writing style, or something about the "approach to life" of the authors appeals to them, etc etc.
Hi Martin, thank you for your reply. By drawn to I mean getting at the truth. I am especially convinced by Heidegger’s dismantling of skepticism and the whole subject-object divide, which many Anglo-American philosophers (though not OLP philosophers) can’t seem to get over. I love and agree with pretty much everything Arendt’s written (she’s my favourite philosopher). Most especially her accounts of labour/work/action in The Human Condition and thinking/judging in her later work. I appreciate Gadamer’s (and Heidegger and Blanchot) insistence on the non-aesthetic truth of art. But like you say, it’s not just that I think they’re more true. I think what I find most compelling in a philosopher is creative problem solving, or rethinking the terms of the question (I don’t agree with a lot of Quine, but I think this is very compelling). I think that’s what brings together the thinkers I’m interested in.
How about you Martin, what draws you to a philosopher?
I think it's changed over the years, and I come back to the same philosopher for different reasons at different times. Definitely a feeling that they're getting at the truth of things is important, but my sense of what that means isn't the same as it was 10 or 15 years ago either. I was never drawn to the modern continental tradition mostly because it seemed intentionally obscure or stylistically impenetrable but maybe that's just me. I think I'm naturally drawn to philosophers who have a certain humaneness and appreciation for real life problems (or at least it seems like that to me) eg. the Hellenistic thinkers, Seneca, Augustine, Montaigne, Pascal, Hume. I tried getting into Heidegger multiple times but even when he's translated into English it feels like we're still speaking very different languages. That said, I've always been interested in Chan/Zen and I think they've got a lot of similar ideas to Heidegger but approached from almost an anti-philosophy perspective.
Hi Martin, that's very interesting, especially the idea of coming back to philosophers for different reasons at different times. I admire your interest in authors that deal with human problems. Of the authors you list I've found myself very moved by Augustine. Initially I thought that if I just truly knew what was good I would do it, and reading Confessions made me realize that practicing goodness was a question of willing as well as knowing, which so far I've found really profound. Are there any insights from these thinkers that especially influence(d) how you act? Interestingly Heidegger himself said that he found a lot of confluence between his thought and zen - but he was committed to dismantling the Western tradition from inside (Destruktion) rather than from outside by adopting Eastern ways of thinking. What do you think of that idea?
Dang that's a hard question, and a good one. Off the top of my head, in terms of practical/real world effects, I'd say Sissela Bok's book on lying did a lot to convince me that lying is almost never ethically permissible in normal circumstances (it should almost be considered as being on the continuum of the use of force).
re: Heidegger, first I should say I'm no expert in his thought. But I'm not sure I'd want to dismantle the Western tradition from the inside or without. I think it's shown itself to be a healthily progressive enterprise that is capable of change and growth, even if we often get stuck in conceptual ruts. But I think the tradition has shown, and is starting to show more, openness to ideas from south and east Asia.
Hi Martin, that sounds interesting, I am excited to read it.
re: Heidegger - I tend to agree, Heidegger exaggerates his departure from Western Philosophy, and in some very meaningful ways his departure is dramatic (especially his idea of truth-as-revealing and rejection of substance ontology), but in other ways he's more continuous with it than he credits. With that said, even when he's committed to dismantling the tradition, on my reading it's never as simple as rejecting it, but rather learning from its mistakes and impact on us.
My most recent blog post was partially a complaint about continental philosophy (inside a review of two dueling books) https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2024/09/25/orientalism-vs-dangerous-knowledge/
Thank you for your reply, I am excited to read it :)
1) which philosophers do you admire 2) why do you admire them
- I'll add another vote for Stanley Cavell. Hugely underrated. Has anyone else written so insightfully on the relationship between philosophical questions and affective life? He remains underappreciated, I think, because he doesn't fit comfortably into either the "analytic" or the "continental" categories, so he gets treated as a marginal figure by both.
- Among contemporary US philosophers, writers on aesthetic topics (e.g. Sianne Ngai, C. Thi Nguyen), seem particularly successful at identifying and exploring interesting new questions.
- Like many people, I admire Robert Brandom more than I actually read him, but I see a lot of value in his insistence on working across different (Euro-American) philosophical traditions, rather than just picking one and working within it. Also in his adoption of a "system building" rather than a "problem solving" approach, not because system-building is an inherently superior way to do philosophy, but because this approach is now so unfashionable that its philosophical potential goes unrecognized and unexploited.
3) what philosophers don't you find value in 4) why don't you find them valuable?
- Most of post-1970 analytic metaphysics. Wittgenstein shows the fly how to escape from the bottle, but apparently now the fly wants to go back in? I don't get it.
5) what are your impressions of continental philosophy? 6) If you are hostile, why?
- The "one big thing" continentals understand better than analytics is how much history is embedded into "philosophical" questions. They quite frequently offer inaccurate and tendentious accounts of that history, but at least they recognize that it matters. As for particular thinkers: some, like Foucault or the Frankfurt School, can offer valuable perspectives. (Take them seriously but not literally!) Some, like Derrida, just seem like they are wasting my time.
Hello, thank you for your reply. I haven’t heard of those aestheticians, I will be sure to research them, thank you. I agree for sure on Stanley Cavell. I haven’t read much Frankfurt School beyond Walter Benjamin, do you have any suggestions for where I should start?
More broadly, what draws you to philosophy, or what do you think connects the thinkers you’re keen on?
>"Frankfurt School"
Adorno's *Minima Moralia* is a good entry point, since it's aphoristic and you can browse through it for the bits that connect to your own concerns. It's a bit like Nietzsche in that respect, but just as with Nietzsche, you eventually need to spend some time thinking through the bits that initially seem to make no sense, or you'll come away with a mistaken impression of the whole.
After that, Adorno + Horkheimer's *Dialectic of Enlightenment* is the big programmatic statement, and it's the main thing that comes to mind when I hear "Frankfurt School." Habermas' *The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere* is quite accessible, and it's not quite the book you might expect if you have only heard about it from second-hand sources. It's helpful for seeing the continuities between Adorno + Horkheimer's concerns and Habermas' later work.
At some point, a good intellectual history like Jay's *The Dialectic Imagination* helps put the whole movement in perspective, particularly for filling in any gaps in your background understanding of Hegel, Marx, and Freud.
>"what draws you to philosophy"
I think my own tendencies to philosophize are mostly just a bad habit, so I appreciate philosophers who are looking outward at the world rather than inward at yet another deeper layer of philosophy. This is why I don't tend to spend too much time reading Brandom, despite my admiration for his overall vision and his patience in working though the details: he's very much a philosophers' philosopher, and I suspect his writings may be a siren song luring me to my doom. It's also why I think Cavell was so great: he didn't see philosophy as a way to demonstrate his own intellectual superiority, but as a way to make (partial!) sense of a wide range of human experience.
These are great recommendations, thank you. That's interesting on the point of being a bad habit, in what way do you mean that? I sometimes wonder that about myself too - I notice that in day to day conversations I have a bad habit of linking everything back to philosophy, which I assume is grating for the people around me. On the other hand, I feel like I've gotten a lot of important insights out of philosophy, and I find it so exhilarating.
What philosophers, other than Cavell, do you think of as having this outward rather than inward focus?
Well, I became a historian of science after coming to the conclusion that a lot of philosophical questions are better addressed in the archive than in the armchair. Ian Hacking, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison are some of the best examples of that sort of work. Also Shigehisa Kuriyama's philosophically inspired work on the history of medicine, which is not nearly as well known as it should be.
Ethics: Bernard Williams explored the "Limits of Philosophy" for our understanding of moral life, and drew extensively on literary examples as material for thinking with. (I believe Martha Nussbaum is known for adopting a similar approach, but I haven't read much of her stuff.)
Philosophy of mind: Peter Godfrey-Smith does a good job of thinking through the philosophical implications of comparative neurobiology, and also teaches you a lot of fascinating facts about octopuses. Hard to beat that!
This is very interesting. I am excited to look into all of these. Thank you for the advice. Do you have any advice about what mistakes I should look out for when I think about the history of science coming mostly from philosophical interpretations of it (Logical Positivism, Kuhn...)?
The problem with Analytic philosophy is that it really wants to be ultra rigorous in a way that leaves no doubt to the claims they make but you can't really do that. We figured out how to make valid arguments a long time ago, the arguments are almost always about the premises but the premises can't be 100% proven. Analytic philosophers then confine themselves to narrow problems.
Continental philosophy is more open, and quite frankly, less boring, but it can get carried away in layers of abstraction that you need to peel to understand and often start with questionable, unstated premises.
Personally, I think continental philosophy has more potential in that it's trying to talk about questions that we care about. It just has this historical baggage that gets in the way.
That’s very interesting, I tend to agree. Do you find any people fruitfully bringing the two together? And more broadly, what draws you to philosophy/what are your “questions we actually care about?”
I’d say that the things I care about are questions of values, like ethics and questions about our society. Ethics is an active discipline in analytic philosophy but I find most of it just wrong. Nick Bostrom does philosophy but it’s very different from traditional questions but it involves futures which we obviously should care about.
I got a lot out of reading The Society of the Spectacle, which is about how our society uses images to alienate us from each other. Written in 1967, it is even more relevant in the social media age.
That is interesting, I was first drawn to philosophy for very similar reasons. Are there any ethicist philosophers that you find for yourself insightful? and what do you find limited about analytic ethics?
Contemporary ethics is essentially trying to find the Universal Platonic Truths about ethics as if it written in to the fabric of the universe. If we just reason hard enough, we'll eventually figure out, as if solving a math problem. There's no reason to believe this is true and the arguments they give are bad. On the other side, you have people who say that aren't any objective moral truths, and I don't think that really bears out either. If you had a tribe that made an obligation out of drinking arsenic, that tribe is clearly doing something wrong. They're going to do die out. It's weird to give their morality equal status to a tribe that doesn't do that.
I'm going to write a longer post about this issue sometime in the next week. I'm pulling more from moral psychology than philosophy, specifically:
Moral Tribes by Joshua Greene
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
The Weirdest People in the World by Joseph Henrich
Especially the last one, because it argues that some beliefs are just clearly better in that they help their members succeed.
I think there has been a lot of crossover in the last decade or so. I remember being the same kind of boat as someone contemplating grad school options, with enjoying the analytical/Anglo philosophy methods but believing there was really interesting ideas in the Continental side. I can't recall the list of thinkers I ended up finding who did this well as I ended up going into another dismal discipline ;).
Canadian thinkers, perhaps because of the dual inheritance of English and French, do a good job crossing the two including Joseph Heath (particularly his more academic work), Charles Taylor, and Ian Hacking.
More classicaly, I think Habermas is very underrated and is maligned as a critical theorist in the same vein as Marcuse. In reality, he seems to be extremely capital L liberal in a manner closer to Arendt.
I also think a lot of conservatives convientently forget how much their favourite Jewish emigres (Strauss, Hayek or Morgenthau) are actually closer to their Marxist Jewish fellow emigres.
Hi Skelton, thank you for your reply. That’s very interesting, I find myself in the same boat (and actually descend from a similar, though less famous, cohort of Jewish emigres). Where do you recommend starting with Habermas? And more broadly, what drew you to philosophy, and what caused you to go into a different discipline instead?
I was equally interested in the empricial side and theory side of political science, so that was how I got into philosophy generally (and as you can see, all my references or recs are in social or political philosophy!).
I think Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action is the best bet but I think more invested readers delineate between different periods of his work. Its elegant (for Habermas at least) and if you close your eyes, some parts dont seem that different from game theory or analytic philosophy - although nothing of the sort of like min-max discussions found in Rawls.
I went from studying and wanting to focus on political science and philosophy to political science and economics - mainly because I needed to be more risk averse in my career outcomes for family reasons, but also because I realized that economics was more philosophically loaded than I initially thought.
Thank you for the recommendation, I will be sure to check it out (I have a seminar on Rawls and Liberalism next term, so it will be a nice compliment). I hear you on the point of career risk, I am constantly debating whether I should go to grad school for philosophy, which I find exhilarating, or play it safer and go to law school. I am glad that you found a career that bridged the two for yourself :)
Hayek wasn't Jewish. He just associated with a lot of Viennese Jews.
My apologies, you are correct!
"I also think a lot of conservatives convientently forget how much their favourite Jewish emigres (Strauss, Hayek or Morgenthau) are actually closer to their Marxist Jewish fellow emigres."
Do you mind developing this a bit more? Closer than what?
Closer than their political alignments (marxist and anti-marxist) and their politcal/intellectual heirs would suggest.
The conservative emigres were equally Continental in the themes they were seized by (modernity, power, rationality). They were part of the same intellectual circles that studied the same German thinkers (i.e, Nietzche, Weber) back in Europe and also were being part of the same social circles once they arrived to the US (New School, UofChicago). In some sense, like cohorts of investors who were respectively scarred by the Great Depression or the Great Inflation, the generational scarring of Nazism and WWII also probably helped.
I don't want to stress this too much, they were very different but they shared the same fount and that matters at least some.
I was talking to some people this past weekend about how doctors have become so reliant on pharmaceuticals when dealing with patients that they can overlook all kinds of issues with the patient or with the pharmaceuticals or both. I made the statement "human beings are by nature lazy and mendacious" and one person objected vehemently. What do you think?
I think I’m going to strongly disagree here.
We live in an age of miracles where there are effective drugs for many things. You can still be unlucky and have some weird thing where they either don’t know what it is or don’t have a good treatment for it, but, often, you’re in luck.
Last time I was in the ER, after being diagnosed by an actual doctor, they send in a medical student to practise on me
The student, who doubtless going to be questioned about this afterwards, is even more thorough on asking questions…
Med student “your hands are kind of blue. You don’t spill blue dye or anything on them, did you?
Me: “No, that is not blue dye.”
(I don’t want to be mean to the poor med student here. He was actually doing pretty well at noting relevant observations. If you’re wondering, my blood oxygen sp02 was down below 80% at one point during this adventure).
Medicine is a big field and your comment is broad.
I can comment within the ER/urgent care realm. What folks might find interesting is how often people get *really pissed off* if they don't get prescribed antibiotics for their viral URI (or insert pointless treatment for benign condition that would just resolve on its own here). I can't give a percentage, and a pretty big chunk of them ultimately get it after you sit down and explain everything, but some people just really want a z-pac.
Elsewhere in the thread Anonymous Dude mentioned the fun that we get to have with EMRs (I've used almost all the major ones, Epic and Cerner are actually probably the two best). Once you add the significant time pressure found in the above environments and patient expectations of receiving some sort of prescription, and you can see why there are issues like over prescribing antibiotics.
So, I am not sure of your "lazy and mendacious" argument. One of the good things about our host's writing, and indeed many of the comments here, is the emphasis looking at the system and sets of incentives in whatever is being discussed. Again, your initial comment was pretty broad and talking about all doctors. You may have had a bad interaction with a specialist of some sort. But at least within the world of generalists, I don't think most docs or midlevels are lazy liars (although like within any large group of people there are some of those I am sure). I think there is a combination of patient expectations to being given a prescription for something, combined with significant time constraints and systemic inefficiencies that leads to providers going down a path of least resistance.
Edit: I just realized I should make it clear that I actually agree that overprescribing is a problem, more taking issue with your reason for why. Would also make clear that this is important issue, off the top of my head for antibiotic resistance reasons, not to mention the low but real amount of side effects even in commonly used meds.
> What folks might find interesting is how often people get *really pissed off* if they don't get prescribed antibiotics for their viral URI (or insert pointless treatment for benign condition that would just resolve on its own here).
In China the pointless treatment would be an IV drip of saline solution. People will visit the hospital for that if they have a cold. It's insane.
I saw a former student once post on Wechat about how she'd been sick and visited her university medical center for an IV, only to be told that they wouldn't do that for her because it wouldn't help. She was very upset, complaining that this made her feel like they didn't even care that she was sick.
I would say that this at least has some advantages in not promoting antibiotic resistance, but I'm pretty sure that at least some antibiotics are available over the counter.
It's probably true that doctors rely a bit too much on pharmaceuticals, but to be fair, I get why pharmaceuticals would be considered a "first resort" for doctors. *When they work*, pharmaceuticals are fantastic. Very quick, very efficient, both for the doctor and for the patient. It's win/win *when it works*. And it works often enough that I can understand why a doctor might choose to turn to it first.
That being said, possible side-effects should never be skimmed over, and in some cases the side-effects can be worse than what's actually being treated. Patients should make informed decisions here.
I do think human beings in general aim for quick/easy solutions. Laziness is sometimes a factor here, but other times it's simply about wanting to be as efficient as possible with one's time.
I think it's probably true. We're monkeys made to reproduce and survive, ethics and reason are bolted on later.
There is some aspect of cognitive saturation in that particular example, I think. Not that doctors aren't corruptible or greedy (I'm always willing to think the worst of anyone), but having looked at some of these systems like Epic and Cerner, they are incredibly baroque and complicated, set up for billing rather than patient care, and full of endless redundant alerts that waste time. They also have a huge load of documentation in directly patient-facing specialties, with one I knew a while back having to go back and work on patient notes for hours after her shift was over. So I'm not surprised they tend to get into a pharmaceutical-fix mentality; there's just so much extra regulatory documentation to do.
Medical school probably selects against laziness, though I don't know about mendaciousness.
It's a sloppy and unjustified generalization, but do we ban people for saying things like that? That seems extreme.
"Humans are by nature X" seems generally false for any X that describes personalities, since we describe X relative to a human baseline (Humans are lazy relative to who? Ground sloths? Other humans?) And it seems false in this narrow group (doctors are probably significantly more conscientious and hardworking than the average human). So I'd say a description of "looking into potential issues with the patient or pharmaceutical is hard work most doctors don't have the spare resources or motivation to do" is a more accurate description.
Obviously a person must be conscientious to make it all the way through, but after doing the job for 20 years anyone would get whittled down a bit, no? My experience tells me this is the case for all professions. All I'll add is that as you grow older learn to take whatever a doctor tells you with skepticism.
Yeah, I think "doctors are less contentious than what people expect so you should be more skeptical" is generally right.
I agree with the lazy part, preserving calories used to be important for us. I don't think the lying part is borne out by psychology research. Or I guess, it depends on where you draw the boundary between gross negligence in rigorous thinking and lying. The former is certainly quite common.
We will not be happy till we are in prison, for only there will we feel safe
Old Russian saying, embodying the dread I feel when seeing a Scott banning session.
As I am not guilty, I relish the incoming shadow of the Hammer!
Followed by a comedic splat noise.
I feel the opposite; I don't celebrate bans but they do show that Scott is actively maintaining the system he's described wanting to govern this community.
A country can have a beautifully drafted constitution, full of rights, protections, and separation of powers, but nevertheless be a barely-organized swirl of chaos, coups, and countercoups because said constitution isn't followed.
There needs to be a line somewhere, and there will always be people too close to the line, so that the decision feels arbitrary. But if you move the line, soon there will be people too close to the new line.
I would prefer a system where the bans are coming *more quickly*, but they are *shorter*. (And yes, a certain number of short bans results in a permaban.) But that would mean more work for Scott... unless he could somehow delegate that job.
I third this.
That tracks- I'd welcome something like that as well, if Scott has the bandwidth or could figure out trustworthy surrogates. Seems like frequent short bans could serve as teachable moments for people and (where possible) could correct behavior rather than just weeding them out of the garden root-and-branch.
Definitely more resource intensive, but the richer option if it's feasible.
> if Scott has the bandwidth
Pretty sure he doesn't, given the kids. And even if he does, I think it would be more pleasant both for him and for us if he spent his free time writing new articles rather than moderating comments.
Substack probably doesn't provide support for this kind of moderation. But I can imagine something like the moderators having a shared online document where they nominate the bans and vote for them, and Scott just announces the bans at each Open Thread.
The shared document could contain the hyperlinks and quotes from the offending comments; optionally with an explanation why that is a bad thing (sometimes not obvious from the comment itself without context). Then each moderator would vote "ok", "warning", "ban", or "permaban" (in the most extreme cases), optionally with a short explanation why. The median vote would then happen (of course, Scott can override any of this). Kinda similar to how Wikipedia handles voting about problems. There should be enough moderators so that each proposal gets at least three votes.
Another document would contain a *history* of users and their warning and bans. First, so that multiple warnings result in user being given a ban instead of yet another warning. Second, the length of the ban could depend on how many previous bans there were, for example: "one week", "two weeks", "one month", "two months", "three months", "permaban"; maybe automatically increasing at each ban, and automatically decreasing after six months with no bans nor warnings (so that the moderators only vote for "ok / warning / ban / permaban" rather than argue about the specific length of the ban).
Scott, if you happen to read this and like the idea, I volunteer to do the related bureaucracy (count the votes, prepare the summary for each Open Thread) *without* voting on the bans myself (better separation of powers). Just make an empty Google Drive folder and share it with me and the moderators; I will do the rest, and we will figure out the details as we go.
I would greatly appreciate it if you could you give a source for this saying. I'm either not familiar with it or have forgotten it, and it sounds like something I should know.
Yes, I always get a sinking feeling when I see one of these banning sessions, too. I'll miss Carateca.
Can't remember and can't find on the internet. Will let you know if it comes to me
My reaction doesn't quite rise to the level of "dread," but I get your sentiment. I'm bummed out; I enjoyed both LearnsHebrewHatesIP and Carateca. They often had tremendously fun spicy posts, and I don't think either post they were actually banned over necessarily rose to the level of "deadly poisonous."
LHHIP advocated for the murder of his political enemies (and he didn't even say it politely!); how high is your bar for "deadly poisonous" comments?
Such comments should be *deleted* a.s.a.p., but if that happened for the first time, I think a temporary bad would be enough; sometimes people learn.
(Permanent ban if he proposes a specific plan to murder the political enemy and creates a prediction market.)
Admittedly pretty high; I once dissuaded my co-moderators of a 20k+ regional group on a different site from banning a member who repeatedly directly insulted me and then publicly solicited that I be raped. I considered it a victory.
LLHIP's comment struck me as very deliberate hyperbole intended to express a tremendous frustration with a person who is arguably the most polarizing figure of our time. Weighed against many previous posts which were calm and provided sources, I didn't take the emotional one particularly seriously.
And I was also advocating for both of them; if I had to choose, Carateca is the bigger loss.
Yeah, that was pretty bad
> I'm bummed out; I enjoyed both LearnsHebrewHatesIP and Carateca.
Ah, I'm not alone. :-)
You are not!
Which US city over 50,000 residents has the strictest enforcement of minor law violations? For example, are there any cities where the police will bother stopping and fining every single car that blasts loud music from their stereo system?
I've heard Irvine is relatively aggressive on stuff like this? I haven't lived there though
My family lives Irvine-adjacent; it's pretty darn clean but I wouldn't call it "aggressive," especially not around traffic laws.
I had my Covid19 vaccination last week.
I tried arguing I'm eligible for vaccination ion grounds I have Grvaes disease (thyroid conditiin) and, in my case, the effect of the thyroid condition on my heart gets me an official diagnosis of atrial fibrilation, which is on the NHS official list of things that make you eligible for vaccination. That got accepted no problem; probably, they'll vaccinate you with any sort of plausible reason.
(Downside: atrial fibrilation is way more likely to kill me than covid, so I am not winning here...)
Huh? Why would you need to argue that you're eligible? The Walgreens down the street from me seemed like it was giving them to everyone who walks in and asks.
I'm in the UK.
So, even if the UK, you can just pay for a covid19 vaccination.
I thought that the j redding ban was a bit harsh. Good commentator.
I was largely a cynic about AI and its potential and cynical also about OpenAI and its finances, admittedly from a position of general ignorance, but that cynicism is widespread. I also never believed in crypto, blockchain and other tech fads.
Now that I’ve used ChatGPT in work a bit I can definitely see the use. Of course it will be wrong sometimes, which is actually the best of both worlds, more productive humans but humans still needed.
It’s also useful at home, I’ve used it to create recipes, and while I could google that kind of thing it’s the interactive nature of the conversation that’s more interesting, (ie I actually have 3 not 2 breasts of chicken, redo the recipe).
But I want to talk about the finances. There’s been a lot of ink spilled and keyboards bashed about the losses that OpenAI is making right now, with fairly simplistic maths leads to the company running out of runway by late next year, all of them basing todays monthly losses into known funded capital minus previous losses.
The obvious problem with that analysis is that revenue is also growing and being discounted. In fact revenue is going to increase to $11.6B next year. And if that rate of growth continues (or even abates but growth continues) we are talking about very valuable company.
Of course costs might accelerate too, and I know there is some talk about the costs ballooning to multiple billions or a trillion.
Anybody got any insights?
Dwarkesh Patel's latest podcast, with Dylan Patel partially covers the economics of OpenAI and AI scaling. In part, new money is needed to build the data centers and infrastructure to host and train the next models. GPUs are expensive to buy, servers must be set up and deployed into *really* large clusters of tens of thousands of sometimes scarce GPUs. There are race dynamics where OpenAI, via Microsoft partnership wants the biggest GPU centered data centers as does X-AI, etc. These data centers use GigaWatts of power, and so they also require power infrastructure. There is also a lag dynamic where the money is needed for the next generation of AI models, which will then make it's money back via API and product monetization so they need to raise money up front for infrastructure for future models. Oh, also everyone wants to have the latest chips for power efficiency reasons, which are also getting better to. Many companies are heavily invested, and for better or worse, many believe in AI as a very big product that can be won via scaling to the biggest, fastest, most compute heavy data centers.
> I thought that the j redding ban was a bit harsh
Yeah. It was a very bad comment for the type of discussion that this space is for, but if their other comments were better, it doesn't seem worthy of a permaban? *sigh* I also don't want to discourage Scott from moderating.
Yes, it was a particularly trollish coment. I also did not think their other comments were particularly good, though they were not all as trollish
I think it's moderately likely that we've almost reached the limits of what you can do with LLMs, and the benefits wont be big enough to justify the huge investment needed to get us here.
But that could just be me being optimistic, as "OpenAI looses money" is the least bad option at this point.
Much worse: they actually do succeed to creating AGI, but fail on alignment.
Well Open AI is still trying to eke out gains. Having access to all the models I think there’s a clear increase in functionality since 3.5. Not as spectacular as 2.5 to 3.5 no doubt (I never used the very old models but there’s a general consensus that there was a step change in ability there), but impressive enough.
Kind of bad: AI causes some medium scale disaster of the rough magnitude as tye World Trade Center, and everyone goes Dune-style Butlerian Jihad on the AI companies.
Most of their costs are on research, no? If they just stuck with their current products they'd be pretty profitable, but it makes sense to spend more money on research given that's what their investors want (pretty reasonably imo).
Yes. And I think, I’m not sure, that the greatest costs are in training the model not using the model. Which isn’t that different from other software. R&D is the major cost.
So once we’ve hit max AI it’s mostly profit.
Why call it hallucinations?
Typical AI Google search result which I got last week explains the end of the film Heaven's Gate; Averill is shown on the deck of his yacht; Jim stands on his boat. Jim Averill is just the one guy, played by Kris Kristofferson. This is one of the most discussed films on the internet. The AI has presumably read all the discussion, possibly seen the film, and thinks Averill and Jim are two people.
This is not hallucination. Thinking a purple dragon showed up at the battle would be hallucination. It's what we would call extreme stupidity, in a human being.
We have allowed the entire internet to be enshittified by this sort of thing in the bare 2 years since ChatGPT was released. Somewhat analogously we have allowed Musk and others to kesslerise the night sky with satellites (if you haven't stargazed for a couple of years, do so. You will be amazed). On these precedents if AI becomes a thing (and I don't see LLM as being on the path to AI) I expect Big Capital to have its way irrespective of any attempts to control it
> we have allowed Musk and others to kesslerise the night sky with satellites
Calling it 'kesslerizing' isn't really accurate because starlink satellites aren't actually in stable orbits - they'll decay naturally if not maintained, there isn't really much threat of a long-term Kessler syndrome.
Yes, it affects stargazing a bit, but also I kinda think if I lived in a remote area (or an area where the internet was strictly regulated by the powers-that-be, or an area where I felt that was a significant risk) the trade of "slightly worse stargazing" is probably worth it.
(I also don't see how either of these points is connected)
It's virtual kesslerization because we know they will be replaced at least as fast as they burn up.
I did say the connection was only "somewhat analogous" but I think it's there. It's the tragedy of the commons in both cases, universal goods (clear skies and hallucination-free internet) ruined by thoughtless self-interest.
The danger of Kessler syndrome is some runaway, (nigh) unstoppable cascade - the idea that there will continue to be satellites in orbit because we'll continue to find that to be a useful thing to keep doing is IMO a very different concept. Calling that "kesllerization" feels like watering down a term with a specific meaning to make a much weaker complaint.
And, yeah, I agree in principal that the night sky is a shared resource... but I think the problem with tragedy of the commons arguments in the specific is that nobody can ever agree on which things are worth doing - for me, the existence of affordable, non-terrestrial internet access is pretty clearly worthwhile.
(And I think more people would be in favor of Starlink if it wasn't associated with Elon Musk)
I was going to post about this today: I’ve been using ChatGPT a lot to brainstorm recipes and I’ve been impressed at its ability to come up with good ones despite presumably not being able to cook or taste food or appreciate qualia.
I asked it about that and it said that it has a deep knowledge of recipes in different cultures and eras and also knowledge of how different ingredients work together.
I know you can’t take an LLM’s statements at face value, especially about itself, but it was interesting and, combined with the advanced voice, makes it really feel like chatting with a food nerd friend.
Where I live you can't see virtually any stars except the "evening star". I was thus struck dumb one night I happened to look out (since I seldom do, there being no reward) to the west and saw a very bright object moving quickly toward me, then wink out. I had paid no attention to Musk or his doings, so went to reddit (if we could only get a reddit dedicated exclusively to answering questions about various phenomena, or why the Thunderbirds flew over, or why the police are all over the street) and learned that it was Starlink. I was quite delighted, though obviously it didn't compare to the night sky in the desert or something like that.
I am a city boy, and the first time I slept in a forest I was shocked how *many* stars were up there. I always assumed it was just a few dozens (about a dozen constellations with about a dozen stars each), but if you are at a dark place away from cities and the sky is clear, there are myriads of stars.
Like, I was aware of the fact that there are many stars in the galaxy, I just assumed that you cannot see too many of them with your eyes.
Exactly the same for me except I was on a “sky island” out west. Had no clue prior to that.
I've since seen the familiar string.
> Why call it hallucinations?
Its a very good term, and an early image ai was googles deep dream
No it isn't. Or rather it is if you are trying to disguise the inadequacy of LLM. Hallucinating would be imagining there are dragons in the battle scene in Heaven's Gate, and would be an interesting thing for a LLM to do. Thinking Averill is not Jim is stupidity.
Here's a gem from Google AI: "The next dividend date for Vanguard FTSE 100 UCITS ETF (VUKE.L) is projected to be 11.69% from September 24, 2023 to September 24, 2024." Genuine response to a genuine query of mine last week, not something I found on the internet. I can't imagine hallucinating that dates can be expressed as percentages. This is not hallucination, it's just shit.
Agreed. "Hallucination" is pure branding (supplanting the more accurate previous term, "egregiously wrong", with one that inaccurately flatters LLM's abilities) and I'm annoyed that essentially everyone immediately bought into a misrepresentative terminology change. If anyone asked me to point to an example of "NPCs receive software update", it would be exactly this.
I think it's a mistake to treat the current generation of LLMs as being conscious and having "seen the film" and "read the discussion". I think their output is more on the order of vivid dreaming, where sometimes things seem to just happen using "dream logic" and associations. But they're getting better and better.
I stargaze, and I think the satellites are fine. I want humans to colonize the rest of the universe. I'd love to be able to look up and see orbital habitats and space elevators and a ring city.
Yes sorry that was shorthand, I don't think LLMs are or will be conscious. In fact I think their more enthusiastic supporters are in an analogous position to someone proclaiming in 1900 "Air travel is bound to revolutionise 20th century life, look how close to perfection the hydrogen dirigible is."
The stars is a nice idea but they are awfully far away. And Elon's satellites are inward looking, making sure every square inch of the globe has high speed access to the information that Heaven's Gate is about Averill and Jim.
No, *I'm* sorry, I'm pretty sure I understood you but I guess my response was unclear. :-) I got that you were using those as metaphors, and I was trying to say that those metaphors are counterproductive.
Upthread, I mention that I've read the entire King James Version of the Bible. I haven't memorized it, I can't recite more than tiny fragments, there's probably lots of mistakes in my memory. If I'm prompted to talk about heave offerings vs wave offerings, I really can't go much deeper, and I'm only 90% sure that those are actual things in the first place. So I'll try to answer questions either with explicit acknowledgement of my limits, or more usually, in a very casual way that should make it clear that I'm talking off the cuff and shouldn't be relied on. ;-)
I think part of what happens with hallucinations is that we force AIs to respond even when they don't have strong associations. And the less signal there is, the more the surrounding noise can be misinterpreted as signal. Which is what I think is going on with human dreaming, too.
Does that make any sense?
Time and space are relative. I mean not in the physics sense, but rather in a perception sense. The stars are indeed far away for a person, but for humanity?
E. Coli reproduces, under ideal conditions, in about 20 minutes. It's hard to tell how long it lives, but it looks like about 2 hours to a few months (unsure if this is only how long it can survive, while waiting for better conditions). If people were experiencing time like bacteria, it would seem like much more time must pass for anything to happen. Yet colonies of bacteria eat, grow, and spread out, over (for them) fantastically long periods of time.
When we start building multi-generation colonization ships, humanity will spread throughout the galaxy, though it may take hundreds of years to get from system to system. But individuals may only see one star system, or none.
Requesting advice:
I've published several books and short stories online, and in order to get them more views, I opened a Youtube channel, dealing mainly with media analysis and political philosophy. I want to make videos about things that A. will get me a decent viewership and B. I genuinely care about.
Following that logic, I'm considering doing a video summery of one of the top articles by Scott.
What article would you like to see in video-essay form? Whether because you'd enjoy watching it yourself or because you could send it to the same friends that refused to read a long ass paper about neuroscience.
I'm thinking about Moloch, or maybe the notes The hungry brain?
Sample (How No Country for Old Men Does Symbolism Right):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOW8LU050Ms&ab_channel=Noam
Check out rational animations on YouTube for inspiration.
A 5 minute, very high production quality video on moloch that is reasonably bi-partisan would probably be useful to reshare when debating
I don't know what's more challenging, the 5 minutes of the high production quality.
Just some ideas:
If you read do nothing else, remember this one:
Titles and thumbnails are the main reason why people click on a video.
If you have subscribers, they're more likely to watch whatever you post, but for everyone else, you have to have a compelling reason why they should click on your video as opposed to the millions of others. Your title isn't bad but there are lots of videos about the movie's symbolism. Maybe try taking a provocative claim and making that the title instead.
It seems like the main way channels grow is trying to find a "gimmick" and then making a lot of videos using it. There is a youtuber who made a video about the unemployment rate in a video game town. He just walked around and tried to figure out whether they worked or not. Funny idea, successful video. Then he made a few more of those and now is one of the biggest video game youtube channels.
Making videos about whatever is in the news can get your subscribers up.
Commentaries on well known pop culture artifacts can work pretty well, although it's best to seem like you have novel take.
If you find a niche that no one else is doing and some people are interested in, you can get a small but loyal audience.
>There is a youtuber who made a video about the unemployment rate in a video game town.
AnyAustin's videos are amazing.
Thanks for taking the time, I'll think about it.
Also, people like it when you show your face. It's just part of our psychology.
From what I've heard of Youtube thumbnails, it has to be a shocked-looking face though.
Edit: Or perhaps not. New research suggests closed mouths are superior: https://x.com/MrBeast/status/1699459457002918138
I'd consider demographics when applying this kind of analysis. The open mouthed faced is the subject of endless memes, and many crowds find it fake and unappealing (myself included). I will baselessly claim that people who are into literally analysis will prefer something slightly more sophisticated. Also, y'all don't what I look like. Are you sure this face is a net positive?
You might want to read at least some of your short stories online.
I'm actually testing voice actors for the audio book. I agree that it seems like an easy (but pricy) way to lower the barrier for entry. Thanks!
Did I dream this, or was there some sort of mystery series that followed a detective from case to case, with the twist being that the detective was the one committing all the murders and then framing other people for them?
This is also a shocking twist in one of the "Father Brown" stories by Chesterton, where the namesake priest detective reveals this horrible truth in a large company of friends. My shock when I first read it was quite significant. Father Brown, of course, continutes to explain that he meant "he killed them" in a sense that he gets into the mind of a killer in each specific case so well, that...
One of the best ones.
You might be thinking about "Hannibal", maybe?
Not quite the same as what you said, but this is a subplot in Heavy Rain.
That is a pretty common trope. You can always check the TV Tropes page: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DetectiveMole
Reminds me of Dead Air by Ian Banks, though if I recall this is only one plausible interpretation. I'm not sure, ut was a long time since I read it. Great book, great author.
There's a famous horror movie that ends with the detective being killed, and in the source material (which I haven't read) the ending instead reveals the detective committed the murder or murders he's investigating. I can't, of course, reveal any titles as that would spoil them.
You mean, other than Murder, She Wrote? You of course noticed that suspicious deaths in coastal Maine decreased 26% since the passing of Angela Lansbury.
There's a video game that did that. Naming it would of course be spoilers.
Is it the one with a weather related title by any chance?
That's the one I was thinking. One with a night-related title is also within shooting distance.
This is one of the plotlines of Hotline Miami 2. Not much of a mystery though.
Not quite what you're looking for, but Dexter is somewhat similar to this.
Sherlock had an episode where someone staged things to make it look like he'd been doing that all along. I don't know if anything has played it straight though
In my ongoing quest to consistently conceptualize perception I'm falling back on a not new idea.
(beowulf888 said I should just enjoy the ride. thanks, but I can't.)
The idea is that whether one is awake or dreaming, one is conscious of, let's call it, temporarily, stuff.
I know I'm not the only one who was once woken up by an alarm clock while dreaming. In one of my dreams I was doing some gardening, in a bar, and suddenly one of the sheep begins baaing. Baa, baa, baa! I woke up and realized it's the alarm clock.
So being awake is like dreaming but with one's body putting more of what actually happens in the content of one's dreams.
But this means the following:
While I dreamed, in the usual sense of that sentence, it was *not me* who really "heard" the alarm clock, and what I heard was *not the alarm clock*.
My body "heard" the alarm clock, like a computer with Siri or Alexa running on it might "hear" an alarm clock, and it, my body, made/caused/produced that I in and as part of the dream heard the sheep. (The latter being something that I presume a computer, unlike a human body, doesn't do.)
My body of course also made/caused/produced everything else in the dream, including me.
I'm one of the fictions or models my body makes based on the reality of it being a physical thing among other physical things.
So one really needs different words for what happens when one's body "hears", "feels", "smells", "sees" or "tastes" something -- these are all physical processes -- and when one oneself hears, feels, smells, sees or tastes something -- those aren't. Those happen in the dream.
I used to want to identify myself with my body, but I'm at a point where it seems to me that I just can't do that consistently.
This idea here removes the trouble of wondering what it is that one is seeing with one's eyes.
One does not see anything with one's eyes.
One is not a real thing and one's presumed eyes, that what you see in a mirror, aren't real eyes (and the mirror isn't real too). One's body is a real thing and "sees" real things with his real eyes, but it itself has no clue about it. Just like my phone has no clue about anything. I'm the one, the one of whom my body is "dreaming", who has a clue about it.
The only reason my body is not just a zombie, like most other things, is because of the simulation it is running, in which I'm trapped and experience everything.
As to the nature of the simulation: Maybe it's somewhat like when electrons accelerate. They just produce waves in some electromagnetic field. If all the matter in a brain moves like it does, it might just produce some waves that *are* the simulation. That might be a reason why computer, as we built them, can never be conscious. The matter moves too differently from how matter in a brain moves, irrespective of any information processing similarities.
I wanted to identify with my body, so that it's me who makes decisions, whether one calls them free or not, but in this conceptualisation my body just makes/causes/produces a dream in which I feel, as a part of the dream, like I'm making decisions.
Is my reasoning wrong somewhere?
I hope you don’t mind me asking a few questions? In your understanding, what is thought? Is it something you perceive too (the voice in your head)? Anything you perceive is not you. Whenever you attach a “self” label to something, what is doing the attaching? What are you, really?
Thoughts, not as the physical processes in my brain, but "their content", I do perceive.
Otherwise I would not know that I'm thinking :D
I either think in speech imagination, and pretty similar stuff then happens in my brain as would happen when I were actually speaking. Or I think in visual imagination.
> Whenever you attach a “self” label to something, what is doing the attaching?
With this you touch a big point, I guess. That was something that prevented me for a long time from buying all the "I am a fiction" talk.
But consider it like this:
I am clearly that thing lying on the sofa. I feel it beneath me and I see the ceiling above me. I can move my arms and legs but all else, the pillows, I can only move with them.
But if everything I'm perceiving is only a fictional model of a thing, not the thing itself, then that body is only a fiction of the real one too.
I'm not the one doing the attaching of the self label on that fictional body with which I can soooo easily identify. I even cry when it gets cut.
It is my *real* body that is doing the attaching.
It is the one who is doing *everything*. Even the thinking of which I have explained how "I" do it. It makes it seem to me I'm doing something, just like it makes *everything* seem to me.
I really hate this. From an intellectual perspective. I don't cry about it. But I want to find a way out of this idea.
Your sensorium is produced by your brain and isn’t necessarily faithful to the real world, that’s true.
That doesn’t have to mean that the self is an illusion or that we’re all in a simulation.
Well, ... There are these pictures, provoking optical illusions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon_color_spreading
You see areas, not just lines, of certain colors in these pictures.
And these areas aren't there. They do not exist.
Not like the other parts of the pictures, which exist as real parts of the physical thing on which the picture is rendered. That is, as pigmented paper or in that color shining pixels.
What you see is a fiction.
And I conclude all my seeing is like that, and you too, I guess.
It only seems to me, when I open my eyes, that I see things. But I don't see them. I see fictions of them ... or, as such optical illusions show, in some cases: of nothing.
My seeing is just most strong imagination. A simulation of aspects of reality. And this simulation is not always, in it's own special way -- birds may have a different one -- "correct" or "true" to reality.
And since I'm a part of what I perceive, I'm a part of that simulation.
It's a bit like what Kant said about not being able to know anything about the real things, or physical things, or things in themselves -- except that I think my body belongs to these things too, and that I think we can know something about them, for example that our bodies are able to generate fictions of themselves, which we are.
And I still don't like this. I would prefer to identify with my body.
When you say that your body is creating fictions, that's a different statement from your body is perceiving fictions. The way I see it, the sense of self may very well be a fiction created by the body, but the perceiver (at least in certain mental states) can exist without a sense of self. And are you really part of what you perceive? You and I can observe a couch sitting in the middle of the room. The definition of a couch as a type of object, the material that makes up the couch, and the underlying physics of the material that makes up the couch may all be abstracted into a placeholder we conveniently call a couch — but there's nothing in that formulation that says we both can't sit on the couch at the same time. If OTOH you don't believe the couch is real, and our selves aren't real, then you have to come up with a way for two unreal entities can perceive an unreal object — but that unreal object continues to be there when we're not in the room with it.
That's why I distinguish between what our bodies do, and what we do.
> When you say that your body is creating fictions, that's a different statement from your body is perceiving fictions.
It doesn't. I, inside and as part of the model of all it really "perceives" and constructs the model of, do perceive those fictions.
I put the terms like seeing and perceiving in quotes when I say my body is doing it, because it does it in the way an elevator "sees" that someone is blocking its doors.
Would the elevator have something that's enough like a human brain, then a fiction of the elevator, which would then accompany the doings of the elevator's physical parts, would see that someone who's blocking its doors. It might be different though, its resolution would consist of just one pixel, on or off, because it has just a light barrier with which to "see".
> And are you really part of what you perceive? You and I can observe a couch sitting in the middle of the room. The definition of a couch as a type of object, the material that makes up the couch, and the underlying physics of the material that makes up the couch may all be abstracted into a placeholder we conveniently call a couch — but there's nothing in that formulation that says we both can't sit on the couch at the same time.
Our bodies can sit on the same couch, but we sit on different "couches" in our bodies respective models of reality.
Since *all* I'm perceiving, including all I attribute to being a part of me -- that is, the "body" I see -- is part of the fictional model my (real) body creates, I am part of what I perceive. A part of that model.
Even my thoughts I perceive, I'm aware of them as imaginations of speech acts or sight of things. All not real therefore.
> If OTOH you don't believe the couch is real, and our selves aren't real, then you have to come up with a way for two unreal entities can perceive an unreal object — but that unreal object continues to be there when we're not in the room with it.
I believe in the existence of (real) things, the world, to explain all the regularities of "the world", that is the fiction I live in.
And I only go through this complication, through all this hassle, because direct realism is false. This idea here is the only alternative conception I find to make sense.
OK. I think I understand what you're saying. It sounds to me like you're an idealist. But I'm not quite sure why you're uncomfortable being an idealist. You're in good company. Neils Bohr was an idealist (along with a lot of his colleagues). And from your response to my couch analogy, I would call you a "consensus idealist" (a term of my own coinage for the idea that conscious entities work together to create reality). Donald Hoffman has been advocating something like that lately (a couple of Youtube links below).
I'm not an idealist (although I think the physicalists would say I am). I'm a Middle-Way peep. I believe there is a universe outside ourselves, but I see consciousness as being an emergent property from the constants that define our physical realm. The universe came before consciousness, and consciousness does not create reality as we go along, but it can interact with reality and the universe can respond in a limited pan-psychic way. Whoah! I hope a crowd of rationalists with torches and pitchforks doesn't come after me for saying that!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgusmjQujNw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmieNQH7Q4w
If you think you understand what I'm saying, then I'm not sure to understand it myself anymore :))
I meant what I said as materialistic as possible.
I check out the videos and think some more. Thanks.
People make too much of optical illusions, and the fact that we can’t see everything. That’s true, we can’t see as well as an eagle, and what we see is an approximation. A bat sees less, an eagle more. But what we is a reflection of reality at the level we need to see it.
Possibly related: My hearing seems to have a capacity for short instant replay. I believe this is common.
In real world, I can have a "Huh, what?" reaction to a sound, and then pull it out of memory.
Who or what heard the sound the first time?
That's really cool!
Isn't that like the thing they emphasize in defensive driving - only in reverse - you decided to stop, then you initiate stopping some nontrivial time later?
I guess I'm a safety-first geek, because when I see people on e.g. the freeway following 10 feet behind the next car, I feel like that's not a cushion I'd be comfortable with.
At least, I get that it happens in traffic, from time to time even to me, but lots of folks on the interstate seem like they are driving all 300 miles that way.
Wow, I read your comment, thought of something that might be related - at least it genuinely popped into my mind - but then who came along and turned it into an earnest PSA?
I know that too. With me it's often when I hear someone in the background say my name.
According to the theory, it was my body that "heard" it, and then retconed me into having heard it half a second ago.
Or differently said: it makes it appear to me -- like it makes everything *only* appear to me -- that half a second ago someone said my name.
This is also somewhat consistent with Daniel Dennett's "multiple drafts theory".
Kaj Sotala on LessWrong.com has written a series of essays exploring existence. Based on what you've written here, I think you might find the series interesting. Here's the first essay:
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/ZbmRyDN8TCpBTZSip/p/Mf2MCkYgSZSJRz5nM
"I used to want to identify myself with my body, but I'm at a point where it seems to me that I just can't do that consistently."
This is called the Mind Body Problem and has exercised philosophers since the beginning of philosophy or at least since Descartes. Google it to learn how greater minds than ours have equally failed to resolve it.
The awareness simulation is real to you and you can talk about it so it's real to your reasoning processes which are in turn real to the outside world. (Anyway, the outside world is a simulation created by atoms which are in turn simulations created by subatomic particles which are merely simulations (aka emergent properties) of quantum foam.)
So the real/simulation split is just a simulation - it isn't real :)
How do you know there's only one you inside you? I don't mean multiple personalities, but multiple awarenesses sharing the same thoughts and experiences.
PS: there is a different word, at least a collective term: qualia.
> The awareness simulation is real to you
That's not how I use that word. Only physical things are real, not how they seem.
I just replied to Neurology For You in this thread with a link to Wikipedia about neon-like color spreading.
If I see a pink ring on a wall with not the tinyest amount of pink pigment on it, then I see something that isn't there, that is not real, and just because it seems to me that it is there does not make it real ... to me or anyone.
Just to explain where I'm coming from.
> How do you know there's only one you inside you? I don't mean multiple personalities, but multiple awarenesses sharing the same thoughts and experiences.
If they share all the same thoughts and experiences then I do it like the mathematicians: I put an equal sign between those awarenesses, as you call them, and count them as one, not multiple.
> Only physical things are real, not how they seem.
I'd argue that we only perceive physical things as they seem not as they are.
But further up, you argue hat we don't perceive things as they are, so I'm not sure if I'm arguing with you or against you. ;-) And I'm with Malcolm on this when he says "The outside world is a simulation created by atoms which are in turn simulations created by subatomic particles..."
Say you see a chair painted with red enamel (which would probably use Quinacridone Red as a pigment) — do you think the enamel is inherently red? If so, how about we do the following thought experiment?...
Say you had a microscope that could magnify down to the atomic level. You scrape a sample of the pigment off that chair and bring the magnification of your microscope up to full magnification to the point where you can see the atoms of the Quinacridone molecule (C₂₀H₁₂N₂O₂) arranged around three benzene rings. Would you see the color red at that level of magnification? As you reduced the magnification at what point would you see red?
A little more info for our thought experiment... According to ChatGPT, a Quinacridone molecule is about 10-15 angstroms across at its widest length. Now what is the wavelength of red light? It ranges from 6200 to 7500 angstroms (or about 620 to 750 nanometers). So at what point would a clump of Quinacridone molecules seem to be red? I would guess that when we would need to look at a sample of at least 62,000 to 75,000 of those molecules across — or about 0.65 microns to 0.75 microns (squared?) before we'd begin to see the red color of Quinacridone pigment.
There are no colors at the atomic level because the wavelength of light in the visible range for humans is far longer than the size of atoms. This should be the first hint that the way you perceive reality is only a convenient illusion provided by your qualia. There are probably other animals that perceive the 620 to 750 nm wavelengths. Should we assume they perceive the quality of red the same way we perceive it? If they have the same types of cones and rods in their eyes, maybe they do. But what if their brains are wired differently? Maybe they perceive red the way we perceive green and vice versa?
Oh, and about the red! Exactly that is a reason to call our perceptions or percept or qualia fictions.
There is -- really -- no red. Not on an apple and not in the brain.
Just apples with a surface such and such that in such and such atmosphere under such and such lighting our bodies make us, under such and such further conditions, see a red apple -- not the real one, the real one is only in this sense "red", but a fictional model of it.
> I'd argue that we only perceive physical things as they seem not as they are.
> But further up, you argue hat we don't perceive things as they are, so I'm not sure if I'm arguing with you or against you. ;-)
I don't know yet too :D
"We only perceive physical things as they seem not as they are."
I say, things do not seem in any way on their own. They seem to someone.
When "something seems to be somehow", then there is always some animal, a body, that has created a model of it by what is happening in its brain.
Daniel Dennett has put that very baffling, when he's written a dialog with someone who is suffering the illusion of a pink ring being on the surface of a white painting with black and red lines on it. (Neon color spreding)
The guy says: "But how come I see that ring?"
Dennett answers: "Which ring?"
"Well, the ring there."
"There is no ring. It just seems to you there is one."
So I say, we do not perceive things at all, it's not even right to say we perceive them only as they seem.
They do not seem, our bodies make they seem, and sometimes our bodies make even nothing seem to be somehow.
And, thankfully, we -- eh, our bodies -- are all descendants of tried and tested "perceivers", and most of us -- again, really our bodies -- quite good at that ourselves.
I don't understand the point that Dennett was trying to make — but most of Dennett's arguments about the nature of consciousness seemed full of contradictions to me — i.e. consciousness is an illusion, but it's real. If I were the guy seeing the pink phosphene ring, I'd tell Dennett to take a hike. After all, how dare the Dennett P-Zombie tell me what I'm experiencing isn't real?!
If you think consciousness is an illusion, why would you trust your qualia to tell you anything useful about the external world?
Note: I separate the idea of self from consciousness. I think my "I" is an illusion. But I think consciousness is a real phenomenon. And I think it's possible to be conscious without self-identity (heck, I've experienced that state through psychedelics and meditation). I also believe in free will (within the constraints of physical laws and the constraints of our body). Indeed, free will is an important element of consciousness.
Yes, the self is a fiction of sorts but I’m not sure what I’m going to do with that information, or why it needs too much contemplation.
As Malcolm Storey above has commented, this problem has exercised many philosophers since at least Descartes!
I believe, If I give it enough contemplation to come up with an awesome solution, something no one has ever achieved before, revolutionizing all human understanding, I get laid.
You might adjust your moral outlook if it were true.
https://opentheory.net/2018/09/a-new-theory-of-open-individualism/
Quoting: "In terms of ethics, if this version of Open Individualism is true, it’d be deep justification for utilitarianism: let’s be good to each other, because We Are The Same Thing."
Interesting. That's about where I'd gotten to but from a different route.
Well that’s a different argument, not about the fiction of the self but the oneness of all selves. However you just need a golden rule for this.
The golden rule needs moral realism. This theory doesn't require it.
> I'm one of the fictions or models my body makes based on the reality of it being a physical thing among other physical things.
> So one really needs different words for what happens when one's body "hears", "feels", "smells", "sees" or "tastes" something -- these are all physical processes -- and when one oneself hears, feels, smells, sees or tastes something
Take all this with a huge grain of salt, but... Coming at this from a non-expert Buddhist standpoint, I think the second quote is where you start diverging from more standard Buddhist thought. If the self is a fiction, then don't go forward as though the self is a base concept, but instead continue to deconstruct the fictional self and work with lower-level concepts. Perhaps, and this is for the specific purpose of gaining understanding of the system, don't identify with the fictional self, because that locks in a viewpoint and brings in outside assumptions. (And then when you're done, you can go right back to identifying with the fictional self and even with your body.) I ... think that's fairly safe?
I totally did not expect, or forgot, someone might have a Buddhist take on this.
But right, there's this talk about the self not being real too.
Not sure though how to do such deconstruction lover-level stuff.
Sounds like an awful long time of awful meditating :))
You're already doing part of it, by thinking of the self as a fiction. So instead of saying "I want", maybe try looking at it as "the fictional self wants", and see if that gives you any new questions to think about?
I'd suggest reading a few things, here and there, and see if anything strikes a chord. And then come back and read it again 6 months later, and see how it feels. It's a cool feeling to come back and see that the thing that was fascinating before, is now mundane, and the thing that was obscure and confusing before, is now fascinating. (My favorite introductory overview is "The Way of Zen" by Alan Watts.)
Why is climate change almost entirely absent from the US political discourse? I understand that it's not appealing to politicians or the average citizen to think about lifestyle changes, but it seems to me that not even intellectuals talk about it.
Most economic analyses just focus on GDP growth ignoring the cost (and the opportunities) of completely transforming the energy system or the trillions needed to adapt to extreme events.
(I'm not American and I don't live there and while I think I follow American politics pretty closely, I'm very happy to be told I got this wrong by somebody more in the know)
They do discuss it in newspapers and media but I think it isn’t a useful topic to bring up for the Democrats in the current political environment.
Judging by some of the comments though, I get the impression that some Americans don’t care because they are used to spending all their time in air conditioned rooms and cars and so they don’t think there will be any difference.
I've never understood why conservation related things - even at its simplest, conservation in the Amory Lovins negawatt-sense - do not qualify as innovation in the ordinary way that will result in jobs, money! I've always figured that Exxon has in a file drawer a plan for how to keep reliably making money After Fossil Fuels. Or at least during the long transition. So I don't understand the failure of imagination by everyone else, in this regard. And it's not sudden. I was wondering this about 1990. This fear of change seems too widespread to be attributable to something rational like everybody knowing the energy density of gasoline.
Bastiat suffered from a similar mental block when it come to broken windows.
Ask yourself why that Exxon plan is still in the file drawer and you'll be well on the way to answering your own question.
I guess I don’t see that the solar panel powering the ranch gate is like deliberately breaking a window.
In each case a needless expense is being imposed on someone, and passed off as a good thing. If you believe the solar panel is necessary, make *that* argument-- not tell us that the cost is a good thing regardless.
You’ll have to explain it to the bubbas - I don’t have a ranch, or a gate - why the grid is free but their solar panel carries a societal cost.
You're the one who wants the bubbas to change the way they power their gates. How come I have to do the explaining?
To the extent global warming environmentalism had taken hold in the US, it seems many favored policies are not actually helpful: anti-nuclear power, pro-CAFE, very little effort put into pushing a carbon tax (admittedly a bit of a loser election issue if not carefully packaged), anti-fracking (despite it resulting in massive reductions of CO2 emissions in the US, though one can argue about the scale of methane leakage), anti-carbon capture, anti-geoengineering, etc. From these deficiencies, it's clear many "environmentalists" don't actually care about fixing any problems but instead wish to use the issue to attack perceived social injustices and political rivals.
It’s relevant but not really a debate point since one of the two parties is largely in denial. Also the US is a rich country that is more able to absorb the shocks than most.
Yes, it takes two to debate. The last presidential debate did have a question on climate change, but Trump's answer had nothing to do with climate change.
Does it matter if the discourse includes climate change? As far as I can tell the USA is investing heavily in green energy; not as much as China but much more than many other western countries. https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2024/united-states
The emission pro capita of the US are still much higher than most countries in the world and their global share of investment in clean energy is much lower than their share of GDP. So at the moment the US is contributing more to the problem than to the solution
Here is a recent article perhaps explaining some of the broken dynamics: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-opinion-how-us-lost-solar-power-race-to-china/
A lot of the current quiet is because there needs to be bipartisan collaboration for anything that isn’t an administration’s capstone policy, even when the same party controls the legislative and executive branches. The Republican Party initially took an anti-climate-change stance and made it part of the culture war. Since then, it’s become clear that a) they’ve lost on that front and b) it’s serious enough that adhering to their position would cause actual problems as a result of carbon emissions/lack of preparation for climate-related disasters/etc. They have to rehabilitate their stance to allow for bipartisan work on the problem, but can’t be seen to change on a dime.
The result is that they’ve reduced messaging on it and slowly tried to cede that ground in the culture war. The Democrats want to work with them on this, so they’re largely not trying to bring it to the forefront and make them fight battles they still feel they would have to. In 5, maybe 10 years at the worst it’ll be far enough in the past that they can work together on this. In the meantime, the Republicans are trying to look the other way while the Democrats do what they can solo. Efforts from the left wing of the Democrats in 2019-2021 to make climate change an issue that the party would fight to achieve without bipartisan support failed. Since then, it’s basically been minor stuff and waiting for the Republicans to be ready to work together.
Plenty of people care about it, but it’s been obvious since late 2021 that nothing major was going to happen for a while. That combined with letting it fade from the culture war has led to a period of quiet at both the high-brow and low-brow levels.
Thanks, this is a very helpful summary
That's a much more optimistic take than what I thought. Thanks.
The fact that the US is a large country with a lot of internal climatic diversity probably has something to do with it: it makes us less susceptible to the notion of the status quo being the one correct climate. All the more so when we have for generations been voting with our feet for warmer weather. The guy in Chicago who they're trying to scare with the specter of missing the arbitrary 2C warming target, has probably at least been toying with the idea of moving to Florida.
Isn’t Florida a place that will likely suffer significantly from climate change? With the sea level rising and so forth.
The internal migration statistics suggest that people aren't too worried about that. You can argue that they ought to be, but what we're trying to do in this thread is explain the attitudes they actually have. (ETA: Swap in Arizona if you like. People have been moving there too.)
Well, a lot of people in Northern Europe want to live in warmer places too, so it's not really a very convincing explanation.
You may just be confused by the terminology. US political discourse has a lot of talk about "Green Energy" and "Carbon Free Energy" because supporting those are seen as the solution to climate change.
You ask why they don't think about "lifestyle changes" and that's because they are not promoting "lifestyle changes" as the solution to climate change. The solution the political discourse talks about is to maintain and continually improve our lifestyle while combating climate change by developing new technologies that don't emit as much carbon dioxide.
I guess the problem for those of us who happen to be interested in conservation, and just so happen to also be on the "towards simpler" end of the spectrum is that we don't agree about what the best parts of "our lifestyle" are.
For instance, the early spread of Covid among the jetsetting elite caused me to grouse that all this air travel is way overrated and out of control.
On the other hand, to me, plumbing is the greatest thing in the world and I would be astonished (and heartbroken) at losing it, even in my worst imaginings about the future (which are indeed grim, and more so every day).
I mean, the Democrats believe it and talk about it. As myst_05 says, the country's further right than Europe at least and each party has only so many things they can talk about. I feel like the identity issues are taking center stage, but that may just be my personal beef so take it with a grain of salt.
I'd guess in the last couple of elections the Green New Deal didn't work out as everyone expected and the Democrats are really worried about working-class white guys in swing states who tend to overlap with the Rust Belt that suffered from deindustrialization and tend to blame environmentalism in general. But it's always tricky to know exactly what politicians are thinking, they are the least likely people to tell you.
I thought the IRA was mostly a success? And isn't the answer to deindustrialisation bringing green technologies to the US (as the IRA is trying to do)? I find there's a huge opportunity lost with China now being the leader on all the key green technologies...
Could be. If they failed to *sell* it as a success, though, that's unfortunately more important in politics.
Climate change is luckily not a zero sum game. China being the leader and rapidly switching to solar/nuclear/hydro is amazing news because it results in a rapid reduction of total CO2 emitted on the planet. If they then sell a bunch of cheap solar panels to the entire world and decarbonize the rest of us, that's a win-win for all.
China is indeed being a "leader" in this, but not the way you seem to think: https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=CHN~USA~IND#what-are-the-country-s-annual-co2-emissions.
And possibly climate isn't a major part of the US political discourse because we're mostly happy with where we are headed under the status quo.
I mean, for humanity, yeah.
In the geopolitical realm, though, that does improve China's position vis-a-vis our own. Arguably European industrialization wound up helping the world in terms of living standards in the long run, but it was pretty bad for China between about 1830 and 1980.
It's a global problem and there is only so much the US can do. It doesn't really matter what the GHG emissions per capita are in the states when China is building a new coal plant every week, and all of the developing countries are experiencing a population boom with the requisite energy demands. Not to mention current political systems are really bad at dealing with long term problems that have short term costs, even over a few decades, and this is an issue on the scale of centuries.
Personally I think the overt and laughably false doomerism from certain people also turned a lot of the public off. When you've been told that the world is going to end from global warming in the next 5/10 years unless we Do Something, and people have been saying that for the last 40 years, they lose a lot of credibility. The public tunes out and starts to wonder if the whole thing is bunk. Climate change is a good case study in the perils of overstating alarmism to try and raise awareness of an issue. Hans Rosling covers this in Factfulness, which is a good read.
Well, it is ending for plenty of species, but that's owing (also, and more heavily) to habitat loss. As soon as the environmental movement was co-opted by the humanist left - it became impossible to describe the problems of climate change in terms of environmental impacts, rather than "people" impacts. And of course, there are always cynical libertarians standing by to leverage that. You want to save the planet (e.g. like people largely uncontroversially and bipartisanly wanted to do for decades, up until the 80s)? You must hate people! And I saw you driving a car! And I saw Emerson's wife doing Thoreau's laundry! QE-Dumb-D!
Probably this has to do with the fact that a lot fewer people care about impact on the environment than about impact on people. "Lots of insect and plant species will die if we don't do something" << "Lots of humans will die if we don't do something," at least in the eyes of most voters.
Also, there does seem to be a strain of the hairshirt in American environmental rhetoric, probably derived from our Puritan heritage. (You see lots of that in antiracism as well.) I think that strain is actively harmful. We are not going to reduce CO2 emissions in the US (or probably most democracies) by way of getting voters to accept a big drop in quality of life--even in the stuff that you think was frivolous and they shouldn't have wanted anyway. But we can still substantially reduce CO2 emissions by improved technology and switching over to that technology when it becomes available.
We've largely switched over to LEDs for lighting, we're largely switching over to heat pumps for electric heating, code requirements for insulation have gone up substantially over time, appliances have efficiency requirements that seem to be up to the point where they impose a trafeoff between {electrical/water} efficiency and doing their job, electric cars are becoming more and more common and seem to me to obviously be the future, etc. I think in terms of actually taking action that will help reduce CO2 emissions, we've done a fair bit. OTOH, it's a partisan issue in the US, so even when Republicans are okay with regulations requiring more insulation or efficient appliances or whatever, they usually don't talk about AGW as a reason for it.
It's also notable that environmentalists tend to be pretty hostile to nuclear power, and also very often environmental arguments are used for why solar plants, wind farms, high-efficiency transmission lines, and the like can't be built in a given place. (Though that may just be because environmental regulations are the easiest tool to block them for the people who want those things built far from their backyards.)
> fewer people care
They used to though.
It’s pretty sorry to put wind towers in the path of migratory bird fallout in the Gulf. Or at least, to do it without - for once - even “studying” it.
And too - rooftops. It may be that grassland is opportune for solar panels, but it’s too bad to place them on habitat when we’ve got all these flat roofs.
The efficiency gains used to be celebrated but not so much anymore. Now we are rolling goal recreationally. Of course some people will say we plowed our savings on our refrigerators, into more energy-intensive TVs.
I am not keen for nuclear, certainly (though not worried the market is about to supply it). I feel like I can maintain that as long as e.g. whatever city I live in lights its buildings up all night &etc. Give Amory Lovins a chance.
That argument about China would only work if China were also not moving to renewables, but it is.
Good points.
I think human-caused climate change is real, and is significantly warming our planet. But alarmism really was overstated, at least in a time-frame sense. And most people lose patience with that pretty fast.
Adding to your point on "it's a global problem", a lot of people are noticing that diplomatically our world is increasingly breaking down to an US/EU/NATO sphere and a BRICS+ sphere with BRICS growing quite rapidly. It's not talked about a whole lot, but we're increasingly a divided planet, making it much harder to tackle an issue like climate change.
Prediction: The breakdown of the global order will make it easier to fight climate change; as everyone will be for nuclear and there wont be externalizing the cost of production to china.
... no comment of if it will be to late to save this civilization without american world police; but everyone will at least believe they could've been different and it was easy now
Interesting prediction! I hope you're right.
For further reading: https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-shared-socioeconomic-pathways-explore-future-climate-change/
The baseline scenarios of climate change depend heavily on what happens to the global order. That's why there are five SSPs with different climate projections for each. A fun exercise is to pick which SSP you think is most likely based on the description, then see what it implies for (a) the default magnitude of climate change and (b) the ability to deal with or change that path.
You shouldn't, my near term predictions of civilization collapse airnt great
I agree that alarmism might be overstated, but from a purely economic point it makes sense to try to reduce emissions faster than under the current trajectory (global emissions haven't peaked yet). If you account for the cost of dealing with the impact of climate change, as well as the loss of lives due to pollution and extreme events, rationally we would do more. The problem, as you suggest, it's that it's a global issue so being the only country taking action doesn't make sense and diplomacy doesn't seem to be working in a very divided planet
' If you account for the cost of dealing with the impact of climate change, as well as the loss of lives due to pollution and extreme events, rationally we would do more.'
I think you are very much mistaken. https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2021/09/climate-economics.html
Most reliable sources say otherwise...
https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/12/05/benefits-of-accelerating-the-climate-transition-outweigh-the-costs
https://www.camecon.com/blog/ipcc-report-macroeconomic-impacts/
Btw, both of your so called reliable sources come from advocacy groups
You have to be careful about parsing 'reliable' sources. What specifically about Cochrane's arguments are you disagreeing with?
From a purely economic point, it would make sense to reduce emissions if the costs (including externalities) exceed the benefits. I am sure this is the case for some emissions, but I seriously doubt it is the general case. What is often ignored are the life saving and enhancing benefits of energy use.
I agree that it is a global issue, and would add that reduced emissions in one part of the world may even result in higher emissions elsewhere, thus undermining most or even any local reductions. The more effective solution is primarily technology, supplemented with adaptation. Think investments in solar, geothermal, nuclear, and carbon sequestration and cloud seeding.
I work for the UK government, which has developed a methodology to assess the societal cost of emitting a tonne of carbon (I imagine the US might have a similar document somewhere)
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/valuing-greenhouse-gas-emissions-in-policy-appraisal/valuation-of-greenhouse-gas-emissions-for-policy-appraisal-and-evaluation
The current cost is more than 300 dollars and is estimated to go up over time. This implies that, once we account for externalities, we should stop most emissions. It would make sense to keep using fossil fuels just in a few hard to abate sectors and then, as you say, we could consider adaptation measures and carbon sequestration.
+1
Better technology >> hairshirts.
Good points.
The US has taken steps to solve this. But the countries that matter, aren't following. As noted upthread, US carbon emissions have been trending steadily downward for twenty years. India is still growing geometrically, and China's graph looks like the classic hockey stick on account of e.g. the *hundred* or so new coal-fired power plants they build every year.
You're being fooled by someone's propaganda, and so you're doing the opposite of helping to solve this problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions
China is by far the greatest polluter. The US is second place but slowly going down. India is growing rapidly - assuming current trends hold they should take over by 2028. Overall trend is that China+India should account for 50% of global emissions by 2030.
What about non-environmentalists with private jets? Arguing about Al Gore’s lifestyle won’t get us very far.
Because America is to the right of every country in Europe, so the Left has to pick their battles and climate change has to compete with questions like abortion or gun control.
A bigger puzzle is why countries like Germany care about it at all, given that they're far enough north and high enough in elevation to not suffer any negative consequences in the next 100 years. Netherlands? Sure, I'd panic loud and clear. But Berlin? You get to save on heating in winter while paying a little bit for AC in the summer.
> A bigger puzzle is why countries like Germany care about it at all, given that they're far enough north and high enough in elevation to not suffer any negative consequences in the next 100 years.
In the last 6 years, Germany had two once-in-a-hundred-years floods and two once-in-a-hundred-years drouths. The floods killed some people and created billions of EUR in property damage. The drouths created damages >30 billion EUR in 2018 and 2019 .
here is an articles from 3 years ago, in case you want to compare it to this years flood-news:
https://www.nzz.ch/wirtschaft/grossschadensjahr-2021-tief-bernd-bringt-deutschland-und-europa-die-bisher-teuerste-naturkatastrophe-der-geschichte-ld.1663929
this article is about the drouts in 2018 and 2019:
https://www.prognos.com/sites/default/files/2022-07/Prognos_KlimawandelfolgenDeutschland_Detailuntersuchung%20Hitzesommer%2018_19_AP2_3a_.pdf
Nur gut, dass Klimawandel nicht echt ist... sonst müsste man sich langsam richtig sorgen machen
If one plotted flood heights and drought durations for the past 150 years in Germany, is there a clear pattern of increasingly dramatic weather? Without a proper historical plot its impossible to make any inferences.
Such a plot is easily available for temperature - and yes, its getting warmer.
> But Berlin? You get to save on heating in winter while paying a little bit for AC in the summer.
Currently, only about 20% of households in Germany have air conditioning. The other 80% probably don't regard higher temperatures as a net benefit.
John, I agree with you that its a pain for many households today, especially given the numerous restrictions on installing visible AC units in many cities. But air conditioning is not particularly expensive - a portable window unit is $200 and works really well for me every summer in the Pacific Northwest. A proper split unit with installation is $5,000 around here and it could easily last for 20-30 years with minor maintenance.
So... if governments allow everyone to install visible AC units (save perhaps for the most important historical buildings), wouldn't that be a solved problem? $5,000 split over 20 years is peanuts for the vast majority of German households.
The issue is not just higher temperatures and sea water level though, extreme weather events are more likely and more extreme because of climate change. So I don't know specifically about Germany, but in the long term it makes economic sense if the world reduced carbon emissions (also because there are opportunities in green technologies).
Your point about America being more on the right compared to Europe makes lots of sense, thanks
> Because America is to the right of every country in Europe
The ex-empires yes, but surely not the eastern block, no? I don't see that as likely for turkey and uckain
The eastern block indeed does not care all that much about climate change. But the U.S. is rather to the right than even the most right wing EU member, for the most member.
Which version of the left-right spectrum do you believe in? Whats your "basis-vector" for the furthest right opinion?
I dont see how the massive blob of "america" doesn't regress to the mean to be moderately right when compared to several smaller segments of a "European country".
Let’s consider the classic economic-social spectrum.
Economics
1. US has the lowest taxes as a share of GDP among all OECD countries, except for Ireland, which is a tax haven.
2. As a result, income taxes are lower overall, even compared to Ireland. Sales tax in the U.S. is under 10%, in the EU VAT is around 20%.
3. "At-will employment" exists in the U.S. but is entirely non-existent in Europe.
4. The U.S. has much lower rates of unionization and collective bargaining. The recent port workers strike was a HUGE event in the States, but would be just another Tuesday in France.
5. There are fewer regulations on goods and services in the U.S. on average, though exceptions exist (sunscreen).
Social
1. At-will abortion is now banned in several U.S. states. In Europe its only banned in Poland and is not discussed much in other countries.
2. US is the only country *in the world* where anyone can buy semi-automatic handguns or long guns without a permit. Concealed carry is legal by default in most states and thanks to the SC carry permits are now "shall-issue" nationwide. Even Harris said that she owns a gun in the last debate.
3. The First Amendment uniquely protects *all* speech, including "hate speech" and most forms of libel against public figures. Used to be left-coded but is now right-coded.
4. Homeschooling is illegal or heavily restricted in most EU countries.
5. No single payer healthcare in the US.
So climate change agenda has to compete against many other issues which are long resolved in the EU. You only get a handful of items to put front and center in your agenda and the American left has chosen to give climate change much less priority.
Isn't abortion more restricted in most of Europe than it was in the US before Roe was overturned, and still more restricted than it is in (say) California or New York now?
> A bigger puzzle is why countries like Germany care about it at all, given that they're far enough north and high enough in elevation to not suffer any negative consequences in the next 100 years. Netherlands? Sure, I'd panic loud and clear. But Berlin? You get to save on heating in winter while paying a little bit for AC in the summer.
This seems similar to the "puzzle" while immigration over the Mexican border is a topic in US politics while Washington DC is thousands (?) of miles away from the border and presumably does not get to see that many immigrants.
They didn’t! At least until Republicans started sending buses up their way.
How much does Germany actually care about climate change though? Of course there is this overall view that the country cares a lot of environment and has been historically a stronghold of ecologist parties in Europe, but regarding specifically anti-climate change policies the results aren't really there
It has much more Co2 emissions per capita than countries like France or UK (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita
Its electricity production is the most Co2 intensive in western Europe (or tied with Italy) due to the combustion of coal and natural gas. (https://app.electricitymaps.com/map?solar=false&remote=true&wind=false)
Its automotive industry is still completely dependent of combustion fuel and succesfully lobbies their governments policies.
This whole makes me wonder whether it's true they actually care that much.
edit: broken link
I'm not claiming anything about whether Germans care more or less than other countries. But that the CO2 emissions are higher than that of Western neighbours is mostly due to historical coincidences that have nothing to do with climate politics. They were already much higher than in the UK or France in the 70s, when no one talked about CO2 emissions.
Germany has traditionally large coal deposits, and built an infrastructure based on coal. France built its infrastructure around nuclear power (not just electricity, also heating), which in hindsight is convenient because it is less CO2 intense. If you look at Germany's Eastern neighbours Poland and Czechia with the same deposit of brown coal, the emissions are higher than for Germany. Likewise, the car industry was one of Germany's main industrial pillars long before CO2 emissions were a thing.
It's also a strong simplification that the German automotive industry is lobbying for longer combustion fuel. Volkswagen (VW) does, the other German car producers lobby in the other direction. And even VW simply lobbies for the timeline that is optimal for VW, which still includes a complete EU ban of combustion car in 2035. VW CEO Blume has publicly opposed politicians who want to push back this deadline or soften it.
I completely agree that the amount of coal available in the country (vs France for example) was what triggered this difference at first. But still, in the last decades, Germany could have aimed to reduce more drastically its CO2 emissions rather than aiming to completely shut down all its nuclear power plants and use gas as a "transition energy".
>"France built its infrastructure around nuclear power (not just electricity, also heating)"
I'm not sure what you mean here with nuclear power heating, isn't it just that the heating is powered with electricity (generated at 80% by nuclear power plants)?
I am very happy that you provided more insights about the German automotive industry as while writing my previous message I indeed felt I had only a superficial knowledge of what was happening and was probably oversimplifying things. I remember reading that German (not only though) car manufacturers were trying to push against the ban combustion cars after 2035, but indeed it seems it's not the case for VW. However from what I was just reading online it seems that Mercedes and BMW indeed push for that.
More generally my understanding was that the German car manufacturers preferred gathering profits from the sells of combustion cars rather than reinvesting them in R&D for electric cars, leading (of course together with the subsidizing, cheaper labor cost, and great investment of China in this direction) to the situation we have now where many European electric cars are imported from China (and growing). Would you say that this is a misconception?
> Germany could have aimed to reduce more drastically its CO2 emissions rather than aiming to completely shut down all its nuclear power plants and use gas as a "transition energy".
Yes, I also think it's a mixed bag. The shutdown of nuclear power plants did show that CO2 emissions are not the highest priority. On the other hand, they are also not the lowest priorities, and there is a transition that is still pretty fast. For example, electricity production in Germany was already at 65% renewables in the first 6 months of 2024. Personally I think Germany is not doing so bad overall, but certainly not the front runner as many Germans believe. All this is a matter of perspective though.
> "France built its infrastructure around nuclear power (not just electricity, also heating)." Isn't it just that the heating is powered with electricity?
Yes exactly, but that is a notable difference. By far most households in Germany are directly heated by oil or by gas, and only a tiny fraction by electricity. That's what I meant.
> More generally my understanding was that the German car manufacturers preferred gathering profits from the sells of combustion cars rather than reinvesting them in R&D for electric cars, leading (of course together with the subsidizing, cheaper labor cost, and great investment of China in this direction) to the situation we have now where many European electric cars are imported from China (and growing). Would you say that this is a misconception?
Hm, I wouldn't agree with that. I think especially VW has invested huge amounts and has bet strongly on electric cars. I have just checked, and for electric cars (including plug-in hybrids) VW was the third-largest producer in 2023 (1st BYD: 3m cars, 2nd Tesla: 1.8m, 3rd VW: 1m). BMW was place 6 with 0.57m, Mercedes place 10 with 0.4m. The top-selling VW model ID.4 already reached >100,000 car sales in 2021. So the German manufacturers haven't been completely idle.
The issue is that they have not managed to reduce costs as fast as Chinese producers. Their cars cost something like 30,000-40,000€. They do try to get down to around 20k, but the Chinese companies are already there. This means that German manufacturers are selling much fewer cars right now than they had anticipated two years ago. (Also for other reasons. The prime market for cars in China has been down for a while.) Which means that the German manufacturers are fighting an uphill battle at the moment. The plan was always to subsidize this fight with their profits from combustion models, and they do lobby for it, but I don't think they plan with that in the long run. Though I think you are right that Mercedes and BMW would like to have more than 10 years left, and have tried to push back the 2035 deadline.
For VW, the situation is even more special. Since they sell fewer electric cars than anticipated, their whole strategy just falls apart at the moment. They will likely not meet the EU emission criteria for 2025, which is an average over all sold cars. In their predictions that had worked out fine, but with so few electric car sales it doesn't. This will likely lead to a fine of several billion euros. Other manufacturers don't have this problem, so right now VW is somewhat desperately trying to lobby against this fine for next year. But the overarching strategy of VW is and has been to switch to electric cars.
> electricity production in Germany was already at 65% renewables in the first 6 months of 2024
Importantly, Germany includes burning biomass as "renewable."
As of 2023, that accounted for about 10% of their energy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#Sources_of_power).
From an emissions / warming standpoint, biomass is more similar to fossil fuels than to other renewables (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emissions_of_energy_sources).
And from other environmental perspectives, i.e. release of pollutants, it's also much worse than other renewables like nuclear.
It’s odd to think people would care about climate change only if it directly rendered their immediate environment unpleasant.
Well, there WAS a nasty flooding just last month, which touched Germany too
Rising sea levels is one issue, but drought is another, and drinking water supply can become tough in Northeastern Germany in the decades to come. Here is a short overview: https://www.t-online.de/klima/leben-umwelt/id_100216412/bilder/duerre-und-waldsterben-die-auswirkungen-der-klimakrise-in-deutschland.html
This seems like… fake news?
https://www.meteoblue.com/en/climate-change/berlin_germany_2950159 Is the best data source for this. There’s a clear temperature trend upwards (3F increase in trend over 40 years) but barely any changes in precipitation (0.4 inch decrease over 40 years).
Obviously bad drought years can still happen but is there any proof they’re more likely to happen in 100 years vs today, specifically in Germany?
for historical data on drought see https://www.ufz.de/index.php?de=40990
I won't do the number crunching for you though, and I do not know what level of statistic sophistication you are expecting.
For the north-eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the years 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 count as 5 drought years in a row. Everybody living there kind of agrees that this is exceptional. You can either believe the people there, or you will have to do some historic hydrology, which I will again not do for you.
https://www.lung.mv-regierung.de/fachinformationen/wasser/hydrologie/
My initial comment was mainly about pointing out that there are consequences beyond the rise of sea level which can people can find concerning. You can of course think that all the people concerned about drought have fallen prey to fake news, but even then, it remains a valid explanation why people are concerned about climate change, even in the absence of imminent risk from rising sea level.
Thanks! Cliff Mass famously crunched the numbers for north western U.S. and found that both forest fires and droughts will become less likely over time thanks to climate change. He also (perhaps unsurprisingly) foind that the risk of cold snaps will go down when the media claimed it would go up.
So the statistical data crunching angle is very important, because it often shows that some regions will indeed not be affected at all in the next 100 years or even benefit from the changes.
Couldn't find Cliff's writeup after a few minutes of googling. Did he take into account the effect of higher temperatures in producing faster snowmelt and evaporation and lengthening the wildfire season?
I believe it's wrong to look only in the change in average precipitation for this matter.
Increased level of temperature increases the rate of water evaporation from the plants/soil.
Also, rising temperatures increase the rate of extreme climatic events, so for the same average in precipitation you can have longer periods of drought followed by heavy rains which then cannot be effectively be absorbed by the soil.
But is there any statistical data to back this up? We have it for temperature but is there any proof that it’s the case for the drought/rain cycle?
I’m sure Egypt has to worry about it but North East Germany?
Variability is, well, too variable to be able to tell whether there's a climate-driven trend from most local observations, but climate models predict an increase in precipitation variability on the monthly and seasonal scale over most land areas.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17966-y
It would take a large positive precipitation trend to overcome the effects on drought of warming and variability. "How large?" is a complicated question.
for the record, I remember that already in my high school years in the 90's, there was a map showing drought risk for north eastern Germany as a possible consequence of climate change, which left me as puzzled then as you are probably now. But the predictions from then seem to bear out.
The city of Berlin is thinking about tapping into the Elbe river system to get extra water (in addition to the Spree/Havel system), but the Elbe people fight back since they want the water for themselves
https://www.tagesschau.de/wissen/klima/wassermangel-berlin-100.html
I have no specific data for this matter regarding specifically Germany
> Sure, I'd panic loud and clear.
Or build better and bigger dykes.
One think I don't understand about Hanania when he says that the rise of the temperature is unprecedented in human history is that he omits to mention that industrial revolution is also unprecedented in human history.
Our ancestors lived in poor conditions, without air conditioning and heating was very inefficient. They suffered from heat in the summer and cold in winter.
We have never had this good in whole history (in the rich western countries at least).
My point is that our technologies are more than capable to deal and mitigate the effects of climate change. While not negating that we should switch from fossil fuels to other sources of energy that is less damaging to the environment, scare tactics are unnecessary. In fact, the best course would be continue to develop more technologies to help with this transition. The GDP growth is the best indicator that we will be able to do this successfully.
I like that Americans are smart by being reasonably concerned that environmentalists and de-growth activists can do more damage. In Germany environmentalists have done a lot of damage by closing nuclear power stations prematurely.
> In Germany environmentalists have done a lot of damage by closing nuclear power stations prematurely.
Did they? If you compare
https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&year=2010
(before Fukushima and Angela Merkel deciding to quit nuclear)
with today: https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE
It seems fossil energy production has decreased, but overall electricity consumption has decreased, too.
I won't argue against Germans being more dramatic than other people about nuclear... thank you, Gudrun Pausewang
Overall electricity consumption decreasing is damage. That's what damage looks like.
Also, I don't see what the contrast is supposed to be between "energy production has decreased... BUT energy consumption has also decreased!". What else would happen?
These are net figures; are the gross consumption numbers also indicating a decrease? The solar share in summer seems high, and a lot of that could have been used locally and not passed back to the grid, for instance. In addition there could have been a decrease as increased costs of gas-powered electricity generation has shifted domestic heating more to biomass and gas. I don't think a conclusion "decrease is damage" is necessarily warranted, not without a lot more analysis.
There is no such concept as "net energy consumption". Production and consumption don't cancel out; if they did, net consumption would always be zero.
(I do see that the linked chart is labeled "public net electricity generation", but that doesn't stop "net electricity generation" from being a malformed concept. I assume the intention of the graph is to confuse somebody.)
I'm assuming that they mean "total bought from the public generation pool" but I could not find anything on the site that would confirm this. A large industrial user that also generates a lot of solar power in summer, or a household with solar panels, is the case that would need to be quantified.
In 2023, German energy consumption was 10735 PJ, down 8.1% from the previous year. Main reasons were weak economy (that's what you mean with "damage"?), warm weather, high energy prices (you wouldn't believe how much energy the industry can save if they really want to) and CO2 emission cost. First quarter 2024 is down again another 4.6%.
https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/konjunktur/energie-verbrauch-kohle-erneuerbare-wetter-konjunktur-100.html
> One thing I don't understand about Hanania when he says that the rise of the temperature is unprecedented in human history is
The bigger problem with this claim is that it appears to be nothing but a barefaced lie. Hanania isn't exactly opposed to those.
For example, here's Li Feng's Early China: A Social and Cultural History:
> Even when we are talking only about the areas that can be considered as part of Early China, back in a time when "China" as a nation was still in her infancy, we find that more cultural developments had taken place in the valleys and strips of plains that are surrounded by the mountains and plateaus on the second step mentioned above ["1,000 - 2,000 m above sea level"], or on the transitional belts along the major mountain ranges, but not at the centers of the floodplains located in the east. The reason for this development was simply ecological, given the fact that in the second millennium BC most of the eastern China plains were still covered by marshes and lakes, and the coastline in some sections was at least 150 km inland from today's seashores.
> Over the past thirty years, Chinese paleoclimatologists have made significant progress through fieldwork in understanding long-term climate changes in China across multiple ecological zones. By correlating data from different locations, the researchers were able to isolate a number of periods of important change in the temperature fluctuations over some 11,000 years. As the world was moving out from the last Glacial Age at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch in about 11,000 BP, the temperature in North China climbed up to a level of 3-4 °C higher than the average temperature of the present years, and the precipitation was 40% [] more than today's.
> This high temperature continued from 8,000 BP to 5,000 BP with wide fluctuations in the later millennia until the arrival of the third millennium BP when the temperature suddenly dropped down to below the present-day level. In historical chronology this drop corresponded with the end of the Shang Dynasty (1554 - 1046 BC) and the early Western Zhou (1045 - 771 BC) period. But even during most of the Shang Dynasty, the temperature in North China was still about 2 °C higher than today's.
Our technology, or more precisely our society's practical implementation of technology, is presently not capable of completely mitigating the effects of extreme weather, nor will it be able to do so for the foreseeable future. Given that, it will be (and is) even less capable of mitigating the effects of climate-change-enhanced extreme weather.
Somewhere there might be a tradeoff between improved technology and reduced climate change, but we don't seem to be anywhere near having to make that tradeoff. We are doing both.
Isn't it true though that all-cause disaster death tolls have gone down over the last century?
I've also heard that disaster expenses have gone up, but the citation said this was adequately explained by the rise in real estate and building on land that had previously been left alone for good reason.
Robb - Yes, death tolls have gone down tremendously. We now have things like severe weather warnings, flood control reservoirs...lots of things that didn't exist a century ago.
Disaster expenses have increased from the fact that infrastructure has greater cash value and there's more of it. Weather warnings are great, but most infrastructure can't get out of the way of a hurricane that will be arriving in two days.
But what would have happened if extreme weather frequency and intensity hadn't changed? Deaths would have gone down, and damages would have gone up.
So how do you adjust for the improved forecasting and the more expensive infrastructure and figure out whatever residual trends are caused by changes in extreme events? For deaths, you don't. Nobody has a way to do it. For infrastructure, there are various ways, but none is clearly accurate enough to isolate the climate-change trend, whatever it is.
So climate scientists study the extreme events themselves. For example, I published a paper earlier this year quantifying the observed trend in single-day 100-year rainfall amounts across the south and southeast US. They've increased (best estimate: 19% increase in intensity over four decades, which corresponds to over a doubling in frequency if you hold the intensity cutoff constant). Other studies, defining extreme event thresholds their own ways and analyzing data across the United States in their own way, find small increases or large increases in extreme events, depending on the region.
So why all the talk about deaths and damages? In one sense, they're cheat codes for skipping the complex reality during arguments. "Look, deaths are way down!" "No look, damages are way up!"
But still, deaths and damages are relevant, because you can take the deaths and damages, combine them with the climate change trend magnitudes, and estimate the portion attributable to climate change. Or for the future, estimate the amount of deaths and damages that could be avoided if future climate change is limited. The fractional benefits are relatively insensitive to changes in warnings or infrastructure, even as the total numbers change wildly due to other factors.
With Helene, my estimate for climate change's enhancement of the heavy rain is at least 20%. I've seen another group come up with 50%, and at least one other estimate will come out just in the next few days. We can blame deaths on people ignoring warnings, we can blame damages on infrastructure built in vulnerable locations, but the fact remains that, given the actual choices of individuals and society, some fraction of the actual deaths and damages would not have occurred if the rainfall was 20%-50% less.
We don't need to mitigate completely. That is a false target.
We won't be able to mitigate climate change either. But I don't understand your point that we are not making tradeoff? Is this because we are not discussing about this tradeoff? I agree and that is a big problem.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that complete mitigation was an appropriate target. But given incomplete mitigation, technologies cannot eliminate the additional impacts of climate change. At least, that's what I interpreted your "technologies are more than capable to deal and mitigate the effects of climate change" to mean.
Regarding the tradeoff, I don't see anyone advocating for reducing technological innovation in order to fight climate change.
I see that as different from the tradeoff between economic growth and climate change mitigation, which is indeed a challenging topic.
That's not really true. Europe generally has very low air-con use. Now with raising temperatures air-con can make the life even better than before warming.
Those specific environmentalists that are anti-nuclear have scored a massive own goal. Nuclear energy should be a big part of *the solution* for "providing sufficient energy to humans while also making serious attempts to combat climate change."
Energy forms that have less risk or are cleaner than nuclear simply aren't yet up to the task of providing humans with our modern energy needs. Of the forms of energy that *are* up to the task, nuclear is arguably the best. It's certainly better than fossil fuel-based energy. And from what I've read elsewhere, Germany is increasingly turning to fossil fuel-based energy as a result of shutting down nuclear power stations. It's a horrific lose/lose.
Going entirely wind/solar at some point might be a good goal, but we're far from reaching it, and nuclear would probably be ideal for filling the gap until we can reach that goal.
Have you considered that they may be lying about their goals? If "de-growth" is what they want, their actions make perfect sense.
> Have you considered that they may be lying about their goals? If "de-growth" is what they want, their actions make perfect sense.
My mother has repeatedly implemented decisions for the family that are strongly counterproductive to her stated goals. But I tend to believe that her stated goals, mostly to do with the well-being of the family, are honest, and she's just very bad at considering whether the decisions that society recommends are actually beneficial.
I think that model ("I support policy X because someone told me it advances my goals, and I don't want to put any thought into it") can explain most environmentalists well. In the case of e.g. endangered species protection lawsuits that target specific developments, "they're lying about their goals" looks like a better explanation, largely because the participants in those tend not to engage in similar activism against similar, but faraway, targets.
(Given the larger conversation, it's worth noting that a large contingent of the environmentalist movement explicitly states that what it wants is degrowth.)
Of professional necessity I associate with anti-nuclear activists, have for years. I do not at all share their views on the topic which sharply limits how much and how well I can work with them and also frankly how much I want to.
Anyway to the specific hypothesis you're advancing: no, not at all. Their motivations are exactly what they say they are, they are entirely sincere in viewing nuclear power as an inherently unsafe and horrifying genie that needs to go back into its bottle. They are pretty comprehensively wrong on that, and unfortunately are just as dug-in and immune to new information as MAGAs talking about nonwhite immigration. But that is what they genuinely believe.
I did come across a conspiracy theory online that the Russians were funding environmentalists in Germany to go against nuclear energy in the hopes of making Germany more reliant on Russian gas imports. Of course, this is arguably moot given everything that's happened since Russia invaded Ukraine.
I never saw much evidence presented for this conspiracy theory, but it's an interesting thought anyway. It would make sense for Russia, and it's not unthinkable that a group might simply sell out for money.
The dog that didn’t bark.
If China and Russia aren’t funding environmental and anti-nuclear and anti growth initiatives in the West then they are missing a golden opportunity. There is nothing that they could do to that would provide them as much bang for the buck as funding the internal anti-growth initiatives of their perceived enemies.
You don’t need to kill someone who is drawn to suicide.
Agreed.
Yes of course people I disagree with lie. /sarcasm
Just not the case that we have the technology to deal with climate change, unless you can give me some examples I don't know about. Physical processes tend to be asymmetrical: give yourself cancer by smoking cigarettes, easy. Reversing the situation not so easy: having caused something doesn't confer a privileged ability to uncause it. Nor does a whole heap of lung cancer specific technology in our hospitals
What technologies we don't have? Air conditioning? Heating?
People didn't smoke in Middle Ages and yet lived shorter lives. I don't expect any meaningfully shorter life expectancy if any at all due to climate change.
Do I understand this right, you believe the solution to all of climate change is air conditioning?
Yes, and other types of advanced technologies.
It will be challenge in some places but overall the life on this planet will be better than it has ever been.
What kind of "other advanced tefchnologies"?
The outdoor environment will be impacted as well. Agriculture could be disrupted.
Yes, and we have technologies to mitigate this. In general warming climate is better for agriculture. The only problem is the change. That will be challenge that we will solve with technologies and science.
Tell this to the people in North Carolina after hurricane Helene, or the people in Florida anticipating Milton, or anybody who got burnt out by wildfires last summer.
> banned […] Carateca
I understand why you banned him for that post, but that's unfortunate. carateca's posts usually brought a "down-to-earth sanity" to discussions here (although I might be biased, because I often agreed with his point of view).
That post is a couple of months old, maybe there's a case to be made that he's become more civil by now?
> carateca's posts usually brought a "down-to-earth sanity" to discussions here (although I might be biased, because I often agreed with his point of view).
I usually disagreed with his point of view, and found him to be the worst poster on the site. I definitely think there's bias at play here (and I'm not claiming to be immune either).
I'm also going to note that I'll miss Carateca. He contributed a lot to many of the discussions around here, especially when he was wrong.
Someone upthread mentioned using the report button for what struck me as an exceedingly petty personal taste, which makes me think comment likes might be incredibly useful for tracking an otherwise (potential) silent majority who weren't offended.
To illustrate what I mean, here's a post from that same subthread: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-330/comment/56953660
Not kind, but true and very much necessary.
I was not a fan of Carateca -- there is a fine line between "down to earth sanity" and "assertion of one's unsupported priors", and they were more often on the wrong side of that line than on the right side -- but I don't understand why that post merited a ban. It was very mildly intemperate, at worst.
I agree with you and Rothwed on Carateca. "Down-to-earth sanity" is a good way to describe a lot of his posts. And in a community that can get very abstract/theoretical in its thinking, I think that it's quite nice to have someone that can provide a sort of practical feedback to that.
Seconded - losing Carateca is a mistake. Guess there's no appeals process? If enough regular posters sign on to an appeal, seems like a decent praxis?
Scott hardly gets around to doing any moderating at all. I don't think he has time for anything resembling a "process".
I'm not aware of an appeals process, but I've only been active here a few months. A good number of people are commenting on the Carateca ban and wanting that ban undone. For myself, I just hope that Scott is reading all of these comments on the Carateca ban and it might give him a change of heart?
If anybody starts up a formal appeal, I'll sign on to it.
Carateca had a long history of aggressive comments, so I'm not surprised they ate a ban. Still, it's sad to see them go. They had some interesting views, and were a good balance against the leftist majority on here.
I'll miss him; he's got an interesting mixture of positions I very much agree with and positions I very much don't. And yeah, that post was bad, but it was also four and a half months ago. :-/
That honestly doesn't seem like a particularly inflammatory comment (it's slightly confrontational but not especially banworthy by itself).
I suppose the problem was saying that the other person was fine with pogroms, and not in an "you advocated for A here and B there, which together logically seem to imply C" sort of way (which I think is probably OK), but instead more in an "personal attack" sort of way. Like, asking "do you have a problem with that" is better than asserting "not that you have a problem with that", when it's not something that the person has said explicitly. Especially when it's saying that the person is fine with genocide.
Yeah I don't think it's 0% problematic, just doesn't seem banworthy (I could see like "one third of a ban" if Scott's still doing those, or "one month ban"). It's a couple steps short of the other ban-inspiring comments on the list.
For any indie sci fi fans, I am analysing the entries of the fourth Self Published Science Fiction competition (my book Our Vitreous Womb is also an entry). So far I have filtered the titles, cover images, and blurbs to analyse what factors make some books stand out. Moving on to reading all 188 sample chapters, then hoping to read a handful of novels in full and interview the authors. The Introduction episode is linked below.
https://open.substack.com/pub/haldanebdoyle/p/intro-to-sci-fi-high-five?r=f45kp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Cool idea. I'm putting this on my "to read" list.
This thread is for microfiction. Tell a complete story in a hundred words or less.
MORNING DRAMA
Ok, off to work. Final check before leaving: keys, wallet, phone. Oops, no keys.
Darn. Check my pockets again. Nope. In my briefcase, maybe? Nope. The side table? Not there either.
Crap. I'm going to be late. Or I'll have to leave the door unlocked.
Check my pockets again. No, really nothing.
Ok, check the weird places. Laundry hamper? No. Couch cushions? No.
Wait. These aren't the trousers I wore yesterday. I spilled coffee on those and put them in the washing machine. Maybe ...?
Yes. My keys, in the bottom of the washing machine.
Great. Off to work.
It was their last meal together, and it was genius.
Literally. This tumor made her the smartest person in history. It didn't talk, just made the next step obvious and undeniable. Like the miniaturized tokamak or the Starship redesign or the simple cancer cure that made her immortal.
She had a future to protect, now. No one would interfere or even observe. The virus was highly infectious, with no symptoms until suddenly 100% lethal in a year. She had time to prepare.
Meanwhile her husband couldn't interfere, or even observe. The meal was genius. The poison obvious and undeniable.
You might like _Camp Concentration_ by Samuel Delany.
You mean by Thomas Disch? I've never read it but reading a synopsis, I definitely see the parallels to this little micro story.
Yes, that's it.
“Quick announcement: I didn't think I would have to say this, but this is a reminder that Secret Santa gifts are not to contain flammable or explosive materials of any kind, including matches or any amount of gasoline. It's Secret Santa, not Secret Krampus.
In related news, the doctors have given Vanessa a clean bill of health, she should be back to work tomorrow. If you would like to get her a return gift, please add it to the pile by tomorrow morning. If you don't know where the gift pile is... look for the scorch marks. Thank you.”
It wasn't me man, I'm telling you. That little gobli- LOOK at that smug little punk! He's smiling right now. Well no, not now, but I mean, before you looked. Yeah see, he keeps glancing back, all sneaky. I'm telling you, it wasn't me. I mean I get it, normally yeah I would be the guy. It's your fault for sleepin' on the bench though man. 'Course some little twerp is gonna come along. It looks pretty good though, just sayin'. Yeah totally! I always said you'd look good with a 'stache. Glitter glue just makes it pop.
almost 10 years ago I was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. I am fortunate to respond well to the standard treatment (Levadopa), and my progression has been relatively slow. However a clock is ticking; I take 3X the amount of levadopa I started with, and I have to take it almost hourly to avoid "down" periods that turn me into a tired lobster. Eventually, barring an unlikely deviation from the typical course of the disease, I will eventually start suffering further disabilities, including cognitive impairment, dyskinesia (jerky involuntary motions) and distonia (random painful cramps of various muscles).
For several years, evidence has been growing that certain GLP-1 agonists (same class as Ozembic) may be the first legitimate, statistically defensible disease-modifying treatment for Parkinson's. In several studies published in journals such as The Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine, phase-2 double-blind studies show that under certain metrics the degeneration typical of PD is stopped cold. The most comprehensive study so far, a phase 3, multi-center, double-blind study over almost 2 years (previous studies were for at most 1 year) has wrapped up, and is awaiting the unmasking of treatment/placebo and publication of findings (search for trial NCT04232969).
The institute in charge of producing the final report (University College of London) keeps pushing the publication date into the future, with the most recent date set for July 31, 2025.
OK, this being the Internet, here's where I might wax a wee bit conspiratorial. I am posting on this forum with the meager hope that focused minds committed to rational analysis and decision-making will prevail upon me to look at things with some semblance of subjectivity.
My first nit is that the first trial of this hypothesis dates to 2017. The weird thing about that is, as a techie/rationalist sort living with the disease, as you might guess I have been very proactive doing my own research for potential new treatments (ie googling and vetting) but strangely, this approach, considerably more promising (to my layman's eyes) than any other proposed treatment, never came up on my radar. I mean, it feels like it was scrubbed, or at least there was a very intentional campaign to avoid any public examination or discussion of this potentially life-changing drug going through the gauntlet of trials and studies, and looking ever more promising with each new year.
Perhaps there were many candidates for the "silver bullet" and this one emerged as a front-runner only in the last few years. The head of the phase 3 study has reportedly mentioned that the Covid pandemic made enlisting subjects and keeping them engaged much more difficult than usual. I just can't understand why I didn't notice the previous phase 2 trial that apparently published their results in May of 2023 (started in 2017, so 6 years in the making).
Anyway, the question that is really on my mind is, when the fuck will I be taking a drug that puts the brakes on this slow boiling frog of a malady? Because every year that passes raises the temperature in the pot (the one with the frog). I just re-read this paragraph and popped another Levodopa so I can lift the brain fog and make a concise point. (Those of us at around the same stage as I am have settled on a protocol of "Dr, just give me a friggin' huge pill bottle of the stuff and let me take it as needed, the way my dad smoked cigarettes).
All of the potential drugs tested have been approved for either diabetes or weight loss, meaning their safety and side-effect profiles are well known. So, for example, why in hell should I not be taking once-weekly slow-release Exenatide? Oh wait, AstraZeneca took it off the market, presumably to put all oars in the water for an Ozempic-killer oral semaglutide they are reported as pursuing).
So after some research, and a bit of logical deduction, I am seriously considering dosing myself with daily shots of Liraglutide, if I can source it (it's not too competitive with the daily injection vs Ozempic weekly dosing).
Oh, I rambled on and now have left little of your patience to discuss price, insurance, and availability. I'm trying to imagine what the state of affairs will be like next year, assuming the phase 3 trial is as successful as the numerous phase 2 trials would lead us to expect.
> I am seriously considering dosing myself with daily shots of Liraglutide
Is there any reason not to?
Aside from financial (looks to be around $1K / month, very unlikely to be covered by most insurance) there is a reasonable argument that it would be preferable to wait for a solid consensus on which medication has the desired effect, what the dosage and overall protocol should be, and to have a trained doctor (who has bought into the treatment, as opposed to tolerating what could be seen as a patient's naive self-directed research) monitor the situation. For example, there is evidence that these medications increase one's chances of getting pancreatitis or pancreatic cancer.
It's really just a question of whether it makes sense to be conservative and wait for the new drugs to be developed and distributed to the overall medical community, versus basically experimenting on myself.
> I mean, it feels like it was scrubbed
> just can't understand why I didn't notice
Trust your memory more then the ever shifting landscape of the dead internet, we were at war with Eurasia.
Honestly that is absurd. Let’s hope it’s all clears up sooner rather than later.
Sorry about your condition.
I've seen a similar BS story around the MAPs Crohn's vaccine, which finished a Phase II trial more than a year ago but still refuses to publish any results from it, supposedly because "its in peer review". I'm guessing it failed but then why not just say so openly?
> supposedly because "its in peer review".
have you tried contacting the authors directly? (maybe with promise of confidentiallity)
I can imagine, that privatly funded medical research is subject to much more potent NDAs, so maybe the authors are not free to discuss any results beforehand. But it shouldn't hurt to try.
I’ve been stuck in peer review for years at a time before, due to the reviewers being stubborn and confused rather than the results being bad. What makes you think that’s implausible here?
Why not put the results on Biorxiv in the meantime? Is that not allowed by journals?
My hunch is that the results confirm the phase-2 research, and glp-1 agonists may in fact be the silver bullet we've all been waiting for -- and then the authors have to contend with a barrage of press and cries for immediate dissemination of the drug in the study (Bydureon, slow-release Exenatide) -- which is not even presently on the market.
I hope they are just trying to get their ducks in a row to deal with this.
Alternatively, the study was a wash-out and they are reluctant to publish the bad news, so they are rummaging for a pony in the cesspool.
I would put it on arxiv beforehand, but not everyone always does that. I don’t know how strong of a norm that is in medicine. But if they were comfortable submitting it to a journal then I see no reason why them not putting it on some arxiv would mean they’re hiding it.
Probably not once it's begun the peer review route? But they could have made it available first (medRxiv is the relevant preprint server). I think some journals may still discourage preprints, but in my opinion that just crosses them off my list of places to submit to.
I wrote a book review of the short story collection Mirrors by Jorge Luis Borges: https://soupofthenight.substack.com/p/book-review-mirrors-by-jorge-luis
It was originally intended for the ACX book review contest (for which I missed the deadline) and later submitted to Adam Mastroianni's blogpost contest (which it didn't win). I spend an embarrassing amount of time on it. It is over 15,000 words long, and while I think I could have made it shorter (the section "Borges and I" is probably too self-indulgent and might have been better off left out) I still decided to publish it in mostly unedited form because if I kept working on it I might have lost to the temptation to keep expanding it.
As a spoiler-sensitive person myself, I think the spoilers in the review don't matter much and it's fine for you to read it without having read the actual book first. (Of course, I WOULD say that.)
I'll be honest: this might be the best thing I have written in my life so far (at least outside of university assignments and such). So even if you're disappointed by it, it might be interesting for you to see what a mediocre writer considers his best work.
I enjoyed your review, thanks for linking to it.
When I write anything for publication I have a vision of all the people who'll ever sit down to attempt to read it, their frustrations and incomprehension and boredom, stretching out to infinity. Why is your time more valuable than theirs? Which is to say that the heart of writing is editing, and a piece of writing is complete when the meaning is communicated clearly and there's nothing left to remove.
I like Borges and I like what you wrote, but you're right about 'Borges and I'. I frankly skipped the story reviews after the first two, because the seemed blow-by-blow retellings of the originals. I really liked the section on evolutionary psychology though its relation to the rest of the essay is unclear - I think you could develop that as a separate post. Your list of conceptions about art were too long for me - I think I get the point, but I don't understand the connection back to Borges, or it's not expressed sufficiently clearly. Your conclusion is underwhelming.
Overall, I liked the essay - there's way too much peripheral material there. Interweaving one or two conceptions on art with (less revealing) snippets of stories would be effective. There's a message in there which could make a fine book review, on a par with any of the ones I read on this site. But it's 2000 meaningful words interspersed with 13000 others. Oh... it's a Library of Babel thing... (sorry).
Thanks for the feedback!
I think most of your criticisms are fairly reasonable, but when I look at the writing process that went into this piece I don't think it could have turned out much different.
As I said in the essay, I set out to write it before I knew what the conclusion would be ("thinking by writing"). As I kept working on it, it only grew longer, not shorter, and if it wasn't for the deadline (remember that I missed my first one; and I barely met my second one) I might never have finished it. So maybe this entire approach to writing is not for me?
If I was a slightly better writer, I perhaps could have killed more of my darlings and reduced it to, say, 12,000 words, but reducing it to 2000 just wasn't in the cards. I'm not sure I agree it's THAT bloated, but if it is then this is pretty humbling for me.
I agree that the conclusion is underwhelming. That said, I do give myself props for resisting the temptation to write a more exciting but dishonest one.
>I frankly skipped the story reviews after the first two, because the seemed blow-by-blow retellings of the originals.
But this criticism I don't agree with at all. This approach might have been wrong for most books, but in this particular case, if you look at the originals and the retellings side by side, you might be more inclined to agree that I made the right call. Winky face emoji.
Take my criticisms with a grain of salt - you're writing for yourself, not for me! I have a different edition of Borges' short stories, and I read the reviews of the ones I remembered. I'll go back and read the rest.
Personally, I spend much more time rewriting than writing. Often low level stuff: what if we put this paragraph after that one? This sentence and that one make the same point - cut and paste them side by side. Let's rewrite the fifth paragraph as the introduction, etc. But also higher level: once I figure out what I want to say, the whole thing gets rewritten from scratch. This could happen more than once. My coauthors hate it, and it's slow. But I get to where I want to be eventually.
In any case, good job, keep at it ;)
I have it saved, that is really too big for Substack but I will be waiting for a train at some point and will read it
Which presidential candidate is better on AI existential risk?
Honestly, if we're looking at the long-con, probably Trump. He would be significantly more likely than his opposition to cause global destabilization that would very likely cripple AI research efforts, giving humanity more time, to, well... figure something out. Still only delaying the inevitable of course (unless some irreversible societal collapse happens), but it would still be more concrete than some half-measure policies that probably won't even be fully enforced due to the need to compete with other countries.
I would think the level of global destabilisation required for it to cripple AI research instead of causing an arms race would be in the order of a limited nuclear exchange depleting the population and infrastructure of various powerful countries. Nothing short of AI datacentres no longer being a possible investment is going to stop further research in the event that the planet destabilises.
I don't think global destabilization is really helpful for solving problems.
Yet the Biden years have brought a fair share of global destabilization. I think it's a mistake to equate destablization with Trump just because he says crazy things all the time. His actual performance during his presidency was relatively good on this front.
My guess is Kamala, because the AIXR people have managed to get more inroads into the Democratic policy establishment than the Republican one (mostly because they themselves are liberal Californians associated with NGOs and this is easier for them), and they'll have an easier time making their voice heard during a Harris administration than a Trump one. EG Biden's Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo appointed Paul Christiano (personal friend of mine, probably AI safety community's #1 choice) as head of the US AI Safety Institute; I don't know if this was because of her own opinion or because we have good lobbyists somewhere in this process, but either way it's a really impressive victory that's given me some loyalty to the Democrats here and that would be hard for GOP to match. Also, a lot of x-risk responses will probably look (on a zoomed-out view) like "regulate AI", and Democrats love regulating things. And I also think that ability to be stable and listen to people and make good decisions is a good quality here (even if we accept that Trump's from-the-gut style of decision-making is better for some things like foreign policy where it's sometimes good to keep your opponents uneasy).
Counterargument is that Ivanka Trump is possibly in the process of getting AI-pilled (https://x.com/IvankaTrump/status/1839002887600370145 , but I can't tell if this is a real endorsement, vs. someone told her it would be cool/profitable/good PR to tweet about this and she did, vs. she read about it and will forget about it in another 15 minutes). Another counterargument is that Musk could probably be a big influence on the Trump administration and he is somewhat AI-pilled (though I think dumb about specific strategic considerations) and takes advice from Dan Hendrycks (who I think is smarter about it). Samuel Hammond has a longer counterargument at https://www.secondbest.ca/p/the-ea-case-for-trump-2024.
I would also add that Trump is a wild card but sometimes has an Emperor's New Clothes esque ability to think of things in an untaught common-sense way when nobody else can, and if he got convinced that AI was dangerous (eg to him, his family, and America) he would have an appropriate emotional reaction and get angry/scared, whereas everyone else would be going through 50-step strategic thought processes of how to turn this to their political advantage. But it would be tough to get him to that point.
I still think probably Harris is better, mostly because I have high opinions of some of the specific people who have made their way into the Democratic policy network.
Musk is I think dumb about specific strategic (AI) considerations …
I don’t know what “specific strategic (AI) considerations are, but I would think that if anyone does, it would be Elon Musk. After all, he co-founded OpenAI, founded XAI, and his company Tesla has developed Full Self Driving to the point of almost being able to operate unsupervised. Then, there is Optimus, the humanoid robot. What are you trying to say?
Trump also says he would repeal the Biden executive order that set up the US AI Safety Institute. This is a clear case of Trump advocating for bad AI x-risk policy (by my lights).
A bit off-topic but I keep trying to game out why Musk, A16Z, Thiel et al are so pro-Trump, and the only reason that I find defensible is that 1) they think they can control him because, you know, superior IQ and 2) now they have their boy JD a hamburger away, they can afford to play the long game.
So getting back to the topic, if you want AI policy to be decided by ultra-rich tech bros with simple-minded Ayn Rand-inspired memes in their head to decide on AI safety measures, go with Team Red.
I don't think it's strategic at all. Musk got sucked into the far-right bubble and that's all it takes. People get their beliefs from their community.
Warning for the second paragraph, try for a higher insight-to-insult ratio.
I think their stated reasons - they're anti-woke, anti-regulation, and anti-blob-of-smug-cultural-elites-telling-everyone-what-to-do - seem simple and plausible enough. Thiel has been conservative/libertarian since at least college and thinks civilization is slowly stagnating. Musk was apparently pretty radicalized by his kid transitioning; if you look at the text messages between him and his ex-wife, they both seem genuinely freaked out by wokeness. But I think he also feels like the Democrats weren't grateful enough for his electric car work and frustrated his Mars work with stupid regulations, and got in a nasty cycle where he criticized them, they criticized him back, and that offended his ego and made him hate them even more.
Can you explain the motives of VC investors such as A16Z and the All-in folk? They were supposedly horrified by 1/6 and swore DT should never get power again. Now they are, pardon the pun, All In.
What explains such a radical about-face?
Sorry about the snark, sometimes forget where I'm posting and fail to curate the proper tone for the venue.
I don't know as much about A16Z, but I think https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/ is probably their real opinion and you can see how it might make someone lean Republican. I didn't read whatever they had to say about 1/6 so I can't speak to that.
Democrats have been disgusted by Elon for a long time, and over the last few years Elon has gotten antagonistic enough that they just openly call him hitler or veppers or satan. I think it is the fact that he’s a weird nerd who is successful, which activates some bully gene.
So I think part of Elons trump support is just that democrats hate him.
> Democrats have been disgusted by Elon for a long time
Have they been? I seem to remember him being quite well-liked for the EV/climate change angle. It seems more like the anti-Elon sentiment on the left side of the political spectrum is much more to do with his, well, current positions on almost every political question.
(Amusingly, he has not been brainrotted on climate change or solar yet.)
Searching for "the problem with elon musk" pulls up a lot of pre-2022 articles, which was the year he bought twitter. Of course he didn't help himself with his bad jokes on twitter and his very awkward Joe Rogan interview in 2018. But I would say his awkwardness and bad jokes marks him as a weird nerd, and that is a big part of why people don't like him. But you are right, certainly his anti-woke stuff in years past did not endear him to anyone.
It's hard to separate it all out, but Steve Jobs was basically the charismatic, socially adept version of Elon, who treated people horribly. Steve would be the Chad who doesn't get HR called on him for flirting with his coworker, and Elon is the nerd who gets slapped.
I think this seems pretty much right on the nose, and that the negative feedback loop Scott describes is not only applicable here but to plenty of people I know personally.
I would add crypto regulation, especially for A16Z.
Why wouldn't they support Trump? They all share the desire to completely purge wokeness from this society.
Serious question: do you think re-electing Trump will lead to more or less wokeness?
FWIW I believe his election in 2016 was a giant catalyst to wokeness, which happened to peak shortly after Biden assumed the office in 21, and has been precipitously declining lately.
I could quote not-Zhou Enlai and say it's too early to tell. ;)
Seriously, it's hard to say. My money would be on 'less, but potentially with equally or more dangerous freedom of speech threats on the right'. But he could also flub things so badly he enrages and empowers the left, and they return with a vengeance. Frankly the range of outcomes is so huge I wouldn't say anything except that a Trump victory is probably the higher-variance option...which is basically impossible to falsify and therefore useless.
Kamala, well, on the one hand you're going to empower the left and they may try to restrict freedom of speech like they love. But then again they've seen how sick everyone is of living with woke commissars and they may have to dial it down a bit. Or, they may figure "it just really hasn't been tried!"
tl;dr: Dunno, man.
My argument for Kamala is that it's better to defeat Trump for reasons outside of wokeness (I have serious concerns about his power hunger and complete lack of ethics even for a politician), but that wasn't the question.
I'd say less, but it really depends on how ambitious Trump and the GOP are. Trump really does have nothing to lose at this point, so he's much more likely to use the full extent of his powers. The real question is, what are the GOP's plans? They have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take *actual* power using Trump. If they follow through with Project 2025, a full ideological purge of government workers and prosecution of dissidents is very much within their reach. And I'd doubt the liberals would meaningfully fight back, spineless as they are.
I’m with Woolery on this one. As to “spineless” liberals - underestimating your opponent is the worst error in a fight, ask Hillary Clinton.
More. And this is good for the current GOP. If woke ideology, which as you say appears to be declining, doesn’t remain a primary political issue, it hurts GOP candidates’ chances at winning office. And I don’t think it’s controversial to presume winning office is a greater concern for most politicians than systematically solving societal problems.
Agreed
Yes, this is what it comes down to.
Elon Musk, specifically, has been in the crosshairs of left-wing intelligentsia (including friends of mine!) for at least three years, maybe longer. I suppose he finally gave up on hoping they'd reverse course. (I suspect they were hoping that he'd reverse course when faced with criticism by the best and brightest.)
I was thinking their reasoning was something like they're willing to take very large risks of bad outcomes in exchanges for tax cuts for billionaires.
I don't recall Musk talking about taxes much. His 3 top issues might be 1) free speech (under constant attack by Democrats), 2) regulation (e.g. FAA is hobbling SpaceX, and 3) wokeism
It would be really dumb of him to talk about taxes, and despite everything I don't think he's dumb. Yet cui bono remains a useful frame to consider.
“and despite everything I don't think he's dumb”
Intelligence is multidimensional. He’s a brilliant hardware engineer, for sure. But that doesn’t mean he can’t be dumb in other domains.
I don't think we need any 50-step strategic thought process to understand why they lean republican.
All of them want less regulation, and republicans are less likely to regulate them.
Musk in specific is obvious. He's basically liberal Satan. Don't help your enemies?
I think Biden has a personal dislike of Elon and tries to steer contracts away from his companies, Elon certainly believes that.
The FCC chair redefining their requirements for rural Internet subsidy to favor "fiber eventually" and disqualify Starlink *now* over the objection of her own co missioner https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-105A2.pdf supports this view.
The Biden not acknowledging / tax-breaking Tesla isn’t an anti-Elon thing. It’s a UAW Ford/GM union workers political thing. Unfortunately, union votes are key political calculus because they’re so crucial in some of the swing states, even though Tesla is moving the US industry forward a lot better than Ford/GM have. Of course Elon hates that, but I also think he’s somehow too blind to see why it’s happening.
There are well-known colloquial names for the most notable variants of COVID-19, e.g., Delta and Omicron, but there doesn't seem to be a name for the original virus that distinguishes it from the later variants. Is there any good way to refer specifically to the original virus without causing confusion? I've seen Wikipedia refer to it as "wild-type SARS-CoV-2" but I'm not sure many people would understand that.
(Wouldn't it have made more sense to reserve Alpha for the wild-type virus and start naming the variants from Beta?)
Wild type was also called "Wuhan-Hu-1"
Wildtype is the standard name for how something was before it mutated. "The original virus" is a little ambiguous, but if you mean the one that first crossed into humans, try "covid lineage A". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variants_of_SARS-CoV-2#Nomenclature for the full gory details.
Ur-covid? OG covid?
COVID Prime? COVID Zero? Big Poppa COVID?
The Wuhan virus?
Too redolent of "Kung flu."
It's what the Chinese called it initially.
Fun very minor substack bug: when I refresh this page on my phone (chrome on android), the datestamp on this post very briefly changes to "Oct 07" before reverting back to "Oct 06".
it’s probably loading the time as UTC and then the javascript is updating the date once it calculates the time zone offset based on your browser info.
Ah, that makes sense.
Hey Everyone! For anyone in the Bay Area, this upcoming week is #SFTechWeek (https://www.tech-week.com/)
ACX 2024 grantee Spartacus.app, which is building a platform for "Overcoming inertial barriers to collective action through anonymous coordination." (see details here: https://manifund.org/projects/an-online-platform-to-solve-collective-action-and-coordination-problems), is hosting an event in San Francisco on Tuesday, Oct. 8, at 2 PM.
RSVP Here! https://partiful.com/e/7OiiSdriuPY8eq6HN3Ss
With overwhelming e/acc energy and techno-prosperity gospel sure to be the dominant vibe across the mostly AI-centric menu of events, instead come to one that won't shy away from seriously discussing AI safety and other coordination dilemmas. Hopefully, some feathers get ruffled.
If so inclined, please also give us a follow at https://x.com/AppSpartacus and https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordanbraunstein1/
Thanks!
Here's a thread for the city line/metropolitan area discourse from https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ballots-everywhere-times-and-places
Since no one is active on this thread I'll bump it up myself.
It turns out that Boston grew to its present size by annexing 6 other towns - namely, Brighton, Roxbury, Dorchester, Hyde Park, West Roxbury, and Charlestown - as well as the (formerly uninhabited?) areas of South and East Boston. (Plus what is now the Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood, which formerly was part of Brookline.)
In 1912 someone called Daniel J. Kiley proposed a bill that would merge 32 other cities and towns into Boston to create "Greater Boston". Needless to say, this did not pass.
*sources: https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2012/01/22/welcome-megaboston/nYTuQFpRryVrd8i35yFjsL/story.html ; https://guides.bpl.org/townsofboston
Assuming literacy is a range (from 'doesn't know his letters' at the bottom, through the sort that in the old days only ever read the papers, up to the very well-read, indeed, at the top), and if we knew where everyone fell on this scale, I wonder what global literacy rates would look like. There's a repugnant conclusion that it's better to have everyone at a 1 or a 2 than have most at 0 and some at 9 and 10; presumably most of us believe that no such trade-off is taking place, and that literacy is a tide that is lifting all boats.
But I wonder. And I'd love to see a prediction market of what the numbers will look like in 20, 50, and 100 years.
> There's a repugnant conclusion that it's better to have everyone at a 1 or a 2 than have most at 0 and some at 9 and 10; presumably most of us believe that no such trade-off is taking place, and that literacy is a tide that is lifting all boats.
I'm not sure it would be assuming that the 1 or 2 literacy also comes with inability to do more complex jobs. At best a society with universal poor literacy is going to be technology and developmentally stagnant while at bas a society with some excellent literacy and most non-existent can at least have people do critical but complex jobs like engineering and medicine. There isn't really a historical comparison since the "9 or 10" precludes feudal periods. I suppose there would be some sort of threshold for the percentage of complete illiterates in this thought experiment, 51% would almost certainly be superior to universal poor literacy but it would be hard to argue that 1% would be superior You could probably analyse economic class and employment data and figure out the percentage of jobs that would require baseline good to great literacy.
There's been an enormous amount of work on this. Many countries have scales - they're normally ordered by age, and they're not directly comparable. So the OECD developed the PISA test to make international comparisons. Yes, this only measures 15 year olds, but it's a reasonable assumption that by 15 you've acquired most of the literacy you will ever have. Yes, it's not global, but it captures Europe, most of North and South America and a good part of South East Asia.
All the evidence suggests that most people have adequate literacy skills. But literacy isn't measured like IQ - there's a 'satisfactory' bar and most people reach and it an no-one measures beyond that.
The skills required to crunch through a text on postmodernism and extract meaning from it aren't really called literacy anymore. There's been work on the acquisition of complex concept at third level and beyond, but it's not called literacy anymore. Maybe that's what you want? But you'll need to quantify your argument rather better before it would be possible to make a prediction.
Halfway through your second paragraph you acknowledge that there isn't any work on my actual point, let alone 'enormous'.
With the usual definition of literacy, there's a large literature that I pointed to.
I can't think of any measure of human ability where everyone or almost everyone measures at 0,1,2 but some people measure at 10. Most measures of ability tend to be normally distributed, and scales tend to reflect that. So maybe I just don't understand what you're asking.
He's using the word "literacy", but if you look at his examples, he's referring to the amount of reading that people do, not to their ability to do it.
Oh, no indeed. A person who, in 1950, reads the whole of the newspaper every day might very well take in a large number of words, but this indicates nothing about his ability to read anything harder.
Today, a kid who can read the words on a tiktok and who sends and receives very many words of text via discord every day is in some ways more 'literate' than the authors of classical antiquity who appear not to have been able to read silently to themselves.
I think I see now what you mean - the ability to read 'Ulysses' or some other complex texts, and extract ideas and meaning from them?
I think that most people would regard this as very subject specific. Someone who can read the latest research in chemistry probably can't get through a book on critical theory or vice versa. And if you remove subject knowledge from the equation, I think you're left with something similar to IQ...
I didn't know it was possible to crunch through a text on postmodernism and extract meaning from it.
Well, yeah, having everyone able to communicate with written words is significantly better than only having a few people able to do that.
Past the bottom tier of learning how to read, there's no trade-off; people will sort themselves by interest. There will always be 9's and 10's unless you're out there physically stopping people from reading at higher levels. I don't see any conclusions that would think that's a thing worth doing.
What makes you think that such a trade-off is indeed taking place?
Nobody said there was - it's from the repugnant conclusion thought experiment.
Weird to even think along these lines though, like "what if there was conservation of fire and we had to worry about how to share it?"
You're also conflating the repugnant conclusion with...any scenario where you might want to distribute a resource more evenly, I think. The repugnant conclusion isn't that sometimes it's better to share.
I conflate nothing, friend. It's an analogy, which you can tell is two separate (non-conflated) things because otherwise it wouldn't be an analogy.
I wish I'd have thought of this as a kind of meta-troll on the nature of literacy, but I didn't and award myself no points for the hilarious responses I've received. For sure the problem with people not understanding one another on Twitter was never the character limit.
Humor me and give us illiterates an another chance. What was it you were trying to say that the whole thread whooshed on?
LOL no, the implication is that this goes both ways. The experience of communicating well to people who can't read probably isn't something I can distinguish from the experience of communicating poorly.
Here's what I've been wondering lately: what should be the goal of humanity?
Like, in sci-fi books, many paint the future as kinda utopian where automation does everything and no one really needs to work. People like Musk think we need to colonize other planets to extend the species. Environmentalists would prefer we limit our impact on the natural earth (and maybe, in some sense, humanity isn't as important.)
Is this something that has been discussed much in some corners of the world?
Humanity should have 8,181,186,780 distinct goals as of this writing. Presumably with quite a bit of overlap, in many cases with only marginal differences. Anybody talking about "the" goal for humanity, is missing the point. If they won't take a hint, they should be tactfully ignored, ridiculed, or invited to decrement the active human goal count by one at their earliest convenience, depending on how pushy they are about it.
Just wanted to say, despite our earlier disagreements on pharmaceutical pricing, how strongly I agree with this statement. Every human gets to pick what their goal is. Nobody should be making goals for all of humanity, whether it's a rationalist commenter or any of the infinitely more evil people who have tried throughout the centuries.
Humanity contains a lot of individuals with different goals.
Individuals contain a lot of conflicting preferences.
Setting aside that different humans will have different, non-exclusive goals, isn't this a rephrasing of "what is the meaning of life" as applied to humanity?
Yes. It's an important question.
It seems obvious to me that, to oversimplify a bit, any part of humanity that basically only values "continued existence" will outcompete any part of humanity that values basically anything else.
We conquered aging? Great let's go multiplanetary. Done that? Colonize other star systems. Have colonies that live, laugh, and love on giant space ships in the void between superclusters.
If you're worried about the quality of our qualia, don't, much - those with compatible qualia will outcompete those without. I expect we'll be able to choose our qualia by then so this won't be a problem.
Step one would be to end human suffering and ensure every human experiences a state of permanent, unblemished, uninterrupted bliss. After that... who knows, maybe make more humans? But that would definitely be step one.
As a an atheist (ie a cultural Catholic) I rejected belief in religion because of the afterlife. Not just hell but heaven. Any place where I’m just feeling bliss all the time without earning it would not be heaven, and I would not be me.
What if you could feel bliss where it felt like you did earn it? It's obviously impossible today because we don't have such tech, but what if we did? What if everyone could feel like Elon Musk (presumably) did when the first SpaceX mission launched successfully?
This post gets to the heart of the issue. It's not whether or not you earned bliss that's valuable, it's the feeling of having earned it that's valuable, regardless of whether someone acknowledges this or not. The idea of unearned bliss is only instinctually repugnant because we imagine it feeling unearned, because that's how it would feel without the sensation of earnedness also being present. So if we reach a point where emotional states are engineerable, then it will be perfectly possible to not just instantiate positive emotional states, but also the state of fully believing any emotional state was properly earned. Therefore, there should be no opposition to engineered emotional states due to a lack of earnedness.
> The idea of unearned bliss is only instinctually repugnant because we imagine it feeling unearned, because that's how it would feel without the sensation of earnedness also being present.
Some people find it abhorrent because they care about the external world and actual impacts and outcomes of other people.
Feeling earned bliss means positive impacts and outcomes for other people actually happened - surely this is better for all of us? Surely we should indeed incentivize this form of bliss over unearned, both for our collective good and for our civilizational and aggregate capacity to solve real-world problems and survive and thrive as a species overall?
While it may be true that at the present, earned bliss is instrumentally more useful, I still hold that bliss itself should be the ultimate end of human striving, and that therefore this bliss achieved as a terminal value in and of itself doesn't need to be "earned" to still be valuable as a final outcome.
At this exact point, where we can engineer a sense of “earned” bliss, we have achieved a state of lying to ourselves about our own actions and our freedom to determine them that I cannot help but despise. I look on the hedonic experience machine and I respond with despair for my own agency. I regard the mental state you describe as qualitatively different from anything I have experienced in my life, so I cannot grasp for a more personal metaphor.
For maximum authenticity, I would refrain from using Ibuprofen. It creates a false sense of wellbeing, which we haven't earned.
If you learned that your current happiness set point was higher than 90% of people's, would you take prodepressant drugs to make you sadder until you were at the exact average?
If you learned that your happiness set point was in the lowest 10% of people, would you take antidepressant drugs until it was back at average? If you could take even more antidepressants and get higher than average, would you?
If you learned that 50000 years ago, happiness set points were higher, but agriculture had metabolic effects that drove them lower, would you take the antidepressants until you reached the current average set point, or the 50000 years ago set point?
After thinking about questions like this I stop caring about this kind of stuff too much and whatever, I'll just take the perma-happiness.
(I think many people assume perma-happiness must mean you're not capable of acting, or feeling worse or better depending on whether good or bad things are happening, but I'm assuming that's not true and you can just copy the mental state of someone with a much higher happiness set point than you)
Not the OP here, but I feel some deep-seated unease at this kind of rhetoric because I sense that this spectrum of hypothetical bliss is only possible in the mental model of a rationalist, where utilitarian notions of happiness mean that everything is fungible, including mental states. If you were offered the “eternal bliss” pill right now, would you take it? Would you eagerly take the soma?
I know I am hopelessly incapable of articulating my thought process here, but it seems like your rhetoric is only possible in the kind of a philosopher with no preferential regard for the status quo; I understand that this is most utilitarians, but I personally derive a sense of – not comfort or contentment, but stability? acceptance? – from the notion that things are as they are because of how they have been. I am capable of experiencing intense joy and deep sorrow, and when I do, it is the result of some causal precipitating chain of events that are in some sense self-determined… to the extent that I am capable of taking any self-determined action whatsoever (many people are, of course, incapacitated in some manner as to render them unable to comprehend the causal impacts of their own actions). I feel a wrenching sense of incapacity as well when contemplating this kind of scenario.
The freedom of the utilitarian is to be governed by their internal rule, an ideal so internal that the objects of value are themselves internal, the qualities of consciousness itself. Nothing is left to chance, and everything comes from within and only has value therein. This is more authentic perhaps than the psychological illusion of making a choice spontaneously, like Libet's delay. It also makes more sense than valuing a choice merely because it was spontaneous.
The utilitarian would prefer to give up free will entirely, and to have all their future actions be the best ones, whichever those are. But I could see why you'd think utilitarianism would be so dreary. It doesn't tell a story, and it doesn't have characters. It has no ulterior motives, no moments of character development. But alongside Buddhism no other living system sees how deeply serious our situation is, no other system condemns the world so totally and wages such a war against it. In other systems with positive precepts, even in Christian Gnosticism, there is always a note of apologetics, of theodicy or cosmodicy. In utilitarianism and Buddhism the desire to make peace with the world and befriend it has totally vanished, and the world is beyond forgiveness.
>If you were offered the “eternal bliss” pill right now, would you take it? Would you eagerly take the soma?
If this was quite literally what you describe it as being, it would be wildly irresponsible for me not to take it. That, and that I would be caving into fear to protect my petty sense of normality, would be too shameful for words. It's really a repugnant thought.
Did you see this tweet: https://x.com/freganmitts/status/1444019853497671691
"Just taught Nozick’s Experience Machine for the hundredth time. All but one student were immediately and unreservedly in favor of entering the machine for life. Never had that happen before, rather threw off my lesson plan!"
I just refreshed my memory of the Experience Machine, and I think people today have different perceptions of the thought experiment than previously, because of the march of technology. For example, which students considered the possibility of any errors in the machine, from which no recovery could even be possible because the machine operators think it's running just fine?
Another issue is the definition of happiness. Everyone knows what happiness is, but that may differ from person to person. The machine may customize the experience to the individual, but without feedback from the individual, how can the machine provide consistent happiness? In a thought experiment, such concerns can be waved away, but only up to a point. For instance, if you enjoy eating a certain food, so the machine simulates you eating that food, diminishing marginal utility indicates, at some point, that that food is no longer what it should be simulating.
I was raised Catholic. I remember learning that in the "afterlife" -- heaven anyway -- was described similarly. Want for nothing, etc.
When I was in 5th grade, I had a crush on a girl who had no interest in me. I imagined how much she would like me in "heaven". But it occurred to me that that might not be how she imagined heaven.
Today, the US is a wealthy nation by any historic standards. Yet the rate of anxiety and depression are really high. Particularly in young people.
I can understand the idea that feeding an housing everyone is a good baseline goal for humanity. But I don't think that would be enough to make everyone happy. We could medicate, I guess. But that doesn't seem fulfilling either. (Reminds me of the movie Wall-E).
So to me that seems like an unachievable goal -- and the wrong one anway.
Why couldn't you, in heaven, be with that girl? And also the girl, in HER heaven, never meet you again, if such is ideal for her? Heaven could be a kind of Hilbert space, so that everyone's ideal state is achieved.
Not that I believe in heaven, as it sounds like wishful thinking with no evidence for or against it.
The last story in Julian Barnes' 'A History of the World in 10½ Chapters' postulated a heaven much like yours.
We don’t medication just yet to give you a “fulfilling” sense of bliss. But nothing in the laws of physics says we can’t make one.
As a hedonic utilitarian, I personally think the end goal of humanity should be to convert the universe's matter into as many minds experiencing sublime happiness as possible. We can tell from direct experience that pleasure is a good in and of itself, and therefore it is something we should try to maximize. When we really think about this, we realize that we don't have to limit ourselves to increasing happiness in already existing minds, but we can create even greater pleasure by creating new minds that have been engineered to feel a maximum level of happiness in perpetuity. If creating such minds is even theoretically possible, then the clear end goal that presents itself is to create as many such minds as possible from the majority unthinking matter of the universe. I forsee a future where Von Neumann probes spread out across the cosmos, converting all matter in their path into minds that will continue to feel rapturous pleasure until the heat death of the universe. That is what I believe the end goal of human progress should be.
It's probably good to strike a deal with the existing lifeforms, so that they'll go along with this plan. Probably good to assure humans they won't be converted into hedonium cores.
That's why I say that it's the majority unthinking matter of the universe that gets converted. We can leave humanity and any other systems containing life alone, as a sort of "hedge" in case there's some more existential meaning to life that pure hedonism doesn't fulfill. The vast majority of the universe not containing life would be converted either way.
This goal you’ve proposed fills me with a sense of reflexive and overwhelming revulsion.
I suspect that, if democratic impulses are to have anything to do with the determination of our long-term goals as a species, you may see more opposition than you might expect.
I wrote a detailed reply to this that the Substack app appears to have eaten, so I'll briefly restate it. I can understand why you might feel instinctual revulsion at the idea of humans being put into experience machines, but that's not actually what I'm proposing. I think that humanity and any other intelligent life can be left alone, to provide an outlet for more existentially diverse modes of existence, as a hedge in case there is more meaning to life than pure pleasure maximization. It would only be the inert, unthinking matter that makes up the majority of the universe that would be converted. So it wouldn't be a case of human experience being replaced by maximized pleasure, but rather lifelessness being replaced by maximized pleasure. I hope you find this idea less off-putting knowing that humanity would still be able to exist in all its experiential diversity.
First of all, let me say that I can deeply empathize on the Substack vanishing point. I have experienced the same thing at several times and there are few things more frustrating.
The discussion here has actually been quite interesting for me in a personal sense, because I’m slightly surprised to notice how much I oppose the idea of even converting inert space to “bliss”. I hope you’ll grant me some license to ramble here.
I have a lot I could say in terms of articulating minutiae related to my sense of opposition, but I think there are several sort of overarching beliefs I hold that are more foundational; I notice that I believe deeply in the inestimably complex nature of systems (as in, that systems in nature are often far more complex than we recognize, and that we tend to minimize our estimation of remaining unacknowledged complexity every time we make an iterative step in the direction of discovering some additional complex facet of a given system. i.e. we habitually lack the humility necessary to comprehend system complexity), and I am concerned about the possibility of knock-on effects from the conversion of inert space. Just as a universal assumption, I think I tend to model some sort of James C. Scott-style skepticism of any paradisiacal top-down scheme to radically transform natural systems; take German scientific forestry, if you will, as the parallel. In other words I feel absolutely no compulsion to enact some sweeping scheme to spread consciousness to “inert space”, and I feel some concern about potential downsides, so on net I feel no desire to do it. A pure utilitarian (with different assumptions about the legibility of natural systems) may feel otherwise.
I am also fairly skeptical of the notion of fungible or replicable consciousness, as a concept divorced of humanity; like Erik Hoel, I am AI-pilled on the threat and capabilities (and imminence) of AGI whilst not granting it any claim to consciousness. On this point I will not elaborate too much, given that other people much smarter than I have already articulated the various permutations and consequences of this assumption.
I think that if I consider myself even more deeply, there is some core belief even more foundational that perhaps ties the previous two beliefs together – that it is best for the human race not to try and play God. On this assumption I have nothing more to say, other than to acknowledge it seems a silly thing in light of rationalist or utilitarian arguments because it is frustratingly unmoored from these kinds of philosophical approaches. Nevertheless.
>We can tell from direct experience that pleasure is a good in and of itself, and therefore it is something we should try to maximize.
"What do you mean by 'we', paleface?"
Probably means sentient life.
Count me out. "Pleasure" is, well, pleasant, but it is not a goal.
True, but hedonic utilitarianism counts all forms of joy and happiness as "pleasure" as well. It's just a broad term.
That sounds like defining "pleasure" to mean "the thing that is maximised". But then it is no longer a subject of direct experience.
I'll be posting a review of Nick Bostrom's "Deep Utopia" sometime in the next month or so.
My position is that AI and the possibility of superintelligence make everything else irrelevant. Either it takes over, or it produces such dramatic changes (eg humans near obsolete, technology advances at the rate of centuries per year) that - ironically - stories about humans leisurely colonizing the solar system and building dome cities on Mars and having wars with little spaceships - are science fiction only insofar as they're too *normal* and *boring*. In the real world everything explodes in some kind of crazy way and the aftermath is either extreme ever-expanding utopia or nothing human-looking at all. I think even if there's somehow no such thing as superintelligence or recursive self-improvement, just one or two AI generations beyond what we have now is enough to make the future really different from the Star Wars version where you still have human pilots, soldiers, merchants, etc. Accelerando is the only sci-fi book I've read that really grapples with this, though there are probably others I've missed.
This makes the "goal" of humanity hard to reason about - with enough far future tech, instead of worrying about environment-tech tradeoffs, we can just give Earth to the animals and live on the outside surface of the Dyson Sphere or whatever. At that point the question is less normal environment-tech tradeoffs and more what happens at the extreme extreme limits of environmentalism - should we end wild animal suffering and genetically engineer predators into herbivores? If biodiversity is good, should we accelerate evolution to create billions of new species on paradise-worlds scattered across the solar system? If we want to expand to other planets, should we form a colonization shockwave expanding at lightspeed throughout the galaxy to create trillions of trillions of humans teeming across every solid surface, or is that the astronomical equivalent of spam? (cf. Asimov's Spacers and Settlers, and the Repugnant Conclusion literature)
Bostrom has some thoughts on this, but I think it's probably safe to leave the details to future superintelligences that are vastly smarter than we are. Although I realize that intelligence =/ wisdom or good values, I don't think our moral reasoning / philosophy would be very good if it had been done entirely by sub-70-IQ retarded people, and that's the closest equivalent to trying to solve these issues today instead of leaving them to future intelligence-amplified philosophers. I think we solve the minimum number of philosophical problems necessary to value-align superintelligence, then let it tell us more (I would trust it most if it says that it's going to create genetically engineered humans or human-AI cyborgs to combine superintelligence with natural human thought processes).
>The aftermath is either extreme ever-expanding utopia or nothing human-looking at all
Okay I agree things are going to explode and we aren't going to get a space opera future but these aren't the only possibilities.
How about a world where:
- Humans are fabulously wealthy - maybe trillions of times wealthier than today
- They have access to perfectly tailored virtual realities
- They have access to unbelievable amounts of computing power and intelligence - on - demand
- They can arbitrarily modify their own minds
- They rapidly expand throughout the galaxy
But history has not ended, and it isn't a perfect utopia:
- Large-scale coordination is still difficult
- Civilizational outcomes are still mostly not the end result of long philosophical reflection
- Sometimes wars still happen
- It is not "post-scarcity" - material resources are still very much limited and in demand, if only to create more computers
- Torture still exists, and it can be much more severe than modern torture. Some actors use torture as an extortion tactic
- Some humans are sadists and use their computational resources to torment digital minds.
I think this future is very plausible and I wouldn't consider it a utopia
You are a smart guy and I’m going to assume here that something like AGI and super-intelligence can happen but..
> technology advances at the rate of centuries per year
That’s just not possible. Maybe in theory science can advance at centuries per year. I doubt it but let’s go with it - but technology as an applied science will be subject to the laws of physics, economics, commerce and - not least - the supply chain.
See the section beginning with "What Are The Bottlenecks..." at https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/127386375/what-are-the-bottlenecks-to-ai-speeding-up-ai-progress
Science is currently progressing at centuries per year, relative to the normal rate of scientific progress before agriculture.
Which proves nothing about the future. If anything, as I’ll reply to Scott later, we may be one the top of the S curve for a lot of technologies we already have, and the smartest super intelligence will have no ability to do anything but eke out a few percentages.
Perhaps, but that's not the historical norm. New technologies get created as well.
I'd instead say that speedup depends on things like feedback from physical world stuff, the parallelizable proportion of a task, the efficiency with which you prune branches in exploring combinatorial hypothesis space etc, which would lead to anywhere from "not much speedup" to "well beyond hundreds of times". No idea what this extreme heterogeneity in speedup nets out to though.
Suppose you had brief access to high technology (perhaps 1000 years from now) that would allow you do do the following:
- send self-replicating agents throughout the galaxy/universe, which could
- identify planets with primitive life (say equiv earth @ 3.5B years old)
- irrevocably sterilize such planets
would you do it? Would you find that abhorrent or, in fact, a moral imperative?
I think any technology powerful enough to do that could also do much better things (like https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/profile-the-far-out-initiative), and that any civilization powerful enough to deploy this technology would know things we don't that would let them make this decision better than we can (eg the nature of consciousness and suffering, what it feels like to be a snake, etc). So to some degree I reject this hypothetical.
If you force me to accept it, I want to know other things, like if humans are planning to expand through space and colonize those planets or not, and how good a job humans are doing with their own civilization/biosphere.
If you put a gun to my head and force me to answer either yes or no without answering any of these things, I'd take the [strikethrough]bullet to the head[/strikethrough] deal.
Thank you for your thoughts. I agree 100%. Let's get wiser first before going toe-to-toe against evolution.
To make things massivlely more grounded, though, I have to confess that the idea of " genetically engineer[ing] predators into herbivores" is something that I get less grip on the more I think about it. What is a lion without predation, males fighting to the death for domination a a pride, and so on. Could humans ever be wise enough to "fix this" and leave anything worthwhile other than a quasi-human with fur? (Though I'm pessimstic, I'll give an encouraging thought by noting that what we did with dogs, even if inadvertently, isn't the worst precedent.)
> I'll give an encouraging thought by noting that what we did with dogs, even if inadvertently, isn't the worst precedent.
It's pretty likely dogs self-domesticated, so you could consider it them-driven rather than us-driven. You start with wolves scavenging near human camps 40kya, and the ones with less reactive aggression and fear reflexes are able to go deeper / stay longer / get more food and leave more descendants. The ones who compound on that to be able to actually get closer as humans are discarding bones or gristle or whatever, and act friendly while closer do still better.
You compound this for tens of thousands of years. By 15-20kya dogs are morphologically distinct from wolves. Now they're tame enough to be near humans full time and humans probably start breeding them into some of the oldest breeds like Basenjis and Salukis and such.
As an aside that's not directly relevant, domestication can happen surprisingly quickly when actively selected for - it took us probably 200-400k years to self domesticate, dogs around 20k years, but when Byalev deliberately set out to breed domesticated foxes, it only took 3 generations until they had no aggression response, within 4 generations some kits would approach humans wagging, like puppies. At the sixth generation, they essentially had the full dog behavioral package.
Then the “domesticated elite” went from 18% of the population at 10 generations to 80% in 35 generations, very fast fixation when selected for.
The thing about the Singularities is afterwards, someone or something else is calling the shots, so to paraphrase “1066 and all that”, it would be THE END of history from our perspective.
I'm definitely skeptical that AI is going to change society *that much* in the next decades. Will be interesting to see what happens, tho.
Stross has multiple times strongly disavowed the stance in Accelerando, though. As far as I can tell current-Stross sees AI more along the lines of Rule 34, strange and humanly inexplicable and beyond control like any optimization engine, creating big changes but Internet-scale, not singularity-scale.
It’s funny that the authors opinion (seemingly, I didn’t read it) guessed the trend correctly in the past but is now failing to guess it correctly in the future. Foresight is 20/20 in his case?
He also stopped writing fun, well-thought-out, futurist scifi and started focusing on relatively boring fantasy / Cthulu-esque worlds (The Laundry).
A loss on both ends.
I think Stross has come to believe that singularitarianism is essentially a Fyodorovian religion. As far as I understand the reasoning (this might be wrong and I don't necessarily share these beliefs), it is therefore politically dangerous, in the sense of being an opiate and a dampener of action, and perhaps also likely to be encouraged by people who benefit from the status quo. His blog archives contain more detail about this.
> "creating big changes but Internet-scale, not singularity-scale"
I don't understand this perspective. I understand and appreciate (though on balance disagree with) people saying AI will take so long to become superintelligent that we shouldn't worry about it in our lifetimes/the near term. But I don't understand how you're a sci-fi author happy to write about 2100 or 3000 and don't think this consideration dominates, unless you think that the normal human IQ is as fixed as the lightspeed limit (in which case, how do we get human geniuses?)
Hey Scott, just curious whether you've come across (and presumably rejected) David Deutsch's 'universal explainer' theory? He thinks there is a discrete jump between e.g. humans and chimps, but the concept of a higher level superintelligence is incoherent—humans are in principle capable of understanding any knowledge that is explicable, even if we have to do so more slowly due to differences in hardware (processing speed, working memory). The heart of all knowledge creation is the ability to come up with explanations, and this is a binary attribute: humans have it, animals don't, AIs don't have it (yet). Once they do, they will be people like us, who can be persuaded by reason.
It's a very counterintuitive idea and I'm not sure if it fully resolves all the AI doom concerns even if true, but it is really interesting IMO and worth looking into.
Specifically about AI doom, I don't think this argument goes far. It's only considering the quality of the intelligence, not the speed. Even if human geniuses represent the most intelligent form of life possible (unlikely, but let's imagine it) the speed of execution remains a determining factor in what can be achieved by them.
A strong example of this is that any person with mediocre chess skills could quite easily beat the world's best chess player, if they got to spend 10 years thinking about each move for every 1 minute that the chess master did.
An AI that could think hundreds or thousands of times faster than us wouldn't need to be qualitatively more intelligent than us in order to hand us our asses at practically every task. Moreover, it could also run in parallel. It could effectively be like a team of hundreds or thousands of people thinking at once. Putting some theoretical ceiling on intelligence that makes humans the most intelligent things possible doesn't actually keep us safe from any of that.
Yeah this is where my remaining concerns lie. I'm pretty sure Deutsch would reject the orthogonality thesis: morality also stems from the ability to generate and critique explanations—which is the key attribute of 'personhood'—so we wouldn't end up with totally inscrutable paperclip-style mismatches. But there would still be a lot of time for an AGI to make major and irreversible moral mistakes, in the same way that humans have made lots of moral mistakes (and continue to make them) despite being universal explainers.
I haven't read it. Gut reaction is that I deny the premise - I think of humans as more like 1000x the IQ of chimps rather than a step change. I feel like LLMs sort of back this up - as you go from GPT-1 to GPT-4.5, you see a lot of what you might think of as human reason emerging gradually.
Language is obviously great, but I think of it as the same type of thing as mathematics - just an incredibly useful tool that opens up lots of new opportunities. Could there be another equally-interesting tool that you only get at IQ 5000 and above? I would guess no, but I'm not sure.
(maybe formal logic, statistics, or the scientific method were tools like this which we got in historical times?)
Re: chimps, it's interesting that they have roughly the same brain size and structure as us, and even have more oomph in some respects (e.g. superior working memory) but are, as you put it, 1000x less intelligent. To me that fits much better with the idea that we are running a different software program that lets us do a completely novel type of mental move, rather than on some kind of continuum of ability.
Language is downstream of the trait that Deutsch is interested in, which is something like the ability to come up with creative conjectures about the world, and which leads to all the various behaviours that only humans can do. Simon Baron-Cohen has a very similar idea which he frames as the ability to systematise, although AFAIK he is unaware of Deutsch. Baron-Cohen runs through the anthropological and animal behaviour evidence in 'The Pattern Seekers'—I'm not an expert but it at least passed the sniff test for me (I reviewed it in this year's contest if you're interested).
LLMs are a whole other can of worms which I'm still kinda confused about. It seems like they're smart in the same way as chimps - they have superhuman intuition and memory (System 1), but are fundamentally limited in the ability to synthesise solutions to novel problems on the fly (System 2). It's really hard to operationalise a test for this, and AI people will quite rightly be frustrated about endlessly moving goalposts.
But Deutsch's arguments are very compelling and I still lean towards him probably being right. Again, if you're interested I cover them briefly in the Pattern Seekers review. Otherwise Deutsch's book The Beginning of Infinity is a great read which I think you'd enjoy in its own right, even if you disagree with the universal explainer theory.
Quibble: Stross' most recent novels that include AI (Rule 34 is probably the best one) are near-future SF police procedurals, set 10-20 years in the future. He's also pretty much abandoned the idea of writing near-to-medium-term SF because the future is too hazy and uncertain, although he's thinking more about sociopolitical uncertainty, not primarily AI.
You may be familiar with it already, but I'd also recommend Vernor Vinge's work generally, and especially his "Rainbows End," which is set on the cusp of a singularity. Rainbows End does a particularly good job of suckering you in to think it's a story about everything being _about_ to go crazy, and then realizing that, no, it's actually a story of a world where everything _already_ went crazy, and people are doing their best to cope.
I mean, are we counting almost philosopher since Socrates?
More seriously Hegel and his students/followers can be seen as among the most serious answers to this, and considering what it would mean to set a goal for all humanity in the presence of freedom.
> The goal of humanity should be for all humans to get to enjoy the benefits of modern society, to end global poverty in other words, not just extreme $1/day poverty but any living standards that people in the rich world would consider poor.
Yes, let's all of humanity aspire to being 300lb sedentary moderns glued to screens both tiny and large for 10+ hours a day.
This is surely the highest and best purpose humanity as a whole should aspire to.
I mean, I actually agree we should raise global GDP per capita and automate production enough that everyone can be physically comfortable, but that's not going to happen without actual vision and aspirations beyond becoming Wall-E.
Also, making everyone comfortable isn't actually a good thing for human flourishing and happiness and mental health. Just look at "comfortable" Western depression, anxiety and suicide rates, life satisfaction, etc.
“We imagined ourselves as samurai sword VR pirate pioneers, but it turns out we’re pointless argument vegetables growing in walled gardens, harvested for the benefit of robots that serve us ads.”
Also, "lifting people out of poverty" only happens via economic growth, which only happens when you let rich people create businesses and jobs without taxing and disincentivizing them into oblivion. The way we lifted ~800M people out of <$5 a day poverty in the last 40 years was via China going capitalist, after all.
But all I ever hear from the "make everyone comfortable" crowd is to increase taxes, guillotine billionaires, etc. 70% of billionaries on the Forbes lists are self-made - they created a TON of jobs and economic growth, the main thing we want / need for the end goal. But no, they're just trying to make Elysium.
> Yes, let's all of humanity aspire to being 300lb sedentary moderns glued to screens both tiny and large for 10+ hours a day.
That's an extremely uncharitable interpretation of what Nikuruga wrote. And the rest of your comment makes me think that you set up this strawman merely as an excuse for that libertarian-flavored rant.
You're right, I probably owe Nikuruga an apology.
What I wrote was actually more tactful than my initial reaction - I think the things he's advocating for are completely opposite day, literally the wrong direction for either end, and I think it was upsetting to me because I actually agree with the end goal.
I agree with Nikuruga that we should lift as much of the world out of <$5 a day poverty as we can. I think that we should indeed try to increase human flourishing and the potential for people to use their talents to the fullest in the pursuit of excellence. The methodologies he's suggesting are explicitly pulling in the wrong direction for those ends.
"Enjoying the benefits of modern [Western] society" is almost certainly a mistake. Western society is fat, sick, and unhappy, with below replacement fertility, significant political divisions, declining state and civilizational capacity, and more. This is because everyone is comfortable and lazy and stares at big and / or small screens for 5-12 hours a day, and are basically adversarially captured by various FAANG eyeball and attention mines. Putting this as an end goal is pretty much explicitly a program to turn the entire world into 300 pound argument vegetables.
"Comfort" should never be an end, it's a stasis and the death of vitality and individual and civilizational capability. It's also explicitly *anti-correlated* with human flourishing and happiness, pace "comfortable" Western depression and anxiety rates, suicide rates, etc.
"Billionaires shouldn't try to go to Mars, they should give money to the poor" is ALSO not even wrong, even by his own lights. A), they've already done more than anyone else in terms of creating jobs and economic growth, the ONLY thing that permanently lifts poor people out of poverty in the aggregate. B) deciding we can't try to do anything cool or exciting until everyone on earth is "comfortable" is explicitly a program to turn us all into 300 pound argument vegetables and never achieve anything. C) billionaires became billionaires by DOING aspirational, cool things - trying to eliminate them (or trying to tax the crap out of billionaires-to-be to give to the poor) is just going to end with much less economic growth, and so many fewer poor people being permanently lifted out of poverty.
If you ACTUALLY want to lift more of the global poor out of poverty, we need dynamics that create a whole lot MORE billionaires. When China went capitalist and lifted 800M people out of poverty? That created a TON of billionaires - who are right now driving up real estate prices in Vancouver and NYC and London and whatever. Now we need a wave of economic dynamism similar to China's that will create the next wave of non-political-leader African billionaires. Because they'll become billionaires by building companies that create a lot of jobs and employ a metric buttload of people, and which drive a lot of GDP creation and economic growth.
Thank you for this clarification. I don't agree with all of your points, but they make more sense now.
That sounds like there's a lot in it for poor people, but what's in it for people who are already rich?
The satisfaction of knowing that all of the items I use or food I eat were produced by people who were paid enough to live a pleasant life. Freedom from the negative feelings involved in knowing that other people are suffering because of resource distribution. The cultivation of compassion for other people. Moral and ethical goodness.
I'm guessing those things are not motivators for you the way they are for me and, probably, Nikuruga.
This is a very “The Good Place” approach to utilitarianism, but I like it at least on its face.
Well, I'm not a utilitarian!
Very well put.
A random thought about Putin's secret children:
https://tapwatersommelier.substack.com/p/how-to-grow-your-princes
This is also IIRC how later Ottoman sultans were raised in Topkapi Palace.
I wouldn't take everything written about Putin's kids at face value. I'm sure they live a great life but I doubt this part specifically:
> None of them dares to argue with the children, so they grow up knowing that they are exceptional. Any whim is fulfilled, and they perceive all the residences they live in as their personal domains.
Putin has been managing people for over 30 years now, I'm sure he understands that some degree of discipline is important to raise a proper heir.
These statements do not contradict each other. Even if Putin knows discipline is important, that does not mean that someone else would dare to apply said discipline to his child.
This is a quote from an investigation, during which they supposedly managed to talk to several of the staff members. So, not just a baseless conjecture.
I think, any assumption about Putin capable of understanding anything at this point is just an assumption. We truly don't know the damage this amount of power can do to a person holding it.
Also, if that were true, then surely very few actual princes and princesses from history would be spoiled arrogant idiots, which is not the case.