A hypothetical situation/question that has bugged me since childhood: A ball is thrown at a wall. The distance between the ball and the wall can be measured and expressed mathematically. As the ball approaches the wall, that measurement becomes a smaller and smaller number. Numbers are infinite, and numbers can be always be divided and made smaller (in my understanding). My question - as the ball nears the wall, the numerically expressed distance can always be made into a smaller number - how does the ball, numerically speaking, ever actually make contact with the wall? This may be a dumb question, but hey, if you don't ask... Thanks in advance.
These are not trivial problems at all. If you suppose that the ball moves at constant speed of 1m/s toward the wall, and starts out 3m away, then the distance to the wall is (3-t)m and as the time t approaches 3, the distance goes to 0. There's nothing special happening at t=3 from a mathematical sense, though physically the ball contacts the wall at that point and you need to refine the model to go any further.
Actually, Newton developed calculus to deal with problems of the type you're describing. The way calculus is taught in schools and universities obscures this fact, but the basics of the subject are all about making sense of processes which happen in continuous time, like the one you describe.
You'll read this and think I haven't answered the question. Actually setting calculus on a completely rigorous mathematical footing took around 250 years, and the effort of many mathematicians. (Real numbers are already surprisingly difficult to describe formally - and then you're looking at processes involving these to describe the real world.) To get a completely satisfying answer to the question, you would probably need to go through a sequence of undergrad level calculus courses - but hopefully this gives a sense of what's going on.
Keep in mind that time works the same way; every time you remeasure the distance from the ball to the wall, you remeasure the time it takes to travel there. Eventually you hit... is it Planck, or Heisenberg? Either way, there's a distance at which things are no longer things, and then the ball changes direction.
Technically, the ball never touches the wall. The ball is made of atoms, the wall is made of atoms; if you put the atoms too close, they repel. At a tiny but nonzero distance the force becomes strong enough to make the ball bounce.
(If Chuck Norris throws a ball at a wall, a microscopic black hole is created at the place of collision, and then it gets complicated. EDIT: The atoms would probably just fit in places between other atoms and the ball would get stuck inside the wall, possibly leading to an explosion.)
You're looking for solutions for Xeno's paradoxes, which in the modern era broadly get solved with calculus. I'm not super up on the exact solutions, but it's something to do with limits?
Gebru and Torres, two dissident researchers who became famous as coauthors of the renowned "Stochastic Parrots" article, recently published a new paper critical of the rationality sphere and EA:
They coin the awesome-sounding acronym TESCREAL to describe the sphere, and then argue that it has roots in the eugenics tradition. Are you aware of this article, and have you considered responding to it?
In what way are they "dissidents"? They're representatives of the boring, narrow hegemony that rules intellectual life, trying to extend that hegemony into one of the few corners they don't control.
Once I strip aside the authors' tone of moral panic about the followers of TESCREAL beliefs (Transhumanism, Extopianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, EAism, and Longtermism) their arguments boil down to (a) these are all influenced by eugenics-based ideas, and (b) and most of their AGI hopes and dreams are not based on sound scientific nor engineering principles.
As for the first, they admit that the dream of breeding/creating superior humans goes back long before the early 20th-century Eugenics movement, and they fail to tie the current eugenical beliefs to those of the previous century. But they try to tar the current movements with old stains of the old movement.
And as for the latter, I tend to agree with their statements. A lot of the TESCREAL beliefs are attractive to smart people who think they know more than they do (and Charlie Stross has noted how much of their beliefs have been influenced by old science fiction tropes). I see the TESCREAL belief systems as being mostly harmless crackpottery. Of course, certain billionaire followers of TESCREAL beliefs could do a lot of social and political damage if they're given the power to do so.
Reading the article, commenting as I go, I am not promising that I will make it to the end:
> we have seen little discussion of why AGI is considered desirable by many in the field of AI, and whether this is a goal that should be pursued
Apparently no one reads Yudkowsky these days.
> In this paper, we ask: What ideologies are driving the race to attempt to build AGI?
In this comment, I answer: it's about money and power; the things that transcend all ideologies.
> the acronym “TESCREAL” denotes “transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, (modern) cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism”
At the first sight, this sounds like a complicated way to say "nerds". (Later we will see how much the words can actually be substituted, but if yes, that would kinda reduce the entire finding to: "the people trying to build AGI are... nerds". Which is true, but not really surprising.)
> The idea of eugenics can be traced back to the origins of the Western intellectual tradition
Yeah, I guess if you want to talk about transhumanists and singularitarians, you need to start with the recent examples, such as Plato and Aristotle.
> second-wave eugenics arose in response to new technological possibilities associated with genetic engineering and biotechnology. Such technologies opened the door to human “improvements”
When the authors say "eugenics", they basically include anything that concerns human DNA. If you worry about your child potentially getting Tay–Sachs disease, you know who else worried about people having inferior genes, right?
The link between eugenics and transhumanism seems to be that eugenicists wanted to improve humans by improving the genetic pool, and transhumanists want to achieve the same goal by abandoning the biological limitations completely. Different methods, the same goal.
Extropianists were the first organized modern transhumanist group. Singularitarians are also transhumanists. This... apparently makes the belief that an artificial intelligence could be smarter than humans an eugenicist belief, by the power of association. (I wonder whether a belief that Google can find things online better than you is also a fundamentally eugenicist belief. Or that a calculator can do multiplication faster than you.)
Never heard about cosmism before, so whatever; I find it plausible that it is also somehow related to thinking about the future and technology (which, as we have already established, are fundamentally eugenicist topics). Rationalists... also believe that AI is a big thing, and that it would better for the poweful AI to be good rather than evil. (Those assholes.) Effective altruists want to alleviate poverty... I am sure there is something sinister behind that, too, let's wait for the punchline... ah, yeah, some of them also worry about the future humans. And longtermists, those by definition worry about the future. (Remember, worrying about the future is an eugenicist thing.)
> Indeed, transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, and cosmism are examples of second-wave eugenics, since all endorse the use of emerging technologies to radically “enhance” humanity and create a new “posthuman” species.
OK, still in 20% of the article, but seems like this is the crux. If you accept the premise that trying to improve humans in any way (such as curing hereditary diseases or augmenting humans by technology) is basically the same thing that Nazis tried to do, only using modern technology, then... either you become a Nazi sympathizer, or you need to ban all efforts to cure genetic diseases or augment humans. Anything else means being in denial; and luckily we have two smart professors here to expose your hypocrisy.
> The TESCREAL bundle shares certain “eschatological” (relating to “last things”) convictions. As with religions like Christianity, these take two forms: utopian and apocalyptic, which are inextricably bound up together.
The belief in either horrible or glorious future is also in Marxism, just saying. On the other hand, effective altruists are mostly worried about the dark present. (I think that rationalists are also quite concerned about people being stupid right now.)
> The reason for concern is that emerging technologies are expected to be (a) extremely powerful; (b) increasingly accessible to both state and nonstate actors; and (c) dual-use, as exemplified by CRISPR-Cas9, which could enable us to cure diseases but also synthesize designer pathogens unleashing an “engineered pandemic”.
Here I would like to ask the authors whether *they* agree with this assessment factually, or not. Because if they do, then it also puts them in the category of people worrying about the future. (And if they don't, then what's the point of obsessing whether the technologies are connected to the sinister TESCREALs?)
> in 1996, Yudkowsky expressed concerns about superintelligence, writing: “Superintelligent robots = Aryans, humans = Jews.
Ah, Yudkowsky being Yudkowsky. But what exactly are the authors trying to say? Are they suggesting that Yudkowsky proposes the extermination of Jews/humans as a desirable thing to do? Or are they just taking things out of context in order to make their point?
> “Intelligence,” typically understood as the property measured by IQ tests, matters greatly because of its instrumental value
Uhm... yes?
> The obsession with IQ can be traced back to first-wave eugenicists, who used IQ tests to identify “defectives” and the “feeble-minded.”
Ah, I see the logic. In a parallel universe where Nazis sent *short* people to death camps, it is probably a taboo to talk about human height, and if you suggest that putting things on the top shelf can make them difficult to reach for some people, you get cancelled.
A list of people and organizations to get cancelled.
> Effective accelerationists believe that the probability of a bad outcome due to AGI is very low
Yeah, that's pretty much the same thing as Yudkowsky says, except with "not" at the beginning.
(Would that make the acronym TESCREALEACC?)
> how TESCREAList groups are steering the field of AI toward the goal of creating AGI.
This feels like giving too much credit. Are they saying that without these people, it wouldn't occur to anyone to build an LLM?
> In 1955, four white men officially launched the field of AI
Ah, the field is forever tainted by the association with crackers. :(
> many researchers in fields currently associated with AI, such as natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and computer vision (CV), explicitly distanced themselves from the term “AI,” in part because it became associated with unfulfilled grandiose promises. Nonetheless, some groups continued to work toward “artificial general intelligence,”
So, both the former and the latter agree that the AIs we have now are not AGIs? And that is somehow controversial? Or why the framing of "some researchers work on X, but others [sinister music starts playing] work on Y"? Isn't it quite normal that different researchers work on different things? It seems like the authors are trying to hint at some dark controversy here, but to me it sounds about as sinister as saying "some biologists study mice, but others [sinister music starts playing] study frogs". Like, yeah, that's how research works. (Actually, I may be wrong here. That's how research works in natural sciences. In some other fields, it is probably very important that the researchers agree with each other and all do the same thing, otherwise they get cancelled?)
> How, then, would researchers know that they have achieved their goals of building AGI? They need to know how to define and measure “general intelligence.” Unsurprisingly, these definitions rest on notions of “intelligence” that depend on IQ and other racist concepts
(facepalm)
> For these reasons, Keira Havens, who has written extensively on race science, asks those attempting to build AGI: “Why are you relying on eugenic definitions, eugenic concepts, eugenic thinking to inform your work? Why [...] do you want to enshrine these static and limited ways of thinking about humanity and intelligence?”
Mussolini promised to make trains run on time. Why are you still using trains?
> One conjecture is that the resulting AGI will be so intelligent that it will figure out what the best thing to do is in any potential situation.
I'm confused. So did they read Yudkowsky or didn't they? Or were they just looking for a quote to take out of context, and ignored everything else, including the part where he *literally* called exactly this thing "the sheer folly of callow youth"?
> TESCREALists have been able to divert resources toward trying to build AGI and stopping their version of an apocalypse in the far future, while dissuading the public from scrutinizing the actual harms that they cause in their attempts to build AGI.
Uhm... sorry about mentioning this Yudkowsky guy all the time, but you included the movement he started in your acronym... and you pretend to be experts on what the movement is about, so... maybe it would be nice to get familiar at least with the very basics?
> As an example, one of us worked as a hardware engineer designing audio circuitry for devices such as laptops. Some of the tests that we performed as part of our work included drop testing, constantly dropping devices to understand the manner in which their functionality degrades when they are exposed to shocks, placing the devices in extremely cold or hot environments, frequently restarting them [...] we argue that the first steps in making any AI system safe are attempting to build well-scoped and well-defined systems like those described as “narrow AI,” rather than a machine that can supposedly do any task under any circumstance.
OK, I really don't want to put your expertise in restarting laptops in doubt. But, you know, these AI things sometimes turn out to work differently than you would expect. For example, I think that scientists in 1960s believed that we will make artificial intelligences understand human knowledge one topic at a time, by building expert systems and cleverly designing the semantical nets. They would probably be shocked to hear that the state-of-art AIs of 2024 are good at poetry and painting, but suck at math. And yet, here we are. The line between the narrow AIs and AGIs may turn out to be similarly unpredictable; it can happen much later or much sooner that we expect, and may be caused by an improvement that we will not suspect of having exactly that impact.
(THE END)
OK, my summary would be that the authors identified a group of people whom I would describe as "nerds thinking about the future, specifically the technology", and correctly noticed that there is an overlap between various groups.
The connection to eugenics is mostly made through "trying to improve things" and "believing that intelligence is a thing". I understand that both of these things are *problematic* for some people, but I also think those people are... how to put it politely... not thinking clearly, and probably not even interested in thinking clearly.
Some of their arguments require *a lot* of cherry-picking. If you fail to notice that the effective altruists mostly care about reducing the suffering that exists *today*... or if you believe that Yudkowsky wants to build the AGI as soon as possible, and believes that by the virtue of being generally intelligent it will get all the answers right... then I strongly doubt your expertise on the individual elements of the "TESCREAL" boogeyperson you invented. It's more like you sometimes need to make things the very opposite of what they are, in order to make your point.
Congratulation on finding your powerful and rich enemy responsible for manipulating the society and science towards their sinister goals. You know who else did that, right?
Yes. As usual, it is 10% of reality that gets 90% of the attention, but see e.g. here: https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities -- malaria, malaria, vitamin A, some unspecified vaccines. Okay, I guess the vaccines are about reducing suffering in the future, but it is still different from what the "TEASCREAL" model suggests.
Maybe somewhere lower on the list there is a longtermist project, and that is what makes some people freak out. Or maybe there are also separate lists by categories, and the longtermist category contains longtermist projects. But there is a difference between "there are some X somewhere among Y" and "Y is about X".
I coin a slightly less awesome acronym HGT, which means Hitler, Gebru, and Torres. I claim that HGT has roots in Nazi traditions, and I have historical data to prove that at least one third of HGT was actively involved. That sounds quite damning, in my opinion.
Long story short, you can choose a perspective that supports your conclusions. As a rationalist, you should also reflect on how much your conclusion reflects the territory and how much it merely reflects the perspective you chose. To get the best results, you should aim to "carve reality at its joints", i.e. let yourself be guided by how things actually are, rather than your arbitrary definitions, no matter how clever they may sound (they may or may not be correct). For example, I am pretty sure you can find a connection between "TESCREAL" and eugenics tradition, just like you can find a connection between the eugenics tradition and progressive politics. The question is, is the former connection stronger than the latter? (If not, why do you focus on it so much? Instead of e.g. writing an article about "TESCREAL" having roots in the progressive politics?)
...okay, now I am going to actually read the article.
EDIT: One of the names sounded vaguely familiar, took me a moment to remember why:
Still haven't read the article, but now it seems to me that the alleged main connection between eugenics and "TESCREAL" is... consequentialist thinking, and worrying about the future of humanity. Technically true. (So it's like, someone says: "I would prefer if AI didn't kill all humans", and the response is: "so what you're saying is that you are worried about preserving the future of the while race?")
I agree. Unfortunately, these values are dominant in Western academia and their supremacy is jealously guarded. Some high-profile EA should probably make a response, otherwise I'm worried that good EA ideas will see even more opposition from the academy.
The Trump administration last time around couldn't even manage to purge the Trump administration. This time around I think they'll be ever so slightly more effective, but I doubt they'll manage a purge of academia.
Is the rationalist movement privileged? Ok, stupid question. I'd say the answer is an obvious yes. What I mean specifically is privileged in the economic sense. I.e. something that some wealthy people can afford to do/be but less wealthy people can't afford to be/do. And when I say rationalist I mean someone who esteems truth for truth's sake. Feel free to argue for or against this first question, but I take it as a given. It seems obvious to me that some people are getting subsidized by their jobs/career to be rationalists while most other people get subsidized to shut their mouths and do what they are told. So my actual question is, in what ways can one incorporate rationalist principles in their life if honing these skills may actually end up hurting them economically? Do you see it sort of like a Socratic matter of principles (I'll be broke as hell but at least I'll know I was being honest with myself), is the world really just dog-eat-dog and poor people should just excise rationalist thinking from their lives if they know what is best for them? Other ways of looking at this? I ask because I work as a secondary ed teacher and I've found that there are aspects of my job where being a rationalist is helpful/good but I think it is valuable to bifurcate rationalist thinking (truth for truth's sake) and just play the political game a lot/most of the time.
Good question. Why not take a data centred approach?
How do we measure privilege? It's going to depend on the society you're immersed in, and your own values. But most people would agree that wealth, education, a 'good' job, social standing and various freedoms/civil rights are a reasonable measure of this. The first three are fairly easy to measure. In the amount of time I'm willing to spend on this, I can compare the ACX survey to US demographic data.
Something like 85% of Scott's readers have a third level degree, upwards of 20% have a doctorate. Less than 40% of the population in the US has a bachelors degree. Approx. 2% have a PhD and at most 5% have doctoral level qualifications. So readers of the blog do have educational privilege. Since the ability to do a PhD requires years of forgone earnings, it's reasonable to infer that blog readers are coming from a family background which is higher socio-economic status.
Unfortunately, the survey data just reports numbers for income with the majority of responses censored. You could ask Scott for the data if you wanted to do more analysis, but I think it's likely that average and median earnings are well above the US average. Participants did self-identify their SES but I would treat this with caution, it's better to collect 'hard' data rather than self-descriptions, particularly when something like 'upper-middle class' is context and country dependent. Personally, I think the level of education and amount of free time required to read blogs like this and post in them means that they're biased to the privileged.
Recently, I've been at odds with my manager over small issues. E.g. they wanted to rearrange the schedule of a meeting I was chairing so they could arrive and deliver the welcome address 30 minutes in - I insisted the welcome be at the beginning, they could speak on other topics if arriving at the end of the meeting - they rescheduled to arrive on time. I don't think this is in any way a rationalist approach - to me it's common sense. I had the background and sufficient social standing to make my case persuasively. I didn't play the political game though - and I'm lucky to have a boss who is (mostly) willing to listen to pushback. I'd be curious to hear if a card carrying rationalist would have approached this differently - to me it was a mixture of common sense and my own stubbornness.
A) The Big Yud often said that "rationality is the art of winning". I.e. winning is the goal, rationality is a tool. If rationality precludes you from winning, discard rationality and win. He typically relies on Zen motifs to get his point across. C.f. "The Twelfth Virtue" [0] and "Something to Protect" [1].
B) The wealthy are privileged ipso facto. Dependency (of any kind, including financial dependency) represents exogenous influence. Unfortunately, specialization has made modern society quite interdependent. So it often is, infact, in your best interest to adeptly navigate Baudrillard's Simulacrum [2]. Another way of thinking about money: money is "slack" [3], and slack is options. Including the option to be intellectually-honest.
> So my actual question is, in what ways can one incorporate rationalist principles in their life if honing these skills may actually end up hurting them economically?
C) To paraphrase The-Bugman-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named: "you have to live like you're in enemy territory". If the powers-that-be don't like what you're teaching your students, you need to realize that you're basically distributing samizdat.
Hm... I don't remember anything like that. Got links? Not gonna lie, it's been a long time since I read The Sequences. And I never completed the entire corpus. So I'm prepared to be surprised.
Whatever the case, I stand by my initial comment, insofar as winning is ultimately more important than truth. (No, this isn't a carte blanche to act like a pathological liar. But Kant's radical honesty, for example, is a kinda bonkers imho.)
Movements are not privileged; people are. Some rationalists are rich, some are poor, most of them probably somewhere in the middle. Or slightly above the average, considering their typical professions.
> something that some wealthy people can afford to do/be but less wealthy people can't afford to be/do.
My personal freedom of speech is mostly a result of living in Eastern Europe where no one gives a fuck about what you think. If I lived in America, I would probably watch my tongue more carefully. I am *not* wealthy enough to not need a job, which dramatically limits the things I can do (and in America would also limit the things I can say).
> It seems obvious to me that some people are getting subsidized by their jobs/career to be rationalists while most other people get subsidized to shut their mouths and do what they are told.
Yeah, your type of job determines what kind of idiots you are surrounded by.
> Other ways of looking at this?
It seems like some good (for self-preservation) habits from communism are also useful in the woke era, so here is one:
* Don't think.
* If you think, then don't speak.
* If you think and speak, then don't write.
* If you think, speak and write, then don't sign.
* If you think, speak, write and sign, then don't be surprised.
Personally, I would think, and only talk to friends or talk pseudonymously on the web.
> I work as a secondary ed teacher and I've found that there are aspects of my job where being a rationalist is helpful/good but I think it is valuable to bifurcate rationalist thinking (truth for truth's sake) and just play the political game a lot/most of the time.
Yeah, you can use some rationality at your work, without saying explicitly that this is what you are doing. (When someone important says "there is a dragon in a garage", say "of course there is", and then continue using the garage as usual. Which is what many people actually do.)
Others may chime in with different takes, but, for me, rationalism is about forming confidence estimates related to beliefs, it is not about saintly purity in how you choose to act or what you choose to say.
Taking an example from inside your question: imagine a situation where you are called to make a statement and you see two choices (a) what you believe to be true, (b) what you believe to be politically expedient. Rationalist methods could help you in the following ways:
(i) identify a false dichotomy and determine a third (or even more than one) alternative thing to say/way to act
(ii) form and update an estimate of the probability that (a) is a better/worse choice than (b)
(iii) phrase your belief (a) in a way that does not have the assumed political cost (because you indicate openness to other possibilities, you support your statement with evidence, you shade your statement probabalistically)
Last year I found myself across the table from Substack CEO Chris Best—and I hoped he would satisfy my curiosity on one matter. So I asked:
“Chris, I have a question. Has Elon Musk made an offer to buy Substack?”
Then I added:
“Appropriate answers to this question are (1) Yes, (2) No, or (3) I prefer not to say.”
Chris didn’t answer immediately. He thought it over for a moment, then responded: “I prefer not to say.”
In this soft-spoken way, Mr. Best showed his wisdom. Although he works hard to empower journalists, he’s smart enough to know to watch his words around those pesky folks. We’re as leaky as sieves, and only half as reliable.
But the New York Times reported yesterday that Elon Musk did attempt to buy Substack last year. Musk also hinted that he would merge it into Twitter and let Best run the combined companies.
The Times also reports that Best rejected this offer.
And he didn’t even fret about it. It was a “short-lived discussion,” according to the Times’ three sources.
That proves that Chris not only has wisdom, but also possesses integrity and strong core values. When he says that he supports indie writers, he really means it.
If Musk’s plan had been accepted, Chris would have enjoyed a huge payday in the transaction, and also might have found himself running the most powerful media force in the world right now.
But he didn’t hesitate to walk away from that.
I want to commend Chris and the entire Substack team. They not only talk the talk, but walk the walk—which is rare in the media world right now. Or in any world right now.
First, saying "I prefer not to say" is not necessarily the same as kinda-deniable "yes". Maybe he rejected Musk. Maybe he is waiting and hoping that Musk will offer more money. Maybe someone else offered money, and he is trying to make the other person think that they are competing against Musk. Maybe he even said yes to Musk, but they have some kind of deal that the website will officially change hands on January 1st 2025, and until then there is an embargo on this information.
From business perspective, the Substack model seems great. By taking a fixed fraction of subscriptions, the financial interests seem aligned; Substack makes money when the authors do. The possible downside is that this can make the platform attractive to all kinds of conspiracy theorists and scammers (I imagine that writing Flat Earth News could be quite profitable), but if you advertise yourself as a platform where no one gets censored, that already goes with the territory.
But technically, using Substack can be quite frustrating experience, and frankly it seems like it's no one's priority to improve it. It took years just to make ACX comment section usable, and it still could be improved a lot. Or the bug where if you replied to a comment in an e-mail, your reply got inserted incorrectly in the comment tree. (That one is probably fixed, but that also took years.) I haven't written a post lately, but I remember it to be also frustrating. Like, how am I supposed to write articles containing code examples, if all existing character style options are so huge that you can barely fit 40 characters in a line? Or why do I have to choose whether a word is monospace or a hyperlink, but it cannot be both? It's obvious that the intended type of article is "type a lot of text, drag and drop a few pictures and a YouTube video, insert five 'subscribe' buttons, and call it a day", which I guess is where most money comes from. Yeah, it makes sense economically, but that means that if your technical skills are even slightly above zero, Substack will constantly make you cry.
So, maybe don't sell to Musk, but at least hire someone who is technically competent and who cares.
One of the weird things happening in the amazing nowadays is the number of people eager to jump to defend Musk. Like, you know he's a man with immense wealth and power, and is quite capable to looking after himself. He's also not running for any popularity contest. So... why do so many spend so much effort defending whatever he does? Jumping to counter every lightest slight in his direction, like he was a precious baby or something...
That's weird, because I got the opposite impression, that recently it is incredibly popular to accuse Musk of... well, nothing specific, just being generally the worst. Seems to be so since the moment he bought Twitter, but maybe I got the timing wrong.
I don't even like the guy; I think he is neither a saint nor a devil, just a smart rich guy trying to become even more rich, who seems to spend too much time online shitposting.
Is there somewhere a list of his "crimes" that I could read?
For the same reason that lots of people jump to criticize him for no real reason. He's become a symbol of the culture wars, so everything he does gets framed that way.
Also I don't think it's fair to characterize my comment as "jumping to counter every lightest slight". I genuinely don't think him buying substack would be bad for anyone and don't understand why someone would reflexively assume that it would be.
He makes rules on the fly and interprets hazy policies in a way that justifies him banning, suspending or pushing voices he doesn't like off the platform. When he took over I was curious to see what twitter with free speech would look like, but unfortunately these are not the actions of someone with a genuine commitment to free speech.
Wait! Wait! The Webb Telescope disproved the existence of Dark Matter?! I guess I must have been snoozing. The massive galaxies that Webb observed in the early universe are an excellent fit for MOND, and their existence that early in the universe pretty thoroughly falsifies the Dark Matter models of galaxy formation.
Stupid question: if Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) is a better description of gravity, how does this affect the value of the Cosmological Constant? Does Dark Energy also go away? I don't know enough about MOND because I never took it seriously. I guess another Internet rabbit hole awaits my exploration.
Hmm, well I've been following Mond for a while now. Tracy McGaugh's blog is full of stuff. https://tritonstation.com/
Later edit;
I just want to add that Mond is less of a 'theory' and more of a 'fit to the data'. If gravity at accelerations below a_0 became a 1/r force law, (rather than 1/r^2) then that fits all the data.. up to some point. Mond fails at the mass level of galaxy clusters, it doesn't fit the third hump in the CMB data. nor the bullet cluster... There's something missing from Mond.... My favorite idea is some hot dark matter... sterile neutrinos. (I mean first of all I love the name.) Oh and that Mond is true... whatever mond is... beyond a fit to the data.
I don't think it can be concluded yet that DM or that the age of the universe has been falsified nor that has MOND been proven.
On this topic, the empirical evidence for MOND seems better but that isn't a 100% exclusion for DM.
DM can explain current star formation history, if and only if models of star/galaxy formation "innovate".
Be it a non constant IMF, super eddington accretions, assumptions about black holes and dust prevalences and properties, etc.
We are at the limit where nearly 100% of baryons needs to be converted into stars which sounds highly unlikely though. There has been some pre JWST era models that match most current observations. Moreover there are many possible more exotic catalysis mechanisms of galaxy and star formation, among which some might require new physics or standard physics but in practice non standard physics (few people will understand what I mean here), e.g. via dust based Mock gravity, rydberg matter or Zeldovich radiation.
Most importantly the debate should not be dumbed down to MOND or DM, one both can coexist, two there are many extensions (interacting DM, etc), three both can be false, the true theory might be quantized inertia, etc
My personal belief is that the age of the universe is at least moderately wrong.
The MOND existence will be forever settled via GAIA DR4 in 2026 (is settled in 2025 but ESA will gatekeep the data because they do not follow open data science)
BTW here is the biggest issue in LCDM by far, and you'll never hear of it, like in most sciences, the most interesting discoveries are absolutely unknown because well there is only one person on this planet reading the scientific literature extensively (me)
In reference to your paper, how would a missing dust signature in the CMB support the existence of dark matter? Would the presumed distribution of dark matter—clumped around galaxies and diffuse to a near-perfect vacuum in intergalactic space—reduce the density of dust in intergalactic space?
This is Scott's substack, and he has the power and the right to draw whatever lines he wishes. But in the past, Scott used to post a separate political open thread every week (month?) that allowed political discussions and arguments. He did a good job snuffing out the political crap on the other threads—but I suspect it became too onerous for him. And so, I'm forced to wade through political crap to get to any interesting philosophical or scientific discussions. This is one of the reasons I haven't re-upped my subscription to this sub.
Matt Gaetz has already withdrawn from the Attorney General nomination, having previously resigned from the House, meaning he's currently not in any political offices. This removal of Matt Gaetz from Congress has the chance to be the first win of the new Trump cabinet, although I don't know if his resignation will actually hold this early in.
I'm at the Whipple museum of history and philosophy of science at Cambridge university. So cool. Here's info about an instrument built by John Harrison to measure longitude at sea.
I've been to a similar museum in Harvard, but this is even smaller and less overwhelming...
Btw, Longitude is a great book for young kids.
Why does a kid even need to attend school if they can go to such a museum with guidance?! Only for a social life I suppose. And in some states because it's a legal requirement.
Great question. No, a museum won't be all of the curriculum, but a learning aid. And dies it have to be in your city? Give the $17k per kid per year to the homeschooling parents to use for such expenses.
The govt needs to be good at some minimal checks on the process and results. The results seem to be better than what public schools can produce. So this should be possible for motivated parents.
Different kids need different things, and the same kid might need different things each year.
I'm not claiming this is a perfect system. And others have thought through this better than I have.
Sort of but not really. The museum is chosen by the parents as part of a curriculum, one designed or children by the parents.
The teacher can be the parent (if they have knowledge in the area) or a homeschool teacher hired by the parent. Parents of homeschooled children with different areas of expertise form co-ops and teach each other's children based on their expertise.
The basic difference is if it isn't going well for the child, the teacher can be fired immediately.
I know this is probably very worrying for Americans because this is going to be your government, but today's headlines about Trump's cabinet picks have me laughing.
New Secretary for Education is, if I go by the headlines, "WWE wrestling mogul" Linda McMahon. I know there was a lot of disdain for his last pick there in the first administration, Betsy de Vos, so I'm awaiting (with a certain amount of glee, I have to say) the reaction to this. It would seem her experience in education was serving on the Connecticut state board of education 2009-2010 and being on the board of trustees for a Catholic school:
"She served on the Connecticut Board of Education for a year starting in 2009 and has spent years on the board of trustees for Sacred Heart University in Connecticut. Seen as a relative unknown in education circles, she has expressed support for charter schools and school choice."
More Catholics in the cabinet? I am delighted to see the Sinister Papist Conspiracy to extend the tentacles of the Vatican into American government is proceeding apace!
Dr. Oz to oversee health insurance? Okay, even I have to blink at that one.
Head of Commerce department could affect us here in Ireland, as (and I have to agree on this one), allegedly he tweeted (or Xed, is that how we should say it now?):
"Lutnick was recently critical of the nature of Ireland's trade relationship with the US.
"It's nonsense that Ireland of all places runs a trade surplus at our expense. We don’t make anything here any more – even great American cars are made in Mexico. When we end this nonsense, America will be a truly great country again. You’ll be shocked," he wrote in a post on X in October."
It is nonsense, and it's not anything tangible (except for the pharma plants here), it's all down to our tax strategy to attract multinationals (like the FAANG set) which have headquarters here and move money around from one bank account to another. The effect on our economy is such that we need to have a separate calculation for GDP to account for the 'phantom GDP' from this.
So I wouldn't be surprised if the Trump administration changes taxes to make it attractive for American multinationals to keep their business at home, and of course this will have a knock-on affect on Irish employment as/if plants are closed or the Silicon Docks crowd shutter their offices. We'll have to see what happens!
I'm curious: what's your view of the worst case scenario here? Like what's the worst possible outcome that a bad DoEd secretary could cause? In my view the DoEd doesn't do anything positive for the cause of education, so it's impossible to do any harm by nominating an incompetent secretary. I think the country would be better off if the entire dept was completely abolished.
The DoEd becomes dysfunctional without having its duties transferred to other agencies, six million college students (mostly from poor or working-class families) lose their Pell Grants, many of them have to drop out of school, their lives are diminished, the nation's supply of skilled labor is diminished, and there's a massive electoral backlash of mostly Trump supporters looking for the anti-Trumpiest possible candidates in the next election.
If you were under the impression that the Department of Education was just a bunch of wokescolds who send out letters to people trying to run good schools and saying "you need to be more woke or else!", then no, that's not how any of this works.
And why is that a bad outcome? In my view far fewer people should be going to college, *particularly* those from poor and working-class families. Elitism is good in elite institutions. Eliminating Pell grants would go some way to eliminating cost disease and bloat in higher education. Academia has become a lumbering zombie and a propaganda indoctrination zone. Anything that cuts it down to size is good in my view. Education needs far less regulation.
< In my view far fewer people should be going to college, *particularly* those from poor and working-class families. Elitism is good in elite institutions.
Well, Wanda, I come from a family with only one college-educated parent, and our finances were very tight indeed when I went to college. My parents were especially honest people, and did not fudge the truth to make us look poorer than we were when they filled out the financial aid forms. Our income and savings were low enough that I got almost a full scholarship for the entire 4 years. I graduated from an Ivy, scored 99th percentile on the GREs and got PhD. Jeez, maybe if you'd had Betsy DeVos's job I'd never have gone to college, and would instead be your hairdresser. Or, like, the lady who gives you Brazilian waxes.
As for other teens whose Pells you'd like to yank: I just looked at some data about four year colleges and their average SAT score.
For about 35%, the average SAT score is 1200 or above. 1200 places someone at 64th percentile in the group that took the SAT, & that group's average intelligence and academic performance is surely above the average for college students as a whole. I'd say it's someone scoring that well or better on the SAT is not in the in your born-to-be-your-hairdresser (or hair-plucker) group, and can certainly benefit from college-level courses. If you nix the Pell grants of all the kids in those schools, that's a lot of people unable to pay for an undergrad degree they could probably have made good use of. And only 8% of colleges have have SAT scores 1000 (the average score) or below.
Ok, you're the exception. Getting 99th percentile on your GRE's means you have a >120 IQ. You're exactly the kind of poor person that's supposed to be discovered via standardized testing.
>For about 35%, the average SAT score is 1200 or above.
Ok. An SAT of 1200 is an IQ of about 120 which is about the top 10% of the population. That's who should be going to college, not the ~50% that we currently send. I would MUCH rather sacrifice the 35% who should be there for the 65% who shouldn't. And pulling Pell Grants wouldn't prevent them from going, it would just make it more expensive. I want poor, potentially-stupid people to think very carefully about whether their mongrel genes can actually benefit from an expensive education before they just blithely go. College used to be a sorting mechanism. It's not anymore and that loss imposes very reals costs on society. It's incredibly useful for everyone to know where to get smart people.
>And only 8% of colleges have have SAT scores 1000 (the average score) or below.
Ok. That number should be 0. If someone gets a 1000 on the SAT then they shouldn't come anywhere near a college. College is for the top 10-25% of society. Everyone else should just learn a trade. Hairdresser is an excellent example.
<And pulling Pell Grants wouldn't prevent them from going, it would just make it more expensive.
"Let them eat cake."
Actually, the way the colleges set financial aid is by using the data the parents send about their savings and income, and the data parents must give is *very* detailed. There really is no loophole that allows people to look less able to pay for college than they are by having a secret rental property or whatnot. Of course they can lie, but colleges are allowed to do some checking around so that's pretty daunting. Using the data the parents sent, colleges calculate how much parents should be able to pay, and their idea of what people of a given income can cough up is generally more than people themselves feel able to cough up (though most can by penny-pinching. To cover the amount parents will not be expected to pay, colleges give a financial aid package, which is a mix of scholarship (i.e. college eats the cost), loans the parents or kid must take out, and money the kid must earn with an on-campus job. Financial aid packages always set the amount the parents and kids borrow as the maximum in government student loans they are allowed to borrow . Colleges give scholarships to cover the rest, and for kids who qualify for Pells the scholarship includes the Pell grants. So if the Pells are yanked, either the colleges would have to be willing to eat more of the cost or the kid and parents would have to borrow more. However, the family is generally already stuck with borrowing the maximum they are allowed to as federal student loans. The alternative for borrowing more is bank loans. People who are poor enough to qualify for Pell grants, and have already committed to take out $10,000 in student loans for the coming year generally do not qualify for bank loans.
<I want poor, potentially-stupid people to think very carefully about whether their mongrel genes can actually benefit from an expensive education before they just blithely go.
Jeez, Wanda, what even are mongrel genes?
< I would MUCH rather sacrifice the 35% who should be there for the 65% who shouldn't.
You know, I think I agree that people scoring at or below average on the SAT generally can't benefit from college courses. (Although there are college majors in things like hospitality, and when I was on vacation in Mexico I met a young couple who had actually majored in that and were looking like they were going to make a go of it with an eco-resort.). But I find you extraordinarily mean-spirited, and would even if I were not in the 35% you'd rather have doing your hair. It's pleasant to remind myself, and you, that nobody but you gives a shit who you are willing to sacrifice.
I'd prefer the backlash be more "reversion to the mean" and less "pendulum swings back like a wrecking ball", and I'd prefer not to have millions of innocent young men and women thrown abruptly out of school to that end.
And, yeah, among the hip rationalists and contrarians, academia is all cost disease and bloat and indoctrination and signaling. To the *vast* majority of Americans, the sort of social mobility represented by someone from a working-class family going to college and hopefully making a better life for themselves, is seen as a *good* thing. That's the story that made J.D. Vance a household name, but I suppose as an Ivy-league alum we're supposed to write him off as an irredeemably woke leftie or something.
The now-predominately-Republican working class likes that sort of social mobility, because those are *their* kids with a shot at what they see as a better life. The Democrats like that sort of thing because they think they'll get more Democrats out of it. I like that sort of thing because I'm a libertarian who believes in meritocracy. I'm not sure what you are that you don't see this as a good thing, but whatever it is, there aren't enough of you to matter.
And the bit where there's at least a large minority that's annoyed by all the kids going to Oberlin to study Uselessology or Columbia to join Team Hamas, fine, but *these aren't those kids*. Those are mostly the ones from upper-middle-class families who assume they'll be getting an upper-middle-class lifestyle just for having a college degree, and feel guilty about it. The ones who need a Pell Grant to make it through school, know they need to make that education count for something in the real world. So, yeah, pat yourself on the back for having reduced the number of college students, but you're getting rid of the students and your pissing off their parents and they're going to make you pay for that.
I think the problem is that university is associated in people's minds with being above average on the social ladder, so the popular sentiment is "if we all can get university education, then we will all be above the average".
Unfortunately, this is not how averages work. If everyone gets university education, then you will need PhD to get a hairdresser license.
So perhaps instead of extending the sweet deal of "get more credentials in return for a lifetime of debt" to an ever increasing part of population, we should go in the opposite direction and reduce the need of credentials. To become a hairdresser, you should need one month of training, at most. Make it so that if you decide that being an unemployed bum or a software developer sucks and you would prefer to be a plumber instead, you will only need two or three months, and you are legally free to start your own business.
Separately from that, we should improve education, and there are many things that could be improved there. But we should not make it legally required in order to get a good job.
What does "if we all can get a university education..." have to do with the policies of the second Trump administration, or with this discussion? Nobody here is proposing to give everybody a university education. There is no plausible outcome where everybody gets a university education in the next four years.
*Some* people will get university educations. Some people *should* get university educations. Not so much the people who are planning to become hairdressers, but definitely the ones who are planning to become engineers, doctors, lawyers, or businessmen, Ms (or Dr?) Tinasky may be of the opinion that those should all come from the middle to upper middle class and the proles should stick to their prole jobs like hairdressing. I'm strongly of the opinion that a good number of our future engineers, doctors, lawyers, and businessmen should come from the ranks of the working class and even some of them from the poor. And I'm pretty sure the wast majority of American voters agree with me on that.
Right now, the way that happens is with loans and grants that come through the Department of Education. I can imagine worlds where it doesn't work that way. Worlds where wealthy philanthropists or large charities or state governments handle that, and worlds where college is cheap enough that an ambitious young man or woman can pay for it with a part-time job. But we don't live in one of those worlds, and we're not going to build one of those worlds in the next four years.
So, if you break the Department of Education, then A: millions of students who I *think* you and I agree really *should* be going to college, will have to drop out, and B: a large majority of Americans will be really pissed at whoever made that happen.
If you've got ideas for substantive educational reform, great, but they're going to take more than four years. And to make them work as well as you hope, you're probably going to want to have the DoEd in good working order to either carry out the reforms or to seamlessly transfer operations to whoever is going to carry out the reforms.
>To the *vast* majority of Americans, the sort of social mobility represented by someone from a working-class family going to college and hopefully making a better life for themselves, is seen as a *good* thing.
Those people are wrong and I don't think that the federal government should be in the business of laundering their delusions. The "everyone should go to college" idea is just a hedonic-treadmill effect. The government shouldn't fund that.
If you're a working class kid who has class-bucking IQ then fine, suck it up and take on some debt. College isn't the express-lane to upper middle class that it used to be, so low-class families should legitimately stop and think about whether it's the right choice. Eliminating federal grants is something that would encourage a more rational cost-benefit analysis among the consumers of higher education. College was designed to be for the top 20% or so of the population. Anything more than that is just a waste of resources.
<If you're a working class kid who has class-bucking IQ then fine, suck it up and take on some debt.
You seem to be very underinformed about paying for college. Did you think Pell grants cover everything? Nope, they average about $5000 per year. And the average kid with a Pell grant ends up with a 15% *larger* debt, approx $26,000 total, than kids who did not qualify for a Pells, presumably because the Pell does not fully make up the difference between their funding and other kids'. So be of good cheer, Wanda, the Pell kids are doing plenty of sucking it up.
I can't tell what Peter is trying to say, but: people do want social mobility, of the type that comes from being capable of doing things that pay well enough to fund their entry into higher social strata. What they *don't* want is the type of social mobility that only comes about by bending the knee to the people currently in the top stratum because they have arbitrarily seized that stratum and have changed the entry criteria away from being capable of producing actually valuable things. Possibly taking Pell grants hostage in the process.
> And why is that a bad outcome? In my view far fewer people should be going to college, *particularly* those from poor and working-class families.
Definitely because nobody wants social mobility. The real problem is the rich bit dim, and what is needed is a reduction in certain courses but that’s less likely to happen.
Seems like Trump is in an awkward place. He put a number of normal people with regular credentials in his cabinet last time, and not only did he get lots of flack about it anyway, but lots of the people he picked tried to foil him. So he's highly incentivized to bypass all the normal picks.
I don't know what people expected differently, to be honest.
"Huh, everyone who is reputed to know what they're doing thinks I'm a moron and tries to derail my plans. But since I'm obviously infallible, I guess I should go with people who everyone says are clueless next time". Peak Dunning-Kruger right there.
Maybe, or maybe there really is a "deep state" of people with similar views across party lines and they hate Trump for his opposition to their one-party rule.
I'm not saying that's necessarily true, but I also don't think we can rule that out. I'm troubled by how many things Trump got criticized about that Obama did before him and Biden did after. Kids in cages being an obvious and well known case, but also Biden continuing Trump's tariffs and things like drone strikes against enemy leaders.
Let me rewrite the first sentence from a different perspective: Maybe there really is a group of public servants with a deep knowledge of how the machine runs and commitment to keep the state running regardless of party affiliations, who really hate Trump for his blatant stupidity and disregard for reality and morality.
Of course, that's the optimistic spin, and the reality may be somewhere in the middle. But I really believe that any complex organization needs a lot of people with specialized knowledge, and replacing them will lead to dysfunction. The question is, "is the current state of things so rotten that it's worth tearing big parts of the system down and having effectively nothing in their place for a while?" Apparently, in the opinion of Trump, Musk and others, it's worth it. My guess is that they're going to replace somewhat corrupt but functioning systems with ones that are both dysfunctional and utterly corrupt... but we'll see.
That is a really good question, and I also do not have the answer to it.
I do have a problem with leadership in a democracy ignoring the well-intentioned pleas of the population. This includes people on the left (Bernie supporters) as well as people on the right.
Many of the problems are not exactly subtle or hidden. That outsourcing and deindustrialization has gutted the entire rust belt is not news to anyone. That the leadership class seems to think of this as somewhere between fine and good is a serious problem. What's an economy for? They seem to think that number-go-up is enough. Serving the needs of the population is a better answer. If number-go-up also helps the population (as it did in the 50s) then everyone can be satisfied. If instead it helps people in certain fields to a massive extent but most people are hurt or gain little, that's going to cause problems.
I don't think Trump is a cause, but a symptom. I've been listening to working class Republicans hating on their elected Republicans for well over 20 years. It was only a matter of time before someone showed up to do what those people actually wanted, instead of more wars and more international trade. If the solution ends up being bad, which is entirely possible, then that still doesn't fix the underlying issues. The only thing that will fix the issues is those so-called experts to take the needs of the lower classes seriously.
I assume that those working class Republicans you talk about hate on their elected Republicans in between elections, but vote Republican at election time.
The Biden Administration passed the CHIPS act and the Inflation Reduction Act, and we saw the election results. It’s possible that the policy would have been a political winner with better messaging; I personally don’t have any expertise in political messaging so it’s hard for me to say. It’s also possible that the policy helped politically, but not enough to overcome other factors which allowed Trump to win. But it suggests that addressing deindustrialization is not a politically winning policy.
Indeed, you go on to write that these Republicans voted against more wars and more international trade. The first has nothing to do with economics, and the second is different from the issue of outsourcing and deindustrialization gutted the rust belt. If you put tariffs on the import of raw materials, that makes American manufacturers less competitive, so it reduces international trade both by reducing the import of raw materials and by reducing the export of manufactured goods. Great if your goal is to reduce international trade, bad if you care about American manufacturing.
Based on polling done in 2019, Bob Altemeyer wrote, “The biggest reason by far that people supported Trump was their level of prejudice, but some (not many) relatively unprejudiced subjects approved of him because they thought they were prospering thanks to him.”
I see what you mean, but I am not sure the wishes of the electorate can be fulfilled in a straightforward way without unintended consequences hitting them hard years or decades later. My understanding is that the bleeding-out of parts of America's industry was an inevitable side effect of globalization (i.e., free trade and Pax Americana), which not only lifted hundreds of millions of people worldwide out of poverty, but also brought about relative peace, a ridiculous pace of technological progress and, last but not least, the possibility of bying cheap stuff from China. Rolling it back may or may not lead to workers in the US having plenty to do (depending on how it's handled), but it very likely leads to an overall lower standard of living in the US and probably, within a few years, lots of wars leading to a thorough disruption of global trade, neocolonialism, biblical-level famines and general unpleasantness which eventually impact everyone, including the workers in the US. (Peter Zeihan paints the full picture in "The end of the world is just the beginning"). People who have worked for decades in the State Department probably understand this; the guy whose economical platform consists of "I LOVE tariffs" maybe doesn't, and neither do many of the voters who can't find China on a map.
Curious which picks of his you think got a lot of flack while being normal. At least some of his picks were quite popular - James Mattis for SecDef was confirmed 98-1 and H.R. McMaster for National Security Adviser was confirmed 86-10, for example.
He got burned in two different ways. Careerists who sailed through confirmation tended to stymie his plans. Anyone else got pilloried as unfit even before they got in the job.
Would we really expect Biden, Harris, Obama, or Bush to keep playing by the informal rules when those were the results?
I mean, if your choice is between "qualified people who will easily be confirmed but won't do whatever I tell them to" and "widely-criticized people who will do anything I want", I think MOST people would wonder whether the first group actually are doing a better job than the second group. There's more to cabinet roles than rubber-stamping the President's agenda, and surrounding yourself with a bunch of yes-men could be pretty self-defeating.
Sure, but Trump ran on a platform of doing things differently than other politicians. His options are to either follow the consensus like every other president and thereby betray his voters, or put people in his administration that aren't part of the consensus.
I think there's a lot of room for us to discuss which examples are "non-consensus" and which are "unqualified cranks".
E.g. Rex Tillerson for State was definitely not a direction I would have gone in, and I would argue was pretty meh for the department, but at least was an international businessman and probably falls into the "not willing to do whatever Trump wants" category. RFK, Jr. is a lunatic conspiracy theorist with the opposite of qualifications who could do astonishing damage to public health.
Yes, I think this is a factor in Trump's more controversial picks for his next cabinet. It's pretty clear that he felt burned by some of the "normal people with regular credentials" in his first administration, so this time he's putting a premium on reliable allies and friends. Trump has been close to the McMahons for decades, so no surprise he's turning to Linda again, this time in a larger role.
Conservatives have for years wanted to dispense with the federal Department of Education; it's not immediately clear whether Linda McMahon is being put in charge to try to carry that out. Certainly the Project2025 guys want it to happen as described in their big blueprint document.
The McMahons, husband and wife, are actually a helluva shared life story which some competent writer could make a compelling book out of some day. A couple since high school, early in their married life they were on food stamps and a bit later went bankrupt; neither had been born into any money. Despite which they became very successful and will soon celebrate their 60th (!) wedding anniversary. Frankly they are in some ways what Trump cosplays as....Linda held a lesser appointment during the first Trump administration, and once won a party nomination for a Senate seat. So she's not now a complete rookie to the political/governmental big leagues.
Lutnick is someone who's pursued an admirable adult path after a rough start (his mother died of cancer during his last year of high school and then his father was killed by medical malpractice during his first week of college). His qualifications for Secretary of Commerce are not obvious but then again that job has become largely toothless anyway; his appointment isn't much different than our longstanding shitty practice of naming large campaign donors to be our ambassadors.
Meanwhile though I am not at all laughing at Trump naming his literal personal defense attorneys to the #2, #3 and #4 positions of our Justice Department. _That_ is a new one which not even the likes of Tricky Dick or Slick Willy or Harding's handlers ever tried.
McMahon converted from Protestantism to Catholicism. Vance is also a Catholic convert. You'd think Protestants would be bothered by losing so many of their future elites. Or maybe they're proud of being a religion for low-class people.
Mass immigration from third world means internal white difference are no longer relevant. No one cares if you are an Irish (American) or Swedish (American) or just a good old Anglo. When a third your university class consists of recent arrivals from China and India, another third children of Latin American immigrants, you are just "white". The massive secularization starting in 2000s means the same process has happened with religion.
> So I wouldn't be surprised if the Trump administration changes taxes to make it attractive for American multinationals to keep their business at home
I thought the point of Ireland was that it was the cheapest (tax-wise) European state to be in? If I recall correctly, there is a significant tax advantage (or requirement?) for big tech companies to keep a European bank account if they’re doing business in the EU…
That's what Trump's guy is complaining about, and others before him. The EU told Apple to pay us €14 billion in back taxes, and our government had to be *forced* to take the money, they tried putting it off because that's our one advantage, our low tax regime for foreign investment.
As I get older it seems that cats, in general, like me more. When I was a teenager, even friends' cats would give me a wide berth. Then progressively catkind got more neutral about my presence. Now it's a semi-regular occurence that cats actually come up to me and ask to be petted. Even completely strange cats, in the street. I don't think my behavior toward them has changed (I'm not aggressive but reserved. Since I'm mildly allergic, I avoid touching them). Is it because they see fidgeting as scary and I got more immobile with age? Has anyone else noticed it happens to them too?
It seems to be cats specifically and not pets in general.
A primate grin is NOT welcoming to a cat, quite the reverse as one is showing teeth. Most cats are also averse to wide open looking eyes, especially staring at them, as they view these as a challenge. Also, outstretched human arms tend to alarm them, especially when these move abruptly.
A cat smile is a slow blink and gently narrowing eyes. So maybe your eyes have become apparently less open and alert looking as you age, possibly behind glasses you never wore as a teenager, when cats were avoiding you. Either that, or you regularly eat toast or muffins for breakfast. Cats can overlook most worrying quirks of human anatomy if the humans smell slightly of butter! :-)
You may have cracked it, I have a drooping eyelid and now that you mention it, in all three of the last instances the cat approached me from that side. Never saw (heh) the pattern.
Why isn't it a bigger deal here that the benefits of scaling AI larger seems to have hit the ceiling? Shouldn't that be the biggest AI story in the world? Why aren't chip and utilities stocks crashing?
I know they say blah blah blah we got other ways to improve AI --- but fucking shit --- the way to improve it so far has been scaling on bigger data sets. Why should believe another way of scaling is going to improve things all of a sudden?
Nine months ago people around here were going "Why isn't the market reacting to the fact that AI will soon be godlike and/or destroy us all?" But people outside this bubble never really expected that to happen.
Because the NVIDIA etc stock bubble hasn't burst yet.
Stipulating for the moment that AI has hit something ceiling-ish: Hype sells. There's stories to be told about hype, and people want to tell, hear, and be part of those stories. Blood also sells, and that includes the green-tinted financial sort of blood. The interregnum where the hype has worn thin, but the last round of Bigger Fools haven't given up and sold out yet, that's just kind of meh and boring.
And around here, we've basically got people who believe AI is wonderful and awesome, and we've got people who believe AI is an awesome and terrible danger, and we've got people who think the first two groups have been talking about AI way too much. If it turns out that AI stagnates at "meh", then for both the wonderful-and-awesome and the awesome-and-terrible groups, talking about AI would mean talking about how they were wrong. Nobody wants to do that. And the third group has had all the AI-talk they care for so they're not contributing more.
Sooner or later, either AI will break through the "ceiling", or the bubble will burst, and either one of those will be a big deal here. In the meantime, all is quiet on the AI front. Enjoy it while it lasts.
>Sooner or later, either AI will break through the "ceiling", or the bubble will burst
A third, "meh"er possibility is that LLMs stagnate - but the current level winds up being good enough for a lot of applications (which may include enshitification of customer service). Remember how long it took for businesses to work out just how to use personal computers intelligently!
>if AI paused tomorrow, people would be figuring out applications for decades.
I do think we can rule out a near-term stagnation of machine learning on _trustworthy_ data, e.g. the protein fold prediction. That doesn't have the hallucination problem that predict-the-next-token has.
Yes, this has all the vibes of 1999 internet bubble. Both things will likely come to pass: the bubble will burst, and a useful machine-learning infrastructure will be available to used for many more years.
Yes, that sounds plausible. And, when the internet bubble burst, the stocks came down, but the internet didn't go away, as if the whole technology was a bad idea, so I agree with your expectation that machine learning applications will persist.
I'm pretty sure LLMs stagnating, even at a useful level, still results in a spectacularly newsworthy bursting of a bubble that's currently valued on the expectations of LLMs very much not stagnating.
I'm kind of surprised that the people most concerned with AI singularity haven't attacked it more from an energy conservation perspective. The amount of energy required to keep improving AI is truly immense, and it shouldn't be hard to make a basic environmentalist argument against using that much energy on AI, even putting aside concerns with possible AI superintelligence. I'm surprised that more people in *this* social circle haven't done so, at least from what I've read so far.
Probably most people here are already concerned with anthropogenic climate change. And much of that climate change comes down to energy consumption. I have some very leftist friends that are highly anti-crypto currency precisely because of how energy-intensive crypto mining is (at least from what I've heard). Well, it sounds like AI is becoming even more energy-demanding than crypto-mining is.
If you're concerned about anthropogenic climate change, and if you're concerned about AI superintelligences, then it seems there's now a great way to tie them together and attack both at the same time. It seems odd to me that I haven't read this argument put forward more.
As I understand it, OpenAI's GPT was developed essentially by simply ploughing through every recorded utterance since the dawn of time through 2018 or whenever it was. On that assumption, If energy is a limiting factor then presumably further progress can be made only by structuring the data better, into a network of more self-contained units, and enhancing these independently.
If we draw a rough parallel with programming, the first operating systems were presumably masses of messy machine-specific assembler, but over the decades these have become far more modularized at the same time sophisticated.
Well, when the same people are pushing for electric cars, it looks transparently dishonest to be demonizing electricity consumption in non-Woke applications.
Pushing for electric cars happens when the choice is between many little engines burning fossil fuels to accomplish some task and using centrally generated electricity to do it.
When instead the choice is between doing a task and not doing it at all, yes, the same people will push for the latter option.
No-one's arguing for clockwork+petrol AI; Nvidia is not, last I heard, building giant Babbage engines for running LLMs, though I do admit that would be kind of awesome; and no-one's putting petrol engines in their data centres.
Meanwhile, the people pushing for electric cars do also very much tend to push to reduce car use overall.
All seems consistent to me. Where's the dishonesty?
In pretending that the electric cars won't require electricity generation and transmission infrastructure enhancements along the same lines as for AI or any other non-Woke-favored use.
>Meanwhile, the people pushing for electric cars do also very much tend to push to reduce car use overall.
That _is_ a fair position, and characterization of their position. I generally oppose it, but it is at least honest.
> I generally oppose it, but it is at least honest.
I do feel there is a massive disconnect between people who live in very densely populated areas where owning and using a car is misery and people living in suburban sprawl and/or rural areas, where a dense public transport network would not see enough use to be feasible and so there is no sane alternative to car ownership; people in each of the two groups who have not lived in the other kind of place find it very hard to get in each other's headspace.
> In pretending that the electric cars won't require electricity generation
Does anyone pretend that? I've only ever heard it as a MAGA talking point, trotted out while ignoring whatever the interlocutor actually says; much as you just did to me.
Many Thanks! I've usually seen it as the _absence_ of discussion of all the electricity generation and transmission requirements in some electric car advocacy piece. Look, I've seen Greens block _transmission lines_ , the national equivalent of an extension cord, let alone power plants. Now, these may not be the exact same people who are pushing electric cars, but, as an overall political group, in aggregate, they look hypocritical.
Frankly, for the training phase part of AI development, solar or wind could potentially be used. Training is an incremental process. Nothing intrinsically horrible happens if the process runs during daylight hours. There is an economic trade-off due to having the capital cost of the chips lying fallow at night - but if we _really_ are in or near a regime where energy costs dominate, this should be ok. Solar _without_ storage is one of the cheapest, possible _the_ cheapest, source of electricity.
If we _aren't_ in a regime where energy costs dominate, then these energy discussions look like a dishonest cudgel being used to bash AI which wokesters actually oppose for _other_ reasons.
I don't think most people in AI -- myself included -- think we have hit a ceiling. Everyone in the world is compute capped. We need more chips, and more energy. But chips and energy are continuously getting better and cheaper. It shouldn't be lost on anyone that tech basically lobbied the government to make nuclear a green energy category and starting buying a bunch of micro reactor time as a result. That should give you a sense of what the industry thinks of as our current limitations.
Related: there are several good papers on scaling laws that show that, following a power law, exponential improvements in compute and data together result in linear improvements to models. Anecdotally, however, linear improvements in models lead to exponential improvements in acquired abilities and outcomes. This is part of why everyone is compute capped. Every single GPU is already going towards training the largest models possible, they need more to scale more.
(Inb4: Data is not the limitation -- Google has tons of data they are purposely not using, no one has the compute capacity to really use images and definitely not video or audio.)
"Employees who tested the new model, code-named Orion, reportedly found that even though its performance exceeds OpenAI’s existing models, there was less improvement than they’d seen in the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4.
If this were just a few hedged anonymous reports about “less improvement,” I honestly wouldn’t give it too much credence. But traditional funders and boosters like Marc Andreessen are also saying the models are reaching a “ceiling,” and now one of the great proponents of the scaling hypothesis (the idea that AI capabilities scale with how big they are and the amount of data they’re fed) is agreeing. Ilya Sutskever was always the quiet scientific brains behind OpenAI, not Sam Altman, so what he recently told Reuters should be given significant weight:
Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of AI labs Safe Superintelligence (SSI) and OpenAI, told Reuters recently that results from scaling up pre-training—the phase of training an AI model that uses a vast amount of unlabeled data to understand language patterns and structures—have plateaued."
What to make then, of the claim that researchers have unlocked a new axis of scaling by giving the models time to “think”? For this is what the entire industry will now rely on, both in practice but also to keep the sky-high hype alive.
I think this new axis of scaling will matter far less than people expect and will not keep the train of improvements chugging along anywhere near the previous rate.
First, this new type of scaling appears limited to certain domains: it makes the models no better on English language tasks or provides only minimal improvements for questions about biology, for instance. Second, there are good reasons to believe that this sort of scaling will be much more expensive: linear improvements for extreme sums of money."
As tech journalist Garrison Lovely wrote about it on Substack:
If you have a way of outcompeting human experts on STEM tasks, but it costs $1B to run on a days worth of tasks, you can't get to a capabilities explosion, which is the main thing that makes the idea of artificial general intelligence (AGI) so compelling to many people…. the y-axis is not on a log scale, while the x-axis is, meaning that cost increases exponentially for linear returns to performance (i.e. you get diminishing marginal returns to ‘thinking’ longer on a task). This reminds me of quantum computers or fusion reactors—we can build them, but the economics are far from working.
But I think people focusing on price or the domain-specificity of improvements are missing the even bigger picture about this new supposed scaling law. For what I’m noticing is that the field of AI research appears to be reverting to what the mostly-stuck AI of the 70s, 80s, and 90s relied on: search.
Saturation along a straightforward axis is indeed always bad news.
I'm not as pessimistic about the combination of LLMs + search as Hoel is.
LLMs have always seemed to me to be like system 1 thinking - pattern recognition on steroids. And search is similar to system 2 thinking, articulating possibilities, then evaluating their relative merits.
I'm _not_ a worker in this field, so my gut reaction is ill-informed, but these _look_ complementary, and might still be a pathway to AGI.
I do think we can reasonably say that _some_ sort of artificial neural net must be able to reach AGI, since _we_ are neural nets, and _we_ exhibit general intelligence. But, this doesn't say that the _current_ artificial neural net interconnection _architecture_ can reach AGI, and exploring multiple alternative candidate architectures, at many millions of dollars of training costs per experiment, might be a deal-breaker :-(
I'm not one to go against Sutskever, his track record is certainly better than most. That said, I'd also be curious what, exactly, he's doing over at SSI, and how much he stands by how Erik is interpreting his words.
More broadly, 10x-ing the amount of compute and data that is fed into a GPT is no small task and I'd be somewhat surprised if anyone has gotten there. Is Orion 10x bigger than GPT4? The latter is almost 2 trillion parameters trained on 25000 GPUs using 13 trillion tokens. Is Orion 20 trillion parameters trained on 250000 GPUs using 130 trillion tokens? I'm really doubtful.
But such a model may well be linearly better than GPT4, in the same way GPT4 was linearly better than GPT3. There's just massive engineering challenges that need to be addressed first. I don't think Sutskever can solve those engineering problems with SSI, the company is not big enough. Note too that Sutskever was sorta probably pushed out of OAI, he didn't leave out of some scientific disagreement. Meanwhile, Microsoft (OAI) or Google might be able to actually hit the level of scale necessary for a real GPT5, and they are both certainly trying (again see the nuclear power expenditure). But getting your hands on 250000 GPUs (or some number of TPUs for Google) is tough! So imo it remains to be seen that the scaling hypothesis is truly dead. And my own circles of AI researcher friends sure seem to think there's more juice to squeeze.
There will always be people willing to throw money at fancy new tech. And the big companies have set out their stalls with AI versions of their own, from Microsoft to Google, all producing consumer versions to "try this and let it help you".
So there is too much money already spent on this to stop, or for share prices to fall. The faith is that AI progress will keep going, or even if it doesn't, that widespread adoption of it will keep the profits rolling. Internet of Things Mark II.
It's not that big of a deal, because even if the scaling laws do hold, they imply that you need exponentially increasing amounts of power and compute to eke out marginal gains in ability. What good is an AGI if you need one data center and one power plant to replace one human employee? Or even 1,000 humans?
I think it's pretty obvious that a pure transformer approach can't lead to true AGI, because we have yet to find a way to train models on small data sets, and there's only so much you can put in the context window. For a lot of tasks, there's just not enough data available to train an LLM on, you have to "learn on the job", and a pure transformer can't do this.
OpenAI's o1 approach is much more promising and shows that scale alone isn't everything. I'm somewhat sure that LLMs will be part of the first AGI, however.
"we have yet to find a way to train models on small data sets"
Humans have GI (General Intelligence), and I think THEY don't actually work on small data sets. Humans take in an awful lot of data points every second. Just the eyes have about 120 million rods and cones, each of which are collecting data many times per second.
Scaling up a process is linear, no matter how you do it. Economies of scale can reduce per-unit costs, but linearly. LLMs are an important milestone, being able to do things computers weren't expected to be able to do, but it will take another kind of technological leap to have geometric growth in AI.
We are born wired to pay attention to language, and to use the language we learn to make sense of experiences. We are wired to experience it as carrying meaning. We have a special brain area set up to organize and remember the language we hear, and find regularities and remember them. We are born with a craving to make sounds with our mouths, and to imitate sounds we hear. we are born preset to transfer what we know to other modalities —
writing, sign language, foreign languages. All that gives us an enormous advantage over a machine that has to figure out stuff from scratch.
Agreed on everything except your last sentence. Yes, we have, e.g. Broca's area.
But the language processing is the part of AGI that is a _solved_ problem at this point. Probably inefficiently solved, but solved. As you showed with your experiment with the pendulum problem, they are still getting very simple physics (what bumps into what) wrong. And I keep seeing them get simple chemistry questions wrong. But these aren't language problems.
Yeah, you're right about my last sentence. In fact it's odd to be denigrating AI about language, when it seems like that's the thing where it comes closest to being our equal. When I talk with GPT4 now, I don't even think about simplifying, just write my questions or comments exactly as I would here, and it understands fine. What I had in mind, but did not say, is that our inborn ability to master language is set up so that learning language and learning about the world link up easily, in fact they are sort of two sides of the same coin. Here are a couple small cute examples. : When my daughter was learning to talk we had 2 affectionate cats who hung out with her a lot. One day she was touching something soft -- I can't remember what -- and she said "it's kitty." And she didn't mean it was a kitty, she meant it was soft, as cats are. Learning the textures of things, and learning words for them, were part of the same process. Not knowing the word *soft* she felt free to invent a word by extending the meaning of a word she knew, and knew I knew. Here's another example, sort of a cousin of the first, I think from when she was 3: We were in a Starbux and slow jazz was playing, and I asked her if she liked the music. "It's whiny," she said.
So the hard-to-duplicate thing about our species isn't that we are set up to learn language, and so can do it with way smaller samples. It's that we're set up to learn langauge *and integrate that* with learning about world. So the way we know what pendulums do comes both from things we've read or been told and from handling objects.
Many Thanks! Yes, the LLMs have a lot of trouble with things that we learned with our senses, and that we, as you said, _linked_ to language.
>It's that we're set up to learn langauge and _integrate that_ with learning about world.
Yup. And a good chunk of how humans learn is by acting on the world, both physically and socially, and seeing the reaction. As you said:
>When my daughter was learning to talk we had 2 affectionate cats who hung out with her a lot. One day she was _touching_ something soft -- I can't remember what -- and she said "it's kitty." And she didn't mean it was a kitty, she meant it was soft, as cats are.
[emphasis added, and also agree about the generalization she did]
Reading enormous amounts of text can substitute for _some_ of this, but LLMs clearly have problems in these areas, and it isn't clear how far into something like robots-who-can-play we would need to go to get around them.
I dispute this assumption. We are born with awesome pattern-matching brains, which recognize sounds, gestures, differences in pitch, and myriad other things, and determine ways to use some of these things to communicate with others. Language is learned behavior.
Machines, on the other hand, are nothing but Chinese rooms so far. Even the idea that they interact with language must be programmed into them. Any dataset can be interpreted any number of ways, and it is up to the programmers to choose which ways.
It’s well known that our brain is set up to attend to and learn language. Really. If you doubt me, google something like “is human brain optimized for language.”. iIf you still doubt it, read the links.
I don't think you understand me. Yes, the brains perceives the components of language. But "language" itself is for communication, which is something the brain determines for itself. We do know an awful lot about how the brain handles such things (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_processing_in_the_brain).
Consider a thought experiment of taking some people as babies, and raising them without teaching them any known languages. They will likely develop their own languages to interact with each other, and making mouth sounds will probably be only one part of that. If a baby were abandoned in an isolated area and somehow survived, it would not develop any language capability, until it conceived the desire to communicate, perhaps with animals it befriends.
So I'm saying that the brain is CAPABLE of language, and is good at it, but it isn't really programmed in any way for language specifically. A bicycle is designed for travel. It could be placed into a device that converts the energy of motion into electricity. Even though it generates electricity well, it remains designed to convert a person's energy into wheel rotation.
> Humans take in an awful lot of data points every second. Just the eyes have about 120 million rods and cones, each of which are collecting data many times per second.
I don't think this argument works, because almost none of that sensor data is used for text-based learning. When a human reads the definition of a previously unknown word plus one example (corresponding to maybe 50 tokens), they're able to use it from now on. It doesn't matter that the eyes are collecting Megabytes-equivalent of data while reading that short text, because that sensor data still only contains about 50 tokens worth of training data.
An LLM is able to temporarily "learn" to use a new word this way, as long as its definition is still in the context window. However, to permanently learn this word (i.e., to modify the model itself), a lot more examples and training data are required. Maybe a sufficient amount of synthetic training data can be generated by the model itself from the definition in the context window; however, I don't consider this a "pure" transformer architecture anymore, but rather a system with the LLM as one of its components.
You're thinking of learning like a computer or data scientist. Living things don't think that way, and though it may be inefficient, it is certainly effective. LLMs analyze text because they have a format of data analysis programmed in that allows symbols to be correlated in that way. Brains, however, figure out HOW TO CORRELATE THE DATA, and which data to correlate.
In other words, which pieces of data should be included in analysis? We make the decision for LLMs. Imagine giving LLMs long strings of bits to analyze, say 2^100 bits long. What is it to make of it? We could have encoded a bunch of pictures in a certain format, or encyclopedias of informational text, or some format of blueprints of various buildings, or recordings of various sounds. A brain figures out what the sensory information means, but a LLM must somehow be "told".
That's essentially what the "attention" layers in the transformer architecture do. And the adjustable parameters in them get optimized during training, along with the other parameters, so, yes, LLMs do learn
>which pieces of data should be included in analysis
Well, it's a pretty good place to store all the Europeans so they don't come over here and be angry at us.
Also, there are still plenty of places in Europe where people don't generally get angry at Americans. Thought I'm certain they'd be willing to make an exception for certain Americans.
As other respondents said, I think the basic premise is mistaken (or very context-dependent at best). I can think of a few unserious answers as to the purpose of Europe.
1) Give Americans places for cheaper (yet chic) vacations where you can drink tap water.
2) Showcase how to properly be left-wing (think of how many meanings this sentence can have!).
3) Give the World Spirit some psychological drama for this grand story of stories that They’re realizing.
4) Give more data and customers to tech companies (there are more Facebook users in Europe than in the US).
5) School of life for the US “greatest generations”. Why don’t Americans cook up another big European war again? (As everyone knows*, the UK only got the atomic bomb because France did. You can still rekindle the 900-old rivalry!)
*Well, that’s what actors playing top-level UK bureaucrats in a comedic 1980’s TV show say in-character anyway. Why would they lie?
What makes you think they get angry with us when we go there? I've been there multiple times in the last 12 months, I didn't encounter anyone who seemed angry at my presence.
I think they mean there's a bunch of people in social media saying "argh tourism is bad", and anecdotally I've seen graffiti in more than one place I traveled to saying "refugees welcome, tourists go away" (granted in the rest of Europe, not in England).
I think this sentiment is just people blaming bad economic conditions on a scapegoat, and it's probably a minority of people. If tourism actually decreased many European cities would actually suffer.
I have read that high profile destinations like Venice are getting overwhelmed by large scale group tourism from countries like China whose citizens aren’t well socialized for tourism (yet). Also, social media drives large numbers of young people to take their selfies in the same Instagrammable locations, causing bottlenecks.
There's people on social media saying literally anything you can think of at any given moment. I'd save the worrying about people being mean to you when you vacation in Europe for when they are, actually, mean to you when you vacation in Europe.
Chances of random Euros being "angry at Americans when they go there" have never been particularly high as far as I know, but is probably lower now than during the Iraq War.
The UN decided to do a worldwide survey, with just a single question. The only question asked was: "Would you please give your honest opinion about solutions to the food shortage in the rest of the world?" The survey was a huge flop.
In Africa they didn't know what "food" meant. In Eastern Europe, they didn't know what "honest" meant. In Western Europe, they didn't know what "shortage" meant. In China, they didn't know what "opinion" meant. In the Middle East, they didn't know what "solution" meant. In South America, they didn't know what "please" meant. And in the USA, they didn't know what "the rest of the world" meant.
The software actually works. I have all sorts of negative feelings about Turbo Tax in specific and regulatory capture in general, but they found me a deduction once that will cover all the money I'll ever pay in Turbo Tax fees for the rest of my life.
It's not like Turbo Tax is comparable to Microsoft Office applications. Excel and Word have inertia because they are the standard we share with each other in the business world.
We don't need to share our Turbo Tax with each other, right? So why do people keep turning to it instead of a cheaper alternative?
They can prepopulate much of my data as a returning customer, and I can typically do my taxes each year in less than an hour. For me, it's not worth the search cost to find something cheaper to save $100.
Also, I've heard it alledged that TT lobbies for more complex tax laws to help maintain their confuseopoly position in the market, but not sure of this.
Regardless of your politics, what are people doing to prepare for the incoming administration? Buying crypto or real estate to get around inflation? Getting all your vaccinations done ahead of schedule in case access is disrupted? Buying organic food in case food safety is disrupted? Nothing in particular?
I bought oil and gas stock index and partially sold long-term (20+ years) US government bonds index. Also I've started to incrementally increase my S and P 500 allocation.
Epstein for Secretary of Education! Oh, he's dead? OK, that old girlfriend of his who's in jail, how about her? And I know it's a bit weird, but how about a dung beetle for Sec. of Health. And what about that guy who wore a Viking helmet in the Senate for Sec of State. Fearless, you know?
* Bought Series-I bonds up to the purchase limit for myself and my wife.
* Decided to take the saver's credit this year instead of realizing capital gains, as the Trump tax cuts aren't going anywhere for at least another four years.
Any trustworthy analysis on why the final Selzer poll in Iowa (which showed Harris *ahead* by 3 percentage points) wound up so wrong (Trump won by 13 percentage points or so)? Selzer has a long and impressive track record, and it doesn't look like there was a dumb spreadsheet entry error or anything of that sort. Did the poll just get massively unlucky, on a level analogous to "we got p<.005, but the null hypothesis was in fact correct; this was the 5-in-a-thousand chance"?
One of the wackier conspiracy posts about the election I've seen is that Selzer's poll was correct *but* Musk and Trump hacked the voting machines and stole the votes, which is why the results of the poll didn't tally with the election results.
That's some religious level of faith in "Ann Selzer is always right" there.
On the other side of the wackiness gap, I've also seen suggestions (but how serious versus tongue-in-cheek I have no way of assessing) that Selzer was going to retire anyway, so she decided to burn all her credibility to get the result she wanted. Release a poll showing Harris with a massive lead, hopefully discourage all the grubby MAGA voters from turning up and energise the Brat Summer set to turn out and be part of the victory.
I don't believe either set of alternatives, but I do lean towards "Selzer was getting the results she might have subconsciously wanted" as one reason why the polling was so out of sync. Even pollsters are only human and have their biases.
The analyses I've read emphasize that her polling method was unusually "hands-off"; that is, she adjusts for very few factors. I found an old 538 article saying merely "age, sex, and congressional district". It turned out that, in this election, there was an effect that strongly confounded that uncontrolled analysis - I would suspect education as the culprit, given that the college/no-college split widened this year, and that education correlates with polling response rates. There was probably also some nontrivial amount of random error, though I suspect it didn't have to be on the order of thousands-to-one.
I think if there's an aberrant thing here, it's people being overimpressed by her track record - overcorrecting based on a small set of dramatic events, starting in 2008. No shade to her, really - she's always been transparent about her method, why she likes it, and its limitations - but it should have been clear that her method wasn't magic, and it was always vulnerable to this. While it avoided pitfalls others fell into in other cycles, as soon as there was a really significant split which wasn't substantially correlated with her sole controls of age, sex, and district, her methods were going to yield results divorced from reality. It's a shame it happened so dramatically when she was planning to retire anyway, ending her career on a sour note.
> I think if there's an aberrant thing here, it's people being overimpressed by her track record - overcorrecting based on a small set of dramatic events, starting in 2008
I don't know if they were overimpressed by her track record, so much as they were overimpressed by the fact that she was telling them what they wanted to hear. I swear that 99% of the people telling me how reliable Selzer's polls were on November 2 had never heard of the name Selzer on October 31. She went from obscure specialist to household name and back again faster than anyone since... well, I dunno, I'm sure there's other examples but I've forgotten them all.
There were outliers on the other side too which didn't get nearly as much attention. I remember a few polls showing Trump winning New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York.
Prior to this election, at least Nate Silver was impressed with her, and his judgment counts for something in my book. (A lot of the commentary around the latest poll specifically may have been Democrats hyping news they wanted to here, but readers of Nate Silver would have been familiar with Selzer for a while.)
Yeah I expect Nate Silver to be familiar with Ann Selzer, I was just bugged by all the random civilians who were suddenly telling me that Ann Selzer was the bestest pollster ever despite the fact that they hadn't heard of her a week earlier.
Someone, I think maybe Silver or a commenter on his site, mentioned that the crosstabs were crazy. Way too many women, especially within certain subfields.
This. The only thing I'd add is that she's been famous in large part because she was historically willing to buck the trend, and while she got lucky the last few times (and is actually a good pollster), being willing to buck the trend does mean you'll also be loudly incredibly wrong sometimes. So her being so visibly off here is in some ways correlated with her being impressively right in the past.
I was expecting to see people criticize Dr. Oz as a pick, I was not expecting to see someone criticizing him on the grounds that he was supportive of a trans kid on his show.
Watch the entire clip. The "girl" barely remembers being a boy. Then the mother (it's ALWAYS the mother) "reminds" her that she didn't like getting her hair cut and she compliantly gives the "correct" answer that it was because she was a "girl not a boy." Munchausen syndrome by proxy.
I did watch the clip, which is why I described it the way I did rather than the inflammatory way the tweet does. The mother says they didn't know anything about being transgender until the pediatrician diagnosed it, and I certainly wouldn't accuse someone of making up the story for attention based on a one-minute clip of them.
And regardless of what you think of the mother, Dr. Oz just seems generically polite and validating here, in the way I'd expect most TV personalities to be. Were you expecting him to yell at the girl and tell her she's a boy?
There isn't any plausible scenario for a US civil war in the next 6 years, but I'll try:
Trump goes full slash-and-burn against the Federal government: FBI is disbanded; HUD, Dept of Education eliminated, others radically downsized; Federal funding is pulled from all Universities that have any DEI or grievance-studies departments. This creates massive economic dislocation as significant streams of federal money dry up. At the same time AGI is created at OpenAI and they declare explicit anti-administration political intentions as the state of California aligns with them. The administration begins a serious crackdown on illegal immigration and sends National Guard troops to detain them. Coastal cities declare themselves immigration sanctuaries and refuse to admit federal troops. Trump freaks out about OpenAI and considers it a national security priority to have the newly-minted AGI firmly in control of the federal government. OpenAI refuses and California aligns with them. There is open rioting in the streets as political protests grow unruly so Trump sends Federal troops to California to a) restore order b) detain illegals and c) secure OpenAI. Democrats win the midterms on the back of a 2008-level recession and rampant inflation. They use their control of Congress to impeach Trump on completely baseless politically-motivated charges. The vote is close but he's removed from office amid rumors of unscrupulous practices by the Democrats (which are actually true - they threaten the families of several key swing votes with violence in a very "wink wink" organized crime sort of way) so Trump refuses to leave office and appeals the impeachment to SCOTUS which rules in his favor. Progressives declare SCOTUS a GOP-apologist kangaroo court and refuse to accept the verdict. Coastal progressive states collectively declare Trump an outlaw and refuse to cooperate with the Federal government. Military leaders are divided along regional lines and bases in progressive states formally refuse to acknowledge Trump's legitimacy. Hilarity ensues.
Disgruntled fanatics on the right side of history suddenly discovered the Second Amendment was in fact right and dropped all their calls for gun control so they could tool up and riot in the streets.
Being leftists, they were of course fissiparous, which is why you now have the People's Independent Democratic Republic militia duking it out with the Socialist Democratic People's Front terrorist cells and both of them making and breaking alliances with the Democratic Republic of All Folx Peaceful Protest (And Suitcase Nukes) Units, themselves considered by analysts to be in danger of breaking up between the All Folx, the Y'All Folx, and the "Damn it, it's spelled 'folks' Grammar Communist Cadre" factions.
The rest of the country just grills, drinks beer, and goes to sportsball games 😁
AI leads to superpowered scissors statements and/or superpersuader effects. As a result, you can get any of these:
* Almost every person hates almost every other person.
* Polarization gets taken to the extreme.
* People randomly get sucked into online rabbit holes and emerge as people with drastically different views and values than they had before.
* AI which can convince people of anything just by talking to them, so the first movers get massive cults behind them, and use them however they see fit. Conversation is acknowledged as dangerous, so communications are shut down, exacerbating previous disputes.
Big protest of something or other, police show up to break it up, shots are exchanged, and a celebrity of some kind is killed in the crossfire, prompting both sides to go all in. Who's the American Francis Ferdinand? I'm going with... Weird Al Yankovic. The assassination of Weird Al Yankovic leads to civil war.
If your definition involves neat lines of blue or grey coated men carrying muskets, then I would think the most probable steps involve invention of an ASI which then placed us in a Matrix style simulation, deciding for its own ineffable reasons that the *nineteenth* century was the pinnacle of our civilization.
The Navajo Reservation decides to secede from the United States.
The US Government doesn't want to acknowledge it, but also doesn't want to step in and violently put it down, so there's an awkward state of technical civil war happening.
Would it mean anything legally for the Navajo Nation to secede from the US? Does anyone know?
I'm doubting that "technical civil war" means anything. I think civil war can only exist if a reasonable person thinks it does or some standard like that.
Well if there were a legal means for the Navajo to secede then it wouldn't be a civil war any more. It didn't "mean anything" legally for the South to secede from the US, or the US to secede from the British Empire, but that didn't stop it from happening.
You can imagine various low-level skirmishes going on that turn it into a more real war if you like, to raise it above the threshold where you could say "hmm I guess this does really count as a civil war" but not above the threshold where the US military simply comes in and stomps everyone.
I don't think this is likely, but a tiny civil war that just counts as a civil war seems like a much more likely scenario than a massive war of all against all.
I'm going to say "Trump refuses to leave office and gets a few generals to agree with him on that", or "After Trump leaves office the Democrats charge him with treason and execute him, leading to a popular revolt", or "Congress passes an Australia style firearms ban." But honestly, I can't see any of those as being likely to happen.
Of course civil war isn't likely. But given that it's not likely and given that it happened anyway, I'm curious what sort of scenarios people think are most likely.
Has anyone done a Scott Alexander style “more than you ever wanted to know” about seed oils?
My prior is that the whole thing pattern matches to every nutrition fad: some interesting but not terribly conclusive studies challenge conventional wisdom (in this case, that linoleic-acid is good for heart health) and trigger a current year bogeyman (inflammation!), then pop culture health influencers amp it to 11 and insist they’ve discovered the one magic bullet that explains all our health woes. Bonus points if you can blame it on modernism and double bonus if you can spin a conspiracy theories about BIG FOOD and their effort to POISON us for PROFIT. Until a few years later none of it really pans out, nutritionist update slightly to “maybe eat a bit less of that if you’re sensitive” and the health influencers move on to the next demon food.
But I’d be happy to approach on objective summary with an open mind.
Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein have a sort of intro-level explanation of why seed oils are bad, or rather, why one ought to infer at a layman level that they're probably bad (they presumably have empirical research that supports the layperson reasoning): seeds, unlike other parts of a plant, do not want* to be consumed. They want to grow into new plants. To help with that, they make themselves non-nutritious to animals, relative to, say, fruit, which *does* want to be eaten in order to carry the seeds elsewhere to spread the plant's lineage. In general, we can expect a part of a plant to be nutritious if (a) eating it would help the plant's lineage and (b) the plant wasn't artificially engineered into "forgetting" what helps it.
They have a book called _The Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century_, that I think goes into some detail on this.
*"want" here is in the evolutionary sense (Heying and Weinstein are evolutionary biologists) - shorthand for "evolve in the direction of".
"Consumed" here means in the sense of being dismantled and used for nutrition. Simply passing through a GI tract doesn't count toward this. (Indeed, an animal won't want to eat things simply to pass undigested through it, unless those things come with some other benefit. The plant, by contrast, would be perfectly fine with this, and encourage it for its seeds.)
Evolution is too wacky to consistently apply anything like this. There are all sorts of healthy and edible plant parts that aren't the fruiting body; carrots, onions, potatoes. In fact, the fruit of the potato plant is poisonous to humans while the tuber is not, in direct contradiction.
I agree, but will also broaden it in that people aren't the only beings to eat fruits and vegetables. For example, deer eat and enjoy poison ivy, and many birds love eating seeds of various kinds. And anything produced by a plant, if not sprouting into a new plant, will be recycled by other living beings, such as bacteria and fungi.
Well, I agree evolution is pretty chaotic. To take your examples: all three of those vegetables are very aggressively bred from the original wild stock, so to some extent, all bets are off. Or alternately, we say these lineages have "adapted" to being spread by the humans who are functionally symbiotes, and indeed, the human-bred varieties grow in vast numbers.
The wild carrot, aka Queen Anne's lace, birds nest, et al., is a wildflower with a woody root. The seeds are apparently edible and aromatic, but maybe only if cooked, and I can't tell if they're nourishing.
The onion is virtually only existent as an artificial cultivar; the wild varieties (there are several) have bulbs that animals will eat, but the bulbs are not the seeds.
Potatoes grow from their eyes, which are nodes in the tuber. Aha! ...But an animal would have to dig for that tuber. Certainly, they do. I'm honestly not 100% sure what's going on there; maybe the eyes aren't digestible, so gophers et al. end up just spreading them the same way tomatoes get spread.
Hmm. I've eaten onions and other edible stems like leeks growing in the woods, which afaik are wild cultivars. But when eating a fruit, whatever eats it also ingests seeds which are excreted later, propagating the plant. That doesn't work for tubers or stems, since eating them prevents the plant from sprouting. Potato tubers sprout from eyes, which contain the same inedible toxins as the potato fruit. But this can also be avoided by just eating the potato before the eyes sprout.
An animal doesn't want to die, but doesn't much care what happens to its fatty tissues after it does. Either it has surviving kids or it doesn't, and evolution is mostly going to work on "don't get killed until you've had plenty of kids".
A plant, evolutionarily speaking, *does* care what happens to its seeds after it dies. Or even while it still lives but the seeds have fallen/been harvested. So there's reason for evolution to work on "please don't eat my seeds".
Whether this effect is strong enough to have rendered seed oils subtly unhealthy for human consumption. is questionable. Evolutionary biology is quite good at conjuring just-so stories that are probably directionally true, but not at a significant level. And I'd expect that if evolution *had* significantly optimized for "please don't eat my seeds", the result would be something dramatically different than "really tasty oil that probably gives you heart disease in twenty years".
I think the idea there is that animal fat is serving a role for the animal that grows it. Ideally, an animal wants to be as tasteless to predators as possible; however, it also wants to survive times where food is hard to find. Fat is the easiest way to do that, and there are other ways to avoid predators, so animals grow fat, but also claws, quills, sensitive ears, legs that move them fast, etc.
Properly, we ought to apply the same idea to plants. I suspect a seed can only be so unnourishing before it can't even make a new plant, so that's the floor, and the plant has to explore other methods of surviving to the next round as well, and sure enough, while they haven't tried running away, they do grow spines, poisonous leaves, bark, and other tricks.
So then my question would be whether any of these tricks are enough to make a plant just not "care" how good its seeds are to eat, but that ends up functioning on whether it costs energy for a plant to defend its seeds that could be instead channeled into something else that helps it thrive. I imagine a plant wants seeds with enough stored energy to grow that new plant, but not so much energy that animals seek it out, so no matter how I slice it, it makes sense to me that a plant would send some of that energy into animal-repelling tech, but maybe not as much into parts of itself that aren't quite as critical - or even sending that into something that *attracts* animals that will help it spread, such as birds and bats and insects.
I don't know their account much beyond what I described above, but if I tried to lay it out based on what I know of evolution:
Plant seeds will be nutritious or not. If they aren't, then animals will adapt to not eat them, and the seeds will survive, and so will the lineage. If they are nutritious, animals will adapt to eating more of them until they go extinct, or adapt to be non-nutritious or repel the animal with something that leaves that animal worse off, encourages the animal to not digest the seeds, etc.
Ergo, plant seeds "want" to be less nutritious. Ergo, any plant that's evolved on this planet sufficiently long (and hasn't been extensively fiddled with by geneticists or breeders) will possess seeds that aren't nutritious - or are as non-nutritious as the plant can manage while still permitting germination, or will be coupled with toxins.
It isn't one sided though - any animal that wants to eat seeds will be more successful if it can digest seed oils. And humans in particular seem to be pretty good at eating a wide range of plants that have evolved to avoid getting eaten (tolerant of caffeine, capsaicin, etc.)
I think the idea here is to distinguish which things humans have adapted biologically to eating, from which things they've adapted to technologically (either humans to them, or them to humans). The evolutionary biologist's argument is that the former process enables us to be nourished and not poisoned by what we're choosing to eat through good old fashioned natural selection; the latter goes too fast for that to work, and we could easily damage ourselves faster than the biological adaptation process can do its work to acclimate.
One possible answer to this is to speed up acclimation with technology, too. I haven't seen Heying and Weinstein address this possibility specifically, but based on my experience following their Q&A sessions, I'd guess their answer would be that this is possible in theory, but currently, technology doesn't know how to do this. Moreover, they might maintain that the human body, like any lifeform, is so complex that it's likely to outpace any technological solution in the foreseeable future - including the parts of our bodies that get harmed by technologically engineered food. (This is consistent with a rule of thumb I *have* heard them say, which is, when in doubt, the fewer the processing steps performed to make your food edible in the short term, the better it probably is for you in the long term.)
Hmm. Fruit is the only part of plants that is “designed” to be eaten (plus or minus nectar to attract pollinators), and most herbivores do not exclusively eat fruit. Ergo I don’t think the logic fully holds.
At any rate, seeds must contain some degree of nutrition, else they would not perform their function of fueling the newly germinating plant.
Lots of seeds are not easily digestible (to survive being eaten with the fruit) but that doesn’t mean they are necessarily inedible, nonnutritious, or toxic.
The seeds I think of as indigestible are the ones with a hard coating that looks designed to survive going through a GI tract or just being avoided by a rummaging animal. So, yeah.
I agree seeds have to be at least *somewhat* nutritious - while you responded here, I was saying as much to other replies. The idea there is that there are multiple ways for that plant to defend its seeds. One is to reduce the reward to the animal by reducing the nutrition. Another is to raise the cost with seed coatings, and toxins.
In this case I agree with Nassim Taleb, considering that we have a lot of oils we've been using for millenia, why become a guinea pig testing new stuff? it's almost impossible to prove that modern seed oils have no long term adverse effects
The problem is that it's almost impossible to prove that [insert words here] have no long term adverse effects. If this is our standard nothing new can be ever done.
Not at all. If something has been consumed for millenia we can observe long term effects. Also one could argue that genuinely harmful substances would not pass the evolutionary filter but I'm less sure about this argument.
Basically agreed. If something has very visible adverse effects, and it is very obviously linked to consumption of a given food (e.g. group A and B are identical except group B consumes one extra food, and regularly keels over ten years before group A) then maybe...
Generally, though:
- We only started to look at disease patterns systematically with John Snow's work on cholera in 1854. Earlier than that - well, people _were_ dropping dead quickly from cholera, it _was_ from water (from a particular source) that they consumed, and no one isolated the cause before then.
- Even for things we have been consuming for millennia, the dose may change. Sucrose has been consumed for a long time, but the _amounts_ that e.g. the USA population consumes are recent
- It is damned hard to isolate the effects of _one_ food (short of having people drop dead immediately after consuming it). Given different groups which have all sorts of differences, including many differences in diet, attributing illnesses (particularly long term illnesses) to particular causes is excruciatingly difficult
Even more damning, the Romans used lead for plates and plumbing for - at least - centuries, clearly unable to detect its toxicity. Like you said, only obviously toxic foods where the link between consumption and illness is immediate, are easily identified.
I can't add much to what Michael Watts wrote below, that's pretty much what I think
On a related note, while answering this I learned thanks to wikipedia that "naturalistic fallacy" is also a philosophical term that has nothing to do with appeal to nature as an argument
Perhaps I was being imprecise to call it the “naturalistic fallacy”, but whether it’s that, an appeal to nature, an appeal to the precautionary principle, an isolated demand for rigor, or whatever, I think the essence is the same - you’re just stating a prior to prefer more “natural” stuff absent (impossible) proof of the absence of harm from newer less natural stuff. And I was hoping for a more rigorous evaluation of the “seed oils are bad” claim.
Besides, you’re a guinea pig either way because you don’t eat or live like we have “for millennia”. This whole thing started when scientists thought they had (and maybe still have) pretty good evidence that a reliance on saturated animal fats plus the modern lifestyle does have adverse effects - the “for millennia” safety doesn’t apply because we mostly ate a lot less and got killed by other stuff before heart disease from too much tallow would have been a big problem.
Yes, I'm a guinea pig in many ways, but it doesn't mean that I want to experiment with seed oils when a perfectly good time-tested alternative in the form of olive oil exists in my neck of the woods
You're right that it's a prior. But if you want to argue that it's wrong, perhaps you should show that there are numerous traditionally used foods that turned out to be harmful (because we know of many modern ones that were later recognised as harmful). The only one that came to my mind was alcohol, Claude added betel nuts and agave syrup but when I pressed him on it he had to admit that agave syrup is also a recent invention. So it looks like the only undeniably unhealthy traditional foods are those that have psychoactive effects.
>But if you want to argue that it's wrong, perhaps you should show that there are numerous traditionally used foods that turned out to be harmful (because we know of many modern ones that were later recognised as harmful). The only one that came to my mind was alcohol, Claude added betel nuts and agave syrup but when I pressed him on it he had to admit that agave syrup is also a recent invention.
What's the relationship between "considering that we have a lot of oils we've been using for millen[n]ia, why become a guinea pig testing new stuff?" and the naturalistic fallacy?
The assumption that we should be skeptical of new stuff because it’s new (and by implication, leas natural) and that we are “guinea pigs” if we consume it is pretty textbook naturalism.
That's in your mind. The argument is perfectly sound as stated - things we've been doing for thousands of years are unlikely to hurt us. There's no assumption about what is or isn't natural.
Oh, well if you declare it to be correct, how can I object?
Life has a 100% fatality rate. Objectively lots of stuff we do and have been doing a long time is harmful. Objectively lots of stuff we haven’t been doing for thousands of years is helpful to our health and longevity.
At the heart of it, despite the process for getting there, there is nothing really novel about the constituents of seed oil - just the relative composition of the various fatty acid types. Linoleic acid, the supposed bogeyman, is literally essential to human life, we’re just eating *more* of it than we have historically. In a more general sense we *have* been eating heavily processed seeds (cereal grains) for millennia, literally since the birth of agriculture.
So I guess a steel man version of “this is a major change in our historical lipid balance, proceed with caution” I could buy. But that’s a *prior*, not evidence (and the actual evidence seems to show a poor global correlation between seed oil consumption and obesity rates - obesity is much more strongly correlated with GDP).
To the extent Scott has something of a soft prior for Chesterton’s fence barring other evidence, and a general agreement that something about “processed food” is bad, fine (although he seems to share my frustration that nobody can really pin down scientifically what that is). But his article on saturated fat (linked in this thread) is ultimately pretty dismissive of key aspects of the seed oil theory.
> and trigger a current year bogeyman (inflammation!)
This is such a weird bogeyman. Inflammation, like fever, is the reaction you have to something going wrong, your mechanism of putting it right again. The expectation for artificially reducing existing inflammation has to be that it will make your situation worse, not better.
Steelmanning, I presume that the argument is that we want to remove the cause of chronic inflammation, not that we want to suppress the inflammation as a symptom.
In the specific case of seed oils, Don P. is correct. The theory is that a component of the oils (specifically linoleic acid) is a direct cause of inflammation (by one of its metabolites I think?). Basically, “stop consuming this thing that your body feels the need to attack”. Nothing to do with inflammation suppression per se.
You seem to be commenting on a much more general trend.
That's definitely untrue; all the energy is going toward suppressing inflammation itself.
I've asked my mother (a doctor) about this question for fevers, and her take is that we suppress fevers because, in the event that the fever was actually necessary, we can fall back on hospitalization to deal with whatever the fever was going to prevent.
For inflammation, I don't think even that much thought has gone into it; nobody knows what the inflammation is responding to.
Followup question: let's suppose I accept that seed oils might be bad and are probably worth eliminating just in case. What oil should I use in my cooking instead? Olive oil has a low smoke point, and things like coconut or avocado oil have a strong taste.
My experience is that avocado oil has an extremely mild taste, certainly milder than olive oil. Speaking as an avid home chef, avocado oil is my go-to daily oil. For certain use cases, I also keep olive oil (basically just for Italian), bacon grease (richness and searing steaks) and peanut oil (high heat for deep frying) on hand.
Depends on which theory you subscribe to about why seed oils are bad. If you think unsaturated fats are bad, go with lard or ghee. If you think PUFAs are bad, go with safflower oil… a seed oil. If you think a low omega 6 to omega 3 ratio is important, go with canola oil… a seed oil. Uh oh.
As far as I can tell, anything with high omega 3 is going to have a low smoke point.
Lard is very unsaturated compared to butter, ghee, tallow or coconut oil.
Safflower oil is like 70% linoleic acid, a PUFA, and widely regarded to be the most dangerous one. I'm not sure why you think it's low PUFA.
Most seed oil avoiders don't care so much about the omega 3 to 6 ratio, mostly they try to avoid linoleic acid and other unsaturated fats full stop. Butter is what most people cook with.
I’m seeing conflicting versions of fat breakdowns on safflower oil. I was going off a graphic showing it as having a very high percentage of monounsaturated fat.
I think what’s going on is that there are recently (GMO?) high oleic acid varieties of safflower oil being produced.
In any case there does not seem to be a 1-1 correspondence between “seed oil” and “highest linoleic acid” content, at least among plant derived oils, though a couple of the highest linoleic acid varieties are indeed from seeds. Which I thought odd.
Oh, and you’re right about lard relative to beef tallow, but the poster I’m responding to rejected avocado and coconut oil as being strongly flavored, and lard is more neutral tasting IMO.
Careful! If the pigs ate a lot of seed oils in their feed then there lard will be full of the same kind of fatty acid chains. Ruminants, on the other hand, reprocess everything they eat into new fatty acids. So tallow is safe, lard not necessarily.
It mostly focused on high-saturated fat diets, but as a part of that addresses polyunsaturated fats (which mostly come from seed oils in western diets, as you likely well know) as a potential cause of obesity and illness.
Thanks. I have a vague recollection of actually reading that post when it came out, but since the current obsession is all about “seed” oils, I guess it didn’t trigger my memory.
Is the closest, it basically does a high level literature review of studies in seed oils vs not and essentially takes them at their word. It's likely not as good as something from Scott, since I think it's not trying to figure out every possible interpretation from data / figure out if there are other confounders, but I basically trust this like 10-20x more than people making assertions about "the science", which I imagine is what young otherwise be getting.
Has anyone here used Duolicious? I'd expect it to be "just like every other dating app, except possibly even more of a sausage festival," but correct me if I'm wrong, please.
I tried it. Girls there were a lot more internet culture, which is good if that's your thing. It was also so much of a sausage fest that I hardly ever got replies. Much lower response rate than other dating sites. Chicks mentioned having thousands of messages to get through. This was closer to launch, so maybe the situation has improved since.
I took the SAT four times in my life and remember each score I got. I also remember my GRE score.
If you ask someone what they got on the SAT, ACT, or GRE, and they took it fewer than 10 years ago, but they respond they can't remember their score, how likely is it that they got a bad score and don't want to admit it? 50% likely? 90% likely?
Data point: I got a very high score (1598) and my default in conversation is to claim that I can't remember. Sharing a score that high is interpreted as bragging and can get very awkward.
I don't think I've ever been in a conversation where people talked or asked about SAT scores. I remember mine, but I never tell anyone because I assume no one cares.
I wouldn't take that as evidence either way. I personally barely looked at my scores bc I knew I'd get a good score. Like GlacierCow, I do remember my percentiles though. An obviously better metric, in my opinion and way easier to remember.
Something I've been asking about for a while, from that link:
> The Biggest SAT → IQ Conversion Site Is Wrong
>> This man has directly converted the SAT percentiles to IQ scores, which is not what should be done. Tests like the ACT and SAT correlate with IQ at about 0.8-0.85
>> Instead, the ideal way to do this is to take the percentiles from the current versions of the SAT and then convert those into z-scores and then regress those z-scores by the mean by the estimated regression coefficient.
I don't see how this can be correct. When we see that the SAT correlates with IQ tests at about 0.8, we also note that that is the same correlation we see between different IQ tests. But we don't regress the results of other IQ tests when reporting the tested IQ given by those instruments - if you take a Wechsler test and your reported IQ is 120, then your tested IQ is 120 regardless of whether I'm secretly thinking about Wechsler or Raven's. Why would we regress results only for the SAT?
How is that a direct answer? It tells you literally nothing about the question you asked. It does tell you that people who don't remember their SAT score are stupider than people who do, but that doesn't speak to the odds of forgetting versus not wishing to report.
I don't remember my score exactly (been more than 10 years since then) because I don't even know what the scoring standards are anymore (various SAT scoring system changes over the years). But I do remember that I scored in the 97th percentile and I remember this because it's the closest analogue I have for IQ I have. What does this make me?
2) Do you have absolutely no memory of what your score was, or could you confidently narrow it down to something like "around 1400" or "in the low 1300s"?
If I want to guess it was something like 750 on math, a little less good on the reading/writing. Looking online I was in the 2400-score-years so it gets confusing. I think I could confidently narrow it to something around 2100 (+-100ish?) but I had to look online just now to remember what that meant so I think I've contaminated the example.
Yes but do you remember the fastest time you ever got on a 100m sprint?
People who base their self worth on test scores are likely to remember, people who don't are more likely to forget.
Why would you even ask someone that, if you're not in charge of college admissions or something? Just so that you can feel superior if their score is lower than yours? I don't blame anyone for weaseling out of that sort of game.
It depends on how many bits of information are involved? I also remember, even though it’s been a lot more than 10 years, but it’s not hard since I only have to remember one bit of information.
But also, why do you care? I’ve never had anyone ask me my sat score after high school, and I would definitely judge negatively someone who asked me that today.
I took the PSAT and the SAT, once each, and remember both my scores but not which one goes with which test. They're pretty close, but less than perfect, so it doesn't much matter.
That's not an approach I would recommend when the scoring scales are so different in absolute terms. It's similar to suggesting that one mile plus one meter is two. You'd need to convert both scores to the same scale first.
I also wouldn't recommend it as stated even for multiple instances of the same test; your compressed score will get worse and worse the more you take the test.
One thing I don't understand is why it's constitutional for Trump to run for office in 2024. Amendment 22 says you can only have two terms, and Trump won in both 2016 and 2020.
I guess on a serious note, Trump running for office in 2024 is an implicit admission of the loss in 2020. That is, if we assume Trump cares about the Constitution. Well, never mind!
Interesting, the plain language of "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice" suggests it's the election that matters, not the ratification.
The election by the president happens by the electors, with the election of *those* electors being a separate matter, insofar as I've understood. The electors conducted the election of the president on Jan 6.
When precisely do you believe the election is COMPLETE, and the person is considered to be elected? When the last polls close on election night? When the ballots are all completely counted? When ENOUGH ballots have been counted? When all recounts have been completed? When appeals/legal challenges have been exhausted?
Or perhaps all of that is irrelevant, and it's when the electoral college meets that matters, which was December 14 in 2020? (That one's actually reasonable, and Trump lost that one.)
I don't believe he has issued any official statement about it. But also, it's the certification on January 6 that determines whether or not he (retroactively) lost on December 14. At any rate, I don't think the precise time one officially wins is something anyone has cared to adjudicate, since the inauguration (specifically the moment he completes swearing the oath of office) is generally what matters.
I don't know where I originally found the link, but this guy Sam Jennings has the best take I've seen on Trump's victory. A few extracts:
> Which is not to say I'm excited for the coming chaos. Only a very certain, or very rash, person would prefer unbridled chaos to an anxious blandness. And yet we have no real choice in this. The people have chosen chaos. They’ve hit the big red button that says, “Go on, fuck it all up, what do we have to lose?” and now we’ll get to see exactly what we have to lose.
[...]
> It’s an awful picture, yet I can think of no other way to put it: the entire attitude post-election seems to me to be essentially post-ejaculatory. We’ve been anxiously invested and secretly turned on by a carnivalesque libidinal ritual, being hacked out by two very unsexy parties, and now we’re all emerging from a vaguely masturbatory haze to discover how sordid and sad the whole thing was.
> and now we’re all emerging from a vaguely masturbatory haze to discover how sordid and sad the whole thing was.
For some? Sure. For Trump's core base? Smells like projection. People like to pretend that Trumpism is just some inexplicable wave of hysteria. When in fact, the stage was set 30 years ago [0]. Keynes once said "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" Well apparently, Jennings' go-to strat is to revert to epistemic helplessness. It's not as bad as full-on denial, I'll give him that.
Say it with me, everyone: "We're not at the end of history"
My favourite take was that Kamala Harris ran a campaign about ideas, and that non-college educated people voted as a bloc for the person whose campaign was about them.
I don’t think everyone who voted for Trump just wants to watch the world burn, as noble as that is.
Lots and lots of people who voted for Trump but want opposing things think Trump is going to be on their side. They can’t all be right! It will be interesting to see how it shakes out.
How is it unfounded ? It is very likely that Harris would have kept on with the current policies. It is also very likely that she wouldn't have tried to break any norms.
I keep seeing people trying to "both sides" this so hard but it always seems so dishonest. For example equating Hillary's "[Trump] knows he’s an illegitimate president" which is calling out shady voter suppression tactics and the fact that Trump did not win the popular vote with the staunch denial of the 2020 election result by Trump to this day and the organization of a (failed) plot to remain in power.
Are you people serious ? Do I really have to convince people in the comment section of a rationalist author that Kamala Harris was willing "to destroy the country" ?
Yes, they are; but no, you don't. I put it to you that there are better uses for your time than trying to interrupt people who are deep into their enjoyment of a gratifying fantasy that, while absurd, can never truly be debunked.
The Harris administration will always be a counterfactual. You can't even prove to *me*--a person who thinks it's broken-brained delusion to believe otherwise--that President Kamala Harris would have continued to be a bog standard bland Democratic politician, presiding over a bland (but diverse!) Democratic cabinet and pursuing vaguely center-left policy objectives, to the extent possible with a divided Congress, in the usual boring and bureaucratic manner for four to eight years. How do you expect to prove it to people who genuinely get a kick out of imagining her becoming Woke Hugo Chavez overnight?
"You can't even prove to *me*--a person who thinks it's broken-brained delusion to believe otherwise--that President Kamala Harris would have continued to be a bog standard bland Democratic politician"
Look at the record. She got a reputation as "Copmala" in California. Later on, when first running for the primary, she tacked hard left because the winds of change had shifted to a different position being considered more appealing to the public. That got her nowhere, so this time round she moved back to the centre and avoided explaining why she was repudiating her former positions.
That's because she doesn't *have* any positions. As Vice-President, she's best known for what? A media controversy over whether or not she was known as/appointed as "Border Czar"? Her campaign this time round ran on vibes.
If elected, she would have continued to be as bland as rice pudding and would just have gone along with whatever seemed to be the best position to give her the greatest chance of high approval ratings. She wouldn't have gone full socialist and she wouldn't have reverted back to tough on crime (legal weed and free loans for black men to transition from being drug dealers to being legal drug dealers/businessmen still has me face-palming here).
Yes but that's a good thing in a democracy. You want someone who will do what's required within the limit of the system. Always going the in the direction of the person in power's latest whim is not a good thing. It strains the system and may end up breaking it. I'll tank blank rice pudding instead of castor oil any day.
>In 2019, Vice President Kamala Harris told CNN’s Jake Tapper that social media companies “are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation[censorship] and _it has to stop_.”
[emphasis added]
And, in addition to her words, she was a participant in the Biden/Harris administration, which used Facebook and pre-Musk Twitter as private proxies for unconstitutional censorship by their administration. So this is not just a hypothetical of what Trump _might_ do.
There's an argument that she was pro-censorship merely because that's what the polls suggested her voters wanted. If the polls said her voters were 60-40 in favor of tariffs on quinoa, Tapper would have been hearing her rail about how Peruvian agri-conglomerates "have put thousands of small American quinoa farms out of business without any remedy and _it has to stop_."
I took this as Deiseach's point: Harris lost appeal because she resembled a weathervane. Even her speech stance might have been poll-driven. (I think it's likely, and all it would have taken to flip her would be a minor BLM tweet storm.)
It occurs to me that you never actually /hear/ this sort of thing any more. It's too gauche to mudsling out loud, even at the end of a night's drinking. Mostly, now, you /read/ it in the more shouty bits of the internet.
Well at least we share the same reality but if you think keeping on the tracks of the previous administration is going to destroy the country you may as well define what destroy means to you because it seems far off the center of even the metaphorical meaning of this word.
The campaign funding reminds me of 2016 when Hillary's campaign was boasting of all the money it was raising and there were constant media pieces about "Trump has no donors, no money, his campaign is going to run out of steam soon".
Well, looks like the deeper pockets didn't win a second time! And Trump's campaign didn't need to spend money on publicity because everyone was throwing free publicity at it with both hands! From "The Republicans are weird" to every breathless "it's the Fourth Reich for sure this time!" social media/traditional media take, they honestly spent more time talking about Trump than their own candidates.
What was Walz gonna do in the White House? I have no idea, but I certainly know the Harris campaign position on JD Vance.
The difference this time round seems to be the begging letters/emails being sent out still, and in increasing numbers. The over-spend seems to be about $20 million, which is not terribly bad, but the reaction makes me wonder if there is more there we are not hearing about. Is the DNC growing a spine and demanding Harris personally take responsibility for paying it off or making sure it's paid off? Are the deep-pocket donors cajoled into backing the booting out of Biden now having buyer's regret and intimating they may not be putting their hands in their pockets the next time a Democratic candidate comes looking for a little help to protect democracy? Reading between the lines, there seems to be some indication of the usual bribery re: walking around money to get out the black vote, that may not sit well with the emphasis on transparency and openness and 'Kamala was the grassroots choice'. Also that consultants, hangers-on, and 'jobs for the boys' chomped a good bite out of the funds, but that's par for the course in politics.
"Harris camp also spent a whopping six figures building a set for her appearance on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, which attracted a fraction of the viewership of Trump’s appearance on the “Joe Rogan Experience.”
Yeah, that sure was worth the money they tossed down the sink, wasn't it? This kind of thing niggles at me - the campaign seemed to want a huge level of control over such interviews (not going to the studio where this podcast is usually held, and the same with what Joe Rogan has said about them - they wouldn't let her go to him, they insisted he had to go to them) which sounds like they didn't trust their own candidate enough to let her do an unscripted interview on strange territory. That doesn't bode well for "she is competent and capable".
There seems to be an air of desperation that I don't remember from Hillary's loss this time round.
I think I might disagree with him in that in many ways the grift is the point for a lot of Dems; I think my best steel-manned version of this "functioning as a political party that wins elections is secondary to its function as social club for the Professional Managerial Class and above, and throwing out large contracts for bad services is merely a cleverly-disguised welfare payment
To that last point - from my recollection, the atmosphere in November 2016 was complete shock - "how *could* this happen" overshadowing "how *did* this happen", with blame focused more on Americans failing to elect Hillary than her failing to appeal to them. The latter came later.
Ah, it's that the guy is obviously An Actor playing the part of "regular guy who goes to football matches with his dad". Sure, a real Regular Guy would have been stiff as a plank in the part (if you've ever heard radio ads with Real People, you'll know what I mean). So it's plastic not real wood, while the tone of the ad is "we're real, he's not".
Harris' disdain for the common man bleeds from it. There's the prevailing sense that she thinks people are cows and they'll follow whoever looks most familiar. "He lives in a country club, that's not your herd! I'm your herd, with the haircut and the Sports!"
This is a twisted and uncharitable take. Do you really think Harris personally oversaw this ad ?
A lot of ads I see from the US country are like that : Interview someone that is supposedly just one of the viewer so that they identify and buy something. Nothing special about it.
No, I doubt Harris had more to do with it than "my campaign signs off on these". It's a terrible ad, but no worse than many political ads, so she can't be blamed for that.
But "Trump is a fake!" messaging loses out when the guy spouting it is clearly professional actor doing a role and he'll be dressed up as white collar PMC guy, possibly IT guy, for another ad instead of "I'm a guy what drives a SUV and work in a saw mill".
Contrast that with the garbage truck, and that's really Trump in a real garbage truck. It may be dumb, but it's funny and most importantly it's not faked up the same way.
Harris is in charge of the organisation that made this ad, her personal level of involvement doesn't matter. Being senior management means taking responsibility for the actions of the organisation that you built, and Harris was asking for the most senior-management job of all.
I'd never seen this ad before. It's not quite as terrible as the "I'm a man what eats carburettors for breakfast" one, but it oozes the same contempt for voters. "We have to figure out the things that each of the demographic groups on rows A through M of this spreadsheet likes, and make an ad filled with each of them, and say Donald Trump Bad. Make sure it doesn't mention Kamala Harris or any actual policies."
>Do you really think Harris personally oversaw this ad ?
It ends with "I'm Kamala Harris, and I approved this message", so yes, she personally oversaw it as much as she was going to personally oversee the presidency.
A couple of thoughts. One, I don't think the people who voted in Trump are having any kind of second thoughts or "post-ejaculatory" worries. They seem pretty content with having won and are looking forward to seeing how far Trump can get with fixing their problems. I don't think many, maybe any, have delusions that everything will go their way, but they have a reason to hope that some will go their way. Second, and this is important for people who hate Trump to understand, Trump only exists because the people who support him have felt like they didn't get *any* of their preferred preferences since sometime in the 80s or 90s. NAFTA and greatly increased immigration have done huge damage to them economically and socially. If the choice is "more of the same" or "unbridled chaos" they pretty much have to pick chaos. It's the choice between some level of hope and death.
It could be true if conservative living is just that much better than liberal/left. That's not a charitable option, but there are so many possible confounders that I don't know that we could ever really determine the reason(s).
My personal take is that rural living really is that much better for human happiness, and rural people are significantly more conservative. Less crowded, more likely you know your community members. Less chance of running into random jerks and criminals, even if the rate of criminality/jerkiness is the same or worse in rural areas. There's something to be said about the ability of one jerk to ruin your day, and the chances of running into one jerk a day is unbelievably higher in a city (unless the jerk is your family or a close neighbor or something).
The first is that the conservative (small c) life script is genuinely better for human flourishing. Finish school, get a job, get married, have kids, go to church and engage with your community and extended family (all while living in the countryside or suburbs).
Compare with 'Finish school, do a postgraduate degree, move to the city and try to break into a competitive field, sleep around for several years, cohabit and then maybe have a child in a small apartment without getting married'.
All the elements of the first option are better for psychological health.
The second element is that the conservative worldview itself is better psychologically. Believing that you are responsible for your own fate, believing that the world is basically just, believing that you have duties to other people and to ideas bigger than yourself are all psychologically helpful.
Jonathan Haidt has done some interesting work on this. He refers to the modern leftist worldview as 'anti-CBT' for this reason.
I don't really agree with most of their policy preferences, but society has been running on "Certain people have gotten their way too long and don't get to have their way anymore" for so long that half of the members of "certain people" haven't actually seen anything go their way for their entire lives - up until Trump. Society has been on this train for about thirty years now.
("Certain people" is not "white people", or "men", or "Christian"; it's both more specific and more general than any of those things.)
Yes, I think that the process of being disappointed by the politician you supported is usually a gradual process, not a rapid one analogous to post-nut clarity.
I think that Harris supporters might be having a quicker-than-usual realisation that she was shit, but that's only because they all thought she was shit four months ago and then suddenly turned on a dime the moment she became the only possible nominee.
>I think that the process of being disappointed by the politician you supported is usually a gradual process
Well, I viewed the contest as between Horrible and Worse (with Harris _narrowly_ getting the role for Worse), so I'll only _really_ be disappointed if Trump actually manages to stumble into a nuclear exchange (unlikely, but possible - but it was possible with Harris too).
I got the impression Harris was trying to project centrist and people didn't buy it. After four months of Harris being in the spotlight, I still have little idea of who she really is. The best glimpse I got was during the debate, for which she had a month to prepare, and all I saw was preparation.
"I still have little idea of who she really is... all I saw was preparation"
I never understood this argument, bc it always seem like any criticism you can levy at Kamala would be one thousand times worse with Trump. No, I would never prefer an honest Hitler to a passive-aggressive faux-kind co-worker.
Yes, she prepared for a debate, sure, she isn't being super genuine in her policies, but is that really worse than Trump? Someone who didn't plan at all for the debate, didn't have any policies proposals ready, and lied through his teeth? Trump is a genuinely stupid man, who does not understand much about how the government functions. How is he any better?
People wonder about how a civil war in the US might break out. How plausible does the following scenario sound?
1. Trump purges the army of commanders not considered loyal to him (under the guise of some other reason)
2. Martial Law is declared due to major protests or riots over something (something like the George Floyd riots), and the army is brought in. The US Army stays visibly positioned in several major US cities.
3. 2028 rolls around and a Democrat is elected POTUS. He tells the army to withdraw from the cities but meanwhile Trump tells them not to and at least one of the armies obeys Trump not the new POTUS. (Throughout the period after martial law is declared, The Left stays angry about the situation, with violence breaking out occasionally, army personnel sometimes getting shot by The Resistance.)
4. Some generals stay loyal to Trump while other generals are loyal to the POTUS.
Very unlikely. Every stop of your process seems individually unlikely, with a combined effect of all but impossible.
1) Gutting enough of the military to make it specifically loyal to Trump would completely eviscerate the military. Rank and file people may love Trump, but not separate from their love of the US. The commanders don't particularly love Trump.
2) Limited martial law is possible, but not multi-year. The federal government calling for martial law would likely result in local jurisdictions doing everything in their power to fix a problem before federal troops could even get there, and then quickly getting them out. Martial law is bad for everyone involved and would be incredibly unpopular, especially after an immediate need was handled.
3) This seems to presuppose that Trump doesn't leave office? I'm not sure what you have in mind, but once we have a new president who can give lawful orders to stand down, then we don't have Trump in office to give counter orders. If Trump would fight against leaving office then the details of his argument and who supports him matter. I don't see that as being very likely, either.
4) If Trump could pull off the complete gutting of the military, I guess some of the new generals could potentially support Trump. But they would almost certainly be very bad generals, likely incompetent at their jobs and unliked by their troops. If they were qualified people who rose in the ranks after their bosses were removed, then why follow an illegitimate Trump?
>1. Trump purges the army of commanders not considered loyal to him (under the guise of some other reason)
Seems definitely possible. I'd say at least 50% chance this happens anyways.
>2. Martial Law is declared due to major protests or riots over something (something like the George Floyd riots), and the army is brought in. The US Army stays visibly positioned in several major US cities.
Very unlikely. Maybe 1-3% chance IMO. There are a lot of other steps before that: declaring national emergency, militarizing the police, sending in the national guard, federalizing the state national guard, repealing or ignoring all the laws that prevent him from doing this...etc. etc. Public sentiment would be low. Congress would likely act against it. Supreme Court is, contrary to popular opinion, not a bunch of Trump loyalists (they're FedSoc which is very much not a MAGA organization!) and would probably act as well. States would likely refuse to cooperate.
>3. 2028 rolls around and a Democrat is elected POTUS. He tells the army to withdraw from the cities but meanwhile Trump tells them not to and at least one of the armies obeys Trump not the new POTUS. (Throughout the period after martial law is declared, The Left stays angry about the situation, with violence breaking out occasionally, army personnel sometimes getting shot by The Resistance.)
less than 1% chance. Highly unlikely
>4. Some generals stay loyal to Trump while other generals are loyal to the POTUS.
less than 1% chance. Highly unlikely.
>5. Civil War
less than 1% chance. Highly unlikely.
I can think of like 10 different possible paths off the top of my head to civil war that are more likely than this. Most involve some kind of state secession crisis or medium-intensity insurgency, rather than a president trying to become king.
My guess would be to sequester them from the general populace, official purpose being "special training". Some of them are selected for special teams, given special gear and instructions for using it.
Generally, any government that wants to oppress its own people gets that going by having a police force that doesn't socialize with those people. Very, very unlikely in the US as a result. The closest we tend to get is hiring police from one part of town to police another part of town.
On "1" there's a big gap between "personally loyal to Trump" and "actively disloyal to Trump". I might expect him to fire a few of the actively disloyal ones, but the vast majority of officers are in the middle, willing to obey all legal orders.
Incredibly unlikely. Trump purging enough people from DoD to where they would support long-term suspension of Posse Comitatus to implement Martial Law is one where the Army wouldn't be competent enough to do it anyway.
I don't know if it's been said on here before (and I'd love to hear @Deiseach's perspective on this), but elsewhere it's been noted how fascinating it is that people's mental model of an American Civil War is something that looks a lot like the Spanish Civil War and not "Na Trioblóidí, but bigger". Because I think we're a lot closer to the latter than I think we would like to believe, and I think the former is much harder to make happen than I think people expect, to say nothing of "Nicaragua but with more paramilitary death squads".
The divisions in the US are nothing like Northern Ireland. You asked Deisheach who is, Irish. I’m British with family in Northern Ireland - so with an understanding of history of the place.
These ethno religious civil wars are not what is happening or possible in the US. An ideological civil war is unlikely either, despite the caterwauling about Trump, he is not a fascist and the opposition are not communists either. In the Spanish civil war they were, literally that. That, and anarchists. Democracy was a young political idea then and had little credibility.
In the US it is part of the fabric, however flawed that fabric, for centuries.
I did worry slightly about the US creating, out of nowhere, inter ethnic conflict at the height of the anti white supremacy kerfuffle a few years back, those worries have entirely dissipated in this election. It looks like Hispanic males in particular either like a bit of white supremacism or don’t believe it.
Being old enough to be around during the 70s and just old enough then to be somewhat aware of what was going on in America, I remain astounded you didn't have your own version of The Troubles. You really got lucky and zigged where other countries would have zagged. You had your own amateur terrorist militias robbing banks and performing bombings, you had political theorists pushing revolution, and there is of course the race question.
Seems like your Founding Fathers got something right when setting up the state!
Probably helped a lot that our most dedicated and extreme revolutionaries could always defect and go back to cushy jobs thanks to being rich kids. No need to be a diehard martyr, you can just become an education professor!
Try iodine. If that doesn't help, organic food. Sulfonylureas are used as preharvest desiccants in conventional agriculture. They're also used as diabetes drugs, because they make your pancreas squirt out insulin. Long-term, this can lead to an insulin resistance phenotype, and hypertriglyceridemia can follow on from that.
1. COVID wastewater numbers remain low, but SARS2 is still circulating.
2. COVID deaths and ED visits are down, and the weekly COVID mortality rate is lower than at any point since the beginning of the pandemic (of course, mortality will rise during the next wave). In fact, ED visits are still falling ~11% per week. These generally trail WW numbers by a couple of weeks, so I expect the rate of ED visits will level off in the coming week to reflect the WW curve.
3. In the US, XEC's growth rate has plateaued at ~20% of samples and may be falling now. It's unlikely to cause the next wave in its current form (my opinion). For instance, in the UK
4. Over in the UK XEC is greater than 60%, but COVID cases are falling. XEC seems to outcompete the KP.x variants but doesn't increase case numbers. We've seen this pattern before with some other competitive variants (remember Kraken?). My hypothesis is they outcompete the previous vars in a population that is susceptible to those vars, but they don't infect the rest of the population.
5. OTOH, XEC is taking off in Australia. It's at greater than 50 percent in NSW. And a new wave seems to be revving up Down Under.
6. And I need to retract a claim I made in earlier updates that, during interwave gaps, SARS is circulating at higher levels than Flu and RSV by an order of magnitude (per wastewater numbers). After a little research, I learned that Flu A&B shed significantly less RNA out the gut, and Flu RNA is less stable so even though COVID and Flu could be circulating at similar rates in the US population, the WW would show lower levels of Flu. Calculating actual case load from WW numbers is fools game, but they are good for indicating changes in R.
6. I already posted the latest A(H5) avian influenza news in the last open thread.
7. California reported the first Clade 1 MPox case in US. The patient traveled from Africa. It's unclear if it's 1b—which is (supposedly) more transmissible and more virulent. I'm surprised we haven't seen it here sooner if Clade 1 is transmissible as claimed, though.
8. It's started later than normal this year, but Flu season is starting to take off. Biobot seems to show it's more prevalent in the Western US.
9. RSV rates are starting to rise, as well.
10. Mycoplasma pneumoniae infections are increasing. The CDC doesn't officially track these numbers, but Biofire's proprietary Syndromic Trends site suggest that the current rise in cases may not be as dramatic as the MSM has portrayed it.
11. And finally, an actual SARS-CoV-2 recombination event between two vars in one patient and the subsequent transmission to another was documented. We see a lot of SARS2 recombinant (hybrid) vars in the wild, but this is the first time we've seen it as it happened --> https://tinyurl.com/476bkr2w
Thanks! And another reason for careful celebration: it's been four years now, and we still haven't seen any cases of the B Yamagata line of influenza. It might be that the worldwide anti-virus measures have accidentally reduced the number of influenza lines from four to three.
Yes, but influenza showed an interesting pattern. Cases dropped off the cliff to near zero *worldwide* just as the pandemic was revving up in March. I wish Substack would allow us to post graphics in our replies because I could show this better than I can describe it, but within three weeks, Flu cases (from all strains) in the US dropped from 18,000 to 1,200, and test positivity rates dropped from ~25% to ~1%. This same pattern was seen in other Northern Hemisphere countries, too. In a normal flu season, there's a long tail out into April, but the 2019-20 Flu season ended early. In China, where COVID was spreading earlier than the rest of the world, Flu season ended in January (with the same precipitous dropoff in test positivity and cases). Although COVID had been circulating in the US since February, the cases didn't really start ramping up until the 3rd week of March. So, the Flu decline in the US preceded the COVID case surge by about 3 weeks (which is longer than the incubation period of SARS2). Several virologists and epidemiologists posited viral interference as the cause of this pattern, but most experts dismissed the idea. The explanation i saw was that the Flu decline was all due to the farsighted NPIs that the US (and other nations) implemented early. But in the US NPIs weren't really introduced until late April when the first wave was peaking (typo correction: I wrote Alpha, but I meant the original A strain). And many countries never implemented NPIs.
Flu was suppressed worldwide in both the northern and southern hemispheres until the end of 2021, when Omicron hit the scene. The northern hemisphere had a late starting 2021-22 Flu season, but overall Flu cases were low compared to previous Flu seasons. The world returned to normal Flu seasons in the southern hemisphere for their 2022 season, and in the northern hemisphere, Flu came back with a vengeance during our 2022-23 season. Note: China had a steady background of Type B cases all through 2021 that peaked early in 2022. This was when their ZeroCOVID policy was in full force and was the most restrictive NPI policy in the world. Then they had a belated burp of Type A in the spring of 2022.
I don't think the NPI and restricted air travel explanations explain these patterns. I suspect there was some sort of viral interference going on. And when it comes to one pathogen affecting another, we can see a weird pattern between SARS2 and Rhinoviruses. In the US they show a noticeable inverse correlation. When COVID is low, Rhinoviruses pick up. And when COVID is high, Rhinoviruses drop. Or maybe it's when Rhinoviruses are high, COVID is low and vice versa.
Finally, B Yamagata cases dropped after the 2017-18 Flu season. And they didn't really pick up again during the 2018-19 season. I suspect B Yamagata didn't have the numbers going into the COVID pandemic to survive the die-off.
Many have remarked on this seeming paradox. Why does Trump appeal to so many lower-class people despite being a billionaire? It hardly seems paradoxical to the many people in Hollywood whose full-time job is selling an image of luxury to low-class people. The actress partying in her 15 million dollar mansion. The rapper driving his luxury car and bragging about his money. The musician haggling over a multimillion-dollar contract. Of course, the audience needs to be able to relate to the subjects. Such programs focus on the actor, musician, and athlete rather than the derivatives trader because the former are more culturally and psychologically relatable.
Trump has an intuitive understanding of celebrity culture. At the RNC, he didn't invite random people to talk about relatable subjects like not having any money. He invited Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock.
The Democrats' answer was, "Look, we've got a relatable candidate. He's just like you, a middle-aged man who's going bald and wearing a hoodie and has a cat on his lap." And he's "coach." Not the coach of an NFL team; he's the coach of a high school football team. Who trashes J.D. Vance for being a working-class kid who went to Yale instead of Minnesota State University, Mankato:
I think Trump just genuinely likes wrestling. He's attended wrestling events in the past. And I heard he went super into the weeds on MMA (or something?) while on Joe Rogan (I've not watched the podcast episode myself). So Hulk Hogan is not a surprise.
I listened to it, and he did, and he does. Boxing too. (One of the weirdest accusations I continue to hear against Trump is that he's racist, as if to imply the hood-wearing cross-burning sense. Meanwhile, he socialized with black athletes in ways that no hood-wearing cross burner would.)
Low class person: eats McDonalds because it's tasty
PMC striver : doesn't eat McDonald's because that's gross lower class slop
Powerful billionaire: eats McDonalds because it's tasty
The PMC striver class spends their whole time trying to distinguish themselves from the low class yokels, but then demands their loyalty once every four years.
A smart person puts out a sign saying "pedi-habiliments ambidextrously lubricated and illuminated for the infinitesimal remuneration of ten cents per operation".
A *really* smart person puts out a sign saying "shoe shine: ten cents".
Isn't it the other way around? We lose our capacity to taste as we age - it's why kids are super picky while adults are happier with much more strongly tasting foods than kids are.
We have lost our capacity to appreciate how delicious the McDonalds we loved as kids truly is, because we are old now and those taste receptors are all dead and all that remains is the sensation of eating limp ketchup-covered cardboard.
Might be a liberal boomer thing. I think they really did grow up in a beatnik culture that rejected looking rich and successful. Times have changed but the same liberal boomers were picking the candidates.
Your first link is correct. Trump had McDonalds served on Air Force One. That's the kind of 'relatable' that all the spin doctors in all the campaigns can't fake.
And it's not the first time he's done that, and the more stories about being "mocked" for that, the more ordinary people go "yeah, I dunno about him but I sure know *you* are not on my side, so I'm voting for him".
As for the second, Walz emits a slight air of jealousy, never mind that his family circumstances at the start were way better than Vance's family circumstances. And I really don't have much of an image of him or what he is really like, because I don't think the Harris campaign did much with him - he was trotted out now and again, but mostly kept in the background not to take any lustre off the Coconut Queen, for all the good it did. Does Walz eat McDonalds? or another fast food chain? Does he do anything at all, apart from "I used to coach high school football"?
The expression on his face is what sells it. It's clearly not one of the staged "now let's all eat a bacon sandwich to show we're Just Folks", Trump really does like McDonald's and the rest are going along with various levels of enthusiasm.
That's the kind of 'real' that we're talking about in regard to the Harris ads. Did we ever see her eat a Dorito, despite the claim that Doritos are her favourite snack? There was also a photo op with Gretchen Whitmer and the pair of them 'having a beer' together visiting a restaurant in Kalamazoo, but Harris had one sip (granted, you don't want your candidate to get hammered on the campaign trail). At least Whitmer looks like she *would* drink a beer, as she's supping away here:
I will say this for the Harris-Walz... they really do look exactly like Maya Rudolph and Jim Gaffigan. If you wanted to pick a ticket based on the availability of comedians who can play them on SNL, then you could hardly do any better than Harris-Walz.
Trump is terrible for SNL. In fact I've never seen a comedian do a decent impression of Trump, which is incredible.
That part of it I kinda-sorta get: if you start from the premise that the masculinity we've already got is diseased and has to be replaced with something else, "Dad" is certainly a focal-point solution. The unfathomable part is where the campaign got the notion that they could ever appeal to men by starting from that premise.
He was maximum inoffensiveness, which turned out to be maximum ineffectuality. I suppose the lesson to be learned here, from both Hillary and Kamala's attempts, is "if you want to be First Female Ever, do *not* pick as your running mate a white guy named Tim who is a former state governor" 😁
> It's eerily similar to the good times, weak men meme.
But in reverse right? Good times come from generous, cooperative bots (i.e. 'weak'), but eventually everyone is so generous that bad bots take advantage of them, leading to a period of bad times.
When there's a randomized component of the game, where bots might "accidentally" play the opposite of what they intend. TfT can get into an eternal grudge match while always-cooperate recovers smoothly.
I'm not sure if its tested by actual game theorists, but I could imagine one where you take a tiny penalty for each line of code. So tit for tat looses to pure cooperate if those are the only two players.
Penalizing "thinking" (slightly) has crossed my mind as well as a worthy addition to a simulator. TFT has that nice property where you only have to keep one register for the other player. And this feels intuitively like what a lot of people do. (Trump is famously called out here - he seems to only remember the last thing you said about him, and if it was positive, it doesn't matter how much you criticized him before that.)
So, we could incur a small penalty for memory (do I remember what the last move was against me? Do I track each player's last move? Do I track *all* the moves? And the payouts?), and for processing (how much analysis do I do about each move and payout?).
A simulator might have players little smarter than an amoeba, where TFT or WSLS dominate, or smarter players where the dominant strategies start to resemble stock trading algorithms. Or a mix, where the dominant player might implement nearly any strategy at all and dominates anyway because it plays so many games.
For 1v1 matchups if a single bit is expensive. Always defect beats always cooperate. Tit for Tat beats always defect (the value of the strategy > the expense of computation) and always cooperate beats tit-for-tat.
If we think of humans rather than bots, the time and effort it takes to learn the skills of whose a defector and whose sob story is completely true means that in a world where most people are honest you'll get a lot of cooperate bots.
Where is the appetite for Milei style economic reforms in the US coming from? Both Musk and Ramaswarmy have said America needs such a shock reform followed by a recession and economic pain, but why? Argentina's problems are distinct and not at all like America's. Shock therapy seems to cause unnecessary pain when the problem simply isn't that acute and there are less painful alternatives available. Or do I miss some deep underlying problem that can only be cured by a shock?
It’s class warfare with the signs reversed, that’s all. These policies are hideously unpopular with regular voters of both parties, who want the government to keep its hands off their Medicare/Social Security/farm subsidies/etc.
Cruelty is the point. In Argentina's case, some suffering in likely unavoidable, just like in the Eastern European countries coming out of the Soviet-style socialism. The US doesn't need the same medicine Argentina needs, but both Trump and Musk seem to like hurting people, and Ramaswamy... nevermind, better not flirting with bans, so there.
It's just basic LET'S DO THINGS! style populism. What is being done is unimportant, the important is that it's hard-charging, and drastic, and radical, and that it will fix everything! Wih another set of memes they'd be advocating for the state to DO THINGS! directly.
Musk (re)posting various studies with headlines that sound briefly silly until one thinks more than a few seconds (eg. like https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GcbbzANWkAEofik?format=jpg&name=medium and https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GcbcSDiXUAA83uu?format=jpg&name=medium) rather moves my priors to the direction that what gets done is less Milei-style reforms and more like Golden Fleece style nibbling at the edges. I don't think that drastic Milei-style cuts would be good, but neither would be just turning this exercise into potentially useful research funding being shot down because lol sexbeetles.
The US has some longstanding and well known financial issues that could have been fixed previously but every year gets worse instead of even staying neutral. The national debt increases regularly and the amount of increases keep growing instead of shrinking. We're on track to be paying a trillion dollars a year on interest to the debt next year. Social Security is on an obvious track to insolvency.
There are pretty good reasons why we haven't fixed these issues, but they obviously need to be fixed. It's unsustainable, and everyone knows it. We're unfortunately playing hot potato with these things now, because whichever party actually fixes it is risking not getting elected for a long time, since it is likely to be very unpopular. Milei ran on a platform of doing things to fix long standing problems even though it will cause a lot of pain. If Trump's team can pull that off, then we might dodge the twin bullets of financial ruin and political ruin.
No disagreement here. The question was about the appetite for Milei-style cuts, which Trump is signaling he would be willing to do. I also agree he will find it difficult to pull this off, and will be reluctant to actually try. It will depend significantly on whether Trump is willing to give real power to someone near him (while Milei is the ideologue who believes in what he's doing).
Past practice shows that Trump is unlikely to do that, but I'm trying to be optimistic that things may be changing enough to get it done.
Sure, but cutting taxes is sort of the opposite of reducing the national debt.
The last time the federal government ran a surplus was under Clinton, who worked out a compromise with the GOP to raise taxes and cut spending. Bush inheritied an 100b annual surplus which he blew up with massive tax cuts. Obama worked out a Clinton-like compromise with GOP Speaker Bohner but the House GOP rank and file were dead set against giving Obama anything, so it died before even coming up for a vote. Now we are going to have even bigger deficits. I don't see any possibility of a fix without both tax increases and spending cuts.
>Clinton, who worked out a compromise with the GOP to raise taxes and cut spending.
Clinton and Congressional Democrats raised taxes a lot and cut spending a little in 1993, with zero Republican votes in Congress. Then Congressional Republicans pushed large spending cuts and small tax cuts in 1995-1996 against Clinton's objections. Clinton and Congressional Republicans did compromise on something that still cut both spending and taxes, but by less than Republicans had wanted. That compromise was projected to balance the budget by 2002, but windfall tax revenues from the Dot Com boom lead to the surplus appearing early, in the 1998 fiscal year.
The combined effect was a combination of tax increases and spending cuts, as the tax cuts (even before Clinton pushed back and got them reduced) were a lot smaller than the 1993 tax increases, but it's important to note came in two stages with different Congresses approving each stage.
>Bush inheritied an 100b annual surplus which he blew up with massive tax cuts.
Also massive spending increases, both domestic spending (mostly Medicare and Education) and war. And the Dot Com boom ended. We could have afforded any two of the tax cuts, the domestic spending increases, and the wars and still had a surplus again by the time the recession ended, but not all three at the same time.
IIRC, Clinton also cut the deficit by borrowing from the Social Security fund in a manner that didn't come due until the Bush administration. (Imagine if Gore had won and had this dropped in his lap.)
You don’t recall correctly. You are probably remembering somebody arguing that the unified budget numbers were misleading. The argument is reasonable, which is why the Social Security program is “off budget” in the first place, but is as applicable to the Bush years as the Clinton years. There was nothing to “drop into the lap” of a hypothetical Gore Administration.
The “on budget” numbers exclude “off budget” programs, including Social Security. The “on budget” numbers don’t distinguish between debt held by the Social Security Trust Fund an debt held by the public. For that reason, it is not possible to cut the “on budget” deficit by borrowing from Social Security
The “unified budget” includes all Federal programs, including “off budget” ones like Social Security. During the Reagan Administration, Congress passed a plan prosed by the Greenspan Commission that caused the Social Security Trust Fund to run a surplus in order to build up funds to pay for the baby boom retirees. This resulted in the unified budget showing a much smaller deficit or larger surplus than the on budget numbers. In fiscal year 2000, for example, the unified budget showed a surplus of $236 billion whereas the on budget numbers showed a surplus of only $86 billion, mostly due to Social Security running a surplus. This discrepancy increased during the Bush Administration; in fiscal 2008 the on budget deficit was $642 billion but the unified budget had a deficit of only $459 billion. So the unified budget deficit was reduced due to borrowing from Social Security, but Clinton had nothing to do with that.
I don't quite understand what you mean by "on budget". Looking it up, it appears to mean what I took to be the plain reading, which is spending within prior limits, as opposed to unforeseen spending. If so, SS ought to be on budget, not off, and you say it is. So that's probably not what you mean. The meaning I found seems closer to what you're calling "unified budget".
If I just move on to your last paragraph (where most of the meat is anyway), I have trouble tracking down the legislation you cite. I see the "Social Security Amendments of 1983", aka H.R.1900 (https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/98/hr1900/text), but my skim of it doesn't tell me anything obvious. ("Surplus" doesn't appear anywhere in the text, so if it happens, it's implied, either by raising FICA or lowering payouts, and indeed, a lot of the bill does that, so, maybe?) I can see how your account explains an apparent reduction of deficit / increase in surplus. It's possible the explanation I heard was referring to HR1900 (or whatever the proposal became), but I can't tell for sure.
If I happen to run into someone who argues that Clinton merely borrowed from SS, though, I can pass this along and see if it jibes with their evidence.
I do notice, meanwhile, that if this plan happened for the reasons you describe, then it wasn't general fiscal prudence on Clinton's part, but rather a specific concern for the Boomer retirement surge that went back to Reagan, which is new to me.
>I don't see any possibility of a fix without both tax increases and spending cuts.
And the former is not going to happen. It is unlikely that the Republicans will even permit the 2017 tax cuts to expire as scheduled at the end of 2025.
I have ended up following more US politics than local politics without even trying. Does anyone have a good writer to follow for succint, rational takes on the state of European/German politics?
Very simplified but: Germany is having economic issues. The German government wanted to spend more (mostly domestically) and did its equivalent of hitting a debt ceiling (in this case a debt brake law). Scholz fired his finance minister after the finance minister's party didn't agree to either increasing taxes or changing the debt brake. This led to his coalition no longer having a majority in the legislature. So he called an election to sort it out.
Overall it looks like the Center Right is going to win right now. Though they will need to form a coalition and with whom is an interesting question. But we'll have to wait for the vote totals which we should get in February.
> Say there's a magic button that, when you press it, reduces your LDL cholesterol by 30%.
I really hope this is market research, because having a probiotic you could take that would reduce LDL by 30% would be awesome.
If I were trying to sell it, I wouldn't even want to get it FDA approved, I'd just mass produce Cholester-yogurt or whatever and hedge with a bunch of "this MAY reduce cholesterol, as part of a complete breakfast" or whatever, like the oatmeal people do, and let people do their own research and make their own conclusions.
But then, I've always been a fan of "go high volume and small margin" as a strategy versus the usual drug / bio strategy of "niche and high end."
You've hit the nail on the head, my guy! The good lawyers at General Mills have spent decades carving out the Cheerios Exemption, AKA Structure/Function Claims.
Probiotics are foods/supplements in the US, so the primary regulatory burden for a new food is just proving safety as long as you don't make disease claims. Cholesterol is really in the sweet spot here because everyone knows that "number go down" means lower risk of heart attack and stroke.
And yes, I'm hoping to make this as widely available as possible, but the logistics involved in anaerobes-as-probiotics mean substantial running costs and geographically limited rollout
I hope you'll publicize it on your Substack whenever it's ready. I'd probably pay $1k, and I've got no history of triglyceride problems or CVD in the family.
No idea. Not nothing because I have a. Just been reading a book by a woman who made herself tetraplegic falling off a horse and b. Learned that spinal column strokes can have the same effect. But the question isn't answerable unless you quantify the changes in absolute and relative risk caused by pushing your button. In the most favourable case perhaps £10000? I am oldish and have high LDL for which I get free statins from socialised medicine.
I had a physical a couple months ago and doc said my cholesterol was high. By about 25%. Since then I’ve been trying to eat right. I eat walnuts and fucking mackerel all day. I’m losing it.
Statins are a no go because I’m religious about only taking drugs that get me high.
If someone said they could perform surgery to do what your button did, I’d probably get it done if my plan covered it. If all I had to do was press your button, no side effects, and witness medical magic, $4855 seems right, but not a penny more.
Walnuts and mackerel *every* day? I like mackerel but even that is a bit much 😁
God alone knows what are cholesterol reducing foods, I've eaten nearly everything suggested and nothing worked (niacin helped a bit, but that was the "your face starts burning like a cherub after taking it" version and I couldn't tolerate that long-term).
Right, I'm saying you, personally, right now. Given your risk of heart disease and your disposable income.
And yes, statins exist, but plenty of people on statins still have heart attacks or strokes. I suppose, if you take statins now and wouldn't have to after pressing the button, you could calculate a floor value based on how much you'd expect to pay for statins over the course of your lifetime—but risk of cardiac events is basically a function of the integral of LDL with respect to time, so even someone who's still gonna have to take statins should theoretically derive a few QALY of benefit from the button.
Sure but statins are a thing you have to keep taking.
One of the things I dread about getting older is the idea of becoming a Person Who Takes Medication. Once you enter that category there's no getting out of it, it's just an ever increasing daily pill load until you're dead. I'd definitely pay the $4855 to put off needing to enter that category.
This is an oddly specific medical conditionality, both the condition and the amount.
It seems to me the benefit to this would allow you to eat anything you want without the problems associated with higher LDL cholesterol. As such, it equates to how much you're missing from not eating those things. In my case, it might be worth something like $100 a year.
I don't really think I ought to disclose my medical conditions and medications in this format, so it's tough for you to see my context.
My LDL is fine. My total cholesterol is fine. But my triglycerides are way too high and I can't shift them. So I'd pay a reasonable amount for that kind of reduction.
I want a number! No wrong answer, but half the point of this question is to figure out how accurately people value their lives, given that heart disease is still the #1 cause of death.
I could say it would be worth €1 million, or €10 million, or €100 million to me. I don't have anything approaching that kind of money, so it's a useless question.
If you mean "out of the money you have right now, as a once-off payment, how much?", then I'll pay €100 as that is literally the maximum I can afford. EDIT: This does not mean I only value my life at €100, I mean that's all the spare money I can give for something not immediately urgent like the house burning down. See what I mean about stupid questions?
Now, if you're finished asking dumb questions and getting dumb answers, why not ask people "would you take this? would you value the opportunity?" instead of this mania for "put a number on it! it don't mean nothin' if you don't put a number on it!" for the rationalists here. If you want numbers, heck, let me throw the US interest of $1 trillion dollars (as quoted in a different comment) on it as the kind of meaningless dumb valuation of "put a number on it" - yes, I'd very much like to get my triglyceride levels down since the actions and medication I've been taking to date haven't helped. If a magic button fixed that, I would be happy to press the magic button.
>This does not mean I only value my life at €100, I mean that's all the spare money I can give for something not immediately urgent like the house burning down.
No, see, this is helpful. Like, everyone values their life more than their possessions, but that's the thing about uncertainty and probability—you never know that you should've prioritized "not having a stroke" higher until you're in rehab trying to re-learn how to talk. I expect if you were somebody who'd already had his first heart attack, you might be willing, for instance, to sell your phone, or take out a small loan so you could pay €200 or €300 to hit the button.
FYI, I'm not just doing thought experiments here, I'm doing market research. Genuinely trying to figure out how to price a one-time intervention with potential to persistently lower cholesterol. No idea if it works for triglycerides yet, but if you want I'll keep you posted.
Very difficult to price something like that. Huge variability by person. If you have a family history of hypercholesterolemia, and your father died of a heart attack at 55 then perhaps this will be worth more to you. But statins are effective, and some statins are associated with lower inflammation and lower cancer risk beyond what would be expected from just lowering cholesterol. Of course you need to start statins or get your procedure before the plaque builds up. People tend to turn a blind eye to long term health risks. After all, you may get cancer or die in an accident before the heart attack gets you. How to weigh that risk? Is the procedure really without any potential downsides? If it is a new procedure then that would lower the value to me.
If this is about an actual potential cure or treatment, then I'm interested. I'm not even that concerned about stroke/heart attack, just that I cannot for the life of me figure out why "overall cholesterol levels good, LDL levels okay, triglycerides sky-high". If all my levels were bad, I'd understand it, but they're not.
EDIT: I guess, even if it wasn't, you can adjust your lifestyle accordingly. Being able to increase your pizza, burgers and fries intake without any worries has value in itself.
A Big Mac is going to turn out to be great for your cholesterol, I'm calling it now.
I remember "go to work on an egg" ad campaign to encourage people to eat more eggs, then that was the height of dangerous folly because eggs are full of cholesterol and will kill you, and now it's okay to eat eggs a few times a week.
They seem to be very skeptical and back it up with some good rationale. NTP report however seems to think the risk is moderate based on the evidence (on their scale of ‘high’, ‘moderate’, ‘low’, ‘very low’) and they also appear to back it up by a very thorough review of the evidence,
I can't help but read pieces like that and conclude they are wrong. It is one part Pascal's mugging by over-weighting the opinions of ideologically-motivated outliers, and one part << if utilitarianism proves this, then utilitarianism is wrong >>.
The suggestions that we should genetically engineer shrimp that are incapable of suffering are the most odious, in my view. It is a funhouse version of morality. It is magical thinking.
When I first heard of the Effective Altruism movement, my first thought was of a group of highly altruistic people who are also very good at math, sitting around and doing heavy duty number-crunching to determine which charities give the best bang for the buck when it comes to helping humanity in general. Based on this, I was initially inclined to *like* effective altruists, and think they were providing a highly valuable service to humanity. I thought I'd be seeing fancy charts and tables all over the place, grading various charities against each other, while also seeing promotion for EA-created charities.
But since following some effective altruists here on substack, I don't recall seeing *any* such public number-crunching, and I definitely don't recall seeing a formal comparison between the various charitable organizations out there. I'm going to guess that some number-crunching went into promoting malaria nets, and it just happened before I started following some EA blogs. If so, great, good work. But has there been *recent* number-crunching within the EA movement? Any recent suggestions of how to best help humanity with charitable donations?
Instead, I see a degree of consideration for non-human suffering that would make PETA blush, and hardly any talk at all of "Ok, we've done good work with malaria nets. What should we do next to try to help the poorest people on Earth?" And look, if you want to lower non-human suffering, fine, good for you. But a lot of altruistic people are going to put their main priority on other human beings, so it might be nice to read about the best ways to help other human beings?
EA people are genuinely well-intentioned, charitable - and scrupulous and tend to believe maths solves all problems. The scrupulosity then leads them down some very winding paths, and they convince themselves by BIG NUMBERS that the weird destinations are the right ones.
Like, I'm not saying you didn't look carefully into this, but your search process seems pretty detailed and it's kinda wild to me that it somehow didn't turn up the quintessential EA org. It'd be like someone knowing a bunch of theologians but not Jesus or the Pope in a Bible study group.
I think I saw an ad for GiveWell on YouTube once. I genuinely did not know it was connected to the Effective Altruism movement. I learned of EA primarily from this blog, and discovered some other EA blogs through it. It's possible I missed something, but in the time I've seen reading these blogs (last several months), I don't recall any promotion of GiveWell. Or any permanent link to it on a blog page.
Open Philanthropy is basically the more speculative arm of GiveWell that was spun off, since it's not just about Global Poverty and they fund things that aren't "Development economics has 50 billion studies for the last 5000 years about how not stepping on rusty nails helps the destitute stay healthy"
There are also animal welfare charities that are more about things like "how can we make factory farmed chickens not essentially be in 24/7 torture" or "what is the most ethically sourced type of meat". I can't link them since I'm not part of that wing, but that is *more* the type of thing that gets discussed in animal welfare circles: if a normal person would balk at seeing how the animals are treated, how do we stop that treatment?
Thanks a lot for that. I'll admit that I was clearly too hard on EA, probably putting too much stock in popular blogs of individual EA members. I guess I'm so used to cross-promotion being *the thing* online that not seeing a lot of it here made me wonder if there wasn't much depth to EA. It's good to know there in fact is a lot of depth to it. Highly informative links.
Yeah, I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with not knowing about GiveWell, it's just really weird given everything else you know about EA. I kinda scoffed at comments about how weirder parts of EA might crowd out global poverty in public consciousness about a decade ago when EA was more like 5k students at universities plus GiveWell but I probably was too dismissive there!
Maybe the problem is those blogs aren't shilling GiveWell as much as they should be.
EA presents an immediate problem for me because of how much art and culture is entirely dependent on philanthropy. I'll confess 100% that I'm personally biased as someone who receives my paycheck from arts non-profits. But if we tacitly accept the notion that arts and culture are not worthwhile until we've achieved utilitarian utopia... then what the hell is it all for?
ETA: Also, my understanding is that a much larger moral concern with shrimping is the harms to other marine life and ecosystems as a whole. I just don't think shrimp taste good enough relative to the many alternatives, so I'll side-step the whole issue by not buying them.
I think you should go to a rural village in a developing country, look some villagers in the eye, and tell them that while you could have saved some children in their district from malaria/clubfoot/whatever, you ultimately decided that opera was more important.
Don't worry, I'm not giving money to the opera, I'm receiving money from the opera. Many thanks to all the (apparently heartless&evil) people who pay me!
Don't fret, there will always be rich people whose motivation for charity is to see their name on a gold plate on some fancy cultural building in the local community, which is something that EA does not offer. It has been thus since the bronze age.
Also, there is some cultural activity which manages to be self-sustaining: books, video games and movies come to mind. Broadly, I am in favor of equipping the local population with enough money to enjoy culture and leave the details on how they spend it up to them.
And one of the things that most frosts my cookies (metaphorically) about the whole EA movement is the implied co-option of "if you don't accept my (wackadoo) notions about what is best, you don't want to be effective OR you don't want to help people." By grabbing a name, they can play the same rhetorical game that so many other organizations (trying to avoid politics here, but...BLM!) do--if you don't support the organization/movement, then you must disagree with/hate the thing the name represents! No.
Gods be damned. I don't contribute to shrimp suffering because I don't eat shrimp because I don't like shellfish in general (I'm not allergic, I just don't like them).
But this kind of niminy-piminy secular sermon about "think of the liddle shrimpies suffocating to death on ice!!!!" makes me want to ring in an order to the local takeaway for two orders of every shrimp/prawn dish they have on the menu.
If it is the Bulldog's secret plan to increase the shrimp-fishing economy by reverse psychology, congratulations, it worked.
Shrimp don't have brains in any meaningful sense so they don't know they're suffering and they'll be dead soon. If I'm working my way down the list of moral demands on my attention, they're so far down the list I'm not even sure they're on it.
Right now we have the Russians bombing the hell out of Ukraine, California burning, the homeless and the deranged and the sorrowful all in need, and this charming selection of headlines from the newspapers in my country.
Hmmm - shrimps on ice versus toddlers put into oven by their mother and baked to death. You tell me which is more harrowing.
Shrimp suffering is something you can indulge yourself on when you have no problems in your life and need to feel like you're A Good Guy.
"I asked chat GPT to make an image of 1,500 shrimp in a lecture hall"
And this is why I'm so harsh in my response - it's the Disneyfication of animals, the faked-up anthropomorphism. No shrimp is ever going to sit at a desk with paper and pen to take notes from a lecture, unless they make The Little Mermaid 3 and we get to see schools in the cartoon underwater realm. It's not real. It's so far from real, it's insulting. And yet this is the image chosen, in order to pluck at the heartstrings and get us feeling, not thinking, all worked up over the liddle shrimpies and their suffering.
If reality is not good enough for you, Bentham's Bulldog, then why be surprised when my reaction is "To hell with the shrimp and in fact I hope they suffer *even more*"?
There's a fallacy here which I think of as the drunk driver's fallacy: Why aren't you busy arresting rapists and murderers instead of hassling me? We can attend to more than one thing at once. I agree that shrimp are a long way down the list, but then I also think early stage human foetuses are and you might disagree about that.
That is not really true, we have the resources we have, and any we spent allocated to shrimp welfare won't be allocated to (for example) modern art museums.
You can expand your resources by taxing and borrowing if you are the government. You can think that modern art museums, or EU membership, more or less directly enhance productivity and increase resources. And ignoring both those points there's distributive justice: if shrimps and paintings are both worthwhile they both deserve a slice of the pie.
> There's a fallacy here which I think of as the drunk driver's fallacy: Why aren't you busy arresting rapists and murderers instead of hassling me?
Except in real life, rape closure rates are <30% and murder about 50%, and meanwhile 80%+ of police hours are spent on traffic stops and overhead, with a tiny minority going to anything that looks anything like "solving actual crime."
Cites on request, I've got a whole post about this.
But the answer is rebalance, adjust, reprioritise. It is not abolish traffic cops and put them on to serious crimes
I feel strongly about this fallacy because it was responsible for Brexit. David Cameron invented the tactic when we had a referendum on AV voting in 2011: switching to AV would cost money we could otherwise spend on the National Health Service. Not how it works: we are a rich first world country. If we would be better and more democratically governed under AV we should and can find the money to implement it.
Cameron was then bitten on the arse by the same silly argument about reallocating money from the EU to the NHS.
And now we have an idiot called Streeting claiming that assisted dying would divert funds from the NHS. This is disgraceful: if someone has the right to ask to die it's not a right which should be postponed to granny having to wait and extra month for her hip replacement. It's also a stupid argument as well as immoral because the obvious answer is that actually assisted dying is highly likely to save the NHS large amounts of time and money. Nobody would make that argument, but it is no more immoral than the converse one.
A foetus is human. A shrimp is a shrimp. But I think we would both agree that "let's solve the problem of people whose idea of childrearing is to bake their kids to death" should be tackled first before the poor widdle shrimpies.
I think that generally, formal theories of morality can lead you to weird places. Sometimes, that can be a problem, when the action they prescribe is explicitly forbidden by other moral theories, e.g. "kill all problems".
For the shrimps cause, this is not the case, most other theories do not care either way about shrimps. While "forget bed-nets, poverty, mammal welfare and humanities far future and focus exclusively on shrimps" would be silly, nobody is seriously proposing that. "Spend some small fraction of donations on this cause area which might be important according to a major formal ethical theory" is much less contentious.
Having formal moral theories (notice the plural) instead of just doing what people feel like doing has some clear advantages. "The director of the organ bank just assigns priorities based on their gut feelings" is no way to do anything large scale.
Also, it is not always the case that just because a theory leads you to weird places, it is wrong. "Care about shrimp suffering" is positively tame compared to the weirdness following from some physical theories of the last century, for example.
I neither believe that shrimp suffer (because the studies are carried out by people who have an interest in the result being "yes" so yeah I'm crying 'bias') nor do I care if they do suffer.
3% to 19% as intensely as humans? As humans *what*? A headache? A stubbed toe? A paper cut? Dying of lung cancer? (I've seen that last, baby, and believe me a shrimp on ice don't cut it by comparison).
Imagine you are a woman living in Sudan right now. The mother of a family. You and your children are living in a conflict zone. And then someone tells you that there's a guy in America who is fundraising to alleviate suffering.
You are very grateful, because maybe this means you'll be able to feed your kids today.
"Imagine life for a child caught in a conflict zone this Christmas. No soap for cleaning and hygiene. No food for their bellies. No safe water to drink or place to rest their heads. Fragile. Frightened."
No, you are told. The really big, really important cause for suffering is - shrimp. Really important that we raise money to buy stunners to kill shrimp humanely. Oh, you and your family are suffering? Yeah, but you're not a cute CGI picture of shrimp studying in a lecture hall - lookit them sitting at their wee desks with their wee claws in front of them on their wee books! People are bored of doing the ordinary donating to human suffering that goes on day-after-day with seemingly no end in sight. But shrimps are pink and cute and we in the full-belly West just wuvs us cute widdle critters! And best of all, it's *novel*, it's *unusual*. Every dumb redneck Bible-thumping Trump voter is throwing a dollar or a pound or a euro into the collection basket for suffering humans. But it's so much more *interesting* to be the type of person concerned with shrimp suffering, so much more *intelligent*, high human capital type. So much more impressive to talk about self-deprecatingly at one of those Bay Area house parties.
That makes it even more delicious (not the shrimp, which I dislike to eat, but the fact that the imagery they are using is Dead Shrimp, murdered so brutally in the fashion described).
What if the answer were "90% as intensely as the worst pain a human can suffer"? Surely, then you'd care at least a little bit?
Even if the answer is, "on the scale of a human headache" does your attitude imply that it's ridiculous to try and research a cure for headaches?
I agree that this kind of thing has the flavour of a Pacal's mugging where you multiply an uncertain and probably small number by a very big number, get a very big number and draw conclusions from that, but like, it's pretty clear that what the numbers are actually matters, and a little suffering spread very, very widely is still something that is worth dealing with.
I think you're going too far and doing the opposite: signaling that you're not one of those Berkeley weirdos, tyvm, and acting like there's no possible argument for why someone might think shrimp suffering is an important cause. I think the much more likely reason people take that view is that it's a simple extrapolation of some obvious ideas and for a certain kind of mindset it's hard to avoid extrapolation in that way.
There's a difference between "organism feels negative reaction to negative stimulus" and "organism feels pain". For me to be concerned about shrimp suffering, I'd have to believe they did feel pain on a level above immediate physical sensation; that they had some kind of mind going on.
I don't think shrimp have minds, and never mind the cutesy-poo "research shows they have favourite foods and like chatting with their friends" quoted in Bentham's Bulldog article.
So do I think shrimp feel pain? Yes, the same way all living things are set up on a basic level to react to stimuli. Do I think shrimp feel pain like a human does? No. What does it mean for a shrimp to feel immense pain and then death? I have no idea, I don't think we should be crueler than can be helped, but I don't think a shrimp is "suffering" in a meaningful sense. I wouldn't pull the wings off flies and I wouldn't pull the legs off living shrimp, but it does not follow that I think shrimp or flies are sentient or sapient or have consciousness.
I do think being concerned with shrimp suffering, when there are more immediate and much graver instances of suffering going on in the world around us and immediately around us, *is* an indulgence of the neurotic, hyper-civilised sort akin to the exquisite sensibilities of fin-de-siècle dandies in the same social circles as Proust, particularly the Comte de Montesquiou:
"Suffering from what he felt to be a misalliance of his father, he distanced himself from his mother ("a person to whom I am only distantly related")"
Now *that* is the kind of person who would have entertained the salons with his campaign to end the suffering of shrimp, a thought unbearable to him, that racked his nerves when he contemplated the silent screams of the crustaceans!
There's a difference between being compassionate and living on your nerves.
I'm *hugely* enjoying your immense impatience with this topic.
That said, it's not actually about the shrimp, I think. The phrase "virtue signaling" is pretty loaded these days, but I suspect that's what's happening here. It might not be deliberate or conscious, but the person who invents a whole new never-before-contemplated level of *CARING!* *SO!* *MUCH!* must consider themselves A Very Good Person for doing so.
Maybe they're even the *best* at caring, given that they're setting new records for caring about things.
Funny how they're so rarely foster parents to special needs kids, isn't it?
I give Bentham's Bulldog the benefit of the doubt because (a) they hang around here and I like to think we're a better class of fruit cakes, ones with real crystallised fruit and a healthy slug of brandy 😀 and (b) they do seem to be groping their way to a coherent morality to live by.
So I think it's not so much virtue signalling on their path as "oops, should have turned left ten miles back, how the heck did I end up on this sheep track?" but by now they're so far down it, they feel their only choice is to keep driving over the mountain and hope they'll come out to civilisation on the other side.
"the person who invents a whole new never-before-contemplated level of *CARING!* *SO!* *MUCH!* must consider themselves A Very Good Person for doing so."
I agree it's very plausible that shrimp don't feel pain in any way we care about... But how sure are you? How certain would you have to be in order to attach _no_ weight to their potential suffering?
Indeed, you say you wouldn't pull the wings off flies, or that we shouldn't be crueler than we need to be, but unless you give some weight to the idea that they do have a morally valuable experience, it's not clear why you'd feel that way. Do you feel that pulling the legs off a live shrimp is the moral equivalent of pulling a leaf off a tree?
In fact one might characterize shrimp charities as trying to figure out just how cruel _is actually necessary_ and to promote no more than that level of cruelty!
I think being concerned _exclusively_ with shrimp suffering is ridiculous, and I generally find BB's completely naive total utilitarianism to be kind of annoying, so I get where you're coming from... But it's an even worse mistake to commit yourself to the opposite cause just because someone is annoying. The correct answer is almost certainly "shrimp have some moral worth, how to quantify it and how to trade it off against human moral worth is probably not amenable to simple back of the envelope calculations, but given the scale on which shrimp are harmed it should be probably be a _little bit_ on your radar". It's almost certainly not, "this issue is trivial compared to genocide so I'm going to treat it as having no importance, or maybe even negatively polarize against it".
Minor headaches also don't really rate compared to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and so forth, but I still think it's valuable to research better Tylenol. I think you'd agree, and you wouldn't say "to hell with people with slight headaches, I hope they suffer even more".
To clarify, you said that no science can persuade you that shrimp can suffer, because you know in your heart that they can’t? You give only a passing mention of the facts in your 3 comments, and seem hyper focused on the emotional tone of Bentham’s article. If facts can’t change your mind, maybe a different sort of argument will?
it's a question of cubic capacity. They just don't have enough space for a brain complex enough for all the things claimed for them.
The classical example we all learned in primary school biology is the amoeba reacting to being poked and moving in a different direction. Do amoebae therefore suffer? or have the capacity for suffering? The kinds of studies that show "shrimp have friends" are interpreted the same way as people interpreted that dolphins or chimpanzees could talk and reason just like humans, where in those instances there is native intelligence, a boatload of training, and wishful thinking on the part of partisan 'scientists'.
"If facts can’t change your mind, maybe a different sort of argument will?
Oh gosh! Cartoon sharks coded Italian-American mafiosi, with shrimps that have human eyes in human eye colours and can talk and are people, too! That has totally convinced me that - Italian-Americans are evil and should be destroyed for the sake of cute anthropomorphic vermin everywhere!
The numbers provided (5 shrimp = 1 human) are unbelievable and I'm not a hedonist anyway.
To get better numbers, suppose we say a human-sized pile of shrimp has 20% of the suffering capacity of a single human. For largish shrimp and a medium-small human, there might be 2400 shrimp in that pile, this is generous. Redoing the numbers then with 12000 shrimp = 1 human gets us $8 per human-equivalent of shrimp rather than $1 per 285 human-equivalents.
Is it worth paying $8 to have a human, instead of experiencing 20 minutes of being frozen to death, first get clubbed on the head and then frozen to death while unconscious? If I were the human, I would not pay $8 for that, nor would I pay $0 for it either. I'd happily pay a lot more than $8 to avoid the "death" part of it, but that's not an option.
Of course, that's not nearly as cute and cuddly as ChatGPT shrimp sitting at desks, or cartoon smiling shrimp (on another Bulldog post) and the reality is much harder to have the sentimental attitude that they are sentient cute little critters who would look up at you with big eyes and trembling - antennae, I guess? That really do feel pain and talk to each other just like people do and have interior lives and food preferences.
Reality is inconvenient like that, but if you are genuine about "shrimp suffer and we should alleviate that", then stick to what is actual, not some fake cartoon world "singing dancing talking shrimp, they're humans in a shell case" version of the animal.
Statements which, on their surface, sound universally agreeable—things like “It’s wrong to take a life when you don’t need to”, or “We should try to minimize the suffering of sentient creatures”—lead you to some very weird places very quickly, even if you don’t let yourself get bogged down in questions like whether or not shrimp count as “sentient”.
Nature, after all, is red in tooth and claw. Killing a hawk might save a dozen rabbits painful deaths. Does that make it okay? What about a year later, when those dozen rabbits have turned into a hundred, and half of them are starving to death because the vegetation has been over-grazed? Is it better for those fifty rabbits to have lived and lost—or should their existences have been prevented? And how are we supposed to feel about creatures with lifestyles that seem to require suffering, like the wasps that paralyze other insects and then lay eggs in them, so that their young can have a fresh first meal of still-living flesh?
The whole business about taking lives is even hairier. Sure, you can go vegetarian, or even vegan—but scramble up to that moral high-ground and a still-higher peak comes into view: Fruitopia, where even plants’ lives matter. There dwell the Fruititarians, who restrict themselves to vegetable foods that don’t kill the plant they came from in the process of harvest.
I suspect that smart people are often drawn to these systems (Steve Jobs is one famous example) out of a desire to figure out the rule underlying their intuitive compunctions and follow that rule to its logical extreme. The prize for having thought the most about this, and developed the most internally consistent framework, goes to the Jains of India, who have a whole system of ranking organisms from plants to humans based on how many senses they have.
But most of us, myself included, are happy to shrug and enjoy a burger provided we don’t have to think too hard about how it came to be on our plate. Personally, I go to great lengths to avoid having lunch with the kind of people who ask tricky questions about why it’s okay to eat a cow but not a cat.
And I suspect these weird questions arise because ethical frameworks like this are, ultimately, proxies for something concrete and biological that we all have an intuitive sense for: the likelihood that a given behavior will come back to bite you in the ass.
This is karma, at its core.
Consider kosher slaughter practices, which focus on minimizing pain and distress to the animal. It’s ethical, sure, to make sure your goat doesn’t know what’s coming until its throat has been cleanly slit—but it just so happens that this also prevents adrenaline from leaching into the meat and tainting it, or using up the animal’s glycogen stores in struggle. A botched slaughter means brays of distress, which means an agitated herd, which in turn means you’re not getting nearly as much goat milk this week as you were expecting.
It feels wrong to feed the meat of one cow to another cow. Why? The cow doesn’t know it’s doing cannibalism, right? But if you disobey that feeling, your prize is a very interesting disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob, wherein your brain begins to resemble a sponge.
There’s a reason the thought of twenty thousand chickens being raised in a warehouse (cage free!), pecking around in each other’s shit all day and never seeing the light of the sun is morally repugnant. Is it that the chickens are stressed and unhappy? Do we *really* care how they feel?
Or is that repulsion just a recognition that such a practice is practically *begging* for disease to come and wipe out the entire flock? Certainly, if you could smell the situation, you’d never want to eat such an animal, no matter how thoroughly cooked. It’s unnatural, in the literal sense that these kinds of factory farming operations would collapse overnight without constant pharmaceutical intervention: drugs like coccidiostats and antibiotics.
In some sense, these technologies let us engineer around the thing that the moral compunction is there to warn us about.
But this is the thing about karma: you can’t escape it. It doesn’t give up, it only transforms. Sure, you can do a “washout” period before eating the chicken, so that its flesh doesn’t contain any antibiotics—but the body, as they say, keeps the score. That washout doesn’t get rid of the antibiotic-resistant bacteria that have evolved over the thing’s lifetime. Maybe you cook it well enough to kill them, but even if you do, are you going to denature the DNA well enough to prevent something else in your gut from picking up those genes?
Antibiotics also drastically increase the amount of heavy metals that an animal absorbs from its diet, and there’s no length of washout that will remove lead or arsenic from its flesh. Maybe a clever guy could engineer a chemical solution to that problem—but I suspect that if you did, you’d end up taking the iron and other important minerals out, along with the heavy metals.
My point is: Karma's a bitch, and any time we think we've pulled one over on her—engineering around what our intuitive sense tells us is moral behavior for the sake of efficiency—we've usually set ourselves up to step on a rake at some point in the not-too-distant future. It reminds me of Elua—the Kushielian god you mention in your Meditations on Moloch piece (first thing of yours I ever read, and the post that drew me into this community, actually).
So if we come across a fatally wounded mammal, we put it out of its misery. Such creatures can be unpredictable in their desperation. Even if it's something harmless, like a rabbit, we don't want it dragging itself around all over the place, getting its wounds infected, turning into an incubator for gangrenous bacteria. Maybe we even bury it.
But this seems less imperative if it's, say, a turtle or a fish. And yes, you could explain this moral differential as a function of number of neurons, or complexity of neural network, or number of senses, like the Jains...but you could just as well explain it as a function of the animal's degree of relatedness to you—and therefore the likelihood of zoonosis, that a pathogen which breeds in the body of this weakened and dying creature will be able to infect you too.
I don't think anyone would argue with the notion that the disgust response is there to protect us from disease. But there’s a moral dimension to disgust, as well as a visceral one, and I think that’s a clue. Why do we describe black pepper, ginger, and red pepper all as being “spicy”, when they’re very different flavors? The answer is that all three activate TRPV channels; that despite the inherent limitations on our attempts to describe the world and our experience of it, we’ve actually done a very good job.
So I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to minimize the suffering of animals; you won’t find me out there burning ants with a magnifying glass for fun. Mainly, I’m saying it’s interesting that a completely amoral person practicing selfishness-writ-long, informed by a deep knowledge of ecology and biology, would end up behaving basically in accordance with the ethical framework that most people take for granted. Give them a sufficiently wide scope of vision, and you might even find such a person engaging in bleeding-heart behaviors like going down to the wet market and wrecking as much as they can—breaking open cages, shooing the animals into the forest, “BE FREE!”
...no, I don't think you've quite got the point. I'm saying that, the same way the visceral dimension of disgust protects us from e.g. smallpox, the moral dimension of disgust protects us from behaviors that lead to prion diseases or, in your case, cops.
Something I found interesting. A fresh study profiled 263 jobs on Big 5 personality traits and published their interactive data tables here: https://apps.psych.ut.ee/JobProfiles/
If you're outside the US, use US VPN to see the tables.
Data includes answers to specific questions by job (n ranges from 25 to 1000). Some highlights I spotted:
- Actors way, way, way outscore everyone else on neuroticism
- Lowest extraversion jobs are ACX central: Electronics engineers, software and web development, lab technicians, animal care workers
- Lowest agreeableness jobs are those we love to hate: sales workers, entrepreneurs, real estate agents, board members
- Conversely, highest agreeableness jobs are those no one hates: electronics engineers and webdev, software dev and researchers are in top 10 too
- Out of top 10 conscientiousness jobs, 3 are managerial and 3 are naval.
- Conversely, bottom 2 conscientiousness jobs are visual artists and electronics engineers. Researchers and developers are not too far behind.
- Authors have the greatest spread in conscientiousness over any job in any trait.
- Software developers are the #1 job that doesn't believe in the power of fate. #2 is religious professionals.
- Webdev is the top job that becomes anxious in new situations
- Top 3 jobs on the "Can't make up my mind" item: Actors, Webdev and... toolmakers? Really?
- Highest standard deviation in conscientiousness is among authors/writers
- Top 27 jobs on "I want to be in charge" question are all some variety of manager, followed by air traffic controllers at #28
- Top job on "I'm interested in science" question is "Research Professionals Not Elsewhere Classified", which presumably makes them my fellow postdocs.
- Psychologists score #2 on "Have a natural talent for influencing people". #1 is HR managers
- Pilots score the lowest on "become anxious in new situations"
- "Believe we should be tough on crime". Top: statisticians. Bottom: judges, lawyers
- All the jobs that score the lowest on "support liberal political candidates" are blue collar jobs, plus religious and military.
- Jobs that score lowest on "Tend to feel very hopeless": Aircraft pilots, psychologists, database professionals
- 9 out of 10 jobs that score the lowest on "Like to stand out in a crowd" are blue collar laborers, the 10th is web dev.
- Jobs that score the lowest on "see myself as an average person": artists, authors, actors, film directors and journalists
- Jobs that enjoy philosophical discussions most: artists, authors, actors, film directors and psychologists
- All the jobs that score highest on "Try to out-do others" are managerial, plus lawyers.
"Conversely, bottom 2 conscientiousness jobs are visual artists and..."
"Authors have the greatest spread in conscientiousness over any job in any trait."
Like in any challenging and highly competitive field, there's a lot of exhortations to "work hard" in the arts... and I think this really goes to show some limitations to that way of thinking. Pure talent matters /a lot./ To be sure, arts careers are their own kind of grind, trying to "make it" is very psychologically taxing, there's a reason the tortured artist is such a trope. But the actual amount someone can force their way to success in these fields through hard work is very questionable.
> Psychologists score #2 on "Have a natural talent for influencing people". #1 is HR managers
Do I understand that correctly as scoring high on the *belief* (whether substantiated or not) that they have a natural talent for influencing people? I don't think they actually measured that.
Self-reported Big 5 personality traits, plus the nuanced questions; so presumably all beliefs, unless you can empirically measure how manipulative someone is
Hating how social media sites work is universal across all sites, and that's just one part of it.
Now, admittedly anectotal, I'm open to the possibility I'm actually in a bubble here and the regular experience is different for most - but the additional datapoint that makes me suspect it's truly universal is how much we hate our website maintainers in my job.
I’m very surprised about the “bottom conscientiousness” jobs.
Isn’t the creed of visual artists that any imperfection will be detected disproportionately easily and ruin the performance?
For electronics engineers or developers, how is it even possible to have low conscientiousness? You need to get a staggering amount of details right in your working memory to end up with a working product. How does it square with willingness to half-ass the job or other low conscientiousness (am I misunderstanding what it even means)?
Could it be that conscientiousness would be trained out of them (lots of work, they’re expensive, so no time for perfectionism) instead?
I went into software instead of biology largely because of low conscientiousness, especially the head-in-the-clouds version of it. If I need to do labwork and add these ingredients in these amounts in that order, odds are good that I WILL mess it up and have to do it all over, or worse, get wrong results and not know it. If I run an extra test to double-check, odds are good I mess up that one too. With software when I think I have a feature working I can run a bunch of unit tests and if I can just get it correct once, it'll stay correct unless someone changes it.
While there is hard work and perfectionism involved, a lot of people in the arts are driven by an underlying desire to /not/ work.
I think of the arts as somewhat analogous to an early retirement approach to life. Lots of people in the arts are drawn to the idea that they can frontload a lot of effort into honing their skills, and then once they "make it" they'll be set for life.
I'd say this same dynamic of frontloading effort for reduced effort later is why engineers and developers are over-represented in the FIRE community.
I also suspect conscientiousness is just one of the traits that is hardest to measure by self-reporting. A lot of people drive themselves to disciplined hard work through self-flagellation and the sense that they're never doing enough.
A typical software system will have way more bugs than there is developer time to fix, so a certain amount of "does this bug *really* matter" becomes useful...
I wonder if the job actually could be affecting people's conscientiousness, I gave way more of a shit about correctness when I started working 10 years ago vs now.
As the quote goes, "I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it."
Jobs where this is possible will naturally have low C types gravitating towards them, people who hate doing the same routine over and over and would rather find a way to "automate boring stuff".
Many situations are equivalent to the Prisoner's Dilemma. Is the standard formulation that we use (the one about prisoners) a bad/confusing one?
I remember that on my first exposure to the Prisoner's Dilemma as a kid I found the whole discussion confusing. "Obviously," I said, "if you actually did the crime then you should confess, and give evidence against your accomplice as well." The discussion in whatever I was reading, which talked about payoff matrices, seemed disturbingly amoral -- "you shouldn't be thinking about how to minimise your own punishment, you should be thinking about how to ensure that you both get the punishment you deserve!"
Later on I understood that this wasn't really what the thought experiment was supposed to be about, but it left a bad taste in my mouth. Did anyone else have the same experience?
Many of the problems in decision theory run into issues with violating morality almost immediately. For a couple of other examples, the King Solomon problem involves sleeping with another woman's wife (and the husband and wife's opinions do not enter into it), and the Hitchhiker problem involves trying to cheat somebody who is trying to help you out of payment for doing so.
They're supposed to be abstractions, I think, a la logic puzzles - you're not supposed to evaluate the obvious moral problems inherent in the problem itself. And you're supposed to just accept that you value whatever it is the problem asks you to value.
But the overall impression such problems produce is that the decision theory isn't really meant for human beings - we don't evaluate problems in a contextless vacuum, and trying to make decisions in such a vacuum is crippling an important part of our actual decision-making process.
I was presented with the Prisoners Dilema in business school, so there it was obviously about explaining bussiness strategy, not to test our moral intuition.
But I have come to think of moral deliberation as originating in Game Theory( Prisoners Dilema) / Moloch/ economic externalities. Moral discussions seem to be mostly about hashing out under which circumstances the other players can expect an individual to play cooperate and, if that expectation is dissapointed, add reputational costs onto playing defect.
If you follow a strict Deontological ruleset, which happens to include "lying is never permissible" you always land at your childhood intuition. Your childhood self would always put the reputational cost on the defectee, independent of how te other choice rewards are allocated.
Under most forms of Utilitarianism it does depend on how the rewards are allocated; we would permit the prisoner to play defect, iff her personal reward in the defect box is larger than the total reward in the cooperate/ cooperate box. On paper, such an allocation is easy to make and might be plausible in the given scenario; it only depends on potential punishments and degree of leeniency under cooperation. But if we want to apply this to the real world, the total utility would have to include the utility gained by the interrogator (representing us - the rest of society) which probably tips the scale to us demanding cooperate from all players under most realistic allocations and putting reputational costs on them if they choose to defect.
Of course you could try to apply countless other moral frameworks, but in the end it comes down to how you allocate the numbers.
I remember having the same thought at first. Then I actually lived some life and realized success is about being unethical and making people think you're ethical. Now it doesn't bother me.
You're playing with clippy. If you defect, you can save a million human lives. If clippy defects, he can produce some paper clips. You don't care about paper clips at all, nor does he about human lives.
Yeah, the colorful names make it easier to remember, but also introduce unnecessary connotations: Prisoner's Dilemma, Stag Hunt, Chicken, Battle of the Sexes...
I read a lot after Oct 7 about how Bibi will be toast in the next election, but the taboo about not holding elections during war would let him stay in power and postpone his trial on corruption charges. The chance of the war ending looks slimmer than ever now, but what about long term? What happens if he dies in office? Will the no election during war taboo ever end?
Barring a coalition crisis (which, as you mentioned, parties are trying to avoid because they don't want to hold elections), elections will be held in October 2026.
(Interestingly, Manifold thinks there's a 50% odds that the war is over by June.)
Doubt he'll die in office, but if he does, Lieberman will maaaaybe find some way to cobble together a center-right secular coalition with Gantz, Bennett, and Lapid..? Otherwise, Likud will just fall into the hands of some slightly-less-charismatic sycophant like Israel Katz and put together another precarious right-far-right government.
The U.S. constitution outlines how the electoral college works:
"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector."
Note that there is no requirement to hold a popular vote. The legislature can appoint electors however it wishes. Something to keep in mind when thinking about the outcome of the 2026 elections.
While the constitution doesn't require having citizens vote for president, it's something we expect. Changing this would be massively unpopular. Whichever party does this would ruin their chances at winning all of the other elections.
1. The Electoral College has nothing to do with the 2026 elections, which are purely legislative
2. The Constitution exists and is interpreted by the courts within a body of established law. There is vastly more to the entirety of federal election law than 1 sentence from the Constitution. In general, we don't run our country based on 1 single sentence, even from our founding document. This would be obviously chaotic.
Current legal precedent is that states have to declare whether they're going to hold popular elections for their EC votes, or alternately have the legislature do it (last done by Colorado in the 1870s if I'm not mistaken). So yes, a state could decide in advance of a presidential election that it wants its legislature to decide who gets their EC votes. However the legislators themselves would also be up for election, so they'd be running on a platform of 'we're suspending your right to vote for President'. How would that go for them? Good luck I guess.
But to your point- no, a state may not choose one method, dislike the outcome, and then decide to use a different method. That is not legal
Note that there are a couple of odd-year-elections for legislatures; most notoriously Virginia, which usually goes the opposite way of the previous year's Presidential election and then everyone overinterprets it.
"However the legislators themselves would also be up for election"
Who says state governments have to hold elections for their legislature? Although the United States must "guarantee every a republican form of government," this clause is nonjusticiable:
So what would stop a state government from just straight-up suspending elections if it's allied with a party that controls a majority in the House of Representatives and thus could block federal action?
My point here is not to advocate for such a course of action, just to point out what a state might do if it felt backed into a corner.
They would probably run afoul of their State constitution and bring the State's own judiciary down on themselves.
If a party has such unchecked control (i.e., legislative supermajorities) that they could amend the State constitution and keep the judiciary at bay, the Presidential popular vote would almost certainly be in favor of their preferred candidate anyway.
And if it wouldn't be, the country as a whole is probably swinging so hard against their party that their own State's EVs wouldn't be decisive.
Judicial decisions are pretty heavily informed by precedent & social context. 'The United States is a democratic republic where incumbents can't just suspend elections' is quite the context, to put it mildly. Unfortunately we will likely never have a chance to test this, but if a state government did suspend elections, I'd be willing to bet my entire net worth with you that the US judicial system would not in fact permit this
I recently researched and made a post about transgender athletes, and I wonder if there's anybody here who will take the contrary side.
Broadly, I argue that the current IOC criteria ignores some significant advantages that M2F athletes have over both F2M and female athletes, and it would be quite easy to ultimately wreck the playing field for born-female athletes with the current criteria.
These advantages include:
> A suite of ~20 physiological advantages that come with having a Y chromosome and having trained as a man, regardless of testosterone levels. (and this is why, for example, androgen insensitive XY women are 50x over-represented in sport)
> Even after transition, untrained M2F laypersons have 13-30% more muscle and 20-50% more strength than even F2M laypersons with testosterone, and this is likely even more skewed for M2F athletes.
> Elite athletics is such a competitive domain that even percent and decimal-point level advantages matter enough that sports specialize strongly by body type and size
> Per the above, competitive gaps are so large that any middling male athlete could transition and dominate a female roster in their sport, and these two factors combined could drive out women at the elite level overall.
I haven't received any informed criticisms or commentary from anyone else who's seen it so far. Is there anyone here who would argue the contrary side? That M2F athletes should definitely be allowed to compete as females at the elite level?
Sports are dominated by the statistical tails; it's not quite as clear as you think that middling men could overwhelm elite women in the sports, because the averages alone tell you nothing about the tails.
And the statistical tails in the cases for the sports where MTF trans people might have the advantage - are likely to be dominated by women who, not to put to fine a point on it, are probably a lot closer to men due to individual-specific hormonal and other effects. Statistical tails, you see.
So I'd hazard a guess that MTF trans people are probably a lot more similar to the women they're competing with at a professional level than either group are to the statistical average of women.
But "professional level", and the selection effects this has, is doing all the heavy lifting for us here. Most sports aren't professional! School and college sports in particular are not professional. There was a woman who I went to school with who ended up in the WNBA; she more or less single-handedly turned the local high school basketball team into a champion team. She probably would have been the best player on the men's basketball team - but not by a margin that would have automatically won them the championship.
That, I think, is where the arguments probably matter more; not at the "elite" level where you want to focus, where I expect the arguments are going to be weakest - but at every other level.
The problem continues to turn, however. The future WNBA player playing in High School made a lot of parents rather upset; she clearly outclassed everyone else such that the game did not feel "fair" to them. I expect a future NBA player in the men's team would not have provoked the same reaction; there is an expectation of a kind of baseline fairness in women's sports that our culture has (but doesn't often talk about) which doesn't exist in men's sports, that everybody is going to be playing at approximately the same level.
Some might blame this on misogyny - women aren't allowed to be champions - others might blame this on misandry - men aren't entitled to the same kind of social expectations of fairness and are left to sink or swim on their own. But regardless of the source, it's something that exists, and I expect it drives a lot of public sentiment.
> Sports are dominated by the statistical tails; it's not quite as clear as you think that middling men could overwhelm elite women in the sports, because the averages alone tell you nothing about the tails.
I agree with your overall point that elite female athletes are closer to males on a number of physiological (and probably psychological) dimensions.
But I disagree that the tails are close at the elite level, I think the evidence is quite clear. Here's the gap between male and female Olympic athletes by a number of sports:
Let's just take a couple Track and Field data points, with an average 11% gap, one of the smallest gaps on the chart.
The female 100m record, by Elaine Thompson Herah, is 10.61. Schoolboy 100m male record: 10.20, age 15. The *slowest* male 100m Olympic qualifying time is 10.05.
200m: 21.34 female record (FloJo), slowest male qualifier 20.28
800m: 1:53.43 f, schoolboy record (age 14) 1:51.23, slowest m qualifier 1:46.26
Long jump female record: 7.4m (JJK), schoolboy record 7.85m (age 15), shortest male qualifier 8.06m.
In general, female *world records* wouldn't even qualify to *compete* in a male event, and talented high school boys can outclass female world record holders, much less actually competitive male athletes.
Even the slowest and weakest male Olympic qualifiers could *absolutely* hop on hormones for a year, dominate several female events, then detransition.
> The problem continues to turn, however. The future WNBA player playing in High School made a lot of parents rather upset; she clearly outclassed everyone else such that the game did not feel "fair" to them. I expect a future NBA player in the men's team would not have provoked the same reaction;
This is a great point, I've observed this myself as well. Not sure what can be done about it, but it at least points in the right direction in terms of likely acting against M2F athletes at sub-elite levels too.
> Even the slowest and weakest male Olympic qualifiers could *absolutely* hop on hormones for a year, dominate several female events, then detransition.
Notice that this is a different problem than "MTF person wants to compete in women's sports".
> Notice that this is a different problem than "MTF person wants to compete in women's sports".
Yes, but as the IOC rules are written right now, this is how "female" is defined. If any man hops on hormones for a year and tests under 288 ng / dl in Testosterone for that year, they can compete as a female Olympian, according to current IOC rules.
So it may not be the MTF problem you had in mind, but it's a viable MTF strategy to gold medals right now.
> "Hops on hormones for a year"? Like they're just putting on a sweater they're going to take off once the year is up?
Sure, this sounds implausible, but there are a few scenarios the incentives might make sense:
1. African runners in countries like Kenya and Ethiopia with <2k GDP per capita frequently go to Europe or the West to race, because the race prizes are several years GDP for them. Any male athlete who's consistently on the bubble as a male could transition, then dominate any female races that use the IOC criteria.
2. Some countries award serious prize money for Olympic golds. Most of SE Asia is $200k+ USD, Singapore and Hong Kong are both $700k each. A talented male athlete, even at the HS or college level, could hop on hormones for a year, win several medals as a woman, then detransition, and have all that money.
This seems like a pretty rich incentive structure to exploit just financially, much less for the glory of gold (or even just to troll people, which HS and college athletes have been known to do).
>If any man hops on hormones for a year and tests under 288 ng / dl in Testosterone for that year
That is the official threshold? It seems hilariously high, there's a whole bunch of men who wouldn't need to do anything to pass it (probably not elite athletes, though).
You could go all the way to sports which require zero physicality. Like chess. As I understand it, men and women still compete in separate tournaments, and if they didn't, the top rankings would be overwhelmingly male. Paging Larry Summers...
Chess is divided into women's tournaments and open tournaments. Women can compete in either, while men may only compete in the latter. In reality, high level open tournaments don't include women, since there are no female players who are very strong. The strongest female player is ranked #111 in the world, while the 10th strongest female player is ranked #529 in the world.
Women have their own tournaments for the same reason children have their own tournaments. As with many sports, in chess, the top females perform at a similar level as teenage boys. The top 10 female players in the world typically have a lower average rating than the top 10 boys under-16.
The strongest 13-year-old boy would be the women's #2 and the strongest 11-year-old boy would be the women's #30. The strongest 9-year-old boy will almost certainly get his rating higher than the women's #100 before he turns 10.
Of the 43 rated players who participated in this year's Canadian Women's Chess Championship, 7 are lower rated than the strongest 3-year-old boy.
To summarize: men are more likely to obsessively focus on something, men on average are better at the cognitive skills required to succeed in chess (leading to a drastic difference at the tail end, where you are most likely to find grandmasters), and are more interested in competition, leading them to seek high stakes arenas and tournaments.
Even if there were no difference in cognitive ability between the sexes, women are less likely to be monomaniacally obsessed with it, and even less likely to seek the high-pressure stakes of a competitive environment.
Major edit: the top rated women chess player of all time, Judit Polgar, was raised by her parents, along with her two sisters, in an extremely competitive environment. From a young age she attended regular tournaments, bucking the social norms and pressure that chess was not a women's sport. Indeed, initially she was deemed a slow learner by her father, who had by this point trained her two older sisters to become chess prodigies, but this seemed to be the perfect environment for Judit to foster her competitive drive into something that surpassed her sisters. She would eventually become not only the best women's player of all time, but also the #8 ranked player in the world, an unbelievable feat, and having taken games off of many of the best male players in the world.
If you read her interviews and comments you will notice that she has a total obsession with chess, practicing upwards of 5 hours a day, being incredibly self-motivated and seeking improvement at all cost, taking every opportunity to learn from the best around her and taking the game extremely seriously. Perhaps if more parents could nurture this level of competitiveness in women we would see more women compete on the level of men in the world of non-physical sports
> What about sports that don't require much in the way of physicality? Say... being a coxswain on a rowing crew? Or... hmm. Pistol shooting?
Yeah, this is a good question. There IS a M/F gap in sports like marksmanship, but the gap is indeed much smaller than the gaps in Track and Field and strength and other sports (it's around 0.5-4%).
Swimming is the next smallest gap (on the order of 6%, and to baseline, an 11% gap in track and field means talented high school boys can outrun world record female times).
Why the gap exists in relatively "non-physical" sports like marskmanship is a matter of some debate, and I haven't seen any great papers that make a good argument one way or the other, it's likely a combination of things.
On a narrow point of fact, opposite sex coxwains have been around for years. Over here in the UK, the first female cox for a male Oxford - Cambridge boat race crew was happened back in the early 80s. I rowed for my Oxford college and one year we had a female cox.
I've never rowed (well, not as a sport) but wouldn't a female cox be a big advantage? Don't you just want the lightest person you can find who can shout loudly?
That strikes me as fundamentally different from a male cox on a female crew.
I haven't seen any concerns about FtM athletes in men's sports.
Although there are specific instances that differ (gymnastics being an obvious case where the sets of events differ), sex-segregated sports seem to generally be unlimited or female-only; e.g., if a woman was good enough, she could be in the NBA rather than the WNBA.
"I haven't seen any concerns about FtM athletes in men's sports."
I don't know how many FtM are going for men's sports, but I think that - unless they were originally tall and strong to begin with, and started transition early - then FtM are not really challenging natal men for the top spots, as they'll generally be shorter and weaker even after going on testosterone (I know: citation needed, but the online photos I see are generally 'short dumpy person presenting as male' and not 'gosh I see no difference between Alex formerly Alice and Shaquille O'Neill' examples).
I don't know a tactful way to put this, but in the photos I've seen of the couples where one partner is MtF and one is FtM, it's generally 'the male-presenting partner is shorter and weedier than the female-presenting partner' so take that for what it's worth.
I basically agree with you. Just because I think this is a mildly interesting counterexample though:
There was a M2F MMA fighter named Fallon Fox about a decade ago. She racked up a 5-1 MMA record, which means that 'she' did lose a fight to a biological woman (Ashlee Evans-Smith, who went on to have a middling UFC career). So the Y chromosome, enhanced muscle mass, increased bone density, and cardiovascular advantages were not enough for Fox to beat a woman in a fistfight. Evans-Smith didn't just win a decision, she TKOed Fox in the 3rd round. I mean, as a man I'd hope that I could at least beat a similar-bodyweight woman in a fight!
Seeing as a lot of athletics is really just a stand-in for..... fighting..... and MMA is actually fighting, I always thought that was sort of interesting. (Again, I do agree with your broader point)
Without having read your research, I am sure you are right that M2F athletes have a huge advantage over athletes born female. Seems like anyone disagreeing would be arguing that M2F athletes are now women, and should be allowed to do absolutely anything a female-from-birth person can do. I myself am definitely not prepared to argue that. To me it seems like there are a few situations where M2F people just do not get to do what female-from-birth women can do. They cannot, for instance, serve in subjects in research on female health -- for ex., research on the determinants of female risk for heart attacks or liver cancer, which may be different from male risk factors. And they cannot participate in non-casual sports competitions designated as for women only. Jeez, that limitations just not that bad.
Trans athletes in sports are like the gay marriage campaign: it's about mainstreaming, acceptance, and normalisation. If gays can get married just like straights, then society should accept them just like straights. If trans athletes can compete in women's sports, then society should accept them just as women.
Intersex people are a different, if related, question and a thorny one to solve, but I don't think there should be very much difficulty over "born male sex, no intersex/other dysfunction, transitioned to female gender" cases - if you're six inches taller and three weight classes stronger, I don't care how much of a lady you are, you are not competing on level terms. Maybe we'll have to revise classes so that all the "big tall strong" people are competing against each other, regardless of gender, and all the "small weaker" people are competing against each other.
> Trans athletes in sports are like the gay marriage campaign: it's about mainstreaming, acceptance, and normalisation.
That seems to have backfired badly as a strategy then. For everyday interaction, trans people are mostly already mainstreamed, accepted and normalized, and quite rightly so; what someone's genitals are like, or what sex they were assigned at birth is no-one else's business in the context of most social interactions.
OTOH, as Performative Bafflement explains above, allowing people to self-select into women's competitive sports has the potential to fuck up the entire category.
"Revising classes" sounds fine in principle, but becomes impractical very quickly. You need very clear, reliably measurable criteria to sort people into a small number of categories. "Between 160 and 175 lbs" is okay (but even there, additional regulations are needed to keep competitors from killing themselves trying to cut weight), but "160 < 0.6*weight in lbs + 1.2*height in inches - 1.5*bodyfat percentage < 190" is probably not feasible. And if you go with, say, bodyweight, women are screwed again, because men are significantly stronger and faster even at the same weight.
And what's the point? We already have a simple criterion that takes care of the sexual dimorphism - bona fine females in one category, everyone else in the other. Then, add weight classes as needed.
If you’re opening the can of worms that certain genetic attributes confer advantages and must disqualify their owner from participating in certain kinds of events, why the Y chromosome specifically? What about the gene that gave Michael Phelps large feet?
"That athlete doesn't look attractive enough to be a woman to me, and also punches a bit too hard in my opinion. I call de la Chappelle syndrome! I don't care what your simplistic rule says, that ain't a woman!"
Assuming everything you say is true, how do you think this plays out? Trend left unchecked, say by 2035, every winner's podium in every single female sport is gold-silver-bronze m2fs. So what point in competing as bio female?
At that point, either eliminate gendered sports, and 99% of female athletes are out of the running, or if there is any social value to women's sports, they will self correct to exclude trans.
Excluding trans is discrimination, though: you are saying we are not real women! *That's* what the whole current debate is about: we are women just like cis women, we should be treated like cis women and accepted in all female roles just like cis women are. It's not really about "first trans female to be Olympic gold medallist in the 5,000m track race".
EDIT: I suppose I should make it clear that the "we" above is not including me, I was making the argument from their side. So far as I know, I'm natal cis female 😁
Yup, that's the issue. And we'd be able to have a much saner conversation if we could get back to "trans women are males who wish to be treated as if they were females". Which has the advantages of a) being true, b) not forcing us to discard immensely intuitive and useful definitions, and c) allowing for a nuanced discussion about where this wish can be granted, and where it can't.
I'd be happy to go back to the position "sex and gender are different things, A is biological sex male but gender presents as female". But that seems to have been abandoned for "sex and gender are the same thing, if A is on hormones then A is as biologically female as cis woman B".
Men and women's sports are separate to encourage equatable and competitive groups. For the same reason we have seperate groups for boys 9 and under soccer and boys 11 and under soccer. Presumably, if this happened, transgender might get pulled out into a seperate competition, like the paralympic games.
> Assuming everything you say is true, how do you think this plays out? Trend left unchecked, say by 2035, every winner's podium in every single female sport is gold-silver-bronze m2fs. So what point in competing as bio female?
Yeah, pretty much - maybe not 2035, this is more or less what happened over several decades in most sports, as phenotypes with better fit for the sport came to dominate them (so skinny and tall for high jumpers, tall and bulky for shot put, short and muscular for short-distance sprinters, short and skinny for marathoners, etc).
I mean, your position seems to be "no reason to worry now, let's just see how it plays out and react when necessary?"
Sure, I guess. I was more looking for an argument on merits, to see if I hadn't considered something important or had missed or misinterpreted something.
I don't disagree with you. It just seems like of all cultural problems, this is super low stakes. Worst case, women's sports ceasing to be an institution, is not an existential threat to humanity; or they will be forced to create some kind of hard genetic rules on their own terms. Does not seem like a productive topic for non-competitors to spend political air time.
I'll throw out there, requiring actual genital reassignment surgery would weed out the opportunists real quick, but prob still converge on your scenario eventually.
> It just seems like of all cultural problems, this is super low stakes. Worst case, women's sports ceasing to be an institution
That just amounts to saying you don't personally care. For that matter I don't either, the entire field of competitive sports could just go away and I wouldn't miss it. But given what we see out there, it does seem to be super important to lots of people.
A hypothetical situation/question that has bugged me since childhood: A ball is thrown at a wall. The distance between the ball and the wall can be measured and expressed mathematically. As the ball approaches the wall, that measurement becomes a smaller and smaller number. Numbers are infinite, and numbers can be always be divided and made smaller (in my understanding). My question - as the ball nears the wall, the numerically expressed distance can always be made into a smaller number - how does the ball, numerically speaking, ever actually make contact with the wall? This may be a dumb question, but hey, if you don't ask... Thanks in advance.
There’s a collision detection system in the simulator, it works pretty well.
These are not trivial problems at all. If you suppose that the ball moves at constant speed of 1m/s toward the wall, and starts out 3m away, then the distance to the wall is (3-t)m and as the time t approaches 3, the distance goes to 0. There's nothing special happening at t=3 from a mathematical sense, though physically the ball contacts the wall at that point and you need to refine the model to go any further.
Actually, Newton developed calculus to deal with problems of the type you're describing. The way calculus is taught in schools and universities obscures this fact, but the basics of the subject are all about making sense of processes which happen in continuous time, like the one you describe.
You'll read this and think I haven't answered the question. Actually setting calculus on a completely rigorous mathematical footing took around 250 years, and the effort of many mathematicians. (Real numbers are already surprisingly difficult to describe formally - and then you're looking at processes involving these to describe the real world.) To get a completely satisfying answer to the question, you would probably need to go through a sequence of undergrad level calculus courses - but hopefully this gives a sense of what's going on.
Keep in mind that time works the same way; every time you remeasure the distance from the ball to the wall, you remeasure the time it takes to travel there. Eventually you hit... is it Planck, or Heisenberg? Either way, there's a distance at which things are no longer things, and then the ball changes direction.
Technically, the ball never touches the wall. The ball is made of atoms, the wall is made of atoms; if you put the atoms too close, they repel. At a tiny but nonzero distance the force becomes strong enough to make the ball bounce.
(If Chuck Norris throws a ball at a wall, a microscopic black hole is created at the place of collision, and then it gets complicated. EDIT: The atoms would probably just fit in places between other atoms and the ball would get stuck inside the wall, possibly leading to an explosion.)
You're looking for solutions for Xeno's paradoxes, which in the modern era broadly get solved with calculus. I'm not super up on the exact solutions, but it's something to do with limits?
EDIT: Here's the actual solution, explained for people that haven't thought about math formally for a long time: https://sciencehouse.wordpress.com/2020/12/06/math-solved-zenos-paradox/
Gebru and Torres, two dissident researchers who became famous as coauthors of the renowned "Stochastic Parrots" article, recently published a new paper critical of the rationality sphere and EA:
https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636/11599
They coin the awesome-sounding acronym TESCREAL to describe the sphere, and then argue that it has roots in the eugenics tradition. Are you aware of this article, and have you considered responding to it?
> dissident researchers
In what way are they "dissidents"? They're representatives of the boring, narrow hegemony that rules intellectual life, trying to extend that hegemony into one of the few corners they don't control.
Once I strip aside the authors' tone of moral panic about the followers of TESCREAL beliefs (Transhumanism, Extopianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, EAism, and Longtermism) their arguments boil down to (a) these are all influenced by eugenics-based ideas, and (b) and most of their AGI hopes and dreams are not based on sound scientific nor engineering principles.
As for the first, they admit that the dream of breeding/creating superior humans goes back long before the early 20th-century Eugenics movement, and they fail to tie the current eugenical beliefs to those of the previous century. But they try to tar the current movements with old stains of the old movement.
And as for the latter, I tend to agree with their statements. A lot of the TESCREAL beliefs are attractive to smart people who think they know more than they do (and Charlie Stross has noted how much of their beliefs have been influenced by old science fiction tropes). I see the TESCREAL belief systems as being mostly harmless crackpottery. Of course, certain billionaire followers of TESCREAL beliefs could do a lot of social and political damage if they're given the power to do so.
Reading the article, commenting as I go, I am not promising that I will make it to the end:
> we have seen little discussion of why AGI is considered desirable by many in the field of AI, and whether this is a goal that should be pursued
Apparently no one reads Yudkowsky these days.
> In this paper, we ask: What ideologies are driving the race to attempt to build AGI?
In this comment, I answer: it's about money and power; the things that transcend all ideologies.
> the acronym “TESCREAL” denotes “transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, (modern) cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism”
At the first sight, this sounds like a complicated way to say "nerds". (Later we will see how much the words can actually be substituted, but if yes, that would kinda reduce the entire finding to: "the people trying to build AGI are... nerds". Which is true, but not really surprising.)
> The idea of eugenics can be traced back to the origins of the Western intellectual tradition
Yeah, I guess if you want to talk about transhumanists and singularitarians, you need to start with the recent examples, such as Plato and Aristotle.
> second-wave eugenics arose in response to new technological possibilities associated with genetic engineering and biotechnology. Such technologies opened the door to human “improvements”
When the authors say "eugenics", they basically include anything that concerns human DNA. If you worry about your child potentially getting Tay–Sachs disease, you know who else worried about people having inferior genes, right?
The link between eugenics and transhumanism seems to be that eugenicists wanted to improve humans by improving the genetic pool, and transhumanists want to achieve the same goal by abandoning the biological limitations completely. Different methods, the same goal.
Extropianists were the first organized modern transhumanist group. Singularitarians are also transhumanists. This... apparently makes the belief that an artificial intelligence could be smarter than humans an eugenicist belief, by the power of association. (I wonder whether a belief that Google can find things online better than you is also a fundamentally eugenicist belief. Or that a calculator can do multiplication faster than you.)
Never heard about cosmism before, so whatever; I find it plausible that it is also somehow related to thinking about the future and technology (which, as we have already established, are fundamentally eugenicist topics). Rationalists... also believe that AI is a big thing, and that it would better for the poweful AI to be good rather than evil. (Those assholes.) Effective altruists want to alleviate poverty... I am sure there is something sinister behind that, too, let's wait for the punchline... ah, yeah, some of them also worry about the future humans. And longtermists, those by definition worry about the future. (Remember, worrying about the future is an eugenicist thing.)
> Indeed, transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, and cosmism are examples of second-wave eugenics, since all endorse the use of emerging technologies to radically “enhance” humanity and create a new “posthuman” species.
OK, still in 20% of the article, but seems like this is the crux. If you accept the premise that trying to improve humans in any way (such as curing hereditary diseases or augmenting humans by technology) is basically the same thing that Nazis tried to do, only using modern technology, then... either you become a Nazi sympathizer, or you need to ban all efforts to cure genetic diseases or augment humans. Anything else means being in denial; and luckily we have two smart professors here to expose your hypocrisy.
> The TESCREAL bundle shares certain “eschatological” (relating to “last things”) convictions. As with religions like Christianity, these take two forms: utopian and apocalyptic, which are inextricably bound up together.
The belief in either horrible or glorious future is also in Marxism, just saying. On the other hand, effective altruists are mostly worried about the dark present. (I think that rationalists are also quite concerned about people being stupid right now.)
> The reason for concern is that emerging technologies are expected to be (a) extremely powerful; (b) increasingly accessible to both state and nonstate actors; and (c) dual-use, as exemplified by CRISPR-Cas9, which could enable us to cure diseases but also synthesize designer pathogens unleashing an “engineered pandemic”.
Here I would like to ask the authors whether *they* agree with this assessment factually, or not. Because if they do, then it also puts them in the category of people worrying about the future. (And if they don't, then what's the point of obsessing whether the technologies are connected to the sinister TESCREALs?)
> in 1996, Yudkowsky expressed concerns about superintelligence, writing: “Superintelligent robots = Aryans, humans = Jews.
Ah, Yudkowsky being Yudkowsky. But what exactly are the authors trying to say? Are they suggesting that Yudkowsky proposes the extermination of Jews/humans as a desirable thing to do? Or are they just taking things out of context in order to make their point?
> “Intelligence,” typically understood as the property measured by IQ tests, matters greatly because of its instrumental value
Uhm... yes?
> The obsession with IQ can be traced back to first-wave eugenicists, who used IQ tests to identify “defectives” and the “feeble-minded.”
Ah, I see the logic. In a parallel universe where Nazis sent *short* people to death camps, it is probably a taboo to talk about human height, and if you suggest that putting things on the top shelf can make them difficult to reach for some people, you get cancelled.
(PART 2)
> Table 1: “TESCREAL bundle” of ideologies.
A list of people and organizations to get cancelled.
> Effective accelerationists believe that the probability of a bad outcome due to AGI is very low
Yeah, that's pretty much the same thing as Yudkowsky says, except with "not" at the beginning.
(Would that make the acronym TESCREALEACC?)
> how TESCREAList groups are steering the field of AI toward the goal of creating AGI.
This feels like giving too much credit. Are they saying that without these people, it wouldn't occur to anyone to build an LLM?
> In 1955, four white men officially launched the field of AI
Ah, the field is forever tainted by the association with crackers. :(
> many researchers in fields currently associated with AI, such as natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and computer vision (CV), explicitly distanced themselves from the term “AI,” in part because it became associated with unfulfilled grandiose promises. Nonetheless, some groups continued to work toward “artificial general intelligence,”
So, both the former and the latter agree that the AIs we have now are not AGIs? And that is somehow controversial? Or why the framing of "some researchers work on X, but others [sinister music starts playing] work on Y"? Isn't it quite normal that different researchers work on different things? It seems like the authors are trying to hint at some dark controversy here, but to me it sounds about as sinister as saying "some biologists study mice, but others [sinister music starts playing] study frogs". Like, yeah, that's how research works. (Actually, I may be wrong here. That's how research works in natural sciences. In some other fields, it is probably very important that the researchers agree with each other and all do the same thing, otherwise they get cancelled?)
> How, then, would researchers know that they have achieved their goals of building AGI? They need to know how to define and measure “general intelligence.” Unsurprisingly, these definitions rest on notions of “intelligence” that depend on IQ and other racist concepts
(facepalm)
> For these reasons, Keira Havens, who has written extensively on race science, asks those attempting to build AGI: “Why are you relying on eugenic definitions, eugenic concepts, eugenic thinking to inform your work? Why [...] do you want to enshrine these static and limited ways of thinking about humanity and intelligence?”
Mussolini promised to make trains run on time. Why are you still using trains?
> One conjecture is that the resulting AGI will be so intelligent that it will figure out what the best thing to do is in any potential situation.
I'm confused. So did they read Yudkowsky or didn't they? Or were they just looking for a quote to take out of context, and ignored everything else, including the part where he *literally* called exactly this thing "the sheer folly of callow youth"?
https://www.readthesequences.com/The-Sheer-Folly-Of-Callow-Youth
> TESCREALists have been able to divert resources toward trying to build AGI and stopping their version of an apocalypse in the far future, while dissuading the public from scrutinizing the actual harms that they cause in their attempts to build AGI.
Uhm... sorry about mentioning this Yudkowsky guy all the time, but you included the movement he started in your acronym... and you pretend to be experts on what the movement is about, so... maybe it would be nice to get familiar at least with the very basics?
> As an example, one of us worked as a hardware engineer designing audio circuitry for devices such as laptops. Some of the tests that we performed as part of our work included drop testing, constantly dropping devices to understand the manner in which their functionality degrades when they are exposed to shocks, placing the devices in extremely cold or hot environments, frequently restarting them [...] we argue that the first steps in making any AI system safe are attempting to build well-scoped and well-defined systems like those described as “narrow AI,” rather than a machine that can supposedly do any task under any circumstance.
OK, I really don't want to put your expertise in restarting laptops in doubt. But, you know, these AI things sometimes turn out to work differently than you would expect. For example, I think that scientists in 1960s believed that we will make artificial intelligences understand human knowledge one topic at a time, by building expert systems and cleverly designing the semantical nets. They would probably be shocked to hear that the state-of-art AIs of 2024 are good at poetry and painting, but suck at math. And yet, here we are. The line between the narrow AIs and AGIs may turn out to be similarly unpredictable; it can happen much later or much sooner that we expect, and may be caused by an improvement that we will not suspect of having exactly that impact.
(THE END)
OK, my summary would be that the authors identified a group of people whom I would describe as "nerds thinking about the future, specifically the technology", and correctly noticed that there is an overlap between various groups.
The connection to eugenics is mostly made through "trying to improve things" and "believing that intelligence is a thing". I understand that both of these things are *problematic* for some people, but I also think those people are... how to put it politely... not thinking clearly, and probably not even interested in thinking clearly.
Some of their arguments require *a lot* of cherry-picking. If you fail to notice that the effective altruists mostly care about reducing the suffering that exists *today*... or if you believe that Yudkowsky wants to build the AGI as soon as possible, and believes that by the virtue of being generally intelligent it will get all the answers right... then I strongly doubt your expertise on the individual elements of the "TESCREAL" boogeyperson you invented. It's more like you sometimes need to make things the very opposite of what they are, in order to make your point.
Congratulation on finding your powerful and rich enemy responsible for manipulating the society and science towards their sinister goals. You know who else did that, right?
Yes. As usual, it is 10% of reality that gets 90% of the attention, but see e.g. here: https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities -- malaria, malaria, vitamin A, some unspecified vaccines. Okay, I guess the vaccines are about reducing suffering in the future, but it is still different from what the "TEASCREAL" model suggests.
Maybe somewhere lower on the list there is a longtermist project, and that is what makes some people freak out. Or maybe there are also separate lists by categories, and the longtermist category contains longtermist projects. But there is a difference between "there are some X somewhere among Y" and "Y is about X".
On the other hand, top 2 (and also 5th and 6th) careers recommended by 80KH (as of today) are AI risk-related.
https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/
I coin a slightly less awesome acronym HGT, which means Hitler, Gebru, and Torres. I claim that HGT has roots in Nazi traditions, and I have historical data to prove that at least one third of HGT was actively involved. That sounds quite damning, in my opinion.
Long story short, you can choose a perspective that supports your conclusions. As a rationalist, you should also reflect on how much your conclusion reflects the territory and how much it merely reflects the perspective you chose. To get the best results, you should aim to "carve reality at its joints", i.e. let yourself be guided by how things actually are, rather than your arbitrary definitions, no matter how clever they may sound (they may or may not be correct). For example, I am pretty sure you can find a connection between "TESCREAL" and eugenics tradition, just like you can find a connection between the eugenics tradition and progressive politics. The question is, is the former connection stronger than the latter? (If not, why do you focus on it so much? Instead of e.g. writing an article about "TESCREAL" having roots in the progressive politics?)
...okay, now I am going to actually read the article.
EDIT: One of the names sounded vaguely familiar, took me a moment to remember why:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yAHcPNZzx35i25xML/emile-p-torres-s-history-of-dishonesty-and-harassment
Torres wrote a response, if you want to go down that rabbit hole:
https://mileptorres.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-is-a-dangerous
Still haven't read the article, but now it seems to me that the alleged main connection between eugenics and "TESCREAL" is... consequentialist thinking, and worrying about the future of humanity. Technically true. (So it's like, someone says: "I would prefer if AI didn't kill all humans", and the response is: "so what you're saying is that you are worried about preserving the future of the while race?")
>What is with these people's obsession with identity politics and "marginalized communities"?
Buzzwords and such part of an institutional jargon designed to advance that institution's interests or satisfy certain needs.
I agree. Unfortunately, these values are dominant in Western academia and their supremacy is jealously guarded. Some high-profile EA should probably make a response, otherwise I'm worried that good EA ideas will see even more opposition from the academy.
By whom?
The Trump administration last time around couldn't even manage to purge the Trump administration. This time around I think they'll be ever so slightly more effective, but I doubt they'll manage a purge of academia.
Is the rationalist movement privileged? Ok, stupid question. I'd say the answer is an obvious yes. What I mean specifically is privileged in the economic sense. I.e. something that some wealthy people can afford to do/be but less wealthy people can't afford to be/do. And when I say rationalist I mean someone who esteems truth for truth's sake. Feel free to argue for or against this first question, but I take it as a given. It seems obvious to me that some people are getting subsidized by their jobs/career to be rationalists while most other people get subsidized to shut their mouths and do what they are told. So my actual question is, in what ways can one incorporate rationalist principles in their life if honing these skills may actually end up hurting them economically? Do you see it sort of like a Socratic matter of principles (I'll be broke as hell but at least I'll know I was being honest with myself), is the world really just dog-eat-dog and poor people should just excise rationalist thinking from their lives if they know what is best for them? Other ways of looking at this? I ask because I work as a secondary ed teacher and I've found that there are aspects of my job where being a rationalist is helpful/good but I think it is valuable to bifurcate rationalist thinking (truth for truth's sake) and just play the political game a lot/most of the time.
Good question. Why not take a data centred approach?
How do we measure privilege? It's going to depend on the society you're immersed in, and your own values. But most people would agree that wealth, education, a 'good' job, social standing and various freedoms/civil rights are a reasonable measure of this. The first three are fairly easy to measure. In the amount of time I'm willing to spend on this, I can compare the ACX survey to US demographic data.
Something like 85% of Scott's readers have a third level degree, upwards of 20% have a doctorate. Less than 40% of the population in the US has a bachelors degree. Approx. 2% have a PhD and at most 5% have doctoral level qualifications. So readers of the blog do have educational privilege. Since the ability to do a PhD requires years of forgone earnings, it's reasonable to infer that blog readers are coming from a family background which is higher socio-economic status.
Unfortunately, the survey data just reports numbers for income with the majority of responses censored. You could ask Scott for the data if you wanted to do more analysis, but I think it's likely that average and median earnings are well above the US average. Participants did self-identify their SES but I would treat this with caution, it's better to collect 'hard' data rather than self-descriptions, particularly when something like 'upper-middle class' is context and country dependent. Personally, I think the level of education and amount of free time required to read blogs like this and post in them means that they're biased to the privileged.
Recently, I've been at odds with my manager over small issues. E.g. they wanted to rearrange the schedule of a meeting I was chairing so they could arrive and deliver the welcome address 30 minutes in - I insisted the welcome be at the beginning, they could speak on other topics if arriving at the end of the meeting - they rescheduled to arrive on time. I don't think this is in any way a rationalist approach - to me it's common sense. I had the background and sufficient social standing to make my case persuasively. I didn't play the political game though - and I'm lucky to have a boss who is (mostly) willing to listen to pushback. I'd be curious to hear if a card carrying rationalist would have approached this differently - to me it was a mixture of common sense and my own stubbornness.
A) The Big Yud often said that "rationality is the art of winning". I.e. winning is the goal, rationality is a tool. If rationality precludes you from winning, discard rationality and win. He typically relies on Zen motifs to get his point across. C.f. "The Twelfth Virtue" [0] and "Something to Protect" [1].
B) The wealthy are privileged ipso facto. Dependency (of any kind, including financial dependency) represents exogenous influence. Unfortunately, specialization has made modern society quite interdependent. So it often is, infact, in your best interest to adeptly navigate Baudrillard's Simulacrum [2]. Another way of thinking about money: money is "slack" [3], and slack is options. Including the option to be intellectually-honest.
> So my actual question is, in what ways can one incorporate rationalist principles in their life if honing these skills may actually end up hurting them economically?
C) To paraphrase The-Bugman-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named: "you have to live like you're in enemy territory". If the powers-that-be don't like what you're teaching your students, you need to realize that you're basically distributing samizdat.
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/twelfth-virtue-the
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect/
[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/simulacrum-levels
[3] https://thezvi.substack.com/p/slack
These are helpful! Thanks
Big Yud also said that it's about truth, and assumed the formulations were equivalent , and they're not.
Hm... I don't remember anything like that. Got links? Not gonna lie, it's been a long time since I read The Sequences. And I never completed the entire corpus. So I'm prepared to be surprised.
Whatever the case, I stand by my initial comment, insofar as winning is ultimately more important than truth. (No, this isn't a carte blanche to act like a pathological liar. But Kant's radical honesty, for example, is a kinda bonkers imho.)
> Is the rationalist movement privileged?
Movements are not privileged; people are. Some rationalists are rich, some are poor, most of them probably somewhere in the middle. Or slightly above the average, considering their typical professions.
> something that some wealthy people can afford to do/be but less wealthy people can't afford to be/do.
My personal freedom of speech is mostly a result of living in Eastern Europe where no one gives a fuck about what you think. If I lived in America, I would probably watch my tongue more carefully. I am *not* wealthy enough to not need a job, which dramatically limits the things I can do (and in America would also limit the things I can say).
> It seems obvious to me that some people are getting subsidized by their jobs/career to be rationalists while most other people get subsidized to shut their mouths and do what they are told.
Yeah, your type of job determines what kind of idiots you are surrounded by.
> Other ways of looking at this?
It seems like some good (for self-preservation) habits from communism are also useful in the woke era, so here is one:
* Don't think.
* If you think, then don't speak.
* If you think and speak, then don't write.
* If you think, speak and write, then don't sign.
* If you think, speak, write and sign, then don't be surprised.
Personally, I would think, and only talk to friends or talk pseudonymously on the web.
> I work as a secondary ed teacher and I've found that there are aspects of my job where being a rationalist is helpful/good but I think it is valuable to bifurcate rationalist thinking (truth for truth's sake) and just play the political game a lot/most of the time.
Yeah, you can use some rationality at your work, without saying explicitly that this is what you are doing. (When someone important says "there is a dragon in a garage", say "of course there is", and then continue using the garage as usual. Which is what many people actually do.)
Thanks Viliam!
Others may chime in with different takes, but, for me, rationalism is about forming confidence estimates related to beliefs, it is not about saintly purity in how you choose to act or what you choose to say.
Taking an example from inside your question: imagine a situation where you are called to make a statement and you see two choices (a) what you believe to be true, (b) what you believe to be politically expedient. Rationalist methods could help you in the following ways:
(i) identify a false dichotomy and determine a third (or even more than one) alternative thing to say/way to act
(ii) form and update an estimate of the probability that (a) is a better/worse choice than (b)
(iii) phrase your belief (a) in a way that does not have the assumed political cost (because you indicate openness to other possibilities, you support your statement with evidence, you shade your statement probabalistically)
This is really helpful. Thanks Joshua!
Ted Gioia just dropped this on his substack - https://www.honest-broker.com/p/strange-and-dazzling-things-are-happening
tldr - NY Times reports, paywalled, (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/18/business/media/substack-politics-newsletters.htm) that Musk tried to buy Substack, but failed. Ted is a big enough whale on Substack that he has met Substack CEO Chris Best in person. Ted's comments are worth quoting, so here they are -
Last year I found myself across the table from Substack CEO Chris Best—and I hoped he would satisfy my curiosity on one matter. So I asked:
“Chris, I have a question. Has Elon Musk made an offer to buy Substack?”
Then I added:
“Appropriate answers to this question are (1) Yes, (2) No, or (3) I prefer not to say.”
Chris didn’t answer immediately. He thought it over for a moment, then responded: “I prefer not to say.”
In this soft-spoken way, Mr. Best showed his wisdom. Although he works hard to empower journalists, he’s smart enough to know to watch his words around those pesky folks. We’re as leaky as sieves, and only half as reliable.
But the New York Times reported yesterday that Elon Musk did attempt to buy Substack last year. Musk also hinted that he would merge it into Twitter and let Best run the combined companies.
The Times also reports that Best rejected this offer.
And he didn’t even fret about it. It was a “short-lived discussion,” according to the Times’ three sources.
That proves that Chris not only has wisdom, but also possesses integrity and strong core values. When he says that he supports indie writers, he really means it.
If Musk’s plan had been accepted, Chris would have enjoyed a huge payday in the transaction, and also might have found himself running the most powerful media force in the world right now.
But he didn’t hesitate to walk away from that.
I want to commend Chris and the entire Substack team. They not only talk the talk, but walk the walk—which is rare in the media world right now. Or in any world right now.
The article makes it seem so obvious, but...
First, saying "I prefer not to say" is not necessarily the same as kinda-deniable "yes". Maybe he rejected Musk. Maybe he is waiting and hoping that Musk will offer more money. Maybe someone else offered money, and he is trying to make the other person think that they are competing against Musk. Maybe he even said yes to Musk, but they have some kind of deal that the website will officially change hands on January 1st 2025, and until then there is an embargo on this information.
From business perspective, the Substack model seems great. By taking a fixed fraction of subscriptions, the financial interests seem aligned; Substack makes money when the authors do. The possible downside is that this can make the platform attractive to all kinds of conspiracy theorists and scammers (I imagine that writing Flat Earth News could be quite profitable), but if you advertise yourself as a platform where no one gets censored, that already goes with the territory.
But technically, using Substack can be quite frustrating experience, and frankly it seems like it's no one's priority to improve it. It took years just to make ACX comment section usable, and it still could be improved a lot. Or the bug where if you replied to a comment in an e-mail, your reply got inserted incorrectly in the comment tree. (That one is probably fixed, but that also took years.) I haven't written a post lately, but I remember it to be also frustrating. Like, how am I supposed to write articles containing code examples, if all existing character style options are so huge that you can barely fit 40 characters in a line? Or why do I have to choose whether a word is monospace or a hyperlink, but it cannot be both? It's obvious that the intended type of article is "type a lot of text, drag and drop a few pictures and a YouTube video, insert five 'subscribe' buttons, and call it a day", which I guess is where most money comes from. Yeah, it makes sense economically, but that means that if your technical skills are even slightly above zero, Substack will constantly make you cry.
So, maybe don't sell to Musk, but at least hire someone who is technically competent and who cares.
>That proves that Chris not only has wisdom
What makes you confident of that? Maybe accepting the offer would have been good for Substack. Why are you so sure that it wasn't?
"Cannot confirm or deny" is usually the best response to questions about possible takeover offers even if they haven't occurred.
> "Cannot confirm or deny"
It's also the preferred statement from the CIA, which is known as the Glomar response.[1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_response
It would suck not just for Scott but also all of us here in the comments.
In what way? Musk has shown a commitment to free speech that few others in media have.
Until it's speech that he doesn't like. Then, um, not so much
One of the weird things happening in the amazing nowadays is the number of people eager to jump to defend Musk. Like, you know he's a man with immense wealth and power, and is quite capable to looking after himself. He's also not running for any popularity contest. So... why do so many spend so much effort defending whatever he does? Jumping to counter every lightest slight in his direction, like he was a precious baby or something...
That's weird, because I got the opposite impression, that recently it is incredibly popular to accuse Musk of... well, nothing specific, just being generally the worst. Seems to be so since the moment he bought Twitter, but maybe I got the timing wrong.
I don't even like the guy; I think he is neither a saint nor a devil, just a smart rich guy trying to become even more rich, who seems to spend too much time online shitposting.
Is there somewhere a list of his "crimes" that I could read?
For the same reason that lots of people jump to criticize him for no real reason. He's become a symbol of the culture wars, so everything he does gets framed that way.
Also I don't think it's fair to characterize my comment as "jumping to counter every lightest slight". I genuinely don't think him buying substack would be bad for anyone and don't understand why someone would reflexively assume that it would be.
Oh? What's an example of speech he's suppressed purely because of its content?
He makes rules on the fly and interprets hazy policies in a way that justifies him banning, suspending or pushing voices he doesn't like off the platform. When he took over I was curious to see what twitter with free speech would look like, but unfortunately these are not the actions of someone with a genuine commitment to free speech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_2022_Twitter_suspensions
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/04/elon-musk-twitter-still-banning-journalists
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/15/elon-musk-hypocrite-free-speech
Doesn't substack have competitors by now?
Wait! Wait! The Webb Telescope disproved the existence of Dark Matter?! I guess I must have been snoozing. The massive galaxies that Webb observed in the early universe are an excellent fit for MOND, and their existence that early in the universe pretty thoroughly falsifies the Dark Matter models of galaxy formation.
Stupid question: if Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) is a better description of gravity, how does this affect the value of the Cosmological Constant? Does Dark Energy also go away? I don't know enough about MOND because I never took it seriously. I guess another Internet rabbit hole awaits my exploration.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ad834d/meta
Hmm, well I've been following Mond for a while now. Tracy McGaugh's blog is full of stuff. https://tritonstation.com/
Later edit;
I just want to add that Mond is less of a 'theory' and more of a 'fit to the data'. If gravity at accelerations below a_0 became a 1/r force law, (rather than 1/r^2) then that fits all the data.. up to some point. Mond fails at the mass level of galaxy clusters, it doesn't fit the third hump in the CMB data. nor the bullet cluster... There's something missing from Mond.... My favorite idea is some hot dark matter... sterile neutrinos. (I mean first of all I love the name.) Oh and that Mond is true... whatever mond is... beyond a fit to the data.
I don't think it can be concluded yet that DM or that the age of the universe has been falsified nor that has MOND been proven.
On this topic, the empirical evidence for MOND seems better but that isn't a 100% exclusion for DM.
DM can explain current star formation history, if and only if models of star/galaxy formation "innovate".
Be it a non constant IMF, super eddington accretions, assumptions about black holes and dust prevalences and properties, etc.
We are at the limit where nearly 100% of baryons needs to be converted into stars which sounds highly unlikely though. There has been some pre JWST era models that match most current observations. Moreover there are many possible more exotic catalysis mechanisms of galaxy and star formation, among which some might require new physics or standard physics but in practice non standard physics (few people will understand what I mean here), e.g. via dust based Mock gravity, rydberg matter or Zeldovich radiation.
Most importantly the debate should not be dumbed down to MOND or DM, one both can coexist, two there are many extensions (interacting DM, etc), three both can be false, the true theory might be quantized inertia, etc
My personal belief is that the age of the universe is at least moderately wrong.
The MOND existence will be forever settled via GAIA DR4 in 2026 (is settled in 2025 but ESA will gatekeep the data because they do not follow open data science)
BTW here is the biggest issue in LCDM by far, and you'll never hear of it, like in most sciences, the most interesting discoveries are absolutely unknown because well there is only one person on this planet reading the scientific literature extensively (me)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.04771
Oh Mond is by no means complete.. it fails at higher mass levels, galaxy clusters and above.
In reference to your paper, how would a missing dust signature in the CMB support the existence of dark matter? Would the presumed distribution of dark matter—clumped around galaxies and diffuse to a near-perfect vacuum in intergalactic space—reduce the density of dust in intergalactic space?
Also the Z>14.3 barrier has already been broken, the information is just not public yet
Uhm, could we please restore the ancient tradition of Open Threads without politics? I am not really interested in reading about Trump every day.
Yeah, I agree. The only problem is where (or who) draws the line?
Banning the word "Trump" would alone get us 80% there. Adding "woke", "Israel", and "Palestine" would move it to 95%.
This is Scott's substack, and he has the power and the right to draw whatever lines he wishes. But in the past, Scott used to post a separate political open thread every week (month?) that allowed political discussions and arguments. He did a good job snuffing out the political crap on the other threads—but I suspect it became too onerous for him. And so, I'm forced to wade through political crap to get to any interesting philosophical or scientific discussions. This is one of the reasons I haven't re-upped my subscription to this sub.
Are those not the hidden open threads for the paypigs?
Yes please.
I second that motion!
https://apnews.com/article/gaetz-trump-fbi-justice-department-248b46ba0c882dd46d661568e8bd3bd7?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
Matt Gaetz has already withdrawn from the Attorney General nomination, having previously resigned from the House, meaning he's currently not in any political offices. This removal of Matt Gaetz from Congress has the chance to be the first win of the new Trump cabinet, although I don't know if his resignation will actually hold this early in.
I'm at the Whipple museum of history and philosophy of science at Cambridge university. So cool. Here's info about an instrument built by John Harrison to measure longitude at sea.
https://collections.whipplemuseum.cam.ac.uk/objects/15687/
I've been to a similar museum in Harvard, but this is even smaller and less overwhelming...
Btw, Longitude is a great book for young kids.
Why does a kid even need to attend school if they can go to such a museum with guidance?! Only for a social life I suppose. And in some states because it's a legal requirement.
What, is every city in the world going to have a museum covering every topic?
Great question. No, a museum won't be all of the curriculum, but a learning aid. And dies it have to be in your city? Give the $17k per kid per year to the homeschooling parents to use for such expenses.
The govt needs to be good at some minimal checks on the process and results. The results seem to be better than what public schools can produce. So this should be possible for motivated parents.
Different kids need different things, and the same kid might need different things each year.
I'm not claiming this is a perfect system. And others have thought through this better than I have.
>Why does a kid even need to attend school if they can go to such a museum with guidance?
Guidance from whom? A human being? Wouldn't that human being thus be a teacher, and the museum a school?
Sort of but not really. The museum is chosen by the parents as part of a curriculum, one designed or children by the parents.
The teacher can be the parent (if they have knowledge in the area) or a homeschool teacher hired by the parent. Parents of homeschooled children with different areas of expertise form co-ops and teach each other's children based on their expertise.
The basic difference is if it isn't going well for the child, the teacher can be fired immediately.
I know this is probably very worrying for Americans because this is going to be your government, but today's headlines about Trump's cabinet picks have me laughing.
New Secretary for Education is, if I go by the headlines, "WWE wrestling mogul" Linda McMahon. I know there was a lot of disdain for his last pick there in the first administration, Betsy de Vos, so I'm awaiting (with a certain amount of glee, I have to say) the reaction to this. It would seem her experience in education was serving on the Connecticut state board of education 2009-2010 and being on the board of trustees for a Catholic school:
https://www.irishexaminer.com/world/arid-41520317.html
"She served on the Connecticut Board of Education for a year starting in 2009 and has spent years on the board of trustees for Sacred Heart University in Connecticut. Seen as a relative unknown in education circles, she has expressed support for charter schools and school choice."
More Catholics in the cabinet? I am delighted to see the Sinister Papist Conspiracy to extend the tentacles of the Vatican into American government is proceeding apace!
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anti-Catholic_octopus_cartoon.jpg
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fus-anti-catholic-cartoons-portraying-the-catholic-church-as-v0-4elnjjf86nnd1.jpg%3Fwidth%3D768%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D739ca4399e09440f78fff0a25e87a778fb71c67b
Dr. Oz to oversee health insurance? Okay, even I have to blink at that one.
Head of Commerce department could affect us here in Ireland, as (and I have to agree on this one), allegedly he tweeted (or Xed, is that how we should say it now?):
https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2024/1119/1481894-trump-to-nominate-howard-lutnick-to-lead-commerce-dept/
"Lutnick was recently critical of the nature of Ireland's trade relationship with the US.
"It's nonsense that Ireland of all places runs a trade surplus at our expense. We don’t make anything here any more – even great American cars are made in Mexico. When we end this nonsense, America will be a truly great country again. You’ll be shocked," he wrote in a post on X in October."
It is nonsense, and it's not anything tangible (except for the pharma plants here), it's all down to our tax strategy to attract multinationals (like the FAANG set) which have headquarters here and move money around from one bank account to another. The effect on our economy is such that we need to have a separate calculation for GDP to account for the 'phantom GDP' from this.
So I wouldn't be surprised if the Trump administration changes taxes to make it attractive for American multinationals to keep their business at home, and of course this will have a knock-on affect on Irish employment as/if plants are closed or the Silicon Docks crowd shutter their offices. We'll have to see what happens!
I'm curious: what's your view of the worst case scenario here? Like what's the worst possible outcome that a bad DoEd secretary could cause? In my view the DoEd doesn't do anything positive for the cause of education, so it's impossible to do any harm by nominating an incompetent secretary. I think the country would be better off if the entire dept was completely abolished.
The DoEd becomes dysfunctional without having its duties transferred to other agencies, six million college students (mostly from poor or working-class families) lose their Pell Grants, many of them have to drop out of school, their lives are diminished, the nation's supply of skilled labor is diminished, and there's a massive electoral backlash of mostly Trump supporters looking for the anti-Trumpiest possible candidates in the next election.
If you were under the impression that the Department of Education was just a bunch of wokescolds who send out letters to people trying to run good schools and saying "you need to be more woke or else!", then no, that's not how any of this works.
And why is that a bad outcome? In my view far fewer people should be going to college, *particularly* those from poor and working-class families. Elitism is good in elite institutions. Eliminating Pell grants would go some way to eliminating cost disease and bloat in higher education. Academia has become a lumbering zombie and a propaganda indoctrination zone. Anything that cuts it down to size is good in my view. Education needs far less regulation.
Wouldn't you support an anti-Trump backlash?
< In my view far fewer people should be going to college, *particularly* those from poor and working-class families. Elitism is good in elite institutions.
Well, Wanda, I come from a family with only one college-educated parent, and our finances were very tight indeed when I went to college. My parents were especially honest people, and did not fudge the truth to make us look poorer than we were when they filled out the financial aid forms. Our income and savings were low enough that I got almost a full scholarship for the entire 4 years. I graduated from an Ivy, scored 99th percentile on the GREs and got PhD. Jeez, maybe if you'd had Betsy DeVos's job I'd never have gone to college, and would instead be your hairdresser. Or, like, the lady who gives you Brazilian waxes.
As for other teens whose Pells you'd like to yank: I just looked at some data about four year colleges and their average SAT score.
https://www.univstats.com/corestats/admission/colleges-by-average-sat-score/
For about 35%, the average SAT score is 1200 or above. 1200 places someone at 64th percentile in the group that took the SAT, & that group's average intelligence and academic performance is surely above the average for college students as a whole. I'd say it's someone scoring that well or better on the SAT is not in the in your born-to-be-your-hairdresser (or hair-plucker) group, and can certainly benefit from college-level courses. If you nix the Pell grants of all the kids in those schools, that's a lot of people unable to pay for an undergrad degree they could probably have made good use of. And only 8% of colleges have have SAT scores 1000 (the average score) or below.
Ok, you're the exception. Getting 99th percentile on your GRE's means you have a >120 IQ. You're exactly the kind of poor person that's supposed to be discovered via standardized testing.
>For about 35%, the average SAT score is 1200 or above.
Ok. An SAT of 1200 is an IQ of about 120 which is about the top 10% of the population. That's who should be going to college, not the ~50% that we currently send. I would MUCH rather sacrifice the 35% who should be there for the 65% who shouldn't. And pulling Pell Grants wouldn't prevent them from going, it would just make it more expensive. I want poor, potentially-stupid people to think very carefully about whether their mongrel genes can actually benefit from an expensive education before they just blithely go. College used to be a sorting mechanism. It's not anymore and that loss imposes very reals costs on society. It's incredibly useful for everyone to know where to get smart people.
>And only 8% of colleges have have SAT scores 1000 (the average score) or below.
Ok. That number should be 0. If someone gets a 1000 on the SAT then they shouldn't come anywhere near a college. College is for the top 10-25% of society. Everyone else should just learn a trade. Hairdresser is an excellent example.
<And pulling Pell Grants wouldn't prevent them from going, it would just make it more expensive.
"Let them eat cake."
Actually, the way the colleges set financial aid is by using the data the parents send about their savings and income, and the data parents must give is *very* detailed. There really is no loophole that allows people to look less able to pay for college than they are by having a secret rental property or whatnot. Of course they can lie, but colleges are allowed to do some checking around so that's pretty daunting. Using the data the parents sent, colleges calculate how much parents should be able to pay, and their idea of what people of a given income can cough up is generally more than people themselves feel able to cough up (though most can by penny-pinching. To cover the amount parents will not be expected to pay, colleges give a financial aid package, which is a mix of scholarship (i.e. college eats the cost), loans the parents or kid must take out, and money the kid must earn with an on-campus job. Financial aid packages always set the amount the parents and kids borrow as the maximum in government student loans they are allowed to borrow . Colleges give scholarships to cover the rest, and for kids who qualify for Pells the scholarship includes the Pell grants. So if the Pells are yanked, either the colleges would have to be willing to eat more of the cost or the kid and parents would have to borrow more. However, the family is generally already stuck with borrowing the maximum they are allowed to as federal student loans. The alternative for borrowing more is bank loans. People who are poor enough to qualify for Pell grants, and have already committed to take out $10,000 in student loans for the coming year generally do not qualify for bank loans.
<I want poor, potentially-stupid people to think very carefully about whether their mongrel genes can actually benefit from an expensive education before they just blithely go.
Jeez, Wanda, what even are mongrel genes?
< I would MUCH rather sacrifice the 35% who should be there for the 65% who shouldn't.
You know, I think I agree that people scoring at or below average on the SAT generally can't benefit from college courses. (Although there are college majors in things like hospitality, and when I was on vacation in Mexico I met a young couple who had actually majored in that and were looking like they were going to make a go of it with an eco-resort.). But I find you extraordinarily mean-spirited, and would even if I were not in the 35% you'd rather have doing your hair. It's pleasant to remind myself, and you, that nobody but you gives a shit who you are willing to sacrifice.
I'd prefer the backlash be more "reversion to the mean" and less "pendulum swings back like a wrecking ball", and I'd prefer not to have millions of innocent young men and women thrown abruptly out of school to that end.
And, yeah, among the hip rationalists and contrarians, academia is all cost disease and bloat and indoctrination and signaling. To the *vast* majority of Americans, the sort of social mobility represented by someone from a working-class family going to college and hopefully making a better life for themselves, is seen as a *good* thing. That's the story that made J.D. Vance a household name, but I suppose as an Ivy-league alum we're supposed to write him off as an irredeemably woke leftie or something.
The now-predominately-Republican working class likes that sort of social mobility, because those are *their* kids with a shot at what they see as a better life. The Democrats like that sort of thing because they think they'll get more Democrats out of it. I like that sort of thing because I'm a libertarian who believes in meritocracy. I'm not sure what you are that you don't see this as a good thing, but whatever it is, there aren't enough of you to matter.
And the bit where there's at least a large minority that's annoyed by all the kids going to Oberlin to study Uselessology or Columbia to join Team Hamas, fine, but *these aren't those kids*. Those are mostly the ones from upper-middle-class families who assume they'll be getting an upper-middle-class lifestyle just for having a college degree, and feel guilty about it. The ones who need a Pell Grant to make it through school, know they need to make that education count for something in the real world. So, yeah, pat yourself on the back for having reduced the number of college students, but you're getting rid of the students and your pissing off their parents and they're going to make you pay for that.
A+ comment, no notes.
I think the problem is that university is associated in people's minds with being above average on the social ladder, so the popular sentiment is "if we all can get university education, then we will all be above the average".
Unfortunately, this is not how averages work. If everyone gets university education, then you will need PhD to get a hairdresser license.
So perhaps instead of extending the sweet deal of "get more credentials in return for a lifetime of debt" to an ever increasing part of population, we should go in the opposite direction and reduce the need of credentials. To become a hairdresser, you should need one month of training, at most. Make it so that if you decide that being an unemployed bum or a software developer sucks and you would prefer to be a plumber instead, you will only need two or three months, and you are legally free to start your own business.
Separately from that, we should improve education, and there are many things that could be improved there. But we should not make it legally required in order to get a good job.
What does "if we all can get a university education..." have to do with the policies of the second Trump administration, or with this discussion? Nobody here is proposing to give everybody a university education. There is no plausible outcome where everybody gets a university education in the next four years.
*Some* people will get university educations. Some people *should* get university educations. Not so much the people who are planning to become hairdressers, but definitely the ones who are planning to become engineers, doctors, lawyers, or businessmen, Ms (or Dr?) Tinasky may be of the opinion that those should all come from the middle to upper middle class and the proles should stick to their prole jobs like hairdressing. I'm strongly of the opinion that a good number of our future engineers, doctors, lawyers, and businessmen should come from the ranks of the working class and even some of them from the poor. And I'm pretty sure the wast majority of American voters agree with me on that.
Right now, the way that happens is with loans and grants that come through the Department of Education. I can imagine worlds where it doesn't work that way. Worlds where wealthy philanthropists or large charities or state governments handle that, and worlds where college is cheap enough that an ambitious young man or woman can pay for it with a part-time job. But we don't live in one of those worlds, and we're not going to build one of those worlds in the next four years.
So, if you break the Department of Education, then A: millions of students who I *think* you and I agree really *should* be going to college, will have to drop out, and B: a large majority of Americans will be really pissed at whoever made that happen.
If you've got ideas for substantive educational reform, great, but they're going to take more than four years. And to make them work as well as you hope, you're probably going to want to have the DoEd in good working order to either carry out the reforms or to seamlessly transfer operations to whoever is going to carry out the reforms.
>To the *vast* majority of Americans, the sort of social mobility represented by someone from a working-class family going to college and hopefully making a better life for themselves, is seen as a *good* thing.
Those people are wrong and I don't think that the federal government should be in the business of laundering their delusions. The "everyone should go to college" idea is just a hedonic-treadmill effect. The government shouldn't fund that.
If you're a working class kid who has class-bucking IQ then fine, suck it up and take on some debt. College isn't the express-lane to upper middle class that it used to be, so low-class families should legitimately stop and think about whether it's the right choice. Eliminating federal grants is something that would encourage a more rational cost-benefit analysis among the consumers of higher education. College was designed to be for the top 20% or so of the population. Anything more than that is just a waste of resources.
<If you're a working class kid who has class-bucking IQ then fine, suck it up and take on some debt.
You seem to be very underinformed about paying for college. Did you think Pell grants cover everything? Nope, they average about $5000 per year. And the average kid with a Pell grant ends up with a 15% *larger* debt, approx $26,000 total, than kids who did not qualify for a Pells, presumably because the Pell does not fully make up the difference between their funding and other kids'. So be of good cheer, Wanda, the Pell kids are doing plenty of sucking it up.
I can't tell what Peter is trying to say, but: people do want social mobility, of the type that comes from being capable of doing things that pay well enough to fund their entry into higher social strata. What they *don't* want is the type of social mobility that only comes about by bending the knee to the people currently in the top stratum because they have arbitrarily seized that stratum and have changed the entry criteria away from being capable of producing actually valuable things. Possibly taking Pell grants hostage in the process.
> And why is that a bad outcome? In my view far fewer people should be going to college, *particularly* those from poor and working-class families.
Definitely because nobody wants social mobility. The real problem is the rich bit dim, and what is needed is a reduction in certain courses but that’s less likely to happen.
Seems like Trump is in an awkward place. He put a number of normal people with regular credentials in his cabinet last time, and not only did he get lots of flack about it anyway, but lots of the people he picked tried to foil him. So he's highly incentivized to bypass all the normal picks.
I don't know what people expected differently, to be honest.
"Huh, everyone who is reputed to know what they're doing thinks I'm a moron and tries to derail my plans. But since I'm obviously infallible, I guess I should go with people who everyone says are clueless next time". Peak Dunning-Kruger right there.
Maybe, or maybe there really is a "deep state" of people with similar views across party lines and they hate Trump for his opposition to their one-party rule.
I'm not saying that's necessarily true, but I also don't think we can rule that out. I'm troubled by how many things Trump got criticized about that Obama did before him and Biden did after. Kids in cages being an obvious and well known case, but also Biden continuing Trump's tariffs and things like drone strikes against enemy leaders.
Let me rewrite the first sentence from a different perspective: Maybe there really is a group of public servants with a deep knowledge of how the machine runs and commitment to keep the state running regardless of party affiliations, who really hate Trump for his blatant stupidity and disregard for reality and morality.
Of course, that's the optimistic spin, and the reality may be somewhere in the middle. But I really believe that any complex organization needs a lot of people with specialized knowledge, and replacing them will lead to dysfunction. The question is, "is the current state of things so rotten that it's worth tearing big parts of the system down and having effectively nothing in their place for a while?" Apparently, in the opinion of Trump, Musk and others, it's worth it. My guess is that they're going to replace somewhat corrupt but functioning systems with ones that are both dysfunctional and utterly corrupt... but we'll see.
That is a really good question, and I also do not have the answer to it.
I do have a problem with leadership in a democracy ignoring the well-intentioned pleas of the population. This includes people on the left (Bernie supporters) as well as people on the right.
Many of the problems are not exactly subtle or hidden. That outsourcing and deindustrialization has gutted the entire rust belt is not news to anyone. That the leadership class seems to think of this as somewhere between fine and good is a serious problem. What's an economy for? They seem to think that number-go-up is enough. Serving the needs of the population is a better answer. If number-go-up also helps the population (as it did in the 50s) then everyone can be satisfied. If instead it helps people in certain fields to a massive extent but most people are hurt or gain little, that's going to cause problems.
I don't think Trump is a cause, but a symptom. I've been listening to working class Republicans hating on their elected Republicans for well over 20 years. It was only a matter of time before someone showed up to do what those people actually wanted, instead of more wars and more international trade. If the solution ends up being bad, which is entirely possible, then that still doesn't fix the underlying issues. The only thing that will fix the issues is those so-called experts to take the needs of the lower classes seriously.
I assume that those working class Republicans you talk about hate on their elected Republicans in between elections, but vote Republican at election time.
The Biden Administration passed the CHIPS act and the Inflation Reduction Act, and we saw the election results. It’s possible that the policy would have been a political winner with better messaging; I personally don’t have any expertise in political messaging so it’s hard for me to say. It’s also possible that the policy helped politically, but not enough to overcome other factors which allowed Trump to win. But it suggests that addressing deindustrialization is not a politically winning policy.
Indeed, you go on to write that these Republicans voted against more wars and more international trade. The first has nothing to do with economics, and the second is different from the issue of outsourcing and deindustrialization gutted the rust belt. If you put tariffs on the import of raw materials, that makes American manufacturers less competitive, so it reduces international trade both by reducing the import of raw materials and by reducing the export of manufactured goods. Great if your goal is to reduce international trade, bad if you care about American manufacturing.
Based on polling done in 2019, Bob Altemeyer wrote, “The biggest reason by far that people supported Trump was their level of prejudice, but some (not many) relatively unprejudiced subjects approved of him because they thought they were prospering thanks to him.”
https://cdn2.mhpbooks.com/2020/08/Authoritarian-Nightmare_Appendices.pdf
I see what you mean, but I am not sure the wishes of the electorate can be fulfilled in a straightforward way without unintended consequences hitting them hard years or decades later. My understanding is that the bleeding-out of parts of America's industry was an inevitable side effect of globalization (i.e., free trade and Pax Americana), which not only lifted hundreds of millions of people worldwide out of poverty, but also brought about relative peace, a ridiculous pace of technological progress and, last but not least, the possibility of bying cheap stuff from China. Rolling it back may or may not lead to workers in the US having plenty to do (depending on how it's handled), but it very likely leads to an overall lower standard of living in the US and probably, within a few years, lots of wars leading to a thorough disruption of global trade, neocolonialism, biblical-level famines and general unpleasantness which eventually impact everyone, including the workers in the US. (Peter Zeihan paints the full picture in "The end of the world is just the beginning"). People who have worked for decades in the State Department probably understand this; the guy whose economical platform consists of "I LOVE tariffs" maybe doesn't, and neither do many of the voters who can't find China on a map.
Curious which picks of his you think got a lot of flack while being normal. At least some of his picks were quite popular - James Mattis for SecDef was confirmed 98-1 and H.R. McMaster for National Security Adviser was confirmed 86-10, for example.
EDIT: Other popular choices:
- Shulkin for VA, 100-0
- Nikki Haley for UN Ambassador, 96-4
- John Kelly for DHS, 88-11
- Elaine Chao for Transportation, 93-6
- Perdue for Agriculture, 87-11
- Ross for Commerce, 72-27
He got burned in two different ways. Careerists who sailed through confirmation tended to stymie his plans. Anyone else got pilloried as unfit even before they got in the job.
Would we really expect Biden, Harris, Obama, or Bush to keep playing by the informal rules when those were the results?
I mean, if your choice is between "qualified people who will easily be confirmed but won't do whatever I tell them to" and "widely-criticized people who will do anything I want", I think MOST people would wonder whether the first group actually are doing a better job than the second group. There's more to cabinet roles than rubber-stamping the President's agenda, and surrounding yourself with a bunch of yes-men could be pretty self-defeating.
Sure, but Trump ran on a platform of doing things differently than other politicians. His options are to either follow the consensus like every other president and thereby betray his voters, or put people in his administration that aren't part of the consensus.
I think there's a lot of room for us to discuss which examples are "non-consensus" and which are "unqualified cranks".
E.g. Rex Tillerson for State was definitely not a direction I would have gone in, and I would argue was pretty meh for the department, but at least was an international businessman and probably falls into the "not willing to do whatever Trump wants" category. RFK, Jr. is a lunatic conspiracy theorist with the opposite of qualifications who could do astonishing damage to public health.
Yes, I think this is a factor in Trump's more controversial picks for his next cabinet. It's pretty clear that he felt burned by some of the "normal people with regular credentials" in his first administration, so this time he's putting a premium on reliable allies and friends. Trump has been close to the McMahons for decades, so no surprise he's turning to Linda again, this time in a larger role.
Conservatives have for years wanted to dispense with the federal Department of Education; it's not immediately clear whether Linda McMahon is being put in charge to try to carry that out. Certainly the Project2025 guys want it to happen as described in their big blueprint document.
The McMahons, husband and wife, are actually a helluva shared life story which some competent writer could make a compelling book out of some day. A couple since high school, early in their married life they were on food stamps and a bit later went bankrupt; neither had been born into any money. Despite which they became very successful and will soon celebrate their 60th (!) wedding anniversary. Frankly they are in some ways what Trump cosplays as....Linda held a lesser appointment during the first Trump administration, and once won a party nomination for a Senate seat. So she's not now a complete rookie to the political/governmental big leagues.
Lutnick is someone who's pursued an admirable adult path after a rough start (his mother died of cancer during his last year of high school and then his father was killed by medical malpractice during his first week of college). His qualifications for Secretary of Commerce are not obvious but then again that job has become largely toothless anyway; his appointment isn't much different than our longstanding shitty practice of naming large campaign donors to be our ambassadors.
Meanwhile though I am not at all laughing at Trump naming his literal personal defense attorneys to the #2, #3 and #4 positions of our Justice Department. _That_ is a new one which not even the likes of Tricky Dick or Slick Willy or Harding's handlers ever tried.
McMahon converted from Protestantism to Catholicism. Vance is also a Catholic convert. You'd think Protestants would be bothered by losing so many of their future elites. Or maybe they're proud of being a religion for low-class people.
Mass immigration from third world means internal white difference are no longer relevant. No one cares if you are an Irish (American) or Swedish (American) or just a good old Anglo. When a third your university class consists of recent arrivals from China and India, another third children of Latin American immigrants, you are just "white". The massive secularization starting in 2000s means the same process has happened with religion.
> So I wouldn't be surprised if the Trump administration changes taxes to make it attractive for American multinationals to keep their business at home
I thought the point of Ireland was that it was the cheapest (tax-wise) European state to be in? If I recall correctly, there is a significant tax advantage (or requirement?) for big tech companies to keep a European bank account if they’re doing business in the EU…
That's what Trump's guy is complaining about, and others before him. The EU told Apple to pay us €14 billion in back taxes, and our government had to be *forced* to take the money, they tried putting it off because that's our one advantage, our low tax regime for foreign investment.
https://www.breakingnews.ie/business/apple-tax-billions-begin-to-roll-into-state-coffers-1691491.html
As I get older it seems that cats, in general, like me more. When I was a teenager, even friends' cats would give me a wide berth. Then progressively catkind got more neutral about my presence. Now it's a semi-regular occurence that cats actually come up to me and ask to be petted. Even completely strange cats, in the street. I don't think my behavior toward them has changed (I'm not aggressive but reserved. Since I'm mildly allergic, I avoid touching them). Is it because they see fidgeting as scary and I got more immobile with age? Has anyone else noticed it happens to them too?
It seems to be cats specifically and not pets in general.
A primate grin is NOT welcoming to a cat, quite the reverse as one is showing teeth. Most cats are also averse to wide open looking eyes, especially staring at them, as they view these as a challenge. Also, outstretched human arms tend to alarm them, especially when these move abruptly.
A cat smile is a slow blink and gently narrowing eyes. So maybe your eyes have become apparently less open and alert looking as you age, possibly behind glasses you never wore as a teenager, when cats were avoiding you. Either that, or you regularly eat toast or muffins for breakfast. Cats can overlook most worrying quirks of human anatomy if the humans smell slightly of butter! :-)
You may have cracked it, I have a drooping eyelid and now that you mention it, in all three of the last instances the cat approached me from that side. Never saw (heh) the pattern.
They can sense that you're infected with Toxoplasma gondii.
Damn, and apparently it's incurable.
Why isn't it a bigger deal here that the benefits of scaling AI larger seems to have hit the ceiling? Shouldn't that be the biggest AI story in the world? Why aren't chip and utilities stocks crashing?
I know they say blah blah blah we got other ways to improve AI --- but fucking shit --- the way to improve it so far has been scaling on bigger data sets. Why should believe another way of scaling is going to improve things all of a sudden?
Well the "AI Explained" channel had a maybe-it-will-maybe-it-won't segment :-)
It was already priced in.
Nine months ago people around here were going "Why isn't the market reacting to the fact that AI will soon be godlike and/or destroy us all?" But people outside this bubble never really expected that to happen.
Because the NVIDIA etc stock bubble hasn't burst yet.
Stipulating for the moment that AI has hit something ceiling-ish: Hype sells. There's stories to be told about hype, and people want to tell, hear, and be part of those stories. Blood also sells, and that includes the green-tinted financial sort of blood. The interregnum where the hype has worn thin, but the last round of Bigger Fools haven't given up and sold out yet, that's just kind of meh and boring.
And around here, we've basically got people who believe AI is wonderful and awesome, and we've got people who believe AI is an awesome and terrible danger, and we've got people who think the first two groups have been talking about AI way too much. If it turns out that AI stagnates at "meh", then for both the wonderful-and-awesome and the awesome-and-terrible groups, talking about AI would mean talking about how they were wrong. Nobody wants to do that. And the third group has had all the AI-talk they care for so they're not contributing more.
Sooner or later, either AI will break through the "ceiling", or the bubble will burst, and either one of those will be a big deal here. In the meantime, all is quiet on the AI front. Enjoy it while it lasts.
>Sooner or later, either AI will break through the "ceiling", or the bubble will burst
A third, "meh"er possibility is that LLMs stagnate - but the current level winds up being good enough for a lot of applications (which may include enshitification of customer service). Remember how long it took for businesses to work out just how to use personal computers intelligently!
edit: (from the https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/ai-progress-has-plateaued-at-gpt article):
>if AI paused tomorrow, people would be figuring out applications for decades.
I do think we can rule out a near-term stagnation of machine learning on _trustworthy_ data, e.g. the protein fold prediction. That doesn't have the hallucination problem that predict-the-next-token has.
Yes, this has all the vibes of 1999 internet bubble. Both things will likely come to pass: the bubble will burst, and a useful machine-learning infrastructure will be available to used for many more years.
Yes, that sounds plausible. And, when the internet bubble burst, the stocks came down, but the internet didn't go away, as if the whole technology was a bad idea, so I agree with your expectation that machine learning applications will persist.
Hmm... There _have_ been bubbles where the underlying technology really was a bad idea. E.g. https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/radioactive-quack-cures/emanators/national-radium-emanator.html the radium craze around 1920-1930ish... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_fad
I'm pretty sure LLMs stagnating, even at a useful level, still results in a spectacularly newsworthy bursting of a bubble that's currently valued on the expectations of LLMs very much not stagnating.
That sounds plausible. Many Thanks!
edit:
<mildSnark>
2030: "And one of the more famous points of interest in Silicon Valley is the Nvidia stock crash crater, formed in 2026..."
</mildStart>
I'm kind of surprised that the people most concerned with AI singularity haven't attacked it more from an energy conservation perspective. The amount of energy required to keep improving AI is truly immense, and it shouldn't be hard to make a basic environmentalist argument against using that much energy on AI, even putting aside concerns with possible AI superintelligence. I'm surprised that more people in *this* social circle haven't done so, at least from what I've read so far.
Probably most people here are already concerned with anthropogenic climate change. And much of that climate change comes down to energy consumption. I have some very leftist friends that are highly anti-crypto currency precisely because of how energy-intensive crypto mining is (at least from what I've heard). Well, it sounds like AI is becoming even more energy-demanding than crypto-mining is.
If you're concerned about anthropogenic climate change, and if you're concerned about AI superintelligences, then it seems there's now a great way to tie them together and attack both at the same time. It seems odd to me that I haven't read this argument put forward more.
As I understand it, OpenAI's GPT was developed essentially by simply ploughing through every recorded utterance since the dawn of time through 2018 or whenever it was. On that assumption, If energy is a limiting factor then presumably further progress can be made only by structuring the data better, into a network of more self-contained units, and enhancing these independently.
If we draw a rough parallel with programming, the first operating systems were presumably masses of messy machine-specific assembler, but over the decades these have become far more modularized at the same time sophisticated.
People absolutely do complain about the amount of energy AI uses, including here.
Well, when the same people are pushing for electric cars, it looks transparently dishonest to be demonizing electricity consumption in non-Woke applications.
Pushing for electric cars happens when the choice is between many little engines burning fossil fuels to accomplish some task and using centrally generated electricity to do it.
When instead the choice is between doing a task and not doing it at all, yes, the same people will push for the latter option.
No-one's arguing for clockwork+petrol AI; Nvidia is not, last I heard, building giant Babbage engines for running LLMs, though I do admit that would be kind of awesome; and no-one's putting petrol engines in their data centres.
Meanwhile, the people pushing for electric cars do also very much tend to push to reduce car use overall.
All seems consistent to me. Where's the dishonesty?
>Where's the dishonesty?
In pretending that the electric cars won't require electricity generation and transmission infrastructure enhancements along the same lines as for AI or any other non-Woke-favored use.
>Meanwhile, the people pushing for electric cars do also very much tend to push to reduce car use overall.
That _is_ a fair position, and characterization of their position. I generally oppose it, but it is at least honest.
> I generally oppose it, but it is at least honest.
I do feel there is a massive disconnect between people who live in very densely populated areas where owning and using a car is misery and people living in suburban sprawl and/or rural areas, where a dense public transport network would not see enough use to be feasible and so there is no sane alternative to car ownership; people in each of the two groups who have not lived in the other kind of place find it very hard to get in each other's headspace.
But that is by the by.
Many Thanks!
>so there is no sane alternative to car ownership
Yup, I'm in one of those areas.
> In pretending that the electric cars won't require electricity generation
Does anyone pretend that? I've only ever heard it as a MAGA talking point, trotted out while ignoring whatever the interlocutor actually says; much as you just did to me.
Many Thanks! I've usually seen it as the _absence_ of discussion of all the electricity generation and transmission requirements in some electric car advocacy piece. Look, I've seen Greens block _transmission lines_ , the national equivalent of an extension cord, let alone power plants. Now, these may not be the exact same people who are pushing electric cars, but, as an overall political group, in aggregate, they look hypocritical.
Frankly, for the training phase part of AI development, solar or wind could potentially be used. Training is an incremental process. Nothing intrinsically horrible happens if the process runs during daylight hours. There is an economic trade-off due to having the capital cost of the chips lying fallow at night - but if we _really_ are in or near a regime where energy costs dominate, this should be ok. Solar _without_ storage is one of the cheapest, possible _the_ cheapest, source of electricity.
If we _aren't_ in a regime where energy costs dominate, then these energy discussions look like a dishonest cudgel being used to bash AI which wokesters actually oppose for _other_ reasons.
I don't think most people in AI -- myself included -- think we have hit a ceiling. Everyone in the world is compute capped. We need more chips, and more energy. But chips and energy are continuously getting better and cheaper. It shouldn't be lost on anyone that tech basically lobbied the government to make nuclear a green energy category and starting buying a bunch of micro reactor time as a result. That should give you a sense of what the industry thinks of as our current limitations.
Related: there are several good papers on scaling laws that show that, following a power law, exponential improvements in compute and data together result in linear improvements to models. Anecdotally, however, linear improvements in models lead to exponential improvements in acquired abilities and outcomes. This is part of why everyone is compute capped. Every single GPU is already going towards training the largest models possible, they need more to scale more.
(Inb4: Data is not the limitation -- Google has tons of data they are purposely not using, no one has the compute capacity to really use images and definitely not video or audio.)
I realize he isn't in AI, but why is Erik Hoel wrong in this post:
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/ai-progress-has-plateaued-at-gpt
Some excerpts:
"Employees who tested the new model, code-named Orion, reportedly found that even though its performance exceeds OpenAI’s existing models, there was less improvement than they’d seen in the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4.
If this were just a few hedged anonymous reports about “less improvement,” I honestly wouldn’t give it too much credence. But traditional funders and boosters like Marc Andreessen are also saying the models are reaching a “ceiling,” and now one of the great proponents of the scaling hypothesis (the idea that AI capabilities scale with how big they are and the amount of data they’re fed) is agreeing. Ilya Sutskever was always the quiet scientific brains behind OpenAI, not Sam Altman, so what he recently told Reuters should be given significant weight:
Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of AI labs Safe Superintelligence (SSI) and OpenAI, told Reuters recently that results from scaling up pre-training—the phase of training an AI model that uses a vast amount of unlabeled data to understand language patterns and structures—have plateaued."
What to make then, of the claim that researchers have unlocked a new axis of scaling by giving the models time to “think”? For this is what the entire industry will now rely on, both in practice but also to keep the sky-high hype alive.
I think this new axis of scaling will matter far less than people expect and will not keep the train of improvements chugging along anywhere near the previous rate.
First, this new type of scaling appears limited to certain domains: it makes the models no better on English language tasks or provides only minimal improvements for questions about biology, for instance. Second, there are good reasons to believe that this sort of scaling will be much more expensive: linear improvements for extreme sums of money."
As tech journalist Garrison Lovely wrote about it on Substack:
If you have a way of outcompeting human experts on STEM tasks, but it costs $1B to run on a days worth of tasks, you can't get to a capabilities explosion, which is the main thing that makes the idea of artificial general intelligence (AGI) so compelling to many people…. the y-axis is not on a log scale, while the x-axis is, meaning that cost increases exponentially for linear returns to performance (i.e. you get diminishing marginal returns to ‘thinking’ longer on a task). This reminds me of quantum computers or fusion reactors—we can build them, but the economics are far from working.
But I think people focusing on price or the domain-specificity of improvements are missing the even bigger picture about this new supposed scaling law. For what I’m noticing is that the field of AI research appears to be reverting to what the mostly-stuck AI of the 70s, 80s, and 90s relied on: search.
Re Hoel's essay:
Saturation along a straightforward axis is indeed always bad news.
I'm not as pessimistic about the combination of LLMs + search as Hoel is.
LLMs have always seemed to me to be like system 1 thinking - pattern recognition on steroids. And search is similar to system 2 thinking, articulating possibilities, then evaluating their relative merits.
I'm _not_ a worker in this field, so my gut reaction is ill-informed, but these _look_ complementary, and might still be a pathway to AGI.
I do think we can reasonably say that _some_ sort of artificial neural net must be able to reach AGI, since _we_ are neural nets, and _we_ exhibit general intelligence. But, this doesn't say that the _current_ artificial neural net interconnection _architecture_ can reach AGI, and exploring multiple alternative candidate architectures, at many millions of dollars of training costs per experiment, might be a deal-breaker :-(
I'm not one to go against Sutskever, his track record is certainly better than most. That said, I'd also be curious what, exactly, he's doing over at SSI, and how much he stands by how Erik is interpreting his words.
More broadly, 10x-ing the amount of compute and data that is fed into a GPT is no small task and I'd be somewhat surprised if anyone has gotten there. Is Orion 10x bigger than GPT4? The latter is almost 2 trillion parameters trained on 25000 GPUs using 13 trillion tokens. Is Orion 20 trillion parameters trained on 250000 GPUs using 130 trillion tokens? I'm really doubtful.
But such a model may well be linearly better than GPT4, in the same way GPT4 was linearly better than GPT3. There's just massive engineering challenges that need to be addressed first. I don't think Sutskever can solve those engineering problems with SSI, the company is not big enough. Note too that Sutskever was sorta probably pushed out of OAI, he didn't leave out of some scientific disagreement. Meanwhile, Microsoft (OAI) or Google might be able to actually hit the level of scale necessary for a real GPT5, and they are both certainly trying (again see the nuclear power expenditure). But getting your hands on 250000 GPUs (or some number of TPUs for Google) is tough! So imo it remains to be seen that the scaling hypothesis is truly dead. And my own circles of AI researcher friends sure seem to think there's more juice to squeeze.
>And my own circles of AI researcher friends sure seem to think there's more juice to squeeze.
I wish them luck! There may be other parameters to push, but it would certainly be bad news if (reasonably) straightforward scaling has plateaued.
There will always be people willing to throw money at fancy new tech. And the big companies have set out their stalls with AI versions of their own, from Microsoft to Google, all producing consumer versions to "try this and let it help you".
So there is too much money already spent on this to stop, or for share prices to fall. The faith is that AI progress will keep going, or even if it doesn't, that widespread adoption of it will keep the profits rolling. Internet of Things Mark II.
It's not that big of a deal, because even if the scaling laws do hold, they imply that you need exponentially increasing amounts of power and compute to eke out marginal gains in ability. What good is an AGI if you need one data center and one power plant to replace one human employee? Or even 1,000 humans?
I think it's pretty obvious that a pure transformer approach can't lead to true AGI, because we have yet to find a way to train models on small data sets, and there's only so much you can put in the context window. For a lot of tasks, there's just not enough data available to train an LLM on, you have to "learn on the job", and a pure transformer can't do this.
OpenAI's o1 approach is much more promising and shows that scale alone isn't everything. I'm somewhat sure that LLMs will be part of the first AGI, however.
"we have yet to find a way to train models on small data sets"
Humans have GI (General Intelligence), and I think THEY don't actually work on small data sets. Humans take in an awful lot of data points every second. Just the eyes have about 120 million rods and cones, each of which are collecting data many times per second.
Scaling up a process is linear, no matter how you do it. Economies of scale can reduce per-unit costs, but linearly. LLMs are an important milestone, being able to do things computers weren't expected to be able to do, but it will take another kind of technological leap to have geometric growth in AI.
We are born wired to pay attention to language, and to use the language we learn to make sense of experiences. We are wired to experience it as carrying meaning. We have a special brain area set up to organize and remember the language we hear, and find regularities and remember them. We are born with a craving to make sounds with our mouths, and to imitate sounds we hear. we are born preset to transfer what we know to other modalities —
writing, sign language, foreign languages. All that gives us an enormous advantage over a machine that has to figure out stuff from scratch.
Agreed on everything except your last sentence. Yes, we have, e.g. Broca's area.
But the language processing is the part of AGI that is a _solved_ problem at this point. Probably inefficiently solved, but solved. As you showed with your experiment with the pendulum problem, they are still getting very simple physics (what bumps into what) wrong. And I keep seeing them get simple chemistry questions wrong. But these aren't language problems.
Yeah, you're right about my last sentence. In fact it's odd to be denigrating AI about language, when it seems like that's the thing where it comes closest to being our equal. When I talk with GPT4 now, I don't even think about simplifying, just write my questions or comments exactly as I would here, and it understands fine. What I had in mind, but did not say, is that our inborn ability to master language is set up so that learning language and learning about the world link up easily, in fact they are sort of two sides of the same coin. Here are a couple small cute examples. : When my daughter was learning to talk we had 2 affectionate cats who hung out with her a lot. One day she was touching something soft -- I can't remember what -- and she said "it's kitty." And she didn't mean it was a kitty, she meant it was soft, as cats are. Learning the textures of things, and learning words for them, were part of the same process. Not knowing the word *soft* she felt free to invent a word by extending the meaning of a word she knew, and knew I knew. Here's another example, sort of a cousin of the first, I think from when she was 3: We were in a Starbux and slow jazz was playing, and I asked her if she liked the music. "It's whiny," she said.
So the hard-to-duplicate thing about our species isn't that we are set up to learn language, and so can do it with way smaller samples. It's that we're set up to learn langauge *and integrate that* with learning about world. So the way we know what pendulums do comes both from things we've read or been told and from handling objects.
Many Thanks! Yes, the LLMs have a lot of trouble with things that we learned with our senses, and that we, as you said, _linked_ to language.
>It's that we're set up to learn langauge and _integrate that_ with learning about world.
Yup. And a good chunk of how humans learn is by acting on the world, both physically and socially, and seeing the reaction. As you said:
>When my daughter was learning to talk we had 2 affectionate cats who hung out with her a lot. One day she was _touching_ something soft -- I can't remember what -- and she said "it's kitty." And she didn't mean it was a kitty, she meant it was soft, as cats are.
[emphasis added, and also agree about the generalization she did]
Reading enormous amounts of text can substitute for _some_ of this, but LLMs clearly have problems in these areas, and it isn't clear how far into something like robots-who-can-play we would need to go to get around them.
"We are born wired to pay attention to language"
I dispute this assumption. We are born with awesome pattern-matching brains, which recognize sounds, gestures, differences in pitch, and myriad other things, and determine ways to use some of these things to communicate with others. Language is learned behavior.
Machines, on the other hand, are nothing but Chinese rooms so far. Even the idea that they interact with language must be programmed into them. Any dataset can be interpreted any number of ways, and it is up to the programmers to choose which ways.
It’s well known that our brain is set up to attend to and learn language. Really. If you doubt me, google something like “is human brain optimized for language.”. iIf you still doubt it, read the links.
I don't think you understand me. Yes, the brains perceives the components of language. But "language" itself is for communication, which is something the brain determines for itself. We do know an awful lot about how the brain handles such things (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_processing_in_the_brain).
Consider a thought experiment of taking some people as babies, and raising them without teaching them any known languages. They will likely develop their own languages to interact with each other, and making mouth sounds will probably be only one part of that. If a baby were abandoned in an isolated area and somehow survived, it would not develop any language capability, until it conceived the desire to communicate, perhaps with animals it befriends.
So I'm saying that the brain is CAPABLE of language, and is good at it, but it isn't really programmed in any way for language specifically. A bicycle is designed for travel. It could be placed into a device that converts the energy of motion into electricity. Even though it generates electricity well, it remains designed to convert a person's energy into wheel rotation.
> Humans take in an awful lot of data points every second. Just the eyes have about 120 million rods and cones, each of which are collecting data many times per second.
I don't think this argument works, because almost none of that sensor data is used for text-based learning. When a human reads the definition of a previously unknown word plus one example (corresponding to maybe 50 tokens), they're able to use it from now on. It doesn't matter that the eyes are collecting Megabytes-equivalent of data while reading that short text, because that sensor data still only contains about 50 tokens worth of training data.
An LLM is able to temporarily "learn" to use a new word this way, as long as its definition is still in the context window. However, to permanently learn this word (i.e., to modify the model itself), a lot more examples and training data are required. Maybe a sufficient amount of synthetic training data can be generated by the model itself from the definition in the context window; however, I don't consider this a "pure" transformer architecture anymore, but rather a system with the LLM as one of its components.
You're thinking of learning like a computer or data scientist. Living things don't think that way, and though it may be inefficient, it is certainly effective. LLMs analyze text because they have a format of data analysis programmed in that allows symbols to be correlated in that way. Brains, however, figure out HOW TO CORRELATE THE DATA, and which data to correlate.
In other words, which pieces of data should be included in analysis? We make the decision for LLMs. Imagine giving LLMs long strings of bits to analyze, say 2^100 bits long. What is it to make of it? We could have encoded a bunch of pictures in a certain format, or encyclopedias of informational text, or some format of blueprints of various buildings, or recordings of various sounds. A brain figures out what the sensory information means, but a LLM must somehow be "told".
>and which data to correlate
That's essentially what the "attention" layers in the transformer architecture do. And the adjustable parameters in them get optimized during training, along with the other parameters, so, yes, LLMs do learn
>which pieces of data should be included in analysis
maybe also delaying the consequences
of this view becoming the norm.
What does Europe do? It used to be a fun place to vacation, but now they get angry at us when we go there. What purpose does Europe serve anymore?
Come up with solutions that are then ignored by other countries.
Well, it's a pretty good place to store all the Europeans so they don't come over here and be angry at us.
Also, there are still plenty of places in Europe where people don't generally get angry at Americans. Thought I'm certain they'd be willing to make an exception for certain Americans.
Did you think the purpose of Europe was American tourism. The vast majority of tourism in Europe is from Europe.
A few cities are feeling over congested but that is it. Mostly tourism is a very important part of the European economy
As other respondents said, I think the basic premise is mistaken (or very context-dependent at best). I can think of a few unserious answers as to the purpose of Europe.
1) Give Americans places for cheaper (yet chic) vacations where you can drink tap water.
2) Showcase how to properly be left-wing (think of how many meanings this sentence can have!).
3) Give the World Spirit some psychological drama for this grand story of stories that They’re realizing.
4) Give more data and customers to tech companies (there are more Facebook users in Europe than in the US).
5) School of life for the US “greatest generations”. Why don’t Americans cook up another big European war again? (As everyone knows*, the UK only got the atomic bomb because France did. You can still rekindle the 900-old rivalry!)
*Well, that’s what actors playing top-level UK bureaucrats in a comedic 1980’s TV show say in-character anyway. Why would they lie?
Wonderful list!
What makes you think they get angry with us when we go there? I've been there multiple times in the last 12 months, I didn't encounter anyone who seemed angry at my presence.
I think they mean there's a bunch of people in social media saying "argh tourism is bad", and anecdotally I've seen graffiti in more than one place I traveled to saying "refugees welcome, tourists go away" (granted in the rest of Europe, not in England).
I think this sentiment is just people blaming bad economic conditions on a scapegoat, and it's probably a minority of people. If tourism actually decreased many European cities would actually suffer.
I have read that high profile destinations like Venice are getting overwhelmed by large scale group tourism from countries like China whose citizens aren’t well socialized for tourism (yet). Also, social media drives large numbers of young people to take their selfies in the same Instagrammable locations, causing bottlenecks.
Yeah, people used to complain about American tourists but that was before Chinese tourists were a thing.
There's people on social media saying literally anything you can think of at any given moment. I'd save the worrying about people being mean to you when you vacation in Europe for when they are, actually, mean to you when you vacation in Europe.
Most of the anti-tourist attitudes are probably aimed mostly at other Euros.
Chances of random Euros being "angry at Americans when they go there" have never been particularly high as far as I know, but is probably lower now than during the Iraq War.
The purpose of countries isn't to serve Americans. People live there!
As an American, I can only say ?!?!?!?!
From one source (https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/8rmsx2/the_un_decided_to_do_a_worldwide_survey/):
The UN decided to do a worldwide survey, with just a single question. The only question asked was: "Would you please give your honest opinion about solutions to the food shortage in the rest of the world?" The survey was a huge flop.
In Africa they didn't know what "food" meant. In Eastern Europe, they didn't know what "honest" meant. In Western Europe, they didn't know what "shortage" meant. In China, they didn't know what "opinion" meant. In the Middle East, they didn't know what "solution" meant. In South America, they didn't know what "please" meant. And in the USA, they didn't know what "the rest of the world" meant.
I love this joke!
This made my day. Thank you for sharing the joke!
Who is “us”? I recently went to Europe and they weren’t angry with me.
Why does Turbo Tax have a near monopoly on tax software? Is it mostly due to:
1. Marketing and branding
2. Quality, ease of use
3. They got in early with the IRS and have a sweetheart deal
4. Other
The software actually works. I have all sorts of negative feelings about Turbo Tax in specific and regulatory capture in general, but they found me a deduction once that will cover all the money I'll ever pay in Turbo Tax fees for the rest of my life.
It might be partly mindshare, and I say that because I'm a TaxAct (H&R Block) user, but yes TT is the one everybody knows.
It's not like Turbo Tax is comparable to Microsoft Office applications. Excel and Word have inertia because they are the standard we share with each other in the business world.
We don't need to share our Turbo Tax with each other, right? So why do people keep turning to it instead of a cheaper alternative?
They can prepopulate much of my data as a returning customer, and I can typically do my taxes each year in less than an hour. For me, it's not worth the search cost to find something cheaper to save $100.
Also, I've heard it alledged that TT lobbies for more complex tax laws to help maintain their confuseopoly position in the market, but not sure of this.
Regardless of your politics, what are people doing to prepare for the incoming administration? Buying crypto or real estate to get around inflation? Getting all your vaccinations done ahead of schedule in case access is disrupted? Buying organic food in case food safety is disrupted? Nothing in particular?
I bought oil and gas stock index and partially sold long-term (20+ years) US government bonds index. Also I've started to incrementally increase my S and P 500 allocation.
Practicing my "sympathetic yet ironic detachment" face in case anyone IRL tries to talk to me about it.
all of those things sound like massive overreactions to me, but if they help you sleep at night then you do you.
My default assumption is that Trump's second term will be a lot like his first (hopefully without the pandemic at the end).
> "all of those things sound like massive overreactions to me"
The "every-day-it's-worse" cabinet picks really seem to indicate otherwise, but hopefully you are right
Epstein for Secretary of Education! Oh, he's dead? OK, that old girlfriend of his who's in jail, how about her? And I know it's a bit weird, but how about a dung beetle for Sec. of Health. And what about that guy who wore a Viking helmet in the Senate for Sec of State. Fearless, you know?
Dung Beetle? Quietly takes care of shit - perfect resume for any cabinet position I say.
Buying Trump buttplugs for Christmas presents
https://www.etsy.com/il-en/listing/1358286625/donald-trump-butt-plug-desk-office?click_key=23bd5be96665820e34c760f08cd20328434190ee%3A1358286625&click_sum=31266222&ref=sold_out-5
I'm being trolled. But that's OK.
So you WANT Trump up your ass? Interesting.
Up yours.
I'm considering buying several 2.5 gallon containers of glyphosate and triclopyr.
* Bought Series-I bonds up to the purchase limit for myself and my wife.
* Decided to take the saver's credit this year instead of realizing capital gains, as the Trump tax cuts aren't going anywhere for at least another four years.
I'm buying lots of handguns and knives
I'm preparing for a life of crime for when the economy goes to shit.
Any trustworthy analysis on why the final Selzer poll in Iowa (which showed Harris *ahead* by 3 percentage points) wound up so wrong (Trump won by 13 percentage points or so)? Selzer has a long and impressive track record, and it doesn't look like there was a dumb spreadsheet entry error or anything of that sort. Did the poll just get massively unlucky, on a level analogous to "we got p<.005, but the null hypothesis was in fact correct; this was the 5-in-a-thousand chance"?
One of the wackier conspiracy posts about the election I've seen is that Selzer's poll was correct *but* Musk and Trump hacked the voting machines and stole the votes, which is why the results of the poll didn't tally with the election results.
That's some religious level of faith in "Ann Selzer is always right" there.
On the other side of the wackiness gap, I've also seen suggestions (but how serious versus tongue-in-cheek I have no way of assessing) that Selzer was going to retire anyway, so she decided to burn all her credibility to get the result she wanted. Release a poll showing Harris with a massive lead, hopefully discourage all the grubby MAGA voters from turning up and energise the Brat Summer set to turn out and be part of the victory.
I don't believe either set of alternatives, but I do lean towards "Selzer was getting the results she might have subconsciously wanted" as one reason why the polling was so out of sync. Even pollsters are only human and have their biases.
The analyses I've read emphasize that her polling method was unusually "hands-off"; that is, she adjusts for very few factors. I found an old 538 article saying merely "age, sex, and congressional district". It turned out that, in this election, there was an effect that strongly confounded that uncontrolled analysis - I would suspect education as the culprit, given that the college/no-college split widened this year, and that education correlates with polling response rates. There was probably also some nontrivial amount of random error, though I suspect it didn't have to be on the order of thousands-to-one.
I think if there's an aberrant thing here, it's people being overimpressed by her track record - overcorrecting based on a small set of dramatic events, starting in 2008. No shade to her, really - she's always been transparent about her method, why she likes it, and its limitations - but it should have been clear that her method wasn't magic, and it was always vulnerable to this. While it avoided pitfalls others fell into in other cycles, as soon as there was a really significant split which wasn't substantially correlated with her sole controls of age, sex, and district, her methods were going to yield results divorced from reality. It's a shame it happened so dramatically when she was planning to retire anyway, ending her career on a sour note.
> I think if there's an aberrant thing here, it's people being overimpressed by her track record - overcorrecting based on a small set of dramatic events, starting in 2008
I don't know if they were overimpressed by her track record, so much as they were overimpressed by the fact that she was telling them what they wanted to hear. I swear that 99% of the people telling me how reliable Selzer's polls were on November 2 had never heard of the name Selzer on October 31. She went from obscure specialist to household name and back again faster than anyone since... well, I dunno, I'm sure there's other examples but I've forgotten them all.
There were outliers on the other side too which didn't get nearly as much attention. I remember a few polls showing Trump winning New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York.
Prior to this election, at least Nate Silver was impressed with her, and his judgment counts for something in my book. (A lot of the commentary around the latest poll specifically may have been Democrats hyping news they wanted to here, but readers of Nate Silver would have been familiar with Selzer for a while.)
Yeah I expect Nate Silver to be familiar with Ann Selzer, I was just bugged by all the random civilians who were suddenly telling me that Ann Selzer was the bestest pollster ever despite the fact that they hadn't heard of her a week earlier.
Someone, I think maybe Silver or a commenter on his site, mentioned that the crosstabs were crazy. Way too many women, especially within certain subfields.
This is helpful - thank you!
This. The only thing I'd add is that she's been famous in large part because she was historically willing to buck the trend, and while she got lucky the last few times (and is actually a good pollster), being willing to buck the trend does mean you'll also be loudly incredibly wrong sometimes. So her being so visibly off here is in some ways correlated with her being impressively right in the past.
This is the man Trump wants in charge of Medicare and Medicaid:
https://x.com/ShadowofEzra/status/1858995616161890670
I was expecting to see people criticize Dr. Oz as a pick, I was not expecting to see someone criticizing him on the grounds that he was supportive of a trans kid on his show.
Watch the entire clip. The "girl" barely remembers being a boy. Then the mother (it's ALWAYS the mother) "reminds" her that she didn't like getting her hair cut and she compliantly gives the "correct" answer that it was because she was a "girl not a boy." Munchausen syndrome by proxy.
I did watch the clip, which is why I described it the way I did rather than the inflammatory way the tweet does. The mother says they didn't know anything about being transgender until the pediatrician diagnosed it, and I certainly wouldn't accuse someone of making up the story for attention based on a one-minute clip of them.
And regardless of what you think of the mother, Dr. Oz just seems generically polite and validating here, in the way I'd expect most TV personalities to be. Were you expecting him to yell at the girl and tell her she's a boy?
"Were you expecting him to yell at the girl and tell her she's a boy?"
Ideological Turing Test failed.
Rhetorical questions are attempts at ITTs now, apparently.
Beat those strawmen!
For anyone who doesn't want to follow a Twitter link, FYI it's Dr. Oz and that's not a joke.
The year is 2030 and the US is in a civil war. Given those facts, what do you think the most likely steps were that led to the war?
Trump's pick for Minister for Technology makes a statement officially recognising Vim as superiour to Emacs.
There isn't any plausible scenario for a US civil war in the next 6 years, but I'll try:
Trump goes full slash-and-burn against the Federal government: FBI is disbanded; HUD, Dept of Education eliminated, others radically downsized; Federal funding is pulled from all Universities that have any DEI or grievance-studies departments. This creates massive economic dislocation as significant streams of federal money dry up. At the same time AGI is created at OpenAI and they declare explicit anti-administration political intentions as the state of California aligns with them. The administration begins a serious crackdown on illegal immigration and sends National Guard troops to detain them. Coastal cities declare themselves immigration sanctuaries and refuse to admit federal troops. Trump freaks out about OpenAI and considers it a national security priority to have the newly-minted AGI firmly in control of the federal government. OpenAI refuses and California aligns with them. There is open rioting in the streets as political protests grow unruly so Trump sends Federal troops to California to a) restore order b) detain illegals and c) secure OpenAI. Democrats win the midterms on the back of a 2008-level recession and rampant inflation. They use their control of Congress to impeach Trump on completely baseless politically-motivated charges. The vote is close but he's removed from office amid rumors of unscrupulous practices by the Democrats (which are actually true - they threaten the families of several key swing votes with violence in a very "wink wink" organized crime sort of way) so Trump refuses to leave office and appeals the impeachment to SCOTUS which rules in his favor. Progressives declare SCOTUS a GOP-apologist kangaroo court and refuse to accept the verdict. Coastal progressive states collectively declare Trump an outlaw and refuse to cooperate with the Federal government. Military leaders are divided along regional lines and bases in progressive states formally refuse to acknowledge Trump's legitimacy. Hilarity ensues.
Disgruntled fanatics on the right side of history suddenly discovered the Second Amendment was in fact right and dropped all their calls for gun control so they could tool up and riot in the streets.
Being leftists, they were of course fissiparous, which is why you now have the People's Independent Democratic Republic militia duking it out with the Socialist Democratic People's Front terrorist cells and both of them making and breaking alliances with the Democratic Republic of All Folx Peaceful Protest (And Suitcase Nukes) Units, themselves considered by analysts to be in danger of breaking up between the All Folx, the Y'All Folx, and the "Damn it, it's spelled 'folks' Grammar Communist Cadre" factions.
The rest of the country just grills, drinks beer, and goes to sportsball games 😁
I can see it.
AI leads to superpowered scissors statements and/or superpersuader effects. As a result, you can get any of these:
* Almost every person hates almost every other person.
* Polarization gets taken to the extreme.
* People randomly get sucked into online rabbit holes and emerge as people with drastically different views and values than they had before.
* AI which can convince people of anything just by talking to them, so the first movers get massive cults behind them, and use them however they see fit. Conversation is acknowledged as dangerous, so communications are shut down, exacerbating previous disputes.
>AI leads to superpowered scissors statements and/or superpersuader effects.
Hmm... Kind-of an AI-driven zombie apocalypse?
Interesting.
Big protest of something or other, police show up to break it up, shots are exchanged, and a celebrity of some kind is killed in the crossfire, prompting both sides to go all in. Who's the American Francis Ferdinand? I'm going with... Weird Al Yankovic. The assassination of Weird Al Yankovic leads to civil war.
When you can't find a damned foolish thing _in_ the Balkans, find a damned foolish thing _from_ the Balkans (I like Weird Al, FWIW)
I like it.
We find out the entire calendar system is significantly wrong, and the date previously thought of as 1863 is in fact 2030.
You guys are no fun sometimes.
Define civil war?
If your definition involves neat lines of blue or grey coated men carrying muskets, then I would think the most probable steps involve invention of an ASI which then placed us in a Matrix style simulation, deciding for its own ineffable reasons that the *nineteenth* century was the pinnacle of our civilization.
This is the inadvertent correct answer.
The US will get into a civil war over the proper definition of "civil war".
The Navajo Reservation decides to secede from the United States.
The US Government doesn't want to acknowledge it, but also doesn't want to step in and violently put it down, so there's an awkward state of technical civil war happening.
Would it mean anything legally for the Navajo Nation to secede from the US? Does anyone know?
I'm doubting that "technical civil war" means anything. I think civil war can only exist if a reasonable person thinks it does or some standard like that.
It's a civil war fought primarily with technicals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_(vehicle)
(The best kind of civil war!)
Well if there were a legal means for the Navajo to secede then it wouldn't be a civil war any more. It didn't "mean anything" legally for the South to secede from the US, or the US to secede from the British Empire, but that didn't stop it from happening.
You can imagine various low-level skirmishes going on that turn it into a more real war if you like, to raise it above the threshold where you could say "hmm I guess this does really count as a civil war" but not above the threshold where the US military simply comes in and stomps everyone.
I don't think this is likely, but a tiny civil war that just counts as a civil war seems like a much more likely scenario than a massive war of all against all.
Hmm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_War - Does this count as a tiny civil war?
I'm going to say "Trump refuses to leave office and gets a few generals to agree with him on that", or "After Trump leaves office the Democrats charge him with treason and execute him, leading to a popular revolt", or "Congress passes an Australia style firearms ban." But honestly, I can't see any of those as being likely to happen.
Thanks.
Of course civil war isn't likely. But given that it's not likely and given that it happened anyway, I'm curious what sort of scenarios people think are most likely.
Has anyone done a Scott Alexander style “more than you ever wanted to know” about seed oils?
My prior is that the whole thing pattern matches to every nutrition fad: some interesting but not terribly conclusive studies challenge conventional wisdom (in this case, that linoleic-acid is good for heart health) and trigger a current year bogeyman (inflammation!), then pop culture health influencers amp it to 11 and insist they’ve discovered the one magic bullet that explains all our health woes. Bonus points if you can blame it on modernism and double bonus if you can spin a conspiracy theories about BIG FOOD and their effort to POISON us for PROFIT. Until a few years later none of it really pans out, nutritionist update slightly to “maybe eat a bit less of that if you’re sensitive” and the health influencers move on to the next demon food.
But I’d be happy to approach on objective summary with an open mind.
Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein have a sort of intro-level explanation of why seed oils are bad, or rather, why one ought to infer at a layman level that they're probably bad (they presumably have empirical research that supports the layperson reasoning): seeds, unlike other parts of a plant, do not want* to be consumed. They want to grow into new plants. To help with that, they make themselves non-nutritious to animals, relative to, say, fruit, which *does* want to be eaten in order to carry the seeds elsewhere to spread the plant's lineage. In general, we can expect a part of a plant to be nutritious if (a) eating it would help the plant's lineage and (b) the plant wasn't artificially engineered into "forgetting" what helps it.
They have a book called _The Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century_, that I think goes into some detail on this.
*"want" here is in the evolutionary sense (Heying and Weinstein are evolutionary biologists) - shorthand for "evolve in the direction of".
> seeds, unlike other parts of a plant, do not want* to be consumed
The counter example that disproves this is that some seeds (e.g. coffee beans) do get eaten and pooped so they can spread.
"Consumed" here means in the sense of being dismantled and used for nutrition. Simply passing through a GI tract doesn't count toward this. (Indeed, an animal won't want to eat things simply to pass undigested through it, unless those things come with some other benefit. The plant, by contrast, would be perfectly fine with this, and encourage it for its seeds.)
Evolution is too wacky to consistently apply anything like this. There are all sorts of healthy and edible plant parts that aren't the fruiting body; carrots, onions, potatoes. In fact, the fruit of the potato plant is poisonous to humans while the tuber is not, in direct contradiction.
I agree, but will also broaden it in that people aren't the only beings to eat fruits and vegetables. For example, deer eat and enjoy poison ivy, and many birds love eating seeds of various kinds. And anything produced by a plant, if not sprouting into a new plant, will be recycled by other living beings, such as bacteria and fungi.
>while the tuber is not
Well, there is _some_ solanine in potatoes. Green potatoes can have enough to be toxic https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/002875.htm
Well, I agree evolution is pretty chaotic. To take your examples: all three of those vegetables are very aggressively bred from the original wild stock, so to some extent, all bets are off. Or alternately, we say these lineages have "adapted" to being spread by the humans who are functionally symbiotes, and indeed, the human-bred varieties grow in vast numbers.
The wild carrot, aka Queen Anne's lace, birds nest, et al., is a wildflower with a woody root. The seeds are apparently edible and aromatic, but maybe only if cooked, and I can't tell if they're nourishing.
The onion is virtually only existent as an artificial cultivar; the wild varieties (there are several) have bulbs that animals will eat, but the bulbs are not the seeds.
Potatoes grow from their eyes, which are nodes in the tuber. Aha! ...But an animal would have to dig for that tuber. Certainly, they do. I'm honestly not 100% sure what's going on there; maybe the eyes aren't digestible, so gophers et al. end up just spreading them the same way tomatoes get spread.
Hmm. I've eaten onions and other edible stems like leeks growing in the woods, which afaik are wild cultivars. But when eating a fruit, whatever eats it also ingests seeds which are excreted later, propagating the plant. That doesn't work for tubers or stems, since eating them prevents the plant from sprouting. Potato tubers sprout from eyes, which contain the same inedible toxins as the potato fruit. But this can also be avoided by just eating the potato before the eyes sprout.
I'm skeptical of seed oils, but...wouldn't that same logic apply to animal fats? No animal *wants* to get eaten, after all.
An animal doesn't want to die, but doesn't much care what happens to its fatty tissues after it does. Either it has surviving kids or it doesn't, and evolution is mostly going to work on "don't get killed until you've had plenty of kids".
A plant, evolutionarily speaking, *does* care what happens to its seeds after it dies. Or even while it still lives but the seeds have fallen/been harvested. So there's reason for evolution to work on "please don't eat my seeds".
Whether this effect is strong enough to have rendered seed oils subtly unhealthy for human consumption. is questionable. Evolutionary biology is quite good at conjuring just-so stories that are probably directionally true, but not at a significant level. And I'd expect that if evolution *had* significantly optimized for "please don't eat my seeds", the result would be something dramatically different than "really tasty oil that probably gives you heart disease in twenty years".
Good point! I hadn't considered that.
I think the idea there is that animal fat is serving a role for the animal that grows it. Ideally, an animal wants to be as tasteless to predators as possible; however, it also wants to survive times where food is hard to find. Fat is the easiest way to do that, and there are other ways to avoid predators, so animals grow fat, but also claws, quills, sensitive ears, legs that move them fast, etc.
Properly, we ought to apply the same idea to plants. I suspect a seed can only be so unnourishing before it can't even make a new plant, so that's the floor, and the plant has to explore other methods of surviving to the next round as well, and sure enough, while they haven't tried running away, they do grow spines, poisonous leaves, bark, and other tricks.
So then my question would be whether any of these tricks are enough to make a plant just not "care" how good its seeds are to eat, but that ends up functioning on whether it costs energy for a plant to defend its seeds that could be instead channeled into something else that helps it thrive. I imagine a plant wants seeds with enough stored energy to grow that new plant, but not so much energy that animals seek it out, so no matter how I slice it, it makes sense to me that a plant would send some of that energy into animal-repelling tech, but maybe not as much into parts of itself that aren't quite as critical - or even sending that into something that *attracts* animals that will help it spread, such as birds and bats and insects.
What’s the actual mechanism? That sounds like a just-so story.
Animals also do not want to be eaten, and yet their meat is tasty and nutritious.
I don't know their account much beyond what I described above, but if I tried to lay it out based on what I know of evolution:
Plant seeds will be nutritious or not. If they aren't, then animals will adapt to not eat them, and the seeds will survive, and so will the lineage. If they are nutritious, animals will adapt to eating more of them until they go extinct, or adapt to be non-nutritious or repel the animal with something that leaves that animal worse off, encourages the animal to not digest the seeds, etc.
Ergo, plant seeds "want" to be less nutritious. Ergo, any plant that's evolved on this planet sufficiently long (and hasn't been extensively fiddled with by geneticists or breeders) will possess seeds that aren't nutritious - or are as non-nutritious as the plant can manage while still permitting germination, or will be coupled with toxins.
It isn't one sided though - any animal that wants to eat seeds will be more successful if it can digest seed oils. And humans in particular seem to be pretty good at eating a wide range of plants that have evolved to avoid getting eaten (tolerant of caffeine, capsaicin, etc.)
I think the idea here is to distinguish which things humans have adapted biologically to eating, from which things they've adapted to technologically (either humans to them, or them to humans). The evolutionary biologist's argument is that the former process enables us to be nourished and not poisoned by what we're choosing to eat through good old fashioned natural selection; the latter goes too fast for that to work, and we could easily damage ourselves faster than the biological adaptation process can do its work to acclimate.
One possible answer to this is to speed up acclimation with technology, too. I haven't seen Heying and Weinstein address this possibility specifically, but based on my experience following their Q&A sessions, I'd guess their answer would be that this is possible in theory, but currently, technology doesn't know how to do this. Moreover, they might maintain that the human body, like any lifeform, is so complex that it's likely to outpace any technological solution in the foreseeable future - including the parts of our bodies that get harmed by technologically engineered food. (This is consistent with a rule of thumb I *have* heard them say, which is, when in doubt, the fewer the processing steps performed to make your food edible in the short term, the better it probably is for you in the long term.)
Hmm. Fruit is the only part of plants that is “designed” to be eaten (plus or minus nectar to attract pollinators), and most herbivores do not exclusively eat fruit. Ergo I don’t think the logic fully holds.
At any rate, seeds must contain some degree of nutrition, else they would not perform their function of fueling the newly germinating plant.
Lots of seeds are not easily digestible (to survive being eaten with the fruit) but that doesn’t mean they are necessarily inedible, nonnutritious, or toxic.
The seeds I think of as indigestible are the ones with a hard coating that looks designed to survive going through a GI tract or just being avoided by a rummaging animal. So, yeah.
I agree seeds have to be at least *somewhat* nutritious - while you responded here, I was saying as much to other replies. The idea there is that there are multiple ways for that plant to defend its seeds. One is to reduce the reward to the animal by reducing the nutrition. Another is to raise the cost with seed coatings, and toxins.
In this case I agree with Nassim Taleb, considering that we have a lot of oils we've been using for millenia, why become a guinea pig testing new stuff? it's almost impossible to prove that modern seed oils have no long term adverse effects
The problem is that it's almost impossible to prove that [insert words here] have no long term adverse effects. If this is our standard nothing new can be ever done.
Not at all. If something has been consumed for millenia we can observe long term effects. Also one could argue that genuinely harmful substances would not pass the evolutionary filter but I'm less sure about this argument.
“If something has been consumed for millennia we can observe long term effects.”
I don’t think this is at all obvious. How exactly would we? How would this experiment be designed?
Basically agreed. If something has very visible adverse effects, and it is very obviously linked to consumption of a given food (e.g. group A and B are identical except group B consumes one extra food, and regularly keels over ten years before group A) then maybe...
Generally, though:
- We only started to look at disease patterns systematically with John Snow's work on cholera in 1854. Earlier than that - well, people _were_ dropping dead quickly from cholera, it _was_ from water (from a particular source) that they consumed, and no one isolated the cause before then.
- Even for things we have been consuming for millennia, the dose may change. Sucrose has been consumed for a long time, but the _amounts_ that e.g. the USA population consumes are recent
- It is damned hard to isolate the effects of _one_ food (short of having people drop dead immediately after consuming it). Given different groups which have all sorts of differences, including many differences in diet, attributing illnesses (particularly long term illnesses) to particular causes is excruciatingly difficult
Even more damning, the Romans used lead for plates and plumbing for - at least - centuries, clearly unable to detect its toxicity. Like you said, only obviously toxic foods where the link between consumption and illness is immediate, are easily identified.
The State of California warns of the long term adverse effects of [living in the State of California].
Literally! See, e.g., Prop 65.
As being tautologically the sort of person who reads Scott Alexander, I was hoping for something more than the naturalistic fallacy.
I can't add much to what Michael Watts wrote below, that's pretty much what I think
On a related note, while answering this I learned thanks to wikipedia that "naturalistic fallacy" is also a philosophical term that has nothing to do with appeal to nature as an argument
Perhaps I was being imprecise to call it the “naturalistic fallacy”, but whether it’s that, an appeal to nature, an appeal to the precautionary principle, an isolated demand for rigor, or whatever, I think the essence is the same - you’re just stating a prior to prefer more “natural” stuff absent (impossible) proof of the absence of harm from newer less natural stuff. And I was hoping for a more rigorous evaluation of the “seed oils are bad” claim.
Besides, you’re a guinea pig either way because you don’t eat or live like we have “for millennia”. This whole thing started when scientists thought they had (and maybe still have) pretty good evidence that a reliance on saturated animal fats plus the modern lifestyle does have adverse effects - the “for millennia” safety doesn’t apply because we mostly ate a lot less and got killed by other stuff before heart disease from too much tallow would have been a big problem.
Yes, I'm a guinea pig in many ways, but it doesn't mean that I want to experiment with seed oils when a perfectly good time-tested alternative in the form of olive oil exists in my neck of the woods
You're right that it's a prior. But if you want to argue that it's wrong, perhaps you should show that there are numerous traditionally used foods that turned out to be harmful (because we know of many modern ones that were later recognised as harmful). The only one that came to my mind was alcohol, Claude added betel nuts and agave syrup but when I pressed him on it he had to admit that agave syrup is also a recent invention. So it looks like the only undeniably unhealthy traditional foods are those that have psychoactive effects.
>But if you want to argue that it's wrong, perhaps you should show that there are numerous traditionally used foods that turned out to be harmful (because we know of many modern ones that were later recognised as harmful). The only one that came to my mind was alcohol, Claude added betel nuts and agave syrup but when I pressed him on it he had to admit that agave syrup is also a recent invention.
https://www.samitivejhospitals.com/article/detail/colon-cancer-risk
tldr: Broiling producing PAHs, mold toxins (the article mentions in garlic) nitrite preserved foods with N-nitrosamines
What's the relationship between "considering that we have a lot of oils we've been using for millen[n]ia, why become a guinea pig testing new stuff?" and the naturalistic fallacy?
The assumption that we should be skeptical of new stuff because it’s new (and by implication, leas natural) and that we are “guinea pigs” if we consume it is pretty textbook naturalism.
That's in your mind. The argument is perfectly sound as stated - things we've been doing for thousands of years are unlikely to hurt us. There's no assumption about what is or isn't natural.
Oh, well if you declare it to be correct, how can I object?
Life has a 100% fatality rate. Objectively lots of stuff we do and have been doing a long time is harmful. Objectively lots of stuff we haven’t been doing for thousands of years is helpful to our health and longevity.
At the heart of it, despite the process for getting there, there is nothing really novel about the constituents of seed oil - just the relative composition of the various fatty acid types. Linoleic acid, the supposed bogeyman, is literally essential to human life, we’re just eating *more* of it than we have historically. In a more general sense we *have* been eating heavily processed seeds (cereal grains) for millennia, literally since the birth of agriculture.
So I guess a steel man version of “this is a major change in our historical lipid balance, proceed with caution” I could buy. But that’s a *prior*, not evidence (and the actual evidence seems to show a poor global correlation between seed oil consumption and obesity rates - obesity is much more strongly correlated with GDP).
To the extent Scott has something of a soft prior for Chesterton’s fence barring other evidence, and a general agreement that something about “processed food” is bad, fine (although he seems to share my frustration that nobody can really pin down scientifically what that is). But his article on saturated fat (linked in this thread) is ultimately pretty dismissive of key aspects of the seed oil theory.
> and trigger a current year bogeyman (inflammation!)
This is such a weird bogeyman. Inflammation, like fever, is the reaction you have to something going wrong, your mechanism of putting it right again. The expectation for artificially reducing existing inflammation has to be that it will make your situation worse, not better.
Steelmanning, I presume that the argument is that we want to remove the cause of chronic inflammation, not that we want to suppress the inflammation as a symptom.
In the specific case of seed oils, Don P. is correct. The theory is that a component of the oils (specifically linoleic acid) is a direct cause of inflammation (by one of its metabolites I think?). Basically, “stop consuming this thing that your body feels the need to attack”. Nothing to do with inflammation suppression per se.
You seem to be commenting on a much more general trend.
That's definitely untrue; all the energy is going toward suppressing inflammation itself.
I've asked my mother (a doctor) about this question for fevers, and her take is that we suppress fevers because, in the event that the fever was actually necessary, we can fall back on hospitalization to deal with whatever the fever was going to prevent.
For inflammation, I don't think even that much thought has gone into it; nobody knows what the inflammation is responding to.
Followup question: let's suppose I accept that seed oils might be bad and are probably worth eliminating just in case. What oil should I use in my cooking instead? Olive oil has a low smoke point, and things like coconut or avocado oil have a strong taste.
My experience is that avocado oil has an extremely mild taste, certainly milder than olive oil. Speaking as an avid home chef, avocado oil is my go-to daily oil. For certain use cases, I also keep olive oil (basically just for Italian), bacon grease (richness and searing steaks) and peanut oil (high heat for deep frying) on hand.
Depends on which theory you subscribe to about why seed oils are bad. If you think unsaturated fats are bad, go with lard or ghee. If you think PUFAs are bad, go with safflower oil… a seed oil. If you think a low omega 6 to omega 3 ratio is important, go with canola oil… a seed oil. Uh oh.
As far as I can tell, anything with high omega 3 is going to have a low smoke point.
Lard is very unsaturated compared to butter, ghee, tallow or coconut oil.
Safflower oil is like 70% linoleic acid, a PUFA, and widely regarded to be the most dangerous one. I'm not sure why you think it's low PUFA.
Most seed oil avoiders don't care so much about the omega 3 to 6 ratio, mostly they try to avoid linoleic acid and other unsaturated fats full stop. Butter is what most people cook with.
I’m seeing conflicting versions of fat breakdowns on safflower oil. I was going off a graphic showing it as having a very high percentage of monounsaturated fat.
I think what’s going on is that there are recently (GMO?) high oleic acid varieties of safflower oil being produced.
In any case there does not seem to be a 1-1 correspondence between “seed oil” and “highest linoleic acid” content, at least among plant derived oils, though a couple of the highest linoleic acid varieties are indeed from seeds. Which I thought odd.
Oh, and you’re right about lard relative to beef tallow, but the poster I’m responding to rejected avocado and coconut oil as being strongly flavored, and lard is more neutral tasting IMO.
Avocado oil being strongly flavored? This is strange, it's actually pretty neutral.
Butter is low smoke point. You can turn it into ghee and it works great for frying.
I like the idea of going back to animal fats! Suet and lard and dripping, as well as fats rendered when roasting lamb and poultry:
https://greenpasturefarms.co.uk/tallow-dripping-suet-whats-the-difference/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-drink/features/why-top-chefs-love-beef-dripping/
Ghee for the vegetarians. The vegans will just have to eat their food cold 😁
Careful! If the pigs ate a lot of seed oils in their feed then there lard will be full of the same kind of fatty acid chains. Ruminants, on the other hand, reprocess everything they eat into new fatty acids. So tallow is safe, lard not necessarily.
Scott himself did a post that was obliquely about that on his old blog. https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/10/for-then-against-high-saturated-fat-diets/
It mostly focused on high-saturated fat diets, but as a part of that addresses polyunsaturated fats (which mostly come from seed oils in western diets, as you likely well know) as a potential cause of obesity and illness.
Thanks. I have a vague recollection of actually reading that post when it came out, but since the current obsession is all about “seed” oils, I guess it didn’t trigger my memory.
https://dynomight.net/seed-oil/
Is the closest, it basically does a high level literature review of studies in seed oils vs not and essentially takes them at their word. It's likely not as good as something from Scott, since I think it's not trying to figure out every possible interpretation from data / figure out if there are other confounders, but I basically trust this like 10-20x more than people making assertions about "the science", which I imagine is what young otherwise be getting.
Thank you, I thought that was very good. Then again I would, since it basically confirms my priors.
If ivermectin will allow me to eat an occasional bag of Doritos in peace, then pass the damn horse dewormer.
Has anyone here used Duolicious? I'd expect it to be "just like every other dating app, except possibly even more of a sausage festival," but correct me if I'm wrong, please.
I tried it. Girls there were a lot more internet culture, which is good if that's your thing. It was also so much of a sausage fest that I hardly ever got replies. Much lower response rate than other dating sites. Chicks mentioned having thousands of messages to get through. This was closer to launch, so maybe the situation has improved since.
I took the SAT four times in my life and remember each score I got. I also remember my GRE score.
If you ask someone what they got on the SAT, ACT, or GRE, and they took it fewer than 10 years ago, but they respond they can't remember their score, how likely is it that they got a bad score and don't want to admit it? 50% likely? 90% likely?
Data point: I got a very high score (1598) and my default in conversation is to claim that I can't remember. Sharing a score that high is interpreted as bragging and can get very awkward.
I don't think I've ever been in a conversation where people talked or asked about SAT scores. I remember mine, but I never tell anyone because I assume no one cares.
I wouldn't take that as evidence either way. I personally barely looked at my scores bc I knew I'd get a good score. Like GlacierCow, I do remember my percentiles though. An obviously better metric, in my opinion and way easier to remember.
I never took any of these American exams, so that must mean I don't have an IQ at all.
See https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/136151229/problem-only-the-smartest-people-report-their-sats , which finds that people who "don't remember" their SAT score have, on average, six points lower IQ than those who do.
Something I've been asking about for a while, from that link:
> The Biggest SAT → IQ Conversion Site Is Wrong
>> This man has directly converted the SAT percentiles to IQ scores, which is not what should be done. Tests like the ACT and SAT correlate with IQ at about 0.8-0.85
>> Instead, the ideal way to do this is to take the percentiles from the current versions of the SAT and then convert those into z-scores and then regress those z-scores by the mean by the estimated regression coefficient.
I don't see how this can be correct. When we see that the SAT correlates with IQ tests at about 0.8, we also note that that is the same correlation we see between different IQ tests. But we don't regress the results of other IQ tests when reporting the tested IQ given by those instruments - if you take a Wechsler test and your reported IQ is 120, then your tested IQ is 120 regardless of whether I'm secretly thinking about Wechsler or Raven's. Why would we regress results only for the SAT?
THANK YOU for giving me a direct, useful answer to my question. Looking at the other responses, you're a rare breed.
How is that a direct answer? It tells you literally nothing about the question you asked. It does tell you that people who don't remember their SAT score are stupider than people who do, but that doesn't speak to the odds of forgetting versus not wishing to report.
> you’re a rare breed
Isn’t it why we come here at all?
The Rightful Caliph is a shining example to us down here grubbing in the muck of the comments section!
I don't even remember if I took the SAT, or if it was some other test. Anyway, this depends on what you're counting as "a bad score".
Every time I remember my SAT score, it creeps up a little higher. What does this mean?
Adjusting for inflation?
It means you took it underwater and it developed the properties of a fish story.
I don't remember my score exactly (been more than 10 years since then) because I don't even know what the scoring standards are anymore (various SAT scoring system changes over the years). But I do remember that I scored in the 97th percentile and I remember this because it's the closest analogue I have for IQ I have. What does this make me?
1) How many years ago did you take it?
2) Do you have absolutely no memory of what your score was, or could you confidently narrow it down to something like "around 1400" or "in the low 1300s"?
If I want to guess it was something like 750 on math, a little less good on the reading/writing. Looking online I was in the 2400-score-years so it gets confusing. I think I could confidently narrow it to something around 2100 (+-100ish?) but I had to look online just now to remember what that meant so I think I've contaminated the example.
I took it in 2012.
Yes but do you remember the fastest time you ever got on a 100m sprint?
People who base their self worth on test scores are likely to remember, people who don't are more likely to forget.
Why would you even ask someone that, if you're not in charge of college admissions or something? Just so that you can feel superior if their score is lower than yours? I don't blame anyone for weaseling out of that sort of game.
I don't ask people what their standardized test scores are in normal conversation.
It depends on how many bits of information are involved? I also remember, even though it’s been a lot more than 10 years, but it’s not hard since I only have to remember one bit of information.
But also, why do you care? I’ve never had anyone ask me my sat score after high school, and I would definitely judge negatively someone who asked me that today.
I took the PSAT and the SAT, once each, and remember both my scores but not which one goes with which test. They're pretty close, but less than perfect, so it doesn't much matter.
Technically SAT scores are ten times higher than PSAT scores.
You can compress the data by only storing `total number of points lost across all standardized tests.'
That's not an approach I would recommend when the scoring scales are so different in absolute terms. It's similar to suggesting that one mile plus one meter is two. You'd need to convert both scores to the same scale first.
I also wouldn't recommend it as stated even for multiple instances of the same test; your compressed score will get worse and worse the more you take the test.
Works just fine as long as the compressed number is zero
So SAT = 10 * PSAT? So P = 0.1?
Are you sure that's reportable?
One thing I don't understand is why it's constitutional for Trump to run for office in 2024. Amendment 22 says you can only have two terms, and Trump won in both 2016 and 2020.
There's no evidence he won in 2020 that didn't immediately fail when analyzed with some scrutiny. If this was a joke it was mildly funny though lol
I guess on a serious note, Trump running for office in 2024 is an implicit admission of the loss in 2020. That is, if we assume Trump cares about the Constitution. Well, never mind!
It's an implicit admission he lost in 2020 iff he does not also plan to run in 2028.
He won on November 3, but not on January 6, and that's what matters.
Interesting, the plain language of "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice" suggests it's the election that matters, not the ratification.
The election by the president happens by the electors, with the election of *those* electors being a separate matter, insofar as I've understood. The electors conducted the election of the president on Jan 6.
When precisely do you believe the election is COMPLETE, and the person is considered to be elected? When the last polls close on election night? When the ballots are all completely counted? When ENOUGH ballots have been counted? When all recounts have been completed? When appeals/legal challenges have been exhausted?
Or perhaps all of that is irrelevant, and it's when the electoral college meets that matters, which was December 14 in 2020? (That one's actually reasonable, and Trump lost that one.)
Does Trump agree that he lost that one?
I don't believe he has issued any official statement about it. But also, it's the certification on January 6 that determines whether or not he (retroactively) lost on December 14. At any rate, I don't think the precise time one officially wins is something anyone has cared to adjudicate, since the inauguration (specifically the moment he completes swearing the oath of office) is generally what matters.
I can't tell whether he conceded the election, but on 1/7/2021 he conceded Biden would be inaugurated. https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/07/politics/trump-biden-us-capitol-electoral-college-insurrection/index.html
All of the above. Every President Elect has violated the law halfway through their first nomination.
No, only every one since Eisenhower.
I don't know where I originally found the link, but this guy Sam Jennings has the best take I've seen on Trump's victory. A few extracts:
> Which is not to say I'm excited for the coming chaos. Only a very certain, or very rash, person would prefer unbridled chaos to an anxious blandness. And yet we have no real choice in this. The people have chosen chaos. They’ve hit the big red button that says, “Go on, fuck it all up, what do we have to lose?” and now we’ll get to see exactly what we have to lose.
[...]
> It’s an awful picture, yet I can think of no other way to put it: the entire attitude post-election seems to me to be essentially post-ejaculatory. We’ve been anxiously invested and secretly turned on by a carnivalesque libidinal ritual, being hacked out by two very unsexy parties, and now we’re all emerging from a vaguely masturbatory haze to discover how sordid and sad the whole thing was.
https://samueljennings9.substack.com/p/please-shoot-the-messenger
> and now we’re all emerging from a vaguely masturbatory haze to discover how sordid and sad the whole thing was.
For some? Sure. For Trump's core base? Smells like projection. People like to pretend that Trumpism is just some inexplicable wave of hysteria. When in fact, the stage was set 30 years ago [0]. Keynes once said "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" Well apparently, Jennings' go-to strat is to revert to epistemic helplessness. It's not as bad as full-on denial, I'll give him that.
Say it with me, everyone: "We're not at the end of history"
[0] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-353/comment/74547663
My favourite take was that Kamala Harris ran a campaign about ideas, and that non-college educated people voted as a bloc for the person whose campaign was about them.
I don’t think everyone who voted for Trump just wants to watch the world burn, as noble as that is.
Lots and lots of people who voted for Trump but want opposing things think Trump is going to be on their side. They can’t all be right! It will be interesting to see how it shakes out.
NYMag did the thing where they actually asked Trump voters why they voted for him, recommended read:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-new-york-election-results-turning-red.html
Does that magazine by any chance make it possible for you as a subscriber to create a non-paywalled reading link to that specific article?
Use https://archive.ph/
Well I guess now's the time to link that NBC News story I saw about Kamala Harris raising $1.4 billion and blowing through all of it in four months. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/kamala-harris/clashes-confusion-secrecy-consume-harris-campaign-finances-rcna179654?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
We can watch what they did with it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npxb6vytkZg
It's an unfounded claim to say Kamala Harris would have been anxious blandness and not unbridled chaos.
How is it unfounded ? It is very likely that Harris would have kept on with the current policies. It is also very likely that she wouldn't have tried to break any norms.
I keep seeing people trying to "both sides" this so hard but it always seems so dishonest. For example equating Hillary's "[Trump] knows he’s an illegitimate president" which is calling out shady voter suppression tactics and the fact that Trump did not win the popular vote with the staunch denial of the 2020 election result by Trump to this day and the organization of a (failed) plot to remain in power.
Are you people serious ? Do I really have to convince people in the comment section of a rationalist author that Kamala Harris was willing "to destroy the country" ?
Yes, they are; but no, you don't. I put it to you that there are better uses for your time than trying to interrupt people who are deep into their enjoyment of a gratifying fantasy that, while absurd, can never truly be debunked.
The Harris administration will always be a counterfactual. You can't even prove to *me*--a person who thinks it's broken-brained delusion to believe otherwise--that President Kamala Harris would have continued to be a bog standard bland Democratic politician, presiding over a bland (but diverse!) Democratic cabinet and pursuing vaguely center-left policy objectives, to the extent possible with a divided Congress, in the usual boring and bureaucratic manner for four to eight years. How do you expect to prove it to people who genuinely get a kick out of imagining her becoming Woke Hugo Chavez overnight?
"You can't even prove to *me*--a person who thinks it's broken-brained delusion to believe otherwise--that President Kamala Harris would have continued to be a bog standard bland Democratic politician"
Look at the record. She got a reputation as "Copmala" in California. Later on, when first running for the primary, she tacked hard left because the winds of change had shifted to a different position being considered more appealing to the public. That got her nowhere, so this time round she moved back to the centre and avoided explaining why she was repudiating her former positions.
That's because she doesn't *have* any positions. As Vice-President, she's best known for what? A media controversy over whether or not she was known as/appointed as "Border Czar"? Her campaign this time round ran on vibes.
If elected, she would have continued to be as bland as rice pudding and would just have gone along with whatever seemed to be the best position to give her the greatest chance of high approval ratings. She wouldn't have gone full socialist and she wouldn't have reverted back to tough on crime (legal weed and free loans for black men to transition from being drug dealers to being legal drug dealers/businessmen still has me face-palming here).
Yes but that's a good thing in a democracy. You want someone who will do what's required within the limit of the system. Always going the in the direction of the person in power's latest whim is not a good thing. It strains the system and may end up breaking it. I'll tank blank rice pudding instead of castor oil any day.
Well, she took a strong stand against the First Amendment:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/3142667/harris-banana-republic-free-speech/
>In 2019, Vice President Kamala Harris told CNN’s Jake Tapper that social media companies “are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation[censorship] and _it has to stop_.”
[emphasis added]
And, in addition to her words, she was a participant in the Biden/Harris administration, which used Facebook and pre-Musk Twitter as private proxies for unconstitutional censorship by their administration. So this is not just a hypothetical of what Trump _might_ do.
There's an argument that she was pro-censorship merely because that's what the polls suggested her voters wanted. If the polls said her voters were 60-40 in favor of tariffs on quinoa, Tapper would have been hearing her rail about how Peruvian agri-conglomerates "have put thousands of small American quinoa farms out of business without any remedy and _it has to stop_."
I took this as Deiseach's point: Harris lost appeal because she resembled a weathervane. Even her speech stance might have been poll-driven. (I think it's likely, and all it would have taken to flip her would be a minor BLM tweet storm.)
It occurs to me that you never actually /hear/ this sort of thing any more. It's too gauche to mudsling out loud, even at the end of a night's drinking. Mostly, now, you /read/ it in the more shouty bits of the internet.
>It is very likely that Harris would have kept on with the current policies. It is also very likely that she wouldn't have tried to break any norms.
Based on what?
Well at least we share the same reality but if you think keeping on the tracks of the previous administration is going to destroy the country you may as well define what destroy means to you because it seems far off the center of even the metaphorical meaning of this word.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world
The money just changed hands; no wealth was lost.
Same with burglary.
The campaign funding reminds me of 2016 when Hillary's campaign was boasting of all the money it was raising and there were constant media pieces about "Trump has no donors, no money, his campaign is going to run out of steam soon".
Well, looks like the deeper pockets didn't win a second time! And Trump's campaign didn't need to spend money on publicity because everyone was throwing free publicity at it with both hands! From "The Republicans are weird" to every breathless "it's the Fourth Reich for sure this time!" social media/traditional media take, they honestly spent more time talking about Trump than their own candidates.
What was Walz gonna do in the White House? I have no idea, but I certainly know the Harris campaign position on JD Vance.
The difference this time round seems to be the begging letters/emails being sent out still, and in increasing numbers. The over-spend seems to be about $20 million, which is not terribly bad, but the reaction makes me wonder if there is more there we are not hearing about. Is the DNC growing a spine and demanding Harris personally take responsibility for paying it off or making sure it's paid off? Are the deep-pocket donors cajoled into backing the booting out of Biden now having buyer's regret and intimating they may not be putting their hands in their pockets the next time a Democratic candidate comes looking for a little help to protect democracy? Reading between the lines, there seems to be some indication of the usual bribery re: walking around money to get out the black vote, that may not sit well with the emphasis on transparency and openness and 'Kamala was the grassroots choice'. Also that consultants, hangers-on, and 'jobs for the boys' chomped a good bite out of the funds, but that's par for the course in politics.
And of course a ton of unforced errors:
https://nypost.com/2024/11/09/us-news/trump-trolls-debt-ridden-harris-camp-urges-gop-to-do-whatever-we-can-to-help-them-after-its-revealed-vp-owes-20m/
"Harris camp also spent a whopping six figures building a set for her appearance on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, which attracted a fraction of the viewership of Trump’s appearance on the “Joe Rogan Experience.”
Yeah, that sure was worth the money they tossed down the sink, wasn't it? This kind of thing niggles at me - the campaign seemed to want a huge level of control over such interviews (not going to the studio where this podcast is usually held, and the same with what Joe Rogan has said about them - they wouldn't let her go to him, they insisted he had to go to them) which sounds like they didn't trust their own candidate enough to let her do an unscripted interview on strange territory. That doesn't bode well for "she is competent and capable".
There seems to be an air of desperation that I don't remember from Hillary's loss this time round.
Matt Shapiro had a (paywalled) post about against the grifters that I thought was somewhat relevant
https://www.marginallycompelling.com/p/against-the-grifters
I think I might disagree with him in that in many ways the grift is the point for a lot of Dems; I think my best steel-manned version of this "functioning as a political party that wins elections is secondary to its function as social club for the Professional Managerial Class and above, and throwing out large contracts for bad services is merely a cleverly-disguised welfare payment
To that last point - from my recollection, the atmosphere in November 2016 was complete shock - "how *could* this happen" overshadowing "how *did* this happen", with blame focused more on Americans failing to elect Hillary than her failing to appeal to them. The latter came later.
Ah, it's that the guy is obviously An Actor playing the part of "regular guy who goes to football matches with his dad". Sure, a real Regular Guy would have been stiff as a plank in the part (if you've ever heard radio ads with Real People, you'll know what I mean). So it's plastic not real wood, while the tone of the ad is "we're real, he's not".
Harris' disdain for the common man bleeds from it. There's the prevailing sense that she thinks people are cows and they'll follow whoever looks most familiar. "He lives in a country club, that's not your herd! I'm your herd, with the haircut and the Sports!"
This is a twisted and uncharitable take. Do you really think Harris personally oversaw this ad ?
A lot of ads I see from the US country are like that : Interview someone that is supposedly just one of the viewer so that they identify and buy something. Nothing special about it.
No, I doubt Harris had more to do with it than "my campaign signs off on these". It's a terrible ad, but no worse than many political ads, so she can't be blamed for that.
But "Trump is a fake!" messaging loses out when the guy spouting it is clearly professional actor doing a role and he'll be dressed up as white collar PMC guy, possibly IT guy, for another ad instead of "I'm a guy what drives a SUV and work in a saw mill".
Contrast that with the garbage truck, and that's really Trump in a real garbage truck. It may be dumb, but it's funny and most importantly it's not faked up the same way.
Or rather, it's so OBVIOUSLY fake, like his McDonald's photo-op, that it has its own kind of authenticity.
Harris is in charge of the organisation that made this ad, her personal level of involvement doesn't matter. Being senior management means taking responsibility for the actions of the organisation that you built, and Harris was asking for the most senior-management job of all.
I'd never seen this ad before. It's not quite as terrible as the "I'm a man what eats carburettors for breakfast" one, but it oozes the same contempt for voters. "We have to figure out the things that each of the demographic groups on rows A through M of this spreadsheet likes, and make an ad filled with each of them, and say Donald Trump Bad. Make sure it doesn't mention Kamala Harris or any actual policies."
>Do you really think Harris personally oversaw this ad ?
It ends with "I'm Kamala Harris, and I approved this message", so yes, she personally oversaw it as much as she was going to personally oversee the presidency.
Sure
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0pN1PpfIag
I've been deliberately avoiding Takes in all directions, subjects and temperatures the last few weeks but I really enjoyed this, thanks for sharing
A couple of thoughts. One, I don't think the people who voted in Trump are having any kind of second thoughts or "post-ejaculatory" worries. They seem pretty content with having won and are looking forward to seeing how far Trump can get with fixing their problems. I don't think many, maybe any, have delusions that everything will go their way, but they have a reason to hope that some will go their way. Second, and this is important for people who hate Trump to understand, Trump only exists because the people who support him have felt like they didn't get *any* of their preferred preferences since sometime in the 80s or 90s. NAFTA and greatly increased immigration have done huge damage to them economically and socially. If the choice is "more of the same" or "unbridled chaos" they pretty much have to pick chaos. It's the choice between some level of hope and death.
> If the choice is "more of the same" or "unbridled chaos" they pretty much have to pick chaos. It's the choice between some level of hope and death.
How can this be true for Trump voters while all the surveys show that liberals in general are less happy than conservatives?
It could be true if conservative living is just that much better than liberal/left. That's not a charitable option, but there are so many possible confounders that I don't know that we could ever really determine the reason(s).
My personal take is that rural living really is that much better for human happiness, and rural people are significantly more conservative. Less crowded, more likely you know your community members. Less chance of running into random jerks and criminals, even if the rate of criminality/jerkiness is the same or worse in rural areas. There's something to be said about the ability of one jerk to ruin your day, and the chances of running into one jerk a day is unbelievably higher in a city (unless the jerk is your family or a close neighbor or something).
There's two elements to it.
The first is that the conservative (small c) life script is genuinely better for human flourishing. Finish school, get a job, get married, have kids, go to church and engage with your community and extended family (all while living in the countryside or suburbs).
Compare with 'Finish school, do a postgraduate degree, move to the city and try to break into a competitive field, sleep around for several years, cohabit and then maybe have a child in a small apartment without getting married'.
All the elements of the first option are better for psychological health.
The second element is that the conservative worldview itself is better psychologically. Believing that you are responsible for your own fate, believing that the world is basically just, believing that you have duties to other people and to ideas bigger than yourself are all psychologically helpful.
Jonathan Haidt has done some interesting work on this. He refers to the modern leftist worldview as 'anti-CBT' for this reason.
This, basically.
I don't really agree with most of their policy preferences, but society has been running on "Certain people have gotten their way too long and don't get to have their way anymore" for so long that half of the members of "certain people" haven't actually seen anything go their way for their entire lives - up until Trump. Society has been on this train for about thirty years now.
("Certain people" is not "white people", or "men", or "Christian"; it's both more specific and more general than any of those things.)
I expect some people have a few minor qualms about the RFK nomination.
Yes, I think that the process of being disappointed by the politician you supported is usually a gradual process, not a rapid one analogous to post-nut clarity.
I think that Harris supporters might be having a quicker-than-usual realisation that she was shit, but that's only because they all thought she was shit four months ago and then suddenly turned on a dime the moment she became the only possible nominee.
>I think that the process of being disappointed by the politician you supported is usually a gradual process
Well, I viewed the contest as between Horrible and Worse (with Harris _narrowly_ getting the role for Worse), so I'll only _really_ be disappointed if Trump actually manages to stumble into a nuclear exchange (unlikely, but possible - but it was possible with Harris too).
I got the impression Harris was trying to project centrist and people didn't buy it. After four months of Harris being in the spotlight, I still have little idea of who she really is. The best glimpse I got was during the debate, for which she had a month to prepare, and all I saw was preparation.
>who she really is.
Evasive? :-) (That was the main impression I took from the debate, and from the Bash interview.)
"I still have little idea of who she really is... all I saw was preparation"
I never understood this argument, bc it always seem like any criticism you can levy at Kamala would be one thousand times worse with Trump. No, I would never prefer an honest Hitler to a passive-aggressive faux-kind co-worker.
Yes, she prepared for a debate, sure, she isn't being super genuine in her policies, but is that really worse than Trump? Someone who didn't plan at all for the debate, didn't have any policies proposals ready, and lied through his teeth? Trump is a genuinely stupid man, who does not understand much about how the government functions. How is he any better?
People wonder about how a civil war in the US might break out. How plausible does the following scenario sound?
1. Trump purges the army of commanders not considered loyal to him (under the guise of some other reason)
2. Martial Law is declared due to major protests or riots over something (something like the George Floyd riots), and the army is brought in. The US Army stays visibly positioned in several major US cities.
3. 2028 rolls around and a Democrat is elected POTUS. He tells the army to withdraw from the cities but meanwhile Trump tells them not to and at least one of the armies obeys Trump not the new POTUS. (Throughout the period after martial law is declared, The Left stays angry about the situation, with violence breaking out occasionally, army personnel sometimes getting shot by The Resistance.)
4. Some generals stay loyal to Trump while other generals are loyal to the POTUS.
5. Civil war.
How plausible does something like that sound?
Highly implausible.
Very unlikely. Every stop of your process seems individually unlikely, with a combined effect of all but impossible.
1) Gutting enough of the military to make it specifically loyal to Trump would completely eviscerate the military. Rank and file people may love Trump, but not separate from their love of the US. The commanders don't particularly love Trump.
2) Limited martial law is possible, but not multi-year. The federal government calling for martial law would likely result in local jurisdictions doing everything in their power to fix a problem before federal troops could even get there, and then quickly getting them out. Martial law is bad for everyone involved and would be incredibly unpopular, especially after an immediate need was handled.
3) This seems to presuppose that Trump doesn't leave office? I'm not sure what you have in mind, but once we have a new president who can give lawful orders to stand down, then we don't have Trump in office to give counter orders. If Trump would fight against leaving office then the details of his argument and who supports him matter. I don't see that as being very likely, either.
4) If Trump could pull off the complete gutting of the military, I guess some of the new generals could potentially support Trump. But they would almost certainly be very bad generals, likely incompetent at their jobs and unliked by their troops. If they were qualified people who rose in the ranks after their bosses were removed, then why follow an illegitimate Trump?
>1. Trump purges the army of commanders not considered loyal to him (under the guise of some other reason)
Seems definitely possible. I'd say at least 50% chance this happens anyways.
>2. Martial Law is declared due to major protests or riots over something (something like the George Floyd riots), and the army is brought in. The US Army stays visibly positioned in several major US cities.
Very unlikely. Maybe 1-3% chance IMO. There are a lot of other steps before that: declaring national emergency, militarizing the police, sending in the national guard, federalizing the state national guard, repealing or ignoring all the laws that prevent him from doing this...etc. etc. Public sentiment would be low. Congress would likely act against it. Supreme Court is, contrary to popular opinion, not a bunch of Trump loyalists (they're FedSoc which is very much not a MAGA organization!) and would probably act as well. States would likely refuse to cooperate.
>3. 2028 rolls around and a Democrat is elected POTUS. He tells the army to withdraw from the cities but meanwhile Trump tells them not to and at least one of the armies obeys Trump not the new POTUS. (Throughout the period after martial law is declared, The Left stays angry about the situation, with violence breaking out occasionally, army personnel sometimes getting shot by The Resistance.)
less than 1% chance. Highly unlikely
>4. Some generals stay loyal to Trump while other generals are loyal to the POTUS.
less than 1% chance. Highly unlikely.
>5. Civil War
less than 1% chance. Highly unlikely.
I can think of like 10 different possible paths off the top of my head to civil war that are more likely than this. Most involve some kind of state secession crisis or medium-intensity insurgency, rather than a president trying to become king.
> There are a lot of other steps before that:
> militarizing the police
How would the police be different after this process than they are now?
My guess would be to sequester them from the general populace, official purpose being "special training". Some of them are selected for special teams, given special gear and instructions for using it.
Generally, any government that wants to oppress its own people gets that going by having a police force that doesn't socialize with those people. Very, very unlikely in the US as a result. The closest we tend to get is hiring police from one part of town to police another part of town.
On "1" there's a big gap between "personally loyal to Trump" and "actively disloyal to Trump". I might expect him to fire a few of the actively disloyal ones, but the vast majority of officers are in the middle, willing to obey all legal orders.
Good clarification. That's more of what I had in mind.
"How plausible does something like that sound?"
About the same as winning the Powerball.
Incredibly unlikely. Trump purging enough people from DoD to where they would support long-term suspension of Posse Comitatus to implement Martial Law is one where the Army wouldn't be competent enough to do it anyway.
I don't know if it's been said on here before (and I'd love to hear @Deiseach's perspective on this), but elsewhere it's been noted how fascinating it is that people's mental model of an American Civil War is something that looks a lot like the Spanish Civil War and not "Na Trioblóidí, but bigger". Because I think we're a lot closer to the latter than I think we would like to believe, and I think the former is much harder to make happen than I think people expect, to say nothing of "Nicaragua but with more paramilitary death squads".
The divisions in the US are nothing like Northern Ireland. You asked Deisheach who is, Irish. I’m British with family in Northern Ireland - so with an understanding of history of the place.
These ethno religious civil wars are not what is happening or possible in the US. An ideological civil war is unlikely either, despite the caterwauling about Trump, he is not a fascist and the opposition are not communists either. In the Spanish civil war they were, literally that. That, and anarchists. Democracy was a young political idea then and had little credibility.
In the US it is part of the fabric, however flawed that fabric, for centuries.
I did worry slightly about the US creating, out of nowhere, inter ethnic conflict at the height of the anti white supremacy kerfuffle a few years back, those worries have entirely dissipated in this election. It looks like Hispanic males in particular either like a bit of white supremacism or don’t believe it.
Being old enough to be around during the 70s and just old enough then to be somewhat aware of what was going on in America, I remain astounded you didn't have your own version of The Troubles. You really got lucky and zigged where other countries would have zagged. You had your own amateur terrorist militias robbing banks and performing bombings, you had political theorists pushing revolution, and there is of course the race question.
Seems like your Founding Fathers got something right when setting up the state!
Probably helped a lot that our most dedicated and extreme revolutionaries could always defect and go back to cushy jobs thanks to being rich kids. No need to be a diehard martyr, you can just become an education professor!
https://www.amazon.com/stores/William-Ayers/author/B001JPBUT0?ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true
Try iodine. If that doesn't help, organic food. Sulfonylureas are used as preharvest desiccants in conventional agriculture. They're also used as diabetes drugs, because they make your pancreas squirt out insulin. Long-term, this can lead to an insulin resistance phenotype, and hypertriglyceridemia can follow on from that.
I might follow up on the iodine, can't hurt!
In pathogen news:
1. COVID wastewater numbers remain low, but SARS2 is still circulating.
2. COVID deaths and ED visits are down, and the weekly COVID mortality rate is lower than at any point since the beginning of the pandemic (of course, mortality will rise during the next wave). In fact, ED visits are still falling ~11% per week. These generally trail WW numbers by a couple of weeks, so I expect the rate of ED visits will level off in the coming week to reflect the WW curve.
3. In the US, XEC's growth rate has plateaued at ~20% of samples and may be falling now. It's unlikely to cause the next wave in its current form (my opinion). For instance, in the UK
4. Over in the UK XEC is greater than 60%, but COVID cases are falling. XEC seems to outcompete the KP.x variants but doesn't increase case numbers. We've seen this pattern before with some other competitive variants (remember Kraken?). My hypothesis is they outcompete the previous vars in a population that is susceptible to those vars, but they don't infect the rest of the population.
5. OTOH, XEC is taking off in Australia. It's at greater than 50 percent in NSW. And a new wave seems to be revving up Down Under.
6. And I need to retract a claim I made in earlier updates that, during interwave gaps, SARS is circulating at higher levels than Flu and RSV by an order of magnitude (per wastewater numbers). After a little research, I learned that Flu A&B shed significantly less RNA out the gut, and Flu RNA is less stable so even though COVID and Flu could be circulating at similar rates in the US population, the WW would show lower levels of Flu. Calculating actual case load from WW numbers is fools game, but they are good for indicating changes in R.
6. I already posted the latest A(H5) avian influenza news in the last open thread.
7. California reported the first Clade 1 MPox case in US. The patient traveled from Africa. It's unclear if it's 1b—which is (supposedly) more transmissible and more virulent. I'm surprised we haven't seen it here sooner if Clade 1 is transmissible as claimed, though.
8. It's started later than normal this year, but Flu season is starting to take off. Biobot seems to show it's more prevalent in the Western US.
9. RSV rates are starting to rise, as well.
10. Mycoplasma pneumoniae infections are increasing. The CDC doesn't officially track these numbers, but Biofire's proprietary Syndromic Trends site suggest that the current rise in cases may not be as dramatic as the MSM has portrayed it.
11. And finally, an actual SARS-CoV-2 recombination event between two vars in one patient and the subsequent transmission to another was documented. We see a lot of SARS2 recombinant (hybrid) vars in the wild, but this is the first time we've seen it as it happened --> https://tinyurl.com/476bkr2w
My slides are up on ThreadReaderApp...
https://t.co/6WlYGzCGBk
Thanks! And another reason for careful celebration: it's been four years now, and we still haven't seen any cases of the B Yamagata line of influenza. It might be that the worldwide anti-virus measures have accidentally reduced the number of influenza lines from four to three.
Yes, but influenza showed an interesting pattern. Cases dropped off the cliff to near zero *worldwide* just as the pandemic was revving up in March. I wish Substack would allow us to post graphics in our replies because I could show this better than I can describe it, but within three weeks, Flu cases (from all strains) in the US dropped from 18,000 to 1,200, and test positivity rates dropped from ~25% to ~1%. This same pattern was seen in other Northern Hemisphere countries, too. In a normal flu season, there's a long tail out into April, but the 2019-20 Flu season ended early. In China, where COVID was spreading earlier than the rest of the world, Flu season ended in January (with the same precipitous dropoff in test positivity and cases). Although COVID had been circulating in the US since February, the cases didn't really start ramping up until the 3rd week of March. So, the Flu decline in the US preceded the COVID case surge by about 3 weeks (which is longer than the incubation period of SARS2). Several virologists and epidemiologists posited viral interference as the cause of this pattern, but most experts dismissed the idea. The explanation i saw was that the Flu decline was all due to the farsighted NPIs that the US (and other nations) implemented early. But in the US NPIs weren't really introduced until late April when the first wave was peaking (typo correction: I wrote Alpha, but I meant the original A strain). And many countries never implemented NPIs.
Flu was suppressed worldwide in both the northern and southern hemispheres until the end of 2021, when Omicron hit the scene. The northern hemisphere had a late starting 2021-22 Flu season, but overall Flu cases were low compared to previous Flu seasons. The world returned to normal Flu seasons in the southern hemisphere for their 2022 season, and in the northern hemisphere, Flu came back with a vengeance during our 2022-23 season. Note: China had a steady background of Type B cases all through 2021 that peaked early in 2022. This was when their ZeroCOVID policy was in full force and was the most restrictive NPI policy in the world. Then they had a belated burp of Type A in the spring of 2022.
I don't think the NPI and restricted air travel explanations explain these patterns. I suspect there was some sort of viral interference going on. And when it comes to one pathogen affecting another, we can see a weird pattern between SARS2 and Rhinoviruses. In the US they show a noticeable inverse correlation. When COVID is low, Rhinoviruses pick up. And when COVID is high, Rhinoviruses drop. Or maybe it's when Rhinoviruses are high, COVID is low and vice versa.
Finally, B Yamagata cases dropped after the 2017-18 Flu season. And they didn't really pick up again during the 2018-19 season. I suspect B Yamagata didn't have the numbers going into the COVID pandemic to survive the die-off.
Great comment, thank you!
A recent tweet demonstrated a failure on the part of many liberals to grok low-class people:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe33bbcab-239d-4dc2-ba82-7216ed049f5b_1001x532.png
Many have remarked on this seeming paradox. Why does Trump appeal to so many lower-class people despite being a billionaire? It hardly seems paradoxical to the many people in Hollywood whose full-time job is selling an image of luxury to low-class people. The actress partying in her 15 million dollar mansion. The rapper driving his luxury car and bragging about his money. The musician haggling over a multimillion-dollar contract. Of course, the audience needs to be able to relate to the subjects. Such programs focus on the actor, musician, and athlete rather than the derivatives trader because the former are more culturally and psychologically relatable.
Trump has an intuitive understanding of celebrity culture. At the RNC, he didn't invite random people to talk about relatable subjects like not having any money. He invited Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock.
The Democrats' answer was, "Look, we've got a relatable candidate. He's just like you, a middle-aged man who's going bald and wearing a hoodie and has a cat on his lap." And he's "coach." Not the coach of an NFL team; he's the coach of a high school football team. Who trashes J.D. Vance for being a working-class kid who went to Yale instead of Minnesota State University, Mankato:
https://x.com/Tim_Walz/status/1820963380108157166
I think Trump just genuinely likes wrestling. He's attended wrestling events in the past. And I heard he went super into the weeds on MMA (or something?) while on Joe Rogan (I've not watched the podcast episode myself). So Hulk Hogan is not a surprise.
I listened to it, and he did, and he does. Boxing too. (One of the weirdest accusations I continue to hear against Trump is that he's racist, as if to imply the hood-wearing cross-burning sense. Meanwhile, he socialized with black athletes in ways that no hood-wearing cross burner would.)
It's a barber pole thing, or a midwit meme thing.
Low class person: eats McDonalds because it's tasty
PMC striver : doesn't eat McDonald's because that's gross lower class slop
Powerful billionaire: eats McDonalds because it's tasty
The PMC striver class spends their whole time trying to distinguish themselves from the low class yokels, but then demands their loyalty once every four years.
My dad explained it to me when I was around ten:
A smart person puts out a sign saying "pedi-habiliments ambidextrously lubricated and illuminated for the infinitesimal remuneration of ten cents per operation".
A *really* smart person puts out a sign saying "shoe shine: ten cents".
It's okay, I know, I'm PMC too.
I've read that some people want to coin a term for the quality of being right, but being an asshole about it, as "Waltersobchakheit".
Or you don't live in the US.
> or have lost all your tastebuds
Isn't it the other way around? We lose our capacity to taste as we age - it's why kids are super picky while adults are happier with much more strongly tasting foods than kids are.
We have lost our capacity to appreciate how delicious the McDonalds we loved as kids truly is, because we are old now and those taste receptors are all dead and all that remains is the sensation of eating limp ketchup-covered cardboard.
Might be a liberal boomer thing. I think they really did grow up in a beatnik culture that rejected looking rich and successful. Times have changed but the same liberal boomers were picking the candidates.
Your first link is correct. Trump had McDonalds served on Air Force One. That's the kind of 'relatable' that all the spin doctors in all the campaigns can't fake.
https://x.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1858136498530374074
And it's not the first time he's done that, and the more stories about being "mocked" for that, the more ordinary people go "yeah, I dunno about him but I sure know *you* are not on my side, so I'm voting for him".
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/ivanka-donald-trump-photo-eating-mcdonalds-air-force-one-a4353081.html
As for the second, Walz emits a slight air of jealousy, never mind that his family circumstances at the start were way better than Vance's family circumstances. And I really don't have much of an image of him or what he is really like, because I don't think the Harris campaign did much with him - he was trotted out now and again, but mostly kept in the background not to take any lustre off the Coconut Queen, for all the good it did. Does Walz eat McDonalds? or another fast food chain? Does he do anything at all, apart from "I used to coach high school football"?
I wonder what RFKjr thinks as he decides if he prefers to eat the fastfood or just go hungry. Also the rolled silverware is killing me.
The expression on his face is what sells it. It's clearly not one of the staged "now let's all eat a bacon sandwich to show we're Just Folks", Trump really does like McDonald's and the rest are going along with various levels of enthusiasm.
That's the kind of 'real' that we're talking about in regard to the Harris ads. Did we ever see her eat a Dorito, despite the claim that Doritos are her favourite snack? There was also a photo op with Gretchen Whitmer and the pair of them 'having a beer' together visiting a restaurant in Kalamazoo, but Harris had one sip (granted, you don't want your candidate to get hammered on the campaign trail). At least Whitmer looks like she *would* drink a beer, as she's supping away here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-SdPl98mlw
The fact Walz was supposed to embody a new and inspiring model of healthy masculinity is hilarious to me. Who aspires to be Tim Walz?
I will say this for the Harris-Walz... they really do look exactly like Maya Rudolph and Jim Gaffigan. If you wanted to pick a ticket based on the availability of comedians who can play them on SNL, then you could hardly do any better than Harris-Walz.
Trump is terrible for SNL. In fact I've never seen a comedian do a decent impression of Trump, which is incredible.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Xj_KXoNnako
How about this one?
That part of it I kinda-sorta get: if you start from the premise that the masculinity we've already got is diseased and has to be replaced with something else, "Dad" is certainly a focal-point solution. The unfathomable part is where the campaign got the notion that they could ever appeal to men by starting from that premise.
He was maximum inoffensiveness, which turned out to be maximum ineffectuality. I suppose the lesson to be learned here, from both Hillary and Kamala's attempts, is "if you want to be First Female Ever, do *not* pick as your running mate a white guy named Tim who is a former state governor" 😁
> It's eerily similar to the good times, weak men meme.
But in reverse right? Good times come from generous, cooperative bots (i.e. 'weak'), but eventually everyone is so generous that bad bots take advantage of them, leading to a period of bad times.
I think the cycle he was referring to is
1. Bad times (with lots of defecting bots) create strong bots (tit for tat takes over).
2. Strong bots (tit for tat) create good times.
3. Good times create weak bots (cooperators take over from tit-for-tat).
4. Weak bots create bad times (defecting bots take over).
The "Win-Stay, Lose-Shift" strategy breaks the cycle by punishing the cooperators that allow themselves to be eaten.
https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2024/09/the-moral-obligation-not-to-be-eaten.html
When there's a randomized component of the game, where bots might "accidentally" play the opposite of what they intend. TfT can get into an eternal grudge match while always-cooperate recovers smoothly.
See https://ncase.me/trust/
I'm not sure if its tested by actual game theorists, but I could imagine one where you take a tiny penalty for each line of code. So tit for tat looses to pure cooperate if those are the only two players.
Penalizing "thinking" (slightly) has crossed my mind as well as a worthy addition to a simulator. TFT has that nice property where you only have to keep one register for the other player. And this feels intuitively like what a lot of people do. (Trump is famously called out here - he seems to only remember the last thing you said about him, and if it was positive, it doesn't matter how much you criticized him before that.)
So, we could incur a small penalty for memory (do I remember what the last move was against me? Do I track each player's last move? Do I track *all* the moves? And the payouts?), and for processing (how much analysis do I do about each move and payout?).
A simulator might have players little smarter than an amoeba, where TFT or WSLS dominate, or smarter players where the dominant strategies start to resemble stock trading algorithms. Or a mix, where the dominant player might implement nearly any strategy at all and dominates anyway because it plays so many games.
For 1v1 matchups if a single bit is expensive. Always defect beats always cooperate. Tit for Tat beats always defect (the value of the strategy > the expense of computation) and always cooperate beats tit-for-tat.
If we think of humans rather than bots, the time and effort it takes to learn the skills of whose a defector and whose sob story is completely true means that in a world where most people are honest you'll get a lot of cooperate bots.
Where is the appetite for Milei style economic reforms in the US coming from? Both Musk and Ramaswarmy have said America needs such a shock reform followed by a recession and economic pain, but why? Argentina's problems are distinct and not at all like America's. Shock therapy seems to cause unnecessary pain when the problem simply isn't that acute and there are less painful alternatives available. Or do I miss some deep underlying problem that can only be cured by a shock?
It’s class warfare with the signs reversed, that’s all. These policies are hideously unpopular with regular voters of both parties, who want the government to keep its hands off their Medicare/Social Security/farm subsidies/etc.
Cruelty is the point. In Argentina's case, some suffering in likely unavoidable, just like in the Eastern European countries coming out of the Soviet-style socialism. The US doesn't need the same medicine Argentina needs, but both Trump and Musk seem to like hurting people, and Ramaswamy... nevermind, better not flirting with bans, so there.
It's just basic LET'S DO THINGS! style populism. What is being done is unimportant, the important is that it's hard-charging, and drastic, and radical, and that it will fix everything! Wih another set of memes they'd be advocating for the state to DO THINGS! directly.
Musk (re)posting various studies with headlines that sound briefly silly until one thinks more than a few seconds (eg. like https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GcbbzANWkAEofik?format=jpg&name=medium and https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GcbcSDiXUAA83uu?format=jpg&name=medium) rather moves my priors to the direction that what gets done is less Milei-style reforms and more like Golden Fleece style nibbling at the edges. I don't think that drastic Milei-style cuts would be good, but neither would be just turning this exercise into potentially useful research funding being shot down because lol sexbeetles.
The US has some longstanding and well known financial issues that could have been fixed previously but every year gets worse instead of even staying neutral. The national debt increases regularly and the amount of increases keep growing instead of shrinking. We're on track to be paying a trillion dollars a year on interest to the debt next year. Social Security is on an obvious track to insolvency.
There are pretty good reasons why we haven't fixed these issues, but they obviously need to be fixed. It's unsustainable, and everyone knows it. We're unfortunately playing hot potato with these things now, because whichever party actually fixes it is risking not getting elected for a long time, since it is likely to be very unpopular. Milei ran on a platform of doing things to fix long standing problems even though it will cause a lot of pain. If Trump's team can pull that off, then we might dodge the twin bullets of financial ruin and political ruin.
Trump actually increased debt in his first term, and I don't think his tax cutting policies will change this time around.
No disagreement here. The question was about the appetite for Milei-style cuts, which Trump is signaling he would be willing to do. I also agree he will find it difficult to pull this off, and will be reluctant to actually try. It will depend significantly on whether Trump is willing to give real power to someone near him (while Milei is the ideologue who believes in what he's doing).
Past practice shows that Trump is unlikely to do that, but I'm trying to be optimistic that things may be changing enough to get it done.
Sure, but cutting taxes is sort of the opposite of reducing the national debt.
The last time the federal government ran a surplus was under Clinton, who worked out a compromise with the GOP to raise taxes and cut spending. Bush inheritied an 100b annual surplus which he blew up with massive tax cuts. Obama worked out a Clinton-like compromise with GOP Speaker Bohner but the House GOP rank and file were dead set against giving Obama anything, so it died before even coming up for a vote. Now we are going to have even bigger deficits. I don't see any possibility of a fix without both tax increases and spending cuts.
>Clinton, who worked out a compromise with the GOP to raise taxes and cut spending.
Clinton and Congressional Democrats raised taxes a lot and cut spending a little in 1993, with zero Republican votes in Congress. Then Congressional Republicans pushed large spending cuts and small tax cuts in 1995-1996 against Clinton's objections. Clinton and Congressional Republicans did compromise on something that still cut both spending and taxes, but by less than Republicans had wanted. That compromise was projected to balance the budget by 2002, but windfall tax revenues from the Dot Com boom lead to the surplus appearing early, in the 1998 fiscal year.
The combined effect was a combination of tax increases and spending cuts, as the tax cuts (even before Clinton pushed back and got them reduced) were a lot smaller than the 1993 tax increases, but it's important to note came in two stages with different Congresses approving each stage.
>Bush inheritied an 100b annual surplus which he blew up with massive tax cuts.
Also massive spending increases, both domestic spending (mostly Medicare and Education) and war. And the Dot Com boom ended. We could have afforded any two of the tax cuts, the domestic spending increases, and the wars and still had a surplus again by the time the recession ended, but not all three at the same time.
IIRC, Clinton also cut the deficit by borrowing from the Social Security fund in a manner that didn't come due until the Bush administration. (Imagine if Gore had won and had this dropped in his lap.)
You don’t recall correctly. You are probably remembering somebody arguing that the unified budget numbers were misleading. The argument is reasonable, which is why the Social Security program is “off budget” in the first place, but is as applicable to the Bush years as the Clinton years. There was nothing to “drop into the lap” of a hypothetical Gore Administration.
The “on budget” numbers exclude “off budget” programs, including Social Security. The “on budget” numbers don’t distinguish between debt held by the Social Security Trust Fund an debt held by the public. For that reason, it is not possible to cut the “on budget” deficit by borrowing from Social Security
The “unified budget” includes all Federal programs, including “off budget” ones like Social Security. During the Reagan Administration, Congress passed a plan prosed by the Greenspan Commission that caused the Social Security Trust Fund to run a surplus in order to build up funds to pay for the baby boom retirees. This resulted in the unified budget showing a much smaller deficit or larger surplus than the on budget numbers. In fiscal year 2000, for example, the unified budget showed a surplus of $236 billion whereas the on budget numbers showed a surplus of only $86 billion, mostly due to Social Security running a surplus. This discrepancy increased during the Bush Administration; in fiscal 2008 the on budget deficit was $642 billion but the unified budget had a deficit of only $459 billion. So the unified budget deficit was reduced due to borrowing from Social Security, but Clinton had nothing to do with that.
I don't quite understand what you mean by "on budget". Looking it up, it appears to mean what I took to be the plain reading, which is spending within prior limits, as opposed to unforeseen spending. If so, SS ought to be on budget, not off, and you say it is. So that's probably not what you mean. The meaning I found seems closer to what you're calling "unified budget".
If I just move on to your last paragraph (where most of the meat is anyway), I have trouble tracking down the legislation you cite. I see the "Social Security Amendments of 1983", aka H.R.1900 (https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/98/hr1900/text), but my skim of it doesn't tell me anything obvious. ("Surplus" doesn't appear anywhere in the text, so if it happens, it's implied, either by raising FICA or lowering payouts, and indeed, a lot of the bill does that, so, maybe?) I can see how your account explains an apparent reduction of deficit / increase in surplus. It's possible the explanation I heard was referring to HR1900 (or whatever the proposal became), but I can't tell for sure.
If I happen to run into someone who argues that Clinton merely borrowed from SS, though, I can pass this along and see if it jibes with their evidence.
I do notice, meanwhile, that if this plan happened for the reasons you describe, then it wasn't general fiscal prudence on Clinton's part, but rather a specific concern for the Boomer retirement surge that went back to Reagan, which is new to me.
>I don't see any possibility of a fix without both tax increases and spending cuts.
And the former is not going to happen. It is unlikely that the Republicans will even permit the 2017 tax cuts to expire as scheduled at the end of 2025.
I have ended up following more US politics than local politics without even trying. Does anyone have a good writer to follow for succint, rational takes on the state of European/German politics?
https://www.eurointelligence.com/ might suit you.
This does seem promising. Thanks.
What do you want to know?
Very simplified but: Germany is having economic issues. The German government wanted to spend more (mostly domestically) and did its equivalent of hitting a debt ceiling (in this case a debt brake law). Scholz fired his finance minister after the finance minister's party didn't agree to either increasing taxes or changing the debt brake. This led to his coalition no longer having a majority in the legislature. So he called an election to sort it out.
Overall it looks like the Center Right is going to win right now. Though they will need to form a coalition and with whom is an interesting question. But we'll have to wait for the vote totals which we should get in February.
I want to know where I can go for reasonable succinct takes when there's something going on here, not just now.
I'd also like that!
Say there's a magic button that, when you press it, reduces your LDL cholesterol by 30%.
It stays like that, no evil genie stuff.
How much would you pay to press the button?
> Say there's a magic button that, when you press it, reduces your LDL cholesterol by 30%.
I really hope this is market research, because having a probiotic you could take that would reduce LDL by 30% would be awesome.
If I were trying to sell it, I wouldn't even want to get it FDA approved, I'd just mass produce Cholester-yogurt or whatever and hedge with a bunch of "this MAY reduce cholesterol, as part of a complete breakfast" or whatever, like the oatmeal people do, and let people do their own research and make their own conclusions.
But then, I've always been a fan of "go high volume and small margin" as a strategy versus the usual drug / bio strategy of "niche and high end."
You've hit the nail on the head, my guy! The good lawyers at General Mills have spent decades carving out the Cheerios Exemption, AKA Structure/Function Claims.
Probiotics are foods/supplements in the US, so the primary regulatory burden for a new food is just proving safety as long as you don't make disease claims. Cholesterol is really in the sweet spot here because everyone knows that "number go down" means lower risk of heart attack and stroke.
And yes, I'm hoping to make this as widely available as possible, but the logistics involved in anaerobes-as-probiotics mean substantial running costs and geographically limited rollout
Ooh, exciting!
I hope you'll publicize it on your Substack whenever it's ready. I'd probably pay $1k, and I've got no history of triglyceride problems or CVD in the family.
No idea. Not nothing because I have a. Just been reading a book by a woman who made herself tetraplegic falling off a horse and b. Learned that spinal column strokes can have the same effect. But the question isn't answerable unless you quantify the changes in absolute and relative risk caused by pushing your button. In the most favourable case perhaps £10000? I am oldish and have high LDL for which I get free statins from socialised medicine.
$4855
lol how'd you get there? "just vibes" is an acceptable answer but I'm curious if there was math.
I had a physical a couple months ago and doc said my cholesterol was high. By about 25%. Since then I’ve been trying to eat right. I eat walnuts and fucking mackerel all day. I’m losing it.
Statins are a no go because I’m religious about only taking drugs that get me high.
If someone said they could perform surgery to do what your button did, I’d probably get it done if my plan covered it. If all I had to do was press your button, no side effects, and witness medical magic, $4855 seems right, but not a penny more.
***
Walnuts and mackerel *every* day? I like mackerel but even that is a bit much 😁
God alone knows what are cholesterol reducing foods, I've eaten nearly everything suggested and nothing worked (niacin helped a bit, but that was the "your face starts burning like a cherub after taking it" version and I couldn't tolerate that long-term).
Somewhere between $500 and $1,000.
As for the question, how much I would pay would depend on several factors
• baseline LDL levels
• risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes etc. (at the time of determining how much I’m willing to pay)
• disposable income
Right, I'm saying you, personally, right now. Given your risk of heart disease and your disposable income.
And yes, statins exist, but plenty of people on statins still have heart attacks or strokes. I suppose, if you take statins now and wouldn't have to after pressing the button, you could calculate a floor value based on how much you'd expect to pay for statins over the course of your lifetime—but risk of cardiac events is basically a function of the integral of LDL with respect to time, so even someone who's still gonna have to take statins should theoretically derive a few QALY of benefit from the button.
Doesn’t something like this already exist? ie. statins
Sure but statins are a thing you have to keep taking.
One of the things I dread about getting older is the idea of becoming a Person Who Takes Medication. Once you enter that category there's no getting out of it, it's just an ever increasing daily pill load until you're dead. I'd definitely pay the $4855 to put off needing to enter that category.
This is an oddly specific medical conditionality, both the condition and the amount.
It seems to me the benefit to this would allow you to eat anything you want without the problems associated with higher LDL cholesterol. As such, it equates to how much you're missing from not eating those things. In my case, it might be worth something like $100 a year.
I don't really think I ought to disclose my medical conditions and medications in this format, so it's tough for you to see my context.
My LDL is fine. My total cholesterol is fine. But my triglycerides are way too high and I can't shift them. So I'd pay a reasonable amount for that kind of reduction.
What counts as "reasonable" is up for debate.
I want a number! No wrong answer, but half the point of this question is to figure out how accurately people value their lives, given that heart disease is still the #1 cause of death.
I value my life very highly but don't have much of an idea how much lowering my LDL is going to extend it, in isolation.
I could say it would be worth €1 million, or €10 million, or €100 million to me. I don't have anything approaching that kind of money, so it's a useless question.
If you mean "out of the money you have right now, as a once-off payment, how much?", then I'll pay €100 as that is literally the maximum I can afford. EDIT: This does not mean I only value my life at €100, I mean that's all the spare money I can give for something not immediately urgent like the house burning down. See what I mean about stupid questions?
Now, if you're finished asking dumb questions and getting dumb answers, why not ask people "would you take this? would you value the opportunity?" instead of this mania for "put a number on it! it don't mean nothin' if you don't put a number on it!" for the rationalists here. If you want numbers, heck, let me throw the US interest of $1 trillion dollars (as quoted in a different comment) on it as the kind of meaningless dumb valuation of "put a number on it" - yes, I'd very much like to get my triglyceride levels down since the actions and medication I've been taking to date haven't helped. If a magic button fixed that, I would be happy to press the magic button.
>This does not mean I only value my life at €100, I mean that's all the spare money I can give for something not immediately urgent like the house burning down.
No, see, this is helpful. Like, everyone values their life more than their possessions, but that's the thing about uncertainty and probability—you never know that you should've prioritized "not having a stroke" higher until you're in rehab trying to re-learn how to talk. I expect if you were somebody who'd already had his first heart attack, you might be willing, for instance, to sell your phone, or take out a small loan so you could pay €200 or €300 to hit the button.
FYI, I'm not just doing thought experiments here, I'm doing market research. Genuinely trying to figure out how to price a one-time intervention with potential to persistently lower cholesterol. No idea if it works for triglycerides yet, but if you want I'll keep you posted.
Very difficult to price something like that. Huge variability by person. If you have a family history of hypercholesterolemia, and your father died of a heart attack at 55 then perhaps this will be worth more to you. But statins are effective, and some statins are associated with lower inflammation and lower cancer risk beyond what would be expected from just lowering cholesterol. Of course you need to start statins or get your procedure before the plaque builds up. People tend to turn a blind eye to long term health risks. After all, you may get cancer or die in an accident before the heart attack gets you. How to weigh that risk? Is the procedure really without any potential downsides? If it is a new procedure then that would lower the value to me.
If this is about an actual potential cure or treatment, then I'm interested. I'm not even that concerned about stroke/heart attack, just that I cannot for the life of me figure out why "overall cholesterol levels good, LDL levels okay, triglycerides sky-high". If all my levels were bad, I'd understand it, but they're not.
Would that even be healthy past some point?
EDIT: I guess, even if it wasn't, you can adjust your lifestyle accordingly. Being able to increase your pizza, burgers and fries intake without any worries has value in itself.
A Big Mac is going to turn out to be great for your cholesterol, I'm calling it now.
I remember "go to work on an egg" ad campaign to encourage people to eat more eggs, then that was the height of dangerous folly because eggs are full of cholesterol and will kill you, and now it's okay to eat eggs a few times a week.
Nobody knows nothing about nutrition.
A thread from Bryan Johnson on fluoride toxicity:
https://x.com/bryan_johnson/status/1858580634761130422
Would love to see a post by Scott on the topic.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/obscure-pregnancy-interventions-much
Thanks! For others who want to skip to the fluoride part, it’s under “Activated Alumina Water Filter (Tier 3)”.
The Studies Show podcast episode on the topic, published today:
https://share.snipd.com/episode/d4e12744-1ddc-4462-b31e-a445be9eab70
They seem to be very skeptical and back it up with some good rationale. NTP report however seems to think the risk is moderate based on the evidence (on their scale of ‘high’, ‘moderate’, ‘low’, ‘very low’) and they also appear to back it up by a very thorough review of the evidence,
Agreed, would love to see a post on this.
Post from Cremieux on the topic: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1853263599680061564.
https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-best-charity-isnt-what-you-think (he says it is preventing shrimp from suffering)
I can't help but read pieces like that and conclude they are wrong. It is one part Pascal's mugging by over-weighting the opinions of ideologically-motivated outliers, and one part << if utilitarianism proves this, then utilitarianism is wrong >>.
The suggestions that we should genetically engineer shrimp that are incapable of suffering are the most odious, in my view. It is a funhouse version of morality. It is magical thinking.
When I first heard of the Effective Altruism movement, my first thought was of a group of highly altruistic people who are also very good at math, sitting around and doing heavy duty number-crunching to determine which charities give the best bang for the buck when it comes to helping humanity in general. Based on this, I was initially inclined to *like* effective altruists, and think they were providing a highly valuable service to humanity. I thought I'd be seeing fancy charts and tables all over the place, grading various charities against each other, while also seeing promotion for EA-created charities.
But since following some effective altruists here on substack, I don't recall seeing *any* such public number-crunching, and I definitely don't recall seeing a formal comparison between the various charitable organizations out there. I'm going to guess that some number-crunching went into promoting malaria nets, and it just happened before I started following some EA blogs. If so, great, good work. But has there been *recent* number-crunching within the EA movement? Any recent suggestions of how to best help humanity with charitable donations?
Instead, I see a degree of consideration for non-human suffering that would make PETA blush, and hardly any talk at all of "Ok, we've done good work with malaria nets. What should we do next to try to help the poorest people on Earth?" And look, if you want to lower non-human suffering, fine, good for you. But a lot of altruistic people are going to put their main priority on other human beings, so it might be nice to read about the best ways to help other human beings?
EA people are genuinely well-intentioned, charitable - and scrupulous and tend to believe maths solves all problems. The scrupulosity then leads them down some very winding paths, and they convince themselves by BIG NUMBERS that the weird destinations are the right ones.
Are you aware of GiveWell, and if so, why doesn't it qualify?
It's the oldest EA organization which also AFAIK moves the most money from mass donors, and in fact has a spreadsheet giving their case. It has also been mentioned on this blog at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-effective
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-deboer-on-movement-shell-games
Three times in the last year.
Like, I'm not saying you didn't look carefully into this, but your search process seems pretty detailed and it's kinda wild to me that it somehow didn't turn up the quintessential EA org. It'd be like someone knowing a bunch of theologians but not Jesus or the Pope in a Bible study group.
I think I saw an ad for GiveWell on YouTube once. I genuinely did not know it was connected to the Effective Altruism movement. I learned of EA primarily from this blog, and discovered some other EA blogs through it. It's possible I missed something, but in the time I've seen reading these blogs (last several months), I don't recall any promotion of GiveWell. Or any permanent link to it on a blog page.
Thank you for the info on GiveWell.
And well, since we're here, it might be a good idea to just link all the "typical" EA resources:
https://80000hours.org/
Site which has a career guide for people who want to have the highest EA impact
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/
Pledge to give 10% of your income, as well as suggested places to do so
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/
Open Philanthropy is basically the more speculative arm of GiveWell that was spun off, since it's not just about Global Poverty and they fund things that aren't "Development economics has 50 billion studies for the last 5000 years about how not stepping on rusty nails helps the destitute stay healthy"
There are also animal welfare charities that are more about things like "how can we make factory farmed chickens not essentially be in 24/7 torture" or "what is the most ethically sourced type of meat". I can't link them since I'm not part of that wing, but that is *more* the type of thing that gets discussed in animal welfare circles: if a normal person would balk at seeing how the animals are treated, how do we stop that treatment?
Thanks a lot for that. I'll admit that I was clearly too hard on EA, probably putting too much stock in popular blogs of individual EA members. I guess I'm so used to cross-promotion being *the thing* online that not seeing a lot of it here made me wonder if there wasn't much depth to EA. It's good to know there in fact is a lot of depth to it. Highly informative links.
Yeah, I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with not knowing about GiveWell, it's just really weird given everything else you know about EA. I kinda scoffed at comments about how weirder parts of EA might crowd out global poverty in public consciousness about a decade ago when EA was more like 5k students at universities plus GiveWell but I probably was too dismissive there!
Maybe the problem is those blogs aren't shilling GiveWell as much as they should be.
EA presents an immediate problem for me because of how much art and culture is entirely dependent on philanthropy. I'll confess 100% that I'm personally biased as someone who receives my paycheck from arts non-profits. But if we tacitly accept the notion that arts and culture are not worthwhile until we've achieved utilitarian utopia... then what the hell is it all for?
ETA: Also, my understanding is that a much larger moral concern with shrimping is the harms to other marine life and ecosystems as a whole. I just don't think shrimp taste good enough relative to the many alternatives, so I'll side-step the whole issue by not buying them.
I think you should go to a rural village in a developing country, look some villagers in the eye, and tell them that while you could have saved some children in their district from malaria/clubfoot/whatever, you ultimately decided that opera was more important.
Don't worry, I'm not giving money to the opera, I'm receiving money from the opera. Many thanks to all the (apparently heartless&evil) people who pay me!
Don't fret, there will always be rich people whose motivation for charity is to see their name on a gold plate on some fancy cultural building in the local community, which is something that EA does not offer. It has been thus since the bronze age.
Also, there is some cultural activity which manages to be self-sustaining: books, video games and movies come to mind. Broadly, I am in favor of equipping the local population with enough money to enjoy culture and leave the details on how they spend it up to them.
2nd this. All my charity goes to art and culture, I'm personally biased because I live that culture, and yes - what is it all for?
Amen to this.
And one of the things that most frosts my cookies (metaphorically) about the whole EA movement is the implied co-option of "if you don't accept my (wackadoo) notions about what is best, you don't want to be effective OR you don't want to help people." By grabbing a name, they can play the same rhetorical game that so many other organizations (trying to avoid politics here, but...BLM!) do--if you don't support the organization/movement, then you must disagree with/hate the thing the name represents! No.
Frosted cookies are delicious. Perhaps some shouldn't be frosted, such as peanut butter cookies, but usually frosting makes things better.
Gods be damned. I don't contribute to shrimp suffering because I don't eat shrimp because I don't like shellfish in general (I'm not allergic, I just don't like them).
But this kind of niminy-piminy secular sermon about "think of the liddle shrimpies suffocating to death on ice!!!!" makes me want to ring in an order to the local takeaway for two orders of every shrimp/prawn dish they have on the menu.
If it is the Bulldog's secret plan to increase the shrimp-fishing economy by reverse psychology, congratulations, it worked.
Shrimp don't have brains in any meaningful sense so they don't know they're suffering and they'll be dead soon. If I'm working my way down the list of moral demands on my attention, they're so far down the list I'm not even sure they're on it.
Right now we have the Russians bombing the hell out of Ukraine, California burning, the homeless and the deranged and the sorrowful all in need, and this charming selection of headlines from the newspapers in my country.
https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/a-horrible-hateful-crime-judge-34133035
https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/courtandcrime/arid-41519117.html
https://www.leitrimobserver.ie/news/national-news/1648179/man-pleads-guilty-to-serious-assault-that-left-then-girlfriend-with-broken-ribs-and-eye-socket.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/lamora-williams-georgia-mother-sentencing-b2648456.html
Hmmm - shrimps on ice versus toddlers put into oven by their mother and baked to death. You tell me which is more harrowing.
Shrimp suffering is something you can indulge yourself on when you have no problems in your life and need to feel like you're A Good Guy.
"I asked chat GPT to make an image of 1,500 shrimp in a lecture hall"
And this is why I'm so harsh in my response - it's the Disneyfication of animals, the faked-up anthropomorphism. No shrimp is ever going to sit at a desk with paper and pen to take notes from a lecture, unless they make The Little Mermaid 3 and we get to see schools in the cartoon underwater realm. It's not real. It's so far from real, it's insulting. And yet this is the image chosen, in order to pluck at the heartstrings and get us feeling, not thinking, all worked up over the liddle shrimpies and their suffering.
If reality is not good enough for you, Bentham's Bulldog, then why be surprised when my reaction is "To hell with the shrimp and in fact I hope they suffer *even more*"?
There's a fallacy here which I think of as the drunk driver's fallacy: Why aren't you busy arresting rapists and murderers instead of hassling me? We can attend to more than one thing at once. I agree that shrimp are a long way down the list, but then I also think early stage human foetuses are and you might disagree about that.
> We can attend to more than one thing at once.
That is not really true, we have the resources we have, and any we spent allocated to shrimp welfare won't be allocated to (for example) modern art museums.
You can expand your resources by taxing and borrowing if you are the government. You can think that modern art museums, or EU membership, more or less directly enhance productivity and increase resources. And ignoring both those points there's distributive justice: if shrimps and paintings are both worthwhile they both deserve a slice of the pie.
> There's a fallacy here which I think of as the drunk driver's fallacy: Why aren't you busy arresting rapists and murderers instead of hassling me?
Except in real life, rape closure rates are <30% and murder about 50%, and meanwhile 80%+ of police hours are spent on traffic stops and overhead, with a tiny minority going to anything that looks anything like "solving actual crime."
Cites on request, I've got a whole post about this.
But the answer is rebalance, adjust, reprioritise. It is not abolish traffic cops and put them on to serious crimes
I feel strongly about this fallacy because it was responsible for Brexit. David Cameron invented the tactic when we had a referendum on AV voting in 2011: switching to AV would cost money we could otherwise spend on the National Health Service. Not how it works: we are a rich first world country. If we would be better and more democratically governed under AV we should and can find the money to implement it.
Cameron was then bitten on the arse by the same silly argument about reallocating money from the EU to the NHS.
And now we have an idiot called Streeting claiming that assisted dying would divert funds from the NHS. This is disgraceful: if someone has the right to ask to die it's not a right which should be postponed to granny having to wait and extra month for her hip replacement. It's also a stupid argument as well as immoral because the obvious answer is that actually assisted dying is highly likely to save the NHS large amounts of time and money. Nobody would make that argument, but it is no more immoral than the converse one.
A foetus is human. A shrimp is a shrimp. But I think we would both agree that "let's solve the problem of people whose idea of childrearing is to bake their kids to death" should be tackled first before the poor widdle shrimpies.
I think that generally, formal theories of morality can lead you to weird places. Sometimes, that can be a problem, when the action they prescribe is explicitly forbidden by other moral theories, e.g. "kill all problems".
For the shrimps cause, this is not the case, most other theories do not care either way about shrimps. While "forget bed-nets, poverty, mammal welfare and humanities far future and focus exclusively on shrimps" would be silly, nobody is seriously proposing that. "Spend some small fraction of donations on this cause area which might be important according to a major formal ethical theory" is much less contentious.
Having formal moral theories (notice the plural) instead of just doing what people feel like doing has some clear advantages. "The director of the organ bank just assigns priorities based on their gut feelings" is no way to do anything large scale.
Also, it is not always the case that just because a theory leads you to weird places, it is wrong. "Care about shrimp suffering" is positively tame compared to the weirdness following from some physical theories of the last century, for example.
I neither believe that shrimp suffer (because the studies are carried out by people who have an interest in the result being "yes" so yeah I'm crying 'bias') nor do I care if they do suffer.
3% to 19% as intensely as humans? As humans *what*? A headache? A stubbed toe? A paper cut? Dying of lung cancer? (I've seen that last, baby, and believe me a shrimp on ice don't cut it by comparison).
Imagine you are a woman living in Sudan right now. The mother of a family. You and your children are living in a conflict zone. And then someone tells you that there's a guy in America who is fundraising to alleviate suffering.
You are very grateful, because maybe this means you'll be able to feed your kids today.
https://www.trocaire.org/donations/now/?gad_source=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI_4iRkq_oiQMVhIBQBh09RQ4IEAAYAiAAEgIvDvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
"Imagine life for a child caught in a conflict zone this Christmas. No soap for cleaning and hygiene. No food for their bellies. No safe water to drink or place to rest their heads. Fragile. Frightened."
No, you are told. The really big, really important cause for suffering is - shrimp. Really important that we raise money to buy stunners to kill shrimp humanely. Oh, you and your family are suffering? Yeah, but you're not a cute CGI picture of shrimp studying in a lecture hall - lookit them sitting at their wee desks with their wee claws in front of them on their wee books! People are bored of doing the ordinary donating to human suffering that goes on day-after-day with seemingly no end in sight. But shrimps are pink and cute and we in the full-belly West just wuvs us cute widdle critters! And best of all, it's *novel*, it's *unusual*. Every dumb redneck Bible-thumping Trump voter is throwing a dollar or a pound or a euro into the collection basket for suffering humans. But it's so much more *interesting* to be the type of person concerned with shrimp suffering, so much more *intelligent*, high human capital type. So much more impressive to talk about self-deprecatingly at one of those Bay Area house parties.
> But shrimps are pink and cute
Fun fact: live shrimp are translucent. The ones in the image have all been cooked.
That makes it even more delicious (not the shrimp, which I dislike to eat, but the fact that the imagery they are using is Dead Shrimp, murdered so brutally in the fashion described).
What if the answer were "90% as intensely as the worst pain a human can suffer"? Surely, then you'd care at least a little bit?
Even if the answer is, "on the scale of a human headache" does your attitude imply that it's ridiculous to try and research a cure for headaches?
I agree that this kind of thing has the flavour of a Pacal's mugging where you multiply an uncertain and probably small number by a very big number, get a very big number and draw conclusions from that, but like, it's pretty clear that what the numbers are actually matters, and a little suffering spread very, very widely is still something that is worth dealing with.
I think you're going too far and doing the opposite: signaling that you're not one of those Berkeley weirdos, tyvm, and acting like there's no possible argument for why someone might think shrimp suffering is an important cause. I think the much more likely reason people take that view is that it's a simple extrapolation of some obvious ideas and for a certain kind of mindset it's hard to avoid extrapolation in that way.
There's a difference between "organism feels negative reaction to negative stimulus" and "organism feels pain". For me to be concerned about shrimp suffering, I'd have to believe they did feel pain on a level above immediate physical sensation; that they had some kind of mind going on.
I don't think shrimp have minds, and never mind the cutesy-poo "research shows they have favourite foods and like chatting with their friends" quoted in Bentham's Bulldog article.
So do I think shrimp feel pain? Yes, the same way all living things are set up on a basic level to react to stimuli. Do I think shrimp feel pain like a human does? No. What does it mean for a shrimp to feel immense pain and then death? I have no idea, I don't think we should be crueler than can be helped, but I don't think a shrimp is "suffering" in a meaningful sense. I wouldn't pull the wings off flies and I wouldn't pull the legs off living shrimp, but it does not follow that I think shrimp or flies are sentient or sapient or have consciousness.
I do think being concerned with shrimp suffering, when there are more immediate and much graver instances of suffering going on in the world around us and immediately around us, *is* an indulgence of the neurotic, hyper-civilised sort akin to the exquisite sensibilities of fin-de-siècle dandies in the same social circles as Proust, particularly the Comte de Montesquiou:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_de_Montesquiou
"Suffering from what he felt to be a misalliance of his father, he distanced himself from his mother ("a person to whom I am only distantly related")"
Now *that* is the kind of person who would have entertained the salons with his campaign to end the suffering of shrimp, a thought unbearable to him, that racked his nerves when he contemplated the silent screams of the crustaceans!
There's a difference between being compassionate and living on your nerves.
I'm *hugely* enjoying your immense impatience with this topic.
That said, it's not actually about the shrimp, I think. The phrase "virtue signaling" is pretty loaded these days, but I suspect that's what's happening here. It might not be deliberate or conscious, but the person who invents a whole new never-before-contemplated level of *CARING!* *SO!* *MUCH!* must consider themselves A Very Good Person for doing so.
Maybe they're even the *best* at caring, given that they're setting new records for caring about things.
Funny how they're so rarely foster parents to special needs kids, isn't it?
I give Bentham's Bulldog the benefit of the doubt because (a) they hang around here and I like to think we're a better class of fruit cakes, ones with real crystallised fruit and a healthy slug of brandy 😀 and (b) they do seem to be groping their way to a coherent morality to live by.
So I think it's not so much virtue signalling on their path as "oops, should have turned left ten miles back, how the heck did I end up on this sheep track?" but by now they're so far down it, they feel their only choice is to keep driving over the mountain and hope they'll come out to civilisation on the other side.
"the person who invents a whole new never-before-contemplated level of *CARING!* *SO!* *MUCH!* must consider themselves A Very Good Person for doing so."
In the same vein as the aesthete in "Patience":
https://genius.com/Gilbert-and-sullivan-am-i-alone-and-unobserved-lyrics
If you're anxious for to shine
In the high aesthetic line
As a man of culture rare
You must get up all the germs
Of the transcendental terms
And plant them ev'rywhere
You must lie upon the daisies
And discourse in novel phrases
Of your complicated state of mind
The meaning doesn't matter
If it's only idle chatter
Of a transcendental kind
And ev'ry one will say
As you walk your mystic way
"If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me
Why, what a very singularly deep young man this deep young man must be!"
I agree it's very plausible that shrimp don't feel pain in any way we care about... But how sure are you? How certain would you have to be in order to attach _no_ weight to their potential suffering?
Indeed, you say you wouldn't pull the wings off flies, or that we shouldn't be crueler than we need to be, but unless you give some weight to the idea that they do have a morally valuable experience, it's not clear why you'd feel that way. Do you feel that pulling the legs off a live shrimp is the moral equivalent of pulling a leaf off a tree?
In fact one might characterize shrimp charities as trying to figure out just how cruel _is actually necessary_ and to promote no more than that level of cruelty!
I think being concerned _exclusively_ with shrimp suffering is ridiculous, and I generally find BB's completely naive total utilitarianism to be kind of annoying, so I get where you're coming from... But it's an even worse mistake to commit yourself to the opposite cause just because someone is annoying. The correct answer is almost certainly "shrimp have some moral worth, how to quantify it and how to trade it off against human moral worth is probably not amenable to simple back of the envelope calculations, but given the scale on which shrimp are harmed it should be probably be a _little bit_ on your radar". It's almost certainly not, "this issue is trivial compared to genocide so I'm going to treat it as having no importance, or maybe even negatively polarize against it".
Minor headaches also don't really rate compared to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and so forth, but I still think it's valuable to research better Tylenol. I think you'd agree, and you wouldn't say "to hell with people with slight headaches, I hope they suffer even more".
It's not so much the moral weigh on the shrimp or the flies, as on the human. Indulging in cruelty for the sake of it is bad for you.
To clarify, you said that no science can persuade you that shrimp can suffer, because you know in your heart that they can’t? You give only a passing mention of the facts in your 3 comments, and seem hyper focused on the emotional tone of Bentham’s article. If facts can’t change your mind, maybe a different sort of argument will?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_8AwlEdClA
it's a question of cubic capacity. They just don't have enough space for a brain complex enough for all the things claimed for them.
The classical example we all learned in primary school biology is the amoeba reacting to being poked and moving in a different direction. Do amoebae therefore suffer? or have the capacity for suffering? The kinds of studies that show "shrimp have friends" are interpreted the same way as people interpreted that dolphins or chimpanzees could talk and reason just like humans, where in those instances there is native intelligence, a boatload of training, and wishful thinking on the part of partisan 'scientists'.
"If facts can’t change your mind, maybe a different sort of argument will?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_8AwlEdClA"
Oh gosh! Cartoon sharks coded Italian-American mafiosi, with shrimps that have human eyes in human eye colours and can talk and are people, too! That has totally convinced me that - Italian-Americans are evil and should be destroyed for the sake of cute anthropomorphic vermin everywhere!
"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt", eh? Thanks for the kind thought, Koopa!
Prefer comments which have a higher argument : incredulous assertion ratio.
The numbers provided (5 shrimp = 1 human) are unbelievable and I'm not a hedonist anyway.
To get better numbers, suppose we say a human-sized pile of shrimp has 20% of the suffering capacity of a single human. For largish shrimp and a medium-small human, there might be 2400 shrimp in that pile, this is generous. Redoing the numbers then with 12000 shrimp = 1 human gets us $8 per human-equivalent of shrimp rather than $1 per 285 human-equivalents.
Is it worth paying $8 to have a human, instead of experiencing 20 minutes of being frozen to death, first get clubbed on the head and then frozen to death while unconscious? If I were the human, I would not pay $8 for that, nor would I pay $0 for it either. I'd happily pay a lot more than $8 to avoid the "death" part of it, but that's not an option.
If (generic "you") you want to show me an image of 1,500 shrimp, show me something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSE7sv-2V_8&ab_channel=WondasticTech
Of course, that's not nearly as cute and cuddly as ChatGPT shrimp sitting at desks, or cartoon smiling shrimp (on another Bulldog post) and the reality is much harder to have the sentimental attitude that they are sentient cute little critters who would look up at you with big eyes and trembling - antennae, I guess? That really do feel pain and talk to each other just like people do and have interior lives and food preferences.
Reality is inconvenient like that, but if you are genuine about "shrimp suffer and we should alleviate that", then stick to what is actual, not some fake cartoon world "singing dancing talking shrimp, they're humans in a shell case" version of the animal.
Okay, how about this:
Statements which, on their surface, sound universally agreeable—things like “It’s wrong to take a life when you don’t need to”, or “We should try to minimize the suffering of sentient creatures”—lead you to some very weird places very quickly, even if you don’t let yourself get bogged down in questions like whether or not shrimp count as “sentient”.
Nature, after all, is red in tooth and claw. Killing a hawk might save a dozen rabbits painful deaths. Does that make it okay? What about a year later, when those dozen rabbits have turned into a hundred, and half of them are starving to death because the vegetation has been over-grazed? Is it better for those fifty rabbits to have lived and lost—or should their existences have been prevented? And how are we supposed to feel about creatures with lifestyles that seem to require suffering, like the wasps that paralyze other insects and then lay eggs in them, so that their young can have a fresh first meal of still-living flesh?
The whole business about taking lives is even hairier. Sure, you can go vegetarian, or even vegan—but scramble up to that moral high-ground and a still-higher peak comes into view: Fruitopia, where even plants’ lives matter. There dwell the Fruititarians, who restrict themselves to vegetable foods that don’t kill the plant they came from in the process of harvest.
I suspect that smart people are often drawn to these systems (Steve Jobs is one famous example) out of a desire to figure out the rule underlying their intuitive compunctions and follow that rule to its logical extreme. The prize for having thought the most about this, and developed the most internally consistent framework, goes to the Jains of India, who have a whole system of ranking organisms from plants to humans based on how many senses they have.
But most of us, myself included, are happy to shrug and enjoy a burger provided we don’t have to think too hard about how it came to be on our plate. Personally, I go to great lengths to avoid having lunch with the kind of people who ask tricky questions about why it’s okay to eat a cow but not a cat.
And I suspect these weird questions arise because ethical frameworks like this are, ultimately, proxies for something concrete and biological that we all have an intuitive sense for: the likelihood that a given behavior will come back to bite you in the ass.
This is karma, at its core.
Consider kosher slaughter practices, which focus on minimizing pain and distress to the animal. It’s ethical, sure, to make sure your goat doesn’t know what’s coming until its throat has been cleanly slit—but it just so happens that this also prevents adrenaline from leaching into the meat and tainting it, or using up the animal’s glycogen stores in struggle. A botched slaughter means brays of distress, which means an agitated herd, which in turn means you’re not getting nearly as much goat milk this week as you were expecting.
It feels wrong to feed the meat of one cow to another cow. Why? The cow doesn’t know it’s doing cannibalism, right? But if you disobey that feeling, your prize is a very interesting disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob, wherein your brain begins to resemble a sponge.
There’s a reason the thought of twenty thousand chickens being raised in a warehouse (cage free!), pecking around in each other’s shit all day and never seeing the light of the sun is morally repugnant. Is it that the chickens are stressed and unhappy? Do we *really* care how they feel?
Or is that repulsion just a recognition that such a practice is practically *begging* for disease to come and wipe out the entire flock? Certainly, if you could smell the situation, you’d never want to eat such an animal, no matter how thoroughly cooked. It’s unnatural, in the literal sense that these kinds of factory farming operations would collapse overnight without constant pharmaceutical intervention: drugs like coccidiostats and antibiotics.
In some sense, these technologies let us engineer around the thing that the moral compunction is there to warn us about.
But this is the thing about karma: you can’t escape it. It doesn’t give up, it only transforms. Sure, you can do a “washout” period before eating the chicken, so that its flesh doesn’t contain any antibiotics—but the body, as they say, keeps the score. That washout doesn’t get rid of the antibiotic-resistant bacteria that have evolved over the thing’s lifetime. Maybe you cook it well enough to kill them, but even if you do, are you going to denature the DNA well enough to prevent something else in your gut from picking up those genes?
Antibiotics also drastically increase the amount of heavy metals that an animal absorbs from its diet, and there’s no length of washout that will remove lead or arsenic from its flesh. Maybe a clever guy could engineer a chemical solution to that problem—but I suspect that if you did, you’d end up taking the iron and other important minerals out, along with the heavy metals.
My point is: Karma's a bitch, and any time we think we've pulled one over on her—engineering around what our intuitive sense tells us is moral behavior for the sake of efficiency—we've usually set ourselves up to step on a rake at some point in the not-too-distant future. It reminds me of Elua—the Kushielian god you mention in your Meditations on Moloch piece (first thing of yours I ever read, and the post that drew me into this community, actually).
So if we come across a fatally wounded mammal, we put it out of its misery. Such creatures can be unpredictable in their desperation. Even if it's something harmless, like a rabbit, we don't want it dragging itself around all over the place, getting its wounds infected, turning into an incubator for gangrenous bacteria. Maybe we even bury it.
But this seems less imperative if it's, say, a turtle or a fish. And yes, you could explain this moral differential as a function of number of neurons, or complexity of neural network, or number of senses, like the Jains...but you could just as well explain it as a function of the animal's degree of relatedness to you—and therefore the likelihood of zoonosis, that a pathogen which breeds in the body of this weakened and dying creature will be able to infect you too.
I don't think anyone would argue with the notion that the disgust response is there to protect us from disease. But there’s a moral dimension to disgust, as well as a visceral one, and I think that’s a clue. Why do we describe black pepper, ginger, and red pepper all as being “spicy”, when they’re very different flavors? The answer is that all three activate TRPV channels; that despite the inherent limitations on our attempts to describe the world and our experience of it, we’ve actually done a very good job.
So I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to minimize the suffering of animals; you won’t find me out there burning ants with a magnifying glass for fun. Mainly, I’m saying it’s interesting that a completely amoral person practicing selfishness-writ-long, informed by a deep knowledge of ecology and biology, would end up behaving basically in accordance with the ethical framework that most people take for granted. Give them a sufficiently wide scope of vision, and you might even find such a person engaging in bleeding-heart behaviors like going down to the wet market and wrecking as much as they can—breaking open cages, shooing the animals into the forest, “BE FREE!”
...no, I don't think you've quite got the point. I'm saying that, the same way the visceral dimension of disgust protects us from e.g. smallpox, the moral dimension of disgust protects us from behaviors that lead to prion diseases or, in your case, cops.
Something I found interesting. A fresh study profiled 263 jobs on Big 5 personality traits and published their interactive data tables here: https://apps.psych.ut.ee/JobProfiles/
If you're outside the US, use US VPN to see the tables.
Data includes answers to specific questions by job (n ranges from 25 to 1000). Some highlights I spotted:
- Actors way, way, way outscore everyone else on neuroticism
- Lowest extraversion jobs are ACX central: Electronics engineers, software and web development, lab technicians, animal care workers
- Lowest agreeableness jobs are those we love to hate: sales workers, entrepreneurs, real estate agents, board members
- Conversely, highest agreeableness jobs are those no one hates: electronics engineers and webdev, software dev and researchers are in top 10 too
- Out of top 10 conscientiousness jobs, 3 are managerial and 3 are naval.
- Conversely, bottom 2 conscientiousness jobs are visual artists and electronics engineers. Researchers and developers are not too far behind.
- Authors have the greatest spread in conscientiousness over any job in any trait.
- Software developers are the #1 job that doesn't believe in the power of fate. #2 is religious professionals.
- Webdev is the top job that becomes anxious in new situations
- Top 3 jobs on the "Can't make up my mind" item: Actors, Webdev and... toolmakers? Really?
- Highest standard deviation in conscientiousness is among authors/writers
- Top 27 jobs on "I want to be in charge" question are all some variety of manager, followed by air traffic controllers at #28
- Top job on "I'm interested in science" question is "Research Professionals Not Elsewhere Classified", which presumably makes them my fellow postdocs.
- Psychologists score #2 on "Have a natural talent for influencing people". #1 is HR managers
- Pilots score the lowest on "become anxious in new situations"
- "Believe we should be tough on crime". Top: statisticians. Bottom: judges, lawyers
- All the jobs that score the lowest on "support liberal political candidates" are blue collar jobs, plus religious and military.
- Jobs that score lowest on "Tend to feel very hopeless": Aircraft pilots, psychologists, database professionals
- 9 out of 10 jobs that score the lowest on "Like to stand out in a crowd" are blue collar laborers, the 10th is web dev.
- Jobs that score the lowest on "see myself as an average person": artists, authors, actors, film directors and journalists
- Jobs that enjoy philosophical discussions most: artists, authors, actors, film directors and psychologists
- All the jobs that score highest on "Try to out-do others" are managerial, plus lawyers.
"Conversely, bottom 2 conscientiousness jobs are visual artists and..."
"Authors have the greatest spread in conscientiousness over any job in any trait."
Like in any challenging and highly competitive field, there's a lot of exhortations to "work hard" in the arts... and I think this really goes to show some limitations to that way of thinking. Pure talent matters /a lot./ To be sure, arts careers are their own kind of grind, trying to "make it" is very psychologically taxing, there's a reason the tortured artist is such a trope. But the actual amount someone can force their way to success in these fields through hard work is very questionable.
> "Believe we should be tough on crime". Top: statisticians. Bottom: judges, lawyers
Imagine my shock
> Psychologists score #2 on "Have a natural talent for influencing people". #1 is HR managers
Do I understand that correctly as scoring high on the *belief* (whether substantiated or not) that they have a natural talent for influencing people? I don't think they actually measured that.
(If they did, that would be quite interesting.)
Self-reported Big 5 personality traits, plus the nuanced questions; so presumably all beliefs, unless you can empirically measure how manipulative someone is
My experience is everyone hating webdevs with a passion, what are you talking about?
Everyone here seems to hate Substack webdevs, but maybe our bubble is not representative for the world in general.
Hating how social media sites work is universal across all sites, and that's just one part of it.
Now, admittedly anectotal, I'm open to the possibility I'm actually in a bubble here and the regular experience is different for most - but the additional datapoint that makes me suspect it's truly universal is how much we hate our website maintainers in my job.
I’m very surprised about the “bottom conscientiousness” jobs.
Isn’t the creed of visual artists that any imperfection will be detected disproportionately easily and ruin the performance?
For electronics engineers or developers, how is it even possible to have low conscientiousness? You need to get a staggering amount of details right in your working memory to end up with a working product. How does it square with willingness to half-ass the job or other low conscientiousness (am I misunderstanding what it even means)?
Could it be that conscientiousness would be trained out of them (lots of work, they’re expensive, so no time for perfectionism) instead?
I went into software instead of biology largely because of low conscientiousness, especially the head-in-the-clouds version of it. If I need to do labwork and add these ingredients in these amounts in that order, odds are good that I WILL mess it up and have to do it all over, or worse, get wrong results and not know it. If I run an extra test to double-check, odds are good I mess up that one too. With software when I think I have a feature working I can run a bunch of unit tests and if I can just get it correct once, it'll stay correct unless someone changes it.
While there is hard work and perfectionism involved, a lot of people in the arts are driven by an underlying desire to /not/ work.
I think of the arts as somewhat analogous to an early retirement approach to life. Lots of people in the arts are drawn to the idea that they can frontload a lot of effort into honing their skills, and then once they "make it" they'll be set for life.
I'd say this same dynamic of frontloading effort for reduced effort later is why engineers and developers are over-represented in the FIRE community.
I also suspect conscientiousness is just one of the traits that is hardest to measure by self-reporting. A lot of people drive themselves to disciplined hard work through self-flagellation and the sense that they're never doing enough.
A typical software system will have way more bugs than there is developer time to fix, so a certain amount of "does this bug *really* matter" becomes useful...
I wonder if the job actually could be affecting people's conscientiousness, I gave way more of a shit about correctness when I started working 10 years ago vs now.
"We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris." -- Larry Wall, Programming Perl
As the quote goes, "I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it."
Jobs where this is possible will naturally have low C types gravitating towards them, people who hate doing the same routine over and over and would rather find a way to "automate boring stuff".
Many situations are equivalent to the Prisoner's Dilemma. Is the standard formulation that we use (the one about prisoners) a bad/confusing one?
I remember that on my first exposure to the Prisoner's Dilemma as a kid I found the whole discussion confusing. "Obviously," I said, "if you actually did the crime then you should confess, and give evidence against your accomplice as well." The discussion in whatever I was reading, which talked about payoff matrices, seemed disturbingly amoral -- "you shouldn't be thinking about how to minimise your own punishment, you should be thinking about how to ensure that you both get the punishment you deserve!"
Later on I understood that this wasn't really what the thought experiment was supposed to be about, but it left a bad taste in my mouth. Did anyone else have the same experience?
Imagine you both are wrongfully accused.
Many of the problems in decision theory run into issues with violating morality almost immediately. For a couple of other examples, the King Solomon problem involves sleeping with another woman's wife (and the husband and wife's opinions do not enter into it), and the Hitchhiker problem involves trying to cheat somebody who is trying to help you out of payment for doing so.
They're supposed to be abstractions, I think, a la logic puzzles - you're not supposed to evaluate the obvious moral problems inherent in the problem itself. And you're supposed to just accept that you value whatever it is the problem asks you to value.
But the overall impression such problems produce is that the decision theory isn't really meant for human beings - we don't evaluate problems in a contextless vacuum, and trying to make decisions in such a vacuum is crippling an important part of our actual decision-making process.
I was presented with the Prisoners Dilema in business school, so there it was obviously about explaining bussiness strategy, not to test our moral intuition.
But I have come to think of moral deliberation as originating in Game Theory( Prisoners Dilema) / Moloch/ economic externalities. Moral discussions seem to be mostly about hashing out under which circumstances the other players can expect an individual to play cooperate and, if that expectation is dissapointed, add reputational costs onto playing defect.
If you follow a strict Deontological ruleset, which happens to include "lying is never permissible" you always land at your childhood intuition. Your childhood self would always put the reputational cost on the defectee, independent of how te other choice rewards are allocated.
Under most forms of Utilitarianism it does depend on how the rewards are allocated; we would permit the prisoner to play defect, iff her personal reward in the defect box is larger than the total reward in the cooperate/ cooperate box. On paper, such an allocation is easy to make and might be plausible in the given scenario; it only depends on potential punishments and degree of leeniency under cooperation. But if we want to apply this to the real world, the total utility would have to include the utility gained by the interrogator (representing us - the rest of society) which probably tips the scale to us demanding cooperate from all players under most realistic allocations and putting reputational costs on them if they choose to defect.
Of course you could try to apply countless other moral frameworks, but in the end it comes down to how you allocate the numbers.
I remember having the same thought at first. Then I actually lived some life and realized success is about being unethical and making people think you're ethical. Now it doesn't bother me.
Absolutely, same here. I also used to wonder what's cooperative about not admitting your wrongdoing.
In fact, a better framing of the dilemma comes from good ol' Eliezer: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HFyWNBnDNEDsDNLrZ/the-true-prisoner-s-dilemma
You're playing with clippy. If you defect, you can save a million human lives. If clippy defects, he can produce some paper clips. You don't care about paper clips at all, nor does he about human lives.
Yeah, the colorful names make it easier to remember, but also introduce unnecessary connotations: Prisoner's Dilemma, Stag Hunt, Chicken, Battle of the Sexes...
When will Israel have another election?
I read a lot after Oct 7 about how Bibi will be toast in the next election, but the taboo about not holding elections during war would let him stay in power and postpone his trial on corruption charges. The chance of the war ending looks slimmer than ever now, but what about long term? What happens if he dies in office? Will the no election during war taboo ever end?
Barring a coalition crisis (which, as you mentioned, parties are trying to avoid because they don't want to hold elections), elections will be held in October 2026.
(Interestingly, Manifold thinks there's a 50% odds that the war is over by June.)
Is there some reason why Oct 2026? Or is that just your prediction?
It's the law? Knesset terms are four years, unless called early.
Many thanks. That's the missing piece I didn't know.
Probably won't hold the election for as long as they can, until late 2026—that is, unless the religious right tears the coalition apart over Haredi drafting. Also of note: Bibi's Likud is back on top of the polls, and he's again the most popular pick for PM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_Israeli_legislative_election
Doubt he'll die in office, but if he does, Lieberman will maaaaybe find some way to cobble together a center-right secular coalition with Gantz, Bennett, and Lapid..? Otherwise, Likud will just fall into the hands of some slightly-less-charismatic sycophant like Israel Katz and put together another precarious right-far-right government.
Isn't it just that they won't hold an election because the governing parties will lose seats in an election?
The U.S. constitution outlines how the electoral college works:
"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector."
Note that there is no requirement to hold a popular vote. The legislature can appoint electors however it wishes. Something to keep in mind when thinking about the outcome of the 2026 elections.
While the constitution doesn't require having citizens vote for president, it's something we expect. Changing this would be massively unpopular. Whichever party does this would ruin their chances at winning all of the other elections.
The constitution doesn't require 𝘰𝘳 𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸 citizens to vote for president. Preventing that from happening is the purpose of the electoral college.
Could use a Ouija board!
Or my recent proposal for a National Instant Runoff Voting Interstate Compact (NIRVIC): https://pontifex.substack.com/p/a-better-electoral-system-for-the
This is like NPVIC except:
- Nirvic is pronounceable
- FPTP is crap, IRV is better; why put in a lot of effort to get something crap
- My proposal is that Nirvic is implemented as soon as 3 states sign up for it; hopefully this increases interest.
Might as well go all the way and find the Schwartz set or something.
Try explaining that to an average member of the public.
If i was going for a Condorcet system, I'd go for Ranked Robin:
- choose the candidate who wins the most pairwise comparisons
- if there's a tie, use average score as a tie breaker
1. The Electoral College has nothing to do with the 2026 elections, which are purely legislative
2. The Constitution exists and is interpreted by the courts within a body of established law. There is vastly more to the entirety of federal election law than 1 sentence from the Constitution. In general, we don't run our country based on 1 single sentence, even from our founding document. This would be obviously chaotic.
Current legal precedent is that states have to declare whether they're going to hold popular elections for their EC votes, or alternately have the legislature do it (last done by Colorado in the 1870s if I'm not mistaken). So yes, a state could decide in advance of a presidential election that it wants its legislature to decide who gets their EC votes. However the legislators themselves would also be up for election, so they'd be running on a platform of 'we're suspending your right to vote for President'. How would that go for them? Good luck I guess.
But to your point- no, a state may not choose one method, dislike the outcome, and then decide to use a different method. That is not legal
Well said.
Worth adding that "current legal precedent" on this topic is not just some recent court ruling, it is dozens of them going back two centuries.
Note that there are a couple of odd-year-elections for legislatures; most notoriously Virginia, which usually goes the opposite way of the previous year's Presidential election and then everyone overinterprets it.
"However the legislators themselves would also be up for election"
Who says state governments have to hold elections for their legislature? Although the United States must "guarantee every a republican form of government," this clause is nonjusticiable:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guarantee_Clause#Interpretation
So what would stop a state government from just straight-up suspending elections if it's allied with a party that controls a majority in the House of Representatives and thus could block federal action?
My point here is not to advocate for such a course of action, just to point out what a state might do if it felt backed into a corner.
They would probably run afoul of their State constitution and bring the State's own judiciary down on themselves.
If a party has such unchecked control (i.e., legislative supermajorities) that they could amend the State constitution and keep the judiciary at bay, the Presidential popular vote would almost certainly be in favor of their preferred candidate anyway.
And if it wouldn't be, the country as a whole is probably swinging so hard against their party that their own State's EVs wouldn't be decisive.
Judicial decisions are pretty heavily informed by precedent & social context. 'The United States is a democratic republic where incumbents can't just suspend elections' is quite the context, to put it mildly. Unfortunately we will likely never have a chance to test this, but if a state government did suspend elections, I'd be willing to bet my entire net worth with you that the US judicial system would not in fact permit this
I recently researched and made a post about transgender athletes, and I wonder if there's anybody here who will take the contrary side.
Broadly, I argue that the current IOC criteria ignores some significant advantages that M2F athletes have over both F2M and female athletes, and it would be quite easy to ultimately wreck the playing field for born-female athletes with the current criteria.
These advantages include:
> A suite of ~20 physiological advantages that come with having a Y chromosome and having trained as a man, regardless of testosterone levels. (and this is why, for example, androgen insensitive XY women are 50x over-represented in sport)
> Even after transition, untrained M2F laypersons have 13-30% more muscle and 20-50% more strength than even F2M laypersons with testosterone, and this is likely even more skewed for M2F athletes.
> Elite athletics is such a competitive domain that even percent and decimal-point level advantages matter enough that sports specialize strongly by body type and size
> Per the above, competitive gaps are so large that any middling male athlete could transition and dominate a female roster in their sport, and these two factors combined could drive out women at the elite level overall.
My full argument is here: https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/transgender-divides-in-athletics
I haven't received any informed criticisms or commentary from anyone else who's seen it so far. Is there anyone here who would argue the contrary side? That M2F athletes should definitely be allowed to compete as females at the elite level?
I welcome a discussion with you if so.
Sports are dominated by the statistical tails; it's not quite as clear as you think that middling men could overwhelm elite women in the sports, because the averages alone tell you nothing about the tails.
And the statistical tails in the cases for the sports where MTF trans people might have the advantage - are likely to be dominated by women who, not to put to fine a point on it, are probably a lot closer to men due to individual-specific hormonal and other effects. Statistical tails, you see.
So I'd hazard a guess that MTF trans people are probably a lot more similar to the women they're competing with at a professional level than either group are to the statistical average of women.
But "professional level", and the selection effects this has, is doing all the heavy lifting for us here. Most sports aren't professional! School and college sports in particular are not professional. There was a woman who I went to school with who ended up in the WNBA; she more or less single-handedly turned the local high school basketball team into a champion team. She probably would have been the best player on the men's basketball team - but not by a margin that would have automatically won them the championship.
That, I think, is where the arguments probably matter more; not at the "elite" level where you want to focus, where I expect the arguments are going to be weakest - but at every other level.
The problem continues to turn, however. The future WNBA player playing in High School made a lot of parents rather upset; she clearly outclassed everyone else such that the game did not feel "fair" to them. I expect a future NBA player in the men's team would not have provoked the same reaction; there is an expectation of a kind of baseline fairness in women's sports that our culture has (but doesn't often talk about) which doesn't exist in men's sports, that everybody is going to be playing at approximately the same level.
Some might blame this on misogyny - women aren't allowed to be champions - others might blame this on misandry - men aren't entitled to the same kind of social expectations of fairness and are left to sink or swim on their own. But regardless of the source, it's something that exists, and I expect it drives a lot of public sentiment.
> Sports are dominated by the statistical tails; it's not quite as clear as you think that middling men could overwhelm elite women in the sports, because the averages alone tell you nothing about the tails.
I agree with your overall point that elite female athletes are closer to males on a number of physiological (and probably psychological) dimensions.
But I disagree that the tails are close at the elite level, I think the evidence is quite clear. Here's the gap between male and female Olympic athletes by a number of sports:
https://imgur.com/a/MqJ0TnV
Let's just take a couple Track and Field data points, with an average 11% gap, one of the smallest gaps on the chart.
The female 100m record, by Elaine Thompson Herah, is 10.61. Schoolboy 100m male record: 10.20, age 15. The *slowest* male 100m Olympic qualifying time is 10.05.
200m: 21.34 female record (FloJo), slowest male qualifier 20.28
800m: 1:53.43 f, schoolboy record (age 14) 1:51.23, slowest m qualifier 1:46.26
Long jump female record: 7.4m (JJK), schoolboy record 7.85m (age 15), shortest male qualifier 8.06m.
In general, female *world records* wouldn't even qualify to *compete* in a male event, and talented high school boys can outclass female world record holders, much less actually competitive male athletes.
Even the slowest and weakest male Olympic qualifiers could *absolutely* hop on hormones for a year, dominate several female events, then detransition.
> The problem continues to turn, however. The future WNBA player playing in High School made a lot of parents rather upset; she clearly outclassed everyone else such that the game did not feel "fair" to them. I expect a future NBA player in the men's team would not have provoked the same reaction;
This is a great point, I've observed this myself as well. Not sure what can be done about it, but it at least points in the right direction in terms of likely acting against M2F athletes at sub-elite levels too.
> Even the slowest and weakest male Olympic qualifiers could *absolutely* hop on hormones for a year, dominate several female events, then detransition.
Notice that this is a different problem than "MTF person wants to compete in women's sports".
> Notice that this is a different problem than "MTF person wants to compete in women's sports".
Yes, but as the IOC rules are written right now, this is how "female" is defined. If any man hops on hormones for a year and tests under 288 ng / dl in Testosterone for that year, they can compete as a female Olympian, according to current IOC rules.
So it may not be the MTF problem you had in mind, but it's a viable MTF strategy to gold medals right now.
"Hops on hormones for a year"? Like they're just putting on a sweater they're going to take off once the year is up?
> "Hops on hormones for a year"? Like they're just putting on a sweater they're going to take off once the year is up?
Sure, this sounds implausible, but there are a few scenarios the incentives might make sense:
1. African runners in countries like Kenya and Ethiopia with <2k GDP per capita frequently go to Europe or the West to race, because the race prizes are several years GDP for them. Any male athlete who's consistently on the bubble as a male could transition, then dominate any female races that use the IOC criteria.
2. Some countries award serious prize money for Olympic golds. Most of SE Asia is $200k+ USD, Singapore and Hong Kong are both $700k each. A talented male athlete, even at the HS or college level, could hop on hormones for a year, win several medals as a woman, then detransition, and have all that money.
This seems like a pretty rich incentive structure to exploit just financially, much less for the glory of gold (or even just to troll people, which HS and college athletes have been known to do).
>If any man hops on hormones for a year and tests under 288 ng / dl in Testosterone for that year
That is the official threshold? It seems hilariously high, there's a whole bunch of men who wouldn't need to do anything to pass it (probably not elite athletes, though).
What about sports that don't require much in the way of physicality? Say... being a coxswain on a rowing crew? Or... hmm. Pistol shooting?
You could go all the way to sports which require zero physicality. Like chess. As I understand it, men and women still compete in separate tournaments, and if they didn't, the top rankings would be overwhelmingly male. Paging Larry Summers...
Chess is divided into women's tournaments and open tournaments. Women can compete in either, while men may only compete in the latter. In reality, high level open tournaments don't include women, since there are no female players who are very strong. The strongest female player is ranked #111 in the world, while the 10th strongest female player is ranked #529 in the world.
Women have their own tournaments for the same reason children have their own tournaments. As with many sports, in chess, the top females perform at a similar level as teenage boys. The top 10 female players in the world typically have a lower average rating than the top 10 boys under-16.
The strongest 13-year-old boy would be the women's #2 and the strongest 11-year-old boy would be the women's #30. The strongest 9-year-old boy will almost certainly get his rating higher than the women's #100 before he turns 10.
Of the 43 rated players who participated in this year's Canadian Women's Chess Championship, 7 are lower rated than the strongest 3-year-old boy.
> Chess is divided into women's tournaments and open tournaments. Women can compete in either, while men may only compete in the latter.
That's nothing special to chess; it's how all sex-segregated sports work. The WNBA has a sex requirement; the NBA has no sex requirement.
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/03/24/why-are-men-dominant-in-chess/#:~:text=Males%20are%20innately%20better%20in,lot%20more%2C%20and%20so%20on.
To summarize: men are more likely to obsessively focus on something, men on average are better at the cognitive skills required to succeed in chess (leading to a drastic difference at the tail end, where you are most likely to find grandmasters), and are more interested in competition, leading them to seek high stakes arenas and tournaments.
Even if there were no difference in cognitive ability between the sexes, women are less likely to be monomaniacally obsessed with it, and even less likely to seek the high-pressure stakes of a competitive environment.
Major edit: the top rated women chess player of all time, Judit Polgar, was raised by her parents, along with her two sisters, in an extremely competitive environment. From a young age she attended regular tournaments, bucking the social norms and pressure that chess was not a women's sport. Indeed, initially she was deemed a slow learner by her father, who had by this point trained her two older sisters to become chess prodigies, but this seemed to be the perfect environment for Judit to foster her competitive drive into something that surpassed her sisters. She would eventually become not only the best women's player of all time, but also the #8 ranked player in the world, an unbelievable feat, and having taken games off of many of the best male players in the world.
If you read her interviews and comments you will notice that she has a total obsession with chess, practicing upwards of 5 hours a day, being incredibly self-motivated and seeking improvement at all cost, taking every opportunity to learn from the best around her and taking the game extremely seriously. Perhaps if more parents could nurture this level of competitiveness in women we would see more women compete on the level of men in the world of non-physical sports
> What about sports that don't require much in the way of physicality? Say... being a coxswain on a rowing crew? Or... hmm. Pistol shooting?
Yeah, this is a good question. There IS a M/F gap in sports like marksmanship, but the gap is indeed much smaller than the gaps in Track and Field and strength and other sports (it's around 0.5-4%).
Swimming is the next smallest gap (on the order of 6%, and to baseline, an 11% gap in track and field means talented high school boys can outrun world record female times).
Why the gap exists in relatively "non-physical" sports like marskmanship is a matter of some debate, and I haven't seen any great papers that make a good argument one way or the other, it's likely a combination of things.
Then why are those (presumably) currently sex segregated?
On a narrow point of fact, opposite sex coxwains have been around for years. Over here in the UK, the first female cox for a male Oxford - Cambridge boat race crew was happened back in the early 80s. I rowed for my Oxford college and one year we had a female cox.
I've never rowed (well, not as a sport) but wouldn't a female cox be a big advantage? Don't you just want the lightest person you can find who can shout loudly?
That strikes me as fundamentally different from a male cox on a female crew.
I haven't seen any concerns about FtM athletes in men's sports.
Although there are specific instances that differ (gymnastics being an obvious case where the sets of events differ), sex-segregated sports seem to generally be unlimited or female-only; e.g., if a woman was good enough, she could be in the NBA rather than the WNBA.
"I haven't seen any concerns about FtM athletes in men's sports."
I don't know how many FtM are going for men's sports, but I think that - unless they were originally tall and strong to begin with, and started transition early - then FtM are not really challenging natal men for the top spots, as they'll generally be shorter and weaker even after going on testosterone (I know: citation needed, but the online photos I see are generally 'short dumpy person presenting as male' and not 'gosh I see no difference between Alex formerly Alice and Shaquille O'Neill' examples).
I don't know a tactful way to put this, but in the photos I've seen of the couples where one partner is MtF and one is FtM, it's generally 'the male-presenting partner is shorter and weedier than the female-presenting partner' so take that for what it's worth.
I think coxes are because the whole team is. Pistol shooting... just because of tradition I guess?
I basically agree with you. Just because I think this is a mildly interesting counterexample though:
There was a M2F MMA fighter named Fallon Fox about a decade ago. She racked up a 5-1 MMA record, which means that 'she' did lose a fight to a biological woman (Ashlee Evans-Smith, who went on to have a middling UFC career). So the Y chromosome, enhanced muscle mass, increased bone density, and cardiovascular advantages were not enough for Fox to beat a woman in a fistfight. Evans-Smith didn't just win a decision, she TKOed Fox in the 3rd round. I mean, as a man I'd hope that I could at least beat a similar-bodyweight woman in a fight!
Seeing as a lot of athletics is really just a stand-in for..... fighting..... and MMA is actually fighting, I always thought that was sort of interesting. (Again, I do agree with your broader point)
Without having read your research, I am sure you are right that M2F athletes have a huge advantage over athletes born female. Seems like anyone disagreeing would be arguing that M2F athletes are now women, and should be allowed to do absolutely anything a female-from-birth person can do. I myself am definitely not prepared to argue that. To me it seems like there are a few situations where M2F people just do not get to do what female-from-birth women can do. They cannot, for instance, serve in subjects in research on female health -- for ex., research on the determinants of female risk for heart attacks or liver cancer, which may be different from male risk factors. And they cannot participate in non-casual sports competitions designated as for women only. Jeez, that limitations just not that bad.
Trans athletes in sports are like the gay marriage campaign: it's about mainstreaming, acceptance, and normalisation. If gays can get married just like straights, then society should accept them just like straights. If trans athletes can compete in women's sports, then society should accept them just as women.
Intersex people are a different, if related, question and a thorny one to solve, but I don't think there should be very much difficulty over "born male sex, no intersex/other dysfunction, transitioned to female gender" cases - if you're six inches taller and three weight classes stronger, I don't care how much of a lady you are, you are not competing on level terms. Maybe we'll have to revise classes so that all the "big tall strong" people are competing against each other, regardless of gender, and all the "small weaker" people are competing against each other.
> Trans athletes in sports are like the gay marriage campaign: it's about mainstreaming, acceptance, and normalisation.
That seems to have backfired badly as a strategy then. For everyday interaction, trans people are mostly already mainstreamed, accepted and normalized, and quite rightly so; what someone's genitals are like, or what sex they were assigned at birth is no-one else's business in the context of most social interactions.
OTOH, as Performative Bafflement explains above, allowing people to self-select into women's competitive sports has the potential to fuck up the entire category.
"Revising classes" sounds fine in principle, but becomes impractical very quickly. You need very clear, reliably measurable criteria to sort people into a small number of categories. "Between 160 and 175 lbs" is okay (but even there, additional regulations are needed to keep competitors from killing themselves trying to cut weight), but "160 < 0.6*weight in lbs + 1.2*height in inches - 1.5*bodyfat percentage < 190" is probably not feasible. And if you go with, say, bodyweight, women are screwed again, because men are significantly stronger and faster even at the same weight.
And what's the point? We already have a simple criterion that takes care of the sexual dimorphism - bona fine females in one category, everyone else in the other. Then, add weight classes as needed.
>a simple criterion
Please define it in a way that can be scientifically applied to any person.
"XX chromosomes only" does the trick IMO.
If you’re opening the can of worms that certain genetic attributes confer advantages and must disqualify their owner from participating in certain kinds of events, why the Y chromosome specifically? What about the gene that gave Michael Phelps large feet?
"That athlete doesn't look attractive enough to be a woman to me, and also punches a bit too hard in my opinion. I call de la Chappelle syndrome! I don't care what your simplistic rule says, that ain't a woman!"
Cue scandal.
About 1 in 20,000 men are XX.
Assuming everything you say is true, how do you think this plays out? Trend left unchecked, say by 2035, every winner's podium in every single female sport is gold-silver-bronze m2fs. So what point in competing as bio female?
At that point, either eliminate gendered sports, and 99% of female athletes are out of the running, or if there is any social value to women's sports, they will self correct to exclude trans.
>So what point in competing as bio female?
There was never one in high level sports regardless of gender.
Excluding trans is discrimination, though: you are saying we are not real women! *That's* what the whole current debate is about: we are women just like cis women, we should be treated like cis women and accepted in all female roles just like cis women are. It's not really about "first trans female to be Olympic gold medallist in the 5,000m track race".
EDIT: I suppose I should make it clear that the "we" above is not including me, I was making the argument from their side. So far as I know, I'm natal cis female 😁
Yup, that's the issue. And we'd be able to have a much saner conversation if we could get back to "trans women are males who wish to be treated as if they were females". Which has the advantages of a) being true, b) not forcing us to discard immensely intuitive and useful definitions, and c) allowing for a nuanced discussion about where this wish can be granted, and where it can't.
I'd be happy to go back to the position "sex and gender are different things, A is biological sex male but gender presents as female". But that seems to have been abandoned for "sex and gender are the same thing, if A is on hormones then A is as biologically female as cis woman B".
Men and women's sports are separate to encourage equatable and competitive groups. For the same reason we have seperate groups for boys 9 and under soccer and boys 11 and under soccer. Presumably, if this happened, transgender might get pulled out into a seperate competition, like the paralympic games.
> Assuming everything you say is true, how do you think this plays out? Trend left unchecked, say by 2035, every winner's podium in every single female sport is gold-silver-bronze m2fs. So what point in competing as bio female?
Yeah, pretty much - maybe not 2035, this is more or less what happened over several decades in most sports, as phenotypes with better fit for the sport came to dominate them (so skinny and tall for high jumpers, tall and bulky for shot put, short and muscular for short-distance sprinters, short and skinny for marathoners, etc).
I mean, your position seems to be "no reason to worry now, let's just see how it plays out and react when necessary?"
Sure, I guess. I was more looking for an argument on merits, to see if I hadn't considered something important or had missed or misinterpreted something.
I don't disagree with you. It just seems like of all cultural problems, this is super low stakes. Worst case, women's sports ceasing to be an institution, is not an existential threat to humanity; or they will be forced to create some kind of hard genetic rules on their own terms. Does not seem like a productive topic for non-competitors to spend political air time.
I'll throw out there, requiring actual genital reassignment surgery would weed out the opportunists real quick, but prob still converge on your scenario eventually.
> It just seems like of all cultural problems, this is super low stakes. Worst case, women's sports ceasing to be an institution
That just amounts to saying you don't personally care. For that matter I don't either, the entire field of competitive sports could just go away and I wouldn't miss it. But given what we see out there, it does seem to be super important to lots of people.
>the entire field of competitive sports could just go away and I wouldn't miss it.
Seconded!