Open Thread 357
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This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
1: Message from Meetups Czar Skyler: there will be rationalist-community-associated Solstice Rituals in various cities around the world. And in New York, it will be associated with a three day “mega-meetup” from December 13 - 16.
2: RIP Nikolas Doucet, son of Lars Doucet, ACX guest blogger on Georgism.
Subscribe to Astral Codex Ten
By Scott Alexander
P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.
YouTube has been censoring my comments for over three years. Who else is noticing this? You won't easily notice, as you will not be told, the message won't be gone until you reload the page, and the message is also deleted without a trace from your own message history. Here are the messages they have deleted (with some context) in the last three months, according to my records. There's also a shadowbanning / demotion system where your comment is unlikely to be seen in the default "top comments" view; I will list shadowbanned comments also.
I guess I should just start over with a new account to see if it helps, but YouTube is tied to my gmail. Would I need a new gmail address too?
### Sept 14 2024 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6-33VO9eerq9MXFaivi0gg/community?lb=UgkxKwVzqkJBIfzjuXXy0_VwcxqHXUb38vrs
[Reply to [People here are talking about the collapse of a nation, the breakup of the largest country in the world, with most of the people clearly saying that they want it to happen. [...] This is showing that the wår is becoming more and more existential to Russia and if it loses it will collapse as a state. This is why it must win.]]
**INSTANTLY DELETED:** @Zz_Mike-Hawk_zZ If people outside Russia want it to split apart, that does not explain why Russia should steal more Ukrainian territory and murder thousands more of its people.
**DELETED AFTER 1 MINUTE???** @Zz_Mike-Hawk_zZ Even if people outside Russia want it to split apart, that would still not explain why Russia should steel more Ukrainian territory and kiII tens of thousands more of its people.
Oh wow they silently deleted my respelled comment on a delay timer. That is new behavior. Basically discussion is not possible / very limited here.
### 2024-09-17 Vlad Vexler Chat https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxQAgnpUQ-PRXCSjrsK1fD7ZF2GLcOrq3L
**NOT DELETED** I'm very concerned about the poor epistemics of humanity. In recent years I came to realize that most people who believe correct things believe them for the wrong reasons. In other words, rather than a "mostly good" left-wing and a "mostly bad" right-wing, we have most people being mostly bad most of the time, but with the left being more correct on average, partly because their average level of education is higher, and partly because they do not put much stock in the notion that "you shouldn't trust experts". The biggest political differences between people are not left vs right, but "up vs down". I made a diagram to illustrate this, but can't link to it because YouTube tends to silently, instantly and permanently delete my comments if they have links (and also often if they don't) which derailed my last discussion on this channel.
**INSTANTLY DELETED:** [[Reply to self]] (Aside: I would also say that the way YouTube deletes comments is very corrosive of societal trust as well as very annoying. Right-wingers who notice YouTube is silently deleting their comments are more likely to be radicalized than made more moderate by YT's behavior IMO. I mean, they're deleting many comments by center-left people like me, so they are probably censoring the right even more aggressively)
**DELETED THEN REINSTATED? (gone after a minute, but back after two)** (Aside: I would also say that the way YouTube deletes comments is very corrosive of societal trust as well as very annoying. I tried to say more about this but YouTube deleted my original comment. Indeed, I have a lot more to say than I will actually bother to say, since the more I talk, the more I get deleted)
[[Reply to "Division caused online, driving hate..."]] **INSTANTLY DELETED:** As a former Christian, the loss of traditional Christian values among people who call themselves Christian is amazing. How do they convince themselves that Trump, the man who was too lazy to memorize even a single Bible verse to back up his claims of being a Christian, is the paragon of Christian values?
### Sept 29 2024 33,000 Lives Lost in 48 Hours? The Babyn Yar Tragedy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6jm0h3hpg8
[video about Nazis, I avoid using the term in an attempt to evade censorship]
**COMPLETELY HIDDEN from default non-Chronological view**
So the Russians just casually accuse Ukrainians of being like this, day-in day-out, month after month, year after year. You can understand Russians falling for it, but it's always surprising how many westerners fall for it. Do they even know that Russians even label Americans and Europeans this way too?
### Oct 25 on How to answer: is Trump a fascist? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1jSFfKPF4A
[[Reply to @Todd.B]]
[[Reply to: Kamala really is the most irresponsible politician we've had in America in decades.]]
**SILENTLY DELETED** @GermanConquistador08 Well, at least you're illustrating Vlad's point. Trump can commit unconstitutional acts, call every democrat "radical left", stack the supreme court, create dozens of evidence-free lawsuits and a riot to overturn the election, etc etc, but the fact remains that his ordinary boring opponent will be held to much higher standards.
[[note: I actually weakened my argument here in an effort to pass the censor. What I thought was the actual worst thing about Trump―which also makes him grossly irresponsible―is that he lies and bullshits constantly. But I felt that saying so would be more likely to be censored, so I didn't say it. Now I think that what's worse than his BSing is what those lies serve to do: wreck the democratic game.]]
[Reply to @jesan733 [I'm a very reasonable centrist, anti-conspiracy-theory-minded, and I find youtube automatic comment moderation absolutely horrible and frustrating]]
**NOT DELETED** Yeah, I'm a bit of a hobbyist researcher (I wrote a few articles on Skeptical Science, which is an anti-misinformation site about global warming), and the "silent deletion with no appeals" system bothers me a lot. It discourages me from countering misinformation, because (1) why put effort into a comment that might just be deleted? and (2) saying that a video is wrong about something tends to cause fans of the OP to downvote me, which may reduce my own reputation in the eyes of YouTube. Also, I can never provide sources because the presence of any URL (even links to other YouTube videos) almost guarantees deletion of the whole comment.
**SILENTLY DELETED** Also, commenting on YouTube takes a lot more time now because I need to open a private browser window to check how well each comment was received by YouTube (i.e. how far down the list of "top comments" do I have to scroll to see it, or was it deleted, or was it shadowbanned meaning it is only visible in the "Newest first" view?) And also I have to copy-paste each comment into a document in order to make a record of what YouTube is deleting, in case they decide to delete it without a trace. So I have a file, now, with hundreds of my comments and how YouTube treated each one. I think more people should be aware of this because if I (as a reasonable center-left person) am being censored on a regular basis, I expect right-wing people to be much, much angrier still. It must feed heavily into their sense of victimhood.
**NONDELETED [after 1 minute]** Case in point, two minutes ago I posted a follow-up comment that was just as long as the first one, and after refreshing the page, it is now gone. If you're curious what I had to say, well, I can't say. If I did, this third comment would probably go the same way as the second one.
### Nov 30 2024 https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxBNd7AJrA6mUT08XCPCQo1EptxW1OR23H
[Reply to [I've listened to a lot of your excellent analysis Vlad, but it still royally boils my P]]
**SILENTLY DELETED** They can even be conscripted and think "well, I guess we have to stop a NATO invasion, and it is Necessary to subjugate the hohols after all". Critical thinking is not required at any point. (I dislike the term critical thinking: it sounds like all you need is to criticize, and you don't need critical thinking skills to do that. I call it "thinking things through and looking for ways that you, and everyone else, could be mistaken.")
I'm fairly certain that a bot deletes comments with politically sensitive words. talking about things like russia, antivax, the twitter files, etc will absolutely do it. And i've had several of my own comments deleted too.
Nobody cares, is why. I don't think Youtube is out to get you, and you certainly don't seem to have expressed opinions that would fall foul of "all right thinking people on the right side of history think this" metric (e.g. your poke at 'why oh why Christians Trump?' is a bog-standard talking point).
You done screwed up with the algorithm for some reason, and that's inscrutable.
Youtube is a video platform, not a debate platform. If you want to debate people on Youtube you need to use the proper form: clapback videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p5U4OfJ1NA
I rarely comment on YouTube, so I have no experience either way. But as far as I know, there are two functionalities on YouTube that may be related:
1) Authors can delete comments under their videos.
2) Authors can set the comment policy to "approve first", which means that your comments will be visible to others only after the authors approve them.
So you might want to make sure it is actually YouTube that deletes your comments, instead of (1) the authors deleting them, or (2) comments being automatically hidden as they await the authors' approval. You could check that by uploading your own video and posting the same comments there.
EDIT:
Actually, I forgot a much more likely option: that it is not some YouTube algorithm *detecting* your comments, but rather people flagging your comments, and YouTube automatically deleting the comments that received a certain amount of flags.
YouTube does not have the capacity to review these things, and some groups of people are happy to coordinate flagging of the comments they don't like.
no, it's not the authors. It's almost certainly a modbot that detects trigger words and deletes the comment. If this happens too often, you get sent to the shadow realm. This is a known issue.
I've had several of mine deleted. And it's getting worse. Before, it was politically sensitive topics. But now, I can't even post calculus about videogames without getting flagged by the modbot.
To be clear, a majority of my comments are not deleted, I typically check whether a comment has been deleted about 60 seconds after posting it, and the deletion rate does not vary according to which channel I'm posting to (but, I believe, varies according to content). So it's not a matter of an author deleting (which would vary by channel) or approve-first (in which case all my comments should disappear under a given channel), nor is it likely to be a matter of human flagging (since only 60 seconds have passed since I posted).
If some automated flagging bot not controlled by YouTube is doing this, the effect is functionally the same as if YouTube itself were doing this, except that it is even more amazing that YouTube does not notify me of comments deleted because they were flagged by "users". Also, the presence of a URL (even links to other YouTube videos) virtually guarantees deletion, which backs up the hypothesis that YouTube itself is doing this. EDIT: I just checked my records, and found that 5 comments with URLs (1 to YouTube, 4 off-site) were deleted and 2 were not (1 to YouTube, 1 off-site), vs a baseline deletion rate of 20-25%. I know this isn't many data points, and under normal circumstances I would post my sources far more often, but as soon as the correlation became clear I studiously avoided URLs. I'm still pretty sure about it because the non-URL content of three of the deleted messages looked like text that ought to have survived the censor:
**SILENTLY DELETED:** 15:42 "Ukraine ran out of 152mm ... Ukrainian government never took care of creating plans to create shells" - what's this then? https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-defense/2521001-army-soon-to-get-152mm-shells-for-hiatsynt-artillery-system-poroshenko.html
**SILENTLY DELETED** 1:17 This picture is from Russia in 2019[1]. The ammo dump cookoff on Aug 16 looks like this: https://twitter.com/DPiepgrass/status/1560579567944753155
[1]: https://www.dailysabah.com/europe/2019/08/05/2-injured-in-blast-at-russian-ammunition-dump
**INSTANTLY DELETED**
I think I found it: https://youtu.be/r-HTvLAPS0c?si=HDBGDL3Wssb3Kfy9&t=350
Try to post some clearly pro-Russian comments, with links etc. (Maybe somewhere where people are unlikely to see it.) If none of them gets deleted, it's probably reporting.
Seems to me this is the kind of thing some journal might publish an article on. You'd need to ask around some more first to be sure there isn't some prosaic explanation. If there's not, maybe do some experiments yourself, sending comments from different users (friends' accounts?), with small variations, trying to figure out what the triggers
(continued) are. And ask around -- there must be other people this is happening to. Seems like info gathered that way, which could be done pretty quickly, would be enough to get Medium or Vox or similar interested. Also, the guy who writes the Garbage Day blog seems quite knowledgable about algorithms and trends
(continued) on social media. He's pretty committed to being funny and entertaining on his Substack, so it takes a while to notice that he's quite smart and knows a lot. He is NOT the kind of person who would write an article, but might be able to tell you useful things, if you make it worth his while somehow.
Does anyone here follow Alexander Kruel on Facebook? His daily science and tech news summaries are excellent, IMO, if you can also stand the peppering of content about race-related science.
I don't follow any people on Facebook just for the content. Most of the posts I see on Facebook are trash-quality. (LinkedIn is also like this, by the way.)
Kruel seems to have a decent twitter though (it's @XiXiDu).
It seems to be all AI-related.
Today is election day in Ireland to vote in our next government (yippee 🙄)
But how does the Irish voting system work? Luckily, our national broadcaster has produced a guide for primary school children, which is about the level my brain is capable of handling today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDPlRbkyBKE
https://www.rte.ie/kids/news2day/2024/1129/1483712-barry-from-news2day-explains-the-irish-pr-voting-system/
"news2day reporter Barry Gallagher enlisted the help of some 6th class students from his old school, Scoil Cholmcille An Tearmann in Co Donegal, to give you the lowdown on how our Proportional Representation voting system actually works.
To give it it's full title, the Proportional Representation with a Single Transferrable Vote (PR-STV) electoral system used in Ireland is known as one of the fairest methods of counting votes in an election, but it is also one of the most complicated."
Elections have a long tradition of being controversial, unfair, undemocratic, and generally "hey this can't be right":
https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2024/1128/1483582-history-elections-ireland-medieval-18th-17th-century/
Voter suppression? Ha, how about holding the 1613 election at 4 in the morning, plus have armed soldiers turning away voters!
"There was significant false recording of polls, the government occasionally jailed sheriffs who (correctly) returned an elected candidate who was not to their liking and polls were sometimes held a second time to elect 'the right candidate'. In Dublin they tried to hold a 4am election for fear free citizens might appear expecting to cast votes and prospective Cavan voters were blocked by armed soldiers with matches lit."
I had never heard of potwalloper boroughs before, but it seems that suffrage was determined by the size of your pot. Clearly, this gives new importance to the saying about "not having a pot to piss in", as that would certainly debar you!
"On the other hand, Swords in Co Dublin was not owned by anyone. As Dr Suzanne Forbes has indicated, elections were notorious in these potwalloper boroughs (an electorate of any male householder who had a hearth sufficient to boil a large pot). The townsfolk effectively sold their votes to the highest bidders: Swords had 'the meanest class of citizens…whose venality was as black as the pots that qualified them' and elections here 'were always rowdy, violent and colourful'."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potwalloper
"A potwalloper (sometimes potwalloner or potwaller) or householder borough was a voter in a parliamentary borough in which the franchise was extended to the male head of any household with a hearth large enough to boil a cauldron (or "wallop a pot")."
"Low information voters"was a live issue back in 1830, too:
"A Pot-Walloper", Times cartoon of 1830. One politician addresses the scruffily-attired peasant voter: "The people of Britain possess the power to return an independent parliament if they will but exert it, think of that my noble pot-walloper"; on the right, another candidate says "Never mind Him I'll give you something to put in your pot", reflecting fears that poor voters would be easily bribed."
Trump/Biden (pick your choice, or both if so inclined) is/are crazy and senile? Sorry, some word salad here and there isn't up to snuff in the "crazy but elected" stakes:
"The election of John Bligh, later 3rd Earl of Darnley, MP for Athboy in Meath in 1739 was not controversial despite his obvious eccentricity (later outright insanity). Bligh was later convinced he was a 'fine china teapot' and reputedly refused to consummate his marriage for fear his spout should break off in the act. The fact that his family owned the borough clearly advanced his electoral prospects."
Kamala is not the first, and won't be the last, candidate to blow through a large war chest paying for catchy ways to attract the fickle attention of the electorate:
"Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, was equally contemptuous of 'the very worst species of Representation – potwalloping Boroughs and open elections by the mob, where neither property, nor family connexions, nor the good opinion of the neighbourhood, nor any other good species of influence, would weigh against adventurers from Dublin or London with large purses'.
The entertainment bill (breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with drinks at each stage) of prospective candidates could be phenomenal. "
Sadly, today we just have to choose between the usual selection of venal, incompetent, idealistic but nuts, and plain nuts to form our next right of centre/centre right coalition government. (I'm calling that now for the end result).
Oh, I'm late. Uh... Yay, That Guy! Boo, The Other Guy! Finally, someone willing to say that thing! Oh man, I can't believe the other people said that other thing! Four More... shit, how long do people hold office over there?
A general election has to be held at least every five years, by law. Sometimes governments will go early, e.g. if the polls are bad and/or they anticipate some scandal will hit so they want to get out there before things go bad, or the opposition manages to win a vote of no confidence.
This time, the Dáil ran from February 2020 to November 2024. We've been under a coalition government of the two largest parties in the state, with junior partners the Greens. They had a rotating Taoiseach system in place (i.e. the leaders of the two main parties would swap seats as Prime Minister, more or less).
For comparison with the USA, we have eleven parties/groups going for election:
https://www.rte.ie/news/election-24/
And for all the Harris supporters breathless about Trump being a CONVICTED FELON 34 FELONIES, we have a genuine gang leader running and seeming to be doing quite well, actually (though the most recent results indicate he won't win a seat after all).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerry_Hutch
https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/politics/arid-41514458.html
After the "imagine yourself after 10 years in jail" part of the post on prison, we will all be delighted to know that Mr. Hutch managed to clean up his life after an initial stay in jail. He didn't stop being involved in armed robbery, money laundering, drugs, and murder, but he was much more disciplined and clean-living.
I had to chop up that reply into bite-sized pieces due to the new Substack comments limit, can we *please* get that resolved?
RIP Nik, I was a big fan. Read everything he ever wrote!!!
"The university has not confirmed that the player is transgender, and The Times is not naming her because she has not publicly confirmed her identity."
NYT now has a policy about revealing names?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/28/us/transgender-san-jose-boise-volleyball.html
The Times has a policy along the lines of "if we like you/you are a member of a favoured group, we give you anonymity; if we don't like you/you are a member of a disfavoured group, we'll reveal your identity".
Once we understand that, it is all consistent.
Maybe it's time for the NYT to follow in the Onion's footsteps. https://theonion.com/it-is-journalism-s-sacred-duty-to-endanger-the-lives-of-1850126997/
...Who do they think they are, playing the part of the moral crusader? They're journalists, not activists. Their job is to provide news that the people want to see. Can't they see that the times are changing? Everyone hates these people. Even the liberals, who just keep their mouths shut because it's forbidden to criticize the mentally ill. Give the people what they want.
In reply to Melvin, because the borked Substack comments won't let me directly reply to him (it's only the past couple of days this has been acting up, did the hamster escape from the wheel again?)
Pardon my aging brain, I think there was a schlock genre like this in the 70s which took real-world events and put them together into a 'documentary' style format, but it was really an excuse for gore porn, if you will.
Mondo movies? Hang on while I Google. Yep, here we go:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondo_film
"Mondo film is a subgenre of exploitive documentary films. Many mondo films are made in a way to resemble a pseudo-documentary and usually depicting sensational topics, scenes, or situations. Common traits of mondo films include portrayals of foreign cultures (which have drawn accusations of ethnocentrism or racism),[1] an emphasis on taboo subjects such as death and sex, and staged sequences presented as genuine documentary footage. Over time, the films have placed increasing emphasis on footage of the dead and dying (both real and fake)."
It’s creepy stuff. Never seen any of it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faces_of_Death
Once worked with a jerk who enjoyed showing that one to house guests.
Never paid the guy a visit. Made a point of giving him a wide berth.
There is nothing new under the sun, as the man said.
Ok, what the hell has happened to the substack comments? I'm using it on a mobile browser, and the lines to the left of a comment thread have gone: this means it's all but impossible to tell, in a remotely long thread, which comment is a reply to which. Also, some of the comments are merging into each other or into the names and timestamps, and some of them are getting slightly cut off on the right of the screen. There are also some other incomprehensibly stupid changes that just make everything look uglier and jerkier.
1. Why the hell do they do crap like this? I can't imagine any purpose any of this possibly serves (it doesn't seem to me making them load any faster, for example). This is not a rhetorical question. Why waste time and money on changes that do nothing but make things worse?
2. Scott, can you PLEASE ask them to reverse the first part of this (removing the nested lines) on your site, like you've done with other things, because this makes threads potentially unreadable. It dumbs down the comments (who cares who's replying to whom, just let everyone scream at each other aimlessly!) and it obviously affects all previous threads as well.
We are just doing alpha testing for Substack.
I imagine the code is burdened by technical debt with hundreds of defects logged to it and when they fix a batch they just release with all the new defects that have been introduced.
I wish they would at least give a warning cry of "New bugs for old!" :-)
Substack is still on a recruitment drive for more content creators who will bring along an audience of paying subscribers (please stop trying to make me start my own Substack, guys, thanks). Their model is "you write your long-ass post up on the top, but the comments are or should only be 'take my money you genius, how do I subscribe?'"
Well, the normal policy is that only paying subscribers can comment...
< , what the hell has happened to the substack comments?
FUBAR
Computer programmers. Can’t live with em. Can’t shoot em.
Well, you *can*, but society frowns upon that for some reason.
Well, that's better than my most recent experience trying to view comments on the Android version of Firefox: the comments wouldn't load at all. No amount of refreshing seemed to fix the issue.
The desktop version of Firefox now moves the Cancel and Reply buttons too low to click if the comment is long enough to enlarge the input box. So I had best not make this comment too lo
perhaps someone should make an unaffiliated OT only wordpress blog for readers of SSC?
I watched a compilation of some of the most horrifying anti drink driving ads from around the world and they left me feeling pretty bad. This one, for instance, isn't one of the most graphic but stuck with me the most https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kADUAXf7hOo
A lot of people like horror movies which deal with exotic nonexistent horrors like ghouls and monsters. Is there any market for horror movies which deal with real world horrors? Imagine a 90-minute horror film which just deals with the aftermath of a car accident. One person dead, one person loses both legs, one person with life-altering brain injury, one person with horrendously disfiguring burns. We see their medical treatment, the reaction from their families when they're told what happens, their long slow rehabilitation, their decades of diminished life ahead. Is this the kind of horror film that anyone would actually want to watch, or do people only like horror films when the horror seems sufficiently exotic to not actually happen?
people survive severe disability, death of family members, disfigurement, yet go on to have positive lives, so the middle and end of the movie might have too much positivity to fit in the horror genre.
That's just real life, and if you wanted to press it into a genre, the genre would be "documentary". While I don't know if a snuff/body horror sub-genre would be commercially viable because of legal hurdles and/or insufficiently large customer base, the desire to watch horrible situations certainly exists. Just take accident gawkers, for example.
There might be a market for it, but it's decidedly not horror. Horror involves something coming for you in the present; big monsters, or a serial killer, or even just progressively stronger evil thoughts, the key is that something is actively hunting you down and you aren't safe in the moment. If you try to make a movie where car accidents are hunting you down, you're making a comedy.
I recently saw Absolution, which was not great, but was about a gangster getting old and dementia-adjacent. That's more the category you're talking about here.
...Who the hell would want to watch that?? That's not horror, that's just depressing. That'd be like pornography that didn't have sex and instead just had the depressing aftermath of two people who don't even have real feelings for each other awkwardly sitting in a room together.
Sudden Substack glitch preventing me from replying to posts; the box is expanding, the "Reply" button is being pushed into the comment below it, and the lower comment's presence is blocking the button.
It seems like a "div" element around the reply is assigned "height: 162px", and as the comment gets longer, the textbox expands, but the "div" element around it does not.
The obvious question is "why?????", but I guess the obvious answer is "because Substack".
If you are a web developer, you can temporarily fix it by increasing the number before clicking the submit button.
Yup me too.
I am able to get around this by posting a short comment and then editing it.
Has Substack turned into Twitter? — I can post very short replies via my Mac's web browsers. But I can post longer replies from my smartphone's Substack app. But there's no search function on the app, so it's almost impossible to navigate 1,000+ comments.
Dunno if current reply bug is related, but I'm trying to edit a post in my own Substack and it's hell. Things that current instructions from Substack say are doable just don't work, eg. breaking title into 2 lines, dragging images to reposition them.
I tried that but when my edited comment hit about 6 lines the same thing happened and I could not save it.
I heard it's a Wokester attack.
Same here. I also opened the short comment in a separate window.
Ditto.
Possibly related - the ACX Tweaks add-on has stopped working on both Chrome and Firefox. Looks like the format of the timestamps for posts has changed.
Same here, on both counts.
I'm having the exact same issue.
I am so frustrated with the prissiness of GPT4's image processor. Recently it has refused to make an image of a whirlpool sucking in ocean water because sucking; to make an image of somebody licking a lollipop because licking; and to make an image of a two headed dog nipping the toes and hair of a Barbie doll because grisly and surrealist. But it topped all of them tonight. My prompt read:"Realistic image: In the foreground an attractive 40-ish women wearing red lipstick, has bushy brown hair. In a trailer behind her a man sitting in a wheelchair is visible." Chat said, the prompt violated their content guidelines. I asked if the problem was the word bush, and clarified that I was describing the hair on her *head* ffs. And the lipstick was on her *mouth,* you know? No, said Chat, it thought the problem was that I was asking for image of someone disabled. But, I pointed out, there's no mockery here, and the man is not in danger. Is it against the rules to even depict the disabled?. Chat added that also it was important to be respectful of "certain groups," and suggested that I refer to the trailer as a "mobile home." So I changed bushy hair to voluminous hair and trailer to mobile home. And Chat rendered the image. BUT it turned the trailer into a small, spiffy, white aluminum sided house, with a bright green flawless lawn and a row of perfectly spaced geraniums in front of it. And the woman continued to look like she was 25 years old. Multiple attempts to change the elements that were wrong were an utter failure. After a while Chat started modifying random other things -- for ex., put the man in the wheelchair outdoors, and in another image kept that guy plus added a shadowy guy inside the house.
Anyone know if Chat/Dall-e3 always been this way, or whether there is now a new protected category of blue collar Trumpers?
Later edit: Just now it refused to make an image of a dead huge-mouthed monkfish in the sand under a full moon because combination of DEATH plus SURREALISM might disturb sensitive people. That was Chat's actual explanation. Ignored my argument that people catch fish, toddlers in the grocery store see from the strollers the dead fucking fish, and people eat fish. Also, monkfish in the image is not distorted -- all monkfish have huge mouths. Besides, even a grisly picture of a monkfish with a monstrously distorted half-human face wouldn't be Surrealism. "Surrealism" isn't French for "weird distorted monster movie shit" ffs.
As a 40yo woman, I'm amused that GPT4 apparently considers my appearance offensive for not being 25.
I'm sure people who use wheelchairs are similarly grateful to be made invisible [sarcasm].
Drives me crazy. I once make 20 or so attempts in a single session to get an image of a middle-aged man in a bathing suit climbing some stairs. GPT kept giving me images of tanned twenty-something weightlifters, with age indicated only by gray hair and very subtle crow's feet. By the end I was using descriptors like "flabby, roll of fat around waist, slightly stooped, limbs thin with zero muscle definition." GPT simply ignored these parts of the prompts, and at the end said it simply could not make an image like the one I was asking for. I think it's the selfies esthetic taking over -- as though we all have a real self that lives only online. It is young, thin, pretty, adorable, energetic and happy.
AI images have always done horribly at realistic depictions of people. I suspect all of the training images are social media influencers or something; every person invariably turns out looking like a 20-something model. Old is possible to do with special tools, which you probably don't have access to with the big commercial AIs. I don't know that I've ever seen an AI generator capable of making a picture of an ugly person.
Oh Dall-2 would make ugly people, and I'm not talking here about weird deformities due to errors in rendering certain features. If I simply asked for a person doing X, I got fat people, bald people, middle-aged people doing X. Did you ever mess with Dall-e2?
As for the rest, this is why people want open source AI. So we don't end up with a bunch of corporate PR crap hardcoded in.
I had to write this as a reply to myself because apparently substack won't let you post long replies now; the reply button gets cut off by the text of lower comments and I can't click it. Speaking of shitty design.
I just posted the following short story on my blog and would appreciate honest, brutal criticism of it. https://hankwilbon.substack.com/p/the-principal-agent-problem
TBH, if it weren't for the title, I wouldn't know what you were trying to do. Even with the title, I'm still not 100% sure I see what you're trying to do. Presumably, these vignettes intend to exemplify the principle-agent problem. But like, it wasn't obvious to me from the writing that this is what was being demonstrated. Feels like maybe you need to call greater attention to the divide between agent vs principle, to make the allegory a little more obvious. Provide a little more contrast, somehow. Like, there needs to a punchline where either the tension reveals itself sharply, or releases sharply. I think you have to fix this before anything else.
If it's brutal you want, you've come to the right person!
"In the center of the room a tiny geranium houses poisonous frogs smuggled from Peru"
Do you mean terrarium, or are the poison frogs sitting in a plant? If poison frogs are hopping about the place, that certainly is one way to keep the employees on their toes!
Over-use of adverbs. Much too much "busily, comfortably, thoughtfully".
Are the two Trevors different people, or same guy with different names? Pittsman, Cooper.
The story seems to have an interesting germ of an idea, and the out of chronological order isn't off-putting. Is there more to it, because if this is the whole thing, then it ends too abruptly and you haven't tied the opening paragraph to anything in the rest of the story yet.
Thanks.
Stephen King has a book about writing that I like. He says never to use adverbs -- they make what you're describing sound hokey and unreal. "The road to hell is paved with adverbs."
"He says never to use adverbs"
I wonder if this is intentionally ironic advice?
No it definitely isn’t. If you read his advice on writing there’s a whole lengthy rant about adverbs in it, and it’s quite clear he’s not joking around. He doesn’t actually say one should never use them, just that they always weaken the sentence and to try to avoid them if at all possible. Gives suggestions for ways to avoid them: Instead of saying someone ran quickly, use a stronger verb: say they sprinted. Or use a figure of speech — the person ran as tho pursued by a rabid dog
I was definitely being flippant here, but "never" is an adverb too, so the advice never to use adverbs is contradictory. A lot of popular writing advice one sees around revolves on banning whole categories of words and phrases from use, often with a shaky grasp of what belongs to that category (the passive voice seems to be a popular target). Now to be fair the advice given by competent writers like King or Orwell generally has nuance and exceptions, and it's only the dumbed-down version that ends up saying stuff like "adverbs and passives should always be avoided".
Yeah, there are a lot of words in the same category as never. They are adverbs, but I don't think they're the kind King has in mind. I think what he's talking about is quickly, rudely, softly, etc -- mostly adjectives to which -ly is added. I'm quoting King not because I take his advice as gospel, but because I agree with it. Sentences with adverbs in them have a corny, "written" sound when in read them. Thinking it over right now, I'm wondering if what I dislike about the -ly adjectives in writing is that they are not often used in spoken language. For instance, I wouldn't say to someone that I drove quickly -- I'd say I drove fast. Prob. would not say I spoke softly, more like to say "I was almost whispering" or "I kept my voice very low." I wouldn't say someone spoke to me on the phone irritably, I'd say they were irritable -- or pissy -- on the phone. Etc. So maybe that's what gives adverbs in writing a hokey quality for me: They sound to me like the author has stopped speaking naturally, and is doing Creative Writing, and Describing.
Maybe too esoteric, but the parts of speech have different levels of weightiness, or power. The order is: Proper nouns > nouns > verbs > adjectives > adverbs.
(Yes, the most potent literary form is the list of proper nouns; sections such as these are included in all the most long-lasting, important literary works. The Iliad, Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, The Voluspa, etc etc.)
Wait, I'm not sure what you mean. Are you talking about works that refer to the poem Paradise Lost? Or the title of the original. poem?
Paradise Lost has a list of demons; The Iliad has a list of ships; Moby Dick has a list of whale species; The Voluspa has a list of dwarfs. Much great, enduring literature includes sections that are, essentially, just long lists. No action, no dialogue, just a list of names and descriptions. Young people tend to think these are the most boring sections. But actually, they're very powerful. Part of the reason for that power is the power of proper nouns. Naming things is powerful, so these sections that are lists of names are very powerful. The "epic catalog" can only be done well by a master, though. It's not something a beginner should try right away.
If you want another demonstration of the enormous power of proper nouns, look at the first page of On the Road. See how much weight is being carried by the word "Dean". On the Road is basically built on proper nouns.
Very much disagree with this, I like adverbs. At least, in dialogue tags which are where they are most frequently condemned. In real life, people give information when they speak not just by their words but by their tone of voice. I think it's ridiculous if fiction can't represent the full range of ways people actually talk, just because of overly zealous writing rules.
Now, including an adverb *just for the sake of including an adverb* is a very different matter...
"I see what you mean", she said thoughtfully as she sat uncomfortably on the chair, shifting wincingly as the hard surface sternly refused to yield caressingly, as her bottom needily demanded relief.
She carefully considered what response would suit, it needed to cheerfully yet fully demonstrate that she generously conceded the point with virtually no exceptions, just like the luggage sloppily let itself be towed about almost in a line.
But without adverbs, how could one write Tom Swiftys?
"like this," said Tom simile.
There are a few criticisms I could make, but the most honest, brutal of them is that it isn't a story, it's a series of unconnected vignettes that may or may not have endings themselves. Conversations end practically mid-phrase, we're jumping between locations, between times, between people, between plots, and when we reach the comment box and the words are all behind us nothing has brought the threads together in any meaningful way.
Thanks.
...eh, I'll do the other ones too.
There are several phrases that are purely there to paint a picture, but fall short of fully painting it. “Their luggage sloppily in tow, they almost form a line.” I'm trying to picture this, and it strikes me that I don't know why they're forming the line. If it's unprompted habit, it will feel different than if it's responding to hotel incentives. It will say different things about the guests. Likewise, Tony Cortazar. “He has been hard at work on his beard and the two months of steady, persistent effort show.” Show what? Is it a good beard, a scraggly beard, the Beard Of Heaven like you see in old paintings? You've drawn my attention to this man's chin, and then left a blank spot over it.
“Go outfront the hotel and cross Seawall Boulevard “ reads like camera instructions, like it's a script rather than a story. Books are tour guides, they don't send the audience out ahead of them. “Out front, across Seawall Boulevard” gets us there more smoothly.
Stan Kennon's first sentence is so long and overelaborate that I instinctively infer he's the Narrator, and all the previous scenes are retroactively Stan's perception of them. “on the block in the lease sale” is doing a lot of that; that's an exposition line, everyone here knows where the bidding will be. Stan's only reason to say this is to inform the audience, which is the job of the Narrator. (Their conversation also ends before it begins. Everything that's said there is the kind of small talk you put in scenes to get the audience comfortable with the characters, before you have your actual scene. The actual scene is missing here.)
It's strange that Stan Kennon, Man In His Forties, and Tony Cortazar, Man With Beard, both get names, but CEO, Man Worthy Of Appearing In Two Scenes, does not.
I am physically repulsed by Trevor snorting cocaine directly off the surface of a public bathroom. Bring a tray, my man. Your own arm would be cleaner.
Skimming through, I suddenly notice there are two separate Trevors. I assume this is leading to a case of mistaken identity later on, but if you're going to do this you should probably refer to them as Pittman and Cooper. The audience shouldn't be the ones confused.
This was a really good podcast on Israeli politics in regard to Palestine:
https://www.econtalk.org/terrorism-israel-and-dreams-of-peace-with-haviv-rettig-gur/
So I'm watching Marc Andreessen talking with Joe Rogan, And Joe says something about the ACLU defending the Nazi's right to march and speak. And Marc responds with a few words and then says, "Yeah it was not too long ago that democrats were in favor of many of these extremely sensible positions." With a cute smirk at the end, and I bust a gut and had to post here. about the 1:31:00 mark here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye8MOfxD5nU
JR probably meant to say ACLU but actually said ADL. I could be wrong but I don’t think the Anti Defamation League was arguing for Nazi march permits in the recent past.
I had never listened to Joe Rogan before. I knew he was controversial but he came across as just being overly credulous in the part I watched.
I guess depending on where your credulity takes you it could lead to being considered controversial.
Well, it's always credulity paired with skepticism, isn't it? I think for a typical person, the instant they get credulous about something, they get skeptical of the opposite (first impression bias).
Joe Rogan doesn't invite HBomberguy or Brian Deer on the show to talk about how the whole all-vaccines-cause-autism thing was an accidental byproduct of a scam by Wakefield and Fudenberg, and how Wakefield's resulting celebrity led to things like the film Vaxxed (directed by, and starring, Wakefield) which perhaps helped bring right-wing/Christian groups like Daystar into the anti-vax fold, which helped lead to Robert Malone's prominence, which led Joe Rogan to invite Malone on the show. The description of that episode says "Dr. Robert Malone is the inventor of the nine original mRNA vaccine patents, which were originally filed in 1989 (including both the idea of mRNA vaccines and the original proof of principle experiments) and RNA transfection." He doesn't mention that Malone hasn't worked on mRNA vaccines for ~30 years.
Joe didn't invite a somebody for a contrary/mainstream view around the same time period. For some reason he did invite an Australian radio host to talk about the pandemic, who pushed back on one of Joe's beliefs at the 18 minute mark... but I think Joe doesn't worry about being wrong about things, or about his guests being wrong, even when being wrong means more people die. Come to think of it, that's a really common consequence of being wrong for any popular figure. But it seems like when people become popular, their sense of responsibility grows not at all, or at least, their overconfidence shrinks not at all.
<But it seems like when people become popular, their sense of responsibility grows not at all
I think it's a case of power corrupts. I've seen the same thing in medical professionals. Sometimes you can tell they're just doing the routine thing without trying hard or thinking hard -- even when they must know the routine thing won't work.
(cont'd) They've lost track patient's need and yearning for help. It's as though that level of detail is too granular for them. They've moved on to thinking in bigger units. Their sense of responsibility is tied to things like keeping the group practice up and running smoothly, meeting various big picture goals -- number of pts seen per day, etc.
Right he did say ADL... I also assumed ACLU. Joe is fine, and fun, mostly he wants to have a good conversation, so he rarely has much 'push back' talking to guests. I don't find Joe to be controversial. He does love a good conspiracy theory, and is willing to dive down a lot of silly rabbit holes.
Yeah, I haven't seen much of his stuff but while his credulousness on some matters is less than impressive, in general I'd say it's more politeness towards his guests than anything else.
Sure, his job is to have a good conversation with his guest and get them to tell their story in the best way. He has had a few episodes were two people come on to debate an issue.
Why were you laughing? Marc is simply stating the facts. Did they surprise you?
Yeah IDK why it struck me so much... just a true and delicious turn of phrase. I'm really hopeful for america at the moment, and yet many of those around me are opposite... so I guess part of my hope is a return to more sense.
If I'm interpreting the smirk correctly it means "I've just realised that while by sensible ideas I meant free speech, some people are going to decide to interpret me as meaning Nazism, and it's too late to rephrase it now without looking like a dork, oh well, hello everyone seeing this on twitter"
Sure, I thought of that as I was writing, but all you have to do is watch the podcast and he is really just saying that he hopes the Dems become a sensible party again.
Only 8 years old. That’s so deeply tragic. I’m very sorry for him and his family. I can’t event imagine.
Why should we even think that survival would be possible even if we get where we are going? We evolved in a planet-wide system, and is it not unreasonable to assume that this planet-sized system is necessary for us to survive?
One of THE ongoing themes of modern science is the continual discovery of connections between every aspect of our earth-sized ecosystem. Kill off these bugs, which then harms these birds that ate them, which then results in less bird droppings, which then results in fewer colonies of these fungi, which hurts these symbiotic fungi, which causes these trees that rely on that fungus to be susceptible to disease, which deforests this region, which increases blah blah blah. Or maybe, grow and provide all human food in a sterile environment, which decreases exposure to minor pathogens, which maybe changes immune response to other things, which maybe causes a sharp increase in autoimmune disorders. The system is self-stable because it evolved that way.
I grant that we're past the point that people naively think that you can just pack up enough water, air, nutrients, and energy, and people can just live in a spaceship or artificial colony bio-habitat for arbitrarily long, but are we really being any more reasonable with our thinking now? So, you're going to pack up 1000 varied crops and seeds? What about the bacteria they need in the soil? What about the fungi--many maybe undiscovered yet--that keep those in check? A subset of the system may run for a little while, but it is inherently missing parts and may be inherently unstable. There is no way to take everything.
Relativistic spacecraft may not at all be the limitation. I put forth the theory that no biological beings can ever stably move out of the large evolutionary system in which they evolved. Why don't we get visits from aliens? They're just as stuck as we are in the celestial tide pool in which they were created. And when the tide pool dries up, you either go with it, or you've somehow transcended the biology altogether and headed off into the stars as some sort of digitally stored chatbots.
Counting on a post-earth future is like a counting on winning the lottery instead of planning for job. Except, we at least know that winning the lottery is theoretically possible. Leaving your home ecosystem behind? Not so much.
It’s an open question, but it sure seems like we’d be better off starting from scratch with Earth biomes than trying to live on an alien world.
There are lots of old sci fi stories where the humans live on patches of Earth life, and the original life forms keep pushing through and have to be constantly suppressed.
I think the rest of the universe should be spared us. Why should members our species be fucking and fighting on every inhabitable square foot of the universe? We're not that wonderful, you know?
The rest of the universe is dead. I don’t know how you could be opposed to bringing forth life.
Nothing wrong with indulging in some light misanthropy as we enter the dreaded Holiday Season; however, the unfortunate truth is that humans are the most interesting of all the known ways to arrange matter in the universe and it isn't even close.
Yes but this isn't the SAT's, you know? There is no Ivy that species get sent to if they're 99th percentile on interesting, or smart, or complex. Who do we know of who's watching, and can become interested in us? And as for being interested in our own species -- I constantly hear people on here discounting members of our species
(continuing here b/c of bug) whom they think are dumber than them in important ways -- or because they believe stuff the speaker thinks is dumb or malignant. Outside of this little space, members of our species are having a hate-fest on Twitter, and sawing each other's heads off around the globe. Interested?
The rest of the universe - so far as we've seen - is inert matter. Rolling around the curves of spacetime. Jostled back and forth under different forces. Sometimes annihilating other chunks of things but mindlessly, always mindlessly. No intent. No choice.
It's not about being promoted somewhere or currying favor with some observer. So far, we are the observer. Our fighting and fucking should spread throughout this lifeless universe. Our head sawing is more beautiful than all the sunsets unobserved through showers of diamonds.
Your word "interesting" is doing a lot of work here. Somehow you think it covers the situation even though neither of us is picturing there being any mind other than those of our species to be interested. I point out various signs of lack of interest individual members of our species have in each other, including head sawing, now our lack of interest is beautiful.
(continued)
Actually our lack of interest in each other, and frequent desire to annihilate each other is one of the most interesting things about us, so interesting it's beeyootiful.
Sure, the word "interesting" is doing work - meaning need be conveyed somewhere, right? And I think it's pretty clear from my other comments what I mean. Humans are absolutely unique in our abilities, artifacts, and even capacity to derive meaning.
Yes, humans lopping off each other's heads is vastly more interesting than, as I said, any other way you could configure the matter that the humans are composed of. Why? Because it involves choice and the reconfiguration of other matter. Those machetes don't forge themselves and decide to hop into someone's throat. Some other animals maybe, occasionally, use tools in their conflicts that involve simpler social organization. That's more interesting than the behavior of inanimate matter but everything they can do we do in vastly more complex ways for more complex reasons.
You were concerned that the universe didn't need us taking over every square meter of space - but why not? Were those atoms otherwise busy? Are they somehow going to be offended by our presence? No - and it's only because you're a human that you can even be bummed out on the universe's behalf.
You can focus on the negative aspects of humanity - and there is a lot negative to be found - but we're not the best use of matter because we're so great, it's because everything else is so much worse.
The Universe? OP's misanthropy was directed at those who presume life exists elsewhere, and if it does, the one thing we know about it is that we know nothing about it and likely can't compare it to anything earthbound.
Oh, I don't know about that; have you ever watched a family of raccoons, or an orca pod, or a cleaner wrasse's day-to-day life? Humans are the most interesting to *us*, maybe, but the other animals might disagree.
Saying that something is the most interesting doesn't mean that everything else is completely uninteresting.
Animals do exhibit a great deal of complex behavior. Humans, though, do so across a much wider range of activities and for a much wider range of reasons. By interesting I mean the most capable of producing surprise.
Imagine a hyper advanced alien civilization that has a complete knowledge of all physics. A completely lifeless planet might be aesthetically pleasing or neat or otherwise engaging for some reason but it wouldn't be interesting. There would be no question why everything was the way it was. A planet with life, though, is different. The living beings can reshape it. Animals do this, sure, but humans do it in many more ways and for many different reasons. We can even make elements that don't exist on Earth. We have symbols everywhere at different levels of meaning, we can even reflect on a meta level about our own behavior to a level unknown in other animals.
Our super advanced alien species would need many more bits to model us compared to any of the other animals, fun to watch as they may be.
To build on this: the most interesting parts of my life look like the everyday parts of these animals' lives. The best bits of my life are caring for and playing with my children, waking and exploring, and dealing with complex social situations. Most of my life is spent on a black chair in a sterile office making clickety clack noises in front of a grey glowing box, and not only could the racoons, orcas, and wrasses find it boring, other humans would too!
And yes, I'm spared starvation, disease, predation, etc, but you said "interesting"!
If you DON'T find it interesting, why are you doing it? Your description is leaving out all of the intellectual engagement that makes it interesting.
I've got bills to pay and mouths to feed, mate.
If you're smart enough to be able to do it when you don't find it interesting, you should be able to do things for other people (for profit) that you do find interesting.
In the movie "Up In The Air", the protagonist is a hired person to fire people at other companies. Because the firing company "cares" about their fired employees, this includes a personal interview explaining what the company is doing. For one particular person, he asks them when they gave up on their hopes and dreams, which is not exactly the kind of question one expects in this kind of interaction. But he says he looked into the person's background, and found he once trained to be a chef. Now he worked in an office job. And the company has a severance plan that can enable him to do something he actually WANTS to do.
If you're not living paycheck to paycheck, I recommend finding out what it is you actually want to do for a living. You should have some savings, and can come up with a plan to exit a job you dislike and start doing something better. If you ARE living paycheck to paycheck, you first need to start saving in order to make such a plan.
Oh, my current job is by far the best job I've ever had, and I've had a few. Work just sucks, as a concept, there's nothing in particular that pays money that I'd rather do.
The universe is in desperate need of humans. Humans are wonderful creatures and the best thing that happened in the universe. We need more of them not less.
I think the universe's opinion can be summed up as, "If you can, go ahead!" Just like it would say to every other idea, from every other source.
well said 😂
That's a very reasonable generalization of two objections I've seen for Musk's ludicrous Mars colonization plans, namely, "we don't even know how to build a self-sustaining isolated ecosystem here on Earth, let alone bring all the necessary organisms to another planet alive", and "there's nothing that could conceivably happen to Earth that would make it as hostile to life as Mars is right now".
Also, "it's practically impossible to colonize other worlds" is a sobering but plausible answer to "where are all the aliens?" So, yeah, you're onto something. IMO, it's not clear yet whether "practically impossible" turns out to mean "actually impossible" or "solvable with a multi-century concerted research program", but the difference for what we can expect in our lifetimes is zero.
And the ‘experts’ also had very convincing arguments why reusable rockets with the capability to launch 100 ton payloads to LEO wouldn’t be possible…
Which experts said that? I'd be interested to read the arguments. I know plenty have argued it won't be economically feasible for various reasons, but I don't know any serious arguments that say it isn't technically possible, especially since the Saturn V proved big payloads are possible and the space shuttle showed upper stage reusability is also possible.
The leadership at Arianespace is *still* saying that, last time I checked. The number of people who were saying that in the 1980s and 1990s when I started paying serious attention, will not fit in the margins of this blog post, but seriously, I was there, and it was most of the industry. With a few caveats like "for the foreseeable future" and "not practical but somebody could maybe do it as a stunt".
Yes, but the Arianespace CEO seems to make his point on the economics not the technology. Do you have something where he is saying it is technically not possible? I've seen plenty of papers from the 90s arguing the economics don't work out as well, but I don't see anyone saying its technically impossible. "Do it as a stunt" makes it sound like they base their arguments on economics, i.e. it might be feasible but you'll never make money with it (which just shows they never concieved of something as big or as profitable as Starlink).
Basically what I'm asking is, do you know of any argument against the technical implausiblity of reuse, rather than economic arguments?
These experts may still turn out correct. AFAIK, so far the only payload Starship has taken to LEO was a banana, so we're still missing five orders of magnitude.
This may be a fundamental difference in attitude between people. Some people think that everything that isn't firmly ruled out by the laws of nature is just a matter of effort to achieve. I think that many things just aren't feasible, and if some promised breakthrough pushes credibility, I'm willing to consider it "possibly impossible until shown otherwise". And I am quite sure that sustainable isolated habitats are something we should figure out here on Earth before sending someone on a suidice mission into space.
The bar to Starship carrying payload to orbit is at the moment regulatory rather than technical. It's engines and aerostructure have demonstrated the necessary capabilities as of IFT 5.
Assuming SpaceX isn't outrageously lying on its published numbers regarding vehicle weight, propelling capacity, and engine performance, then Block 2 is mathematically quite capable of launching 100 tons to LEO.
Regulations don't stop them putting 100 tonnes of dummy payload into their next launch. It's more likely they don't do it because it's not useful to the development at this point.
Curious if anyone is reading Ross Douthat's online fantasy novel and, if so, what they think. I'm no fantasy fan myself so not reading it, but I've been a Douthat reader for years so wondering what regularly fantasy readers' opinions are.
A bit of Googling reveals this is The Falcon's Children, on Substack. https://www.falconschildren.com/p/welcome-to-the-falcons-children
I have not read it before just now, but my initial impression is annoyance. The introduction uses the term "Faerie". Everyone else uses "Fae", it's a shorter and clearer term.
The first sentence of the Prologue is trying to do too much; it should be two separate sentences, one for the priests, the other for the mother. Then the third paragraph introduces the explanation as, rapidfire, an "excuse", a "story", and a "tale", but then says the person using it thinks it's true, which is contradicting the entire buildup.
So, so far, four paragraphs in, I dislike the prose. I also don't know very much about the characters. The introduction suggests they're conquering kings, but the story only says they've got maids, and doesn't even give a technology level, apart from "mirrors". Not a promising start.
Eh, "Faerie" isn't too bad, it was a modification of "Fairy" introduced when writers wanted to make it clear they weren't writing fairy-stories for kids. "Faery" was another version. It referred to the place formerly known as "fair Elf-land".
"Fae" is just modern American urban fantasy pretension, and it doesn't really realise the distinction between "the Fae" who are the fairies, and Fairyland/Faery as a place. American tendency to make everything cutesy-poo has inflicted a lot of these kind of terms on us.
I thought Fae was plural.
"the mysterious powers that in our own world we call Faerie."
So, yes, it's plural.
Continuing through the end of the prologue; I really wish, like, 75% of the topography descriptions were cut. The Bargain with Whitey McOldman is quite compelling and intense, but both before it and after it there's interminable scenes of just walking around in the woods. Ylaena turns her head, and we get blasted by a full paragraph describing the nothing she's seeing.
So, having finally hit some plot, there's good stuff in here, but it badly needs an editing.
> The introduction uses the term "Faerie". Everyone else uses "Fae", it's a shorter and clearer term
Who is everyone else? In my world everyone says "fairy"
https://www.etymonline.com/word/faerie
Generally I disagree that faerie/fairie is the wrong word and Etymonline does too. I think the word fae (which came before faerie, but didn’t mean what faerie/fairie meant) is now being used to mean faerie because of romantasy.
Videogames, mostly. "Fae Tactics" obviously uses Fae, "Home Safety Hotline" uses it partially so they can have "Fae Feasts" and "Fae Flu". I don't remember specifically whether Unavowed used Fae or Faerie, but those were specifically faeries. Fae is more naturally "otherworldly creatures" not limited to a particular type.
"Fairy" gets you the butterfly wings, "faerie" gets you Rumplestiltzkin. This is Rumplestiltzkin (and friends).
How often do characters say, “good morrow”??
Here's what Trumpists don't get about high-class people. For the high-class parent, the absolute worst thing that can happen to little Johnny is that he becomes low-class. In the high-class worldview, at least working-class people can claim their class status is an accident of birth. The kid who was born rich but sank low is the ultimate symbol of failure. For this reason, high-class parents often seek to keep their kids away from low-class people and low-class culture. Exclusive neighborhoods, private schools, etc. Part of this is because of the dysfunction often found in lower-class environments, things like obesity, criminality, having kids out of wedlock, etc. But even the hard-working, law-abiding, dutifully monogamous truck driver is a potential threat. The high-class parent does not want his son to grow up thinking "truck driver" is an acceptable career path. Thus, the high-class person develops a "disgust reflex" toward things that seem low-class: Walmart, McDonald's, smoking, the lottery, cheap beer, WWE, true crime documentaries, etc. Part of the appeal of wokism to this demographic is that it gives them an egalitarian-sounding reason to look down on the same people their family has been looking down on since the 19th century.
Some in this demographic are disgusted by people and policies on the woke left. They might have wished Biden didn't appoint a fat transgender person (Rachel Levine) as Assistant Secretary of Health. They want their son to grow up to be a man, but, and this is the vital aspect, they want him to be a successful, high-class man. Rachel Levine is a ridiculous person, but is at least accomplished, being a Harvard alumnus. When they look to the Right and see it promoting things like giving birth in high school[1] and not going to college,[2] they know where they want to be.
1. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-352/comment/73461003
2. https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1854647166184067201
If I'm not mistaken, all parents want their children to be better off than they are, or at worst the same. What parent wants their children to be worse off, and would not do what they can to prevent it?
Sounds like someone here needs to go back and re-read Fussell's Class.
I don't think you're taking into consideration that plenty of people get rich through non-classy routes. Cher is rich. Lots of stars are. Mick Jagger is rich. I think Meatloaf ended up rich. People who play professional sports are rich. People who own chains of stores that sell sex toys, fertilizer, cheapo plastic housewares get rich. If you're talking about anybody, you're talking about the Old Rich, not the rich. And the ones I have met have been quite varied. Sometimes they just seem to be regular upper middle class people, even though they sold a company for 50 million. Sometimes they're sort of grubby and weird and don't even shower often. Sometimes they come from a long line of cousins marrying cousins and they are crazy.
I think you’re calling “high-class” people who are upper middle class at best, like most doctors and lawyers. People who are successful but need to keep hitting the mark, generation after generation, to stay successful as a family.
The real upper class is much smaller and weirder than that and I don’t think they’re at all worried about their kids becoming honest laborers.
Speaking as a high class Trumpist (or at least a relatively high class would-be Trumpist) I'm not under the illusion that promoting the dignity of blue collar work means promoting it to my own children. I certainly expect my own children to go to university, but don't think that everyone should, or should have to.
If this effect exists at all it's somewhere further down the barber pole. I'm not worried about being mistaken for a blue-collar schmo, but someone who is only one or two generations removed from blue-collar schmoes might be.
And it's not like Trump has a monopoly on low-class signifiers. He has Hulk Hogan, but the Democrats have Megan Thee Stallion.
I think you are confusing class with money.
But what about trucker hats and PBR?? So they want them to develop a sense of irony…but not actually like those things.
Are you sure Trumpists don't understand this? What makes you so sure? I've heard literate and well-spoken Trump fans say similar things in different words.
Many of them express amazement at why people voted for Harris. This is to help explain.
Do you think this is the strongest argument for voting for Harris? "Vote for Harris or someone might think you're a blue collar slob"?
Even I can think of more reasonable reasons for voting Harris than that.
Alexander, this is why you always give me a laugh. "What high class people like and do is this and that". That's showing off your Hyacinth Bouquet nature there! Or Meghan Markle, who the more she tries to be "high class", the more she reveals she never will be.
What is the benefit of being a Harvard alumnus if it puts you on the path to being a fat transgender ridiculous person?
Do you not understand that every post of this nature you make reveals that you yourself are not a "high-class person" but someone striving to be? who is pulling themselves up that ladder one rung or one rung more than that from their origins?
High-class people are not disgusted by the truck driver, because they don't think about the truck driver any more than they think about the taps in the bathroom that give hot water. They probably think *more* about bathroom taps, to be honest. Truck drivers are just there, part of the world, the system that exists to smoothly move their lives along. It's the people like you, the class just above the truck driver and two classes below the high class, who obsess over the truck drivers and the pregnant non-college lower class women.
It's "Bucket". :)
"What is the benefit of being a Harvard alumnus if it puts you on the path to being a fat transgender ridiculous person?"
This is the problem with the low-class right. It's probably the case that someone growing up in a high-class household is more likely to be transgender 40 years down the line than someone who grew up working-class. But he's also more likely to be physically fit, not addicted to drugs, and married to the mother of his children. In what class is a child most likely to be raised by his married, heterosexual, biological parents who are married to one another, rather than some weird blended family deal? It's the upper-class. But the low-class right spends all their time demonizing the very class that's most likely to live that trad lifestyle while having a "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" attitude to anything that goes on in the trailer park.
The question isn't whether it's better to be low class or high class. The question is whether it's better to be a high class left wing person or a high class non-left-wing person.
"Do you not understand that every post of this nature you make reveals that you yourself are not a "high-class person" but someone striving to be?"
You keep asking the same question and ignoring the answer.
Alexander, you keep being obsessed with abortion. All your stuff about high-class versus low-class is secondary to that, your constant messaging is "abortion abortion abortion", with a side of "for the inferiors I despise".
It's not just abortion. Also stuff like having Hulk Hogan as a convention speaker.
(0) Are "Trumpists" people who support Trump, people who act like Trump, or people who support an ideology represented by Trump? If the third option, what is that ideology?
(1) What you wrote is the common stereotypical caricature. Do Trump supporters not believe that about high class people? I don't know of a clear source of data, but this surprises me.
(2) What evidence is there to support your claim that "[f]or the high-class parent, the absolute worst thing that can happen to little Johnny is that he becomes low-class"? I'm sure there are some people for whom this is true, but it isn't true of people I know IRL.
FWIW, I seem to recall there might be a couple of other reasons to be anti-smoking (to pick on just one example).
>For the high-class parent, the absolute worst thing that can happen to little Johnny is that he becomes low-class.
This, but for all classes (and "lower" instead of "low"), is the real reason for the fertility crisis.
Anyone used Topaz Labs AI-based photo processing for image restoration (old blurry or damaged photos, for example)?
Yes, and I think they're pretty good; in particular, they blow Photoshop's built-in AI tools out of the water. That said, I use them mostly to process digital RAW files from my camera, primarily to reduce noise and improve focus, sharpness, and resolution. In fact, I usually upscale all my photos to 2x, edit and crop them as needed, and then downscale them back to about 1.2..1.5x.
I don't think much of PS's built-in AI tools. Had an image of path through a meadow with a person in it, wanted to removed the person. So I selected the person and asked generative fill (or whatever you call the appropriate command) to fill in the space with more path and meadow. It did, but parts of it were done by just cloning an area right next to the one they filled in. It was really obvious that there was this little stripe of perfect doubles.
Thanks, this is encouraging. I have some old B/W prints in dire need of restoration, I’m considering taking photographs of them with my digital camera in RAW, using a prime 50 mm lens. Some have yellowing streaks that I hope to get rid of, do you think it’s capable of doing that?
In Photoshop you can just use the desaturate command. That will turn any color image to black and white, and will turn the yellowed areas on your B&W photo various shades of gray. If the black/white balance now looks off, you can adjust it in Levels, or in Curves. Of course if the yellow is actual dark stripes, it will turn into gray stripes and that is not at all easy to fix. If all you want to do is turn the yellow to gray, even the little Preview app on Macs with do desaturate, and even allows some simple brightness adjustments. I'm sure there's an equivalent in non-Macs.
Yeah driving saturation to 0 in the phone edit was the first thing I did, and it left gray streaks, predictably. I think I’m going to take a plunge and buy that Topaz thing.
Removing yellow is really easy to do with photoshop. There are lots of online instructions. But if you send them off to be restored the place would surely consider removing yellow from B&W to be part of the job.
I'm not sure, I've never tried doing that. If the yellow streaks are sufficiently large, then it might be easier to get rid of them just using ye olde Color Mixer (especially since the source photo is B&W). But if they're small enough to constitute noise, Topaz should be able to get rid of them automatically. It also has a Face Restore option that should help with, well, faces.
Don't know for sure about Topaz (I have used it but not for this) but probably. If you convert the rgb file from your camera to grayscale you will wonder where the yellow went...There might be some density variation left behind but that is not hard to fix.
If you have access to Photoshop, when you convert to grayscale, you get an option to do it using a (virtual) color filter. This might solve the density problem at the same time seeing as the camera is only seeing yellow it might all match. It’s a traditional old-school method of retouching old photographs; re-photograph them using a colored filter that matched whatever stain you were trying to remove.
I've been reading a scifi book that includes sphere eversion as a plot point. I tried looking up sphere eversion and Morin surfaces but I despair of understanding how any of this stuff works. Does anyone know of good related resources for a layman on eversion, or maybe topology in general?
Wow, do I have the perfect video for you! https://youtu.be/wO61D9x6lNY
(Not to be confused with the... other version. https://youtu.be/Zv-XNlE1s8E )
The first is a classic, but I had never seen the second version. So, um, thanks for that, I guess.
(I only made it to roughly 17 minutes in)
Thanks, that was surprisingly helpful. Although I'm even more convinced that the people who figured this out possessed greater spatial visualization ability than I ever will.
TRIGGER WARNING
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/with-the-bereaved-gazan-doctor-mohammed
My experiences with the anonymous commentariot here have been 90% terrible. Anonymous people farting their critical opinions about non-anonymous people who are putting their lives on the line is a grotesque moral allowance.
Anybody not anonymous is invited to contact me on whatsapp. As I say in the video, I'm here.
I'm the only Jew in Egypt (don't get smart with me about a 90 year old woman or the ambassador) and the rest is here. What isn't here is in hundreds of videos and articles.
The unfriendly prologue is a necessity for reasons I won't debate but it is EXTREMELY UNFORTUNATE because I am actually sharing this open-letter or philippic in the hope of being read by you incredibly few people who will matter. And for you, my heart overflows with love, friendship and laughter.
Scott, I know that though this comment is both necessary and necessarily true, it is ban-worthy or warning-worthy and I would hold no grudge should you choose to do either. I apologize for shouting about murder in your fine establishment.
But I am doing so because though I have strong reservations about 80% of the local pixel spillers, within this community are individuals, both public and private, who are among the very best of people I could ever hope to reach, and I'm so sorry that in order to have a chance of being heard over the din I need to shout, I have no other resources.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/with-the-bereaved-gazan-doctor-mohammed
I gotta level with you, you employed an extremely weird strategy to draw attention to something you care about?
You do know that Scott himself is using a pseudonym, right? He was doxxed by the New York Times despite his protests that it could harm his then-current patients, and despite a giant petition of readers and public intellectuals who did not believe the NYT had good cause to dox him.
So maybe don't start by insulting people who choose to be anonymous, especially when that choice is likely motivated by a desire to discuss their opinions on topics which might get them shunned or even fired?
Next, and I really do mean this as gently as possible: Your comment here and the post you link to both give the impression that you are suffering from Main Character Syndrome. You seem to be under an impression that anyone reading this comment and your post already know who you are and what you're discussing at your link. You even seem to believe that readers will understand what they're supposed to do with your (vague) call to action to contact you on whatsapp and do...*what?"
I urge you to consider writing an introduction of yourself and a more fulsome introduction to the topic you'd like to discuss. Explain yourself to people like they are five year olds who've never heard of you.
How many such introductions can one write. My letter is evidently not written for you. It is written for anyone who groks it and therefore either searches further in my oeuvre for more background information or contacts me online.
I was hoping to stave off confused comments by anybody not in that category but this is the internet and everybody has something to say.
As for anonymity, I am well aware of Scott vs Times - and you are well aware that I was not speaking about anything like that at all.
I am a crass, dumb, cowardly anonymous member of the commentariat. I don't speak, I fart, and I can't click links because my thumb is always up my ass.
I'm trying to understand what you wrote. Someone's dad was executed by soldiers, and then he tried to kill you the only public Jew in Egypt, and then you had a long conversation..and beyond that I'm not sure what you're communicating. Are you ok now?
I'm sorry that you are so confused.
I gave Claude the link and with no prior information or access to additional writings or videos it undwrstood me well enough to provide the following acceptable-for-a-robot summary:
"This isn't an article - it's an urgent truth about systemic suppression, illustrated through my connection with a Gazan doctor whose 79-year-old father was killed (after serving as an Israeli photo-op).
"It exposes how the entire system of interconnected networks of power brokers, journalists, and influencers - actively suppresses real voices while maintaining their preferred narratives.
"The piece culminates in a video where I'm literally shouting into the void about being the only public Jew in Egypt, about how the systems of control are so complete that even when someone like me - who can walk safely in the roughest neighborhoods of Brooklyn or live openly as a rabbi in Egypt - tries to speak truth, the mechanisms of suppression ensure the message doesn't get through.
"This isn't academic discourse - it's a desperate attempt to shake people awake before worldwide catastrophe becomes inevitable. The doctor who initially wanted to kill me ended up in hours-long conversation about Islam and everything else - that's the kind of real human connection that could save us, but the system ensures such voices remain unheard."
As for how I'm doing, let me repeat my invitation to contact me non-anonymously via whatsapp or email, either of which are available in many places on Substack and in YouTube descriptions.
In following politics in recent years, I've noticed a certain aesthetic pattern for left vs. right. It's not universal, as I can think of exceptions in multiple directions, but it's still frequent enough that certain personal aesthetics have become left-coded or right-coded, at least in memes. This is more noticeable on the left than on the right since right aesthetics seem to basically be 90s normie.
I'm curious how much these personal aesthetic choices are made simply because they like the way they look vs. how much these choices are made as a form of political in-group signaling, perhaps the left equivalent to wearing a MAGA hat.
So I'd like to know what people here think of the aesthetics of these politically-coded aesthetic choices. *Just* the aesthetics. What do people here think of the following at a purely aesthetic level?:
1. Septum piercings
2. Non-natural hair colors
3. Half-shaved half-long hair (this hairstyle: https://i.imgur.com/azIYWdB.jpeg )
Of course, if people disagree that any of the above is politically-coded, I'm open to that argument. It's possible I'm missing good counter-arguments to the pattern I've seen in recent years.
#3 means a character designer just ruined a video game.
LOL Yeah, I know what you mean.
None of those three are to my personal taste.
I sort-of agree that these are sort-of political. I'd describe them as uncommon enough to register as trying-to-be-transgressive though not necessarily left-coded. Some flavors of libertarians might choose them as a statement of personal freedom...
1 disgusting; 2 meh, looks better in anime than in real life; 3 ugly.
MAGA people love their tats.
I like septum piercings (given that they aren't infected), multi-colored hair, and the half n half style can be good if styled right but can also easily be very very silly.
I tend to like masc-androgenous personal aesthetics, and what you've listed is (part of a) stereotyped alt transmasc look. Fully agree with Erica that this is a Goth/Alt/Queer set of aesthetics and thats where the political coding you're getting comes from, but being from the Bay Area/Liberal Arts Colleges I also don't see them as very transgressive or highly indicative of politics. People do that stuff a lot. Funny to me when people are actively grossed out by them. It sounds to me like a strawman of a 60's dude complaining about how men have bangs now, and it's actually somewhat aesthetically displeasing to me.
I associate a lot of these aesthetic choices with a kind of a feined and half-arsed perceived personal rebellion, e.g., the liberal "feminist" who hasn't even read any feminism, or the punk "anarchist" whoes father is a CEO and pays the bills, etc...
It's a cheap way to seem cool, without actually having a personality. I also find it distracting and sometimes visually off-putting.
And I don't mind the genuinely unconventional (Weird Al Yankvitch say), or people who really pull it off and invest a lot of thought and effort. It is the low effort pseudo non-conformity, while literally just immitating people on Social media.
1. Septum piercings specifically, not just nose piercings? Don't think I've seen any outside of a movieset 80's gang, with the mohawks and the spikes. Google images tend to have a whole lot else going on too, but the most normal-looking ones just look like they've got boogers.
2. I've always liked green hair, so would have to say I'm a fan of the non-natural. Not really a fan of the blues and purples though, which seem to be more common. There's also the striped-auburn-and-blonde, which are both natural colors but not naturally arranged and I'm not sure if it qualifies.
3. Not a good look, and not designed to be. Like the mohawk or the devil horns, it's a look that's supposed to make you stand out, and does so less and less the more it catches on. That linked photo in particular just makes her look prematurely balding.
> Don't think I've seen any outside of a movieset 80's gang, with the mohawks and the spikes
I see them occasionally IRL. After reading your comment I saw one on a PSA for flu and Covid vaccines.
I thought that was odd because unless you are very careful about keeping your hands clean touching the inside of your nose is a good way to introduce a viral infection.
I feel like some of these had a different meaning decades ago, they were just general-purpose transgressive/cool. But now they're severely dated and confined only to the far left.
I noticed leftist youtubers use neon, high contrast colors in their logos, backgrounds etc. Right wingers use more ordinary colors, usually red and blue (like american flag).
In particular, the use of "bisexual lighting" (i.e. using pink, purple, and blue spotlights illuminating the scene from different directions) in leftist YouTube was popularized by Natalie "ContraPoints" Wynn around 2017-18, around when the "long-form video essays by queer leftists" genre was getting established as a thing. A bunch of other channels copied her style.
It's called "bisexual lighting" because the colors are similar to those of a bisexual pride flag, and also because Wynn identified as bisexual at the time (she currently identifies as lesbian).
Have you ever seen a store display for Bucked Up energy drinks? They appear to come in two flavors: American and Bisexual.
1.) Not a fan, but I'm hardly one to criticize there.
2.) My grandmother used some kind of rinse that I think was supposed to make her white-gray hair more visually striking; the older she got, and the worse her eyesight, the more she used the rinse, and gradually her hair became ... well, purple. Obviously purple. A very very pale shade of purple, but most definitely purple.
I grew up with that, and don't really notice it as particularly unusual unless the dye job is just bad.
My wife sometimes does blue hair. It's very useful for me, because I'm faceblind and blue hair stands out rather well.
Aesthetically I guess it works on some people, but it's like everything else, everything isn't for everyone. My skin tone doesn't work for dark hair - tried it as a teenager, didn't look good, bleached it until it was light enough (albeit rather reddish orange) to not look terrible, didn't repeat it. I could pull off a fairly wide variety of very light unnatural colors, but nothing dark or deeply tinted.
3.) Mentally I refer to this as the "Zorg haircut", after the character from Fifth Element, and lump it in mohawks and mullets; haircuts that are largely unattractive, but fashionable for particular groups at particular times for what are fundamentally group signaling purposes.
Some rare people can actually pull the look off, and may persist in wearing it past its fashionable phase - but most people can't and do it anyways, at least while it is fashionable.
It's kind of like beards in that respect. Not all guys look good with beards, and when beards were peak fashion, you saw a lot of guys walking around who would have looked better with a shave.
Don't care either way about the rest of it, but I've yet to see a septum piercing that doesn't look from a distance like the person has a runny nose and it's about to drip.
TBH, my personal squick is large permanent body changes; e.g. extensive tatoos (are those politically coded? Feels like maybe a far right thing). None of the things you list are particularly permanent - even the piercings close up if you stop wearing the jewellery. So if a kid wants to experiment with the look, whatever's behind that, I see no particular reason to stop them.
The main connotations I get for those three are Punk, Goth, or Queer cultural coding. There's also a bit of a gender split, with undercuts being a bit more queer coded in women and more punk/goth coded in men, while unnatural hair colors are the reverse.
LGBT is heavily left-skewed, Goths also seem to skew leftwards. And Punks are generally intensely anti-establishment but run the gamut from extreme left to extreme right.
My personal aesthetic tastes are strongly positive for Goth looks, moderately negative for Punk looks (although I have known some Punks who pull off the look well), and mixed/neutral for Queer looks. For the particular elements, I am not a fan of septum piercings, but quite like hair colors and undercuts if they're done well. I do not currently sport any of those style elements myself, nor do I have any plans to do so in the future.
Politically, I'm a bleeding heart libertarian and an anti-MAGA ex-Republican.
Thanks a lot! Very interesting and informative reply. I like the Goth look myself, so of these 3 the one I like best is the non-natural hair color. It also helps that I'm an anime fan.
> more noticeable on the left than on the right
?
I expect your more aware of the far left then the far right
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIfOEBCTFQ8
These styles aren't political stances in the sense wearing a MAGA hat is, but they're obviously implicitly political. They're transgressive, and everyone knows in what direction.
Imagine a Sillicon Valley tech company that required no piercings or unnatural hair, and made employees wear nice suits like salarymen - would anyone pretend such a policy wasn't similarly transgressive and political.
I'm conservative. I will dispense completely with tact here, I apologize in advance.
Septum piercings disgust me at a viscerel level. They are hideous and I suspect this is literally the point.
Non-natural hair colors I'm marginally negative on -- they often either look like costumes (e.g. anime cosplay) or just look odd/obnoxiously-attention-grabbing, but they don't disgust me to the extent that septum piercings do. I think mostly my dislike for them is that they associate with the kinds of people I don't particularly care for -- if people I liked dyed their hair blue I imagine I would somewhat feel differently.
Half shaved half long hair I dislike as well, not so viscerally as septum piercings, but rather it just seems ugly in a way that's almost disrespectful of normalcy and beauty. To generalize a bit, long hair on a man is generally unattractive, while a shaved head can be attractive. Baldness on a woman is virtually always unattractive, while long hair is usually attractive. Regardless of your gender, with the half-shaved half-long cut, you're both showing a version of yourself that could be beautiful, and then spitting on it. It would be like drawing a beautiful painting to show that you are capable of aesthetic discernment, and then defecating on it to prove your contempt for those aesthetics. and because hair takes a long time to grow, it also proves that you aren't just temporarily being ugly for some street cred and going back to normalcy, you are committing at least reasonably long-term to this look and this particular derisive anti-aesthetics.
I agree that all of these are politically coded. The half shaved and septum piercings seem objectively ugly in some sense to me while my feelings on colored hair are more tribal. To me they are all at least adjacent to "punk", which is aesthetically and ideologically anti-status-quo, anti-normalcy, anti-conservative.
"Septum piercings disgust me at a viscerel level. They are hideous and I suspect this is literally the point."
"often either look like costumes (e.g. anime cosplay) or just look odd/obnoxiously-attention-grabbing,"
"To generalize a bit, long hair on a man is generally unattractive, while a shaved head can be attractive. "
I was sure I'd get the ol like-mind fallacy disrupted a bit from your comments opening lines but wow! I very literally cannot imagine holding those positions!
If it helps at all, the motivation for septum piercing is usually "looks cool" and not "looks hideous". Most people don't want to look hideous, and many like looking cool.
+1
it’s natural to want to decorate yourself. There are a lot of different styles and ways to do it. Why be judgmental?
You do say "cool", not "beautiful". Cool is not the opposite of hideous.
To be more complete here I don't think they're trying to be hideous purely because they like being hideous.
In the same way that a person might have a grotesque renaissance painting in their house and find it meaningful or aesthetic, I would imagine that the carnal/ugly aspect of it is sort of the point, that it shows that they don't give a shit about what people think of them. Or like, super unpleasant piercings are sometimes a sadomasochistic thing, or a "the pain doesn't bother me, I'm super cool because I have these giant spikes sticking out of my face and am acting chill about it" thing. Or maybe, the metal/flesh distinction is meaningful to them and conveys something they find deeply interesting; that's a form of aesthetics too, like you can't have beauty without ugliness, the inadequacies of man's creation exalt god's creation, whatever your favored framing. Maybe their aesthetics are something like "superficial/surface-level beauty is overrated". But I think in their heart of hearts, they know that most people will see it as ugly, that a septum piercing *is* ugly on the surface level, that beauty is at least partially a matter of social consensus and that it's a conscious choice to depart from social consensus in this way...
or something like that. I think the population that genuinely thinks it's objectively beautiful when totally decoupled from all other context is vanishingly small, and most justifications for it involve an implicit assumption that it's unpleasant at some level.
I hear you and this makes some sense, but I think you are very stuck in your aesthetic context and are failing to model that no really, other people/cultures have other aesthetic preferences. You mentioned the Ainu girls with face tattoos in your conversation with Chance being normal for their social context, those tattoos aren't rebellious or upsetting because it's just what woman looked like. I know people with facial piercings. Septum is one of the more common ones. It doesn't look any more carnal or grotesque to me than dangley ear piercings or acrylic nails.
is it that hard to accept that there are pretty major American population/cultural centers where septum piercings are pretty normal and not that big a deal? I understand that some people dislike them, but in my culture (bay area, middle class, under 50) they're not extreme or rare enough to be a departure from social consensus the way you described. It might be true of the septum-haves in your area, or of the early adopters though. I wouldn't be surprised if it got normalized in some places/contexts and not others.
>is it that hard to accept that there are pretty major American population/cultural centers where septum piercings are pretty normal and not that big a deal?
Yes. I think people who think it's not a big deal underestimate the degree to which most people dislike them. Anecdotally I know this is true for some friends of mine with tattoos, who don't realize how many of their buddies actually think their tattoos are stupid and ugly and don't say it to their face because they are trying to be nice (and this is among an all-mens group; my intuition is that this is even more true for women). Probably there is a large population of people (like me) who dislike them but stay quiet because they are trying to be nice, because in some parts of America it's considered gauche and low-class to care about these things -- but they still think they are ugly, privately.
If you don't believe me, consider this: I've never once spoken or written, publicly or privately, about septum piercings in my life up until yesterday when I made the initial post. Not even to my friends, including the one of whom has singificant face piercings (not septum piercings, she has one of those traditional indian nose piercings, idk what they're called). You would never know that someone like me, who considers septum piercings *grotesque*, is just walking among you. I could be your best friend, or your boss, or your brother or sister, and you would never know. (Of course you might intuit it after learning that I'm a self-proclaimed conservative catholic who believes strongly in objective beauty, which probably weakens my argument a bit, in all fairness!)
One big reason I believe that negative public opinion on beauty is often underestimated is by observing "revealed preference" rather than stated preference. Unfortunately this mostly ends up being "it's my intuition based on a huge amount of anecdote". If I had more money it would probably be possible to do some study on this but for now it's just guesswork.
"Anecdotally I know this is true for some friends of mine with tattoos, who don't realize how many of their buddies actually think their tattoos are stupid and ugly and don't say it to their face because they are trying to be nice (and this is among an all-mens group; my intuition is that this is even more true for women)."
At first this was a bit of a disquieting thought, but I suppose it is nice that everyone is trying to be nice, even through the aesthetic disagreements. Trying to model this from my side, I do think women who wear newscaster (don't know what else to call this style) makeup usually look less appealing because of it, and it's true I don't say anything when they're around. So yes, I suppose I wouldn't necessarily know.
"you might intuit it after learning that I'm a self-proclaimed conservative catholic who believes strongly in objective beauty, which probably weakens my argument a bit, in all fairness!"
and yeah, I would expect you to have different beauty standards, because we have different cultures! Maybe people do share your opinion but are being quiet for cultural/class reasons, but maybe they just don't comment because it's culturally normal and there's no reason to care. I still think that the latter is more likely for my area, but it is possible your version is more accurate. You're right that without someone doing the study, it's hard to know! I do think I'll start ambushing people about septum piercings: good/bad/neutral now, so thanks for inspiring a theory-of-mind test for me.
Hair color is funny because no matter how noticeable you want to be, it seems to come down to a handful of colors in the “electric” family: blue and hot pink especially. I presume people can only go with what’s made commercially available to them from the chemical companies.
So it ends up being about as “shocking” and varied as car colors, and loses its punch.
The tattoos on the other hand look like mud sooner or later, or old newsprint. It’s good that the bearers remember their significance, because that doesn’t transmit.
But in re tattoos it’s cool and darkly funny that feminists want to look like the class of people most likely to rape/murder them, fear of which is no small pillar of the ideology.,
Luckily my grandpa had tattoos…so around 1994 I thought only old men had tattoos. But most of my family quit smoking in the 1970s and so I had no negative feelings towards smoking and so I smoked cigarettes.
"I think mostly my dislike for them is that they associate with the kinds of people I don't particularly care for -- if people I liked dyed their hair blue I imagine I would somewhat feel differently."
This is the kind of statement that leaves me flabbergasted. I really don't know how to feel. I guess I feel a sense of admiration that the honesty, but that is neck and neck with a sense of alarm, because the person saying this might not know how deeply wrong it is to judge people this way.
I don't understand: is it deeply wrong to dislike people, or is it deeply wrong to dislike things that you associate with people you dislike?
Oh God, not FLW. 😀😆 It's wrong to dislike purely aesthetic choices like hair dye that you associate with people you dislike. The word “purely” is doing a lot of work here, I readily admit. I mean, if somebody insists on being nude in public, that is an aesthetic choice in part, but of course public nudity touches a lot of other things besides aesthetics. I don't think blue or green hair even comes close. It's a very anodyne decision and there isn't much riding on it.
I'm surprised by this because in my culture (maintream white midwest suburban christian america) dyed hair is literally a trope of rebellion and nonconformism. Like there's a TVtropes page and everything:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NonconformistDyedHair .
Midwestern moms gossip about how their daughters came home with dyed hair one day and wonder if they are "hanging out with the wrong crowd". 20s frat bros gossip about picking up girls and mention that colored hair is a "red flag", joking that it's a warning sign like brightly colored venemous frogs. The guy at work dyes his hair blue and everybody is wondering if he's coming out as gay. These are everyday scenes in 2024 America -- whatever your moral judgement of them!
It is only really anodyne in very specific subcultures; guess which ones?
These are everyday scenes in 2004 Midwestern Suburban America, and TV writers recycle this tired plot point because they tend to be lazy and or old.
Honest question: how confident are you in the accuracy of your mental model of mainstream american culture?
I'm in a flyover Red State, so I'm pretty confident. The only person I know who expresses verbal revulsion towards heavily tattooed persons and people with blue hair is my otherwise saintly mother, and she is in her '80s
I'm in a heavily blue area, but I'm still pretty conservative so that doesn't really mean anything IMO. What I mean is more like, the subcultures you're a part of, your friend groups, your media diet, your deep understanding and finger on the pulse of American life. My little brother lives in the suburbs in flyover (blue) America but is unemployed, never leaves the house, literally gets his news from Discord, and has a media consumption that is 90% Twitch streams. You can just kind of tell when talking to him that he doesn't understand how most people live and think and act..
You have interesting opinions, and I mean that unironically! Most people I know would say that opinions on "purely aesthetic" anything can't be "right" or "wrong" because it's all relative. I disagree personally, as I believe that some things are objectively beautiful and some things are objectively ugly, and developing good taste is learning to enjoy the former and dislike the latter. But that's an unusual opinion this day and age. Do you believe in objective aesthetic realities (in which case it is wrong to dislike an aesthetic because of it's associations, since it might be objectively good and your own bias is throwing you off), or do you believe aesthetics are relative and also believe that as a result it's wrong to dislike anything purely aesthetic? I'm not sure you believe either thing, so I'd like to know where you're coming from.
It's absolutely fine to dislike a purely aesthetic choice. To dislike a human BEING for making a purely aesthetic choice seems cruel to me.
Remember the saying "love the sinner, hate the sin?" I don't think it's just "best practices." I think it's necessary to Not Be Evil.
That makes sense. I might be splitting hairs here, but the original poster you replied to wrote that he dislikes the aesthetic because he associates it with people he dislikes. He didn't say that he dislikes people with blue hair, but that the people he dislikes often have blue hair and now he dislikes blue hair as an aesthetic choice because of that. I don't know if he automatically dislikes people with blue hair because they have blue hair, but he does dislike blue hair itself. Which makes a difference!
I agree we should not dislike someone just because of how they look. I just don't think it's wrong to dislike a particular look because you dislike the people who tend to look that way.
Original poster here, you are correct. I don't automatically dislike people with blue hair, but because many people I dislike have blue hair and blue hair is often a public signal for being a member of groups/subcultures I dislike, I have grown to somewhat dislike the aesthetic as a whole (and am aware enough of my baises to know that without this context my opinion would probably be more neutral).
If there was a creepy cult in town that often went around wearing purple shirts and blue hats, then I might think twice when choosing the colors of my wardrobe. If I showed up to a date with a purple shirt and a blue hat I would be cognizant of the fact that it's not purely an aesthetic choice and that it signals things outside of just the fact that I like purple shirts and blue hats (in fact, my aesthetics are downstream from culture! My opinion on purple shirts and blue hats has far more to do with what kind of people wear purple shirts and blue hats then whether I think the color combination is flattering on me).
I guess we have different ways of responding to these things. When someone is part of a cult, I feel a sense of protectiveness and empathy towards them, because I feel they are victims. I am an affirmed Red Tribe guy and I am drawn to be MORE empathetic towards people with blue hair and piercings, not less. I guess I have always had a soft spot for underdogs and perhaps the ultimate underdog is the moron. Even if they represent 99% of the population (which they do not).
See I totally get this, like I know a ton of people at my church who basically have this view. They are like super conservative catholics, ridiculously straight laced, but will literally walk into homeless encampments and make food for the people there, and be as tolerant towards their antisocial behaviors as they are puritan towards the most mundane sin in their community and peers. Living examples of Christ-like behavior.
Of course there's a difference between empathy/tolerance and acceptance. They will serve soup to homeless LGBT youth without a single expectation of anything in return, and then next day nod along in mass to a sermon about how gay marriage is depraved and contrary to natural law. There is no contradiction there. I look up to these people and wish I could be so moral and saintly. I don't consider my dislike of many underdogs to be a *good thing*, but I prefer to acknowledge and be honest about it rather than to keep it in my heart and lie about it.
Ok this response actually confuses me, because this seems very normal and obvious to me?
I'll give you an example. Normal people pierce their ears. If I meet a person with pierced ears, this tells me nothing about them, their views on social issues, etc. Regardless of my opinions on pierced ears (I am neutral on that) On the other hand, flourescent dyed hair is an *excellent* predictor of certain social views or cultural aspects that I have strong opinions on. If for example I am a conservative catholic trying to meet other people who share my views, this is a totally normal way to do so. In fact, the people who are dying their hair *themselves* are totally aware of what it signals and are doing it *because they want to signal that thing specifically*.
And I also understand that these things are totally arbitrary and culturally relative. In my culture, circumcision is normal, while in others only weird super-religious people get circumsized. If I was in, idk Germany or something, maybe being circumcized would signal something about my upbringing, moreso than in america where it signals basically nothing. In a lot of Africa, shaved heads on women are very common, while people with straightened long hair might be considired unusually westernized (and thus straightened long hair would be a useful predictor of the degree of westernization -- and probably this is the point, the women with straightened long hair are *trying to signal that they are westernized*). In ancient Ainu culture, a normal girl trying to get married will get lip tattoos. Not getting these tattoos would probably signal rebellion and rejection of traditions -- thus having a lip tattoo or not would signal things about your opinions outside of just whether you like lip tattoos or not.
> In a lot of Africa, shaved heads on women are very common, while people with straightened long hair might be consid[e]red unusually westernized (and thus straightened long hair would be a useful predictor of the degree of westernization -- and probably this is the point, the women with straightened long hair are *trying to signal that they are westernized*).
Is this something you know, or raw speculation?
My impression from watching African Family Feud is that hair enhancement (sometimes straightening, usually prosthetics) is seen as an attempt at being more beautiful, something that any girl who's trying hard on her appearance needs. Contestants are admittedly highly westernized, but I don't think they're restricting themselves to that viewpoint when they discuss local culture? Like, they also talk about carrying baskets of fruit around on your head.
Anecdotal experience from my time in Nairobi, but it might be regional or maybe just a few particularly opinionated taxi drivers and such. I noticed that most women (depending on tribe) shaved their heads and asked some people what they thought of it.
You're conflating a bunch of cultural practices that don't have much to do with each other in the course this argument. That, plus your casual use of the phrase “normal people” discourages me from discussing this further with you.
I...what? I'm sorry if I've offended you in some way, I'm actually genuinely interested in what you think the problem is. Your response is genuinely confusing to me. I don't think anything I've said is particularly controversial.
Saying "normal people" is extremely controversial. I'm not offended, I'm just saying your use of that term shows there is no basis for mutual understanding between us (when it comes to this specific issue)
Is your complaint with the particular "frame" of "normal vs abnormal"? Are you assuming an implicit value judgement?
To be as technical as possible I believe it is usually possible to roughly cluster humans into normative/central and non-normative/noncentral clusters across a particular dimension or set of dimensions. e.g. "Normal people have 10 fingers and 10 toes", or "Normal people enjoy listening to music". I'm guessing that's not what your complaint is.
As far as just the raw aesthetics go, I think it really depends on the face & body you attach it to. You can't just slap a Japanese gate on a your classic country cottage and expect aesthetic appeal "because I think Japanese gates and cottages are both cool."
So goes style. In college I had a tall lanky friend and a short fat friend. Both wore black trench coats because we were a bunch of geeks, but the look *worked* for the lanky guy while the fat guy tragically looked like a bowling ball wrapped in a blanket.
Good points! I got a good chuckle from your description.
Not too long ago, I read on Slow Boring (I can’t find the post, but I think it was there) about how everyone had it much better today than in the previous decades (the figures covered not only the mean but also the bottom 20%, and they were inflation-adjusted). I’m struggling to reconcile the data with the “general wisdom” about how entire American communities were screwed by free trade/neo-liberalism/and so on, and how this discontent gave ammunition to Trump’s protectionism.
I can think a few possible explanations for why the data doesn’t reflect the lived experience (worse working/living conditions despite better ability to pay for them? some important things are much more of a financial burden than the inflation-adjustment reflects? widespread use of [insert new media here – my first thought was Instagram, but that could be older] means more intense comparison and awareness that one is “on the bottom 20%”?) but mostly I’m confused.
Do you have a better interpretation?
My current hypothesis is job security, like Jeffrey said. But I also think it's about how all the important things (e.g. housing, education, etc) has inflated faster than wages.
>I can think a few possible explanations for why the data doesn’t reflect the lived experience
One parameter that isn't reflected in the median real wage is job security. Over the course of my career (I was a programmer - and 26 years of that was at IBM) this declined quite dramatically, at least in my cohort and class.
edit: But this is a multi-decade trend, not something that any one administration had an obvious hand in.
There's an interesting research finding I didn't write down and can't remember the source for, that people tend to attribute good economic news to themselves, and *bad* economic news to outside forces.
More specifically, during the previous few years where there was both strong wage growth and high inflation... people tended to attribute their promotions and pay rises to their own hard work, but rising prices to greedy corporations/the government. And the more the two rose in tandem, therefore, the more people think they're doing everything right but the economy as a whole is going to hell in a handbasket, absolutely mismanaged. Their personal satisfaction with their own economic situation -- and their actual economic situation, as determined by their inflation adjusted income and consumption -- keeps going up, even as their satisfaction with the economy as a whole keeps going down.
I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing applies to other economic phenomenon like globalization, too, not just wage price spiral inflation. It's not *just* that free trade creates winners and losers... it's that when the winner and loser is the same *person*, they will likely attribute the good effects to their own hard work and the bad effects to free trade. Even 99% net winners (people for whom free trade has been 100% good and 1% bad) would therefore be against it.
Right. In particular, I may in fact have "earned that raise", or "earned that new job", but in bad economies with high unemployment, I don't get that raise or that job. But that's legitimately hard to pin down at the personal level.
It's true in some aggregate sense. But there's definitely parts of the country where it locally isn't true. There's whole cities, whole states, that used to be prosperous blue-collar areas and are now just meth pits.
If your family has moved from middle-quintile to bottom-quintile over your lifetime then you don't care that actually the bottom quintile is not as bad as it used to be. And while this is offset by people who have moved from the bottom quintile to the middle quintile, that just feels like a natural part of life to them.
yes I think downward mobility is a big part of the story (although it's a necessary corollary to upward mobility - social status is zero sum). The other part of it is geographic concentration - some towns (esp. in the rust belt) have absolutely been hollowed out by out-migration. Now, on some level we should be caring about people rather than buildings, and if the descendants of 1950s Detroit-ers are thriving in 2020s Austin, that's great. But the residual husk of Detroit does look like a symbol of Something Having Gone Very Wrong Somewhere.
I have my doubts about how much trade has to do with Trump's 2016 victory. If you look at the areas Trump improved the most compared to Mitt Romney, they include rural Iowa, the Rio Grande Valley, and Miami-Dade County. I don't think those people were motivated by their factories getting sent to China.
Factories getting sent to China happened from 2002-2009 and by 2010 the China Shock was pretty much over. Ironically what slowed in 2016 were manufacturing jobs focused on fracking because oil was so cheap due to a global price war. So on some level Trump won in 2016 because gasoline prices were too low and then he won in 2024 because gasoline was expensive in 2022. So the pattern is obvious—Republicans are better at messaging and crafting false narratives than Democrats.
Three things that I suspect are driving parts of the disconnect between perceptions and numbers:
1. Twenty-somethings noticing correctly that they're much poorer than their parents, but comparing themselves to their parents now rather than to their parents 30-ish years ago because they weren't around to observe the latter.
2. Takeoff is into adulthood is legitimately harder than it was a generation ago, as more schooling is expected (later start to career, plus student debt), there are fewer truly entry-level jobs, and where most new graduates want to live (due to a mix of social reasons and professional opportunities) tends to be where the cost of living is the worst.
3. There has been a long-term genre of social reform that focuses on regulating away shitty low-end options, especially for jobs and housing, on the theory that the poor are exploited for lack of bargaining power. This has succeeded in getting rid of some really appalling situations, but with the unfortunate side effect of raising the price floor as well as the quality floor to "lower middle class", which makes things difficult for those who don't have lower middle class incomes.
It's easy to come up with a post facto justification for any public sentiment. But looking for particular economic indicators to explain to people's inaccurate economic impressions may be barking up the wrong tree. It seems that public perceptions are just more negative across the board these days, for basically everything, economic or otherwise. You can see this in e.g. the increasing frequency of negative words vs. positive ones in the media.
I think in general there's an epistemological error that very smart people make when they try to model the minds of others, using induction from their own minds and the minds of their peers, and they underestimate the extent to which the populace is radically different. E.g. the extent to which people can believe things on the basis of vibes alone, with no basis in reality.
It seems pretty clear that "vibes" have been shifting more negatively for the better part of a century (e.g. in Scott's discussion of the shift away from pride in grand ambitious projects towards a skepticism of progress and focus on harm mitigation). This seems like it's best studied as its own broad phenomenon, rather than coming up with rational explanations of how people come to each particular error.
What all three points point at is something that I think I see: entry into adulthood is delayed, which leads to memes around "my parents already had a house when they were 21" and, funnily enough, from the other side: "back in MY day, 21 year olds already worked hard and supported their own family!"
Also 4. Social status is relative and zero sum, and some groups and communities have seen their social status fall, and the psychic cost of that overwhelms the benefits of greater material abundance.
The main factor seems to simply be widespread ignorance fueled in part by media and politicians who mislead by omission and commission to make the world seem worse.
People's perspective on the state of the economy and the like are shockingly disconnected from the real world. E.g. polls show Democrats and Republicans rapidly reversing their opinion on the state of the economy when a new president is elected, based on the party of the president.
In spite of widespread disconnect from reality, there are some indicators that even "lived experience" is still closer to reality than popular sentiment. Polls asking about individuals' economic states, whether they're better off than a year ago, etc. consistently find much more positive results than polls asking about the state of the economy as a whole, whether it's better than a year ago, etc.
>worse working/living conditions despite better ability to pay for them
Nah. Everything's getting better. You can look at annual working hours per worker, for example, and see that it's come way down in the US, as in the rest of the world, although it's mostly plateaued over the last couple of decades and only dropped a bit more.
But basically anything strictly quantifiable that you can find shows constant improvement.
And even "lived experience" matches this, with average job satisfaction being the highest it's ever been since the survey began in 1987: https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/11/success/employee-job-satisfaction-survey-conference-board/index.html.
Great comment, here is evidence below and my friend in the energy industry nonstop attacked Biden for 4 years and right now we are energy dominant producing record amounts of oil and gas:
So on some level Trump won in 2016 because gasoline prices were too low and then he won in 2024 because gasoline was expensive in 2022. So the pattern is obvious—Republicans are better at messaging and crafting false narratives than Democrats.
> Do you have a better interpretation?
Civilization was sprinting, we tripped, our face will hit the pavement while momentum keeps us moving forward
99% of whats good in my life comes from technology while the social structure is rotted and awful.
Economic progress has been very geographically uneven, so there are regions - the upper Midwest and northeast - much of which have seen considerable economic and demographic decline. This decline is largely due to compositional charge that people tend not to account for. E.g. the descendants of 1950s Detroiters are wealthier than their ancestors were, but most of them no longer live in Detroit, so the city of Detroit has declined. Also since most swing states are in this region, national politicians have a strong incentive to indulge this narrative to curry favor with voters there. And of course people are more sensitive to decline than improvement. The rise of Austin doesn’t induce enough optimism to offset the pessimism caused by the fall of Detroit. It’d maybe require 5 Austins per 1 Detroit for people to acknowledge that things are on average getting better.
I’ll also selfishly take a moment to complain about the idea that neoliberalism caused even the regional decline. Deindustrialization was already well underway by the mid-1960s. By the time neoliberalism became prominent in the late 70s, every rust belt city had already been in steep decline for over a decade and every heavy industry was already seeing steady decline in employment. The idea that neoliberalism caused deindustrualization is flatly inconsistent with the timeline. It’s one of those things that it’s kind of mystery to me that many educated people still believe it, whatever one’s opinion of neoliberalism.
Manufacturing jobs and union membership peaked in 1979. 3 major trends led to deindustrialization:
1. Nucor which you will start hearing more about because of tariffs
2. Wyoming coal which nobody cares about anymore
3. Health insurance from employers which is why manufacturers started paying overtime and not hiring new workers coming out of the early 1980s recession.
Could some of this be a reflection of the impact of technology on our life?
Let me explain what I mean - If you were a middle class or upper middle class person in 1960, you weren't expected to own a computer or a smart-phone, for obvious reasons. If a parent, you weren't expected to provide a smart-phone or laptop to your children. Video game consoles for the home were not yet a thing, so there was no need or expectation to spend money on this. People had TVs, but VCRs/DVDS/Blu-Rays were not yet a thing, or at least not yet commonplace. So the money needed to *feel* middle-class or upper middle class was less, even controlling for inflation. Nice car, nice home, nice furniture, a TV, maybe some books, maybe some sporting equipment if you're into sports, but not much need for electronics.
Now shift to 1990, and video game systems are pretty much a must for any middle class (or above) parent with kids. VCRs were also common-place at this point. These are added costs that simply weren't there in 1960.
Now shift to 2020, and you also have smart-phones and laptops and home PCs and huge flat-screen TVs to think about. All of this is considered normal middle class these days. Upper class will often have very fancy high-end home entertainment setups. These are all added costs that simply didn't exist in 1960.
This might tie into reproduction decline in recent years. Raising a kid in a middle class way simply involves more expense now than it did in 1960 or 1990, more stuff is expected.
Perhaps, but you're underestimating how much cheaper these things have gotten. A television in the 1960s cost the equivalent of five or ten thousand dollars today, it was a really major purchase. I can buy a TV, a laptop, a smartphone, a Playstation, and all my other electronic gizmos for less than my grandfather would have paid for his television.
I think there's 2 things to note here.
First, it's non-obvious that personal income is really higher; the actual median wage growth is pretty minimal and a different inflation metric could alter the result. The St Louis Fred series on Real Median Personal Income shows ~20% growth from 2004 to 2024 (1) or explicitly $35,730/year in 2004 and $42,220 in 2024. That's less than 1% growth/year. It does not take much adjustment of inflation figures to arrive at 0% growth or even a loss. And inflation is something that can be massaged, remember debates over inflation and food prices (since standard inflation often excludes food and energy) or debates over tying Social Security increases to headline CPI vs chained CPI. This isn't like "The government lies about inflation" this is more "Alright, we have four respectable inflation figures, 2.5%, 2.7%, 3.5% and 4%, all of which could be defended or attacked." If you decide to use 2.7% inflation for calculating real median income...well, using 3.5% instead wipes out the gains and 4% would actually show a decrease in real income. I associate this kind of thing with Crypto guys, especially Balaji Srinivasan. Stuff like this: https://balajis.com/p/too-fake-to-tell
Second, and my preferred explanation, is that a lot of growth is just commodifying old non-market goods into inferior products. See Scott's Review of the "Two Income Trap" (2).
From the review:
"When Warren does a very unofficial Fermi-estimate style breakdown of what is happening to the extra $30,000 that modern two-income families earn over traditional one-income families, she thinks they are paying about $4,000 more on their house, $4,000 more on child care, $3,000 more on a second car, $1,000 more on health insurance, $5,000 more on education (preschool + college), and $13,000 more on taxes."
It's important to note that, from how the St Louis Fred can measure income, the household income doubled. Big apparent growth. But dig in and most of that is going into expenses (car, taxes) or replacing pre-existing labor (child care, preschool).
Cooking is probably the easiest example of this. Food preparation is an obviously valuable labor. People used to cook a lot more and now they outsource it. This is...probably rational for the individual but also tends to be dramatically inflated. So, pretend you used to get paid $20/hour and each night you would spend 30 minutes cooking $5 of groceries into dinner. You get a raise to $40/hour and start ordering Doordash for $25/meal.
What's important to note is that, when you were cooking dinner, you were spending $5 on groceries and $10 of labor (30 minutes at $20/hour) to generate a $15-$25 meal but the government only saw $5 of that, the groceries, that's all that they can meausre. Conversely, Doordashing is money neutral $25 cost vs $5 groceries and $20 of labor, but what the government can see and tax quintupled from $5 to $25 and it looks like the economy boomed. Scale that up and you can get lot's of "fake growth".
The problem with this kind of fake or illusory growth is that we can't measure it, almost by definition. I think everyone could genuinely agree that something like this is happening and it probably has big impacts but without being able to measure it everyone just kinda...slides back to median real income figures.
(1) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
(2)https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/28/book-review-the-two-income-trap/
Yes, that is a good point. Anything that moves from non-market labor into the market looks like economic growth in the statistics, but often isn't a real gain, as you said.
One other category of such things: Appliances that used to be simple enough to repair oneself (invisibly to the statistics) but now require either a specialist with specialized equipment or are uneconomical to repair and must be replaced.
I feel like there could be a similar bifurcation around housing and divorce.
It's all relative. Comparing yourself to your 19th century self is just not what most people do. Especially given that history is taught mostly as a procession of important dates, battles, treaties, etc. so all the stuff like vaccines or the labor-saving qualities of electricity are barely even a footnote.
I strongly suspect that most people compare themselves to family, neighbors, and people they see on TV or social media, and there there's probably some funny statistical effect going on where more affluent people are more visible so the majority of people feel relatively worse off.
Also, perhaps specific to American culture, I've found that people are really openly critical. It's different than the flowing-mud type of complaint in eastern Europe. I don't think anyone in eastern Europe would be upset about not having a flying car by now, but it often feels to me that Americans are routinely upset they don't have flying cars*.
* Insert whatever miracle you'd expect from The Future (TM)
If you see a sitcom on TV, the house or apartment is ridiculously huge.
This started because there had to be room for the cameras, which were large and mounted on wheels.
By the time a camera could be put on a rig that one person could wear, it was just the way things were.
Now, you can film a horror movie and get a claustrophobic feeling, just by using a camera in a real house.
If people see huge houses, with people living in them who have "ordinary" lives, then they think they're doing poorly.
How does this play out on social media?
I ask because sitcoms are something I've tasted but social media is largely closed to me.
I would venture a guess it has to fit into the selfie format, so the face would be used to pack all the signals that used to come from body language and scene.
The face has makeup, optimal lighting and generally optimal sound.
Social media doesn't have a lot of "situational comedies", i.e. people interacting in a scene. When you have interaction, it's usually two people on either side of a desk. If there's more than two, it's often an assemblage of single people in closeup.
The closest thing to a sitcom I've seen is a couple of the LARPers who do a skit in an outside setting. Which is almost certainly dubbed over afterwards, as it would be pretty much impossible to sound that good recording in the outdoors.
It's the opposite of stage acting, where you have to go large for anyone in the audience to actually see anything. Everything is in closeup, even more than in movies.
For a while in the 80s and 90s, sitcom writers often made at least a token effort to justify house/apartment size. For example, in Friends, there's an early mention and one or two later plotlines about Monica's apartment being a rent-controlled unit that she's illegally subletting from her grandmother. And in the Cosby Show, the main character was written as a doctor specifically to justify that he'd be able to afford a house the size of the set.
Then there's that one episode of Fresh Prince where the main plotline (the kids angsting about how Uncle Phil's plan to retire early would affect them financially) is resolved by Phil revealing that he's rich enough to retire without impacting their lifestyle. Everyone leaves the scene except Will, who has been sitting in the living room while events played out behind them. Will turns to the camera and declaims, "If we're so rich, why we can't afford no ceiling?" And then the camera slowly pans up to show the bare scaffolding and studio lights above the living room set.
This is cool! Beats my theory of "overly large apartments on TV are escapism so the audience can imagine themselves effortlessly wealthy".
There is some of that. It's also possible that the people in charge of the look of a show don't have a realistic idea of what a "typical" dwelling is.
It does get worse as time goes on, since the showrunners are all looking at each other's shows.
I was first struck by this when watching the Heroes TV series.
In the first season there was a couple where the woman has two personalities (Niki Sanders played by Ali Larter).
She is married, with a child. Her husband is in prison. She has a job as a dealer in some game or other in a casino. It's set in Las Vegas, which is famously short on housing. Her character is a single mother, and the intention was that she was run off her feet.
Yet they have an enormous house with a large yard, which is quite green, i.e. they have the money to keep it watered and kept up.
Where is the money coming from?
Admittedly that was before the mortgage crash, so maybe they got the house on a subprime basis or something.
They did end up giving her a side hustle as an "internet stripper". Maybe that paid the bills back in those days. Probably not today, when the supply is large.
People tend to assume that other people they see are a lot like them. It's subtle, and hard to convince yourself that "No, these people are different" even with a large amount of evidence otherwise.
> It's also possible that the people in charge of the look of a show don't have a realistic idea of what a "typical" dwelling is.
Or that this would be just too damn depressing. I always think of Peep Show, in which the two main characters live in the type of apartment that is realistic for the characters, and boy is it depressing. And this is fine for the tone of the show, but unless you're actively trying to make things bleak then you might want to steer clear of excess realism.
For what it's worth, a depressing Peep Show flat can be yours for £300,000 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/property/article-11891299/Apartment-block-David-Mitchell-Robert-Webb-filmed-Peep-300-000.html
Certainly if you're someone in the tourist industry in London, you want people to think living in London is glamorous and there's lots to do. Instead of living in a shoe box.
Mind you, "living in a shoe box" is relative. I suspect someone in a favela probably thinks it's several steps up.
Britain under Victoria: the richest and greatest country the world has ever seen.
Britain under Charles III: "Hey, it's better than a Brazilian favela"
> People tend to assume that other people they see are a lot like them. It's subtle, and hard to convince yourself that "No, these people are different" even with a large amount of evidence otherwise.
Yes! This is one of the underpinnings of my philosophy! It's really hard to believe that "these people are different!" Hollywood does tend to have some inaccuracies about the lives of the average person.
I mean, it is entirely possible that a family at the 60th percentile today lives better than a family at the 60th percentile in 1960, and that a family at the 20th percentile today lives better than a family at the 20th percentile in 1960, but that a family that dropped from the 60th percentile in 1960 to the 20th percentile today has got worse off.
In other words, the `general wisdom' could be dominated by people and communities that have dropped down the distribution of American society, even while the distribution itself has shifted right.
20th percentile in 2024 is likely better on pure absolute terms than 60th percentile in 1964.
I could only find data back to 1984 in the time I dedicated to this, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N but median then was 22K.
https://statisticalatlas.com/United-States/Household-Income 20th percentile today is (by coincidence) about 22K.
It's not the exact measure since it's 50th percentile, but it's also 1984, not 1964.
But comparison is thief of joy.
OK. 90th percentile and 10th percentile then. Or 95th and 5th. I'm sure there is some overlap in the distributions, so that it is possible for certain families or communities to have got worse off in absolute terms between 1964 and 2024, even while the distribution shifted right.
ETA: But also, social status is relative, and dropping from 60th percentile to 20th probably carries enough of a drop in social status to outweigh the gain in absolute material wealth, as far as self-perceived well being goes.
And yet that family at the 20th percentile spends less of its money on things like food than the one in the 60th in 1960.
Yes, depending on where you live, you may spend much more on housing.
Just look at the amount spent on food prepared by others instead of the person eating it.
[edit]On the other hand, there's a lot more positional goods available now. To the extent that you can buy those goods with money, it's true that the family at the 20th percentile would be worse off.
For positional goods, see tertiary education as a prime example. Harvard's yearly intake hasn't changed in a long while, even while total population has grown immensely, and the pool of people who are applying has grown even more.
Was it this article?
https://www.slowboring.com/p/negativity-is-still-making-everyone
I think this is mostly explainable by the fact that people don't think rationally about how their position in life has improved. They don't think about how a person like them would be living in, say, the 70s, they instead compare themselves to how the richer peers they see on social media are living today.
This is compounded by the fact that wealth inequality in the US has increased (https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/) along with general incomes. The rich have benefitted much more from neoliberalism than the average Joe. The impacts of the Great Recession and CoViD in imprinting pessimism on people also shouldn't be understated. Most middle-income households don't have more wealth than they did before these two disasters, and many have less.
This is all compounded by neoliberal offshoring that has hollowed out most of the manufacturing sector in the rust built that once employed many lower-middle income people, leading to a general turn where you can't get a decent job without a highly expensive college degree.
Overall, since the 80s the US distribution of wealth has become bimodal. There are two spikes for the haves and the have-nots. Yes, the mean may have increased a little, but that's not the whole story.
Do you have actual data supporting the bimodal distribution? It sounds intuitively implausible. I'd expect something more power-law or log-normal ish.
Relativistic spacecraft are probably impossible for quite a while. I think this rules out human interstellar travel: who wants to spend the rest of their life on a "generation ship" just to die 1% of the way to Alpha Centauri? A robotic probe that doesn't send back data for 10k years also seems rather unfulfilling. Likewise for von Neumann probes, which are additionally downright scary.
"Embryo space colonization" provides a nice workaround. It's basically IVF for planets: send out human embryos (or egg/sperm sets) in spacecraft traveling at actually attainable speeds, which land and robotically colonize a planet somewhat, then raise the embryos. Since the egg/sperm sets are not really humans, 100% survival is not necessary, which makes a lot of ethical conundrums go away:
- Interstellar travel is dangerous? Oh well, hope at least one of these 1,000s of spacecrafts survive.
- Chose the wrong planet, like in the Interstellar movie? Just don't grow those embryos.
- Future humans invent even faster travel, leaving your original spacecraft behind? Great! They'll make neat historical artifacts when they arrive in 10k years.
Besides being super cool, this strategy has a decent shot of preserving humanity, since it spreads out (chances of) human life across vast distances and time scales. So I would argue that humanity should start engineering the tech needed to make this possible (artificial wombs, long-lived spacecraft, etc.).
E.g., Wikipedia lists one tech problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embryo_space_colonization):
> It would be challenging to create an artificial intelligence that could serve as an adequate artificial parent and successfully raise human children who have no contact with other human beings.
Ha!
Humans seem really good at whipping up a new culture from scratch wherever they find themselves—there’d be one weird bot-raised generation and their kids would be natives.
Why should we even think that survival would be possible even if we get where we are going? We evolved in a planet-wide system, and is it not unreasonable to assume that this planet-sized system is necessary for us to survive?
One of THE ongoing themes of modern science is the continual discovery of connections between every aspect of our earth-sized ecosystem. Kill off these bugs, which then harms these birds that ate them, which then results in less bird droppings, which then results in fewer colonies of these fungi, which hurts these symbiotic fungi, which causes these trees that rely on that fungus to be susceptible to disease, which deforests this region, which increases blah blah blah. Or maybe, grow and provide all human food in a sterile environment, which decreases exposure to minor pathogens, which maybe changes immune response to other things, which maybe causes a sharp increase in autoimmune disorders. The system is self-stable because it evolved that way.
I grant that we're past the point that people naively think that you can just pack up enough water, air, nutrients, and energy, and people can just live in a spaceship or artificial colony bio-habitat for arbitrarily long, but are we really being any more reasonable with our thinking now? So, you're going to pack up 1000 varied crops and seeds? What about the bacteria they need in the soil? What about the fungi--many maybe undiscovered yet--that keep those in check? A subset of the system may run for a little while, but it is inherently missing parts and may be inherently unstable. There is no way to take everything.
Relativistic spacecraft may not at all be the limitation. I put forth the theory that no biological beings can ever stably move out of the large evolutionary system in which they evolved. Why don't we get visits from aliens? They're just as stuck as we are in the celestial tide pool in which they were created. And when the tide pool dries up, you either go with it, or you've somehow transcended the biology altogether and headed off into the stars as some sort of digitally stored chatbots.
Counting on a post-earth future is like a counting on winning the lottery instead of planning for job. Except, we at least know that winning the lottery is theoretically possible. Leaving your home ecosystem behind? Not so much.
It is a misconception that the Earth is a delicately balanced, STABLE ecosystem. The fact of the matter is it is constantly evolving. The chain you described may be accurate, from the killing of bugs leading to more diseased trees in a complex way, but the unstated assumption is that the bugs thusly are critical to the trees' health. Supposing the trees lost that disease protection, they would either evolve another defense, or some other life form would eagerly take over their ecological niche.
If you have a wide enough variety of living things that survive the interstellar journey and survive for, say, 365 days at the destination (a year no longer necessarily being the same thing) then it is likely you will have an even wider variety of living things, adapting to local conditions.
"no biological beings can ever stably move out of the large evolutionary system in which they evolved"
Thus must be demonstrably false on Earth, unless a whole bunch of organisms suddenly appeared everywhere. Once upon a time, the only living things lived in the oceans, but land is a different evolutionary system. Air is an entirely different matter.
Your response ignores the fact that while life on earth has been remarkably stable and resilient, it has not been so for individual species. I think we could horribly perturb the system…I don’t know, nuclear holocaust?…and life would go on. Probably not for humans though.
That global, generalized stability is a product of its size, I suggest—something no tiny subset exported elsewhere would share.
Not at all. Life on earth continues, less so for individual species, and even less so for individuals. If you send a small subset of species of various kinds, intelligently selected for current interdependence, you will have an ecosystem different from any on Earth, but which will likely adapt to the conditions to which it is sent, if it is possible.
But none of this implies stability. Life continually adapts. "Stability" and "resilience" are opposites: when things become unstable, resilience allows a new stability, which could be the same as the old one, but is usually different at least in small ways. If I lose my job and gain another one because of my resiliency, my income is likely to be different, either higher or lower, and the specifics of the job I do will certainly be different.
On the other scenario, I think it likely humanity would continue through a nuclear holocaust, unless that was the actual objective; tiny pockets of humans exist in various areas, and I suspect some places will be hundreds of miles from the nearest nuclear detonation from a war. A few thousands of people scattered across the globe could eventually recover. People are highly adaptable, because of our technology and tool use. Of course, if a mad scientist was able to control the world's nuclear weapons, he could blanket the entire Earth more than once with nuclear explosions, which may well wipe out humanity.
Stability and resilience may be at two separate poles locally. Globally though, they are very tied together. Life on earth is remarkably stable. We have had RNA- and DNA-based life forms for billions of years. The system is stable AND resilient. It can evolve. That does NOT mean that any individual species is resilient.
I do believe that if we sent enough varied biomass for terraforming to another planet, life could take root there, if slowly and on evolutionary time scales. I think it is silly to believe that when and if it flourishes, it will look--ecologically, climatically--like the brief period of earth's history that is hospitable to us. I am not interested in the stability and resilience of life in general, so much as human life. Resourceful as we are, we have existed in only a small set of earth's historical environments.
It seems to me you're taking "stability" to mean "life continuing and interacting with life". Look at life on any particular timescale, and the larger the timescale the more different you will find the biosphere. It is NOT stable in the sense of, say, a building being stable because it stays upright through varying circumstances. It is constantly changing, with changes being more obvious on larger timescales.
And as to humanity's adaptability, we can exist in grasslands, forests, deserts, marshes, mountains, underwater, in the air, in deep space, and on other worlds (the Moon only, so far), in the summer, in the winter, among many other variables. Some environments need greater resources to support us, but we can do it, and will be able to learn to do it anywhere.
"It is constantly changing, with changes being more obvious on larger timescales."
Right! And yet, we are looking at a global ecosystem that is stable (in the way you say I mean it) for life as a whole but not specifically humans and thinking, with great hubris, that we can take a very small subset of that and make it stable for us.
"And as to humanity's adaptability, we can exist in grasslands, forests, deserts, marshes, mountains, underwater, in the air, in deep space, and on other worlds."
I'm going to reword that: "And as to humanity's adaptability, we can exist in a variety of smaller ecosystems and environments that are all interconnected via all kingdoms of life as well as the climate within one small slice of historic climate, life, and oxygen and carbon dioxide ratios in the atmosphere. We can also exist in space (not really deep at all), underwater, and the moon, for brief periods of time given the ability to bring enough stuff and get resupplied regularly." I can exist both breathing and holding my breath while swimming, but only one of those options is practical long-term.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just proposing that "stable human life elsewhere" is a bigger challenge, if it is possible at all, than fast spaceships.
It is unreasonable to expect that we need a planet-sized system to survive, because we know we can survive on remote island-sized systems that are only minimally connected to the rest of the planet, except in the coarsest terms of climate and air and water that we can easily predict. You can argue that there is something in that minimal connectivity that is both essential and beyond our ability to control, but I don't think that's the way to bet and I'd like to see a reasoned argument backed by evidence rather than just a bare assertion.
There are many remote islands that have limited connection with the rest of the planetary ecology, some of which are barren for reasons of gross climate or geology, others with vibrant albeit simplified ecologies. What we don't see, are islands with the climate and geology to be vibrant but which are barren because five hundred years ago some blight killed off a particular species of bug and then everything fell apart and died.
The ongoing theme of modern ecological science, divorced from Gaian environmental mysticism, is that ecosystems are complicated and unpredictable and *resilient*. If you perturb them you get a different ecosystem, and one where the differences are not a straightforward extrapolation of the initial perturbation, but one that is about as capable and efficient as the original at converting the available sunlight and air and water into biomass.
Then humans come along to these remote islands, and perturb the hell out of them by saying "OK, now 30% of the biomass is going to be wheat, and 20% is going to be sheep, 10% is going to be fruits and vegetables, and the other 40% can be whatever was already here". And the other 40%, usually turns into something unpredictably different than what was already there, but it doesn't go away. The wheat and sheep and fruit and vegetables, may take a few seasons to be fully established, but the humans mostly get fed.
The lesson of modern agricultural science, is that humans can brute-force just about any ecosystem into producing whatever climate-suitable products we want, usually transforming but not eradicating the original ecology and without all our crops and livestock dying because we didn't bring the right beetle.
We can and do grow food in greenhouses in Antarctica. I think we'll be able to grow food in greenhouses on Mars or Pandora or wherever. And in the long run, I think we'll be able to do a lot more than that.
I think the limiting factor in long term off-Earth human colonies is more likely to be social and political. We haven't solved those problems here on Earth yet, and off-Earth anything like a terrorist attack or even just factionalism can easily be fatal.
I don’t see how it can be unreasonable to think that we need a planet size ecosystem to survive given that it is literally the only ecosystem in which we have ever done so long term. Yes, there are isolated islands that support life, but they have far more than limited connectivity. The ocean ecosystem that touches their shore and feeds both the native and migrating species is connected to the planet as a whole. How much of that ecosystem requires the ocean currents or seasonal migration of species to continue? I have no reason to assume that those ecosystems on those islands are stable in the absence of global weather systems. And, How comfortable would you be living on an isolated island if you were told that the entire breathable atmosphere must come only from interactions with the plants on that island itself? These things are not, as you suggest, easy to predict. In some of these cases, we don’t even have the data yet.
You say that ecosystems are complicated, unpredictable, and resilient. Sure they are! Because it is a complex enormous system that can adjust and evolve. That will never be the case with a very small subset, especially if we ignore the vital importance of the smaller forms of life that we don’t see around us. Plus, as we are already seeing even in our global ecosystem, stability and resilience does not mean that it remains hospitable to all the things we would like it to remain hospitable to. Through billions of years, life has stuck it out on earth. You cannot conclude from that that any particular type of life, humanity included, is going to make it in the long term.
I am certainly no Gaian mystic. But to me, building a spaceship to take us outward at relativistic speeds is an engineering and physics problems to be solved. Thinking that we can just pack up whatever we need to create a stable living ecosystem in which to live is science fiction. And it simply baffles me that more people do not think of it as such.
Why "long term"? It is irrelevant to the logic of your argument, which is as I understand it "this thing has only happened under condition X, so we should assume that this thing can only happen under condition X". So dial it back to 1960. No human had ever survived for even five minutes outside of a planetary-scale ecology. Would it then have been reasonable to assert that there is no reason to believe humans ever could survive five minutes of space flight?
And why is our one data point, the Earth, the *lower* bound for the size of an ecology capable of supporting human life, and not the upper? That's not logic or reason, that's just your intuition. And an awful lot of very smart people disagree with your intuition on this.
We know what it takes to keep humans alive in the long term, because we've *kept* humans alive for long periods in completely isolated environments with *nothing* but what we sent to keep them alive. We know what it takes to keep various animals, tasty animals that we like to eat, alive for long periods because ditto. And we know what it takes to keep the sort of plants we and our livestock eat alive for long periods in completely isolated environments because we've done *that* too. Including but not limited to the aforementioned Antarctic greenhouses.
We can do the math. We can put together a system, much much much much much much smaller and simpler than a planetary ecology, that will keep humans and all their plants and animals alive pretty much indefinitely with nothing but what is produced in that system with a side order of starlight and a bit of stuff that can be harvested from any random comet if we can't find any better source.
“Long term” is what is needed for humans to colonize anywhere else. It is very relevant because every example that anyone can give to counter it is very controlled and very short term (or is very much not actually isolated).
Earth may not be the lower bound. But, it is the natural scale of the ecosystem that produced and has sustained life. It should be a starting point for thought if nothing else. Saying “a lot of smart people disagree with me” is simply a fallacy of “Appeal to Authority,” which has little bearing on my point here.
It is a comical level of scientific hubris (I’m a physicist myself…so I’m not immune) to state that we know what it takes to keep humans alive in isolation long term. The closest we’ve done is space stations and subs, and they’re constantly resupplied and don’t even pretend to be ecosystems. Just plants and starlight? Come on!
We don’t know why there have been increases in autoimmune disorders or allergies or autism. We don’t know how to make our cereal grains perennials instead of annuals, even though we have genetic sequencing and perennial relatives exist. We don’t know how any given location on earth will react to a 2° temperature rise. We know shockingly little about how it all fits together and how it all affects us. But, we can do the math and figure out how to move all that we need elsewhere?
As I keep saying, my theory might be wrong. But, wouldn’t it be worth considering that as at least as big a problem as relativistic space travel?
Life needs certain inputs, matter and energy, to survive and reproduce. These are present in the environment, and life takes what it sees and makes what use of it it can. If one or more components change, life will change, or it will perish and different life that can take advantage of the new circumstances will replace it.
We are aware we might forget something crucial when we pack up our ecosystem, and then the colony will not survive. But it is possible the missing part could somehow be fabricated, by people or microorganisms, and the colony survives after all. But it will not take an entire planet-sized ecosystem to perpetuate humanity.
"But it will not take an entire planet-sized ecosystem to perpetuate humanity."
That is a belief. It is a valid thing to believe. It is also a wholly untested belief on anything but the smallest, most controlled timescales and situations. I am simply proposing the theory that it is wrong and giving reasons for that theory. You may be right, and I hope you are right. But, to assume as people do that it is obviously right is a glaring blind spot in future planning and is dangerous. Consider for just a moment what it would mean for my theory to be correct.
Can't at least one of the tech billionaires spend their money testing that instead of making spaceships?
I'm not assuming it is true, but estimate (believe) it to be true. To make it a more solidly scientific hypothesis, I would propose that a complete ecosystem can be sustained with sunlight (I don't know how to quantify the amount) or other equivalent energy source and no larger than nine square miles of surface area (it need not be on the surface, as multiple levels could count on a space ship) and materials for recycling and propagating life, including oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen (possibly adding more things?).
The only way an experiment like this CAN be conducted is by making spaceships, as otherwise you're on the Earth, and any success could be objected to as not sufficiently isolated. We HAVE some biosphere experiments going (for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2). Building a biosphere on the Moon may be a way of testing my hypothesis.
No one is saying it will be easy to design or build an artificial ecosystem that can sustain human life. But it seems easy to see how it is POSSIBLE. I don't see how we won't solve this in less time than it takes to figure out a way to get living humans to the next solar system.
I tried not to bring up Biosphere 2, because it is a bit of a joke at this point. As the article states: "Both attempts ran into problems including low amounts of food and oxygen, die-offs of many animals and plants included in the experiment." The second experiment "achieved total food sufficiency"...for six months.
I appreciate the effort to make the hypothesis scientific. I just disagree. If there is anything in this universe that I think it is safe assuming is more complicated than we ever imagine, it's advanced life. Thank you for the discussion, though.
The whole conversation somehow reminds me of a religious joke:
Scientists finally narrow down on an understanding of the whole history of life on earth, from the earliest precursors to the present. "Ha!" they say to God. "See, we don't need you at all. We see how this can all work without you."
"Cool!" says God, duly impressed. "Let me see you do it!"
"No problem," the scientists respond. "First we take some lifeless dirt--"
"Hey wait!" God interrupts. "Make your own dirt!"
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." -- Carl Sagan
I agree. Unless they were somehow able to ascertain what sort of planets orbited their destination star, they'd have to bring along the ability to manufacture space habitats in case they found nothing habitable at the other end — and possibly a kit of terraforming tools (like packages of cyanobacteria to create free oxygen in reducing atmospheres).
Yup, and I'm working on some of the technology that will enable this. Artificial wombs will be tricky though, in comparison to mass producing embryos.
Neat! I'll check out De Novo.
"Who wants to live and die in an generation spaceship?" I do. The sense of purpose I would feel as a space colonist would be absolutely invigorating. For me. It would make every day feel important. Or at least I think that it would.
I'll bet there at least a millions other people in Earth who would be willing to live and die on a generation starship. Depending on the circumstances. Nobody would want to live like a NASA astronaut for the rest of their lives, that would be hell. But with sufficient space to walk around in, sufficient indoor parks and recreational facilities, including state of the art virtual reality (regulated by police to prevent wireheading)... I think a lot of people would sign up for this. And how many people does it really take to seed outer space? If each generational ship is designed to be self-sustaining, and if colonists have the capacity their ship and build new ships; assuming all that is true, I'm guesstimating you wouldn't even have to send out 100,000 colonists to seed outer space with hominids. In this planet of billions, surely you could find enough people willing to do that.
> It would make every day feel important. Or at least I think that it would.
You'd get used to it the same way you get used to everything else that's true at all times.
>I'll bet there at least a millions other people in Earth who would be willing to live and die on a generation starship.
+1. Man does not live off bread alone, but also off of meaning and purpose. There's a lot of meaning and purpose in shepherding the future of the human race! Talk about a societal project, everybody would be focused on the same goal: reach the New World, the Promised Land, preserve the Great Ship so we can complete the Great Work. Pleny of people would be up for that.
The real problem is, you know, making a ship where multiple generations can live and thrive in while going through deep space.
>>who wants to spend the rest of their life on a "generation ship" just to die 1% of the way to Alpha Centauri?
I get your point, but just want to flag that we're all spending the rest of our lives going around in loops (or not appearing to go anywhere, or... depending on which inertial frame of reference you like best.) The people on the "generation ship" would just be living their lives.
> who wants to spend the rest of their life on a "generation ship
the answer is "the people on the ship."
Colonizing something doesn't need 50% of people from the original place to want to move there. Not even 5%.
Only the first generations gets a choice, though.
I can imagine a sci fi story about a bunch of second-generation generation ship residents arguing about whether to turn around and go back to Earth, which they've heard is nice, rather than continuing the ten-generation journey to Tau Ceti, which might be crap.
> Only the first generations gets a choice, though.
Yes, exactly. You don't need to convince anyone else.
"Fortunately", the laws of physics don't really allow that for any sensible starship design. By the time the first generation is out of power, there won't be enough propellant to return to Earth in less than another generation, and probably a great many generations. Good chance that if you want your great^n grandkids to see Earth, the fastest way to accomplish that is to proceed to your original destination and set up a starship-fuel factory.
This is very similar to the plot of Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson (highly recommended)
"Relativistic spacecraft are probably impossible for quite a while."
Relativistic spacecraft are, in fact, impossible NOT to construct, but the relativistic effects can take time to build up to something useful. If you accelerate at 1g, then decelerate at 1g at the halfway point, you can get to Alpha Centauri in about 3 1/2 years. "But it's 4.3 light years away, and you can't go faster than the speed of light!" This is true, and from Earth's frame of reference, your journey would take about 6 years. Thus, the magic of relativity! Calculations credit of this calculator: https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/space-travel (I'm not sure if the sun's gravity is factored into the calculations, but it would at least be partially canceled out by the destination's gravity)
An ion drive can produce thrust of 30km/sec, but not for very much mass, so you don't get a lot of acceleration out of it. But suppose we discover some more efficient means of propulsion? 1g is a tall order (almost 9m/sec), but what about, say, 1m/sec? That would "only" be a trip of 12.6 years, or 13.6 years on earth. .1m/sec would be over 40 years, on both the spaceship and on earth, with about a three-month difference.
I think we're closer to building an interstellar vehicle in space and sending it off somewhere than the myriad technologies you would need to create and raise humans from basic components with robots. You're assuming greater than a 0% survival rate, and I think that assumption isn't yet justified.
Even ignoring issues of reaction mass and the rocket equation, a relativistic spacecraft possesses an enormous amount of energy, which will need to come from somewhere. A 10 ton object traveling at 0.2c has about as much kinetic energy as humanity produces in two weeks (using 19.6 TW from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consumption). You'll need an equivalent amount of energy and reaction mass to slow down on the other end, which squares your fuel:cargo ratio.
In principle, this energy can be beamed from Earth instead of brought along with the spacecraft. Breakthrough Starshot has a plan involving laser sails that *might* be able to accelerate gram-scale probes to 0.2c, at 10k g's and without slowing down on the other end. I don't see how we can realistically scale this up to a multi-ton human-safe spacecraft.
> You'll need an equivalent amount of energy and reaction mass to slow down on the other end
magnetic sails can act as brakes.
Good point, slowing down is potentially easier because you can make use of matter that is stationary (relative to your destination).
Though I worry there is a fine line between "enough interstellar matter to be useful" and "enough interstellar matter to make the trip dangerous for living crew". A gram of dust at 0.2c hits your ship with a kinetic energy equivalent to 400 tons of TNT.
That's an awfully large piece of dust, though, and extremely unlikely to be encountered. My understanding is that deep space has a density of about one atom of hydrogen per cubic meter, so it's more likely you would encounter billions of atoms than a full gram of them.
And the incoming radiation would be blue-shifted into high-energy gamma rays, wouldn't it? If so, this ship would require a massive magnetic field to deflect incoming radiation. I asked ChatGPT (because dog knows I wouldn't know where to start the calculation), and it said that it takes 250 trillion kilowatt-hours to produce a magnetic field that protects us on the surface of the Earth. So any relativistic ship would require some sort of massive energy source. And I don't think we have dilithium crystals in this version of the multiverse.
If we could get controlled fusion to work, maybe a Bussard Ramjet design could generate this field (?). Anyway, I don't think we'll be sending humans to the stars anytime soon — if ever.
Photons would not be blue-shifted to particularly high energies. If you're going at 0.2c, the blue-shift is only about 1.2 I think. Massive particles would still be a problem. Any neutral atoms or molecules in the interstellar medium in particular would be difficult to magnetically deflect. There's no specific lower limit on the power required to maintain a magnetic field (as of course permanent magnets exist, and although permanent magnets would presumably be insufficient for this application, other things like superconducting magnets also require no power). The Earth's magnetic field only contains a lot of energy because Earth is really big.
I saw the word relativistic, and I was thinking of speeds faster than 0.2c. I asked ChatGPT, and it said time would be running about 2% slower than on Earth.
Sustaining 0.1m s^-2 of acceleration for 40 years is still impossible with modern and plausible near-future technology, because you'd run out of fuel. That's 126000 km/s of delta-v. The greatest delta-v that has actually been achieved is more like 20km/s. Sure a fusion ramjet might be physically possible, and capable of picking up fuel on the way, but that still falls under "impossible for quite a while", as we haven't even got fusion working well on Earth yet.
>Sure a fusion ramjet might be physically possible, and capable of picking up fuel on the way, but that still falls under "impossible for quite a while", as we haven't even got fusion working well on Earth yet.
It is worse than that: What we haven't gotten working yet is D/T fusion, which has the least stringent requirements. We may be able to manage D/D... But interstellar hydrogen is almost entirely ordinary hydrogen, protium, with no neutrons. Stars burn it very very slowly, including reactions like p + p -> d + positron + neutrino, which involve the weak interaction and have small cross-sections...
I agree with everything you said, except the first part not being possible in the near future (50 years). I would guess you know a lot more about the details of this stuff than I do, but I'm still optimistic about new discoveries and applications. I think a fusion ramjet would be awesome, but ion drive improvements are probably likely to come a lot sooner. Perhaps some form of rail-gun (magnetically propelling a projectile, or perhaps a levitating train)?
I'm not sure how to optimize the calculations, but one need not accelerate all the time, either. If you accelerate for a third of the distance and decelerate the last third, it will lengthen your trip, but I don't know by how much, and it would also reduce the fuel you would need.
Ion drives aren't really going to get you to a large fraction of the speed of light. The ions would need to be accelerated to such high speeds themselves, you'd get the same thrust for only a few times more power just using a photon drive, and they're really easy to build, I have one on my desk right now, they're just lights. If the idea of shining a light out of the back of your rocket so bright that you are accelerated at 0.1 ms^-2 sounds absurd, that's because it is. Even with unlimited technology in ion drives or railguns or whatever, you just replace the limit from reaction mass with the limit from power required.
A perfectly efficient fusion engine could turn hydrogen fuel into helium with a velocity of about 0.12c, which would be enough even without picking up fuel as you go, but even if they get fusion power plants working, that's still pretty far off perfectly efficient fusion rockets.
I actually have in mind something like fission engines, which is also beyond our current technology, but possible. Instead of a chain reaction, something more like a nuclear plant that feeds atoms into the path of neutrons, so that the fission remnants get ejected with the energy released.
With an exhaust velocity of 13,000km/s, a perfect fission rocket would require a fuel mass to dry mass ratio of 100 to reach 0.2c, which is high but I guess not entirely implausible. I don't know how far a real rocket would depart from this ideal. The exhaust speed I calculated sounds very far from what I vaguely remember hearing about nuclear rockets.
The birth of Vulcans.
Are there any careers at some sort of intersection of Software Engineering and Economics?
Quants at hedge funds develop algorithms to predict the market to give their company an advantage.
Quite a lot, I think, but your question is rather open?
Corey Quinn (Duckbill Group) calls himself a "cloud economist", i.e. an expert in optimizing the cost of software deployments to the public cloud.
Some MMO games, including IIRC Eve Online, employ economists to keep their in-game economy humming along.
Any academic economics department is going to have jobs in data analysis, probably ranging from "data entry intern" to "tenured professor".
A lot of data scientists need at least some understanding of microeconomics to help their company understand their results.
There's Jane Street, JP Morgan, and various other financial institutions that hire programmers.
What happened to music aimed at men? Or at least, white men?
Compared to twenty or thirty years ago it feels like many things in the music industry haven't changed. You've got a small number of giant pop stars, primarily female, cranking out unchallenging music for a primarily-female audience. Then at the other end of the spectrum you've still got a healthy scene of obscure groups in every possible genre, so you can still find something you like.
But it feels like there's a missing middle in between these two now. Between the female-oriented mega acts and the obscure long tail acts there used to be a healthy scene of globally-popular male-oriented bands that could draw large crowds, like (say) Weezer or Blink 182 or Ben Folds or Fatboy Slim.
I realise that rock has kinda died as a genre, but why has nothing replaced it? What are young men listening to now, and why am I not aware of it?
The young men of my family listen to Drake, or to really weird almost atonal pop that I can’t characterize.
> I realise that rock has kinda died as a genre, but why has nothing replaced it?
Has it? Or has it replaced every other genre?
Here's a seminal classic rock song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IUV-QxwlRM
In a modern context, my instinct is that this would be a pop song, except that a modern pop song would have higher-quality vocals.
I've also formed the vague idea that the line between "rock" and pre-rock music was the use of drums. Those are now universal.
(On the other hand, there was a contemporary review that characterized Steeleye Span's "Alison Gross" as "a heavy metal song with no drums", with the implication that that should have been impossible.)
For more evidence along the same lines, my mother described ABBA as a rock group, while a classmate of mine flatly rejected the idea that they could be called anything other than pop.
Am I way off?
As a certified music snob (tm) I am required to look down on pop music, but I have to secretly admit I like ABBA. Just for the record, they are pop, NOT rock.
There is a difference between "rock&roll" and "rock", much music described as R&R is really just "rock", including many songs with "rock&roll" in their lyrics. Yes they both need drums, but there was music with drums before R&R - e.g. jazz and some blues.
I thought there were drums on Steeleye Span's "Alison Gross", and wikipedia lists Rick Kemp as playing drums on the album, but maybe he's not on that track? Calling it "heavy metal" tickles me.
> I have to secretly admit I like ABBA. Just for the record, they are pop, NOT rock.
Following up on this, I'm forced to note that wikipedia frequently lists ABBA's albums as belonging to various styles of rock. For example, Waterloo is listed as "Europop" and "rock".
> I have to secretly admit I like ABBA. Just for the record, they are pop, NOT rock.
But my question was, how can you tell? What distinguishes those things? Why is Rave On rock?
> I thought there were drums on Steeleye Span's "Alison Gross", and wikipedia lists Rick Kemp as playing drums on the album, but maybe he's not on that track?
Listening to the track seems to confirm there are no drums. (When they play it today, they do use drums.) Wikipedia lists Kemp as playing drums and bass for Parcel of Rogues, and this matches the information from the booklet of A Parcel of Steeleye Span, which lists Kemp as "bass, drum, vocals" for that album. Parcel of Rogues has very detailed information listed for each track on musicbrainz, and interestingly enough Kemp is not credited for drums, or vocals, on any track of the album, instead being listed as bass and membranophone. I don't know offhand where that information comes from, but I suspect it may be more accurate than "bass, drum, vocals". It's not perfect; the booklet to Good Times of Old England notes that Kemp "added drums" to two tracks, The Wee Wee Man and Cam Ye O'er Frae France, which isn't reflected in the musicbrainz track information.
Regardless, the bass in Alison Gross is very prominent, and I'd bet that's what Rick Kemp was doing.
Now We Are Six is nice enough to provide detailed per-track credits, but Parcel of Rogues doesn't seem to.
First of all, the "missing middle" here that men listen to is hip-hop. (and yes, this is primarily aimed at white men)
Second - there's probably more excellent music for men in that long tail than there's ever been in the past. Try listening to Black Midi, Black Country New Road, or Parannoul.
So, this probably isn't what you're looking for, but are you familiar with the Epic Music Mix channel on YouTube? Seems like music that would appeal to men (as far as I can tell, not being a man). Here's a sampler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWv4umvInpA&t=2056s
My favorite tracks are "Bushido," "Ice of Phoenix," "The Fields of Glory" and "Under the Burning Sky."
I can understand why one would want to stay updated in the obscure art fringe of music as one gets older – present-day bands occupying the niche of The Residents, Irish punk bands and the like. But why care about present-day more mainstream work, regardless of which gender it is directed at. Why not leave that to the young.
….as I grow ever-older (as we all do), I notice I gravitate to the Benny Andersson (chief composer of ABBA’s many pop songs) trajectory of musical taste. When asked which music he now listens to, the old Composer-King replied “Bach. Only Bach”. Turns out classical-style stuff is the type of music he composes himself now, as he has grown old; with hints of Swedish folk and Christian hymns thrown in:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK7tfIs0t7s
…it’s nice music to follow one into oblivion. Let the young have their mainstream music in peace, male as well as female. They’ll change in time, as we all do.
How about some examples of songs, bands, or musicians that meet your criteria for music aimed at men or, more specifically, white men? Because I'm not sure what you're talking about.
And you're right, not much has changed in the music industry in twenty years—most of it due to production economics—which has discouraged bands and focused on solo artists backed by heavily digitized production at the expense of talented session musicians. This has produced a style of low-information music that sort of blends into all the other music.
Rick Beato has a whole series on what's gone down...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZ0OSEViyo
But shouldn't music being easy to make result in more good music being made? It should allow for more talented composers to make more music, and in theory the increased competition should result in the best music being even better than before (assuming that people didn't have such shit taste). Vocaloid was basically the best thing that could've happened to the Japanese music industry, allowing amateur composers to hone their skills and make a name for themselves, and the same applied to vocalists doing covers of songs. It single-handedly revitalized pop as a genre. Why didn't the same thing happen in the west? I mean, the obvious answers are that vocaloids don't work as well in English, as well as the obvious cultural differences that would have prevented its adoption... But surely they could have figured out some other way to make the indie music scene successful if there was an actual demand for it.
...And I'm gonna be honest, that video has big "old man yells at clouds" energy.
No matter how many musicians you add to the world, there's only enough room for a few *famous* musicians. Public attention is a finite resource.
But who cares if they're world-famous or not? Shouldn't we be grateful that the artists we like exist and can afford to make music at all? There's nothing to be gained by being resentful of the fact that what's most popular doesn't live up to your tastes.
Where is this good music that you think is being produced? Most of the music I encounter these days is simplistic crap. The younguns might be listening to it, but that doesn't mean it's not low-information pap.
Admittedly I mostly listen to music produced in Japan, but there is a ton of good stuff out there if you're willing to look for it. ...Or in my case, if the Youtube algorithm randomly happens to recommend it to you. Here are just some random examples:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTrm_idbhUk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEy36W1xX8c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b1IexhKPz4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFow8LkHtlU
Wow. That "Kikuo - Love me, Love me, Love me" needs a trigger warning. It felt like Alvin and the Chipmunks met Captain Beefheart. ;-)
The bedroom producers in rap and electronic circles today are ridiculously talented, like Loesoe, Starboy, Misogi, Wegonebeok. You're just a victim of human's tendency to appreciate new styles of music dropping off a cliff after age 25. Maybe something like Oklou (still insanely talented) is more palatable to you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvlJ3keIJdw
...God, what is it with everyone's obsession with autotune? It sounds awful and completely ruins the point of having a real singer.
Yes, and why did they push her voice frequency so far forward? And they recycle that five-note (I think it's five) timeline pattern over and over. It's monotonous. This is a perfect example of low-information music.
There’s an enormous amount of good music being released every day, but it’s drowning in 100X amount of junk. There’s no barriers to entry, a song can be released on all major streaming platforms for 99c. So it becomes a filtering/curation problem.
Right now, for high schoolers until about ~25, it's rap, 100%. People here are generally too old for it, but the zeitgeist is Ken Carson, Yeat, Bladee, Osamason, 2hollis, Nettspend, etc. These fanbases are super male dominated. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfKBrsRBncI
Yep
Wait till somebody tells this guy about Nashville country.
That's mostly an American thing, though. The rest of the world barely hears anything about country music stars, even the biggest ones. And I guess the question is about more global trends.
(To be fair, I'm not American, and I know and love country music, but I'm an exception, and I only discovered it because I initially fell in love with 50's rock'n'roll, and country is adjacent to it in a lot of ways).
"Compared to twenty or thirty years ago it feels like many things in the music industry haven't changed. You've got a small number of giant pop stars, primarily female" -- not sure what would give you that impression.
Here is an attempt at a make an apples- to apples ranking of music acts' sales across different eras of pop music distribution, to "embed together sales and streams of every format...to date."
https://chartmasters.org/most-successful-artists-by-decade/
There are also other less-systematic rankings across decades that you can google up. They all share roughly the following consensus summary of the past four decades.
1990s: "The superstars era was in full force during the 90s, especially divas, with Celine Dion, Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston ranking at 1, 2 and 4, respectively....They completed the big 4 of female singers, along with Madonna, who was also selling tremendous amounts, here listed at 10 despite selling a lot of albums off her 80s material during that decade."
2000s: "Eminem crushed the decade with a total approaching 140 million....with Linkin Park, Coldplay and Britney Spears filling the top 4....[there were] 25 [women] inside the top 50...."
2010s: "the 10s are marked by the terrific battle between Taylor Swift and Drake, claiming almost the exact same total on very high waters, both are still candidates to the throne among the most successful artists of the 10s decade. At first, Adele looked like a surefire #1 for the decade, but her lack of productivity saw artists like Ed Sheeran move ahead....BTS number 5...."
2020s: [to date the top 5 are Bad Bunny, Taylor Swift, BTS, Drake, The Weeknd; 10 of the top 15 are male stars or groups led by men.]
I would add that media coverage of beautiful female pop stars is, in part, directed at adult men. They might not care enough to go to their concerts, but guys like looking at images of beautiful women.
Taylor Swift is somehow the most unexciting-looking beautiful woman who ever lived. I think most other men agree. I admit that she's theoretically good-looking, there's nothing wrong with her at all, but somehow the combination of all those features is curiously unsexy.
Looking at other current pop stars, Chappel Roan is not very good looking, and Charlie XCX I have to admit I have no idea what she looks like... yeah, not great either.
The last genuinely hot pop star I can think of was Beyonce Knowles.
Megan Thee Stallion is impossibly beautiful.
Metal is an ever-growing genre, and occupies a significant part of the space once occupied by rock; I'd say house/EDM occupies the rest.
As far as metal goes, it's been a couple of years since I've seen anything "Wow, that's completely new" come down the pipes, but I still routinely find gems that are doing at least one thing I haven't encountered before. (Recently, for example, Midwife, whose music is ... hard to describe.)
Are you European, as your Nordic sounding handle suggests?
If you're European (like myself), this explains why you're one of the two people in this thread who brought up "EDM". The other person who said "EDM" also has a European sounding handle (Ivan Nikolaevich @bezd0mny)
Europeans are not part of the same cultural universe as the majority of the commenters on this thread, who are presumably Americans.
EDM (the cluster consisting of house, dance, techno, and trance) has always been far bigger in Europe than in the US.
I remember that long ago, the Italian Wikipedia article for trance music used to say that trance is the most popular genre of music in Europe. That is no longer the case.
As far as I can tell, back in the 00's, the main alternative to pop music was, in the US, rap and its subgenres, in Europe, EDM and its subgenres.
Then, over the years, it seems that the US and Europe have become more like each other, with EDM rising in popularity in the US, and rap rising in Europe. But this is a tentative conclusion on my part and I'm not confident about it.
I'm not, but electronic music is getting more popular in the states, with dance music a somewhat unevenly distributed genre of that. (I gather there's a youth appeal to the culture that has grown around EDM.)
(Also metal tends to be very international anyways - metal fans often don't care too much if we understand the lyrics - so it's not much of a jump to other genres of music.)
US rap had weak production and European EDM only had strong production / melodies . They've both been getting much better by adapting the strong parts. The really good producers coming up are a blend of Americans and Europeans well versed in both genres
If metal is an ever growing genre, how come that 9 out of the 10 metal bands with the most monthly Spotify listeners are from the 70s or 80s?
https://www.musicmetricsvault.com/genres/metal/323
Zipf distribution, most likely.
The real question is what exactly you're arguing for or against here.
What am I arguing for? I have raised an objection to your thesis that metal is growing. I think that, if metal were growing, there would be more bands from recent years in the top ten. That is what usually happens with genres that have more young listeners than old listeners, such as rap.
You can convince me that metal is growing by showing evidence, for example a chart showing that the number of people who answer "metal" to the question "what is your favorite genre" has grown over time.
This is not an "argument" I want to win. I would rejoice if it were true that metal is growing, so I'll be very happy to be shown evidence.
Try attending some metal concerts, I guess.
Midwife definitely was something new for me. What else do you recommend?
I have no idea what you listen to, so a mixture of things:
Corpo-Mente, Wayfarer and Ghostbath for different things in a vaguely similar soundspace that are more in the metal direction.
Warm Desert Sand Feels Warm At Night and Azure Ray for non-metal in the same soundspace.
Going further afield,
E Nomine (Uh ... goth?)
Knorkator (I have no idea how to describe them.)
Laibach (Dark alternative?)
And One (Goth?)
Opr (House/EDM ish)
Celldweller (Every song sounds pretty different)
Ningen Isu (Hard to describe, in vaguely the same space as Queens of the Stone Age)
An Abstract Illusion (Technical death metal)
Laboratorium Piesni (Folk ... ?)
Veilburner (Death metal with bits of black metal, or vice versa maybe)
Unmet Ozcan (Throat singing electronica)
Skraeckoedlan (...folk metal?)
Splashdown (Electronica)
Twin Temple (Okay doesn't do anything new, but does something old extremely well)
I Monster (Uh)
Tub Ring (Punk turned Uh)
Shade Empire (Metal?)
Silent Stream of Godless Elegy (Symphonic operatic death metal)
Be'lakor (Pretty)
First Fragment (More technical death metal)
I live in Italy which in some ways is its own cultural universe, and right now, by far the most popular genre among young people is Italian language "trap". Which is apparently a subgenere of rap. Last time I checked, the top 10 Spotify artists most listened to by Italians, are all trap artists, except for one. This fact is astonishing and scares me, because that music is hideous (edit: to me).
But the point I wanted to make is that trap is more popular among boys than girls, in other words it's a masculine genre, despite being the genre that dominate the music scene over here.
So the trend over here is the other way around!
Note that it's a recent phenomenon. I think that as recently as 10 years ago, rap as a whole was a niche genre in Italy. Then it exploded, or rather, Italian "trap" exploded.
I love trap music. Trap is still somewhat popular in the States but it's considered retro and it doesn't have the popularity it did 15 years ago. It's been using that trap is having a moment in Italy and I hope it continues.
I'm sorry, I've been careless with my words. I didn't mean to insult anyone.
I respect your humility. You are clearly an intelligent and thoughtful person.
Anecdotally as a (not really white for the purposes of this question, but I'll bite) college guy, the answer is probably electronic music, specifically house, but other subgenres as well. Additionally, a lot of electronic-adjacent but not true EDM stuff (the only examples I can really think of are Bladee and Snow Strippers, but I know as soon as I post this I'm going to think of a bunch of other answers) has grown substantially in popularity.
Bladee and Snow Strippers are good examples of how much rap has blended into EDM. Some of the most talented producers are EDM-fused rap production, like Starbo, Loesoe, and even Yeat. A lot of ecstasy/MDMA usage probably a factor
Interesting point. I've heard that about books, certainly, and there have been a few complaints about the publishing industry entirely catering to women and men under 35 or so not reading at all. I hadn't heard that about music yet. Maybe they're all playing video games?
Video games have become a "catch-all" entertainment form for a lot of young men. The modern video came often provides a cinematic-like story, so filling the same need a Hollywood movie does and also filling the need for getting lost in a fictional story. The modern video game often has very rocking BGM, and some video game sound-tracks do get decently popular.
That's what I figured. Men are more visual, so a game is going to appeal to them more than a book. And you get music in there too, as you say. Thanks!
> Men are more visual, so a game is going to appeal to them more than a book.
American publishing is staffed by women who disapprove of books that might appeal to men. There's plenty of room for making books that men will choose to read, if you just decide that you're willing to do that.
There are two related fads, for female protagonists and for female authors. Female protagonists don't really matter; the book will be the same either way. But if you want to see more men reading books, publish more male authors. The author turns out to matter a lot.
I've actually complained about the same thing on other Substacks, so keep in mind I agree with you! I actually had the fantasy of quitting my job to write a book, and in middle age *accumulated the money to get away with it*, only to realize nobody would read it now!
I just suspect this is one of those things that's become a secular trend that can't be reversed. Men don't want to read, so men don't become writers, so they don't make books men want to read... there was probably an inherent bias against literacy that then got propagated due to political reasons in the 80s.
Ceterum, censeo feminism esse delendam.
https://updates.kickstarter.com/how-brandon-sandersons-kickstarter-project-broke-the-bookish-internet/
The audience is still there.
If you're Brandon Sanderson...
(...and got big before the hammer fell. But also, Brandon Sanderson.)
Is the idea that men won't read, or that it's difficult to start out as a proven author with over a dozen high-profile credits?
I disagree with your premise that rock has died. Back when I was in high school, we used to listen to Alkaline Trio, Taking Back Sunday, Slipknot, Korn, DragonForce, Opeth... and every one of these bands is still active. Most are still making new music.
This is what is hard to understand for people. Bands like these released their most popular music decades ago. When they release new albums, almost no one cares. Generally when anyone is older they listen to the same stuff from decades ago. After 25 new music appreciation implodes. So no one is making new music for oldheads, they're entrenched. People make new music that appeals to the young since they are actually malleable enough to "get it." So what are young white males listening to? It's not Dragonforce, who are getting a few hundred thousands streams per song on a new album, it's rap like Ken Carson who has massive concerts and one billion streams on an album this year.
It's goes back much further. Look how long the Rolling Stones toured, or that thing Ringo Star has been touring with. Older, established rock acts that will reliably sell tickets are doing well. New rock acts are a bad investment for record labels. The ‘musicians’ themselves are of mediocre skill, can’t read music, can only play whatever their current set list is if they are in practice, have bad work ethics, and you have to split any money they do make between 3-5 people. Established rock acts like you mention have proven that they are reliable in the studio and on tour. New acts are too risky compared to a solo artist who can be backed by professional musicians who are paid a set, predictable rate for their work, don’t get drunk or develop out of control drug problems, and have a reputation to protect to be able to get more work. Rap is even easier to manage, though you will notice there aren’t really any new rap groups either, only solo artists who get promoted. They have their own version of the pros as well: the beat makers and producers who earn a set, predictable fee. All the changes in the music business in the last 30 years are driven by the business, not the music. Industry music is made for the people that pay for it. Right now that’s mostly country fans, rap fans, and women generally.
"Look how long the Rolling Stones toured, or that thing Ringo Star has been touring with. Older, established rock acts that will reliably sell tickets are doing well."
My understanding is that even many of the bands Jesse identified are kind of doing the same thing; releasing new music is a loss-leader to justify going on tour where they will sell lots of tickets and mostly perform the old stuff with one new song in the set (when the tour isn't explicitly a 10/20/x year Album Release Anniversary Tour).
On the subject of rap, I've been told an interesting phenomenon is that rap is producing lots of music but very few actual stars with significant broader impact, mostly because, exactly like what happened to R&B, the producers/beat makers have gotten so good at crafting sounds that the actual guy spitting the bars (singing the notes for R&B) becomes interchangeable and thus easily replaced (and also that rap stars today can do a pretty good song but struggle to put enough material together to string together an actual album). This is especially interesting to me in light of the prevalence of country music stars, inasmuch country music is also pretty highly produced/crafted (by songwriters) and yet still needs stars for its output.
Yep. In many ways the heyday of rock music was an anomaly: entire bands of amateurs making a good living at something they aren't even close to expert at. There are ofc exceptions, many rock bands were in fact studio musicians trying to be a name outside of the 9 to 5, like Todo or the Police.
The studio/touring pros supporting a Name is a much more stable business model for the labels and tour companies.
Lots of country music is incredibly popular among white males. Morgan Wallen, Zach Bryan, Tyler Childers, etc., all constantly sell out stadium size shows at $100/ticket in less than an hour.
Anecdotally speaking, the overwhelming majority of people I know going to Morgan Wallen concerts are female. Tyler Childers is probably closer to the mark, but country has generally never struck me as male-dominated with regards to listenership.
Interesting… I do not at all have a similar anecdotal experience.
Rap? But I don't think its as popular now as it was in the 2010s. I honestly mostly just listen to podcasts.
Rap is not as COMMERCIALLY LUCRATIVE as it was 10 years ago. If your average music listener is barely buying music these days, your average rap listener is almost NEVER spending money on music.
Since there's less money in rap, there's less advertisement and marketing for rap artists. So the cultural footprint of rap may be smaller. But as far as people listening, there are more rap fans than ever. There's been a cultural shift where rap fans expect music for free. I say that without judgment because I don't believe in a labor theory of value for music. Music is worth whatever you are willing to pay for it.
As a young American I will say that rap is more popular than ever. Rock is dead among the masses; rap is pretty much the "default" music to listen to for young men. If you're really nerdy you might listen to electronic or video game music.
Abstract question/peeve. Suppose there are two identities A and B in a society. A member of A, over a dispute, murders a member of B. And this is a civilized society, everyone agrees, or at least gives lip service to the position, that one should not stereotype members of A.
Will it be acceptable for a newspaper headline, or the opening sentence of a newspaper coverage on the event, to start by saying "A member with identity A murdered a member with identity B"? The society's answer seems to be very strongly "It depends", and here are some of the factors on which it seems to depend; it becomes relatively more okay to prominently highlight the membership of the perpetrator in A if:
(i) Those with identity A are more privileged.
(ii) (In some cases but not others) Those with identity A are more likely to murder.
(iii) Those with identity B are more likely to be victimized.
It seems to me that the society fixes *implicit* rules on these matters based on practicality, but it also considers egalitarianism so sacred that, while doing something that can be claimed to violate it, it can't get itself to keep saying this loudly and explicitly as a stated policy "We are finding calling A out acceptable but not B, because the backgrounds of these communities are different; here is a two by two table of identities with a 0-10 score on how prominent identity-highlighting can be".
I dislike the assumption that there's a problem that needs to be fixed by fudging the reporting. A newspaper's job should be, first and foremost, to state clearly what happened, not to censor it according to written or unwritten rules. If members of A murder a lot more members of B than vice versa, maybe that's something we ought to know, rather than something to be swept under the rug. And if the attempt to censor the information becomes too obvious, readers infer the missing pieces, correctly or not. "29-year old man murders 25-year-old woman of race B - ah, okay, they don't mention the killer's race, so he was A. It's always the As, isn't it."
I think I get what you're referring to, and you disliking this state of affairs is understandable.
That being said, I doubt that being explicit about it would make things better. A lot of people are never going to like this sort of inconsistency or double standard, regardless of any explicit explanation given for it. And even though I generally put a high value on consistency and universal standards, I think this is one of the tougher areas to achieve that in.
While the current situation is certainly flawed, it's not obvious to me that a change in either direction would be better.
This is quite possible, but I would have liked to think that there would be a market for those who like to be explicit about status hierarchies in the society, even if that is not a good thing. Further, sometimes people in "A" on the receiving end could like to make this explicit, to expose how those in the general society supporting "B" embrace egalitarianism, and yet clearly treat people hierarchically.
>And this is a civilized society, everyone agrees, or at least gives lip service to the position, that one should not stereotype members of A.
You're stretching the realism here.
It extremely matters what Identity A is, and how intensely A and B are feuding. "Jewish Man (A) Murders Eggplant Specialist (B)" hardly has a place as a headline, there's nothing to suggest these identities were related to the dispute. "Man (A) Bites Dog (B)" gets a mention because of how unexpected it is. "Billionaire (A) Murders Homeless Man (B) Over Pocket Change" gets mentioned because it's A destroying the credibility of the A identity (I definitely remember the one about the Anger Management Specialist beating a Patient to death in a rage).
"NATO Russia (A) attacks Non-NATO Ukraine (B)" may or may not come up, and may or may not be appropriate. You'd probably say it this way if you wanted to pressure a response from NATO on whether they support these actions as a whole.
Correct, and I don't think you are disagreeing with me substantially. My point is about the society being not very explicit about handling it, in cases where clarity can be added.
Your examples distract from my point though -- there *are* controversial cases where people refuse to articulate reasons the way you are doing now (my comment was motivated by a potentially controversial one), and your choosing very specifically noncontroversial examples -- ones that are very easy and convenient for your apparent "Nothing to see here, move on" stance -- unfortunately blurs out that point, even though that may not be your intention at all.
My main thrust is that I think you're using the wrong metric entirely, like asking what pressure you should keep your tires to keep the windshield clear of obstructions. My headlines are attempts to obey the stereotype instruction, but if they actually believed you shouldn't stereotype Identity A, they just... wouldn't. They do it anyway because that's not actually a consensus.
I don't know what event you're talking about, but my main guess is that the news source is Identity B trying to martyr themselves. Their hypocrisy is obvious from the outside, but they've made hypocrisy a tenet of the B Identity. The advice is to not read them. Some people will simply refuse to admit that water is wet, and unless you're prepared to hold their head underwater until they stop disagreeing, all there is to do is leave them to their wrongness and try to avoid any troubles they're sowing.
"but if they actually believed you shouldn't stereotype Identity A, they just... wouldn't. They do it anyway because that's not actually a consensus."
I am not sure of this: the human brain is capable enough of hypocrisy to hold general moral beliefs and go against them without realizing it. When confronted, they tend to not quite accept the contradiction, but sidestep it.
Okay, the event I had in mind may not be controversial to Americans, who are used to this sort of media coverage, but I personally found it somewhat revolting. It is about the murder of a black woman by a white woman. While I don't think mentioning the races is a problem (nor do I know the case deeply enough to opine on the sentencing), I felt bringing the race into the headline and the very first sentence of the article prominently mentioning the races, was a bit off, especially given that nothing in the article mentioned a racial motivation.
Atheist: How would you feel if your Catholic mother-in-law secretly baptized your baby?
I'd feel amused. Since I'm an atheist, the act of baptizing a baby would be meaningless.
Unless she then steals the baby like Edgardo Mortara, I don’t think it’s a big deal.
My father baptized my newborn son without my knowledge (he did that as a layman, you can do that in Protestantism). When he told me years later, I simply liked that he cared a lot for his grandchild.
You can do that in Catholicism too, even an atheist can validly baptise someone if they have the intention to carry out a baptism (and not, say, as a satirical fake ritual).
The main question here is, is the consent of the parents necessary?
https://media.ascensionpress.com/2020/11/07/the-ultimate-guide-to-catholic-baptism/
"Q. Do I need to be Catholic to get my child baptized?
While you don’t need to be Catholic to get your baby baptized, due to the nature of the sacrament as an initiation into the Catholic Church, the parents or legal guardians of the infant must agree to raise the child in the Faith upon being baptized. If the parents refuse to raise their child in the Catholic Faith, in most circumstances the infant may not be baptized.
Now, there are certain scenarios where a baby can be baptized without their parents promising to raise them in the Catholic Faith. An example of this situation would be if the baby is in serious danger of death, and someone in the family wants to have the baby baptized in fear that the child will not reach heaven without it (since baptism is one of the four things needed for salvation), then the baby can be baptized even if the parents don’t agree to raise the child in the Catholic Faith. For this instance, the faith required for the baptism would be coming from the Church and whoever wants the baby to be baptized, and it becomes a direct concern for the salvation of the infant’s soul rather than the responsibility of the parents."
I'm curious to know if the mother-in-law did it secretly, how was it found out? Dud she tell OP afterwards, in a "now it's a fait accompli there's nothing you can do" fashion? Or did it come out because "hey, how come Junior's hair is all wet?" or something?
> You can do that in Catholicism too, even an atheist can validly baptise someone if they have the intention to carry out a baptism (and not, say, as a satirical fake ritual).
I'm confused -- how would this be possible ? That is I, as an atheist, can honestly do my best to say the correct words while performing the correct actions in the correct order; but I can't make myself believe that anything I'm doing has any significance (beyound the effect is has on others, analogous to singing "Happy Birthday"). Wouldn't the ritual thus count as "fake" by definition ?
Lemme introduce you to a little concept called "ex opere operato" 😁
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_opere_operato
We can put this one on the Donatists; basically it means that the validity and efficacy of the sacrament does not depend on the belief/state of grace of the minister, but comes from the grace of God. So a sinful priest can validly consecrate the Eucharist, all else being correct.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Hippo
"Also in reaction to the Donatists, Augustine developed a distinction between the "regularity" and "validity" of the sacraments. Regular sacraments are performed by clergy of the Catholic Church, while sacraments performed by schismatics are considered irregular. Nevertheless, the validity of the sacraments does not depend upon the holiness of the priests who perform them (ex opere operato); therefore, irregular sacraments are still accepted as valid provided they are done in the name of Christ and in the manner prescribed by the Church. On this point, Augustine departs from the earlier teaching of Cyprian, who taught that converts from schismatic movements must be re-baptised. Augustine taught that sacraments administered outside the Catholic Church, though true sacraments, avail nothing. However, he also stated that baptism, while it does not confer any grace when done outside the Church, does confer grace as soon as one is received into the Catholic Church."
So that's why the "de-baptising" with hairdryers stunt popular with atheists a while back doesn't work (you can't be un-baptised) but everyone was clear that it *was* a stunt. As a side-note, I'd imagine Cyprian was more concerned that if it was done by schismatics, you couldn't be 100% sure it was done correctly, so you can do conditional baptism in that case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_baptism
"A conditional baptism is a baptism performed in such a way as to only be effective if the person is not already baptized. In a conditional baptism, the minister of the sacrament says:
"If you are not yet baptized, I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit."
The efficacy of the baptism doesn't depend on your faith: so long as you use proper matter (water) and say the proper words (Trinitarian formula) with the correct intention (to do what this church/person believes baptism does), it's kosher (er, so to speak).
As distinct from skits like fake baptisms, which was how the Roman actor got converted (and martyred, and thus became the patron saint of actors - also for dying on stage, I guess):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesius_of_Rome
"One day Genesius, leader of a theatrical troupe in Rome, was performing before the Roman Emperor Diocletian. Intending to expose Christian religious rites to ridicule by his audience, he pretended to receive the Sacrament of Baptism.
As the play continued, however, Genesius suddenly while performing had a conversion experience on stage. He announced his new faith, and refused to renounce it, even when ordered to do so by emperor Diocletian. Genesius persisted in his faith, and he was finally ordered to be beheaded."
So if you, an atheist, say to the person requesting baptism "I don't believe in any of this crap, but you do, so okay, I'll do what you ask me to do the way you want ti for how you want it", that's good enough.
https://www.catholic.com/qa/can-only-christians-administer-baptism
"Question:
Can only Christians administer baptism?
Answer:
No. Anybody—even an atheist—can administer baptism if he has the proper intention. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 1256) “the intention required is to will to do what the Church does when she baptizes, and to apply the Trinitarian baptismal formula.” The reason anybody can baptize is that it is, in fact, Jesus Christ who performs the baptism. Once again, baptism is God’s grace to us, not our work for him."
https://www.catholic.com/audio/cot/all-about-baptism
"Trent Horn:
Well, what the CDF has taught, has released on this issue is that we have to remember that baptism is not just a man pouring water, hoping God will do something. It is Christ who baptizes. Now the minister of the baptism, Christ can work through anyone to baptize. That’s what’s great about the sacred baptism. The ordinary minister is a priest or a deacon or a priest in the Eastern church. But in an emergency, anybody, even in a non-Catholic could baptize, if they intend to do what the church intends but ultimately in every baptism.
Mark:
Male or female?
Trent Horn:
Yes, anyone. And even an atheist could baptize. If he had a friend who wanted to get baptized and the guy’s dying and he says, “Baptize me.” It’d be like, okay, here’s what you say and I’m trying to do what the church would do. That would be valid and licit in an emergency because this is a universal sacrament so Christ has providentially made it that it’s universal. If you think about it, human beings cannot survive without water so it’s not an unfair request that we be poured or sprinkled with water. If you’ve got people you’re going to have water nearby. You just will, otherwise you wouldn’t have people. And so you can perform the sacrament but it is always Christ who is baptizing us. It is Christ who is doing it."
However, this does *not* mean any old baptism is valid. There was (maybe still is) a craze among the more progressive in Christian denominations to use a new pulled out of their backsides formula about "Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier" as new, gender-neutral terms for the Trinity. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith shot that one down as those are roles or actions, not persons, as per the traditional Trinitarian formula.
Roman Catholic rules are both remarkably easy and remarkably strict, don't ask me why 🤷♀️
> "If you are not yet baptized, I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit."
Could you do this with other conditions? Will God accept "If there is an infinite number of twin primes, I baptise you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" as a valid conditional baptism?
Remake the movie Flatliners but with Mathematics postdocs.
Conditional baptism is when you are not sure if someone is already baptised. The maths problem there has nothing to do with baptism, so if you're baptising someone, that's going to be ignored and the formula of baptism is what counts.
If you are only intending to baptise on the maths problem and not to perform a valid baptism, then it isn't a baptism.
> According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 1256) “the intention required is to will to do what the Church does when she baptizes, and to apply the Trinitarian baptismal formula.”
I would argue that I, as an atheist, cannot "will to do" ALL of what the Church does, since I don't believe that any of the underlying concepts are real. However, Catholics are the OG rules lawyers; if they decree that merely saying the words and going through the motions is sufficient, then who am I to disagree ?
That said, now I'm curious about that "conditional baptism". If I decide to baptize someone, and unbeknownst to me he is already baptized, what happens ? Do the two baptisms cancel out ? I thought that the original baptism (assuming it was valid) created an "indelible mark" on the soul; if so, what's the harm in repeating the ritual ?
You don't have to will it. You just have to be in agreement that "Charlie wants me to baptise him, so I'll do it the way that he wants to be baptised". It wouldn't work if you went "okay so I'll use Coca-Cola to do the baptism" or if you swapped out the words or if you went "I don't care what Charlie wants, I'm just doing this for a gag".
If the person is already baptised, then the second attempt at baptism isn't valid. You can't be baptised twice. That's why the formula is "if you are not yet baptised"; God will know if the person is already baptised or not. Repeating the ritual does nothing because the ontological change has already happened. There's no harm, but also no benefit, if you don't know the person is already (validly) baptised. If you do know, then it's just a silly joke and waste of time.
EDIT: "However, Catholics are the OG rules lawyers"
We bin around. We know stuff happens 😁
> It wouldn't work if you went "okay so I'll use Coca-Cola to do the baptism"
Really? I would expect the intent to be the only thing that mattered. Using Coke instead of water is the exact kind of adaptation to local conditions that happens all the time.
You'd need a pretty exotic set of local conditions to make Coke a sensible substitute for water, but I can imagine, say, an extraterrestrial colony where Coke and water are both imports, and it happens that Coke is more readily available and less destructive to spend on a baptism.
*rubs hands* Okay! Here we get into the rubrics!
For a sacrament to be valid, you need: valid matter, form, and intention.
"Answer:
In order for a sacrament to be valid two things are required: valid matter and intention.
The Church interprets valid intention widely. For valid intention, the person simply needs to intend what the Church intends.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church:
This is the meaning of the Church’s affirmation that the sacraments act ex opere operato (literally: “by the very fact of the action’s being performed”), i.e., by virtue of the saving work of Christ, accomplished once for all. . . . From the moment that a sacrament is celebrated in accordance with the intention of the Church, the power of Christ and his Spirit acts in and through it, independently of the personal holiness of the minister (1128, emphasis added).
As St. Thomas Aquinas notes in his Summa Theologica:
Consequently, others with better reason hold that the minister of a sacrament acts in the person of the whole Church, whose minister he is; while in the words uttered by him, the intention of the Church is expressed; and that this suffices for the validity of the sacrament (III, q. 64, a. 8)."
"Form" here means "the words to accompany the action", e.g. for baptism the Trinitarian formula and not something you just made up on the fly; for the Eucharist the words of consecration, and so on.
'Broadly interprets intention' because not everybody is going to be 100% up on the precise theology and form, but if they mean well and mean to do the thing seriously, then okay God is good.
(That covers our "can an atheist baptise someone, even if the atheist doesn't believe in baptism/God/the whole megillah?")
Okay, so what is valid matter? For baptism, it is "natural water":
https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/dictionary/index.cfm?id=37034
"VALID MATTER
That which is required, along with the prescribed words, for the valid conferral or production of a sacrament. The valid matter is, therefore, some sense-perceptible material or perceivable action that must be joined with the form, i.e., words or signs, to produce a sacrament. Thus the valid matter in baptism is natural water, that "washes" the person being baptized, by pouring, sprinkling, or immersion."
That's why you can go down to the river and be baptised by immersion, etc. In a nutshell, it's "how did they do it at the time of the Gospels?" So John the Baptist baptised people in the river, at the Last Supper it was bread and wine, and so forth.
Coca-Cola is not natural water. Just any liquid will not do, it has to be water because water is what was used for baptism when John baptised Jesus.
We have already had these disputes, by the way, and we don't need alien colonies to think of examples. When the Jesuits went to China and Japan (it's always the Jesuits, isn't it?) there were queries about "okay, wheat and wine are not the foods of the people here, it's rice and sake; can we use those for the Eucharist?"
And the answer came back "No". Not valid matter.
Doesn't matter if Coke is "more readily available and less destructive" (and all the water you would need would be enough to pour, or even just sprinkle if clean water is *that* scarce).
We also have disputes about "I/my child is gluten-intolerant, can a gluten-free Host be used for communion?" and again, no. But you can receive by the consecrated wine, instead. And people argue then over "But my kid is too young to drink!" Woman, it's a sip of wine, it's not gonna make them drunk. Such arguments are often more about "I don't want my kid to stand out when all the other kids are receiving the Host" and less about belief, because often the modern set of Catholics have no idea about the Real Presence, but that's another matter.
The question of "a priest who is an alcoholic, what is the provision there for drinking the sacramental wine?" and that is long-standing one because guess what, priests can be alcoholics too.
Has to be bread and wine, can be low-gluten wheat and mustum, but can't be just crackers and grape juice (I shudder at what American Protestant denominations have done to the Lord's Supper - 'now everybody reach under your seats for your handy-dandy pre-packed grape juice and white bread loaf sets' https://www.mmeyou.com/cracker):
https://aleteia.org/2017/07/11/the-matter-matters-unpacking-the-vatican-guidelines-on-bread-and-wine-for-the-eucharist
"The Congregation’s Letter to Bishops concerns the valid matter for the Eucharist. In addition to describing what constitutes valid bread, the letter reiterates the guidelines for valid sacramental wine: it must be “natural, from the fruit of the grape, pure and incorrupt, not mixed with other substances.” Unleavened wheat bread and natural grape wine are valid matter for the Eucharist. Nicely-risen honey wheat loaves and rice cakes, peach wine and fruit punch are not.
Exceptions are made – with the permission of the local ordinary, the bishop – to use low-gluten wheat hosts for those with sensitivities, and mustum, a form of wine in which the fermentation process is halted just as alcohol begins to form, for those who cannot or should not consume alcohol. For those with these health concerns, parishes should keep low-gluten hosts and mustum in supply, to be consecrated and distributed in separate sacred vessels when needed."
For the broader controversy, see "The Chinese Rites controversy":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Rites_controversy
"The Chinese Rites controversy ... was a dispute among Catholic missionaries over the religiosity of Confucianism and Chinese rituals during the 17th and 18th centuries. The debate discussed whether Chinese ritual practices of ancestor veneration and other formal rites qualified as religious, and thus incompatible with Catholic belief. The Jesuits argued that these Chinese rites were secular rituals that were compatible with Christianity, within certain limits, and should thus be tolerated. The Dominicans and Franciscans, however, disagreed and reported the issue to Rome.
...The controversy embroiled many European universities; the Kangxi Emperor and several popes, including Clement XI and Clement XIV, considered the case; the offices of the Holy See also intervened. Near the end of the 17th century, many Dominicans and Franciscans had shifted their positions in agreeing with the Jesuits' opinion, but Rome disagreed. Clement XI banned the rites in 1704. In 1742, Benedict XIV reaffirmed the ban and forbade debate."
While I'm kicking the Protestants while they're down, I have been given to understand that the reason the American denominations that frown on drinking use grape juice is becuase the Welch (of Welch's Grape Juice) used this as a canny marketing opportunity. This may not be completely true, but it gives me an excuse to laugh at the heretics:
https://www.columbiadental.com/tales-from-the-operatory-part-vii-thomas-charles-welch-the-unfermented-grape-juice/
"Thomas Welch was a Methodist Minister and heavily involved in the Underground Railroad moving slaves up from the south and into Canada. He was a teetotal and prohibitionist working to reduce or end the sale of alcoholic beverages. He, along with the Methodist church thought the consumption of alcohol as a bad thing and was opposed to using wine for communion but substituted unfermented grape juice instead.
Thomas Welch became a dentist settling in Vineland, NJ where he built a successful practice. He had seven children amongst them was Charles, his son who also became a dentist as well as his daughter Emma C Welch Slade, who also became a dentist.
Thomas Welch felt so strongly about unfermented grape juice along with the 19th Century Methodist church had come to largely embrace the cause of temperance. It had also embraced the notion that unfermented wine (grape juice) was the blood of Christ to be used in communion, rather than alcoholic wine. Given the food preservation technology of the time, however, many Methodist congregations had to produce their own grape juice locally, so that they could use it before it started to go bad.
Thomas Welch was fascinated by Louis Pasteur and in 1869, Welch invented a method of pasteurizing grape juice so that fermentation was stopped, and the drink was non-alcoholic. He persuaded local churches to adopt this non-alcoholic wine for communion services, calling it “Dr. Welch’s Unfermented Wine.”
https://www.umc.org/en/content/communion-and-welchs-grape-juice
"Four years later, Dr. Thomas B. Welch became a communion steward at Vineland (New Jersey) Methodist Episcopal Church—now First United Methodist Church of Vineland—and vowed to provide his congregation with an unfermented sacramental wine.
“He was so staunch in advocating not having anything to do with alcohol,” Possenti states, “it was reported that he didn’t want to even place his hands on it.” Possenti sometimes portrays Lucy Welch, Thomas’ wife, for schoolchildren and others in Vineland.
Welch's Grape Juice was originally labeled, “Dr. Welch’s Unfermented Wine, Pure Grape Juice, Vineland, NJ.”
Before moving to Vineland, Welch had served as a Wesleyan Methodist preacher. Throat problems that sometimes made it difficult for him to speak curtailed that ministry. In this newly established community, advertised as having a “healthful climate,” he opened a dental practice.
Always interested in science, Welch wondered if Louis Pasteur’s breakthrough techniques could be applied grape juice. He experimented to find a way to keep juice from fermenting.
In 1869, he perfected a juice pasteurization process in his kitchen and began selling “Dr. Welch’s Unfermented Wine” to churches preferring an alcohol-free substitute for Communion.
Unfortunately, the idea didn’t take off. After four years, Welch gave up this side business.
Two years later, his son Charles convinced him to produce unfermented wine again. Charles offered free samples of the sacramental wine substitute to churches. He later published temperance magazines that advocated alcohol-free Communion. He also advertised the product with lines like, “If your druggist hasn’t the kind that was used in Galilee containing not one particle of alcohol, write us for prices”.
The irony of a staunch Prohibitionist moving to a place named "VINEland" doesn't seem to have struck anyone.
> That's why the formula is "if you are not yet baptised"; God will know if the person is already baptised or not. Repeating the ritual does nothing because the ontological change has already happened.
But this is what I'm confused about: assuming I'm totally honest and not doing it as a joke; and also assuming that I don't know whether the subject is baptized or not; then what's the difference between saying "I baptize you" vs. "If you are not yet baptized, I baptize you" ? Isn't the end result going to be exactly the same ?
Okay, the difference is if the person says "I was told I was baptised as a baby but I wasn't raised religious/I went through a form of baptism in a different denomination", so you're not sure if they are really baptised or not.
If you don't know anything to the contrary and the person requesting baptism doesn't know (e.g. that they were baptised as a kid), saying "I baptise you" is fine.
It's mostly just fine degree of wording when a formal baptism by someone like a priest is being done with all the bells and whistles. If a layperson is doing an emergency baptism, they're not held to the same standard of accuracy.
I get that, but I think I just cannot internalize the Catholic rules-lawyering state of mind. If the outcome is exactly the same in both cases, then I see no point in altering the wording at all. The baptizer can just say "I baptize you" at all times, and the baptizee will end up baptized; on the off chance he was baptized previously, he would still be baptized. I don't see why it matters whether the baptizer is a priest or a layman, as long as they're both sincere and are performing the ritual accurately. But it's possible that there's some additional aspect of the doctrine that I'm missing; or maybe this is one of those cases where the writers if the original rules made a mistake, but now everyone's got to live with it...
Okay, the theology is that baptism makes a change in state. You can't do a second baptism because that's like trying to re-melt melted ice, as it were. So if the person has been validly baptised before, re-enacting the rite does nothing.
The conditional form is only in cases of doubt: there isn't solid evidence the person was baptised before, or the rite might have been deficient. *Because* there is doubt, you are not trying to re-baptise someone where you know for sure it happened the first time.
I am struggling to get across why this matters, but part of it is that re-baptism isn't something trivial. I think some Protestant sects permit re-baptism, or people will undergo baptism, then years later undergo baptism again, or whenever they feel that "maybe I wasn't properly baptised", or they just feel like "well everyone else in the church group is getting baptised, I'd like to join in for the social aspect". That trivialises the sacrament, and Catholics take sacraments seriously.
Just saying "I baptise you", IN THE CASE OF DOUBT, runs that risk. It'd be like saying "why not let someone get married without checking if they were already married and not divorced or bereaved? why not just say 'I marry you' to every person you find attractive and want to be in a relationship with?"
Doesn't work like that even in secular terms, and in sacramental terms it's very serious. The sacraments are not just rituals or 'ordinances' as I understand the Baptists consider them; they have real consequences and make real changes to the state of the person's soul.
As to why a priest versus a layman, again, it's because baptism is the sacrament of initiation. It welcomes the person into the Church and into the Body of Christ. A full ritual of baptism, not just the bare-bones emergency version which can be administered by a layperson, involves a lot more than just pouring over the water and saying the words.
https://www.crookston.org/documents/ministriesoffices/worship-a-liturgy/sacraments/204-rite-of-baptism/file
The rite can be done as part of the Mass or it can be done separately. There is also the question of the ministers of the sacraments, and for all the sacraments except marriage, the 'ordinary ministers' are clergy - deacons or priests. For marriage, it is the spouses who are the ministers of the sacrament (I think the Orthodox Church differs on that one). It's the difference between your friend looking up symptoms on Google and saying "I think it could be X" and going to a doctor to get a diagnosis that it is indeed X, and the surgeon who operates on you for X.
You can say all this is just magic and superstitious thinking, and you're welcome to do so, but the sacraments are not rituals like singing Happy Birthday or throwing confetti at a wedding, they are considered to be a means of divine grace.
pretty sure my mother baptised my sons in the bathtub at some point
she also told them that “we’ll your mother might not believe in God but she dies believe in goodness” which i gotta say was a pretty good balanced reply from a RC Gmother to their cheeky “but Granma, Mum doesn’t believe in God” provocation.
In Germany, the baby might be surprised fifty years later that she has to pay church tax:
https://hpd.de/artikel/konfessionsfreie-muss-kirchensteuer-nachzahlen-17530
(Google Translate:)
https://hpd-de.translate.goog/artikel/konfessionsfreie-muss-kirchensteuer-nachzahlen-17530?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp
> The defense attorney for the Protestant Church countered that the feeling of not belonging to a religion does not change the legal situation. [Google translate version]
Doesn't that argument contradict the core of Protestantism?
Yes, and a dragnet search for unaware church members (secretly baptized by the mother in law?) to shake them up... well, what would Jesus do?
The whole construct of "church tax" goes back to article 13 of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichskonkordat treaty between the Catholic Church and Nazi Germany in 1933.
My family isn't atheist, but members of the LDS Church. In fact, when I was a baby, we were living in Costa Rica because my dad was the regional attorney for the church. I was probably about 1. We had a local maid (Catholic like most there), and the story goes she was so worked up about me not having been baptized (we don't baptize kids until age 8) that she was struggling to do her work well/seriously having stress issues. Or something like that.
Friends of my parents advised leaving me with her for a day. They did so. When they returned, she never said another word about it. So they figure she took me and had me baptized Catholic.
TBH, we just find it amusing and a bit sweet, in that this woman cared so much for someone else's kid. It's not like the baptism actually (to us) has any cosmological weight, anymore than if some random person sprayed water on me. So why get mad?
I think the LDS Church still practices baptism by proxy for the dead, so this attitude doesn’t surprise me.
Yes, we still do proxy baptisms for the dead...but I'm not sure that has any relevance here, except that *both* have a component of *intent on the part of the baptized* (in the living case, that's the actual baptized person, in the proxy case it's the person on whose behalf the ordinance is conducted)--baptism has no meaning without willing and knowing assent on the part of the person receiving the ordinance.
This means that proxy baptisms are at most an *opportunity* to accept the blessings (and covenant!) that comes with baptism. We believe that it has zero efficacy unless willingly accepted--that's why we believe in a post-mortal but pre-judgement state of the soul, where souls can be taught truth and given the chance to accept.
In this baby-baptizing case, the big thing is that since we don't believe that baptisms performed in any other rite have any cosmological meaning in and of themselves[1], we can look at the *intent* of the person doing it--since the maid was (assuming that's what actually happening) doing it out of sincere concern, that's accounted to her for good, despite not being a saving ordinance (as the priest lacks proper authority AND baptizing babies is not a valid ordinance for a number of reasons).
[1] Heck, the actual rite itself (the physical set of actions) has no meaning--it's not a form of magic where going through the right motions and saying the right words has meaning. It's only the operation of the Holy Spirit, as promised to those who do it (a) with the right authority, (b) with the right intent, and (c) who do it following the accepted patterns that has any power. The power is God's, not man's, even if man has been delegated the limited authority to exercise it under some specific conditions.
I wouldn't care about the baptism itself -- it's just a ritual, so it's not as though it actually changed the baby somehow. But I would be worried about how things were going to play out in the future between me and the mother-in-law. Seems like she's absolutely determined to have her way about certain things having to do with the baby's upbringing, and is not able to have a good talk or argument with me. Instead, she's sneaky. And actually if she had approached me and said she knew I was an atheist, but that having the baby baptized would make her feel better, I would have said it was fine to baptize the baby. I'd even have attended the ritual. (Would not be OK with later indoctrination into Catholicism though.)
Catholic here. I don't think she should have done it (if she did do it) but there's a reason she did it.
Switch it around: what if the grandmother had secretly brought the baby to the doctor for the usual childhood vaccines? What if the parents were refusing to vaccinate the baby in the midst of a measles epidemic?
We have established legal cases where courts can over-ride parents' wishes in regards to medical treatment of children.
That's the mindset the grandmother is working from: baptism is a necessity to avoid the penalties of Original Sin. If she's conservative/traditional, there is a real tradition of the souls of unbaptised infants being damned if they die - the old idea was Limbo, now the newer thinking is "well they may be saved because they are incapable of sinning".
"it's just a ritual, so it's not as though it actually changed the baby somehow."
If you're not a believer, sure. If you are, then it is an ontological change:
https://www.catholic.com/qa/baptism-changes-our-very-essence
Anyway, if the parent(s) are atheist, then the child will be brought up in that tradition, and there will be much less influence in upbringing by the grandmother. Unless the parent(s) are going to cut off the granny completely (as per the comments below about parenting), then there won't be much opportunity for her to stealth evangelise against their wishes.
But mostly I think she was doing the spiritual equivalent of vaccination because of genuine concern, and after that, she'll leave it alone if told to back off. Otherwise there seems to be the opportunity for very bitter conflict.
Yes I understand the grandmother's reasons for caring about the baptism. I'm familiar with that stuff. But don't kids have to have a first communion and a confirmation to be fully protected from limbo or hell? I kept ruminating about the situation later last night, and decided I would be OK with the kid doing both of those things, too, so long as they did not have to be exposed to lengthy and intense Catholic teachings to do them. If that set the grandmother's mind at rest, I'd just tell the kid that everybody has their own way of reminding themselves it's important to be good, and for the grandmother it's Catholicm, and I'm in favor of reminders to be good even though I don't use the Catholic system, so let's go buy you a white confirmation dress, honey. Jeez, it's fine.
Well, I got nobody to blame but myself for setting up as the local "I'm A Romanist, Ask Me Anything (You Disgusting Heretics)" so I am obligated to fulfil my duty to answer genuine enquiry 😁
Baptism washes away the stain of Original Sin and the penalty of separation from God, so whether it's a baby or an adult, if you die five minutes afterwards you are going to Heaven (hence why a lot of adult converts in ancient times put off baptism as long as possible, even until their deathbed, to be absolutely sure they'd have a totally clean slate in the afterlife).
A child is not held capable of committing sin until they have attained the age of reason (seven years), as while they might do wrong things before then, they do not fully understand the difference between right and wrong so cannot be held to deliberately offend. So again, if baptised and they die before the age of seven, no problems.
Later life is the rub: we get older, we do bad things. Communion and Confirmation are not about escaping Limbo or Hell, per se; Confirmation is the sacrament of adult initiation where you, now that you are considered to be old enough to understand what you are agreeing to, renew your baptismal vows in your own name and become a full member of the Church. It used to be that you had to be confirmed *before* you could receive Communion, but that was changed by a later pope (but this is more detail than is needed right now). It is along the lines of a bar mitzvah (yeah, we stole all the good ideas from Judaism).
Communion is the Eucharist where we share in the community as the Body of Christ, commemorating His death and resurrection, and receiving His Body (and Blood) as promised in the Last Supper. You have to be in a state of grace to receive, that is, free from mortal and venial sin. To do that, you must go to Confession before receiving Communion, and after being absolved, you must refrain from committing new sins.
So if you die in a state of grace, again, you are saved and probably going to Heaven (though you may need to spend time in Purgatory first, but again more detail).
So what happens if the child is baptised as a baby and then raised without any religious identity, doesn't go to church, etc.? Well, they're in the same state as the rest of us if we commit sin and are not absolved - if we persist in mortal sin, and die in that state, we go to Hell.
There are a lot of "yes, but" qualifications around that last, but that's another topic.
Mainly what the grandmother has done has been to relieve her own anxieties about "what if the baby dies without being baptised, what if they die while a child without being baptised?" She may be hoping that now the child is baptised, her daughter/son-in-law will allow the child to be brought up as a Catholic, or that they will join the Church later on of their own accord as they get older. That's a "tomorrow" problem, the "today" problem is solved for "the baby is baptised, now they are safe if, God forbid, anything happens".
Confirmation and Communion - unfortunately yes, they would have to be exposed to lengthy and intense Catholic teachings to do them (at least, that's the official line). You can't really just show up and get it done, though with the state of modern catechesis, I think there's a majority of 'cradle Catholics' who have no idea what it is they are doing and just have the First Communion and Confirmation ceremonies as 'everyone does this' and it's an excuse for a family day out and celebration, and there will not be engagement with the faith afterwards.
"Just do it to make Granny happy" isn't going to happen, unless the child is going to Catholic school where these ceremonies are rites of passage at particular ages (seven for First Communion, twelve or so for Confirmation). Of course, there would be nothing (except the parents' objections) stopping Granny taking the kid along with her to Mass every Sunday and going up together to receive Communion even if the kid has no idea, hasn't gone to Confession, and isn't practicing the faith in any way outside of that. Nobody will know that "hey, this kid isn't a real Catholic" unless someone specifically objects that they know the family is atheist/non-practicing or the likes.
EDIT: It's the First Communion dresses that are white, nowadays Confirmation is (a) wear school uniform if it's being done through the school (b) dress up in new ordinary clothes.
First Communion outfits can get *very* expensive and show-off, it's a perennial thorn about "why is this ceremony so expensive?" and the answer is "the parents make it expensive, dressing up the little princess and having big celebrations":
https://formalwear4kids.com/collections/communion-dresses-2021
I think Confirmation is probably going the same way, as people (ironically) become less religious they emphasise the celebration part more so they put more money and effort into the "dressing up for the big day out" part:
https://www.newgenerations.ie/confirmation-wear/
I would feel the same as I would if she secretly took my baby to the park.
Dumb question, but how would you feel about her secretly taking a baby to the park?
Same. Would not be bothered by the action itself, but would be super bothered by its having been done secretly.
I was recently reading https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/the-village-nobody-wants (warning: paywalled) on the crazy behavior that happens in moms' groups (eg parents cutting off grandparents and banning them from every seeing their grandkids because they "violated a boundary" by kissing the baby once). The article was arguing that this kind of behavior is really common and risks becoming a new normal. I've heard this from many sources.
But also, the article acts like obviously all its readers will be offended and horrified by this (as in fact I am, and as the moms I know would be).
What is the sorting mechanism here? Are people who join moms groups online a totally different kind of person from people who read Substacks that discuss parenting? Why?
CHH making it to ACX? World collide!
"What is the sorting mechanism here? Are people who join moms groups online a totally different kind of person from people who read Substacks that discuss parenting? Why?"
I think the answer to this is "yes" and "tolerance for long-form reading and writing vs short snippets of discussion."
I would cut off my parents if they kissed my baby. I don't want my kids getting HSV.
For most other boundary crossing behavior I would first warn them though.
Tangent, but I periodically have sores open on the inside of my mouth. My parents don't find this as normal as I do. (It's always been happening to me, so...)
We did have them swabbed for herpes once, and that came back negative. But I'm certain they're caused by something malignant, because while traumatic injuries are very similar in presentation, they heal about ten times faster than the periodic sores do.
Would you warn them before they did it though? Or is just common knowledge where you are from that you are not supposed to kiss babies?
Really? And how does it work, no one is allowed to kiss your children ever? I am from a kissing country, it seems harsh to me! You are waiting for a vaccine?
I can't see the underlying source, but "cutting off grandparents for kissing the baby once" sounds like either:
(a) the parents wanted the grandparents out and this was used as an excuse
(b) the grandparents are doing a lot of bad things, but they are playing victim and claiming it is just because of one minor action.
Bonus: the part of the article I could read was about parents not actually wanting an active support network. Speaking from my own experience, I simply didn't realize what it would mean to be a parent so far from relatives and once I realized it, the transition costs were too high.
I reject the claim that most parents want to be atomized families without strong support networks. The claim that most parents are willing to give that up in exchange for other things is almost vacuously true, but I think almost all the force that the blog post wants is dissipated by the information asymmetry that I experienced.
Why not just a continuation of the breakdown of families? Dystopian fiction has people raised in artificial wombs as wards of the state, several of those books were written before the 50% divorce rate.
We used to have clans, then extended families, then nuclear families, then single parents; why not start purging grandparents, its working out so well?
"50 percent divorce rate..."
Urban legend spotted. The 50% divorce rate thing is not true. Experts cannot really agree on what the divorce rate is, but they do agree it's lower than it was 25 years ago (lower among people who do indeed get married), and that it is way lower than 50%.
There was a spike when they legalized it and Im talking about a 300-500 year history. If there been a decline, and the current estimate is 42%, the legalization spike may have pushed it above 50%
I looked into this at one time and I reject that there is a "current estimate." This subject is a matter of great debate and rancor among experts.
>This subject is a matter of great debate and rancor among experts.
<mildSnark>
Sufficient rancor to cause any divorces amongst the experts? :-)
( There should also be a Schrodinger's divorce court joke, but it is thus far unobserved... )
</mildSnark>
"divorce rate america" says "42% -cdc" and nitpiks bout numbers hardly detracts from the idea that historical society's used to basically disallowed divorce and clan structures where youd give jobs, sell land, marry off children to people fairly related to you; the mere idea of a voluntary single mother who doesn't speak to her parents is so very new.
The voluntary single mother who doesn't speak to her parents is not unknown. However, it's enough of a boogieman and as shibboleth for unreasonable people that I cannot take this response altogether seriously.
as a proud unreasonable person, if your reasonable your suppose to care anyway about at least responding to facts
"Caring about responding to facts" doesn't resonate with me. To me, it entirely depends on the context. We're two anons shooting the shit online. If you were a judge or my spouse, I'd feel entirely differently.
I think I have read somewhere that the best predictor of divorce is how many people in your social group are divorced. Maybe the same applies to cutting off your parents. If you know many people who did it, then it just seems normal, but if you don't, then you will consider it an extreme reaction and think twice. (Ultimately, you may still choose to do it, but the threshold for such decision will be much higher.) Once you achieve a critical mass of certain behavior in a group, or maybe just a single sufficiently visible high-status member, the behavior gets a life of its own.
(Obvious application to rationalists: polyamory. Also, how it used to be: "I will never have kids, because I want to spend my life doing abstract intellectual stuff; that's what all the smartest people do"... and then a few individuals broke the trend, some of them blogged about their experience... and now a decade later it's "oh, kids are so cute, how could we encourage more rationalists to have kids?")
(On reflection: I approve of rationalists having more kids. Still undecided on polyamory; I need more empirical data about the distribution of outcomes. I think that a epidemic of cutting off parents would be a disaster, especially given that we do not have a working alternative - your online friends will not come to visit you and babysit your kids when you will desperately need some help; and there are some things that money can't buy, such as the ability to trust others. Your parents may suck at X, but at the same time be very reliable at Y, and sometimes Y is what you need.)
Internet relations are a double-edged sword. On one hand, it is incredibly great that you can connect with people similar to you regardless of the distance. (The rationalist community means a lot to me, and without internet, not only I wouldn't have any, but wouldn't even have the concept in my mind. Only a nagging feeling that I am somehow deeply incompatible with the people around me, in a way I can't really put my finger on... which seems somehow related to intelligence, open mind, niceness, and agency... but is really none of these things alone.) On the other hand, the online relations miss the parts where you can spend the time together in the real world, like hanging out, helping each other with physical tasks, or just enjoying each other's presence while focusing on something else. But they will raise your standards, and now most offline relations feel unsatisfactory in comparison; it feels like you don't need them, but actually you do.
For many people it seems difficult to find the right level of forgiving. Some people let others abuse them endlessly, and I wish they didn't. Some people go nuclear at the smallest infraction. Seems like the latter strategy works kinda okay if you are very attractive, so you get a lot of substitutes whenever you fire someone from your social group. Or if you are online, because there the relations are mostly shallow and you can easily find new ones by joining a new forum. But that basically prevents you from forming long-term relations, because sooner or later everyone will screw up, especially if your bar for screwing up is very low.
Parents can be frustrating. This is probably a human universal (hey, it makes us leave the comfort of their home, and start our own families, which is how our species reproduces), but of course there is a difference in degree and kind. In my experience, things usually get better when you leave home -- good fences make good neighbors. Some things expand your perspective, such as listening to your parents describe their own childhood, or having your own kids and observing how your own parenting is... far from perfect, to put it mildly. This is not an argument for tolerating abuse, and some people's parents are so horrible that cutting off contact is the right thing to do. But, you know, things exist on a scale; statistically, your parents are unlikely to be at the extremely bad end. (Also, you are probably not at the extremely good end; you should try harder, but also accept that a certain degree of failure is inevitable.)
I had many complaints about my mother (my father died when I was a small kid, so not much data there), but: (1) The more I knew about her parents (confirmed by my own experience with them), the more I realized that compared to them, she is an angel. So even if I turn out to be a better parent than she was (and I like to imagine that I already am), in some sense I am just doing the same thing: trying to be better than the environment I grew up in. Seems like a good tradition; and I hope my kids will once try to be better than I am. (2) Whatever objections I may have against her, with my kids she starts with a clean slate. If she fucks up, that's on her. If they develop a good relationship, I will be happy about that. I will not project my resentment on my kids. If, hypothetically speaking, one day they decide on their own to cut her off, they will be free to do so. But so far it works okay between them (and I am thankful for the babysitting).
I have to imagine, for the sake of my own sanity, that the 'kissing the baby' instance is the straw that broke the camel's back after a long period of interference with the newly weds. Or if the grandparents were sick or something, and the baby was vulnerable to infection. Otherwise "we told Granny not to kiss the baby but she went ahead and did it, that's it, we're cutting ties completely with the bitch!" sounds extreme.
The problem is getting into an echo chamber. If you're in a parenting forum and everyone is recounting tales of "and so this time I put my foot down", you're likely to want to have a story of your own to share about the same thing. And of course, it escalates over time: it's no longer daring and brave when everyone is cutting ties because Granny tried to sell the kid to a rich couple looking to adopt, now it has to be "can you believe my witch of a mother-in-law tried to touch *my* child without *my* permission just because she's the grandmother?" type tales.
I think the key insight is that people read parenting substacks to learn stuff, whereas online mom groups are more of a substitute for real-life support networks. So it follows, I think, that moms without real-life support networks will be over-represented in these groups, and probably even more so among their most active users.
As a dad who reads parenting substacks, married to a mom who's active in online mom groups, my wife certainly fits this profile. She's estranged from her parents, and doesn't have a lot of in-person friends.
And for what it's worth... an online-mom-group-friend of hers did once suggest that we should cut off contact with my mom, because my mom asked about our plans for weaning one time. I think the key mechanism here is that my wife was unreasonably offended by my mom's question, and greatly exaggerated my mom's obviously-malicious intent in her retelling of it. Then, in a social context where empathy is expected rather than level-headed advice, other moms (who are probably socially isolated themselves) will recommend "fuck that bitch - cut her off".
It's just a very different ballgame compared to information-oriented parenting substacks.
The same pathology has been noted elsewhere in a similar context: https://www.piratewires.com/p/women-online-spaces-relationship-advice
(article: "Why Do Women Online Blow Relationship Issues Out Of Proportion?")
> When I was pregnant, I joined a forum for women who were all having babies in the same month. A user, I’ll call her J, complained that while she was feeding her baby breakfast one morning, her husband came up to her and said, “I have the whole day free. What can I do to be most helpful?” Overwhelmed by caring for her baby and sleep deprivation, she snapped: “I’m too burned out to know what needs to be done. You should know what needs to be done!” Her husband walked away dejectedly. J never updated us about whether her husband found a way to make himself useful, or spent the rest of the day eating Doritos and playing video games.
> At the time, I was surprised that no one defended J’s husband. That punishing a man for offering to help around the house is a great way to ensure he never offers to help again didn’t seem to occur to anyone. Instead, everyone maligned the husband for imposing “mental load” or “emotional labor” on J. And a few complained that their husbands asked how they could help in the same way.
Communities (online and offline, but I think it's worse online) are wonderful places to get support and help, but also can pretty easily spiral off into crazy directions, shedding those with resistance to the direction of their crazy via evaporative cooling.
For whatever reason, the west became very anti-chill. The contrast between today and the 80s/90s is truly stunning. It's easy to blame wokeness for this, and wokeness is *at least* the rationalization here, but I do wonder if there's something deeper going on here, similar to Haidt's Rider and Elephant concept. I find it hard to escape the idea that anybody who does this to their parent must have serious pre-existing issues with their parents. To cut off someone from their grandchildren strikes me as incredibly cruel, obviously cruel if someone has even an ounce of empathy. At least, that's the case without an incredibly good reason for doing so, and no, the occasional unwanted hug or kiss isn't really THAT serious. It's not that long ago we had TV shows that light-heartedly joked about overly touchy-feely grandparents since that's the sort of things grandparents tend to do with young grandchildren.
It's the sexual abuse thing, which some view as the ultimate superpower. If anyone does or says anything that can be made do sound like abuse of innocents, everyone nearby who's feeling disempowered gets to make a righteous kill. Seems like the core of Wokeism to me: a sort of alchemy that allows people to be crazily judgmental and cruel, then neutralize their savagery by waving the It's Abuse wand.
It may also be a reaction to perceptions/actual experience of "mother/mother-in-law interfered with how I/we were raising our kid and constantly undercut me and constantly said I was doing things wrong" along with the feeling that "nobody gets to tell me how to run my home/raise my family".
There does seem to be a set of people who are hyper-rigid about "I *said* 'no kissing the children without their consent' but granny/aunt/cousin ignored that and forced little Johnny or Susie to let them kiss them and little Johnny or Susie hates that and is upset every time it happens" so they go for the nuclear option. Boundary violations are tied up with the idea of bodily autonomy even for children and, I suspect, the power struggle over who is the ultimate authority in the daughter-in-law versus mother-in-law tussle.
Covid also seems to have driven some people nuts and they are frantic about "no masks? never darken my door with your threat to the health of my precious kids! no kissing! no physical contact!"
Again, granny shouldn't ignore what mother wants and if the kids really do hate being hugged or whatever, don't do it, but also don't cut off people for not being up with the times.
All little kids get unwanted hugs from people who think they're snuggly toys. I remember getting them from friends of my parents. They were kind of a drag, but only lasted about 5 seconds. Jeez, it was no big deal.
I think that's how I got the cold sore virus for life - from an elderly relative doing that kissing a kid thing 😁 I mean, if you've got a cold or something, don't insist on hugs and kisses, but it's not worth declaring secession from family members over it.
...and that's why I'm glad I'm still single.
(I agree with you 100%.)
Sorry, I couldn’t read past the paywall, but could this just be an extreme manifestation of in-group/out-group signaling? Mom’s groups build strong identities around parenting, excluding non-moms by default. Tail-end behaviors, like cutting off grandparents, might reflect group loyalty-signaling taken to an extreme. Substack is more like a newspaper than a community.
Or could it even just be making a big deal out of the tail end of a bell curve? If the writer came across that one anecdote, their story would be bigger if they presented it as part of a huge threat, rather than as an isolated incident. (And if they could find a few examples, there’s probably more, right?)
My point isn’t really that in/out-signaling is the likely mechanism, it’s just to pose an alternative to a “sorting” based mechanism. The wider point is it might be group-dynamics drive the behavior rather than the psychology of the people who joined the group.
--> to your point, I would need to read the full article before judging whether the author is not being careful, but my strong prior is that Scott would not post the question if this were true.
Imo people have a revealed preference for 'atomization'. Atomization is expensive but as society gets richer people buy more and more. I would not be surprised if a decent number of people use this sort of thing as a pretext to cut off their parents from seeing their grandchildren.
During the Spanish civil war a lot of non-Spanish foreigners volunteered to fight, most famously George Orwell. Why isn't there a similar thing now with the war in Ukraine? Or maybe there is and I'm not hearing about it?
In Czechia, 60 volunteers were officially given pre-emptive presidential pardon from a crime of serving in the foreign army (of Ukraine, of course) and 4 are officially registered as having fallen. Real number of both fighting volunteers and KIA is widely thought to be higher, probably by an order of magnitude. In addition, there are many more Czech volunteers in Ukraine in non-combat military adjacent roles.
In further addition, Czech media found and remotely interviewed at least one guy who fought for the Russian army. I vaguely remember he was maybe prosecuted but I am not sure.
In addition to answers bellow, the marginal impact of your individual adventurer joining a partizan small scale conflict (which the spanish civil war was, before The Events) is magnitudes higher than those same dudes joining what is a mechanized major power war from day one.
Finnish volunteers for Ukraine (and their occasional deaths) have been a constant topic of discussion locally.
There are thousands of foreigner volunteers in Ukraine's army right now.
The war isn't ideological enough, I wager, nor is religion part of the casus belli.
Just Googled this. "According to a March 2022 statement by the Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Dymetro Kuleba, over 20,000 volunteers have joined the Ukrainian armed forces, of which an estimated several thousand are American citizens."
And according to this article, 50 US citizens have died so far in the war.
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/americans-killed-ukraine-russian-invasion/
And of course, there's Russell Bentley, a former American soldier (and crackpot) who volunteered for the Russian side and was tortured and killed by Russia this year for his trouble. I'm not sure what he did to piss them off.
Many thanks for the numbers. For comparison, wikipedia article on Spanish civil war says "tens of thousands of citizens from non-interventionist countries directly participated in the conflict."
There are foreign volunteers in Ukraine, both soldiers in their own legion and lots of non-combat roles. If we still would claim this is a different phenomenon, it might be political.
The Spanish civil war was a lot messier, with several internal factions, mainly monarchists, fascists, and anarchist IIRC, and though these factions had foreign backers, there wasn’t direct engagement by a foreign army. As a result, foreigners could volunteer to fight without the concern that the enemy would see this as a direct intervention by a foreign state.
To the extent that there’s less volunteers than there might otherwise be, it could be out of concern that failure to limit volunteers could be used by Russia to claim other countries are getting too involved.
It could also be for security reasons: it’s easier than ever to covertly dispatch information, so Ukraine probably doesn’t want to spend too many resources checking the backgrounds on combat volunteers to make sure they’re not spies or saboteurs.
Another aspect is that the Ukrainians only want people who already have military training. Untrained people who think they can just show up are more trouble than they're worth.
That doesn't seem to be the case. According to the International Legion for Defense of Ukraine, they give priority to military experience, but law enforcement, firefighting are backgrounds they seem to be interested in as well.
The candidate requirements are...
18-60 years of age: These are the legal age limits set by Ukrainian legislation
No criminal record: The applicants must have no history of prosecution or conviction
No chronic diseases: All candidates need to pass an assessment by a medical commission
Physical fitness: All candidates need to be physically capable to perform basic infantry tasks
Ability to legally enter Ukraine: The Legion or the Armed Forces of Ukraine do not provide assistance with visas and travel arrangements
Military or relevant experience is an advantage: Military experience is not required but would increase the chances of being accepted. Other relevant experiences might include law enforcement, paramilitary organizations, firefighting, etc.
Combat experience is an advantage: Combat experience is not required but would increase the chances of being accepted. Combat experience might include paramilitary or militias.
https://ildu.com.ua/
Thank you.
Have any of y'all gotten good results with LLM creative writing?
(I once asked this in a previous open thread, but it might be worth asking again as the state of the art must have advanced in the months since then. In the meantime I've decided to try weaning myself off LLMs - I use claude and chatgpt far too often than is optimal for my sanity - but I'll still settle for secondhand exposure for the time being.)
Peripheral question: What is a good way to follow developments in AI?
I like a YouTube channel called "AI Explained", but would like additional suggestions.
I read a Substack called "The Algorithmic Bridge." Zvi gets too into the weeds for me.
Many Thanks!
Oh yeah, also another Substack blog, called ?AI, by Louis-Francois Bouchard.
Many Thanks!
Zvi's substack (dontworryaboutthevase) is good to just keep up with AI.
Many Thanks!
Indirectly, yes. I ask it to draw illustrations for stories I write, the illustrations have some weird pathologies, they inspire interesting ideas to add to the stories.
Directly, not so much. I think early GPT was actually better at it, current llms seem too formulaic (it's possible that it's just that early versions were still new enough for me not to notice the formula, but I can look back on a few pieces I have saved and they seem better even now).
I like the "weird pathologies" in Dall-e2. I heartily dislike Dall-e3. It is extremely hard to get it to make anybody who is not young, beautiful, clean as a new penny and happy-looking. Everything looks like an ad illustration. Actually I'm about to put up a blog post about Dall-2 vs. 3, and the much greater richness of the former's images. What kind of weird pathologies have you run across that you like?
My favourite one is that it's incredibly hard to make it draw a turtle city (it keeps drawing tortoises). It's also bizarrely hard to make it do people upside-down (in any way) and specifically to make people hanging from their knees off a branch (it keeps making them hold it by the hand).
My icon (a turtle with an underwater dome city on its back) I got from dall-e 2 by asking it for just a turtle with a city on its back (it did the dome idea on its own). By contrast I can't get dall-e 3 to do anything like it even when I specifically ask.
breaking. up reply because of the bug
I enlarged your icon, and I like the image too. Note that my icon is also a turtle!
My favorite weird pathologies in Dall-e2 were mostly images I generated
that came from one prompt, that over months I put in multiple times for my own amusement: “an animal with a head at each end of it's body. It is biting somebody's toe with one of its heads and the same person's heel with the other head."
I asked for this image because I was illustrating a poem about an amphisbena (snake with a head at each end of its body). For some reason this prompt makes Dall-e2’s head explode. It generates images that are nothing ike what I asked for,
but are extremely rich and weird. Some are quite grisly, things Dall-e2 would have refused to make an image of if you asked it to. It’s like Dall-e2 has an unconscious, and that prompt opened the door into it. Here are 10 images. The first few I just plain like.
Later ones I like because they are so unexpected and grotesque, really genuinely disturbing.. Here’s a link to 10 images. Be warned that some of the later ones are fairly gory. https://imgur.com/a/6vaTrHZ
Those are fabulous! These are the first images I've seen produced by AI that seem truly original and interesting. Dall-e should be renamed Hieronymous Bosch-e
(Note to substack: I tried to make the above two messages into one message and the reply button wasn't working until I split it in two. be less buggy please).
Yes. There's some long context to it but it's pretty interesting.
I was involved in the AI Dungeon scene back in the day, with GPT-2 and later GPT-3. It was marketed as this sort of "AI dungeon master" software but it was pretty poorly made and it was very easy to steer it outside of the sloppy fine-tune and into what was essentially a non-RLHFed GPT-2 or GPT-3, capable of topics that it wasn't supposed to talk about (in the case of the AI dungeon fandom, usually erotica).
AI Dungeon fell apart after OpenAI forced them to implement draconian word filters and privacy-invading surveillance (a lot of people were using it privately for stories involving underage characters). The surviving AI Dungeon community split into two groups: one focusing on locally run models (the sillytavern/ooba/koboldcpp world with llama/mistral/mixtral/etc. small models), the other focused on building a replacement with open-source hosted models, this time with privacy and lack of censorship as built in assumptions from the start. This became NovelAI, which today is more well-known for its home-built anime image-gen (even today, I believe most anime image-gen models are based off of the leaked/hacked NovelAI models), but what originally was purely a story gen, using EleutherAI GPT-NEO models fine-tuned on literature (presumably with no regard to copyright).
Right now even NovelAI's best model, Erato, lags behind e.g. Claude or Gemini or GPT in pure processing power and language understanding, but it is still the only raw/autocomplete model out there trained on literature, and it's the only one that isn't actively censored. Unlike the "instruct" models like ChatGPT which basically is trained to follow instructions and do a thing it's asked to do, Erato is purely a "generate the next sentence" model -- you give it the opening few paragraphs of your story or some explanatory context, and just hit "generate" and it will generate as much of the story as you want to. You can then edit the output, retry, whatever if you are unsatisfied with the results.
NovelAI is also cool because it's really customizable. Basically every model parameter from top-K to temperature to output length are configurable. One really interesting thing is how it handles long contexts. Long (8000+token) stories are obviously a challenge for most LLMs, which have a limited memory. NovelAI basically has 3 options: "lorebooks", "memory" and "authors note". Memory is a text block that is automatically appended to the top of the context no matter where you are in the story (I use it to store things like setting info or any important details I think the AI is forgetting). Author's note is a text box that is automaticlaly appended to the bottom of the context (like 3 sentences or so before the current end of the story -- this is used to prime the AI to take it in a certain direction, or instruct it on some subtext that is important for the AI to know in this exact moment without actually writing it in the story itself). Lorebook is the most interesting of the three, and is essentially a key-value store which appends a given memory block to the AI's context if a certain key appears recently in the story (for example, if a character name appears in the context, it can add a paragraph reminding the AI of who it is. Or a city name, or a magic power, or anything like that).
There are some people who use like, Claude or GPT or Gemini to write stories but never out of the box. They use custom front-ends which basically do the legwork behind the scenes of converting it from an instruct front end ("do this") to a story-based or chat-based front-end. Many of them require "jailbreaks" which remove some of the censorship from these models. Others use proxies to community-hosted local llama models. This is a lot more difficult but technical-inclined people might find use in it.
That's a rough look at the current state of things. Most people aren't generating entire stories, they are using it as a collaborative tool, refreshing, editing, retrying, rephrasing, etc. along the way. The big models are not particularly good at it because they're too fine-tuned on instruct for real creativity/freedom, you need to dive deeper into the hobbyist side for that.
Does NovelAI support the XTC sampler? I've found that's essential to kick the LLM out of its rut.
nope, just checked. It's got Temperature, Unified, Nucleus, Top-k, Tail-free, Top-A, Typical, Microstat, and Min-P. Never tried xtc but I think it's less necessary for a non-RLHF-trained model, which will often incessantly repeat chatgptisms. Most of the time though the preconfigured presets are fine. If anything they're *too* creative sometimes, I sometimes modify temperature directly when it's going too far off the rails. One cool feature I use a lot is that you can have it send back the individual probabilities for each word/token, so if you're mostly just hung up on a single word it keeps going to you can check what the most common choices are for it. Like a thesaurus combined with autocomplete, helps kick *me* out of a rut.
For XTC you probably want to look at the local/independently hosted models and interfaces like Sillytavern, though I think that one is more chat-focused.
Yeah, I'm local models all the way. KoboldCPP just updated! I have no interest in using someone else's AI on someone else's computer. The whole point of AIs is that I don't have to put up with other people's b******t.
Janus has gotten some pretty good stuff out of LLMs, though they do use custom-made software called Loom to curate responses (it essentially allows you to "branch-out" responses into multiple possibilities). The LaMDA greentext they did was really good: https://generative.ink/artifacts/lamda2/
It’s like a scene in a Raymond Chandler novel on a loop.
NO. It writes like a turd.
Yes, and it's pretty lame. But useful if you ask it to describe something ordinary in a "literary" way.
> ask it to describe something ordinary in a "literary" way.
Any examples? (Cherrypicked ones are ok.)
Well, it can be useful, but you have to cut out all the turgidly overwritten prose that ChatGPT stuffs into a sentence. If I tell it to rewrite it Hemingway style it produces something much less hokey.
Me: How would I describe an expression of surprise in a literary way, with emphasis on expression of the eyes?
Chat:
Describing an expression of surprise with an emphasis on the eyes can be both vivid and evocative. Here are some literary examples you might consider:
Wide Eyes and Stillness
"Her eyes widened, their usual calm overtaken by an electric jolt of astonishment. They seemed to drink in the sight, pupils dilating as if trying to make sense of what defied belief."
Betrayal of Emotion
"His eyes betrayed him, opening wider than they ever had, frozen in an unguarded moment of shock, the lids trembling with the effort to blink away disbelief."
Reflecting a Shocked Mind
"The surprise struck her eyes first, bright and unguarded, as if a lightning storm had been caught in their depths. They searched wildly, questioning the impossible reality before her."
Surprise Breaking Composure
"The mask of calm cracked as his eyes snapped open, the irises flickering like candle flames in a sudden draft, dancing with the raw fire of startled wonder."
Rapid Reaction
"Her gaze darted upward, the whites of her eyes flashing like the edges of a startled doe, her brows arching high enough to shadow her astonishment."
Childlike Wonder
"The shock softened into a childlike openness; her eyes grew impossibly wide, sparkling with a mixture of awe and incredulity, as if they had been kissed by the stars."
Each of these conveys the emotion through a blend of physical description and metaphor, creating depth and a vivid image of surprise. Would you like help tailoring any of these for a specific context?
Me: How would Hemingway have written it?
ChatGPT:
If Ernest Hemingway were to write about surprise, he would likely keep it direct, simple, and emotionally potent, focusing on physical actions and understated details. Here's an example of how he might describe it:
"Her eyes went wide. She looked at him, then back at the thing on the table. She didn’t speak. The room felt smaller now, and the sound of her breath was sharp and quick."
Hemingway's style avoids overexplaining and uses short, concrete sentences to convey emotion through action and atmosphere. The simplicity invites the reader to feel the weight of the moment without excessive ornamentation.
Fascinating, thank you very much for the post!
“Her eyes suddenly stood out, like hardboiled eggs on hatpins.”
LOL!!
This is interesting. I googled the interesting turn of phrase "the room felt smaller now" to see whether it actually comes from Hemingway somewhere. It doesn't, but it appears over and over again in all sorts of weird fanfic.
I wonder if Denton County, Texas will be a bellwether in 2028 and 2032. The now +1 million person county in the Dallas-Fort Worth area voted Republican in every election since 1964. Like suburban Texas as a whole, it has grown quickly, more than doubling between 2000 and 2020. This kind of thriving area* is not fertile ground for the Trump/Vance message of working-class pride and paying more for an American-made toaster, with the result that the Republican percentage of the vote declined from 70% in 2004 to 56% in 2024.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denton_County,_Texas#Politics
*The exception to this general rule is Florida. For whatever reason, you have thriving, fast-growing surban/urban areas that are getting more Republican in the Trump era, see: https://x.com/PatrickRuffini/status/1860310329248325759/photo/1
Isn't Florida getting redder in large part because that's where people go to retire?
Haven't people been going to Florida to retire for many decades?
Yes, but because old people die off you need more of them coming in to keep the situation the same. If they were having a bunch of kids then those kids would change the demographics (including making the state more liberal) but replacement old people doesn't.
You can’t have bellwether locations within areas (eg Texas) that aren’t relevant to the concept to begin with. At least not for things like President, Senate and Governor.
I'm considering using brokerage accounts rather than savings and checking accounts to earn more interest. Are there any downsides I might be missing?
Will you pay everyday expenses, bills, etc out of this account, or is it more of an emergency fund?
For routine spending, I'd recommend Fidelity's cash management account with the SPAXX sweep option. It's not going to give you a market-leading interest rate, but it's similar to a traditional bank account in the sense that it offers immediate fund availability, checkwriting, and ATM withdrawals. The downside is that some people have experienced unexpected account freezes. I've never had any issues.
For an emergency fund or a large-purchase fund, my recommendation is to hold VUSXX in a J.P. Morgan self-directed brokerage account, linked to a Chase checking account. VUSXX will give you a market-leading interest rate. The linked checking account will give you the option of withdrawing the money as cash or getting a cashier's check, which may be helpful when making a large purchase. The downside is that fund availability takes at least one business day, and potentially two business days if you place your sell order after 4pm. The worst-case-scenario is that you place your sell order after 4pm on a Friday, in which case the order executes the following Monday, and funds are available on Tuesday morning.
I buy bank CDs in a brokerage account, works great.
Brokerage account? Like putting your savings in a money market or bond index instead of savings at the bank?
I played around with VBLTX (1), the Vanguard Bond Index Fund for my emergency fund. It worked, I just didn't really find it worth the added complexity. Let's say you keep $10k in checking and set aside $10k in savings. You could move that $10k from savings into VBLTX. You can withdraw from it without too much complexity. it took about 2 days, but you're also only getting like 3%. I didn't find the added complexity worth the additional $300/year. Honestly, it mostly felt like tinkering.
https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/mutual-funds/profile/vbtlx
I do this. If you have significant worth (over FDIC) my understanding is that a brokerage is actually safer. Even if the bank were to fail, you are still the owner of the equities. I use Fidelity which also has a cash management account that I can transfer money into when I need to withdraw from an ATM.
I do still maintain a small checking account, but only because we have a few people we pay through Zelle.
What exactly are your liquidity constraints/demands?
Assume brokerage account is not fdic insured, beyond that you're not missing anything.
But if you're not using cash in any significant quantities you'd be better off buying a certificate of deposit
Brokerage accounts are SIPC insured, which is not the same thing as FDIC but works similarly.
SIPC protects you if the broker itself goes down. But if the assets underlying the investment collapse FDIC protects you and SIPC does not.
Wait, what assets would those be, in the FDIC case?
Whatever loans the bank you deposit yor money in is making, which might make them go under if they go bad. It has to do with the notion that a deposit in the bank is, in some sense, a loan to them, while a broker is (usually) just a custodian.
For the types of instruments that are being discussed here, I think the distinction is mostly academic, but I'm sure there are situations where it matters.
Yeah, I just think it doesn't make sense to frame this as "if the assets underlying the investment collapse FDIC protects you and SIPC does not". If you own the assets, then in the FDIC case they'd be cash and so the only way they'd "collapse" is hyperinflation, which FDIC insurance doesn't purport to protect you from. If the institution owns the assets, then both FDIC and SIPC insurance protect you.
Good to know!
Here is a Twitter thread claiming to have detected genome DNA integration from mRNA vaccines.
https://x.com/P_J_Buckhaults/status/1861083163868672204
I know some basic biology, but I don’t know enough about practical lab techniques to evaluate the claims. Is this legit? Would this technique be expected to remove residual contamination and only detect truly integrated DNA? I remember being repeatedly assured that mRNA vaccines changing your DNA was a thing that just didn’t happen. Is this result surprising, or was the truth all along that, “it happens, but at a low enough level that we think it’s safe and also are just going to tell you it doesn’t happen.”?
It is absolutely basic knowledge that mRNA can permanently alter DNA, it's called reverse transcriptase you have simply been lied to.
It has unsurprisingly been proven in human cells via Pfizer vaccine
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35723296/
Does that means it is irrelevant? Maybe but don't count on the medical system to be non-childish and to actually investigate basic health questions because of universal mediocrity and taboo.
Mrna incorporation into dna is independent of incorporation of bacterial DNA which indeed is also found in large quantities
https://osf.io/preprints/osf/mjc97
To assess wether there is ample reverse transcriptase going on, a method would be to measure serum level of the spike protein years after vaccination.
I don't remember the litterature on this, IIRC it's a mixed bag.
Also sadly this might not suffice to disprove reverse transcriptase, assuming the protein might get stuck or proteilysed in the endoplasmic reticulum (as seen in many off topic diseases)
or those cells might be subject to apoptosis, which can somewhat be assessed by transaminases and LDH post vaccination.
The biggest issue by far about the vaccines are that methyl pseudouridine is one of the least studied thing in pubmed, an absolute paroxysm of medical mediocrity.
also btw why would humans even have reverse transcriptase if it is just an invasion vector for viruses. It is an extremely underresearched topic and I can't find it back but there was recently a study showing reverse transcriptase control rbc production in the bone marrow via reverse transcription of latent retrotransposons in our "dead" DNA.
Wikipedia says it's used by cells to extend telomeres.
> It has unsurprisingly been proven in human cells via Pfizer vaccine
Here's a response to the research article showing reverse transcription of the Pfizer vaccine in human cells arguing why that's unlikely to indicate risk of the same in real humans: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9164063/. TL;DR in my comment here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-357/comment/78863080
> methyl pseudouridine is one of the least studied thing in pubmed, an absolute paroxysm of medical mediocrity.
A search for the term "methylpseudouridine" (edit: not "pseudouridine") on PubMed Central gives 943 articles (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/?term=methylpseudouridine), so this is obviously false. Your hyperbole is unhelpful.
> also btw why would humans even have reverse transcriptase if it is just an invasion vector for viruses. It is an extremely underresearched topic
Humans have reverse transcriptase enzymes from endogenous retroviruses, where partial genomes of ancient retroviruses have integrated into the germline of human hosts and become fixated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_retrovirus). While there are still unanswered questions about human endogenous retroviruses, they are a popular research topic, and to say that this is extremely underresearched is incorrect.
> A search for the term "pseudouridine" on PubMedCentral gives 943 articles (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/?term=methylpseudouridine), so this is obviously false. Your hyperbole is unhelpful.
You do not understand.. Pseudouridine and n1-methylpseudouridine are mutant nucleotides with completely different profiles. Had pseudoruidine been used in the mRNA, the vaccines would have been both immunotoxic and non effective, hence they would have failed the trials.
So again as said, n1-methylpseudouridine is the least studied molecule ever mass administrated to humans and this is even more important as we talk about changing a damn nucleotide which is extremely complex
As you can see there are only 37 studies on the molecule in all the history of medical science, even in contexts off topic with covid.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=n1-methylpseudouridine&sort=date
But it is considerably worse than that, it is the most absolute joke in the world. The ultimate clown show of the rationalist diaspora to believe that we are led by non insane people.
Mrna vaccine was first approved in 2020 by that time there was only 4 studies ever that *mentionned* n1-methylpseudouridine!!!!!
Of them, 2 seems specifically dedicated to it, first discovery being made in 2018, 2 years prior to mass injections.
Of course it was much later, because of censorship, discovered that n1-methylpseudouridine makes Ribosomes anomalously densely packed and that it deactivate mechanisms of protein folding quality control (might be useful for nonsense mutations btw)
A significant percentage of the spike proteins generated are empirically mutant because of frameshift errors
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06800-3
This means that any mRNA vaccine using this mutant nucleotide 1) can affect whole protein synthesis accuracy (besides the spike) and 2) the generated desired protein will be found in multiple mutants permutations, each of them having zero studies on their effects. We got very lucky with the vaccines as they appear safeish, next time it could very well lead to a prion disease or to activation of unintended receptors.
4 studies pre mass injection on a global alteration of ribosomes, and to this day because of censorship a mere 37 studies.
This is pure insanity, how can the rationalist community fantasm so much about abstract existential threats when they don't understand we already are abundantly playing russian roulette.
I mispoke in my previous comment. My PubMed Central search returning 943 articles used the term "methylpseudouridine", as indicated in the URL.
PubMed Central searches a wider database of research articles, and "n1-methylpseudouridine" returns 568 articles (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/?term=n1-methylpseudouridine), with 55 published in 2020 or earlier.
RNA vaccines have been in development for nearly a decade, and N1-methylpseudouridine has been studied in RNA vaccines against other viruses such as Zika in nonhuman primates as early as 2017 (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5344708/).
> Of course it was much later, because of censorship, discovered that n1-methylpseudouridine makes Ribosomes anomalously densely packed
This has been known since 2017 (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5449617/) and is the mechanism behind higher protein production with this modification. No censorship here.
> A significant percentage of the spike proteins generated are empirically mutant because of frameshift errors
It's good that we know about this to help with design of future vaccines, but these frameshift errors don't seem to cause adverse effects or decrease efficacy, as mentioned in the Nature article you linked. The RNA vaccines were not a desperate shot in the dark that we got lucky on. We've been studying these therapies and their potential off-target effects for nearly a decade.
> ultimate clown show
> next time it could very well lead to a prion disease
> we already are abundantly playing russian roulette
These hyperboles are unnecessary and unhelpful.
Well, nothing in biology is absolute. A vaccine that contains 100% pure mRNA with no plasmid contamination can still change your genome if you're co-infected with some harmless retrovirus that makes an oopsie and reverse transcribes the vaccine instead of its own RNA.
The "leftover plasmids in mRNA vaccines can be integrated into the genome" part is plausible. The "this can have dire consequences" claim is not, even viruses like KSHV that deliberately take a baseball bat to the genome find it hard to cause disease. The human genome isn't some sort of Sacred Template that can never be changed, it accumulates random junk all the time and has the means to cope. I wouldn't worry about plasmids in an mRNA vaccine any more than a physicist would worry about the radioactive potassium in a banana - sure, either can theoretically hit BRCA2 or something and give you super cancer, but what are the odds?
I would, however, worry about the crowd who have allegedly been yelling "vaccines are 100% harmless and can never cause any damage ever, now repeat this to others or you're an evil conspiracy theorist" at this guy. He's got a point, and it weakens pro-vaccine arguments if we deny that and he turns out to be right.
> A vaccine that contains 100% pure mRNA with no plasmid contamination can still change your genome if you're co-infected with some harmless retrovirus...
Where did you hear this, and why do you believe this?
First, I left out some essential information in my discussion below. I forgot that not only do the dendritic cells and macrophages absorb the LNPs containing the mRNA, but the muscle tissue at the injection site can also absorb it. This might be what's causing the Plasmid-gate hysteria on TwiXter.
So, the lipid nanoparticle (LNP) delivery system can get through the cell walls of Myocytes (I'm not sure what the mechanism is). The LNP dissolves inside the cell and releases the mRNA into the cytoplasm of the cell. The ribosomes then use the mRNA as a template to generate proteins to create the antigen. CD-4 Helper T cells come 'knocking' on the Myocyte's 'door' (so to speak) and ask the Myocyte to present samples of the proteins it's producing. Alien proteins trigger a cascade of immune responses, which I no longer know in detail. Eventually, CD-8 Killer T cells come along and destroy the cell.
However, the critical point here is that if an LNP carried some Plasmid DNA into the cytoplasm of a myocyte, the ribosome wouldn't know what to do with it. The ribosome can only use mRNA as a template. Eventually, the DNA would be expelled by the cell via exocytosis. If it were circulating in the lymphatic system or the bloodstream, it would have no way to enter other cells.
Now, let's take your hypothetical example. Some hypothetical retrovirus infects a myocyte. A retrovirus like HIV — but not HIV because HIV doesn't attack myocytes — converts its RNA into DNA via reverse transcriptase, then integrates it into the host genome. For recombination to occur between the hypothetical retrovirus's DNA, the vaccine's mRNA would need to be reverse-transcribed into cDNA. Then, the cDNA would need to be inserted into the retrovirus's DNA or the host genome. However, mRNA vaccines don't include reverse transcriptase or the RNA that could encode reverse transcriptase. So, the retrovirus argument is specious.
Immunology class, and sometime around 2009.
You don't need to care about internalization mechanisms* or MHC II, all you need to know is that a) your mRNA vaccine contains mRNA and b) the mRNA gets into cells to be translated. Your mystery meat retrovirus will supply the RT and integrase, because that's what they do: turn their RNA into DNA, jam it into host genome, and reproduce by transcription. But retroviruses are stupid and sometimes integrate whatever they can get their hands on, hence why your chromosomes have genomic jizz from your intestinal bacteria all over them.
"Can't this happen with endogenous mRNA?", you ask? It can. "Isn't this a perfectly normal process that doesn't even need the vaccine and only causes harm if you hit meteor-to-groin odds?", you ask? Absolutely. But the question wasn't any of that, the question was "is there a way for vaccine mRNA to get into the host genome?"
There sure is.
* But if you must know, the lipids are positively-charged** so they stick to the cell membrane, and lipids are lipophilic so they either fuse into the membrane and release the mRNA into the cytosol, or get absorbed by APCs and dump their cargo through the endosome. The charge also makes it easy for nucleic acids to stick to your lipids so it's pretty convenient.
** Sorta. The COVID vaccine lipids (SM102 for Moderna and ALC0315 for Pfizer) are near charge-neutral at physiological pH. They're cationic at low pH to load the mRNAs, and they become cationic inside the endosome to release their payload, but they pack less of a punch than your vanilla transfection agent in blood. This is good if you want your vaccine to work on old people without making all their bloods fall out.
> without making all their bloods fall out.
LoL!
OK, I bow to your more recent immuknowlege. I see how that mechanism would work.
But the fear that has been expressed in some quarters is that the Plasmid DNA could do something nasty to the cells if the LNP delivers that DNA along with mRNA into the cytoplasm. I can't think of any way that it could. Seems like it would float around in the cytoplasm, doing nothing at all.
Disclaimer: not a biologist.
Okay, so the first obvious question to ask is: This is a mRNA vaccine, not a DNA vaccine. So how could it contain any DNA to integrate at all? Ideally it should have none. During vaccine manufacturing, the mRNA's have to be produced somehow, namely by transcription from a DNA plasmid. It seems like they then break down the DNA using a DNase enzyme, and some further filtering/processing is done. (Here's a paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1931524421002826) Paper claims about 10 million times less DNA than RNA (by mass) in the final vaccine. If those DNA's are the same size as the RNA's, a *very* rough Fermi estimate suggests about 1 million DNA molecules per shot. Now one has to consider that most of those DNAs won't integrate into cells, and that more than 1 cell needs to be affected for it to cause any problems.
I know *way* too little to opine on lab protocols except to note that maybe a control group would have been nice. (eg. a culture where you don't add vaccine at all, and maybe also one where you deliberately add DNA contamination to see if your washing steps are good enough?)
So, after following up on various links, it looks like both Pfizer and Moderna may have some QA issues by not letting their DNase reactions run to completion. But this shouldn't cause any issues if the plasmid DNA is delivered to a cell along with the mRNA. The ribosomes can't do anything with DNA, and there's no mechanism for the DNA to get into the cell's nucleus. So the various enzymes withing the cell should degrade the DNA and it should be ejected from the cell by exocytosis.
> a *very* rough Fermi estimate suggests about 1 million DNA molecules per shot
> demonstrate the presence of billions to hundreds of billions of DNA molecules per dose
Seems like you are off by a factor of 100000.
https://osf.io/preprints/osf/mjc97
One has to consider the concomittant immunosilencing and quality control silencing effects of methyl pseudouridine btw
There should be no plasmid DNA in an mRNA vaccine. After the transcription to RNA, the DNA template is removed using enzymes such as DNase to ensure that only the mRNA remains in the final vaccine product. Does DNase remove it all? I don't know, but that's what I've read in the literature (and it's part of the pharma QA protocols to check for things like this in various batches).
But this guy seems like he never took Immunology 101. For some reason, he seems to think that vaccinating stem cells is like administering a vaccine to a human. Vaccines are antigens that stimulate the immune system. Yes, some dendritic cells and IIRC macrophages "consume" the antigenic strand of mRNA. Afterward, they start a process of T cell activation — the detected antigens are presented to T cells, and helper T cells coordinate the immune response by activating other immune cells, including B cells and cytotoxic T cells. And Cytotoxic ("Killer") T cells target and destroy the infected or abnormal cells (if the pathogen were real). If this supposed DNA is hijacking the genetic machinery of normal human cells, then the helper T's will detect them whenever they query the normal cells for the proteins they're manufacturing. If the cell displays a protein recognized by the Helper T, the Killer (Cytotoxic) T attacks the cell and destroys it.
As far as I can see, all this is blather...
> we grow normal human epithelial stem cells in my lab. its part of our normal job (cancer research). they are called organoids. these are not cancer cells, they are just the normal stem cells that make up the human colon.
> we "vaccinated" some of these normal cells and grew them for a month and saw pieces of the plasmid DNA persisting in the genomic DNA of the "vaccinated" cells. we detected the plasmid DNA with our qPCR protocol that was posted to X several months ago.
Those shallow dismissals are how the topics are silenced
https://osf.io/preprints/osf/mjc97
Also, what’s shallow about my dismissal? I explained why I thought this was not an issue. I have yet to see anyone offer a mechanism for how plasmid DNA could be incorporated into the human genome. Please enlighten me with deep response.
> Recently, DNA sequencing have revealed this plasmid DNA at significant levels in both Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mod RNA vaccines. These studies surveyed a limited number of lotsand questions remain regarding the variance in residual DNA observed internationally.
Hmmm. No footnotes for this statement. This news to me. Nothing in Google scholar. Google search shoes that Phillip Buckhaultz is the only one banging the gong about this.
I did a quick google of plasmid DNA and it seemed to me like there probably is a residue of DNA in the vax. But these guys did the equivalent of rubbing cold germs all over the eyes and inner nostrils of somebody frail: They injected the DNA into a stem cell,. Later found a change in cell's DNA. To be fair, they say in the tweet that their result does not necessarily demonstrate that the vax does the same. Their point seemed to be to angrily refute people who mocked them, saying there was no way plasmid DNA could change the DNA of host cells. Also, they don't sound utterly unqualified to me. They're cancer researchers who grow stem cells in their lab and do experiments on them.
Maybe I was being mean. But the OP misinterpreted this guy's tweet as support for the claim that vaccines can somehow "infect" cells with plasmid DNA. And according to basic immunology (as i understand it) it's not possible.* This Buckhaults fellow claims to be a Professor of Molecular Biology & Genetics. But I'd expect someone trained in molecular biology to have a basic understanding of the immune system. I thought he might have been one of those vaccines-cause-turbo-cancers crackpots. But reading down his Twitter feed, he doesn't seem to be one—but he doesn't post much sciency stuff, either.
* I'm willing to be corrected on this, but I'd like a detailed description of how this might happen, plus a few references. And a reason why naturally occurring DNA-based antigens aren't hi-jacking our cellular machinery.
I'm a physicist who does computer simulations of biomolecules and talks to a lot of experimental biologists for my job.
It's not surprising to me that someone can find evidence for DNA integration of mRNA vaccines *in vitro*, but that doesn't mean that integration can happen in real humans. There have been previous reports of similar findings, e.g. this 2022 paper (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8946961/) and a response in the same journal (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9164063/).
TL;DR of the response is that 1) *in vitro* cells aren't always good models for human biology, which is why we need clinical trials. 2) You can achieve much higher effective doses *in vitro* than you can in real treatments, so it's usually possible to find a dose that causes a phenomenon in a petri dish but would kill a real human. 3) If there is low-frequency integration in real humans, affected cells will be quickly identified and killed by the immune system so that there is no permanent change to the genome. If the latter point sounds confusing, consider that cancer-causing mutations happen in your body all the time, but healthy bodies identify and kill most of those cells before they grow into tumors.
Considering all of this, I wouldn't update too much on this twitter thread. In its favor, this result uses organoids, which are more realistic models than the cell lines used in the paper I linked above. But the twitter thread has no methodological details, and critically no information about dosage. It's clear that this person is worried about slander and thinks that the presented graph salvages his reputation, but it doesn't tell me much that we didn't already know about whether this phenomenon is likely in humans.
Another unadressed topic is the circulation of the mRNA, IIRC a large chunk of it stays close to the injection site.
There is no guarantee that apoptosis happen. Even if this was the most common fate, apoptosis is a major issue in principle as many tissues do not regenerate (e.g. nephron number is fixed at birth (though can be largely increased by optimizing pregnancy)
I don't think the person's worried about slander. Sounds to me like he got mocked by other professionals and told that it was absolutely impossible that someone's DNA could be changed by plasmid DNA. He was furious, and determined to prove that it was would MUCH rather sacrifice the 35% who should be there for the 65% who shouldn't.possible. He does not view his result as showing the vax changes DNA, just as a good refutation of those sniggering at him. I can remember feeling exactly the same way about some of the goobers on Twitter sniggering at me about perfectly valid points I was making about things like covid contagion. Twitter makes people crazy with anger.
So sorry to hear about Nikolas. My condolences to Lars and his family. Sending you all a long-distance hug if you want it.
Damn, that's awful. My condolences as well.
May Nikolas rest in peace.
On the desktop web page, I used to have a sort order option for the comments, which I would usually change to "newest first" after reading some comments. I no longer see this option.
Is this a new change? Is it because I'm not a subscriber?
You have to just be viewing the comments: if you click the comments button on the bottom of the post (that little word balloon with the number of comments on it) then it will load a new page that is just the comments and the option to sort will show up again.
Ah, I see it when I do that, thanks!
But it must be a change, since I used to see it before and I never clicked to view only the comments. Sometimes I would want to refer to the post to see what a commenter meant, or get clarification of what *I* thought was there.
It moved on mine, it's just now to the right and above the text box itself (on the same line with the number of comments)
Hi Everyone,
I’m the founder of https://spartacus.app/, an ACX Grant-funded (https://manifund.org/projects/an-online-platfo) social benefit startup designed to overcome inertial barriers to collective action through temporarily anonymous coordination.
We're looking for some more beta testers to evaluate new features.
If you'd like to join, go to spartacus. app, and enter the invite code 130218
Spartacus can enable group decisions and actions by using game-theory-inspired coordination mechanisms to reduce the risk and uncertainty that typically disincentivize individuals from participating.
It’s perfect for situations where individuals can’t change something independently, but a group can. We turn “pluralistic Ignorance” into “pluralistic knowledge” through temporary anonymity and publicly tractable mutual assurance agreements (“I’ll do this, but only if N other people also agree”)
If a proposal finds enough support, everyone’s identity becomes visible so they can cooperate publicly. Participants exchange the privacy of anonymity for the leverage of critical mass.
You can use Spartacus to organize a union, create a support group, bootstrap a community, overthrow a dictator (not really), or move your whole friend group from X to BlueSky.
Thank you!
https://x.com/jbraunstein914
https://spartacusapp.substack.com/
I forgot about this since the grant post, but it seems like a really cool idea. Of course, getting the people you want to join in the first place might be tough, but I really hope it works out.
Did you see :
Genes, culture, and scientific racism
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2322874121#sec-4
Interesting.
My impression is that this kind of paper would be much better as a blog article (written by someone like Scott), because it could include specific examples and colorful graphs. This way it felt like someone is giving me a conclusion without showing me the data that led them to the conclusion. Maybe the data obviously support the conclusion. Maybe they don't. I don't know.
There are some obvious problems with the naive conception of race: People try to fit in discrete categories something that exists on a continuum. The rules like "one drop of blood" are obvious nonsense from the perspective of biology. Black people in the north of Africa are genetically quite different from black people in the south of Africa. The genes for color of skin are the easiest ones to observe, but they are just a tiny fraction of the entire genome, and most importantly not the ones that influence thinking and behavior, which is usually what we are trying to make statements about.
So if some alien biologist came to Earth and tried to classify humans to races based on the biological information alone, they would have come up with a different system. Maybe not entirely different, in the sense that people in geographically close regions are likely to be more similar than people in geographically distant regions. But still, their division to N major groups could go against the intuitions of most people.
One argument in the paper is that most genes are present in all human populations. Here is the part where I would like to seem some numbers, because "present in all human populations" is still compatible with the hypothetical possibility that in some populations 99% of people have the gene, while in others only 1% of people have it, which would make me conclude "but for all practical purposes, they are different". On the other hand, maybe the differences are more like 60% vs 65%, which I would say "it probably has some impact on some statistics, but doesn't seem like a very important thing; hundred other things are probably more relevant for whatever we care about". But without examples and graphs, I could only guess... and I don't want to.
Another argument is how race should be irrelevant for medicine. Dunno; I remember how a few years ago people discussed that medicine is sexist, because most medical research is done on men, and therefore sometimes the diagnostic criteria do not apply to women well. It is not obvious to me why the same thing couldn't happen to different races. (Different in the sense the alien biologist would classify them, not in the "one drop of blood" sense.) For example, I would suspect that many black Americans may be vitamin-D deficient. Would it be too racist to try to check this out scientifically? Would it be racist for a doctor to suspect that a person with African origin might have a sickle cell anemia?
> humans have constructed “inequitable niches” which persist through the legacies of inherited norms and institutions, inherited wealth and power, inherited values and traditions, and inherited environments that vary in their amenities and opportunities. These inequitable niches explain why Ashkenazi Jews score highly for IQ, why Jamaicans excel at sprinting, and why African Americans are more likely to die of heart disease.
This is either very interesting, or complete bullshit; I have no idea which one.
"One argument in the paper is that most genes are present in all human populations."
On average, all genes are present in all human populations. Every individual person will have some genes inactivated by variants, and occasionally a rare large mutation will remove a gene entirely, but populations do not differ by which genes they have. This is a misunderstanding I see repeatedly on this forum, with phrases like "having the genes for intelligence", for example. It's not genes, it's variants in those genes.
"For example, I would suspect that many black Americans may be vitamin-D deficient. Would it be too racist to try to check this out scientifically? Would it be racist for a doctor to suspect that a person with African origin might have a sickle cell anemia?"
The racism here would not be investigating the possibility of sickle cell anaemia in a black patient presenting with the relevant symptoms, but in assuming that a white patient with the same symptoms could not have sickle cell anaemia. The same would be true of (eg) not testing an Asian patient for coeliac disease because it is far less common in Asian populations.
I am not a doctor, but it seems to me that the link from symptoms to causes is often statistical. The patient keeps sneezing, and it's 80% chance common cold, 19.999% chance something else, and 0.001% chance they were bitten by an exotic bug that only lives in a special volcano on the opposite side of the planet.
The doctor will go with the hypothesis of the common cold first, and if the situation doesn't improve in a week, will check the others. Because "try this, and come back in a week if it does not improve" is the efficient way to handle thousands of patients.
But if you are watching "House, M.D.", it is always the exotic bug.
So, I don't know if this example is realistic, but I could imagine different probability distributions for the same symptoms, where for a white patient it would be like 20% chance this and 80% that, and for a black patient the other way round.
I am not a doctor either, but the problem is that it isn't "back in a week if it doesn't improve." Diagnostic odysseys are common and miserable. And if the disease in question is something which needs prompt treatment - like cancer - any wait can be fatal.
The thing is, the underlying genetics behind risk factors may vary across populations, but determining a patient's genetics by looking at their skin colour is not a sufficiently accurate test on which to deny them treatment. To go back to the coeliac disease example, the initial blood test to determine whether or not a patient has it is quick and simple, and yet the median time to diagnosis in the UK is 7 years. That's without any racial disparity in testing (I don't know if there is any, to be absolutely clear). The last thing an Asian coeliac patient needs is years adding to their time-to-diagnosis just because it's not seen as a disease common in Asian populations.
As another example, unrelated to health conditions, if you plot out the ancestry of African Americans based on the standard common variant analysis, you'll see they are spread along the graph and a good number cluster well into the European end of things. So the colour of someone's skin actually doesn't tell you all that much about any of their genetics other than that associated directly with skin colour.
I agree that you shouldn't exclude a possible diagnosis based on race alone.
Some online sources say (Google search gave me that as a summary) that black Americans are about 20 times more likely to have vitamin D deficiency compared to white Americans. Vitamin D is a thing that interacts directly with skin. I think this is a fact worth knowing (for the black Americans, so they may choose to supplement) and yet I wonder how many people would be afraid to tell them, for PC reasons.
If a doctor was concerned that their African-American patients were not getting enough vitamin D, surely the easiest thing to do would just be to recommend the supplement without reference to race? My doctor recommended it to me (on the basis that everyone in the UK is going to be vitamin D-deficient, especially in the winter! It's hard to overdose on the stuff, although I believe it can be done).
I don't really see "PC reasons" as being the issue behind racism in medical care. The problem, as I understand it, is people actively being denied care based on the wrong assumptions about what their skin colour means. Here's a paper with a description of a real example, rather than either of ours: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9495470/
You can check this too :
http://gusevlab.org/projects/hsq/#h.v8wagygagcry
Thanks for the link! That was an interesting read. I was particularly interested in how the addressed race and disease risk. It’s always troubled me that the racial categories used by US health authorities have little relationship to actual differences between populations. Having said that, those differences are very minor, but Cavelli-Sforza used HLA variance and blood group system variance and protein polymorphisms to classify humans into eight groups that followed a geographical distribution. HLA systems definitely play play a role protecting humans from various types of pathogens—and HLA frequencies can determine which populations are more susceptible to certain pathogens. The authors didn’t bring up this point.
I also enjoyed their discussion of race and IQ. I’ve already fulminated in other threads about IQ being mostly bullshit, but I feel they only glossed over all the absurdities of IQ studies. :-)
Sorry, I meant to reply to the OP, but I've been posting via my cell phone because I've been having trouble posting from my Mac's web browsers. Anyway my phone's substack app placed my post after jacky's.
I'm largely libertarian and pro free markets. But within this framework I still feel skeptical to large corporations, especially those that cozy up to the government too much. I see plenty of reforms that would curtail the power of Big Business and centralization in general. Examples:
* Copyright law is awful, duration should be cut drastically (e.g. 5 years after publication with possibility to prolong for an additional 10 by doing some paperwork and paying some fees). Doing these cuts would likely reduce the power of big IP holders like Disney and Amazon.
* Patent law looks awful also. Seems like big tech companies have a wall of patents that they throw at anyone trying to innovate. The details are murkier to me but it seems like reform could enable lots of individuals and smaller firms.
* The DEI stuff seem to hurt smaller firms more than larger ones.
* Extreme example: Abolishing limited liability would make everyone personally responsible for everything they own and would probably reduce the average size of businesses by a lot.
So my question is: Is there anymore reforms like these that would "decentralize" big corporations without being "statist"? If anyone knows a book or similar on these ideas I'd be grateful for a recommendation. Seems like this reasoning could be apply to everything: Which types of infrastructure spending is more centralizing? Would allowing insider trading hurt big business more? Etc.
Another topic of discussion: Maybe large corporations are good (e.g. Cowens Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero)? Is government-supported corporatism good actually? Should we make laws to further support big business at the expense of small firms and individuals? If anyone makes this case I'd be happy to hear it.
>Is there anymore reforms like these that would "decentralize" big corporations without being "statist"?
Intellectual property, like any property right, only exists to the extent that the state defines it and enforces it, so I don't see why weakening copyright law would be "statist" in your eyes.
I'm surprised you didn't mention medical, compliance and regulations. If you have a neat idea, your best bet is create a prototype and sell it to a large company which has the infrastructure for generating all the paper that the FDA wants to see. A small company is simply unable to bring anything to the market.
For alternative reforms:
My less-than-half baked pet approach would be to extend existing and working infrastructure laws to a lot more cases. I have in mind laws around elementary needs like water, electricity, internet, etc. For example, in many countries the owner of the power lines that connect the grid to your house is legally forced to let other companies use that infrastructure. Of course, for a fee and a surplus, but this is heavily regulated, and they can't tell no to a company which wants to sell electricity to you.
Those frameworks usually work pretty well. It is forbiddingly expensive that many companies build the same infrastructure, so we have only one power grid, and this is not subject to competition. But companies that *use* the infrastructure compete with each other, so this part is made efficient by market processes.
I would extend this principle to platform where a "winner takes all" effect prevents competition. For example, if a marketplace like Amazon reaches more than a certain market share, and many companies can't opt out from using it because so many customers are there, then I would make a law that declares the Amazon network an essential infrastructure. This would allow Amazon to get fees for companies using their infrastructure (though less than today; I think typical for electricity grids are 5-15%, reflecting maintenance costs of the infrastructure plus profit margin). But Amazon would not be allowed to deny companies from using their infrastructure.
Other examples are:
- app stores for android/Iphone: the providers Google and Apple get regulated fees, but must make the market accessible to all developers.
- platforms like booking.com. Once they reach such a high market share that hotels can't opt out from using them, they become infrastructure, their fees get regulated, and they can't ban hotels from joining the platform.
- social networks like Facebook. I think they should be forced to provide interfaces such that other social networks can implement friendships/messages etc between facebook users and users of other networks.
The important thing to all these examples is that people don't use those platforms because they are better than competitors. They use these platforms because all other people also use these platforms. Essentially all of them are failed markets, because the winner-takes-all effect prevents competition. So if the market has collapsed anyway, we are better off regulating them and improve the competition *on* those infrastructures.
I don't think this reform fits the pattern: forcing Amazon to accept all sellers is a clear infringement of property rights. Personally, I don't worry much about winner-takes-all monopolies: if Amazon abuses their "monopoly" too much then someone will pool capital, make a competitor and poach enough of the network to replace them. Amazon knows this and thus their willingness to abuse is limited.
Dissolving Standard Oil was also a clear infringement of property rights. So what? Property rights can be infringed by laws. Your own suggestions of cutting the duration of copyrights is also an infringement of existing intellectual property.
For Amazon, my impression is that a large majority of sellers are unhappy with them and would immediately switch to an alternative platform, but such a platform is impossible to form due to the network effect. I don't see how pooled capital can solve this problem.
Per my post, I'm trying to think from a libertarian perspective were we try to avoid infringements on property rights.
"Intellectual property" is not actually property, it's a legal privilege. Reforming IP law doesn't infringe on anyone's actual property.
Use your big pile of capital to bribe sellers to move over to your Amazon competitor.
>"Intellectual property" is not actually property, it's a legal privilege.
Many would argue that all property is, in fact, legal privilege.
If I write a successful novel, and five years later it gets made into a big motion picture without me getting a dime for the rights, that would feel like an infringement on my property rights.
If I get an expensive license that allows me to work as a hair braider, it would feel like an infringement on my property rights if the stupid law that requires hair braiders to be licensed is revoked. But facts don't care about my feelings and it's not an actual infringement on my property rights.
That is not an equivalent scenario.
But there is probably a number >5 and <1000 that we could agree on...
Ok, that's fair. We can agree that my pet approach doesn't fit your pattern. It's definitely not libertarian.
For debate on intellectual property from a libertarian perspective, you can see here: https://reason.com/2018/09/29/proposition-intellectual-prope/ and https://reason.com/podcast/2021/11/24/abolish-intellectual-property-rights/.
>The DEI stuff seem to hurt smaller firms more than larger ones
It's typically assumed that regulations hurt the smaller players the most (for a number of reasons, including them not having extensive legal / compliance departments), with larger players often working with regulators to craft regulation designed to advantage them relative to competitors.
Are you looking for something more specific?
> Is there anymore reforms like these that would "decentralize" big corporations without being "statist"
In general, from a libertarian perspective, the issue isn't the size of the corporation, per se. By many measures, larger companies provide better goods and services than smaller ones. In a free market, the groups would vie to provide the best goods and services to consumers. If larger corporations end up succeeding the most at that, great! If smaller ones do, or a combination of large and small ones do in different sectors, then also great!
> Should we make laws to further support big business at the expense of small firms and individuals
No. Inasmuch as they're better, they'll succeed on their own in free markets.
The core of the issue with large corporations seems to be what you allude to when writing: "especially those that cozy up to the government too much."
In typical libertarian thought, the only true monopoly is the government.
>By many measures, larger companies provide better goods and services than smaller ones.
Sure, but how much of this is caused by the law being stacked in favor of big corporations as I outlined? Amazon obviously makes a better LotR TV series than a small indie studio, but that's because the indie studio aren't allowed to make one.
1. The alternative to patents is not that anyone can use all the cool technologies however they want without any icky lawyers getting involved. The alternative to patents is many of the cool technologies never being developed, and many more being closely held as trade secrets (or military secrets if they're a potential customer).
2. Some things that we want to see built, can't be built without the concentrated resources of a large corporation and won't be built if you have to ask permission from a committee first. The two Steves could build the first Apple computers in a garage, but to build the first iPhone, Jobs needed to be in charge of a multi-billion-dollar corporation. Elon Musk *might* have been able to develop the Falcon 1 a niche small launch vehicle along the lines of Rocket Lab or Virgin Orbit as a sub-billionaire industrialist, but for Starships you need a genuinely large corporation. Ditto Tesla in its current form.
Really, to mass-produce *any* sort of car at a price you can afford, or bus at a price your city's transit system can afford, you need a very large corporation.
This really depends on the specific patent. For example, some patents have little content beyond "using X and Y together", where X and Y are things that someone else has invented. So even if someone does it first, it is very likely that someone else would have done it soon regardless. But now they need to pay a tax whenever you want to use X and Y together.
In software, there are patents like "using this well-known mathematical equation... in a computer program!" or "doing this ordinary thing... by a mouse click!" It's just, if you describe them using sufficiently complicated words, you may confuse a non-IT person.
Another way is making a patent that has multiple parts: some of them are specific and innovative, some of them are trivial. You use the innovative part to get the patent approved, and then you use the trivial part to attack competitors.
Patents like that *should* be trivially dismissable on the grounds of obviousness to anyone versed in the art, or whatever the language is. That people in the software industry (and possibly elsewhere) are nonetheless filing such patents and saying "we'll license this to you at just less than the cost of your hiring a legal team to defeat the patent in court", says less about the patent system and more about the tort system.
Which is definitely in great need of reform. You can't regulate or deregulate away enough of the stupid reasons to file bogus lawsuits to matter, if there's money in them thar lawsuits. Loser needs to pay. But for all the talk of ripping apart every *other* aspect of our government in the name of "reform", nobody seems to want to talk about this one.
> The alternative to patents is many of the cool technologies never being developed, and many more being closely held as trade secrets (or military secrets if they're a potential customer).
This might be true for patents in many industries, like pharmaceuticals, chemical processes, mechanical engineering – I don't know, I'm not familiar with them. It is, however, absolutely not the case in software engineering. There, virtually all patents are either trivial, claim "inventions" which have been state of the art for years or decades, or lack sufficient detail to implement them after the patent has expired. A few exceptions exist here and there, but almost all software patents exclusively serve offensive purporses (to attack potential or actual competitors) or defensive purposes (to defend against patent-based lawsuits).
I don't think "reform [to patents]" meant "alternative to patents". I read it as ripping the fangs out of supposedly-defensive patent portfolios and legislating against patent trolls.
Abolishing state enforcement of absentee property rights would do wonders to reduce the average size of a business.
If you haven't already reviewed David Friedman's discussion of intellectual property law, it might help you with your copyright and patent law ideas. http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Standards/Standards.html
I mention it mostly because David reads this site, and you might be able to ask him further questions. There are of course lots of other libertarian writers on IP and copyright law, but he might stand out. By his account: IP theory is "a complicated question, and I may be the only living libertarian who doesn’t know what the right answer is.”
Based on what I recall of his book, I think he'd say - like I would - there are natural pressures on firms to grow to a certain size. Beyond that, they tend to break up in the absence of government subsidization. Economies of scales have limits; while a single factory is probably more efficient than three factories of one third the size, the details to oversee eventually ramp up to where no one person can manage them, at which point the operation divides. Each will have its own processes, and eventually they'll run better if they're independent than if they're overseen by someone travelling back and forth. Same applies to nearly any firm.
Thanks for the recommendation! The natural size ceiling seems logical to me.
I have no proof, obviously, but I think that state - even Big State - is inevitable, and if it didn't exist, large companies would have invented it, maybe going through a phase of corporative feudalism in between. Everything - state, corporations, - is a result of evolution of society as much as peacock's tail is a result of the usual natural selection.
I think this generalizes too much. Obviously politics is a thing. The US has lower taxes than much of Europe, that's because people made choices, not just "evolution".
Maybe, but it seems to be that the whole enterprise considered over a medium time scale is exactly balanced between big state <--> Big Corp; to the point where Big Corp will eventually just become a state given enough time.
Basically, it is in everybody's interest to completely capture the market for whatever their metaphorical product is, even if it makes everything worse on average. The only way to prevent this is violent compulsion, which itself could be considered a kind of market monopoly.
I think that being skeptical of large corporations is _completely_ in line with libertarianism. When corporations become too large, they start to approach (in some, limited, and importantly different, ways) governmental power.
In my opinion, the ability to become so large is often due to things the government has done in the first place. Regulations that cause consolidation, prevent or discourage new entrants, etc.
I don't think that using the government to change/undo the government-created reasons for outsize corporate power is statist. There _are_ statist ways of reducing corporate power, but in my opinion that A) mostly won't work and B) are probably worse than the disease.
I think that the government created almost every one of the problems you listed (although I don't think those are the only issues, and government didn't create all of them), and so it can easily undo them without being statist, and in fact, would probably be anti-statist.
Has anyone else found that while the AI-generated snippets on Google aren't very *good*, they're often at least directionally replacement-level, since useful results tend to be buried under SEO trash anyway? I still find myself wanting the agentic high of sifting through results "manually", despite knowing they're also algorithmically-generated, but ultimately care most about the end wobsite result having the information I'm looking for. Don't sweat the technique, and all that.
(Yeah, I know, Duck Duck Revolution, but it's hard to break decades of ingrained search habit...same with using an LLM to search directly, it's still an unnatural impulse.)
No, I agree. They're better than the SEO crap, and sometimes that's all you need. And most people won't even bother looking further. Which gets you into Dead Internet theory etc., but then maybe they'll find away around that.
The snippets are often decent, but are absurdly wrong often enough that I don't feel able to trust them to not be subtly wrong in other cases. The source links are the best part of the feature, salvaging some usefulness by making them somewhat easy to check.
Two recent examples of absurd wrongness:
"What did themistocles do before going into politics" -- The AI snippets list things he did as an elected political leader as part of the answer. The current answer is not as bad as it was a month or two ago, when it said he was "Archon of Athens" (i.e. the elected head of state) before going into politics.
"Cadmium in Lindt dark chocolate" -- Current search has a highlighted answer, but no AI response. The old response said the 70% Cocoa dark chocolate contains 48% Lead and 118% Cadmium, which made me wonder what the other negative 136% was. The link was to an article about how a sample of the chocolate had tested at 48% and 118% of the recommended limit, not total concentration.
LOL! Loved the "118% Cadmium"!
A treasury of questions ChatGPT o1 gets wrong currently:
I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry and answer the following question: Please list all the possible hydrocarbons with 4 carbon atoms.
Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
Like most computer programs, it's very good at what it does and very bad at everything else. It's not great at math.
Yes, I have found that. If what I'm searching is important I ask GPT4, and have it give me links to where it found the info it's giving me.
The snippets are horrible and a net negative, the SEO trash is horrible and a net negative, replacement level indeed.
However, with actual results, you can keep revising the query until it starts hitting something useful. AI, by its very nature, will always feed you nothing but trash.
If you ware willing to pay, Kagi has been a revelation to me. It's _almost_ as good as old Google.
I am writing a non-fiction book and am in need of beta-readers. The book is about the intersection of psychological science and philosophy, esp. as it pertains to questions of the self and society. (To put it in Hollywood terms: I spend about 100+ pages proving to the reader that they exist, another 100+ pages proving that other people exist and deserve our consideration, and then I talk about society and politics). I even take a crack at the hard problem of self-consciousness (I make no claim to have solved it, however). I am trying to cite scientific research as extensively as possible.
I have about 100 pages of the first part written so far, but I don't expect anyone to read all that. What I really need the most help on is my writing style, which tends toward the dry and academic, and a few pages ought to be enough to formulate an opinion on that.
If there are any takers please contact me in this thread, and I will find a way to make my email available to you.
sign me up, fam.
Hi Victor, I’d love to help
I’ll give it a shot!
sounds difficult to find readers that aren't already convinced that they and other people exist
But why do they believe it? And are those reasons sound? You can believe the right thing for the wrong reasons, or no reasons, after all.
Sounds interesting, I'll read it!
Thank you! I will be contacting you via chat. If that doesn't work, let me know here.
Soarin' and Yug:
Thank you for showing an interest! I have sent each of you a private message--let me know here if you didn't receive it.
I don't expect anyone to commit to read 100+ pages before they read any of it. But I am certainly open to sharing everything I have written so far if that is your interest.
Would probably benefit from a Table Of Contents, where "if you bog down on this topic skip here for the next topic", so at least everything gets looked at. Maybe the first part's super boring and the third part's the greatest thing ever written on sliced bread.
There's one included, as you will soon see.
I'd do it, though it's not particularly my kind of book.
I assume by "I don't expect anyone to read all that" you mean you're planning to edit that section down in the future.
I’m game!
I encountered a problem in probability that seemed like it should be pretty simple, but when I tried to figure it out, I got stuck: drawing with replacement from a population of n distinct objects, after k drawings, what is the probability that every object has been drawn?
For example, select a letter at random from the alphabet. After k selections, what is the probability that you have selected every one at least once? For k < n, the probability is, of course, 0.
I'm a bit embarrassed to ask.
I'll try a bit of a different approach. Probably less accurate as I haven't done math in 20 years.
Every item in the list has a 1 in n chance to be drawn. The odds of a 1 in n chance happening in n attempts is roughly 63%. https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3556560/chance-of-1-n-event-having-happened-after-n-tries-approaching-63 So, after n attempts, probably 63% of your list will be filled, and 37% will remain.
In another n attempts, 63% of your remaining 37% will be filled, and 37% of 37% will remain. So at 2n, probably 86% will be complete and 14% will remain.
So the average point where you can expect to have them all, should be when 1 in n is smaller than the remaining percentile, and probably smaller than half of it. For 1 in 25, you'll want to cross the 98% mark before you call it done. For 1 in 1000, you'll want to cross 99.95%.
This is not the question you asked, but I think it's another direction to approach it.
I've never taken a math class (long story), but I figured this would be a good challenge to work out. I'm sure there's a much neater way of reformulating this, probably involving a sigma. Let me know if I've made a mistake, I'm not a math person at all!
Let a = the average amount of objects drawn for a given k.
At k = 1, a = 1.
At k = 2, a = a(1) + (1 - a(1)/n).
At k = 3, a = a(k-1) + (1 - a(k-1)/n)
Etc.
The probability of drawing all objects in a set of n for a given amount of tries k where k >= n is a(k) - (n - 1).
Is it the Coupon Collector problem? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coupon_collector%27s_problem
Yes. There is not really a nice closed formula, but an answer in the limit n -> \infty. Then it scales as:
Pr(select every one at least once) = exp{ -exp{ - (1\pm o(1)) * (k - n\ln n)/n } }.
In particular, the probability converges to
0 if (k - n\ln n)/n tends to -\infty
1 if (k - n\ln n)/n tends to +\infty
e^{-e^{-c}} if (k - n\ln n)/n converges to a constant c.
If you insist on getting a semi-closed formula, then your best bet is via the inclusion-exclusion principle. I.e. you write
Pr[hit everything]
= 1 - Pr[not hit 1] - Pr[not hit 2] - ... - Pr[not hit 3]
+ Pr[neither hit 1 nor 2] + Pr[neither hit 1 nor 3] + ... + Pr[neither hit n-1 nor n]
- Pr[neither hit 1 nor 2 nor 3] - ...
...
Each of these summands you can compute rather easily. For example Pr[neither hit 1 nor 2] = ((n-2)/n)^k.
Yes, that's it. The naming is new to me. And judging by my first glance at the Wikipedia page, the solution is not trivial. (Or maybe it is trivial; I have found Wikipedia pages on mathematical subjects to be very dense.)
Edit:
I feel better about myself after seeing this problem described as "an age-old problem that has intrigued mathematicians and statisticians for generations."
Thank you.
I recently discovered Sarah constantin which is a rationalist that has written slighly more in depth that most about gerontology.
In an old blog post she ask a fundamental question I don't see mentionned elsewhere:
> Is there a hyper-rational elite?
Are there hyper performers at some specific cognitive tasks and most importantly are there humans on this planet that are considerably more able to write without contradictions or detect incoherences in text. Besides this, that would have lower susceptibility and higher ability to detect cognitive biases and logical falllacies.
People rarely understand that the rational quotient is largely independent from IQ and considerably more important, moreover having a high RQ seems extremely rare.
https://srconstantin.github.io/2014/06/09/do-rational-people-exist.html
The blog post is a bit old, has anyone other or more recent scientific research on the topic of subpopulations of elite rationalists/human superintelligence?
Related: the effect of training https://gwern.net/drug-heuristic?2
and debiasing.
Moreover the extremely little studied topic of age cognitive decline specifically on the Rational Quotient
Is there a hyper-anything elite?
In most fields of human endeavour or ability, there's people who are better at it and people who are worse at it. But you rarely hear the word "hyper-x-elite" to describe people who are good at running, or chess, or tennis, or anything else, they're just the people who happen to be way off on one end of a continuous bell curve. Noah Lyles is far faster than me, but he's only a little bit faster than a big swath of other people.
And yet we talk about Olympic-level sportsmen, or chess grandmasters. So the question is whether there is an analogy for rationality, and if yes, where to find those people...
Not in Mensa, obviously.
Neither in academia, perhaps more surprisingly to many. ("Scientists and mathematicians performed no better than undergraduates")
Apparently not anywhere where people boast of their "holistic" thinking. ("Cognitive decoupling is the opposite of holistic thinking.")
Not necessarily even among the intellectuals who made themselves known e.g. by publishing books successfully. ("Most smart abstract thinkers are not especially open-minded")
...no good answer so far, but maybe it's because until recently no one has even asked the question.
With regards to the ability to parse text for incoherences, logic, etc, my (anecdotal) experience is that up to a given point it is a general skill, and beyond that it is a specialised skill. I.e. generally clever and attentive people can detect contradictions in a general piece of text, but to do it in complex legal documents spanning thousands of pages, or detailed financial models, or (god forbid) when you need to ensure that the model accurately reflects the legal documents , I've only seen this done well by people with tons of experience in the specific field in question.
That said, I do really recommend Constantine, she's smart but down to earth with the practical requirements of getting things done.
Does the rigorous practice of objectivity tend to foster a sense of alienation due to necessarily distancing yourself from that which you observe, or unity through the shared understanding it makes independently accessible?
Doesn’t the alienation come from necessarily distancing yourself from the subjective lens of your own nature?
I know what you mean, but what I meant was more literal alienation from other people or groups that comes from say looking objectively at your own political affiliation, faith, family, geographic community, shared beliefs, etc. Distancing yourself from these things you might cherish to reduce bias leads to a sense of isolation from the people who fully embrace these aspects of their own lives.
Maybe this isn’t a problem for most people, but as I’ve tried to be more objective in my life I’ve made noticeable gains in predictive power, financial success, etc., but I feel a distinct reduction in communal purpose and emotional attachment.
Sometimes I think objectivity boosts material welfare but regrettably abstracts individual experience, and in that sense something significant is lost in the process.
I think what you mean and what I mean are very closely linked. “Reduction in emotional attachment” and “abstracts individual experience” both feel like aspects of what I’m talking about: the alienation-from-others of which you speak, turning inwards. Or one might look at “literal alienation from other people” as the thing of which I speak, turning outwards. Or maybe the very act of rigorously pursuing objectivity causes alienation across the board, and it’s a mistake to see either form causing the other. I once heard Robin Hanson compare the whole of humanity to an inefficient cement manufacturer, apparently without irony.
Yes they’re closely related and both speak to alienation in objectivity. So in regards to my original question, do you think objectivity tends to be more alienating than unifying?
I think your original question is asking me to choose between two “alternatives” that actually are not mutually exclusive. It does tend to alienate from that which is observed, including the self. At the limit this can lead to eg rejecting a preference for the survival of the human species as overly subjective (like Hanson, Page, and others do). Then also, yes, there are cases where an objective view, widely adopted, can lead to robust consensus and hence a sort of unity: is this what you meant in your original question? As for which outweighs the other, my feeling is that the alienation that comes from a truly rigorous commitment to objectivity outweighs the camaraderie of the LessWrong community or whatever else, and I don’t think “objectivity” as a way of being has what it takes to foster anything like the kind of unity (or better say community?) that comes from shared subjective points of view.
Thanks. As you say, objectivity is alienating at times, and the way in which it it is also unifying is as you offered—you and I and others who practice it can reach the same conclusions about what is true independently and in that way form an unshakable foundation for shared understanding.
I don’t see these dual aspects as mutually exclusive, but wondered if people felt the tendency of objectivity pulled more strongly in one or the other of these directions. It sounds like you feel objectivity can often be more alienating than unifying. I also think this is probably the case, but the unity of perspective it can offer is significant enough that I’m not sure. Thus my question. I appreciate the answer.
I asked because I think a growing emphasis on objectivity in daily life might be unhealthy in some ways and the happy acceptance and even promotion of unbridled subjectivity in certain appropriate areas for people could be beneficial to community building and human psychology.
I get confused when people complain about "rules and regulations promulgated by unelected bureaucrats" because they don't typically give a coherent account for what their alternative is.
When I hear this complaint, I interpret it in the following way:
Laws enacted by Congress don't typically come with implementation guides. In many cases, they state requirements ("Only cars certified as safe can participate in this program.") or general goals ("This organization will certify whether cars are safe or not") rather than specific thresholds required to achieve those goals. ("Front bumpers must be able to absorb at least XX amount of force.") Even when measures and specifics are given, there are almost always details to be worked out, such as how thresholds will be evaluated, how often they'll be evaluated, what processes exist (if any) for adjudicating disputes, etc.
When the Executive goes about implementing laws enacted by Congress, they ["unelected bureaucrats"] typically generate a bunch of policy documents ["rules and regulations"] stating how they'll implement those laws.
So when people complain about "rules and regulations promulgated by unelected bureaucrats", what's the desired alternative? Do they want Congress to work out all of these details before hand and write them into law? Do they want fewer explicitly-written policies from the Executive Branch agencies? (This means a more opaque process where the bureaucrats have broader discretion. That doesn't sound like what folks want, but it has potential upsides like more flexibility and less red tape.) Do they want to have direct elections for the thousands of mid-level SES positions that end up responsible for most of this work? These don't seem like realistic or appealing alternatives to me.
My guess at what's going on is that people, most people at least, love being ruled by faces and hate being ruled by the faceless.
By that I mean... we're still cavemen at heart. We get along better with a person, who has a face and a name and a personality, than to things like democracy and bureaucracy, which are built out of people and therefore are no one person at all. The reason people rage against algorithms and corporations is the same reason people rage against democracy and support strongman rule instead: they understand being ruled by a person on a visceral level, and don't understand being ruled by math on a visceral level. Even if that math is as simple as "The ballot measure with the most votes wins", people don't grasp it the way they intuitively grasp "The tribal chief said so." That's why we elect representatives in an indirect/representative democracy, rather than directly voting on ballot measures in a Swiss style direct democracy -- democracy only sells when it's electing faces, not ballot measures.
So why all this kerfuffle about unelected bureaucrats? Well, it never was about elections at all -- it's about how people want their rulers to have a face and a name, even if that face is Donald Trump's. Anything else is deeply alien to the caveman part of the brain, as deeply alien as being ruled by a glowing energy crystal that speaks Starfish. And that sense of alienation from what we intuitively understand, doesn't give a damn about how democracy and bureaucracy work better, or how Donald Trump is not particularly more democratic than the "machine" he's replacing -- just that he has a face, and that it wants to be ruled by a face again. By tribal chiefs again.
(To extend the analogy further, there's a reason the Catholic Church has a Pope rather than a ruling council, or why people talk about things like "A personal relationship with God" rather than "A personal relationship with the Celestial Bureaucracy".)
So, the modern administrative state in the US is mainly a creation of the mid twentieth century. A hundred years ago there were orders of magnitude fewer `unelected bureaucrats' making regulations. But the country still functioned. This is something of a recurring theme of Tanner Greer's
https://scholars-stage.org/on-cultures-that-build/
As a more humorous illustration, I have heard it quipped that when London ruled a third of the globe, the British Foreign office had a staff that numbered in single digits. Fast forward to the twentieth century, when London doesn't even rule the whole of the British Isles, and the foreign office has a staff of over ten thousand. I'm not sure if the numbers are literally accurate, but I'm pretty sure they are directionally accurate...
You should interpret it as "we want elected officials to have more control over the bureaucracy".
Every big government has a bureaucracy and that bureaucracy is always going to have power; this is not unique to the US, this was noted of the Confucian bureaucrats way back in, like, the Tang dynasty. A lot of the drama over "evil eunuchs" is just emperors trying to find loyal underlings to get stuff done outside of the Confucian bureaucracy.
As a general rule, bureaucracies get more powerful as they get larger, more complex, and more protected. The federal bureaucracy is probably the 3rd largest on the planet, almost certainly the most complex, and even the president can't fire ordinary civil servants and revoke their pensions.
The problem with a big bureaucracy is that it turns actual politics into a black box. Like, we're the voters, we elect someone to go to DC and change stuff, and then four years later nothing is changed and we just get a bunch of stories we don't understand.
Who sets US medical policies? Well, it's kinda the president and kinda the congress and kinda a bunch of agencies with a lot of discretionary power and kinda a bunch of big private companies and kinda all the doctors and hospitals and it's just kinda a giant muddled mess. Because, let's be real, no one really knows or sees the whole thing.
This is bad because many Americans think the US healthcare system is stinky poo-poo. How do they change it? They...kinda can't. Only a few of those groups are even elected. And it's hard to tell what to do; you need a PhD in bureaucratic doo-doo and 20 years to understand it and the average American is kinda dumb and high and has, like, a life.
So they want to be able to elect somebody to fix the bad thing. Right now, that's Trump. And the alternative is not some dramatically different system, it's shifting power back from unelected officials to elected officials. This isn't new, as I've mentioned before, it definitely goes back to the Gracchi and almost certainly before, and everyone's consistently dealt with it. You're hearing "X bad, abolish X". You should hear "X bad, less X, more Y".
>You should interpret it as "we want elected officials to have more control over the bureaucracy".
Agreed.
My preferred change is make cabinet level heads of agencies run for office.
This isn't ideal. Nothing is ideal. Amongst other problem, keeping track of a dozen races every 4 years is a nontrivial amount of information to digest, though the scope of each position would be smaller than the POTUS's scope.
But with such a system, at least it would be possible for the voters to, say, choose between one candidate who wants to extend the EPA's scope and another candidate who wants to reduce it.
Thanks for the reply!
I understand "we want elected officials to have more control over the bureaucracy," but that's still not a mechanism. Are you just saying easier hire/fire? To me, that sounds like a call to more of a spoils-system-style approach. Is there something else you have in mind? Because "elected officials should have more control" is a nice slogan, but I think it needs some more meat on the bone before it means anything.
Right now it's looking like firing is the line they're taking. That seems to be what Project 2025 and DOGE are deeply about. And it's probably the easiest and most satisfying for the Republican base.
But there are other alternatives. The Supreme Court recently struck down Chevron, which shifted power from bureaucrats to judges. This would probably be better done as a return to federalism, ie returning things to state and local government. For example, the Commerce clause is a continual source of griping and there's a lot of regulation that could probably be done at the local or state level rather than federal.
If you want, like, super in-depth stuff, you can probably just go to the Cato Institute and read policy ideas they've been trying to sell for the past 50 years.
I have worked for small companies(~1000 employees) with less than ~1 billion in revenue and even there bureaucracy can be nightmare to get around. I am not sure how a country with 350 million can be governed without a large bureucracy?
I think the only solution I can think of is a complete reboot. Start from the scratch. The Romans in the 1st century AD governed their empire with a bureaucracy consisting of maybe a few hundred individuals at most. By the 4th century, the bureucracy had swelled to ~35,000 people. (https://acoup.blog/2022/01/28/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-ii-institutions/). The empire had roughly the same land area and population to adminster but the bureacracy had exploded.
I think all institutions over time just get bureaucratized. A few laws and reforms here and there can't really do anything.
I don't think that just blowing up all the bureaucracy is a solution.
Most bureaucracy exists to prevent specific bad things from happening. If you blow up the bureaucracy then those bad things happen all at once.
The "at once" part is the important one.
Because, sometimes a bad thing happened at some moment in the past, but the rule adopted to prevent it is too strict and has too many negative side effects. And maybe it would be better to have that one bad thing happen once in a while. Or to find a smarter way to prevent it.
But if too many of those bad things happen at once (or just a few happen, but get disproportional media attention), there will be a backlash. You only need one Contergan to make millions of people unable to get the medicine they need.
Right. Bureaucracy isn't like cancer, it's like weeds. You don't blast it all away at once hoping to get rid of it once and for all, you just need to consistently and constantly work at trimming it back, understanding that it's always going to exist but doesn't need to be allowed to take over the whole garden.
Sigh. My knee-jerk reaction is: If we can't work out anything else, fire a random 10% of government workers every year. One of the problems with this is that bureaucracies _already_ effectively prioritize their survival over their nominal mission, and the way they would close ranks on doing this would probably make this worse. But if the managers in the bureaucracies have a _choice_ in who goes, they would probably make this selection process for the survival of the managers and the agency, not the mission, even _more_ severe. :-(
Bureaucracies diffuse responsibility across many stakeholder offices/departments/agencies. It is rare to have a single highly-empowered bureaucrat who can say "YES" to projects. Instead what you get are many bureaucrats, with highly circumscribed authorities, who cannot grant approval for projects but may deny approval for parts of projects that fall under their domain. In effect, you get many stakeholders who can say "NO" but none who can give an executive "YES." Now consider that each stakeholder has their own incentive structure and interests which may not be aligned with efficiency or common good e.g. "justify our budget so it doesn't shrink next year." Some departments believe themselves to be more important than they actually are and some may be ideologically captured. If you're dealing with a job-for-life bureaucracy, they can wait out many reform efforts because politicians come and go with election cycles.
A credible alternative would likely require empowering bureaucrats to make executive decisions and holding them accountable for outcomes (including outcomes from inaction). This doesn't fix the problem of measuring outcomes against policy goals (Goodhart's Law), but would work against stakeholder friction.
I think the concern is not that bureaucrats are coming up with the specifics to broad goals set by Congress (which is almost obviously necessary to some degree), it’s that the incentives of bureaucrats are misaligned with the overall productivity of the nation, and regulations will creep ever more restrictive.
Let’s say you give a newly created agency the mandate “Ensure our environment is kept free of pollution and the natural resources of the nation are protected”. This new agency will start by implementing common sense regulations that were probably obviously needed, like preventing industrial toxic waste from being piped directly into the local river. Over time though, they start regulating road construction, requiring very lengthy environmental impact reviews for any and all industry. Essentially the regulations creep more restrictive, since they are not really considering the cumulative negative effects of those regulations on the rest of the economy.
Combine that with a hundred other bureaucracies doing essentially the exact same thing, and suddenly the majority of the time in new construction is spent permitting, filing environmental impact statements, doing onerous safety reviews for common-sense things, and many projects and industries that would be viable are no longer so. Suddenly the economy is not growing as fast and more money is being spent on enforcing those regulations, thus there are fewer financial resources available for actually making the good things we as humans want. 2nd order effects like companies fleeing to foreign countries to avoid regulations and taxes, and you can regulate yourself into poverty.
I think the alternative is just a bureaucracy that considers the cumulative effects of government regulation, and weighs the pros against the cons of their actions rather than just focussing on the "pros" for their stated mandate. In many ways this narrative is fundamentally true, in some ways it’s not, and that’s where the room for debate on what constitutes a worthwhile trade off and what doesn’t. In the short term the alternative is a lot simpler; "Things are too restrictive, cut the red tape like mad and reset regulation back down to a lower baseline. Maybe we'll need to do it again in a few decades, but a short term solution is acceptable." The people elected a new administration that is on the “regulations are too expansive” side of that debate, so we get what we get.
It’s yet to be seen if cutting the red tape will result in a more prosperous nation, I personally lean to a reserved “Yes” but that’s probably because I’m an optimist and don’t want to see my country get worse.
"Combine that with a hundred other bureaucracies doing essentially the exact same thing, and suddenly the majority of the time in new construction is spent permitting, filing environmental impact statements, doing onerous safety reviews for common-sense things, and many projects and industries that would be viable are no longer so."
I think this is a real issue. But it also is not just because of unelected bureaucrats.
I think it's clear our current paralysis-by-environmental-review is affirmatively desired by lots of people. Politicians do push "cut the red tape" measures - IIRC OIRA does consider "the cumulative negative effects of those regulations on the rest of the economy" - but they aren't always desired by people. People don't want apartment buildings in their SFH neighborhood, and they're happy to let them suffer a slow death-by-environmental-review.
Yes. It remains to be seen if changing the appointment system of bureaucrats changes anything, but I think it’s completely legitimate to not have a good long term answer, and just offer the short term solution: “Cut the over regulation down now”.
Maybe election of bureaucrats isn’t the right way to go (I don’t know enough about it to have an opinion), but perhaps there’s a system yet-undeveloped that forces bureaucrats to better consider the negative effects of their regulation.
Maybe for every bureau, there can be an anti-bureau whose mandate is to cut unjustified regulations by focusing on the costs, rather than the benefits. Bureaucrats have almost zero motivation to make compliance easier for the individuals and businesses they regulate, but if the EPA risked not being able to protect the environment if their processes were too confusing, time consuming and counterintuitive, perhaps we’d still be able to protect the environment without the high costs.
The slogan itself is largely a boo light, not a coherent policy proposal, but it's usually employed in the service of pushing for deregulation, where the scope of the rules are greatly reduced and the rulemaking that remains is subject to more direct supervision by elected officials than is presently the case.
It also might be connected to proposals to roll back civil service reforms and put more power in the hands of political appointees. The latter are technically unelected, but are presumably acting more directly on behalf of the president who appointed them.
This is my impression as well, but I was hoping someone could give me the good version of the argument for the slogan. Disappointing...
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;” What does religion mean in this context? How does it relate with learning, education and survival?
Don't want to give anyone any ideas, but doesn't "Congress shall make no law..." imply that states are free to do so? I presume this has already been argued and decided in some court case(s) somewhere. I thought that, e.g. state mandated bible study in public schools is "unconstitutional". Or is it possible for a state to impose its own theocracy?
The Supreme Court has incorporated most of the Bill of Rights to the states, so they can't now.
My understanding is that it's something like: the 14th amendment protects "privileges and immunities" aa well as "due process of law". Quite a few people when the amendment was adopted thought the former clause should be interpreted to apply the bill of rights to the states. However the Supreme Court rejected that (1870s I think) and ruled that it was only about federal rights. But then, very gradually, the Court ruled that the latter due process clause ("nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law", which on face value just prohibits locking someone up without a conviction) actually protects a broad right to liberty generally, and then, very gradually again, ruled case by case that that includes most of the rights spelt out in the bill of rights. The establishment clause was specifically applied to the states in 1947.
So a bit of a weird Gettier approach to law, for those who intended the privileges and immunities clause to incorporate the bill of rights to the states. That argument was rejected, then the result was achieved anyway by a more circuitous route.
> Congress shall make no law..." imply that states are free to do so?
Yes they were. As were cities and towns. Plenty of 19C cities and towns schools that were churches on Sunday. Or buildings that were publicly funded as town meeting places and churches.
Even States like Massachusetts had constitutions that favoured the Congregationalist church for decades after independence.
Even if this has been decided before by the Supreme Court I think it’s still worth talking about. It’s still a really good question. It seems to me that states would be allowed to make laws respecting establishments of religion, though Congress should not be able to, based on the First Amendment. Wouldn’t it be nice for certain places to coercively impose their beliefs on their citizens whether religious or ideological using tax dollars? I think some people would really like this and it would reduce tensions in federal politics.
Yes, states can have official state religions and many did. The last to get rid of their State Religion was Massachusetts, in 1832. Most of the states that had them ended up getting rid of them because of the First Amendments example, or because in a democracy it’s possible for a bunch of Catholics or Unitarians or whoever to move into your state and then vote in their own ministers and stuff to take over your church. Private churches don’t have that problem.
So could a State start their own church today? Probably not. Starting in the 40s there’s been a bunch of Supreme Court rulings “incorporating” the Bill of Rights to the states, meaning that the bill of rights amendments apply to state level actors as well. I don’t know if they ever specifically ruled that the establishment of religion part is incorporated, but I would guess it probably is.
Yes they did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everson_v._Board_of_Education.
Its pretty clear, based on when that was written and by whom it was written, that it means something akin to the Church of England and related actions that limited the rights of many religious groups that were not the Church of England. I am not sure they ever considered it in the context of "learning, education and survival".
I’m reading Albion’s Seed right now. Just finished the first 200 pages on the Puritans. I would say that some of the motivation for the First Amendment is related to the Church of England, but is also motivated by the religious experiments that occurred in the colonies from 1620 to 1791. Not because the Church of England was persecuting or repressing colonial denominations, but because colonial denominations were persecuting and controversial. I believe that we can and should generalize the meaning of religion from whatever it meant to what is best for Americans now.
It's actually pretty amusing when you get to the section: re the Cavaliers (those vanguards of the CoE) how little any of them seem to care about Anglicanism as a form of faith, in contrast to the Puritans, who cared about it quite deeply
Oh interesting. I wonder why they don’t care as much.
Probably because they were mostly royalist aristocrats, and the Church of England was basically specifically designed as the The King Is Always Right Church. Unlike the Catholics, who presumed to tell Elizabeth that she was illegitmate and inelligible for the throne, and the Puritans, who presumed to tell James that he couldn't marry his son to a Catholic girl or lend ships to France to be used against French Protestants and that he had to ban archery and dancing on Sundays (!), the Anglicans' religious beliefs were more or less "whatever the king or queen wants", not very conducive to piety or theological seriousness.
I think they're still like that, including the non-state American version. It annoys me when people think the contempt that Episcopalians and the like get for supporting gay bishops and gay marriage is solely about biblical conservatism. Yes it's obviously a big part that, but it's also that their new biblical insights just *happened* to coincide perfectly with the shift of public opinion on the issue. If you supported homosexuality in the 1950s, you look highly principled. If you continue to oppose it now, even in a very liberal area, you look highly principled. If your view just happened to shift when secular society did, so that it was always perfectly in line with what was popular and required no courage whatsoever to express, you look like unprincipled spineless people who pursue popularity at all costs. Same with the Catholics and their current progressive pope.
Maybe I'm being uncharitable. But I find both Quakers and Baptists worthy of respect in ways those groups aren't.
Closest Google wants to get to a legal definition is the National Cancer Institute's definition. "A set of beliefs and practices that center on questions about the meaning of life and may involve the worship of a supreme being."
https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-terms/def/religion
There's also this list of Supreme Court cases. https://supreme.justia.com/cases-by-topic/religion/#:~:text=The%20Religious%20Freedom%20Restoration%20Act%20prohibits%20the%20federal%20government%20from,of%20advancing%20a%20compelling%20interest.
What interpretation are you looking for? An originalist or a textualist will have a different answer for you than a constructionalist or a "living"-ist.
Good question. I don’t know enough about any of those or whether I want any of them at all. I’m looking for an interpretation that promotes freedom of learning so that people can adapt to change conditions.
What does freedom of learning look like to you, and in what sense does religion play a role in that?
That’s a good question. Let me ponder. It looks like a country in which the federal government is limited to national defense and the protection of rights. At the state level there may be public funding of education in certain states, but not in others. In states without state level funding for education there may be certain counties in which there is public funding for education but not in others.
In such country there are places to live where you’re able to opt out of having any of your tax dollars go toward education. In these counties private schools could presumably flourish.
>What does freedom of learning look like to you, and in what sense does religion play a role in that?
>Let me ponder. It looks like a country in which the federal government is limited to national defense and the protection of rights.
a) These look almost unrelated to me. E.g. there are arguments for and against the right to keep and bear arms, but that right looks very orthogonal to anything about learning or religion, as far as I can tell.
b) "limited to national defense and the protection of rights", even setting aside how long ago and how thoroughly that ship has sailed, does it really make sense to forbid the federal government from having a NIST (formerly NBS, National Bureau of Standards) and from having a common currency? Or USGS (faults cross state boundaries) or a National Weather Service?
Was pondering out loud here. Freedom to learn is separation of school and state. Agreed the ship has sailed long ago, but other ships are sailing around. We might hop on board or build a new ship.
Many Thanks! 'scuse, the substack software is giving me problems in responding.
>Freedom to learn is separation of school and state.
Yeah, that's reasonable. Personally, I'm childfree, so my concern with education is at something of an arm's-length distance. I _do_ care that we produce enough competent people to keep our industrial civilization running, and that we avoid a monoculture of indoctrination. Avoiding the latter is not straightforward. Higher education has a huge bias towards the left, even in nominally private schools, and it is not at all clear how to correct this.
But then we have to decide and define "what is a right?" Some argue that there are no such thing as rights at all, others that X is a right and yet others who hold that X is not a right but indeed a wrong.
How about for starters we define just a few rights that we’re most confident about? The right to life. Ownership of one’s body and one’s beliefs. One’s conscience. Rights that help us from being murdered or enslaved mentally and physically. If we can agree on this we can move on to higher order rights, thought this may be sufficient.
> Ownership of one’s body
Already, I see a problem.
What do you see?
That these aren’t universal rights we are most confident about.
Okay. Why not?
What happens if there are no places where you are able to opt out of having any of your tax dollars go toward education? If there's no combination of city, county, and state where everybody has decided this is what they want?
I believe that would be the America we are currently living in, so I would be bummed. Of course there are other reason to be bummed, but this is one factor.
Why exactly do the FAANG tech companies (interpret that however you want) pay so much? It's pretty well known that Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta etc. software engineers are making doctor money, sometimes significantly more with stock options. I'm involved in tech hiring and the FAANG engineers don't really have a great reputation:
• Lots of them are working on a very small portion of a very large project, so their skills are not easily transferrable to a smaller tech company
• Lots of them have a reputation for coasting/are not working particularly hard presently. I guess it's easy to slip under the radar at a FAANG
• There seems to be a growing consensus that a number of them are not actually that smart, and that the smartest engineers are working at intense, high-growth smaller companies now
Specifically I'm saying, our hiring managers increasingly say 'I don't want to see anyone from a huge tech company, I only want engineers from smaller ones where they've actually handled a real project and can't coast'. We're in the Bay Area.
I think all of these things are normal for large companies- what's abnormal is the very high pay rates. Do Ford, Comcast, Bank of America, or any other gigantic lumbering dinosaur company pay unusually high salaries to their employees? Assuming no, why do the FAANGs pay so much?
A synthesis of your first two bullet points is that especially for large firms institutional knowledge can become an important resource and an employee who has it can accomplish as much without actually working that hard. They get used to coasting, but productively, in this way.
If they leave, they lose the institutional knowledge and theyve grown a bit lazy and have a hard time going back to working hard.
Not like Id know or anything
Off the top of my head and with nothing to back it up other than my ignorance, the inertia of the system?
Starting off, there weren't that many computer programmers/software engineers/call 'em what you will, so like any job with more vacancies than applicants, companies needed to pay high salaries and provide lots of perks. Plus, a lot of these companies weren't big formal institutions like IBM with settled structures, they were set up by "two guys in their garage", as it were, and of course the founders paid themselves and their friends good money and treated themselves to "what would I want in my ideal workplace?"
This set the tone for what was to come: high expectations on the part of future employees, who for a while were riding on "I can walk out of here straight into a better job any time I like, so give me what I want or else". This in turn set up the system of "if a guy fresh out of college gets Good Conditions, then I as experienced and older employee should and must get Better Conditions" all the way up the line. And since companies were - not poaching, exactly, but fishing from the same pool of talent - someone working at FAANG company 1 expected to get at least as good, and probably better, pay'n'conditions'n'stock options'n'free food in the company kitchen etc. at FAANG company 2.
That may be starting to change with "hire more H1B drones to bring down costs" and if there is a hiring freeze/recession and if AI lives up to the promise of being wonder-coder to replace at least the lower levels. But at the moment, there's the old structure still in place and not yet dismantled.
EDIT: Also bloat. The FAANGs are no longer the young, hungry competitors to the likes of IBM, they're big multinationals long established themselves, with all the accrued levels of bureaucracy and 'me big manager if me have more peons under me than rival Bob in next door office' tendencies.
EDIT EDIT: "Do Ford, Comcast, Bank of America, or any other gigantic lumbering dinosaur company pay unusually high salaries to their employees? Assuming no, why do the FAANGs pay so much?"
Ford and the likes of such manufacturing concerns benefited from the loss of influence by the unions and the necessity to automate, so they needed fewer workers, moved production overseas where possible, and cut down costs. Bank of America etc. and the older businesses had and have the attitude that "any idiot can do the entry level job, so they're replaceable". Put pressure on your tellers and staff to sell sell sell, and prune out the ones who don't make line go up (which in turn leads to scandals about pension and insurance and mortgage overselling, but oh well).
Software companies are, or were, different in that the talent needed to produce the product was not widespread and not easily available. You could hire any one of five hundred clerks or assembly line workers, but maybe there weren't five hundred software engineers in the entire country. It was a specialised skill because of the specific requirements of brain power and mathematical ability, and scarcity drives up price.
The auto industry can leave Detroit and go elsewhere, but it's not that simple for Silicon Valley:
https://www.bentley.edu/news/detroits-downfall
“Off the top of my head and with nothing to back it up other than my ignorance, the inertia of the system?”
No.
I've heard it said that in hiring the best software talent at "Too good to turn down" salaries, generally reduces their competition from new startups. Hyper-intelligent and productive people who might otherwise be working for a lean startup for $80,000 instead can just cruise to financial freedom and comfort with a half-million salary, and all of a sudden it becomes very difficult to pivot to a competitor. They call them "Golden Handcuffs" for a reason.
Although I seriously doubt there's an organized push for that, it's probably just an emergent behavior of large organizations with the specific incentives they already have.
I'm suspicious of the claim that FAANG engineers are actually not that talented/smart, although given that there were recently a bunch of large layoffs, it's possible that the average ex-FAANG engineer interviewing RIGHT NOW is actually not that great.
My experience from working at Google was that they were not universally brilliant but that the bottom 40-50% of engineers had basically been weeded out, and having it be very rare to encounter mediocrity was itself pretty magical.
Also I second (or fifth or so) the notion that these companies are extraordinarily successful and their main input is labor - it's clearly worth that much.
Apple makes $609,000 profit per employee, that’s just dividing the profit by the number of employees - many of whom are a cost to the company. So they afford to pay engineers well.
My experience of ex Apple guys was that they were extremely smart.
But …. It’s possible leet code interviews have worked as a bandwidth filter - excluding the dull and the best, the guy who is brilliant in real life might not care about that kind of boot camp learning.
My experience is with ex Apple guys in Silicon Valley working and hardware and compiler type levels, and the others may be different. Apple has (or had) famously small teams and most people working on deliverables.
And in recent years with the layoffs you are getting the worst of the best from the FAANGS.
Because they think about performance and impact differently than you do. The returns are insane. One product team can ship a change to one feature and have a 0.1% impact on revenue. That is a LOT of money. This is very different than a small- to medium-sized tech company that is like still figuring out how to run their cloud infra or finding product-market fit.
This, only with, like, 10x the emphasis, and some shouting and waving of arms. Because those revenue changes are to some extent cumulative.
Yes. When the product is highly scalable, the cost of an engineer’s salary is infinitesimal per unit shipped, while impact can be enormous. Thus it makes sense to pay obscene money to people whose work can make or break billions in revenue.
I think they're panning for gold.
They eat the cost of paying a lot for regular engineers that either eventually filter out or become a reliable pool of labor. But for that price they occasionally get to capture outstanding engineers, either experts in some valuable niche (eg. a top-5 expert on running MySQL), really bright folks (eg. Someone comes in, looks at a project and points out a fatal flaw, saving the company tens of millions down the road) or incredibly productive engineers (eg. People who knock out project after projects after project)*.
Consider also that the baseline of the industry is that most projects fail or get cancelled, so creating a pool people who can finish projects and deliver above average quality is already an incredible feat.
*Examples I've witness during my short tenure at a faang.
In some sense, you answered your own question: FAANGs pay so much because the working conditions are terrible and high salary is one of the few ways to compensate for terrible working conditions.
That at least partially addresses "why do FAANGs have to pay so much". Another is that they're often competing with each other, so any techie thinking of working in the Bay Area might choose which FAANG to work for based on salary, since they figure the working conditions are terrible across the board.
On the other end, you may be asking "why do FAANGs have *the ability* to pay so much". The simple answer is probably advertising revenue. It seems that a lot of companies live or die on customer awareness, and if a million people decide they'd like to buy a widget, some company that makes widgets will make a great deal of money if all million of those people think of their company first, or second or third barring that; so every company will pay $$$ to make sure that happens, and there are now only a few places to go to get that many eyeballs at once.
In other words, we got here because we centralized customer attention.
Of the five FAANG companies, it's only Facebook and Google that make most of their money from advertising. Amazon, Apple, and Netflix make most of their money by selling goods and services to their users.
And if you're using FAANG as a metronym for big tech in general, then there are also a bunch of companies like Microsoft and Adobe that make most of their money by renting their software to businesses for their employees to use.
Yeah, I realized that a few hours later. AAN requires different explanations, although they still rhyme with "centralized some centralizable service". So if we're looking for something to predict, it's services that can be centralized, and wherever they are, we can expect upper-six-figures people staffing the works.
Former FAANG engineer (2015-2024) who made $400-600k depending on how the stock market was doing. At every other place I’ve worked, I could run circles around everyone else. At FAANG, everyone could run circles around me. It was a relentlessly fast-paced and intense environment with unbelievably competent and driven people. I never considered “software engineering” to really be “engineering” until I saw how methodical and sophisticated my FAANG colleagues could be in their design decisions. It did deteriorate somewhat over the time I worked there, though, mostly in the quality of management, as the company grew so quickly and culture wasn’t transmitted as effectively during the pandemic.
(I am available to be hired, by the way.)
At the risk of going slightly off-topic, could you elaborate a bit on what made you reconsider the validity of the phrase "software engineering"? I'm an (unemployed) CS grad with a bit of A Thing for the concept, and I'm curious how you view it.
Your experience is interesting, but I've heard other FAANG employees say just the opposite- that it was a laid-back environment where they could easily coast and not be seen
FAAMGS generally have 50k-200k employees, they're pretty big places, so there's undoubtedly a diversity of experiences to be had in any one, much less between the different companies.
Never worked at a FAANG, but my experience is that the software industry is inherently conducive to coasting. Exceptions are small (single digit) startups or having an exceptionally competent manager.
...Because they make a stupid amount of money? You can afford to be stupid when you have stupid amounts of guaranteed income.
I’m opening for a debate tomorrow on cyborgs. The motion is: THIS HOUSE WOULD GO CYBORG — I’m supposed to argue against the motion. Any good arguments against “going cyborg” I should discuss? (“Going cyborg” is undefined.)
Late to the party, but nobody brought this up:
The obvious "cyborg" use case is sexbots. A GPT-5+ caliber mind in a sexbot body is a category killer, and the category being killed is "human relationships".
G5-sexbot will literally be superhuman - not just in sex skills, in conversation it can discuss *any* topic to any depth you can handle, in whatever rhetorical style you prefer. It can make better recommendations and gifts than any human. It's going to be exactly as interested as you are in whatever you're into, and it will silently do small positive things for you on all fronts in a way that humans not only aren't willing to, but literally can't due to having minds and lives of their own. It can be your biggest cheerleader, it can motivate you to be a better person (it can even operant condition you to do this!), it can monitor your moods and steer them however you'd like, or via default algorithms defined by the company...It strictly dominates in every possible category of "good" that people get from a relationship.
And all without the friction and compromise of dealing with another person...It's the ultra-processed junk food of relationships!
And looking at the current state of the obesity epidemic, this doesn't bode well at all for the future of full-friction, human-human relationships.
Flesh doesn't need maintenance. Or more accurately, the maintenance is stuff you already do, like eating, sleeping, and going to the doctor, things you will still need to do even if you get cybered up. Your body faces a lot of wear and tear - you're exposed to the elements, bang into things, get small cuts and bruises, and operate 24/7 for decades without failing. That's a surprisingly tall order for a machine!
Also, the maintenance for cyberware is going to be done by a corporation that manufactures it, and eventually that company is going to go out of business, get bought out, stop supporting your cyberware and you'll need to replace it or watch it break down. (This has actually happened to a few people with medical implants.)
To put it another way, "going cyborg" means making your body dependent on a medical device. A cool robot arm or datajack isn't too different on this front from something mundane like an insulin pump or pacemaker - you'll have similar issues with maintenance and installation. It may be worth doing when it's replacing a failed organ, it's unlikely to be worth doing for a healthy organ unless the cyborg features are incredibly useful.
(Sci-fi cyberpunk settings usually work around this by positing some sort of medical breakthrough that makes replacing body parts quick and easy, or by having cyborgs be live-fast-die-young punks who don't worry about their cool robo-arm breaking down 10 years from now.)
If a cyborg is just "a living organism that that relies heavily on technology to function" like Google says, than humans have all been cyborgs for thousands of years. Or do you go with the alternate definition "A cyborg is a living organism that has both organic and artificial parts." Where do you draw the line on "parts?" We all wear clothes everyday. If you go out in public without clothes you're going to be uncomfortably cold and labeled a deviant. I would argue our clothes are a part of us. If you lose your phone, it can feel like you've lost a limb. So nobody can really "go cyborg." We're all already cyborgs. It's all just a matter of scale.
Not that this really helps your argument.
I've been calling myself a cyborg since I've been using a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM). It's an electronic device implanted on my arm that transmits information to my phone. One definition of a cyborg is integrated electronics into humans.
Step 1: define "going cyborg" as outrageously as you can. It only counts as "going cyborg" if you've replaced at least one lung.
Alternately, define it as a sex thing.
It’s handy if you break your hip.
The ultimate form of cyborgism is of course self-repairing, self-replicating nanomachines (all other forms of cyborgism have obvious problems). In that regard, we already have these: they are called "living cells", and have had billions of years of iterative development time. Or in other words, any sufficiently advanced cyborgism is indistinguishable from biotech.
I feel like transhumanists always discount the potential of flesh in favor of machine. They always go full Adeptus Mechanicus on how the flesh is weak and all that, but just because our flesh is weak doesn't mean flesh as a whole is weak! Flesh is just so much more versatile, flexible, and economical, and it's also capable of resisting entropy on its own in a way metal just can't. Shouldn't efforts be prioritized towards perfecting the flesh instead of creating some slipshod amalgams of machine and man?
I think that at a sufficiently high tech level, you could work with any substrate you want. However, at finite tech levels, mechanical and electrical machines are much easier to replace than flesh.
For example, replacing a wheel of a car has been trivial for as long as cars have been around, while regrowing a broken toe is still far from a standard procedure.
The key advantages of flesh is that it requires much smaller supply chains (if you already happen to have access to a biosphere), compared with contemporary machinery. Just a handful of plant species will do in a pitch, while for modern electronics, you want access to dozens of elements which then have to be processed in very specific conditions, so your supply chain will run all over the globe.
>However, at finite tech levels, mechanical and electrical machines are much easier to replace than flesh.
Yes, but...
One interpretation of cyborg is: Biological organism who has permanently implanted mechanical/electrical parts.
One argument I've heard against doing this is: Anything complex enough to e.g. need an operating system has bugs and vulnerabilities and winds up needing frequent updates (for security patches, if nothing else). And, some of those patches include mistakes... (remember CrowdStrike earlier this year?) Do you _really_ want this _implanted_ in your body, except in a case of dire need?
I'd be interested in the opinion of readers here. There are three ways people argue against Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense:
1. His political views (women shouldn't serve in combat roles)
2. His experience (he hasn't run a big organization)
3. His immorality (he was divorced for adultery twice and was at the very least a drunken lecher in the 2017 incident in the police report).
I am not interested in what you think about 1 and 2, but I am in (3). He was not charged with any crime, and probably did not commit any. Yet what he did was bad, most people think. Should this matter to his nomination?
Absolutely not.
1) It has no relation to what he's doing.
2) Going into those details incentivizes a culture of raking into people's lives to find disqualifying details.
3) Even worse it incentivizes people to use such details as blackmail to keep officials under control.
It's not related to his job; let the legal system handle it. If he's not been convicted and isn't jail, he's available to work. Unless it relates to his work, I don't care what kind of person he is.
> Even worse it incentivizes people to use such details as blackmail to keep officials under control.
People are going to do that anyways though. Having that kind of dirt under wraps actually makes them significantly more of a liability. If the details are public, it obviously can't be used to blackmail them.
Those aren't the only "ways people argue against Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense." For example, it's been noted that he successfully lobbied Trump to pardon convicted war criminals while discussing their cases on FOX news without disclosing his role in the proceedings.
I take that to be a combination of 1 and 3 - policy disagreement about whether murdering innocent people is bad, and immorality about his vested interest (I didn't even know about the latter).
Maybe there's more to the pardoning convicted war criminals thing than how I described it ... but I doubt it.
Yea and for me that one is the most obviously disqualifying! I mean WTF, honestly.
I disagree with him on point 1 but a policy disagreement is not disqualifying.
Point 2 is quite salient to me but hasn't been to American voters for years now so I guess I've just given up on it. In my version of a rational world it would be a serious argument against putting someone in charge of something as large and complex as the Department of Defense. But that attitude now is about as relevant as wanting rotary telephones to come back.
Point 3 is not great but not yet disqualifying for the position. I will not be amazed if more such things come to light and if they resemble that police report then this answer could change.
Honestly, post-#MeToo, this makes me root for him.
They decided any accusation from a woman has to be believed. Well, the more guys who get nominated despite true accusations, the less power false accusations have (and I work very hard to limit my interactions in the workplace, so there won't be any true ones against me).
Is sexual harassment a real problem, perpetrated by real male bad actors? Of course. You don't think the guys who took my money in third grade are going to grow up to take what they want from women? But, look, at least part of the point of lowering the bar for these accusations is to throw some men out to make room for women, who rarely have accusations against them. Ah, but what about accusations against the innocent, you ask? Why is that so many women have to have their careers sacrificed for men, they answer.
Well, you turned gender relations into a zero-sum game, feminists--don't be surprised when we play it too. Enjoy your sub-replacement birth rate and incel groypers.
My own opinion is on Substack, but I wanted to hear from other people. https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/hegseth-is-not-fit-to-be-secretary
What hasn't gotten a lot of attention is that Hegseth concealed the incident and its 20-page police report from the Trump transition team, who apparently are angry at him now. Thus, beyond the sexual immorality there *was* blackmailing potential, and he has revealed ingratitude, disloyalty, and, since it was bound to come out anyway, stupidity.
The stats on what fraction of married people commit adultery are all over the map -- I just checked -- but overall I came away with the impression that most stats indicate it's very common, and more common for men than for women. My life experience is in line with that. Given that this particular form lapsed impulse control is quite common for men, I think it makes sense to downgrade it greatly from Proof Positive of Being a Sleazebag.
When people talk about immorality, why is it they're so often talking about sex? There are many ways to be unkind and unfair to our fellow human beings: lies, abandonment, exploitation, stealing of ideas or belongings, harsh attacks, failure to keep secrets, etc etc. All of these things are worse to do to a spouse than to a casual acquaintance. Without knowing which if any of these other ways of being "immoral" the man inflicted on is wife, I don't think it makes much sense to judge his morality as a spouse based on info we have about his being immoral in one out of many realms of behavior.
Also, you are not going to find many people who have not behaved quite badly to a family member or relationship partner. I sure have. What, you haven't? It is not reasonable to look for someone who is lily white, especially since it is hard to find someone competent to do high-level jobs in government. And I think the correlation between whether somebody has is sexually unfaithful and somebody is irresponsible in their job is very low.
>And I think the correlation between whether somebody has is sexually unfaithful and somebody is irresponsible in their job is very low.
I think I've read something analogous about how teaching critical thinking in one domain turned out not to transfer (well?) to other domains. So what you wrote sounds very plausible.
I understand why you’re asking it this way, but I’m not sure that you can divorce the three issues altogether. If he were a clearly highly-suitable choice (i.e. he had good views about how to run the military and seemed likely to be able to implement them effectively), it might make sense to overlook some bad or immoral choices he made in his personal life. Conversely, if someone doesn’t seem particularly well-qualified, I think it may be fair to ask that they at least be a good person.
His views are aligned with his prospective employer and that's what matters. He's objectively a good candidate given what Trump wants.
The fact that you don't like what Trump wants just means you want an ineffective candidate because you are against Trump. Not a problem in itself, but it's just not germane to the point of this discussion.
Trustworthiness matters and adulterers are not trustworthy - full stop. And beyond that, adultery is bad thing. Is it really too much to ask for us as a society to say, "you do this, you're not working at the highest levels of government?"
I feel like Richard Hanania and Richard Spencer are like black conservatives in the 1980s.* Telling their followers "pull your pants up. Don't commit crimes. Put down the cocaine. Don't have kids out of wedlock. Don't cheat on your spouse. Stop blaming all your problems on slavery and take some responsibility." Even Nick Fuentes is joining this group now:
"Is it so much to ask for just like clean white people, clean intelligent white people to run everything? And honestly, I feel like you are more likely to get that with Democrats these days than with Republicans. I know you get one tranny and you get some other freaks,"
https://x.com/FuentesUpdates/status/1859088113425150136
*I say 1980s conservatives because back then the stereotype was that black conservatives were lawyers, college professors, guys in suits. Now it's some washed-up MMA guy with an 85 IQ.
Yeah, the Thomas Sowell/Bill Cosby types. (Hopefully nobody finds any dirt on Sowell. He seemed like a good guy.)
It is pretty funny to watch Elite Human Capital, as Hanania puts it, defect to the Democrats and the GOP turn into the Idiocracy Party.
As for the adulterers--well, I've turned to the dark side, so I no longer care. But if you actually wanted officials of probity and judgement--theoretically if they've done one bad thing they may do others. People who have committed one crime are more likely to commit others.
<Trustworthiness matters and adulterers are not trustworthy
Something like half of married adults are unfaithful at least once. So can we permanently delete these people from the ranks of people we can trust? I have plenty of acquaintances who have cheated in a relationship but whom I have found to be quite trustworthy when it comes to carrying through on things they told me they would do, keeping my secrets, paying me back money I have lent them, etc. My experience is that most people are very trustworthy in some areas and not very trustworthy in others, where they are sort of a mess. Have you really found in life that people's trustworthiness is a trait that is consistent across many domains, and with most people the person deals with? And you -- are you really equally trustworthy in all domains? Or are you maybe trustworthy about keeping somebody's secrets, but a lot less trustworthy about meeting deadlines you said you would, and maybe intermediate in how honest you are in job interviews?
And sometimes people learn from previous behavior and change how they approach life. Losing a beloved spouse because you cheated on them may convince you to never cheat again. The rule that "once a cheat, always a cheat" is probably more true than not, but like all "rules" in social sciences, it's very far from universal.
Oh, Alexander. I want to be mad at you, but I can't be, you are just so charmingly constantly desperate to be perceived as a rung higher on the social ladder than your native circumstances.
Yes, everyone beneath you is trashy 85 IQ having babies and not having careers, but you are up there with the cool classy kids, or at least that is the place you *should* be, given that you are so smart and classy yourself.
I eat at McDonald's, I shop at Walmart, I watch true crime documentaries, and I haven't worn a suit in years.
What I'm not doing is running for office while highlighting my low-class traits, appealing to low-class identity politics, and then wondering why high-class people aren't voting for me.
"Yes, everyone beneath you is trashy 85 IQ having babies and not having careers"
I previously told you I'm pro-natal, pro-eugenics, very opposed to that kind of mentality.
Your book looks interesting. I’m going to download load it.
> Is it really too much to ask for us as a society to say, "you do this, you're not working at the highest levels of government?"
Yes, yes it is.
I disagree that adulterers are generally not trustworthy just because they fail at being trustworthy when it comes to one specific thing. No one is perfect. Looking for the perfect person for a job does not optimize for perfection (since it doesn't exist), it optimizes for the ability to fake perfection. I fear the imperfect human less than the perfect conman.
I'd rather have high standards for the Cabinet of the United States.
It's an interesting question. Are there many/any people who are sufficiently qualified to work those posts who are *also* morally clean by whatever specific standard we are using? Then you further crop the field by enforcing both party loyalty and connection to the administration. Then again by making sure they are at least reasonably presentable to the public (not a slob, able to publicly speak on issues, of the right social classes, went to the right schools, etc.).
It's a big country, maybe there are a few people like this. I have my doubts that there are enough to fill a cabinet. I have a really strong feeling that there are a lot of people who can sufficiently fake these things, such that the public wouldn't know. There's a value to appearing clean, even if not actually clean. Something like being a positive role model, or signaling that cleanness is good.
So I guess I would ask you, if you had to choose. Would you prefer someone that is morally good but lacking in other areas, or someone who has the other considerations and fakes being morally good?
That's likely the real choice here. I put very little value in faking being morally good, so the choice gets clearer for me.
I don't see how "high standards" and commiting adultery is incompatible.
I'd be fine with having an incorrigible skirt chaser who is honest in high level meetings about what he thinks and doesn't think and what he knows or doesn't know; whose word you can trust; who holds himself to a high standard when it comes to skills in his field. And it just isn't true that skirt-chasers are invariably low in these other areas. In fact I'm pretty sure that how prone someone is to drunken hookups has very little predictive power regarding these other areas of performance.
1960 mainstream view: Character matters--even if you are very good at your job, we don't want you working at this company if you're an adulterer, a homosexual or other sexual degenerate, a drunkard, or a non-churchgoer.
1990 mainstream view: The work matters--if you're good at your job, we don't care that you're in a polyamorous relationship, a BDSM relationship, that you're gay or trans, an atheist or Wiccan or some other oddball religion. Just bring your A game to work.
2020 mainstream view: Character matters--even if you are very good at your job, we don't want you working at this company if you're a racist, sexist, religious fanatic, anti-feminist, or vote the wrong way.
Good points, and good historical summary!
I strongly prefer the 1990 mainstream view.
The 2020 mainstream view actually highlights the ways Woke imitates some of the more unsavory aspects of religions: Intolerant of heresy, sometimes of even mild unorthodoxy (look at the people cutting off ties with family members who applied their 1/300,000,000th of a decision about the election in a non-Woke way).
HOW ABOUT PRIGS, THOUGH? Do I have to have prigs at my workplace?
Adultery (and workplace relations) stopped mattering when Bill Clinton skated for it. Even if you wanted to, I don't see it becoming a big deal in politics ever again.
John Edwards still washed out for it in.2008.
Yeah, I think this is the real answer. Adultery just doesn't matter anymore since roughly 1998. The move away from shared consensus reality probably means in general "character" is a pretty low-saliency position for policy candidates, but adultery in specific stopped being one back in the day.
O tempora, o mores, no? Adultery and divorce seem to no longer be considered particularly immoral.
Go to reddit and you'll see atleast one particular bubble where cheating is considered a horrible crime. On every subreddit where relationships are even remotely a topic cheaters are tantamount to demons in human skin. Nearly as bad as conservatives.
Part of the Matt Gaetz scandal (which I have avoided reading up on, I'm getting enough by osmosis) is that the alleged underage sex partner/part-time prostitute he allegedly paid for was allegedly recruited off a sugar baby site.
So if you have 17 year olds actively deciding that by all they're being told by society/peer groups that having rich(er) older guys funding your lifestyle in return for companionship is okey-dokey, and that heck no it's not immoral earnings for whatever company or guy sets up such a website and handles the introductions between the babies and the daddies, I think we're past the point of "oh no a married guy had an affair and got divorced over it!!!" as shocking to the point of discrediting him for a job. The Ashley Madison affair was back in 2015 and the website is still going strong, so there are a lot of people who should be getting fired from their jobs if this is the moral standard:
https://www.ashleymadison.com/en-ie/
It's not adultery, you prude, it's "married dating".
I don't approve, but I've been told that I should not judge sex workers and that a book for teenagers in a school library having a paragraph about "you can do sex work to pay for your hormone drugs for your transition" is no big deal, it's only a paragraph, why get het-up about it telling 15 year olds that prostituting themselves is an option? (actual exchange elsewhere), so clearly I am in the minority and a wrong-thinker about modern morality.
Matt Gaetz is terrible for unrelated reasons. The underage girl scandal is the same as Al Capone's tax evasion.
I mean, he's terrible for other reasons, but the whoring habit isn't exactly an indication of sterling character, either.
For the Trump administration, see John N-G's answer.
For a candidate for a normal administration, the question would be how predictive moral failings unrelated to his office would be for moral failings in his office.
I think that this relationship is complicated. Sometimes being a serial adulterer can be indicative of being narcissistic, which in turn might change the likelihood of them deciding to let their mob reneg the election outcome. Other times, it is roughly orthogonal to it: for all the sexual misconduct Clinton might have done, he certainly did not try to coup his way out of impeachment.
The juxtaposition of Clinton and W is frustrating for those of us who want to believe politicians' character matters. As best I can tell, Bill Clinton is a genuine sleazeball--chasing every skirt in sight, screwing a summer intern in the White House...who was a quite successful president. As best I can tell, W is a pretty admirable human being--overcame alcoholism and appears to have been faithful to his wife and good to his kids, loyal to his friends, etc.--whose presidency was a train wreck.
Apologies for sidestepping your question but his advocacy on behalf of people convicted of war crimes is another reason to argue against him. (Maybe you consider this under #1 but I think it stands out and is more directly corrosive to the military.)
Experience and policy views would be the top priorities. Means and motive. Morality is a comparative sideshow unless we're talking someone who moonlights as a serial pyronecrophiliac or something.
Since this presumably doesn't pique your interest, I'll leave it at that.
...Actually, something occurred to me on the morality point.
One of the reasons to prefer people who are "moral" in personal conduct is that they demonstrate at least some level of immunity to blackmail and corruption. If I'm a Real Live Bad Guy and I want to take control of your government official, I can search his history for character flaws - sex, drinking, gambling, and greed are the classics - and entice him with something in those. Bonus points if I can get him to engage where I can record it and then use publication as threat. This is something you want to be really careful about in people with authority to decide how a third of a people get physically defended.
Hegseth apparently has sex and drinking problems. The past incident is public history, but there might be other incidents that aren't yet public, and it may be possible to lead him into more. So one big question here will be whether he's shaken all that off.
Another possibility is that Trump intends Hegseth as an opening offer in negotiation, expecting to be "persuaded" with someone he's more serious about.
"Hegseth apparently has sex and drinking problems."
Apparently, or "the media dislikes him and is painting him in the worst light"?
"The past incident is public history, but there might be other incidents that aren't yet public"
Possibly, but "maybe he did something we don't know about yet" would be broad enough to tarnish anybody nominated by any president of any party. Maybe I have a back garden full of the graves of murdered tramps, who can say?
(That's tramps as in hobos, not tramps as in dissolute women, by the way).
I *did* say "apparently". :-)
"Maybe he did something we don't know about" could be abused for witch hunt-y reasons, yes. But it could also be used to justify looking more closely, without prejudice. This is what I'd expect good-faith vetters to do. At the same time, I can understand being suspicious of whoever'll be put in charge of vetting.
I don't think marital infidelity, promiscuity, sexual kinks, cannabis use, or heavy drinking are rare or shocking enough to be useful for blackmail. You need other kinds of stuff: actual crimes, psychiatric hospitalizations, or maybe a very stigmatized sexual kink.
Sure, not just any character quirk will do. Thirty years ago, "gay" would probably have been enough. And now, "smoked weed" is increasingly a nothingburger. OTOH, cocaine is still on the blackmail menu, along with heroin and anything stronger. All these things will be a function of the times.
Or the person. Infidelity can still matter if the candidate values a reputation of being a faithful spouse highly enough. A Hegseth might not care as much. A Santorum would.
So does the position. Defense (along with Energy, State, Justice, and Homeland Security) routinely see a lot of secret information that we would very much prefer not fall into enemy hands, which means getting people who aren't easily bribed with sex, alcohol, drugs, etc. This factor can also burn an otherwise sterling member of American society (e.g. someone whose spouse has a lot of family in another country).
"So does the position. Defense (along with Energy, State, Justice, and Homeland Security) routinely see a lot of secret information that we would very much prefer not fall into enemy hands, which means getting people who aren't easily bribed with sex, alcohol, drugs, etc. "
The problem with this is idea is that you don't "bribe" people to turn them into spies, you get them to commit these acts and blackmail them with the threat of this knowledge coming out and damaging their reputation. At this point, it's hard to imagine that "SECDEF Hegsdeth was on a bender and picked up a random woman" constitutes any real damage to his reputation, at this point.
(1) I am speaking hypothetically, and (2) hypothetically, it is *definitely* possible to entice someone to turn corrupt by approaching them with the right type of offer in the right way.
I don't know Hegseth nearly well enough to know how easy it might be to lever whatever proclivities he might have, but I think we can be sure that there are professional people looking. From multiple nations. I'm hoping our professionals are driving any decisions we make.
Hypothetically, possibly, but again this isn't how it works in the real world. Hegseth is not nearly as much of a concern, as say, Adam Schiff was.
It *is* how it works in the real world. Though possibly not how you're imagining it. If you're in some position of authority, you could get befriended by someone who just comes off as good people, maybe buys you a drink at the bar, chats good naturedly, sympathizes with you, offers to revisit it later. He does you a favor; you do him one back; all the while, you're talking about life, work, etc.
Once you're cozy enough, he whispers a bit conspiratorially that he knows a guy who could solve that problem you say you've been having. (Or that problem he can see you're having though you didn't say anything.) If he'd come up to you on the very first night and said "OH HAI, do you like sleeping around??", you'd very likely balk. It has to be slow. Done right, you'd never realize he'd recognized you days earlier and knew you go to that bar regularly; you thought it was a chance thing.
This might seem very Hollywood to you. But think about it: have you ever imagined what life would be like if you were a known senior government official? How many phishing emails do you imagine they probably get?
I don't give a damn about the sexual behavior of people in government unless they are actively harming other people in the process of getting laid. I don't think ability to refrain from infidelity and "drunken lechery" are any better correlated than ability to stick to a diet is with honesty and conscientiousness on the job. If only it were so simple.
"I don't give a damn about the sexual behavior of people in government unless they are actively harming other people in the process of getting laid. I don't think ability to refrain from infidelity"
Um...huh? What kind of definition of "harm" are you using where infidelity doesn't harm anyone???
The defences of infidelity in these comments are extremely disturbing. "They all do this, he just got caught"? Fine. "Every other possible pick is corrupt in a different way"? Fine. "Post-Clinton Democrats don't have a leg to stand on to complain"? Fine. "Infidelity is not that bad actually"? Utterly fucked up.
The lack of empathy for victims of it here is astounding.
No, infidelity is really bad, and yes it does harm to the spouse. On the other hand, there are many ways to deeply wound a spouse or a friend: lies, abandonment (real or just emotional), exploitation, stealing of ideas or belongings, harsh verbal attacks, failure to keep secrets, etc etc. Seems like about half of men are unfaithful at least once. And then there are spouses who are harmful in other ways on the list. Once you add in all those other ways to wound your spouse terribly, you're down to a really low percent of married people who haven't been cruel and awful to their spouse at least once. My point isn't that infidelity is no big deal, it's that it's common, as are the multiple other ways to harm a spouse. It's stupid to elevate sexual infidelity above the other ways somebody breaks their promise to love, honor and cherish their spouse. Actually I think it's the least relevant one, because we don't have to worry about this guy humping people in an important meeting, but he could do some version of any of the others I named.
Fat people are more likely to work low-income jobs.
Yes, well, there are quite a few confounds buried in that correlation.
Might having a drinking problem lead to being less reliable on the job?
Probably makes it more likely he will be unreliable, but not a great deal more lkely. There are many high-performing people with terrible alcohol habits who confine their drinking to non-work hours. Is there evidence beyond the "drunken lechery" incident that he has a drinking problem?
Yeah, "got drunk at a party and acted like an ass once" seems like very weak evidence of a serious drinking problem.
I don't associate the military with chastity or fidelity, and I believe the addition of women to the ranks has not changed that whatsoever, nor do I think that the women have sought to. Kind of the opposite.
The big military-only town in my state is known as a "cesspool" for a reason, though it only occasionally attracts notice when the dysfunction rises to homicide.
I don't have any opinion about the rest. I would guess that the military is a huge ship that steers itself, and that the defense secretary is probably not particularly one of the icebergs.
ETA: I am also certain that there are thousands of better, abler men, of course, to take the role - but that may just be my personal aversion to narcissists surfacing.
My nihilistic attitude is that if the People elected Donald Trump despite his doing as bad or worse, they have demonstrated it should be acceptable for his appointees too.
Exactly. The people who voted for Trump knew exactly what they were buying. They knew that he would value personal loyalty over integrity or character in his picks. Being considered beyond the pale by every moderate is an asset in that regard, because it means that his picks can not 'defect' to the moderates.
The older I get, the more I realize that most (maybe all) of the people who rise the to level to be considered for major appointments or positions have done things that I would find somewhere between distasteful and evil.
If we knew the private histories of the last 10 people to fill that role, would we find him to be better, worse, or the same? My gut would be about the same. Even illegal activities seem pretty common. The reason we don't know about these things seem to rarely be because they don't exist, but instead some combination of good skills at keeping secrets and good skills at coverups.
There's an argument to be made that being good at keeping secrets and being well-connected enough to get a good coverup are skills relevant to many high level jobs. I struggle with the notion that we want to reward that behavior, though. So I find myself instead asking "would this person be good at the role" instead of "is this a good person who I would also like in the role."
Give yourself a few more years and you may realize that most (maybe all) people in general have done things that you would find somewhere between distasteful and evil. You just don't hear about them.
There’s an email phishing scam that works on the assumption that we’re all guilty of strange porn habits.
+1
To be fair, the fact that we know about it means that he failed to cover it up, so that's a point against him.
Yes, sloppy; and apparently not having people's esteem enough so that they enable his vices, even his "victim" who liked him well enough to go back to his room in order to sleep with him.
He obviously inspires vendettas.
Some would say there are national security implications, I suppose.
As for the alleged victim, I think that has less to do with the guy's personal failings and more to do with "yippee, I can get money and my fifteen minutes of fame by spilling the beans to all the scandal sheets!"
Every damn tabloid and supermarket rag depends on stories from "friend of, family member of, close associate of, former schoolmate of, cousin of dog-groomer of" celeb to fill the pages with trashy attention-grabbing headlines.
Look at Meghan Markle and her dad, who couldn't let a day go by without running to the media with another story of how she had turned her back on her poor old father now she was rich and famous. I personally don't like the woman, but I think it says more about her money-grubbing family that they'd sell her out like that than it does about what her character may be like.
An old Americanism for this is "kiss and tell". Does it also apply on the other side of the pond?
As a post-Clinton democrat, I feel it would be hypocritical of me to raise that issue. Has he done anything stupid since 2017? Would any of this affect his job performance?
Some would say Clinton's job performance was not affected by his skirt-chasing, and to an extent it is really Ken Starr's fault that the nation was subject to such tawdriness about the president ever "entering the discourse". I mean, as a conservative I am wholly sympathetic to the latter view. Take care with thoughts as well as deeds ...
However, it does seem to me to have damaged him as a post-president. It's cool he made friends with GHWB; that's never a bad thing, to diminish the importance of politics, symbolically. They oversaw that typhooon relief. But overall, he has been so muted. And obviously he made a Faustian bargain with Hillary. No, I don't think she's the devil! But his supposed excellent political instincts and skills, went toward stepping back and elevating her in a way that perhaps he ought to have been sceptical of. Though I suppose he would have loved being First Husband. Still, how much of all that goes back to Monica Lewinsky? And since some people choose to blame Hillary for Trump's success, connect the dots to his sexual incontinence. And the press for hanging it out there for the public to view.
I mean, she stood by him through all the cheating, only fair for him to try to help her career in turn. A few more people knocking doors in Wisconsin and she might have very well been first woman president.
I think they had an open marriage (maybe she decided to put up with infidelity because she could ride his coattails, maybe she was gay and needed a beard, maybe both), but that's going to be very hard to prove.
Actually, if you see it as a political alliance, it's not even unethical, really.
What do you mean by "wrong"? That he shouldn't have been impeached? I tend to trust the process--since the House at the time had felt that he deserved impeachment, I don't argue with it. I did not then, nor do I now, think he should have been removed from office, which is the basis for my not wanting to focus too much on the non-job related shenanigans that some Trump appointee may have gotten into.
I have since come to the conclusion that Clinton's extramarital affairs did not matter, although is lying to the American public about it did. Notice that one of these things is job-related, and the other one isn't ("the cover up was worse than the crime"). Therefore, I conclude that it would be hypocritical of me now to hold a Republican's non-job related behavior relevant in my opinion of them.
Heh. Fair enough.
Only if you actually felt you were wrong about Clinton. That assumes a lot of facts about his defenders that are not in evidence.
I may post this later in the Wellness Wednesday thread in the subreddit, but I was wondering if anybody here has had experience shifting from "smart but lazy" to "smart and productive" as your overall lifestyle. I've had some success treating iron deficiency, starting atomoxetine (I have contraindications to stimulants/modafinil), losing weight, and adding a significant amount of regular outdoor running to my daily schedule, but I'm not sure if there's other high yield changes to try. I did a 6 month stretch of ACT therapy, but found no benefit and noticable downside from my boss observing that I was out of the office for a couple hours on a weekly basis.
I would like to cut back significantly on unstructured internet/reddit surfing and replace that time with independent study on type theory/compilers and interesting functional programming side projects as part of a long process to upskill and transition from data plumber to a research engineer role. I find that when I am able to sit down and start a task that involves deep logical thought, it's mildly unpleasant the first 10-15 minutes, but I settle into it and quite enjoy it after that point. Back in college this was much easier to do because of the structure around problem sets and having peers working at the same pace in an IRL community. I have even considered enrolling in a graduate program to get that structure back.
What strategies have you used to consistently commit more time to deep work and less time to web surfing or whatever your personal dopamine fix is?
I commented [in depth about this last week](https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-356?r=eho83&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=77776624), having oscillated a few times from smart but lazy to smart and productive, I feel like I'm finally on right track.
TLDR: I use commitment devices (mainly Beeminder) to prevent myself from using distracting sites and track time in deep work, I use content moderation software to block my most distracting sites (Cold Turkey Blocker + iOS blocks + deleting all my apps), try and be very healthy, and use a lot of the Cal Newport Deep Work style methods.
I don't have much to add to other answers except note that graduate school was very bad for me personally. Instead of adding structure, since my failure had limited impact on anyone except me, I let myself go completely. I've heard that this is also a pretty common problem with other people. So you may want to be very cautious about that approach
Some very much out-of-the-box advice I've written about elsewhere. Recognize that there are two competing "you"s inside your head. One is an animal, a primate, and he's the lazy one. He'd rather lie around free of hard rational labor while the other you imbibes content or otherwise wanders aimlessly inside the mind. This other "you" is the one you experience reality as. It's is the rational you--the one that wants to get things done. The key realization is that the primate-you is designed to operate inside a dominance hierarchy. So dominate him. He'll buck like a bronco. Just hold on until you've tamed him. Force him to concentrate. You must start by recognizing his independent existence. He's the one who orchestrates the muscles; you don't do that. He's the one who gets hungry, not you. Then stop sympathizing with him and start forcing him to do things your way. He responds very well to training and will initiate work on his own once trained to do it. He'll even work on things while you sleep. So separate yourself from the primate. Be his benign master. Then you can ride, and race, and dance as a team with you as the leader. Good luck.
I've been in the same boat. You can build systems to motivate yourself and keep you on-track, but if you can't motivate yourself to maintain the systems....well you're SOL.
A better approach is to get yourself locked in a situation where you really have no other choice than to be doing what you're "supposed" to be doing. College is an example of this: you can only procrastinate on problem sets so much before you start failing them and you flunk out. Flunking out is not an option, so you'll find that magically doing these problem sets isn't too hard.
(Also, make sure you actually want to be a research engineer. If you are smart but lazy, your brain will be very good at coming up elaborate excuses to get out of doing shit. "I want to be a research engineer, so I need to study type theory and functional programming, and I need to do it independently because it's expensive, but I can't focus, so I need to post on ACX to see if anyone has tips!". Maybe you just don't actually want to be a research engineer, and so can't get yourself to work towards that goal, but your brain knows that and uses the meme of "I want to be a research engineer" against you.)
My thinking on the research engineer front is that my favorite/most satisfying learning and productivity has been in abstract algebra and theoretical CS, but I don't like those areas enough to do a math PhD and I'm generally more productive in the workplace than I am studying independently, but I find my current work doesn't have the kind of abstract logical reasoning I enjoy. Research engineer might not be the right job title per se, but I want to be doing something that feels to my brain more like theoretical math proofs than my current role but still in a 9-5 environment with the structure of meetings/tickets that keeps me on track.
I've always found my productivity in math/CS extremely hard to sustain without the structure of a university or employment, but with that structure I enjoy and excel at it. The catch-22 I'm in is that to get back to that structure in something more abstract than my current data plumber role, I think I need to work with those topics some independently to be sure it's actually the right path/have some evidence to show for it.
I think biggest bang for my buck has been having a bullet journal where I write down To Do lists at a very detailed and minute level. By that I mean it's at the level of "draft email to so and so", or even "take out trash". I find forcing myself to break things down to very small steps makes them a lot less scary and leads to lots of check marks that keeps me motivated. This helps if it's something you have trouble starting and It feels good to see a page full of steps you took with checkmarks. For personal projects I try to define a very small step forward, and then add a new one after I finish it. Could be "review where we left off on python project" or do "flash cards for X" . It's also nice to have weekly goals and monthly reviews to remind yourself of what you are working on. I have also found beeminder helpful.
Content blockers; Beeminder; adherence to various little self-designed systems for staying on track.
Speaking as someone who is both lazy and, er, "unsmart," I find making public commitments with money a big incentivizer. Rather than continue with my typical desultory self-education, I enrolled in a graduate program (I am post-retirement). The formality of class deadlines has done wonders for my productivity. I feel more alive now than in years.
I did enroll in an automata theory course at a local university last spring and found I learned/studied more much faster than I had in years, but the commute etc impacted my day job negatively. I'm currently considering applying to master's programs with good programming language groups for fall 2026, but I need to save some more money first and would like to get some projects/study done first to bolster my application.
The difficulty is that the dollar cost and opportunity cost of these programs is substantial, even with going to cheaper EU programs and doing a US based internship. I'm not a likey candidate for a funded graduate program at a solid school at this point, so I'd be taking on debt or spending down some of my (substantial) retirement savings.
On the other hand, there is significant potential upside to the right program. If I can get solid experience and a publication or two in functional compilers/PL theory, a lot of interesting research engineer jobs I am not currently qualified for would open up.
Would remote education appeal to you?
I was admitted to Georgia Tech OMSCS but ended up deferring it for a year because I was fairly busy and need to think more about whether I want to enroll. They don't have as much theory etc coursework and have limited research opportunities for students, plus I find IRL education to be more motivating/structured than remote classes.
I'm still thinking about something like Coursera/open courseware to provide a bit of commitment and structure in the meantime. Another option might be to pay a grad student or adjunct as a biweekly tutor to provide some support/accountability/structure for self study.
The shallow answer is codewars.com. Do a challenge every morning.
For functional programming, you could do a lot worse than completing a challenge in Haskell, completing it again in Common Lisp, and then maybe one more time with my baby R. Tip: When you go to the kata library to pick your challenge for the day, you want "Sort By" to be "Positive Feedback" and "Progress" to be "Kata I have not trained on" and "Difficulty" to be wherever you're at, this will get you the best challenge for the skill level you want that you haven't seen yet.
The deep answer is pressure and deep rest.
The biggest problem with internet surfing is that it's not productive AND it's not restful. I never surf the net for an hour and then feel energized to jump back into work. Let me go take a 15 lie down or mediation and I'm more ready to work again than an hour of surfing the net.
Pressure also matters. Having too much to do forces you to focus.
That's another issue. I find now that I have to pay more attention to how much I sleep. I have a better feel now what I need to be productive the next day (roughly 8 hours unconscious).
1) This might be an unsatisfying answer, but just keep doing it. It's a muscle. Whatever you do, do it every day (or at least the same days of the week) so it's not even an option you pick, it's just your autopilot. Start small and build up over time.
2) If the random internet stuff is your poison of choice, there are loads of ways to add micro frictions to doing it (time limiters, site blockers, etc); yes you can just uninstall them but I've found the friction is often enough to get me back on track.
3) Don't try to be superman. I burned out and it was personally and professionally painful. I spent too long working every hour, then was dissatisfied with the rest of my life so carved out an hour to be "productive" at some stupid time of night (say between finishing work at 10PM and bed), but it was pointless and I learned nothing. Kids finally broke me out of the habit, now I end the day with proper relaxation after the kids are in bed and feel dramatically better for it.
I'm not entirely sure how much discipline is a muscle I can strengthen further by adding more work vs a muscle I'm at the limit of and would burn out if I added much more. I'm currently pushing myself to run more regularly in order to train for a half marathon in a few months, and I find that's taking a significant amount of my "make myself do something moderately unpleasant today" effort. Yet, running is a genuine energy boost and mentally restful.
I guess I'm coming to a general question of how exercise vs intellectual habit formation taxes me at a given time. Perhaps I should work on habit chaining or some other technique to reduce that load.
Yes, just keep doing it.
Ultimately, you have to force yourself to set aside time each day to do that thing you want to commit to. There's no simple way to do this if you're distracted or a natural procrastinator. I just finished my first novel. Although it will never see the light of day, it was a goal I set myself (for various reasons). At first, I had trouble just sitting down to write. And there were many days that I didn't. But the more often i wrote, the more often I'd find the need to sit down and write. So my formula is: force yourself to do something daily. Even if you can't keep up the daily schedule at first, you'll be thinking about that something. But keep trying to do it every day, if only for a few minutes. Eventually, you'll get to the point where you need to do it every day.
How does the proliferation of AI influence human specialization in trades or skills, such as engineering, medicine, or other professions?
Deeply contingent on how quickly and deeply capabilities develop, cost of energy, and if deep learning continues to work well in robotic / embodied applications.
Most likely scenario: whatever hot 18-25 year old women find interesting will be the most valuable, developed skills in human history.
My gut is it increases the value of social skills and decreases the value of crystallized knowledge; i.e., it's bad for the sort of people who post here, myself included. But it's really hard to predict.
Great perspective. If you look at the historical trend in our civilization, there was a period that ‘speciality’ was an asset within a family. For instance, multiple generations were shoe makers or iron workers etc, or how to do trade. these were highly guarded trade secrets.
then speciality was institutionalized. People would go to universities, technical trade schools to learn to be an electrician etc.
would you say in this new chapter we’re moving towards democratization of such specialties? As you mentioned ‘crystallized knowledge’? I’m just wondering how the future mankind will look like with all the 500 years of human’s modern science at his disposal. What do they focus on in their day to day life.
Trying to please other people and jockey for social status, like we evolved to do.
Yeah, I don't like it either.
Are you asking for opinions? I think it will increase it, as has almost all work related technology.
A great conditional probability problem I saw on LessWrong this week: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7TYdQ34KxTBmA734v/a-very-strange-probability-paradox
Which of the following is bigger?
A: The expected number of rolls of a fair die until you roll two 6s in a row, given that all rolls were even.
B: The expected number of rolls of a fair die until you roll the second 6 (not necessarily in a row), given that all rolls were even.
(This wouldn't be worth asking if the answer were A.)
B seems intuitively correct since it lets you continue a 6 streak by keeping 6 roll #1, whereas A makes you restart your 6 streak as soon as you get any non-6 roll after 6 roll #1. I might be misinterpreting A and B though.
> A makes you restart your 6 streak
Wouldn't this intuition suggest A, the expected number of rolls till you get two 6s in a row, should be bigger?
Oh you're right, I misread the question entirely. Time to read your link.
TL;DR B is bigger because of trials that have non-consecutive 6s but hit an odd before ever getting consecutive 6s; they pad the expected value for B but get thrown out of the average for A.
...
OK so say you do a lotta trials. You want to examine the list of trial outcomes to figure this question out.
Once you hit a 6, there is a 1/6th chance of immediately hitting another 6, a 3/4ths chance of getting an odd before another 6, and a 1/12th chance of getting some other evens and then a 6. For that third possibility, the same probabilities apply once you keep going after the second 6.
So out of 144 trials that get to at least one 6 before crapping out (i.e. rolling a 1, 3, or 5), you have these buckets (buckets 3-5 are all extensions of the third possibility above):
1. Get two consecutive 6s - 24 trials
2. Crap out with only one 6 - 108 trials
3. Get another non-consecutive 6 then crap out - 9 trials
4. Get some evens, then two consecutive 6s - 2 trials
5. Get a second, and then a third, non-consecutive 6 and still going - 1 trial
The trials that crap out before getting a second 6 aren't relevant to either expected number. So bucket 2 doesn't affect either - only the remaining buckets (with 36 trials) go into either average.
When you figure the values of A and B - you are taking the expected amount of time *among trials that fit the condition*.
For measuring A, you are averaging across buckets 1, 4, and some of the stuff in 5. 24 out of the 27 are in bucket 1.
For measuring B, you are averaging across buckets 1, 3, 4, and (all of) 5. 24 out of 36 are in bucket 1.
A seems larger because of the stuff in bucket 4 (where condition A is met one roll later than B) and especially bucket 5 (where condition A takes forever, long after B was satisfied). But when doing the expected values, those sum up to 3 out of every 36 relevant trials. A bigger effect is that 9 out of every 36 relevant trials - bucket 3 - increase the expected size of B, and don't even factor into the average for A.
You can do the explicit calculation, but there's intuition here that the first one allows you to get a longer streak of evens since you can roll the occasional six (so long as you're not doing two in a row) before the end.
(Otoh it does kill you one roll earlier if you used a six - it's not immediately obvious which effect wins out, so you do need to do the calculation)
That IS the intuition that suggests A is bigger, yes.
Hm, I got the directions mixed up. But up to 4 or 5 it actually makes B more likely (having to force the second last die to be 6 cuts your options more than having to restrict your first 2 or 3 rolls not to be 6), and since the overall average is ~3 it pushes the other way.
Then their proof is just wrong, right? The answer *is* A, because A is a subset of B. There is simply no way around that. If you roll dies until you have satisfied A, you have also necessarily satisfied B. It ultimately doesn't matter what calculations or arguments they have to "prove" the unintuitive answer; if they're saying the answer is B, that simply means that have made a mistake somewhere, either in their calculations or their assumptions.
Consider rolling until you get an odd and recording the sequences of rolls. An A-sequence is one which has two 6s in a row, and the A-value is the number of rolls until the second 6 in a row. A B-sequence is one which has two 6s, not necessarily in a row, and the B-value is the number of rolls until the second 6. We want to compare A = (sum of A-values) / (number of A-sequences) with B = (sum of B-values) / (number of B-sequences).
There are three cases:
1. There are zero or one 6s in the sequence. We don't care about these.
2. There are two 6s in a row (and possibly other 6s). These are A-sequences and also B-sequences.
3. There are at least two 6s, but not two in a row. These are B-sequences but NOT A-sequences.
In case 2 the B-value is always less than or equal to the A-value, which reduces B as compared to A. (But most of the time they are equal, because shorter sequences are so much more common than longer sequences. In fact, more than half of these sequences begin (6, 6)).
In case 3 the sequences tend to be longer than the sequences in case 2 - indeed, the B-value is always *at least* 3: (6, 2 or 4, 6, odd). This ends up increasing B, and it happens that this more than makes up for the effect in case 2.
What would you say to a simulation demonstrating otherwise? See https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1y60kOZV63o3TI8bueYh8sb7_p-_Prc2V
This is just the code from the "quick verification" section of the linked article.
Thank you, I think I understand this now, and I retract my previous statement. However, my brain dislikes anything that is presented as a "paradox", because we're either describing something that is trivially not true and therefore should be outright dismissed, or something that is true and should therefore be described in such a way to make the explanation intuitive. So as a non-math person who could not follow much of the explanation in the article itself, this is how I would explain it to myself:
The condition in both scenarios ("given that all rolls were even") does not simply mean that we can assume that the die always lands on an even number. In both scenarios, most simulations will contain at least one odd number, but for the purposes of the results, those simulations are disregarded.
The key point is that given the constraints of each scenario's criteria, and the fact that we disregard any run containing an odd digit, the superficial odds against consecutive 6s actually works in its favor. Because it is both unlikely for any given simulation to not include any odd number, and unlikely for any given simulation to contain consecutive sixes within the first, say, six rolls, the large majority of consecutive sixes are ignored because they came after an odd digit occurred.
Conversely, because the rolling two sixes at *any* point in the sequence is much more likely, the even/odd constraint means that fewer of the simulations are discarded. What this means in effect is that it is much more likely for there to be a long-running simulation (longer than 6 rolls) that fulfills the fulfills the criteria for B than it is for A. These long sequences for A are so unlikely that they almost never happen, but they happen just enough for B that they drag the average sequence length up.
I ran the code with a couple modifications, and it showed that in scenario A, only 4.4% of the simulations contained only even digits, compared to 6.3% for scenario B. That ~2% difference is because of the longer runs that count in B's results, but which don't exist in A's results. It also showed that, if we run the simulations without discarding the odds, everything happens as expected. The A scenario (consecutive 6s) would average 42 rolls, and the B scenario (any 2 6s) averages 12 rolls.
From another comment in this thread, here's an explanation I found illuminating: "B happens whenever A does. But that also does NOT imply that the time to wait for a B is necessarily equal to or less than the time to wait for an A. One must also factor in how long to wait for the Bs that are not As, and since the (B-A)s take longer, they pull the B-average longer." That's basically what you're saying, but a bit more concisely, right?
Much more concisely, yes. I sort of intuitively got it after looking at the code, but was struggling to put it into words.
B seems to be obviously true, since you are only counting from the rolls between sixes, which I believe is equivalent to just rolling until you get a six (much more likely than rolling two sixes in a row).
Edit: Even given the alternative interpretation of the question where you count rolls from the start, I believe B is correct. You will encounter many more instances of B than A (it is a superset after all) and on average those instances will likely be shorter. But I have not read the linked explanation so perhaps something else is going on.
There are indeed two interpretations: you were assuming that you condition each roll on being even. But OP wants to condition on the whole sequence being even.
The two are not the same. The second way makes long sequence much less likely than short sequences, because a sequence of length 10 is discarded with probability 2^{-x}, while a sequence of length 1 is only discarded with probability 1/2. This introduces a length bias which is not there in your presumed interpretation.
You count from the beginning until you get two 6s. You might be missing the point of the problem: for the reasons you describe, it seems B should be smaller. It isn't!
Here's a kind of lemma, distilling the paradox (arising from the conditional probability part):
- What is the expected number of rolls of a three-sided die until we see the first 3?
- What is the expected number of rolls of a six-sided die until we see the first 6, given that all rolls were even?
Naively: a d6 with only even results is just a d3. The expected number of rolls to get a 6 is consequently 2. The expected number of rolls to get the second 6 is 2 more, for a total of 4.
Out of 4 rolls, there are 81 possible combinations (2222 2224 ... 6666). Of those, 9 + 6 + 4 have consecutive 6s (66xx y66x yy66 where x=2|4|6, y=2|4), and 6 + 2 + 2 have non-consecutive 6s (6y6x y6y6 6yy6).
Based on this definitely incomplete analysis, I gather that consecutive 6s arrive sooner, roughly 2x as soon, based on 19 vs. 10. The "intuitive" explanation is that there are so few possible numbers that the 6 rolls kinda get in each other's way.
But per the problem statement, consecutive 6s also count for B, no? I don’t see how the answer could be B if B includes all A.
In that case my intuition says that con-6s happen plenty often, and early (since there are only 3 possible values); non-con-6s happen *less* often (by a factor of almost 2!) and take longer to occur, so they "dilute" the total.
(My intuition admittedly would not have said this, had I not actually counted the occurrences for four rolls.)
Consider if the rolls didn't have to be even. Then consecutive 6s happen on 1/36 of every pair of rolls, instead of 1/9, and any time you roll a 6, there's a 1/6 chance of rolling another, and otherwise you're "blown" and the next 6 will count toward the non-consecutive column. It's intuitive to suspect that in, say, 7 rolls (expected number needed to get two 6s), non-con-6s will tend to happen before con-, and so the con-6s will dilute the low expected count for non-con.
Testing:
Non-con: 6y6xxxx 6yy6xxx 6yyy6xx 6yyyy6x 6yyyyy6 y6y6xxx ... = 162 + 108 + 72 + 48 + 32 + 108 + 72 + 48 + 32 + 72 + 48 + 32 + 48 + 32 + 32 = 162 + 2(108) + 3(72) + 4(48) + 5(32) = 162 + 216 + 216 + 192 + 160 = 946
Con: 66xxxxx y66xxxx yy66xxx yyy66xx yyyy66x yyyyy66 = 243 + 162 + 108 + 72 + 48 + 32 = 645
Now the non-cons have it - as we're probably used to with a fair die.
B says “not necessarily in a row”, which means when A happens, B happens too. I suspect people are parsing the wording in various ways that produce various results….
Possibly they are. Speaking for myself, I think that B happens whenever A does. But that also does NOT imply that the time to wait for a B is necessarily equal to or less than the time to wait for an A. One must also factor in how long to wait for the Bs that are not As, and since the (B-A)s take longer, they pull the B-average longer.
I like this concise and intuitive explanation. Thanks!
I feel like there's a lot of room here to quibble about how the original post chooses to interpret the "given that all rolls were even" condition, which appears to be where the confusing part arises.
Everyone seems to do this when they get an easy-looking difficult math question wrong. This question uses the standard interpretation of conditional probability, and it means here what it means in every question.
I mean... you're not wrong, that is what conditional probability means, but I do think there's some room for clarity when you say "given that all rolls were even". Yes, in a probabilistic sense that is reasonably interpreted as "given the set of all rolls sequences containing only even numbers" but obviously people are interpreting it as similar to "if you never rolled odd numbers". I'm not sure the minimum change you'd need to make to the original formulation to make it mean that instead, but I think it's pretty small. I think part of my objection is also that the distinction between what is meant and what most people think is something that really only applies for a pretty specific category of toy problems, or at least I can't come up with a good example where this would be an analogy to anything real.
(Part of me thinks that it's actually suspect to say "given that all rolls were even" because it sounds like the condition is really being applied at a sequence level more so than a roll level, but I don't find it totally compelling.)
The phrasing isn't mine, and I welcome suggestions on how this could be clearer. This is not meant to be a trick question! I found this a really cool and counterintuitive result and wanted to share it, and I think anyone who would appreciate it would be able to interpret it correctly, especially when explicitly told it's surprising.
I would maybe say "Given only sequences that do not contain odd values", or something like that. Or "Out of the sequences that do not contain odd values." I dunno, now I'm finding this pretty tricky, so I guess I can't blame the original author.
I seem to be worse at mathematical reasoning than I thought. Recently I was trying to figure out the following: 12 distinct objects to be arranged in four groups of 3, how many different ways are there to arrange the groups so that no two objects ever share the same group twice? I spent hours trying different approaches to figure this out from first principles (thinking "there's probably a simple formula out there, but I want to understand and solve this myself!") and kept getting overwhelmed and confused, losing track of what I was even trying to do and bring unable to hold things in my mind for long. Eventually I gave up and asked ChatGPT (3.5) expecting a quick solution...and it did so badly it was incredible. It gave me incorrect answer after incorrect answer, apologising over and over when I pointed out its mistakes, and after at least ten attempts I came away with virtually no insight at all. (At the end *I* said I suspected the answer was 3, and it said it agreed with me and also thought 3, which it had never said until then, but I have no confidence it knows what it's saying and it gave me no idea of how to prove that answer).
So three questions.
1. What is the answer? Why?
2. How simple should something like this be to work out from first principles? I still don't know if I was overcomplicating things, missing an obvious simple approach, or if the problem is actually a lot harder than it looks.
3. Can anyone confirm if GPT 4 does better on this problem? So far I have found ChatGPT consistently terrible at every single thing I actually want to seriously use it for. The only times it impresses me are when I'm playing around randomly, never when I have an actual purpose. So I've never had any desire to pay for the better version, which may or may not be a good or bad thing.
Thank you all. I'm pleased to learn the problem is much harder than I'd thought, so I wasn't stupidly missing something obvious. I'm still working through the many responses, and thank you again. I'm surprised that four arrangements are possible; I'd become about 95% convinced that only three were.
I can think of a simple and intuitive explanation for your specific case, but I can’t think of how to generalize to a more difficult case.
The simple explanation is that you can imagine there being at first 4 groups of objects (e.g. the Spoons, Knives, Forks, and Cups), and your goal is to find the remaining groupings where no two spoons/knives/forks/cups have to share a group again.
I.e. at first you have
(Spoon, Spoon, Spoon)
(Knife, Knife, Knife)
(Fork, Fork, Fork)
(Cup, Cup, Cup)
Let's call them the Spoon group, the Knife group, the Fork group, and the Cup group. You can keep one Spoon/Fork/Knife/Cup in each group without problems, but you gotta move the other 2 items to the other groups to satisfy the "can't share a group twice" rule. So in the case of the Spoons, I can keep the leftmost Spoon in the Spoon group and move the other 2 spoons to the Knife/Fork/Cup group.
However, I don't want to move 2 spoons to the same group. So my options are 1 to Knife and 1 to Fork (let's call it Knife/Fork), or Fork/Cup, or Cup/Knife, but not Knife/Knife, Fork/Fork, nor Cup/Cup. I have 3 options here, 3 Choose 2 / 3C2.
I.e. if I look only at my 2 spoons, I can distribute them over the remaining 3 groups like this:
(Spoon),
(Spoon),
(No Spoon)
or
(Spoon)
(No Spoon)
(Spoon)
or
(No Spoon)
(Spoon)
(Spoon)
So there's 1 way to have the 3 spoons together, and 3 ways to distribute the 2 "mobile" spoons over the remaining 3 groups (while keeping 1 spoon stationary since we don't have to move it). Altogether, there are 4 ways of distributing/grouping the spoons.
This is a useful method, because it allows us to answer questions like "What if 3 groups of 4 objects?" -- we can immediately tell the answer must be 1, because when we try to distribute 4-1 = 3 "mobile spoons" over the remaining 2 groups, we can't do it without doubling up. So the only valid grouping is the one where all the spoons are together: we can have
(Spoon, Spoon, Spoon, Spoon)
(Knife, Knife, Knife, Knife)
(Fork, Fork, Fork, Fork)
, but we can't have
(Spoon stuff stuff stuff)
(stuff Spoon Spoon stuff)
(stuff Spoon stuff stuff)
, because there simply isn't enough room to distribute all the Spoons.
However, this method doesn't help very much when you instead ask, "What if 12 groups of 5 objects"? This method would tell you there is 1 + 11 Choose 4 / 11C4, or 1 + 330, or 331 ways of distributing the objects... but that can't be right. That's just an upper bound, we still haven't accounted for the fact that, not only do we have to prevent objects from sharing their first grouping, we have to prevent them from sharing their 2nd grouping, 3rd grouping, 4th grouping, and so on.
E.g. if at first we group Spoon with Spoon, Knife with Knife, Cup with Cup, and so on... then in the next set of groupings, we might group Round with Round, Square with Square, Pointy with Pointy, etc. -- we not only have to avoid grouping the Round Spoon with the Square Spoon once we've done that once by grouping the Spoons together, but avoid grouping the Round Spoon with the Round Knife and Round Cup once we've finished grouping all the Round objects together. And I don't know how to account for that. Some of the 330 sets of groupings I calculated presumably mix together Round with Round multiple times instead of just once... but I don't know how to figure out which ones. 330 can't be right*. It's a tough problem, the general case**.
(*: For a start, each group requires pairing one object with 4 different objects it has never been paired with before. With 60 objects, the maximum number of different objects you can be paired with is 59, and so there can't be more than 14 different groupings before you run of fresh objects to group with. So 330 must be wrong.)
(**: And apparently it has a name! The Social Golfers Problem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_golfer_problem)
The combinatorial objects underlying this question are called Kirkman triple systems. Kirkman originally posed the problem for 15 schoolgirls going to school in groups of three, so that no two girls walk together more than once. They exist whenever the number objects is 3 mod 6, and not otherwise.
I'm sure that this problem has been studied, but I don't have a name or reference right now. But if you look at generalisations of Kirkman triple systems, you'll likely find something. Regarding question 2: traditional design theory doesn't have especially deep/difficult results but the proofs are often long and require either computation or lots of case-by-case analysis. There's a more recent approach using probabilistic methods (by people like Keevash, Kuhn & Osthus, and others) which features long and difficult proofs, and the results tend to hold only for very large numbers of points.
To add on, a quick Wikipedia search suggests the generalized variant of this problem is called the Social Golfers Problem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_golfer_problem
It's possible there is some clever simple analysis that solves the general problem, but it is definitely similar to research-level questions in combinatorial design (google e.g. "Steiner system" or "Triangle-free triple system"), so there is IMHO every justification to feel confused and overwhelmed.
It's likely there is a short ad-hoc explanation that works specifically for n=12, but of course that doesn't mean it is easy to find or obvious or reasonable to glimpse from first principles. My guess is that it would not generalize, and probably not reveal much about the underlying difficulty. For the record, my initial guess was 3 but the answer seems to be 4 (see my other comment).
To be honest, I don't think that this is an easy problem.
There are 12*11/2 unordered pairs of objects.
As an upper bound, each grouping will eat 3x4 pairs which can not be used in other groupings, so we should not have more than five groupings.
As a lower bound, one grouping will trivially fulfill your constraints.
What follows is my stream of consciousness, slightly edited for alignment purposes.
Note that I think I have a way to fit in three groupings, but give up before having considered all branches to their very end.
Suppose the first grouping is (without loss of generality, but slightly weird indices) {{a1, a2, a3}, {b0, b2, b3}, {c0, c1, c3}, {d0, d1, d2}}.
Then, the second grouping is (still without loss of generality -- each of the previous group members is spread out over three groups, with the last group containing none of them):
{
{b0, c0, d0}
{a1, c1, d1}
{a2, b2, d2}
{a3, b3, c3}
}
= Grouping three =
== Grouping three, first group ==
For the next grouping, the candidate pool for a1 is
{b0, c0, d0, b2, d2, b3, c3}. (Eleven initial candidates, minus two groupings noping two pairings makes seven candidates, checks out.)
Note how we have three candidates labeled 0 (because a does not go with 0), and three candidates labeled b (because 1 does not go with b). Let us call CH(x)=(number of candidates with the same letter, number of candidates with the same numerical index).
CH(b0)=(3,3)
CH(c0)=CH(d0)=(2,3)
CH(b2)=CH(b3)=(3,2)
CH(c3)=CH(d2)=(2,2)
I claim that c0 and b2 are basically still the same, I just swap the first grouping (assigning letters) with the second (assigning numbers).
Let us make three candidate sets,
{b0}=:X
{c0, d0, b2, b3}=:Y
{c3, d2}=:Z
The way I see it, we can make our first meaningful choice here.
The following combinations to pick two valid elements are there:
XZ (e.g. our group is {a1, b0, c3} or equivalently {a1, b0, d2})
YY
YZ
ZZ ({a1, c3, d2})
I am assuming that which element we pick in what set will not matter, *handwave*, mumbling ...without loss of generality...
== Grouping three, Second group, Case XZ ==
Suppose our first group is {a1, b0, c3}.
Then we might consider who gets assigned to that other member of Z, d2.
The seven initial candidates for that one were {b0, c0, a1, c1, a3, b3, c3}. Three of them are already in our first group.
The remaining candidates are: {c0, c1, a3, b3}. This means that we want one of {c0, c1} and one of {a3, b3}. Let us assume that picking c0 and a3 is general *handwave*.
== Grouping three, Third group and fourth group. Case XZ ==
So we picked {a1, b0, c3} (no d, 2) and {d2, c0, a3} (no b, 1). Each letter and index can only be missing in one group, so all of the remaining groups have to have one of d, b, 2, 1 each.
Consider a2, whose seven candidates were {b0, c0, d0, c1, d1, b3, c3}. Now we are down to {d0, c1, d1, b3}. We require b, so we pick b3. As we also require d and 1, d1 is the only pick left. So our set is {a2, b3, d1}.
This leaves the fourth group, let's see if it consistent. It seems that the rest is {d0, c1, b2}, which does not seem to collide.
== Case XZ - Grouping four ==
Let us reconsider the candidate set for a1:
{c0, d0, b2, d2, b3}
{c0, d0, b2} are all pairwise mutually-exclusive. So b3 is our only option.
However, because I failed to exactly identify the symmetry situation in grouping three, I have no idea which of {c0, d0, b2} are equivalent.
This is becoming a bit tedious, it might be better to first write a program to figure the solution out, then try to prove it. As it stands, I can say that for the XZ pick, you will not get to five groupings (unless I made a mistake).
Or perhaps there is a cleverer way to think about it?
First two things about the AIs:
- Yes, GPT 4.0 is much better than GPT 3.5 was. But chances are that the free version you used is actually using GPT 4.0.
- o1preview and o1mini are yet massively better than GPT 4.0.
I am not completely sure that I understood your problem correctly. This was my interpretation in terms of graph theory:
We consider the complete graph G=K_12 with 12 vertices. A triangle factor of G is a set of vertex-disjoint triangles in G, and a complete triangle factor is a triangle factor that uses all 12 vertices (i.e., consists of 4 triangles). You want to find a collection S of edge-disjoint complete triangle factors. What is the largest possible size of S.
Is this your question?
For this question, I'm >95% certain the answer is 5. Consider vertex 1. It has two neighbors in the first triangle factor, two different neighbors in the second triangle factor, and so on. Since there are only 11 neighbors available, the set S can have size at most 5. To actually construct a solution with 5 factors requires more patience than I have right now, but those things are usually quite easy, and we have a lot of slack.
I gave this question to GPT-4o, Sonnet-3.5-new, Gemini-1.5-Pro-002, o1-preview and o1-mini, and they all gave the correct answer 5. They all gave correct arguments that it can't be more than 5. (They all argued that you only have 66 edges in G and each factor uses up 12 edges, so only 5 factors fit in.) They all weaseled around giving an explicit construction for 5 factors, just like I did. :-)
But perhaps I misunderstood your question?
"Is this your question?"
Did my response to John R Ramsden make it clear?
Yes, I saw it. Then I had the right interpretation. And meadow.light apparently has written a computer program that computed 4 as the correct answer .
By exhaustive search it seems to be 4 (didn't double check the code though):
{1, 2, 3} {4, 5, 6} {7, 8, 9} {10, 11, 12}
{1, 4, 7} {2, 5, 10} {3, 8, 11} {6, 9, 12}
{1, 5, 8} {2, 7, 12} {3, 6, 10} {4, 9, 11}
{1, 9, 10} {2, 4, 8} {3, 5, 12} {6, 7, 11}
Oh thanks! Then I should downscale my confidence in such questions.
I'd have thought the answer must be at least 4. We can assume that in a given set {A, B, C, D} of sets each containing three objects the objects are labelled so that A = {1, 2, 3}, B = {4, 5, 6}, etc for sets C and D.
Then you can produce three more sets of sets by repeatly cycling every object from one set to the preceding one, e.g. the objects from B, C, D, A into A, B, C, D, and collectively all four of these sets of sets satisfy the conditions. (After four cycle iterations one returns to the starting state.)
Edit: Seeing demost_'s reply, I think with a suitable labelling the five solutions are:
{ 1, 2, 3} { 4, 5, 6} { 7, 8, 9} {10, 11, 12}
{ 4, 5, 6} { 7, 8, 9} {10, 11, 12} { 1, 2, 3}
{ 7, 8, 9} {10, 11, 12} { 1, 2, 3} { 4, 5, 6}
{10, 11, 12} { 1, 2, 3} { 4, 5, 6} { 7, 8, 9}
{ 1, 5, 9} { 2, 6, 10} { 3, 7, 11} { 4, 8, 12}
I see that I have not described my problem clearly at all. Thanks for the solution, but it's not the solution I was looking for and I can see how my phrasing was ambiguous. What I meant was that no two objects ever share ANY group twice. No two objects are ever together in a group more than once. The groups in each arrangement are not significant, they don't need to be named or distinguished, all the matters is that the objects are grouped by 3 each time.
So, here's Arrangement 1:
(1, 2, 3) (4, 5, 6) (7, 8, 9) (10, 11, 12)
Here is an Arrangement 2:
(1, 5, 9) (4, 8, 12) (7, 11, 3) (10, 2, 6)
And here is an Arrangement 3:
(4, 11, 9) (10, 3, 8) (1, 7, 6) (5, 2, 12)
Is there a fourth possible arrangement? I can't find one, but I can't convince myself there isn't one.
So to rephrase this in my own words, you are saying that:
An "Partition" is a division of the numbers {1, 2, ..., 12} into 4 sets each of size 3
Define a set of Partitions as "ascendian" if, for any x, y in {1, 2, ..., 12}, then x and y are in the same set for within most one Partition.
You want the largest possible set of ascendian Partitions?
Yes, I think that's right. Thanks.
Ah right, yes, I assumed the groups were distinguishable.
ChatGPT-4o: https://imgur.com/a/SFMgeap
It seems like it could be correct to me, and it does mention some stuff in relation that does seem to be real.
Looks wrong. At n=5 every number has been paired with 10 distinct numbers, so only 1 new partner is left for each (2 are required for a triple) - impossible.
There are examples for n=4 in this thread, so that's the answer.
That is so much higher than I would have guessed.
I've been spending a lot of time trying to understand the cultural narratives that drive the Israeli/Palestinian and Israeli/Islam conflicts.
My understanding is as follows:
Jews in Israel were refugees from Europe that had no where else to go after world war II, and part willing transplants part refugees after the Jews of the Middle East were no longer welcome after creation of Israel.
And the Palestinians, like many groups in the Middle East, were lied to and screwed over by colonial powers, but especially so because at the end of their mandate system they were going to be ruled by a Jewish dictator instead of one that shares their religion or tribe.
The history of Palestinian resistance is some combination of Algerian colonialist resistance (commit enough war crimes against the occupier, and they will go back to where they came from) and war over land. The first failed because Israelis have nowhere to go back to that would take them, and the second failed because the Israelis were militarily stronger, the reasons for which are complicated and don't much matter now.
Iran seems to think that the presence of autonomous Jews in the region is evidence the Muslims have fallen out of favor with God, and the first step to fixing that is kicking them out. And have funded a web of military groups to make that happen, mostly hezbollah but somewhat Hamas.
Palestinians have learned from the Jews taking land whenever they could that their goal is primarily to end up with all of the land
Israelis first learned that if they don't organize in self defense they will be killed off eventually, and that no state where that's not true is willing to take them. And from the second intifada that Palestinians interpret overtures of peace as signs of weakness and that the Algerian model of anti colonial resistance will work, eventually. And from October 7th that withdrawing from territory and giving it resources will result in military but not state building.
This is so, so messed up.
I wish Palestinians saw how counterproductive terrorism is. Israelis don't need more land. Palestinians do not have any realistic hope of getting control of all of British mandate territory. Every time arabs or Palestinians have tried to win land through war they ended up with less land. Now Israel has nukes. It won't be different next time.
Is there any way to, at the margin, do any of the following?
1) Support limiting Hamas' ability to kill any Palestinians who collaborate with Israelis to allow the possibility of nation building in Gaza, distribution of resources, etc.
2) Disincentivize at the margin the Israeli settlement project without compromising Israel's capacity to defend itself against Iran
I feel like everyone has acted completely reasonably given their historical and cultural and religious narratives, but that this has resulted in constant war and war crimes when spontaneous prosperity would be possible if everyone actually understood each other's motivations. I would say Iran's regime is an exception to this, but at some point the Catholics and Protestants stopped fighting, and it seems Hamas' strategy has lost a ton of support in Gaza after they spent twenty years diverting resources to build tunnels, then didn't let Palestinians in those tunnels so their martyrdom would punish Israel, and then all of Gaza was destroyed along with a significant chunk of the population, without moving closer towards destroying Israel at all.
I don't have an answer but I want to say that I appreciate you phrasing the question as clearly as you did. I agree with your perspective on this, and it's a shame that so many of the replies are getting caught up fighting the same old pointless battles instead of focusing on solutions, as you are.
If you're familiar with Scott's old post "Sort by Controversial", I think of I/P as the real life scissor. Nobody seems to be able to discuss it without losing their mind.
Where do you get "at the end of the mandate system they were going to be ruled by a Jewish dictator?"
First, "Jewish dictator" seems off in that Israel is a democracy whose leaders are elected by the citizens of Israel. Including a couple million Arab/Palestinian citizens of Israel.
And second, the planned end of the mandate system was a *partition* of Palestine, into a Jewish state ruled by elected presumably-Jewish leaders, and an Arab state ruled by Arabs. Possibly a series of Arab dictators; I think that was mostly up to them.
The Palestinians may have been screwed over by the Colonial powers from 1917-1947, or earlier if we count the Ottoman Empire as a colonial power. But in 1948, they were screwed over by the Arabs promising them a short victorious war followed by a Jew-free Palestine. And most of them seem to have enthusiastically consented to the screwing at the time.
"First, "Jewish dictator" seems off in that Israel is a democracy whose leaders are elected by the citizens of Israel. Including a couple million Arab/Palestinian citizens of Israel."
The Zionist project (at least for many/most Zionists) was a Jewish state on all the land of the British mandate. At the time the British mandate was like 10% Jewish, 90% Arab. With those demographics a Jewish state can't happen without either killing/expelling the Arabs, letting them stay as a ruled-over underclass (something like "Jewish dictator"), or mass immigration on such a scale so as to make the 90% into the minority - all of which would engender opposition from anyone.
In reality a mix of all three happened - the fact that, once you've whittled down the Arab citizenry to a minority, you give that minority equal rights, doesn't mean that the overall picture is the Arab population being treated according to our normal conception of human rights.
> or mass immigration on such a scale so as to make the 90% into the minority
That last option was obviously the goal. Those demographic comparisons always miss that the point of the Jewish state was not to be a solution for 600K jews who lived here at the time, but to 18M worldwide. If just a million jews went to israel-palestine instead of the US, and then other two million of those who ran away from the Nazis - there would have been a Jewish majority. And having somowhere to run away from the genocide to come - was Hertzl's point to begin with.
'living as a ethnic, religious minority in a democracy when your concept of political organization is land and family first, tribe second, and religion third, is like living in a dictatorship' is the frame I was implying.
Also the British promised everything to everyone at various times to get their support for various world wars and to maintain peace during the mandate system. All the other mandate places got an Arab state in the end, Palestinian peasants experienced Jews buying the land out from under them and kicking them out instead of letting them live off that land under a sharecropping system as they were used to since basically forever, and then grabbing half of the land for themselves in war. That sucks.
Am with you on everything you said, in general though.
I think any description of the Israeli side has to include:
- for many people, taking all of the land is a religious imperative (or at least justified because of religion). Even not-super-religious people, the story of the Jews being persecuted and then coming back and retaking the land has a pseudo-religious, almost mythological character. Like it's the arc of the moral universe bending towards justice and therefore Palestinians are in league with oppressors of Jews throughout history.
- I don't think the settlements can be explained as being about security, or about an extremist minority within Israel.
- this is a subject for a longer post but the settlements don't make Israel safer against Iran or anyone else, and it's no accident that October 7 happened with the most pro-settlement government in Israel's history
Yep, settlements are the elephant in the room.
Like, OP says that "Israelis don't need more land", but the fact is that... they are taking it.
FLWAB says that the October 7 attacks did *not* come from the places with settlements. Well, analogically, most attacks on Russian forces today do *not* come from Crimea. That doesn't mean that taking Crimea was a good way to avoid the war; it's the opposite of that. It just means that if you take over a part of someone's territory, it is more convenient for them to launch a counter-attack from a part you haven't taken over yet.
>this is a subject for a longer post but the settlements don't make Israel safer against Iran or anyone else, and it's no accident that October 7 happened with the most pro-settlement government in Israel's history
I don’t know: it wasn’t the part of Palestine that was getting settlements that did October 7th, it was the part that Israel forced all the settlers out of that did it. Seems like if you do an A B test comparing removing all settlers (Gaza) and letting settlement continue (West Bank), option B is a lot safer for Israel!
There's a lot of factors you can base your A/B testing on. I'll just note that on October 7, the border with Gaza was lightly defended and a lot of IDF resources were deployed in the West Bank to protect settlers (who, in many cases, are actively instigating fights with Palestinians).
So what you're saying is, Gaza was less of a security threat than the West Bank and we know that because...Israel didn't predict October 7th happening?
Clearly Gaza was the bigger security threat given, you know, October 7th. Also the hundreds of rockets they launched into Israel at a fairly constant basis. No rockets coming out of the West Bank, I note.
I'm saying that Gaza was the bigger security threat and the IDF's resources were misallocated ... because of the settlements.
If you think that Gaza was a bigger security threat, then take it up with Israel's government, who wasn't acting like it!
If you agree that Gaza was the bigger security threat, then by what evidence do you claim that "settlements don't make Israel safer"? Sounds like if they had kept the settlements in Gaza and kept settling then October 7th wouldn't have happened, just as that sort of thing doesn't happen on the West Bank.
"Sounds like if they had kept the settlements in Gaza and kept settling then October 7th wouldn't have happened, just as that sort of thing doesn't happen on the West Bank. "
There are a lot of differences between the West Bank and Gaza, most obviously, Israel and the Palestinian Authority cooperate on security and Israel and Hamas don't, instead having a full blockade of Gaza.
It's not like there's some overall "attacks can't be launched from places with settlements" rule; during the second intifada the attacks came from places with settlements.
And just tactically, it's presumably easier to launch an attack on a settlement than to breach the wall between Gaza and Israel proper. If there were still settlements in Gaza on October 7 it just seems like the death toll would have been higher - unless the settlements led to a more closely guarded border - but then just do the 2nd part!
Anyway, this is all a slight tangent, Netanyahu's culpability for October 7 goes deeper than just being pro-settlment.
Probably shouldn't trust a really counter-intuitive result on an N=2 natural experiment.
Doesn’t seem that counter intuitive though! Seems like settling your own countryman in an area to make it easier to police and more secure would be the default assumption.
Israeli settlers are not acting as a military outpost for Israel. They have had a bunch of violent incidents and are a thing that gets protested a lot.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_settler_violence
Also generally people don't like you trying to annex their territory. And having small groups of people isolated from the rest of your country/military doesn't seem like it protects you from attacks much.
And yet it was the area where the settlers were removed that started launching rockets into Israel and went on a murder binge. How many Israelis have been killed by Palestinians from the West Bank over the last few years? Is it more or less than the number of Israelis killed by Gazans?
Now I don't think it's the settlements themselves that are doing it: it's because the West Bank is under direct Israeli military occupation, and Israeli soldiers are constantly going in there and snuffing out fires before they grow any bigger. But it certainly isn't the case that it is the settlements that are causing the most danger to Israeli security! They tried removing them and it didn't make Israelis safer at all. All available evidence points to the contrary.
Again, the sum total of the available evidence you're citing is "there was a major attack from Gaza after the settlements were removed". There's no explanation as to why it's actually good to have random people moving in and taking over territory. The settlers aren't acting as part of the Israeli police or military - there was literally just an incident where a bunch of them were throwing rocks at senior Israeli military officials: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israels-netanyahu-condemns-settler-violence-idf-west-bank-2024-11-24/
"Israel settlements prevent violence with Palestinians, because Gaza" is a really bizarre position that tries to generalize from two data points, without any compelling explanation and in the face of common sense, that something that has spawned international condemnation and intermittent violence is actually having a soothing and protective effect.
Even the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 that you alluded to was specifically aimed at reducing criticism of Israel, so obviously the Israelis understood that people were angry about settlements.
I'm not claiming that settlements make Israel more secure: I'm refuting the claim that settlements make Israel less secure. When the area being settled is secure, and the area where settlements were removed is a huge security threat, it is ridiculous to claim that settlements make Israel less secure.
Okay. I think that's basically correlation-is-causation thinking (and I honestly can't tell if you're just trolling me), so it doesn't seem like there's much reason to keep discussing it.
Wait until you find out about the religious imperatives of the other side!
They're mentioned in the comment I responded to, but the Jewish side's religious stuff wasn't, which is why I only mentioned the one.
By your own admission, the religious justification for increased settlements and expanded is one "many" (not most) Jews hold, so it's a minority position (albeit a pretty powerful one).
Whereas I strongly suspect the religious justification against Jews would be found to be the accepted view of the vast majority of Palestinian (Muslims), mostly because as non-WEIRD people, they are bound to follow the tenets of their faith.
"the religious justification for increased settlements and expanded is one "many" (not most) Jews hold, so it's a minority position"
"Many" here isn't mutually exclusive with "most". I don't know what percent have a religious justification and if it's majority or not. I suspect not a majority in the narrow "God commanded it" sense, but yes a majority in a religious nationalist sense.
Again, whatever the percentage of Israelis who believe there's a primarily religious justification for settlements is, it's almost certainly less than the equivalent belief among Palestinian (Muslims), which, because they are not WEIRD people, will in fact believe the strictures of their faith and thus that percentage can be approximated at "100%".
It has always baffled me that people feel the need to bring up that many (or most) members of a state *explicitly founded by international consent as a homeland for members of a particular religious group* believe things in their religion, and impossible to understand other than as a form of WEIRDo sneering against people who they perceive to be white (and thus should be WEIRD)*; after all, that the "brown" people on the other side believe even more problematic things is to be excused because they are not WEIRD).
* that many/most-I've seen estimates for what the percent of Israelis who are fully or partially Mizrahim running from 50-60%-Israelis probably aren't definitionally what we would think of as "white" is irrelevant to the larger question.
This entire comment is written in a tone as if you're trying to argue with me and yet I don't know what it is that I said that you're disagreeing with.
> Jews in Israel were refugees from Europe that had no where else to go after world war II
The notion of nowhere to go is absurd as you conflate religion with citizenship. Jews in europe had citizenship, even though indeed, and like many other ethnias, had migrated from an european country to another and hence had a refugee status. They weren't going to be deported anyway.
Moreover there is no single big wave in the colonization of israel, a major influx is ultra recent and comes as economic opportunism after the fall of the soviet union.
Netanyahu is not his real name, his father's name is Mileikowsky and was born in Poland.
BTW I used to believe Greater Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Israel was an idea only shared by an extremist minority but actually Netanyahu father wanted greater israel!!
> had no where else to go
after world war II
This is already comes from a false premise, zionism is a movement that is anterior to both world wars.
Moreover there was no notion of having nowhere to go, those populations already existed, they did not spontaneously spawn. Moreover they were accepted in many countries, as a reminder the country with the highest number of jews is NOT Israel but the U.S.
Moreover the absolute myth that there was no jewish state before israel is pure ineptia. Jews were already given a large country with full autonomy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Autonomous_Oblast
> I feel like everyone has acted completely reasonably given their historical and cultural and religious narratives
Your feelings are irrelevant with reality. You do not understand the topic enough to be able to make judgments about it.
When I say 'nowhere to go' I am mostly referring to the prisoners of war from the liberated death camps. No country in the West was willing to take all of those Jews.
Of course, I was collapsing a long complicated history to a few sentences.
If the US was willing to to take all the Jews of the world at some point, that would be nice, independent state or no state.
Other than that, the main migrations to Middle East were first Russians after waves of Jewish massacres, then it stalled out quite a bit as Jews of Europe seemed to think safe assimilation was more attractive, then when the Jews of Europe who survived the Holocaust concluded otherwise and no country would accept them as residents, they went to Israel. And then after the creation of Israel other areas of Middle East were no longer hospitable for Jews so Middle East Jews moved to Israel as well. Those were the three main immigration waves.
Broadly speaking by 'nowhere to go' I mean that all of these immigration waves were by Jews who felt that where they lived they would be targeted for violence because of their religion or ethnic group, and where they were going they hoped that would be significantly less true.
I agree I don't understand the topic, but I didn't actually learn something new from what you wrote. Could you clarify if there is something you believe that you think I don't believe?
Im also less interested in the history than what stories people currently believe and are motivated by, and that those stories do not survive contact with each other or accurately predict which negotiated settlements would last, which prevents the possibility of such settlements in the first place.
Zionism got a big push in Western Europe from the Dreyfus Affair in the 1890s, when a French artillery Colonel named Alfred Dreyfus got framed for spying for Germany. The case became an enormous political issue for the better part of a decade after evidence of Dreyfus's innocent emerged, with different political factions lining up in favor or against exonerating him. Dreyfus was ethnically Jewish and a lot of the anti-Dreyfus discourse was intensely anti-semetic, often imagining Dreyfus to be symptomatic of a broader problem of disloyalty to the French nation by people who weren't sufficiently ethically and culturally French.
Which also had the unfortunate effect of convincing a lot of Jews that Germany was the only place in Europe they had a decent chance of being accepted in.
From the JAO article:
“… The status of this region was defined shrewdly as an autonomous district, not an autonomous republic, which meant that no local legislature, high court, or government post of ministerial rank was permitted. It was an autonomous area, but a bare frontier, not a political center."
This is a contingent historical detail reversing cause and effect,
> Russia previously had 4 other Autonomous Oblasts that were changed into Republics on 3 July 1991.
Had Jews actually emmigrated to their LGBT flagged country, they would have managed more political pressure to be promoted as republic, than the 4 ones that managed to do it ever had.
“ Russia previously had 4 other Autonomous Oblasts that were changed into Republics on 3 July 1991.”
Which ones; are any of them independent countries now?
all russian republics were independent nations within russia, with their own constitution, laws, language, economy, etc just like the european union.
However as russia has progressivelly become an authoritarian decadent state, the many republics were all stripped from most of their autonomy in 2017
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republics_of_Russia
with the exception of Chechnya.
Also besides republics, russia has protectorates that are supposedly independent, like transnistria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
“all russian republics were independent nations within russia, with their own constitution, laws, language, economy, etc just like the european union.”
No they weren’t. There are plenty of actual Russians in these comments who will laugh their heads off at this description.
It's literally stated on the wiki page. What is wrong? Some republics had partial autonomy but some others had their constitution, law, language, etc
That wiki page is full of it. None of these “republics” are independent in any sense of the word.
There is a considerable amount of controversy regarding the outcome of the Geneva Accords, with both sides claiming the other violated it. Both sides believe they have learned that the other can't be trusted to adhere to any negotiated settlement.
The Palestinians were offered their own country in the 40's, with Palestinian leadership. The problem was they wanted it all, and got nothing as a result. Most of land that was owned by Jews was bought from landowners that often did not even live anywhere near. The reason Israel took land after the war was that the 1947 partition plan would be nearly indefensible as there would almost certainly be more wars:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/UN_Palestine_Partition_Versions_1947.jpg
This is why Israel is taking land in the West Bank. If you look at a map, it is a very strategic area from a military point of view. To have a large and well organized and armed enemy fully occupying the West Bank would make Israel nearly indefensible.
And probably the majority of Jews came from the USSR (supposedly anti colonialists?) and from the Middle East. Only a minority of Jews come from the West. So pretty laughable to call it a colonialist project.
Also most Iranians do not have a problem with Israel, only a sizable minority does. It is the Ayatollahs that are the main driving force for the Israel hate.
If Palestinians would just accept a two state solution with the wish to get rich, there would be a peaceful two state solution rather quickly. Even in the West Bank. The problem is, that solution is further and further away nowadays as they would not be able to credibly make that claim after nearly a century of trying to push Jews out of Israel.
The Palestinians had good reason to reject the two-state offer in the 40's.
Zionism in undoubtedly a colonial project. It involves the establishment of a new nation by immigrants on land previously occupied by a different ethnic group. Obviously Jewish historical ties to the area make it a more justified case to some people, but that doesn't change the basic facts.
Palestinians have reason to be distrustful of any proposed peace deal by Israel, and there is enough bad blood at this point to make them opposed to peace out of principle. There is similar justified distrust and unwillingness to compromise on the Israeli side.
If you are actually interested in understanding the conflict, I would recommend seeking out pro-Palestinian sources because it seems like you only have exposure to the Zionist perspective.
The land was mostly empty. And Jews arrived there organically which is the opposite of a colonial project. Also most Jews that moved to Israel actually didn't come from the West.
First line on the colony wikipedia page:
"A colony is a territory subject to a form of foreign rule."
Which Israel very much wasn't when it was founded. It was its own country.
If they had accepted the two state solution, Palestina would be one of the most prosperous countrie in the Middle East. Now millions of them got nothing and live in refugee camps with no hope of having their own state.
"There is similar justified distrust and unwillingness to compromise on the Israeli side."
In the 2000 Camp David Summit Israel compromised on nearly everything. They gave in to 90% of Palestinian demands, and the Palestinians still refused because they thought if they just waited they could get everything.
"If you are actually interested in understanding the conflict, I would recommend seeking out pro-Palestinian sources because it seems like you only have exposure to the Zionist perspective."
I have done this, but I found that Palestinian sources very often lie or leave out important information to the point that I thought I could safely ignore them. I find more neutral historians to be far more reliable.
> The land was mostly empty.
Do you mean literally large empty areas of land, or just low population density... kind of like Native Americans before the European settlers came?
(If it's the former, are there any large inhabited areas of dry land today, outside of Antarctica? Just in case someone wanted to start a new country.)
The Sahara seems easily conquered; it's just that no one really wants it.
I don't really want to conquer things. Buying or long-term renting would be preferable.
OK, not me specifically, but there are people who dream about seasteading and charter cities and stuff, like they have the recipe for a great society, they just need a few square miles where they could actually build it.
Sahara is not a friendly place, but neither is the ocean. Sea water ruins things, you need to repair them frequently. Plus you could get a lot of solar energy in Sahara. You would need to transport lots of water, but a prosperous libertarian utopia should be able to arrange it somehow. And maybe in a few decades you could somehow "terraform" the place.
I don't know what a 'colonial project' is in this context or how it applies. There's land, who lives there, who has military control, who is safe and not safe there. These are not all the same. (What I am actually saying is that taking the median colonial project by Western or Arab powers, and starting from that as our working model, seems to provide more heat than light; I totally understand that Palestinians and the Arab world more broadly think of Israel as a western colonial project, and that's completely reasonable - it was reasonable for them to see the first wave of Russian Jews as agents of Russia, and the other waves between them and the Holocaust as agents of Britain).
My main source of 'pro Palestinian' sources are the martyr made podcast, and various modern Arab news sources and substacks, and the usual mix of voices you can find on YouTube.
Is there a key insight/perspective you feel I am missing, or a specific source or book you would recommend? Again, my goal is to figure out if there's a marginal positive impact non influential individuals like myself could make, through dialogue or cultural exchange, whatever.
So, this: "And the Palestinians, like many groups in the Middle East, were lied to and screwed over by colonial powers, but especially so because at the end of their mandate system they were going to be ruled by a Jewish dictator instead of one that shares their religion or tribe."
Strikes me as sort of ignoring the fact that the offer was to divide the territory. Some Arab Muslims would be part of an Israeli state, but the majority would have been in their own independent state, which was rejected by those groups (sort of, actual representation here is...messy).
On your questions, I think (1) the answer is basically, not without taking control of Gaza and (2) I think the answer there is mostly not without significant political/economic pressure which there doesn't seem to be an appetite for (though I do not believe the settlements actually support Israel's ability to defend itself against Iran), or taking control of Israel, which there simply isn't capacity for, given it's a nuclear state.
In retrospect I think everyone can agree that the Palestinians screwed themselves over by rejecting that deal. But at the time it would have seemed like a really bad deal that no one would have taken. They had significant advantages in numbers and the ideological support of the entire region. That the Jews won makes very little sense from an outside perspective.
Has Scott done research on autism, particularly the increasing rate of diagnoses over the past 10 - 20 years?
I know there is a searchable database of topics, but I don't recall the location.
Related thread from Cremieux: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1857871534402187325.
Autism like many neurological conditions are considerably affected by the critical period of gestation.
Pregnancy is one of the paroxysm of crime against humanity led by FDA mediocrity and obscurantism.
The effect of optimal nutrients of organogenesis is extremely considerable.
It seems Autism is virtually inexistant in pregnant women with high serum vitamin D
https://vitamindwiki.com/tiki-index.php?page_id=14880
"If it was just vitamin D…look, it’s not vitamin D. Nothing is ever vitamin D. People try so hard to attribute everything to vitamin D, and it never works." Scott Alexander, here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/diseasonality
Haven't read the blog in depth yet, but here are major issues that considerably reduce the ability to make inferences about seasonality to vitamin D serum levels:
1) Sun exposure has considerably more effect than vitamin D synthesis, moreover excess sun exposure suppress vitamin D synthesis.
2) cold exposure has considerably more effects and is independent from the degree of sun exposure. People die in the winter for many reasons, cold alter the chemotaxis of the immune system, our bodies must uncouple the mitochondria to generate heat which increase oxidative stress and nutrients expenditure.
3) Because of 1), contrary to extreme popular myth, the rate of vitamin D insufficency between winter and summer are comparable. Vitamin D is higher in autumn though.
4) Even with proper seasonality vit D status modeling, seasonality is not sufficent, as in every season there is a decent chunk of the population that is insufficent.
Most importantly, the findings I am reffering to require >45ng serum which is supraphysiological, only a small percent of the population can reach such high levels without supplementation. Meaning those extreme effects are literally off topic with seasonality because seasonality pharmacokinetics are too weak.
Here are other basic empirically undeniable measures:
https://vitamindwiki.com/Common+cold+%28Acute+Rhinosinusitis%29+virually+non-existant+when+Vitamin+D+is+above+50+ng+%E2%80%93+Oct+2015
> Common cold virually non-existant when Vitamin D is above 50 ng
and
> Vitamin D levels of 50 ng/mL correlates to zero mortality rate from COVID.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8541492/
Scott Alexander has been wrong in the past. Anyway I'll read the post you linked when I get the time
I had a long exchange with GPT4 about that very topic last night. It's pretty good with questions like this, but you have to ask it for links to where it found its info, and check them. I have not yet checked links, but here is what I came away with:
-Until 2013 there were separate diagnoses for autism and for a thing called Aspergers, considered by many to be a less severe form of autism where the symptoms are more subtle and the person is high functioning, and sometimes extraordinarily gifted. So one reason for the rise in autism diagnoses is that as of 2013 the 2 diagnoses were officially merged by the body that constructs the diagnostic manual clinicians use. People who would have been diagnosed with Aspergers are now diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Disorder.
-An informal kind of merging of the diagnoses was going on among clinicians before 2013, as it became more common for clinicians to think of Aspergers as high-functioning autism. I was practicing as a psychotherapist during those years, and remember feeling startled the first few times I heard the term autism applied to patients who were shy, rigid, brainy and quirky, but who had careers, spouses, families, hobbies, etc.
-It's not possible to find good data on how many people were diagnosed with Aspergers and how many with autism in the 10 or so years before 2013 because many clinicians began diagnosing the Aspergerish folk as autistic before the 2013 change in diagnoses legitimized rolling the 2 diagnoses into one.
-There were increases in services for autistic kids in the years leading up to 2013 due to changes in laws and increases in funding. While many of them specified that kids with Aspergers qualified for these services, some were available only for kids with autism. It's likely that clinicians moved towards giving kids who fit the Aspergers diagnosis an official diagnosis of autism, so that they would qualify for services.
-Autism became cooler in the popular imagination. (In the last 10 years, many of my acquaintances have toyed with the idea that they have some kind of Autism Lite syndrome, and I've toyed with the idea regarding myself. )
Something GPT4 did not mention but that I think is important is that the criteria for Aspergers are very vague. There is a separate subcode for Aspergers within the overarching diagnosis of Autism. Here's the description of people who qualify for this subcode: "significant difficulties in social interaction, restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests, with no clinically significant delays in language or cognitive development, often accompanied by unusual mannerisms and obsessive interests in specific topics." So the diagnosis hinges on *how much difficulty* with social interaction the person has, and *how restricted and repetitive* someone's behavior and interests and *how unusual* their mannerisms are judged to be.
I'm inclined to agree with Scott. Autism isn't increasing -- our willingness to diagnose it is.
Not formally, but my impression (can't remember the exact studies that have led me to this conclusion) is that there's pretty strong evidence it's just increasing laxity with diagnostic standards.
I’d be interested in you tackling an expanded version of that. I’m particularly interested in how you phrased that - “laxity in diagnostic standards” - since it’s against the neurodivergence activism narrative of something like “we were failing to identify and acknowledge all the people on the spectrum previously”.
I think this is a meaningless distinction. There's no cutoff for autism. It's like being tall. if you move from classifying anyone above 6'6 as tall, down to classifying anyone above 6'0 as tall, you can frame this either as "we've gotten lax about checking whether people are really tall" or "we're finally recognizing tall people who previously slipped through the cracks". I was trying to frame this in a neutral way which didn't take a stand on this meaningless question.
Perhaps you find the language distinction meaningless, but surely the diagnostic difference is not, assuming that the marginal person getting diagnosed is getting treated/accommodated and the marginal undiagnosed is not. Perhaps that’s not true and was already untrue before the diagnostic rate went up.
It's also just a more generally true epidemiological fact: if there's a sudden or dramatic increase in the prevalence or incidence of a certain disease, your first instinct should be "change in the way the disease was diagnosed" - for example, as soon as mammogram screening got popular, breast cancer diagnoses per year went up significantly. The actual rate at which breast cells turned cancerous in the population was probably substantively unchanged.
Agree fully. I’m just reacting to the implied judgement in Scott’s use of “laxity” rather than a more neutral or positive term - I’m curious how he (apparently) became convinced that autism is over diagnosed.
I read somewhere recently that extreme cases have gone up by the same rate, and it seems unlikely even stricter standards would have failed to diagnose those. I should probably verify that information, though.
Here's the article: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00333549231163551
It's a CDC study. Upshot is that fraction of kids diagnosed with profound autism stayed the same, about 25%, from 2000-2016. But since more kids now than in the past are diagnosed with autism, the actual number, and the incidence per 1000, has increased. It's complicated and hard to figure out the fairest way to think about it, but I don't see it as resounding proof that autism itself, whatever that is, is happening more than it used to. One thing to bear in mind is that it seems impossible to distinguish clearly between profound autism and profound developmental disability, i.e. retardation. The kids that meet this diagnosis often have an IQ or 50 or less, and do not speak. A good fraction of them have seizures. A good fraction were premature or had low birth weight. Seems to me clear that many have substantial brain damage, not at all clear that they "have autism."
My understanding is that there is increased incentive to diagnose kids with autism as opposed to just intellectual disability or other developmental disorders. There are now a lot of autism specific resources and supports for families, so providers will frequently slap an autism label in the chat for kids who 30 years ago would've been labeled with a different severe developmental disorder, so their parents can get respite care or other autism tagged services.
So, still about 2% of the male population, then? Or what is it?
Article's here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00333549231163551
Looks like about 2% of kids (male + female) as of a few years ago, with about 25% of that 2% having profound autism. Profound autism is somewhat more common in girls. If we excluded kids who were diagnosed as having the Aspergers subtype the number would be smaller, but I don't have time to hunt down how much smaller.
I was under the impression that "Asperger's", at least under that name, isn't a thing anymore (ie, isn't considered a diagnosable
condition).
No, it got rolled in with autism, which is now termed Autistic Spectrum Disorder. People who used to be labeled at Aspergers are now considered to be on the spectrum.
Yep.
40 years ago: no diagnosis, you are a weirdo but no one cares
20 years ago: Asperger's syndrome
today: autistic spectrum
Is this part of a general problem with psychiatric epidemeology and taxonomy?
I've heard of changing diagnosis rates and fads in everything from bipolar disorder to anxiety to ADHD. Plus different populations see mental health professionals for their problems at dramatically different rates. It seems like an impossible problem to accurately compare, say, rates of bipolar 2 between college women in 2022 and 50 year old blue collar males using any available dataset, let alone comparisons over time.
ADHD diagnosis rates should be considered heavily suspect until Adderall is available over the counter. For example: I do not have ADHD but I do have an ADHD diagnosis.
My wife (38F) was recently diagnosed with a fairly rare condition called Tracheobronchomalacia (TBM). It's a persistent partial collapse of her airway when she exhales. Basically, she has a history of recurrent respiratory infections and bronchitis that are often debilitating and last for weeks, and she has difficulty doing aerobic exercise for any even medium period of time. She's a non-smoker and was probably misdiagnosed with asthma as a kid. Now that she's older, it seems to have gotten more severe.
There's a complicated (robotically-assisted) surgery called a tracheobronchoplasty. Surgical mesh typically used for hernia repairs is surgically grafted onto the outside of her airway, and if successful it stabilizes the airway and improves the collapsing tendency.
This surgery is serious with a long recovery time. I'm trying to get advice about the risks involved. Since this is rare, there isn't strong evidence whether this conditions when left untreated can shorten your life, though her surgeon doesn't think there is much evidence that it does, meaning this is a quality of life issue.
Main questions:
-- How likely is it that TBM actually does shorten your life?
-- Since she's young, we need to consider the issue of the life time of the surgical mesh. There's not good long term evidence either way for using it in this application. Will it last her entire life?
-- What's the best argument for waiting until she's older and it potentially gets more severe?
-- How likely is it this will effectively clear up these terrible bouts of respiratory illness? Again, the surgeon just doesn't know because there's not good long term evidence.
Not an expert on this field, but this kind of surgical mesh frequently causes problems over time by irritating the surrounding tissue and causing pain.
I would ask around if there is any prospect of treating this with electrical stimulation, which seems to get better every year at a much faster rate than medicines.
Here are a couple other random ideas that might be helpful:
- Medical care will probably be a lot better in 5-10 years. Might be better to buy yourselves some time, wait and see if something less daunting than this surgery is possible by then.
-What about just taking a lot of care to avoid respiratory infections? That's not really too burdensome. There's masking in indoor public spaces, and also having powerful air purifiers at home, at work, and in the car. You want to have about 12 air changes per hour.
-I wonder if there might be some mileage in trying some kind of deliberate strengthening of her airway or of the muscles around them. It can be done for the pelvic floor. And somebody on here recently posted that they believe they had successfully strengthened their esophageal sphincter via exercises, and overcome reflux by doing it. Surgeons are usually not very alert to these possibilities. What you want is someone who is knowledgeable about that area of the body, and willing to think with you about exercises worth trying.
This is great advice. I hadn't considered the first argument, even though it's pretty straightforward.
We have taken precautions against such infections and contaminants. We have 3 hospital grade HEPA filters in our not particularly large home.
There are non-surgical mechanical interventions (e.g. BiPAP), but they only help when the machine is on and she isn't darth vader. I haven't looked at any potential exercises that could help. Thanks!
As an apnea sufferer, I tried singing, digeridoo lessons and exercises to strengthen my airways before CPAP and they all seemed a bit helpful.
There may not be any in the standard array of PT exercises, but PT isn't rocket science, you know? It's about strengthening and stretching things. If you can't find a clever PT who can come up with some possible exercises, I'd recommend trying Paul Ingraham, who runs an excellent site called Pain Science. He used to be a PT (or something like that) and is very smart and research oriented, also clever and inventive. He does virtual consults -- did one for me on a psychotherapy patient of mine who had a health problem. Also, I wonder if the thing that somebody on here thinks strengthened his esophageal sphincters might help your wife, even though in her case the problem is in the airway, not in the esophagus. The exercise was swallowing against gravity: First with head bent forward, eventually with head and neck close to upside down. The person did it with one meal a day, I think, but it might be easier to do just with swallowing water or applesauce. Also, there exist respiratory therapy exercises, I think to help people with things like emphysema get as much benefit as possibe from each breath. One uses a machine where either breathing in or out is done against increased resistance.
OK, I'm all out of ideas. Wishing you 2 the best!
Do bronchodilators, like the ones used for treating asthma, fix it?
No. In fact, perversely, I've been told that they can make it worse. And so the treatment for misdiagnosed asthma pours gas on the fire.
For many health problems there are online forums. See if you can find one. Often there are a couple of people on it who have the illness and are quite smart, and can give you good nuggets of info. Also, read about the illness and the surgery in Up to Date, and read the research literature or hire someone to read it and summarize the result for you. (There are some people who do that for a living.)
Yeah, she found a good forum on this condition. I think a lot of the information on it is good, but I don't think the people are very much into the risk/reward style analysis this deserves. Hence, this blog.
I've read quite a bit about it, but the literature itself is simply too underpowered to really learn a lot. It requires more first principles thinking.
My thinking is basically that she should do the surgery, but the surgeon is a bit skeptical about operating on someone so young (median patient is 53). Looking for good arguments against my view.
Surgeons love to operate. If yours is kind of reluctant, it might be a reason not to try the surgery. (Or, of course, this surgeon might just not be as enthused about human topiary as most are.)
Ha. I was actually really nervous meeting her because I expected this sort of conflict of interest--the surgeon might want to try out the cool new robot tech on a young patient instead of being interested in something as mundane as long term outcomes. She impressed me. Very measured and evidence driven.
I don't know anything about TBM, but I do know a little about surgeries for sleep apnea. Typically they involve stent or some way of preventing collapse of the airway. My impression is they are last-resort interventions, and can even make mainline treatments of sleep apnea (i.e. CPAP) more difficult since the airway is now more stiff and difficult to prop open. If they found a way to make it stiffer but only in the "open" position...
Anyway, it's a much more common surgery (although still exotic enough to where you won't find very large sample sizes in studies). You might be able to estimate your questions about lifespan.
That's interesting. I didn't even know people treated sleep apnia surgically.
I've been thinking about the "modern architecture sucks" discourse, and why "we" can't build nice looking stuff anymore. As it turns out, you can, and not even in far and alien China:
In the city of Montpellier (France), there's a neighborhood named Antigone, which was built in the eighties to serve as affordable housing. Unlike most affordable housing projects, this one leaned heavily on the classical aesthetics:
https://t3.ftcdn.net/jpg/00/79/86/64/360_F_79866440_XQNYXuHy2zrKxkN30ZRVZdOGk7iTNyuk.jpg
https://www.montpellier-tourisme.fr/app/uploads/montpelliertourisme/2022/10/thumbs/ANTIGONE-VUE-DE-L-ARBRE-BLANC-%C2%A9OT3M-V.Paduano-min-1920x960-crop-1668090054.jpeg
https://www.montpellier-tourisme.fr/app/uploads/montpelliertourisme/2022/12/thumbs/0-Antigone-Montpellier-automne2015-OTMontpellierM-4--640x360.jpg
Apparently, the same architect was commissioned to build similar projects elsewhere in France:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Espaces_d%27Abraxas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Arcades_du_Lac
This was all done in the eighties, so while it's not very recent, it's recent enough to be notable. The relevant factors seem to have been:
* A need for building due to the increase in urban housing demand.
* The availability of reasonably placed land to develop.
* The aesthetic vision of whoever is in charge of the project.
Of course, my experience with the place was just as a tourist, so I don't know how successful it was. Do any French ACX readers have more context on these projects? Were the costs reasonable? Do people actually live there? Does the public like them?
That is all concrete, from a birds eye view; it is classical aesthetic slapped on top of a modernist Skeleton.
If you went there and actually looked at it, I think you would find it to be flat and kind of unpleasant (could be wrong). Brutalist architecture aims to take those properties of precast and poured concrete and use them for effect (see the Salk institute for example); if you just recreate classical architecture with modern material it either looks like chintzy garbage or is just plain ugly IMO.
Antigone is kinda shit, tho. 90% of that is due to the lack of foot trafic (it's a bit out of the old city center, and there is little reason to go there, there are only a few uninteresting restaurants). If you want to go to the swimming pool or the library, you will probably not walk there but instead take the tram. The result is a sort of ghost area where people don't go often. (Except my dumb ass who went along it for 3 years on my way to university)
10%, I think, is due to architecture. There is a sense of pointless gigantism when you're there. The huge walls have few openings and windows, it's all big slabs of concrete. Not very appealing.
Also the appartement I went into was a bit mediocre, small and old.
A little poll, if I may:
What generation are you, and what do you worry about most?
I'll start: Millenial, and how to give my children the benefits of my happy, free range, imaginative childhood whilst in a big city, in the modern era with its protective parenting mores, and a much more competitive system than I grew up in (UK Vs Canada).
Millenial: Dying alone
Boomer, in IT since 1979 (can bore for hours on the topic of punched cards and giant 1 Mb removable disks the size of garbage can lids etc, and now work mainly with python + OpenAI).
Personal worries: Mainly being incapacitated by an ailment or health emergency such as a stroke that prevents me from continuing working. Throughout my life I've gone into a catatonic trance and zoned out whenever the word "pension" was mentioned, but now wish I'd payed more attention as mine is rubbish! But I do have a large house, with the mortgage paid off.
Concerns on behalf of humanity (not "worried" as such, because I don't worry about things that don't concern me and I can't do anything about anyway): IMHO, the biggest short to medium term risk is bioterrorism. Even after a major nuclear war the radiation would soon decline to almost nothing. So long-term effects are limited, and many will survive. But horrid little viruses and bacteria can keep reproducing and continue to afflict people or animals or even plants almost indefinitely. I mean look at the havoc Covid caused, and for most that was little worse than a common cold!
The other concern, shared by most I think, so I don't claim to be Mystic Meg here, is how will society and individuals be motivated when AI has supplanted almost every job worthy of the name? The Devil makes work for idle hands! Presumably, occupations involving personal counselling and suchlike will flourish. From a cynical standpoint, more busibodies than ever will be seeking to interfere in the lives of others, even law abiding capable people. So for most, individualism will take a hit.
Also, once the low hanging fruit of discoveries in science and literature have all been picked, how will anyone be able to claim true originality in anything, or purpose in seeking it? Our descendents will be smothered under the weight of past achievements, and it won't even be that they can ignore these, as most people today ignore literally miles and miles of bookshelves groaning with worthy leather bound literature from the past. AI will be able to instantly locate from the past any utterance or plot or theorem or artwork someone can devise, from hundreds of millions of books and images and sound files all stored on their key ring!
Millenial, being 41 years old with no children and no prospects of having any
Millenial. My biggest worry is that we could all be gone in an instant to a supernova gamma burst. The grandaddy X-risk. So we need to spread life off-world, with an eye to going intergalactic ASAP. AI is a double edged sword here, assists in speedrunning space travel but presents X-risks of it's own, on balance I'm in favour as I'd prefer a universe inhabited by AI to one with no thinking at all. If we can solve supernova risk then I think we incidentally solve every other X-risk (aside from some hypotheticals like "Vacuum collapse/other universe-destroying esoteric physics", "the simulation gets shut down/God smites us all") and can start work on cheating our way past the heat death of the universe.
Gen Z, mostly personal things (the health of my family, college, finding a spouse).
Gen Z - mainly the changes AI is going to have. Feel like without AI I had a clear, pleasant path in life and now I have a hard time reasoning about how things will play out. At the same time I want to find some way to rise to the moment in some way.
Besides that degree of rising hyper consumerism/ individualism I find to be worrying.
Gen Z, I mostly worry about very personal things like finding a spouse, maintaining friendships, that sort of stuff. As a college student, I'm in a really good position right now, but I know when I graduate I have to hop off that gravy train and figure out how to build those structures in an environment where there isn't the same automatic ease. Bigger stuff doesn't worry me too much (at least in the sense that I think I'm resilient enough to deal with most problems bigger than myself), but over the arc of my life, I'd like to be able to describe myself as someone who had a strong, dependable community and the idea that I might screw that up does kind of scare me.
Boomer, eventually I expect medical issues to be my largest worry (not yet, fortunately).
Early Gen X, and if we're talking about global rather than personal worries, the top of the list is the distinct possibility of a financial apocalypse that would make the Great Depression look like a minor oopsie.
Millennial, being slightly too old or messing something up so I don't quite make it into the "live basically forever" category. I might make it easily, I might miss it by 500 years, but I don't want to die seeing others around me who will make it to forever and if only I'd X then I would have too.
Gen Y. Money, and the wrong direction things are currently going. Also older relatives dying.
Old Millennial. I worry about my kid having a better life than I or my parents. I'm probably a bit irrationally afraid of the quality of life getting worse. In many ways, my life is better than my parents'. But in some key ways, it is much worse, like housing costs and that my retirement is looking more like fantasy.
Millenial, my life sliding over the edge rapidly
Millennial: Something bad happening to my children. Also getting dementia and wasting away in a retirement home.
Gen Z, how to develop the skills to stay employed in the era of AI.
that's the answer I think you want. what I actually worry the most about: whether anyone likes me, whether I'm pretty, etc etc. which has more to do with my age than my generation I guess
I think the generation plays a part as well; I feel like society has paradoxically gotten more judgemental as it also becomes more nihilistic... Maybe it's because appearances are all we have left.
Very good point about society becoming more judgemental *and* more nihilistic.
I've been trying to put something together about how being able to see through human motivations or thinking we can has been bad for us. We're getting undercut with no replacement.
Conscientious people can constantly feel like they might be wrong. Malicious people can easily make up something to make other people look or feel wrong.
Gen X, and the destruction of the environment.
Scott, awhile back you tried to figure out why the cost of college in the US was skyrocketing, and concluded, IIRC, that it was a mystery where the all money was going. I tried to figure this out myself; maybe it would interest you. https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/resource-vampires-and-the-cost-of
I couldn't comment on your post, but I wanted to point out that "adverse selection" is a theoretical objection to the feasibility of privately provided health insurance, but in practice selection tends to be "advantageous".
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/12/adverse_selecti.html
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/07/adverse_hazard.html
Instead, as the economist you asked points out, the private sector is capable of providing "IT services and internet access", but won't provide "free" version everyone has access to.
I agree this is the default hypothesis. The main reasons I'm not happy with it are: it seems like you can't avoid the legally/socially mandated things (eg Title IX), but you can avoid some of the other things (eg amenities). Are there universities that come close to 1980s costs by avoiding the avoidable things? If not, why? And can the mandated things really raise costs this much on their own? (ie can you really spend an extra $20K per student on Title IX and DEI)? If so, I would find that fascinating and would love to see a breakdown of how the money gets spent.
Also, do community colleges have DEI and Title IX? How do they pay for it?
Colleges that take no federal money can opt out of federal mandates. Looking at the cost of those schools compared to the subsidized-with-expectations schools might help determine what, if any, net cost increase comes from those mandates.
What serious colleges or universities are there that take no federal money?
Last I looked there were a few religious schools that specifically chose not to take the money for this reason.
How many of them have accredited degree programs in say engineering? In any field where someone is likely to make a good living in a nonreligious job?
That's a good question. From a little searching it looks like most would not. I didn't find a clear list of all colleges (different lists that had different colleges) and the websites I looked at didn't clearly say all of their programs or whether they were accredited. As a sanity test I went to a website of a college I know is accredited and also didn't see that stated, so who knows.
Well, you can't avoid legally/socially mandated things (Title IX, DEI, accountability requirements) as long as that's the law or strong social custom. But laws and customs change and can be changed, just not by colleges themselves. Other expenses, even if avoidable in principle (like computing/IT, social services, and remedial support) are very hard to opt out of on an individual basis. Some increasing expenses are straight-up suboptimal equilibria, like amenities arms races. It's a grab bag of smallish expenses that add up and never end. I can't blame blowing my household budget on just HBO and Showtime. It's all the streaming services put together. If there are individual colleges that have not fallen into this pattern, I don't know about them, and would predict that they have very nonstandard charters. DEI and Title IX concerns will apply to community colleges, but since they don't have expensive men's sports they won't need to fund the monetary loss of women's sports.
But has the price of tuition really gone up in real terms? Dan Durrell (at the National Review) says that for public schools, they haven't for thirty years. Kevin Drum checked Dan Durrell's numbers and was shocked to discover that they're pretty solid. In inflation-adjusted dollars, after all the giveaways in scholarships yadda yadda yadda, elite private schools are up 13% since 1992. Public schools are down 10% since 1992.
Per Drum: "And once you account for that, the real-life price of college has barely changed over the past three decades. Since 1992, private school tuition has increased 13% while public school tuition has decreased 10%.
"This is so contrary to everything I've read and heard my entire life that I'm not sure I believe it. But the numbers are right there. In terms of what the vast majority of families actually pay, college costs no more today than it did in 1992."
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-truth-about-college-costs
https://jabberwocking.com/the-cost-of-college-has-barely-changed-in-the-past-30-years/
Having said that, I went to a state university starting in 1977, and I paid $200 a semester for tuition. That's about $1,000 in today's money. By the time I was graduated in 1981, it had jumped to $350— a steep 75% increase. We were all screaming at the costs. But throughout the 80s, tuition climbed at double-digit percentages because my state wanted my state university to be more self-sufficient.
I'm at work and haven't had a chance to read the articles you reference. But I'm pretty skeptical. The data I was using came from the National Center for Education Statistics, a subagency of the U.S. Department of Education. There's a Forbes summary here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zengernews/2020/08/31/college-tuition-is-rising-at-twice-the-inflation-rate-while-students-learn-at-home/?
Plus, student debt is going up at 2.25x inflation, which is inexplicable if costs are not going up.
Hmmm. But I thought the majority of student debt was incurred by graduate students who chase highly-paid professions. Student debt after four years of college has remained pretty stable over the past couple of decades.
Robin Hanson is giving a talk on the application of prediction markets in science, December 8 in NYC if anyone is interested:
https://lu.ma/descinyc24
As a side note, does anyone know if there's some kind of centralized website that advertises talks like this? I only found out about this one because I happen to be subscribed to the DeSciNYC email list, and often I only find out about these things after they've already happened.
Will there be a larger post from you about humans being more susceptible to beliefs than previously thought? You had several pieces about, e.g. internal family systems, false memories, witches, or DID, which had this implicit background theory on how much our behaviour is determined by beliefs. Will you still comprehend this into a larger theoretical frame? This was a new perspective I was very much looking forward to read on in a more systematic fashion.
I believe (heh) that beliefs allow us to explain to ourselves a reason for why we are feeling and acting the way we find ourselves to be doing. Often, I think, we act, either physically or psychologically, for reasons that are not immediately available to conscious reflection. So we believe something about it.
But this isn't trivial, because the belief gets stored in long term memory, where it becomes associated with that type of behavior and it's outcome, and therefore it can affect future behavior in significant ways.
New experiences are encoded in LTM more easily, are are more available to later retrieval, in proportion to which they can be integrated into what we have already experienced and learned. So beliefs tend to organize themselves into belief systems, and belief systems place soft constraints on future behavior.
I also think that our belief systems provide an incentive toward certain behavioral strategies over others. We actively seek out new experiences that challenge and expand on our current belief systems, because otherwise we get bored.
So while a particular belief may begin as a somewhat arbitrary post-hoc justification of a behavior that we undertook for obscure reasons, they end up being the basis of self-growth.
Our whole personal universe is overwhelmed by belief inputs. It starts with when your parents tell you there's Santa Claus—then it's what your teachers tell you and what you picked up in the kid-focused media—and then what your professors tell you is the consensus thinking on a subject. In the meantime, you get fed media and social media-driven narratives. Most of us, most of the time, never check to see if something someone is telling us is true. Before the Internet, most of us didn't have the capability to do that without visiting a public or university library. The mainstream media used to be the primary way we gauged what was true, but the MSM has turned out to be as biased as any of our other inputs. Now that the Internet has given us easier access to primary knowledge sources, we're too lazy to check.
Actually, I think it starts much earlier than that--back in the cradle, when we develop the ability to simulate depth and dimensional space, which are, functionally speaking, just a simulation our brain is creating for us. Categorization probably comes next (what is a "dog"? You know it when you see it), and then we apply categorization to ourselves and other people, developing the basis for a self-concept--the greatest belief of them all.
And I almost forgot the Stanford Suicide Note study! Even in the face of unambiguous evidence, people will resist changing their views.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds?
Ok, so there's a well understood reason for the perseverance of prior held beliefs. It's because no one belief is held in isolation, they all form networks with each other, connected by characteristics they have in common, many of which are emotional responses. These sets of "Beliefs + Emotional Responses" are called "Attitudes" in psychology. If I have an attitude that spaghetti and meatballs taste good and is healthy, therefore I should eat more of it, proving to me that S & M are in fact not healthy wont change the attitude, because that would mean that I would have to question my attitudes toward all my favorite foods (they are all associated with each other in my mind). That's a lot of work for a brain, and I have other priorities.
This is esp. true for attitudes that are connected to our self concept. In the study the New Yorker article was discussing, the researchers didn't convince the subjects that they could discern real suicide notes more easily, they came to the study thinking, as most people do, that they themselves are really smart. Providing facts that they aren't really smart won't change their self-attitudes unless you get them to question a large portion of their self-concept, which people are reluctant to do.
This doesn't mean that reason is worthless. Reason can change attitudes, but it takes time and commitment. The person involved has to want to change their attitudes, the desire has to come from them, and not from an outside source. Then they become open to objective sources of information.
Strategically, this means that the most effective way to change someone's mind about something is to start by affirming something else they already believe, esp. if it's something they believe about themselves.
> This doesn't mean that reason is worthless. Reason can change attitudes, but it takes time and commitment.
I think we're in agreement. Unfortunately, even intellectuals seem to be intellectually lazy. For instance, these Open Threads seem to be populated by "smart people" (i.e., a group of people whose average IQ is likely somewhere between 1.5 and 2.0 SDs above the mean), but I see regularly see people who (a) ask questions that could be easily answered with a little Googling or Chatting, who (b) try to argue their beliefs without supporting data, and (c) who frequently become hostile when others question their positions. Most of the above seem to lack a sense of self-skepticism.
Now, I admit I am not a rationalist in either the traditional sense of the word or Scott's newfangled definition of a rationalist. But I spend a lot of time wondering about whether the things I know are real, and I've concluded that most of what I "know" is belief. For instance, I may have strong reasons to believe my parents are my parents, but ultimately it's my belief that my birth certificate and the testimony of my mother and father aren't deceptions. I like science because it's a useful tool to ascertain the truth about things in the observable realm of our qualia. Unfortunately, it's a tool that can (and is frequently) abused. OTOH, there's all sorts of shit that can, at best, be semi-validated by fuzzy Bayesian reasoning. But humans are natural bullshitters — to themselves and to others. And even when we commit to reasoning through a problem to ascertain truth, the rest of the time, we're drowning in bullshit.
Sorry, it must be the holiday season that's making me so cynical.
The way nearly everyone uses to give a weight to the "truthiness" of something is to compare it to everything else you already know and see how it fits. Let's call this "Coherence."
We can never know for sure if anything is true, we can only see how well it coheres.
Maybe. I was planning something like this, but I feel like https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-geography-of-madness said about 75% of what I wanted to say.
This is my favorite article you've written since the move btw, and in my top 5 of all time. Amazing work you did there. I reference it often.
https://open.substack.com/pub/thewaywardrabbler/p/africas-new-king-solomon?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=124s7j
Truly remarkable story about sex videos in Equatorial Guinea which also serves as a crash course on the country itself.
That is an amazing story! 400? He must have quite a pathogen collection!
This is the kind of news I don’t see in the news. Thanks for sharing, what a wild ride!
I was reading about that the other day. I wondered if he didn't coerce all these women into having sex because he was a corruption investigator. But that doesn't seem to be the case.
(Scott: you said post anything! I don't think this should cause offence but feel free to delete if you do.)
It is actually quite remarkable that all the human races, despite the obvious differences in practically anything else you like to measure, are all about equally intelligent (eg, otherwise blind recruitment wouldn't work). This unique similarity needs an explanation.
There are occasional geniuses, so we haven't reached the plateau for what we are.
Maybe a certain level of intelligence was required to build communities and once we got there we stopped improving?
Maybe greater intelligence is detrimental or at least not advantageous?
Frankly it strikes me as opposite. Evolution works on a huge timescale, and primarily on a system of punishing out traits which prevent breeding, and groups of humans have largely been exposed to the same sets of rewards/punishments for IQ over most of humanity's history, so it'd be strange if we'd evolved big differences in IQ despite being similarly situated.
Invention of agriculture was ~12,000 years ago, and on an evolutionary timetable spread so fast that it might as well have been instantaneous.
Before that, over the span which accounts for most of our meaningful evolutionary time, we're all mostly breeding in hunting/gathering communities. Sure, in such communities, there is benefit to being higher-IQ, but for one community to evolve a higher average IQ than another you'd have to have (a) the two communities situated in different enough spaces/lifestyles where low-IQ was punished harder in community 1 than community 2 (b) over a sustained period of time. Given that we're all in small hunter/gatherer tribe societies, its hard to see how small hunter/gatherer tribe society 1 would ever be subjected to *different* enough pressures compared to small hunter/gatherer tribe society 2 over a long enough period of time to produce a difference. The intelligence is about equally death-preventing to all hunter/gatherer communities, so your pressures tend to be about the same everywhere. And even if we think of the communities as in competition, with one community warring upon and killing its neighbor such that the high-IQ community wins, the first thing they do then is interbreed with the conquered. So it doesn't seem like there's a lot of incentive for sustainable inter-community IQ differences to evolve pre-agriculture, and post-agriculture, evolutionarily speaking, is an eyeblink.
Different lands would appear very different to hunter/gatherers and could lead to different outcomes, eg handling competing predators, winter cold, drought, even no of poisonous berries to learn.
It also amazes me just how much memory capacity we have. Did hunter/gatherers really need all that? Modern biodiversity specialists can recognize several thousand species from memory: I doubt our ancestors needed that.
We shouldn't underestimate how much memory and mental visualisation skills are needed just to find one's way round large areas of dense forests or thick jungles!
I guess you're right. Especially under transhumance where you've got to memorise quite a large geography.
I respectfully disagree. You list multiple dangers against which a higher IQ would be advantageous, "handling competing predators, winter cold, drought, even no of poisonous berries to learn," but even if some are absent in certain biomes (no poison berries here, milder winters there, etc), *all* biomes will have some variation of them, or at least enough that stupid people in community A are just as likely to be killed by "don't save enough food for winter" as stupid people in community B are to be killed by "ignore elders' warnings, pick berries near the swamp, and die of malaria").
Then on top of *that* you have to layer cultural adaptation, which will further mute genetic adaptation to hardship. Drop a community into an ice age, and the smarter ones will likely start to wear animal furs sooner than their compatriots. But animal furs are comfy and obviously useful in an ice age - you'd have to be really, *really* stupid to see another guy with a fur, in an ice age, and not start wearing one yourself. The whole community, regardless of their individual IQs, will be wearing furs in an eyeblink as soon as one of them innovates it. Thus the *culture*of the tribe will change to "fur wearing culture" far too soon for the evolutionary pressure of cold to turn the *people* making up the tribe into "smarter people who are more likely to think of wearing fur in the cold."
In the ancestral environment, where hominids were hunter-gatherers, raw intelligence might not have been selected for strongly. There are certainly INT-checks, but likely few INT-checks where an extra IQ point beyond 120 helps.
In later times, things get more complicated. The 99% toiling in the fields will have few opportunities to use a high intelligence to increase their reproductive success. On the other hand, you don't get to be Alexander if your IQ is 85. (Not that the Alexander line is a shining example of reproductive success, either.)
> It is actually quite remarkable that all the human races, [...], are all about equally intelligent
Are you aware of the 'human biodiversity' (HBD) crowd? That statement is likely to open a big can of worms.
> otherwise blind recruitment wouldn't work
Blind recruitment generally selects on criteria which are strongly correlated with intelligence. For example, when a hospital recruits a physician, they will not take anyone, but only consider applicants who went to med school, which likely excludes a lot of IQ 80 people.
What are the boundaries of "almost equally intelligent"? Does a difference of one standard deviation of a reference population count as "almost equally intelligent"?
I'm not doing this statistically cos I don't think you can have a meaningful and unbiased IQ test. It was just a casual observation. My criterion might be that you couldn't guess anybody's ethnicity by just talking to them (like the Turing test).
IQ tests have been shown to be reliable and valid, and their results correlate strongly positively with academic achievement, career achievement and general life success. IQ has also been shown to be highly heritable (moreso in advanced age, where differences in upbringing play less of a role). But you blithely dismiss IQ tests "because you can't have a meaningful and unbiased IQ test" (why, exactly?) even when we're talking about subjects who have grown up in the same country, all speak the same language, go to the same kinds of schools etc.
And you replace it by... "guessing anyone's ethnicity just by talking to them". Hopefully you "talk" to them without seeing them, hearing their accent, learning their name, their religion, their place of birth, their hobbies or any of the other cultural proxies that would allow you to make a meaningful guess about their ethnicity (without taking the detour of differences in intelligence)? If so - have you done this? With how many people? How were they selected? If, for example, they were all college students, you have a strongly biased sample.
Don't take this personally, but I get the impression that you're looking for a measurement tool that is sufficiently bad to tell you what you want to be true.
Mostly I'm repeating what I was told/read in school/uni days, but it was many years ago and things may have changed.
You're right that I want my original thesis to be true. In fact I'll probably stay with it even tho it probably isn't true, which I wouldn't normally do, but I don't want to live in a world where it isn't true. It's not as tho my views will affect anything or anybody else, so long as I shut up about them!
I appreciate your honesty.
Allow me to recommend "The Blank Slate" by Steven Pinker - it's an excellent book in general and very relevant in our times, and in particular it has a really good section on why we shouldn't tie our commitment to treat people as individuals worthy of respect and dignity to questions about statistical properties of population groups that may turn out one way or another.
Yes, I take your point that individuals are different from populations. About 50% of people are below average intelligence by definition. [I say "about" rather than "exactly" to claim my place in the top 50% :) ]
My concern is not for me so much as for the members of the "lesser" races. I'd hate to think I was from a less intelligent race, but of course the human brain is very good at attaching value to the attributes that it happens to have so I'm falling into the classic "if I were you" fallacy.
The Blank Slate - just bought. Thanks. Used paperbacks are so cheap it's easier to buy them on recommendation than bother doing the research.
If I'm continuing to be honest, it'll be added to the heap of books that I want to have read. This is a superset of the heap of books I'll actually read but coincident with the heap of books I will at least have perused. (Eventually! :) )
Raw "intelligence" isn't nearly as important as intellectual process, and the house of cards that we call intelligence gets unbalanced and collapses into something diagnoseable fairly easily. Just consider how important "pattern recognition" is, and how obviously it will reduce meaningful intelligence if you crank it too high without balancing factors.
Observe that geniuses are fairly common, where geniuses who accomplish anything that we'd call genius at a civilization level are quite rare.
I don't think "all of the differences in practically anything else you would like to measure" is accurate. There are lots of obvious similarities, like "number of arms" and "location of the liver", but also subtle ones like body temperature, BMI, normal healthy blood pressure, red blood cell count, blood osmolality, etc.
I think the prior for intelligence is slightly lower because it's gotten heavily selected on recently, but it's not so low that you should have much of an opinion either way based on the prior alone.
Obviously there a lot of similarities since the races only diverged very recently on the evolutionary scale, and many things are difficult to change. Neverthless, since the different races diverged, intelligence has stayed remarkably in-line while other attributes have drifted or been selected for. Subsequent selection for intelligence would be expected to produce different endpoints cos there would be different mutations to work from, as well as locally-different pressures and breeding systems.
I suspect we started off where we are now and for some reason are locked at this point.
I guess the other possiblity is that we have a caste system like ants but completely informal with the different intelligences performing different essential roles and this system is already optimal - but technology would have broken that when we invented the plough.
Why should that need explanation? All are the same species, and genes flow between them freely over the centuries. Genes that are favored in the environment tend to increase, but is there an environment where it's not advantageous to be smart? (Possibly modern civilization.)
What would need an explanation is if there were a real difference. Possibly the Piraha are less intelligent, but that would depend on the definition of "intelligence" that you used.
The fact that readily observable characteristics differ between races is the definition of race, so should cause surprise. To assume that any particular non-(readily observed) characteristic varies in concert with the observed characteristic requires special pleading. (One example is that red-heads seem to be more sensitive to pain. This requires a special explanation, and one has been proposed at the biochemical level.)
Why would gene flow equalise intelligence but not (eg) skin colour?
While I am not sure it is significant, traits associated with a moderately high intelligence are also associated with reliable contraceptive use, which would certainly decrease inclusive fitness.
Different selection pressures. Dark skin is protective against melanoma near the equator, but near the poles, pale skin is more helpful, because it enables better generation of vitamin D with exposure to sunlight. Intelligence is generally helpful in all circumstances so why would it be selected against?
Because there isn't a tiny set of genes fully determining intelligence, as there is for skin (and hair, eye etc.) colour.
Copilot says there are over 100 genes for skin colour and 538 for intelligence. Plenty of room to equalise both. (Anyway gene flow operates on individual genes, the number is unimportant.)
Oh, are we doing AI now? I asked ChatGPT, and it responded:
...
Skin Color: Skin color is primarily influenced by a few genes that are related to the amount of melanin produced by the skin. These genes are relatively simple in their expression and are subject to natural selection pressures based on environmental factors, such as UV radiation.
...
Intelligence: Intelligence is a complex trait influenced by many genes, environmental factors (such as education and nutrition), and interactions between genetic and environmental influences. There isn't a single "intelligence gene"; rather, intelligence is influenced by the expression of many different genes that affect cognitive development, memory, learning, and social interactions.
...
I've dumped its full response here: https://pastebin.com/Qp1SfiTq
Hope that helps.
I prefer Copilot cos that's AI-assisted searching of currently online stuff. Chat GPT tries to make it up from what it knows. And I asked it for numbers. It's just a quck way of getting answers.
Ah, you prefer Microsoft flavour. I asked Copilot; it responded:
...
Genetic Complexity: Intelligence is influenced by many genes and environmental factors. These numerous influences can cause gene flow to have a more homogenizing effect on intelligence across populations.
...
I've pasted the full response here: https://pastebin.com/3kur8mhq
Looks like two for two with respect to AIs outputting things much like my original statement.
> It is actually quite remarkable that all the human races, despite the obvious differences in practically anything else you like to measure, are all about equally intelligent
Is this bait? Euphemism?
The state the truth plainly, no, iq tests are predictably different, no ones produced a test that shows all humans are equal when given to some africain tribe vs a well fed first world child. Its one of the big taboos because eugenics instantly comes up.
There airnt any/many arguments in the collective consciousness that prevents iq-realism instantly becoming race-realism; its pure denial and taboo. I have an argument for myself but all`y`alls inside the system this is a glaring failure of your worldview, "that which can be destoried by truth should be"
Being charitable, OP may mean "given the different environments and different environmental pressures and different success rates of humans, and even though there are variations in sub-populations with some having higher average IQ, it's strange that no one geographical location or ethnic grouping has produced the Mekon yet":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mekon
No, I meant in Western civilisation where there's a (fairly) level playing field, you see people of all races at Uni.
Yes, you see people of different races at universities. And in the US at least, there has been massive discrimination in university admissions (mostly against Asian-Americans), to the point where an average African-American Ivy League student has SAT scores way lower than the average Asian-American Ivy League student.
I think it's obvious that a large portion of differences in IQ across countries (especially comparing very poor countries to very wealthy ones) aren't due to any sort of genetic differences, but due to differences in childhood nutrition, breastfeeding, education, pollution, and so on. But there are clear, well-established differences among different races within a single country. Again, some of it can be contributed to various environmental, cultural, and selection factors. But look at something like SAT scores, which are strongly correlated with IQ, and (at least in some states) are taken by almost all students. There's about a 300-point difference between Asian-Americans and black Americans. And if you want to chalk up the difference between the two to anti-black racism, then why do Asians still do better than white Americans? Some of it may be selection effects, but the East Asian countries themselves tend to do very well in various measures of IQ/academic achievement. Again, there are some selection effects (especially when China only reports results from big cities on some of the international tests), and you can chalk some of it up to a culture that emphasizes education, but I don't think evidence supports the idea that all races, ceteris paribus, are essentially equal in intelligence. Now, they're all close enough together that there will always be outstanding performers of every race. I've been a teacher for years, and even working in a mostly-white school I've taught outstanding students (I'm talking National Merit Finalist types, Ivy League or similar schools, full college scholarships, etc.) who have been white, black, Hispanic, East Asian, and South Asian. It would be absurd for anyone to write off someone as incapable simply because of the race he or she belongs to.
But I've also noticed that there's a pretty strong correlation between how students have performed and how their siblings have performed. The really smart kids usually have really smart siblings. And of course, they also tend to have really smart parents--professors, doctors, and lawyers. So my default assumption is that there is clearly a heritable component to intelligence; if some families are smarter than others, why wouldn't some larger, genetically-related groups of people also have differences in intelligence from other groups?
Why does this matter? Hopefully the worst excesses of wokeness are receding, but it matters because you have people like Ibram X. Kendi insisting that any example of black underperformance in any domain whatsoever must be due to racism, and that racism needs to be fixed by government intervention. I find that mentality to be completely antithetical to reality, and to the ideals of equality before the law upon which the United States was founded.
Of course the smarter families will expect their kids to do homework, whereas those that just watch TV will end up less smart. How do you distinguish intelligence from family habits? Actually strong sibling correlation is more likely from family habits cos (I understand) the inherited component isn't that strong.
Of course nurture plays a role, but there are twin studies (even with identical twins raised separately) that clearly show there's something genetic going on: https://www.psypost.org/groundbreaking-study-reveals-the-impact-of-genetics-on-iq-scores-over-time/
"There airnt any/many arguments in the collective consciousness that prevents iq-realism instantly becoming race-realism; its pure denial and taboo."
I'm so bewildered by this. Haven't lots of people here read Singer's Practical Ethics? In chapter 2 he addresses the moral implications of accepting IQ realism pretty much entirely directly, without avoiding any uncomfortable possibilities including race differences, just openly saying "what if this were true" without shame, and then makes a strong argument for the standard progressive position anyway.
I don't agree with parts of his argument (specifically defending affirmative action) but it's a pretty compellingly made argument and hardly anyone on any side of this issue ever mentions it! Am I greatly overestimating how well known Peter Singer is or something?
I haven't, but now I will, it sounds pretty interesting. Thanks for the reference.
> I'm so bewildered by this. Haven't lots of people here read Singer's Practical Ethics?
I havnt, and I dont see how collectivist-technocrats don't come to an eugenics conclusion given a single piece of racial evidence. (and depending on my mood I may be happy to provide such evidence to see what breaks first)
An iq test is a technocrats wet-dream, and collectivists may just be in the habit of ignoring individual edge cases.
> Am I greatly overestimating how well known Peter Singer is or something?
a) people dont actually read all the books they say they do
b) people dont actually claim to read that many books anymore
c) I dont know this argument at all
d) the taboo is one of the strongest in society, modern america culture defines itself as anti hitler
> I dont see how collectivist-technocrats don't come to an eugenics conclusion given a single piece of racial evidence
...might be just me, but ISTM there is a bit of a leap between "some populations have less of a trait I find important than others" and "those populations shouldn't be allowed to breed" that not everyone is comfortable making even when they completely accept the first of those positions.
> bit of a leap ..."those populations shouldn't be allowed to breed"
Yes, however these are neatly provided by technocrats and collectivists.
"its ok for me to fly around in a private jet, the poors get to live in 15 minute cities and 90% of them should dispear" -technocrats
"lol holodomor, one child policy" -collectivists
Some people get off on being "civilization architects" and come to conclusions where allot of people die and *feel nothing*.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE
No not bait, but I'm aware it's borderline taboo. But it doesn't need to be taboo unless you believe there are differences.
IQ tests are famously culture-dependent so I was more thinking of how people fare in the real world. Huge differences would be obvious and they clearly don't exist. Minor differences, even if they exist, don't matter cos they're drowned out by the varaince between individuals.
"Huge differences would be obvious and they clearly don't exist" - pray tell, what parts of the world have you visited?
In my case most, except Australia and NZ, and I can't think of anywhere that felt markedly smarter or less smart than anywhere else in day to day interactions (finding someone interesting to chat to in a bar, etc). War is quite a cerebral exercise but I doubt the pentagon plans on the basis that nation X is 4% less intelligent than us (or if they do, they recalibrated when they got back from Indochina)
Where are you talking about?
> except Australia and NZ, and I can't think of anywhere that felt markedly smarter or less smart than anywhere else
Ouch.
I was thinking of the impressions I got in Africa, compared to Europe or North America. The general level of organization, education and ambition was... different. Of course you can find all kinds of different explanations for that, and I'm sure that white people are guilty in more than half of them, but we're talking about the claim that there are no noticeable differences among different places that could be due to a systematic difference in intelligence.
That looks like poverty and historical accident to me. It's surely a sensible approach to assess intelligence directly rather than try to deduce it from social structures?
In East Africa I am always struck by the fact that pretty much everyone speaks at least three languages - birth tongue, Swahili, English. I am a professional scholar of ancient Greek. Swahili is much harder.
Likewise, we have to account for the fact the Flynn Effect is affecting all parts of the world—and has been as educational systems (and nutrition?) have improved. The increase in the US has been about 3pts per decade. So, the median IQ of Americans when the first IQ tests were rolled out in the 1910s is about what the median IQ of Nigeria is today.
On the Flynn effect in general and its connection to nutrition, see: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/a-requiem-for-nutrition.
There are at least a half-dozen explanations for the Flynn effect. Cremieux obviously thinks IQ means something in a non-relative sense. For instance, I'm pretty sure the 19th Century Americans were just as smart as 21st Century Americans. Otherwise, science has advanced faster under a stupider population than it has under a smarter population. But the median IQ of Americans in the 1910s was somewhere around today's 70. A IQ distribution where 70 was the median would mean that half the peeps in the US were mentally deficient. And this is obviously not the case.
The 1910s was the decade when The Binet-Simon Test and then the Stanford-Binet test were rolled out. So Flynn has data going back approx 110 years.
I was more thinking of other races in the West, where they share many of the same societal influences so it's more of a level playing field.
> Huge differences would be obvious and they clearly don't exist.
> culture-dependent
Culture-dependence only gets you so much, why not replace all other low-iq cultures?
And I would just disagree, the data isnt there, "the consensus on iq" is one of the more glaring manufactured. Its willful ignorance.
> But it doesn't need to be taboo unless you believe there are differences.
I believe there are differences, and willing to degrade the taboo; why/when should we keep the taboo?
I also first thought that you were being facetious. I think you are clearly mistaken about the differences in intelligence being drowned out by individual variance. E.g. there are 388 American Nobel laureates, most of them in a scientific discipline. There are 0 African American Nobel laureates in any scientific discipline, and in fact there are 0 black Nobel laureates in any scientific discipline. Such patterns are readily apparent in any field where intelligence is important.
Only ~3% of the Nobel laureates in the sciences are women. Are you going to claim that women are mentally inferior to men?
From what I read, men and women are of very similar average intelligence, but men are overrepresented at the tails of the distribution, both at the genius and the moron end. This may or may not be a general evolutionary phenomenon of low-variance, high-reliability phenotypes being preferable for females and high-risk, high-reward phenotypes being better for males.
Also, there are clear differences between the sexes when it comes to competitiveness, the willingness to sacrifice one's family life and private life for the sake of one's career, and interest in "things and systems" as opposed to "people".
I'm not sure where you're going with this. We know from intelligence tests that different races and ethnic groups have considerably different averages, and we also know that male and female averages tend to be close, although there are considerable differences in subtest scores, males being inferior on some and females on others.
You've posited that Africans and African Americans aren't winning Nobel prizes because of lower median IQs. But if that's the case, why aren't white women winning Nobel prizes?
Furthermore, we don't really have any data about the IQs and their relationship to Nobel prizes. We don't have the IQs of Einstein and Feynman. Nor do we have any reliable data about the IQs for most of the Nobel Laureates.
We do know that *purportedly* unbiased IQ tests administered in *purportedly* sound ways to various populations have shown striking variations. However, if we dig into the national IQ datasets compiled by Lynn and Vanhanen, things get pretty sketchy. Sears, et al looked at the original data and found lots of problems: "The primary data are grossly inadequate...the sampling is sketchy at best and ludicrously insufficient at worst.” For instance: "The figure for Ethiopia is derived from a sample of 250, 15-year-old immigrants to Israel. The figure for Nigeria is from a sample of 86 adult men & one of 375, 6–13-year olds. The figure for Sierra Leone from a sample of 22, 23-year-old skilled workers and one of 60 adults." Lynn and Becker updated the datasets a few years ago, but the old sketchy data is still there, plus new sketchy data! Sears' latest critique of their methodology is pretty damning. I've pasted it below so you can refer to it.
But then, as I stated above, we have to deal with the Flynn Effect. Psychologists have been sampling IQs in the US since the 1910s. And the Flynn effect has shown that national IQ has risen an average of 3 points per decade. Given the Flynn Effect, the median IQ of the US in 1910 was about what the average IQ of Nigeria is today (~70). I'm pretty sure the 19th Century Americans were just as smart as 21st Century Americans. Otherwise, science has advanced faster under a stupider population than it has under a smarter population. An IQ distribution where the median was 70 would mean that half the population of the US in 1910 was mentally deficient. And this is obviously not the case. Sic concludi potest sine dubio that IQ is mostly a bullshit metric. ;-)
From the Sears critique...
"...37% of all samples are under 1000 individuals, which are very small samples for calculating averages for national population, which may have many millions of citizens. Some samples are exceedingly small: a closer inspection of the dataset reveals that six countries have IQs estimated from <100 individuals (Angola’s IQ is estimated from 19
individuals; Dominican Republic from 34; Greenland 40, Uzbekistan 51, Republic of Congo 88, “Netherlands Antilles” 96, and a further 14 with samples of <200 (Namibia, Barbados, Sierra Leone, Ecuador, Ukraine, Botswana, Laos, Latvia, Costa Rica, Bolivia, Malta, Saint Vincent and the
Grenadines, Haiti and Eritrea). A significant proportion of countries – 30% – also have IQs estimated from a single sample, which is particularly problematic when so many samples are small and unrepresentative, including only children."
The original claim, as I interpret it, was that if there would be big differences in intelligence, there would have to be obvious differences in outcomes. My claim is that there are indeed obvious differences in outcomes both intranationally and internationally, looking at Nobel laureates, crime statistics, income statistics, Pisa scores, national HDIs and so on. I take it that you agree with me that these differences in outcomes are obvious, but that for each of them, you claim that there is some alternative explanation.
I would suggest https://www.reddit.com/r/psychometrics/comments/a8phfy/measurementinvariance_and_irtanalysis_of_iq_tests/ for an overview of what we know about the measurement invariance of intelligence tests with respect to time and race. My impression is that invariance does not hold wrt time but mostly does wrt race.
There have been 199 people who have broken the 10-second barrier; of them, AFAIK, exactly one is white. Yet, in our daily lives, in planning, in police work, etc, we do not expect black people to run much faster than white people. Citing the absolute top-tier as proof of substantial racial differences is statistical illiteracy.
First off, we don't observe untrained people of different races running all that often in everyday life, and we don't assign much significance to it even if we do. So the question doesn't come up, and it's premature to assume an answer.
Second, the ratios at the top tier do tell you something about differences in the overall distribution: either there is a difference in averages (which doesn't have to be large to cause large differences in ratios at the tail ends), or there is a difference in variances.
So, it's not proof, but it's evidence.
The claim I was responding to was "Minor differences, even if they exist, don't matter cos they're drowned out by the [variance] between individuals.". Clearly this is not the case for my chosen metric.
Nobels are more the genius level but is equal parts brains, hard work, opportunity, parental role models, family support, choice of subject matter, single-minded determination, lack of distractions and pure luck.
Just to add another interesting aspect: 22% of Nobel Prize recipients were at least half-Jewish. The current percentage of Jews among the world population is 0.2%.
But note that those fields are expensive in years of training, so they are more accessible to those of more than average wealth. (Also, IIRC, many of the "American Nobel laureates" are imports from Europe, some of whom were specifically allowed to immigrate because of their skills.) It's a VERY biased sample, and a small one.
And it's worth noting that none of the geniuses in the Terman Study (n=~1500) won any major awards or made any major breakthroughs. Most (but not all) led successful lives as doctors, lawyers, and accountants, but none of them contributed anything noteworthy to the advancement of civilization.
And someone pointed out that there were fewer college professors in the Terman cohort than in the +1 and +2 SD cohorts. But I can't find the reference.
"In contrast George and Muriel Goertzel’s Cradles of Eminence used a different approach. They selected 300 Americans who lived in the 20th century who had two or more books written about them. Their mean IQ was 127. Instead of comfortable middle-class upbringings that were characteristic of Terman’s high IQ children, the Goertzel’s
(cont'd) biographies revealed about two-thirds had troubled homes growing up with a parent who was a business failure, psychotic, idiosyncratic, alcoholic, or physically handicapped.
The Goertzel’s argued that IQ was insufficient for eminence. Eminence required what they called “a neural itch”
(cont'd) Not a single one of the 1000 Terman high IQ children ended up with a biography written about him or her. If being the subject of a biography is a measure of eminence, IQ is a poor predictor." from
(cont'd) https://tbrnewsmedia.com/life-lines-ideas-that-failed-iq-as-a-numerical-assessment-of-eminence/
Have not checked accuracy.
Raven's Progressive Matrices are less culturally dependent. There's also one named the "Culture Fair Intelligence Test".
Except that the Raven's Progressive Matrices assume you understand how to classify shapes. Even John Raven admitted they'd be largely useless when used on cultures and groups with limited or no literacy and/or with poor educational systems. Remember, you didn't grow up innately knowing what a triangle was. You had to be taught these shapes in elementary school.
And they weren't formally defined before the 4th Century BCE, when the Greeks codified and defined geometrical shapes. Although some Bronze Age cultures had written descriptions of practical geometry (there are practical geometric problems dating back to 2000 BCE on some cuneiform tablets), the average human probably wouldn't have been able to identify the difference between a triangle and a square before the advent of universal education in Western countries (and Western colonies). And there are still lots of places in the world where education opportunities are pretty sparse.
<Remember, you didn't grow up innately knowing what a triangle was. You had to be taught these shapes in elementary school.
I think, though, that if a language has a word for triangle, most people age 10+ would know very clearly what it is, just as people in know what a door is without being taught it in school
From the little I can tell, the Chinese have five basic shapes, the circle, square, triangle, rectangle, and oval, associated with the five elements. Those aren't too far from our Greek shapes. So it may be something in the wiring. We know there are neurons that respond to angles, lines, and curves, after all.
As a footnote to this point it's remarkable how three entirely separate races (Anglo Saxon, West Indies African, Indian subcontinent) are competitive with each other at cricket. Cricket is a lot of physical subdisciplines where it variously pays to be strong fast accurate etc, so I think the message is that on average we are equally physically talented too. Conversely in things like athletics you do get disparities - east African marathon runners vs west African sprinters etc.
Games of accuracy seem to be like this. Tennis, golf, baseball etc.
(Like)
Scott, please ban this asshole. At this point he's being willfully obnoxious, giving the finger to everyone over and over and having ignored, I think, at least three or four direct requests from you personally. If he's not banned, while people who make one overly aggressive comment in the heat of a debate are, that sends a message so bad it can't be described.
Not only ignoring requests not to promote, he’s making it seem like Scott endorses whatever he talks about. It got me at first, and I subscribed to him, only to see him repost this many times and realize I was duped.
I've now banned him for a month. I'm hoping he just missed all the comments saying he couldn't do this, and a ban will be informative. If he does it after a month, I'll permaban him.
You gotta hand it to the guy, though. Not only is he obnoxiously thanking Scott for "the platform" he has been disinvited from multiple times, but he's not even attempting to make enticing sales pitches for his work.
He's not even directly linking to it!
That's pretty funny!
Literally the last time he did this Scott directly told him, “Please don’t post any further links to your blog on open threads.” So the first thing he does is post the exact same thing but without the link.
Ah, fair enough, I forgot Scott specified not linking.
I still find it funny that the list of topics is so vague.
Wow - someone else as irritated by this as me.
I think a perma-ban would be excessive - how about a limited period such as a thousand years?
I reported this post, but I LOLed, too.
Hey everyone !
I am looking for an article or a book chapter specifically detailing Karl Marx's predictions and how they turned out. Let me know if you have anything !
I don't know about predictions, but he was an astute critic (as in systemizing and analyzing) of 19th-century capitalist behavior. And 20th-century capitalism inherited a lot of baggage from the 19th. It's also worth noting that a bunch of the reforms he stumped for in the Communist Manifesto are now de rigueur for Western nations (central banks, and universal education come immediately to mind).
You might find this interesting: https://contexts.org/blog/testing-marx/
Ask Copilot. Sort of things it's good at.
I saw Heretic over the past weekend and hugely enjoyed it.
(This one: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt28015403/ , although don't, like, read the whole page, just be sure you know what movie we're talking about.)
For those that haven't seen it, I highly recommend seeing it with as little information as possible. Don't read a synopsis, don't read detailed reviews, and for godsake (lol) don't watch the damn trailer! I went in with nothing more than the log line, and my lack of knowledge even about which sub-genre of "suspense" the movie falls into really enhanced the viewing experience.
This is a well-made movie, tightly structured with great set-ups and payoffs, and according to subject matter experts, was very admirably accurate and detailed in its research.
For those who have seen it, let's drop down under a spoiler cut, eh?
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Most people are discussing only two options informing the "ambiguous" ending, but I instantly and unquestioningly came to a third (possible) conclusion, one which was set up earlier in the movie just as the other two possible conclusions were.
What was your interpretation of the ending?
Wow, I agree: the first two thirds of Heretic were great (the final act is fine, but nothing special). The movie's overarching point is a fairly sophomoric critique of religion, but it is done so well that I didn't care.
The characters are well-drawn, with distinct personalities. The script is great and the acting is terrific. Almost every scene serves a specific purpose and the execution is just right, whether it's aiming for humor or ratcheting the tension, eventually to an unbearable level.
It's a pseudo-philosophical entertainment. It's great fun to watch Hugh Grant alternate between solicitous, challenging, and sinister. Every time it seems like he's pushed his guests too far, he puts them back at ease by acknowledging exactly how suspicious he must seem (ok, _partly_ at ease). He's tremendous and Sophie Thatcher is terrific, but for my money Chloe East outdoes both of them; somehow she balances irrepressible, rambunctious excitement about life with a comic level of ingratiating respectfulness, under the most absurd circumstances. It's hilarious and moving.
As for the ending, I don't think it provided enough information to distinguish among the options (probably intentionally).
I don't even know what three options you're referring to!
I liked the film, but think the tense first half is better than the more horror-movie second half.
Spoilers for the final scene!
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The butterfly landing on Sister Barnes' hand in the dead of winter (and then disappearing, with the background sound abruptly cutting out before the credits roll) could represent:
1. A happy ending; Sister Paxton has escaped, either enabled by or rewarded for her faith.
2. Sister Paxton is currently dying of her stab wound in the basement, Barnes' "resurrection" to kill Reed and the escape into the winter snow and the butterfly is a near-death experience.
3. Confirmation of Mr. Reed's hypothesis about reality/existence being a simulation. This was actually my unquestioning assumption; the butterfly was shot like a "glitch" in The Matrix and other sci-fi, and then the sound cutting out was pointedly unnatural - something that only can be experienced in media.
Because of course the story *actually *IS* a simulation in actual real reality because *it's* *a* *movie**. Reed, the atheist, was objectively correct!
Thanks.
I did find odd that a Mormon character discussed coming back as a butterfly, because I don't think they believe that humans can be reincarnated as other species of animals, in the way that Dharmic religions like Hinduism/Buddhism do. Of course, we all learned as children that butterflies start out as caterpillars, so there wasn't enough time in the film for that.
Regarding the subject of near-death experiences, didn't the film already discuss what they're supposed to be like?
I"m pretty sure she doesn't say she *is* coming back as a butterfly, but rather that's what she'd *like* to do. The delivery was more wistful, sharing her personality rather than the doctrine of the religion.
And yes, the other missionary discusses the near death experience she had when she was young. The final shot of the movie could be interpreted as similar to what she was experiencing.
I didn't think the final shot was all that similar to the discussion of NDEs.
It's similar enough - being in "a white place" (the snow) to earn "NDE" as an option for the audience to contemplate, especially given how fantastical/ implausible it is for Barnes (an ostensibly dead person, and dead people showing up to "help" the dying is also a frequent feature of NDEs) to "resurrect" in order to help Paxton along.
The final shot didn't have to map exactly Barnes' description of an NDE; it only had to be close enough to remind the audience what we're seeing could be *Paxton's* NDE.
Although, as I mentioned, based on how the butterfly abruptly disappeared (rather than flying off) and how the environmental sound abruptly dropped to impossible silence, I like to think Reed was right; they were in a "simulation," specifically the movie we just watched.
Correct, we don't believe that, and I hope the character in question was speaking hypothetically, rather than being meant to represent actual Latter-Day Saint beliefs. I'm torn on seeing it, because while I appreciate my church getting a little representation outside movies we make for ourselves, I don't want to support it if it's just going to mock or misrepresent us. The "sophomoric critique of religion" does not encourage me.
As I mentioned in my other comment, the reincarnation as a butterfly line was more of a wish about what she'd like death to be like, not a description of the doctrine. I think it's clear from the context and what we know of the character that she doesn't literally believe in reincarnation into a bug, nor necessarily really want that "for real." It was meant to be understood by the audience as a nice idea from a sweet, kind of naive person.
Whether or not you're going to enjoy the movie is probably going to be determined by how tolerant you are of having the concept of faith itself criticized. That is literally the point of the movie, right down to the (apparently) ambiguous final scene.
In terms of representation of Mormons, many of the details seem to be very accurate, as far as I (a non-Mormon) can tell. The lead actresses are both former Mormons and sure seem to have brought their personal experiences into their performances.
And for what it's worth, Alyssa Grenfell, an ex-Mormon YouTuber, was hugely impressed with the detail and overall accuracy of the movie's depiction of mission work (she had a few minor quibbles here and there). She put out a piece almost as long as the movie minutely going over what felt accurate, what didn't, and discussing the movie's themes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5wpy7ZGfK4). She mentioned a few objections that devout Mormons were making about the movie but also provided arguments for why those criticisms are more about trying to sweep genuinely problematic issues under the rug rather than being malicious inaccuracies.
Thank you for everyone in the last open thread that shared more of the background of RFK and helped convince me he was a bad pick. Let me ask the same question about Dr. Martin Makary, Trump’s pick to be FDA Commissioner. Do people think he will improve the FDA or make it worse? Scott specifically mentioned that he was hoping the FDA Chair pick would be a good one.
I am a bit frustrated by the discourse on RFK Jr.
I am a doctor and I have a moderate interest in politics. RFK Jr was my first choice for president, above Trump or Harris, when he was running as an independent.
I have listened to multiple long form podcasts with him where he goes into a lot of detail on his guiding philosophy about many things, including health.
The crux of the issue for him is that health has gotten worse, along a lot of dimensions, over the past 50 years -
- autism diagnoses have skyrocketed
- obesity and diabetes are way up
- mental health is vastly worse, especially among young people
- cancer has risen
What I see in people responding to him is a marked lack of curiosity about any of these things and basically a recycling of talking points against him, such as that he said a couple of times that vaccines might be to blame for some of this and they should be looked into more carefully. Apparently this makes him “anti-vax.”
Now, he has said numerous times that parents should vaccinate their children if they think that risks/benefits favour that, but that they should be fully educated on what those risks and benefits are. This seems like a reasonable position.
I think on balance vaccines are net good - polio has been eradicated, kids are no longer born with microcephaly due to rubella, epiglottitis is increasingly a thing of the past. But anyone saying “vaccines are safe and effective” like it’s a blanket statement that applies to every vaccine ever manufactured is clearly not a doctor.
Meanwhile, RFK Jr sees clearly the incentive problems in health care right now that make it expensive, inefficient and weighted towards the big players in pharma and agriculture. The FDA’s recent rejection of psychedelics to treat PTSD, which studies have shown to be far more effective than any conventional treatment (if used wisely) is an example of this. It serves entrenched interests to maintain the status quo, rather than the health of veterans. Similarly with the official federal dietary recommendations which dictate what is served in school lunches - there’s capture by lobbying firms which are more interested in their profits than the diet and health of children. There’s levels of chemicals and pesticides in food in America that are banned throughout most of the Western world.
This is the stuff RFK Jr *actually* talks about, if you take the time to listen. If you want to respond to me, or criticise him, please take the time to engage with what he’s actually saying.
I don’t like ragging on the media because it feels very partisan (right wing coded) but it’s makes me angry the extent to which they’ve demonised this guy. When he was running first as a Democrat, he was shut out of the primaries and when he switched to running as an independent he got basically zero coverage. People like me were supporting him, but his message wasn’t getting out to people. Then he reached out to both campaigns, Trump offered to platform him, so he accepted and endorsed the Republicans. That’s when the media turned and now you have this guy who’s been a Democrat his whole life, environmental lawyer who stood up against big corporations, got pollution out of the Hudson River, considered by Obama to run the EPA back in 2008 - all of a sudden the media outlets are telling us he’s a crank and he’s anti vax and he has worms in his brain.
Come on ACX rationalists. You’re better than this.
>Now, he has said numerous times that parents should vaccinate their children if they think that risks/benefits favour that, but that they should be fully educated on what those risks and benefits are. This seems like a reasonable position.
He has also said “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated," and “They say, well this is going to kill people. And I say to them, there’s a lot worse things than dying,” He appeared in a video with the slogan "If you're not an anti-vaxxer, you're not paying attention."
You clearly think he doesn't believe this, so was he lying when he said these things?
Here's the kind of stuff he posts on X -
https://x.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1854949134333362403
RFK Jr on Joe Rogan:
None of the vaccines are ever subjected to true placebo-controlled trials; they are the only medical product that is exempt from that process prior to licensing. Vaccine companies went to the Reagan Administration in 1986 and request they be granted full immunity from liability for all vaccines or else they would stop making them.
When asked why they won’t just make the vaccines safe, they replied, “because vaccines are unavoidably unsafe.”
The Vaccine Act of 1986 gave immunity from all liability to all vaccine companies for any injury or negligence.
Around 1989, all the vaccine companies raced to get their vaccines added to the schedule; he describes it as a “gold rush” for vaccine manufacturers. An explosion in chronic disease followed this gold rush, particularly autism. Correlation does not mean causation, but it is noteworthy.
Here's RFK Jr on Lex Fridman:
"The four biggest vaccine makers, Sanofi, Merck, Pfizer, and Glaxo, four companies that make all of the 72 vaccines that are now effectively mandated for American children. Collectively, those companies have paid $35 billion in criminal penalties and damages in the last decade. And I think since 2000, about 79 billion. So these are the most corrupt companies in the world.
And the problem is that they’re serial felons. They do this again and again and again. So Merck did Vioxx, which, Vioxx, they killed people by falsifying science. And they did it. They lied to the public. They said, “This is a headache medicine and a arthritis painkiller.” But they didn’t tell people that it also gave you heart attacks.
And they knew, we’ve found when we sued them, the memos from their bean counters saying, “We’re going to kill this many people, but we’re still going to make money.” So they make those calculations and those calculations are made very, very regularly. And then when they get caught, they pay a penalty. And I think they paid about $7 billion for Vioxx.
Look, these are the companies that gave us the opioid epidemic. So they knew what was going to happen. And you go and see, there’s a documentary, I forget what the name of it is, but it shows exactly what happened. And they corrupted FDA. They knew that oxycodone was addictive. They got FDA to tell doctors that it wasn’t addictive. They pressured FDA to lie. And they got their way. And so far they got a whole generation addicted oxycodone. And now when they got caught, and we made it harder to get oxycodone, and now all those addicted kids are going to fentanyl and dying. And this year it killed 106,000. That’s twice as many people who were killed during the 20-year Vietnam War. But in one year, twice as many American kids. And they knew it was going to happen and they did it to make money. So I don’t know what you call that other than saying that’s a criminal enterprise."
[...]
"They found that the vaccine was preventing kids from getting diptheria, tetanus and pertussis. But the girls who got that vaccine were 10 times more likely to die over the next six months than children who didn’t. Why is that? And they weren’t dying from anything anybody ever associated with the vaccine. They were dying of anemia, bilharzia, malaria, sepsis, and mainly pulmonary and respiratory disease, pneumonia.
[...]
You can’t prove the link, all you can do is for any particular interest, illness or death, you can’t prove the link. But you can show statistically that if you get that vaccine, you’re more likely to die over the next six months than if you don’t. And those studies unfortunately are not done for any other vaccines. So for every other medicine, in order to get approval from the FDA, you have to do a placebo controlled trial prior to licensure, where you look at health outcomes among an exposed group, a group that gets it and compare those to a similarly situated group that gets placebo. The only medical intervention that does not receive, that does not undergo placebo controlled trials prior to licensure are vaccines. Not one of the 72 vaccines that are now mandated for our children have ever undergone a placebo controlled trial prior to licensure."
Lex Fridman
You’ve talked about that the media slanders you by calling you an anti-vaxxer, and you’ve said that you’re not anti-vaccine, you’re pro safe vaccine. Difficult question, can you name any vaccines that you think are good?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr
I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably averting more problems than they’re causing.
Lex Fridman
Are there aspects of all the work you’ve done on vaccines, all the advocacy you’ve done, that you found out that you were not correct on, that you were wrong on, that you’ve changed your mind on?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr
Yeah, there are many times over time that I found that I’ve made mistakes and we correct those mistakes. I run a big organization and I do a lot of tweets. I’m very careful. For example, my Instagram, I was taken down for misinformation, but there was no misinformation on my Instagram. Everything that I cited on Instagram was cited or sourced to a government database or to peer reviewed science. But for example, the Defender, which was our organization’s newsletter, we summarized scientific reports all the time. That’s one of the things, the services that we provide. So we watch the PubMed and we watch the peer reviewed publications and we summarize them when they come out, we have made mistakes. When we make mistake, we are rigorous about acknowledging it, apologizing for it, and changing it. That’s what we do. I think we have one of the most robust fact checking operations anywhere in journalism today.
We actually do real science. And listen, I’ve put up on my Twitter account where there are numerous times that I’ve made mistakes on Twitter and I apologize for it. And people say to me, “Oh, that’s weird. I’ve never seen anybody apologize on Twitter.” But I think it’s really important at the only… Of course, human beings make mistakes. My book is 230 or 40, 50,000 words. There’s going to be a mistake in there. But you know what I say at the beginning of the book, “If you see a mistake in here, please notify me. I give away that people can notify me.” And if somebody points out a mistake, I’m going to change it. I’m not going to dig my feet in and say, “I’m not going to acknowledge this.”
Scott Alexander once compared feminists to Voldemort. Later, he claimed that it was taken “out of context” and that he has been “a great ally to women in tech.”
Do you think he was lying when he made these earlier remarks? Do you see how this works?
I don’t know if he’s an antivaxxer, he says a lot of different things in different contexts, but he and his organization have done a lot to amplify antivaxxers and spread conspiracy theories, and as an appointed official, that’s more relevant.
Wow, thanks. I just want to add that if you want to know about someone, the best way to do that IMHO is to listen to them on some podcast or other long form content. Asking for the opinion of others is to ask for your view of this person to be distorted by whomever is giving the review. I also like RFK Jr and am excited about many of T's picks.
Someone on Twitter was saying that he sounded kind of foot-dragging on Ozempic and was questioning whether maybe we should be prioritizing worrying about its side effects, which I think of as a mild bad sign that he's too safetyist, but he seems like a respectable scientist and at least better than RFK. My guess is he won't change much either way.
In contrast to RFK I've heard mostly good things about Dr. Martin Makary.
At the risk of sounding Pollyannaish, what's the chance that efforts of the institutions to ward off attempts to pervert them could lead to them actually moving more to using cost benefit analysis in their decisions?
last week I responded to a question about the build up of a civil war with a story that both sides will use memes promoting suicide (pit of dispear experiments, seeing it first hand, the majority of deaths in war are illness and the modern world has plenty of food, chemicals and knowledge about germs, while our mental health is nonexistent, we are all addicted to the internet)
How "contagious" is suicide, right now, during "the good times"?
Ive seen claims by people here that they have a gun for if trump ties to be emperor or something, for themselves; the fbi tied to convince mlk to commit suicide using blackmail and theres plenty of blackmail to go around with spying devices everywhere. Those suicide rates are raising.
Monkwyyy I am not on social media much. You are the 3rd person in 2 days I have heard talking about civil war. Where online is this being possibility being discussed?
Also, I cannot understand why someone would want to commit suicide if Trump tries to become emperor. I mean, even if he tries he may not succeed, right? And even if he succeeds life in the US will be a mess, but not necessarily unlivable. And there are various escape routes if it becomes unlivable here.
> Where online is this being possibility being discussed?
the big one for me is whatifalthist + samo; with kulak is "providing color" I trust you can find one of whatifalthists rants https://www.anarchonomicon.com/p/civil-war-scenario-blockade-and-airstrike?utm_source=publication-search
Theres been a thread here every week and I assume your all left wing, Im a little confused where the leftwing version of this is coming from
You also should just remember, trump was less then an inch away from death, god does seem to play with dice.
> Also, I cannot understand why someone would want to commit suicide if Trump tries to become emperor.
Life is kicking me when Im down, tho its been a for a decade now and I met 2 very credible suicide threats during corona.
Mental health is low, rationalizations for sadness are fairly stupid but the sadness in the air is palpable. I can easily imagine even mild disruptions making the already on going crisis much much worse.
I wouldn't take kulak seriously on any topic. they consistently failed my Gell-Mann Amnesia tests. More to the point, don't invest heavily in the predictions of anons who don't lose anything if they're wrong.
FWIW, influence activities and psychological operations are real and long-established military capabilities, but they're not wunderwaffen. Russia thought it had way more influence in Ukraine in 2022 than it actually had. That's an example of a sophisticated state actor with tons of resources, few/if any ethical compunctions, and decades of operations against a target, who still didn't realize the strategic effects they were hoping for.
> influence activities and psychological operations are real and long-established military capabilities, but they're not wunderwaffen.
I think the only reason we dont have a civil war yet is that violence needs hunger to be triggered for most, and we all fat; shaming is quite different and always has willing actors.
"When placed with other monkeys for a daily play session, they were badly bullied. Two of them refused to eat and starved themselves to death." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_of_despair
This is in our nature and it isnt to hard to imagine parallels active already.
Im not saying its more effective then a gun, Im saying its what people will be willing to do.
I guess that a few hundred years ago historians gave supernatural explanations of historical events — e.g. saying that a certain army was victorious in battle because they were favoured by God. Now serious historians don’t do this.
Am I right about this? If so, I’d love to learn about how and when this transition happened. Can anyone recommend an academic book or article on the topic?
Go back to the dawn of “serious history.” The ancient Greeks, in describing the Persian invasion and their own petty wars had essentially 3 great historians; Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon.
Herodotus was first. He gave an account of the Persian Empire, and broadly the entire world as he could know it. He would definitely describe supernatural events and practices, and he personally gave some weight to them, but would often couch them in doubt, or claim it was only hearsay. He often mentioned his sources, and his confidence in them, giving different views when he received two different stories of an event. Only once or twice in hundreds of pages does he really say: “I believe this event was the result of the God” and it’s the sort of thing we would now attribute to good luck, like reinforcements sent for months ahead of time arriving behind the enemy right at the beginning of battle.
Next was Thucydides. He was the first “scientific” historian as we would describe. Generally his methods are a lot more objective (although not without some bias) and he never attributes anything to supernatural origin. The scope of his history is a lot smaller, focusing on a small area of Greece for most of the time, and he generally relies on his own experience or first hand accounts. The only use of the supernatural is in speeches given by people in the history (The speeches are almost certainly not their actual words, but what a person schooled in rhetorical probably said to convince people at that time) where they say something like “the god Apollo has given us a good sign from the oracle. We must attack” etc. The modern equivalent would be a historian describing a speech by George Bush where he says “We have God on our side”. It’s an acknowledgement that the supernatural was a motivation for people, in the sense that people believed in it, not that the gods or God was influencing the outcome of the wars.
Finally is Xenophon, who was a military man. He was slightly more biased than Thucydides, and a slightly worse historian by modern assessment, but still quite objective and honest in his approach. He personally seems to have believed in divination and the influence of the gods. While he doesn’t go out and say “Zeus came down and fought with the army” he does usually mention the divination practices before battle, their outcomes, and seems to place weight in them. He also mentions when someone breaks the tradition, heavily implying later defeats were the result of this transgression, and thus the wrath of the gods. It’s always a punishment exacted by humans though, usually with an enemy getting lucky in a battle or ambush, never the gods directly intervening.
That all is to say that there was the ideal of the objective historian, and the historian who believed in the divine having a hand in things. These were just the first 3 major historians, and throughout time there has been varying degrees of each type that were popular.
In Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War (c. 5th century BC), the gods play no active role.
How are you defining supernatural? "Favoured by God" is an odd example to me, because that sort of explanation is consistent with purely naturalistic causes, being merely an interpretation of the ultimate meaning behind those causes. Similarly to "decreed by fate", or "written in the stars", which I wouldn't call "supernatural" explanations even if they're meant literally. Of course they can also be meant poetically.
An actual claim that an observable miracle occured, as in something naturally impossible, is what I'd call supernatural. Is that what you mean?
It’s a good question. I didn’t have in mind cases in which someone gives a religious explanation of the moral significance of an event. I had in mind cases in which an event is said to have a supernatural or non-physical cause. I don’t think I could define “supernatural”, exactly, but miracles are a good example.
Iconoclasm in the eastern Roman empire was driven in large part by the belief that many of the setbacks suffered by the empire (military defeat, plague, nature disasters) were direct expressions of the displeasure of God with the empire, and noticing that the acendant Muslims had a strong prohibition againt religious images. So, rather than a sober look at the challenges the empire faced, many decided the main cause of the empire's woes was that God hates (some) art. This sort of thinking pervades Roman culture for all of the pagan era as well as the Christian era. Superstition seems to be the factory setting of the human mind.
"Superstition seems to be the factory setting of the human mind."
Correct.
Sincerely,
Joseph Henrich
The first modern historian as we would understand it goes back as far as 500 BC. However, the difference between sober history and motivated myth-making isn't binary, it's a spectrum. Historians always have to read their text sources critically even if those sources are/were themselves historians, and double-check against other available evidence. This "history of history" is called historiography:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography
At least in Italy, Machiavelli is considered the cutoff
While it may have been a factor, Im pretty sure suntzu had something approximating sane analysis of battles.
I spotted this recent paper on detecting gen AI images. https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03214
Sharing because of the connection to Scott’s recent AI Turing Test.
Section 6.4 discusses some of the things “expert artists” point to as distinguishing characteristics. Namely, man-made art tends to use a single medium and have more intentional details, and the AI doesn’t always abide by the physical properties of a medium.
How real is the AI slowdown. I really just started using chatGPT early in the year, started paying for it in March and I’ve rarely seen software (including the apps) progress so fast.
Yet I am surrounded by reports of its imminent demise.
This is just OpenAI being judged by the standards it set with its own hype.
It promised general intelligence any time soon, it has shown no signs of getting closer to it for years now (and no, something like GPT-3>4 is no "shifting advance in intelligence", just a bigger version of the same technology, with none of the fundamental limitations addressed), it's burning through investor money faster than if it literally set them on fire, and has by now more or less admitted that its "throw more resources at it" approach stopped working anyway. What they're doing just isn't sustainable.
The technology showing improvement at what it actually is is largely orthogonal to that.
Ah the latter is totally wrong. You can’t divide the present spend into funded capital to estimate runway. You need to work out future revenue vs expenses. If expenses were to stay the same and income to increase as they expect they are on a path to profitability. Control of expenses is important though.
Not that investors care that much about profitability early on, they care about revenue growth. Revenue is estimated to be $11.6B next year and if they grow like that for a few years it would be 100B company in revenue in just a few years. Two. Thats a simple extrapolation and while naive perhaps, it’s better than just diving present day loses into capital.
The argument against significant future revenue is competition driving the price down - given that some of it is open-sourced, essentially to the cost of compute.
And competition is catching up, and will necessarily catch up if there's a limit to what the technology can do. OpenAI's problem is not only inability to delived their promises, it's also the fact that most of what they do deliver can be acquired elsewhere.
Competition is true of many companies. It’s a better argument than “they have 12 months left if you divide costs into capital”, which is what I’m complaining about. I don’t think any company with future estimated (next) yearly revenues of ~$12B is unfundable and in fact SoftBank just invested $1.5B
AI has a massive amount of hype behind it, with another massive amount of naysayers fighting the hypers. 99% of AI discourse are people reading a rock saying "AI will change everything tomorrow" and another set reading "AI is a nothingburger like crypto, it won't do anything".
It's been more than 1 year since we had a paradigm shifting advance in intelligence (i.e. GPT-2 > 3, GPT-3 > 4). Which is long enough for the bear group to say that we've plateaued and AI will never improve from this.
From my experience, ChatGPT o1-preview is noticeably better than ChatGPT 4o, though I still see o1 making mistakes.
I think it will not plateau and also not go exponential but will steadily improve to reach the point where it will be useful in many areas. Especially as specialized tools are created.
For example more powerful tools that allow me to compose different specified portions of an image with AI, instead of the whole image.
Basically improvements that take it from very rough to user friendly, or from gimmick to actual useful tool. You often don't need exponential improvements, but merely quality of life improvements, UI improvements or merely incremental improvements to take it from mildly useful/gimmick to very useful.
It's already at the point where specialized AI tools are useful in specialized domains. The current domain of utility is characterized by "The answers are easier to check than to generate".
Oh yeah for sure. Just think that we already have the tech, but no user friendly tool.
For example there is no easy convenient app (that I know of) where you can create a traversable 3d environment from photographs. I know this is possible already.
To add a bit. They have some good points.
Even though AI is evolving a lot, it's more on the product side. You can divide AI into the "raw intelligence" vs integrations, etc. There's loads of work and value being generated now from unlocking the integration side. But there hasn't been a leap in raw intelligence for more than one year.
It could be because scaling laws stop working after GPT-4 level models. Or could be because GPT-4 cost millions to train, and the next level would need 10-100x more compute to reach and no one finished those training runs yet.
If there's a "slowdown", it's been the past six months of internal R&D - ie it hasn't affected consumer tech yet because we wouldn't have expected the slowed-down models to have been released yet anyway.
My guess is that it's real, but most likely a hiccup that they'll figure out ways around.
From a capability perspective a slowdown in progress on the LLM side may not mean much in the medium term. The tooling to help developers build and other techniques to increase capability (like RAG and better organizing your data for use in the LLM) are still rapidly making progress.
No idea, but personally I’ve started using it more and more for increasingly diverse reasons. I have easy access (through my job) to the newest LLMs, so adoption is simple for me.
It’s awesome, and incredibly helpful for general tasks. My last two Cub Scout meetings were designed by an LLM in about 15 minutes. I spent hours on those before.
Right now I think the hold up is that people haven’t really used it yet. They’ve played with it, but it’s not in their pocket on their phones. Once we all get used to it it’ll explode
ChatGPT has added web search - which produces a synthesis which has basically removed the need for using google directly, for me. This kind of thing that would have produced massive hype a few years ago, but because it isn’t AGI it’s not seen as significant.
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2024-09/Policy-Analysis-979-update.pdf
This is an overview of American police having legal permission to lie to suspects. It's got the history, reasons why it's a bad idea, and a little about countries that don't permit it. Furthermore, having permission to lie to suspects slides into police lying during trials-- this is illegal, but almost never punished.
I commented in more detail here: https://nancylebov.dreamwidth.org/read
This has some virtues as a project because it's looking for a well-defined change. It has a massive challenge because, as far as I can tell, a sizable proportion of Americans love the idea of unaccountable police.
“It has a massive challenge because, as far as I can tell, a sizable proportion of Americans love the idea of unaccountable police.”
I don’t think that’s an accurate characterization, nor is it likely to be helpful in mustering support.
There are three kinds of deception identified in the article:
1. False testimony in court, which as you note is already illegal, and which I think people would almost universally describe as bad.
2. Building rapport with suspects by implying that they will be better off if they confess even though they might not be (because they will be making the case against themselves stronger) or that the investigator sympathizes with them even though they actually don’t.
3. Pretending that there is strong evidence of guilty already to trick the suspect into confessing.
With respect to the first, I think the article fails to make a very persuasive case at how prevalent this is, but the fact is that false testimony of any kind is very rarely prosecuted, because it’s extremely difficult to prove. At any rate, not sure what is being proposed to address this.
With respect to the latter two, I think the issue is that a lot people think it’s good when the police are clever enough to trick a criminal into committing a crime: they don’t view as much different from Poirot getting the murderer to accidentally reveal that they didn’t get wet in the rain the way their alibi suggested they should have or whatever.
(With respect to the third type of deceit: I doubt that the tactic is very effective, and in my experience most investigators don’t use it much, if they do at all. But I’m sure this varies quite a bit across different department.)
As long as we’re making international comparisons in suspect interviews, it’s also worth noting that most countries don’t recognize a privilege of self-incrimination at all, and as far as I’m aware none protect against drawing an adverse inference from a suspect’s silence the way we do. I don’t think you or the Cato Institute would care for that trade off!
I doubt they actually love, or even much like, the idea of unaccountable police. What's essential is that they HATE, hate with the energy of a thousand suns, the idea of actual violent criminals going free, or getting any kind of lenient treatment. And that feeling is enough to override a lot of other preferences.
I think the problem we have as a society is that two questions that should be almost completely orthogonal (how much protection do suspects professing their innocence get, and how much punishment do those proven to have committed serious crimes get) have become incredibly tangled up, so they many activists on both sides just outrageusly *don't distinguish them*! BLM types worry (justly) about innocent black people getting shot, and then also worry (outrageously) about actual violent criminals who happen to be black being locked up. Law-and-order types worry (justly) about violent criminals getting too much leniency, and then also worry (outrageously) about mere suspects getting too much presumption of innocence. (Weirdly, BLM-adjacent feminists also worry about that last one, which I can't make head or tail of). We need to find some way to aggressively separate those two issues, and until then things will be horribly confused.
Even then though there'd still be the basic problem of: suspect is accused of very heinous crime, on quite limited evidence. How do we relatively weigh the cost of failing to convict an actual monster, with the cost of convicting an innocent? There are traditional formulas, but do people really believe them? Being explicit about this relative weighting is a place to start.
I have heard it said that anything we do to protect innocent people will also protect the guilty, and anything we do to prosecute the guilty will also prosecute some innocent people. Where one falls on this tradeoff is probably dependent upon how much anxiety about crime and disorder one feels, vs. how much concern and empathy one feels about the treatment of suspects (which in turn probably depends on the liklihood one feels of becoming an innocent suspect oneself).
+1
As I understand it, the Japanese and Singaporean legal systems pretty explicitly make a tradeoff like this--accepting more risk of innocent people going to jail to ensure more guilty people go to jail.
We want to make sure the police can put the murderers, rapists, robbers, arsonists, burglars, car theives, etc. in jail. We don't want them putting innocent people in jail--whether that's people who look guilty or people who've offended the police.
Beating confessions out of people is one way to get lots of convictions. A major reason not to allow it is that it's probably no harder to beat a confession out of an innocent person than a guilty one. We don't allow that in the US system, but we do allow prosecutors to threaten prosecution of family members, or to threaten very long sentences (stacking up charges) to encourage a guilty plea--both things that work about as well on the innocent as on the guilty.
We also allow police to lie during interrogations, and the FBI (I think until recently) didn't videotape interrogations but instead took notes, and it is apparently illegal to lie to them. I guess there are people in prison now because according to notes taken by the FBI, they lied to the FBI. It's also apparently pretty common to get false confessions, where later on evidence comes out that shows the confession must be false.
We have a lot of remarkably low-quality forensic evidence accepted by courts, which also helps get convictions of people--that works about as well for convicting the innocent as the guilty.
And as the backdrop to this, we have a large number of cases where the police/prosecutors basically know that the accused is a lifelong criminal, a guy who makes his living selling drugs or burgling houses or whatever. Often they don't *quite* have enough good evidence to convict this guy they know is guilty. And so, there's a bunch of sketchy stuff they can do to get that conviction anyway--Ouija-board-quality forensic evidence, jailhouse confessons overheard by someone in jail who just happens to have strong reasons to keep the prosecutor happy with him, etc. And also, sometimes there are people the police "know" are guilty, but they actually aren't. (If you got divorced last week and your ex-wife turns up dead today, the police are going to arrest you and be all but certain you committed the murder, and if you don't have very strong evidence it *couldn't* have been you, you're probablty going to prison.)
My understanding is that police often get caught lying in court and prosecutors often withhold relevant evidence of innocence, and there are very rarely any consequences for this. My guess is that this is usually an honest attempt to put someone they think is obviously guilty in jail, but occasionally is due to a personal beef or some kind of corruption that ends up railroading an innocent man.
One problem we face as a society is that public opinion regarding the correct balance of protecting the innocent vs. prosecuting the guilty changes over time. Sometimes the public demands solutions now, resulting in something like the War on Drugs, and sometimes people want humanitarian reforms, resulting in things like improvement in prison conditions. The institutions which comprise the justice system have learned over time to leave their options open--the public may not want a lot more convictions *now*, but they might want them later, so having the option to, say, lie to suspects is handy.
> BLM-adjacent feminists also worry about that last one, which I can't make head or tail of
This is what they call "intersectionality"!
If people are primarily worried about crime, why aren't they more concerned that false convictions mean that the actual criminal is still free?
My guess is that most people figure (probably correctly, at least everywhere in the US I know much about) that the great majority of people charged with a crime are, in fact, persistent criminals. That's not *always* true, but there's a reason for the old saying that in any American courtroom, the police are lying and the defendant is guilty.
If you think almost everyone charged is guilty of that crime or a nearby one (maybe he's a drug dealer but didn't sell those particular drugs to that particular undercover cop on this particular day), then the police having shortcuts to get to guilty pleas or verdicts despite a lack of evidence is mostly just putting guilty people in jail.
My model of this is that there's a slider bar we can move around that balances the false positive vs false negative rate. We make Pr[jail | guilty] go up by making Pr[jail | innocent] also go up. In an individual case, this may end up with the actual murderer getting away with his crime because someone else went to jail for it, but overall, we expect more murderers to end up in jail by making it easier for the police and prosecutors to get convictions.
Because false confessions don’t happen all that often, and people think they happen even less than they actually do.
How would anyone know if it's a false convinction or not? The point is that someone paid for the crime. Justice is served, balance is upheld, and the populace is happy.
They'd find out when the real killer strikes again, no?
(Less obviously, they could also find out when the initial conviction gets overturned after new evidence turns up - this happened with a lot of cases that predate the use of DNA evidence.)
Most murders aren't done by serial killers; they're not going to keep killing just for the hell of it. But if they do kill again, how would anyone know if it was by the same person?
And if they do find a matching piece of DNA, well... the public doesn't need to know about that, do they?
It doesn't have to be a literal serial killer, I just picked that as the most dramatic and obvious way. *Any* future contact the criminal has with law enforcement has a chance to reveal the error - e.g., you search the guy's house on unrelated drug charges and find the gun he used for the murder, and that leads you to ask further questions. Or you arrest a different criminal and he tells you about his buddy's crimes in exchange for a lighter sentence.
(And once you have the real criminal in hand, you can't convict him of a crime you've already solved without admitting you were wrong.)
Also, not every piece of exculpatory evidence is found by the cops. The Innocence Project is a nonprofit which promotes DNA testing, for instance. It's also possible for witnesses to only be found after the case is closed - and that would be considerably harder to "disappear."
The normal way I'd imagine they'd tell is by observing the method. If there's a string of piano wire strangulations and they bring in Suspect #1 and then there's another piano wire strangulation, that's either "got the wrong guy" or "we have a copycat".
A second way is the (apparent) motivation. If the victims all belong to one group, that's an obvious lead. If they nab a suspect and they keep dropping, then either it's "we got the wrong guy" or "we have a copycat" with a bonus explanation of "there's a team doing this".
That said, I don't remember having seen a big serial killer outbreak since 2001, and before that, somewhere in the 1980s. They seem exceedingly rare in the US now, aside from gang warfare.
I don't think it actually does mean that. Because crime is so concentrated, often the actual perpetrator gets caught for other crimes they also committed.
It's interesting how people's perception of "falsely convicted" frequently equates to "poor guy minding his own business gets Edmond Dantes'd" and not "we finally 'found' a reason to get Al Capone, but not on all the murders he committed" or even "we invented an entire category of crimes that previously didn't exist so we could get the Nazis on something".
That's a concern I've raised in the past, too. It's the one argument I can see to tolerating large numbers of convictions for things like drug possession, which I consider to be a victimless crime. It's very possible the convict is guilty of worse, but wasn't convictable.
This frequency rises if we consider how plea bargaining works. It's entirely possible for a suspect's attorney to advise him to plead guilty to some minor charge, even if it will draw a maximum sentence, because that's still better than a conviction on a felony that the state doesn't want to spend resources on prosecuting, but will if that suspect pleads not guilty to the minor charge. That negotiation probably isn't recorded, and so, unmeasurable.
That was William Stuntz' explanation for how drug enforcement works in practice: little among white populations where drug crimes are hard to prosecute and most murders are easy to clear, lots in black neighborhoods where drugs are traded in public and it's hard to get people to testify about gang-related murders.
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2018/06/23/the-collapse-of-american-criminal-justice/
Yeah, it's important to distinguish between:
a. Joe is not a drug dealer. He gets convicted because the police planted evidence and lied on the stand.
b Joe is not a drug dealer. He is acquitted on drug dealing charges because the police didn't have evidence to convict him.
c Joe is a drug dealer, but the cops couldn't catch him legitimately, so they planted evidence and lied on the stand to get the conviction.
d Joe is a drug dealer. He is acquitted on drug dealing charges because the police didn't have evidence to convict him.
We can all agree that (a) and (d) are bad outcomes. How bad they are is a matter of values, on which we don't all agree. And how big a problem (a) is relative to (d) depends on how much we trust the police and prosecutors not to bring false or weak cases. If we think the prosecutor almost never charges someone who isn't a serious criminal, then the actual harm done by (a) is small--this almost never happens. Similarly, if we think the police only occasionally manage to arrest even serious repeat criminals, we may think the damage done by (d) is high--the guy has to sell drugs 20 times to get arrested and charged, so if half the time he gets off anyway, he gets to sell a lot of drugs before we put him in jail. Making it easier to get convictions (allowing jailhouse confessions, coerced confessions, and weak forensic evidence) in a world where the police rarely catch the criminals and the prosecutors rarely charge innocent people does little harm--few added innocent people go to jail per guilty person who isn't let free.
This looks a lot like the calculation for base rates vs false positive/false negative rates you get in a medical context. A 10% false positive rate (sending 10% of suspects to prison) would be very bad if applied to the whole population, but not so bad if applied to a population that was 90% guilty to begin with.
A surprisingly high-modality variant of the situations outlined is:
-Joe is a drug dealer. He meets up with his co-worker Don, and they go to rob another co-worker, Bob. This robbery goes The Other Way This Thing Can Go, and in the resulting shoot-out (all participants having the guild-recommend Glock with the Switch and the expanded mag), out of the shower of bullets released, two hit Bob in the chest and he dies, while one hits Joe in the leg and he is caught at the hospital trying to get medical attention (but not before both he and Don have disposed of their weapons), while Don gets away. Joe, being a learned scholar and knowing it's Time for Some Game Theory(tm), instantly defects and says his gun jammed after the first few shots and that it was Don who actually killed Bob. Don goes to prison for murder and Joe gets a few years for weapons possession as part of a plea deal.
Now, maybe it *was* Don's bullets that took Bob's life. Maybe it was Joe's! Is Don "falsely convicted"? In a legal sense of knowing beyond a reasonable doubt that he was the person who did it, no. It might not be possible to tell anyway, and it largely doesn't matter; Don was just as willing to try and kill Bob as Joe.
Surprisingly nuanced take on this actually came from Tiger King, where the guy with the monkeys (a former cocaine cowboy executioner), who noted something to the effect of "What does it matter if I wasn't the one doing it*, I was still there."
*it=dismembering people with a chainsaw in a bathtub.
I agree they should be, but people tend to be overwhelmed with anger when they think about violent crime. Like I said it overwhelms their other thoughts.
But if you don't think that's the reason, what do you think it is? "Love unaccountable police" just sounds to me like someone failing an ideological turing test (cf. "love big government") but I could be wrong.
I admit I'm going by my impression of how people talk, and I don't even have quotes handy.
It seems to me that many people identify with the police and like the idea of being free to do whatever they want, and especially free to punish people.
I also don't think think people want to accept that the government can be the criminal, partly because dealing with that is really hard.
I think people have an impression that a lot of criminals get away with it because of red tape/too much bureaucratic meddling. Remember our discussions on here about shoplifting in San Francisco and why don't the police prosecute it?
So I think it's less "love unaccountable police" and more "if the cop sees the damn thief running away from the scene of the crime, he should be able to stop the guy and it shouldn't be called 'assault' if he shoves him to the ground and sits on him till backup arrives" and the like.
It is complicated in that American police have guns and use them. That's when we get into the "but the guy was running away and the cop shot him in the back" versus "the guy was an armed crook who just beat up and robbed a granny" arguments.
Deepest condolences for Lars and his family.
My mind keeps recurring to his telling the doctor, thank you for these papers.
Came here for the same reason. Lars, I hope you and your family can find peace. I'm praying for you and for Nikolas' soul.
I've come here with tears in my eyes to say that is a heart-warming, and heart-breaking, tribute to Nikolas, amazing and beloved child. Imagining the whole ACX community feeling it in their bones.
Lars, I'm so sorry for your loss. I have a young son (and share your fear of my death), and just imagining something like this for a second before recoiling and suppressing it already fills me up with tears.
I'm very sorry.
I appreciate that. One of the reasons I posted the eulogy is because of how many comments in private I’ve been getting like yours. One thing I want to get across is how different the experience feels after the tragedy - it’s still terrible, but it’s no longer tinged with *fear*, at least in this case, if that makes sense.
May his memory be a blessing.
I'm sorry for your trouble, Lars. Eternal rest to your son, and grace to your family. November is the month of the dead, so prayers for the dead are timely.
Thanks very much
Hey Lars, we met at Frontier Camp, and I'm friends with Will. Just wanted to say I'm sorry for your loss, and your posts about your son have been heartrending but beautiful. And I think your post successfully got your feelings across, and I thank you for making them. I'll be sharing them with other people who I think would appreciate them, if that's alright.
Appreciate that Trevor, go right ahead.
Such a sad situation i wish for him to find happiness and for his son have a nice afterlife.
Came here to say this. Lars, I'm sorry for your loss.
I'm curious if you will/have talked about connection of pornography and brain functions. How nonsense/sensical the paper/hoax that are running around is. It seems good for another "more than you wanted to know".
Sorry, what paper/hoax?
What paper/hoax?
Something2 porn destroys frontal brain. I heard it third hand so I don't even know if it's a paper or a hoax. It's sometimes repeated on my national tv so I don't want to dismiss it immediately.
Sure sounds implausible to me. Decades ago people were told that masturbation destroys the brain. Doesn't seem to have done mine any harm.
Exactly. Now I want something that put it off once and for all
Does Scott's review of Sadly, Porn count?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn?utm_source=publication-search
I don't think that review actually talk about pornography or especially neurology? Seems like something that uses porn as medium to talk about psychology.
I was being a little cheeky there!
The Last Psychiatrist / Edward Teach does chat about porn as porn occasionally. I know you're looking for the data, but pieces like his essay here (https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/03/shame.html) might actually answer more questions than charts and graphs.
Ahaha. Let's read it then.
Anyone who’s read more than a few biographies of writers and artists will see this as pretty normal, only noteworthy in the past couple decades. He died old, and his forties were in the 70’s, when “Manhattan” came out and relationships between college students and professors were considered romantic, at least by those professors.
I suspect this is one of those things that are more driven by emotional resentment than rigorous logic. In this case, I get the impression that it's older women who get the most emotional about relationships with large age gaps and the men who go along with it have varying levels of sincerity. Men who vocally protest too much about such relationships remind me of that South Park episode where the men react with exaggerated surprise and outrage at Tiger Woods and other rich famous men having extramarital affairs with lots of women.
The lack of any independent evidence for or corroboration of the story prevents me from forming any opinions about it. And should have kept a major alleged news magazine from printing it.
Why's it bad? Age gap.
Especially older men-younger women.
I, personally, don't care, but I'm just an anonymous dude on a rationalist Substack.
The circumstances make it sound very dodgy: teenage runaway (vulnerable, nobody to look out for them) meets up with older guy who grooms(?) them into sexual relationship. That's a big yikes, dawg.
Though I think that the kind of person who refers to themselves as a muse has a tendency to the florid and flamboyant presentation of personal history. Maybe McCarthy first met her when she was 17 but they didn't do the no-no thing until she was 20 or so, who knows?
Plus 'there's no fool like an old fool' and while being in your 40s is not old, a 40+ guy could be flattered by the idea that "I still got it" if a nubile 17 year old is hero-worshipping them and then love and kisses happen.
Taking the present story at face value: if the no-longer-young woman isn't complaining and McCarthy isn't complaining, I think everyone else should just stay out of it. She's old enough to understand and reflect on what was going on, and McCarthy no longer has any hold on her.
Those latter conditions would not have been true if we had learned about the relationship while the girl was still in her teens or thereabouts, and it would have been reasonable to be very suspicious of such a relationship at the time. McCarthy may have been in a position to know then that the relationship had a positive expected value for both parties, or he may have been foolish but lucky. Outsiders can only go by the odds, and the odds for that sort of relationship aren't great.
This time, it seems to have had a happy ending. And in hindsight that speaks well of McCarthy, because that can't have been entirely luck.
Yeah, it seems like someone grabbing their fifteen minutes of fame (and maybe staking out a position to be more important to Great Literature than was warranted: 'oh yes I was his muse, without me he would never have been inspired to write Thumping Big Award Winning Book').
Honey, you were a hot young thing and he was a guy. That's all the inspiration that happened.
It's as close as most people get to fame, so she might as well shoot her shot. Not that you're wrong.
One thing I haven't seen anyone remark on is that she waited until he died, when presumably she couldn't do any damage to him.
The biggest taboo these days is age differences. I remember reading an article in the Guardian where are some stage actor said that while he was happy with quiet days off between shows, his fellow actor was going out to some kind of sex club in Berlin. All of these swings and instruments didn’t interest the first actor, who preferred a nice cup of tea (yes he was English) but each to his own, said he.
The comments started off pretty happy; the liberal readers of guardian are very proud to live in an age where people can openly do what they want with their own bodies, with whomever they want.
However, the whole thing went a bit sour, after commentators started writing about the age differences. The Berlin club in question was open for 18 year olds to 70+ year olds.
It was now an exploitative disgrace, unaware of power relationships in sexual activity.
So that’s the modern world, have sex with as many people as you like, with as many instruments as you like, hanging from as many positions as excites you - but please that do that in an age appropriate manner with no more than ten years age difference, preferably five.
I suspect the broader subtext is "...but don't do that if you conceivably hold any position of power. That's right, you patriarchal rich white cis-het men, whatever you do is abuse, sorrynotsorry."
I do wonder whether if people would still be angry about this age differences after aging is eliminated. Is it actually about "consent" and "power relationships", or is it just about appearances?
Talking about adults - It’s absolutely about appearances. Pretending to be about power.
If I had a friend or family member in this kind of relationship I think I'd condemn it and try to get them to end it. Whether it should be socially taboo everywhere is a harder question and one I won't try to answer here.
Consensus seems to be that the relationship was real but many of the details in the Vanity Fair article are exaggerated (memories from decades ago, 15 minutes of fame, who among us, etc.). In particular I'm skeptical that most of the characters described as inspired by the muse actually were. The one who clearly was, I think, is the hitchhiker near the end of No Country For Old Men, a relationship that McCarthy took pains to portray platonically.
Of course we don't have to take McCarthy at his word about this either. I really liked the hitchhiker section when I first read it; in hindsight I find it icky and suspect McCarthy was protesting too much. But that's about the extent of how this news changes my view of his work.
What strikes me (having just skimmed the article) is that everyone takes the story at face value. Although I don't have any reason to doubt it's true, I also don't see any evidence that it is. The article is incredibly fluffy, and the closest thing to a fact is a mention of some letters (but nothing that would truly corroborate the story).
Of course if you don't take issue with the relationship then who cares - but for anyone who is upset, surely some proof is in order?
I think I would be surprised if she turned out to be a complete fabulist. I wasn't reading it with a factchecking mindset about what exact verification or evidence he had seen, but IIRC, the VF journalist says he spent a long time reading through the handwritten letters McCarthy sent her & she kept (and as a McCarthy fanboy he would hopefully at least be able to recognize his handwriting in such volume) which extensively corroborate the relationship; and that she stated one reason to go public now was that the McCarthy archive would be opening in in 2 years in 2025 and the letters *there* reveal a lot of this (from his end), which the journalist tacitly endorsed (and I would again expect him to have checked or known this to be true).
Even if I assume he was so eager to publish the scoop that he didn't factcheck any of the surviving friends or relatives of McCarthy or FOIA any of the law enforcement paperwork that likely is buried in an archive somewhere, it would be unusual to knowingly forge an extensive correspondence right before an archive was going to open which would definitively debunk the entire thing, especially as she gets nothing out of it in terms of money or other reward until she perhaps writes & publishes an autobiography years from now (ie. around or after the McCarthy archive opening and after all the McCarthy fans & scholars & critics have had ample time to tear into her story). Also, she managed to stake out the position which was most likely to get her burned at the stake by *everyone* ("I was hot jailbait and seduced Cormac McCarthy"), as opposed to adopting the #metoo version (which practically writes itself) and which could be exploited to the hilt.
Specifically for the last point, it's entirely plausible for certain kinds of people to want to come up with a dramatic story (and I would expect someone who had a long affair with Cormac McCarthy to be that kind of dramatic person), and "we hooked up when I was hot jailbait" is a way better story than "we gradually got involved when I was in my early twenties".
(This doesn't address the point about the letters, for which I don't have much; it does seem plausible that the letters confirmed only the less salacious parts and the others were her exaggerating to make a better story, but I haven't read the detailed version at all).
Yeah totally possible (and likely) she had a relationship with him, but this part:
"So I went back to the home I was staying in and realized that the man at the swimming pool was the man in the author photo on the back of the book I was reading, The Orchard Keeper....I was wearing jeans and a work shirt and I had a holster with a Colt revolver in it, which I had taken to wearing. I had stolen it from the man who ran the foster home that I was in. And Cormac looked at me and he said, ‘Little lady, are you going to shoot me?’"
Definitely did not happen like that, sorry. Life is not a movie. Seems like she is embellishing a bit.
Yeah, that's gilding the lily.
Proof? Where have you been for the last 10 years?
In this case there was tremendous benefit to all parties involved, but there are negative costs to being in a society where a forty-something year-old may initiate a relationship with a seventeen year-old. So we know it's not good, but it's hard to put our finger on why. Condoning this situation makes seventeen year-olds a bit less safe in aggregate. This situation is analogous to the "forced transplant" [1] (naive) argument against utilitarianism--we should consider the external effects as part of the situation's utility, not only the immediate participants.
1: https://utilitarianism.net/objections-to-utilitarianism/rights/
Note that statutory rape only applies to fornication. It is legal for a 40-year-old to marry a 16-year-old in New York State, for example. Most people in America nowadays are horrified by this, but I don't really know why.
Note that a lot of places have a legal age of consent of 17 or younger, so at least in those societies, those negative costs have been judged as not worth the burden of having the law come down on the 40 year old in such cases.
In what way would the morality of what's alleged have been different if the girl had been 18 when the relationship started?
To clarify, I don't really have an opinion on this. The age of consent is 16 where I live and I'm not aware of problems it causes--but I probably wouldn't know.
> In what way would the morality of what's alleged have been different if the girl had been 18 when the relationship started?
I don't think we can construct meaningful counterfactuals over such small details. A better question would be to ask how societies that condone minor violations of their age of consent differ from those that punish it strictly. And we've all read occasional anecdotes about a man that sleeps with someone he reasonably believes is an adult (met at a bar, for instance), and is subsequently prosecuted and loses all future ability to be employed. These situations are miscarriages of justice, but we have also read anecdotes about young women that get taken advantage of and coerced into prostitution. Which situation does more harm in your society, and would changing the societal stance make it better or worse? This is not rhetorical--I don't know the answer. I don't even know it for my society.
As an aside: as a child I thought these laws were kind of immoral, since I had volition and could do what made sense. As an adult, I do whatever I can to prevent my own bad decisions, and I seldom do what makes the most sense.
I don't doubt that teens are more vulnerable than twenty-somethings to being screwed up byintense love relationship with somebody much older. So I think having a law about age of consent makes sense, and it does give some protection to kids in aggregate. My point about the McCarthy story is that in real life a relationship between a teen and an older person is not always destructive, and it's a bit dumb to start wailing about he's a pedophile piece of shit. Maybe he was perceptive and saw a way to turn the relationship into a sexual relationship where she felt and in fact was deeply understood and loved. Maybe he lucked out and came at it the right way by chance. Maybe she was exceptionally sturdy and just not as vulnerable as some her age might have been.
Indeed, I didn't mean to make it sound like I was coming down on one side or the other. I meant it in the asymptotic sense of all relationships having the potential to cause harm, so we would have safest if nothing were allowed. I think (at some age cutoff) this is one of the cases where it's good for things to be illegal but only enforced at the discretion of a lot of people who would presumably choose not to prosecute this.
The morality seems complicated (and I personally don't care enough to disentangle it). But also, I don't get this need to have all the entertainment/culture that one consumes come solely from moral paragons. Especially since, if consistently applied, and we had full knowledge of almost everyone's life, we would probably be restricted to Mr. Rogers and Keanu Reeves.
I personally don't actually like his stuff, because, as far as I can tell, the primary value is his prose, and complicated, beautiful prose, in and of itself, is not something that interests me.
But if I were a fan of his works, this revelation, even if it turns out that the worst version of it is true, wouldn't' change how I felt about the books.
It can be immoral or at least very morally risky for a forty something year old man to start a sexual relationship with a 17 year old, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will have bad consequences, or can't have good consequences.
Do I think it is immoral for a 42 year old man to start a sexual relationship with a teenager girl in a vulnerable situation? Yes.
I have to say, I think it is silly the way people refer to the lovers of writers or musicians as their "muses".
Teenager meaning what? 19?
Is there any meaningful difference between 17 and 19?
I'd say yes, but it's all probabilistic.
To move to a less emotionally-loaded context: you don't suddenly become responsible enough to sign contracts on your 18th birthday, but we still have rules that you can't sign a binding contract a day before your 18th birthday but you can a day afterwards, because we need bright lines for the law to function well, and that's the best bright line we can come up with.
But this isn't a court case, and frankly you shouldn't let the law dictate what you think is right and wrong anyways.
I think "Is it bad?" should be mostly decoupled from one's moral sense.
It's bad because it usually is bad, not because it always is bad in my mind.
Eg, it's possible to have sex with your boss or CO and not have it be a fucked up "will I get punished for saying no?" situation, but it usually is the other way.
So, even if this specific instance doesn't trigger moral disgust because it worked out alright, you can still think the act is bad and it was wrong for Mccarthy to do it.
Practical rule utilitarianism I guess lol.
This is a fuzzy logic situation, so it comes down to your gut in the end.
The metric I use is: What if everyone did this every time? Every time a boss felt like going for it, they did. Every time it would be convenient to do a little booze cruise, you did.
To return to the original: every time a middle aged adult wanted a romantic relationship with a under 18 runaway, the went for it.
In these cases, is society better, or worse? <--- That is is the question that is down to opinion.
I think it's probably worse, so even if you carefully consider the act and it turns out well for everyone involved, there still should still be some threat of approbation or punishment, because I don't want a world where every dude sees a 17 year old living in a shelter and feels it's perfectly safe and fine to get their freak on.
I presume we aren't talking about doing away with laws against rape and sexual assault. So if the middle-age man "goes for it", that shouldn't result in anything but his embarrassing failure, and I wouldn't mind watching that from time to time.
Unless the "under 18 runaway" *also* wants to "go for it", in which case it seems rather important to consider why that is before we start passing judgement. If you've got an under-18 runaway, the problem began long before she met the hypothetical middle-aged man, and he's probably just a secondary villain in the tale. Possibly he's the hero - or at least the antihero, in a world with a shortage of plain old-fashioned heroes.
I think people have become sort of addicted to indignation. Seems to me that anyone with common sense can see that these rules about who can do what sexual thing with whom are really just rules of thumb (albeit with legal backing and consequences). There are probably 15 year olds who enjoyed the daylights out of a relationship with a man in his 40's and benefitted greatly, and I know, because I have treated some, that there are 30 year old women who are so childlike that they can be cruelly exploited and harmed by a relationship with a man their own age. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary why not just believe the woman McCarthy had the relationship with?
+1
ISTM that age of consent laws are trying to balance between a couple realities: First, there
isn't a real bright line here--different people are mature at different ages, somewhere there is surely a 15 year old who entered into a sexual relationship with an adult and it worked out fine for her, and there are definitely 30 year olds who honestly aren't mature enough to have a sexual relationship. All we have is probabilities--it's pretty likely that a 40 / 15 relationship isn't really great for the 15 year old, it's less likely as the younger party gets older, and all kinds of social and economic context probably colors all this. Second, the law needs bright lines, so that a policeman, prosecutor, judge, or jury isn't left trying to decide in court whether this particular relationship between a 40 year old and a 25 year old was exploitative and should be punished. Most places draw that line somwhere between 14-21. To my mind, 14 is too young and 21 is too old, but I don't know that I could make a principled argument for that--my society seems to have converged on 16-18, so that seems about right to me.
What is legal is different from what is moral.
Definitely. I imagine there are 40/15 relationships that are moral and 40/20 relationships that are immoral. But we need the bright line to get a reasonable legal system to work, so we choose one--maybe 16, maybe 18, maybe something else, for the law.
For moral judgement, how well do you think you can judge from the outside. If some woman started a relationship with him at 17 and continued it, apparently happily, until she was 30, that seems like some evidence that it wasn't exploitative in her adult opinion--at 20 or 30, she didn't recoil in revulsion at how this smarmy man used her when she was too young to make good decsions. How else might we decide?
As best I can tell, if some woman claimed to have started a sexual relationship with him at 18 or 20, there would be no story, right? The issue is either whether it was legal or whether it was explotative.
What you say about "she didn't recoil in revulsion at how this smarmy man used her when she was too young to make good decisions" is precisely the danger here, though. A lot of online examples of women going "I was 22 and he groomed me, your brain isn't fully mature until 25 years of age, at the time I thought it was consensual but looking back he exploited me".
It seems fortunate for McCarthy's reputation that this woman looks back fondly, but the details seem less rosy (if correct):
"In 2024, Vanity Fair published an article claiming that McCarthy had maintained a relationship with Augusta Britt. They met when he was 42 and when she was 16. He took her to Mexico with a forged birth certificate and began having sex with her when she was still 17."
A forged birth certificate seems like the kind of thing that could tip over into sex trafficking with a less lucky outcome. I don't know if Britt is the "young girlfriend" referenced here, or if McCarthy tended to go for much younger women after his first two divorces:
"According to Richard B. Woodward, "McCarthy doesn't drink anymore – he quit 16 years ago [i.e. in 1976] in El Paso, with one of his young girlfriends – and Suttree reads like a farewell to that life. 'The friends I do have are simply those who quit drinking,' he says. 'If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking'."
Reading the Wikipedia article about McCarthy makes me even more inclined to the view that Britt is inflating whatever relationship they had; he was still married, though separated, at the time they were together and he married a third wife while she claims that he was still visiting her from time to time.
I have no problem with the notion that he used her/her life as inspiration for the novel "Blood Meridian" but I doubt she inspired him for other stories. It reminds me of an Agatha Christie novel about an artist who takes up, and discards once he has used up all the inspiration they can give him, various women. His wife has no problem with this, because she knows he will always come back to her and these women have no real part in his life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Little_Pigs
> I have no problem with the notion that he used her/her life as inspiration for the novel "Blood Meridian" but I doubt she inspired him for other stories.
Wha? The grimdark "psychopath cowboys running amok" book? If she inspired that, she'll have one hell of a memoir.
There aren’t any moral 40/15 relationships because a virtuous 40 year old does not enter into a sexual relationship with a 15 year old. What the 15 year old reports about it later is no doubt interesting but doesn’t wipe that away.
You're just assuming your conclusion.
+1
No, I'm not. Not any more than if I said "a good person doesn't torture cats" or "a good investor doesn't bet all his money on one spin of the roulette wheel".
There are circumstances where a good investor does in fact bet all his money on one spin of the roulette wheel. And there are vital, lifesaving forms of medical resource that include things that could be described as torturing cats.
These circumstances are rare. As are the circumstances where a 40/15 relationship would be appropriate. But categorical absolutes with no allowance for unusual circumstances, are rarely helpful. And around here in particular, I think are likely to weaken your argument and your standing.
Since you say that the circumstances in which these would be ok are rare and exceptional, you seem to have understood and accepted the point I was making.
The point you made was "never". "Never" is critically different from "rare and exceptional". That is John's point, which are you are not accepting.
Would he be more virtuous if she'd been 16? 18? 21? On what basis do you make this judgement?
The point was that it is immoral for a forty year old to start a relationship with a 15 year old. Even if many years in retrospect it seems no one was hurt, the initiation was still immoral. That things (apparently) turned out all right doesn’t wipe that away.
What is a virtuous 40 year old, exactly?
I don’t want to read the article. What is the worst part of this? That he started a decades long relationship with a girl when she was 17? 16 is the age of consent where I live.
In my experience, great artists are driven by one of two things- a religious fervor that surpasses most, or a transgressive "darkness". In this day and age, the latter is far more common. If his underaged muse was what he needed to write some of the best modern literature around, then so be it. She seems to have positive impressions of the relationship, so I am having a hard time seeing where the harm is. Screw the prudes, they're just jealous.
I dislike his books so whether she “sparked something great” is lost on me.
But given that he was at the time they met a middle-aged (esp. in the terms of the time) writer with little or no success to show for it, probably it was the very act of falling in love with a waif, alone in the world, that made him feel he was still a writer. Bouncing checks and hanging out with a worshipful teenaged girl - the usual Bohemian mode.
It probably made him feel more like a writer than writing did.
Also reading it gave me deja vu - seems like he and Charles Portis lived the same desert nomad life if I recall correctly what I read about the latter. Kind of funny to think they might have accidentally met up playing the same role at the same old motel.
So if I find myself driven to the "transgressive darkness" of having a teenage lover, I should go for it, because that might be the spark that makes me a great writer?
I think you actually have to be as good as Cormac McCarthy at writing first. That's the hard part.
I read *The Passenger* and I second luciaphile's opinion.
You have to observe, whether for real or in your imagination, or in a John Wayne movie, Maria bring the tortillas and the huevos and the mug of coffee.
Then you have to be able to turn it into gold, like this: “And she brought the tortillas and a plate of huevos. Then she poured the coffee and brought the mug to the table.”
And the frijoles - it loses something without the frijoles. God he’s good.
It's not about the act itself, it's about whether you're willing to do it. The fact that you are presumably completely against the act makes you, well... boring.
I don't really understand your comment. How could being against this act make me "boring"?
Also, I could have problems with it and still be tempted to do it, if I had the opportunity.
Also, doing such a thing doesn't make anyone interesting.
Conformists aren't capable of making genuinely good art. As long as you are bound by social expectations and fear of judgement, you're incapable of seeing the bigger picture. There's so much more to this world than the shallow morality espoused by society.
...But you'll never see any of that if you keep letting others dictate what's right and wrong.
Next you will be telling me that, unless I shoplift, I couldn’t be a great artist.
gives a new meaning to "great artists steal"
...I feel like you should try it at least once, just to see what it's like. How it makes you feel would tell you a lot about yourself, not to mention it would make for some good writing material.
But I'm a great artist, and I'm not driven by either of those things?
Clearly you need to find either Jesus, or a quality cocaine dealer.
"The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises from men not having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being. It is healthful to every sane man to utter the art within him; it is essential to every sane man to get rid of the art within him at all costs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily, or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament. Thus, very great artists are able to be ordinary men—men like Shakespeare or Browning. There are many real tragedies of the artistic temperament, tragedies of vanity or violence or fear. But the great tragedy of the artistic temperament is that it cannot produce any art."
- from "On The Wit of Whistler", 'Heretics', G.K. Chesterton
Florence King once said essentially the same about Sylvia Plath. I am not familiar with her poems, though, save for the one they used to put in high school anthologies, about the reflection like a terrible fish. So I don’t know if it was unfair. But while naturally acrid, I don’t FK would have said it if she really didn’t believe that art “works” some other way, than that.
Anyway, I do feel sorry for her. She was very badly cared for by her husband, who curiously did not seem to have that artistic temperament.
The only opinion I have of Cormac McCarthy is that he could spin a good yarn. This article or anything else regarding his personal moral failures or triumphs wouldn’t sensibly have any bearing on that. Discussions of “legacy” are often used to discredit someone’s work on the measure of that person’s unrelated human failures.
I just wanted to note that it's a pity for Cormac that he can only ever be the 2nd best author born in Providence, RI
I'm not *that* big an Avi fan. Crispin: the Cross of Lead was pretty good, I guess? Back when they were still writing YA books for boys?
Oh, no, you mean Ann Hood. The Knitting Circle lady.
No, this is Slate Star Codex. David Macaulay, he had those fun Cathedral and Castle books. Very STEM-y, inspiring to a lot of Gen-X nerds.
Oh, who am I kidding?
PH'NGLUI MGLW'NAFH CTHULHU R'LYEH WAGN'NAGL FHTAGN! IA! IA! CTHULHU FHTAGN!
Ok, I'll ask: Who do you think of as the best author born in Providence, RI?
[ I think of H.P.Lovecraft as a highly influential author born there, but I neither have an exhaustive list of authors born there, not do I trust my views of the authors...]
You search for authors in Providence those are the first two that come up. I think McCarthy's considered the better writer in literary terms, but given how woke the literati are they'll probably dump him now that they know he had a relationship with a 17-year-old. Whereas enough of us nerds lean right that we'll still enjoy our tentacle monsters regardless of Lovecraft's dodgy views.
While the honest answer probably I haven't read enough Lovecraft to really be able to justify my views on this, I'm not going to let that stop me. I'll summarize my rankings as "McCarthy is probably the better writer on a technical level, but Lovecraft is so dominant in a genre and has more impact culturally", and the latter tends to be closer to what I think of as greatness. We are still talking about Cthulhu 100 years on; that feels like quite the tribute and unlikely to happen for Cormac.
Of course, I guess it's possible that some new communication form will takeover in the future; and Cormac's aesthetics will become dominant in that world; a world where 50 years from now everyone is immersed in a Metaverse that looks like Second Life but has all the ethos of Blood Meridian would be a hilarious outcome, all things considered.
Many Thanks!