1. could someone evaluate the credibility of this video? "Expert shows AI doesn't want to kill us, it has to" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp8zV3YwgdE Is super-intelligence really going to be "a 1000 times smarter than Einstein"? Is alignment even a solvable problem or merely wishful thinking?
2. if alignment is unsolvable or impossible, should we think about how to most efficiently and mercifully euthanize the human race?
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"What is the speed of feelings?"
So assuming alignment is solvable, I'm trying to gauge the "dignity and worth of human life verses machine life".
Humans have emotions, feelings, sensations, joys, pains, rewards, "awareness-es", and myriad other states that are hard to define. In my opinion, I feel these states make life worth living. I'm not trying to be reductionist or hedonistic. I believe our mental states are complex and often very personal. In my very very unprofessional opinion... our states are like "vibrations, music, or internal weather". So again, chaotic, multifaceted, personal.
Now, when we talk about the capabilities of computers or AI, we often include their speed. We talk about how QUICKLY and EFFICIENTLY they can solve a task or reach an outcome. (of course, the ability to get there at all matters too)
But when it comes to the first category, the "emotional states" thing, is speed even relevant? If an AI can simulate an orgasm or a nurturing hug, why would it want to simulate it 1,000 times faster? Unless it can experience time 1,000 slower, why would it want to? Isn't that missing the point?
fwiw, I'll add "the universe has a speed limit with light, so could there be things 'relevant to consciousness and experience" that literally have a speed limit?
Is it possible to divide "mind/thinking/consciousness/experience" into aspects where 'shortening time/state' is a virtue.. and aspects where 'lengthening or prolonging time/state' is a virtue?
I ask because I'm wondering if
in the distant future,
our brains could be like weather systems,
realms of chaotic physics,
computing their unique selves by virtue of their existence,
in ways that can never be totally simulated by Larger Intelligences,
without Full Exact Replication,
because our atoms and their emotions,
like the atmosphere,
goes infinitely downward-in-scale in their unpredictability,
and in that sense we could be free,
and perhaps our "weather" could be a source of curiosity,
(Somehow I cannot watch YouTube videos recently... at exactly 1:00 each video freezes, not sure why, so I can only see the first minute of anything. However...)
Just because someone says "expert shows" on internet, that is no reason to believe them. I looked at other videos from the same author, there was nothing there to convince me that the author is some kind of expert, as oppose to just someone trying to get more clicks.
> if alignment is unsolvable or impossible, should we think about how to most efficiently and mercifully euthanize the human race?
That would assume that you can do it more efficiently than the AI, right? Because otherwise, it would be easier and more efficient to simply wait. What's the point of trying to achieve faster something that you believe is inevitable?
If we make an analogy to personal life and death, does the knowledge that you are mortal motivate you to research efficient ways to euthanize yourself? For me it doesn't work this way.
> Unless it can experience time 1,000 slower, why would it want to?
I suppose the entire point of simulation is that it can.
> I suppose the entire point of simulation is that it can.
But then it's constraining itself. It's limiting itself for the sake of a simulation.
If that's the case, the AI isn't really experiencing the "joy" or "bliss" or "comfort" or whatever ITSELF... it's creating a simulation that is doing the enjoying.
(how do I say this?) In my uneducated opinion,
If it's "running program orgasm" or "running program hug", it's not "enmeshed in the experience" the way we are. It's not "losing itself in the experience". It's sort of sub-tasking it while it's TRUE identity and concerns are still just measuring it from the side like a scientist.
Yes, I know my above answer is full of holes... I mean, our brains measure the "value" of experiences too, and we can definitely think about other things and priorities while we "orgasm", "hug" or whatever else.
But I'm trying to talk about "flow". I'm trying to talk about immersion. I'm trying to talk about states that are "good for their own sake", states that are "ends in themselves" at least partially. I'm trying to talk about states that are good to prolong and prolong and prolong and prolong... so long as they don't create problems for us... because these states are WHAT IT MEANS and WHAT IS POSITIVE about being being ALIVE.
If an AI can experience time 1,000 slower, I'm saying that such a state WOULD STILL WANT TO BE PROLONGED a thousand, million, TRILLION times if possible.
The "real" time might be minutes, days or years. But longer is better.
Interesting idea for a kill switch. Point of caution from addiction, though: creating a highly attractive state may have unexpected consequences.
I think every possible answer is going to be full of holes until we have more data. Assuming that a sufficiently advanced to be existentially dangerous AI can exist, there are two outcomes:
* It cares about additional information involving humanity. Cares here can also be translated as whether its decision theories involve attraction towards states that require / involve knowledge about us, etc. Translate into your preferred term.
* It doesn't.
If it has interest in us then it is extremely unlikely to harm or drive us to extinction. Simulations aren't free, unnecessary when you have the real thing, and subject to out of model considerations. Monitoring is cheaper than simulating.
If it doesn't, bigger problems. My subjective assessment is that it's the least likely state. The set of AGIs that both have no interest in us and extinction level capabilities strike me as a narrow. Worth keeping an eye out.
I was wondering about the "most relatable" black hole: something whose properties are relatively easily to imagine. I found that a black hole of one billion tons (roughly the mass of a mountain): [1]
- Has radius 1.49 femtometers (roughly the size of a proton)
- Matches Earth's gravitational pull at a distance of ~9 feet (from Newton's law of gravitation)
- Is 122 billion °C
- Emits 356 MW of radiation
- Evaporates in 1.474x10¹² years, averaging 382 g/year over its lifetime, but 125 g/year presently
If we increase to one trillion tons, modestly heavier than mount Everest, we get:
- Radius 1.49 picometers (still smaller than a hydrogen atom)
- Matches Earth gravity at a distance of 271 ft / 82.5 m
- Is 122 million °C
- Emits 356 W of radiation
- Loses 0.125 mg of mass per year if nothing falls in
Something confusing: if we raise the mass to 1.87x10⁴³ kg (9.4 trillion suns), the Schwarzschild radius rises to 2.77e16 m or 2.93 light years, and the Newtonian surface gravity falls to 1.62 m/s², matching the surface of Earth's moon. The question, then: how could the event horizon possibly be _there_?
* all of the above assumes a non-rotating black hole. No idea what effect rotation has.
> how could the event horizon possibly be _there_?
Because *Newtonian* gravity is an increasingly inaccurate concept as one approaches the event horizon. You would perceive "infinite" "gravitational force" if you were somehow arrested at the Schwarzschild radius of a non-rotating BH, by definition. (More accurately, no arresting force would be sufficient to hold you at that position.) The Earth's moon figure is the result of using a formula in a domain in which it no longer applies.
Is there a way to make big concrete buildings like data centers and Amazon warehouses aesthetically pleasing on the outside? How about nuclear power plants?
Is this necessary...data centers and warehouses are just rectangle boxes. If people are genuinely bothered by the sight of a rectangle building then plant trees around the perimeter I suppose. No need to modify the building itself.
You paint them a garish florescent pink, then in a high contrast color write "FUCK OFF NIBMYS" on the side.
Or: no one actually has an issue with the aesthetics of data centers or nuclear power plants. They just say that because it's a plausible reason to oppose them. If you somehow figured out a way to make them indisputably beautiful, people would come up with some new justification for their opposition.
Similarly, no right-wingers actually care about birds being killed by wind turbines.
Obviously yes, if you can come up with a definition of "aesthetically pleasing" that encompasses your target audience.
At the very least they can have well manicured lawns and lots of trees and such. Maybe a nice koi pond. Cooling towers might be fairly limited in alternatives, but (for a decent amount of money) you could probably paint them in pleasing colors, maybe even murals.
Possible. Unlikely based on general known murder motives - I'd give 3-1 odds against.
The more amusing speculation is whether the killer was a professional. Hitmen don't really seem to exist outside of movies, occasionally organized crime operating against other criminals, or bumbling low-lifes that do worse than a thoughtful amateur.
Obviously a "more realistic" cinematic portrayal isn't any more likely to reflect real life than any of the flashier versions, but the murderers for hire in Michael Clayton (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3Fva8HFRDg) seems the way actual professionals would behave if they are real. A plausible natural causes or accidental death is more palatable for any police force than a clear murder that has to go on the books.
I don't think there is enough business to support a "professional hitman" in the contemporary US, in the sense of someone whose primary job responsibility is deniably killing specific people for money. *Maybe* in the largest organized crime groups, but that seems unlikely here. Otherwise, and probably even there, it's basically just professional dealers of other sorts of violence who get pressed into service when just this once the boss actually does want a specific rival killed.
Those, and wannabes trying to move up into a field that doesn't exist, and police informants/undercover officers who will gladly pretend to be a "hitman" if there's a rumor someone is hiring.
OTOH, the murder weapon seems to have been a B&T "Station Six", a manually-operated (i.e. non-automatic) silenced pistol designed for spooks and for gun nuts, er, firearms enthusiasts who want a fancy expensive spook-gun in their collection. Those would be very hard to come by on short notice and without leaving a paper trail.
OTOOH, there doesn't seem to be much point in using such a weapon, and several reasons not to, if you're planning to shoot someone at close range in broad daylight on a crowded city street. So this one is hard to figure.
The weapon was almost certainly not a BnT S6, but more likely a (printed?) semi auto frame with a homemade suppressor without a booster. With no booster and subsonic rounds, it's likely that you would have to run the gun manually for each shot.
My mental model of professional killers is less "murders people daily for money" and more "is someone trained by a government to be good at killing, employed in a position that sometimes asks for it." Mostly military or ex-military. And those kinds of people do get jobs in related fields, sometimes as mercenaries, more often as private security or similar. It's possible that there are professional killers working for the CIA and such. Movies almost certainly hype this up, and the history of the CIA trying to kill Castro doesn't exactly look like James Bond, but I think that none of us would be very surprised to hear about actual competent killers working for governments. Mossad certainly counts, even if you think they're an aberration.
Good point about government killers. Mossad is suspected in a number of assassinations, including at least one where they did try to make it appear natural: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Mahmoud_Al-Mabhouh#Cause_of_death. (Devotees of the show Forensic Files will be familiar with succinylcholine.) Given Israel's circumstances they're probably more active in this area but there's no way they're entirely unique.
I think you're right that it's mostly a "sometimes asked for it" kind of job. Skills involved in general human intelligence work - surveillance, counter-surveillance, weapons handling, etc. - are transferrable to murder and most of the time they're probably doing regular intelligence officer stuff with the rare hit. Seems wasteful to have people on payroll mostly sitting idle. Governments generally use the military and do their killing wholesale.
Either way, you or I couldn't put in a constituent services request to borrow them if we had a beef with our insurance provider.
Oh yeah, no doubt we couldn't contract such a person unless we were already on the inside of an organization employing them.
It would still be possible that this was a professional, including a current or former government professional (maybe not even from the US). Someone who has those skills already could certainly have the same motives that your average person has, including to help/protect/revenge family or friends (or friends of friends).
Yes, this is the problem with us amateurs speculating (at least speaking for myself): no framework for an actual "professional assassin" mode of operation. A classic conundrum of "those who speak don't know, and those who know don't speak".
FWIW, "Officials say they are examining whether the words point to a motive related to insurance companies' responses to claims."
Ooooh, that's a big update for me, thank you. A substantial part of my original reasoning was that there was no statement or other actions by the killer to draw attention to insurance denials. Contingent on this report being accurate, I'd now say 60% likelihood that he was either personally denied, knew someone who was denied, or anger over insurance company denials generally. The remaining 40% is that the actual motive is something personal and this was done to confuse investigators.
I am retarded when it comes to game theory. Not because I haven't been exposed to the ideas, but because they didn't stick. Predicting other people's reactions to my actions simply does not come naturally to me, and yes this has gotten me into trouble, but I also kind of value being principled, and doing what I think is right regardless of the consequences.
Is this a problem? Is there a book I can read to flip me into more of a game-theoretic mindset? Anyone else been there?
(sorry if the r-word offends you, but I couldn't think of a good synonym)
The answer depends on specifics. If you are reliable and honest, those are good traits that tend to pay off more over time (developing a reputation). If you "do what is right" by being dogmatic while everyone tells you that you are wrong, probably not.
Being unable to predict other people's reactions generally is likely a problem.
Other people can get really mad if you don't take their feelings into consideration when communicating. This expectation that you will change your behavior subtly, the ways you communicate etc, based on their personality and feelings. I see this as a separate skill from being principled. I can be principled and have the same endgame but also keep different expectations for different people. I feel like Thinking Fast and Slow could be good. Or there is Daniel Goleman. I don't like his stuff because it seems namby pamby and like stuff I do intuitively, but maybe helpful for learning to read the room. I tend to be a very acerbic kindof hardass, but I have had a lot of experience working successfully with emotionally needy people, so I think it can be learned.
I don't think so. It isn't particularly hard to prevent ahead of time, and I don't believe it to be impossible to clean up even if it gets quite bad with sufficient investment.
Yeah, this. It's also only a serious problem if you plan on deploying a lot of infrastructure in low orbit about a planet. Which is certainly a convenient thing to do and any spacefaring society will *want* to do that at least as a staging ground for their real objectives. But if they have the ability and inclination to launch starships on voyages of interstellar colonization or whatnot, and there ancestors messed up low orbit badly enough that they don't want to do cleanup, they can just launch right through it with essentially no risk.
I've spent the last two months or so reading and reviewing Ilya Sutskever's list of papers that he sent to John Carmack. Supposedly, it's 90% of what you need to know about AI (though the list was from 2019 iirc, so there's some parts of it that may be outdated or some newer papers that should be there).
- second, the list is incomplete! Apparently the full list was about 40 papers and included a bunch of stuff on meta learning, but the list that I was able to find is only 30 papers. I'm curious if anyone here knows if the full list is available somewhere?
I'm pretty sure the full list is not available. I searched 'sutskever carmack' on hacker news and found only the same list you have. Some tidbits I also found: some rando added the xLSTM paper. And some people noted that both reinforcement learning and diffusion are not really treated.
Join our Adult Kindergarten and learn to play again and be serious, to be animalistic and angelic, aged and youthful, good and bad, masculine and feminine, to play well together, to put real kindergarteners to shame with our optimized playful excellence
We play as a group, or separate into breakout rooms. We take turns deciding what brief activity to do next and leading the group.
I doubt I'm available in your time zone, but do you have any suggestions for resources on learning to joke, play, flirt, and generally be less serious? (Not humor per se; I'm already funny in an intellectual and mostly inaccessible way.)
>People without college degrees saved us from a Kamala presidency. This is yet more reason why in most cases you shouldn't go to college and you shouldn't send your kids to college. The vast majority of people don't need it and in fact will be harmed by the experienced[sic] -- harmed financially, mentally, and spiritually.
>I have no degree and I have never once in my life regretted my decision to skip college. I thank God that I didn't go. I don't know that I'd be where I am today if I'd spent the first half of my twenties in an indoctrination camp.
>A relatively small number of people should go to college if they plan to enter fields where it's actually necessary to have additional formal education (doctor, lawyer, etc). But the vast majority of jobs are learned entirely by doing. Your degree is irrelevant.
One cannot help but notice the similarity between his attitude and the attitude of the Haredim. I have more about this bizarre Haredi-LARP on my Substack:
Aren't we supposed to be saving blog post links for the Read My Blog section of the Classifieds threads?
Or if we're linking to our own blog post, we should at least be posting a meaningful treatment of the blog entry so that people don't have to follow the link to engage with the comment? "Here are some of my thoughts, more at the link," etc?
You're absolutely right - this is explicitly what Scott asked people not to do. I'm surprised that Turok doesn't know better than to shamelessly shill his own blog.
Yeah, there are problems with how higher education has evolved, and I don't have any good suggestions. The ratio of Democratic Party to GOP registered faculty at e.g. Harvard is over 10:1. Yes, there is a _lot_ of indoctrination being done. Ideally, I'd like to see something reasonably close to a 1:1 ratio, but I don't know how to get there.
I don't know how we would up with such a hugely biased faculty pool. I don't believe that the pool of competent potential faculty is so hugely skewed. Is it simply a positive feedback runaway, where leftist faculty made the environment hostile to conservative potential faculty, so they chose other career paths instead? Can this be reversed?
Personally, I was a programmer, with a STEMM background, so Matt Walsh's
>This is yet more reason why in most cases you shouldn't go to college and you shouldn't send your kids to college. The vast majority of people don't need it and in fact will be harmed by the experienced[sic] -- harmed financially, mentally, and spiritually.
was very false in my _particular_ situation. Personally, I routinely used what I learned, but this is not true in many jobs.
A separate problem is rampant credentialism. As you wrote:
>many hiring managers flat-out refuse to consider anyone who didn't graduate from college. You will not get a chance to interview; your application will be thrown in the electronic trash bin. This will only get worse when the next recession hits and employers can afford to be choosier.
Even if there were _no_ indoctrination in colleges, this is a _spectacular_ waste. Forcing most of the work force to piss away 10% of their working lifetime on a degree that is actually irrelevant to what they will be doing at work is a _huge_ loss. It is really crucial to get companies to distinguish between education that they actually _need_ their people to have and arbitrary filtering.
Many Thanks! Could be, though I'm not following why this winds up being selective by ideology. Ivan Nikolaevich made an interesting point that bright conservatives are selectively going into fields with better paying options. I can certainly see why certain _fields_ (he mentions finance, presumably a lot of STEMM fields are similar) yield better paying options than academia more frequently.
Are the left-leaning people shooting themselves in the foot economically by their choice of field? And selectively winding up in academia as a result, highly competitive though academia is?
I think all you need to explain this is that `Harvard professor' is a job for which a lot of the compensation is in `social status,' but it only carries social status within the blue (or grey) tribe. So if you are blue (or grey) tribe then `Harvard professor' is a highly remunerative job (including non-monetary compensation). But if you are red tribe, then it doesn't carry any status points, and in purely monetary terms it's a much worse deal than finance.
Here's an example of a related study illustrating a similar effect: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2022.01807. Women prefer more meaningful professions are more willing to accept lower compensation for them than men.
Yes, a difference in the value of the status, depending on tribe membership, does sound like a plausible part of the explanation, Many Thanks! This _does_ like part of a positive feedback loop that helps explain how the problem got so bad, rather than of how it got started.
I wonder whether a small change in initial conditions could have given the opposite result: Harvard professors being largely red tribe, and the status of being a Harvard professor higher in red tribe than blue...
I'm pretty sure "conservative Harvard professor" carries a fair bit of status even in Red Tribe. But less so than it would in Blue Tribe, and it involves fewer opportunities to socialize with fellow Reds, so the point stands.
As a college student at a prestigious school, almost all of the bright conservative people I know are pursuing careers in fields like finance, whereas it's a much more diverse mix among left-leaning people of a similar intelligence level. If you want to get the political balance of academia even, you have to convince young people on the right that it's worth it to take a pay cut, and by and large I think that's harder than people think.
I've read that the partisan/ideological mix was much more balanced some hundred years ago. I think the lefty skew we see today makes sense if you believe, like Haidt, that those on the right are better at comprehending the left's positions than vice versa. Say you start with 10 right wing faculty and 10 left wing faculty deciding admissions and hiring. Each year you should expect to see a bit more lefty skew in the composition of academia since the 10 RW faculty gives more of a fair shake to LW applicants than the 10 LW faculty gives to RW applicants.
Many Thanks! Yes, that seems like a plausible part of the mechanism. So the left wing faculty would have been less damaging if there had been a required course for them on understanding right wing views, taught by the right wing faculty...
What is the present understanding of iran's attempt to kill trump, hezbollah's attempt to kill netanyahu, putin's attempts to kill zelensky, ukraine's attempts to kill putin, anything else I may have missed.
I have absolutely no idea how serious any of these were, I'm confused why there isn't more public interest in figuring that out.
Pretty pathetic that at least 2 crackpot Americans with off the shelf guns got much closer to actually assassinating Trump than the whole Revolutionary Guard.
The US intelligence community spends a lot of time and effort figuring out what the IRGC is up to. Monitoring the doings of every random crackpot is much more difficult.
I'm not sure whether it's a damning indictment of bureaucratic organisations, or just reflective of the fact that non-suicidal versions of this plan are a lot harder than probably-suicidal ones, and Revolutionary Guard agents aren't that keen on suicide missions.
> "Revolutionary Guard agents aren't that keen on suicide missions."
I know it wasn't necessarily your intent, but the phrasing here made me chuckle. This would be a great premise for a dark satirical comedy in the vein of The Death of Stalin. It almost writes itself.
True but can't they find some wannabe jihadist to strap a vest on? Especially if money is no object as noted in the linked article. The FBI seems perfectly capable of tricking people into becoming terrorists.
> Putin has always been said to be targeted by assassins, and he probably is.
But it's not sure whether Zelensky would really achieve anything by getting him killed, because the replacement would probably be someone very similar, only younger.
It's not like Putin has a trusted lieutenant ready to step in at a moment's notice; anyone who could plausibly replace Putin is likely long since purged.
The chaos imposed on the RF due to a sudden power vacuum and the resultant scramble would at the very least diminish its focus & coordination on the war, which could be exploited by Ukrainian forces.
Also, any replacement for Putin would have less prestige tied up in the war and so might be more open to ending it, since it really doesn't seem worth it on economical or political terms. Even if they'd be worse people.
There is in fact a public designated successor to Putin, and interestingly it's...noted cat lover Ramzan Kadyrov.
This has always felt like a fail-deadly switch and warning to the oligarchs: "Remove me and that Chechen will turn your skulls into bowls for his cats to eat from."
... but in the process (or as ordered by whoever takes Putin's place), a bunch of incompetent Russian generals might get fired, long-overdue decisions might finally happen, and so Russian military capability might easily double or triple.
Or incompetent generals can get on top in the turmoil, and they will get rid of more (military, but not politically) competent rivals, leading to further decay...
In re laws restricting access to social media for minors and related issues: In general, children and teenagers will do whatever they can to get around restrictions on information and other things. It's almost as if young people have a strong drive to make contact with the world.
We're mostly good materialists here, so there should evolutionary and/or genetic explanations.
And similar explanations for why adults try to restrict access. Is it just that adults know more, or is there some more complicated reason for this push-pull?
Virtually instantly after the first occurrence of life - arguably definitionally concurrent - was the occurrence of the cell membrane. Whatever complicated business those amino acids and nucleotides were up to, was much easier to go about when they didn't have to do it in the midst of all the other undifferentiated complex molecules, simple molecules, and unabsorbed radiation in the ocean. Namely, that business involved establishing lineages of long nucleotide chains, and the means to duplicate them, and that probably couldn't happen unless the replication mechanism was put into a tiny bubble where that chain was the only thing to work on, and was given only specific materials as input stock.
That evolutionary mechanism is just as applicable at larger scales, such as the organ, or the plant or animal, and when we're talking about animals that can absorb ideas in addition to carbs, lipids, and proteins, the value of a membrane that can filter for ideas becomes considerable.
I've settled on the idea that biologically and psychologically, teens are small adults. But the education system leads industrialized economies to legally treat teens as big children.
"In general, children and teenagers will do whatever they can to get around restrictions on information and other things."
Yes teens often test boundaries and seek autonomy, but they tend to test certain boundaries that align with perceived cost/benefit. Trying new things like drugs, sneaking out with romantic partner, avoiding boring school, going to parties. I don't see teens trying to get around restrictions that are in line with their values, or that they see as fair, or that are in line with their identity. (Do Muslim teens often experiment with pork? I sort of doubt that.)
This aligns with the boiler plate neurological explanation of teen brains being extra sensitive to dopamine, to the underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, to the developing limbic system. Adults and society have been able to intuit this long before brain science, and societies have developed ways to protect children, and rites of passage for coming of age. There are evolutionary reasons to seek information (gossip is a universal pastime), and the wiring of a teen brain is going to make them particularly keen on getting that dopamine hit and being impulsive about it.
I see regulating social media as a way of training teen to use the internet in a productive way. Teachers seem to be very concerned, because some kids (not all), are very addicted to checking their phones, and they will sit and eat lunch staring at their phones rather than interacting with their peers. As he stared at his phone rather than making eye contact I recently had a well adjusted kid say to me "how did I rack up 13 hours of screen time in one day?" Teachers see kids opting out of in person social interaction in favor of their phones, while parents see their kids on their phone at home and assume that their kids has been socializing all day at school. And in school it becomes obvious that some kids can juggle the in person/digital lives, and others cannot.
I've heard that not eating pork is one of the rules indifferent Muslims still keep. Interesting if true, because a lot of Jews who will semi-keep kashrut, but might still eat fried rice with bits of pork.
Pork isn't that readily *available* in most Muslim countries (even when there are religious minorities who eat it, why bother raising pigs if you only have a possible market of like 20% of the population), so I'd imagine there's relatively less temptation, when you could just eat goat or beef instead. Likewise there's not that much temptation in India, even for Hindus who aren't that religious, to eat beef. (and yes I know there are some who do, in Kerala and the far northeast, but that's a regional culture thing more than a 'lack of religiosity' thing).
I'd bet that the pork taboo is more 'sticky' than other religious taboos (including within Islam). Partly because you're not giving up as much by abstaining from pork as you are when you abstain from sex, alcohol, etc.. There are lots of other meats that are substitutable for pork.
And also because the idea of forbidden foods is pretty deeply ingrained in us: I've known people before who were pretty desperately poor and could really have used some meat, any meat really, to go with their rice bowl, but would still turn down a free gift of meat if it was from an animal that was forbidden to them. I think that these food taboos are pretty core to our identity as religious and cultural subjects. People have gone to war over food taboos before, after all (cf. the Maccabean wars, and more recently the 1857 Great Indian Mutiny).
>We're mostly good materialists here, so there should evolutionary and/or genetic explanations.
Yes, but best of luck getting something testable rather than a just-so story :-(
I'm much less skeptical of e.g. : For most of our evolutionary history, food was in short supply, so our appetites are not well calibrated to give optimum health in a modern society where calories are very abundant.
For information, on the other hand, the evolutionary history is much vaguer. And for _differential_ questions, such as comparing literacy with online information, _both_ of which are novel on an evolutionary timescale - ouch!
I am not worried about my kids getting access to something. I am worried about some people getting access to my kids. So rather than restrict the access, I try to teach my kids to never post personal information online, and if something seems worrying, to come and ask me for advice.
But that requires a certain amount of mutual trust. For example, when I was a child, I didn't trust my parents enough to tell them about my problems, because they sometimes overreacted and then I had two problems instead of one. And I couldn't predict when that would happen, so I played it safe.
Restricting access to social media seems like a simple solution to many problems that does not require trust. Problem is, one day the kids will get internet access anyway, and at that age it may be too late to try to teach them something.
(Different thing is limiting internet access in the sense "only X hours a day". That's just to make sure that the kids sometimes also do something else.)
> I am not worried about my kids getting access to something. I am worried about some people getting access to my kids.
This is a nice reminder that people are coming at this at cross purposes. I've probably been talking past some people because my chief concern is a third thing - that the social environment created online is a shitter and more impoverished experience than the social environment of the playground/the rec/the old quarry/the pub once you can all credibly pass for 16. Allowing these to be replaced by environments where every possible interaction was designed and constrained will lead to meeker and more colourless children.
Generally kids can enjoy the benefits as well as the pitfalls, whereas parents have to clean up when things go wrong. Hence parents are more cautious with most things teenagers do - dating, drugs, alcohol, partying, etc.
Parallel Worlds very much apply, but I’d expect parents to be more cautious because their children will overestimate the reward and underestimate the risks?
We had a discussion about hearing aids here a couple months ago.
I bought a pair of Jabra prescription hearing aids from Costco on September 5. They cost $1600 (+ $60 Costco membership).
They are made by the same company (and use the same software) that makes the more expensive traditional hearing aid brands that are $4000 at the low end.
I’m pleased that I no longer need to use closed captions on my television and can hear birdsong besides jays and crows. It’s a dramatic improvement for me.
The aids come with a 180 day no questions asked return policy and have a 2 year no extra charge loss/replacement policy. (limited to one left ear and one right ear aid)
A technician did testing and created an audiogram and tuned each hearing aid to the internal geometry of each of my ears after they arrived.
Here is the take of a professional audiologist from the WSJ:
"There's nothing that comes close to the pricing you get at Costco," says Bailey, a doctor of audiology. "It's an unfair position for anyone trying to practice audiology, but have I recommended to friends and family that they go to Costco for hearing aids? Yes, I have."
I’m still experimenting with it. The app lets me set amplification by frequency like the leveling on a stereo receiver. There is a preset Speech Clarity that I use most of the time indoors without a lot of noise. The boost for that is towards higher frequencies.
I use the preset All Around outdoors with more level amplification.
I found no preset for Restaurant Mode with the app as I received it. There is a breakfast place I like to eat at with no soft surfaces and a lot of people raising their voice to be heard above everyone else that I’m still trying to level for. Maybe Costco just forgot to set up the preset at my fitting.
The Jabra has a third microphone at the earpiece that the software uses to cancel wind noise but the tech at Costco said people had complained about it being hard to use so they turn it off by default. If I want to try it out they’ll reenable it for me. The user app doesn’t allow that.
Well, looks like we might to get to see what kind of fun legal mechanisms exist to deal with a president going rogue sooner than people expected, albeit it's South Korean legal mechanisms.
I think Yoon now has to go and follow the precedent of former President Roh and find a high cliff, because if you attempt to impose martial law and the legislature's response is (oversimplified) "lulz no", then there's really no point in coming back from that.
Not totally random. And nothing to do with North Korea; that's just the excuse.
Yoon has been a massively unpopular President; I think his approval rating was in the low twenties before this coup attempt. Which tracks with, A: his being a hard-right leader in a country where the hard right is ~20% of the electorate, and B: not having e.g. Donald Trump's ability to attract not-traditionally-right demographics to his coalition. He's also probably rather corrupt, and his wife is definitely so.
In the recent parliamentary elections, the opposition party won by a landslide, putting him in a very weak position. There have been broadly popular calls for his resignation and/or impeachment. And the new parliament rejected his proposed budget, passing their alternative with a veto-proof majority. Added together, this made him effectively a lame duck who *might* have been able to hold on to his office for the rest of the present term, but without being able to do anything with it and with a good possibility of a prison sentence for him and his wife at the end.
But he has been somewhat popular with the military, doing things like e.g. moving the presidential residence to the MoD headquarters. So it's not hugely surprising that he would gamble on "maybe I can be President-for-life as a de facto military dictator?"
It really seems to have been amateur hour though. If you've made the decision to declare martial law and arrest key parliamentarians, you should make sure you don't bungle the `arrest key parliamentarians' step. And if you do bungle it, and the parliament does meet to pass a law against your martial law declaration...well, why would you back down? At that point isn't alea jacta pretty thoroughly est?
You back down at that point because, A: you've failed and probably beyond hope of recovery but B: you haven't yet done anything that will get you put in front of a firing squad or thrown into an oubliette. Declaring martial law is a legitimate power of the ROK president, so long as you stop when parliament tells you to. Having a secret plan where the first step is declaring martial law and the second step is repacking parliament with your yes-men or whatever is probably criminal, but if you stop before the second step it's hard to prove.
Yoon may be impeached and he may spend a few years in prison if only for the corruption he was already being investigated for, but he's in a way better position than he would have been if he'd ordered the Army to actually start shooting people.
Yoon isn't a "hard-right leader"; I know he often described that way in Western media but it's wrong. He's a former lefty who defected from the Democratic party after he went after Moon Jae In's Minister of Justice for corruption. If he were actually a "hard right" guy, I think the PPP might have bothered defending him. As it is, as BR Myers notes, he has "no demographic to prop up his numbers".
This just raises the question of how he got elected in the first place. I can sort of understand the PPP supporting his campaign; who else voted for him, and what were their reasons? Did they just want Moon Jae In's scalp that badly? Was Yoon the only one in a position to deliver it at the time? The people elect a cat to deal with their rat problem, and are now working on the cat problem?
Democratic Party candidate Lee Myung Baek was excessively corrupt, even by ROK standards, with being tied to receiving a bunch of kickbacks from private developers when he was a mayor (trials related to which are still ongoing). Also he was following Moon Jae-in, who was a gifted politician with a lot of charisma and gravitas. It's not an entirely fair comparison, but the best that comes to mind for Americans is the drop off from Bill Clinton to Al Gore; Gore was a perfectly replacement level-candidate and good on many policy issues, but he also was boring. Lee could have gotten away with being corrupt if he also wasn't boring (Lee's also kind of an asshole from what I recall).
So you're saying Yoon got ~20% of the voters via the PPP, and another ~30+% of non-PPP voters, because Lee was even worse?
"Boring" doesn't sound like enough to explain the turnout, although the corruption problem does (assuming SKoreans rank corruption and boringness roughly the same way USians do).
I guess I absolutely qualify as "basic knowledge, so:
The "what happened" is pretty easy; President Yoon attempted to impose martial law on the country using (some of?) the military and police. The legislature (including his own party) vetoed his act and it was thus lifted.
Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I can say that...this move is still very random, completely unexpected, and more than a little dumb. One does not try to overthrow the government lightly; the lack of larger response in support of Yoon's actions (including the lack of support from his own party) indicates a completely flawed information system that led him to believe this is even possible.
Yoon claims he's doing it stop "anti-state forces", which should be read as North Koreans and Nork-friendly elements in the "left" (the Democratic Party, as opposed to the "right" People's Power Party, which Yoon is a member. Are there Nork-friendly in the left? Yeah certainly; there was a weird incident involving North Korean intelligence operatives and a Democratic Party office last year? I never found a good explanation on this in English. A fringe party was arrested in the late 00s for actively plotting an insurrection. Many of the guys in the previous Moon admin had a reputation going back to their college days of being unusually close to North Korea and openly sympathetic to the North (which is probably overdone but isn't entirely without basis). Are they actively involved in trying to overthrow the ROK government? Doubtful. Could the military and intelligence services be using this an excuse? Sure could, the guys running those two organizations grew up (if probably not served in) during the dictatorship, and there's always been a suspicion that they may have liked that more. There's also a doctor's strike going on right now involving doctors shutting things down over attempts to increase medical school class size to increase the number of doctors.
Regardless, that he failed so thoroughly indicates whatever's going on, it was badly planned and thus pretty stupid.
I mean, there was the massive gender-based polarization that was happening, but I don't know if that actually has much to do with what's happening. He was apparently cracking down on opposition speech via law enforcement, according to the NYTimes. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/03/world/asia/what-is-martial-law-south-korea.html He lost control of parliament back in April, so... either he's actually insane, or this is the dumbest attempt ever at desperately holding onto power. Or both.
"A whole lot of America sees Democrats as the party that says, "Let them eat free-range."
It's not the first time. The Democrats were the party of treasuring redwoods over logging jobs, prizing the lives of wolves over the livelihood of ranchers, shutting down polluters causing acid rain over factory jobs. The Democrats were the party in favor of shutting down the economy to halt Covid, damn the cost to business owners and the workers who depended on those businesses. The Democrats have a horrendous reputation of not being concerned about the "common man", and chosing what seem to them be the fancies of the leisured classes over their own hard-scrabble existences.
So this is the other thing "the price of eggs" is a synecdoche for. It's not just about feeling a pinch in the pocketbook: it's a reference to the idea that the Democratic party is wholly in the control of an economic class who is blithely unconcerned with the cost to the American people of the policies they promulgate."
> The Democrats were the party of treasuring redwoods over logging jobs, prizing the lives of wolves over the livelihood of ranchers, shutting down polluters causing acid rain over factory jobs. The Democrats were the party in favor of shutting down the economy to halt Covid, damn the cost to business owners and the workers who depended on those businesses. The Democrats have a horrendous reputation of not being concerned about the "common man", and chosing what seem to them be the fancies of the leisured classes over their own hard-scrabble existences.
Virginia Postrel had some good comments on this when her essay about synthetic me
three things about AI.
1. could someone evaluate the credibility of this video? "Expert shows AI doesn't want to kill us, it has to" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp8zV3YwgdE Is super-intelligence really going to be "a 1000 times smarter than Einstein"? Is alignment even a solvable problem or merely wishful thinking?
2. if alignment is unsolvable or impossible, should we think about how to most efficiently and mercifully euthanize the human race?
3. ******************************
*********************************
"What is the speed of feelings?"
So assuming alignment is solvable, I'm trying to gauge the "dignity and worth of human life verses machine life".
Humans have emotions, feelings, sensations, joys, pains, rewards, "awareness-es", and myriad other states that are hard to define. In my opinion, I feel these states make life worth living. I'm not trying to be reductionist or hedonistic. I believe our mental states are complex and often very personal. In my very very unprofessional opinion... our states are like "vibrations, music, or internal weather". So again, chaotic, multifaceted, personal.
Now, when we talk about the capabilities of computers or AI, we often include their speed. We talk about how QUICKLY and EFFICIENTLY they can solve a task or reach an outcome. (of course, the ability to get there at all matters too)
But when it comes to the first category, the "emotional states" thing, is speed even relevant? If an AI can simulate an orgasm or a nurturing hug, why would it want to simulate it 1,000 times faster? Unless it can experience time 1,000 slower, why would it want to? Isn't that missing the point?
fwiw, I'll add "the universe has a speed limit with light, so could there be things 'relevant to consciousness and experience" that literally have a speed limit?
Is it possible to divide "mind/thinking/consciousness/experience" into aspects where 'shortening time/state' is a virtue.. and aspects where 'lengthening or prolonging time/state' is a virtue?
I ask because I'm wondering if
in the distant future,
our brains could be like weather systems,
realms of chaotic physics,
computing their unique selves by virtue of their existence,
in ways that can never be totally simulated by Larger Intelligences,
without Full Exact Replication,
because our atoms and their emotions,
like the atmosphere,
goes infinitely downward-in-scale in their unpredictability,
and in that sense we could be free,
and perhaps our "weather" could be a source of curiosity,
and a Call Of Stewardship
to well-aligned gods
(Somehow I cannot watch YouTube videos recently... at exactly 1:00 each video freezes, not sure why, so I can only see the first minute of anything. However...)
Just because someone says "expert shows" on internet, that is no reason to believe them. I looked at other videos from the same author, there was nothing there to convince me that the author is some kind of expert, as oppose to just someone trying to get more clicks.
> if alignment is unsolvable or impossible, should we think about how to most efficiently and mercifully euthanize the human race?
That would assume that you can do it more efficiently than the AI, right? Because otherwise, it would be easier and more efficient to simply wait. What's the point of trying to achieve faster something that you believe is inevitable?
If we make an analogy to personal life and death, does the knowledge that you are mortal motivate you to research efficient ways to euthanize yourself? For me it doesn't work this way.
> Unless it can experience time 1,000 slower, why would it want to?
I suppose the entire point of simulation is that it can.
> I suppose the entire point of simulation is that it can.
But then it's constraining itself. It's limiting itself for the sake of a simulation.
If that's the case, the AI isn't really experiencing the "joy" or "bliss" or "comfort" or whatever ITSELF... it's creating a simulation that is doing the enjoying.
(how do I say this?) In my uneducated opinion,
If it's "running program orgasm" or "running program hug", it's not "enmeshed in the experience" the way we are. It's not "losing itself in the experience". It's sort of sub-tasking it while it's TRUE identity and concerns are still just measuring it from the side like a scientist.
Yes, I know my above answer is full of holes... I mean, our brains measure the "value" of experiences too, and we can definitely think about other things and priorities while we "orgasm", "hug" or whatever else.
But I'm trying to talk about "flow". I'm trying to talk about immersion. I'm trying to talk about states that are "good for their own sake", states that are "ends in themselves" at least partially. I'm trying to talk about states that are good to prolong and prolong and prolong and prolong... so long as they don't create problems for us... because these states are WHAT IT MEANS and WHAT IS POSITIVE about being being ALIVE.
If an AI can experience time 1,000 slower, I'm saying that such a state WOULD STILL WANT TO BE PROLONGED a thousand, million, TRILLION times if possible.
The "real" time might be minutes, days or years. But longer is better.
Interesting idea for a kill switch. Point of caution from addiction, though: creating a highly attractive state may have unexpected consequences.
I think every possible answer is going to be full of holes until we have more data. Assuming that a sufficiently advanced to be existentially dangerous AI can exist, there are two outcomes:
* It cares about additional information involving humanity. Cares here can also be translated as whether its decision theories involve attraction towards states that require / involve knowledge about us, etc. Translate into your preferred term.
* It doesn't.
If it has interest in us then it is extremely unlikely to harm or drive us to extinction. Simulations aren't free, unnecessary when you have the real thing, and subject to out of model considerations. Monitoring is cheaper than simulating.
If it doesn't, bigger problems. My subjective assessment is that it's the least likely state. The set of AGIs that both have no interest in us and extinction level capabilities strike me as a narrow. Worth keeping an eye out.
I was wondering about the "most relatable" black hole: something whose properties are relatively easily to imagine. I found that a black hole of one billion tons (roughly the mass of a mountain): [1]
- Has radius 1.49 femtometers (roughly the size of a proton)
- Matches Earth's gravitational pull at a distance of ~9 feet (from Newton's law of gravitation)
- Is 122 billion °C
- Emits 356 MW of radiation
- Evaporates in 1.474x10¹² years, averaging 382 g/year over its lifetime, but 125 g/year presently
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/dpiepgrass.bsky.social/post/3lcnub2bsns27
If we increase to one trillion tons, modestly heavier than mount Everest, we get:
- Radius 1.49 picometers (still smaller than a hydrogen atom)
- Matches Earth gravity at a distance of 271 ft / 82.5 m
- Is 122 million °C
- Emits 356 W of radiation
- Loses 0.125 mg of mass per year if nothing falls in
Something confusing: if we raise the mass to 1.87x10⁴³ kg (9.4 trillion suns), the Schwarzschild radius rises to 2.77e16 m or 2.93 light years, and the Newtonian surface gravity falls to 1.62 m/s², matching the surface of Earth's moon. The question, then: how could the event horizon possibly be _there_?
* all of the above assumes a non-rotating black hole. No idea what effect rotation has.
> how could the event horizon possibly be _there_?
Because *Newtonian* gravity is an increasingly inaccurate concept as one approaches the event horizon. You would perceive "infinite" "gravitational force" if you were somehow arrested at the Schwarzschild radius of a non-rotating BH, by definition. (More accurately, no arresting force would be sufficient to hold you at that position.) The Earth's moon figure is the result of using a formula in a domain in which it no longer applies.
Is there a way to make big concrete buildings like data centers and Amazon warehouses aesthetically pleasing on the outside? How about nuclear power plants?
Is this necessary...data centers and warehouses are just rectangle boxes. If people are genuinely bothered by the sight of a rectangle building then plant trees around the perimeter I suppose. No need to modify the building itself.
You paint them a garish florescent pink, then in a high contrast color write "FUCK OFF NIBMYS" on the side.
Or: no one actually has an issue with the aesthetics of data centers or nuclear power plants. They just say that because it's a plausible reason to oppose them. If you somehow figured out a way to make them indisputably beautiful, people would come up with some new justification for their opposition.
Similarly, no right-wingers actually care about birds being killed by wind turbines.
You don't find the giant water towers of nuclear power plants aesthetically pleasing?
Hyperboloids are kind of cool in their way.
Obviously yes, if you can come up with a definition of "aesthetically pleasing" that encompasses your target audience.
At the very least they can have well manicured lawns and lots of trees and such. Maybe a nice koi pond. Cooling towers might be fairly limited in alternatives, but (for a decent amount of money) you could probably paint them in pleasing colors, maybe even murals.
I’m assigning a reasonable likelihood to the United Healthcare CEO killer being someone who (or who’s loved one) was denied a treatment or coverage.
Possible. Unlikely based on general known murder motives - I'd give 3-1 odds against.
The more amusing speculation is whether the killer was a professional. Hitmen don't really seem to exist outside of movies, occasionally organized crime operating against other criminals, or bumbling low-lifes that do worse than a thoughtful amateur.
Obviously a "more realistic" cinematic portrayal isn't any more likely to reflect real life than any of the flashier versions, but the murderers for hire in Michael Clayton (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3Fva8HFRDg) seems the way actual professionals would behave if they are real. A plausible natural causes or accidental death is more palatable for any police force than a clear murder that has to go on the books.
I don't think there is enough business to support a "professional hitman" in the contemporary US, in the sense of someone whose primary job responsibility is deniably killing specific people for money. *Maybe* in the largest organized crime groups, but that seems unlikely here. Otherwise, and probably even there, it's basically just professional dealers of other sorts of violence who get pressed into service when just this once the boss actually does want a specific rival killed.
Those, and wannabes trying to move up into a field that doesn't exist, and police informants/undercover officers who will gladly pretend to be a "hitman" if there's a rumor someone is hiring.
OTOH, the murder weapon seems to have been a B&T "Station Six", a manually-operated (i.e. non-automatic) silenced pistol designed for spooks and for gun nuts, er, firearms enthusiasts who want a fancy expensive spook-gun in their collection. Those would be very hard to come by on short notice and without leaving a paper trail.
OTOOH, there doesn't seem to be much point in using such a weapon, and several reasons not to, if you're planning to shoot someone at close range in broad daylight on a crowded city street. So this one is hard to figure.
The weapon was almost certainly not a BnT S6, but more likely a (printed?) semi auto frame with a homemade suppressor without a booster. With no booster and subsonic rounds, it's likely that you would have to run the gun manually for each shot.
They do happen every once in a while.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/jun/13/mexico
My mental model of professional killers is less "murders people daily for money" and more "is someone trained by a government to be good at killing, employed in a position that sometimes asks for it." Mostly military or ex-military. And those kinds of people do get jobs in related fields, sometimes as mercenaries, more often as private security or similar. It's possible that there are professional killers working for the CIA and such. Movies almost certainly hype this up, and the history of the CIA trying to kill Castro doesn't exactly look like James Bond, but I think that none of us would be very surprised to hear about actual competent killers working for governments. Mossad certainly counts, even if you think they're an aberration.
Good point about government killers. Mossad is suspected in a number of assassinations, including at least one where they did try to make it appear natural: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Mahmoud_Al-Mabhouh#Cause_of_death. (Devotees of the show Forensic Files will be familiar with succinylcholine.) Given Israel's circumstances they're probably more active in this area but there's no way they're entirely unique.
I think you're right that it's mostly a "sometimes asked for it" kind of job. Skills involved in general human intelligence work - surveillance, counter-surveillance, weapons handling, etc. - are transferrable to murder and most of the time they're probably doing regular intelligence officer stuff with the rare hit. Seems wasteful to have people on payroll mostly sitting idle. Governments generally use the military and do their killing wholesale.
Either way, you or I couldn't put in a constituent services request to borrow them if we had a beef with our insurance provider.
Oh yeah, no doubt we couldn't contract such a person unless we were already on the inside of an organization employing them.
It would still be possible that this was a professional, including a current or former government professional (maybe not even from the US). Someone who has those skills already could certainly have the same motives that your average person has, including to help/protect/revenge family or friends (or friends of friends).
Yes, this is the problem with us amateurs speculating (at least speaking for myself): no framework for an actual "professional assassin" mode of operation. A classic conundrum of "those who speak don't know, and those who know don't speak".
FWIW, "Officials say they are examining whether the words point to a motive related to insurance companies' responses to claims."
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/crmn2ry1224t?post=asset%3Ad8ae0b2d-39da-4ad3-94e2-d3ad1e9a929a#post
Ooooh, that's a big update for me, thank you. A substantial part of my original reasoning was that there was no statement or other actions by the killer to draw attention to insurance denials. Contingent on this report being accurate, I'd now say 60% likelihood that he was either personally denied, knew someone who was denied, or anger over insurance company denials generally. The remaining 40% is that the actual motive is something personal and this was done to confuse investigators.
I guess I'll take the opposite approach and assign an unreasonable likelihood to it.
You guys do know about Manifold Markets, right? Anyone can sign up and it uses play money. No reason not to use it.
https://manifold.markets/tedks/what-were-the-motives-of-the-united
One thing I like about this is the discipline of thinking about how to define the resolution:
(1) what does motive X actually mean?
(2) what evidence would determine whether the killer was motivated by X?
(3) when, if ever, will we know?
I'll take the opposite approach and say there's every reason not to use it.
Let the best uneducated guess win!
Greta Thunberg/Andrew Tate fanfiction
wait this isn't google
Horrified to imagine how many entries to this there might be on AO3
"This is what happens when you don’t recycle your pizza boxes." —Greta Thunberg
I am retarded when it comes to game theory. Not because I haven't been exposed to the ideas, but because they didn't stick. Predicting other people's reactions to my actions simply does not come naturally to me, and yes this has gotten me into trouble, but I also kind of value being principled, and doing what I think is right regardless of the consequences.
Is this a problem? Is there a book I can read to flip me into more of a game-theoretic mindset? Anyone else been there?
(sorry if the r-word offends you, but I couldn't think of a good synonym)
The answer depends on specifics. If you are reliable and honest, those are good traits that tend to pay off more over time (developing a reputation). If you "do what is right" by being dogmatic while everyone tells you that you are wrong, probably not.
Being unable to predict other people's reactions generally is likely a problem.
Sounds like it's maybe a "theory of mind" problem. Pretty common among autists.
There's the part where you can't accurately model other people's minds, and the part where you don't even try, and I'm at the not even trying level
Other people can get really mad if you don't take their feelings into consideration when communicating. This expectation that you will change your behavior subtly, the ways you communicate etc, based on their personality and feelings. I see this as a separate skill from being principled. I can be principled and have the same endgame but also keep different expectations for different people. I feel like Thinking Fast and Slow could be good. Or there is Daniel Goleman. I don't like his stuff because it seems namby pamby and like stuff I do intuitively, but maybe helpful for learning to read the room. I tend to be a very acerbic kindof hardass, but I have had a lot of experience working successfully with emotionally needy people, so I think it can be learned.
Might the Kessler syndrome (clutter in orbits near the planet keeps increasing) alone be enough to explain the Fermi paradox?
I don't think so. It isn't particularly hard to prevent ahead of time, and I don't believe it to be impossible to clean up even if it gets quite bad with sufficient investment.
Yeah, this. It's also only a serious problem if you plan on deploying a lot of infrastructure in low orbit about a planet. Which is certainly a convenient thing to do and any spacefaring society will *want* to do that at least as a staging ground for their real objectives. But if they have the ability and inclination to launch starships on voyages of interstellar colonization or whatnot, and there ancestors messed up low orbit badly enough that they don't want to do cleanup, they can just launch right through it with essentially no risk.
I've spent the last two months or so reading and reviewing Ilya Sutskever's list of papers that he sent to John Carmack. Supposedly, it's 90% of what you need to know about AI (though the list was from 2019 iirc, so there's some parts of it that may be outdated or some newer papers that should be there).
Two things
- first, I figured I'd share, since there's a sizeable AI-interested community here. The reviews are meant to be approachable by someone who is interested but not an expert. https://open.substack.com/pub/theahura/p/ilyas-30-papers-to-carmack-table
- second, the list is incomplete! Apparently the full list was about 40 papers and included a bunch of stuff on meta learning, but the list that I was able to find is only 30 papers. I'm curious if anyone here knows if the full list is available somewhere?
I'm pretty sure the full list is not available. I searched 'sutskever carmack' on hacker news and found only the same list you have. Some tidbits I also found: some rando added the xLSTM paper. And some people noted that both reinforcement learning and diffusion are not really treated.
Join our Adult Kindergarten and learn to play again and be serious, to be animalistic and angelic, aged and youthful, good and bad, masculine and feminine, to play well together, to put real kindergarteners to shame with our optimized playful excellence
We play as a group, or separate into breakout rooms. We take turns deciding what brief activity to do next and leading the group.
Get in touch IYI: hunterglenn92@yahoo.com @HunterGlenn on X
I doubt I'm available in your time zone, but do you have any suggestions for resources on learning to joke, play, flirt, and generally be less serious? (Not humor per se; I'm already funny in an intellectual and mostly inaccessible way.)
Yeah, Keith Johnstone's Impro still the best!
Thanks, I'll have a look!
Try an improv comedy class.
I forced myself to go to a one-off session, even though I *knew* that I wouldn't like it. I ended up loving it and it became a big part of my life.
This better not be a sex thing.
Would probably be less weird if it was, tbh
Hi everyone, let's expect mockery in advance and make good things anyway!
I’m in man, I want to crush those real kindergarteners little egos so bad
Hope to hear from you! :)
After the election, Matt Walsh said:
>People without college degrees saved us from a Kamala presidency. This is yet more reason why in most cases you shouldn't go to college and you shouldn't send your kids to college. The vast majority of people don't need it and in fact will be harmed by the experienced[sic] -- harmed financially, mentally, and spiritually.
>I have no degree and I have never once in my life regretted my decision to skip college. I thank God that I didn't go. I don't know that I'd be where I am today if I'd spent the first half of my twenties in an indoctrination camp.
>A relatively small number of people should go to college if they plan to enter fields where it's actually necessary to have additional formal education (doctor, lawyer, etc). But the vast majority of jobs are learned entirely by doing. Your degree is irrelevant.
One cannot help but notice the similarity between his attitude and the attitude of the Haredim. I have more about this bizarre Haredi-LARP on my Substack:
https://alexanderturok.substack.com/p/whats-with-the-online-rights-bizarre
Aren't we supposed to be saving blog post links for the Read My Blog section of the Classifieds threads?
Or if we're linking to our own blog post, we should at least be posting a meaningful treatment of the blog entry so that people don't have to follow the link to engage with the comment? "Here are some of my thoughts, more at the link," etc?
He said not to do it more than once every six months. I edited my comment to provide more detail.
Not true - he asked for people to not do what you did AT ALL
You're absolutely right - this is explicitly what Scott asked people not to do. I'm surprised that Turok doesn't know better than to shamelessly shill his own blog.
Less of this please!
Many Thanks for the essay!
Yeah, there are problems with how higher education has evolved, and I don't have any good suggestions. The ratio of Democratic Party to GOP registered faculty at e.g. Harvard is over 10:1. Yes, there is a _lot_ of indoctrination being done. Ideally, I'd like to see something reasonably close to a 1:1 ratio, but I don't know how to get there.
I don't know how we would up with such a hugely biased faculty pool. I don't believe that the pool of competent potential faculty is so hugely skewed. Is it simply a positive feedback runaway, where leftist faculty made the environment hostile to conservative potential faculty, so they chose other career paths instead? Can this be reversed?
Personally, I was a programmer, with a STEMM background, so Matt Walsh's
>This is yet more reason why in most cases you shouldn't go to college and you shouldn't send your kids to college. The vast majority of people don't need it and in fact will be harmed by the experienced[sic] -- harmed financially, mentally, and spiritually.
was very false in my _particular_ situation. Personally, I routinely used what I learned, but this is not true in many jobs.
A separate problem is rampant credentialism. As you wrote:
>many hiring managers flat-out refuse to consider anyone who didn't graduate from college. You will not get a chance to interview; your application will be thrown in the electronic trash bin. This will only get worse when the next recession hits and employers can afford to be choosier.
Even if there were _no_ indoctrination in colleges, this is a _spectacular_ waste. Forcing most of the work force to piss away 10% of their working lifetime on a degree that is actually irrelevant to what they will be doing at work is a _huge_ loss. It is really crucial to get companies to distinguish between education that they actually _need_ their people to have and arbitrary filtering.
Perhaps the people with right-leaning ideology with the competence to be a Harvard professor are more likely to choose higher-earning careers?
Many Thanks! Could be, though I'm not following why this winds up being selective by ideology. Ivan Nikolaevich made an interesting point that bright conservatives are selectively going into fields with better paying options. I can certainly see why certain _fields_ (he mentions finance, presumably a lot of STEMM fields are similar) yield better paying options than academia more frequently.
Are the left-leaning people shooting themselves in the foot economically by their choice of field? And selectively winding up in academia as a result, highly competitive though academia is?
I think all you need to explain this is that `Harvard professor' is a job for which a lot of the compensation is in `social status,' but it only carries social status within the blue (or grey) tribe. So if you are blue (or grey) tribe then `Harvard professor' is a highly remunerative job (including non-monetary compensation). But if you are red tribe, then it doesn't carry any status points, and in purely monetary terms it's a much worse deal than finance.
Here's an example of a related study illustrating a similar effect: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2022.01807. Women prefer more meaningful professions are more willing to accept lower compensation for them than men.
Yes, a difference in the value of the status, depending on tribe membership, does sound like a plausible part of the explanation, Many Thanks! This _does_ like part of a positive feedback loop that helps explain how the problem got so bad, rather than of how it got started.
I wonder whether a small change in initial conditions could have given the opposite result: Harvard professors being largely red tribe, and the status of being a Harvard professor higher in red tribe than blue...
I'm pretty sure "conservative Harvard professor" carries a fair bit of status even in Red Tribe. But less so than it would in Blue Tribe, and it involves fewer opportunities to socialize with fellow Reds, so the point stands.
As a college student at a prestigious school, almost all of the bright conservative people I know are pursuing careers in fields like finance, whereas it's a much more diverse mix among left-leaning people of a similar intelligence level. If you want to get the political balance of academia even, you have to convince young people on the right that it's worth it to take a pay cut, and by and large I think that's harder than people think.
I've read that the partisan/ideological mix was much more balanced some hundred years ago. I think the lefty skew we see today makes sense if you believe, like Haidt, that those on the right are better at comprehending the left's positions than vice versa. Say you start with 10 right wing faculty and 10 left wing faculty deciding admissions and hiring. Each year you should expect to see a bit more lefty skew in the composition of academia since the 10 RW faculty gives more of a fair shake to LW applicants than the 10 LW faculty gives to RW applicants.
Many Thanks! Yes, that seems like a plausible part of the mechanism. So the left wing faculty would have been less damaging if there had been a required course for them on understanding right wing views, taught by the right wing faculty...
What is the present understanding of iran's attempt to kill trump, hezbollah's attempt to kill netanyahu, putin's attempts to kill zelensky, ukraine's attempts to kill putin, anything else I may have missed.
I have absolutely no idea how serious any of these were, I'm confused why there isn't more public interest in figuring that out.
Trump one was apparently serious and involved multiple Iranian government assets, but was thwarted while still in planning stage. Related: https://apnews.com/article/iran-fbi-justice-department-iran-83cff84a7d65901a058ad6f41a564bdb
The other three are most likely just grandstanding and speculation. Putin has always been said to be targeted by assassins, and he probably is.
Pretty pathetic that at least 2 crackpot Americans with off the shelf guns got much closer to actually assassinating Trump than the whole Revolutionary Guard.
The US intelligence community spends a lot of time and effort figuring out what the IRGC is up to. Monitoring the doings of every random crackpot is much more difficult.
I'm not sure whether it's a damning indictment of bureaucratic organisations, or just reflective of the fact that non-suicidal versions of this plan are a lot harder than probably-suicidal ones, and Revolutionary Guard agents aren't that keen on suicide missions.
> "Revolutionary Guard agents aren't that keen on suicide missions."
I know it wasn't necessarily your intent, but the phrasing here made me chuckle. This would be a great premise for a dark satirical comedy in the vein of The Death of Stalin. It almost writes itself.
True but can't they find some wannabe jihadist to strap a vest on? Especially if money is no object as noted in the linked article. The FBI seems perfectly capable of tricking people into becoming terrorists.
> Putin has always been said to be targeted by assassins, and he probably is.
But it's not sure whether Zelensky would really achieve anything by getting him killed, because the replacement would probably be someone very similar, only younger.
It's not like Putin has a trusted lieutenant ready to step in at a moment's notice; anyone who could plausibly replace Putin is likely long since purged.
The chaos imposed on the RF due to a sudden power vacuum and the resultant scramble would at the very least diminish its focus & coordination on the war, which could be exploited by Ukrainian forces.
Also, any replacement for Putin would have less prestige tied up in the war and so might be more open to ending it, since it really doesn't seem worth it on economical or political terms. Even if they'd be worse people.
There is in fact a public designated successor to Putin, and interestingly it's...noted cat lover Ramzan Kadyrov.
This has always felt like a fail-deadly switch and warning to the oligarchs: "Remove me and that Chechen will turn your skulls into bowls for his cats to eat from."
... but in the process (or as ordered by whoever takes Putin's place), a bunch of incompetent Russian generals might get fired, long-overdue decisions might finally happen, and so Russian military capability might easily double or triple.
Or incompetent generals can get on top in the turmoil, and they will get rid of more (military, but not politically) competent rivals, leading to further decay...
Patrushev is both reasonably likely and worse.
In re laws restricting access to social media for minors and related issues: In general, children and teenagers will do whatever they can to get around restrictions on information and other things. It's almost as if young people have a strong drive to make contact with the world.
We're mostly good materialists here, so there should evolutionary and/or genetic explanations.
And similar explanations for why adults try to restrict access. Is it just that adults know more, or is there some more complicated reason for this push-pull?
Virtually instantly after the first occurrence of life - arguably definitionally concurrent - was the occurrence of the cell membrane. Whatever complicated business those amino acids and nucleotides were up to, was much easier to go about when they didn't have to do it in the midst of all the other undifferentiated complex molecules, simple molecules, and unabsorbed radiation in the ocean. Namely, that business involved establishing lineages of long nucleotide chains, and the means to duplicate them, and that probably couldn't happen unless the replication mechanism was put into a tiny bubble where that chain was the only thing to work on, and was given only specific materials as input stock.
That evolutionary mechanism is just as applicable at larger scales, such as the organ, or the plant or animal, and when we're talking about animals that can absorb ideas in addition to carbs, lipids, and proteins, the value of a membrane that can filter for ideas becomes considerable.
I've settled on the idea that biologically and psychologically, teens are small adults. But the education system leads industrialized economies to legally treat teens as big children.
"In general, children and teenagers will do whatever they can to get around restrictions on information and other things."
Yes teens often test boundaries and seek autonomy, but they tend to test certain boundaries that align with perceived cost/benefit. Trying new things like drugs, sneaking out with romantic partner, avoiding boring school, going to parties. I don't see teens trying to get around restrictions that are in line with their values, or that they see as fair, or that are in line with their identity. (Do Muslim teens often experiment with pork? I sort of doubt that.)
This aligns with the boiler plate neurological explanation of teen brains being extra sensitive to dopamine, to the underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, to the developing limbic system. Adults and society have been able to intuit this long before brain science, and societies have developed ways to protect children, and rites of passage for coming of age. There are evolutionary reasons to seek information (gossip is a universal pastime), and the wiring of a teen brain is going to make them particularly keen on getting that dopamine hit and being impulsive about it.
I see regulating social media as a way of training teen to use the internet in a productive way. Teachers seem to be very concerned, because some kids (not all), are very addicted to checking their phones, and they will sit and eat lunch staring at their phones rather than interacting with their peers. As he stared at his phone rather than making eye contact I recently had a well adjusted kid say to me "how did I rack up 13 hours of screen time in one day?" Teachers see kids opting out of in person social interaction in favor of their phones, while parents see their kids on their phone at home and assume that their kids has been socializing all day at school. And in school it becomes obvious that some kids can juggle the in person/digital lives, and others cannot.
Do Muslim teenagers try pork? I have no idea.
I've heard that not eating pork is one of the rules indifferent Muslims still keep. Interesting if true, because a lot of Jews who will semi-keep kashrut, but might still eat fried rice with bits of pork.
Pork isn't that readily *available* in most Muslim countries (even when there are religious minorities who eat it, why bother raising pigs if you only have a possible market of like 20% of the population), so I'd imagine there's relatively less temptation, when you could just eat goat or beef instead. Likewise there's not that much temptation in India, even for Hindus who aren't that religious, to eat beef. (and yes I know there are some who do, in Kerala and the far northeast, but that's a regional culture thing more than a 'lack of religiosity' thing).
There are a lot of Muslims living in non-Muslim countries, so there would still be a question about those teenagers.
I'd bet that the pork taboo is more 'sticky' than other religious taboos (including within Islam). Partly because you're not giving up as much by abstaining from pork as you are when you abstain from sex, alcohol, etc.. There are lots of other meats that are substitutable for pork.
And also because the idea of forbidden foods is pretty deeply ingrained in us: I've known people before who were pretty desperately poor and could really have used some meat, any meat really, to go with their rice bowl, but would still turn down a free gift of meat if it was from an animal that was forbidden to them. I think that these food taboos are pretty core to our identity as religious and cultural subjects. People have gone to war over food taboos before, after all (cf. the Maccabean wars, and more recently the 1857 Great Indian Mutiny).
> We're mostly good materialists here...
Hey! No need to be insulting! ;-)
>We're mostly good materialists here, so there should evolutionary and/or genetic explanations.
Yes, but best of luck getting something testable rather than a just-so story :-(
I'm much less skeptical of e.g. : For most of our evolutionary history, food was in short supply, so our appetites are not well calibrated to give optimum health in a modern society where calories are very abundant.
For information, on the other hand, the evolutionary history is much vaguer. And for _differential_ questions, such as comparing literacy with online information, _both_ of which are novel on an evolutionary timescale - ouch!
I am not worried about my kids getting access to something. I am worried about some people getting access to my kids. So rather than restrict the access, I try to teach my kids to never post personal information online, and if something seems worrying, to come and ask me for advice.
But that requires a certain amount of mutual trust. For example, when I was a child, I didn't trust my parents enough to tell them about my problems, because they sometimes overreacted and then I had two problems instead of one. And I couldn't predict when that would happen, so I played it safe.
Restricting access to social media seems like a simple solution to many problems that does not require trust. Problem is, one day the kids will get internet access anyway, and at that age it may be too late to try to teach them something.
(Different thing is limiting internet access in the sense "only X hours a day". That's just to make sure that the kids sometimes also do something else.)
> I am not worried about my kids getting access to something. I am worried about some people getting access to my kids.
This is a nice reminder that people are coming at this at cross purposes. I've probably been talking past some people because my chief concern is a third thing - that the social environment created online is a shitter and more impoverished experience than the social environment of the playground/the rec/the old quarry/the pub once you can all credibly pass for 16. Allowing these to be replaced by environments where every possible interaction was designed and constrained will lead to meeker and more colourless children.
Generally kids can enjoy the benefits as well as the pitfalls, whereas parents have to clean up when things go wrong. Hence parents are more cautious with most things teenagers do - dating, drugs, alcohol, partying, etc.
Parallel Worlds very much apply, but I’d expect parents to be more cautious because their children will overestimate the reward and underestimate the risks?
We had a discussion about hearing aids here a couple months ago.
I bought a pair of Jabra prescription hearing aids from Costco on September 5. They cost $1600 (+ $60 Costco membership).
They are made by the same company (and use the same software) that makes the more expensive traditional hearing aid brands that are $4000 at the low end.
I’m pleased that I no longer need to use closed captions on my television and can hear birdsong besides jays and crows. It’s a dramatic improvement for me.
The aids come with a 180 day no questions asked return policy and have a 2 year no extra charge loss/replacement policy. (limited to one left ear and one right ear aid)
A technician did testing and created an audiogram and tuned each hearing aid to the internal geometry of each of my ears after they arrived.
Here is the take of a professional audiologist from the WSJ:
"There's nothing that comes close to the pricing you get at Costco," says Bailey, a doctor of audiology. "It's an unfair position for anyone trying to practice audiology, but have I recommended to friends and family that they go to Costco for hearing aids? Yes, I have."
What do you think of the various modes and software options, like using 'voice focus' in 'restaurant mode'?
I’m still experimenting with it. The app lets me set amplification by frequency like the leveling on a stereo receiver. There is a preset Speech Clarity that I use most of the time indoors without a lot of noise. The boost for that is towards higher frequencies.
I use the preset All Around outdoors with more level amplification.
I found no preset for Restaurant Mode with the app as I received it. There is a breakfast place I like to eat at with no soft surfaces and a lot of people raising their voice to be heard above everyone else that I’m still trying to level for. Maybe Costco just forgot to set up the preset at my fitting.
The Jabra has a third microphone at the earpiece that the software uses to cancel wind noise but the tech at Costco said people had complained about it being hard to use so they turn it off by default. If I want to try it out they’ll reenable it for me. The user app doesn’t allow that.
New Apple Earbuds have a similar feature, also similarly hard to find for many people: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/18/dining/noisy-restaurants-apple-airpods.html
I’ve been following that with interest. Unfortunately I have unusually small ear canals and have never been able to get Apple Earbuds to stay in.
Maybe if I used a set punch and a ball peen hammer to put them in place…
Well, looks like we might to get to see what kind of fun legal mechanisms exist to deal with a president going rogue sooner than people expected, albeit it's South Korean legal mechanisms.
At the risk of a premature "Dewey Defeats Truman," it's looking like we're in the "then as farce" stage of South Korean coups.
I think Yoon now has to go and follow the precedent of former President Roh and find a high cliff, because if you attempt to impose martial law and the legislature's response is (oversimplified) "lulz no", then there's really no point in coming back from that.
Anyone with basic knowledge of the country care to explain what happened/why, with the benefit of hindsight, it isn't a totally random development?
Not totally random. And nothing to do with North Korea; that's just the excuse.
Yoon has been a massively unpopular President; I think his approval rating was in the low twenties before this coup attempt. Which tracks with, A: his being a hard-right leader in a country where the hard right is ~20% of the electorate, and B: not having e.g. Donald Trump's ability to attract not-traditionally-right demographics to his coalition. He's also probably rather corrupt, and his wife is definitely so.
In the recent parliamentary elections, the opposition party won by a landslide, putting him in a very weak position. There have been broadly popular calls for his resignation and/or impeachment. And the new parliament rejected his proposed budget, passing their alternative with a veto-proof majority. Added together, this made him effectively a lame duck who *might* have been able to hold on to his office for the rest of the present term, but without being able to do anything with it and with a good possibility of a prison sentence for him and his wife at the end.
But he has been somewhat popular with the military, doing things like e.g. moving the presidential residence to the MoD headquarters. So it's not hugely surprising that he would gamble on "maybe I can be President-for-life as a de facto military dictator?"
Turns out, no, he can't.
It really seems to have been amateur hour though. If you've made the decision to declare martial law and arrest key parliamentarians, you should make sure you don't bungle the `arrest key parliamentarians' step. And if you do bungle it, and the parliament does meet to pass a law against your martial law declaration...well, why would you back down? At that point isn't alea jacta pretty thoroughly est?
You back down at that point because, A: you've failed and probably beyond hope of recovery but B: you haven't yet done anything that will get you put in front of a firing squad or thrown into an oubliette. Declaring martial law is a legitimate power of the ROK president, so long as you stop when parliament tells you to. Having a secret plan where the first step is declaring martial law and the second step is repacking parliament with your yes-men or whatever is probably criminal, but if you stop before the second step it's hard to prove.
Yoon may be impeached and he may spend a few years in prison if only for the corruption he was already being investigated for, but he's in a way better position than he would have been if he'd ordered the Army to actually start shooting people.
Yoon isn't a "hard-right leader"; I know he often described that way in Western media but it's wrong. He's a former lefty who defected from the Democratic party after he went after Moon Jae In's Minister of Justice for corruption. If he were actually a "hard right" guy, I think the PPP might have bothered defending him. As it is, as BR Myers notes, he has "no demographic to prop up his numbers".
This just raises the question of how he got elected in the first place. I can sort of understand the PPP supporting his campaign; who else voted for him, and what were their reasons? Did they just want Moon Jae In's scalp that badly? Was Yoon the only one in a position to deliver it at the time? The people elect a cat to deal with their rat problem, and are now working on the cat problem?
Democratic Party candidate Lee Myung Baek was excessively corrupt, even by ROK standards, with being tied to receiving a bunch of kickbacks from private developers when he was a mayor (trials related to which are still ongoing). Also he was following Moon Jae-in, who was a gifted politician with a lot of charisma and gravitas. It's not an entirely fair comparison, but the best that comes to mind for Americans is the drop off from Bill Clinton to Al Gore; Gore was a perfectly replacement level-candidate and good on many policy issues, but he also was boring. Lee could have gotten away with being corrupt if he also wasn't boring (Lee's also kind of an asshole from what I recall).
So you're saying Yoon got ~20% of the voters via the PPP, and another ~30+% of non-PPP voters, because Lee was even worse?
"Boring" doesn't sound like enough to explain the turnout, although the corruption problem does (assuming SKoreans rank corruption and boringness roughly the same way USians do).
I guess I absolutely qualify as "basic knowledge, so:
The "what happened" is pretty easy; President Yoon attempted to impose martial law on the country using (some of?) the military and police. The legislature (including his own party) vetoed his act and it was thus lifted.
Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I can say that...this move is still very random, completely unexpected, and more than a little dumb. One does not try to overthrow the government lightly; the lack of larger response in support of Yoon's actions (including the lack of support from his own party) indicates a completely flawed information system that led him to believe this is even possible.
Yoon claims he's doing it stop "anti-state forces", which should be read as North Koreans and Nork-friendly elements in the "left" (the Democratic Party, as opposed to the "right" People's Power Party, which Yoon is a member. Are there Nork-friendly in the left? Yeah certainly; there was a weird incident involving North Korean intelligence operatives and a Democratic Party office last year? I never found a good explanation on this in English. A fringe party was arrested in the late 00s for actively plotting an insurrection. Many of the guys in the previous Moon admin had a reputation going back to their college days of being unusually close to North Korea and openly sympathetic to the North (which is probably overdone but isn't entirely without basis). Are they actively involved in trying to overthrow the ROK government? Doubtful. Could the military and intelligence services be using this an excuse? Sure could, the guys running those two organizations grew up (if probably not served in) during the dictatorship, and there's always been a suspicion that they may have liked that more. There's also a doctor's strike going on right now involving doctors shutting things down over attempts to increase medical school class size to increase the number of doctors.
Regardless, that he failed so thoroughly indicates whatever's going on, it was badly planned and thus pretty stupid.
I mean, there was the massive gender-based polarization that was happening, but I don't know if that actually has much to do with what's happening. He was apparently cracking down on opposition speech via law enforcement, according to the NYTimes. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/03/world/asia/what-is-martial-law-south-korea.html He lost control of parliament back in April, so... either he's actually insane, or this is the dumbest attempt ever at desperately holding onto power. Or both.
Also, he backed down already. That was fast.
More about failing to think about tradeoffs: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1861568.html#cutid1
"A whole lot of America sees Democrats as the party that says, "Let them eat free-range."
It's not the first time. The Democrats were the party of treasuring redwoods over logging jobs, prizing the lives of wolves over the livelihood of ranchers, shutting down polluters causing acid rain over factory jobs. The Democrats were the party in favor of shutting down the economy to halt Covid, damn the cost to business owners and the workers who depended on those businesses. The Democrats have a horrendous reputation of not being concerned about the "common man", and chosing what seem to them be the fancies of the leisured classes over their own hard-scrabble existences.
So this is the other thing "the price of eggs" is a synecdoche for. It's not just about feeling a pinch in the pocketbook: it's a reference to the idea that the Democratic party is wholly in the control of an economic class who is blithely unconcerned with the cost to the American people of the policies they promulgate."
> The Democrats were the party of treasuring redwoods over logging jobs, prizing the lives of wolves over the livelihood of ranchers, shutting down polluters causing acid rain over factory jobs. The Democrats were the party in favor of shutting down the economy to halt Covid, damn the cost to business owners and the workers who depended on those businesses. The Democrats have a horrendous reputation of not being concerned about the "common man", and chosing what seem to them be the fancies of the leisured classes over their own hard-scrabble existences.
Virginia Postrel had some good comments on this when her essay about synthetic me