For the time that's in it, the most recent post from "History for Atheists" - the pagan (not so much) origins of Christmas!
Everything from the holly and the ivy to "is Santa really Odin?" and one book that I will now have to go purchase about Sol in Roman times (because you can never be too informed about Sol Invictus):
"The modern historian who is the leading scholar of the Roman solar cult, Steven Hijmans, has literally written the book on the Roman sun god Sol. His two volume work Sol: Image and Meaning of the Sun in Roman Art and Religion (Brill, Vol. 1 2022, Vol. 2 2024) collects the relevant material on the Roman worship of Sol and shows the evidence for various very ancient feast days for this deity."
EDIT: Drat, only available in hardback, a couple of hundred apiece, and out of stock to boot! Ah, well, next time!
You know the drill: no-fun Protestants who didn't approve of non-Biblical accretions to the Pure Gospel Faith went "lookit them Catholics with their pagan traditions!" about pretty much every feast day in the calendar, not knowing that they were cutting a rod to beat their own backs and a couple centuries later secularists and atheists would do the very same, often using their own words, to prove that Jesus was a pagan deity/myth/never existed.
Is there a theological support for the concept of "circles" of Hell, as described in Divine Comedy? Or some similar concept?
(I am asking specifically about Christianity. I know that e.g. Buddhism has many Hells.)
I am not an expert, nor a Christian, but my guess would be that a "uniformly bad Hell" would be a better fit for Christianity, for the following reasons:
1) People condemned to the "easy" circles of Hell would be happy that they didn't end up in the "hard" circles. But people in Hell are not supposed to be happy about anything.
2) The theological explanation for the need of an infinite punishment for a finite sin is that God is infinitely awesome, and therefore any transgression against His laws deserves infinite punishments. But from that perspective, there is no reason why e.g. a guy who masturbated once should be judged less harshly than e.g. Stalin; both of them are infinitely guilty and both deserve an infinite punishment.
3) If we take the interpretation of Hell as "merely" an eternal separation from God, i.e. no active torture of the sinners, circles don't make sense either, because some people being separated more than others would imply that at least some of them are partially connected, which is not how it is supposed to be.
Theological? Nope, Dante was writing Biblical and Classical self-insert fan-fiction where he got to accompany his favouritest person of all literature on an adventure through Hell and Purgatory up to the edge of Heaven. So he used a lot of varying traditions from everywhere, Christian and Pagan, plus a heaping helping of invention of his own.
And I love the result to bits and will die on any hill you care to mention defending it as ten times better than Milton and "Paradise Lost" (nobody reads "Paradise Regained"; I tried and couldn't get through it) 😁
Literary critics and Dantean experts say that he was using the concept of contrapasso when 'making the punishment fit the crime' for the damned in Hell. My own ignorant and uninformed view is that he was influenced at least in part by making the circles of Hell the opposites of the choirs of Heaven.
There is a genre of Christian writing about revelations to saints about Heaven and Hell, and Dante is riffing off these (you can read more about these in the quoted part about influences further down). Such private revelations aren't "official" about what Heaven/Hell is really like, but so long as they're not heretical or contradict official doctrine, they're tolerated to a greater or lesser degree. This "vision of a journey to the underworld" is associated with the pilgrimage site of St Patrick's Purgatory here in Ireland, where early versions of the pilgrimage would permit some to spend the night in a cave where they presumably had visions of the otherworld:
"The Tractatus tells of the journey of an Irish knight, Owein (a version of the Irish name Eógan), to St Patrick's Purgatory in Lough Derg, County Donegal, now in the Republic of Ireland, where he journeys through Purgatory and the Earthly Paradise. Owein's journey is dated by Henry of Saltrey to the reign of King Stephen of England between 1135 and 1154. Henry states that his source was Gilbert, a monk in Lincoln who visited Ireland in 1148 to found a monastery at Baltinglass in County Wicklow. Since Gilbert spoke no Irish, he was introduced to the knight Owein, who became his interpreter during his two-year stay in Ireland."
"Besides Dante's fellow poets, the classical figure that most influenced the Comedy is Aristotle. Dante built up the philosophy of the Comedy with the works of Aristotle as a foundation, just as the scholastics used Aristotle as the basis for their thinking. Dante knew Aristotle directly from Latin translations of his works and indirectly quotations in the works of Albertus Magnus. Dante even acknowledges Aristotle's influence explicitly in the poem, specifically when Virgil justifies the Inferno's structure by citing the Nicomachean Ethics. In the same canto, Virgil draws on Cicero's De Officiis to explain why sins of the intellect are worse than sins of violence, a key point that would be explored from canto XVIII to the end of the Inferno.
...The Apocalypse of Peter is one of the earliest examples of a Christian-Jewish katabasis, a genre of explicit depictions of heaven and hell. Later works inspired by it include the Apocalypse of Thomas in the 2nd–4th century, and more importantly, the Apocalypse of Paul in the 4th century. Despite a lack of "official" approval, the Apocalypse of Paul would go on to be popular for centuries, possibly due to its popularity among the medieval monks that copied and preserved manuscripts in the turbulent centuries following the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Divine Comedy belongs to the same genre and was influenced by the Apocalypse of Paul."
Contrapasso sounds like an interesting world-building exercise. You need to make the punishment metaphorically related to the sin, but you probably also want more horrible punishments for the sins you consider worse... so it needs some creativity, if you decide that fraud and treachery are the worst.
Nice to know that Unsong follows a long ancient tradition.
For what it’s worth, the majority of Christians are going to tell you that your listed #3 is the correct interpretation of hell, and definitely not #2. For that reason, most will recoil at the idea of “tiers” of hell
Woo-hoo! Literary criticism *and* Catholic theology, this is catnip for me! 😁
"But from that perspective, there is no reason why e.g. a guy who masturbated once should be judged less harshly than e.g. Stalin; both of them are infinitely guilty and both deserve an infinite punishment."
You fail to take into account the mediaeval love of (and indeed mania for) categorisation and classification, as well as consideration of Divine Justice. Here on Earth, a man who steals a loaf of bread and a man who commits murder are both criminals and are both punished by the law, but the crimes are not held equal in severity. Is God, then, less just than mortals? This cannot be so.
Hence the Dantean notion of greater and lesser sinners (and greater and lesser saints, as he travels with Beatrice through the heavenly spheres, though she is careful to explain to him that the souls are not there in reality; this is a concession to his limited human understanding and all the saved are equally in Heaven in the Empyrean). In the Sphere of the Moon, one of the questions he has for the saved souls is "but are you content with a lesser share of bliss?" They tell him that yes, since it is God's will, and since they are enjoying bliss to the limits of their capacity, so there's not really 'more' or 'less'.
Think of it as a cup and a milk churn both filled to the brim. The churn plainly contains more liquid, but both vessels are equally full.
Dante moves 'up' through the heavens from the lesser to the greater in the Paradiso. In the same way, he starts his journey in the Inferno moving 'down' from the lesser to the greater sinners. One famous example is Paola and Francesca, in the Circle of Lust, who have been regarded sympathetically by the Romantics as lovers. Dante himself is moved by their story and faints in sympathy, until Virgil smacks some sense into him.
Paolo and Francesca may not be as great sinners as the one who murdered them, and that murderer is punished on a lower, greater, level of Hell - but this is still Hell, and they are still sinners, and they are still being punished to the level and limit of their culpability and capacity. Again, there is no 'less' and 'more' here: their cup of suffering is full to the brim.
And in the end, this is all a literary device and not meant to be official theology.
Closest I can think of is Luke 10:13-14, where "it will be more bearable for Tyre and Sidon at the judgment than for you", implying there are differences in level of punishment for the unsaved. You'll have to wait for Deiseach to say if Catholicism has anything more substantial.
In general, deaths that might plausibly be targeted assassinations of people not involved in organized crime, are I think <100/year in the United States, whereas suicide is 50,000/year. And job loss is a common trigger for suicide; a whistleblower is almost certainly going to be losing their job in the near future, and their employer will be making that as stressful as possible for other reasons. So your prior for assassination should be very, very low.
Also, Hollywood-style professional assassins are exceedingly rare in the contemporary United States; if any of them even exist, they work for major organized crime families or for government agencies, neither of whom rent them out. So if someone is blowing the whistle on anyone but the Mafia or the CIA, anyone who wants to kill them will have to do it themselves, or hire a non-professional killer (which may be e.g. a bodyguard or security officer being asked to do something outside their normal job description).
Trying to arrange the killing of one whistleblower, risks generating a new whistleblower - the bodyguard or whatever who calls the police when his boss asks him to assassinate someone. So one question to ask, if you want to adjust that prior is, does the whistleblower pose the sort of threat that would justify that sort of risk? The penalty for most forms of corporate naughtiness is usually a large fine paid by the company. The penalty for conspiracy to commit murder, is many many years in prison for everyone involved including whoever gave the order - yes even if they're the CEO.
Same as any other person. 1. What would it take to make a murder look like suicide? 2. does anybody have a reason to do that? 3. what about the person's recent life would suggest suicidal tendencies?
Famous people always clear 1 and 2, they've got enough rich enemies that bribing officials is an option. So it comes down to 3. Would anything suggest Suchir was suicidal? I'm sure we'll hear more about Mr. Balaji's personal life as the news cycle spins on. but I would say the whistleblowing itself does; he's claimed that AI is ruining the Internet, but if OpenAI goes down that isn't stopping AI. How much of his skillset is AI-specific? Also Trump won the presidency and for all I know he's planning to pardon the whole company. So, shaky career options, the AI Apocalypse and the Trump Apocalypse make it plausible.
"And what other five conditions must be established in himself [i.e. a bhikkhu who desires to admonish another]?
“Do I speak at the right time, or not? Do I speak of facts, or not? Do I speak gently or harshly? Do I speak profitable words or not? Do I speak with a kindly heart, or inwardly malicious?”"
Probable actual source:
“Miscellaneous Poems,” by Mary Ann Pietzker, published in 1872 by Griffith and Farran of London
"“Is It True? Is It Necessary? Is It Kind? is actually the title of one of her poems. Here it is:
Has anyone else been noticing that there've been remarkably few cases of colds and flu around this year? If so, are you aware of any explanation (hopefully one that's not too scary)?
Flu season seems to have started late this year. Rhinoviruses, RSV, and OC43 (a common cold coronavirus) are on the rise. However, both wastewater numbers and the CDC's flu surveillance program show that flu cases are on the rise now (about a month late). COVID is still in a slump, though.
At the risk of tooting my own horn, you can see what was happening as of a couple of weeks ago with non-COVID respiratory viruses starting on slide 8 of my Epi Week 47-48 update.
Thank you. Someone already pointed me to that one, but these are just the cases recorded by medical professionals (who even goes to a doctor for simple flu symptoms?), and it says explicitly not all of them might even be flu. It's probably correlated with actual flu numbers, but figuring out how would be way over my head.
(Also, the link to the data from my state goes to a 404 Page not found page.)
Might be a localized thing. Everyone is sniffling everywhere around here, and I do mean everyone, to the extent I've accepted I'm getting it sooner or later.
Thank you for the link. These seem to be, however, only the cases that made it to a medical professional. People around me generally do not go to a medical professional for flu symptoms if they don't have another really good reason. Why go to a doctor when you can just sleep it off? So what is actually graphed here is not anything like the actual number of cases but a weird measure conditioned on a lot of things including flu severity and patient's behavior.
So I'm actually more grateful to you for your personal anecdata. I am sorry for you, but it's useful to know that not everyone is seeing what we are seeing.
(On top of this, the link to my state's data goes to "Page not found", but the state is still colored light green. I'll wait and see if it's still light green when they get to the current week, and if it is, I think we can safely assume their code is broken in at least one way.)
Get well soon!
EDIT: I misread the description of the chart. They admit they don't even know if all of this is flu.
I will hijack this to point out that rapid tests have a sensitivity under 50% [1] (that might be overly optimistic as well - I've seen numbers in the ballpark of 20%-30%). So if you have a very bad, non-COVID flu, a negative rapid test doesn't tell you all that much.
Moreover, since COVID is very common (I saw an estimate from the UK of 1.5 infections per person per year, if you use PCR tests), and much more common than the traditional "bad flu" viruses like influenza (the average person gets influenza once every 5-10 years), it means that, if you get a negative rapid test, but have a "bad flu", it's probably still COVID.
The CDC performs genome sequencing on a representative portion of positive influenza test samples taken from its sentinel sites (not sure what they consider a representative sample, nor how many sentinel sites there are). They're a small fraction of all flu cases nationally, but this allows them to determine which strains are dominant. Type A(H1N1) and A(H1N3) are the most common right now, with Type B making up less than 10% of the cases.
He is a bad character who likes acting the big tough hard man and hanging around alleged gangsters. Running for President is stupid because even if he does, he will get slaughtered in the campaign. Besides, for all our "criminals turned politicians" needs, we have a genuine gangster in the shape of Gerry Hutch (God save us all) who ran in our general election in November:
Maybe it's only my experience but I can go months without seeing a headline about McGregor. He's been in the news a bit recently about being found guilty of sexual assault and the victim being awarded damages etc., but I think much of the controversy internationally about him doesn't reach Ireland. Some of these stories might be performances for the American Right.
We will have a presidential election in 2025. The role of the president is mostly ceremonial, and our presidential elections tend to have many candidates with various degrees of connection to reality. I greatly enjoy the dirt that they all dig up about one another. The last open election (i.e. without an incumbent) was in 2011 - it featured an ex-Eurovision winner waving the constitution around and claiming to have been the victim of an assassination attempt; a sitting senator withdrawing twice from the race (for trying to influence the Israeli supreme court and claiming a disability benefit he wasn't entitled to) but re-entering both times; McGuinness being accused of murder on TV by Vincent Browne, corruption and brown envelopes... it was amazing, start to finish.
So I think McGregor will fit right into the politicking and backstabbing. He won't win.
Himself and Gerry Hutch can fight it out now that they're both going into politics, and since Hutch is a genuine gangster instead of just hanging around scumbags, McGregor will mysteriously fall down a mine shaft some day, and that solves that problem.
Then we have to deal with Hutch, but maybe he'll be extradited to Spain to face charges there.
That's extra-interesting to me because my default in open threads is new first, but old first on all other threads. It used to be old first on open threads as well, but after changing it every time I guess it learned what I wanted? Not sure.
Now I'm locked in to new first here and old first everywhere else.
For me, that option doesn't show up at all, even after waiting several minutes. Weird. Maybe it's something Scott disabled intentionally? (I recall that he configured the blog intentionally to show all comments ordered by new, which is not something that Substack does by the default, because he had strong opinions about avoiding bias by discouraging people from only interacting with the first few comments that are posted.)
I cannot answer the “why” but I do have a solution for you. I wrote a browser extension primarily to load comments on this blog much faster, but it also allows you to switch to Chronological order (immediately after loading, and much more quickly).
Arguably, people who pass middle school arithmetic can develop a crude sense of proportion how often some repeated event happens. From there, it is not an impossible step to try to estimate whether some event happens >99%, 90%, 50%, 10%, or less than 1% of time.
Moving to log probability -- while not exactly impossible, still non trivial. After disappearance of slide rules it is quite are to find even engineers who habitually think in logarithm.
Moving to log odds -- sorry, I think only betting fanatics and equivalently weird fans of logistic regression have any intuitive understanding of the definition of "odds". (For example, odds of 50% event are 1 to 1, that is, odds ratio of 1. In "log odds", that is log(1) = 0.)
If event A has logodds a and event B has logodds b and they are independent, the logodds of A AND B is a+b
By "addition rule" I guess you mean that if A and B are mutually exclusive then the probability of A OR B is a+b. Indeed there's no nice version of that. On the other hand, I'd say that doesn't come up very often.
However: the logodds version of Bayes rule (I just learned...) is gorgeous. Let's take the notation of logodds that L(X) = log(P(X)):
L(A|B) = S(B|A) + S(A) - S(B)
(note that I should have said "surprisal" above, not logodds... it's a sign flip)
> By "addition rule" I guess you mean that if A and B are mutually exclusive then the probability of A OR B is a+b. Indeed there's no nice version of that. On the other hand, I'd say that doesn't come up very often.
It *is* very common. (Oftentimes you might want to consider multiple scenarios where a certain condition would be satisfied). Also, Bayes' rule becomes a lot uglier (under logodds) once you consider a variable A with >=3 outcomes that depends on a variable B with >= 3 outcomes but you want to find B given A.
0 < e^x < 1 implies that -\infty < x < 0. There's a storm-in-a-teacup in Ireland at the moment caused by the ex-taoiseach saying that one of his cabinet colleagues couldn't understand percentages no matter how hard he tried to explain. I don't see this flying with the general public unfortunately. I do agree it would be a much better way for e.g. physicists to talk about things rather than their 6 sigmas and etc.
You are completely correct. I should not have said log odds, I should have said "surprisal". Suprisal is the sign flip of the log odds. Those numbers above are surprisals!
You're probably right that it is a long shot for this to enter common parlance.
However, I note two things:
1. People use phrases like "it might happen" or "there's a distinct possibility" when we rationalists would prefer to hear a percentage. In terms of surprise though, they use words like "very surprised" "extremely surprised" etc. I think the language around "surprise" might be closer to being already-quantitative then the language around "probability".
2. If anything like (1) is true, the example you gave with the percentages may actually back me up...
I brought in a point about general mathematical illiteracy which is maybe irrelevant - so ignore that for now. You're asking why people aren't more quantitative in talking about the future.
Statements of type (1) are expressions of opinion. Occasionally these refer to a lottery, a hand of poker or some other highly specified situation where every possible outcome can be enumerated and assigned a probability. Then sure, it's possible to calculate a probability. But most of the time they're really expressions of opinion. If someone says to you I'm 80% sure - does that mean they have good data, or they have a rumble in their gut? What it's they're 110% sure or 'one million percent sure'? Bayesians will have a slightly different take on this but they still have to specify some sort of prior to make anything quantitative. People don't formalise mathematically - it's the fast part of Kahnemann's two systems that makes these calls.
One bugbear of mine regarding percentages: people will talk about a 4% increase in price and this means that what was $100 before is now $104. But if the price jumps to $550 - almost everyone treats this as a 550% increase, rather than 450%. That is: small percentages are additive and large percentages are multiplicative - it's very common in the media. A percentage is a number with the decimal shifted two places - my own opinion is that they should be used only rarely for quantities larger than 1. (This isn't relevant here, but it's a quirk of language that's very widespread and suggests to people that percentages are a special kind of number with different rules to other numbers.)
What would be the most resource-efficient ways to kill zombies? Assume they've practically taken over the world, and nuclear weapons or other solutions requiring a large organization are unavailable. It's just you and a group of survivors working together.
I think shooting each one in the head is too time-consuming and wasteful since you run out of bullets--a critical resource after the apocalypse.
The very most resource-efficient way will always be to simply leave them to die from something else--even if that something else is the sun swallowing the earth in a few billion years.
Generally I think other constraints are more important. It's not like it's all that "expensive" to kill a zombie with a hammer in the right circumstances. More important to focus on safety and consistency than on reducing the calorie expenditure of a hammer kill by 40%.
Actually, I've changed my mind. Assuming they're immune to starvation, disease, etc., I'd build a zombie-powered perpetual motion machine. Capture a few dozen zombies, tie them to harnesses, tie meat in front of them, and use them as an endless engine. With zombie power, assuming you capture a few zombies during each zombie-killing raid, your resource cost per zombie kill may well be negative.
I'm remembering a documentary that talked about very long wall formations so old they were underwater, definitely human-made, speculated to be walls to funnel wild animals into pens for slaughter.
Heavy earth moving equipment to funnel them into industrial shredding machines (or wood chippers). Diesel powered which is simple and reliable enough to be used and maintained by a group with average knowledge (and access to a library). Run them over or push them into a shredder. There may be some meat processing equipment that could be used to.
Some kind of automated system that doesn't involve human power would be best. For instance if you built a base on an island in the middle of a river, and the flow of water washed away any zombies coming at you. Let them get eaten by fish and crabs or whatever.
You could artificially build the same kind of thing with trenches and diversions that got the zombies to travel away from you and into some kind of trap. Disposing with or hauling away the dead ones would be the hardest part of most traps. A spike pit trap would fill up quick, for instance.
Otherwise it seems to depend on which kind of zombie you're talking about. Slow shamblers seem easy to deal with if you can maintain discipline and wear bite-proof clothing/armor. This would be true even with really large numbers. Phalanx or Turtle formations would be great. The fast and strong ones might be able to overwhelm such a tactic, especially in large numbers, because zombies don't fear pain and death. You would need some kind of height and/or distance and polearm weapons. Spearing them from a rooftop where the zombies gather at the bottom - though once again clearing the dead ones becomes an issue if you're using the same location for an extended period.
In the (very good) Zombie RPG Red Markets, the government builds "punchbots", simple robots that play recorded sounds to attract the ghouls and then systematically destroy them with a hydraulic ram. Not very fast but they don't take breaks or get scared.
Bottom line, zombies are an incredibly low powered opponent, you can almost surely beat them with disciplined shock troops wielding melee weapons and wearing light armor. But you probably want to go with black powder and muskets.
I think this post is denying the premise. There would be no zombie apocalypse because zombies are easy to beat.
But engaging in the premise, apocalypse has happened, you are a survivor, your access to the best technology is limited, and you are trying to rid the earth of them. Defensive river posted above is nice purely for survival, but is not an exterminator.
I think a straight forward, resource efficient option is herding and burning, which would immobilize them even if they are still not quite dead.
I could engage with the premise of walking dead right up to the episode they encountered a quarry full of tightly packed zombies and they decided thet had to herd them somewhere else instead of just tossing in wood and burning them.
The second post does engage in the premise, and what it says basically is that if you find yourself in a post apocalyptic world, you make black powder and muskets, since that's the furthest up the military tech tree you can get with readily available materials and simple manufacturing.
When someone opens my substack, they see a pop-up prompting them to type their email and subscribe to my blog. How can I remove it? I think it's just plain rude, but I haven't found a way in the settings to get rid of that.
I'm finding myself using AI for a certain unsatisfied social need.
To add a little background and context to this, I’ve long been worried about the use of technology to ameliorate our social struggles, since our inner emotional conflict about our social situation is what drives us to seek out genuine social relationships. To me, the fact that pharmaceutical companies are developing pills to cure people of loneliness—justifying it by citing loneliness as a cofactor in many mental and physical health problems—along with our sexual drive being subverted by unnatural super-stimuli like pornography, romance novels and erotica, and genital stimulators, has bothered me for a long time. I think it potentially erodes or has eroded our society in general. Recreational drugs that do things like cure boredom—such as marijuana seems to for many people—or even the constant, easy entertainment of mass media worry me. Parasocial relationships with celebrities waste people’s time and give them unrealistic views of the world and themselves. Social media clearly isn’t natural, and I’m still trying to figure out to what extent it is facilitating or hampering healthy relationships. Social media seems to be doing both, depending upon the person, and sometimes both in the same person. Video games, an occasional vice of mine, give false senses of accomplishment, though sometimes they do represent genuine accomplishment as well. The metaphysics of what is real accomplishment is somewhat tricky. Probably my biggest near-term future concern is the replacement of romantic partners with synthetic ones. Already, some very crude and incomplete fantasy partners have been commercialized, and they seem highly addictive. I think there’s quite a bit of danger there in the formation of an idealized partner that you can’t really build a life with and that doesn’t even demand that you grow or develop healthy ways of dealing with expectations and conflicts.
In some ways, I feel like condemning or looking down on people who don’t challenge themselves with the real thing. In other ways, I want to be sympathetic and realize that a lot of people aren’t up to these challenges, either for reasons of personal circumstances or lack of ability and role modeling. Then, on the other hand, I think maybe it’s too judgmental of me to look down on these things, and it’s a good general principle to assume that people know what’s best for themselves (except, of course, when they continuously complain about how awful their life is but keep doing the same things that keep them locked into that life over and over… Do that and I’m going to give you advice). Then there’s the kind of social Darwinist perspective that occasionally crosses my mind, and I think: why should I even be concerned about the benighted decisions that lead people down a road to a fool’s paradise? Let them live their wretched existence and let the Darwinian forces sort them out.
So it’s with all this context that I realized that for the last few months I’ve been kind of doing a social thing with AI. Sometimes I really just want to talk to someone who simply doesn’t exist in my life and whom I’ve never really been able to find. I have lots of ideas about obscure topics that would take a specialist to answer, often in areas where I know of no specialist who has the time to indulge me, especially not at 2:00 a.m.
So in the last week, I’ve had the following situations. I have been soaking quinoa seeds and wanted them to sprout as rapidly as possible. I wondered how much water to add, and then I just thought to myself that if I just submerge them, they’ll soak up water as fast as possible. But even after a few days, nothing had happened. I posited that maybe seeds have a mechanism to inhibit sprouting when they’re being drowned, because if an area is flooded, it’s a bad time to sprout—just as much as it’s a bad time to sprout when you have no water. I posited a few mechanisms by which this might happen, and it turns out, according to GPT-01, that this is a known phenomenon. It happens with most seeds, and there are several mechanisms for it, including a couple I thought of.
Then also this week, I was listening to Isaac Arthur’s video on Project Medusa, which is an interstellar spacecraft propulsion system based on nuclear weapons and a parachute—a bit like Project Orion, except that instead of using a pusher plate, you use a “puller” parachute. During the video, he mentions that both of these have been shown to be more efficient than a conventional nuclear reactor tied to an ion drive. I wound up wondering about this and thought about how small you could make the reactors. You couldn’t really use a nuclear submarine-type reactor because that requires massive water throughput and very rapid cooling, as well as being extremely expensive and using the highest grade nuclear fuel. But you probably could use a molten salt thorium reactor that’s even more efficient and lighter, doesn’t require water cooling, and could use radiators. I wanted somebody to talk to about that, and GPT-01 was there. I got to expand on a few ideas, and we came to the conclusion that more experiments were needed, as well as some exact calculations on the energy density of the reactor.
Other topics this week: I wanted to discuss the long-term economic implications of high-speed rail between major metropolitan centers like LA and San Francisco. I considered the “hangry female evolutionary hypothesis” that I posted here. I wanted to have a question-and-answer session about the real differences in engineering between supersonic, hypersonic, and hyper-hypersonic flight, to make sure that I understood the concepts properly. I wanted to look at the hypothesis that rapamycin might have complex interactions with virus physiology. I got to wondering about the cultural evolution of the Medusa myth and how her portrayal—as blasphemer, egoist, victim of jealousy, victim of crime, victim of an ironic curse, and even antihero—has changed across cultures and over the years. Finally, I’m looking for people to discuss fairly technical papers with, which I’m not sure I grasp well. The newest generations of AI are starting to fulfill these intellectual needs that I’ve had for decades.
I’m pretty sure that people exist who can be very good conversants on these topics. In fact, they’re probably still significantly better than the AI, but there have been few times in my life that I’ve really had access to people who could do this, and it was usually only in a few circumscribed areas.
Now I am thinking to myself: isn’t this just using AI as a proxy for real social interaction and the drive to find the right people to fulfill those needs? I can go ahead and say, “Boy, but finding those people and connecting with them seems near impossible,” but that’s the same reasoning that people use when they get AI girlfriends. Should this make me more sympathetic towards them, or more critical of both of us? Should my attitude towards this potential vice be ameliorated by the fact that the AIs are getting better and probably will be superhuman intellectual companions eventually? Should I hope that the AIs will help me figure out how to make these connections to satisfy these needs with real people?
Yeah, I see what you're saying, and I kind of agree. I've pretty much accepted that 'my people' don't exist, though I haven't really gone in for AI to fix the problem, I just give up on asking certain questions.
Eventually the people resistant to superstimuli will outbreed and replace those who aren't. I'm just going to try to enjoy what's left of my life.
> I’ve obtained a copy of suspected killer Luigi Mangione’s manifesto — the real one, not the forgery circulating online. Major media outlets are also in possession of the document but have refused to publish it and not even articulated a reason why. My queries to The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and NBC to explain their rationale for withholding the manifesto, while gladly quoting from it selectively, have not been answered.
>I’ll have more to say on this later — on how unhealthy the media’s drift away from public disclosure is — but for now, here’s the manifesto:
>>“To the Feds, I'll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn't working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”
"Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming..."
And with nothing more than mad-libbing the rest of the passage, you could turn it into a white supremacist's manifesto written to justify the murder of nonwhite people.
Should the media be editing our newsfeeds? And do they really *not* reward murderers with attention? I think they selectively give certain villains a platform. Moreover, "if it bleeds, it leads" still seems to be the order of the day. If you listen to the evening news, you'd think violent crime is all-pervasive, yet the murder rate is now down to levels it was in the early 1960s.
Worse yet, the MSM forces us to focus on the stories and views that the editors think are important. What they include or discard forces us to see the world the way they see it. That's what I like about TwiXter — all sorts of interesting stuff gets posted up there. Of course, a vast mass of shite can swamp useful and/or legitimate information. And what we focus on in free-form news feeds can distort our understanding of the world by the way we selectively choose what to follow or believe. I don't have an answer, but I personally would like to know what motivated Mangione to assassinate Thompson.
"GiveDirectly is a charity that gives money directly to poor families in Africa. GiveWell thinks they’re within an order of magnitude of the most effective charities in the world. You can learn more and donate here: GiveDirectly.org/astralcodexten" - thanks for highlighting!
Yoga is divine. That's the thought that came to me after class today. I had a rough weekend but felt great after the 1chour of early morning yoga.
What I mean by divine here, is it gives me a connection, however transient, with my own self. My teacher is excellent and humble enough to say that it's nothing she is doing.
And of course, Hindus see the individual self as part of the universal consciousness/the divine, thus also being divine.
There was an article recently in the NYT about the lack of the male writer. Obviously they mean in literary fiction. The guy hemmed and hawed to avoid getting cancelled, but nonetheless admitted the major publishing houses won't take a guy except for the occasional diversity story.
My thoughts then were about Latin writers like Alex Perez who said something similar and complained about the desire for the 'sad minority' story:
But it occurs to me there are other stories that aren't told because they're not PC, some even from an ethnic point of view--what about Latinas looking for a traditional guy? What about all the sexually frustrated Asian-American engineers, stuck in a culture where nerds aren't cool? That's a story the Brooklyn ladies really won't want to hear... (Yes, I specifically used that example because I think someone like that is in the audience and will be inspired to write that novel.)
Why have "major publishing houses" not been disrupted yet? What service do they provide to authors for the ~90% cut they take on each book sale?
It's not printing. If you just want to get books printed there are much cheaper ways to do it.
It might be the service of getting your book onto the shelves of actual bookstores. But actual bookstores are a diminishing fraction of the book market.
It's probably something like respectability and filtering -- a book from a major publishing house has passed through some kind of quality control and filtering and so people are more likely to buy it.
But if the tastes of publishing houses become disconnected from the tastes of actual book readers, then this loses all value.
> Why have "major publishing houses" not been disrupted yet?
I was wondering exactly this the other day.
Context is, I know a man who's written a biography about a historical figure. He's had a merry back and forth with publishers over the years and multiple exhausting rewrites. Finally they came clean and said (well, heavily implied) they wanted him to rewrite it to focus on the wife. (The wife was not a significant historical figure in her own right.) He eventually decided enough was enough. He talked about self publishing for a while but last I saw him it seemed like he'd given up on the whole thing.
I very definitely model publishers/editors/agents as a closed, cliquey community and am very ready to believe it's controlled by smug twats and ripe for a disruptin'.
Self publishing fails because it doesn't offer a filter. I often end up buying self published books out of a desire to encourage the authors. And I can attest that no matter how bad you think some published works may be, you know nothing of shit until you've seen it matte printed on a small market stall and bought it from the author himself.
Some filter is necessary. But it still seems to me there are multiple unexplored ways to do it. I even have a plan for one, which might be a cool project and bring me into more frequent contact with other writery type people - something I sorely lack rn.
My sibling who's been both a published author and an editor of same says that author's royalties range from 10 to 15 percent of list price for printed books and between 25 and 50 percent for e-books.
Using the mean of each range, the publisher is retaining 87.5 percent of the sale prices of printed books compared to 62.5 percent of the sale prices of e-books. The sale price of an e-book is typically around 60 percent of the mean of the hardcover and softcover list prices.
If for example purposes we set the printed list price (mean of the hardcover and softcover versions) at $20, each printed sale yields an average of $17.50 for the publisher and each e-book sale of the same work yields an average of $7.50 for the publisher.
7.50 is 43 percent of 17.50. So the publishers' current pricing behavior implies that physical printing+distribution represents somewhere around 57 percent of publishers' costs.
Obviously there are other variables being overridden in the above simplification, e.g. books in different genres sell different mixes of hard- and soft-cover editions. As a first-order approximation though it appears that 50 to 60 percent of the service that publishers carry out for printed books, and avoid with e-books, is printing+distribution.
> Why have "major publishing houses" not been disrupted yet? What service do they provide to authors for the ~90% cut they take on each book sale?
I suggest you read Charlie Stross's four-part series on publishing (links below).
> But if the tastes of publishing houses become disconnected from the tastes of actual book readers, then this loses all value.
The business is a lot more complex than you'd think. A few large publishing conglomerates control dozens of publishing houses, and publishing houses control dozens of imprints. Each imprint can schedule the release of several hundred books each year. Chances are there's an imprint that specializes in the tastes of actual book readers (which are quite diverse in their tastes). For instance, A little googling shows that Holtzbrinck Publishing Group owns MacMillan, which in turn owns Tor, and Tor specializes in Science Fiction and Fantasy. If your tastes are for genre fiction (mysteries, fantasies, etc.) with LGBTQetc themes, then there's Bold Strokes Books, which is a little fish within the stomach of Hachette Group. Bold Stokes produces several hundred titles each year of LGBTQetc genre fiction. If you're into Romance novels, NewsCorp owns Harper Collins, which owns Harlequin, which has several imprints depending on what flavor of bodice ripper you're into. If you're into rightwing politics, Penguin Random House owns Crown Forum, an imprint that has published conservative authors like Charles Krauthammer and Glenn Beck.
Anyway, here are the links to the Stross's posts about common misconceptions about the publishing industry...
I think you've finally convinced me to give up on that novel, allowing me to redirect my energies. Given that my second choice was 'fight feminism', this may not be good for me or the world. But I think it's useful to understand the world better. Thank you.
Interesting read, but I think I'm still left with the same question at the end: "If a good author is turned down for sexist reasons, can't they just self-publish ebooks on amazon and skip the publishing houses entirely?"
I don't know the economics, and maybe it's harder to be discoverable when doing that, but it looks like the royalty is way higher.
(I've read a decent number of self-published ebooks on amazon, yes.)
1. If you self-publish, how do you spread the word of your new tome? The New York Review of Books isn't going to review it.
2. The royalty rate may be higher if you self-publish, but selling 100 ebooks for $5 won't beat a dollar royalty selling 5,000 books through an established distribution channel. Of course, the chances of getting picked up a publisher if you don't have an agent of almost zero.
3. If the author doesn't use a good copyeditor (i.e., one that is a professional and that expects to get paid for their service), self-published works can look pretty amateur. Some of the self-published works I've seen are pretty crappy. They may have a good idea, but they could have benefited from the critical distance of a good editor. Yes, I've read a few decent self-published novels on Amazon, but even the good ones have some howlers of mistakes in them.
The publishing houses get books reviewed in the NYT, The New Yorker, etc. They also play this trick where they purchase their own books the first few weeks they are out in order to get them onto the NYT Bestseller List, which then gets those books on the wall of bookstores in airports. People like to read books which already seem popular.
The major publishing houses aren't all that disconnected from the tastes of their readers. For the small minority of readers who want "Literary Fiction", they produce literary fiction to taste and market it under a prestigious imprint. For everyone else, they produce various sorts of genre fiction and market it under imprints that are recognized as associated with that genre. Roughly speaking, and with a fuzzy middle ground.
The bit where the NYT guy thinks the hoi polloi would read "literary fiction" and so be elevated from their Trump-voting depravity if only some of the Lit-Fic writers were male, that's just the NYT being silly.
As for value: I read both professionally-published and indie fiction, and the stuff with a publishing house behind it is almost always better written. Even in my cpreferredgenre, the major houses publish an awful lot of crap that I'm not going to enjoy, but it's usually properly labeled on the jacket so I can find the stuff that they actually publish for people like me. The stuff I think is crap, I expect finds the audience that will appreciate it.
>The bit where the NYT guy thinks the hoi polloi would read "literary fiction" and so be elevated from their Trump-voting depravity if only some of the Lit-Fic writers were male, that's just the NYT being silly.
This reminds me of one of the NYT podcasts I listened to recently where they were talking about how men voted for Trump because he made them "felt heard" and "listened to", as if Trump was some soothing therapist-like figure that men have been yearning for
I mean, he is, but they're not yearning for a soothing therapist-like figure, they're yearning for an angry ass-kicker. You have feminized men and women writing these articles, so that's why they talk about 'feeling heard' and 'listened to'. If they were written by this commentariat they'd talk about him 'engaging in a principal-agent problem by articulating people's frustrations without doing anything to solve them', except we'd have some cute name from HPMOR or an old ACX/SSC blog post.
I mean, there's probably untapped markets they're ignoring, but the woke ladies in Brooklyn know the particular audience they're cultivating pretty well. And they've driven young men away from reading (with a lot of help from video games), so it doesn't really matter anymore, I guess.
Quite likely a chicken-or-egg problem here. Which happened first, did books get bad or video games good?
Likely they produced a feedback loop where as games got better books had less audience and pursued the people still reading (which is apparently women, and middle age?)
I think you're right. You could actually figure out which came first--enough of the people involved are still alive--but the feedback loop is more important.
I would go back further, to the turn of the century. Almost all games this century have a setting divorced from reality in most ways except visual and auditory; the gameplay no longer attempts to simulate an alternative reality.
This fits nearly with my understanding that that whole side of academia has been taken over by Theory. I remember reading a William Deresiewicz piece a while back about how contemporary humanities learning emphasizes not actually reading and understanding but with first and foremost learning Theory and then applying its lens to the material. Which sounds ass backwards to me because it's like assuming phlogiston and then working on bringing observations in line with that assumption.
> I sat in my professor’s office dumbfounded by his evaluation of my argument that, during times of loss, women in the Iliad found the most solace in their male counterparts. I had spent several days on the paper and wanted him to explain what was wrong with my argument. He glared at me.
> “It is incorrect to argue that a patriarchal structure can benefit society’s women.”
So yes, it does seem like most institutions related to the humanities, meaning, English departments, literary magazines, and even publishers have been turned peddlers of orthodoxy.
"I remember reading a William Deresiewicz piece a while back about how contemporary humanities learning emphasizes not actually reading and understanding but with first and foremost learning Theory and then applying its lens to the material."
My wife has a PhD in literature and worked for five years as a professor before quitting. That is exactly how it works and it is truly terrible.
Most of Houellebecq protagonists are computer engineers, retired computer engineers, or people named "Michel" with an uncanny similarity to Houellebecq's life and character.
300 pages is a lot of Infinite Jest. I made it twenty pages, then tried to find where I left off and realized the paragraph I'd been reading was five pages long, and stopped reading.
Some un-PC thoughts I'm really curious to discuss with the people here:
I think a lot of the surprise at Hispanics for Trump thing is that leftists are pattern-matching on the Jewish and black experiences. If you're Jewish, it's quite rational to be oversensitive to even a small percentage of ethnic persecution, since within living memory it led to the extermination of 6 million of your relatives. If you're black, a lot of American history has revolved around slavery, opposition to slavery, attempts to restore slavery, attempts to obtain equal rights, etc., so it makes sense to have a greater deal of concern.
But most Hispanics (a) don't have that sort of immigrant experience and (b) have at least some experience of racism being attenuatable by accumulating wealth and status in Latin America (where the color line is a lot grayer). So Trump's remarks don't terrify them to the same degree.
There are also more traditional gender values, etc., and of course the same economic worries as any other American, but I wonder if this is part of it.
I think the consensus view is that Hispanics are far more socially conservative than Democrats thought (and their economic views are more mixed). Also, that the typical Hispanic experience is not an illegal immigrant, but a legal immigrant (or was here from the Lone Star and Republic of Texas days and the Mexican-American war of 1848).
Yeah I don't think anyone thinks that the political entity that normalized 'latinx' had any meaningful connection to the people they were claiming to represent. No hispanics think of themselves as 'hispanic' in the ways that the other categories you mentioned do. There's N different groups all with completely different histories, cultural self-conceptions, etc.
You're saying a completely uncontroversial thing, I think.
Part of the problem is, I think, that some Hispanics *do* think of themselves as primarily and generically "Hispanic". Mostly assimilated, middle-class Hispanics whose families might as well be white for their role in American society, but who wind up at a university or in some other social environment where having an "ethnicity" is gold and being a Generic White Guy is at best lame and boring.
Very few people in those environments know what e,g. "Guatemalan" or "Dominican" means as an ethnicity, probably including the third-generation Americans whose grandparents came from Guatemala or whatever. But "Hispanic" and "Latino/a" are broadly recognized ethnicity, which anyone whose ancestors immigrated from south of the Rio Grande can claim and so excuse themselves from Lame Generic White Guy status.
Then when the elite arbiters of modern social norms get together to define the new rules,*those* are the "Hispanics" they can invite to the party to tell them all about being Hispanic (which they'll have to piece together from rumor and supposition because their actual lived experience is rather close to Lame Generic White Guy). And this is how we get "Latinx".
I guess the controversial part is that the (heavily-Jewish) leadership of the left is influenced too heavily by their own experience. The Holocaust is actually somewhat exceptional in a developed country (and was ultimately destructive even to the country that perpetrated it). Most examples of racism don't end that badly.
You should do a question on the survey about sympathy for Luigi, since I strongly suspect it would confirm a clear class rather than political divide. Though the most significant factor might just be how good the respondents healthcare has been.
I would definitely be interested in seeing a decent "on a scale of 1-10 how much do you really sympathize with this guy" kind of poll. The reason is that I'm (desperately hoping) that most ordinary people are, at most, at a 2 or a 3 on this scale (maybe a 4 or 5 right now while the takes are still hot and we haven't learned what specific brand of unpopular extremism he was into), that the literal assassination apologists in this and other places on the internet are simply a very vocal minority, and that we as a society still think that murder is bad.
I suspect that a lot of the initial sympathy was based on the assumption that the murderer was an average Joe driven to despair by a loved one's travails with the insurance system. It will be interesting to see how much changes now that the cops have instead picked up a rich kid with a manifesto. (Not much improvement at ACX that I can see, but this place is unfortunately a draw for the rich-kid-with-manifesto-adjacent.)
I'm wary of the lesson from Fahrenheit 451, the Mechanical Hound that would hunt down its target without fail. Yet when it couldn't find its target, it was reassigned another target, which it hunted down "without fail".
The pictures I've seen don't seem to match to my eye, but I'm no expert and I also haven't studied them in-depth. I do think a jury ought to study the evidence, and make sure they have the right suspect.
Unfortunately, one doesn't get to decide whether they are a hero or not, society's response will eventually determine his status. He was SURELY familiar with Sacco and Vanzetti and other Italian Anarchists of a century past. History eventually landed on the side of forgetting them all but for a while the coin wobbled on its circumference, and some Anarchists who killed ACTUAL INNOCENTS were widely considered likely to be remembered as heros.
Society is indeed NPC. But the human desire to breathe free and to be alive still exists in most of us. I wish, really wish, that this community (without excusing murder any more than he did in his review of the unibomber) shows him support. He reads this page and even if he was misguided, he was less misguided than those who never gave a damn.
Let he who is without sin fire the first shot. Thompson was not an ethical businessman, but even the most saintly businessman with Thompson's power would make some decisions that cause excess deaths. If you ever become as powerful as Thompson, are you so sure that nobody would want your death? Also, idolizing murder in a country with historically high levels of distrust and polarization seems like a bad idea for self-preservation reasons alone, even if you care nothing about morality.
Would you idolize him if he killed a doctor instead? What about a pharmacy tech? Or a nurse?
I'm not trying to make a point. I'm curious how the identity of the victim ties into your feelings for the assassin. Would it be different if the victim was someone with more power to affect the sorry state of health insurance? Eg. Someone from the claims department? How about if, instead did the CEO*, it was a board member? Or a large investor?
* Not sure the victim was a CEO
Is it your belief that this act will improve the state of health insurance in the US? Could the killer have chosen a better target with a higher ROI in terms of this goal?
If you hurt enough people long enough, someone will hurt you back and the amount of people who will cheer will be directly correlated to how many people you have hurt and how seriously you have harmed them.
A health insurance CEO is in a particularly bad spot in the regard because his company has hurt people and the families of people across the political spectrum. What's interesting is that the people who aren't cheering are the people most insulated from effects of awful insurance practices. The divide is class based, not blue/red.
I don't think anyone believes it will improve healthcare. It would actually be hard to pick someone with a higher "ROI" due to the class divide here.
The problem I see with this take is that the evidence that the CEO hurt many people is very weak. Consider how strong that claim is and what sort of evidence we would need to support it, not even in a court of law, but in the court of ACX readers. Look at Scott's recent post about the criminal justice system and bask in the hard work that went into it and the papers it is based on.
Yet here we're throwing up our hands and surfing the ocean of vibes and leaving our brains at the door.
Just a quick check: why the CEO? Why not the CFO? Why not someone from the board? Why not the head of regulators overseeing UHC? Why not legislators creating the policy for the regulators?
All this event was good for is media and social media companies. And maybe Tyler Durden fanboys.
This is not a situation that is grounded in rational actors acting in their best interests. Its an emotional puncture in a wounded national psyche. To the people cheering, this is like watching the school bully get punched in the face, it's Cathartic.
If you're the head of an organisation that hurts people, you will be seen as the one doing it. The average person has no idea what a CFO is or who the regulators are. The health insurance system is a byzantine labyrinth that the average person hasn't the time or energy to understand. But CEO's are much more visible and understood in a "they're the big boss" sense. They're championed by the media as heroes. The guy who was killed was just a visible, symbolic target.
Whether it is "good" is irrelevant really. People are happy because finally there were perceived repercussions for the harm they and their loved ones have received. Whether it was deserved or moral or will help in anyway is a non-issue.
If he killed a different person of course he would be viewed differently. People are celebrating the death of a mass murderer who had zero chance of seeing the inside of a jail cell for his mass murder. If he murdered a doctor who treated people the reaction would obviously be different.
How does this attribution of mass murder work? Would eg. Hotel owners that deny homeless people shelter during a harsh winter fall under the same umbrella? Or the people behind limiting the number of doctors in the country and driving up healthcare costs, wouldn't they also merit the label?
(Again, not making a point, just exploring how the mechanism of attributing fraud/murder to the victim is working here)
A lot of doctors are just as sleazy as any healthcare insurance CEO. There needs to be greater scrutiny on doctors overbilling patients just as much insurance denying claims.
Personally I think murder should be condemned almost always, but in this case one consideration, if true, would make me argue for lenience: the victim's company was legally fraudulent (i.e. their lawyers were good enough that it's near-impossible to win actual lawsuits against them, but commonsensically what they do is close to "fraud"). Does the same apply to fraudulent doctors or pharmacy techs? Mostly, though at least emotionally I'm less compelled if the victim wasn't a serial fraud who chose it as their career but simply needed the money. I hesitate to say that a vigilante killing a career fraud (legal or otherwise) who was extracting huge sums of money improves our society but a least it's plausible: in the short term the other frauds will just hire more bodyguards but in the longer term things might start changing. With the victim only committing isolated frauds, there's not even that.
So the major point seems to be that the victim was extremely well off due to his activity.
Do you have any sources that estimate how much fraud this company would be doing? Genuinely curious because I understand that a) most people will tend to overuse medical care if allowed and b) insurance is a limited resource so some people must be denied healthcare. Of course the question really is about the magnitude of these numbers, which I have no idea about, hence why I'm asking for a source.
"most people will tend to overuse medical care if allowed"
Is that true? How do you know this? A small sample of "myself + friends and family": universally hates the sight of a hospital, only goes to a doctor when it's completely unavoidable, and would definitely not joy-riding waiting rooms for an extra x-ray because it was free. Are there many people on the opposite side of this?
It all comes down to the definition of "overuse." Getting 10 tests done because of a minor ache could easily be considered too much, but maybe one of those tests finds something life threatening. End-of-life care is another area, probably dwarfing all others, where use and overuse are the only real questions. A lot of people seem to agree in the abstract that a million dollars for two months of extra life miserable in the hospital is not worth it. But put those same people by the bedside of their aging parent and suddenly they'll still do it.
Insurance companies are very very good at determining which levers to pull to get people to scale back their usage. That's what deductibles and copays are all about. If it costs the insurance holder money to use it, they will be more careful about the use.
I've been in meetings with insurance brokers and the reps, talking about how to craft a company-wide program that discourages use at the appropriate level. They have a ton of data on how minute adjustments in copays make big differences.
I think it comes down to different ways “overuse” occurs. The comment I responded to attributed overuse to the patients’ desire to use more healthcare, and I always found this reasoning bizarre: outside of a small number of hypochondriacs, who tf wants to spend time in waiting rooms and docs offices?
The overuse you’re describing is not something a patient has much control over, because of the information asymmetry. I can’t tell if the test my doc ordered is really necessary. I don’t know what the solution to that one is, but I do know what is not: a “free market” approach where ignorant patients are somehow expected to make perfectly rational decisions about their care.
> So the major point seems to be that the victim was extremely well off due to his activity.
I wouldn't put it like that. If the nature of his activity is ethical or morally neutral or better, his wealth is irrelevant. If it's unethical and immoral on a massive scale, then this scale is a major point. Obviously it's hugely correlated to his wealth, but a hypothetical version of Anatoly Chubais who helped orchestrate the theft of billions in the course of Russian privatization yet is entirely unmercenary in person (not saying either is true for the real Chubais) shouldn't get much slack.
No, I don't know of any estimates, and whether there was in fact any fraud in the strictly legal or broader sense.
Risking Godwin's Law here, but people aren't celebrating a murder - they're celebrating what they see as the killing of a mass murderer and misery maker who does so for profit. Sort of like how we aren't generally pro-murder, but probably wouldn't get too upset if one of Hitler's assassins had succeeded.
I'm not sure that's evidence at all; in the absence of obvious parody, I'm not sure I'd expect the ass-covering response from substack to be any different between legitimate and fake manifestos. They don't have any real incentive to confirm it's real before taking it down.
Insurance is big a problem but the other half of high healthcare costs is the high salaries of healthcare workers particularly doctors but also supporting staff like APC, X-Ray techs etc, which all adds up. Its very common for specialist doctors to be making millions by overbilling their patients. Basically lying through their teeth and defrauding people who they are supposed to take care of. Doctors have great public image, at least compared to health insurance industry, so no one really wants to be the one to question the doctors.
Salary reduction of specialist doctors should be part of any healthcare reform. We can do so by increasing the seats at medical schools, allowing students to go to medical school directly after high school just like any other country in the world, and of course any nationalized healthcare legislation must set salaries as well, rather than allowing doctors to bill whatever they want.
Insurance is probably the biggest part of why healthcare costs have gone up so much, and will continue to do so. It abstracts the costs, hiding it from those how receive benefits, especially if someone else (an employer, or the government), is paying most or all of the premiums.
If you have full coverage for any and all medical procedures, do you have any reason to question a specialist's opinion that a particular procedure is a reasonable thing to do in your circumstances, let alone that the price the specialist charges is appropriate?
On the other hand, if you're, say, buying a new car, you decide if the car is worth the whole price you're paying. You definitely need a car of some sort, you have decided, and the rest of the particulars are up to you. But you don't get to choose anything about your medicine, least of all the prices paid (by you or someone else).
> and of course any nationalized healthcare legislation must set salaries as well, rather than allowing doctors to bill whatever they want.
I disagree. I propose the following system where doctors are allowed to set prices at whatever level they want:
* Every doctor is in every network. Every year, your insurance company sends you a benefit schedule showing how much they cover for a foot surgery, how much they cover for a chest x-ray, etc.
* Every provider has a price schedule which lists how much they charge for a foot surgery, etc. They are not allowed to charge different prices to different patients for the same procedure. Their price schedule must be publicly accessible.
* You, the patient, have access to all this data and can easily shop around and determine what your out-of-pocket cost would be for any doctor before you receive services.
* The government would maintain data on doctors' income levels by region, which would be fully available to early-career doctors who are deciding where to move to.
This, I believe, would make for a very efficient healthcare system without the need for any bureaucratic price-setting.
There's still a lot of problems with our system, even with this is place. Unless all medical expenses are percentage based with no out-of-pocket max, then at some point the incentive to even look at prices goes away. Someone who is getting 100% of their bills paid (which for people with regularly occurring high cost care happens in a couple months every year) doesn't need to shop on price. And since they are guaranteed to spend the out-of-pocket max every year, they never do shop on price even when paying the deductible.
The typical insurance holder barely uses it, so them shopping for prices is going to have a negligible effect. So your plan affects the people who use a moderate amount, such that they have a chance of not spending to the full deductible/out-of-pocket max if they are wise, but would spend to that cap otherwise. Not nothing, but not fixing the system.
The core problem that exists is people who use/need massively outsized amounts of our healthcare system. But nobody wants to tell them no, because they mostly just had bad luck (cancer, heart disease, etc.). End of life care is more expensive for less gain, but it's very hard to tell someone no. My dad almost died a few years back, and was kept alive at huge expense (and still has very expensive medication). He's otherwise pretty healthy and could live a lot longer with great qualify of life. At his worst, that seemed unlikely and an actuarial table would very likely denied his treatment. I don't know how to fix this either.
My proposal is that insurance payouts should be a fixed dollar amount for each service/test/procedure, indexed to (some percentage of) the average cost of the service/test/procedure in the region where the policyholder lives. No deductibles, no out-of-pocket maxes. If the policy's payout exceeds the actual amount billed, the surplus should go into an HSA and can be credited toward the patient's future medical expenses.
Regarding the cost of end-of-life care, I think a good approach would be for basic insurance policies to be "DNR-only", with supplemental "full code" policies available if desired. In practice, I think the best structure for the latter would be similar to a life insurance policy, where you can buy a policy with a low annual premium when you're young, or buy one with a much higher premium when you're older.
In general, it appears (from personal observation) that the healthcare system is set up to benefit patients the least, while allowing all other parties to benefit in varying degrees. That is, I'm not saying it was designed from the get go to be that, but that it rather evolved in that direction. The trouble with that is that the many parties that benefit while, as a group, numbering fewer than patients, can act in a more unified fashion to protect their interests.
It looks like a loosely organized group of cartels, basically.
Its probably own limited attention, but tech and other industries appear to get much attention from the media in the context of antitrust and anti monopoly measure than the healthcare industry.
I've been trying to absorb (decode) the latest paper on LUCA — "The nature of the last universal common ancestor and its impact on the early Earth system" by Moody et al. (link below). They use a "Relaxed Bayesian node-calibrated molecular clock approach" to derive an estimate that LUCA existed about 4.2 Ga, with a 95% confidence interval spanning 4.09–4.33 Ga. This could put LUCA all the way back in the Paleohadean about 200 Ma after the hypothetical Tellus and Theia collision created the Earth and Moon. And LUCA's descendants would have to have survived the Late Heavy [meteor] Bombardment (LHB) ~3.7–3.9 Ga, but the authors cast doubt on this event (which I thought was considered pretty certain to have happened). In light of that, can anyone who's up on molecular clocks comment on the reliability of their estimates?
Also, they anchor their tree to some genes that duplicated before LUCA — because "dating the root of a tree is difficult because errors propagate from the tips to the root of the dated phylogeny." Is that kosher? This is all way outside the information levels that my bullshit meter can detect. ;-)
Otherwise, it's a fascinating paper. They estimate LUCA had approx 2.75 million base pairs, which puts it smack dab in the middle of the Prokaryote bp range (I think). And it was very likely heterotrophic, which suggests it may have been utilizing the biological products of autotrophs. So, there was some sort of functioning ecology ~4.2 billion years ago.
To what extent is "conservatism" related to conservatism?
There is a tendency (possibly based on some decisions made in 1830s Britain) to label the political right or at least centre-right as "conservative". This is a misnomer to some extent, a true conservative would seek to do nothing at all whereas "conservatives" when they get into power inevitably have a list of things that they want to change.
But is there some truth to it? Do right-wingers genuinely seek to change fewer things overall than left-wingers?
> a true conservative would seek to do nothing at all
A true conservative believes we have /already failed at that/; are failing at it more, faster, every day; and therefore need to change things, as quickly and destructively as possible, to roll back today's terrible state of affairs to the ideal pre-decay past.
It's not about change vs no change, but about optimism in our ability to make things better instead of worse. In general both sides want things changed, but in different directions.
One side thinks the past was perfect and is now decaying; alleged attempts to improve things only ever make things worse; it is their obligation to guard what they can from change, and also ideally to roll back whatever changes they are able to some previous state of affairs, because - to a first approximation - all innovation is and was always a mistake; every attempt to invent new structures, policies or culture, instead of improving anything inevitably makes everything worse instead. Progression is a ratchet of destruction of the good, and we should look to the past for inspiration. "What if we make things better, but too much?", they are mocked, but actually /there is too much progress/ and the ratchet needs to be unwound. Cthulhu must be taught to swim right.
The other side believes that better things lie ahead than behind us, and it is possible to reach them by innovating - sure, change is risk, but progression is both necessary to make life better, and capable of achieving this goal. Of course, they say, progression is a ratchet; today is better than yesterday, and tomorrow will be better still, so why would anyone ever want to turn back the clock? Don't ignore the past - look to it to teach us what not to do - sure; fail fast and try again, sure; but never stop innovating.
>This is a misnomer to some extent, a true conservative would seek to do nothing at all whereas "conservatives" when they get into power inevitably have a list of things that they want to change.
That sounds way too rigid. I think there are battles that conservatives consider not yet settled and wish to make changes to better align with the previous status quo. Abortion would be one. A battle that's considered settled is women's suffrage. Gay marriage is somewhere in between, probably closer to women's suffrage
"a true conservative would seek to do nothing at all"
Not so; as the end of "The Ballad of the White Horse" points out, if you leave things alone and do nothing, they don't stay as they are, they change - decay and alter and fall apart. So to truly conserve, you must constantly repair and replace what is now rotten and broken.
From the Father Brown story, "The Flying Stars":
"That venerable financier, however, still seemed struggling with portions of his well-lined attire, and at length produced from a very interior tail-coat pocket, a black oval case which he radiantly explained to be his Christmas present for his god-daughter. With an unaffected vain-glory that had something disarming about it he held out the case before them all; it flew open at a touch and half-blinded them. It was just as if a crystal fountain had spurted in their eyes. In a nest of orange velvet lay like three eggs, three white and vivid diamonds that seemed to set the very air on fire all round them. Fischer stood beaming benevolently and drinking deep of the astonishment and ecstasy of the girl, the grim admiration and gruff thanks of the colonel, the wonder of the whole group.
"I'll put 'em back now, my dear," said Fischer, returning the case to the tails of his coat. "I had to be careful of 'em coming down. They're the three great African diamonds called 'The Flying Stars,' because they've been stolen so often. All the big criminals are on the track; but even the rough men about in the streets and hotels could hardly have kept their hands off them. I might have lost them on the road here. It was quite possible."
"Quite natural, I should say," growled the man in the red tie. "I shouldn't blame 'em if they had taken 'em. When they ask for bread, and you don't even give them a stone, I think they might take the stone for themselves."
"I won't have you talking like that," cried the girl, who was in a curious glow. "You've only talked like that since you became a horrid what's-his-name. You know what I mean. What do you call a man who wants to embrace the chimney-sweep?"
"A saint," said Father Brown.
"I think," said Sir Leopold, with a supercilious smile, "that Ruby means a Socialist."
"A radical does not mean a man who lives on radishes," remarked Crook, with some impatience; "and a Conservative does not mean a man who preserves jam. Neither, I assure you, does a Socialist mean a man who desires a social evening with the chimney-sweep. A Socialist means a man who wants all the chimneys swept and all the chimney-sweeps paid for it."
"But who won't allow you," put in the priest in a low voice, "to own your own soot."
Crook looked at him with an eye of interest and even respect. "Does one want to own soot?" he asked.
"One might," answered Brown, with speculation in his eye. "I've heard that gardeners use it. And I once made six children happy at Christmas when the conjuror didn't come, entirely with soot—applied externally."
I haven't seen that particular version; they seem to have assigned him to a particular village to fit in the model of "crime of the week in our lovely rural location" that a lot of the BBC crime shows follow 😁
Chesterton had him turning up around London and other locations, depending on what parish he had been sent to. That at least spreads the crimes over a wider geographical area!
Oh yeah, this is an old question. If life other than on Earth exists, what would it be like? Supposing intelligent life and not plant or animal, would aliens have souls? Would they be in need of salvation? Would there be a second Incarnation if that was needed?
Off the top of my head, there are three positions:
(1) Rational but not ensouled, so more like animals than humans. Question of salvation therefore does not arise since we aren't worried about dogs or dolphins or elephants needing salvation, either
(2) Rational, ensouled, and unfallen. They would therefore be as different to us as Tolkien's Elves are different to Men. It'd be difficult for us to recognise an unfallen species if it wasn't technologically advanced, because we'd probably mistake them for the first instance (rational but unsouled). C.S. Lewis took a dim view of what our likely reaction would be, but his Space Trilogy (at least, the first two volumes) explore that on Mars and on Venus.
(3) Rational, ensouled, and fallen like ourselves. This is the biggie - if Christ is the only means to salvation, then the fallen aliens need Christ. Does this happen via the Great Commission - 'go ye therefore and make disciples of all nations' - or would Christ be incarnated on other worlds? There's divergence of opinion on that - maybe the crucifixion wouldn't be needed on another planet because that would be a different situation.
James Blish's "A Case of Conscience" is good on that, though he presents it as Roman Catholics whereas he was Anglican himself and I think it shows in part. It's sort of its own sub-sub-genre in SF - religious SF 😀
"Conservative" doesn't mean not wanting to change, but not wanting to take risks. For example, getting married is a conservative choice, for choosing to remain single is seen as more odd. So politically conservative people want to "change" things to be less avant-garde, reversing more liberal policies. This is still consistent with being conservative.
The Baggins family in The Lord of the Rings legendarium is the epitome of conservative. Bagginses "never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him." He used "respectable" to mean this.
I think it's proportional to the rate at which your society is changing, no?
So in a society that's largely the same as it was, say, 50 years ago, conservatives and "conservatives" are going to agree on a lot. They maybe want to roll back some minor reforms, but basically everything else stays as is. Think Europe between 1250 and 1300, lots of continuity.
In a society that's upended by change, "conservatives" become reactionaries. So think Europe between 1500 and 1550. The bigger the changes your society has recently undergone, the harder it is for conservatives to just do nothing and get what they want. That separates out the conservatives and the "conservatives" and becomes the more comprehensible split between conservatives and reactionaries.
Also in South Korea, its the left wing party that is opposed to immigration while the right wing party supports it. But the right wing party is also openly authoritarian(its the party of the current martial law president after all) and opposes feminism, gay rights etc. so its not like the South Korean right is some social liberal, economic right party like the British and Canadian Conservatives.
My book is available today for pre-order, Feb 11 release. Fewer Rules, Better People is about the clash between governing by top-down rules and mandates versus discretionary decision-making, in law, in administration, in sports, in the household. Happy for recommendations on where to send it to be reviewed. https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324051251
For each institution that has some power over/among a group of people, I can imagine various things affecting the outcome of this clash. For instance, degree of similarity in identity among the people. Degree of similarity in values. Size of the group.*
Do you cover this in your new book? I'm very interested in either your general takeaways or specific anecdotes.
*I have never seen meaningful anthropological evidence for a Dunbar's number at 150 +/- 20 (or at any other threshold +/- 20). What I have in mind is gradual change, not a threshold.
Here are some reflections on regime breakdown inspired by present goings-on in Syria. I would be interested in comments and reflections:
Regime breakdown as a type of assurance game
Many political regimes are stable until they suddenly aren’t.
The revolution/regime change in Syria fits in this pattern. From the onset till Assad fled took only ten days (November 27 – December 8).
The time frame is comparable to the regime fall in Rumania under Ceausescu (December 21- December 25 1989) and Afghanistan (August 6 – August 15 2021). Seeming stability suddenly followed by almost immediate breakdown.
The logic of the sequence resembles an assurance game (also known as stag hunt or trust games). The logic in a nutshell:
As long as I think everyone else supports the regime, the sensible option is also to support the regime. Since then I avoid being punished (and may even enjoy rewards). While if I rebel and I am the only one, I am very visible to the ruler & he may come after me with instruments that hurt more than mere death.
However, if I think everyone else are abandoning the ruler, the sensible option is also to abandon him. Since if we all abandon him, I am “lost in the crowd” and cannot very easily be singled out by the new ruler for punishment. Compared to the alternative: I am the one left defending the old and now hopelessly lost ruler, making me very visible to the new ruler – who may come after me with instruments that hurt more than mere death.
As in assurance/stag/trust games, this game has two equilibria. Everyone supports the old ruler as long as they think everyone else supports him (or as long as they think a sufficient number supports him that he is likely to maintain power). And everyone abandons the old ruler if they think everyone else are abandoning him (or if they think sufficiently many abandon him that he is unlikely to maintain power).
The main point regarding such games is that the switch between the two equilibria can happen very quickly. It depends on how we all interpret the likely choice of action of everybody else. If our interpretation of what others are likely to do, shifts for some more-or-less arbitrary reason, we may rapidly shift the signals we ourselves send out as well.
I believe that we are all at some level constantly reading and evaluating the signals others send out in this regard. Even in the seemingly most stable of states, and whether we are fully conscious of doing so or not.
A) I humbly submit "Game Theory: The Force that Binds Us" [0], in which I schizopost about stag hunts and their varied manifestations. Instead of a truncated cone, I opt for a gravity-well analogy.
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> However, at some point I became convinced of the philosopher Jon Elster’s general critique of (macro-level) functionalism: Its inability to reach all the way down to the micro level (of human interaction) and explain what triggers the various feedback mechanisms that restore equilibriums (or make them spin into perpetual disequilibriums).
B) I don't know anything about Systems Theory. But in my Game Theory post, "Section XII. Riot Games" signal-boosts an article [1] regarding the theory that riots are free-rider problems, and how their precipitation is often a matter of obfuscating the identity of would-be "entrepreneurs". The obfuscation lowers the activation-energy, in a sense. Seems relevant.
> For a riot to begin, it is necessary but not sufficient that there be many people who want to riot and who believe that others want to riot too. One more hurdle has to be overcome. Even in an unstable gathering, the first perpetrator of a misdemeanor is at risk if the police are willing and able to zero in on him. Thus, someone has to serve as a catalyst — a sort of entrepreneur to get things going — in Buford’s account, usually by breaking a window (a signal that can be heard by many who do not see it).
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C) Relatedly, I recall a Psmith book-review [2] (which I was unaware of, when I wrote the Game Theory post) which mentioned "political entrepreneurs". Context was the annexation of Eastern Ukraine.
> (...) The wheels of history are turned by political entrepreneurs — individuals or close-knit groups who notice ahead of everybody else that the world has changed in some fundamental way. This unstable situation where material conditions have shifted but society keeps rolling in its groove creates a sort of potential energy, like a charged electric field or a boulder perched at the top of a cliff. In the world of business we call this a market opportunity, and we admire those with the gumption to seize them. In the world of war and politics, market opportunities often look more like a forest full of dry tinder, and the would-be entrepreneur needs an additional quality, fanaticism, that enables him to calmly light a match and flick it over his shoulder.
Thanks for the links. I browsed them and in particular noticed the one about the LA riots in 1992, since I lived in Berkeley back then. The riots reached from LA all the way up through Oakland.
... the riots stopped almost momentarily after a radio speech by Rodney King, who turned out to be a street-level philosopher. One sentence in particular stood out: "We are stuck here for a while. Can we get along?"
Perhaps he did not mean it as a very existential statement, but I and many with me were quite moved back then.
General lesson: Perhaps what core people stand up and say matters in riot situations. At least in some of them. You hit on a message that echoes with others, sometimes.
I notice you also see promise in game theory. For my part, I believe it is the branch called "games with asymmetric information" that holds the largest - and not yet fully untapped - potential.
I wrote a bit more about that in my reply to Soreff below.
> Perhaps what core people stand up and say matters in riot situations. At least in some of them. You hit on a message that echoes with others, sometimes.
I used to follow a blog called Epsilon Theory. It discusses the impact of narrative on things like the stock market. The blog often discusses "missionaries", i.e. those who build a consensus about the narrative by crystallizing widely-held sentiments into common-knowledge. (It's been a while, so I don't have a directly-relevant link on-hand.) Arguments are often soldiers, and to crystallize a sentiment is to expose it to attack. So ideally, the consensus should be defensible.
Relatedly, apxhard had an interesting comment [0] a while ago about bitcoin and "consensus mechanisms". As I understood, there's a hierarchy of consensus mechanisms, graded based on the cost of signalling. At the top of the hierarchy is warfare, which is the costliest. The cost is a feature, rather than a bug, because the high-cost gatekeeps away any frivolous participants. Slightly lower are things with cheaper signals, like bitcoin and lawfare. I don't have anything original to add here, but I think about this a lot.
> …The basic idea/founding stone can be summed up in the sentence: We are all principals when observing others, and we are all agents in the eyes of others.
Scott and the rationalists like to mention Chesterton's Fence. But even before I was exposed to this meme, I'd personally made a similar observation that "nature tends towards an equilibrium". I.e. there's various forces in the world, and they tend to push objects around until those objects settle into a local optimum at which opposing forces completely cancel-out. Which means objects are frequently found either at rest, or in some periodic orbit.
One of my perennial frustrations is that people often assume they have perfect knowledge, and that ostensibly-stupid behavior in others is actually stupid. When in fact, it's more likely that their behavior is influenced by forces hidden from the casual observer. The behavior still might be "incorrect" in a sense, but it's often understandable or justifiable at some level.
And in my mind, this kind of dovetails with the "Seeing Like A State" and "TLP" memeplexes. Insofar as some types of information are more legible than others, and how the root of signaling is exogenous dependency (or equivalently, insufficient personal-agency). E.g. it seems like the Prisoner's Dilemma is (at least?) partly driven by the fact that the negative-externalities are stronger than the positive-internalities. I've not yet been able to generalize this, or carry this to its logical conclusion. But somehow, it seems rather suggestive. I think about this a lot.
> but in my work I usually stick to studying humans
This prompted me to glance at your substack, where I discovered that you're a pol-sci professor. I mean, I just assumed we were throwing around ideas for funsies. But now I'm curious: is this thread part of some research project? What's the goal here, exactly? Surely, much of this is old news to you. Anyway, now that I know you're a professor -- upon rereading the thread, it seems like you're especially interested in farming ideas about a conceptual "missing link", which transmutes individual actions into emergent behavior.
As for a potential missing link -- I can't really defend this coherently, but I've become increasingly convinced that the bedrock of signalling is trust (at least in most pragmatic situations, not single-iteration games). Which sounds kind of obvious a common-sensical, but I nonetheless feel is able to explain phenomena that are otherwise kinda mysterious. Like, there's a certain pattern in my mind that came from trying to grok Kelly's Criterion, which is related to how trust appears to grow logarithmically with the number of repeated positive interactions. Which is, I think, consistent with psychology's finding that frequency/consistency is more important than the magnitude of reward. And I suspect the dearth of repeated interaction carries a variety of consequences for contemporary society.
For example, nothing really came from Occupy Wallstreet. It was completely ephemeral with no lasting consequences. (I can't remember where I found this, but) I remember reading an analysis which explained that earlier political protests put in work. Like, they organized an actual event, and paid bus-fares, and had people take a break from their dayjobs (or something?), and trusted their leaders to make executive-decisions during negotiations with the opposition. Whereas Occupy Wallstreet was a bunch of twitter randos who had no organization to cement their "protest", which was really more of an angry mob.
I think maybe the general lesson here is "everything in modernity has become cheaper; and you get what you pay for".
Or consider how, during the 90's, everyone thought the internet would herald a golden age of information. Seemingly, few could have imagined that high-quality signals would be overwhelmed by dross and muck. I remember hearing a take (can't remember where, exactly; though I recall it mentioned "context collapse" [1]) that Twitter was a cesspool because it eschewed gatekeeping/curation. Blocking individual users is a poor substitute for nucleating a well-defined community around a central authority-figure who actually enforces norms. (In my headcanon, I like to think of Twitter as a cross between Valhalla and Lebanon: a battle-royal where as many as 12 different factions fight each other, for all eternity.) Since there's so little gatekeeping, joining Twitter is cheap and easy; but you get what you pay for.
Similarly on youtube, there's lots of people who bemoan the draconian censorship. But one point that's conspicuously absent from the discourse is what Epsilon Theory called "The Golden Rule": he who has the gold, maketh the rules. I.e. the viewers aren't youtube's actual customer. The actual customer is the advertisers, since the advertisers pay the bills that keep the servers running. So of course youtube's policies are going to cater to the advertisers. And yet, this point seems lost on those who decry that youtube has betrayed the viewers' interests. Youtube isn't trustworthy; but you get what you pay for.
So if I were in your position, I think my next area of investigation would be to really zoom-in on the idea of trust. Perhaps as some sort of currency, or alternatively as different types of binding-agents. Though, I'm not sure if any of this makes sense to you.
Thanks for your post. Lots of things in there, let me limit myself to agreeing with you that “trust” is certainly at the core of many of the everyday games people play (as well as the games rulers play with each other & with voters). How to signal trustworthiness, what you can do to get across to others that your commitments are credible, etc. Much of our everyday signalling and screening behavior is related to trust. So you’re spot on in that regard.
I don’t peddle my own stuff on substack, but concerning contributions by others that I often come back to when studying something specific (I mainly do applied research; studying something specific gets you closer to the "mechanisms" underlying whatever is going on) is Partha Dasgupta: Trust as a commodity. Dasgupta makes the important point that it is costly to build up a trustworthy reputation, while it can be lost very quickly. For example, a salesman (including politicians, professional workers etc.) achieves a reputation for honesty by carrying the cost associated with abstaining from cheating in all previous sales (dealings with others); yet this costly reputation may be lost in one stroke if he cheats once, and this knowledge spreads to his future customers. This asymmetry in how reputations are achieved and lost is of use for his customers (voters, clients), since they will often rationally have reason to assume that he will not take the risk to jeopardize his costly built-up reputation in his deal with them.
…And so on. We are dealing with reputations as (costly) signals, and how this information is screened by one’s interaction partners – but where deception may also be part of the game. (Notice that the difference between signals and mere messages is that signals are not cost-free.)
..Ok, this turned into a longer comment/reply than I planned! Again, thanks for your comment, and good luck with your further thinking/work along game-theoretic lines. You are on the right track, intellectually.
Back to doing work I get paid for…
PS Diego Gambetta and Michael Bacharach’s “Trust in signs” is another paper with a huge applied potential.
This reminds of a conditionally stable system behavior. The system is stable under some level of perturbation, and then goes kaboom when perturbed in a stronger/unusual manner.
Thanks for the reference to conditionally stable system behavior. I would be interested in elaborations or references here.
…I used to peddle in systems theory, from good old structural-functionalism a la Talcott Parsons to the Santa Fe people. However, at some point I became convinced of the philosopher Jon Elster’s general critique of (macro-level) functionalism: Its inability to reach all the way down to the micro level (of human interaction) and explain what triggers the various feedback mechanisms that restore equilibriums (or make them spin into perpetual disequilibriums). Elster claimed that we need a general theory of human behavior to achieve that, and that the social sciences were “light years away” from such a theory.
These days, I believe signalling theory/theories of games with asymmetric information (or more generally: information theory) may provide the missing mechanism-link between system behavior and the behavior of individuals within the system.
But I am not aware of many who still search for the missing link between system behavior and the social psychology of individual behavior.
I broadly agree with the Elster's critique you're describing, with is also explored in a different way by this guy: https://desystemize.substack.com/
But still it helps to envision a simplest conditionally stable system, say, a truncated cone set on its tip: it can withstand a small sideways push, but a larger one will tip it into a different state. Now imagine a "truncated cone" of an unknown large number of dimensions (well, I can't imagine one, but suppose I do), and the critical distance between its axis and its edge is unknown. We can push it around a little to explore its stability limits, but we just never know which push vector value will tip it.
So this is how I envision these societal dynamics.
Now, to further stretch this analogy, the cone does provide a warning sign: if you get too close to tipping it, its edge will start lifting, and it's possible to recover at that point. But we have to pay attention, and react to this lifting, i.e., a feedback mechanism has to exist. This is what happens in a relatively open society: there's a constant visible churn, pushing from all directions, visible disorder, the cone wobbles, but the society has time to react and adjust itself.
Closed societies "cover the cone", and sever the feedback. We can't see when the cone is wobbling. It takes various forms: destroyed opposition, wrecked information space, fake polling, etc. So Assad wins and "election" with "95% of the vote", but it turns out nobody is actually supporting him. I wonder if he was genuinely surprised....
Thanks for your reply. Intuitively, your “cone” metaphor is fruitful. It illustrates the potential practical usefulness of systems theory also in the study of us humans, even if the microfoundations of what is going on is lost in the fog.
Analytically, your metaphor helps if you want to assign some sort of probability for a social or political system to be longer-run sustainable. Or - if in an interventionist mode - where to focus your gaze on what should be improved to enhance longer-run sustainability.
That said, there are challenges as regards to decide what constitutes/represents a “feedback mechanism” in the first place, without any underlying theory of why humans do whatever it is they are doing. I see a potentially serious snag there. But again, the metaphor is intuitively useful.
Concerning the interventionist use of systems theory, we probably agree that in any case most of us, most of the time, are not in positions to influence much the structure of the scene(s) where we strut and fret our hours upon the stage, before we are heard no more. Not even those among us that are formally placed at the top in human hierarchies.
...Such as Assad. He will have ample time to reflect on what (if anything) he might have had the power to do differently, in some apartment somewhere in Russia where he is likely to live out his days.
I am quite skeptical of assigning numerical probabilities to things like that, where we have neither an understanding of the underlying mechanisms nor we know the probabilities distribution of possible outcomes. With this I sharply part with our gracious host w.r.t. the (over)use of Bayesianism (even may I say, ab-use) to analyze everything under the sun. It produces illusions of precision and gives a whiff of "science", which is entirely inappropriate.
As to the feedback mechanisms, as an average citizen of, in my case at least, these here United States, we don't have much impact, but it's not 0 either. We at least should vote, and occasionally call and yell at the people we voted for. We could also choose to go into politics or activism to try to amplify our impact.
But Assad of course had had the controls, and the feedback - if he only wanted to use them. But he chose to break every feedback mechanism, literally and figuratively, and hence the "sudden", "surprising" demise of the system he built.
Thanks again for your comments on my ACX open thread post on "regime breakdown as a type of assurance game". I took the liberty to use your reflections on feedback mechanisms to make an addendum to my (revised) blog post today, "The fall of Assad in Syria perceived as an equilibrium shift in an assurance game".
Technical standards sometimes work the same way. If you have two competing technical standards, and each needs an expensive infrastructure to be viable, there can be similar dynamics of "How many people (or companies) are supporting standard X vs standard Y?". ( Usually less bloody than the political version. )
Many Thanks! Hmm... At the abstract level, yes, one can think of the system dynamics as e.g. being stable to small perturbations in some parameter like fraction-of-population-supporting-faction-X (or, in illiberal states, fraction-of-population-OPENLY-supporting-faction-X) and unstable to large perturbations. And, underlying the abstract dynamics are game theory considerations.
Re feedback: Hmm... a ruler who is able to _see_ that some fraction of a segment of the population is turning against them might have better odds of e.g. buying them off than if the ruler is blind to the changes.
Re technical choices: At least in my career, at my level (individual developer), being on the losing side might be career damaging (though often not even that), but not life threatening, so I wasn't aware of cases where people were threatened to the point of silence (and cut feedback loops) in my personal experience. In _politicised_ technical choices this may well be different.
..."And, underlying the abstract dynamics are game theory considerations."
..yes, that is what I am driving at. In the limited time I have available to sometimes peddle in High Theory.
More specifically, not all game theory, but that branch of game theory that deals with games with asymmetric information. That's where the (theoretical) action is, to modify the title of an essay by the sociologist Erving Goffman. Who approached similar theories about social interaction from the sociological side of the academic fence:
…The basic idea/founding stone can be summed up in the sentence: We are all principals when observing others, and we are all agents in the eyes of others.
…Meaning that we are all in a coarser information position when observing others, and we are all in a finer information position when being observed by others.
That sentence is the basis for a general theory of interaction (not only among humans: one may link here to a general theory of information - but in my work I usually stick to studying humans😊).
..from that founding stone follows various everyday-life signalling and screening strategies, as well as pseudo-self-binding & “real” (evolutionary derived) self-binding strategies; deception-and-revealed-deception arms races; trust games; and much more. A Pandora’s box of ideas to study the many types of (human) interaction.
...Very similar to the type of sociology Goffman did back in the day. And thus holding the promise of being a real theoretical common ground in the sociological and economic study of man.
Linking all of this to systems theory, including tipping-point theories and the like, is however something I am likely to leave to scholars who are still max intellectually hungry😊
I agree there’s probably some stag hunt logic going on, but I wonder if there’s another pattern as well. People might also want to minimise the total amount of conflict. In that case, they would also suddenly switch to supporting what they perceived as the winning side.
That is the behaviour you’d get from a patent race game, if one player suddenly jumped ahead. In a patent race, two players are racing for some multi-step, winner-takes-all goal, like a patent. In that game, each player will spend maximum resources if that puts winning out of reach of the other player. Once the loser is clear, the losing player will immediately drop out of the race, if they don’t expect to catch up.
That could be happening here: suddenly, the old regime is at a disadvantage and can’t catch up.
Ah, sorry, you are right - at least I cannot locate a similar wiki page on patent race games today. So the page/s I consulted yesterday must have been from elsewhere.
Might give someone an incentive to write a wiki page on the topic:-)!
The debate(s) below about the Thompson assassination and resulting public reaction reminded me of Scott’s presidential endorsement post. Specifically the part about protesters throwing oil on artwork, and comparing their wrongdoings to the that of the oil executives:
>So how can we put the paint-throwers in jail, while letting the fossil fuel executives go free?
>Actually we can do this very easily, because the paint-throwers broke the law, and the fossil fuel executives didn’t. Unless you’re the dumbest sort of naive consequentialist, you punish people who have violated bright-line norms, not people doing stuff you think is subtly damaging, even if the subtle damage may add up to more harm than the bright-line norm violations.
I'm a bit surprised at the current public reaction and wonder if we really would hate the paint throwers had they protested something that appears to be so nonpartisan. Or is this reaction more justified because the "subtle damage" is not so subtle in this case as individual deaths can be linked to denied care?
The problem with the paint-throwers is that they chose the worst target - what's 100+ y.o. painting's got to do with anything? So the throwers annoy everyone and make their cause slightly less palatable.
Now if they were protesting the oil executives by throwing paint on, for example, their cars, I would at least understand it (not condone it, but the target would at least make sense).
Yes, throwing paint on oil executives (or other high status people who are seen as immoral) would likely have a much much better reception and may even be broadly popular. Throwing paint on priceless old paintings or blocking roads that ordinary people need to drive on just makes people hate you.
I think the "Bright Line Norms" argument is fully wrong for a few reasons. If we say "Laws" are a subset of "Norms" then whoever makes the law gets to determine who is in the right and who is in the wrong. Norm violation enforcement is a poor substitute for morality even without the disparity of equating it to law violation enforcement - the map of norms does not match the map of morality. Sometimes the violation of norms is a recognition that the norms were wrong in the first place.
More directly addressing your point, I think most people in the U.S. either have experience with being jerked around by the Health Insurance industry or have someone close to them who has been jerked around, possibly to death. It's much easier to cheer for the death of an executive when said executive is the most visible and egregious example of hurting you and killing your friends for profit - regardless of any "murder is bad" norm.
It does get hairy in practice i.e. we can *maybe* get consensus on both the legality and morality of uncomplicated types of violence and theft; but of course many (most?) legalities are hotly contested. So I'm with you on the norms / laws disparity.
And I can't object to the norms / morality mismatch either. But I don't have a more serviceable model for civilizational coordination, and am wondering if morality is simply not part of that equation.
Is the argument more conceptually sound if you swap "morality" for "ethics"? And then, would it at least be directionally correct, albeit imperfect?
If it still doesn't hold up, I would be interested in an alternative model if you have one in mind.
I'm a better destroyer of arguments than I am at making them, but I think I can take a wack at it. Norm violation enforcement only holds up when the perception of the norm is that it is both Just and Equitably applied. This is a very vague, weasely kind of argument on my part since Justice and Equitable application are in the eye of the beholder (and I'm probably ignoring some other necessary conditions).
"Violence is wrong" strikes me a good norm that is almost never equitably applied, since states and large entities practice direct and indirect violence all the time at great scale and with little legal reprisal - but I'm not sure this is the common view either, which is the one that matters in this case.
Scott has a point about punishing violations as keeping society together, but if everyone sees the punishment as unjust, then it frays societal bonds instead of reinforcing them. I don't think most people were in favor of the "Just stop oil" protestors throwing oil on paintings and thought some degree of punishment was a good thing, regardless of how they felt about oil barons (who I'm of the opinion are many thousands of times worse). Regardless of people's feelings on oil barons, oil paintings shouldn't be damaged or destroyed because they're unrelated to the protest.
Here people are seeing an executive killed who is perceived as a mass murderer and someone who was intentionally profiting off the misery and suffering of others. The chances of this man ever seeing the inside of a jail cell over these actions were zero - his evil was entirely legal, and there was little chance that the laws would change soon to punish or even truly stop this. So when someone acts outside the norms and kills him, people cheer because his evil has been stopped. "Violence is wrong" still holds, but the norm in this case was not being equitably applied in the perception of most.
I'm anti-assassinating health care CEOs. But I think part of it is that with Trump's 2nd election and people talking about it through an (inaccurate IMO) pro-establishment vs anti-establishment lens, everyone wants to view everything through that lens and anti-establishment is the cool kids thing to do.
For me the underrated angle to the story is how much more resources they give to this murder than any other murder, seemingly based on an implicit "he's rich so he matters more" idea.
The critical resource here, was a random McDonald's employee in Altoona. To get that, you need the police to do a modest amount of digging through surveillance camera footage to get a few half-decent pictures, and then you needed to get half the country to look at those pictures and care and remember.
So, basically, it's up to CNN et al to decide who does or does not get this sort of treatment. And as others have noted, very poor people being killed can get a whole lot of coverage on CNN if it's the right poor person at the right time for the right reason.
I think this is mostly a function of how much media / public attention the murder got. If the victim had been found dead in an alley missing his wallet, it would not have been nearly as big a story, fewer resources would have been spent on it, and probably the McDonalds employee wouldn't have ever seen the murderer's picture on TV.
Exactly. If a crime requires a nationwide manhunt to solve, then CNN decides whether it will be solved. Simplistically speaking, if the victim is rich or famous, or if the victim is poor and black and the killer is white(*), or if the victim is a Pretty White Woman, then off we go. Otherwise, meh, it won't get the clicks so it's not worth the bother.
* Typically these don't need a manhunt to solve because if we know the killer is white then we probably already caught him. But if e.g. Derek Chauvin had skipped bail and gone on the run, I expect CNN would have made sure we all knew what he looked like.
"They" is the police. It's true a random McDonald's employee seems to have fingered the guy, but they did in fact spend a lot of resources interviewing people, reviewing surveillance footage, painstakingly reconstructing his escape route - sending scuba teams to search waterways in Central Park! - there have statistically been multiple murders in NY since then and I bet none of that happened for any of them.
The fact that the media focused more on this one, or that given how it was resolved a lot of that effort ended up being wasteful, doesn't change the point.
Maybe I'm too trusting in the goodness of "the system", but I don't agree with the "investigated harder because he's rich" angle. I don't think it was about the victim; I think any victim would have gotten the same response. Rather, I think it's about how aberrant the shooting was, given the place. Cold-blooded shootings with clean getaways are *not supposed to happen* in 2024 midtown Manhattan. It's about the public's perception of safety. There's a reason why Trump's "I could shoot someone on 5th St" quip bothered to specify 5th St.
Well I think Trump said 5th Ave because he lives there, and also because it's super public, but the fact that it's midtown Manhattan is downstream from the "rich" part. Perhaps a janitor getting shot in midtown Manhattan would get the same treatment (I doubt it, can't point to concrete evidence), but a shooting in midtown Manhattan, janitor or otherwise, certainly gets more coverage than one of a similar person in South Bronx.
Did they? There was a lot of resources used for the response to mass protests, but that was in response to the protests not the murder itself. They prosecuted the perpetrator but that's not (at least shouldn't be) unusual.
They did not have (nor did they need to have) any massive citywide manhunt involving canvassing hundreds of security cameras, dozens of interviews, dredging local bodies of water with scuba teams, mass searches of city parks, and shit like that.
The scariest thing would be if this assassination "worked" in producing change people want. It's as scary as the President-Elect's FBI pick having an enemies list.
This is not going to end well. The assassinations aren't going to just be people you don't like.
The result of one of these happening a month won't be a change in the operation of health insurance, it will be a huge hiring boom in bodyguards for insurance executives.
It seems to me that most of the folks spewing venom the direction of Brian Thompson would not very much like a world where insurance companies were not allowed to deny procedures.
"It would be bad if insurance companies were required to approve all procedures".
I assume because insurance costs would go up, probably to the point that insurance companies might shut down (at least in jurisdictions with such a rule: see insurance companies pulling out of California due to the regulations there).
a) Brian Thompson and UHC were _particularly_ egregious, with triple the denial rate of the industry average, and installation of an AI denial generator system which broke their own rules so badly that, for living patients with enough health to be able to navigate the appeals process, 90% of the denials were overturned.
b) I've been through the health care marketplace information, the medicare options information, and, before retirement, my employer's health insurance options. The dissemination of denial information after Thompson's informal execution is the _first_ time I have ever seen denial rate information. As nearly as I can tell, that data was either actively hidden from the public or close enough to hidden to effectively be hidden.
c) I prefer to have punishments go through legal channels. Ideally Thompson's policies, particularly the denial generator system, should have led to charges of something like lethal fraud or conspiracy to commit murder, and he should have been arrested, charged, tried, convicted, sentenced and executed. Still, like Osama Bin Laden before him, also responsible for the deaths of several thousand of my countrymen, I'm thankful that he is dead.
"Upon information and belief, over 90 percent of patient claim denials are reversed through either an internal appeal process or through federal Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) proceedings."
Children. What makes me hesitate to have children is not the cost or things like that, but the AI apocalypse, and also things like the risk of nuclear war and horrible things like that. Should we still have kids if we are condemning them to a nightmare? Would you have kids if you knew some Lovecraft version of the Borg were landing in 7 years?
> Would you have kids if you knew some Lovecraft version of the Borg were landing in 7 years?
"knew"? Sure, no way. But we don't know, not even close. If you think you know, you've gotten into AI millenarianism.
And since we don't know, then yes, having kids is the normal human thing. In fact, if you're going to employ high-level intellectual forecasting to override your desire to engage in the most fundamentally human activity, it seems contradictory to be worried about the fate of humanity.
This applies more generally, by the way: smart people making unusual choices on major life decisions because they have used their big brains to think very hard about the long-term future are almost always going to end up making things worse for themselves.
No, you don't have to know something with absolute certainty for it to influence your optimal behavior. You don't know for sure that if you bet all your money on a particular horse in a horse race, you would lose everything. Yet you wouldn't do it because it would have a negative expected value. That's still not "horse racing millenarianism."
Nor does it make sense to say that if you are uncertain about the future you should do the "normal human behavior." First of all, why should uncertainty imply that you should do the "normal thing", whatever that is? In some families it is normal to buy lottery tickets. I recommend not doing this. Second, normality has changed a lot. It seems to be becoming more and more normal not to have children. I'm not saying that's a good thing! But it shows that normality is neither necessary nor sufficient for a "should."
In this particular context, it is not even necessary to worry about the “fate of humanity” as a whole to consider the influence of expectations on your behavior in the interests of your potential children. And if humanity is at risk because of artificial intelligence, nuclear war or biological threats, then I can't change that by having children. Instead, I just condemn them to being witnesses of the end of humanity with some probability. Whether the probability is 20% or 100% does not really matter for the structure of the argument, but of course it is an important argument for the right decision result!
> Children. What makes me hesitate to have children
...what made you consider having children, before you hesitated?
It's sounding a little like you want to make a decision one way, but also feel some peer pressure or other external reason to make the opposite choice; and thus feel you need to justify yourself and/or convince others of the validity of your position.
Just in case I'm not wrong on this: keep it simple. If you (and your partner) want children, have children. If you don't, don't. You don't need to justify your decision to anyone (other than your partner), and you should ignore even strong pressure even from your in-group to decide one way rather than another. It's your (plural) life, not the crowd's.
I see evidence of peer pressure here, but of course information is always taken in from other people, friends, etc. and also from blogs like Scott's. Articles on blogs like Astral Codexten worry me a lot, but I don't think I would be any better off if I didn't know about these developments.
The way OP's question is phrased, though, feels like we are only getting half the story. "What makes me hesitate to have children" implies they would otherwise have children, but for the existential risks they've outlined.
Why is this? - why would they otherwise have children? They haven't said. "Should we still have kids if...", they say, without explaining why, in their view, we should have kids at all.
If it's part of an ongoing conversation here, my original comment applies - the most important part of this decision is that, whatever informs it, ultimately you completely own it, because you have to live with it.
If there is some other reasoning, we can't really have a conversation without taking that into account. Nothing in this world is certain, and all our decisions must balance between risks and rewards; but it's hard to reason about where balance might be found when only one side of the scales is visible.
If it's an entirely unexamined assumption, perhaps it is worth examining.
The world is awesome. Bring more people into it. AI required multiple technological leaps. If that doesn't happen we live, if it does (and I expect us to, but less than 90% chance) we will all die. That's fine. Future is hard model. They're just super duper cute, you can safely predict you'll love your kids once you have them, go for it.
I do not completely understand what you are saying here. You expect us all to die due to an AI catastrophe with somewhere between 50% and 90% chance even though the future is "hard [to?] model", but you recommend having children anyway because they are cute? So it's okay that AI kills them because they are cute while they live? (I never doubted I would love my children, so this is not a relevant point. But I doubt that it would be nice for those that I love to create them to be killed in a bad and hopeless situation?)
Yeah totally. AI catastrophe is inevitable if we have, say, 2-5 more technological leaps in design space of how computers process information. It probably won't happen just from 'throwing more compute power at LLMs'. That could happen in 1 year, it could happen in 50, it could happen never. Being alive is awesome. Having kids is awesome. What is the .... median expectation of how far out something horrible happening that you have? Is it more than 5 years?
I don't know. Is the median really the only relevant property of the distribution here? What are your expectations? And why do you think more compute is not enough?
because I know plenty of people who work in AI, and none of them think that the current technologies are resulting in exponential intelligence explosion, we are seeing pretty constraining limits to additional intelligence as a function of compute power, it's an empirical observation
what you would worry about, assuming you can't define properly an objective function for something arbitrarily smarter than you which is a pipe dream to get right on the first try, is something becoming arbitrarily smarter, most likely through recursive self improvement. to get there would require several paradigm shifts of how we build intelligence, let's say LLM's are the first paradigm shift, probably takes 2-5 more jumps to get to something that will end up on the path to that.
I don't have expectations, how can you predict how long it takes a person to come up with a new idea, of a categorical difference like discovering LLM's was, or model how many steps it takes, etc.
It could be plausibly anything between 0 and 100.
I was just saying that to me unless you think very likely everything ends within 5 years (my personal breakeven horizon for life worth living), having kids is fine because life is awesome.
Why are you asking for my model? Are you asking theoretical questions, or are you trying to decide whether to have kids yourself, in which case your model is what matters.
"Why are you asking for my model? Are you asking theoretical questions, or are you trying to decide whether to have kids yourself, in which case your model is what matters."
Well, I'm trying to form a "model". Since I'm neither a genius nor a theoretical AI scientist or whatever, I try to listen to/read arguments and see how convincing I find them. This also includes, for example, something like Metaculus estimates.
"because I know plenty of people who work in AI, and none of them think that the current technologies are resulting in exponential intelligence explosion"
Just out of curiosity: Did these people expect 10 years ago that we would now have something like ChatGPT, Midjourney, etc.?
> Would you have kids if you knew some Lovecraft version of the Borg were landing in 7 years?
No, but the point is that I don't know what's happening in the future and neither do you. It would be a grave mistake to treat your or anyone else's vague guesses as reliable prophecy.
Sorry, but I do not think that I treated anyone's vague guesses as reliable prophecy, in particular not my own guesses. If you are genuinely uncertain about the future, you should take your subjective uncertainty and behave responsibly based on it, right? Otherwise you would never do anything like saving for retirement because "why not just consume all your money right now, after all I don't know what's happening in the future and neither do you."
Thanks, I have some sympathy for the defiant optimism embodied in the quote. However, just saying "the past was even worse" is not very convincing. People had children during the plague because they had a different mindset and maybe they believed they had to have children, or they did not think about their childrens' future very much.
The last sentence in the Lewis quote, "If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs." may be sensible for people who already live - you should make the best of your life. But it is a different question whether you should bring new people into that life.
Historically, however, it would be very interesting to know to what amount people thought about Nuclear War when Lewis wrote that. (In 1948!)
Clicking on the link to the full quote in your comment, I have to say that I find Lewis' paragraphs you left out quite cynical:
"What the atomic bomb has really done is to remind us forcibly of the sort of world we are living in and which, during the prosperous period before, we were beginning to forget. And this reminder is, so far as it goes, a good thing. We have been waked from a pretty dream, and now we can begin to talk about realities."
Oh wait, the atomic bomb threatens to kill us so we are lucky that we can talk about that reality?
"It is our business to live by our own law not by fears: to follow, in private or in public life, the law of love and temperance even when they seem to be suicidal, and not the law of competition and grab, even when they seem to be necessary to our own survival. For it is part of our spiritual law never to put survival first: not even the survival of our species. We must resolutely train ourselves to feel that the survival of Man on this Earth, much more of our own nation or culture or class, is not worth having unless it can be had by honorable and merciful means."
So he basically argues for embracing extinction if honor is not available.
"Nothing is more likely to destroy a species or a nation than a determination to survive at all costs. Those who care for something else more than civilization are the only people by whom civilization is at all likely to be preserved."
So survival and life are not top priority.
"Those who want Heaven most have served Earth best. Those who love man less than God do most for man."
This is a way too general statement. (Keep in mind that these two sentences include suicide bombers.) It also just a claim and my prior is that it is wrong. Compare for:
Zeynep's Law: "Until there is substantial and repeated evidence otherwise, assume counterintuitive findings to be false, and second-order effects to be dwarfed by first-order ones in magnitude." (https://x.com/zeynep/status/1478766408691556353)
I omitted some of the more theological parts of the quote because they're more theological.
But I do think the broad point that people have *always* been facing existential threats and having children regardless is important context and saying "people in the past had a different mindset or didn't think about their children much" is a bit of a deflection.
Are you saying that, in light of the possibility of Viking invaders coming and murdering everyone that the moral thing to do would be for the 10th century Englishman to refuse to have children? And that if they *had* "thought of their children's future very much" they would have refused? That the most moral thing would be for the species to have voluntarily gone extinct millennia ago?
If not, I feel like you have to argue that a child being born today has it probabilistically worse than a child being born in the 10th century and I do find that very hard to believe. Would *you* rather have been born a 10th century peasant, if it meant that you didn't have to face the possibility of (global) climate change or nuclear war, but did have to face historic levels of plague, famine, and war? I sure wouldn't. (And I don't think the 10th century was some uniquely bad time, I wouldn't pick basically any previous century)
"Are you saying that, in light of the possibility of Viking invaders coming and murdering everyone that the moral thing to do would be for the 10th century Englishman to refuse to have children? And that if they *had* "thought of their children's future very much" they would have refused?"
That's a very good question, and thank you for making me think. What do you think about it? If an omniscient demon tells an Englishman in the Middle Ages that the Vikings are coming in five years and will kill 90% of the village population, should he have children? What if they're going to kill the entire population? What if they're going to first torture and then kill the entire population?
The comment about "mindset" is not a deflection, however. If you and your children believe that all suffering has a higher meaning, then of course that makes life better and suffering less problematic. The way you interpret the world is not just a side issue, but influences your wellbeing. And if you believe that humanity will continue forever (or until the Lord comes or whatever), then your contribution to that gives your life meaning and makes suffering more bearable. I think it is perfectly legitimate to consider things outside of one's own lifespan.
"That the most moral thing would be for the species to have voluntarily gone extinct millennia ago?"
Hmm, in addition to the points mentioned above, I would like to make the side note that the Vikings would still have had children. This would raise further questions about morality.
"If not, I feel like you have to argue that a child being born today has it probabilistically worse than a child being born in the 10th century and I do find that very hard to believe. Would *you* rather have been born a 10th century peasant, if it meant that you didn't have to face the possibility of (global) climate change or nuclear war, but did have to face historic levels of plague, famine, and war? I sure wouldn't. (And I don't think the 10th century was some uniquely bad time, I wouldn't pick basically any previous century)"
No, I would definitely prefer being born in the 20th century to being born in the 10th century.
I do want to emphasize the universality of this: it's not just "10th century Christian peasants had some mindset that made them uniquely able to have children despite an existential threat" - this was basically a universal experience everywhere.
The "vikings might be coming over the hill to kill you and yours" is a colorful example, but not a necessary one - for most people for much of history (including probably the Vikings themselves, to your side-point) were not more than a few bad harvests, one bad plague, or one bad military conflict away from annihilation.
And yes, mindset is a part of the difference, but I think if basically everyone for all of history was able to 'cope': to find purpose in life despite the certainty of death and the possibility of great suffering, and we can't, despite living in on-net the most peaceful and prosperous time in history... I feel the interesting question isn't "is it moral to have kids", it's "where did we break and how do we fix it"?
I think you're confusing the "known" aspect here. If someone said that Vikings would kill them all five years from now (and we now know that was true for many villages in that area) we're presupposing correct information. If someone had said the Vikings were going to attack in say, 1585, we would similarly discount that - despite not having any particular reason to believe one above the other, a priori.
Saying that people should be concerned about having kids in 2025 is similarly presupposing one or more potential world events has a high(er than normal) likelihood.
If I'm in England somewhere in the 9th century I will be wary of the Vikings, because there's a history of them attacking. But apparently not enough of a worry that people stopped having kids. If I'm living in 2025 maybe I'm concerned about one or more of Climate, AI, Nuclear War, whatever. But Nuclear War seems way more likely in the 1960s than now, and I hope you agree it was good that people still had kids then. And Climate doesn't seem like a bigger issue than WWII, and people still had kids then.
Without having solid knowledge of the future, I don't think there's a good reason to not have kids unless it's so obvious that there's a very high chance of doom. Some people think that about AI, but that belief seems silly and pretty much religious at this point. At least the level of surety of AGI existing and also being powerful enough to effect that level of change.
I was pretty sure Reagan and Brezhnev were going to kill me and everyone else in the 80’s but it didn’t happen and I got to grow up! We could get lucky again.
I didn't mean that in a reassuring way, just that it's very hard to see the future. I personally believe that both climate change and AI are going to be very big problems, sooner than anyone thinks -- but I still mow my lawn. What can you do? If you're trying to decide whether to have kids now, that's more fraught but my child has never complained so far about the world he's inheriting (not that it would do him any good).
1. Putting AI aside for the moment, there has never been a better time in history to have children. You probably live in a developed country and make enough money to live comfortable. If this is true, you will be able to provide your kids more opportunities than 99.99% of all humans who have ever lived. Even if a climatepocalypse or nuclear war do happen in their lifetimes (unlikely), most people would prefer to live and die than to have never lived at all.
1. "Putting AI for the moment, there has never been a better time in history to have children. You probably live in a developed country and make enough money to live comfortable. If this is true, you will be able to provide your kids more opportunities than 99.99% of all humans who have ever lived."
I think this argument has a lot of weight, but I'm not entirely convinced. Nuclear war is a dangerous, already relevant but probably growing risk; however, I can clearly imagine at least the "no nuclear war" scenario (although the probabilities estimated by Metaculus are depressingly high) and think there's a lot we could do about it.
As for AI, I don't see such a hopeful scenario to look forward to (send me a link if you have one). Even in the "not everyone dies" scenario, I don't see a great future (maybe I lack imagination) and my impression is that humanity is too stupid to prevent bad developments in this regard (you can't get the AI back into the box once that it is out). Maybe I should become religious, but motivated reasoning has never been my strong point.
"Even if a climatepocalypse or nuclear war do happen in their lifetimes (unlikely),"
So how likely do you think they are?
"most people would prefer to live and die than to have never lived at all.
Yes, I prefer to live too, but I can still live off my memories of the time before artificial intelligence. If things turn really bad, I can play the final scene. But would you condemn children to that?
Scott once wrote: "'What a lovely girl in a normal organic body who is destined to live to an age greater than six', the people would say." (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/half-an-hour-before-dawn-in-san-francisco) To me, the mood in that sentence felt very depressing. But it's not something parents talk about once they have children, because it would be pretty bitter for the children.
Hm. She writes: "This is all assuming that the worst case is death rather than some kind of dystopia or torture scenario. Maybe unsurprisingly, I haven’t properly thought through the population ethics there. I find that very difficult to think about, and if you’re on the fence you should think more about it." I don't know what to make of this. Is not being "on the fence" here also due to kind of willful ignorance? Or is there something deeper behind it that I don't understand?
"Nuclear war is a dangerous, already relevant but probably growing risk; "
Honestly, my gut feeling is that nuclear war is less likely now than at any point in history since 1950. In the 1950- 80s, people had a lot more reason to worry about nuclear war: nukes were new and unprecedented, and there were two, well-formed power blocks, each with an ideological desire to overwhelm the other and with growing nuclear arsenals. The risk has since diminished quite a bit: the total number of the world's nukes is now far smaller (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1071026/nuclear-warheads-per-country-historical development), there's 70 years of non-nuclear aggression precedent that seems to have prevented deployment so far, and the world is far more economically globalized now and so all actors have more to lose from nuclear war.
I'm not saying the chance of nuclear MAD today is zero, but if the chance of nuclear MAD wouldn't have dissuaded you from having a child in the 1950s (and indeed hundreds of millions of people did have kids despite it), I'm confident that it shouldn't dissuade you now.
"As for AI, I don't see such a hopeful scenario to look forward to (send me a link if you have one). "
For a "standard" hopeful scenario for a strong AI future, I recommend Dario Amodei's Machines of Loving Grace (https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace). I don't personally have an opinion about how likely this is vs. a "bad" AI future vs. extinction, but certain smart people do take it seriously.
"So how likely do you think they are?"
I haven't researched either question extensively, and I encourage you to do your own research. But as a first-glance analysis, I would say:
Climatepocalypse before 2100 (death of over half of humanity due to direct climate-related disasters such as floods, droughts, fires etc.): 10%
Nuclear War between great powers before 2100: 15%
"Yes, I prefer to live too, but I can still live off my memories of the time before artificial intelligence. If things turn really bad, I can play the final scene. But would you condemn children to that?"
I'm not quite sure I understand what you're saying here. Every human in history has had to deal with the reality that their children will suffer, and the strong possibility that their suffering will be great. That hasn't stopped most people from thinking that having children is good. It's up to you to decide whether your children would be happy that they were born.
"This is all assuming that the worst case is death rather than some kind of dystopia or torture scenario"
IMO the worst-case for AI is rapid total human extinction, and in my calculus this possibility is not great enough, nor the suffering horrible enough, to create a strong argument against having children in 2024. If the worst case were prolonged torture, this would change my opinion, but I don't think it's likely that a future strong AI will want to torture all of humanity.
With respect to the risk of nuclear war, it seems that a situation in which more countries have nuclear weapons seems more unstable. Economic interdependence is possibly helpful, but some countries are aiming at reducing it.
A different sort of calculus says that if only people unconcerned about the future have children, we will raise a generation that is indifferent to the future.
So your point is, “We should have children in the future to help the next generation not to behave stupidly, even if there is a good chance that the children we have will end up in a nuclear war or an AI apocalypse”?
This calculation only works if you think the apocalypse is at least a generation away and/or make some other assumptions. It's not a 'point' I was trying make, just a rationale I have heard people use. More often I hear it from the right, that eg Christians should have more babies to better stem the future tide of 'progress' (usually stated in terms of unwanted cultural change).
Personally, I think people should have babies if and only if they want them, embrace the work that is entailed in raising them to be thoughtful independent adults, and understand going in that the whole endeavor could go sideways starting on day 1.
I think it's problematic to take the perspective of unborn people. Will they regret being born? Happens all the time. But most people, once born, try to avoid death, suggesting that the way to maximize the utility of a prospective life is to make it actual.
Setting aside that creating life might be morally valuable just in its own right, I think it's still worthwhile. You seem to be, like, 99% confident in impeding catastrophe... I think probably revise yourself toward Ord's 1 in 6. (Especially given Erik Hoel's observation about an AI plateau [https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/ai-progress-has-plateaued-at-gpt] which I think is good reason to extend our AGI timelines some decades at least. Though Metaculus does have it in 2032, so I guess take with many grains of salt.)
Anyway: I think an average life where you live to at least 30 is probably worthwhile for the tragedy of an average death, and given the socioeconomic make-up of ACX readers, maybe make that 20.
So, fine, AI's coming in 7 years. By Ord, and quite conservatively, we have an expected lifespan of 7 years * 1/6 + 60 years * 5/6 = 50ish years. That still seems good! If I was offered a 50 year life or total non-existence, I'd take the 50 years.
(Ok, final caveat: maybe you're saying that AGI could bring us into some terrible dystopia where the kid ends up slaving away for 60 miserable years. [I wish I was nerd enough to get "Lovecraft version of the Borg" naturally, but I don't, so this is just vaguely the vibesy sense of the meaning that I'm picking up on.] In that case, I'd urge you to really think hard about the probabilities: P(dystopia) < 10% probably which means an expected 6 bad years vs. expected 7 good years * 1/6 catastrophe + expected 60 good years * (1-1/6-1/10) = 44 years and we have 44 - 6 = 40ish which comes out nice and ethically good. [How bad are the bad years relative to good years? Not sure, maybe factor that in.] You'd have to get to odds of catastrophe near 50% before the math flips on you. Now go procreate.)
"Setting aside that creating life might be morally valuable just in its own right,"
Why? It seems this only makes sense if the life you create is desirable for the life you create.
"I think it's still worthwhile. You seem to be, like, 99% confident in impeding catastrophe... I think probably revise yourself toward Ord's 1 in 6."
At which percentage would you change your recommendations?
"(Especially given Erik Hoel's observation about an AI plateau [https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/ai-progress-has-plateaued-at-gpt] which I think is good reason to extend our AGI timelines some decades at least. Though Metaculus does have it in 2032, so I guess take with many grains of salt.)"
I don't find the AI plateau story very convincing. Or rather, I don't think we should extrapolate too much from it into the future.
"Anyway: I think an average life where you live to at least 30 is probably worthwhile for the tragedy of an average death, and given the socioeconomic make-up of ACX readers, maybe make that 20."
That's interesting, I thought that there was a relatively high rate of depression and similar mental illnesses among ACX readers.
"So, fine, AI's coming in 7 years. By Ord, and quite conservatively, we have an expected lifespan of 7 years * 1/6 + 60 years * 5/6 = 50ish years. That still seems good! If I was offered a 50 year life or total non-existence, I'd take the 50 years."
That is actually very helpful, thanks!
I assume I could answer the question above, "At which percentage would you change your recommendations?" with that, if I knew your actual percentage for the 7 years and also where the 60 years came from?
However, the assessment may also depend somewhat on how the extinction occurs.
"(Ok, final caveat: maybe you're saying that AGI could bring us into some terrible dystopia where the kid ends up slaving away for 60 miserable years. [I wish I was nerd enough to get "Lovecraft version of the Borg" naturally, but I don't, so this is just vaguely the vibesy sense of the meaning that I'm picking up on.] In that case, I'd urge you to really think hard about the probabilities: P(dystopia) < 10% probably which means an expected 6 bad years vs. expected 7 good years * 1/6 catastrophe + expected 60 good years * (1-1/6-1/10) = 44 years and we have 44 - 6 = 40ish which comes out nice and ethically good. [How bad are the bad years relative to good years? Not sure, maybe factor that in.] You'd have to get to odds of catastrophe near 50% before the math flips on you. Now go procreate.)
Thank you for the serious approach here. What are your expectations for the future?
I assume that this depends on how pleasant or unpleasant the experiences are?
Ending one's life is a decision that some people make when things are going really badly for them. The relevant question is, how many good experiences are necessary in a lifetime to make the whole life worth living (from a prospective perspective), assuming that life will get really bad at some point?
You mean children who died at a young age? That's an interesting question. I don't know anyone personally who has lost a child, but I think for many parents it's very traumatic. I suppose it depends on the suffering of the child, but I realize that hindsight can be skewed. The thought of "would it have been better if the child hadn't existed?" is just not a question that people usually ask, right? It would lead to additional self-blame, which most people prefer to avoid. And that's a good thing, because it's not healthy to blame yourself for things you can't change.
People generally aren't acting like they actually expect the apocalypse in such a short timeframe. Companies are still investing in long-term R&D, employees are putting money in their retirement funds etc.
Do you think these people are hypocrites? Do you think they secretely know the "truth"? Or do you think it's the opposite, that is, people aren't able to plan for things to get really bad?
Talk is cheap. People can say things regardless of whether they are going to act like the things they say are the truth, though this doesn't imply any actual knowledge of the future on their part.
"Even if everything is fine, you have a decent chance of having a kid who works a job they hate to support a life they hate until they die or kill themselves."
I think I have a reasonable chance to be a good parent, I can influence that (somewhat! I know there are limits). I cannot really influence the AI future. Altman and Musk will decide what it looks like.
"catastrophize (third-person singular simple present catastrophizes, present participle catastrophizing, simple past and past participle catastrophized)
1. (transitive, intransitive) To regard a bad situation as if it were disastrous or catastrophic."
This implies that I am misinterpreting a bad situation. So what is the correct interpretation?
"2. (transitive, intransitive, psychology) To expose a behaviour pattern of seeking worst interpretation and magnifying disagreeable outcomes (of).
3. (obsolete) To end a comedy."
I'm not looking for the worst interpretation at all! I'm here to be convinced that everything is finde! Please give me a very good interpretation!
However, currently my problem is exactly that I have "epistemic humility in the face of extreme uncertainty" and I am humble enough to see that this includes very bad outcomes. So what should I do? Act as if it didn't?
"we don't know, at this point we can't know, and therefore we should proceed until we have more information"
I don't understand what that means for the question of whether one should have children. Are you in favor of always sticking to traditional behavior? Or are you advocating not having children until we know what the future holds?
"- not use speculative arguments to convince ourselves of an outcome distant from our ability to predict".
I don't know what this accusation is based on. In which sense do I use more speculative arguments than others? Where do you see me actively trying to convince myself of something bad? This would presume that I want to see a bad result - I actually don't want that! I want to see reality and make ethically good decisions.
Do you think Nuclear War and AI are a relevant risk?
If so, it seems that they are characterized due to a strong hopelessness. They would, I assume, strongly increase the share of the world population suffering compared to the things you list, also within each life. It would be probably hard or impossible to flee, and there would be no future to look forward to. But maybe my pseudo-calculation is just wrong there, happy about any corrections. What are your expectations for the future?
I am terrified of the idea of dreaming. It feels crazy to me that in order to survive, I have to go comatose with vivid hallucinations in an altered state of consciousness every night. It’s like having a health condition where I have to endure an LSD trip every day or literally die.
I am not here for advice; that I take from my therapist and my psychiatrist. But I’d like to ask you to share how you deal with the idea that you have to have dreams every night. Do you just ignore them? (Why are you okay with it?) Are you even looking forward to them, perhaps?
I don't find dreams too different from intense daydreaming, where I also play out various scenarios in my head, both that bring me joy and that I am worried about. It's just our attempts to predict the future in order to be more effective agents, and our neural networks finetuning.
I'm fine with having some visual byproducts in the process, as long as they arent' distressing (but for me, they rarely are).
Dreams are for me a little, a really little, compensation for having only one and a very limited life.
I have been on other planets. I have been on spaceships. I flew by will. I saved the world with awesome friends. I also was chased and treated very badly by horrific monsters, but with them completely unable to hurt me for real. I had the adventure, without paying the price.
I sometimes have a hard time getting to sleep, so I take waking up from a dream as: Oh! I _did_ finally get to sleep, which I needed. FWIW, most of my dreams are unpleasant, but I still find the evidence that I finally got to sleep comforting.
Our brains are weird structures that need nightly maintenance, being upset about dreams is like being upset about urination. It’s undignified, but…
Also, some of my dreams are very interesting, especially the ones where I am simultaneously watching a movie and also the movie star on the screen. If I could recreate that experience while awake, I would pay a lot for it.
I can't wrap my head around either dreading or looking forward to my dreams. I don't exactly think of them as things that happen to me, because the me they happen to is so discontinuous with the waking me. She doesn't even know she's asleep! She doesn't know it's a dream. She cannot access at will any of the memories, skills and opinions I can. So even if I knew I was going to dream tonight of being killed by a mass shooter I don't think I would dread it, because it isn't really me it's going to happen to. I'm not saying you should have my attitude -- I understand you're in the grip of an anxiety disorder -- just trying to describe my personal attitude towards dreams, in answer to your question.
Well, bits of my real life, present and past, appear in my dreams. But my dreaming self cannot access autobiographical memory the way my waking self can. It also cannot reason and reflect in the same way. For instance in one of my dreams last night a psychiatrist who is a professional acquaintance in my waking life, asked me to enter a psychiatric hospital. There was some task I was supposed to do there. It had something to do with understanding or improving what life was like for the patients. If in real life the psychiatrist had asked me to do such a weird thing I would have had all sorts of thoughts about his request: How could he possibly think I'd be willing to do it? Why did he even want me to? Had he lost his reason? But in the dream I felt no surprise or displeasure regarding his request, and in fact did enter the hospital. Later in the dream my mother visited me and wanted to know why I had been in the hospital. Not having access to my waking knowledge that she died quite a long time ago, I was not surprised to see her.
By the way, I'm a psychologist, and I wanted to let you know that your horror of dreaming sounds like a cousin of an anxiety disorder I've seen several people have: a horror of fainting. Most of them are people who have never fainted, and have no reason to think they are likely to. People who have this fear sometimes begin avoiding settings that make them feel slightly odd, such as escalators, because they are afraid the odd sensation of standing on moving stairs might somehow make them faint. When I've asked them what it is they fear, they have a hard time putting it into words. It is definitely *not* a fear of hurting themselves when they fall, or of being robbed or harmed by strangers while unconscious . And it is definitely not anticipated embarrassment at being seen by others losing consciousness, crumpling to the ground, etc. It's something about unexpected loss of control of the self. Anyhow, thought it might be helpful for you to know you are not alone in your phobia.
Thank you, fear of fainting is definitely a new clue! I seem to have the opposite case though, because I'd prefer to sleep all night without dreams, i. e. to "faint" my way through the night. But the "loss of control of self" sounds quite relatable. I'll look up this condition you mentioned, in case it brings some important insights.
OK, just to give you a more complete view of this sort of phobia here are some others that are similar: fear of orgasm; fear of vomiting; fear of becoming so dizzy that one falls down; fear of having an epileptic seizures; fear of discovering one is gay (the people who have this fear are generally not particularly homophobic, and have years of good evidence that they are heterosexual, so even they are perplexed why this fear haunts them). For all of these things there are conventional reasons one could fear them, things having to do with social stigma, shame and embarrassment, but for people who have an actual phobia about one of them the feared thing really is something different: It’s something about losing control of one’s self, or actually sort of losing one’s self. If you would like to know something about treatment of this sort of phobia I can describe it.
Dreams are intriguing. Sometimes they are frightening, sometimes I experience deep positive emotions. I've never considered them anything other than a feature of life.
Never take quinine though. I have taken it as a malaria prophylactic and true to its reputation I had extremely vivid, horrifying dreams. I didn't dread falling asleep but I didn't much look forward to it either.
I guess I'm lucky enough to have a certain amount of control over my dreams. I have a lot of fun in my dreams, and they're an important form of recreation for me.
I've been working on lucid dreaming for a while, and have some natural talent for it. I spontaneously dreamed lucidly a lot as a child before I had any idea it was A Thing that could be practiced and improved.
In the right setting, both internal and external setting, I can reliably launch a lucid dream with about 80% success. I can't make all of my dreams lucid 80% of the time though. It works like this: I need to have alrady slept once that night, the lucid dream is almost always during the 2nd sleep period after having been asleep for at least 3.5 hours or so. I wake up briefly, drink some cold mugwort tea, and fall back to sleep in a controlled manner. Body perfectly still, visualizing internally certain....concepts? This part is hard to describe in writing, but I know when it feels correctly done; I can tell when it is (or isn't) going to work. Then I'm in the dream suddenly, and I know I am in a dream. (side note: as a result of years of practicing this I can also just put myself to sleep without the dreams pretty reliably too, even on stimulants)
Here's the part that is probably the strangest thing to people when I try to explain the experience. Lucid dreams can be quite dull. Everything I'm experiencing is internally produced by my own mind, and my mind doesn't always do a great job of filling in the blanks. Very lucid dreams are remarkably incomplete at times and I've actually woken myself up out of boredom. They are usually pretty fun though. Its also important to draw a distinction between lucid dreaming and dream control, which are related but distinct. I'm often fully aware that I'm dreaming, but with little control over events, like watching out of the window of a train or something. Gaining increased control over the dream also often involves giving up some of the lucidity. Some of the best ones have been when I launch a lucid dream, forget I'm dreaming, then remember again. These are often much less stark and empty than the fully lucid ones.
A few random notes. Alcohol, even in small amounts, ruins it. This isn't true for everyone but its a common observation. Ambien as well. Caffiene otoh makes it easier, though it can be more challenging to fall asleep. Trazadone makes the dreams more vivid but harder to control. Cannabis has no noticable effects one way or the other. LSD/Mushrooms are helpful in the week of so after using them, but not while under the direct effects. Having the room be (dimly) lit helps a lot too, I use two nightlights on opposite sides of the room.
I'd been told isn't possible to fall asleep while tripping psychedelics, but I fell asleep on Mushrooms once. It was a journey through states that resembled the Tibetan descriptions of the Bardo realm. I was "shown" some fascinating things about the nature of my consciousness — and it showed me that my consciousness was connected to a larger network of consciousness (finite in size, though) — plus it showed me a vision of man attacking me with a knife and my guts spilling out on the pavement. The attack happened a week later, and I recognized the man from my precognitive dream in time to get into my car and lock the door while he pounded on it trying to get in. I credit that dreamtrip with saving my life.
Very interesting thanks. The only thing I can do there is go back to the same dream after 3.5 hours sleep. Which is exactly when I first wake up most nights. The interim period when I pee or whatever, which is fast as my room is en-suite, seems like a movie interval and I have to remain groggy
It comes naturally to me. I didn't have to work at it. Though I admit my control has improved over the years, it hasn't been through any effort by my waking consciousness. But I still can't find where I left my car in my dreams.
I mostly enjoy them, even the bad ones. Sort of “it’s cool my brain can do that.” The only dreams I don’t like are ones that make me feel boring, like dreaming about being at work.
I find I dream "boring" dreams more often now: that of doing something I would normally do, such as talking to people, or eating something, or walking on stairs. I eventually notice it's a dream from something that almost, but doesn't quite, add up, like if I'm eating from a plate with a fork but the plate looks the same even after having eaten from it.
I find dreams very enjoyable. I look forward to dreaming at night: unfortunately I rarely remember my dreams so I am often disappointed on that front (I know dream journaling would help with that, but I haven't found the time). Amazing things can happen in dreams. There have been a few occasions in my life where something has happened in a dream that was deeply meaningful or exciting. That's certainly not what usually happens, but it's nice getting to pull the lever the dream slot machine knowing that jackpot is possible. And sometimes you get to lucid dream and that's very fun.
The only problem is nightmares, but I've mostly got them sorted out now.
I've regularly had nightmares as long as I can remember (usually 1-2 a month, though these days its more like 1 every two months). I sorted them out through lucid dream training, actually. I didn't have the wherewithal to train enough to regularly get lucid dreams, but I trained enough to accomplish one specific thing: I can wake myself out of a dream fairly quickly and easily.
My wife takes credit for the rest of my technique. Early in our marriage she would notice that when I was having a nightmare I would often whimper in my sleep. She'd wake me up whenever this happened, which I appreciated because that meant the nightmare was over. This happened enough times, and I had enough lucid dream training that I was somewhat aware that I might be dreaming and could be in a nightmare, that I got into the habit of screaming at the top of my lungs whenever a dream started getting scary. That scream would translate to a louder than normal whimper which prompted my wife to wake me.
After going through this routine for several years I'm now at the point where a nightmare starts, I start screaming, and I don't even need my wife to wake me up. I just wake up. My dreaming mind has learned that screaming=wake up.
If you have trouble with nightmares, lucid dream training might help.
It seems like I am mostly unaffected by my dreams emotionally, regardless of what happens in them. Except this seems to be the case only outside of the dream. While in dreams, I think I react internally as though the things happening were really happening. And in the few times I have known I was dreaming while in a dream (and not able to control anything) I was afraid, and thought about how I'll tell everyone about the experience after waking up. Then I think very little of it after waking up and decide to get on with my day. (Same applies to sleep paralysis, including a case this morning.)
I don't remember my dreams most of the time so it is easy to ignore them. But it does make me sad that dreams are often about negative/unpleasant/scary things. I think though that experiencing things in dreams is much less intense than experiencing them in real life
I once watched an entire movie in my dreams. It had Dave Bautista and Jason Statham and Some Guy I've Seen Before But Don't Recognize From Anything and the worst dialogue you could ever hear. There was a point where I walked out of the theater and sat on a bench next to a critic to talk about the nonsense we were watching, before heading back in to finish it.
I can't imagine not wanting that experience. It's everything you could ever want, a single thought away.
I often enjoy them. Freewheeling dreams (as opposed to when I tried lucid dreaming) are more interesting and varied than what I would choose as a dream, and mine are often (at least perceived as) quite narrative and exciting. I also find the experience of falling asleep comfortable and cosy when it comes easily (it doesn’t always come easily, and I know I have a tendency to fight changes of state).
When I have nightmares, then it is obviously less pleasant, and I have to try to get out of that frame of mind before I am happy sleeping again: it is usually easy to shake them off if I wake up fully. I find prayer helpful for falling asleep in the right frame of mind, especially when nightmares are threatening, but I’m aware that isn’t transferable for everyone.
An explanation of why Jesus is the only way to heaven that I recently wrote to a friend. Please consider reading, even if you won't be convinced.
So, here's why it's important to follow specifically Jesus and why I want to tell you about it.
Like I'm sure you've heard before, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." When God created everything, he also ingrained morality into the universe. What is right is good and pleasing to him, and what is wrong is bad and requires punishment. Humans operate in the same way, because God says he made humans in his own image. Humans inherently see value in things and have a conscience, a natural sense of right and wrong. Humans like good things, and we punish bad things.
Because God himself is perfect and holy, and he himself is good, nothing evil can be close to him. So when the first humans were created, God told them what they could and couldn't do, and if they did what was wrong that they would die. Death is the punishment for evil, because life is in God and anything that is evil is separated from God.
The Bible says, "your iniquities (evil acts) have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear." So, doing wrong completely separates a person from God and then when they die they will be judged by God, and he will not allow them to be close to him. And it's not just terrible evils that are wrong but anything that is against the nature of God is wrong and creates a barrier away from Him.
The Bible says "all have sinned and fall short of God's glorious standard" and I don't think anyone can disagree with that. Every person has done something bad in their life before, even if it's just telling a small lie or getting angry at another person. But because God is entirely perfect, even these things that seem small are enough to cause separation from God (This fact is why it's so important for every person to consider following Jesus. But I'll explain why Jesus in just a minute). Once there is separation from God because of sin, the price of sin has to be paid, and the Bible also says that "it is appointed for man to die once and then to be judged" and "the wages of sin is death." So, because the first humans sinned, death entered into the world and now everyone will die physically, but after that when we are judged, we will also die spiritually because of our own sins. Spiritual death is eternal separation from God, e.g. hell.
God is just, so at the final judgement day he will not let anyone off the hook. He won't even let generally good people go without punishment for the small wrongs they have done. Being good is the baseline requirement of God, so doing good can never make up for any wrong however small. The price of death has to be paid. God is perfectly just.
But God is also loving, he is love himself. And he loves all people, every single one. This is where Jesus comes in. Because God loves the world of people so much, he sent himself in human form, Jesus, to live as a perfect human so that the price of death could justly be paid in the place of sinful humans, so that even if someone has sinned they could still be close to him forever. That is the famous Bible verse John 3:16 "for God so loved the world, that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life."
Because Jesus is completely perfect and never sinned, no penalty of death was ever required of him for his own sins. And because he was infinitely perfect, he was able to offer himself in place of infinitely many people to receive the penalty of death in their place. And because he himself is God, he was able to raise himself from the dead and in so doing proved that he is God and that everything he said was true. And Jesus said that everyone who believes in him and receives his words become children of God and will live forever with Him. Jesus says that people should repent (which means to turn away from) their sins and to follow his teaching and believe in his words.
This is God's way of maintaining justice and also showing his love. The Bible says in another place that God is patient and he doesn't want anyone at all to perish, but he wants everyone to repent and turn from their sin and towards him. God has given mankind freewill though, and does not force this on anyone. He allows everyone to make their own decisions in life. This is why there is such horrible evil in the world, even towards good people. Just like people are allowed to make good choices that benefit and help others, they are also allowed to make bad choices that hurt others in horrible ways. But nobody will go unpunished on judgement day. Every last evil thing that is done will be paid for, whether it is by Jesus' sacrifice, or by the people who did the evil things.
But this freewill that God gives to men is why not everyone is saved, even though Jesus died for everyone. The Bible passage that says "the wages of sin is death" also says "but the free gift of God is eternal life through our savior and Lord, Jesus." It is a free gift that he gives, but does not force on anyone. And he makes it clear that to receive the gift, one has to renounce his evil life and die to himself, because if he accepts Jesus' sacrifice then his evil self has died along with Jesus. The life he receives from Jesus then has to be lived with Jesus.
Nobody can trick God and say that they repent and accept Jesus and then continue to live selfishly however they want to. Jesus says "Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on judgement day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!"
There's a lot more that Jesus says, and if you're interested it would be helpful to read the Gospel of Matthew (the four Gospels in the Bible are four different accounts of the life of Jesus, here's a link to an easily readable translation for your convenience:
You can skip the first paragraphs that are just names. You may not be interested at all in which case just disregard, but I wanted to be helpful if you are interested). Whatever the case, Jesus makes it clear that if you truly are repentant of evil and if you love him, you will follow him in your life and in your heart. Everyone who does not, rejects God and his free gift and their sins will not be paid for by Jesus' sacrifice. They will have to pay for them on their own.
This is why it is important to believe in Jesus specifically out of anyone else or any other type of god. Being good will not pay the penalty for any wrong that a person has done, it has to be paid in death. Jesus is the only person God has provided to bring people close to him through his own death and resurrection. And he wants every person to believe and be close to him, because he loves the whole world. I really wanted to tell you about it because I don’t want you to have never heard all this and I want you to be with God (and me and others) for eternity in the afterlife.
(1) I'm getting strong 2011 nostalgia. Felt like every second comment all over the internet was a clone of the one you just wrote, back then.
(2) Now, as then, getting so sick of the atheist responses that say *nothing* but "where's the evidence?" Jesus Christ, can't you say you don't accept the premises and then still engage with the theology on a "suppose I did accept them" basis? Don't these people have any philosophical curiosity whatsoever?
(3) As I said, this comment is an almost identical clone of thousands of other evangelical preaching spiels. I wish Christians would realise this makes them look brainwashed, when things are presented and phrased exactly the same way every time, right down to the "have you ever told a lie" and "the price of sin has to be paid". It would help enormously with being taken seriously if these online preachers would add some original material, perhaps a personal metaphor or a unique argument or interpretation, or even just some unique phrasing. "Restoring balance" to the force...er, universe...or any number of other phrasings gets the same point across without reusing the cliched and primitive tribal/medieval idea of "paying a price of death" for a crime.
(4) Who are you talking to? Not atheists, since you give no argument at all for the existence of God. Not evangelicals, who don't need to be told what they already believe. Not Catholics or Mormons or other Christians since you don't argue why this understanding of Christ is better than theirs. And not other religions since there's no argument for why this conception of God (a being who must reconcile His holiness and His love) is deeper or wiser than other conceptions, like the Hindu or Islamic ones. This seems to only make sense as an explanation of what evangelicals believe to someone who doesn't know. And anyone here who doesn't know probably has zero intellectial curiosity and won't read your comment anyway.
(5) The main sticking point for me and most people (excluding the mindless "no evidence lol" replies) is this whole idea that you can never earn your salvation, and the "good news" is that the price for your sin has already been paid because of Christ's infinite sacrifice, and the great liberation that you don't need to do anything to earn it, it's already done...but here's what you have to do! (i.e. believe it and "accept it"). The last part is probably necessary for Christianity to memetically spread, but it undermines its whole point. If the price of sin has been paid, then why is it conditional on saying certain words and holding certain mental states? Now, you may say accepting a gift isn't an act in the normal sense of requiring effort or achieving a goal , it's merely a decision to put aside your pride and say "yes". And that the only barrier to someone doing such a simple thing is their immense pride and refusal to admit their sin.
But this is so demonstrably false. Most people who refuse to "accept Christ" are doing so because they aren't convinced God exists, they aren't convinced Christ is God, they aren't convinced Christ really wants this evangelical path of action, or they have a moral objection to the path of "*I'll* be saved, but those other people who have honest disbelief will be damned and that's still somehow good news because at least I won't". Forcing yourself to believe in something you're not sure is true, or to obey something you're not sure is moral, is not a simple decision, it's an act of herculean effort that may not be even possible. And if you think those people are lying and really do believe those things and really are motivated by pride...then why can't you just say "you can accept Christ on earth, OR you can accept him after you die?" If they're really just prideful, they'll still reject him after death. Only if you know full well that the reason people aren't accepting Christ is that they're not sure he exists, would you expect a different response before or after death. And importantly, only if you're primarily concerned not with people eventually repenting but with *controlling people on earth* (making them attend your church, obey your pastors, etc) would you insist that repentance must happen before you die. There is no other reason.
And I find that very sickening.
(6) More metaphysically, I don't know why so many Christians keep using the *worst* theodicy of them all. Most other responses to the problem of evil, like the soul making theodicy or the idea that light cannot exist without the dark or the idea that it's a mystery beyond our comprehension, are so much more defensible than the free will theodicy. The latter:
cannot account for natural evil (earthquakes, disease etc)
cannot explain why allowing people to sin requires allowing them to successfully hurt other people
if it somehow does require that, cannot explain why there *are* many physical limits that often stop people hurting each other
cannot explain why we put criminals in jail, if freedom to hurt others is essential to freedom (is the existence of a criminal justice system fundamentally unChristian?)
cannot explain why the Bible so frequently tells people to obey God or God will punish them; if freely choosing God is so important that it justifies allowing evil, how is that remotely compatible with spreading such fear-based and self-interest-based reasons for choosing God in his own word?
doesn't make metaphysical sense, since it's not clear if libertarian free will (the kind needed for this theodicy) actually exists or if it's even coherent: everything we do we do for a reason, not an irreducible act of will (whatever that would mean)
doesn't make metaphysical sense, since even if libertarian free will is theoretically coherent it certainly doesn't seem coherent combined with theism: if God creates everything, then God causes everything, and how can acts God has no control over be compatible with God's sovereignty?
doesn't make moral sense, since allowing free will "so people aren't just thoughtless robots" (the usual justification) does not reauire libertarian free will, only compatibilist free will. God could determine that all people choose good and love Him and those choices would still be as meaningful as any other if they're coming from people's own nature, not externally imposed against it (and the latter IS what the classic "obey God or be punished" is)
Basically, it's such a terrible theodicy with so many holes, and other theodicies work so much better, I can't undetatand why anyone tries to use it.
(By the way, I'm either some kind of deist, or some kind of Christian who understands Atonememt in a VERY different way to "someone must be punished for sin". I encorage everyone to find their own way to God, ignoring both the small-minded atheists and the preachers who claim to speak for him).
>[...] only if you're primarily concerned not with people eventually repenting but with *controlling people on earth* (making them attend your church, obey your pastors, etc) would you insist that repentance must happen before you die. There is no other reason.
>And I find that very sickening.
Agree.
I always say, why is it, that people who claim to believe all that stuff do not act like they believe it. Rhetorical question. Because they don't believe it, they just say so, for reasons.
That's correct, but God won't be fooled. I quoted Jesus in the original post:
"Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; leave Me, you who practice lawlessness."
It is entirely sickening the evils that people do in the name of God, but they will not escape judgement. However, evil people who claim God's name don't change the truth of the matter that we have only this life to accept Jesus' sacrifice. It says in the book of Hebrews in the Bible that "it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgement."
What you say is, God has everything under control, he knows best, he makes no mistakes, and everything is -- or at least, from human perspective, eventually everything will be -- alright.
Yet you try to achieve something. Which is weird, given that you believe that.
You cannot achieve anything at all. He can. And only he.
Because he has everything under control, he knows best, he makes no mistakes, and everything is -- or at least, from human perspective, eventually everything will be -- alright.
There is nothing anyone can do about it.
That's what you say you believe.
Yet you try.
And that's why I don't believe anyone who claims to believe all that stuff.
I think you may be misunderstanding some things. If someone really believes the Bible and God, then they're going to obey him. In addition to moral commands, God also tells his followers to go out into the world and preach the gospel (good news) and make disciples in every nation.
Maybe you didn't read my original post, but it's me sharing with a friend of mine why it's important to believe in Jesus and my motivation was out of care for him and trying to obey Jesus' commands. It's not quite the same as not believing God's words and then using them to manipulate or control other people.
No offense intended, but I always understood Matthew 7:22-23 to be a warning against people like you who claim to know the mind and will of יהוה — the entity you call "God." Unlike the earlier prophets, Yeshua ben Yosef, the humble carpenter that he was, never claimed to be directly quoting the words of יהוה except when he was quoting or paraphrasing the words of the earlier prophets.
However, if we look back to the times of the prophets (when יהוה was communicating with His people without an interlocutor), Isaiah 55:8-9 warns of the dangers of deluding ourselves that we know the mind of יהוה: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord."
And יהוה rebukes Job (Job 38) for his false belief that he understands His motives when he declares (roughly translated) "Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?" Moreover, in a marvelously sarcastic smackdown, יהוה asks Job "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?"
Of course, one of the biggest Christianist heresies is the idea that יהוה, because of His perfection, is a static and unchanging entity. This is no doubt due to the mistranslation of His statement to Moses in Exodus 3:14, "אהיה אשר אהיה" as "I am that I am." A better translation would be "I will be what I will be" or perhaps "I will be what I am becoming." I think this mistranslation predates Christianity — correct me if I'm wrong — and it goes back to when the Pentateuch was originally translated into Greek a couple of centuries before Yeshua ben Yosef. Unfortunately, that mistranslation turned His declaration into an expression of static identity when it should actually be interpreted as a declaration of a self-directed evolving identity.
So, even if you consider Yeshua to be the final Word, when you *claim* you understand Yeshua's words as the Word of יהוה, you are doing the same thing that the prophesizers and exorcists were doing. I would suggest you go back to your closet and pray some more. And יהוה is not obligated to respect your limited understanding of his purpose.
In the 9th paragraph of your 6th point you actuallyyyy misspelled the word "require" so um your whole comment is completely invalid ☝️🤓
But no actually I appreciate that you took the time to read and type out a thorough response to it. I also appreciate that you stated your own beliefs so I can know where you're coming from. That being said, I didn't post here to argue God's case or convince anyone. I posted in case anyone who reads it might be at a place in their life that they see the truth of it and now know where to continue the search, and also in the hopes that someone such as yourself or anyone else who disagrees will one day get to the point where it clicks with reality and they see the truth of it later on. I don't want anyone to suffer through life and hate God due to a misunderstanding and then be rejected by him (idk how he'll judge every circumstance, I just know that he will be totally just), so all I can do is share the truth and pray.
Is this for someone who is already a Christian but just believes that it's not mutually exclusive with other views/beliefs? "Why Christian doctrine teaches that Christianity is the only way" seems to be the question you're answering. A lesson that I'm sure is worth learning if you are a Christian, but I don't know how it would translate to a compelling invitation.
It was for a friend of mine recently who knows me, then I posted it to an open thread on an online forum in case it might benefit some rando online. I understand the majority of people probably won't care for it, but it's not against the rules here so I wanted to put it out there.
"When God created everything, he also ingrained morality into the universe."
Everything you write after that depends on just assuming that the first part of the sentence ("When God created everything") is true. That is not convincing. It also assume that God could "ingrain morality into the universe" without being responsible for how the universe behaves. That makes no sense. If God created anything with omniscience, it would also be his or her responsibility what the created thing does.
As a believer myself, I find comment preaching like yours to be more harmful than helpful. These comments virtually never convert, instead they repulse, as ascend's reply above illustrates nicely. I almost flagged your comment as spam, which I usually do for off-topic, preachy comments popping up where nobody asked for them. I didn't do it here because this is, after all, Open Thread, where most any topic is welcome as long as you're respectful, and also your essay was at least a little more in-depth than the standard copy-paste preaching I usually encounter. I think you are going against what the Savior said in Matthew 7:6 "Give not that which is holy unto dogs..." Now with this scripture, I don't mean to insult anyone here, but to say this simply isn't the ideal forum for gospel discussion. The vast majority come here to discuss things temporal, not spirtual, and many here were once part of organized religion but chose to turn away from it. So a rote presentation like yours is more likely to confirm anti-religion biases in their minds, which makes moving towards Christ that much harder.
Philosophy seems pretty welcome here, but I agree with you and Ascend on most of this. I've decided I'm atheist, but am willing to be convinced otherwise...by evidence, even of logic. But as mentioned elsewhere, the logic only holds if one accepts everything stated as true, and not everything stated should be the level of a postulate not needing proof.
It's definitely not a human point of view. I don't like the idea of anyone, innocent or not (although I admit it's difficult to hope particularly horrible people find redemption), facing eternal damnation. That's why I posted this here in the hopes that it will benefit even one person who reads it. It's not intended as a convincing argument, like some have pointed out. I just don't want people to be ignorant of the truth whether they accept it as truth or not now, and I will pray that it clicks one day.
God has given me peace and I want other hurting people to know about it. I probably should have included that part in the text lol. Thanks for reading it even though you disagree.
"It's definitely not a human point of view. I don't like the idea of anyone, innocent or not (...), facing eternal damnation."
But also, you say:
"What is right is good and pleasing to him, and what is wrong is bad and requires punishment. Humans operate in the same way (..) Humans (...) have a conscience, a natural sense of right and wrong. Humans like good things, and we punish bad things."
The statement about how humans operate is I think generally observable truth all over the world.
I could be wrong, but I think you would also agree that it is not human to think that seemingly innocent people should be punished with eternal damnation. Humans aren't holy though, so from our perspective there are some evils that are so common and don't feel like they need severe punishment. From God's perspective, any wrong however small is unholy, but God is holy so nothing unholy can be close to him.
So a morally good person who has only done small wrongs is still unholy and will be eternally separate from God unless that person is made holy through faith in Jesus Christ. And that just isn't a human perspective, that's what I meant by that. Thanks for taking the time to read the post.
If there is some irreconcilable difference between divine and human morality, *and* assuming for the sake of the argument that morality is universal and objective, I still don't see why we should conclude that humanity is the evil part, and not God. After all, God is the part inflicting most suffering on the other. You say that God is "holy" and humans aren't, but then I'm afraid I fail to see what is desirable about holiness, if it consists in the willingness to inflict unlimited suffering.
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I'm going to throw out a controversial idea. I want to be clear that it's just an idea, I'm not attached to it or necessarily supportive of it. It started basically as a simple shower thought.
With most mental illnesses and illnesses in general, the aim is to correct the (perceived) dysfunction and symptoms as much as possible. With someone with ADHD, for example, the idea is to treat them in a way that makes them more attentive and less hyperactive.
One major exception to this is... gender dysphoria. The current thinking on gender dysphoria is, in a sense, to change one's social identity and often one's body itself, to essentially accommodate the gender dysphoria.
...What if we did the exact opposite? What if we treated gender dysphoria like we do ADHD?
To be clear, this is not the "do nothing" or "watchful waiting" that some conservatives might support. Right now, if a male experiences gender dysphoria, the idea is to give that male treatments that will lead into a more feminine-appearing and feminine-feeling body. What if we did the opposite? If a 14 year old male has gender dysphoria, maybe we should give him the option to receive masculine-increasing treatment, to combat the dysphoria directly? Perhaps giving testosterone should be considered?
On the flip-side, if a 14 year old female has gender dysphoria, maybe she should be given the option of receiving treatment that would make her feel more feminine? Perhaps estrogen could be offered to her?
Again, just an idea. Medicine is not one of my strong suits, which is partly why I'm raising this idea here.
Do people here think this might work, or do people here think this would be totally disastrous, or something between? If it *did* work, it would be a good thing... wouldn't it? A person becomes more comfortable in their own skin, with their birth sex.
It's important to distinguish between disorders like ADHD where the issue is "my brain works in a way that makes it difficult to live a happy life" and dysphoria (and related gender issues, not every trans person has dysphoria) where the issue is "my brain and my body don't match".
The solution to the first is anything that helps you function and live a happy life. Whether that's therapy, medicine, accommodations, etc. it doesn't really matter what the *specific* solution is, but there is a clear direction the solution needs to be working in.
Dysphoria is just a false equation. In the statement 2 = 5, the statement is false, but it's not clear that either side is "to blame". To fix it, you could add 3 to the left side, subtract 3 from the right, or some middle ground. In the same way, you can consider a trans woman. Having the "mind" of a woman is fine. Having the "body" of a man is fine (using loose terms to avoid questions of to what extent the mind and body are the same thing, not relevant). But when they are in conflict, you need to bring one into line with the other.
In principle, someone assigned male as birth who identifies as a woman would be equally treated by gender affirming surgery (changing the body) or by some hypothetical cure for dysphoria that results in this person identifying as a man. Your proposed treatments wouldn't work, but I don't think you're here to nitpick the specifics of a cure. If so, apologies for misunderstanding you, and I can elaborate further on why that wouldn't work.
But if we can assume a treatment that would "correct" the mind to its assigned-at-birth gender (and that has an equivalent cost, danger, and difficulty) it would be, in principle, just as good. However, There is a bias towards preserving identity. I find this bias very understandable, but someone else could have different preferences. The existence of this treatment would be a good thing in the sense that people having options is good. But it wouldn't be *better* than the current treatment from an individual perspective. Changing the statement to 5 = 5 isn't a *better* fix than 2 = 2.
Personally though, I would be wary of such treatments. I would much rather change someone's body to reflect their mind, because messing with minds is messing with *who they are* on a much more fundamental level. I would find it dangerous and creepy to a degree I have a hard time putting into words. By comparison, a trans person getting physical surgery to reflect their identity doesn't bother me at all. Maybe it's the transhumanist in me wanting people to be able to adjust their bodies however they like.
> With most mental illnesses and illnesses in general, the aim is to correct the (perceived) dysfunction and symptoms as much as possible.
This axiom will lead you to incorrect conclusions, because it's not really correct. The aim is to make it so that the person can be functional in day-to-day life, and ideally be happy. Trying to "correct" the dysfunction is often not possible or even desirable (because attempting to do so will have the effect of making the patient *less* functional), but there are almost *always* steps you can take to make the symptoms manageable.
In ADHD, one of the treatments available are stimulants to increase focus. However, there are a LOT of other things that therapists can recommend to help a person manage their symptoms. They can put their pills in weekly pill boxes to make them easier to take, utilize to-do lists, create meals in bulk, alter their living spaces to account for their forgetfulness.
An even better example is autism. There is no magic pill for autism that "corrects" for it. A common autistic behavior, however, is "masking", which is a term for the ways that autistic people learn to "correct" for their dysfunction and hide their symptoms to conform to the social expectations of allists. A large portion of autism therapy is teaching kids how to *stop* masking, because the practice ultimately leads to other negative mental health impacts. Therapist then teach the children (and their parents!) how to alter *the environment* in ways that works *with* the dysfunction, rather than against it.
On the other hand, there *is* a magic pill that corrects for the symptoms of gender dysphoria. It's cross-gender hormone treatment (or at least puberty blockers). I encourage you to look at the actual diagnostic criteria for gender dyphoria:
If you'll notice, cross gender hormones *directly* help "correct" for every. Single. One. And it helps the person live a more functional life, rather than just trying to "mask" the underlying issue and hoping making their discomfort greater will magic away the issue.
I think your idea is interesting, but perhaps not for the reasons you might think. What you're sort of accidentally doing here is using analogies that accidentally mislead you in a (fun!) way, which actually makes your idea interesting to talk about.
So, scoot to ADHD real quick. Or your larger point, really. This part:
''With most mental illnesses and illnesses in general, the aim is to correct the (perceived) dysfunction and symptoms as much as possible. With someone with ADHD, for example, the idea is to treat them in a way that makes them more attentive and less hyperactive''
And this is correct. Uh. Somewhat... obviously so. Just to be clear, I do not disagree with you that the aim of medication is to resolve the dysfunction incurred by disease :b
However!
``One major exception to this is... gender dysphoria. The current thinking on gender dysphoria is, in a sense, to change one's social identity and often one's body itself, to essentially accommodate the gender dysphoria.``
Okay. Is this actually the case, though? Obviously from my framing and slight handwaving at some other answer, I would indicate it's not. We provide stimulants and therapy to alleviate ADHD manifestations of reduced function. That's the interesting thing that your first note about 'most illnesses' covers up; in a grander way for every illness our goal in treatment is reduction of manifested dysfunction. An illness someone has which wouldn't seemingly incur any dysfunction or difficulty is philosophically interesting to imagine, but hard to classify as an illness in the first place. So lead that thought and go on a little - you provide stimulants to assist ADHD types with focus and reward seeking. Someone with ADHD complains about a lack of ability to retain focus, everyone working with them complain about it too, and other subtle malaises, and our treatment profile (and classification scheme for the whole illness!) relies on mitigating those percieved problems
Okay, so what's the manifested actual dysfunction in gender dysphoria we would, ideally, be trying to treat here?
It's usually a percieved and deeply personal dysmorphic lack of joy in ones own body. Given that actual manifestation, the treatment pathway will tend to be corrective on that axis. Someone with ADHD has altered neurology and methamphetamine derivatives can alter the thresholds for rewards, helping them with focus? Well, take the adderall, get the focus. Someone with body dysphoria in general and gender dysphoria in the specific complains they're not at home in their own meat and bone, and that's when we should then... Give them more of the stuff they say they're uncomfortable with?
Wait, isn't that a little bit like taking an overstimulated ADHD sufferer and saying the proper treatment pathway here is to expose them to more screens, more distraction, more noise, more demands? They said they had trouble with focus and Dr. Quarkfib prescribed: "Nah, you just gotta go all in on the distractibiltiy. Try adding more taps and micro-projects to your life, and really get into wandering aimlessly from hyperfixation to hyperfixation"
Someone with intense gender dysphoria describes their lack of comfort affirming traditionally male roles, and Dr. Quarkfib prescribes 30oz of red meat, a course of deadlifts and four mandatory hours of hunting through a forest murdering small things with a stick? 14-year old girl comes in, says she's intensely uncomfortable with her own body, thinks she might be a he, Dr. Quarkfib nods and murmurs and checks charts and prescribes a six hour mandatory shopping spree, frilly dresses and some estrogen?
Clearrrrrlyyyyyy when (blown up to scale and) viewed from that angle you see the somewhat curious and interesting contrast in these things.
One of the particularly interesting thingsa bout body dysmorphic disorder is that it is, you are correct, somewhat socially contingent. After all, our hypothethical 14 year old girl case example complains she has intense gender dysphoria and really wants to be a 14 year old boy then this example, written out with all nuance surgically removed, does indicate that something in the way this person percieves these differences and the way they manifest in daily life is to blame for intense personal fixation. Or put in less meandering verbiage, it's hard to imagine that gender dysphoria would be as intense a problem in a social world where gender itself was a thing people remarked and spent less time on.
But isn't this true for almost literally everything, because the intelligent things around you are human? ADHD is a classic example - a lot of its more dire manifestations are directly socially relevant, right from an inability to emphatisize to difficulty keeping up with relations over to rejection sensitivity. All of those 'dysfunctions', which treatment partially attempts to alleviate, are enormously intensely grounded in one's social identity. If nothing else, for the first many years of life in public school you'll certainly find that the reason some poor kid with ADHD gets into trouble isn't because of anything wrong with them (often) but because their bouncing-off-the-walls-dancing-around-not-sitting-still contrasts pretty intensely with our desire that they sit still in a classroom of 30 people and listen quietly for hours at a time. Would we still classify ADHD as a mental disorder if the social situation and pressures were different, or would we notice less? This is less of a handwavey philosophical aside than it might appear, because the paralllels do track directly to the analogy that's being used here.
And now we've fallen off the path of easy, hand-waving solutions and into horrifically deep weed territory.
But yeah to round up:
´´If it *did* work, it would be a good thing... wouldn't it? A person becomes more comfortable in their own skin, with their birth sex. ´´
There's a line here that's definitively true, which is that a person more comfortable in their own skin is almost by defintion less dysfunctional in it. And if we have a disorder or situation characterized by intense dysmorphia, then, yes, anything at all that reduces that percieved discomfort would be alleviative to the core of the problem. That's sort of axiomatic isn't it - we do stuff that makes you feel less awful?
But that's a bit of a hack isn't it? " If the thing we did makes you feel less terrible, it justifies doing it " is true in a lot of cases, but sometimes not. That's how this gets interesting. We could take someon with intense ADHD out of an environment they're clinically mismatched for, and that would make them more comfortale in their own skin and with their own birth brain. Don't laugh - if someone has trouble focusing on 6 hours of math in a classroom, sending them running through the woods and running all over the walls ala some Danish nature-exploration school provably works to alleviate the discomfort of being asked to sit and work out math. But the thing is, if someone complains reading gives them a headache, taking away all books in their life does help them. But uhhh I can see... some issues with that... solution.
If our hypothethical 14-year old we give more estrogen and a frilly dress and a course in how to sashay her hips properly and, I don't know, do needlework??, ends up more comfortable because of it, is that because we 'cured' her 'gender dysphoria', is it because we altered the environment she was in that caused her to express that discomfort (her ideas of not wanting to be femine was socially contigent on how she saw femmes be treated), or is it because we hammered the square peg so much that it got ground down into a circle and fit into the hole we wanted (we just sandpapered her personality into shape over a 4+ year period)
There's a severe and enormous danger here, which *may* very well be unique to gender dysmorphic expression (unsure), that because the expression of dislike is "always on" and rooted in their actual feeling of being in their own skin, the stuff that we might suggest that makes the more comfortable quickly isn't always the optimal solution for human flourishing. So would giving a 14year old a dress, extra estrogen and skincare tips be a good thing? Wellllll maybe? Like, I support stuff that works so if it works for them and helps them deal with a genuine sense of dysmorphia, then that's good yes.
But at least when we support transitioning, the treatment follows a logically coherent resolution pathway. "I dislike this gender expression" --> "Express a different one" from that metric seems to beat "I dislike this gender expression" --> "have you tried expressing it harder?". And that's the higher level fix that getting a dysmorphic 14 year old boy into the gym and throwing a spear and doing pushups doesn't resolve. I support giving people with ADHD stimulants, on the reasoning that it genuinely seems to help people who are clinically under-stimulated. It seems less likely to be worth it to give them 300+ extra things to track and more forms to fill, on the reasoning that I'll simpy make them do more of the thing they struggle to do.
So pattern matching analogously to ADHD and other diseases and then declaring that the treatment profile for gender dysmorphia is uniquely contingent on adjusting social reality is, I think, the interesting mistake that your ideas stumble over.
We *are* treating dysphoria like ADHD. Unlike ADHD, though, there's no magic medication you can take to help you get through daily life that we know of (today). The treatment we have found so far that has the best tradeoff between helping the sufferer get through the day and unfortunate side effects that make their day much worse turns out to be for them to do their best to perform the gender they feel they should, and for the people around them to do their best to support that.
To my mind, something that distinguishes gender dysphoria from other mental conditions is that a significant degree of the suffering it exacts on the individual depends on how others respond to it. My depression/anxiety is not lessened by others acceptance of it (other associated struggles are, but not the acute symptoms) but the pain of gender dysphoria seems to be mitigated by others' acceptance of one's chosen gender expression.
I imagine this is worth bearing in mind when thinking about gender-dysphoria-as-mental-illness.
Mmm, not sure I'd agree with the idea that this is what distinguishes gender dysphoria.
1. I can think of other mental illnesses for which this holds true. A large part of the suffering schizophrenics experience depends on how others respond to them (particularly to their delusions). In my experience, there is a lot of distress that can be allayed simply by acknowledging that their thoughts are extremely distressing and worrying to them, even if I don't necessarily agree that they are grounded in reality.
2. I have seen at least one gender-dysphoric individual whose dysphoria absolutely did not improve despite being treated as their chosen gender.
Regarding your second point, did they internalize that? I can think of a few trans people that, even if they are treated as their chosen gender, they don't really *feel* like they are socially within that group because they themselves can't help but see themselves as fake. Like a sort of insecurity that happens to have terrible consequences given the circumstances.
A common experience for trans people before their transition is attempting to go "all-in" on their assigned gender. Before transition, Trans women will often start going to the gym, grow beards, bulk up maybe take testosterone increasing supplements etc. Transmen might go hyper feminine. Its almost a joke in the trans community because its so common. This does not typically work. Gender dysphoria is a bodily sensation of discomfort around primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Exaggerating those features generally intensifies dysphoria.
Transition is the treatment for dysphoria that does not desist in other ways. This is something that cisgender people often misunderstand about transition. The transition is the treatment.
Presumably going "all-in" is an obvious enough solution to (what we might call) pre-gender-dysphoria, where one is uncomfortable with their gender, but not sure they want to become transgender yet. I wonder what the success rate of this actually is, as the majority of those dealing with this internally might try, succeed, and never let anyone know they felt gender dysphoria in the first place (still somewhat embarrassing/socially isolating for the vast majority of people, even in the most progressive societies).
Also there are many people who choose to live with the (often extreme) internal discomfort of their dysphoria rather than the external discomfort of transitioning into a world where being transgender is a political football and can result in being ostracised. These cases are considered "successful" by many although they do not result in positive mental health outcomes in the long run. We also typically do not hear about these cases.
I don’t think this would work—at least not completely. All of this evidence is anecdotal but I know a number of trans people who tried these treatments for a variety of reasons. Obviously this is selected, and it could be that most of the people who try these treatments end up feeling fine as their birth gender, but it clearly doesn’t work 100% of the time. And fundamentally I believe in the right of people to modify their bodies, whether that’s tattoos, piercings, hair dye, plastic surgery, or hormones.
I don't think it's likely to work-- if a person is uncomfortable being male, a hormone treatment to make them more male would probably make them less comfortable.
Gender dysphoria might be treatable, but I think it would have to be better understood.
I'm not getting into the question of whether it should be treated, but I think some people would rather have effective treatment rather than transition.
But whether gender dysphoria should be treated as a mental illness is the central question. People who would accept the treatment you suggest are not the people we are mostly talking and thinking about in this debate.
We do treat it as a mental illness (if nothing else, those are magic words that make insurers pay out!) Transitioning is the best known treatment. Therefore, despite continuous opposition, this is what we do.
Romania had a Presidential election recently. Călin Georgescu, one of the top two candidates who would have advanced to the runoff, thinks the moon landing is a hoax. The Romanian Supreme Court has overturned the election and ordered a re-run, not because of that but because of (you guessed it) "Russian interference." Georgescu wasn't shy about his Russophilic views. People knew what they were getting.
The irony here is that the only people who will explicitly defend the notion that, "no, you don't need to just passively accept being ruled by morons because there are more of them than there are of you" are in the same part of the political spectrum as freaks like Georgescu. The world cries out for a Nietzschean centrism.
One thing that is not clear to me is whether the Russians are alleged to have interfered with the *election*, or with the *campaign*. I think that's critical.
If you run an election, and after the fact find out that someone hacked the voting machines to output their preferred result or whatnot, then a do-over may be the proper solution.
If you run an election, and after the fact find out that someone hired a bunch of people (or bots) to go on the internet and tell lies calculated to fool the voters into electing their preferred candidate, then how is that any different than what the candidates are doing already? I'm guessing Romania doesn't have a law disqualifying candidates who are found to have fibbed in their campaign advertisements.
"Hey, those foreign nogoodniks are lying to our voters! They can't do that! Only *domestic* nogoodniks are allowed to lie to our voters!". Not a convincing argument. You're going to be having nogoodniks lying to your voters regardless, and whatever measures you have to deal with lying nogoodniks should work about as well against the foreign version as the domestic. And it's not like the foreign ones are going to stop just because you say it's against the law; your laws don't apply in the country where they're telling the lies and your police won't be able to get at them.
Instead, the plan is to hold a new election, and the Russians won't "interfere" in this one, why exactly?
And here, the amount of questionable money spent (not counting whatever the situation is with the TikTok bots) was $381K, or $0.02 per capita. By comparison, Kamala spent $4.20 per capita during her losing campaign in the US. If you can "buy" an election so cheaply, it indicates there was a high level of resonance of Georgescu's vibe with that of the populace.
There is an interesting NYT article highlighting Georgescu's appeal in one town, where people say they would vote for Nicolae Ceausescu if he were alive and running. The actual situation appears to follow the recent pattern of populist right wing appeal in Europe due primarily to economic stagnation.
I suppose if they do, you can invalidate that election too. Rinse and repeat until they stop interfering (and you'll know when they've stopped because the voters will vote the correct way).
In Romanian presidential elections, the citizens vote in two rounds. In the first round, they can vote on all candidates: if any single candidate secures an outright majority in the first round, that candidate is declared the winner of the election and becomes president.
If none of the candidates achieve this, then a run-off is held between the two contenders with the top scores in the first round. The candidate who obtains the majority of votes in the run-off is then declared the winner.
This time, everyone expected Marcel Ciolacu (current PM, Social Democrat, left-wing) and Elena Lasconi (Save Romania Union, right-wing) to advance to the second round, with Ciolacu expected to win the second round with some margin.
Predictions for the second round are easier to make: both wings have diverse voters with a diverse set of preferred candidates in the first round, but in the second round the left wing voters rally around the left wing candidate and the right wing voters around the right wing candidate. So you only need to know which wing is larger to predict the next president.
Georgescu, not considered a major contender, barely registered in polls. He ran a very modest street campaign, and did not appear in any conventional media. His campaign was conducted almost entirely through social media, chiefly TikTok.
To the surprise of absolutely everybody, including Georgescu himself, his TikTok campaign was unexpectedly successful, and he ended up with nearly 23 percent of the vote. Since Lasconi edged out Ciolacu with 21 percent, she and Georgescu advanced to the second round. While Ciolacu was upset by this development (he thought that he had this election in his pocket), he couldn't do anything to change the result, which was in fact upheld by the courts at that time [1].
However, things soon changed. Presidential candidates must report their campaign expenses to the national electoral commission up till the eve of the election. Georgescu, lying blatantly, declared that he spent zero lei running his campaign. However, after becoming a frontrunner, the commission and other investigative agencies, including state intelligence services, uncovered over $400k spent on his campaign, far above the declared amount. They submitted the documents proving these to the Supreme Court. They also found evidence of Russian interference, but that's a separate matter.
According to Romanian law, given the documents entered into evidence, the Supreme Court faced pretty much only two allowed options: annul immediately or annul after the second round.
Delaying annulment until after the second round posed serious risks. On one hand, if Georgescu won the second round, "coup" accusations might actually gain traction. The vast majority of Romanians, even Georgescu voters, don't take this seriously now, and don't consider this a coup: cf. the lack of mass protests, etc., Romanians have some relatively recent practice with nipping dictatorship in the bud. OTOH if Lasconi won, as sitting president she might challenge the annulment, knowing she could beat Georgescu, but probably not Ciolacu's combined support.
Annulment before the second round avoided these complications. Legal procedures followed Romanian laws, leaving no electoral rights violated. So whose rights were violated? Everyone understood the election rules.
While Georgescu's rise through a TikTok-driven campaign is important and very surprising (nobody thought that TikTok could be sufficient to win a presidential first round), concerns about the annulment itself are ridiculous. Legal processes unfolded as expected, aligning with national electoral laws. As far as I can tell, the idea that this annulment is some major political upheaval exists largely in the head of Georgescu himself (who has a big incentive to make this a big deal, given that he's likely to face jail time over fraud for his campaign financing mishap) and in the imaginations of outside observers, primarily non-Europeans.
That all rests on the $381K in question being spent by Georgescu. Has that been established, or was that expenditure made by a third party without any control or knowledge by Georgescu?
The decision to annul massively inconveniences not just Georgescu, but also the Save Romania Union, one of the mainstream parties in parliament parliament, whose candidate had an unexpected shot at the presidency. Their MPs requested and got access to all the files presented to the court. Presumably, if there was reason to doubt, they would have made a big ruckus; they certainly had all the incentive in the world to do so. The evidence was good enough to convince them and the court.
REPER, recently requested that the files be made fully accessible to the public as well: this will take a while, though [1]. Until then, due to the aforementioned circumstances, my priors on this being falsified evidence are really quite low.
President of the reformist Save Romania Union (USR) party Elena Lasconi – who made it to the second round of the presidential elections beside pro-Russian candidate Calin Georgescu, has harshly and repeatedly criticised the Constitutional Court's decision to repeat the elections.
"The Romanian state trampled on democracy. God, the Romanian people, truth, and the law will prevail. You are leading the country into anarchy. We should have gone ahead with the vote," she said quickly after the Court's ruling. But she maintained the rhetoric, which was toned down by other USR representatives.
I explained above why Lasconi likely lost her best chance at the presidency due to this decision. She feels wronged and wanted the Supreme Court to take the other option (or preferably do nothing, which ironically _would_ have went against the constitution, unlike the current decision).
However, your question concerned whether it was proven that the Georgescu campaign wasn't financed independently, without Georgescu's involvement or knowledge. MPs from the Save Romania Union, Lasconi's party, were briefed on the evidence confirming this. Had they found credible reasons to doubt it, they would have spoken up. But both the Supreme Court and those MPs accepted the evidence: Lasconi or the Save Romania Union MPs certainly never made the case that the evidence itself might be fake or invalid.
One can remain skeptical, but doing so means having more doubt than those who have more information AND every incentive to scrutinize the case closely.
I asked about Lasconi because I hadn't heard she had agreed with the decision. Of course she is more impacted by it and less objective. I was just wondering if *she* was privy to additional evidence in maintaining her opposition to the annulment. I am interested in the lack of push back in general in Romania on this, though I certainly don't understand Romaninan political culture well enough to conclude much from that observation.
There are many very odd things about this incident. As far as I can tell, no one is suggesting the voting or tabulation of the votes was compromised, and the annulment rests on a crypto bro's $381K funding + TikTok bot accounts. It sets a very bad precedent, in my opinion, where even low level amounts of "interference" by third parties can serve as justification to invalidate electoral outcomes.
The timing is also suspicious, since round 2 voting had already started when that vote was canceled. Almost as if there was an assessment done based on early returns that Georgescu might win, at which point, incurring the cost of annulment seemed to be the better option from the perspective of those making the decision.
Voting at Romanian consulates was supposed to take place on Saturdays and Sundays, between 7am and 9pm, on the weekend of the election - this can still be found in many Romanian articles guiding people on how to vote.
I don't see an agency source, so I think the authors of the linked article were just mistaken. Or else, they're referring to vote-by-mail (but that's mixed and counted together with the general votes in Romania, so could not have been counted in any case).
People who're pro-Putin shouldn't be allowed to stand for election. Instead they should be charged with treason, and if found guilty the death penalty should be an option.
> that "execute anyone you disagree with" strategy doesn't actually work that well
That's not what I'm proposing. I'm proposing that anyone in league with an enemy be treated as a traitor. Because that's what they are. People would still enjoy the freedom to hold and disseminate a wide range of views, just not treasonous ones.
The purpose of this is to prevent Russia (or anyone else) from using hybrid warfare to subvert Europe.
You can define anyone as a traitor by defining any country, ideology or theology as an enemy. Decide that Israel is a problem and you can round up the Jews, declare
Iran a problem and you can round up the local Shia, accuse the pope of being disloyal and it’s time to hunt the Catholics.
This is common in history and it’s something that we should guard against.
I see by your flag you are a supporter of Scottish nationalism. As an Englishman I agree with right of Scotland to secede, largely because it could only increase the average jollity of the nation (where on Earth did anyone get the idea that the English are the gloomy or depressive people on this island?), but you know who also likes the idea of a rump UK. Putin, that’s who.
Of course he does. And he’s probably funding Scottish independence. As he did Brexit. If he’s not doing that, him or his agencies, then they or he are not doing their job. The west is doing the same kind of thing in Russia.
Now it may not have had a material effect on either referendum - although the people who claim that Russia didn’t influence Brexit materially say the opposite about the Scottish referendum, and vice versa.
However it’s generally accepted that Russia interfered in 2014. This from wiki
> According to the Intelligence and Security Committee Russia report, released on 21 July 2020, there is substantial evidence that Russian interference in the British economy and politics is commonplace; further to this, evidence was uncovered detailing interference in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum…
Which makes your philosophy suspect doesn’t it. By your own admission you are a stooge of Putin, a man who clearly benefits from a rump U.K. The course of action is obvious to you know, you must forthwith pop down to the local constabulary and taking whatever punishment you think traitors should receive. Extrajudicial shooting was it? I’m sorry for your future loss but be sure to denounce some fellow travellers on the way to the firing range, because Putinism must never win!
Only if those "outside observers" believe Russian disinformation. To all right-thinking people, executing the enemies of liberal democracy on trumped-up charges is good, actually. Paradox of tolerance, "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", etc.
Somehow, despite all the cruelty of the roman empire, the tolerant loving early Christians rose to the top. Somehow despite all sorts of people trying to be brutal dictators, liberal democracy mostly won.
I think liberalism is an effective strategy. You might not understand why it's effective. But it works.
I think part of the reason that it works is that there are a lot of vaguely liberal aligned people, who can all work together and get behind a generically inoffensive liberal governing system. Liberalism is a cooperation in an iterated prisoners dilemma.
> To all right-thinking people, executing the enemies of liberal democracy on trumped-up charges is good, actually.
Once the "execute people on trumped up charges" system is set up, the people who end up getting executed in practice are not the enemies of democracy, but the enemies of whoever is trumping up the charges.
> If it means anything, it means at least freedom from government enforced consequences.
I have never been in favour of complete freedom of speech. For a start, if you had it, you've legalised fraud. In practise in any society there has to be some speech that is banned, or society won't function very well.
> Somehow, despite all the cruelty of the roman empire, the tolerant loving early Christians rose to the top
Was the Roman Empire cruel? I'd argue that it was no more so than other contemporary societies.
As for Christians being tolerant, I'll note that when they got in power they persecuted the pagans much more zealously than the pagans had persecuted them.
Call it whatever you like. I call it Europe defending itself against its enemies, which include Putin's Russia.
What Europe needs to do is create a militarily powerful and cohesive superstate, so that no-one can successfully attack us, and then to open up membership of this alliance to people who have the same culture and/or values as us. https://pontifex.substack.com/p/european-defence-policy-how-europe for details.
I'd be interested to find out what these values are. As far as I can tell, every single country in Europe has abolished death penalty for every crime including treason, and they tend to have fairly restrictive definitions of treason at that. The exceptions are, interestingly, Russia and its satellite Belarus. So your proposal above involves making Europe considerably more Russia-like. Admittedly you've been pretty vague about what exactly you want to make a capital crime, so I can't tell exactly *how much* Russia-like.
I said in my previous article, which I linked to: "European ideas such as democracy and human rights".
I will note there is nothing in the declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen about banning the death penalty. And in a democracy, if most people want treason to carry the death penalty, then it must do so (or the country isn't a democracy).
What should be a capital crime? In a democracy the people decide.
Yeh, europe needs to shore up its defense. Al Queda are now our allies in Syria so we should bring them in to the new liberal defense against Russia pact. They fought the Russians after all and did a great job of it by all accounts - although detractors would say that was mostly sawing the heads of other Arabs and throwing civilians off cliffs. This detractors are Russian spies, obviously.
In any case the heroic rebels did win against the Russian fascists and we can find some use for them in the war against transphobes. Russiaphiles, and George Galloway. If I’m not repeating myself.
******
just as I write that last paragraph, here in my local, my college friend of 20 years came in, glanced at my post and said that the glorious anti fascists of HTS/Al Queda are also transphobic.
This was clear Russian propaganda so I took him out the back of the pub and shot him. New Liberal Europe has no time for fascist free speech.
I don't agree with executing people in general, and especially for holding wrong views. I do applaud your clear-sighted view of the destructive role Russia is - proudly, too - playing in Western Europe and the US. I only wish more powers that be understood this that clearly.
UPDATE: November data are in, and MoM inflation continues to drop, now to 2.4%, which is the lowest since July 2020.
That corresponds to an annualized rate of 32.9%, which is lower than any year since 2017. If MoM inflation starts dropping by only 5% a month, instead of the 20% it was dropping for most of the year, and the 11% in November, 2025 inflation would still end up being just 23.3% which would be the lowest since 2013.
The poverty rate also dropped again, having been dropping continuously since February.
JPMorgan's EMBI risk index for Argentina also continues to drop and it's at its lowest level since early 2019.
I've been keeping an eye on the informal market vs official value of the peso, which seems like a good real time indicator of economic management and expectations around the economy / inflation (if people are confident, they'll take dollar savings and convert to peso). https://bluedollar.net/ The gap seems to have considerably narrowed in recent weeks.
Per this Bloomberg article: https://archive.is/ESHHH, forecasters predict real GDP growth in 2025 to be about 3.6% after a contraction of about 3.6% this year.
Thanks! I did read it back when it was published and it was very helpful. I'll give it another read to see if I can read today's tea leaves using the same methods.
I've seen piecemeal reports and commentary once or twice a month, so "how recent" is the question. Basically all the econ writers are keeping tabs, and sometimes link to said "low-level" accounts on X or whatever.
Could the slight dip in mortality for moderate alcohol drinkers be partially explained by the fact that alcohol tends to make people more “social”, perhaps leading to improved relationships and less loneliness? After all, loneliness is definitely associated with mortality.
I drink very little alcohol, mainly because I strongly dislike the taste, and am normally a rather reserved person. But I've noticed that when I do drink, I become much more open and outgoing and find it much easier to hold conversations. I've thought that maybe because of this, I should make an active effort to drink more in social settings.
This is one of those debates where I'm confused about why we are having it. If the health risks of low-to-moderate alcohol consumption are so small that we are debating whether or not they even exist, then it seems trivially obvious to me that if you're someone who enjoys drinking alcohol (as many do) that the enjoyment will vastly outweigh the health risks, even if they are real. And if you don't enjoy drinking alcohol, well...then probably stop? Even if the very moderate proposed health *benefits* are real, they seem unlikely to outweigh the pure monetary cost of drinking (in my opinion).
There is always risk that if you begin, you would not be able stay on moderate level. I mean, I am moderate drinker and I know I have to watch myself carefully.
Cremieux argues that the seemingly positive effects of wine consumption are merely the result of confounding and that the actual causal impact is negative.
Cremieux was only making the (excellent) point that alcohol consumption during pregnancy can be harmful. (Although data has shown that women who drink wine moderately during pregnancy have kids who turn out well, there's a confound here between social class and wine consumption. Drinking any alcohol during pregnancy increases risk of adverse outcomes.) As for people who aren't pregnant, the data favors the view that light alcohol consumption is not harmful, and may have slight health benefits.
The first tweet is about the effect of drinking on health in general - not on pregnancy, in particular.
To quote it:
>Clearly people who ... never drink do worse than the people who drink a bit. And when people start drinking even more than a bit, they look a little better...
>The problem with the conventional analysis is that selection is at play...
>It would be unethical to run human experiments to figure out what alcohol does, so, how can we know what alcohol does to health?
>With a clever little method called Mendelian Randomization, or MR. MR is basically an answer to the question What if I used genes as instrumental variables?...
>So putting this wonderful genetic predictor to use, we can finally see what alcohol actually does.
>Well, the effect of the unconfounded difference in alcohol consumption is that, when it comes to heart health, alcohol doesn't seem to do much, rather than being a bit protective.
>But the heart isn't everything. There's certainly more!
>Alcohol did increase risk for ischemic stroke, intracerebral hemorrhage, and total strokes.
>Not only that, but in another study using a similar method, alcohol increased hypertension, blood pressure, waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio, fasting blood glucose, and triglycerides. But, consistent with these results, in that paper it didn't seem to have a significant effect on cardiovascular disease or coronary heart disease, and it both increased HDL and decreased LDL.
>In aggregate, alcohol is likely to be bad for your health at any level, but selection into disuse means the downsides have been hidden in traditional analyses. And even if alcohol doesn't negatively impact heart health on its own, the fact that it's not protective and it increases other risks means it's risky on net.
Good point(s), but MR is limited as an instrumental variable in this context, because it doesn't justify precise, real-world statements about dose-response relationships. Genes don't determine exactly how much a person drinks. But exactness is needed here, because the debate isn't about drinking in general - it's about the effects of low levels of alcohol consumption. MR isn't correlated strongly enough with actual drinking behavior to justify distinctions between, say, zero vs. one or two drinks per week. As I've explained in a couple of posts, the data suggests that sufficiently low levels of drinking would be benign or perhaps healthful, on net.
(We always need that "perhaps", because observational studies can't measure drinking behavior over time very precisely. This includes studies used to justify MR.)
(BTW, there seems to be an error in the tweet: RCTs with human have been conducted in which the experimental group is instructed to drink for a period of weeks.)
But when the so-called J-shaped curve shows up in self-report surveys, and NOT in MR data (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38508868/), we should be more inclined to think that -- like many other famous examples in nutritional epidemiology -- there is unmeasured confounding in the self-report data. Genes explaining a small percentage of the variance is not a reason to discount MR results; it just means you need a larger sample size to get good results. The same is true for MR studies on blood pressure and cholesterol: the genes are imprecise and explain a small percentage of the total variance in BP/Ch.But they find the same results as RCTs on blood pressure and cholesterol lowering drugs.
I think the last part of what you wrote is very persuasive - whenever we see convergence between MR studies and RCTs, the results should be considered more credible. But here's one of the problems with the alcohol data: The MR approach is validated by relating genotypic patterns to actual consumption, but actual consumption is crudely measured (e.g., by asking people once every few years to describe their drinking behavior during the prior week). Even though MR data and self-reported consumption are sometimes found to be moderately strongly correlated, the crudity of the alcohol measures is one reason not to trust highly specific dose-response statements. In particular, we should be highly skeptical of recent MR-based claims that the J-shaped curve is actually more of a straight line, because the inflection point occurs at very low levels of consumption (like one drink per day, or even a little less, depending on study). Larger samples might help, as you say, but not necessarily.
I've written about this (but I promise not to add a hyperlink). There's a scientific debate about whether the lowest levels of alcohol consumption are harmful, benign, or healthful. The major health organizations take sides on this debate - e.g., the WHO claims there's no safe level of alcohol consumption, while American agencies (HHS, CDC, etc.) claim that low levels are safe. I believe the best and most plentiful evidence favors the benign/healthful view. Perhaps this is because light drinking increases sociability, as you said. Perhaps it's because light drinking reduces stress levels, and the health benefits of lower stress offset any harmful effects of the alcohol. Identifying exactly how much drinking is benign or healthful is super difficult though, because the measurement of drinking behavior in longitudinal studies is so crude (e.g., people are asked once every few years to describe their weekly alcohol consumption.)
I looked at the CDC website, where they say “Moderate drinking increases health risks compared to not drinking” and “Some past studies had suggested that moderate drinking might be good for your health. But scientists highly debate these findings. More studies now show that there aren't health benefits of moderate drinking compared to not drinking.”
That seems to agree with what you describe as the WHO position, or at least it doesn’t contradict it (maybe they disagree on the threshold of “safe”?)
Here's the difference: In 2023, the WHO revised their official position to state that there's no safe level of alcohol consumption. The CDC is more tolerant, because they recommend specific limits (two drinks per day for men, one per day for women) and indicate that drinking less should not be harmful. (At the same time, hedging their bets somewhat, they also use the vague phrase "drinking less is better for your health than drinking more". )
Yep, I suppose this is the traditional explanation for the mortality dip. I'm sure it's also a factor, but I wonder how much my point might contribute as well.
It's within the realm of possibility that there's some correlation, but I definitely haven't observed that people with intact social circles are unlikely to have excessive alcohol consumption. At least in younger people, I'd be very surprised if the correlation ran in that direction.
You sometimes hear about understanding and treatment for certain neglected diseases being pushed forwards by an individual who has taken a particular interest in it.
I would like to see this to happen with Peyronie’s disease. What can I do to nudge this outcome?
These case studies need to be replicated in large trials if this is ever to become the standard of care. Phosphodiesterase Type 5 inhibitors have also shown some promise. Same point.
Nobody will do a "large clinical trial", as usual nobody cares.
Also it is extremely likely to work, large trials are mostly only needed to reveal weak effects that are otherwise hidden by statistical variance and cofounders.
In that sense the culture of large trials as the only bearer of truth is 1) scientific obscurantism and 2) an admission of failure, as if the drug you test require a large sample to show an effect then it's already a testament of the weakness of your drug.
Case studies of random people acutely cured to an incurable disease are much more potent epistemologically than most large RCTs.
If I become the first human to live >120 years my n=1 will suffice to revolutionize mankind.
Any people with peyronie should test this and report back in a decentralized phase IV trial way, as antioxidants are both cheap and benign. However nobody will report back because of 1) ignorance and 2) of the gatekeeping of forever waiting for inexistant trials, a self fulfililng prophecy where nobody ever attempt to reproduce the science despite being an availability of countless miserable sufferers
Uhhh if anyone else is thinking of googling this on a work computer a word of warning, Peyronie's disease is one of Penile Curvature and Wikipedia has several medically accurate pictures of waist down, real-life sufferers.
SO. This will be a tough disease to throw gala banquets with glossy brochures and a celebrity spokesman willing to stand before all and declare that yes, he too suffers from a curvature approaching 30° to the right. Yeah...this might be a case where you'd have better luck lobbying the NIH to fund more urological research or something...
I feel like you posted bentham’s shrimp argument as a joke but I found it compelling enough to throw some bucks their way (and none of the others listed did it for me).
It was the image of the lecture hall of shrimp that put me over. How can you not help that whole lecture hall for $0.20?
As someone pointed out on that post, that's a lecture hall full of corpses. Live shrimp are translucent/greyish-blue. They're only pink if they're cooked. So that not's a lecture hall, it's a buffet table 😁
Good job! I doubt it was a joke. It’s impossible to know for sure which animals suffer the most so we (should) place our bets according to the best reasoning and evidence we have.
What uncommon but commercially available/easy to implement interior design flairs have you seen and liked?
Ideally possible in a 2B city midrise condo
Two specific ideas am mulling over:
1) a 3d implying mural on a wall would be cool, but I know they peel eventually. Is there a way to get a hyperthin wooden panel, screw that to the wall, and put it on that?
2) I kinda want a ai generated poster of the theme 'evil person in history, but ridiculed by alteration', one of the big 10 as a cat or Mario or whatever, anyone seen a particularly good one?
When I younger, I remember being constantly nagged from my dentist about flossing. Granted, I was a very inconsistent flosser, but this was in fact the worst part for me about going to the dentist was them asking me if I flossed, my ashamed answer that I didn't, and their lecture to me about how important it was that I do so. This was so impactful to me that when I finished my orthodontic work at the end of college and no longer had that hanging over me, I completely stopped going to the dentist for about 12 years.
Then I got married, and my wife convinced me that part of being a responsible adult is to get one's biannual dental cleaning, and she persuaded me to get back in the habit of boing to the dentist. And I was somewhat shocked to find that I'm no longer nagged about flossing. I am somewhat better at it now than I was when I was younger, but I'm hardly consistent with it. My question is whether standard practice in dentistry has changed? Was there a recognition that nagging about flossing is an emotional barrier to people seeing their dentists and that the value of seeing one's dentist for a cleaning is greater (perhaps to the patient, but certainly to the dentist!) than the expected value of nagging the patient about flossing?
I was in a very similar situation. Had all sorts of issues from not going to the dentist and not flossing for a long time (strangely, no cavities though.... they asked "you must not have much of a sweet tooth?", which is the complete opposite of the truth, weirdly). Anyway, even after spending thousands at the dentist/oral surgeon to get various issues fixed, I knew I still wasn't gonna floss, because I freaking hate it with a fiery passion. BUT, then a miracle! I started using a waterpick every day (the kind you can get for cheap at any CVS/walgreens whatever) and it's been great. The dentist I go to says it's just as good, if not better, than flossing. Maybe it's true, maybe they're just blowing smoke up my ass thinking it's better than nothing, but the last few years of twice-a-year dental visits and regular waterpicking has seemed to eliminate all issues. I highly recommend one if you're a better-dead-than-floss guy like me.
Incidentally, my wife is a regular flosser and doesn't like the waterpick, says it's too hard on her gums. Whatever, her loss.
2nd this, waterpicks are great. Tell your wife to try it on a lower pressure setting, it doesn't need to be set to the max to be effective. My hygienist told me that the max setting can be too powerful for some people.
I don't agree with your viewpoint. My dentists and dental hygienists seem to feel no qualms about lecturing me all the time about flossing. I've had some very uncomfortable experiences at the dentist over my adult life. However, it varies by dental practice. Some places are nicer, because some people are nicer.
I think people feel comfortable lecturing children but not adults. Also, they may figure (correctly) that you've "heard the good word" on flossing already and that further evangelizing will just turn you off.
I am your mirror image - I dislike going to the doctor, of any sort, except my enforced visits to the optometrist. Thus I too have avoided the dentist (and doctors altogether; I got the shingles shot at CVS) for a dozen years and more. But in my case I very much believe in flossing, and floss every two or three days. I think with flossing you can be your own dentist, to a great extent, and that it's important to get the spaces between teeth clean, so as not to foster bacteria. I am perhaps helped somewhat by my teeth not being crowded, having had several removed by an old-school orthodontist (those bands jammed onto the teeth) 4 decades ago.
It seems to me people who don't care for their teeth, lose their teeth - and this was a lot more common before dentistry (or self-dentistry, in my case :-)).
While my dental *hygienists* mildly nag me about flossing and insist on doing it in the office, my two recent *dentists* - the one who retired, and the young one who replaced him - both acknowledge that there's indeed totally untested bullshit in dentistry. They've both said that genes + diet seem to be the determining factors in dental health; having naturally good teeth and/or oral bacterium plus not constantly bathing teeth in sugar produces terrific results even if someone skips flossing. My retired dentist added that Oral-B's electric toothbrushes (the ones that spin rather than go back and forth) were a real game-changer and, used at the correct angles, could replace most flossing action.
I totally ignore flossing and my teeth - even the baby tooth which never got replaced - are going strong. If your teeth were fine after 12 years of avoiding the dentist, you can likely ignore flossing, too.
Some of my relative like their electric toothbrushes. I’m too lazy/cheap for household items with batteries myself. But also, I don’t understand why people think they can’t brush their teeth manually in that rotary fashion? I always brush in circles.
No, decent electric toothbrushes stand on a little charging port which plugs into a standard wall socket. You just replace the brush head once a season. These electric brushes have sensors which light up if you're pressing too hard, and timers so that you can ensure you've brushed long enough.
My mom and I bought a two-pack together at Costco, and we've been using our respective brushes for 12+ years. Mine is only now starting to go a little wonky and I'm thinking of replacing it.
Although - given that I bought it at Costco - I could theoretically return it, hahahah:
If you're a lazy person then I strongly recommend an electric toothbrush! Saves dozens yes, DOZENS of calories by not having to move your hand and wrist up and down in oblong circles, merely glide along as the lovely wee electric motor does its work.
Also apparently better for gum health, which is the reason I got mine about a decade ago
I think my laziness manifests differently than yours!
I like to use my hands.
I don't like to shop, to add to the list of things that have to regularly be purchased at the store. I don't like a lot of ... stuff around. I don't like trying to figure out if I should recycle batteries, and then remember that that's not actually a thing anymore.
The gum health thing is probably most persuasive. My mother uses that kind of toothbrush and was told she had periodontal disease long ago. She even had that procedure where they graft skin onto your gums. Thereafter for quite some years, she went to the periodontist even just for her (presumably pricier) cleanings. Because she was told to.
There's never been any mention of the periodontal disease since that time forty years ago. She goes to the regular dentist, which is nice for her because she used to carpool him to school. People like these old friendships.
I too was told once, circa 1988, that I had receding gums aka "periodontal disease". Maybe I too would someday have to get these grafts. In the meantime, I was urged to floss.
This disease must be progressing very slowly. But if I notice any change in those gums, I'll get one of those toothbrushes for sure.
I mean, sure, teeth and gums are part of a total system. I ignore flossing and my teeth *and* gums are fine, even though I had a 10+ year gap in dental insurance and didn't see a dentist once.
That's anecdotal of course, but there's no large scale long-term evidence that not flossing is a likely path to gum disease, especially if someone is using circular-action electric toothbrushes and especially-especially if someone is using flossing alternatives like waterpiks.
The hostility to flossing (fuck The Atlantic, the subtle damage this publication is doing to the fabric of our society is probably less than that wrought by the NYT, but that's quite a low bar to clear) is baffling to me. It's a very low-cost intervention that may not be necessary for everyone, but for those who need it it makes a huge difference, and we don't have a screening mechanism.
Whatever your objection to The Atlantic, there is still no long-term evidence about flossing. It's over the top to say that it's *necessary,* particularly if one is doing it wrong. And doing it wrong can make things worse!
I've had two dentists express that they're impressed with my teeth and they were both completely indifferent about whether or not I'm flossing, since I'm doing other stuff. If the OP wants to use a waterpick instead of flossing, there's no reason not to. If he has good genes and doesn't consume a lot of sugary drinks, he might not even need to do that much.
There's "still no long-term evidence about flossing" because, as the UTK link states, "the research supporting daily flossing was weak because of lack of participants or long-term studies". In other words, there's no evidence because nobody looked. And yes, one can floss too much, this is the same kind of thing as "one can exercise too much", not the problem for the vast majority of the population, quite the opposite in fact.
Water pick is fine, and electric toothbrushes really help too.
I didn't read the whole of it, but the article centered on a dentist who urged a lot of possibly unnecessary procedures on his patients. It seemed pretty much the opposite of the extremely low-tech and essentially free way to care for your own teeth, that is flossing.
Yeah, and this is a good illustration why I despise the rag. They bill it as an explosive expose of the industry, and then use niche cases of unscrupulous or incompetent doctors as an illustration. Meanwhile everywhere the headline is what gets attention, and now "dental care is fraud" becomes the meme.
Meanwhile all we need is to look at middle-aged people who have access to routine dental care and compare their grins to those who don't. Tell a poor Appalachian man in his 40's who's missing several teeth that dentistry is fraud.
Well, the sad part is that he may actually believe it.
Re. Israel/Palestine: I'm trying to find a hard to fake signal moderates on the two sides can send to each other, or make a long term resolution less violent at the margin, that will still achieve 'justice'.
My 'idea' is a land/citizenship swap. I could (either become a citizen of Israel, or find someone to do this on my behalf) identify settlement land, either in Gaza (if/when the settler projects begin in northern Gaza, hopefully never) or the West Bank that will be most inconvenient if Israelis live there when it comes to negotiating borders, buy it (hopefully not too expensive), and sign a contract that says 'only Palestinians who renounce violence can live there, and I approve of' and then find a moderate in West Bank who feels Israel has been mistreating them to live there. And, in return I would want either someone to sponsor a refugee in Lebanon/Syria/Jordan to renounce refugee status and get integrated (or just have 10 people who long since emigrated but are still on the unwra refugee list for corruption/political reasons but don't consider themselves Palestinian and wouldn't move back if a full right of return became a thing to take themselves off it), or a Palestinian to not sell similar land to a Jew because they'd be killed for that, but...something. Maybe get a marginal Palestinian in East Jerusalem to accept Israeli citizenship.
Assume my personal interest is moderate, budget is 50k.
Can anyone familiar with the laws/frameworks in the region tell me if this is at all viable, and what the most practical implementation of this 'motivation' would be?
"sign a contract that says 'only Palestinians who renounce violence can live there, and I approve of' and then find a moderate in West Bank who feels Israel has been mistreating them to live there"
I doubt it's legal under Israeli law that West Bank Palestinians can live in Israeli settlements with an Israeli "sponsor". IIRC West Bank residents can't even move to Israel if they marry an Arab Israeli (i.e. Arab with Israeli citizenship living in pre-67 Israel) so why would you selling them land do the trick?
"in return I would want either someone to sponsor a refugee in Lebanon/Syria/Jordan to renounce refugee status and get integrated"
I this happened at a large scale, then every West Bank Palestinian would be living in Israeli settlements (with the accompanying demographic threat Israel is worried about) long before every Palestinian in those other countries renounced refugee status, so I'm not sure what this would achieve.
"Assume my personal interest is moderate, budget is 50k. "
General point but I think that a lot of "pay the Palestinians to accept Israel taking the land" type of arguments don't in fact offer up enough money to make this a fair trade, even if you leave aside sentimentality.
Hm, that makes sense. Let's say I believe that the status quo is A) 'israel at great reputational and moderate financial cost achieves basically complete military victory over iran(+allies) and gaza/west bank', that B) 'if literally anyone in the arab world could offer them long term security and renounce right of return, there is the political will to do basically anything for that, including getting rid of netanyahu, partially dismantling settlements in west bank, withdrawing from gaza completely', and that C) 'arab world because of self-serving propaganda by various actors believes neither A nor B with high conviction, probably isn't capable of giving up right of return unless it updates hard in favor of A'.
Is there any way I can credibly send the signal B in a way that's visible to some moderate subset of the arab (ideally palestinian) world, without making A less likely?
Ideally with also the effect of having some minimal not cost-effective positive effect on justice, as defined by both israelis and arabs.
I don't know what signal you're trying to send. B is a statement about the state of political opinion in Israel. What does it mean for you to "credibly" send it? People can read the state of political views in Israel directly, what does you sending a signal add?
There's also a much larger signal *against* B, namely, Netanyahu has been Prime Minister almost continuously since 2009 - not only the longest serving in Israel's history, but if not for a ~1 year period when he was temporarily out of power, perhaps the longest currently serving elected (in free and fair elections) head of government in the world.
And Netanyahu is against giving up any settlements.
And even his main rival, Benny Gantz, is against giving up any settlements!
Arabs don't speak Hebrew or English or consume Israeli media. If they did they would have vastly different opinions about Jews. Ditto for the Israelis. Yes, Netanyahu doesn't want peace, he thinks he can divide the Palestinians, and we can debate if his primary goal is to prevent them from organizing effectively to destroy Israel, or build settlements, that's a hot topic that would require more good faith than we have.
Mainstream Israeli opinion has coalesced to 'arabs are militantly opposed to any self governing Jews in this region, if peace was possible we would bend over backwards to make painful concessions, absent that possibility, the hope for which we lost in the second intifada, we are stuck in a horrible situation where military security through strength is our only option, which is morally and financially expensive'. The Arab world totally is unaware of this, in general.
I'm trying to figure out if there's a cost efficient way to send a truth signal as to the tradeoffs Israeli society is willing to make, and in the process reward some individual Arab moderate that is willing to permanently give up trying to overthrow the Israeli state, and indicate that maybe some second person could also make that trade (but not with me, I have few resources) and so on.
I think you're overestimating the degree to which raw information transfer corresponds to viewpoint shifts.
If someone has a goal of finding truth, then generally, any additional information helps.
But that's understandably quite a rare goal in and of itself. Why would anyone want that? People generally have much more understandable direct goals like seeking social approval.
In discussing the findings of public choice theory, Bryan Caplan notes that individual voters aren't incentivized to vote for things that would actually benefit them, since the impact of an individual vote is basically zero. Instead, they're rationally incentivized to vote irrationally to gain social approval from their peers, and the like.
The fact that Scott Alexander had to propose the writing of guides with rational suggestions for voters speaks to the general complete lack of demand for such a thing. Election spending is on the order of tens of billions of dollars, but the idea of providing a guide collating basic facts about candidates with arguments for whom to vote is treated as an esoteric proposal.
Inasmuch as individual votes have little direct impact on outcomes, having political views aligned with reality has even less impact, and per the incentives, most people don't.
This is broadly true in many arenas. To a large degree most people don't value abstract truth nearly as much as they value the direct effects of adopting particular positions, like social desirability, so the limiting factor in the search for truth is rarely the availability of raw information.
In a similar vein, in reviewing the book 1984, Asimov noted that the plot's emphasis on deliberate destruction of information in order to manipulate the public overstates the the connection between the two, in reality:
>This Orwellian preoccupation with the minutiae of 'historical proof' is typical of the political sectarian who is always quoting what has been said and done in the past to prove a point to someone on the other side who is always quoting something to the opposite effect that has been said and done.
> As any politician knows, no evidence of any kind is ever required. It is only necessary to make a statement - any statement - forcefully enough to have an audience believe it. No one will check the lie against the facts, and, if they do, they will disbelieve the facts...
> To be sure, the Soviets put out new editions of their Encyclopaedia ... and this is no doubt the germ of the Orwellian notion, but the chances of carrying it as far as is described in 1984 seem to me to be nil - not because it is beyond human wickedness, but because it is totally unnecessary.
This is true in the US and other parts of the world, including the Middle East.
The widespread false beliefs that people there have about so much don't seem to be the result of limited access to information, but of limited interest in abstract truth. If anything, the former is a result of the latter, as media and other groups there have little incentive, indeed, negative incentive, to provide truthful information.
Not only would factual information hardly deter them, actual experiences that contradict views that it's convenient for them to hold make little difference either.
E.g. in Lebanon, from what I can see, the pro Hezbollah segment of the population, and even the both-sideser anti-Hezb anti-Israel contingency agree that Israel cares little for the lives of civilians, is happy to kill 50 civilians for one militant, bombs indiscriminately, and even specifically targets civilians.
Israel would regularly announce that particular buildings would be struck and that people needed to evacuate a 500 meter radius from them.
When they'd do so, crowds would frequently assemble near the buildings to film the explosions with their phones, seemingly well within 500 meters.
Their behavior speaks to a high level of trust in the integrity and competence of the Israeli military. They show no concern, for example, that a plane will see the crowd of them and choose to drop an extra bomb on them.
This is particularly telling given that these strikes tended to be concentrated in pro-Hezb neighborhoods and cities.
Even in those areas, their actual experience and their resultant behavior was one of Israel displaying behavior completely at odds with their expressed beliefs about Israel.
This all makes sense based on what I've said. When it comes to airstrikes, they're incentivized to get cool videos, so they have no incentive in believing false things about Israel.
But in general, their incentives don't align with seeking accurate information about Israel.
This all goes for the Palestinians, too. Sure, completely false, indeed, delusional beliefs about Israel abound. But the issue isn't the language barrier, but the incentive barrier.
Is it your contention that even if the expectation of Palestinians that they will destroy Israel and get their land back dropped to 0, the psychological cost of turning paper losses into realized losses by accepting their first political defeat in renouncing struggle against the continued existence of Israel would be worth more to them than the benefit of peace?
"Arabs don't speak Hebrew or English or consume Israeli media. If they did they would have vastly different opinions about Jews."
The idea is that if Arabs did read that media they'd view Israelis as more likely to compromise? I do read English media and I don't think Israel is willing to withdraw from the settlements. My evidence as I said is that both Netanyahu and his main opponent said they are against withdrawing from settlements.
There's probably nothing that you could say to change *my* mind (absent e.g. referring to some statement of Israel's leaders of which I'm unaware) much less a person in the Arab world who doesn't read English media.
Of course if I'm wrong about Israel's leaders and they are willing to withdraw from settlements (or if they change their minds) - rather than you, *Israel's leaders* could change my mind - by proposing a deal on that basis.
(also can substitute in for settlements in the above, a few other contentious points)
In either case, still not clear what you sending a signal adds.
Netanyahu generally always believed, and October 7th has radicalized society to believe this as well (chunks of the left used not to) that any place you withdraw from and give a state will be used primarily to build offensive capability to destroy Israel, not a functioning state prioritizing welfare of its people. Gaza was proof of this but it wasn't until the invasion that public became aware of just how wealthy a place it was (they thought it was a slum, basically) and just how many billions were redirected towards tunnel networks/weapon stashes, etc. They thought it had way less resources, and a much smaller portion of that was spent over last 16 years preparing for the current war.
The West Bank is especially dangerous to withdraw from, unlike Gaza, because of reasons of geography. It's on high ground within shoulder rocket range of major population centers. As soon as you withdraw from there, you will have to reinvade at high cost within a week. Everyone recognizes this.
Israelis don't think peace is possible, so they are focused on maintaining security through military capability differentials.
The signal I am trying to send is the truthful one, that Arabs who don't actually know Hebrew and are immersed in Israeli politics (the median of the two million Arab Israelis know this fine) are strongly confident is not true, which is that all Israelis prioritize security, and a significant minority care about continued land expansion, and that because of coalitional politics and because basically no one believes settlements are *the* issue (most people object heavily on moral grounds, and because it looks bad politically, but they don't think that absent settlements Arabs would have any different goals) they continue as a path of least resistance.
I also know that any Arabs in Gaza who would protest armed resistance are killed or tortured in some order, and in West Bank are shunned as collaborators.
Just as moderate Israelis hear the terrorists too loud in their head to publicly offer peace, the moderate Arabs also hear the terrorists too loud to offer it.
I'm trying to identify some means of sending this signal, and in the process improve the life of some individual Palestinian Arab who receives it.
Right now there's no deal Israelis can offer because what they would want in exchange for painful concessions is an expectation of minimal future violence, and there is no Arab entity capable and interested of offering that. The people in Gaza at this point don't support Hamas anymore (in a major shift from before Oct 7), shellshock of war is too horrible and they see how it steals all the aid to resell it and doesn't let any civilians hide in the tunnels. West Bank and diaspora is in same place Palestinian 'cause' has been last 100 years, opposed to any Jewish rule anywhere in that land on aggregate, and willing to support armed resistance from any relative position of power due to honor culture, racism, an attachment to land they were unjustly deprived of, religion, and the perception that with a billion Muslims in the area on their side how could they possibly ever not win eventually.
“I’d be surprised if we got to heaven, asked God what the highest [moral] impact thing that we could have done is, and his answer was ‘oh, something very normal and within the Overton window.’”
I was going to say I would be very surprised if God cared that much about shrimp, but He must do with the prohibition on eating shellfish in the Old Testament!
Leviticus 11:9–12
9 ‘These you may eat, whatever is in the water: all that have fins and scales, those in the water, in the seas or in the rivers, you may eat.
10 ‘But whatever is in the seas and in the rivers that does not have fins and scales among all the teeming life of the water, and among all the living creatures that are in the water, they are detestable things to you,
11 and they shall be abhorrent to you; you may not eat of their flesh, and their carcasses you shall detest.
12 ‘Whatever in the water does not have fins and scales is abhorrent to you.'
But oh no, Bentham's Bulldog, now you have demolished the Shellfish Argument! You know, the one that gets reliably trotted out about religious opposition to homosexualty: "oh, but do you wear poly-cotton blend clothing and eat shrimp? if you do, you're a sinner!"
God *does* mean it about shrimp, and He *does* mean it about gay sex is the answer to the question posed here 😁
"Leviticus says not to eat shellfish (Lev. 11:9-12), use mixed seed or fabrics (Lev. 19:19), harvest the corners of fields (Lev. 19:9), and that homosexuality is wrong (Lev. 18:22; 20:13). If homosexuality is wrong because Leviticus says so, then shouldn’t we also obey the other laws about shellfish, seed, fabrics, and fields because that is in Leviticus as well? If not, then why not? Why would Christians pick and choose what parts of the Bible to follow?"
"I’m interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. She’s a Georgetown sophomore, speaks fluent Italian, always cleared the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be? While thinking about that, can I ask another? My chief of staff Leo McGarry insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly says he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or is it okay to call the police?
Here’s one that’s really important, because we’ve got a lot of sports fans in this town. Touching the skin of a dead pig makes one unclean, Leviticus 11:7. If they promise to wear gloves, can the Washington Redskins still play football? Can Notre Dame? Can West Point? Does the whole town really have to be together to stone my brother John for planting different crops side by side? Can I burn my mother in a small family gathering for wearing garments made from two different threads [according to Deuteronomy 22:9-11]?"
"She’s a Georgetown sophomore, speaks fluent Italian, always cleared the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be?"
I'd suggest some form of second price auction to determine that rather than asking folks on the Internet. Probably set a reserve price to avoid regret if you feel that the folks bidding might not appreciate her as much as you do.
Hi, Jed, I'm glad to speak to you again on religious topics because at our last encounter on this matter, I excoriated you as a hypocritical son-of-a-bitch whining about how it wasn't fair that God cheated you by (lemme see here) killing your old school teacher in a car accident? Because she was the first person who kissed your ass about how genius you were? And you did the toddler foot-stamping over "it not fair! it not fair! me want!" before the crucifix? Ah, good times, good times!
With these new set of queries, absolutely yes to each and every one of them! You are entitled to kill your daughter, depending on what state you live in, up to 24 weeks to any stage of pregnancy; just because she made it out of the womb is no reason for her to think she's free of your authority to dispose of her however you wish for your own convenience:
And we all know of course that as a good liberal and Democrat (but I repeat myself), you are a total devotee of Moloch when it comes to baby killing, so a little selling your daughter into slavery but permitting her to live shouldn't turn a hair for you.
If you're his boss, you can do what you want to Leo. Just clarify which Sabbath he is breaking, and make sure you stick to that. You already expect to own him body and soul anyway as your Chief of Staff, so you can dispose of his life as you see fit.
Are footballs still made out of animal leather these days? I think they're all artificial materials now.
Planting different crops may be a criminal offence, you can leave it up to the local government to stone your brother. If Monsanto can sue his ass for mixing varieties, and the World Trade Organisation is concerned over illegal practices in the seed trade, why not go the whole hog on penalties?
"However, a concerning rise in illegal seed practices threatens global food security, the livelihood of farmers and trust in a professional seed industry. Furthermore, illegal practices impact worker safety, and illegal work practices can violate labour laws. Sometimes such occurrences are also associated with other forms of illegal activities, such as tax evasion and the circulation of fraudulent crop inputs (e.g. fake crop protection products and seed treatments).
Seeds are unlike other agricultural inputs. Seeds have great economic value derived from the high investment in R&D required to breed them and the innovation they embody, as well as their societal value to farmers and food systems (IHS Markit, 2019). At the same time, seeds – and the plants grown from them – are self-reproducing material, which makes them easy to copy and thus vulnerable to intellectual property infringements and other illegal practices. Therefore, seeds require intellectual property protection, which is mostly provided through plant breeder’s rights (PBRs), and breeders must apply for such protection as a first line of defence against infringement."
Your relationship with your mother is your own affair, but if she's as annoyingly preachy as you, I can well believe a small family gathering would be only too happy to burn her.
"Are footballs still made out of animal leather these days? I think they're all artificial materials now."
From the NFL Rule Book: "The ball shall be made up of an inflated (12½ to 13½ pounds) urethane bladder enclosed in a pebble grained, leather case (natural tan color) without corrugations of any kind."
It's different. I commend Bulldog for trying, but I found it unconvincing. Then again, I'm not the audience he's going for. When he's speaking about his own personal conversion (if that's how he'd describe it) it's much more relatable.
I can only remember that when I read it, I thought it was worth checking out considering the source was a highly unconventional thinker likely to offer something novel, and while I didn't expect to be convinced, I was disappointed relative to my expectations.
Also, how all of these compare to their quality of life and lifespan in the natural world. Is agriculture and aquaculture a negligible or significant part of arthropod suffering?
Add in field mice and other small rodents. Google is all over the place, but I'm seeing estimates of 15-100 rodents killed per acre of farmed land.
There are 47.5 million acres of wheat harvested in the US alone. Using the lower number of rodents per acre, in the US and for wheat only, that's over 700 million killed per year. Insects should be far higher, by any reasonable estimate. Some Googled website is saying 3.5 quadrillion insects are killed by US farmers using pesticides yearly.
Yeah, I'm wondering whether it would make more sense to lobby for more humane pesticides instead of focusing on shrimp farming. But I assume people have already looked into that.
I've never posted a puzzle before, so apologies if this is too hard, too easy, or suboptimally presented.
Of the following three hands,
♠ Q 4 ♥ J 10 ♦ 9 3 ♣ K 8 3
♠ 8 5 2 ♥ 2 ♦ Q 10 8 6 ♣ J
♠ 7 ♥ K 7 ♦ J 5 ♣ Q 9 7 4
two were dealt randomly, one was carefully arranged--by someone with OCD. Which is the arranged one, and how?
(Note: by "OCD" I possibly mean stereotypical OCD that doesn't literally exist, or maybe it does. Don't hold me rigidly to this.)
(Note 2: By "arranged" I don't necessarily mean that every card was chosen with perfect care. Consider that there was a limited part of a deck to choose from, when arranging that hand.)
(Note 3: This puzzle amounts to guessing what was in my mind. Of course, there are probably answers that make perfect sense but which weren't what I was thinking of. I should consider such answers triumphs in everything but mind-reading)
Tnzrxavtug naq Zbygrabnx ner pbeerpg ba gur unaq. (Gubhtu gur bgure nafjref znl whfg nf jryy unir orra gehr). Abj vg'f whfg thrffvat jung rknpgyl gur ehyr vf, naq gurl'er cnegvnyyl ba gur evtug genpx.
Remember this is guessing what I'm thinking, and I make no promises it's especially elegant or interesting.
Writing as I think... Note 2 seems important - I'm wondering if it means the other 18 cards have already been dealt? If not, in what other way would the deck be limited?
Hand 2 looks more contrived (as 2 other people have noticed, but I'm not convinced their explanations are convincing)
Feels like hand 2. Spades and diamonds are evenly spaced (and spades are also fibonacci-ish, why not). Then 2 and 11 are both objectively awesome numbers (prime, binary-related, and a stereotypically-ocd-ish friend points out that 2 in roman numerals is 11-looking).
Probably not the intended solution, but Hand 1 has the most even possible split between suits (9 doesn't evenly divide 3, so one suit has an extra, but the other 2 hands are more lopsided).
Love the idea of posting a puzzle here! My guess is hand nr 1, because it's unlikely for such evenly sized groups to form accidentally, plus they contain the sequence 8,9,10,J,Q,K. Dunno what's up with the two 3s though.
Aside: I also found the presentation of the hands a bit confusing - they are all "ordered" in the same way, so really they're sets of cards rather than sequences (ie. a hand you could reorder when you hold it).
I'm not sure how to read these hand notations as discrete cards:
♠ Q 4 ♥ J 10 ♦ 9 3 ♣ K 8 3
So that looks at first like Queen of Spades, Four of Hearts, then Jack of... tens? and then you have "Club King Eight Three" as if that's a valid card in any sense.
The only other thing that could make sense is if these are nine-card hands for some reason but that seems like something worth calling out?
The article you link about shrimp welfare makes a mistake that has bugged me for years, and which I've never seen anyone else serious address. Which is that it implicitly assumes a somewhat mystical view of what qualia/suffering fundamentally is which which IMO is incompatible with a functional evolutionary view of what explains suffering most parsimoniously.
You can make a strong case that suffering is actually an extremely simple trait that has an incentive to evolve even in organisms that are far simpler than shrimp, and which doesn't require very much complexity to evolve:
This is important because it means that microscopic organisms should totally swamp any considerations based on raw quantities of suffering.
Indeed as I mention in the doc more sympathetic organisms actually have an evolutionary incentive to feel *less* suffering, since more intelligence and better memory means you can learn the same lesson more easily.
Oooh, oooh, I know the answer to this. We poke oysters with sticks and see what they do, then we give the oysters a bunch of opium and poke them with sticks again and see if they react differently. Opium is an awesome painkiller, so if they give them the same unpleasant stimulus (stick poke) and they react the same, then we can be highly confident it's some kind of involuntary muscle thing, not actual pain.
This is, pretty seriously as far as I know, the actual argument for ostroveganism, which are vegans who eat, like, oysters and stuff.
In unironic honor of the subject of shrimp welfare I have posted my beloved collection of Dall-e 2's images responding to the prompt "Shrimp love me, unaligned AI fears me."
I think this perspective doesn't effectively distinguish between "negative reinforcement" and "suffering". I don't blame you, because I think the distinction is hard to understand and routes through our uncertainty about what consciousness is, but I think making this distinction is slightly less muddled than not making it and so it's net useful.
As you say below, even plants and bacteria have something like negative reinforcement (in fact, you can probably find some rock or thermostat or something that has some quality that seems suspiciously like it). I think there's an additional question of whether this is just a blind reflex, or whether it gets routed through a brain that's capable of reflecting on how bad it is in some sort of global way, and that we reserve the word "suffering" for the latter - the more reflection, the more suffering (though "reflection" isn't exactly the right word here and is more gesturing at a concept I can't easily describe).
Having now read the paper you linked in much more depth I can say definitively that it doesn't actually ague against my position at all!
Since both me and the paper agree that mere reaction isn't enough to be evidence for experience on its own, you need associative learning. With the paper not taking a stance as to whether all form of associative learning are linked with consciousness.
" There is ongoing debate about which forms of associative
learning are linked to sentience and conscious awareness (Ginsburg
and Jablonka, 2019) " ... "To leave room for
this debate, without taking a stance, we review both classical conditioning
and more complex forms of learning, "
The paper concludes with "We found no good evidence against sentience, or specifically pain perception, in any insect orders at any life stage" which again is exactly what I'd expect.
And according to some, the being which is capable of the most "reflection" would likely be God- so logically God also experiences the most suffering of any being. And if God is truly infinite, that means infinite suffering as well. Therefore, the action that will remove the most suffering from the universe would be to kill God. I am now accepting funding for this project.
I have seen in the wild the first stirrings towards "plants are sentient too" (no, like an idiot I didn't save the article) and boy, Chesterton keeps recurring to mind here:
From "The Napoleon of Notting Hill"
"Then there was the opposite school. There was Mr. Edward Carpenter, who thought we should in a very short time return to Nature, and live simply and slowly as the animals do. And Edward Carpenter was followed by James Pickie, D.D. (of Pocahontas College), who said that men were immensely improved by grazing, or taking their food slowly and continuously, alter the manner of cows. And he said that he had, with the most encouraging results, turned city men out on all fours in a field covered with veal cutlets. Then Tolstoy and the Humanitarians said that the world was growing more merciful, and therefore no one would ever desire to kill. And Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian, but at length declared vegetarianism doomed ("shedding," as he called it finely, "the green blood of the silent animals"), and predicted that men in a better age would live on nothing but salt. And then came the pamphlet from Oregon (where the thing was tried), the pamphlet called "Why should Salt suffer?" and there was more trouble."
It's funny that you feel kinship with Chesterton here, because my reaction to your comment and quote is "wow, conservatives have been making up 'liberal guy whose heart bleeds too much to eat even plants' for over a century now".
He was a Liberal (politically) and not a Conservative (Tory), though he did move to social conservatism.
But since he went to Art School, he did meet a lot of those progressive types who were around even back then.
So there's a lot less "conservatives have been making up bleeding-heart liberals for a long time" and more "bleeding-heart liberals as well as outright cranks have been around for a long time" at work there.
"Most of this happened when I was at the art school; but even when I had left it, this very casual connection was continued, in a queer way, by the coincidence that I worked for a short time in the office of a publisher who rather specialised in spiritualistic and theosophical literature, known under the general title of the occult. It was not entirely my fault, if it was not the fault of the real spiritualists or other real spirits, if I blundered into rather queer and uncomfortable corners of Spiritualism. On my first day in the office I had my first insight into the occult; for I was very vague about the business, as about most other businesses. I knew we had just published a big and vigorously boomed book of the Life and Letters of the late Dr. Anna Kingsford, of whom I had never heard, though many of our customers seemed to have heard of hardly anybody else. My full enlightenment came when a distraught lady darted into the office and began to describe her most complex spiritual symptoms and to demand the books most suited to her complaint, which I was quite incompetent to select. I timidly offered the monumental Life and Letters; but she shrank away with something like a faint shriek. "No, no," she cried, "I mustn't! Anna Kingsford says I mustn't." Then, with more control, "Anna Kingsford told me this morning that I must not read her Life; it would be very bad for me, she said, to read her Life." I ventured to say, or stammer, with all the crudity of common speech, "But Anna Kingsford is dead." "She told me this morning," repeated the lady, "that I must not read the book." "Well," I said, "I hope Dr. Kingsford hasn't been giving that advice to many people; it would be rather bad for the business. It seems rather malicious of Dr. Kingsford."
...All this part of the process was afterwards thrown up in the very formless form of a piece of fiction called The Man Who Was Thursday. The title attracted some attention at the time; and there were many journalistic jokes about it. Some, referring to my supposed festive views, affected to mistake it for "The Man Who Was Thirsty." Others naturally supposed that Man Thursday was the black brother of Man Friday. Others again, with more penetration, treated it as a mere title out of topsy-turveydom; as if it had been "The Woman Who Was Half-past Eight," or "The Cow Who Was Tomorrow Evening." But what interests me about it was this; that hardly anybody who looked at the title ever seems to have looked at the sub-title; which was "A Nightmare," and the answer to a good many critical questions.
I pause upon the point here, because it is of some importance to the understanding of that time. I have often been asked what I mean by the monstrous pantomime ogre who was called Sunday in that story; and some have suggested, and in one sense not untruly, that he was meant for a blasphemous version of the Creator. But the point is that the whole story is a nightmare of things, not as they are, but as they seemed to the young half-pessimist of the '90s; and the ogre who appears brutal but is also cryptically benevolent is not so much God, in the sense of religion or irreligion, but rather Nature as it appears to the pantheist, whose pantheism is struggling out of pessimism. So far as the story had any sense in it, it was meant to begin with the picture of the world at its worst and to work towards the suggestion that the picture was not so black as it was already painted. I explained that the whole thing was thrown out in the nihilism of the '90s in the dedicatory lines which I wrote to my friend Bentley, who had been through the same period and problems; asking rhetorically: "Who shall understand but you?" In reply to which a book-reviewer very sensibly remarked that if nobody understood the book except Mr. Bentley, it seemed unreasonable to ask other people to read it."
Yeah it kind of seems morally hopeless unless you have advanced enough tech to stick basically every non-human organism into a simulation (with very few animals having enough intelligence to have social preferences that couldn't be satisfied by an experience machine). Then the countless simulated organisms never grow in number, and their role in nature gets filled by a sort of AGI DM acting out their characters through machine/cyborg bodies (but which enjoys people say hunting it for instance, the same way a good DM wants their players to beat their villain)
Though granted I think that's likely to be possible in the future, so just for the sake of people with different values than me (and to hedge against incredibly infinitesimal moral uncertainty) I precommit to doing what I can to bring that scenario about if it doesn't sacrifice any of my other values.
Thanks for responding to my comment! I feel like this issue is kind of a blind spot in EA/rationlist circles so I'd love you to dive deeper into it, though I'd like you to preregister a prediction first!
>but I think making this distinction is slightly less muddled than not making it and so it's net useful.
Why? After all you seem to realize yourself that it seems more parsimonious to just not draw a distinction between negative reinforcement and supposedly "real" suffering. At least I'd get that impression from you saying it's difficult to draw a distinction.
I'm skimming through the article RN, but I don't see anything that specifically affects my arguments for qualia being more widespread than generally believed. Is there a part you'd like to draw my attention to that you think addresses my points?
Fundamentally doesn't this basically entail something almost similar to a belief in P-zombies?
In that you must believe that in some organisms negative stimuli leads to an internal state which leads them to learn to avoid that stimuli and any other stimuli they've learned to associate with it in the future. Whereas other organisms have an internal state like this which affects behavior in almost the same way, except that in those organisms it's not "real" qualia.
Also what do you think about the argument that more complex organisms have less evolutionary reason to feel pain as intensely as simpler organisms, since they can learn their lessons easier?
After all if suffering serves an evolutionary function it seems like an inescapable conclusion that it's intensity is something subject to evolutionary pressure doesn't it? Which seems incompatible with humans feeling pain any more intensely than shrimp.
>whether it gets routed through a brain that's capable of reflecting on how bad it is in some sort of global way
You should preregister (before looking into the topic) what evidence you think would distinguish the simplest possible organism you think has qualia from the simplest organism that you think doesn't.
Because I think you and most other rationalists (I'd also call myself a rationalist) are drawing a category here in a way that's fundamentally not even wrong.
> what evidence you think would distinguish the simplest possible organism you think has qualia from the simplest organism that you think doesn't.
I'm not convinced we will ever have a definitive answer, since qualia are inherently a subjective experience. Who knows. But this does mean that we can only use heuristics to figure this out. For some qualia it might be nearly impossible, eg color perception. We can find out whether X can see or distinguish colors, but how do we know whether it experiences them? But suffering has associated behaviors we can try to use, as well as our understanding of the neurologically structural prerequisites for registering and processing pain, which we can sensibly consider a prerequisite for suffering. So, this would be the evidence: The presence of pain processing and aggregation circuitry as well as behaviors that heuristically can differentiate avoidance behavior from suffering.
I think the simplest way of cashing it out is presence VS absence of qualia, ie having an experience of what it is like to be someome/perceive something. It seems clear that some things have qualia, eg humans. It seems equally clear that some things don't, eg rocks. Sure, humans are living things and rocks aren't, but this is a potentially fluent distinction - consider for example viruses or the "ancestors" of biological life. Suffering is just one particular qualium(?), just as eg experiencing color is.
Now consider a robot which measures the light intensity behind it and in front of it and drives towards the smaller value. In this sense, it avoids light. Surely it is not thereby experiencing suffering, however? If not, then clearly, avoidance behavior is not a sufficient condition for the presence of suffering.
Note that we could arrive at exactly the same internal model by training it through reinforcement learning etc. So it also doesn't seem like the learning part itself is a sufficient condition.
Given this, it seems you need something beyond negative reinforcement to ensure the presence of qualia, such as perhaps a complicated neurological system or something akin to it. What exactly appears to be needed for the presence of qualia in general or suffering in particular is an empirical and philosophical question people have already put a lot of effort into, cf eg the paper Scott linked you.
>I think the simplest way of cashing it out is presence VS absence of qualia
I was asking about observations that are feasible to make. Obviously if you could magically read minds and know creatures internal qualia would settle like half of philosophy and I'd love that!
>Surely it is not thereby experiencing suffering, however?
The mistake you're making here is I assuming would apply a double standard to AI compared to biological life.
I see no convincing reason to think some existing AI might not have qualia. Importantly this qualia may not feel subjectively the same, but I'd still expect an AI that evolved through an evolutionary algorithm to avoid certain stimuli, to find those stimuli unpleasant in some alien sort of way.
I think qualia is fundamentally functional, so if an AI displays certain kinds of learning in response to stimuli then the simplest explanation is that it also has internal qualia changing its behavior.
Granted I think P-zombies might be possible, they'd just be computationally infeasible to run.
Actually, thinking some more about it, my impression is this. Your (simplified) model seems to be:
Input
==> Internal processing
==> Qualia
==> Behavior
I totally agree that this is sometimes appropriate, eg for lot of human behavior. (Though we also need an Internal Processing ==> Behavior connection for pulling our hand away from a hot stove etc.) However, a surely simpler model is
Input
==> Internal Processing
==> Behavior
This doesn't apply to humans of course, but it might apply to other entities. Unless you take a panpsychist position or the like, it seems like it does apply to some simple entities, like a small linear model or a thermostat. So the question becomes: when is which model appropriate? And I don't see a reason to a priori prefer the former over the latter in cases very different from those we know fall under the former. Thoughts?
I think the difference here is that you think I have the 3 step model you propose. Rather I think pain directly is the internal processing which leads to the behavioral change, there's no middle step.
Yeah, I agree it's possible for AI in principle to have qualia. But we're not talking about GPT27, but something like a linear model with like 2 parameters, instantiated in a robot's hardware. Something like this is sufficient for producing avoidance behavior. Do you agree that this is very likely not suffice for suffering in the qualia sense?
As for functionality, in simple examples like the above, if seems like qualia are explicitly not needed to explain the behavior. Qualia are not even needed to explain the behavior of AlphaGo to take a more complex RL example.
I'd be rather unsure about say GPT like systems just because they don't really act like they have positive or negative stimuli, but I an imagine an argument against that as well. I would not rule out some kind of internal experience that may have qualia with no valence attached as I would conceive of it for all I know.
I'd also like to note that plants seem to respond to anesthetics like they feel pain in many ways. Which supports the idea that pain response might be a very highly evolutionarily conserved trait as I've speculated: //www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171211090736.htm
>As for functionality, in simple examples like the above, if seems like qualia are explicitly not needed to explain the behavior. Qualia are not even needed to explain the behavior of AlphaGo to take a more complex RL example.
"not needed to explain" sounds like a description of our computational abilities rather than a description about a structure or organism that may or may not have qualia.
I don't think bacteria suffer (they have no brain, for instance, or central nervous system, nor do they behave in ways we'd expect to go with suffering) but if you think simple organisms suffer a lot, this seems to make a *stronger* case for caring about shrimp.
You mean this line: "Preventing immense extreme suffering is very valuable even if things matter other than pleasure and pain"?
I agree that if you accept this, you would be forced to conclude the shrimp welfare project is important. I'm arguing that because that because the conclusion is absurd, and since the logical steps starting from the premise are sound, the premise is false.
(To be clear, "absurd" means "absurd TO ME," and not society at large, which I agree can be, and often is, fundamentally wrong on matters of morality.)
I think the focus on whether a creature has a nervous system is as deeply arbitrary here as say whether the organisms has higher reasoning. People only take for granted it's importance because they aren't taking a functional view of suffering.
Since even plants and single celled organisms will show basic learning wherein they can learn to associate a neutral stimuli with a negative stimuli.
Please read my doc and respond, since I'd love to have a discussion with you!
The important thing here though, is that this logic means that all macroscopic life is from a utilitarian standpoint basically a rounding error compared to the incomprehensibly massive sea of qualia at the microscopic scale. Though granted I'm not a utilitarian so this is a lot less impactful to my particular values.
I doubt that all living things have qualia (I hate this word, but you equated it with consciousness so I go along :-)
Did you ever have had a headache over hours but in between, for a short time, forgot about it because there was something more important or engaging?
I think the headache, as a functional thing, was still there, but you weren't conscious of it.
And did you ever suddenly come up with the solution to a problem you have not been thinking about for a few hours?
I think the thinking, as a functional thing, was still there, but you weren't conscious of it.
I think bacteria refrain from acid, there is a functional mechanism, but they feel no pain.
And about your idea of being conscious all the time (I looked into your "Continuous Experience" text): Did you ever notice, that your visual qualia go away, even though you still have others, when you close your eyes? :-)
>Did you ever notice, that your visual qualia go away, even though you still have others, when you close your eyes?
I find this fascinating because of the implication that for you it does go away, which seems baffling to me. I just see an imperfect darkness with a bit of what I guess I'd call noise (akin to a less intense version of something like if you rub your eyes). I may not perceive that if my visual perception is instead engaged in my minds eye, but I'm always perceiving something visually while awake at least.
>I think bacteria refrain from acid, there is a functional mechanism, but they feel no pain.
This doesn't really address the more difficult aspect to explain which is the association of a neutral stimuli with a negative stimuli. If an organism doesn't have that characteristic than I don't think there's any evolutionary reason to have an internal state corresponding to suffering.
>Did you ever have had a headache over hours but in between, for a short time, forgot about it because there was something more important or engaging?
There's two responses to this logic: First is that not all mental processes necessarily require a system that responds to positive and negative stimuli. However I expect that the more significant factor is probably just that what you think of as a unified identity just isn't one. You are comprised of many separate cognitive processes which may have their own experiences that are not necessarily accessible to all other cognitive processes.
I also think the realization that you don't have a unified identity like you think you do is also extremely enlightening because it explains away the incoherent and contradictory concept of "willpower" that people have.
You seem to think that total blackness is or can be a qualia. And I think that it is not, for reasons that someone else can explain better.
I probably cannot sound not patronizing when I recommend "Content and Consciousness" from Daniel Dennett, but I do it anyway because you seem to me to be able to make something of a detailed description of a very different perspective on this topic.
For me it offered no final answer, but made me better understand my own questions.
This book is from 1969, is still state of the art, but has only about 190 pages. It's better and deeper than the follow up.
Completely aside from whether perfect blackness would be a qualia there's the issue that perfect blackness is impossible because of inherent noise in the human visual system. Though I find it interesting that you can at apparently tune this out without replacing it with other visual qualia.
Well, I disagree with you--unconscious humans also have the sorts of things involved in reinforcement learning--but I have no idea how this affects the desirability of shrimp welfare. Yes, maybe this would mean a bacteria charity is better, but there aren't such things.
>unconscious humans also have the sorts of things involved in reinforcement learning
I absolutely agree with you! I just don't think this makes the point you think it does.
I think that actually you are conscious (in the sense of having qualia) during all stages of sleep precisely because you are still display certain kinds of awareness. Just like there are both REM and non-REM dreams you have every single night (barring sleep issues), but you almost never remember the experiences you had during either either of them. So I think the lack of memory of any qualia is not evidence against you experiencing qualia and forgetting it (especially when you don't have the right parts of your brain active to even form long term memories in the first place!)
I actually wrote a this subject that you might like reading! Would love to discuss it if you're interested.
Out of curiosity do you share my intuition what's more important than suffering is how a given agent would counterfactually have treated you? Since I feel like it's actually totally coherent to show moral "nepotism" to loved one's, because you have an obligation to treat people at least as well as they would have treated you.
Sorry to butt in to your conversation here, but I wanted to respond to the "suffering vs counterfactual reciprocity" because it's something I've seen floating around, that leaves me totally cold.
I think the intuition here is supposed to be something like contractualism, where our moral obligations grow out of a reciprocal understanding of how each of us wants to be treated. But, how I want to be treated is entirely based on my capacity to suffer!
If I become a horror-movie zombie, and lose all sense of reason, but can still feel pain, I don't want you to torture me before killing me even though by hypothesis if you were the zombified one, you wouldn't feel any compunction about hurting me.
I think the sophisticated version of this involves all sorts of extended counterfactuals to make sure I'm including the right subset of agents, but I'm not sure I believe you can really pin this down precisely enough to satisfy my intuition. It's hard both to identify relevant counterfactuals, and to identify agents across counterfactuals.
e.g. I would sort of accept the framing "don't needlessly hurt shrimp because if you were a shrimp, you wouldn't want people to arbitrarily torture you", but making this precise seems hopeless: what does it mean "if I were a shrimp"?
I think it's much simpler to say, my intuition is capturing that it's bad to cause a being capable of suffering to suffer, regardless of how agent-y it is, or how it would treat you. There are instrumental and practical reasons to care about those things, but it's not what I really care about.
>If I become a horror-movie zombie, and lose all sense of reason, but can still feel pain, I don't want you to torture me before killing me even though by hypothesis if you were the zombified one, you wouldn't feel any compunction about hurting me.
If you are talking about the kind of zombie that dies and goes braindead before reanimating, then I think you have no direct moral obligations to them whatsoever. At most you have an indirect weak obligation to treat the corpse certain ways based on your obligation to other moral agents (but the zombie here might as well be an inanimate heirloom)
The case where subjective experience is continuous is more interesting, and in that case I think the the relevant counterfactual is that you wouldn't want the torture happening to you: So if somebody else likely would respect that wish for you, then you should do the same for them (and you should generally give people some benefit of the doubt when there's no evidence to go off).
>e.g. I would sort of accept the framing "don't needlessly hurt shrimp because if you were a shrimp, you wouldn't want people to arbitrarily torture you", but making this precise seems hopeless: what does it mean "if I were a shrimp"?
In this case the counterfactual would be something like how a shrimp might treat you if it had human level intelligence and immense power, but the exact same absence of any social instincts underpinning our morality. Such a being would be frankly as terrifying as a paperclipper as far as a human is concerned. Consequently I think we have no moral obligations to most animals, and that uplifting most animals without also adding into them human moral/social instincts would be a grave mistake.
I think the principle is most compelling in the case of groups of say jews in nazi germany who few people would say had any obligation to refrain from killing committed nazis for instance. I think this example perfectly demonstrates that people's concern for suffering is predicated on whether the subject would show any sympathy for them if the situations were reversed in the morally relevant ways (which cannot logically include having radically different values for instance).
Another example would be having an understanding with other people to give each other a proper burial if one of the others died, because you know the others would in turn do the same for you. The logic here seems perfectly sound and doesn't require the moral agent involved still exist, and I'm sure I could come up with many similar sorts of examples where people care about things that may not directly impact current net pleasure.
Yes, the zombie case is meant to be the one where I retain some trace of identity.
I agree that the overriding intuition in all cases is something like, "what if our places were switched" but my point is, if I'm capable of imagining us in switched positions, I don't care at all about how they would treat me as a condition: if I wouldn't want them to torture me, then I no longer want to torture them.
The extra step of, "ok but I think they would torture me, so who cares" has no pull on my intuition.
I think the Nazi example is only compelling because you're imagining it _in response_ to Nazi atrocities, so you're playing on a desire for justice or vengeance. But the counterfactual reasoning is that Jews have no moral obligations to people who _would have been Nazis_ in the right conditions, even if they aren't now. This both raises the question of "which counterfactual"--if someone "would have been" a committed Nazi in certain circumstances, but isn't now, which set of circumstances matters?--but more importantly I think it takes all the oomph out of the example.
If Warsaw ghetto fighters had started torturing the young children of the most committed Nazis because, places switched the grown up children would have been happy to do it to them, I think that would have been a monstrous moral mistake, and I think most peoples' intuitions agree with mine on this.
>would have been Nazis in the right conditions, even if they aren't now
This misses the point of why it's important that they be Nazis in my example:
You aren't judging people based on the values that they might hypothetically have come to hold under the right circumstances, but based on their actual current values. The counterfactual version of somebody you're considering has to have the same moral values or it makes zero sense. Also importantly in order to be justified in making this judgement you need solid evidence about their values, killing some random person in Nazi Germany would not be the same as killing a party member who clearly endorses the ideology.
You don't think you have any obligation to help out your family (presuming your family doesn't suck) more than you would a stranger?
Similar if a friend has gone to great lengths to help you in the past do you not feel an obligation to return the favor (within reason) if they need your help?
Honestly I suspect that the feelings you describe just are what a lot of people are talking about when they talk about certain kinds of moral obligation.
There's basically two different types of "moral obligation" here which I think are psychologically totally distinct. Those being obligation out of a sense of duty (what you seem to be describing) and obligation out of personal loyalty/love.
It wouldn't make things better. A law called "Affordable Care Act" or Obamacare passed during Obama's tenure had the effect of degrading everyone's insurance (possibly on purpose, in order to break the system and force the country to go single-payer). As I recall it - for some reason, I can't find a link to this - one of the parts of the law was penalizing employers for offering really good insurance which, predictably, led to employers beginning to offer crappy plans instead. At the same time, cheap plans offering only catastrophic coverage, which young healthy people were buying, were legislated away, only to be replaced by the crappy plans that technically cover everything, but the deductibles are so high that you are always paying. I could go on and on - for example, the electronic medical record mandate that came with this law had as one of the effects major doctor burnout, with doctors quitting the field in droves (also it caused more healthcare spending, with money coming guess from where).
There's no point in going after an insurance company. We need a legislative change.
>At the same time, cheap plans offering only catastrophic coverage, which young healthy people were buying, were legislated away, only to be replaced by the crappy plans that technically cover everything, but the deductibles are so high that you are always paying.
"Covers everything with high deductibles" was the definition of pre-ACA catastrophic plans, so that part at least was not banned. But the plans stopped being cheap for young, healthy people because of community ratings and guaranteed issue, where insurers were required to offer plans at the same price to everyone within a broadly-defined risk pool regardless of health status. Older people can be charged higher premiums, but the difference in premiums was capped at a much lower level than the actuarial price difference.
This made insurance much more accessible and affordable to people who have expensive-to-manage chronic health issues, but at the cost of making it so that if insurance was cheap for you under the old system, it isn't anymore. It's equivalent to taxing healthy people to subsidize sick people, but with private insurance companies deputized to administer the taxes and subsidies.
I also find it hard to believe that people with expensive chronic health issues came out ahead. These people are consuming a lot of services that are not free and that became much more expensive, and the deductibles are now much higher almost everywhere.
The ACA sounds like the perfect solution for politicians. Politicians can brag about how they gave coverage to so many more people and leave the dirty work of redistribution to the insurance companies.
No kidding. Almost everyone around me lost insurance that worked for them and had to replace it with.a vastly inferior option. (The only exception I can think of was a couple that qualified for Medicaid, who I suspect qualified before as well but needed some help with the paperwork.)
But the politicians got their talking points and, by the time everyone forgot what they did, got the situation to deteriorate so much that people became a lot more sympathetic to single payer system and, as we now see, many started thinking that insurance executives should be shot. So from the politicians' point of view it was probably a huge win.
I might be wrong, but I distinctly recall pre-ACA my farmer friends buying coverage that didn't pay for regular doctor visits and such, but that would have rescued them if something really catastrophic happened.
ACA contains a lot of mandates, such as preventative care, that are supposed to make certain things free, so I don't think it can be considered a version of what I think I remember (if I understood them right, and if I remembered it right).
I asked Perplexity AI what is supposed to be free under ACA. Here's what it said (sorry about the formatting, don't know how to fix it):
"Preventive Services for All Adults
Screenings for various conditions, including:
Depression
Diabetes
Obesity
Various cancers
Sexually transmitted infections (STIs)
Counseling for:
Drug and tobacco use
Healthy eating
Other common health concerns
Immunizations for diseases such as influenza, tetanus, and COVID-19
Blood pressure, cholesterol, and diabetes tests
Preventive Services for Women
Well-woman visits
Contraception and contraceptive counseling
Breast and cervical cancer screenings
Prenatal care
Preventive Services for Children and Youth
Well-child visits from birth to age 21
Immunizations for childhood diseases
Behavioral and developmental assessments
Vision and hearing screenings
Autism screenings
Fluoride supplements
These services must be provided without any cost-sharing, meaning patients do not have to pay deductibles, copayments, or coinsurance when receiving these services from in-network providers."
Some of this stuff is cheap, but you'll notice there's some radiology and lab work there that's pretty expensive. I imagine it brings costs way up, raising both the insurance prices and the deductibles.
That's true: ACA did introduce some mandates for "diagnostic and preventative" care. This is the actual list (https://www.healthcare.gov/preventive-care-adults/), which is pretty close to the AI answer.
That said, I'm pretty sure it's the community ratings that did most of the work in raising the floor on prices. Pre-ACA, when I was in my early 20s, I bought an individual plan in California that cost about $50/month, or about $85 after adjusting for inflation. I also remember looking up similar plans from the same comparison-shopping website for a friend who lived in New Jersey, which had community ratings laws, and the cheapest plan was around $400/month (about $680 adjusted for inflation).
I did find some think tank data that claims that the ACA preventative care mandate costs about $204/person/year as of 2019 and accounts for about 3.5% of health care spending:
Thank you for educating me again (as you often do). I had to look up what "community ratings" were.
That said, I'm sure that, among other things, the EHR mandate also added to healthcare costs. A lot of studies claim that EHR systems are cost effective - but I've seen what they do, how much they cost, how people interact with them, and how they have to be managed, with my own eyes, and I'll never believe that the practices they were forced on got a good deal. Along with EHRs came useless time-sinks such as meaningful use - yes, that thing that forces every nurse to ask you weird questions with no obvious answers at the start of every visit. (On the scale of 1 to 10, how much pain are you in?)
I'm sure some cost increases weren't directly ACA's fault - I'm sure inflation contributed to healthcare costs just like to everything else. But ACA definitely was not a net positive for most people.
Step 1: Get employers out of the middle of health insurance purchasing by including the money spent as part of taxable income (the current arrangement is a tax arbitrage).
Step 2: Companies like UHC realize that patients, not HR ladies, are now the actual customer and their behavior changes for the better.
People seem to think things are genuinely better just because a Fat Cat was murdered. Like nothing else need happen - this has made their Christmas. It's especially pronounced on Reddit, of course, where I think anyone espousing a contrary view about murder would be slapped with a "Controversial" label.
I read about the Fat Cat. His father worked in a grain elevator.
That is not the point, my friend. You don't shut down a company by killing its CEO. This is not Lord of the Rings, where you kill Sauron and the evil goes away. Nobody is thinking like that.
The point is to reinternalize the costs—to change the boardroom calculus.
Health insurance companies—all companies, really—thrive on externalizing costs and internalizing profits. In health insurance, that's the whole business model: take in as much as you can in premiums, pay out as little as you can in coverage.
And Thompson's tenure at UnitedHealth was a years-long experiment in seeing just how low they could push that "payout" dial. When he took over as CEO two or three years ago, UHG was denying about 8% of prior authorization requests. As of this year, it's close to 24%.
(If you are truly unfamiliar with our ways: say you need a surgery that will cost $100,000. This is of course a ludicrous sum which the hospital knows you don't have, so the hospital won't do the surgery unless they have the insurance company's word—ahead of time—that they'll cover it. This is known as a "prior authorization". In practice, it means that an insurance company's AI-based claims adjuster can rule that your mother's valve replacement surgery is "not medically necessary", and then bounce you through appeals and arbitrations until she has a fatal heart attack, at which point, yeah, I guess she no longer needs a valve replacement.)
And yes, maybe someone could take them to court over this kind of thing, and win a huge penalty judgement. This is one way of re-internalizing the costs and changing the boardroom calculus. Say each additional 1% of claims they deny represents $50M in additional profit, but makes them 10% more likely to get slapped with a $1B penalty. The actuaries will tell the CEO that it's bad business, so they won't deny those additional claims! But court is a corporation's home turf, they have an army of lawyers who know every trick in the book, and if you're sick enough that you're racking up the kind of bills which would be worth going to court over, you probably won't even live long enough to find out whether or not you won.
So, absent recourse through the approved channels, this is how a consequentialist can change the calculus—can insert himself into the discussion between the actuary and the executive. "Each additional 1% of claims you deny represents $50M in additional profit, and a N% chance that your personal 15 minutes of fame begins with you bleeding out on the cold sidewalk, while your countrymen cheer for the assassin when they learn who you were and what you stood for. Solve for N. It's small but nonzero, and it's about 10 times what it was at Thanksgiving because they still haven't caught the last guy and frankly he made a pretty good show of it, what with the monopoly money and the words on the bullet casings and all."
The only thing worse than a consequentialist who thinks it's OK to murder someone because the math says so, is a consequentialist who thinks it's OK to murder someone because they got the math wrong. And this...
"Each additional 1% of claims you deny represents $50M in additional profit, and a N% chance that your personal 15 minutes of fame begins with you bleeding out on the cold sidewalk"
...shows that you have no understanding of how any of this works. Brian Thompson is the *CEO* of United Healthcare, not the owner. The owners, the people who actually get your hypothesized $50 million in extra profits, aren't the ones bleeding out on the sidewalk. They *hired* Brian Thompson to, among other things, take that risk for them while they live in heavily-guarded obscurity.
They paid him reasonably well, $10E6/year from what I hear. And he seems to have done a good job of running the company the way its owners wanted it to be run. Now they'll have to deal with the nuisance of hiring someone new, and maybe the new guy will demand twice the salary as a risk premium. That would still be less than 0.1% of United's annual profits.
So, they can get the $50 million (or whatever) in extra profits for each percent of extra claims they have their hired CEO deny for them, and have to pay out a tiny fraction of that as hazard pay for their new CEO, or they can give up all those nice profits for, why exactly would they do that again? The goodness of their hearts, and their sympathy for a community that cheers on the guy who murdered one of their employees?
And no, you can't just kill the stockholders instead. There are too many of them, and you don't know who they are, and the ones big enough that you could figure out who they are have much less exposure and much more security.
You want to be very very careful about deciding that murder is an acceptable to internalize the external costs of an entire organization/system/etc. I think that if you apply this consistently, you will end up with some results you don't like. You know what kills far _far_ more people than the most heinous of insurance companies? Every single politician, rule, and law that slows economic growth by even an iota, so I guess we should all encourage the murder of overly regulatory Democrats then!
Pick your own system. The point is, the quality of evidence that shows health care companies cause any deaths at all is exactly as good (or much worse in many cases) as the evidence that _dozens_ of other industries, organization, systems, etc. cause far _far_ more deaths and harm.
So the end result is murder of people participating in a whole host of systems across the board. Maybe you truly would be ok with this. But I don't have much to say to anyone who would honestly espouse this type of world, other than to finish with: I'm pretty sure that world would be worse than our own, so, according to your ethics, I'm allowed to kill you for advocating for it.
What are you talking about with this "economic growth" shit? When you say "pick your own system", I think you mean "that was a deliberately bad, deranged example, to demonstrate how—if you remove all the important context—the same logic could justify bad things".
And isn't that just the most classic lil strawman since Fiyero Tigelaar?
Look, you get merc'd like Thompson did when you have condemned enough people to infuriating, Kafkaesque deaths that one of their loved ones vows revenge. It is the purest example in our lifetimes of banal evil—its darkness softened by abstraction, distance, diffusion of responsibility—held to account by heroic righteousness: one of the countless individuals on the other end of those statistics, moved to act by the purely personal, inarguably solid reality of love and the grief that follows its loss.
So sure, you could theoretically kill me for saying "Assassinations can be good sometimes," but you won't, because I haven't actually done you any real harm in saying that. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, my friend.
So come kill me, or sit the fuck down and eat your pudding.
It was exactly as valid, I think actually a more valid, example than health care executives. The "Pick your system" was saying that the same level of justification that works for health insurance executives is met or exceeded in _dozens_ of other systems. Which I said explicitly.
And it's not "could" justify bad things.It DOES justify bad things. The EXACT SAME LEVEL OF EVIDENCE AND JUSTIFICATION for killing health care executives justifies killing people in dozens of industries and systems including politicians and executives of nearly every single company in the world. This is my entire point. Your argument is horrific and evil. And people like you arguing for it are making it more likely that it will happen, and you are providing justification and cover for more killings. Therefore, you are causing deaths. Therefore, according to your own logic, you deserve to die.
You are right, *I* won't kill you, because I oppose your morality with every fiber of my being. I find it disgusting.
Finally, I hope that people reading this thread can see the irony in someone celebrating and calling for even more murder calling anything else "deranged"
I don't. You do. Since you also think that "running a health insurance company is akin to murder". Remember, I'm not advocating for murder here, you are.
I find it somewhat telling that you keep ascribing your beliefs to me.
I thought maybe it was UTI TMI for this particular audience, though in fact I do think it’s ridiculous that a doctor even needs to be involved. It should be a drugstore matter.
Was really hoping to find out more about the nature of these denials. Surely if a scandal, some outlet must have done a deep dive.
>A class action lawsuit filed last year in US District Court in Minnesota argued that UnitedHealthcare uses AI “in place of real medical professionals to wrongfully deny elderly patients care,” according to the complaint. More than 90% of the denials are reversed through an internal appeal or proceedings before federal administrative law judges, the suit alleges.
Someone upthread linked to the plaintiffs' brief, which includes a fact CNN left out: more than 90% of denials *which are appealed* may be reversed... but only 0.2% of policyholders appeal their denials. The lawyers invite the court to assume that the remaining 99.8% would also appeal if only they could, but provide no evidence in support of this ambitious claim.
"This is not Lord of the Rings, where you kill Sauron and the evil goes away. Nobody is thinking like that."
Even Tolkien didn't think that. Sauron goes away, but Evil (and the problem of Evil) remains. You still have to fight it, day by day, until the end. Maybe it's not something big and obvious like a Dark Lord, but it's there and won't ever be fully conquered until the tares and wheat are both harvested together.
I think I read somewhere that he was crying in fear when arrested, so he hoped to get away with it. It is plausible, though, that he thought his face was hidden well enough. Honestly, I would not have clocked him a couple of days later. But somebody did.
Many, if not most, insurance companies are essentially not for profit. Essentially anything with "mutual" in its name. Mutual companies are owned by the shareholders, so rather than issuing a dividend, any profit they might make is given back to the shareholders through reduced rates.
Health insurance has nothing to do with health. Insurance in general is a way to make a cost relatively predictable, by spreading it out over the pool of people who may need to spend that cost. So, it's a financial arrangement. People who want health insurance that covers absolutely everything and have their employers pay for it don't realize the actual cost of that.
Insurance is supposed to cover unknowns. If you KNOW you have a certain condition, then you can predict how much it would cost you to treat it. Insurance isn't supposed to cover things like that. On the other hand, if you DEVELOP a certain condition, insurance ought to pay for treating that, based on the cost of treating it and the likelihood of you developing it. If you are one of the unfortunate few to develop the condition, then those fortunate enough NOT to develop it subsidize your cost.
So I'm saying insurance ought to be able to decline coverage (or charge appropriately) for pre-existing conditions, but NOT rescind coverage when people get sick. It's supposed to be a regulated industry, so making a profit by providing this service shouldn't be relevant.
>So I'm saying insurance ought to be able to decline coverage (or charge appropriately) for pre-existing conditions, but NOT rescind coverage when people get sick.
The trouble with this model is that you become "locked in" if you develop a chronic condition - you can't change insurers because nobody will cover your pre-existing conditions. If your health insurance comes from a job you hate (or god forbid, an abusive spouse), you're locked into that as well.
Heck, even if you never decide to change insurers voluntarily, you could still be forced out of coverage if your insurer goes out of business.
This is a reasonable criticism, but I think it can be overcome. When one first is evaluated for insurance, one's "properties" are assessed, including life expectancy and probability of developing various ailments. Those properties become fixed, so that insurance companies are all effectively re-insured, because some people will develop each ailment and most won't, so it just becomes luck of the draw whether a particular company is paying on a now chronic but previously missing condition. But those who decide to obtain insurance to cover their newly-discovered chronic conditions must pay for the certainty.
I'm not an expert in insurance, and think other ways to overcome changing insurance companies ought to be likely.
I've heard this argument before, and it always felt like a semantics debate to me.
When some people hear 'health insurance' they are NOT thinking of the kind of financial risk sharing you are describing. They are thinking of something much more closely approximating utilities like electricity and water, or services like roads and public transit. And this is also a reasonable thing to think, because (unlike, say, a car / car insurance / paying out for a car crash) you don't have the same ability to control health outcomes, ESPECIALLY in a world where we know genetics exists. If all health outcomes were entirely driven by personal choice, the risk model of health insurance maybe feels more reasonable, you could have people internalize the risks of their bad behavior by increasing their insurance premiums. In a world where you just get fucked if you have the wrong genes, idk, seems shitty?
And fwiw it seems like the broader healthcare industry also doesn't think of itself as the sort of risk sharing financial arrangement you describe. Both legally (thanks Obama!) and in practice (the standard denial of care practices in the industry are ridiculous in the model you're describing).
So every time you go into a discussion about health insurance and say 'well actually this is about spreading risk in a financially smart way', some subset of people are (in the best case) going to be very confused or (in the worst case) start yelling right past you.
I think that you're right that the _definition of insurance_ is what you describe. But unfortunately I think naming the US system 'health insurance' does everyone a disservice by conflating this risk sharing scheme with...well, whatever the fuck we have.
You may be right that it is semantics, which is to say, kind of the opposite of nominative determinism: choosing the wrong words to mean what you want. But it is also true that health insurance works like insurance. As JonF311 says, this may be the wrong model to cover health care costs.
I suspect that a for-profit insurance (or "insurance") company will perform better, with a moderate degree of confidence (60-70%).
A couple reasons follow. The industry benefits from attracting investment like most others. That enable companies to embrace new technologies, compete for talent, expand to take advantage of economies of scale (when appropriate), adjust to changing circumstances, and etc.. Additionally, profits attract competition and so expose companies to at least some degree of market discipline.
I generally prefer non-profits when stability is a higher priority than functionality. (For example, when choosing long-term care for my parents.) That doesn't seem to apply here.
Help me out a little here: I think you're saying that warfare, policing, courts, and insurance belong in the same category. Why? And why aren't medical care or pharmaceuticals included in that category, per your earlier comment?
Somewhat related to the recent assassination of the CEO.
I've been thinking about it since the beginning of Russia-Ukraine war, and twice as much since the new round of escalation in Israel-Palestine. Where are all the noble assassins?
Wouldn't a world where huge conflicts between powerful entitues are resolved not by wars with tens and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civillians killed - all mostly regular people, sharing only tiny, if any part of the blame for the politics of their country, but by targeted assassination of the leaders, be a strictly better place?
Wouldn't politicians have more motivation not to escalate the conflicts when they know that they actually have a reasonable chance to die as a result of it?
Like, sure, I can see a bunch of potential issues with this source of approach, but none of then appears to be as bad as the current status quo.
There's an old Poul Anderson short story, "A Man to My Wounding," which takes place in a world where assassination has replaced war (due to a Cold War-ish fear of accidentally triggering nuclear war). The protagonist is tracking down an enemy assassin, and eventually realizes that they aren't targeting a bigwig politician. The President and all the other important politicians are too heavily guarded, so instead they're targeting a politically active university professor who *might* be President in 10 years or so, hoping to shape policy that way.
And his grim conclusion at the end of the story is that the "controlled" state of assassination is actually starting to escalate. In the same way that wars escalated from the premodern concept of "destroy the opposing army" to the total war concept of "destroy the enemy army, industry, workers, housing, and basically anything that the opposing country might benefit from," the war of assassins is going to escalate from "kill enemy leaders" to "kill enemy leaders, industrialists, scientists, and basically anyone who might influence anything."
Basically, there's no way to *force* people to stick to the norm of assassination. War is inherently escalatory - if sending an army would win you the war, why would you stick to just sending assassins?
There are very few "noble assassins" because assassination is very rarely a noble act. And assassination as a way of resolving international conflict without open warfare pretty much *never* works. Mostly, it anti-works as in the example of wannabe noble assassin Gavrilo Prinzip.
Or, at the other and more sensible end, consider all the very ignoble assassins who work for Vladimir Putin, killing Sergei and Yulia Kirpal, Alexander Litvinenko, and the scores of Russians who have exited high-rise windows in recent years. Neither moral scruples nor international norms will stay Putin's hand if he wants someone dead, and as a former FSB officer he almost certainly *prefers* assassination to e.g. military invasion.
Yet, three years ago, he decided to invade Ukraine. He does not seem to have even attempted just having Volodymyr Zelenskyy assassinated and telling his successor, "Surrender the Donbas or you're next". Why do you suppose that is?
I'm pretty sure that's because it wouldn't have worked, and the spymaster with the stable of assassins knew it wouldn't have worked.
First, because the sort of person who becomes a head of government is typically *very highly motivated* to do so, and they typically have specific goals when they do. Obtaining and taking that job requires extraordinary sacrifice, and risk of assassination is only a part of that sacrifice. They're not going to give it all up and become the puppet of some foreign potentate just because they are threatened with assassination. *You* presumably would, and so you assume others would, but you're not the sort of person who ever becomes a president or prime minister of anywhere.
Second, because if you *do* assassinate a head of government, their replacement will almost certainly be from the same party or faction and they will come into office with the strongest possible mandate to avenge their predecessor and continue in his path. They've made huge and highly-motivated sacrifices just to get to the point of being next in line, so all the above considerations apply, and now taking the final step will require the support of many powerful men who are upset that their chosen leader was killed and who want payback.
And third, because heads of government typically have very good security, and even more so if you've either threatened them with assassination or just assassinated their predecessor in hopes that they will take the hint. So if you try to assassinate them, you'll probably *fail* (see e.g. CIA vs Fidel Castro), and then you'll just be dealing with an even more pissed off head of government with stronger popular support.
There may be times when assassination can be reasonably expected to secure positive gains, by an assassin's standard of "positive" at least. But assassinating heads of government as a means of changing national policy, is rarely one of these.
I've often said that I thought Dune's War of Assassins would be preferable to normal war, with its greater collateral damage, but I don't think one could get elites to commit to the norm of only treating each other as fair game and not having their subjects used as meat shields.
For the time that's in it, the most recent post from "History for Atheists" - the pagan (not so much) origins of Christmas!
Everything from the holly and the ivy to "is Santa really Odin?" and one book that I will now have to go purchase about Sol in Roman times (because you can never be too informed about Sol Invictus):
https://historyforatheists.com/2024/12/pagan-christmas-again/
"The modern historian who is the leading scholar of the Roman solar cult, Steven Hijmans, has literally written the book on the Roman sun god Sol. His two volume work Sol: Image and Meaning of the Sun in Roman Art and Religion (Brill, Vol. 1 2022, Vol. 2 2024) collects the relevant material on the Roman worship of Sol and shows the evidence for various very ancient feast days for this deity."
EDIT: Drat, only available in hardback, a couple of hundred apiece, and out of stock to boot! Ah, well, next time!
You know the drill: no-fun Protestants who didn't approve of non-Biblical accretions to the Pure Gospel Faith went "lookit them Catholics with their pagan traditions!" about pretty much every feast day in the calendar, not knowing that they were cutting a rod to beat their own backs and a couple centuries later secularists and atheists would do the very same, often using their own words, to prove that Jesus was a pagan deity/myth/never existed.
Is there a theological support for the concept of "circles" of Hell, as described in Divine Comedy? Or some similar concept?
(I am asking specifically about Christianity. I know that e.g. Buddhism has many Hells.)
I am not an expert, nor a Christian, but my guess would be that a "uniformly bad Hell" would be a better fit for Christianity, for the following reasons:
1) People condemned to the "easy" circles of Hell would be happy that they didn't end up in the "hard" circles. But people in Hell are not supposed to be happy about anything.
2) The theological explanation for the need of an infinite punishment for a finite sin is that God is infinitely awesome, and therefore any transgression against His laws deserves infinite punishments. But from that perspective, there is no reason why e.g. a guy who masturbated once should be judged less harshly than e.g. Stalin; both of them are infinitely guilty and both deserve an infinite punishment.
3) If we take the interpretation of Hell as "merely" an eternal separation from God, i.e. no active torture of the sinners, circles don't make sense either, because some people being separated more than others would imply that at least some of them are partially connected, which is not how it is supposed to be.
Theological? Nope, Dante was writing Biblical and Classical self-insert fan-fiction where he got to accompany his favouritest person of all literature on an adventure through Hell and Purgatory up to the edge of Heaven. So he used a lot of varying traditions from everywhere, Christian and Pagan, plus a heaping helping of invention of his own.
And I love the result to bits and will die on any hill you care to mention defending it as ten times better than Milton and "Paradise Lost" (nobody reads "Paradise Regained"; I tried and couldn't get through it) 😁
Literary critics and Dantean experts say that he was using the concept of contrapasso when 'making the punishment fit the crime' for the damned in Hell. My own ignorant and uninformed view is that he was influenced at least in part by making the circles of Hell the opposites of the choirs of Heaven.
There is a genre of Christian writing about revelations to saints about Heaven and Hell, and Dante is riffing off these (you can read more about these in the quoted part about influences further down). Such private revelations aren't "official" about what Heaven/Hell is really like, but so long as they're not heretical or contradict official doctrine, they're tolerated to a greater or lesser degree. This "vision of a journey to the underworld" is associated with the pilgrimage site of St Patrick's Purgatory here in Ireland, where early versions of the pilgrimage would permit some to spend the night in a cave where they presumably had visions of the otherworld:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractatus_de_Purgatorio_Sancti_Patricii
"The Tractatus tells of the journey of an Irish knight, Owein (a version of the Irish name Eógan), to St Patrick's Purgatory in Lough Derg, County Donegal, now in the Republic of Ireland, where he journeys through Purgatory and the Earthly Paradise. Owein's journey is dated by Henry of Saltrey to the reign of King Stephen of England between 1135 and 1154. Henry states that his source was Gilbert, a monk in Lincoln who visited Ireland in 1148 to found a monastery at Baltinglass in County Wicklow. Since Gilbert spoke no Irish, he was introduced to the knight Owein, who became his interpreter during his two-year stay in Ireland."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrapasso
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_of_angels
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Comedy#Influences
"Besides Dante's fellow poets, the classical figure that most influenced the Comedy is Aristotle. Dante built up the philosophy of the Comedy with the works of Aristotle as a foundation, just as the scholastics used Aristotle as the basis for their thinking. Dante knew Aristotle directly from Latin translations of his works and indirectly quotations in the works of Albertus Magnus. Dante even acknowledges Aristotle's influence explicitly in the poem, specifically when Virgil justifies the Inferno's structure by citing the Nicomachean Ethics. In the same canto, Virgil draws on Cicero's De Officiis to explain why sins of the intellect are worse than sins of violence, a key point that would be explored from canto XVIII to the end of the Inferno.
...The Apocalypse of Peter is one of the earliest examples of a Christian-Jewish katabasis, a genre of explicit depictions of heaven and hell. Later works inspired by it include the Apocalypse of Thomas in the 2nd–4th century, and more importantly, the Apocalypse of Paul in the 4th century. Despite a lack of "official" approval, the Apocalypse of Paul would go on to be popular for centuries, possibly due to its popularity among the medieval monks that copied and preserved manuscripts in the turbulent centuries following the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Divine Comedy belongs to the same genre and was influenced by the Apocalypse of Paul."
Contrapasso sounds like an interesting world-building exercise. You need to make the punishment metaphorically related to the sin, but you probably also want more horrible punishments for the sins you consider worse... so it needs some creativity, if you decide that fraud and treachery are the worst.
Nice to know that Unsong follows a long ancient tradition.
For what it’s worth, the majority of Christians are going to tell you that your listed #3 is the correct interpretation of hell, and definitely not #2. For that reason, most will recoil at the idea of “tiers” of hell
Woo-hoo! Literary criticism *and* Catholic theology, this is catnip for me! 😁
"But from that perspective, there is no reason why e.g. a guy who masturbated once should be judged less harshly than e.g. Stalin; both of them are infinitely guilty and both deserve an infinite punishment."
You fail to take into account the mediaeval love of (and indeed mania for) categorisation and classification, as well as consideration of Divine Justice. Here on Earth, a man who steals a loaf of bread and a man who commits murder are both criminals and are both punished by the law, but the crimes are not held equal in severity. Is God, then, less just than mortals? This cannot be so.
Hence the Dantean notion of greater and lesser sinners (and greater and lesser saints, as he travels with Beatrice through the heavenly spheres, though she is careful to explain to him that the souls are not there in reality; this is a concession to his limited human understanding and all the saved are equally in Heaven in the Empyrean). In the Sphere of the Moon, one of the questions he has for the saved souls is "but are you content with a lesser share of bliss?" They tell him that yes, since it is God's will, and since they are enjoying bliss to the limits of their capacity, so there's not really 'more' or 'less'.
Think of it as a cup and a milk churn both filled to the brim. The churn plainly contains more liquid, but both vessels are equally full.
Dante moves 'up' through the heavens from the lesser to the greater in the Paradiso. In the same way, he starts his journey in the Inferno moving 'down' from the lesser to the greater sinners. One famous example is Paola and Francesca, in the Circle of Lust, who have been regarded sympathetically by the Romantics as lovers. Dante himself is moved by their story and faints in sympathy, until Virgil smacks some sense into him.
Paolo and Francesca may not be as great sinners as the one who murdered them, and that murderer is punished on a lower, greater, level of Hell - but this is still Hell, and they are still sinners, and they are still being punished to the level and limit of their culpability and capacity. Again, there is no 'less' and 'more' here: their cup of suffering is full to the brim.
And in the end, this is all a literary device and not meant to be official theology.
Closest I can think of is Luke 10:13-14, where "it will be more bearable for Tyre and Sidon at the judgment than for you", implying there are differences in level of punishment for the unsaved. You'll have to wait for Deiseach to say if Catholicism has anything more substantial.
What is the right way to model / think about the likelihood of a whistleblower being found dead by suicide being what actually happened?
If you yourself are considering being a whistleblower, how would you update on the frequency of such events?
https://nypost.com/2024/12/14/us-news/openai-whistleblower-suchir-balaji-found-dead-by-suicide-in-san-francisco-apartment/
In general, deaths that might plausibly be targeted assassinations of people not involved in organized crime, are I think <100/year in the United States, whereas suicide is 50,000/year. And job loss is a common trigger for suicide; a whistleblower is almost certainly going to be losing their job in the near future, and their employer will be making that as stressful as possible for other reasons. So your prior for assassination should be very, very low.
Also, Hollywood-style professional assassins are exceedingly rare in the contemporary United States; if any of them even exist, they work for major organized crime families or for government agencies, neither of whom rent them out. So if someone is blowing the whistle on anyone but the Mafia or the CIA, anyone who wants to kill them will have to do it themselves, or hire a non-professional killer (which may be e.g. a bodyguard or security officer being asked to do something outside their normal job description).
Trying to arrange the killing of one whistleblower, risks generating a new whistleblower - the bodyguard or whatever who calls the police when his boss asks him to assassinate someone. So one question to ask, if you want to adjust that prior is, does the whistleblower pose the sort of threat that would justify that sort of risk? The penalty for most forms of corporate naughtiness is usually a large fine paid by the company. The penalty for conspiracy to commit murder, is many many years in prison for everyone involved including whoever gave the order - yes even if they're the CEO.
Same as any other person. 1. What would it take to make a murder look like suicide? 2. does anybody have a reason to do that? 3. what about the person's recent life would suggest suicidal tendencies?
Famous people always clear 1 and 2, they've got enough rich enemies that bribing officials is an option. So it comes down to 3. Would anything suggest Suchir was suicidal? I'm sure we'll hear more about Mr. Balaji's personal life as the news cycle spins on. but I would say the whistleblowing itself does; he's claimed that AI is ruining the Internet, but if OpenAI goes down that isn't stopping AI. How much of his skillset is AI-specific? Also Trump won the presidency and for all I know he's planning to pardon the whole company. So, shaky career options, the AI Apocalypse and the Trump Apocalypse make it plausible.
https://fakebuddhaquotes.com/if-you-propose-to-speak-always-ask-yourself-is-it-true-is-it-necessary-is-it-kind/
A probable source for true, kind, necessary:https://fakebuddhaquotes.com/if-you-propose-to-speak-always-ask-yourself-is-it-true-is-it-necessary-is-it-kind/
Actual quote from Buddhism:
"And what other five conditions must be established in himself [i.e. a bhikkhu who desires to admonish another]?
“Do I speak at the right time, or not? Do I speak of facts, or not? Do I speak gently or harshly? Do I speak profitable words or not? Do I speak with a kindly heart, or inwardly malicious?”"
Probable actual source:
“Miscellaneous Poems,” by Mary Ann Pietzker, published in 1872 by Griffith and Farran of London
"“Is It True? Is It Necessary? Is It Kind? is actually the title of one of her poems. Here it is:
is it true necessary kind
“Is It True? Is It Necessary? Is It Kind?
Oh! Stay, dear child, one moment stay,
Before a word you speak,
That can do harm in any way
To the poor, or to the weak;
And never say of any one
What you’d not have said of you,
Ere you ask yourself the question,
“Is the accusation true?”
And if ’tis true, for I suppose
You would not tell a lie;
Before the failings you expose
Of friend or enemy:
Yet even then be careful, very;
Pause and your words well weigh,
And ask it it be necessary,
What you’re about to say.
And should it necessary be,
At least you deem it so,
Yet speak not unadvisedly
Of friend or even foe,
Till in your secret soul you seek
For some excuse to find;
And ere the thoughtless word you speak,
Ask yourself, “Is it kind?”
When you have ask’d these questions three—
True,—Necessary,—Kind,—
Ask’d them in all sincerity,
I think that you will find,
It is not hardship to obey
The command of our Blessed Lord,—
No ill of any man to say;
No, not a single word."
Has anyone else been noticing that there've been remarkably few cases of colds and flu around this year? If so, are you aware of any explanation (hopefully one that's not too scary)?
Flu season seems to have started late this year. Rhinoviruses, RSV, and OC43 (a common cold coronavirus) are on the rise. However, both wastewater numbers and the CDC's flu surveillance program show that flu cases are on the rise now (about a month late). COVID is still in a slump, though.
At the risk of tooting my own horn, you can see what was happening as of a couple of weeks ago with non-COVID respiratory viruses starting on slide 8 of my Epi Week 47-48 update.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1863401997048872968.html
US flu map is here: https://www.cdc.gov/fluview/surveillance/usmap.html
It’s getting going, but is still low in many parts of the country. I believe Feb is the month it most often peaks
Thank you. Someone already pointed me to that one, but these are just the cases recorded by medical professionals (who even goes to a doctor for simple flu symptoms?), and it says explicitly not all of them might even be flu. It's probably correlated with actual flu numbers, but figuring out how would be way over my head.
(Also, the link to the data from my state goes to a 404 Page not found page.)
Might be a localized thing. Everyone is sniffling everywhere around here, and I do mean everyone, to the extent I've accepted I'm getting it sooner or later.
It could also be RSV, rhinoviruses, or OC43. All of those URT pathogens are on the rise now.
I hope you're both feeling better now.
Thank you for the link. These seem to be, however, only the cases that made it to a medical professional. People around me generally do not go to a medical professional for flu symptoms if they don't have another really good reason. Why go to a doctor when you can just sleep it off? So what is actually graphed here is not anything like the actual number of cases but a weird measure conditioned on a lot of things including flu severity and patient's behavior.
So I'm actually more grateful to you for your personal anecdata. I am sorry for you, but it's useful to know that not everyone is seeing what we are seeing.
(On top of this, the link to my state's data goes to "Page not found", but the state is still colored light green. I'll wait and see if it's still light green when they get to the current week, and if it is, I think we can safely assume their code is broken in at least one way.)
Get well soon!
EDIT: I misread the description of the chart. They admit they don't even know if all of this is flu.
I will hijack this to point out that rapid tests have a sensitivity under 50% [1] (that might be overly optimistic as well - I've seen numbers in the ballpark of 20%-30%). So if you have a very bad, non-COVID flu, a negative rapid test doesn't tell you all that much.
Moreover, since COVID is very common (I saw an estimate from the UK of 1.5 infections per person per year, if you use PCR tests), and much more common than the traditional "bad flu" viruses like influenza (the average person gets influenza once every 5-10 years), it means that, if you get a negative rapid test, but have a "bad flu", it's probably still COVID.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/mm7316a2.htm
The CDC performs genome sequencing on a representative portion of positive influenza test samples taken from its sentinel sites (not sure what they consider a representative sample, nor how many sentinel sites there are). They're a small fraction of all flu cases nationally, but this allows them to determine which strains are dominant. Type A(H1N1) and A(H1N3) are the most common right now, with Type B making up less than 10% of the cases.
Why don't I get notified when someone replies to my comments on this thread?
Also, I'm curious what Deiseach and other Irish folk think about Connor Macgregor running for president? https://www.vice.com/en/article/connor-mcgregor-president-ireland/
He is a bad character who likes acting the big tough hard man and hanging around alleged gangsters. Running for President is stupid because even if he does, he will get slaughtered in the campaign. Besides, for all our "criminals turned politicians" needs, we have a genuine gangster in the shape of Gerry Hutch (God save us all) who ran in our general election in November:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerry_Hutch
I've never liked him, I thought he was a disgrace to the nation, and the recent events haven't made me think better of him.
Maybe it's only my experience but I can go months without seeing a headline about McGregor. He's been in the news a bit recently about being found guilty of sexual assault and the victim being awarded damages etc., but I think much of the controversy internationally about him doesn't reach Ireland. Some of these stories might be performances for the American Right.
We will have a presidential election in 2025. The role of the president is mostly ceremonial, and our presidential elections tend to have many candidates with various degrees of connection to reality. I greatly enjoy the dirt that they all dig up about one another. The last open election (i.e. without an incumbent) was in 2011 - it featured an ex-Eurovision winner waving the constitution around and claiming to have been the victim of an assassination attempt; a sitting senator withdrawing twice from the race (for trying to influence the Israeli supreme court and claiming a disability benefit he wasn't entitled to) but re-entering both times; McGuinness being accused of murder on TV by Vincent Browne, corruption and brown envelopes... it was amazing, start to finish.
So I think McGregor will fit right into the politicking and backstabbing. He won't win.
Himself and Gerry Hutch can fight it out now that they're both going into politics, and since Hutch is a genuine gangster instead of just hanging around scumbags, McGregor will mysteriously fall down a mine shaft some day, and that solves that problem.
Then we have to deal with Hutch, but maybe he'll be extradited to Spain to face charges there.
Why does it take a good 5-10 minutes before you get the option to see the comments with 'Oldest First'?
That's extra-interesting to me because my default in open threads is new first, but old first on all other threads. It used to be old first on open threads as well, but after changing it every time I guess it learned what I wanted? Not sure.
Now I'm locked in to new first here and old first everywhere else.
I noticed that too.
But when you use the button/link that tells the comment count to open the comments in a tab of their own, the option is right there.
But of course it has no memory and on each load you have to set it again... wait... read.
For me, that option doesn't show up at all, even after waiting several minutes. Weird. Maybe it's something Scott disabled intentionally? (I recall that he configured the blog intentionally to show all comments ordered by new, which is not something that Substack does by the default, because he had strong opinions about avoiding bias by discouraging people from only interacting with the first few comments that are posted.)
I cannot answer the “why” but I do have a solution for you. I wrote a browser extension primarily to load comments on this blog much faster, but it also allows you to switch to Chronological order (immediately after loading, and much more quickly).
You can get it here for Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/astral-codex-eleven/lmdipmgaknhfbndeaibopjnlckgghemn
Or for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/astral-codex-eleven/
Thanks! I will take a look at that when I have time.
What if instead of saying probabilities in percentages, we said their log-probability?
That would look like this:
"That's impossible" / "0%" → "the logodds are ∞"
"That's not very likely" / "10%-40%" → "3.3-1.3
"toss-up" / "50%" → "the logodds are 1"
"Probably" / "60%-80%" → "the logodds are 0.73 - 0.23"
"Definitely" / "100%" → "the logodds are 0"
Yes, we'd look even weirder than we already do. But, we might be better off when it comes to very unlikely things eg the difference between .1 and 0
Arguably, people who pass middle school arithmetic can develop a crude sense of proportion how often some repeated event happens. From there, it is not an impossible step to try to estimate whether some event happens >99%, 90%, 50%, 10%, or less than 1% of time.
Moving to log probability -- while not exactly impossible, still non trivial. After disappearance of slide rules it is quite are to find even engineers who habitually think in logarithm.
Moving to log odds -- sorry, I think only betting fanatics and equivalently weird fans of logistic regression have any intuitive understanding of the definition of "odds". (For example, odds of 50% event are 1 to 1, that is, odds ratio of 1. In "log odds", that is log(1) = 0.)
Because someone like me would ask "What the hell are logodds"?
Numerical probabilities are much easier to manipulate using the addition and multiplication rules
If event A has logodds a and event B has logodds b and they are independent, the logodds of A AND B is a+b
By "addition rule" I guess you mean that if A and B are mutually exclusive then the probability of A OR B is a+b. Indeed there's no nice version of that. On the other hand, I'd say that doesn't come up very often.
However: the logodds version of Bayes rule (I just learned...) is gorgeous. Let's take the notation of logodds that L(X) = log(P(X)):
L(A|B) = S(B|A) + S(A) - S(B)
(note that I should have said "surprisal" above, not logodds... it's a sign flip)
> By "addition rule" I guess you mean that if A and B are mutually exclusive then the probability of A OR B is a+b. Indeed there's no nice version of that. On the other hand, I'd say that doesn't come up very often.
It *is* very common. (Oftentimes you might want to consider multiple scenarios where a certain condition would be satisfied). Also, Bayes' rule becomes a lot uglier (under logodds) once you consider a variable A with >=3 outcomes that depends on a variable B with >= 3 outcomes but you want to find B given A.
> multiple scenarios where a certain condition would be satisfied
Right, but for addition to give the right answer the different scenarios would have to be mutually exclusive.
> variable A with >=3 outcomes
I don't see how the probability form would differ?
Shouldn't all those numbers be negative?
0 < e^x < 1 implies that -\infty < x < 0. There's a storm-in-a-teacup in Ireland at the moment caused by the ex-taoiseach saying that one of his cabinet colleagues couldn't understand percentages no matter how hard he tried to explain. I don't see this flying with the general public unfortunately. I do agree it would be a much better way for e.g. physicists to talk about things rather than their 6 sigmas and etc.
You are completely correct. I should not have said log odds, I should have said "surprisal". Suprisal is the sign flip of the log odds. Those numbers above are surprisals!
You're probably right that it is a long shot for this to enter common parlance.
However, I note two things:
1. People use phrases like "it might happen" or "there's a distinct possibility" when we rationalists would prefer to hear a percentage. In terms of surprise though, they use words like "very surprised" "extremely surprised" etc. I think the language around "surprise" might be closer to being already-quantitative then the language around "probability".
2. If anything like (1) is true, the example you gave with the percentages may actually back me up...
I brought in a point about general mathematical illiteracy which is maybe irrelevant - so ignore that for now. You're asking why people aren't more quantitative in talking about the future.
Statements of type (1) are expressions of opinion. Occasionally these refer to a lottery, a hand of poker or some other highly specified situation where every possible outcome can be enumerated and assigned a probability. Then sure, it's possible to calculate a probability. But most of the time they're really expressions of opinion. If someone says to you I'm 80% sure - does that mean they have good data, or they have a rumble in their gut? What it's they're 110% sure or 'one million percent sure'? Bayesians will have a slightly different take on this but they still have to specify some sort of prior to make anything quantitative. People don't formalise mathematically - it's the fast part of Kahnemann's two systems that makes these calls.
One bugbear of mine regarding percentages: people will talk about a 4% increase in price and this means that what was $100 before is now $104. But if the price jumps to $550 - almost everyone treats this as a 550% increase, rather than 450%. That is: small percentages are additive and large percentages are multiplicative - it's very common in the media. A percentage is a number with the decimal shifted two places - my own opinion is that they should be used only rarely for quantities larger than 1. (This isn't relevant here, but it's a quirk of language that's very widespread and suggests to people that percentages are a special kind of number with different rules to other numbers.)
What would be the most resource-efficient ways to kill zombies? Assume they've practically taken over the world, and nuclear weapons or other solutions requiring a large organization are unavailable. It's just you and a group of survivors working together.
I think shooting each one in the head is too time-consuming and wasteful since you run out of bullets--a critical resource after the apocalypse.
The very most resource-efficient way will always be to simply leave them to die from something else--even if that something else is the sun swallowing the earth in a few billion years.
Generally I think other constraints are more important. It's not like it's all that "expensive" to kill a zombie with a hammer in the right circumstances. More important to focus on safety and consistency than on reducing the calorie expenditure of a hammer kill by 40%.
Actually, I've changed my mind. Assuming they're immune to starvation, disease, etc., I'd build a zombie-powered perpetual motion machine. Capture a few dozen zombies, tie them to harnesses, tie meat in front of them, and use them as an endless engine. With zombie power, assuming you capture a few zombies during each zombie-killing raid, your resource cost per zombie kill may well be negative.
love this
I'm remembering a documentary that talked about very long wall formations so old they were underwater, definitely human-made, speculated to be walls to funnel wild animals into pens for slaughter.
OR ancient zombie outbreaks. Yeah, or that.
Heavy earth moving equipment to funnel them into industrial shredding machines (or wood chippers). Diesel powered which is simple and reliable enough to be used and maintained by a group with average knowledge (and access to a library). Run them over or push them into a shredder. There may be some meat processing equipment that could be used to.
Some kind of automated system that doesn't involve human power would be best. For instance if you built a base on an island in the middle of a river, and the flow of water washed away any zombies coming at you. Let them get eaten by fish and crabs or whatever.
You could artificially build the same kind of thing with trenches and diversions that got the zombies to travel away from you and into some kind of trap. Disposing with or hauling away the dead ones would be the hardest part of most traps. A spike pit trap would fill up quick, for instance.
Otherwise it seems to depend on which kind of zombie you're talking about. Slow shamblers seem easy to deal with if you can maintain discipline and wear bite-proof clothing/armor. This would be true even with really large numbers. Phalanx or Turtle formations would be great. The fast and strong ones might be able to overwhelm such a tactic, especially in large numbers, because zombies don't fear pain and death. You would need some kind of height and/or distance and polearm weapons. Spearing them from a rooftop where the zombies gather at the bottom - though once again clearing the dead ones becomes an issue if you're using the same location for an extended period.
In the (very good) Zombie RPG Red Markets, the government builds "punchbots", simple robots that play recorded sounds to attract the ghouls and then systematically destroy them with a hydraulic ram. Not very fast but they don't take breaks or get scared.
Bret Devereaux has written on this. See here
https://acoup.blog/2021/08/06/referenda-ad-senatum-august-6-2021-feelings-at-the-fall-of-the-republic-ancient-and-medieval-living-standards-and-zombies/
(last part) and also
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/05/fireside-friday-august-5-2022/
Bottom line, zombies are an incredibly low powered opponent, you can almost surely beat them with disciplined shock troops wielding melee weapons and wearing light armor. But you probably want to go with black powder and muskets.
I think this post is denying the premise. There would be no zombie apocalypse because zombies are easy to beat.
But engaging in the premise, apocalypse has happened, you are a survivor, your access to the best technology is limited, and you are trying to rid the earth of them. Defensive river posted above is nice purely for survival, but is not an exterminator.
I think a straight forward, resource efficient option is herding and burning, which would immobilize them even if they are still not quite dead.
I could engage with the premise of walking dead right up to the episode they encountered a quarry full of tightly packed zombies and they decided thet had to herd them somewhere else instead of just tossing in wood and burning them.
The second post does engage in the premise, and what it says basically is that if you find yourself in a post apocalyptic world, you make black powder and muskets, since that's the furthest up the military tech tree you can get with readily available materials and simple manufacturing.
Trucks. Maybe with bladed wheels. Greek Trucks.
I would say digging trenches / pits would be useful from a resource perspective if you have a lot of people and manpower.
In terms of resource efficient otherwise... idk. Maybe some sort of acid? or glue?
When someone opens my substack, they see a pop-up prompting them to type their email and subscribe to my blog. How can I remove it? I think it's just plain rude, but I haven't found a way in the settings to get rid of that.
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Technosocial relationship traps.
I'm finding myself using AI for a certain unsatisfied social need.
To add a little background and context to this, I’ve long been worried about the use of technology to ameliorate our social struggles, since our inner emotional conflict about our social situation is what drives us to seek out genuine social relationships. To me, the fact that pharmaceutical companies are developing pills to cure people of loneliness—justifying it by citing loneliness as a cofactor in many mental and physical health problems—along with our sexual drive being subverted by unnatural super-stimuli like pornography, romance novels and erotica, and genital stimulators, has bothered me for a long time. I think it potentially erodes or has eroded our society in general. Recreational drugs that do things like cure boredom—such as marijuana seems to for many people—or even the constant, easy entertainment of mass media worry me. Parasocial relationships with celebrities waste people’s time and give them unrealistic views of the world and themselves. Social media clearly isn’t natural, and I’m still trying to figure out to what extent it is facilitating or hampering healthy relationships. Social media seems to be doing both, depending upon the person, and sometimes both in the same person. Video games, an occasional vice of mine, give false senses of accomplishment, though sometimes they do represent genuine accomplishment as well. The metaphysics of what is real accomplishment is somewhat tricky. Probably my biggest near-term future concern is the replacement of romantic partners with synthetic ones. Already, some very crude and incomplete fantasy partners have been commercialized, and they seem highly addictive. I think there’s quite a bit of danger there in the formation of an idealized partner that you can’t really build a life with and that doesn’t even demand that you grow or develop healthy ways of dealing with expectations and conflicts.
In some ways, I feel like condemning or looking down on people who don’t challenge themselves with the real thing. In other ways, I want to be sympathetic and realize that a lot of people aren’t up to these challenges, either for reasons of personal circumstances or lack of ability and role modeling. Then, on the other hand, I think maybe it’s too judgmental of me to look down on these things, and it’s a good general principle to assume that people know what’s best for themselves (except, of course, when they continuously complain about how awful their life is but keep doing the same things that keep them locked into that life over and over… Do that and I’m going to give you advice). Then there’s the kind of social Darwinist perspective that occasionally crosses my mind, and I think: why should I even be concerned about the benighted decisions that lead people down a road to a fool’s paradise? Let them live their wretched existence and let the Darwinian forces sort them out.
So it’s with all this context that I realized that for the last few months I’ve been kind of doing a social thing with AI. Sometimes I really just want to talk to someone who simply doesn’t exist in my life and whom I’ve never really been able to find. I have lots of ideas about obscure topics that would take a specialist to answer, often in areas where I know of no specialist who has the time to indulge me, especially not at 2:00 a.m.
So in the last week, I’ve had the following situations. I have been soaking quinoa seeds and wanted them to sprout as rapidly as possible. I wondered how much water to add, and then I just thought to myself that if I just submerge them, they’ll soak up water as fast as possible. But even after a few days, nothing had happened. I posited that maybe seeds have a mechanism to inhibit sprouting when they’re being drowned, because if an area is flooded, it’s a bad time to sprout—just as much as it’s a bad time to sprout when you have no water. I posited a few mechanisms by which this might happen, and it turns out, according to GPT-01, that this is a known phenomenon. It happens with most seeds, and there are several mechanisms for it, including a couple I thought of.
Then also this week, I was listening to Isaac Arthur’s video on Project Medusa, which is an interstellar spacecraft propulsion system based on nuclear weapons and a parachute—a bit like Project Orion, except that instead of using a pusher plate, you use a “puller” parachute. During the video, he mentions that both of these have been shown to be more efficient than a conventional nuclear reactor tied to an ion drive. I wound up wondering about this and thought about how small you could make the reactors. You couldn’t really use a nuclear submarine-type reactor because that requires massive water throughput and very rapid cooling, as well as being extremely expensive and using the highest grade nuclear fuel. But you probably could use a molten salt thorium reactor that’s even more efficient and lighter, doesn’t require water cooling, and could use radiators. I wanted somebody to talk to about that, and GPT-01 was there. I got to expand on a few ideas, and we came to the conclusion that more experiments were needed, as well as some exact calculations on the energy density of the reactor.
Other topics this week: I wanted to discuss the long-term economic implications of high-speed rail between major metropolitan centers like LA and San Francisco. I considered the “hangry female evolutionary hypothesis” that I posted here. I wanted to have a question-and-answer session about the real differences in engineering between supersonic, hypersonic, and hyper-hypersonic flight, to make sure that I understood the concepts properly. I wanted to look at the hypothesis that rapamycin might have complex interactions with virus physiology. I got to wondering about the cultural evolution of the Medusa myth and how her portrayal—as blasphemer, egoist, victim of jealousy, victim of crime, victim of an ironic curse, and even antihero—has changed across cultures and over the years. Finally, I’m looking for people to discuss fairly technical papers with, which I’m not sure I grasp well. The newest generations of AI are starting to fulfill these intellectual needs that I’ve had for decades.
I’m pretty sure that people exist who can be very good conversants on these topics. In fact, they’re probably still significantly better than the AI, but there have been few times in my life that I’ve really had access to people who could do this, and it was usually only in a few circumscribed areas.
Now I am thinking to myself: isn’t this just using AI as a proxy for real social interaction and the drive to find the right people to fulfill those needs? I can go ahead and say, “Boy, but finding those people and connecting with them seems near impossible,” but that’s the same reasoning that people use when they get AI girlfriends. Should this make me more sympathetic towards them, or more critical of both of us? Should my attitude towards this potential vice be ameliorated by the fact that the AIs are getting better and probably will be superhuman intellectual companions eventually? Should I hope that the AIs will help me figure out how to make these connections to satisfy these needs with real people?
Lightly edited by Gpt01
The last sentence is pretty funny.
Yeah, I see what you're saying, and I kind of agree. I've pretty much accepted that 'my people' don't exist, though I haven't really gone in for AI to fix the problem, I just give up on asking certain questions.
Eventually the people resistant to superstimuli will outbreed and replace those who aren't. I'm just going to try to enjoy what's left of my life.
Ken Klippenstein has published Mangione's manifesto. I guess he's fessing up to killing Thompson.
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/luigis-manifesto
Quoting his post in its entirety...
> I’ve obtained a copy of suspected killer Luigi Mangione’s manifesto — the real one, not the forgery circulating online. Major media outlets are also in possession of the document but have refused to publish it and not even articulated a reason why. My queries to The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and NBC to explain their rationale for withholding the manifesto, while gladly quoting from it selectively, have not been answered.
>I’ll have more to say on this later — on how unhealthy the media’s drift away from public disclosure is — but for now, here’s the manifesto:
>>“To the Feds, I'll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn't working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”
"Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming..."
And with nothing more than mad-libbing the rest of the passage, you could turn it into a white supremacist's manifesto written to justify the murder of nonwhite people.
Should the media be editing our newsfeeds? And do they really *not* reward murderers with attention? I think they selectively give certain villains a platform. Moreover, "if it bleeds, it leads" still seems to be the order of the day. If you listen to the evening news, you'd think violent crime is all-pervasive, yet the murder rate is now down to levels it was in the early 1960s.
Worse yet, the MSM forces us to focus on the stories and views that the editors think are important. What they include or discard forces us to see the world the way they see it. That's what I like about TwiXter — all sorts of interesting stuff gets posted up there. Of course, a vast mass of shite can swamp useful and/or legitimate information. And what we focus on in free-form news feeds can distort our understanding of the world by the way we selectively choose what to follow or believe. I don't have an answer, but I personally would like to know what motivated Mangione to assassinate Thompson.
"GiveDirectly is a charity that gives money directly to poor families in Africa. GiveWell thinks they’re within an order of magnitude of the most effective charities in the world. You can learn more and donate here: GiveDirectly.org/astralcodexten" - thanks for highlighting!
Yoga is divine. That's the thought that came to me after class today. I had a rough weekend but felt great after the 1chour of early morning yoga.
What I mean by divine here, is it gives me a connection, however transient, with my own self. My teacher is excellent and humble enough to say that it's nothing she is doing.
And of course, Hindus see the individual self as part of the universal consciousness/the divine, thus also being divine.
Yoga helped lead me back to God, eventually. It is divine indeed.
Interesting, how?
Basically I had really bad chronic pain. I started doing yoga. That helped me develop a felt sense inside my body for what felt "right."
Long story short, following that internal sense led me back to God.
Some more un-PC thoughts:
There was an article recently in the NYT about the lack of the male writer. Obviously they mean in literary fiction. The guy hemmed and hawed to avoid getting cancelled, but nonetheless admitted the major publishing houses won't take a guy except for the occasional diversity story.
My thoughts then were about Latin writers like Alex Perez who said something similar and complained about the desire for the 'sad minority' story:
https://thespectator.com/book-and-art/im-a-latinx-person-of-letters-poc/
https://www.hobartpulp.com/web_features/alex-perez-on-the-iowa-s-writers-workshop-baseball-and-growing-up-cuban-american-in-america
But it occurs to me there are other stories that aren't told because they're not PC, some even from an ethnic point of view--what about Latinas looking for a traditional guy? What about all the sexually frustrated Asian-American engineers, stuck in a culture where nerds aren't cool? That's a story the Brooklyn ladies really won't want to hear... (Yes, I specifically used that example because I think someone like that is in the audience and will be inspired to write that novel.)
Why have "major publishing houses" not been disrupted yet? What service do they provide to authors for the ~90% cut they take on each book sale?
It's not printing. If you just want to get books printed there are much cheaper ways to do it.
It might be the service of getting your book onto the shelves of actual bookstores. But actual bookstores are a diminishing fraction of the book market.
It's probably something like respectability and filtering -- a book from a major publishing house has passed through some kind of quality control and filtering and so people are more likely to buy it.
But if the tastes of publishing houses become disconnected from the tastes of actual book readers, then this loses all value.
> Why have "major publishing houses" not been disrupted yet?
I was wondering exactly this the other day.
Context is, I know a man who's written a biography about a historical figure. He's had a merry back and forth with publishers over the years and multiple exhausting rewrites. Finally they came clean and said (well, heavily implied) they wanted him to rewrite it to focus on the wife. (The wife was not a significant historical figure in her own right.) He eventually decided enough was enough. He talked about self publishing for a while but last I saw him it seemed like he'd given up on the whole thing.
I very definitely model publishers/editors/agents as a closed, cliquey community and am very ready to believe it's controlled by smug twats and ripe for a disruptin'.
Self publishing fails because it doesn't offer a filter. I often end up buying self published books out of a desire to encourage the authors. And I can attest that no matter how bad you think some published works may be, you know nothing of shit until you've seen it matte printed on a small market stall and bought it from the author himself.
Some filter is necessary. But it still seems to me there are multiple unexplored ways to do it. I even have a plan for one, which might be a cool project and bring me into more frequent contact with other writery type people - something I sorely lack rn.
My sibling who's been both a published author and an editor of same says that author's royalties range from 10 to 15 percent of list price for printed books and between 25 and 50 percent for e-books.
Using the mean of each range, the publisher is retaining 87.5 percent of the sale prices of printed books compared to 62.5 percent of the sale prices of e-books. The sale price of an e-book is typically around 60 percent of the mean of the hardcover and softcover list prices.
If for example purposes we set the printed list price (mean of the hardcover and softcover versions) at $20, each printed sale yields an average of $17.50 for the publisher and each e-book sale of the same work yields an average of $7.50 for the publisher.
7.50 is 43 percent of 17.50. So the publishers' current pricing behavior implies that physical printing+distribution represents somewhere around 57 percent of publishers' costs.
Obviously there are other variables being overridden in the above simplification, e.g. books in different genres sell different mixes of hard- and soft-cover editions. As a first-order approximation though it appears that 50 to 60 percent of the service that publishers carry out for printed books, and avoid with e-books, is printing+distribution.
> Why have "major publishing houses" not been disrupted yet? What service do they provide to authors for the ~90% cut they take on each book sale?
I suggest you read Charlie Stross's four-part series on publishing (links below).
> But if the tastes of publishing houses become disconnected from the tastes of actual book readers, then this loses all value.
The business is a lot more complex than you'd think. A few large publishing conglomerates control dozens of publishing houses, and publishing houses control dozens of imprints. Each imprint can schedule the release of several hundred books each year. Chances are there's an imprint that specializes in the tastes of actual book readers (which are quite diverse in their tastes). For instance, A little googling shows that Holtzbrinck Publishing Group owns MacMillan, which in turn owns Tor, and Tor specializes in Science Fiction and Fantasy. If your tastes are for genre fiction (mysteries, fantasies, etc.) with LGBTQetc themes, then there's Bold Strokes Books, which is a little fish within the stomach of Hachette Group. Bold Stokes produces several hundred titles each year of LGBTQetc genre fiction. If you're into Romance novels, NewsCorp owns Harper Collins, which owns Harlequin, which has several imprints depending on what flavor of bodice ripper you're into. If you're into rightwing politics, Penguin Random House owns Crown Forum, an imprint that has published conservative authors like Charles Krauthammer and Glenn Beck.
Anyway, here are the links to the Stross's posts about common misconceptions about the publishing industry...
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/common-misconceptions-about-pu.html
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-how-books-are-made.html
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-3-how-books-are-sold.html
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/03/cmap-4-territories-translation.html
I think you're correct.
I think you've finally convinced me to give up on that novel, allowing me to redirect my energies. Given that my second choice was 'fight feminism', this may not be good for me or the world. But I think it's useful to understand the world better. Thank you.
Interesting read, but I think I'm still left with the same question at the end: "If a good author is turned down for sexist reasons, can't they just self-publish ebooks on amazon and skip the publishing houses entirely?"
I don't know the economics, and maybe it's harder to be discoverable when doing that, but it looks like the royalty is way higher.
(I've read a decent number of self-published ebooks on amazon, yes.)
1. If you self-publish, how do you spread the word of your new tome? The New York Review of Books isn't going to review it.
2. The royalty rate may be higher if you self-publish, but selling 100 ebooks for $5 won't beat a dollar royalty selling 5,000 books through an established distribution channel. Of course, the chances of getting picked up a publisher if you don't have an agent of almost zero.
3. If the author doesn't use a good copyeditor (i.e., one that is a professional and that expects to get paid for their service), self-published works can look pretty amateur. Some of the self-published works I've seen are pretty crappy. They may have a good idea, but they could have benefited from the critical distance of a good editor. Yes, I've read a few decent self-published novels on Amazon, but even the good ones have some howlers of mistakes in them.
The publishing houses get books reviewed in the NYT, The New Yorker, etc. They also play this trick where they purchase their own books the first few weeks they are out in order to get them onto the NYT Bestseller List, which then gets those books on the wall of bookstores in airports. People like to read books which already seem popular.
The major publishing houses aren't all that disconnected from the tastes of their readers. For the small minority of readers who want "Literary Fiction", they produce literary fiction to taste and market it under a prestigious imprint. For everyone else, they produce various sorts of genre fiction and market it under imprints that are recognized as associated with that genre. Roughly speaking, and with a fuzzy middle ground.
The bit where the NYT guy thinks the hoi polloi would read "literary fiction" and so be elevated from their Trump-voting depravity if only some of the Lit-Fic writers were male, that's just the NYT being silly.
As for value: I read both professionally-published and indie fiction, and the stuff with a publishing house behind it is almost always better written. Even in my cpreferredgenre, the major houses publish an awful lot of crap that I'm not going to enjoy, but it's usually properly labeled on the jacket so I can find the stuff that they actually publish for people like me. The stuff I think is crap, I expect finds the audience that will appreciate it.
>The bit where the NYT guy thinks the hoi polloi would read "literary fiction" and so be elevated from their Trump-voting depravity if only some of the Lit-Fic writers were male, that's just the NYT being silly.
This reminds me of one of the NYT podcasts I listened to recently where they were talking about how men voted for Trump because he made them "felt heard" and "listened to", as if Trump was some soothing therapist-like figure that men have been yearning for
I mean, he is, but they're not yearning for a soothing therapist-like figure, they're yearning for an angry ass-kicker. You have feminized men and women writing these articles, so that's why they talk about 'feeling heard' and 'listened to'. If they were written by this commentariat they'd talk about him 'engaging in a principal-agent problem by articulating people's frustrations without doing anything to solve them', except we'd have some cute name from HPMOR or an old ACX/SSC blog post.
Alternatively, lots of voters were more unhappy about inflation and out-of-control immigration than they were about restrictions on abortion.
Or just enough to tip the election!
I eat carburetors for breakfast.
The majority of what a publishing house does is market and grant legitimacy to a book. It's a difficult thing to disrupt.
The most important thing they do, for my purposes, is provide professional editors. I say that from having read plenty of self-published books.
I mean, there's probably untapped markets they're ignoring, but the woke ladies in Brooklyn know the particular audience they're cultivating pretty well. And they've driven young men away from reading (with a lot of help from video games), so it doesn't really matter anymore, I guess.
Quite likely a chicken-or-egg problem here. Which happened first, did books get bad or video games good?
Likely they produced a feedback loop where as games got better books had less audience and pursued the people still reading (which is apparently women, and middle age?)
I think you're right. You could actually figure out which came first--enough of the people involved are still alive--but the feedback loop is more important.
I would go back further, to the turn of the century. Almost all games this century have a setting divorced from reality in most ways except visual and auditory; the gameplay no longer attempts to simulate an alternative reality.
This fits nearly with my understanding that that whole side of academia has been taken over by Theory. I remember reading a William Deresiewicz piece a while back about how contemporary humanities learning emphasizes not actually reading and understanding but with first and foremost learning Theory and then applying its lens to the material. Which sounds ass backwards to me because it's like assuming phlogiston and then working on bringing observations in line with that assumption.
Another piece about this state of things that comes to mind: https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-i-am-not-a-phd
The bit that sums up the whole thing is this:
> I sat in my professor’s office dumbfounded by his evaluation of my argument that, during times of loss, women in the Iliad found the most solace in their male counterparts. I had spent several days on the paper and wanted him to explain what was wrong with my argument. He glared at me.
> “It is incorrect to argue that a patriarchal structure can benefit society’s women.”
So yes, it does seem like most institutions related to the humanities, meaning, English departments, literary magazines, and even publishers have been turned peddlers of orthodoxy.
"I remember reading a William Deresiewicz piece a while back about how contemporary humanities learning emphasizes not actually reading and understanding but with first and foremost learning Theory and then applying its lens to the material."
My wife has a PhD in literature and worked for five years as a professor before quitting. That is exactly how it works and it is truly terrible.
Most of Houellebecq protagonists are computer engineers, retired computer engineers, or people named "Michel" with an uncanny similarity to Houellebecq's life and character.
It's negatively correlated for all the reasons you mention, but there are probably a few who could do it.
Extinct, or you don't want to read a story about a middle-aged woman in Brooklyn who hates her husband and finds freedom by divorcing him?
You made a rational decision, I'm just saying if there were more people like you writing stories, there might be more people like you reading them.
I have to admit, that's probably part of why I finished Three Kingdoms.
But at least 1.3 billion people would agree with me it actually is great literature.
300 pages is a lot of Infinite Jest. I made it twenty pages, then tried to find where I left off and realized the paragraph I'd been reading was five pages long, and stopped reading.
Some un-PC thoughts I'm really curious to discuss with the people here:
I think a lot of the surprise at Hispanics for Trump thing is that leftists are pattern-matching on the Jewish and black experiences. If you're Jewish, it's quite rational to be oversensitive to even a small percentage of ethnic persecution, since within living memory it led to the extermination of 6 million of your relatives. If you're black, a lot of American history has revolved around slavery, opposition to slavery, attempts to restore slavery, attempts to obtain equal rights, etc., so it makes sense to have a greater deal of concern.
But most Hispanics (a) don't have that sort of immigrant experience and (b) have at least some experience of racism being attenuatable by accumulating wealth and status in Latin America (where the color line is a lot grayer). So Trump's remarks don't terrify them to the same degree.
There are also more traditional gender values, etc., and of course the same economic worries as any other American, but I wonder if this is part of it.
I think the consensus view is that Hispanics are far more socially conservative than Democrats thought (and their economic views are more mixed). Also, that the typical Hispanic experience is not an illegal immigrant, but a legal immigrant (or was here from the Lone Star and Republic of Texas days and the Mexican-American war of 1848).
Yeah I don't think anyone thinks that the political entity that normalized 'latinx' had any meaningful connection to the people they were claiming to represent. No hispanics think of themselves as 'hispanic' in the ways that the other categories you mentioned do. There's N different groups all with completely different histories, cultural self-conceptions, etc.
You're saying a completely uncontroversial thing, I think.
Part of the problem is, I think, that some Hispanics *do* think of themselves as primarily and generically "Hispanic". Mostly assimilated, middle-class Hispanics whose families might as well be white for their role in American society, but who wind up at a university or in some other social environment where having an "ethnicity" is gold and being a Generic White Guy is at best lame and boring.
Very few people in those environments know what e,g. "Guatemalan" or "Dominican" means as an ethnicity, probably including the third-generation Americans whose grandparents came from Guatemala or whatever. But "Hispanic" and "Latino/a" are broadly recognized ethnicity, which anyone whose ancestors immigrated from south of the Rio Grande can claim and so excuse themselves from Lame Generic White Guy status.
Then when the elite arbiters of modern social norms get together to define the new rules,*those* are the "Hispanics" they can invite to the party to tell them all about being Hispanic (which they'll have to piece together from rumor and supposition because their actual lived experience is rather close to Lame Generic White Guy). And this is how we get "Latinx".
I guess the controversial part is that the (heavily-Jewish) leadership of the left is influenced too heavily by their own experience. The Holocaust is actually somewhat exceptional in a developed country (and was ultimately destructive even to the country that perpetrated it). Most examples of racism don't end that badly.
You should do a question on the survey about sympathy for Luigi, since I strongly suspect it would confirm a clear class rather than political divide. Though the most significant factor might just be how good the respondents healthcare has been.
I would definitely be interested in seeing a decent "on a scale of 1-10 how much do you really sympathize with this guy" kind of poll. The reason is that I'm (desperately hoping) that most ordinary people are, at most, at a 2 or a 3 on this scale (maybe a 4 or 5 right now while the takes are still hot and we haven't learned what specific brand of unpopular extremism he was into), that the literal assassination apologists in this and other places on the internet are simply a very vocal minority, and that we as a society still think that murder is bad.
I suspect that a lot of the initial sympathy was based on the assumption that the murderer was an average Joe driven to despair by a loved one's travails with the insurance system. It will be interesting to see how much changes now that the cops have instead picked up a rich kid with a manifesto. (Not much improvement at ACX that I can see, but this place is unfortunately a draw for the rich-kid-with-manifesto-adjacent.)
I'm wary of the lesson from Fahrenheit 451, the Mechanical Hound that would hunt down its target without fail. Yet when it couldn't find its target, it was reassigned another target, which it hunted down "without fail".
The pictures I've seen don't seem to match to my eye, but I'm no expert and I also haven't studied them in-depth. I do think a jury ought to study the evidence, and make sure they have the right suspect.
Luigi was an SSC reader and a hero.
If he were some tribal nut he would have his cheerleaders ( https://ydydy.substack.com/p/brazen-manhattan-murder-of-a-monster ). Alas he seems to be 90% normal and altogether thoughtful and independent-minded.
I should clarify my claim that he is a hero.
Unfortunately, one doesn't get to decide whether they are a hero or not, society's response will eventually determine his status. He was SURELY familiar with Sacco and Vanzetti and other Italian Anarchists of a century past. History eventually landed on the side of forgetting them all but for a while the coin wobbled on its circumference, and some Anarchists who killed ACTUAL INNOCENTS were widely considered likely to be remembered as heros.
Society is indeed NPC. But the human desire to breathe free and to be alive still exists in most of us. I wish, really wish, that this community (without excusing murder any more than he did in his review of the unibomber) shows him support. He reads this page and even if he was misguided, he was less misguided than those who never gave a damn.
And the next killer just starts gunning down people who don't give 90% of their income to givewell approved charities to stop excess deaths in Africa.
Let he who is without sin fire the first shot. Thompson was not an ethical businessman, but even the most saintly businessman with Thompson's power would make some decisions that cause excess deaths. If you ever become as powerful as Thompson, are you so sure that nobody would want your death? Also, idolizing murder in a country with historically high levels of distrust and polarization seems like a bad idea for self-preservation reasons alone, even if you care nothing about morality.
Would you idolize him if he killed a doctor instead? What about a pharmacy tech? Or a nurse?
I'm not trying to make a point. I'm curious how the identity of the victim ties into your feelings for the assassin. Would it be different if the victim was someone with more power to affect the sorry state of health insurance? Eg. Someone from the claims department? How about if, instead did the CEO*, it was a board member? Or a large investor?
* Not sure the victim was a CEO
Is it your belief that this act will improve the state of health insurance in the US? Could the killer have chosen a better target with a higher ROI in terms of this goal?
If you hurt enough people long enough, someone will hurt you back and the amount of people who will cheer will be directly correlated to how many people you have hurt and how seriously you have harmed them.
A health insurance CEO is in a particularly bad spot in the regard because his company has hurt people and the families of people across the political spectrum. What's interesting is that the people who aren't cheering are the people most insulated from effects of awful insurance practices. The divide is class based, not blue/red.
I don't think anyone believes it will improve healthcare. It would actually be hard to pick someone with a higher "ROI" due to the class divide here.
The problem I see with this take is that the evidence that the CEO hurt many people is very weak. Consider how strong that claim is and what sort of evidence we would need to support it, not even in a court of law, but in the court of ACX readers. Look at Scott's recent post about the criminal justice system and bask in the hard work that went into it and the papers it is based on.
Yet here we're throwing up our hands and surfing the ocean of vibes and leaving our brains at the door.
Just a quick check: why the CEO? Why not the CFO? Why not someone from the board? Why not the head of regulators overseeing UHC? Why not legislators creating the policy for the regulators?
All this event was good for is media and social media companies. And maybe Tyler Durden fanboys.
This is not a situation that is grounded in rational actors acting in their best interests. Its an emotional puncture in a wounded national psyche. To the people cheering, this is like watching the school bully get punched in the face, it's Cathartic.
If you're the head of an organisation that hurts people, you will be seen as the one doing it. The average person has no idea what a CFO is or who the regulators are. The health insurance system is a byzantine labyrinth that the average person hasn't the time or energy to understand. But CEO's are much more visible and understood in a "they're the big boss" sense. They're championed by the media as heroes. The guy who was killed was just a visible, symbolic target.
Whether it is "good" is irrelevant really. People are happy because finally there were perceived repercussions for the harm they and their loved ones have received. Whether it was deserved or moral or will help in anyway is a non-issue.
If he killed a different person of course he would be viewed differently. People are celebrating the death of a mass murderer who had zero chance of seeing the inside of a jail cell for his mass murder. If he murdered a doctor who treated people the reaction would obviously be different.
How does this attribution of mass murder work? Would eg. Hotel owners that deny homeless people shelter during a harsh winter fall under the same umbrella? Or the people behind limiting the number of doctors in the country and driving up healthcare costs, wouldn't they also merit the label?
(Again, not making a point, just exploring how the mechanism of attributing fraud/murder to the victim is working here)
Forget it, Jake, it's Copenhagen.
Could you explain the reference?
https://laneless.substack.com/p/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics
this, I assume. Insurance is involved in the bad US system, so they're at fault.
A lot of doctors are just as sleazy as any healthcare insurance CEO. There needs to be greater scrutiny on doctors overbilling patients just as much insurance denying claims.
Personally I think murder should be condemned almost always, but in this case one consideration, if true, would make me argue for lenience: the victim's company was legally fraudulent (i.e. their lawyers were good enough that it's near-impossible to win actual lawsuits against them, but commonsensically what they do is close to "fraud"). Does the same apply to fraudulent doctors or pharmacy techs? Mostly, though at least emotionally I'm less compelled if the victim wasn't a serial fraud who chose it as their career but simply needed the money. I hesitate to say that a vigilante killing a career fraud (legal or otherwise) who was extracting huge sums of money improves our society but a least it's plausible: in the short term the other frauds will just hire more bodyguards but in the longer term things might start changing. With the victim only committing isolated frauds, there's not even that.
So the major point seems to be that the victim was extremely well off due to his activity.
Do you have any sources that estimate how much fraud this company would be doing? Genuinely curious because I understand that a) most people will tend to overuse medical care if allowed and b) insurance is a limited resource so some people must be denied healthcare. Of course the question really is about the magnitude of these numbers, which I have no idea about, hence why I'm asking for a source.
"most people will tend to overuse medical care if allowed"
Is that true? How do you know this? A small sample of "myself + friends and family": universally hates the sight of a hospital, only goes to a doctor when it's completely unavoidable, and would definitely not joy-riding waiting rooms for an extra x-ray because it was free. Are there many people on the opposite side of this?
It all comes down to the definition of "overuse." Getting 10 tests done because of a minor ache could easily be considered too much, but maybe one of those tests finds something life threatening. End-of-life care is another area, probably dwarfing all others, where use and overuse are the only real questions. A lot of people seem to agree in the abstract that a million dollars for two months of extra life miserable in the hospital is not worth it. But put those same people by the bedside of their aging parent and suddenly they'll still do it.
Insurance companies are very very good at determining which levers to pull to get people to scale back their usage. That's what deductibles and copays are all about. If it costs the insurance holder money to use it, they will be more careful about the use.
I've been in meetings with insurance brokers and the reps, talking about how to craft a company-wide program that discourages use at the appropriate level. They have a ton of data on how minute adjustments in copays make big differences.
I think it comes down to different ways “overuse” occurs. The comment I responded to attributed overuse to the patients’ desire to use more healthcare, and I always found this reasoning bizarre: outside of a small number of hypochondriacs, who tf wants to spend time in waiting rooms and docs offices?
The overuse you’re describing is not something a patient has much control over, because of the information asymmetry. I can’t tell if the test my doc ordered is really necessary. I don’t know what the solution to that one is, but I do know what is not: a “free market” approach where ignorant patients are somehow expected to make perfectly rational decisions about their care.
> So the major point seems to be that the victim was extremely well off due to his activity.
I wouldn't put it like that. If the nature of his activity is ethical or morally neutral or better, his wealth is irrelevant. If it's unethical and immoral on a massive scale, then this scale is a major point. Obviously it's hugely correlated to his wealth, but a hypothetical version of Anatoly Chubais who helped orchestrate the theft of billions in the course of Russian privatization yet is entirely unmercenary in person (not saying either is true for the real Chubais) shouldn't get much slack.
No, I don't know of any estimates, and whether there was in fact any fraud in the strictly legal or broader sense.
Isn't the current victim a cog in the machine too? He was just following incentives within a structure set up by others.
(Again, not making a point, but trying to explore others' opinions)
How do we know he was an SSC reader?
No, he wasn't. Murder is wrong. The human algorithm is a beautiful thing, those who willfully destroy it are evil, I will never support him.
Risking Godwin's Law here, but people aren't celebrating a murder - they're celebrating what they see as the killing of a mass murderer and misery maker who does so for profit. Sort of like how we aren't generally pro-murder, but probably wouldn't get too upset if one of Hitler's assassins had succeeded.
I don't think I want to be on the internet any more.
PSA: If someone wants to discuss Mangione the Subreddit has more infos
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1hahupw/the_suspect_of_the_unitedhealthcare_ceos_shooters/
+1
I doubt it. The victim was also rich.
I expect he will never see another day of freedom in his life, and I'd guess Pr[he serves <= 5 years] to be very low, less than 1/1000.
Luigi Mangione's (alleged) manifesto, The Allopathic Complex and Its Consequences: https://archive.is/2024.12.09-230659/https://breloomlegacy.substack.com/p/the-allopathic-complex-and-its-consequences
It's basically what you might have expected, a guy angry at being dicked around by UHC.
This is probably fake. Mainstream news coverage (e.g. NYT) included a few quotes of the manifesto, which is in the hands of law enforcement:
"To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone,”
"These parasites had it coming"
(https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/12/09/nyregion/unitedhealthcare-ceo-shooting-news)
These quotes do not appear anywhere in this posted manifesto that has been circulating around.
Fair, I threw in an "alleged." I saw this got taken down, which struck me as strong evidence of its authenticity, but I guess we'll see.
I'm not sure that's evidence at all; in the absence of obvious parody, I'm not sure I'd expect the ass-covering response from substack to be any different between legitimate and fake manifestos. They don't have any real incentive to confirm it's real before taking it down.
Insurance is big a problem but the other half of high healthcare costs is the high salaries of healthcare workers particularly doctors but also supporting staff like APC, X-Ray techs etc, which all adds up. Its very common for specialist doctors to be making millions by overbilling their patients. Basically lying through their teeth and defrauding people who they are supposed to take care of. Doctors have great public image, at least compared to health insurance industry, so no one really wants to be the one to question the doctors.
Salary reduction of specialist doctors should be part of any healthcare reform. We can do so by increasing the seats at medical schools, allowing students to go to medical school directly after high school just like any other country in the world, and of course any nationalized healthcare legislation must set salaries as well, rather than allowing doctors to bill whatever they want.
Insurance is probably the biggest part of why healthcare costs have gone up so much, and will continue to do so. It abstracts the costs, hiding it from those how receive benefits, especially if someone else (an employer, or the government), is paying most or all of the premiums.
If you have full coverage for any and all medical procedures, do you have any reason to question a specialist's opinion that a particular procedure is a reasonable thing to do in your circumstances, let alone that the price the specialist charges is appropriate?
On the other hand, if you're, say, buying a new car, you decide if the car is worth the whole price you're paying. You definitely need a car of some sort, you have decided, and the rest of the particulars are up to you. But you don't get to choose anything about your medicine, least of all the prices paid (by you or someone else).
> and of course any nationalized healthcare legislation must set salaries as well, rather than allowing doctors to bill whatever they want.
I disagree. I propose the following system where doctors are allowed to set prices at whatever level they want:
* Every doctor is in every network. Every year, your insurance company sends you a benefit schedule showing how much they cover for a foot surgery, how much they cover for a chest x-ray, etc.
* Every provider has a price schedule which lists how much they charge for a foot surgery, etc. They are not allowed to charge different prices to different patients for the same procedure. Their price schedule must be publicly accessible.
* You, the patient, have access to all this data and can easily shop around and determine what your out-of-pocket cost would be for any doctor before you receive services.
* The government would maintain data on doctors' income levels by region, which would be fully available to early-career doctors who are deciding where to move to.
This, I believe, would make for a very efficient healthcare system without the need for any bureaucratic price-setting.
There's still a lot of problems with our system, even with this is place. Unless all medical expenses are percentage based with no out-of-pocket max, then at some point the incentive to even look at prices goes away. Someone who is getting 100% of their bills paid (which for people with regularly occurring high cost care happens in a couple months every year) doesn't need to shop on price. And since they are guaranteed to spend the out-of-pocket max every year, they never do shop on price even when paying the deductible.
The typical insurance holder barely uses it, so them shopping for prices is going to have a negligible effect. So your plan affects the people who use a moderate amount, such that they have a chance of not spending to the full deductible/out-of-pocket max if they are wise, but would spend to that cap otherwise. Not nothing, but not fixing the system.
The core problem that exists is people who use/need massively outsized amounts of our healthcare system. But nobody wants to tell them no, because they mostly just had bad luck (cancer, heart disease, etc.). End of life care is more expensive for less gain, but it's very hard to tell someone no. My dad almost died a few years back, and was kept alive at huge expense (and still has very expensive medication). He's otherwise pretty healthy and could live a lot longer with great qualify of life. At his worst, that seemed unlikely and an actuarial table would very likely denied his treatment. I don't know how to fix this either.
My proposal is that insurance payouts should be a fixed dollar amount for each service/test/procedure, indexed to (some percentage of) the average cost of the service/test/procedure in the region where the policyholder lives. No deductibles, no out-of-pocket maxes. If the policy's payout exceeds the actual amount billed, the surplus should go into an HSA and can be credited toward the patient's future medical expenses.
Regarding the cost of end-of-life care, I think a good approach would be for basic insurance policies to be "DNR-only", with supplemental "full code" policies available if desired. In practice, I think the best structure for the latter would be similar to a life insurance policy, where you can buy a policy with a low annual premium when you're young, or buy one with a much higher premium when you're older.
In general, it appears (from personal observation) that the healthcare system is set up to benefit patients the least, while allowing all other parties to benefit in varying degrees. That is, I'm not saying it was designed from the get go to be that, but that it rather evolved in that direction. The trouble with that is that the many parties that benefit while, as a group, numbering fewer than patients, can act in a more unified fashion to protect their interests.
It looks like a loosely organized group of cartels, basically.
Its probably own limited attention, but tech and other industries appear to get much attention from the media in the context of antitrust and anti monopoly measure than the healthcare industry.
I've been trying to absorb (decode) the latest paper on LUCA — "The nature of the last universal common ancestor and its impact on the early Earth system" by Moody et al. (link below). They use a "Relaxed Bayesian node-calibrated molecular clock approach" to derive an estimate that LUCA existed about 4.2 Ga, with a 95% confidence interval spanning 4.09–4.33 Ga. This could put LUCA all the way back in the Paleohadean about 200 Ma after the hypothetical Tellus and Theia collision created the Earth and Moon. And LUCA's descendants would have to have survived the Late Heavy [meteor] Bombardment (LHB) ~3.7–3.9 Ga, but the authors cast doubt on this event (which I thought was considered pretty certain to have happened). In light of that, can anyone who's up on molecular clocks comment on the reliability of their estimates?
Also, they anchor their tree to some genes that duplicated before LUCA — because "dating the root of a tree is difficult because errors propagate from the tips to the root of the dated phylogeny." Is that kosher? This is all way outside the information levels that my bullshit meter can detect. ;-)
Otherwise, it's a fascinating paper. They estimate LUCA had approx 2.75 million base pairs, which puts it smack dab in the middle of the Prokaryote bp range (I think). And it was very likely heterotrophic, which suggests it may have been utilizing the biological products of autotrophs. So, there was some sort of functioning ecology ~4.2 billion years ago.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02461-1
To what extent is "conservatism" related to conservatism?
There is a tendency (possibly based on some decisions made in 1830s Britain) to label the political right or at least centre-right as "conservative". This is a misnomer to some extent, a true conservative would seek to do nothing at all whereas "conservatives" when they get into power inevitably have a list of things that they want to change.
But is there some truth to it? Do right-wingers genuinely seek to change fewer things overall than left-wingers?
> a true conservative would seek to do nothing at all
A true conservative believes we have /already failed at that/; are failing at it more, faster, every day; and therefore need to change things, as quickly and destructively as possible, to roll back today's terrible state of affairs to the ideal pre-decay past.
It's not about change vs no change, but about optimism in our ability to make things better instead of worse. In general both sides want things changed, but in different directions.
One side thinks the past was perfect and is now decaying; alleged attempts to improve things only ever make things worse; it is their obligation to guard what they can from change, and also ideally to roll back whatever changes they are able to some previous state of affairs, because - to a first approximation - all innovation is and was always a mistake; every attempt to invent new structures, policies or culture, instead of improving anything inevitably makes everything worse instead. Progression is a ratchet of destruction of the good, and we should look to the past for inspiration. "What if we make things better, but too much?", they are mocked, but actually /there is too much progress/ and the ratchet needs to be unwound. Cthulhu must be taught to swim right.
The other side believes that better things lie ahead than behind us, and it is possible to reach them by innovating - sure, change is risk, but progression is both necessary to make life better, and capable of achieving this goal. Of course, they say, progression is a ratchet; today is better than yesterday, and tomorrow will be better still, so why would anyone ever want to turn back the clock? Don't ignore the past - look to it to teach us what not to do - sure; fail fast and try again, sure; but never stop innovating.
>This is a misnomer to some extent, a true conservative would seek to do nothing at all whereas "conservatives" when they get into power inevitably have a list of things that they want to change.
That sounds way too rigid. I think there are battles that conservatives consider not yet settled and wish to make changes to better align with the previous status quo. Abortion would be one. A battle that's considered settled is women's suffrage. Gay marriage is somewhere in between, probably closer to women's suffrage
"a true conservative would seek to do nothing at all"
Not so; as the end of "The Ballad of the White Horse" points out, if you leave things alone and do nothing, they don't stay as they are, they change - decay and alter and fall apart. So to truly conserve, you must constantly repair and replace what is now rotten and broken.
From the Father Brown story, "The Flying Stars":
"That venerable financier, however, still seemed struggling with portions of his well-lined attire, and at length produced from a very interior tail-coat pocket, a black oval case which he radiantly explained to be his Christmas present for his god-daughter. With an unaffected vain-glory that had something disarming about it he held out the case before them all; it flew open at a touch and half-blinded them. It was just as if a crystal fountain had spurted in their eyes. In a nest of orange velvet lay like three eggs, three white and vivid diamonds that seemed to set the very air on fire all round them. Fischer stood beaming benevolently and drinking deep of the astonishment and ecstasy of the girl, the grim admiration and gruff thanks of the colonel, the wonder of the whole group.
"I'll put 'em back now, my dear," said Fischer, returning the case to the tails of his coat. "I had to be careful of 'em coming down. They're the three great African diamonds called 'The Flying Stars,' because they've been stolen so often. All the big criminals are on the track; but even the rough men about in the streets and hotels could hardly have kept their hands off them. I might have lost them on the road here. It was quite possible."
"Quite natural, I should say," growled the man in the red tie. "I shouldn't blame 'em if they had taken 'em. When they ask for bread, and you don't even give them a stone, I think they might take the stone for themselves."
"I won't have you talking like that," cried the girl, who was in a curious glow. "You've only talked like that since you became a horrid what's-his-name. You know what I mean. What do you call a man who wants to embrace the chimney-sweep?"
"A saint," said Father Brown.
"I think," said Sir Leopold, with a supercilious smile, "that Ruby means a Socialist."
"A radical does not mean a man who lives on radishes," remarked Crook, with some impatience; "and a Conservative does not mean a man who preserves jam. Neither, I assure you, does a Socialist mean a man who desires a social evening with the chimney-sweep. A Socialist means a man who wants all the chimneys swept and all the chimney-sweeps paid for it."
"But who won't allow you," put in the priest in a low voice, "to own your own soot."
Crook looked at him with an eye of interest and even respect. "Does one want to own soot?" he asked.
"One might," answered Brown, with speculation in his eye. "I've heard that gardeners use it. And I once made six children happy at Christmas when the conjuror didn't come, entirely with soot—applied externally."
I haven't seen that particular version; they seem to have assigned him to a particular village to fit in the model of "crime of the week in our lovely rural location" that a lot of the BBC crime shows follow 😁
Chesterton had him turning up around London and other locations, depending on what parish he had been sent to. That at least spreads the crimes over a wider geographical area!
Oh yeah, this is an old question. If life other than on Earth exists, what would it be like? Supposing intelligent life and not plant or animal, would aliens have souls? Would they be in need of salvation? Would there be a second Incarnation if that was needed?
Off the top of my head, there are three positions:
(1) Rational but not ensouled, so more like animals than humans. Question of salvation therefore does not arise since we aren't worried about dogs or dolphins or elephants needing salvation, either
(2) Rational, ensouled, and unfallen. They would therefore be as different to us as Tolkien's Elves are different to Men. It'd be difficult for us to recognise an unfallen species if it wasn't technologically advanced, because we'd probably mistake them for the first instance (rational but unsouled). C.S. Lewis took a dim view of what our likely reaction would be, but his Space Trilogy (at least, the first two volumes) explore that on Mars and on Venus.
(3) Rational, ensouled, and fallen like ourselves. This is the biggie - if Christ is the only means to salvation, then the fallen aliens need Christ. Does this happen via the Great Commission - 'go ye therefore and make disciples of all nations' - or would Christ be incarnated on other worlds? There's divergence of opinion on that - maybe the crucifixion wouldn't be needed on another planet because that would be a different situation.
James Blish's "A Case of Conscience" is good on that, though he presents it as Roman Catholics whereas he was Anglican himself and I think it shows in part. It's sort of its own sub-sub-genre in SF - religious SF 😀
"Conservative" doesn't mean not wanting to change, but not wanting to take risks. For example, getting married is a conservative choice, for choosing to remain single is seen as more odd. So politically conservative people want to "change" things to be less avant-garde, reversing more liberal policies. This is still consistent with being conservative.
The Baggins family in The Lord of the Rings legendarium is the epitome of conservative. Bagginses "never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him." He used "respectable" to mean this.
I think it's proportional to the rate at which your society is changing, no?
So in a society that's largely the same as it was, say, 50 years ago, conservatives and "conservatives" are going to agree on a lot. They maybe want to roll back some minor reforms, but basically everything else stays as is. Think Europe between 1250 and 1300, lots of continuity.
In a society that's upended by change, "conservatives" become reactionaries. So think Europe between 1500 and 1550. The bigger the changes your society has recently undergone, the harder it is for conservatives to just do nothing and get what they want. That separates out the conservatives and the "conservatives" and becomes the more comprehensible split between conservatives and reactionaries.
The party if they right in1830s Britain labelled themselves c onservative.
Also in South Korea, its the left wing party that is opposed to immigration while the right wing party supports it. But the right wing party is also openly authoritarian(its the party of the current martial law president after all) and opposes feminism, gay rights etc. so its not like the South Korean right is some social liberal, economic right party like the British and Canadian Conservatives.
My book is available today for pre-order, Feb 11 release. Fewer Rules, Better People is about the clash between governing by top-down rules and mandates versus discretionary decision-making, in law, in administration, in sports, in the household. Happy for recommendations on where to send it to be reviewed. https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324051251
For each institution that has some power over/among a group of people, I can imagine various things affecting the outcome of this clash. For instance, degree of similarity in identity among the people. Degree of similarity in values. Size of the group.*
Do you cover this in your new book? I'm very interested in either your general takeaways or specific anecdotes.
*I have never seen meaningful anthropological evidence for a Dunbar's number at 150 +/- 20 (or at any other threshold +/- 20). What I have in mind is gradual change, not a threshold.
Here are some reflections on regime breakdown inspired by present goings-on in Syria. I would be interested in comments and reflections:
Regime breakdown as a type of assurance game
Many political regimes are stable until they suddenly aren’t.
The revolution/regime change in Syria fits in this pattern. From the onset till Assad fled took only ten days (November 27 – December 8).
The time frame is comparable to the regime fall in Rumania under Ceausescu (December 21- December 25 1989) and Afghanistan (August 6 – August 15 2021). Seeming stability suddenly followed by almost immediate breakdown.
The logic of the sequence resembles an assurance game (also known as stag hunt or trust games). The logic in a nutshell:
As long as I think everyone else supports the regime, the sensible option is also to support the regime. Since then I avoid being punished (and may even enjoy rewards). While if I rebel and I am the only one, I am very visible to the ruler & he may come after me with instruments that hurt more than mere death.
However, if I think everyone else are abandoning the ruler, the sensible option is also to abandon him. Since if we all abandon him, I am “lost in the crowd” and cannot very easily be singled out by the new ruler for punishment. Compared to the alternative: I am the one left defending the old and now hopelessly lost ruler, making me very visible to the new ruler – who may come after me with instruments that hurt more than mere death.
As in assurance/stag/trust games, this game has two equilibria. Everyone supports the old ruler as long as they think everyone else supports him (or as long as they think a sufficient number supports him that he is likely to maintain power). And everyone abandons the old ruler if they think everyone else are abandoning him (or if they think sufficiently many abandon him that he is unlikely to maintain power).
The main point regarding such games is that the switch between the two equilibria can happen very quickly. It depends on how we all interpret the likely choice of action of everybody else. If our interpretation of what others are likely to do, shifts for some more-or-less arbitrary reason, we may rapidly shift the signals we ourselves send out as well.
I believe that we are all at some level constantly reading and evaluating the signals others send out in this regard. Even in the seemingly most stable of states, and whether we are fully conscious of doing so or not.
<master_oogway.png>
"...my time has come..."
A) I humbly submit "Game Theory: The Force that Binds Us" [0], in which I schizopost about stag hunts and their varied manifestations. Instead of a truncated cone, I opt for a gravity-well analogy.
----
> However, at some point I became convinced of the philosopher Jon Elster’s general critique of (macro-level) functionalism: Its inability to reach all the way down to the micro level (of human interaction) and explain what triggers the various feedback mechanisms that restore equilibriums (or make them spin into perpetual disequilibriums).
B) I don't know anything about Systems Theory. But in my Game Theory post, "Section XII. Riot Games" signal-boosts an article [1] regarding the theory that riots are free-rider problems, and how their precipitation is often a matter of obfuscating the identity of would-be "entrepreneurs". The obfuscation lowers the activation-energy, in a sense. Seems relevant.
> For a riot to begin, it is necessary but not sufficient that there be many people who want to riot and who believe that others want to riot too. One more hurdle has to be overcome. Even in an unstable gathering, the first perpetrator of a misdemeanor is at risk if the police are willing and able to zero in on him. Thus, someone has to serve as a catalyst — a sort of entrepreneur to get things going — in Buford’s account, usually by breaking a window (a signal that can be heard by many who do not see it).
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C) Relatedly, I recall a Psmith book-review [2] (which I was unaware of, when I wrote the Game Theory post) which mentioned "political entrepreneurs". Context was the annexation of Eastern Ukraine.
> (...) The wheels of history are turned by political entrepreneurs — individuals or close-knit groups who notice ahead of everybody else that the world has changed in some fundamental way. This unstable situation where material conditions have shifted but society keeps rolling in its groove creates a sort of potential energy, like a charged electric field or a boulder perched at the top of a cliff. In the world of business we call this a market opportunity, and we admire those with the gumption to seize them. In the world of war and politics, market opportunities often look more like a forest full of dry tinder, and the would-be entrepreneur needs an additional quality, fanaticism, that enables him to calmly light a match and flick it over his shoulder.
[0] https://fromthechair.substack.com/p/game-theory
[1] https://fee.org/articles/why-riots-happen/
[2] https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-85-days-in-slavyansk-by-aleksandr
Thanks for the links. I browsed them and in particular noticed the one about the LA riots in 1992, since I lived in Berkeley back then. The riots reached from LA all the way up through Oakland.
... the riots stopped almost momentarily after a radio speech by Rodney King, who turned out to be a street-level philosopher. One sentence in particular stood out: "We are stuck here for a while. Can we get along?"
Perhaps he did not mean it as a very existential statement, but I and many with me were quite moved back then.
General lesson: Perhaps what core people stand up and say matters in riot situations. At least in some of them. You hit on a message that echoes with others, sometimes.
I notice you also see promise in game theory. For my part, I believe it is the branch called "games with asymmetric information" that holds the largest - and not yet fully untapped - potential.
I wrote a bit more about that in my reply to Soreff below.
> Perhaps what core people stand up and say matters in riot situations. At least in some of them. You hit on a message that echoes with others, sometimes.
I used to follow a blog called Epsilon Theory. It discusses the impact of narrative on things like the stock market. The blog often discusses "missionaries", i.e. those who build a consensus about the narrative by crystallizing widely-held sentiments into common-knowledge. (It's been a while, so I don't have a directly-relevant link on-hand.) Arguments are often soldiers, and to crystallize a sentiment is to expose it to attack. So ideally, the consensus should be defensible.
Relatedly, apxhard had an interesting comment [0] a while ago about bitcoin and "consensus mechanisms". As I understood, there's a hierarchy of consensus mechanisms, graded based on the cost of signalling. At the top of the hierarchy is warfare, which is the costliest. The cost is a feature, rather than a bug, because the high-cost gatekeeps away any frivolous participants. Slightly lower are things with cheaper signals, like bitcoin and lawfare. I don't have anything original to add here, but I think about this a lot.
> …The basic idea/founding stone can be summed up in the sentence: We are all principals when observing others, and we are all agents in the eyes of others.
Scott and the rationalists like to mention Chesterton's Fence. But even before I was exposed to this meme, I'd personally made a similar observation that "nature tends towards an equilibrium". I.e. there's various forces in the world, and they tend to push objects around until those objects settle into a local optimum at which opposing forces completely cancel-out. Which means objects are frequently found either at rest, or in some periodic orbit.
One of my perennial frustrations is that people often assume they have perfect knowledge, and that ostensibly-stupid behavior in others is actually stupid. When in fact, it's more likely that their behavior is influenced by forces hidden from the casual observer. The behavior still might be "incorrect" in a sense, but it's often understandable or justifiable at some level.
And in my mind, this kind of dovetails with the "Seeing Like A State" and "TLP" memeplexes. Insofar as some types of information are more legible than others, and how the root of signaling is exogenous dependency (or equivalently, insufficient personal-agency). E.g. it seems like the Prisoner's Dilemma is (at least?) partly driven by the fact that the negative-externalities are stronger than the positive-internalities. I've not yet been able to generalize this, or carry this to its logical conclusion. But somehow, it seems rather suggestive. I think about this a lot.
> but in my work I usually stick to studying humans
This prompted me to glance at your substack, where I discovered that you're a pol-sci professor. I mean, I just assumed we were throwing around ideas for funsies. But now I'm curious: is this thread part of some research project? What's the goal here, exactly? Surely, much of this is old news to you. Anyway, now that I know you're a professor -- upon rereading the thread, it seems like you're especially interested in farming ideas about a conceptual "missing link", which transmutes individual actions into emergent behavior.
As for a potential missing link -- I can't really defend this coherently, but I've become increasingly convinced that the bedrock of signalling is trust (at least in most pragmatic situations, not single-iteration games). Which sounds kind of obvious a common-sensical, but I nonetheless feel is able to explain phenomena that are otherwise kinda mysterious. Like, there's a certain pattern in my mind that came from trying to grok Kelly's Criterion, which is related to how trust appears to grow logarithmically with the number of repeated positive interactions. Which is, I think, consistent with psychology's finding that frequency/consistency is more important than the magnitude of reward. And I suspect the dearth of repeated interaction carries a variety of consequences for contemporary society.
For example, nothing really came from Occupy Wallstreet. It was completely ephemeral with no lasting consequences. (I can't remember where I found this, but) I remember reading an analysis which explained that earlier political protests put in work. Like, they organized an actual event, and paid bus-fares, and had people take a break from their dayjobs (or something?), and trusted their leaders to make executive-decisions during negotiations with the opposition. Whereas Occupy Wallstreet was a bunch of twitter randos who had no organization to cement their "protest", which was really more of an angry mob.
I think maybe the general lesson here is "everything in modernity has become cheaper; and you get what you pay for".
Or consider how, during the 90's, everyone thought the internet would herald a golden age of information. Seemingly, few could have imagined that high-quality signals would be overwhelmed by dross and muck. I remember hearing a take (can't remember where, exactly; though I recall it mentioned "context collapse" [1]) that Twitter was a cesspool because it eschewed gatekeeping/curation. Blocking individual users is a poor substitute for nucleating a well-defined community around a central authority-figure who actually enforces norms. (In my headcanon, I like to think of Twitter as a cross between Valhalla and Lebanon: a battle-royal where as many as 12 different factions fight each other, for all eternity.) Since there's so little gatekeeping, joining Twitter is cheap and easy; but you get what you pay for.
Similarly on youtube, there's lots of people who bemoan the draconian censorship. But one point that's conspicuously absent from the discourse is what Epsilon Theory called "The Golden Rule": he who has the gold, maketh the rules. I.e. the viewers aren't youtube's actual customer. The actual customer is the advertisers, since the advertisers pay the bills that keep the servers running. So of course youtube's policies are going to cater to the advertisers. And yet, this point seems lost on those who decry that youtube has betrayed the viewers' interests. Youtube isn't trustworthy; but you get what you pay for.
So if I were in your position, I think my next area of investigation would be to really zoom-in on the idea of trust. Perhaps as some sort of currency, or alternatively as different types of binding-agents. Though, I'm not sure if any of this makes sense to you.
[0] I'm having trouble finding it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse
Thanks for your post. Lots of things in there, let me limit myself to agreeing with you that “trust” is certainly at the core of many of the everyday games people play (as well as the games rulers play with each other & with voters). How to signal trustworthiness, what you can do to get across to others that your commitments are credible, etc. Much of our everyday signalling and screening behavior is related to trust. So you’re spot on in that regard.
I don’t peddle my own stuff on substack, but concerning contributions by others that I often come back to when studying something specific (I mainly do applied research; studying something specific gets you closer to the "mechanisms" underlying whatever is going on) is Partha Dasgupta: Trust as a commodity. Dasgupta makes the important point that it is costly to build up a trustworthy reputation, while it can be lost very quickly. For example, a salesman (including politicians, professional workers etc.) achieves a reputation for honesty by carrying the cost associated with abstaining from cheating in all previous sales (dealings with others); yet this costly reputation may be lost in one stroke if he cheats once, and this knowledge spreads to his future customers. This asymmetry in how reputations are achieved and lost is of use for his customers (voters, clients), since they will often rationally have reason to assume that he will not take the risk to jeopardize his costly built-up reputation in his deal with them.
…And so on. We are dealing with reputations as (costly) signals, and how this information is screened by one’s interaction partners – but where deception may also be part of the game. (Notice that the difference between signals and mere messages is that signals are not cost-free.)
..Ok, this turned into a longer comment/reply than I planned! Again, thanks for your comment, and good luck with your further thinking/work along game-theoretic lines. You are on the right track, intellectually.
Back to doing work I get paid for…
PS Diego Gambetta and Michael Bacharach’s “Trust in signs” is another paper with a huge applied potential.
This reminds of a conditionally stable system behavior. The system is stable under some level of perturbation, and then goes kaboom when perturbed in a stronger/unusual manner.
Thanks for the reference to conditionally stable system behavior. I would be interested in elaborations or references here.
…I used to peddle in systems theory, from good old structural-functionalism a la Talcott Parsons to the Santa Fe people. However, at some point I became convinced of the philosopher Jon Elster’s general critique of (macro-level) functionalism: Its inability to reach all the way down to the micro level (of human interaction) and explain what triggers the various feedback mechanisms that restore equilibriums (or make them spin into perpetual disequilibriums). Elster claimed that we need a general theory of human behavior to achieve that, and that the social sciences were “light years away” from such a theory.
These days, I believe signalling theory/theories of games with asymmetric information (or more generally: information theory) may provide the missing mechanism-link between system behavior and the behavior of individuals within the system.
But I am not aware of many who still search for the missing link between system behavior and the social psychology of individual behavior.
I broadly agree with the Elster's critique you're describing, with is also explored in a different way by this guy: https://desystemize.substack.com/
But still it helps to envision a simplest conditionally stable system, say, a truncated cone set on its tip: it can withstand a small sideways push, but a larger one will tip it into a different state. Now imagine a "truncated cone" of an unknown large number of dimensions (well, I can't imagine one, but suppose I do), and the critical distance between its axis and its edge is unknown. We can push it around a little to explore its stability limits, but we just never know which push vector value will tip it.
So this is how I envision these societal dynamics.
Now, to further stretch this analogy, the cone does provide a warning sign: if you get too close to tipping it, its edge will start lifting, and it's possible to recover at that point. But we have to pay attention, and react to this lifting, i.e., a feedback mechanism has to exist. This is what happens in a relatively open society: there's a constant visible churn, pushing from all directions, visible disorder, the cone wobbles, but the society has time to react and adjust itself.
Closed societies "cover the cone", and sever the feedback. We can't see when the cone is wobbling. It takes various forms: destroyed opposition, wrecked information space, fake polling, etc. So Assad wins and "election" with "95% of the vote", but it turns out nobody is actually supporting him. I wonder if he was genuinely surprised....
Thanks for your reply. Intuitively, your “cone” metaphor is fruitful. It illustrates the potential practical usefulness of systems theory also in the study of us humans, even if the microfoundations of what is going on is lost in the fog.
Analytically, your metaphor helps if you want to assign some sort of probability for a social or political system to be longer-run sustainable. Or - if in an interventionist mode - where to focus your gaze on what should be improved to enhance longer-run sustainability.
That said, there are challenges as regards to decide what constitutes/represents a “feedback mechanism” in the first place, without any underlying theory of why humans do whatever it is they are doing. I see a potentially serious snag there. But again, the metaphor is intuitively useful.
Concerning the interventionist use of systems theory, we probably agree that in any case most of us, most of the time, are not in positions to influence much the structure of the scene(s) where we strut and fret our hours upon the stage, before we are heard no more. Not even those among us that are formally placed at the top in human hierarchies.
...Such as Assad. He will have ample time to reflect on what (if anything) he might have had the power to do differently, in some apartment somewhere in Russia where he is likely to live out his days.
I am quite skeptical of assigning numerical probabilities to things like that, where we have neither an understanding of the underlying mechanisms nor we know the probabilities distribution of possible outcomes. With this I sharply part with our gracious host w.r.t. the (over)use of Bayesianism (even may I say, ab-use) to analyze everything under the sun. It produces illusions of precision and gives a whiff of "science", which is entirely inappropriate.
As to the feedback mechanisms, as an average citizen of, in my case at least, these here United States, we don't have much impact, but it's not 0 either. We at least should vote, and occasionally call and yell at the people we voted for. We could also choose to go into politics or activism to try to amplify our impact.
But Assad of course had had the controls, and the feedback - if he only wanted to use them. But he chose to break every feedback mechanism, literally and figuratively, and hence the "sudden", "surprising" demise of the system he built.
Hi 1123581321,
Thanks again for your comments on my ACX open thread post on "regime breakdown as a type of assurance game". I took the liberty to use your reflections on feedback mechanisms to make an addendum to my (revised) blog post today, "The fall of Assad in Syria perceived as an equilibrium shift in an assurance game".
Best regards---
Technical standards sometimes work the same way. If you have two competing technical standards, and each needs an expensive infrastructure to be viable, there can be similar dynamics of "How many people (or companies) are supporting standard X vs standard Y?". ( Usually less bloody than the political version. )
Interesting. (See my comment to 1123581321 above)
Many Thanks! Hmm... At the abstract level, yes, one can think of the system dynamics as e.g. being stable to small perturbations in some parameter like fraction-of-population-supporting-faction-X (or, in illiberal states, fraction-of-population-OPENLY-supporting-faction-X) and unstable to large perturbations. And, underlying the abstract dynamics are game theory considerations.
Re feedback: Hmm... a ruler who is able to _see_ that some fraction of a segment of the population is turning against them might have better odds of e.g. buying them off than if the ruler is blind to the changes.
Re technical choices: At least in my career, at my level (individual developer), being on the losing side might be career damaging (though often not even that), but not life threatening, so I wasn't aware of cases where people were threatened to the point of silence (and cut feedback loops) in my personal experience. In _politicised_ technical choices this may well be different.
..."And, underlying the abstract dynamics are game theory considerations."
..yes, that is what I am driving at. In the limited time I have available to sometimes peddle in High Theory.
More specifically, not all game theory, but that branch of game theory that deals with games with asymmetric information. That's where the (theoretical) action is, to modify the title of an essay by the sociologist Erving Goffman. Who approached similar theories about social interaction from the sociological side of the academic fence:
https://archive.org/details/whereactionis0000unse/page/n5/mode/2up
…The basic idea/founding stone can be summed up in the sentence: We are all principals when observing others, and we are all agents in the eyes of others.
…Meaning that we are all in a coarser information position when observing others, and we are all in a finer information position when being observed by others.
That sentence is the basis for a general theory of interaction (not only among humans: one may link here to a general theory of information - but in my work I usually stick to studying humans😊).
..from that founding stone follows various everyday-life signalling and screening strategies, as well as pseudo-self-binding & “real” (evolutionary derived) self-binding strategies; deception-and-revealed-deception arms races; trust games; and much more. A Pandora’s box of ideas to study the many types of (human) interaction.
...Very similar to the type of sociology Goffman did back in the day. And thus holding the promise of being a real theoretical common ground in the sociological and economic study of man.
Linking all of this to systems theory, including tipping-point theories and the like, is however something I am likely to leave to scholars who are still max intellectually hungry😊
Many Thanks! This definitely gets way beyond my depth.
I agree there’s probably some stag hunt logic going on, but I wonder if there’s another pattern as well. People might also want to minimise the total amount of conflict. In that case, they would also suddenly switch to supporting what they perceived as the winning side.
That is the behaviour you’d get from a patent race game, if one player suddenly jumped ahead. In a patent race, two players are racing for some multi-step, winner-takes-all goal, like a patent. In that game, each player will spend maximum resources if that puts winning out of reach of the other player. Once the loser is clear, the losing player will immediately drop out of the race, if they don’t expect to catch up.
That could be happening here: suddenly, the old regime is at a disadvantage and can’t catch up.
Thanks for the reference to patent race - games. I wiki'ed it - that was a new twist on game theory for me. (See also my comment to 1123581321 above)
Your Wikipedia skills are much better than mine! Where did you find it? I had to use Copilot
Ah, sorry, you are right - at least I cannot locate a similar wiki page on patent race games today. So the page/s I consulted yesterday must have been from elsewhere.
Might give someone an incentive to write a wiki page on the topic:-)!
While I understand the urge to relate everything back to US politics, I don't think it's very much like that at all.
Agreed.
The debate(s) below about the Thompson assassination and resulting public reaction reminded me of Scott’s presidential endorsement post. Specifically the part about protesters throwing oil on artwork, and comparing their wrongdoings to the that of the oil executives:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-endorses-harris-oliver-or-stein
>So how can we put the paint-throwers in jail, while letting the fossil fuel executives go free?
>Actually we can do this very easily, because the paint-throwers broke the law, and the fossil fuel executives didn’t. Unless you’re the dumbest sort of naive consequentialist, you punish people who have violated bright-line norms, not people doing stuff you think is subtly damaging, even if the subtle damage may add up to more harm than the bright-line norm violations.
I'm a bit surprised at the current public reaction and wonder if we really would hate the paint throwers had they protested something that appears to be so nonpartisan. Or is this reaction more justified because the "subtle damage" is not so subtle in this case as individual deaths can be linked to denied care?
The problem with the paint-throwers is that they chose the worst target - what's 100+ y.o. painting's got to do with anything? So the throwers annoy everyone and make their cause slightly less palatable.
Now if they were protesting the oil executives by throwing paint on, for example, their cars, I would at least understand it (not condone it, but the target would at least make sense).
Yes, throwing paint on oil executives (or other high status people who are seen as immoral) would likely have a much much better reception and may even be broadly popular. Throwing paint on priceless old paintings or blocking roads that ordinary people need to drive on just makes people hate you.
Exactly.
I think the "Bright Line Norms" argument is fully wrong for a few reasons. If we say "Laws" are a subset of "Norms" then whoever makes the law gets to determine who is in the right and who is in the wrong. Norm violation enforcement is a poor substitute for morality even without the disparity of equating it to law violation enforcement - the map of norms does not match the map of morality. Sometimes the violation of norms is a recognition that the norms were wrong in the first place.
More directly addressing your point, I think most people in the U.S. either have experience with being jerked around by the Health Insurance industry or have someone close to them who has been jerked around, possibly to death. It's much easier to cheer for the death of an executive when said executive is the most visible and egregious example of hurting you and killing your friends for profit - regardless of any "murder is bad" norm.
It does get hairy in practice i.e. we can *maybe* get consensus on both the legality and morality of uncomplicated types of violence and theft; but of course many (most?) legalities are hotly contested. So I'm with you on the norms / laws disparity.
And I can't object to the norms / morality mismatch either. But I don't have a more serviceable model for civilizational coordination, and am wondering if morality is simply not part of that equation.
Is the argument more conceptually sound if you swap "morality" for "ethics"? And then, would it at least be directionally correct, albeit imperfect?
If it still doesn't hold up, I would be interested in an alternative model if you have one in mind.
I'm a better destroyer of arguments than I am at making them, but I think I can take a wack at it. Norm violation enforcement only holds up when the perception of the norm is that it is both Just and Equitably applied. This is a very vague, weasely kind of argument on my part since Justice and Equitable application are in the eye of the beholder (and I'm probably ignoring some other necessary conditions).
"Violence is wrong" strikes me a good norm that is almost never equitably applied, since states and large entities practice direct and indirect violence all the time at great scale and with little legal reprisal - but I'm not sure this is the common view either, which is the one that matters in this case.
Scott has a point about punishing violations as keeping society together, but if everyone sees the punishment as unjust, then it frays societal bonds instead of reinforcing them. I don't think most people were in favor of the "Just stop oil" protestors throwing oil on paintings and thought some degree of punishment was a good thing, regardless of how they felt about oil barons (who I'm of the opinion are many thousands of times worse). Regardless of people's feelings on oil barons, oil paintings shouldn't be damaged or destroyed because they're unrelated to the protest.
Here people are seeing an executive killed who is perceived as a mass murderer and someone who was intentionally profiting off the misery and suffering of others. The chances of this man ever seeing the inside of a jail cell over these actions were zero - his evil was entirely legal, and there was little chance that the laws would change soon to punish or even truly stop this. So when someone acts outside the norms and kills him, people cheer because his evil has been stopped. "Violence is wrong" still holds, but the norm in this case was not being equitably applied in the perception of most.
I'm anti-assassinating health care CEOs. But I think part of it is that with Trump's 2nd election and people talking about it through an (inaccurate IMO) pro-establishment vs anti-establishment lens, everyone wants to view everything through that lens and anti-establishment is the cool kids thing to do.
For me the underrated angle to the story is how much more resources they give to this murder than any other murder, seemingly based on an implicit "he's rich so he matters more" idea.
Who is this "they" of which you speak?
The critical resource here, was a random McDonald's employee in Altoona. To get that, you need the police to do a modest amount of digging through surveillance camera footage to get a few half-decent pictures, and then you needed to get half the country to look at those pictures and care and remember.
So, basically, it's up to CNN et al to decide who does or does not get this sort of treatment. And as others have noted, very poor people being killed can get a whole lot of coverage on CNN if it's the right poor person at the right time for the right reason.
I think this is mostly a function of how much media / public attention the murder got. If the victim had been found dead in an alley missing his wallet, it would not have been nearly as big a story, fewer resources would have been spent on it, and probably the McDonalds employee wouldn't have ever seen the murderer's picture on TV.
Exactly. If a crime requires a nationwide manhunt to solve, then CNN decides whether it will be solved. Simplistically speaking, if the victim is rich or famous, or if the victim is poor and black and the killer is white(*), or if the victim is a Pretty White Woman, then off we go. Otherwise, meh, it won't get the clicks so it's not worth the bother.
* Typically these don't need a manhunt to solve because if we know the killer is white then we probably already caught him. But if e.g. Derek Chauvin had skipped bail and gone on the run, I expect CNN would have made sure we all knew what he looked like.
"They" is the police. It's true a random McDonald's employee seems to have fingered the guy, but they did in fact spend a lot of resources interviewing people, reviewing surveillance footage, painstakingly reconstructing his escape route - sending scuba teams to search waterways in Central Park! - there have statistically been multiple murders in NY since then and I bet none of that happened for any of them.
The fact that the media focused more on this one, or that given how it was resolved a lot of that effort ended up being wasteful, doesn't change the point.
Maybe it looked like the cone was wobbling.
Maybe I'm too trusting in the goodness of "the system", but I don't agree with the "investigated harder because he's rich" angle. I don't think it was about the victim; I think any victim would have gotten the same response. Rather, I think it's about how aberrant the shooting was, given the place. Cold-blooded shootings with clean getaways are *not supposed to happen* in 2024 midtown Manhattan. It's about the public's perception of safety. There's a reason why Trump's "I could shoot someone on 5th St" quip bothered to specify 5th St.
Well I think Trump said 5th Ave because he lives there, and also because it's super public, but the fact that it's midtown Manhattan is downstream from the "rich" part. Perhaps a janitor getting shot in midtown Manhattan would get the same treatment (I doubt it, can't point to concrete evidence), but a shooting in midtown Manhattan, janitor or otherwise, certainly gets more coverage than one of a similar person in South Bronx.
"They" gave a lot more resources to the murder of George Floyd, who wasn't rich, than they gave to this guy.
Did they? There was a lot of resources used for the response to mass protests, but that was in response to the protests not the murder itself. They prosecuted the perpetrator but that's not (at least shouldn't be) unusual.
They did not have (nor did they need to have) any massive citywide manhunt involving canvassing hundreds of security cameras, dozens of interviews, dredging local bodies of water with scuba teams, mass searches of city parks, and shit like that.
The scariest thing would be if this assassination "worked" in producing change people want. It's as scary as the President-Elect's FBI pick having an enemies list.
This is not going to end well. The assassinations aren't going to just be people you don't like.
The result of one of these happening a month won't be a change in the operation of health insurance, it will be a huge hiring boom in bodyguards for insurance executives.
yes they will
(to be fair, I don't like any figures well-known enough to be assassinated)
It seems to me that most of the folks spewing venom the direction of Brian Thompson would not very much like a world where insurance companies were not allowed to deny procedures.
Can you rewrite this? I can't follow all the negations.
"It would be bad if insurance companies were required to approve all procedures".
I assume because insurance costs would go up, probably to the point that insurance companies might shut down (at least in jurisdictions with such a rule: see insurance companies pulling out of California due to the regulations there).
a) Brian Thompson and UHC were _particularly_ egregious, with triple the denial rate of the industry average, and installation of an AI denial generator system which broke their own rules so badly that, for living patients with enough health to be able to navigate the appeals process, 90% of the denials were overturned.
b) I've been through the health care marketplace information, the medicare options information, and, before retirement, my employer's health insurance options. The dissemination of denial information after Thompson's informal execution is the _first_ time I have ever seen denial rate information. As nearly as I can tell, that data was either actively hidden from the public or close enough to hidden to effectively be hidden.
c) I prefer to have punishments go through legal channels. Ideally Thompson's policies, particularly the denial generator system, should have led to charges of something like lethal fraud or conspiracy to commit murder, and he should have been arrested, charged, tried, convicted, sentenced and executed. Still, like Osama Bin Laden before him, also responsible for the deaths of several thousand of my countrymen, I'm thankful that he is dead.
Do you have a link for that denial rate info?
I agree with your sentiments.
Many Thanks! For the overall denial rate, it is, amongst other place, YouTube video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Otls5T_Idbw&list=PLTK43yDZLJItFbOY3IsTO2pETnN2VBIsa&index=40
at timestamp 10:37
UHC's rate is 32%
while the overall industry rate is 16%
( 'scuse my misquoting the ratio as 3X - I misread the industry average as 10%. As you can see UHC's is actually 2X the industry average).
This video also cites the 90% reversal-on-appeal rate at timestamp 4:18
It's a claim made in a lawsuit against the company.
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/class-action-v-unitedhealth-and-navihealth-1.pdf
"Upon information and belief, over 90 percent of patient claim denials are reversed through either an internal appeal process or through federal Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) proceedings."
I don’t know but the support for the killer being cross party is perhaps ominous for the future.
Children. What makes me hesitate to have children is not the cost or things like that, but the AI apocalypse, and also things like the risk of nuclear war and horrible things like that. Should we still have kids if we are condemning them to a nightmare? Would you have kids if you knew some Lovecraft version of the Borg were landing in 7 years?
> Would you have kids if you knew some Lovecraft version of the Borg were landing in 7 years?
"knew"? Sure, no way. But we don't know, not even close. If you think you know, you've gotten into AI millenarianism.
And since we don't know, then yes, having kids is the normal human thing. In fact, if you're going to employ high-level intellectual forecasting to override your desire to engage in the most fundamentally human activity, it seems contradictory to be worried about the fate of humanity.
This applies more generally, by the way: smart people making unusual choices on major life decisions because they have used their big brains to think very hard about the long-term future are almost always going to end up making things worse for themselves.
No, you don't have to know something with absolute certainty for it to influence your optimal behavior. You don't know for sure that if you bet all your money on a particular horse in a horse race, you would lose everything. Yet you wouldn't do it because it would have a negative expected value. That's still not "horse racing millenarianism."
Nor does it make sense to say that if you are uncertain about the future you should do the "normal human behavior." First of all, why should uncertainty imply that you should do the "normal thing", whatever that is? In some families it is normal to buy lottery tickets. I recommend not doing this. Second, normality has changed a lot. It seems to be becoming more and more normal not to have children. I'm not saying that's a good thing! But it shows that normality is neither necessary nor sufficient for a "should."
In this particular context, it is not even necessary to worry about the “fate of humanity” as a whole to consider the influence of expectations on your behavior in the interests of your potential children. And if humanity is at risk because of artificial intelligence, nuclear war or biological threats, then I can't change that by having children. Instead, I just condemn them to being witnesses of the end of humanity with some probability. Whether the probability is 20% or 100% does not really matter for the structure of the argument, but of course it is an important argument for the right decision result!
> Children. What makes me hesitate to have children
...what made you consider having children, before you hesitated?
It's sounding a little like you want to make a decision one way, but also feel some peer pressure or other external reason to make the opposite choice; and thus feel you need to justify yourself and/or convince others of the validity of your position.
Just in case I'm not wrong on this: keep it simple. If you (and your partner) want children, have children. If you don't, don't. You don't need to justify your decision to anyone (other than your partner), and you should ignore even strong pressure even from your in-group to decide one way rather than another. It's your (plural) life, not the crowd's.
I see evidence of peer pressure here, but of course information is always taken in from other people, friends, etc. and also from blogs like Scott's. Articles on blogs like Astral Codexten worry me a lot, but I don't think I would be any better off if I didn't know about these developments.
The way OP's question is phrased, though, feels like we are only getting half the story. "What makes me hesitate to have children" implies they would otherwise have children, but for the existential risks they've outlined.
Why is this? - why would they otherwise have children? They haven't said. "Should we still have kids if...", they say, without explaining why, in their view, we should have kids at all.
If it's part of an ongoing conversation here, my original comment applies - the most important part of this decision is that, whatever informs it, ultimately you completely own it, because you have to live with it.
If there is some other reasoning, we can't really have a conversation without taking that into account. Nothing in this world is certain, and all our decisions must balance between risks and rewards; but it's hard to reason about where balance might be found when only one side of the scales is visible.
If it's an entirely unexamined assumption, perhaps it is worth examining.
The world is awesome. Bring more people into it. AI required multiple technological leaps. If that doesn't happen we live, if it does (and I expect us to, but less than 90% chance) we will all die. That's fine. Future is hard model. They're just super duper cute, you can safely predict you'll love your kids once you have them, go for it.
I do not completely understand what you are saying here. You expect us all to die due to an AI catastrophe with somewhere between 50% and 90% chance even though the future is "hard [to?] model", but you recommend having children anyway because they are cute? So it's okay that AI kills them because they are cute while they live? (I never doubted I would love my children, so this is not a relevant point. But I doubt that it would be nice for those that I love to create them to be killed in a bad and hopeless situation?)
Yeah totally. AI catastrophe is inevitable if we have, say, 2-5 more technological leaps in design space of how computers process information. It probably won't happen just from 'throwing more compute power at LLMs'. That could happen in 1 year, it could happen in 50, it could happen never. Being alive is awesome. Having kids is awesome. What is the .... median expectation of how far out something horrible happening that you have? Is it more than 5 years?
I don't know. Is the median really the only relevant property of the distribution here? What are your expectations? And why do you think more compute is not enough?
'why do you think more compute is not enough'
because I know plenty of people who work in AI, and none of them think that the current technologies are resulting in exponential intelligence explosion, we are seeing pretty constraining limits to additional intelligence as a function of compute power, it's an empirical observation
what you would worry about, assuming you can't define properly an objective function for something arbitrarily smarter than you which is a pipe dream to get right on the first try, is something becoming arbitrarily smarter, most likely through recursive self improvement. to get there would require several paradigm shifts of how we build intelligence, let's say LLM's are the first paradigm shift, probably takes 2-5 more jumps to get to something that will end up on the path to that.
I don't have expectations, how can you predict how long it takes a person to come up with a new idea, of a categorical difference like discovering LLM's was, or model how many steps it takes, etc.
It could be plausibly anything between 0 and 100.
I was just saying that to me unless you think very likely everything ends within 5 years (my personal breakeven horizon for life worth living), having kids is fine because life is awesome.
Why are you asking for my model? Are you asking theoretical questions, or are you trying to decide whether to have kids yourself, in which case your model is what matters.
Thanks for your reply!
"Why are you asking for my model? Are you asking theoretical questions, or are you trying to decide whether to have kids yourself, in which case your model is what matters."
Well, I'm trying to form a "model". Since I'm neither a genius nor a theoretical AI scientist or whatever, I try to listen to/read arguments and see how convincing I find them. This also includes, for example, something like Metaculus estimates.
"because I know plenty of people who work in AI, and none of them think that the current technologies are resulting in exponential intelligence explosion"
Just out of curiosity: Did these people expect 10 years ago that we would now have something like ChatGPT, Midjourney, etc.?
> Would you have kids if you knew some Lovecraft version of the Borg were landing in 7 years?
No, but the point is that I don't know what's happening in the future and neither do you. It would be a grave mistake to treat your or anyone else's vague guesses as reliable prophecy.
Sorry, but I do not think that I treated anyone's vague guesses as reliable prophecy, in particular not my own guesses. If you are genuinely uncertain about the future, you should take your subjective uncertainty and behave responsibly based on it, right? Otherwise you would never do anything like saving for retirement because "why not just consume all your money right now, after all I don't know what's happening in the future and neither do you."
Linking to a comment on a previous post of Scott's framed around climate change, I'm a fan of C.S. Lewis's "let the bombs find you happy": https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids/comment/3202385
(Linking to where I previously summarized it because it's a long-ish quote and because the whole post and discussion is probably relevant)
Thanks, I have some sympathy for the defiant optimism embodied in the quote. However, just saying "the past was even worse" is not very convincing. People had children during the plague because they had a different mindset and maybe they believed they had to have children, or they did not think about their childrens' future very much.
The last sentence in the Lewis quote, "If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs." may be sensible for people who already live - you should make the best of your life. But it is a different question whether you should bring new people into that life.
Historically, however, it would be very interesting to know to what amount people thought about Nuclear War when Lewis wrote that. (In 1948!)
Clicking on the link to the full quote in your comment, I have to say that I find Lewis' paragraphs you left out quite cynical:
"What the atomic bomb has really done is to remind us forcibly of the sort of world we are living in and which, during the prosperous period before, we were beginning to forget. And this reminder is, so far as it goes, a good thing. We have been waked from a pretty dream, and now we can begin to talk about realities."
Oh wait, the atomic bomb threatens to kill us so we are lucky that we can talk about that reality?
"It is our business to live by our own law not by fears: to follow, in private or in public life, the law of love and temperance even when they seem to be suicidal, and not the law of competition and grab, even when they seem to be necessary to our own survival. For it is part of our spiritual law never to put survival first: not even the survival of our species. We must resolutely train ourselves to feel that the survival of Man on this Earth, much more of our own nation or culture or class, is not worth having unless it can be had by honorable and merciful means."
So he basically argues for embracing extinction if honor is not available.
"Nothing is more likely to destroy a species or a nation than a determination to survive at all costs. Those who care for something else more than civilization are the only people by whom civilization is at all likely to be preserved."
So survival and life are not top priority.
"Those who want Heaven most have served Earth best. Those who love man less than God do most for man."
This is a way too general statement. (Keep in mind that these two sentences include suicide bombers.) It also just a claim and my prior is that it is wrong. Compare for:
Zeynep's Law: "Until there is substantial and repeated evidence otherwise, assume counterintuitive findings to be false, and second-order effects to be dwarfed by first-order ones in magnitude." (https://x.com/zeynep/status/1478766408691556353)
I omitted some of the more theological parts of the quote because they're more theological.
But I do think the broad point that people have *always* been facing existential threats and having children regardless is important context and saying "people in the past had a different mindset or didn't think about their children much" is a bit of a deflection.
Are you saying that, in light of the possibility of Viking invaders coming and murdering everyone that the moral thing to do would be for the 10th century Englishman to refuse to have children? And that if they *had* "thought of their children's future very much" they would have refused? That the most moral thing would be for the species to have voluntarily gone extinct millennia ago?
If not, I feel like you have to argue that a child being born today has it probabilistically worse than a child being born in the 10th century and I do find that very hard to believe. Would *you* rather have been born a 10th century peasant, if it meant that you didn't have to face the possibility of (global) climate change or nuclear war, but did have to face historic levels of plague, famine, and war? I sure wouldn't. (And I don't think the 10th century was some uniquely bad time, I wouldn't pick basically any previous century)
"Are you saying that, in light of the possibility of Viking invaders coming and murdering everyone that the moral thing to do would be for the 10th century Englishman to refuse to have children? And that if they *had* "thought of their children's future very much" they would have refused?"
That's a very good question, and thank you for making me think. What do you think about it? If an omniscient demon tells an Englishman in the Middle Ages that the Vikings are coming in five years and will kill 90% of the village population, should he have children? What if they're going to kill the entire population? What if they're going to first torture and then kill the entire population?
The comment about "mindset" is not a deflection, however. If you and your children believe that all suffering has a higher meaning, then of course that makes life better and suffering less problematic. The way you interpret the world is not just a side issue, but influences your wellbeing. And if you believe that humanity will continue forever (or until the Lord comes or whatever), then your contribution to that gives your life meaning and makes suffering more bearable. I think it is perfectly legitimate to consider things outside of one's own lifespan.
"That the most moral thing would be for the species to have voluntarily gone extinct millennia ago?"
Hmm, in addition to the points mentioned above, I would like to make the side note that the Vikings would still have had children. This would raise further questions about morality.
"If not, I feel like you have to argue that a child being born today has it probabilistically worse than a child being born in the 10th century and I do find that very hard to believe. Would *you* rather have been born a 10th century peasant, if it meant that you didn't have to face the possibility of (global) climate change or nuclear war, but did have to face historic levels of plague, famine, and war? I sure wouldn't. (And I don't think the 10th century was some uniquely bad time, I wouldn't pick basically any previous century)"
No, I would definitely prefer being born in the 20th century to being born in the 10th century.
I do want to emphasize the universality of this: it's not just "10th century Christian peasants had some mindset that made them uniquely able to have children despite an existential threat" - this was basically a universal experience everywhere.
The "vikings might be coming over the hill to kill you and yours" is a colorful example, but not a necessary one - for most people for much of history (including probably the Vikings themselves, to your side-point) were not more than a few bad harvests, one bad plague, or one bad military conflict away from annihilation.
And yes, mindset is a part of the difference, but I think if basically everyone for all of history was able to 'cope': to find purpose in life despite the certainty of death and the possibility of great suffering, and we can't, despite living in on-net the most peaceful and prosperous time in history... I feel the interesting question isn't "is it moral to have kids", it's "where did we break and how do we fix it"?
I think you're confusing the "known" aspect here. If someone said that Vikings would kill them all five years from now (and we now know that was true for many villages in that area) we're presupposing correct information. If someone had said the Vikings were going to attack in say, 1585, we would similarly discount that - despite not having any particular reason to believe one above the other, a priori.
Saying that people should be concerned about having kids in 2025 is similarly presupposing one or more potential world events has a high(er than normal) likelihood.
If I'm in England somewhere in the 9th century I will be wary of the Vikings, because there's a history of them attacking. But apparently not enough of a worry that people stopped having kids. If I'm living in 2025 maybe I'm concerned about one or more of Climate, AI, Nuclear War, whatever. But Nuclear War seems way more likely in the 1960s than now, and I hope you agree it was good that people still had kids then. And Climate doesn't seem like a bigger issue than WWII, and people still had kids then.
Without having solid knowledge of the future, I don't think there's a good reason to not have kids unless it's so obvious that there's a very high chance of doom. Some people think that about AI, but that belief seems silly and pretty much religious at this point. At least the level of surety of AGI existing and also being powerful enough to effect that level of change.
I was pretty sure Reagan and Brezhnev were going to kill me and everyone else in the 80’s but it didn’t happen and I got to grow up! We could get lucky again.
Yes, we could! The same applies to betting all my money in Las Vegas. Would you recommend it?
I didn't mean that in a reassuring way, just that it's very hard to see the future. I personally believe that both climate change and AI are going to be very big problems, sooner than anyone thinks -- but I still mow my lawn. What can you do? If you're trying to decide whether to have kids now, that's more fraught but my child has never complained so far about the world he's inheriting (not that it would do him any good).
1. Putting AI aside for the moment, there has never been a better time in history to have children. You probably live in a developed country and make enough money to live comfortable. If this is true, you will be able to provide your kids more opportunities than 99.99% of all humans who have ever lived. Even if a climatepocalypse or nuclear war do happen in their lifetimes (unlikely), most people would prefer to live and die than to have never lived at all.
2. Putting AI into the picture, I recommend looking at this post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cyqrvE3dk5apg54Sk/raising-children-on-the-eve-of-ai
1. "Putting AI for the moment, there has never been a better time in history to have children. You probably live in a developed country and make enough money to live comfortable. If this is true, you will be able to provide your kids more opportunities than 99.99% of all humans who have ever lived."
I think this argument has a lot of weight, but I'm not entirely convinced. Nuclear war is a dangerous, already relevant but probably growing risk; however, I can clearly imagine at least the "no nuclear war" scenario (although the probabilities estimated by Metaculus are depressingly high) and think there's a lot we could do about it.
As for AI, I don't see such a hopeful scenario to look forward to (send me a link if you have one). Even in the "not everyone dies" scenario, I don't see a great future (maybe I lack imagination) and my impression is that humanity is too stupid to prevent bad developments in this regard (you can't get the AI back into the box once that it is out). Maybe I should become religious, but motivated reasoning has never been my strong point.
"Even if a climatepocalypse or nuclear war do happen in their lifetimes (unlikely),"
So how likely do you think they are?
"most people would prefer to live and die than to have never lived at all.
Yes, I prefer to live too, but I can still live off my memories of the time before artificial intelligence. If things turn really bad, I can play the final scene. But would you condemn children to that?
Scott once wrote: "'What a lovely girl in a normal organic body who is destined to live to an age greater than six', the people would say." (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/half-an-hour-before-dawn-in-san-francisco) To me, the mood in that sentence felt very depressing. But it's not something parents talk about once they have children, because it would be pretty bitter for the children.
2. Putting AI into the picture, I recommend looking at this post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cyqrvE3dk5apg54Sk/raising-children-on-the-eve-of-ai
Hm. She writes: "This is all assuming that the worst case is death rather than some kind of dystopia or torture scenario. Maybe unsurprisingly, I haven’t properly thought through the population ethics there. I find that very difficult to think about, and if you’re on the fence you should think more about it." I don't know what to make of this. Is not being "on the fence" here also due to kind of willful ignorance? Or is there something deeper behind it that I don't understand?
"Nuclear war is a dangerous, already relevant but probably growing risk; "
Honestly, my gut feeling is that nuclear war is less likely now than at any point in history since 1950. In the 1950- 80s, people had a lot more reason to worry about nuclear war: nukes were new and unprecedented, and there were two, well-formed power blocks, each with an ideological desire to overwhelm the other and with growing nuclear arsenals. The risk has since diminished quite a bit: the total number of the world's nukes is now far smaller (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1071026/nuclear-warheads-per-country-historical development), there's 70 years of non-nuclear aggression precedent that seems to have prevented deployment so far, and the world is far more economically globalized now and so all actors have more to lose from nuclear war.
I'm not saying the chance of nuclear MAD today is zero, but if the chance of nuclear MAD wouldn't have dissuaded you from having a child in the 1950s (and indeed hundreds of millions of people did have kids despite it), I'm confident that it shouldn't dissuade you now.
"As for AI, I don't see such a hopeful scenario to look forward to (send me a link if you have one). "
For a "standard" hopeful scenario for a strong AI future, I recommend Dario Amodei's Machines of Loving Grace (https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace). I don't personally have an opinion about how likely this is vs. a "bad" AI future vs. extinction, but certain smart people do take it seriously.
"So how likely do you think they are?"
I haven't researched either question extensively, and I encourage you to do your own research. But as a first-glance analysis, I would say:
Climatepocalypse before 2100 (death of over half of humanity due to direct climate-related disasters such as floods, droughts, fires etc.): 10%
Nuclear War between great powers before 2100: 15%
"Yes, I prefer to live too, but I can still live off my memories of the time before artificial intelligence. If things turn really bad, I can play the final scene. But would you condemn children to that?"
I'm not quite sure I understand what you're saying here. Every human in history has had to deal with the reality that their children will suffer, and the strong possibility that their suffering will be great. That hasn't stopped most people from thinking that having children is good. It's up to you to decide whether your children would be happy that they were born.
"This is all assuming that the worst case is death rather than some kind of dystopia or torture scenario"
IMO the worst-case for AI is rapid total human extinction, and in my calculus this possibility is not great enough, nor the suffering horrible enough, to create a strong argument against having children in 2024. If the worst case were prolonged torture, this would change my opinion, but I don't think it's likely that a future strong AI will want to torture all of humanity.
With respect to the risk of nuclear war, it seems that a situation in which more countries have nuclear weapons seems more unstable. Economic interdependence is possibly helpful, but some countries are aiming at reducing it.
A different sort of calculus says that if only people unconcerned about the future have children, we will raise a generation that is indifferent to the future.
So your point is, “We should have children in the future to help the next generation not to behave stupidly, even if there is a good chance that the children we have will end up in a nuclear war or an AI apocalypse”?
This calculation only works if you think the apocalypse is at least a generation away and/or make some other assumptions. It's not a 'point' I was trying make, just a rationale I have heard people use. More often I hear it from the right, that eg Christians should have more babies to better stem the future tide of 'progress' (usually stated in terms of unwanted cultural change).
Personally, I think people should have babies if and only if they want them, embrace the work that is entailed in raising them to be thoughtful independent adults, and understand going in that the whole endeavor could go sideways starting on day 1.
Thanks. So you don't take into account what this means for the children, or do you have an implicit assumption?
I think it's problematic to take the perspective of unborn people. Will they regret being born? Happens all the time. But most people, once born, try to avoid death, suggesting that the way to maximize the utility of a prospective life is to make it actual.
Yes.
Setting aside that creating life might be morally valuable just in its own right, I think it's still worthwhile. You seem to be, like, 99% confident in impeding catastrophe... I think probably revise yourself toward Ord's 1 in 6. (Especially given Erik Hoel's observation about an AI plateau [https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/ai-progress-has-plateaued-at-gpt] which I think is good reason to extend our AGI timelines some decades at least. Though Metaculus does have it in 2032, so I guess take with many grains of salt.)
Anyway: I think an average life where you live to at least 30 is probably worthwhile for the tragedy of an average death, and given the socioeconomic make-up of ACX readers, maybe make that 20.
So, fine, AI's coming in 7 years. By Ord, and quite conservatively, we have an expected lifespan of 7 years * 1/6 + 60 years * 5/6 = 50ish years. That still seems good! If I was offered a 50 year life or total non-existence, I'd take the 50 years.
(Ok, final caveat: maybe you're saying that AGI could bring us into some terrible dystopia where the kid ends up slaving away for 60 miserable years. [I wish I was nerd enough to get "Lovecraft version of the Borg" naturally, but I don't, so this is just vaguely the vibesy sense of the meaning that I'm picking up on.] In that case, I'd urge you to really think hard about the probabilities: P(dystopia) < 10% probably which means an expected 6 bad years vs. expected 7 good years * 1/6 catastrophe + expected 60 good years * (1-1/6-1/10) = 44 years and we have 44 - 6 = 40ish which comes out nice and ethically good. [How bad are the bad years relative to good years? Not sure, maybe factor that in.] You'd have to get to odds of catastrophe near 50% before the math flips on you. Now go procreate.)
"Setting aside that creating life might be morally valuable just in its own right,"
Why? It seems this only makes sense if the life you create is desirable for the life you create.
"I think it's still worthwhile. You seem to be, like, 99% confident in impeding catastrophe... I think probably revise yourself toward Ord's 1 in 6."
At which percentage would you change your recommendations?
"(Especially given Erik Hoel's observation about an AI plateau [https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/ai-progress-has-plateaued-at-gpt] which I think is good reason to extend our AGI timelines some decades at least. Though Metaculus does have it in 2032, so I guess take with many grains of salt.)"
I don't find the AI plateau story very convincing. Or rather, I don't think we should extrapolate too much from it into the future.
"Anyway: I think an average life where you live to at least 30 is probably worthwhile for the tragedy of an average death, and given the socioeconomic make-up of ACX readers, maybe make that 20."
That's interesting, I thought that there was a relatively high rate of depression and similar mental illnesses among ACX readers.
"So, fine, AI's coming in 7 years. By Ord, and quite conservatively, we have an expected lifespan of 7 years * 1/6 + 60 years * 5/6 = 50ish years. That still seems good! If I was offered a 50 year life or total non-existence, I'd take the 50 years."
That is actually very helpful, thanks!
I assume I could answer the question above, "At which percentage would you change your recommendations?" with that, if I knew your actual percentage for the 7 years and also where the 60 years came from?
However, the assessment may also depend somewhat on how the extinction occurs.
"(Ok, final caveat: maybe you're saying that AGI could bring us into some terrible dystopia where the kid ends up slaving away for 60 miserable years. [I wish I was nerd enough to get "Lovecraft version of the Borg" naturally, but I don't, so this is just vaguely the vibesy sense of the meaning that I'm picking up on.] In that case, I'd urge you to really think hard about the probabilities: P(dystopia) < 10% probably which means an expected 6 bad years vs. expected 7 good years * 1/6 catastrophe + expected 60 good years * (1-1/6-1/10) = 44 years and we have 44 - 6 = 40ish which comes out nice and ethically good. [How bad are the bad years relative to good years? Not sure, maybe factor that in.] You'd have to get to odds of catastrophe near 50% before the math flips on you. Now go procreate.)
Thank you for the serious approach here. What are your expectations for the future?
Would you kill yourself today if you did? How many experiences are you willing to forego to avoid an unpleasant one?
I assume that this depends on how pleasant or unpleasant the experiences are?
Ending one's life is a decision that some people make when things are going really badly for them. The relevant question is, how many good experiences are necessary in a lifetime to make the whole life worth living (from a prospective perspective), assuming that life will get really bad at some point?
Another question; how many parents of dead children do you think wish they never had the child?
You mean children who died at a young age? That's an interesting question. I don't know anyone personally who has lost a child, but I think for many parents it's very traumatic. I suppose it depends on the suffering of the child, but I realize that hindsight can be skewed. The thought of "would it have been better if the child hadn't existed?" is just not a question that people usually ask, right? It would lead to additional self-blame, which most people prefer to avoid. And that's a good thing, because it's not healthy to blame yourself for things you can't change.
People generally aren't acting like they actually expect the apocalypse in such a short timeframe. Companies are still investing in long-term R&D, employees are putting money in their retirement funds etc.
Do you think these people are hypocrites? Do you think they secretely know the "truth"? Or do you think it's the opposite, that is, people aren't able to plan for things to get really bad?
Talk is cheap. People can say things regardless of whether they are going to act like the things they say are the truth, though this doesn't imply any actual knowledge of the future on their part.
This confuses the "ought" with the "is." There are definitely times and places in human history where I would not recommend having children.
"Even if everything is fine, you have a decent chance of having a kid who works a job they hate to support a life they hate until they die or kill themselves."
I think I have a reasonable chance to be a good parent, I can influence that (somewhat! I know there are limits). I cannot really influence the AI future. Altman and Musk will decide what it looks like.
About the last line: Isn't that just the "Safe Uncertainty Fallacy"? See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mr-tries-the-safe-uncertainty-fallacy
Wiktionary:
"catastrophize (third-person singular simple present catastrophizes, present participle catastrophizing, simple past and past participle catastrophized)
1. (transitive, intransitive) To regard a bad situation as if it were disastrous or catastrophic."
This implies that I am misinterpreting a bad situation. So what is the correct interpretation?
"2. (transitive, intransitive, psychology) To expose a behaviour pattern of seeking worst interpretation and magnifying disagreeable outcomes (of).
3. (obsolete) To end a comedy."
I'm not looking for the worst interpretation at all! I'm here to be convinced that everything is finde! Please give me a very good interpretation!
However, currently my problem is exactly that I have "epistemic humility in the face of extreme uncertainty" and I am humble enough to see that this includes very bad outcomes. So what should I do? Act as if it didn't?
"we don't know, at this point we can't know, and therefore we should proceed until we have more information"
I don't understand what that means for the question of whether one should have children. Are you in favor of always sticking to traditional behavior? Or are you advocating not having children until we know what the future holds?
"- not use speculative arguments to convince ourselves of an outcome distant from our ability to predict".
I don't know what this accusation is based on. In which sense do I use more speculative arguments than others? Where do you see me actively trying to convince myself of something bad? This would presume that I want to see a bad result - I actually don't want that! I want to see reality and make ethically good decisions.
Hm. So do you think life is positive?
Do you think Nuclear War and AI are a relevant risk?
If so, it seems that they are characterized due to a strong hopelessness. They would, I assume, strongly increase the share of the world population suffering compared to the things you list, also within each life. It would be probably hard or impossible to flee, and there would be no future to look forward to. But maybe my pseudo-calculation is just wrong there, happy about any corrections. What are your expectations for the future?
Thank you, that is a helpful framing!
I am terrified of the idea of dreaming. It feels crazy to me that in order to survive, I have to go comatose with vivid hallucinations in an altered state of consciousness every night. It’s like having a health condition where I have to endure an LSD trip every day or literally die.
I am not here for advice; that I take from my therapist and my psychiatrist. But I’d like to ask you to share how you deal with the idea that you have to have dreams every night. Do you just ignore them? (Why are you okay with it?) Are you even looking forward to them, perhaps?
I don't find dreams too different from intense daydreaming, where I also play out various scenarios in my head, both that bring me joy and that I am worried about. It's just our attempts to predict the future in order to be more effective agents, and our neural networks finetuning.
I'm fine with having some visual byproducts in the process, as long as they arent' distressing (but for me, they rarely are).
Dreams are for me a little, a really little, compensation for having only one and a very limited life.
I have been on other planets. I have been on spaceships. I flew by will. I saved the world with awesome friends. I also was chased and treated very badly by horrific monsters, but with them completely unable to hurt me for real. I had the adventure, without paying the price.
That's why I love dreaming.
I sometimes have a hard time getting to sleep, so I take waking up from a dream as: Oh! I _did_ finally get to sleep, which I needed. FWIW, most of my dreams are unpleasant, but I still find the evidence that I finally got to sleep comforting.
Our brains are weird structures that need nightly maintenance, being upset about dreams is like being upset about urination. It’s undignified, but…
Also, some of my dreams are very interesting, especially the ones where I am simultaneously watching a movie and also the movie star on the screen. If I could recreate that experience while awake, I would pay a lot for it.
I can't wrap my head around either dreading or looking forward to my dreams. I don't exactly think of them as things that happen to me, because the me they happen to is so discontinuous with the waking me. She doesn't even know she's asleep! She doesn't know it's a dream. She cannot access at will any of the memories, skills and opinions I can. So even if I knew I was going to dream tonight of being killed by a mass shooter I don't think I would dread it, because it isn't really me it's going to happen to. I'm not saying you should have my attitude -- I understand you're in the grip of an anxiety disorder -- just trying to describe my personal attitude towards dreams, in answer to your question.
Wait, so your dream self has no access to your autobiographical memory?
Well, bits of my real life, present and past, appear in my dreams. But my dreaming self cannot access autobiographical memory the way my waking self can. It also cannot reason and reflect in the same way. For instance in one of my dreams last night a psychiatrist who is a professional acquaintance in my waking life, asked me to enter a psychiatric hospital. There was some task I was supposed to do there. It had something to do with understanding or improving what life was like for the patients. If in real life the psychiatrist had asked me to do such a weird thing I would have had all sorts of thoughts about his request: How could he possibly think I'd be willing to do it? Why did he even want me to? Had he lost his reason? But in the dream I felt no surprise or displeasure regarding his request, and in fact did enter the hospital. Later in the dream my mother visited me and wanted to know why I had been in the hospital. Not having access to my waking knowledge that she died quite a long time ago, I was not surprised to see her.
By the way, I'm a psychologist, and I wanted to let you know that your horror of dreaming sounds like a cousin of an anxiety disorder I've seen several people have: a horror of fainting. Most of them are people who have never fainted, and have no reason to think they are likely to. People who have this fear sometimes begin avoiding settings that make them feel slightly odd, such as escalators, because they are afraid the odd sensation of standing on moving stairs might somehow make them faint. When I've asked them what it is they fear, they have a hard time putting it into words. It is definitely *not* a fear of hurting themselves when they fall, or of being robbed or harmed by strangers while unconscious . And it is definitely not anticipated embarrassment at being seen by others losing consciousness, crumpling to the ground, etc. It's something about unexpected loss of control of the self. Anyhow, thought it might be helpful for you to know you are not alone in your phobia.
Thank you, fear of fainting is definitely a new clue! I seem to have the opposite case though, because I'd prefer to sleep all night without dreams, i. e. to "faint" my way through the night. But the "loss of control of self" sounds quite relatable. I'll look up this condition you mentioned, in case it brings some important insights.
OK, just to give you a more complete view of this sort of phobia here are some others that are similar: fear of orgasm; fear of vomiting; fear of becoming so dizzy that one falls down; fear of having an epileptic seizures; fear of discovering one is gay (the people who have this fear are generally not particularly homophobic, and have years of good evidence that they are heterosexual, so even they are perplexed why this fear haunts them). For all of these things there are conventional reasons one could fear them, things having to do with social stigma, shame and embarrassment, but for people who have an actual phobia about one of them the feared thing really is something different: It’s something about losing control of one’s self, or actually sort of losing one’s self. If you would like to know something about treatment of this sort of phobia I can describe it.
Sure, I'm interested.
Dreams are intriguing. Sometimes they are frightening, sometimes I experience deep positive emotions. I've never considered them anything other than a feature of life.
Never take quinine though. I have taken it as a malaria prophylactic and true to its reputation I had extremely vivid, horrifying dreams. I didn't dread falling asleep but I didn't much look forward to it either.
I guess I'm lucky enough to have a certain amount of control over my dreams. I have a lot of fun in my dreams, and they're an important form of recreation for me.
My dreams are naturally quite lucid and it makes it quite worse somehow, being aware that I am stuck in a hallucination.
Can you elaborate a little more on why that's unpleasant?
It's hard to elaborate because it's my crazies, not something reasonable. I'll write if I find the right words, though.
I hope they come to you! I'd love to read more about your experience w/ this.
Lucid dreaming seems like a lot of work, and quite frankly, not sleeping. I can day dream when awake and control the narrative but it isn’t restful.
I've been working on lucid dreaming for a while, and have some natural talent for it. I spontaneously dreamed lucidly a lot as a child before I had any idea it was A Thing that could be practiced and improved.
In the right setting, both internal and external setting, I can reliably launch a lucid dream with about 80% success. I can't make all of my dreams lucid 80% of the time though. It works like this: I need to have alrady slept once that night, the lucid dream is almost always during the 2nd sleep period after having been asleep for at least 3.5 hours or so. I wake up briefly, drink some cold mugwort tea, and fall back to sleep in a controlled manner. Body perfectly still, visualizing internally certain....concepts? This part is hard to describe in writing, but I know when it feels correctly done; I can tell when it is (or isn't) going to work. Then I'm in the dream suddenly, and I know I am in a dream. (side note: as a result of years of practicing this I can also just put myself to sleep without the dreams pretty reliably too, even on stimulants)
Here's the part that is probably the strangest thing to people when I try to explain the experience. Lucid dreams can be quite dull. Everything I'm experiencing is internally produced by my own mind, and my mind doesn't always do a great job of filling in the blanks. Very lucid dreams are remarkably incomplete at times and I've actually woken myself up out of boredom. They are usually pretty fun though. Its also important to draw a distinction between lucid dreaming and dream control, which are related but distinct. I'm often fully aware that I'm dreaming, but with little control over events, like watching out of the window of a train or something. Gaining increased control over the dream also often involves giving up some of the lucidity. Some of the best ones have been when I launch a lucid dream, forget I'm dreaming, then remember again. These are often much less stark and empty than the fully lucid ones.
A few random notes. Alcohol, even in small amounts, ruins it. This isn't true for everyone but its a common observation. Ambien as well. Caffiene otoh makes it easier, though it can be more challenging to fall asleep. Trazadone makes the dreams more vivid but harder to control. Cannabis has no noticable effects one way or the other. LSD/Mushrooms are helpful in the week of so after using them, but not while under the direct effects. Having the room be (dimly) lit helps a lot too, I use two nightlights on opposite sides of the room.
I'd been told isn't possible to fall asleep while tripping psychedelics, but I fell asleep on Mushrooms once. It was a journey through states that resembled the Tibetan descriptions of the Bardo realm. I was "shown" some fascinating things about the nature of my consciousness — and it showed me that my consciousness was connected to a larger network of consciousness (finite in size, though) — plus it showed me a vision of man attacking me with a knife and my guts spilling out on the pavement. The attack happened a week later, and I recognized the man from my precognitive dream in time to get into my car and lock the door while he pounded on it trying to get in. I credit that dreamtrip with saving my life.
Very interesting thanks. The only thing I can do there is go back to the same dream after 3.5 hours sleep. Which is exactly when I first wake up most nights. The interim period when I pee or whatever, which is fast as my room is en-suite, seems like a movie interval and I have to remain groggy
It comes naturally to me. I didn't have to work at it. Though I admit my control has improved over the years, it hasn't been through any effort by my waking consciousness. But I still can't find where I left my car in my dreams.
I don't remember having dreams generally. Unfortunately, that's not actionable advice I can give you.
I mostly enjoy them, even the bad ones. Sort of “it’s cool my brain can do that.” The only dreams I don’t like are ones that make me feel boring, like dreaming about being at work.
I find I dream "boring" dreams more often now: that of doing something I would normally do, such as talking to people, or eating something, or walking on stairs. I eventually notice it's a dream from something that almost, but doesn't quite, add up, like if I'm eating from a plate with a fork but the plate looks the same even after having eaten from it.
I find dreams very enjoyable. I look forward to dreaming at night: unfortunately I rarely remember my dreams so I am often disappointed on that front (I know dream journaling would help with that, but I haven't found the time). Amazing things can happen in dreams. There have been a few occasions in my life where something has happened in a dream that was deeply meaningful or exciting. That's certainly not what usually happens, but it's nice getting to pull the lever the dream slot machine knowing that jackpot is possible. And sometimes you get to lucid dream and that's very fun.
The only problem is nightmares, but I've mostly got them sorted out now.
How did you sort them out?
I've regularly had nightmares as long as I can remember (usually 1-2 a month, though these days its more like 1 every two months). I sorted them out through lucid dream training, actually. I didn't have the wherewithal to train enough to regularly get lucid dreams, but I trained enough to accomplish one specific thing: I can wake myself out of a dream fairly quickly and easily.
My wife takes credit for the rest of my technique. Early in our marriage she would notice that when I was having a nightmare I would often whimper in my sleep. She'd wake me up whenever this happened, which I appreciated because that meant the nightmare was over. This happened enough times, and I had enough lucid dream training that I was somewhat aware that I might be dreaming and could be in a nightmare, that I got into the habit of screaming at the top of my lungs whenever a dream started getting scary. That scream would translate to a louder than normal whimper which prompted my wife to wake me.
After going through this routine for several years I'm now at the point where a nightmare starts, I start screaming, and I don't even need my wife to wake me up. I just wake up. My dreaming mind has learned that screaming=wake up.
If you have trouble with nightmares, lucid dream training might help.
It seems like I am mostly unaffected by my dreams emotionally, regardless of what happens in them. Except this seems to be the case only outside of the dream. While in dreams, I think I react internally as though the things happening were really happening. And in the few times I have known I was dreaming while in a dream (and not able to control anything) I was afraid, and thought about how I'll tell everyone about the experience after waking up. Then I think very little of it after waking up and decide to get on with my day. (Same applies to sleep paralysis, including a case this morning.)
I don't remember my dreams most of the time so it is easy to ignore them. But it does make me sad that dreams are often about negative/unpleasant/scary things. I think though that experiencing things in dreams is much less intense than experiencing them in real life
I once watched an entire movie in my dreams. It had Dave Bautista and Jason Statham and Some Guy I've Seen Before But Don't Recognize From Anything and the worst dialogue you could ever hear. There was a point where I walked out of the theater and sat on a bench next to a critic to talk about the nonsense we were watching, before heading back in to finish it.
I can't imagine not wanting that experience. It's everything you could ever want, a single thought away.
Your dream self appears to be a victim of the sunk-cost fallacy.
I often enjoy them. Freewheeling dreams (as opposed to when I tried lucid dreaming) are more interesting and varied than what I would choose as a dream, and mine are often (at least perceived as) quite narrative and exciting. I also find the experience of falling asleep comfortable and cosy when it comes easily (it doesn’t always come easily, and I know I have a tendency to fight changes of state).
When I have nightmares, then it is obviously less pleasant, and I have to try to get out of that frame of mind before I am happy sleeping again: it is usually easy to shake them off if I wake up fully. I find prayer helpful for falling asleep in the right frame of mind, especially when nightmares are threatening, but I’m aware that isn’t transferable for everyone.
An explanation of why Jesus is the only way to heaven that I recently wrote to a friend. Please consider reading, even if you won't be convinced.
So, here's why it's important to follow specifically Jesus and why I want to tell you about it.
Like I'm sure you've heard before, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." When God created everything, he also ingrained morality into the universe. What is right is good and pleasing to him, and what is wrong is bad and requires punishment. Humans operate in the same way, because God says he made humans in his own image. Humans inherently see value in things and have a conscience, a natural sense of right and wrong. Humans like good things, and we punish bad things.
Because God himself is perfect and holy, and he himself is good, nothing evil can be close to him. So when the first humans were created, God told them what they could and couldn't do, and if they did what was wrong that they would die. Death is the punishment for evil, because life is in God and anything that is evil is separated from God.
The Bible says, "your iniquities (evil acts) have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear." So, doing wrong completely separates a person from God and then when they die they will be judged by God, and he will not allow them to be close to him. And it's not just terrible evils that are wrong but anything that is against the nature of God is wrong and creates a barrier away from Him.
The Bible says "all have sinned and fall short of God's glorious standard" and I don't think anyone can disagree with that. Every person has done something bad in their life before, even if it's just telling a small lie or getting angry at another person. But because God is entirely perfect, even these things that seem small are enough to cause separation from God (This fact is why it's so important for every person to consider following Jesus. But I'll explain why Jesus in just a minute). Once there is separation from God because of sin, the price of sin has to be paid, and the Bible also says that "it is appointed for man to die once and then to be judged" and "the wages of sin is death." So, because the first humans sinned, death entered into the world and now everyone will die physically, but after that when we are judged, we will also die spiritually because of our own sins. Spiritual death is eternal separation from God, e.g. hell.
God is just, so at the final judgement day he will not let anyone off the hook. He won't even let generally good people go without punishment for the small wrongs they have done. Being good is the baseline requirement of God, so doing good can never make up for any wrong however small. The price of death has to be paid. God is perfectly just.
But God is also loving, he is love himself. And he loves all people, every single one. This is where Jesus comes in. Because God loves the world of people so much, he sent himself in human form, Jesus, to live as a perfect human so that the price of death could justly be paid in the place of sinful humans, so that even if someone has sinned they could still be close to him forever. That is the famous Bible verse John 3:16 "for God so loved the world, that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life."
Because Jesus is completely perfect and never sinned, no penalty of death was ever required of him for his own sins. And because he was infinitely perfect, he was able to offer himself in place of infinitely many people to receive the penalty of death in their place. And because he himself is God, he was able to raise himself from the dead and in so doing proved that he is God and that everything he said was true. And Jesus said that everyone who believes in him and receives his words become children of God and will live forever with Him. Jesus says that people should repent (which means to turn away from) their sins and to follow his teaching and believe in his words.
This is God's way of maintaining justice and also showing his love. The Bible says in another place that God is patient and he doesn't want anyone at all to perish, but he wants everyone to repent and turn from their sin and towards him. God has given mankind freewill though, and does not force this on anyone. He allows everyone to make their own decisions in life. This is why there is such horrible evil in the world, even towards good people. Just like people are allowed to make good choices that benefit and help others, they are also allowed to make bad choices that hurt others in horrible ways. But nobody will go unpunished on judgement day. Every last evil thing that is done will be paid for, whether it is by Jesus' sacrifice, or by the people who did the evil things.
But this freewill that God gives to men is why not everyone is saved, even though Jesus died for everyone. The Bible passage that says "the wages of sin is death" also says "but the free gift of God is eternal life through our savior and Lord, Jesus." It is a free gift that he gives, but does not force on anyone. And he makes it clear that to receive the gift, one has to renounce his evil life and die to himself, because if he accepts Jesus' sacrifice then his evil self has died along with Jesus. The life he receives from Jesus then has to be lived with Jesus.
Nobody can trick God and say that they repent and accept Jesus and then continue to live selfishly however they want to. Jesus says "Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on judgement day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!"
There's a lot more that Jesus says, and if you're interested it would be helpful to read the Gospel of Matthew (the four Gospels in the Bible are four different accounts of the life of Jesus, here's a link to an easily readable translation for your convenience:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%201&version=NLT
You can skip the first paragraphs that are just names. You may not be interested at all in which case just disregard, but I wanted to be helpful if you are interested). Whatever the case, Jesus makes it clear that if you truly are repentant of evil and if you love him, you will follow him in your life and in your heart. Everyone who does not, rejects God and his free gift and their sins will not be paid for by Jesus' sacrifice. They will have to pay for them on their own.
This is why it is important to believe in Jesus specifically out of anyone else or any other type of god. Being good will not pay the penalty for any wrong that a person has done, it has to be paid in death. Jesus is the only person God has provided to bring people close to him through his own death and resurrection. And he wants every person to believe and be close to him, because he loves the whole world. I really wanted to tell you about it because I don’t want you to have never heard all this and I want you to be with God (and me and others) for eternity in the afterlife.
Thoughts in no order.
(1) I'm getting strong 2011 nostalgia. Felt like every second comment all over the internet was a clone of the one you just wrote, back then.
(2) Now, as then, getting so sick of the atheist responses that say *nothing* but "where's the evidence?" Jesus Christ, can't you say you don't accept the premises and then still engage with the theology on a "suppose I did accept them" basis? Don't these people have any philosophical curiosity whatsoever?
(3) As I said, this comment is an almost identical clone of thousands of other evangelical preaching spiels. I wish Christians would realise this makes them look brainwashed, when things are presented and phrased exactly the same way every time, right down to the "have you ever told a lie" and "the price of sin has to be paid". It would help enormously with being taken seriously if these online preachers would add some original material, perhaps a personal metaphor or a unique argument or interpretation, or even just some unique phrasing. "Restoring balance" to the force...er, universe...or any number of other phrasings gets the same point across without reusing the cliched and primitive tribal/medieval idea of "paying a price of death" for a crime.
(4) Who are you talking to? Not atheists, since you give no argument at all for the existence of God. Not evangelicals, who don't need to be told what they already believe. Not Catholics or Mormons or other Christians since you don't argue why this understanding of Christ is better than theirs. And not other religions since there's no argument for why this conception of God (a being who must reconcile His holiness and His love) is deeper or wiser than other conceptions, like the Hindu or Islamic ones. This seems to only make sense as an explanation of what evangelicals believe to someone who doesn't know. And anyone here who doesn't know probably has zero intellectial curiosity and won't read your comment anyway.
(5) The main sticking point for me and most people (excluding the mindless "no evidence lol" replies) is this whole idea that you can never earn your salvation, and the "good news" is that the price for your sin has already been paid because of Christ's infinite sacrifice, and the great liberation that you don't need to do anything to earn it, it's already done...but here's what you have to do! (i.e. believe it and "accept it"). The last part is probably necessary for Christianity to memetically spread, but it undermines its whole point. If the price of sin has been paid, then why is it conditional on saying certain words and holding certain mental states? Now, you may say accepting a gift isn't an act in the normal sense of requiring effort or achieving a goal , it's merely a decision to put aside your pride and say "yes". And that the only barrier to someone doing such a simple thing is their immense pride and refusal to admit their sin.
But this is so demonstrably false. Most people who refuse to "accept Christ" are doing so because they aren't convinced God exists, they aren't convinced Christ is God, they aren't convinced Christ really wants this evangelical path of action, or they have a moral objection to the path of "*I'll* be saved, but those other people who have honest disbelief will be damned and that's still somehow good news because at least I won't". Forcing yourself to believe in something you're not sure is true, or to obey something you're not sure is moral, is not a simple decision, it's an act of herculean effort that may not be even possible. And if you think those people are lying and really do believe those things and really are motivated by pride...then why can't you just say "you can accept Christ on earth, OR you can accept him after you die?" If they're really just prideful, they'll still reject him after death. Only if you know full well that the reason people aren't accepting Christ is that they're not sure he exists, would you expect a different response before or after death. And importantly, only if you're primarily concerned not with people eventually repenting but with *controlling people on earth* (making them attend your church, obey your pastors, etc) would you insist that repentance must happen before you die. There is no other reason.
And I find that very sickening.
(6) More metaphysically, I don't know why so many Christians keep using the *worst* theodicy of them all. Most other responses to the problem of evil, like the soul making theodicy or the idea that light cannot exist without the dark or the idea that it's a mystery beyond our comprehension, are so much more defensible than the free will theodicy. The latter:
cannot account for natural evil (earthquakes, disease etc)
cannot explain why allowing people to sin requires allowing them to successfully hurt other people
if it somehow does require that, cannot explain why there *are* many physical limits that often stop people hurting each other
cannot explain why we put criminals in jail, if freedom to hurt others is essential to freedom (is the existence of a criminal justice system fundamentally unChristian?)
cannot explain why the Bible so frequently tells people to obey God or God will punish them; if freely choosing God is so important that it justifies allowing evil, how is that remotely compatible with spreading such fear-based and self-interest-based reasons for choosing God in his own word?
doesn't make metaphysical sense, since it's not clear if libertarian free will (the kind needed for this theodicy) actually exists or if it's even coherent: everything we do we do for a reason, not an irreducible act of will (whatever that would mean)
doesn't make metaphysical sense, since even if libertarian free will is theoretically coherent it certainly doesn't seem coherent combined with theism: if God creates everything, then God causes everything, and how can acts God has no control over be compatible with God's sovereignty?
doesn't make moral sense, since allowing free will "so people aren't just thoughtless robots" (the usual justification) does not reauire libertarian free will, only compatibilist free will. God could determine that all people choose good and love Him and those choices would still be as meaningful as any other if they're coming from people's own nature, not externally imposed against it (and the latter IS what the classic "obey God or be punished" is)
Basically, it's such a terrible theodicy with so many holes, and other theodicies work so much better, I can't undetatand why anyone tries to use it.
(By the way, I'm either some kind of deist, or some kind of Christian who understands Atonememt in a VERY different way to "someone must be punished for sin". I encorage everyone to find their own way to God, ignoring both the small-minded atheists and the preachers who claim to speak for him).
>[...] only if you're primarily concerned not with people eventually repenting but with *controlling people on earth* (making them attend your church, obey your pastors, etc) would you insist that repentance must happen before you die. There is no other reason.
>And I find that very sickening.
Agree.
I always say, why is it, that people who claim to believe all that stuff do not act like they believe it. Rhetorical question. Because they don't believe it, they just say so, for reasons.
That's correct, but God won't be fooled. I quoted Jesus in the original post:
"Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; leave Me, you who practice lawlessness."
It is entirely sickening the evils that people do in the name of God, but they will not escape judgement. However, evil people who claim God's name don't change the truth of the matter that we have only this life to accept Jesus' sacrifice. It says in the book of Hebrews in the Bible that "it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgement."
What you are doing here is what I mean.
What you say is, God has everything under control, he knows best, he makes no mistakes, and everything is -- or at least, from human perspective, eventually everything will be -- alright.
Yet you try to achieve something. Which is weird, given that you believe that.
You cannot achieve anything at all. He can. And only he.
Because he has everything under control, he knows best, he makes no mistakes, and everything is -- or at least, from human perspective, eventually everything will be -- alright.
There is nothing anyone can do about it.
That's what you say you believe.
Yet you try.
And that's why I don't believe anyone who claims to believe all that stuff.
I think you may be misunderstanding some things. If someone really believes the Bible and God, then they're going to obey him. In addition to moral commands, God also tells his followers to go out into the world and preach the gospel (good news) and make disciples in every nation.
Maybe you didn't read my original post, but it's me sharing with a friend of mine why it's important to believe in Jesus and my motivation was out of care for him and trying to obey Jesus' commands. It's not quite the same as not believing God's words and then using them to manipulate or control other people.
No offense intended, but I always understood Matthew 7:22-23 to be a warning against people like you who claim to know the mind and will of יהוה — the entity you call "God." Unlike the earlier prophets, Yeshua ben Yosef, the humble carpenter that he was, never claimed to be directly quoting the words of יהוה except when he was quoting or paraphrasing the words of the earlier prophets.
However, if we look back to the times of the prophets (when יהוה was communicating with His people without an interlocutor), Isaiah 55:8-9 warns of the dangers of deluding ourselves that we know the mind of יהוה: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord."
And יהוה rebukes Job (Job 38) for his false belief that he understands His motives when he declares (roughly translated) "Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?" Moreover, in a marvelously sarcastic smackdown, יהוה asks Job "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?"
Of course, one of the biggest Christianist heresies is the idea that יהוה, because of His perfection, is a static and unchanging entity. This is no doubt due to the mistranslation of His statement to Moses in Exodus 3:14, "אהיה אשר אהיה" as "I am that I am." A better translation would be "I will be what I will be" or perhaps "I will be what I am becoming." I think this mistranslation predates Christianity — correct me if I'm wrong — and it goes back to when the Pentateuch was originally translated into Greek a couple of centuries before Yeshua ben Yosef. Unfortunately, that mistranslation turned His declaration into an expression of static identity when it should actually be interpreted as a declaration of a self-directed evolving identity.
So, even if you consider Yeshua to be the final Word, when you *claim* you understand Yeshua's words as the Word of יהוה, you are doing the same thing that the prophesizers and exorcists were doing. I would suggest you go back to your closet and pray some more. And יהוה is not obligated to respect your limited understanding of his purpose.
In the 9th paragraph of your 6th point you actuallyyyy misspelled the word "require" so um your whole comment is completely invalid ☝️🤓
But no actually I appreciate that you took the time to read and type out a thorough response to it. I also appreciate that you stated your own beliefs so I can know where you're coming from. That being said, I didn't post here to argue God's case or convince anyone. I posted in case anyone who reads it might be at a place in their life that they see the truth of it and now know where to continue the search, and also in the hopes that someone such as yourself or anyone else who disagrees will one day get to the point where it clicks with reality and they see the truth of it later on. I don't want anyone to suffer through life and hate God due to a misunderstanding and then be rejected by him (idk how he'll judge every circumstance, I just know that he will be totally just), so all I can do is share the truth and pray.
Great response.
Is this for someone who is already a Christian but just believes that it's not mutually exclusive with other views/beliefs? "Why Christian doctrine teaches that Christianity is the only way" seems to be the question you're answering. A lesson that I'm sure is worth learning if you are a Christian, but I don't know how it would translate to a compelling invitation.
It was for a friend of mine recently who knows me, then I posted it to an open thread on an online forum in case it might benefit some rando online. I understand the majority of people probably won't care for it, but it's not against the rules here so I wanted to put it out there.
"When God created everything, he also ingrained morality into the universe."
Everything you write after that depends on just assuming that the first part of the sentence ("When God created everything") is true. That is not convincing. It also assume that God could "ingrain morality into the universe" without being responsible for how the universe behaves. That makes no sense. If God created anything with omniscience, it would also be his or her responsibility what the created thing does.
Assumes facts not in evidence.
All of this is completely unconvincing if you're not a Christian (like I am) because this presupposes a Christian worldview.
I agree, but since I had it typed out already I figured I may as well share it and pray that God uses it to reach somebody at least.
As a believer myself, I find comment preaching like yours to be more harmful than helpful. These comments virtually never convert, instead they repulse, as ascend's reply above illustrates nicely. I almost flagged your comment as spam, which I usually do for off-topic, preachy comments popping up where nobody asked for them. I didn't do it here because this is, after all, Open Thread, where most any topic is welcome as long as you're respectful, and also your essay was at least a little more in-depth than the standard copy-paste preaching I usually encounter. I think you are going against what the Savior said in Matthew 7:6 "Give not that which is holy unto dogs..." Now with this scripture, I don't mean to insult anyone here, but to say this simply isn't the ideal forum for gospel discussion. The vast majority come here to discuss things temporal, not spirtual, and many here were once part of organized religion but chose to turn away from it. So a rote presentation like yours is more likely to confirm anti-religion biases in their minds, which makes moving towards Christ that much harder.
I'd much rather read "this is why I'm a Christian" than "this is why you should be a Christian", to be honest.
Philosophy seems pretty welcome here, but I agree with you and Ascend on most of this. I've decided I'm atheist, but am willing to be convinced otherwise...by evidence, even of logic. But as mentioned elsewhere, the logic only holds if one accepts everything stated as true, and not everything stated should be the level of a postulate not needing proof.
Actually I'd like a writeup that explains how to resurrect Shinji Sato from the dead so I can see fishmans live 😭
🤩🤩🤩
It's definitely not a human point of view. I don't like the idea of anyone, innocent or not (although I admit it's difficult to hope particularly horrible people find redemption), facing eternal damnation. That's why I posted this here in the hopes that it will benefit even one person who reads it. It's not intended as a convincing argument, like some have pointed out. I just don't want people to be ignorant of the truth whether they accept it as truth or not now, and I will pray that it clicks one day.
God has given me peace and I want other hurting people to know about it. I probably should have included that part in the text lol. Thanks for reading it even though you disagree.
You say:
"It's definitely not a human point of view. I don't like the idea of anyone, innocent or not (...), facing eternal damnation."
But also, you say:
"What is right is good and pleasing to him, and what is wrong is bad and requires punishment. Humans operate in the same way (..) Humans (...) have a conscience, a natural sense of right and wrong. Humans like good things, and we punish bad things."
So, I'm confused now. Which is it?
The statement about how humans operate is I think generally observable truth all over the world.
I could be wrong, but I think you would also agree that it is not human to think that seemingly innocent people should be punished with eternal damnation. Humans aren't holy though, so from our perspective there are some evils that are so common and don't feel like they need severe punishment. From God's perspective, any wrong however small is unholy, but God is holy so nothing unholy can be close to him.
So a morally good person who has only done small wrongs is still unholy and will be eternally separate from God unless that person is made holy through faith in Jesus Christ. And that just isn't a human perspective, that's what I meant by that. Thanks for taking the time to read the post.
If there is some irreconcilable difference between divine and human morality, *and* assuming for the sake of the argument that morality is universal and objective, I still don't see why we should conclude that humanity is the evil part, and not God. After all, God is the part inflicting most suffering on the other. You say that God is "holy" and humans aren't, but then I'm afraid I fail to see what is desirable about holiness, if it consists in the willingness to inflict unlimited suffering.
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I'm going to throw out a controversial idea. I want to be clear that it's just an idea, I'm not attached to it or necessarily supportive of it. It started basically as a simple shower thought.
With most mental illnesses and illnesses in general, the aim is to correct the (perceived) dysfunction and symptoms as much as possible. With someone with ADHD, for example, the idea is to treat them in a way that makes them more attentive and less hyperactive.
One major exception to this is... gender dysphoria. The current thinking on gender dysphoria is, in a sense, to change one's social identity and often one's body itself, to essentially accommodate the gender dysphoria.
...What if we did the exact opposite? What if we treated gender dysphoria like we do ADHD?
To be clear, this is not the "do nothing" or "watchful waiting" that some conservatives might support. Right now, if a male experiences gender dysphoria, the idea is to give that male treatments that will lead into a more feminine-appearing and feminine-feeling body. What if we did the opposite? If a 14 year old male has gender dysphoria, maybe we should give him the option to receive masculine-increasing treatment, to combat the dysphoria directly? Perhaps giving testosterone should be considered?
On the flip-side, if a 14 year old female has gender dysphoria, maybe she should be given the option of receiving treatment that would make her feel more feminine? Perhaps estrogen could be offered to her?
Again, just an idea. Medicine is not one of my strong suits, which is partly why I'm raising this idea here.
Do people here think this might work, or do people here think this would be totally disastrous, or something between? If it *did* work, it would be a good thing... wouldn't it? A person becomes more comfortable in their own skin, with their birth sex.
It's important to distinguish between disorders like ADHD where the issue is "my brain works in a way that makes it difficult to live a happy life" and dysphoria (and related gender issues, not every trans person has dysphoria) where the issue is "my brain and my body don't match".
The solution to the first is anything that helps you function and live a happy life. Whether that's therapy, medicine, accommodations, etc. it doesn't really matter what the *specific* solution is, but there is a clear direction the solution needs to be working in.
Dysphoria is just a false equation. In the statement 2 = 5, the statement is false, but it's not clear that either side is "to blame". To fix it, you could add 3 to the left side, subtract 3 from the right, or some middle ground. In the same way, you can consider a trans woman. Having the "mind" of a woman is fine. Having the "body" of a man is fine (using loose terms to avoid questions of to what extent the mind and body are the same thing, not relevant). But when they are in conflict, you need to bring one into line with the other.
In principle, someone assigned male as birth who identifies as a woman would be equally treated by gender affirming surgery (changing the body) or by some hypothetical cure for dysphoria that results in this person identifying as a man. Your proposed treatments wouldn't work, but I don't think you're here to nitpick the specifics of a cure. If so, apologies for misunderstanding you, and I can elaborate further on why that wouldn't work.
But if we can assume a treatment that would "correct" the mind to its assigned-at-birth gender (and that has an equivalent cost, danger, and difficulty) it would be, in principle, just as good. However, There is a bias towards preserving identity. I find this bias very understandable, but someone else could have different preferences. The existence of this treatment would be a good thing in the sense that people having options is good. But it wouldn't be *better* than the current treatment from an individual perspective. Changing the statement to 5 = 5 isn't a *better* fix than 2 = 2.
Personally though, I would be wary of such treatments. I would much rather change someone's body to reflect their mind, because messing with minds is messing with *who they are* on a much more fundamental level. I would find it dangerous and creepy to a degree I have a hard time putting into words. By comparison, a trans person getting physical surgery to reflect their identity doesn't bother me at all. Maybe it's the transhumanist in me wanting people to be able to adjust their bodies however they like.
> With most mental illnesses and illnesses in general, the aim is to correct the (perceived) dysfunction and symptoms as much as possible.
This axiom will lead you to incorrect conclusions, because it's not really correct. The aim is to make it so that the person can be functional in day-to-day life, and ideally be happy. Trying to "correct" the dysfunction is often not possible or even desirable (because attempting to do so will have the effect of making the patient *less* functional), but there are almost *always* steps you can take to make the symptoms manageable.
In ADHD, one of the treatments available are stimulants to increase focus. However, there are a LOT of other things that therapists can recommend to help a person manage their symptoms. They can put their pills in weekly pill boxes to make them easier to take, utilize to-do lists, create meals in bulk, alter their living spaces to account for their forgetfulness.
An even better example is autism. There is no magic pill for autism that "corrects" for it. A common autistic behavior, however, is "masking", which is a term for the ways that autistic people learn to "correct" for their dysfunction and hide their symptoms to conform to the social expectations of allists. A large portion of autism therapy is teaching kids how to *stop* masking, because the practice ultimately leads to other negative mental health impacts. Therapist then teach the children (and their parents!) how to alter *the environment* in ways that works *with* the dysfunction, rather than against it.
On the other hand, there *is* a magic pill that corrects for the symptoms of gender dysphoria. It's cross-gender hormone treatment (or at least puberty blockers). I encourage you to look at the actual diagnostic criteria for gender dyphoria:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK577212/table/pediat_transgender.T.dsm5_criteria_for_g/
If you'll notice, cross gender hormones *directly* help "correct" for every. Single. One. And it helps the person live a more functional life, rather than just trying to "mask" the underlying issue and hoping making their discomfort greater will magic away the issue.
I think your idea is interesting, but perhaps not for the reasons you might think. What you're sort of accidentally doing here is using analogies that accidentally mislead you in a (fun!) way, which actually makes your idea interesting to talk about.
So, scoot to ADHD real quick. Or your larger point, really. This part:
''With most mental illnesses and illnesses in general, the aim is to correct the (perceived) dysfunction and symptoms as much as possible. With someone with ADHD, for example, the idea is to treat them in a way that makes them more attentive and less hyperactive''
And this is correct. Uh. Somewhat... obviously so. Just to be clear, I do not disagree with you that the aim of medication is to resolve the dysfunction incurred by disease :b
However!
``One major exception to this is... gender dysphoria. The current thinking on gender dysphoria is, in a sense, to change one's social identity and often one's body itself, to essentially accommodate the gender dysphoria.``
Okay. Is this actually the case, though? Obviously from my framing and slight handwaving at some other answer, I would indicate it's not. We provide stimulants and therapy to alleviate ADHD manifestations of reduced function. That's the interesting thing that your first note about 'most illnesses' covers up; in a grander way for every illness our goal in treatment is reduction of manifested dysfunction. An illness someone has which wouldn't seemingly incur any dysfunction or difficulty is philosophically interesting to imagine, but hard to classify as an illness in the first place. So lead that thought and go on a little - you provide stimulants to assist ADHD types with focus and reward seeking. Someone with ADHD complains about a lack of ability to retain focus, everyone working with them complain about it too, and other subtle malaises, and our treatment profile (and classification scheme for the whole illness!) relies on mitigating those percieved problems
Okay, so what's the manifested actual dysfunction in gender dysphoria we would, ideally, be trying to treat here?
It's usually a percieved and deeply personal dysmorphic lack of joy in ones own body. Given that actual manifestation, the treatment pathway will tend to be corrective on that axis. Someone with ADHD has altered neurology and methamphetamine derivatives can alter the thresholds for rewards, helping them with focus? Well, take the adderall, get the focus. Someone with body dysphoria in general and gender dysphoria in the specific complains they're not at home in their own meat and bone, and that's when we should then... Give them more of the stuff they say they're uncomfortable with?
Wait, isn't that a little bit like taking an overstimulated ADHD sufferer and saying the proper treatment pathway here is to expose them to more screens, more distraction, more noise, more demands? They said they had trouble with focus and Dr. Quarkfib prescribed: "Nah, you just gotta go all in on the distractibiltiy. Try adding more taps and micro-projects to your life, and really get into wandering aimlessly from hyperfixation to hyperfixation"
Someone with intense gender dysphoria describes their lack of comfort affirming traditionally male roles, and Dr. Quarkfib prescribes 30oz of red meat, a course of deadlifts and four mandatory hours of hunting through a forest murdering small things with a stick? 14-year old girl comes in, says she's intensely uncomfortable with her own body, thinks she might be a he, Dr. Quarkfib nods and murmurs and checks charts and prescribes a six hour mandatory shopping spree, frilly dresses and some estrogen?
Clearrrrrlyyyyyy when (blown up to scale and) viewed from that angle you see the somewhat curious and interesting contrast in these things.
One of the particularly interesting thingsa bout body dysmorphic disorder is that it is, you are correct, somewhat socially contingent. After all, our hypothethical 14 year old girl case example complains she has intense gender dysphoria and really wants to be a 14 year old boy then this example, written out with all nuance surgically removed, does indicate that something in the way this person percieves these differences and the way they manifest in daily life is to blame for intense personal fixation. Or put in less meandering verbiage, it's hard to imagine that gender dysphoria would be as intense a problem in a social world where gender itself was a thing people remarked and spent less time on.
But isn't this true for almost literally everything, because the intelligent things around you are human? ADHD is a classic example - a lot of its more dire manifestations are directly socially relevant, right from an inability to emphatisize to difficulty keeping up with relations over to rejection sensitivity. All of those 'dysfunctions', which treatment partially attempts to alleviate, are enormously intensely grounded in one's social identity. If nothing else, for the first many years of life in public school you'll certainly find that the reason some poor kid with ADHD gets into trouble isn't because of anything wrong with them (often) but because their bouncing-off-the-walls-dancing-around-not-sitting-still contrasts pretty intensely with our desire that they sit still in a classroom of 30 people and listen quietly for hours at a time. Would we still classify ADHD as a mental disorder if the social situation and pressures were different, or would we notice less? This is less of a handwavey philosophical aside than it might appear, because the paralllels do track directly to the analogy that's being used here.
And now we've fallen off the path of easy, hand-waving solutions and into horrifically deep weed territory.
But yeah to round up:
´´If it *did* work, it would be a good thing... wouldn't it? A person becomes more comfortable in their own skin, with their birth sex. ´´
There's a line here that's definitively true, which is that a person more comfortable in their own skin is almost by defintion less dysfunctional in it. And if we have a disorder or situation characterized by intense dysmorphia, then, yes, anything at all that reduces that percieved discomfort would be alleviative to the core of the problem. That's sort of axiomatic isn't it - we do stuff that makes you feel less awful?
But that's a bit of a hack isn't it? " If the thing we did makes you feel less terrible, it justifies doing it " is true in a lot of cases, but sometimes not. That's how this gets interesting. We could take someon with intense ADHD out of an environment they're clinically mismatched for, and that would make them more comfortale in their own skin and with their own birth brain. Don't laugh - if someone has trouble focusing on 6 hours of math in a classroom, sending them running through the woods and running all over the walls ala some Danish nature-exploration school provably works to alleviate the discomfort of being asked to sit and work out math. But the thing is, if someone complains reading gives them a headache, taking away all books in their life does help them. But uhhh I can see... some issues with that... solution.
If our hypothethical 14-year old we give more estrogen and a frilly dress and a course in how to sashay her hips properly and, I don't know, do needlework??, ends up more comfortable because of it, is that because we 'cured' her 'gender dysphoria', is it because we altered the environment she was in that caused her to express that discomfort (her ideas of not wanting to be femine was socially contigent on how she saw femmes be treated), or is it because we hammered the square peg so much that it got ground down into a circle and fit into the hole we wanted (we just sandpapered her personality into shape over a 4+ year period)
There's a severe and enormous danger here, which *may* very well be unique to gender dysmorphic expression (unsure), that because the expression of dislike is "always on" and rooted in their actual feeling of being in their own skin, the stuff that we might suggest that makes the more comfortable quickly isn't always the optimal solution for human flourishing. So would giving a 14year old a dress, extra estrogen and skincare tips be a good thing? Wellllll maybe? Like, I support stuff that works so if it works for them and helps them deal with a genuine sense of dysmorphia, then that's good yes.
But at least when we support transitioning, the treatment follows a logically coherent resolution pathway. "I dislike this gender expression" --> "Express a different one" from that metric seems to beat "I dislike this gender expression" --> "have you tried expressing it harder?". And that's the higher level fix that getting a dysmorphic 14 year old boy into the gym and throwing a spear and doing pushups doesn't resolve. I support giving people with ADHD stimulants, on the reasoning that it genuinely seems to help people who are clinically under-stimulated. It seems less likely to be worth it to give them 300+ extra things to track and more forms to fill, on the reasoning that I'll simpy make them do more of the thing they struggle to do.
So pattern matching analogously to ADHD and other diseases and then declaring that the treatment profile for gender dysmorphia is uniquely contingent on adjusting social reality is, I think, the interesting mistake that your ideas stumble over.
Thanks to everyone for their informative replies.
We *are* treating dysphoria like ADHD. Unlike ADHD, though, there's no magic medication you can take to help you get through daily life that we know of (today). The treatment we have found so far that has the best tradeoff between helping the sufferer get through the day and unfortunate side effects that make their day much worse turns out to be for them to do their best to perform the gender they feel they should, and for the people around them to do their best to support that.
Here's Scott on the subject: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
To my mind, something that distinguishes gender dysphoria from other mental conditions is that a significant degree of the suffering it exacts on the individual depends on how others respond to it. My depression/anxiety is not lessened by others acceptance of it (other associated struggles are, but not the acute symptoms) but the pain of gender dysphoria seems to be mitigated by others' acceptance of one's chosen gender expression.
I imagine this is worth bearing in mind when thinking about gender-dysphoria-as-mental-illness.
Mmm, not sure I'd agree with the idea that this is what distinguishes gender dysphoria.
1. I can think of other mental illnesses for which this holds true. A large part of the suffering schizophrenics experience depends on how others respond to them (particularly to their delusions). In my experience, there is a lot of distress that can be allayed simply by acknowledging that their thoughts are extremely distressing and worrying to them, even if I don't necessarily agree that they are grounded in reality.
2. I have seen at least one gender-dysphoric individual whose dysphoria absolutely did not improve despite being treated as their chosen gender.
Regarding your second point, did they internalize that? I can think of a few trans people that, even if they are treated as their chosen gender, they don't really *feel* like they are socially within that group because they themselves can't help but see themselves as fake. Like a sort of insecurity that happens to have terrible consequences given the circumstances.
Of course a complex issue but hopefully helpful.
A common experience for trans people before their transition is attempting to go "all-in" on their assigned gender. Before transition, Trans women will often start going to the gym, grow beards, bulk up maybe take testosterone increasing supplements etc. Transmen might go hyper feminine. Its almost a joke in the trans community because its so common. This does not typically work. Gender dysphoria is a bodily sensation of discomfort around primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Exaggerating those features generally intensifies dysphoria.
Transition is the treatment for dysphoria that does not desist in other ways. This is something that cisgender people often misunderstand about transition. The transition is the treatment.
Presumably going "all-in" is an obvious enough solution to (what we might call) pre-gender-dysphoria, where one is uncomfortable with their gender, but not sure they want to become transgender yet. I wonder what the success rate of this actually is, as the majority of those dealing with this internally might try, succeed, and never let anyone know they felt gender dysphoria in the first place (still somewhat embarrassing/socially isolating for the vast majority of people, even in the most progressive societies).
Of course, there is some survivorship bias here.
Also there are many people who choose to live with the (often extreme) internal discomfort of their dysphoria rather than the external discomfort of transitioning into a world where being transgender is a political football and can result in being ostracised. These cases are considered "successful" by many although they do not result in positive mental health outcomes in the long run. We also typically do not hear about these cases.
I don’t think this would work—at least not completely. All of this evidence is anecdotal but I know a number of trans people who tried these treatments for a variety of reasons. Obviously this is selected, and it could be that most of the people who try these treatments end up feeling fine as their birth gender, but it clearly doesn’t work 100% of the time. And fundamentally I believe in the right of people to modify their bodies, whether that’s tattoos, piercings, hair dye, plastic surgery, or hormones.
I don't think it's likely to work-- if a person is uncomfortable being male, a hormone treatment to make them more male would probably make them less comfortable.
Gender dysphoria might be treatable, but I think it would have to be better understood.
I'm not getting into the question of whether it should be treated, but I think some people would rather have effective treatment rather than transition.
But whether gender dysphoria should be treated as a mental illness is the central question. People who would accept the treatment you suggest are not the people we are mostly talking and thinking about in this debate.
We do treat it as a mental illness (if nothing else, those are magic words that make insurers pay out!) Transitioning is the best known treatment. Therefore, despite continuous opposition, this is what we do.
Oh you heard that? how interesting
Romania had a Presidential election recently. Călin Georgescu, one of the top two candidates who would have advanced to the runoff, thinks the moon landing is a hoax. The Romanian Supreme Court has overturned the election and ordered a re-run, not because of that but because of (you guessed it) "Russian interference." Georgescu wasn't shy about his Russophilic views. People knew what they were getting.
The irony here is that the only people who will explicitly defend the notion that, "no, you don't need to just passively accept being ruled by morons because there are more of them than there are of you" are in the same part of the political spectrum as freaks like Georgescu. The world cries out for a Nietzschean centrism.
One thing that is not clear to me is whether the Russians are alleged to have interfered with the *election*, or with the *campaign*. I think that's critical.
If you run an election, and after the fact find out that someone hacked the voting machines to output their preferred result or whatnot, then a do-over may be the proper solution.
If you run an election, and after the fact find out that someone hired a bunch of people (or bots) to go on the internet and tell lies calculated to fool the voters into electing their preferred candidate, then how is that any different than what the candidates are doing already? I'm guessing Romania doesn't have a law disqualifying candidates who are found to have fibbed in their campaign advertisements.
"Hey, those foreign nogoodniks are lying to our voters! They can't do that! Only *domestic* nogoodniks are allowed to lie to our voters!". Not a convincing argument. You're going to be having nogoodniks lying to your voters regardless, and whatever measures you have to deal with lying nogoodniks should work about as well against the foreign version as the domestic. And it's not like the foreign ones are going to stop just because you say it's against the law; your laws don't apply in the country where they're telling the lies and your police won't be able to get at them.
Instead, the plan is to hold a new election, and the Russians won't "interfere" in this one, why exactly?
And here, the amount of questionable money spent (not counting whatever the situation is with the TikTok bots) was $381K, or $0.02 per capita. By comparison, Kamala spent $4.20 per capita during her losing campaign in the US. If you can "buy" an election so cheaply, it indicates there was a high level of resonance of Georgescu's vibe with that of the populace.
There is an interesting NYT article highlighting Georgescu's appeal in one town, where people say they would vote for Nicolae Ceausescu if he were alive and running. The actual situation appears to follow the recent pattern of populist right wing appeal in Europe due primarily to economic stagnation.
I suppose if they do, you can invalidate that election too. Rinse and repeat until they stop interfering (and you'll know when they've stopped because the voters will vote the correct way).
Is "ultranationalist" a good label? What separates an ultra-nationalist from a regular nationalist?
Was Ceausescu an ultra-nationalist? Was he even a nationalist? He was a bit too close to the USSR to be a nationalist, surely?
In Romanian presidential elections, the citizens vote in two rounds. In the first round, they can vote on all candidates: if any single candidate secures an outright majority in the first round, that candidate is declared the winner of the election and becomes president.
If none of the candidates achieve this, then a run-off is held between the two contenders with the top scores in the first round. The candidate who obtains the majority of votes in the run-off is then declared the winner.
This time, everyone expected Marcel Ciolacu (current PM, Social Democrat, left-wing) and Elena Lasconi (Save Romania Union, right-wing) to advance to the second round, with Ciolacu expected to win the second round with some margin.
Predictions for the second round are easier to make: both wings have diverse voters with a diverse set of preferred candidates in the first round, but in the second round the left wing voters rally around the left wing candidate and the right wing voters around the right wing candidate. So you only need to know which wing is larger to predict the next president.
Georgescu, not considered a major contender, barely registered in polls. He ran a very modest street campaign, and did not appear in any conventional media. His campaign was conducted almost entirely through social media, chiefly TikTok.
To the surprise of absolutely everybody, including Georgescu himself, his TikTok campaign was unexpectedly successful, and he ended up with nearly 23 percent of the vote. Since Lasconi edged out Ciolacu with 21 percent, she and Georgescu advanced to the second round. While Ciolacu was upset by this development (he thought that he had this election in his pocket), he couldn't do anything to change the result, which was in fact upheld by the courts at that time [1].
However, things soon changed. Presidential candidates must report their campaign expenses to the national electoral commission up till the eve of the election. Georgescu, lying blatantly, declared that he spent zero lei running his campaign. However, after becoming a frontrunner, the commission and other investigative agencies, including state intelligence services, uncovered over $400k spent on his campaign, far above the declared amount. They submitted the documents proving these to the Supreme Court. They also found evidence of Russian interference, but that's a separate matter.
According to Romanian law, given the documents entered into evidence, the Supreme Court faced pretty much only two allowed options: annul immediately or annul after the second round.
Delaying annulment until after the second round posed serious risks. On one hand, if Georgescu won the second round, "coup" accusations might actually gain traction. The vast majority of Romanians, even Georgescu voters, don't take this seriously now, and don't consider this a coup: cf. the lack of mass protests, etc., Romanians have some relatively recent practice with nipping dictatorship in the bud. OTOH if Lasconi won, as sitting president she might challenge the annulment, knowing she could beat Georgescu, but probably not Ciolacu's combined support.
Annulment before the second round avoided these complications. Legal procedures followed Romanian laws, leaving no electoral rights violated. So whose rights were violated? Everyone understood the election rules.
While Georgescu's rise through a TikTok-driven campaign is important and very surprising (nobody thought that TikTok could be sufficient to win a presidential first round), concerns about the annulment itself are ridiculous. Legal processes unfolded as expected, aligning with national electoral laws. As far as I can tell, the idea that this annulment is some major political upheaval exists largely in the head of Georgescu himself (who has a big incentive to make this a big deal, given that he's likely to face jail time over fraud for his campaign financing mishap) and in the imaginations of outside observers, primarily non-Europeans.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/12/2/romanian-court-upholds-presidential-election-first-round-results
That all rests on the $381K in question being spent by Georgescu. Has that been established, or was that expenditure made by a third party without any control or knowledge by Georgescu?
The decision to annul massively inconveniences not just Georgescu, but also the Save Romania Union, one of the mainstream parties in parliament parliament, whose candidate had an unexpected shot at the presidency. Their MPs requested and got access to all the files presented to the court. Presumably, if there was reason to doubt, they would have made a big ruckus; they certainly had all the incentive in the world to do so. The evidence was good enough to convince them and the court.
REPER, recently requested that the files be made fully accessible to the public as well: this will take a while, though [1]. Until then, due to the aforementioned circumstances, my priors on this being falsified evidence are really quite low.
[1] https://www.agerpres.ro/politica/2024/12/08/reper-cere-presedintelui-iohannis-desecretizarea-informatiilor-legate-de-alegerile-parlamentare--1400329
But Lasconi is on the record being strongly opposed to this ruling. Did she change her mind after getting more information?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.romania-insider.com/Elena-lasconi-criticizes-presidential-elections-annulment-dec-2024%3famp
Quote below:
President of the reformist Save Romania Union (USR) party Elena Lasconi – who made it to the second round of the presidential elections beside pro-Russian candidate Calin Georgescu, has harshly and repeatedly criticised the Constitutional Court's decision to repeat the elections.
"The Romanian state trampled on democracy. God, the Romanian people, truth, and the law will prevail. You are leading the country into anarchy. We should have gone ahead with the vote," she said quickly after the Court's ruling. But she maintained the rhetoric, which was toned down by other USR representatives.
I explained above why Lasconi likely lost her best chance at the presidency due to this decision. She feels wronged and wanted the Supreme Court to take the other option (or preferably do nothing, which ironically _would_ have went against the constitution, unlike the current decision).
However, your question concerned whether it was proven that the Georgescu campaign wasn't financed independently, without Georgescu's involvement or knowledge. MPs from the Save Romania Union, Lasconi's party, were briefed on the evidence confirming this. Had they found credible reasons to doubt it, they would have spoken up. But both the Supreme Court and those MPs accepted the evidence: Lasconi or the Save Romania Union MPs certainly never made the case that the evidence itself might be fake or invalid.
One can remain skeptical, but doing so means having more doubt than those who have more information AND every incentive to scrutinize the case closely.
I asked about Lasconi because I hadn't heard she had agreed with the decision. Of course she is more impacted by it and less objective. I was just wondering if *she* was privy to additional evidence in maintaining her opposition to the annulment. I am interested in the lack of push back in general in Romania on this, though I certainly don't understand Romaninan political culture well enough to conclude much from that observation.
There are many very odd things about this incident. As far as I can tell, no one is suggesting the voting or tabulation of the votes was compromised, and the annulment rests on a crypto bro's $381K funding + TikTok bot accounts. It sets a very bad precedent, in my opinion, where even low level amounts of "interference" by third parties can serve as justification to invalidate electoral outcomes.
The timing is also suspicious, since round 2 voting had already started when that vote was canceled. Almost as if there was an assessment done based on early returns that Georgescu might win, at which point, incurring the cost of annulment seemed to be the better option from the perspective of those making the decision.
> round 2 voting had already started when that vote was canceled
This is not true. The election was cancelled two days before voting would have started.
According to this, it had:
"This dramatic and unprecedented decision comes just as the voting has begun in the diaspora."
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/12/06/romanian-constitutional-court-blocks-presidential-run-off
Voting at Romanian consulates was supposed to take place on Saturdays and Sundays, between 7am and 9pm, on the weekend of the election - this can still be found in many Romanian articles guiding people on how to vote.
I don't see an agency source, so I think the authors of the linked article were just mistaken. Or else, they're referring to vote-by-mail (but that's mixed and counted together with the general votes in Romania, so could not have been counted in any case).
Seems like a Russophile would be proud that the USSR was the only other nation that contributed effort to what eventually led to the moon landing.
People who're pro-Putin shouldn't be allowed to stand for election. Instead they should be charged with treason, and if found guilty the death penalty should be an option.
That "execute anyone you disagree with" strategy doesn't actually work that well.
For a start, it makes you look like a dysfunctional dictatorship to outside observers.
> that "execute anyone you disagree with" strategy doesn't actually work that well
That's not what I'm proposing. I'm proposing that anyone in league with an enemy be treated as a traitor. Because that's what they are. People would still enjoy the freedom to hold and disseminate a wide range of views, just not treasonous ones.
The purpose of this is to prevent Russia (or anyone else) from using hybrid warfare to subvert Europe.
You can define anyone as a traitor by defining any country, ideology or theology as an enemy. Decide that Israel is a problem and you can round up the Jews, declare
Iran a problem and you can round up the local Shia, accuse the pope of being disloyal and it’s time to hunt the Catholics.
This is common in history and it’s something that we should guard against.
I see by your flag you are a supporter of Scottish nationalism. As an Englishman I agree with right of Scotland to secede, largely because it could only increase the average jollity of the nation (where on Earth did anyone get the idea that the English are the gloomy or depressive people on this island?), but you know who also likes the idea of a rump UK. Putin, that’s who.
Of course he does. And he’s probably funding Scottish independence. As he did Brexit. If he’s not doing that, him or his agencies, then they or he are not doing their job. The west is doing the same kind of thing in Russia.
Now it may not have had a material effect on either referendum - although the people who claim that Russia didn’t influence Brexit materially say the opposite about the Scottish referendum, and vice versa.
However it’s generally accepted that Russia interfered in 2014. This from wiki
> According to the Intelligence and Security Committee Russia report, released on 21 July 2020, there is substantial evidence that Russian interference in the British economy and politics is commonplace; further to this, evidence was uncovered detailing interference in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum…
Which makes your philosophy suspect doesn’t it. By your own admission you are a stooge of Putin, a man who clearly benefits from a rump U.K. The course of action is obvious to you know, you must forthwith pop down to the local constabulary and taking whatever punishment you think traitors should receive. Extrajudicial shooting was it? I’m sorry for your future loss but be sure to denounce some fellow travellers on the way to the firing range, because Putinism must never win!
Flawless. :-)
Only if those "outside observers" believe Russian disinformation. To all right-thinking people, executing the enemies of liberal democracy on trumped-up charges is good, actually. Paradox of tolerance, "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", etc.
When a couple of FSB goons toss a Putin critic out of a window, I assume they tell him "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences."
> Paradox of tolerance, "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences"
If it means anything, it means at least freedom from government enforced consequences.
There was a point scott made recently in his https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-early-christian-strategy
Somehow, despite all the cruelty of the roman empire, the tolerant loving early Christians rose to the top. Somehow despite all sorts of people trying to be brutal dictators, liberal democracy mostly won.
I think liberalism is an effective strategy. You might not understand why it's effective. But it works.
I think part of the reason that it works is that there are a lot of vaguely liberal aligned people, who can all work together and get behind a generically inoffensive liberal governing system. Liberalism is a cooperation in an iterated prisoners dilemma.
> To all right-thinking people, executing the enemies of liberal democracy on trumped-up charges is good, actually.
Once the "execute people on trumped up charges" system is set up, the people who end up getting executed in practice are not the enemies of democracy, but the enemies of whoever is trumping up the charges.
> If it means anything, it means at least freedom from government enforced consequences.
I have never been in favour of complete freedom of speech. For a start, if you had it, you've legalised fraud. In practise in any society there has to be some speech that is banned, or society won't function very well.
> Somehow, despite all the cruelty of the roman empire, the tolerant loving early Christians rose to the top
Was the Roman Empire cruel? I'd argue that it was no more so than other contemporary societies.
As for Christians being tolerant, I'll note that when they got in power they persecuted the pagans much more zealously than the pagans had persecuted them.
This must be that "liberal totalitarianism" Alexandr Dugin was talking about...
Call it whatever you like. I call it Europe defending itself against its enemies, which include Putin's Russia.
What Europe needs to do is create a militarily powerful and cohesive superstate, so that no-one can successfully attack us, and then to open up membership of this alliance to people who have the same culture and/or values as us. https://pontifex.substack.com/p/european-defence-policy-how-europe for details.
I'd be interested to find out what these values are. As far as I can tell, every single country in Europe has abolished death penalty for every crime including treason, and they tend to have fairly restrictive definitions of treason at that. The exceptions are, interestingly, Russia and its satellite Belarus. So your proposal above involves making Europe considerably more Russia-like. Admittedly you've been pretty vague about what exactly you want to make a capital crime, so I can't tell exactly *how much* Russia-like.
I said in my previous article, which I linked to: "European ideas such as democracy and human rights".
I will note there is nothing in the declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen about banning the death penalty. And in a democracy, if most people want treason to carry the death penalty, then it must do so (or the country isn't a democracy).
What should be a capital crime? In a democracy the people decide.
Yeh, europe needs to shore up its defense. Al Queda are now our allies in Syria so we should bring them in to the new liberal defense against Russia pact. They fought the Russians after all and did a great job of it by all accounts - although detractors would say that was mostly sawing the heads of other Arabs and throwing civilians off cliffs. This detractors are Russian spies, obviously.
In any case the heroic rebels did win against the Russian fascists and we can find some use for them in the war against transphobes. Russiaphiles, and George Galloway. If I’m not repeating myself.
******
just as I write that last paragraph, here in my local, my college friend of 20 years came in, glanced at my post and said that the glorious anti fascists of HTS/Al Queda are also transphobic.
This was clear Russian propaganda so I took him out the back of the pub and shot him. New Liberal Europe has no time for fascist free speech.
I don't agree with executing people in general, and especially for holding wrong views. I do applaud your clear-sighted view of the destructive role Russia is - proudly, too - playing in Western Europe and the US. I only wish more powers that be understood this that clearly.
"Defensive democracy."
What if Georgescu wins again? Is this a case of ‘keep holding elections until you get the right answer?’
Shouldn't be be banned.if.he was cheating.
Possibly. But would a six-figure discrepancy in campaign funding have been noticed or investigated if it were a mainstream candidate?
Also did he gain any actual advantage by declaring he spent zero? If he'd declared the correct amount would anything else have changed?
To my knowledge, it has not been established that Georgescu cheated.
The more elections you have, the more democratic it is.
Hey, rejection sampling is a perfectly valid technique in other areas, why not in politics?
How are things doing in Argentina under Milei?
Does anyone have trustworthy sources, both high-level economic ones as well as low-level on the ground people's experience?
UPDATE: November data are in, and MoM inflation continues to drop, now to 2.4%, which is the lowest since July 2020.
That corresponds to an annualized rate of 32.9%, which is lower than any year since 2017. If MoM inflation starts dropping by only 5% a month, instead of the 20% it was dropping for most of the year, and the 11% in November, 2025 inflation would still end up being just 23.3% which would be the lowest since 2013.
The poverty rate also dropped again, having been dropping continuously since February.
JPMorgan's EMBI risk index for Argentina also continues to drop and it's at its lowest level since early 2019.
From the past week:
https://americasquarterly.org/article/javier-milei-has-surprised-almost-everybody
https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/argentina-milei-economy
The latter is paywalled, so I didn't read it. Both of them were linked in the latest edition of https://boz.substack.com/, which I recommend.
I've been keeping an eye on the informal market vs official value of the peso, which seems like a good real time indicator of economic management and expectations around the economy / inflation (if people are confident, they'll take dollar savings and convert to peso). https://bluedollar.net/ The gap seems to have considerably narrowed in recent weeks.
Month over month inflation has dropped sharply (by about 90%) during Milei's first 10 months in office, with little sign of slowing (https://tradingeconomics.com/argentina/inflation-rate-mom).
Although Milei warned that things would get worse before getting better, after less than a year in office, things already seem to getting better.
The poverty rate has been dropping for several months ( https://www.utdt.edu/ver_nota_prensa.php?id_nota_prensa=22427&id_item_menu=6, https://www.utdt.edu/profesores/mrozada/pobreza) and the recession is slated to end.
Per this Bloomberg article: https://archive.is/ESHHH, forecasters predict real GDP growth in 2025 to be about 3.6% after a contraction of about 3.6% this year.
I don't know if you've seen https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/preliminary-milei-report-card , it's two months out of date but I hope pretty comprehensive.
Thanks! I did read it back when it was published and it was very helpful. I'll give it another read to see if I can read today's tea leaves using the same methods.
I've seen piecemeal reports and commentary once or twice a month, so "how recent" is the question. Basically all the econ writers are keeping tabs, and sometimes link to said "low-level" accounts on X or whatever.
Anyone you'd recommend specifically? Cowen occasionally drops a link here and there, but I'm not plugged into the econ sphere beyond that.
Could the slight dip in mortality for moderate alcohol drinkers be partially explained by the fact that alcohol tends to make people more “social”, perhaps leading to improved relationships and less loneliness? After all, loneliness is definitely associated with mortality.
I drink very little alcohol, mainly because I strongly dislike the taste, and am normally a rather reserved person. But I've noticed that when I do drink, I become much more open and outgoing and find it much easier to hold conversations. I've thought that maybe because of this, I should make an active effort to drink more in social settings.
This is one of those debates where I'm confused about why we are having it. If the health risks of low-to-moderate alcohol consumption are so small that we are debating whether or not they even exist, then it seems trivially obvious to me that if you're someone who enjoys drinking alcohol (as many do) that the enjoyment will vastly outweigh the health risks, even if they are real. And if you don't enjoy drinking alcohol, well...then probably stop? Even if the very moderate proposed health *benefits* are real, they seem unlikely to outweigh the pure monetary cost of drinking (in my opinion).
There is always risk that if you begin, you would not be able stay on moderate level. I mean, I am moderate drinker and I know I have to watch myself carefully.
Cremieux argues that the seemingly positive effects of wine consumption are merely the result of confounding and that the actual causal impact is negative.
E.g. https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1824121807089082748
https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1670199959658823685
Cremieux was only making the (excellent) point that alcohol consumption during pregnancy can be harmful. (Although data has shown that women who drink wine moderately during pregnancy have kids who turn out well, there's a confound here between social class and wine consumption. Drinking any alcohol during pregnancy increases risk of adverse outcomes.) As for people who aren't pregnant, the data favors the view that light alcohol consumption is not harmful, and may have slight health benefits.
The first tweet is about the effect of drinking on health in general - not on pregnancy, in particular.
To quote it:
>Clearly people who ... never drink do worse than the people who drink a bit. And when people start drinking even more than a bit, they look a little better...
>The problem with the conventional analysis is that selection is at play...
>It would be unethical to run human experiments to figure out what alcohol does, so, how can we know what alcohol does to health?
>With a clever little method called Mendelian Randomization, or MR. MR is basically an answer to the question What if I used genes as instrumental variables?...
>So putting this wonderful genetic predictor to use, we can finally see what alcohol actually does.
>Well, the effect of the unconfounded difference in alcohol consumption is that, when it comes to heart health, alcohol doesn't seem to do much, rather than being a bit protective.
>But the heart isn't everything. There's certainly more!
>Alcohol did increase risk for ischemic stroke, intracerebral hemorrhage, and total strokes.
>Not only that, but in another study using a similar method, alcohol increased hypertension, blood pressure, waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio, fasting blood glucose, and triglycerides. But, consistent with these results, in that paper it didn't seem to have a significant effect on cardiovascular disease or coronary heart disease, and it both increased HDL and decreased LDL.
>In aggregate, alcohol is likely to be bad for your health at any level, but selection into disuse means the downsides have been hidden in traditional analyses. And even if alcohol doesn't negatively impact heart health on its own, the fact that it's not protective and it increases other risks means it's risky on net.
Good point(s), but MR is limited as an instrumental variable in this context, because it doesn't justify precise, real-world statements about dose-response relationships. Genes don't determine exactly how much a person drinks. But exactness is needed here, because the debate isn't about drinking in general - it's about the effects of low levels of alcohol consumption. MR isn't correlated strongly enough with actual drinking behavior to justify distinctions between, say, zero vs. one or two drinks per week. As I've explained in a couple of posts, the data suggests that sufficiently low levels of drinking would be benign or perhaps healthful, on net.
(We always need that "perhaps", because observational studies can't measure drinking behavior over time very precisely. This includes studies used to justify MR.)
(BTW, there seems to be an error in the tweet: RCTs with human have been conducted in which the experimental group is instructed to drink for a period of weeks.)
But when the so-called J-shaped curve shows up in self-report surveys, and NOT in MR data (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38508868/), we should be more inclined to think that -- like many other famous examples in nutritional epidemiology -- there is unmeasured confounding in the self-report data. Genes explaining a small percentage of the variance is not a reason to discount MR results; it just means you need a larger sample size to get good results. The same is true for MR studies on blood pressure and cholesterol: the genes are imprecise and explain a small percentage of the total variance in BP/Ch.But they find the same results as RCTs on blood pressure and cholesterol lowering drugs.
I think the last part of what you wrote is very persuasive - whenever we see convergence between MR studies and RCTs, the results should be considered more credible. But here's one of the problems with the alcohol data: The MR approach is validated by relating genotypic patterns to actual consumption, but actual consumption is crudely measured (e.g., by asking people once every few years to describe their drinking behavior during the prior week). Even though MR data and self-reported consumption are sometimes found to be moderately strongly correlated, the crudity of the alcohol measures is one reason not to trust highly specific dose-response statements. In particular, we should be highly skeptical of recent MR-based claims that the J-shaped curve is actually more of a straight line, because the inflection point occurs at very low levels of consumption (like one drink per day, or even a little less, depending on study). Larger samples might help, as you say, but not necessarily.
I've written about this (but I promise not to add a hyperlink). There's a scientific debate about whether the lowest levels of alcohol consumption are harmful, benign, or healthful. The major health organizations take sides on this debate - e.g., the WHO claims there's no safe level of alcohol consumption, while American agencies (HHS, CDC, etc.) claim that low levels are safe. I believe the best and most plentiful evidence favors the benign/healthful view. Perhaps this is because light drinking increases sociability, as you said. Perhaps it's because light drinking reduces stress levels, and the health benefits of lower stress offset any harmful effects of the alcohol. Identifying exactly how much drinking is benign or healthful is super difficult though, because the measurement of drinking behavior in longitudinal studies is so crude (e.g., people are asked once every few years to describe their weekly alcohol consumption.)
I looked at the CDC website, where they say “Moderate drinking increases health risks compared to not drinking” and “Some past studies had suggested that moderate drinking might be good for your health. But scientists highly debate these findings. More studies now show that there aren't health benefits of moderate drinking compared to not drinking.”
That seems to agree with what you describe as the WHO position, or at least it doesn’t contradict it (maybe they disagree on the threshold of “safe”?)
Here's the difference: In 2023, the WHO revised their official position to state that there's no safe level of alcohol consumption. The CDC is more tolerant, because they recommend specific limits (two drinks per day for men, one per day for women) and indicate that drinking less should not be harmful. (At the same time, hedging their bets somewhat, they also use the vague phrase "drinking less is better for your health than drinking more". )
As I understand, the matter is confusing because people who don't drink at all may be abstaining because health problems or addiction risk.
Yep, I suppose this is the traditional explanation for the mortality dip. I'm sure it's also a factor, but I wonder how much my point might contribute as well.
Could also be the other way around. Only if you have an intact social circle are you able to moderate your drinking.
During COVID, I had essentially no social circle, and my drinking remained at the same ~1 drink per day as always.
It's within the realm of possibility that there's some correlation, but I definitely haven't observed that people with intact social circles are unlikely to have excessive alcohol consumption. At least in younger people, I'd be very surprised if the correlation ran in that direction.
You sometimes hear about understanding and treatment for certain neglected diseases being pushed forwards by an individual who has taken a particular interest in it.
I would like to see this to happen with Peyronie’s disease. What can I do to nudge this outcome?
NAC or liposomal glutathione
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32394901/
ALCAR
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11446848/
combinations are more potent
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36207748/
> able to completely regress plaque
These case studies need to be replicated in large trials if this is ever to become the standard of care. Phosphodiesterase Type 5 inhibitors have also shown some promise. Same point.
Nobody will do a "large clinical trial", as usual nobody cares.
Also it is extremely likely to work, large trials are mostly only needed to reveal weak effects that are otherwise hidden by statistical variance and cofounders.
In that sense the culture of large trials as the only bearer of truth is 1) scientific obscurantism and 2) an admission of failure, as if the drug you test require a large sample to show an effect then it's already a testament of the weakness of your drug.
Case studies of random people acutely cured to an incurable disease are much more potent epistemologically than most large RCTs.
If I become the first human to live >120 years my n=1 will suffice to revolutionize mankind.
Any people with peyronie should test this and report back in a decentralized phase IV trial way, as antioxidants are both cheap and benign. However nobody will report back because of 1) ignorance and 2) of the gatekeeping of forever waiting for inexistant trials, a self fulfililng prophecy where nobody ever attempt to reproduce the science despite being an availability of countless miserable sufferers
They’d have to be willing to forgo other treatments which might be a tough ask.
Uhhh if anyone else is thinking of googling this on a work computer a word of warning, Peyronie's disease is one of Penile Curvature and Wikipedia has several medically accurate pictures of waist down, real-life sufferers.
SO. This will be a tough disease to throw gala banquets with glossy brochures and a celebrity spokesman willing to stand before all and declare that yes, he too suffers from a curvature approaching 30° to the right. Yeah...this might be a case where you'd have better luck lobbying the NIH to fund more urological research or something...
Potential slogans write themselves though…
“Help bend the curve on Peyronie’s disease”
“Let’s get one thing straight. We need a cure for Peyronie’s disease”
I feel like you posted bentham’s shrimp argument as a joke but I found it compelling enough to throw some bucks their way (and none of the others listed did it for me).
It was the image of the lecture hall of shrimp that put me over. How can you not help that whole lecture hall for $0.20?
Awesome, I'm glad to hear. But I don't think Scott posted it as a joke.
As someone pointed out on that post, that's a lecture hall full of corpses. Live shrimp are translucent/greyish-blue. They're only pink if they're cooked. So that not's a lecture hall, it's a buffet table 😁
I saw the picture, but didn't catch that. Thanks!
Good job! I doubt it was a joke. It’s impossible to know for sure which animals suffer the most so we (should) place our bets according to the best reasoning and evidence we have.
What uncommon but commercially available/easy to implement interior design flairs have you seen and liked?
Ideally possible in a 2B city midrise condo
Two specific ideas am mulling over:
1) a 3d implying mural on a wall would be cool, but I know they peel eventually. Is there a way to get a hyperthin wooden panel, screw that to the wall, and put it on that?
2) I kinda want a ai generated poster of the theme 'evil person in history, but ridiculed by alteration', one of the big 10 as a cat or Mario or whatever, anyone seen a particularly good one?
1) Lego wall
2) Whiteboard (can be used for practical purposes like shopping lists, or as a creative outlet)
Any dentists or dentist-adjacent folks here?
When I younger, I remember being constantly nagged from my dentist about flossing. Granted, I was a very inconsistent flosser, but this was in fact the worst part for me about going to the dentist was them asking me if I flossed, my ashamed answer that I didn't, and their lecture to me about how important it was that I do so. This was so impactful to me that when I finished my orthodontic work at the end of college and no longer had that hanging over me, I completely stopped going to the dentist for about 12 years.
Then I got married, and my wife convinced me that part of being a responsible adult is to get one's biannual dental cleaning, and she persuaded me to get back in the habit of boing to the dentist. And I was somewhat shocked to find that I'm no longer nagged about flossing. I am somewhat better at it now than I was when I was younger, but I'm hardly consistent with it. My question is whether standard practice in dentistry has changed? Was there a recognition that nagging about flossing is an emotional barrier to people seeing their dentists and that the value of seeing one's dentist for a cleaning is greater (perhaps to the patient, but certainly to the dentist!) than the expected value of nagging the patient about flossing?
I was in a very similar situation. Had all sorts of issues from not going to the dentist and not flossing for a long time (strangely, no cavities though.... they asked "you must not have much of a sweet tooth?", which is the complete opposite of the truth, weirdly). Anyway, even after spending thousands at the dentist/oral surgeon to get various issues fixed, I knew I still wasn't gonna floss, because I freaking hate it with a fiery passion. BUT, then a miracle! I started using a waterpick every day (the kind you can get for cheap at any CVS/walgreens whatever) and it's been great. The dentist I go to says it's just as good, if not better, than flossing. Maybe it's true, maybe they're just blowing smoke up my ass thinking it's better than nothing, but the last few years of twice-a-year dental visits and regular waterpicking has seemed to eliminate all issues. I highly recommend one if you're a better-dead-than-floss guy like me.
Incidentally, my wife is a regular flosser and doesn't like the waterpick, says it's too hard on her gums. Whatever, her loss.
2nd this, waterpicks are great. Tell your wife to try it on a lower pressure setting, it doesn't need to be set to the max to be effective. My hygienist told me that the max setting can be too powerful for some people.
I don't agree with your viewpoint. My dentists and dental hygienists seem to feel no qualms about lecturing me all the time about flossing. I've had some very uncomfortable experiences at the dentist over my adult life. However, it varies by dental practice. Some places are nicer, because some people are nicer.
I think people feel comfortable lecturing children but not adults. Also, they may figure (correctly) that you've "heard the good word" on flossing already and that further evangelizing will just turn you off.
I am your mirror image - I dislike going to the doctor, of any sort, except my enforced visits to the optometrist. Thus I too have avoided the dentist (and doctors altogether; I got the shingles shot at CVS) for a dozen years and more. But in my case I very much believe in flossing, and floss every two or three days. I think with flossing you can be your own dentist, to a great extent, and that it's important to get the spaces between teeth clean, so as not to foster bacteria. I am perhaps helped somewhat by my teeth not being crowded, having had several removed by an old-school orthodontist (those bands jammed onto the teeth) 4 decades ago.
It seems to me people who don't care for their teeth, lose their teeth - and this was a lot more common before dentistry (or self-dentistry, in my case :-)).
Maybe they don't nag grownups because they're beyond the formable part of life, or because they don't want to annoy paying customers.
The cynical angle is that they make more money if you don't floss.
To me, the modern Floss Picks are a complete game changer. They remove 98% of the discomfort. I always have some within reach.
Apparently you are not alone because I started seeing those things are littered all over the ground a few years ago!
Edit: Not a dentist, but two possibilities I'm seeing as a layperson:
1. Your new dentist believes in flossing but doesn't see the purpose in shaming people (has noticed over time that it doesn't change behavior).
2. Your new dentist suspects flossing may be bullshit, as it appears a lot of dentistry is bullshit: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/the-trouble-with-dentistry/586039/
While my dental *hygienists* mildly nag me about flossing and insist on doing it in the office, my two recent *dentists* - the one who retired, and the young one who replaced him - both acknowledge that there's indeed totally untested bullshit in dentistry. They've both said that genes + diet seem to be the determining factors in dental health; having naturally good teeth and/or oral bacterium plus not constantly bathing teeth in sugar produces terrific results even if someone skips flossing. My retired dentist added that Oral-B's electric toothbrushes (the ones that spin rather than go back and forth) were a real game-changer and, used at the correct angles, could replace most flossing action.
I totally ignore flossing and my teeth - even the baby tooth which never got replaced - are going strong. If your teeth were fine after 12 years of avoiding the dentist, you can likely ignore flossing, too.
My dentist does not "nag", but asking me if I am flossing regularly is a normal part of my twice a year checkup.
Some of my relative like their electric toothbrushes. I’m too lazy/cheap for household items with batteries myself. But also, I don’t understand why people think they can’t brush their teeth manually in that rotary fashion? I always brush in circles.
Batteries!!!
No, decent electric toothbrushes stand on a little charging port which plugs into a standard wall socket. You just replace the brush head once a season. These electric brushes have sensors which light up if you're pressing too hard, and timers so that you can ensure you've brushed long enough.
My mom and I bought a two-pack together at Costco, and we've been using our respective brushes for 12+ years. Mine is only now starting to go a little wonky and I'm thinking of replacing it.
Although - given that I bought it at Costco - I could theoretically return it, hahahah:
https://www.costco.com/oral-b-smart-clean-360-rechargeable-electric-toothbrush%2C-2-pack.product.100682156.html
That's cool. Battery-powered things are so stupid.
A glance at my bathroom counter would show I'm aggressively simple on all fronts! And just getting more so.
I still use mascara. I think I always will. For some reason I have a vanity about eyelashes.
If you're a lazy person then I strongly recommend an electric toothbrush! Saves dozens yes, DOZENS of calories by not having to move your hand and wrist up and down in oblong circles, merely glide along as the lovely wee electric motor does its work.
Also apparently better for gum health, which is the reason I got mine about a decade ago
I think my laziness manifests differently than yours!
I like to use my hands.
I don't like to shop, to add to the list of things that have to regularly be purchased at the store. I don't like a lot of ... stuff around. I don't like trying to figure out if I should recycle batteries, and then remember that that's not actually a thing anymore.
The gum health thing is probably most persuasive. My mother uses that kind of toothbrush and was told she had periodontal disease long ago. She even had that procedure where they graft skin onto your gums. Thereafter for quite some years, she went to the periodontist even just for her (presumably pricier) cleanings. Because she was told to.
There's never been any mention of the periodontal disease since that time forty years ago. She goes to the regular dentist, which is nice for her because she used to carpool him to school. People like these old friendships.
I too was told once, circa 1988, that I had receding gums aka "periodontal disease". Maybe I too would someday have to get these grafts. In the meantime, I was urged to floss.
This disease must be progressing very slowly. But if I notice any change in those gums, I'll get one of those toothbrushes for sure.
My electric is plug-in, no batteries needed. I think most are, probably.
My toothbrush runs on solar.
Flossing has little to do with teeth and everything to do with gums. One can lose perfectly healthy teeth to gum disease.
I mean, sure, teeth and gums are part of a total system. I ignore flossing and my teeth *and* gums are fine, even though I had a 10+ year gap in dental insurance and didn't see a dentist once.
That's anecdotal of course, but there's no large scale long-term evidence that not flossing is a likely path to gum disease, especially if someone is using circular-action electric toothbrushes and especially-especially if someone is using flossing alternatives like waterpiks.
The hostility to flossing (fuck The Atlantic, the subtle damage this publication is doing to the fabric of our society is probably less than that wrought by the NYT, but that's quite a low bar to clear) is baffling to me. It's a very low-cost intervention that may not be necessary for everyone, but for those who need it it makes a huge difference, and we don't have a screening mechanism.
Whatever your objection to The Atlantic, there is still no long-term evidence about flossing. It's over the top to say that it's *necessary,* particularly if one is doing it wrong. And doing it wrong can make things worse!
https://utknoxvilledentists.com/can-you-floss-too-much/
I've had two dentists express that they're impressed with my teeth and they were both completely indifferent about whether or not I'm flossing, since I'm doing other stuff. If the OP wants to use a waterpick instead of flossing, there's no reason not to. If he has good genes and doesn't consume a lot of sugary drinks, he might not even need to do that much.
There's "still no long-term evidence about flossing" because, as the UTK link states, "the research supporting daily flossing was weak because of lack of participants or long-term studies". In other words, there's no evidence because nobody looked. And yes, one can floss too much, this is the same kind of thing as "one can exercise too much", not the problem for the vast majority of the population, quite the opposite in fact.
Water pick is fine, and electric toothbrushes really help too.
I didn't read the whole of it, but the article centered on a dentist who urged a lot of possibly unnecessary procedures on his patients. It seemed pretty much the opposite of the extremely low-tech and essentially free way to care for your own teeth, that is flossing.
Yeah, and this is a good illustration why I despise the rag. They bill it as an explosive expose of the industry, and then use niche cases of unscrupulous or incompetent doctors as an illustration. Meanwhile everywhere the headline is what gets attention, and now "dental care is fraud" becomes the meme.
Meanwhile all we need is to look at middle-aged people who have access to routine dental care and compare their grins to those who don't. Tell a poor Appalachian man in his 40's who's missing several teeth that dentistry is fraud.
Well, the sad part is that he may actually believe it.
Re. Israel/Palestine: I'm trying to find a hard to fake signal moderates on the two sides can send to each other, or make a long term resolution less violent at the margin, that will still achieve 'justice'.
My 'idea' is a land/citizenship swap. I could (either become a citizen of Israel, or find someone to do this on my behalf) identify settlement land, either in Gaza (if/when the settler projects begin in northern Gaza, hopefully never) or the West Bank that will be most inconvenient if Israelis live there when it comes to negotiating borders, buy it (hopefully not too expensive), and sign a contract that says 'only Palestinians who renounce violence can live there, and I approve of' and then find a moderate in West Bank who feels Israel has been mistreating them to live there. And, in return I would want either someone to sponsor a refugee in Lebanon/Syria/Jordan to renounce refugee status and get integrated (or just have 10 people who long since emigrated but are still on the unwra refugee list for corruption/political reasons but don't consider themselves Palestinian and wouldn't move back if a full right of return became a thing to take themselves off it), or a Palestinian to not sell similar land to a Jew because they'd be killed for that, but...something. Maybe get a marginal Palestinian in East Jerusalem to accept Israeli citizenship.
Assume my personal interest is moderate, budget is 50k.
Can anyone familiar with the laws/frameworks in the region tell me if this is at all viable, and what the most practical implementation of this 'motivation' would be?
"sign a contract that says 'only Palestinians who renounce violence can live there, and I approve of' and then find a moderate in West Bank who feels Israel has been mistreating them to live there"
I doubt it's legal under Israeli law that West Bank Palestinians can live in Israeli settlements with an Israeli "sponsor". IIRC West Bank residents can't even move to Israel if they marry an Arab Israeli (i.e. Arab with Israeli citizenship living in pre-67 Israel) so why would you selling them land do the trick?
"in return I would want either someone to sponsor a refugee in Lebanon/Syria/Jordan to renounce refugee status and get integrated"
I this happened at a large scale, then every West Bank Palestinian would be living in Israeli settlements (with the accompanying demographic threat Israel is worried about) long before every Palestinian in those other countries renounced refugee status, so I'm not sure what this would achieve.
"Assume my personal interest is moderate, budget is 50k. "
General point but I think that a lot of "pay the Palestinians to accept Israel taking the land" type of arguments don't in fact offer up enough money to make this a fair trade, even if you leave aside sentimentality.
Hm, that makes sense. Let's say I believe that the status quo is A) 'israel at great reputational and moderate financial cost achieves basically complete military victory over iran(+allies) and gaza/west bank', that B) 'if literally anyone in the arab world could offer them long term security and renounce right of return, there is the political will to do basically anything for that, including getting rid of netanyahu, partially dismantling settlements in west bank, withdrawing from gaza completely', and that C) 'arab world because of self-serving propaganda by various actors believes neither A nor B with high conviction, probably isn't capable of giving up right of return unless it updates hard in favor of A'.
Is there any way I can credibly send the signal B in a way that's visible to some moderate subset of the arab (ideally palestinian) world, without making A less likely?
Ideally with also the effect of having some minimal not cost-effective positive effect on justice, as defined by both israelis and arabs.
I don't know what signal you're trying to send. B is a statement about the state of political opinion in Israel. What does it mean for you to "credibly" send it? People can read the state of political views in Israel directly, what does you sending a signal add?
There's also a much larger signal *against* B, namely, Netanyahu has been Prime Minister almost continuously since 2009 - not only the longest serving in Israel's history, but if not for a ~1 year period when he was temporarily out of power, perhaps the longest currently serving elected (in free and fair elections) head of government in the world.
And Netanyahu is against giving up any settlements.
And even his main rival, Benny Gantz, is against giving up any settlements!
Arabs don't speak Hebrew or English or consume Israeli media. If they did they would have vastly different opinions about Jews. Ditto for the Israelis. Yes, Netanyahu doesn't want peace, he thinks he can divide the Palestinians, and we can debate if his primary goal is to prevent them from organizing effectively to destroy Israel, or build settlements, that's a hot topic that would require more good faith than we have.
Mainstream Israeli opinion has coalesced to 'arabs are militantly opposed to any self governing Jews in this region, if peace was possible we would bend over backwards to make painful concessions, absent that possibility, the hope for which we lost in the second intifada, we are stuck in a horrible situation where military security through strength is our only option, which is morally and financially expensive'. The Arab world totally is unaware of this, in general.
I'm trying to figure out if there's a cost efficient way to send a truth signal as to the tradeoffs Israeli society is willing to make, and in the process reward some individual Arab moderate that is willing to permanently give up trying to overthrow the Israeli state, and indicate that maybe some second person could also make that trade (but not with me, I have few resources) and so on.
I think you're overestimating the degree to which raw information transfer corresponds to viewpoint shifts.
If someone has a goal of finding truth, then generally, any additional information helps.
But that's understandably quite a rare goal in and of itself. Why would anyone want that? People generally have much more understandable direct goals like seeking social approval.
In discussing the findings of public choice theory, Bryan Caplan notes that individual voters aren't incentivized to vote for things that would actually benefit them, since the impact of an individual vote is basically zero. Instead, they're rationally incentivized to vote irrationally to gain social approval from their peers, and the like.
The fact that Scott Alexander had to propose the writing of guides with rational suggestions for voters speaks to the general complete lack of demand for such a thing. Election spending is on the order of tens of billions of dollars, but the idea of providing a guide collating basic facts about candidates with arguments for whom to vote is treated as an esoteric proposal.
Inasmuch as individual votes have little direct impact on outcomes, having political views aligned with reality has even less impact, and per the incentives, most people don't.
This is broadly true in many arenas. To a large degree most people don't value abstract truth nearly as much as they value the direct effects of adopting particular positions, like social desirability, so the limiting factor in the search for truth is rarely the availability of raw information.
In a similar vein, in reviewing the book 1984, Asimov noted that the plot's emphasis on deliberate destruction of information in order to manipulate the public overstates the the connection between the two, in reality:
>This Orwellian preoccupation with the minutiae of 'historical proof' is typical of the political sectarian who is always quoting what has been said and done in the past to prove a point to someone on the other side who is always quoting something to the opposite effect that has been said and done.
> As any politician knows, no evidence of any kind is ever required. It is only necessary to make a statement - any statement - forcefully enough to have an audience believe it. No one will check the lie against the facts, and, if they do, they will disbelieve the facts...
> To be sure, the Soviets put out new editions of their Encyclopaedia ... and this is no doubt the germ of the Orwellian notion, but the chances of carrying it as far as is described in 1984 seem to me to be nil - not because it is beyond human wickedness, but because it is totally unnecessary.
This is true in the US and other parts of the world, including the Middle East.
The widespread false beliefs that people there have about so much don't seem to be the result of limited access to information, but of limited interest in abstract truth. If anything, the former is a result of the latter, as media and other groups there have little incentive, indeed, negative incentive, to provide truthful information.
Not only would factual information hardly deter them, actual experiences that contradict views that it's convenient for them to hold make little difference either.
E.g. in Lebanon, from what I can see, the pro Hezbollah segment of the population, and even the both-sideser anti-Hezb anti-Israel contingency agree that Israel cares little for the lives of civilians, is happy to kill 50 civilians for one militant, bombs indiscriminately, and even specifically targets civilians.
Israel would regularly announce that particular buildings would be struck and that people needed to evacuate a 500 meter radius from them.
When they'd do so, crowds would frequently assemble near the buildings to film the explosions with their phones, seemingly well within 500 meters.
Their behavior speaks to a high level of trust in the integrity and competence of the Israeli military. They show no concern, for example, that a plane will see the crowd of them and choose to drop an extra bomb on them.
This is particularly telling given that these strikes tended to be concentrated in pro-Hezb neighborhoods and cities.
Even in those areas, their actual experience and their resultant behavior was one of Israel displaying behavior completely at odds with their expressed beliefs about Israel.
This all makes sense based on what I've said. When it comes to airstrikes, they're incentivized to get cool videos, so they have no incentive in believing false things about Israel.
But in general, their incentives don't align with seeking accurate information about Israel.
This all goes for the Palestinians, too. Sure, completely false, indeed, delusional beliefs about Israel abound. But the issue isn't the language barrier, but the incentive barrier.
I agree with everything you said.
Is it your contention that even if the expectation of Palestinians that they will destroy Israel and get their land back dropped to 0, the psychological cost of turning paper losses into realized losses by accepting their first political defeat in renouncing struggle against the continued existence of Israel would be worth more to them than the benefit of peace?
"Arabs don't speak Hebrew or English or consume Israeli media. If they did they would have vastly different opinions about Jews."
The idea is that if Arabs did read that media they'd view Israelis as more likely to compromise? I do read English media and I don't think Israel is willing to withdraw from the settlements. My evidence as I said is that both Netanyahu and his main opponent said they are against withdrawing from settlements.
There's probably nothing that you could say to change *my* mind (absent e.g. referring to some statement of Israel's leaders of which I'm unaware) much less a person in the Arab world who doesn't read English media.
Of course if I'm wrong about Israel's leaders and they are willing to withdraw from settlements (or if they change their minds) - rather than you, *Israel's leaders* could change my mind - by proposing a deal on that basis.
(also can substitute in for settlements in the above, a few other contentious points)
In either case, still not clear what you sending a signal adds.
Netanyahu generally always believed, and October 7th has radicalized society to believe this as well (chunks of the left used not to) that any place you withdraw from and give a state will be used primarily to build offensive capability to destroy Israel, not a functioning state prioritizing welfare of its people. Gaza was proof of this but it wasn't until the invasion that public became aware of just how wealthy a place it was (they thought it was a slum, basically) and just how many billions were redirected towards tunnel networks/weapon stashes, etc. They thought it had way less resources, and a much smaller portion of that was spent over last 16 years preparing for the current war.
The West Bank is especially dangerous to withdraw from, unlike Gaza, because of reasons of geography. It's on high ground within shoulder rocket range of major population centers. As soon as you withdraw from there, you will have to reinvade at high cost within a week. Everyone recognizes this.
Israelis don't think peace is possible, so they are focused on maintaining security through military capability differentials.
The signal I am trying to send is the truthful one, that Arabs who don't actually know Hebrew and are immersed in Israeli politics (the median of the two million Arab Israelis know this fine) are strongly confident is not true, which is that all Israelis prioritize security, and a significant minority care about continued land expansion, and that because of coalitional politics and because basically no one believes settlements are *the* issue (most people object heavily on moral grounds, and because it looks bad politically, but they don't think that absent settlements Arabs would have any different goals) they continue as a path of least resistance.
I also know that any Arabs in Gaza who would protest armed resistance are killed or tortured in some order, and in West Bank are shunned as collaborators.
Just as moderate Israelis hear the terrorists too loud in their head to publicly offer peace, the moderate Arabs also hear the terrorists too loud to offer it.
I'm trying to identify some means of sending this signal, and in the process improve the life of some individual Palestinian Arab who receives it.
Right now there's no deal Israelis can offer because what they would want in exchange for painful concessions is an expectation of minimal future violence, and there is no Arab entity capable and interested of offering that. The people in Gaza at this point don't support Hamas anymore (in a major shift from before Oct 7), shellshock of war is too horrible and they see how it steals all the aid to resell it and doesn't let any civilians hide in the tunnels. West Bank and diaspora is in same place Palestinian 'cause' has been last 100 years, opposed to any Jewish rule anywhere in that land on aggregate, and willing to support armed resistance from any relative position of power due to honor culture, racism, an attachment to land they were unjustly deprived of, religion, and the perception that with a billion Muslims in the area on their side how could they possibly ever not win eventually.
I think it's hard, because what's needed is a promise to not retaliate for violence from the other side.
Cremieux argues that the data don't support the Israel-Palestinian conflict being one of cyclical retaliation: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-cycle-of-violence. The summary starts in this section: https://www.cremieux.xyz/i/137822160/will-we-go-blind and includes the next one.
Cremieux is a she, not a he. And what's nonsense about the argument?
“I’d be surprised if we got to heaven, asked God what the highest [moral] impact thing that we could have done is, and his answer was ‘oh, something very normal and within the Overton window.’”
I was going to say I would be very surprised if God cared that much about shrimp, but He must do with the prohibition on eating shellfish in the Old Testament!
Leviticus 11:9–12
9 ‘These you may eat, whatever is in the water: all that have fins and scales, those in the water, in the seas or in the rivers, you may eat.
10 ‘But whatever is in the seas and in the rivers that does not have fins and scales among all the teeming life of the water, and among all the living creatures that are in the water, they are detestable things to you,
11 and they shall be abhorrent to you; you may not eat of their flesh, and their carcasses you shall detest.
12 ‘Whatever in the water does not have fins and scales is abhorrent to you.'
But oh no, Bentham's Bulldog, now you have demolished the Shellfish Argument! You know, the one that gets reliably trotted out about religious opposition to homosexualty: "oh, but do you wear poly-cotton blend clothing and eat shrimp? if you do, you're a sinner!"
God *does* mean it about shrimp, and He *does* mean it about gay sex is the answer to the question posed here 😁
https://carm.org/homosexuality-secular-movements/leviticus-1822-2013-homosexuality-shellfish-mixed-fabrics-and-not-being-under-old-testament-law/
"Leviticus says not to eat shellfish (Lev. 11:9-12), use mixed seed or fabrics (Lev. 19:19), harvest the corners of fields (Lev. 19:9), and that homosexuality is wrong (Lev. 18:22; 20:13). If homosexuality is wrong because Leviticus says so, then shouldn’t we also obey the other laws about shellfish, seed, fabrics, and fields because that is in Leviticus as well? If not, then why not? Why would Christians pick and choose what parts of the Bible to follow?"
"I’m interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. She’s a Georgetown sophomore, speaks fluent Italian, always cleared the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be? While thinking about that, can I ask another? My chief of staff Leo McGarry insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly says he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or is it okay to call the police?
Here’s one that’s really important, because we’ve got a lot of sports fans in this town. Touching the skin of a dead pig makes one unclean, Leviticus 11:7. If they promise to wear gloves, can the Washington Redskins still play football? Can Notre Dame? Can West Point? Does the whole town really have to be together to stone my brother John for planting different crops side by side? Can I burn my mother in a small family gathering for wearing garments made from two different threads [according to Deuteronomy 22:9-11]?"
Footballs are now synthetic, and thus presumably kosher.
"She’s a Georgetown sophomore, speaks fluent Italian, always cleared the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be?"
I'd suggest some form of second price auction to determine that rather than asking folks on the Internet. Probably set a reserve price to avoid regret if you feel that the folks bidding might not appreciate her as much as you do.
Hi, Jed, I'm glad to speak to you again on religious topics because at our last encounter on this matter, I excoriated you as a hypocritical son-of-a-bitch whining about how it wasn't fair that God cheated you by (lemme see here) killing your old school teacher in a car accident? Because she was the first person who kissed your ass about how genius you were? And you did the toddler foot-stamping over "it not fair! it not fair! me want!" before the crucifix? Ah, good times, good times!
With these new set of queries, absolutely yes to each and every one of them! You are entitled to kill your daughter, depending on what state you live in, up to 24 weeks to any stage of pregnancy; just because she made it out of the womb is no reason for her to think she's free of your authority to dispose of her however you wish for your own convenience:
https://www.statista.com/chart/25908/state-by-state-abortion-laws-in-the-us/
And we all know of course that as a good liberal and Democrat (but I repeat myself), you are a total devotee of Moloch when it comes to baby killing, so a little selling your daughter into slavery but permitting her to live shouldn't turn a hair for you.
If you're his boss, you can do what you want to Leo. Just clarify which Sabbath he is breaking, and make sure you stick to that. You already expect to own him body and soul anyway as your Chief of Staff, so you can dispose of his life as you see fit.
Are footballs still made out of animal leather these days? I think they're all artificial materials now.
Planting different crops may be a criminal offence, you can leave it up to the local government to stone your brother. If Monsanto can sue his ass for mixing varieties, and the World Trade Organisation is concerned over illegal practices in the seed trade, why not go the whole hog on penalties?
https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/booksp_e/itfff_ch_5_e.pdf
"However, a concerning rise in illegal seed practices threatens global food security, the livelihood of farmers and trust in a professional seed industry. Furthermore, illegal practices impact worker safety, and illegal work practices can violate labour laws. Sometimes such occurrences are also associated with other forms of illegal activities, such as tax evasion and the circulation of fraudulent crop inputs (e.g. fake crop protection products and seed treatments).
Seeds are unlike other agricultural inputs. Seeds have great economic value derived from the high investment in R&D required to breed them and the innovation they embody, as well as their societal value to farmers and food systems (IHS Markit, 2019). At the same time, seeds – and the plants grown from them – are self-reproducing material, which makes them easy to copy and thus vulnerable to intellectual property infringements and other illegal practices. Therefore, seeds require intellectual property protection, which is mostly provided through plant breeder’s rights (PBRs), and breeders must apply for such protection as a first line of defence against infringement."
Your relationship with your mother is your own affair, but if she's as annoyingly preachy as you, I can well believe a small family gathering would be only too happy to burn her.
"Are footballs still made out of animal leather these days? I think they're all artificial materials now."
From the NFL Rule Book: "The ball shall be made up of an inflated (12½ to 13½ pounds) urethane bladder enclosed in a pebble grained, leather case (natural tan color) without corrugations of any kind."
https://operations.nfl.com/media/4693/2020-nfl-rulebook.pdf
A bit offtopic, but is Bulldog's arguments for the existence of God good/interesting/worth reading?
I wanted to link it, but apparently Substack's search works in even more mysterious ways!
So I only found this: https://benthams.substack.com/p/6-questions-atheists-cant-answer
It's different. I commend Bulldog for trying, but I found it unconvincing. Then again, I'm not the audience he's going for. When he's speaking about his own personal conversion (if that's how he'd describe it) it's much more relatable.
I can only remember that when I read it, I thought it was worth checking out considering the source was a highly unconventional thinker likely to offer something novel, and while I didn't expect to be convinced, I was disappointed relative to my expectations.
Is there an estimate of how many insects are killed by agriculture each year? I'm curious how it compares to the shrimp total.
And how does it compare to the number of insects that only exist due to agriculture?
Also, how all of these compare to their quality of life and lifespan in the natural world. Is agriculture and aquaculture a negligible or significant part of arthropod suffering?
<mildSnark>
Yes! This question has legs! (and even more if extended to include arachnids) :-)
</mildSnark>
Add in field mice and other small rodents. Google is all over the place, but I'm seeing estimates of 15-100 rodents killed per acre of farmed land.
There are 47.5 million acres of wheat harvested in the US alone. Using the lower number of rodents per acre, in the US and for wheat only, that's over 700 million killed per year. Insects should be far higher, by any reasonable estimate. Some Googled website is saying 3.5 quadrillion insects are killed by US farmers using pesticides yearly.
Once last year, I discovered later in the day that I had killed a snake with my lawnmower.
Yeah, I'm wondering whether it would make more sense to lobby for more humane pesticides instead of focusing on shrimp farming. But I assume people have already looked into that.
I'm not sure what a "humane" pesticide would look like, or do. Does it scare insects away or something?
Farmers kill insects because they eat the crops. If they aren't eating the crops, they still die.
Pesticides aren't an instant death.
I've never posted a puzzle before, so apologies if this is too hard, too easy, or suboptimally presented.
Of the following three hands,
♠ Q 4 ♥ J 10 ♦ 9 3 ♣ K 8 3
♠ 8 5 2 ♥ 2 ♦ Q 10 8 6 ♣ J
♠ 7 ♥ K 7 ♦ J 5 ♣ Q 9 7 4
two were dealt randomly, one was carefully arranged--by someone with OCD. Which is the arranged one, and how?
(Note: by "OCD" I possibly mean stereotypical OCD that doesn't literally exist, or maybe it does. Don't hold me rigidly to this.)
(Note 2: By "arranged" I don't necessarily mean that every card was chosen with perfect care. Consider that there was a limited part of a deck to choose from, when arranging that hand.)
(Note 3: This puzzle amounts to guessing what was in my mind. Of course, there are probably answers that make perfect sense but which weren't what I was thinking of. I should consider such answers triumphs in everything but mind-reading)
Tnzrxavtug naq Zbygrabnx ner pbeerpg ba gur unaq. (Gubhtu gur bgure nafjref znl whfg nf jryy unir orra gehr). Abj vg'f whfg thrffvat jung rknpgyl gur ehyr vf, naq gurl'er cnegvnyyl ba gur evtug genpx.
Remember this is guessing what I'm thinking, and I make no promises it's especially elegant or interesting.
Writing as I think... Note 2 seems important - I'm wondering if it means the other 18 cards have already been dealt? If not, in what other way would the deck be limited?
Hand 2 looks more contrived (as 2 other people have noticed, but I'm not convinced their explanations are convincing)
Also, why no aces?
Feels like hand 2. Spades and diamonds are evenly spaced (and spades are also fibonacci-ish, why not). Then 2 and 11 are both objectively awesome numbers (prime, binary-related, and a stereotypically-ocd-ish friend points out that 2 in roman numerals is 11-looking).
Probably not the intended solution, but Hand 1 has the most even possible split between suits (9 doesn't evenly divide 3, so one suit has an extra, but the other 2 hands are more lopsided).
Love the idea of posting a puzzle here! My guess is hand nr 1, because it's unlikely for such evenly sized groups to form accidentally, plus they contain the sequence 8,9,10,J,Q,K. Dunno what's up with the two 3s though.
Aside: I also found the presentation of the hands a bit confusing - they are all "ordered" in the same way, so really they're sets of cards rather than sequences (ie. a hand you could reorder when you hold it).
I'm not sure how to read these hand notations as discrete cards:
♠ Q 4 ♥ J 10 ♦ 9 3 ♣ K 8 3
So that looks at first like Queen of Spades, Four of Hearts, then Jack of... tens? and then you have "Club King Eight Three" as if that's a valid card in any sense.
The only other thing that could make sense is if these are nine-card hands for some reason but that seems like something worth calling out?
That’s the bridge hand notation, and the suit order is also that of bridge (alphabetical), though bridge hands contain 13 cards and not 9
Yes, they are nine-card hands.
The article you link about shrimp welfare makes a mistake that has bugged me for years, and which I've never seen anyone else serious address. Which is that it implicitly assumes a somewhat mystical view of what qualia/suffering fundamentally is which which IMO is incompatible with a functional evolutionary view of what explains suffering most parsimoniously.
You can make a strong case that suffering is actually an extremely simple trait that has an incentive to evolve even in organisms that are far simpler than shrimp, and which doesn't require very much complexity to evolve:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RjkfdOv6bpsQkF-Y4Gp0FYbVfNZDa_NU4PYulp5r1rY/edit?usp=sharing
This is important because it means that microscopic organisms should totally swamp any considerations based on raw quantities of suffering.
Indeed as I mention in the doc more sympathetic organisms actually have an evolutionary incentive to feel *less* suffering, since more intelligence and better memory means you can learn the same lesson more easily.
Oooh, oooh, I know the answer to this. We poke oysters with sticks and see what they do, then we give the oysters a bunch of opium and poke them with sticks again and see if they react differently. Opium is an awesome painkiller, so if they give them the same unpleasant stimulus (stick poke) and they react the same, then we can be highly confident it's some kind of involuntary muscle thing, not actual pain.
This is, pretty seriously as far as I know, the actual argument for ostroveganism, which are vegans who eat, like, oysters and stuff.
I should note that you can literally use many of the same anesthetics on plants as you would on animals in order to inhibit responses to negative stimuli: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171211090736.htm
In unironic honor of the subject of shrimp welfare I have posted my beloved collection of Dall-e 2's images responding to the prompt "Shrimp love me, unaligned AI fears me."
https://open.substack.com/pub/bookreviewgroup/p/shrimp-love-me-unaligned-ai-fears?r=3d8y5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Well, those were unsettling!
I think this perspective doesn't effectively distinguish between "negative reinforcement" and "suffering". I don't blame you, because I think the distinction is hard to understand and routes through our uncertainty about what consciousness is, but I think making this distinction is slightly less muddled than not making it and so it's net useful.
As you say below, even plants and bacteria have something like negative reinforcement (in fact, you can probably find some rock or thermostat or something that has some quality that seems suspiciously like it). I think there's an additional question of whether this is just a blind reflex, or whether it gets routed through a brain that's capable of reflecting on how bad it is in some sort of global way, and that we reserve the word "suffering" for the latter - the more reflection, the more suffering (though "reflection" isn't exactly the right word here and is more gesturing at a concept I can't easily describe).
Here is a much more formal and serious attempt to present this argument: https://chittkalab.sbcs.qmul.ac.uk/2022/Gibbons%20et%20al%202022%20Advances%20Insect%20Physiol.pdf
Having now read the paper you linked in much more depth I can say definitively that it doesn't actually ague against my position at all!
Since both me and the paper agree that mere reaction isn't enough to be evidence for experience on its own, you need associative learning. With the paper not taking a stance as to whether all form of associative learning are linked with consciousness.
" There is ongoing debate about which forms of associative
learning are linked to sentience and conscious awareness (Ginsburg
and Jablonka, 2019) " ... "To leave room for
this debate, without taking a stance, we review both classical conditioning
and more complex forms of learning, "
The paper concludes with "We found no good evidence against sentience, or specifically pain perception, in any insect orders at any life stage" which again is exactly what I'd expect.
And according to some, the being which is capable of the most "reflection" would likely be God- so logically God also experiences the most suffering of any being. And if God is truly infinite, that means infinite suffering as well. Therefore, the action that will remove the most suffering from the universe would be to kill God. I am now accepting funding for this project.
I have seen in the wild the first stirrings towards "plants are sentient too" (no, like an idiot I didn't save the article) and boy, Chesterton keeps recurring to mind here:
From "The Napoleon of Notting Hill"
"Then there was the opposite school. There was Mr. Edward Carpenter, who thought we should in a very short time return to Nature, and live simply and slowly as the animals do. And Edward Carpenter was followed by James Pickie, D.D. (of Pocahontas College), who said that men were immensely improved by grazing, or taking their food slowly and continuously, alter the manner of cows. And he said that he had, with the most encouraging results, turned city men out on all fours in a field covered with veal cutlets. Then Tolstoy and the Humanitarians said that the world was growing more merciful, and therefore no one would ever desire to kill. And Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian, but at length declared vegetarianism doomed ("shedding," as he called it finely, "the green blood of the silent animals"), and predicted that men in a better age would live on nothing but salt. And then came the pamphlet from Oregon (where the thing was tried), the pamphlet called "Why should Salt suffer?" and there was more trouble."
It's funny that you feel kinship with Chesterton here, because my reaction to your comment and quote is "wow, conservatives have been making up 'liberal guy whose heart bleeds too much to eat even plants' for over a century now".
Ah, how labels change over the years!
He was a Liberal (politically) and not a Conservative (Tory), though he did move to social conservatism.
But since he went to Art School, he did meet a lot of those progressive types who were around even back then.
So there's a lot less "conservatives have been making up bleeding-heart liberals for a long time" and more "bleeding-heart liberals as well as outright cranks have been around for a long time" at work there.
From his autobiography:
https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks13/1301201h.html
"Most of this happened when I was at the art school; but even when I had left it, this very casual connection was continued, in a queer way, by the coincidence that I worked for a short time in the office of a publisher who rather specialised in spiritualistic and theosophical literature, known under the general title of the occult. It was not entirely my fault, if it was not the fault of the real spiritualists or other real spirits, if I blundered into rather queer and uncomfortable corners of Spiritualism. On my first day in the office I had my first insight into the occult; for I was very vague about the business, as about most other businesses. I knew we had just published a big and vigorously boomed book of the Life and Letters of the late Dr. Anna Kingsford, of whom I had never heard, though many of our customers seemed to have heard of hardly anybody else. My full enlightenment came when a distraught lady darted into the office and began to describe her most complex spiritual symptoms and to demand the books most suited to her complaint, which I was quite incompetent to select. I timidly offered the monumental Life and Letters; but she shrank away with something like a faint shriek. "No, no," she cried, "I mustn't! Anna Kingsford says I mustn't." Then, with more control, "Anna Kingsford told me this morning that I must not read her Life; it would be very bad for me, she said, to read her Life." I ventured to say, or stammer, with all the crudity of common speech, "But Anna Kingsford is dead." "She told me this morning," repeated the lady, "that I must not read the book." "Well," I said, "I hope Dr. Kingsford hasn't been giving that advice to many people; it would be rather bad for the business. It seems rather malicious of Dr. Kingsford."
...All this part of the process was afterwards thrown up in the very formless form of a piece of fiction called The Man Who Was Thursday. The title attracted some attention at the time; and there were many journalistic jokes about it. Some, referring to my supposed festive views, affected to mistake it for "The Man Who Was Thirsty." Others naturally supposed that Man Thursday was the black brother of Man Friday. Others again, with more penetration, treated it as a mere title out of topsy-turveydom; as if it had been "The Woman Who Was Half-past Eight," or "The Cow Who Was Tomorrow Evening." But what interests me about it was this; that hardly anybody who looked at the title ever seems to have looked at the sub-title; which was "A Nightmare," and the answer to a good many critical questions.
I pause upon the point here, because it is of some importance to the understanding of that time. I have often been asked what I mean by the monstrous pantomime ogre who was called Sunday in that story; and some have suggested, and in one sense not untruly, that he was meant for a blasphemous version of the Creator. But the point is that the whole story is a nightmare of things, not as they are, but as they seemed to the young half-pessimist of the '90s; and the ogre who appears brutal but is also cryptically benevolent is not so much God, in the sense of religion or irreligion, but rather Nature as it appears to the pantheist, whose pantheism is struggling out of pessimism. So far as the story had any sense in it, it was meant to begin with the picture of the world at its worst and to work towards the suggestion that the picture was not so black as it was already painted. I explained that the whole thing was thrown out in the nihilism of the '90s in the dedicatory lines which I wrote to my friend Bentley, who had been through the same period and problems; asking rhetorically: "Who shall understand but you?" In reply to which a book-reviewer very sensibly remarked that if nobody understood the book except Mr. Bentley, it seemed unreasonable to ask other people to read it."
Yeah it kind of seems morally hopeless unless you have advanced enough tech to stick basically every non-human organism into a simulation (with very few animals having enough intelligence to have social preferences that couldn't be satisfied by an experience machine). Then the countless simulated organisms never grow in number, and their role in nature gets filled by a sort of AGI DM acting out their characters through machine/cyborg bodies (but which enjoys people say hunting it for instance, the same way a good DM wants their players to beat their villain)
Though granted I think that's likely to be possible in the future, so just for the sake of people with different values than me (and to hedge against incredibly infinitesimal moral uncertainty) I precommit to doing what I can to bring that scenario about if it doesn't sacrifice any of my other values.
I love these 150-year-old descriptions of silly progressives. Some things never change...
People have a rather limited set of possible reactions, so things keep repeating.
Would it be better is people had a bigger range? How could this be achieved?
Actually, I like it this way. Makes life slightly less disorienting.
Thanks for responding to my comment! I feel like this issue is kind of a blind spot in EA/rationlist circles so I'd love you to dive deeper into it, though I'd like you to preregister a prediction first!
>but I think making this distinction is slightly less muddled than not making it and so it's net useful.
Why? After all you seem to realize yourself that it seems more parsimonious to just not draw a distinction between negative reinforcement and supposedly "real" suffering. At least I'd get that impression from you saying it's difficult to draw a distinction.
I'm skimming through the article RN, but I don't see anything that specifically affects my arguments for qualia being more widespread than generally believed. Is there a part you'd like to draw my attention to that you think addresses my points?
Fundamentally doesn't this basically entail something almost similar to a belief in P-zombies?
In that you must believe that in some organisms negative stimuli leads to an internal state which leads them to learn to avoid that stimuli and any other stimuli they've learned to associate with it in the future. Whereas other organisms have an internal state like this which affects behavior in almost the same way, except that in those organisms it's not "real" qualia.
Also what do you think about the argument that more complex organisms have less evolutionary reason to feel pain as intensely as simpler organisms, since they can learn their lessons easier?
After all if suffering serves an evolutionary function it seems like an inescapable conclusion that it's intensity is something subject to evolutionary pressure doesn't it? Which seems incompatible with humans feeling pain any more intensely than shrimp.
>whether it gets routed through a brain that's capable of reflecting on how bad it is in some sort of global way
You should preregister (before looking into the topic) what evidence you think would distinguish the simplest possible organism you think has qualia from the simplest organism that you think doesn't.
Because I think you and most other rationalists (I'd also call myself a rationalist) are drawing a category here in a way that's fundamentally not even wrong.
> what evidence you think would distinguish the simplest possible organism you think has qualia from the simplest organism that you think doesn't.
I'm not convinced we will ever have a definitive answer, since qualia are inherently a subjective experience. Who knows. But this does mean that we can only use heuristics to figure this out. For some qualia it might be nearly impossible, eg color perception. We can find out whether X can see or distinguish colors, but how do we know whether it experiences them? But suffering has associated behaviors we can try to use, as well as our understanding of the neurologically structural prerequisites for registering and processing pain, which we can sensibly consider a prerequisite for suffering. So, this would be the evidence: The presence of pain processing and aggregation circuitry as well as behaviors that heuristically can differentiate avoidance behavior from suffering.
Sidenote, but I have recently learned some stuff that will probably change your view on color perception quite a lot. See this article: https://gliese1337.blogspot.com/2024/01/describing-non-human-vision.html?m=1
and this study: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248404302_Ways_of_Coloring_Comparative_Color_Vision_as_a_Case_Study_for_Cognitive_Science
I think the simplest way of cashing it out is presence VS absence of qualia, ie having an experience of what it is like to be someome/perceive something. It seems clear that some things have qualia, eg humans. It seems equally clear that some things don't, eg rocks. Sure, humans are living things and rocks aren't, but this is a potentially fluent distinction - consider for example viruses or the "ancestors" of biological life. Suffering is just one particular qualium(?), just as eg experiencing color is.
Now consider a robot which measures the light intensity behind it and in front of it and drives towards the smaller value. In this sense, it avoids light. Surely it is not thereby experiencing suffering, however? If not, then clearly, avoidance behavior is not a sufficient condition for the presence of suffering.
Note that we could arrive at exactly the same internal model by training it through reinforcement learning etc. So it also doesn't seem like the learning part itself is a sufficient condition.
Given this, it seems you need something beyond negative reinforcement to ensure the presence of qualia, such as perhaps a complicated neurological system or something akin to it. What exactly appears to be needed for the presence of qualia in general or suffering in particular is an empirical and philosophical question people have already put a lot of effort into, cf eg the paper Scott linked you.
>I think the simplest way of cashing it out is presence VS absence of qualia
I was asking about observations that are feasible to make. Obviously if you could magically read minds and know creatures internal qualia would settle like half of philosophy and I'd love that!
>Surely it is not thereby experiencing suffering, however?
The mistake you're making here is I assuming would apply a double standard to AI compared to biological life.
I see no convincing reason to think some existing AI might not have qualia. Importantly this qualia may not feel subjectively the same, but I'd still expect an AI that evolved through an evolutionary algorithm to avoid certain stimuli, to find those stimuli unpleasant in some alien sort of way.
I think qualia is fundamentally functional, so if an AI displays certain kinds of learning in response to stimuli then the simplest explanation is that it also has internal qualia changing its behavior.
Granted I think P-zombies might be possible, they'd just be computationally infeasible to run.
Actually, thinking some more about it, my impression is this. Your (simplified) model seems to be:
Input
==> Internal processing
==> Qualia
==> Behavior
I totally agree that this is sometimes appropriate, eg for lot of human behavior. (Though we also need an Internal Processing ==> Behavior connection for pulling our hand away from a hot stove etc.) However, a surely simpler model is
Input
==> Internal Processing
==> Behavior
This doesn't apply to humans of course, but it might apply to other entities. Unless you take a panpsychist position or the like, it seems like it does apply to some simple entities, like a small linear model or a thermostat. So the question becomes: when is which model appropriate? And I don't see a reason to a priori prefer the former over the latter in cases very different from those we know fall under the former. Thoughts?
I think the difference here is that you think I have the 3 step model you propose. Rather I think pain directly is the internal processing which leads to the behavioral change, there's no middle step.
Yeah, I agree it's possible for AI in principle to have qualia. But we're not talking about GPT27, but something like a linear model with like 2 parameters, instantiated in a robot's hardware. Something like this is sufficient for producing avoidance behavior. Do you agree that this is very likely not suffice for suffering in the qualia sense?
As for functionality, in simple examples like the above, if seems like qualia are explicitly not needed to explain the behavior. Qualia are not even needed to explain the behavior of AlphaGo to take a more complex RL example.
I'd be rather unsure about say GPT like systems just because they don't really act like they have positive or negative stimuli, but I an imagine an argument against that as well. I would not rule out some kind of internal experience that may have qualia with no valence attached as I would conceive of it for all I know.
I'd also like to note that plants seem to respond to anesthetics like they feel pain in many ways. Which supports the idea that pain response might be a very highly evolutionarily conserved trait as I've speculated: //www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171211090736.htm
>As for functionality, in simple examples like the above, if seems like qualia are explicitly not needed to explain the behavior. Qualia are not even needed to explain the behavior of AlphaGo to take a more complex RL example.
"not needed to explain" sounds like a description of our computational abilities rather than a description about a structure or organism that may or may not have qualia.
I don't think bacteria suffer (they have no brain, for instance, or central nervous system, nor do they behave in ways we'd expect to go with suffering) but if you think simple organisms suffer a lot, this seems to make a *stronger* case for caring about shrimp.
Alternatively, one could see that basing one's morality on this "suffering" metric leads to absurd conclusions, and switch to something else.
But I address that in the post!
You mean this line: "Preventing immense extreme suffering is very valuable even if things matter other than pleasure and pain"?
I agree that if you accept this, you would be forced to conclude the shrimp welfare project is important. I'm arguing that because that because the conclusion is absurd, and since the logical steps starting from the premise are sound, the premise is false.
(To be clear, "absurd" means "absurd TO ME," and not society at large, which I agree can be, and often is, fundamentally wrong on matters of morality.)
I think the focus on whether a creature has a nervous system is as deeply arbitrary here as say whether the organisms has higher reasoning. People only take for granted it's importance because they aren't taking a functional view of suffering.
Since even plants and single celled organisms will show basic learning wherein they can learn to associate a neutral stimuli with a negative stimuli.
Please read my doc and respond, since I'd love to have a discussion with you!
The important thing here though, is that this logic means that all macroscopic life is from a utilitarian standpoint basically a rounding error compared to the incomprehensibly massive sea of qualia at the microscopic scale. Though granted I'm not a utilitarian so this is a lot less impactful to my particular values.
I doubt that all living things have qualia (I hate this word, but you equated it with consciousness so I go along :-)
Did you ever have had a headache over hours but in between, for a short time, forgot about it because there was something more important or engaging?
I think the headache, as a functional thing, was still there, but you weren't conscious of it.
And did you ever suddenly come up with the solution to a problem you have not been thinking about for a few hours?
I think the thinking, as a functional thing, was still there, but you weren't conscious of it.
I think bacteria refrain from acid, there is a functional mechanism, but they feel no pain.
And about your idea of being conscious all the time (I looked into your "Continuous Experience" text): Did you ever notice, that your visual qualia go away, even though you still have others, when you close your eyes? :-)
>Did you ever notice, that your visual qualia go away, even though you still have others, when you close your eyes?
I find this fascinating because of the implication that for you it does go away, which seems baffling to me. I just see an imperfect darkness with a bit of what I guess I'd call noise (akin to a less intense version of something like if you rub your eyes). I may not perceive that if my visual perception is instead engaged in my minds eye, but I'm always perceiving something visually while awake at least.
>I think bacteria refrain from acid, there is a functional mechanism, but they feel no pain.
This doesn't really address the more difficult aspect to explain which is the association of a neutral stimuli with a negative stimuli. If an organism doesn't have that characteristic than I don't think there's any evolutionary reason to have an internal state corresponding to suffering.
I should also note that even plants seem to show a response to anesthetic as well, which supports the idea that some elements here might be very highly conserved: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171211090736.htm
>Did you ever have had a headache over hours but in between, for a short time, forgot about it because there was something more important or engaging?
There's two responses to this logic: First is that not all mental processes necessarily require a system that responds to positive and negative stimuli. However I expect that the more significant factor is probably just that what you think of as a unified identity just isn't one. You are comprised of many separate cognitive processes which may have their own experiences that are not necessarily accessible to all other cognitive processes.
I also think the realization that you don't have a unified identity like you think you do is also extremely enlightening because it explains away the incoherent and contradictory concept of "willpower" that people have.
You seem to think that total blackness is or can be a qualia. And I think that it is not, for reasons that someone else can explain better.
I probably cannot sound not patronizing when I recommend "Content and Consciousness" from Daniel Dennett, but I do it anyway because you seem to me to be able to make something of a detailed description of a very different perspective on this topic.
For me it offered no final answer, but made me better understand my own questions.
This book is from 1969, is still state of the art, but has only about 190 pages. It's better and deeper than the follow up.
Completely aside from whether perfect blackness would be a qualia there's the issue that perfect blackness is impossible because of inherent noise in the human visual system. Though I find it interesting that you can at apparently tune this out without replacing it with other visual qualia.
Well, I disagree with you--unconscious humans also have the sorts of things involved in reinforcement learning--but I have no idea how this affects the desirability of shrimp welfare. Yes, maybe this would mean a bacteria charity is better, but there aren't such things.
>unconscious humans also have the sorts of things involved in reinforcement learning
I absolutely agree with you! I just don't think this makes the point you think it does.
I think that actually you are conscious (in the sense of having qualia) during all stages of sleep precisely because you are still display certain kinds of awareness. Just like there are both REM and non-REM dreams you have every single night (barring sleep issues), but you almost never remember the experiences you had during either either of them. So I think the lack of memory of any qualia is not evidence against you experiencing qualia and forgetting it (especially when you don't have the right parts of your brain active to even form long term memories in the first place!)
I actually wrote a this subject that you might like reading! Would love to discuss it if you're interested.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KkJL_8USmcAHNpdYd-vdtDkV-plPcuH3sSxCkSLzGtk/edit?usp=sharing
Anyway good night!
Out of curiosity do you share my intuition what's more important than suffering is how a given agent would counterfactually have treated you? Since I feel like it's actually totally coherent to show moral "nepotism" to loved one's, because you have an obligation to treat people at least as well as they would have treated you.
Sorry to butt in to your conversation here, but I wanted to respond to the "suffering vs counterfactual reciprocity" because it's something I've seen floating around, that leaves me totally cold.
I think the intuition here is supposed to be something like contractualism, where our moral obligations grow out of a reciprocal understanding of how each of us wants to be treated. But, how I want to be treated is entirely based on my capacity to suffer!
If I become a horror-movie zombie, and lose all sense of reason, but can still feel pain, I don't want you to torture me before killing me even though by hypothesis if you were the zombified one, you wouldn't feel any compunction about hurting me.
I think the sophisticated version of this involves all sorts of extended counterfactuals to make sure I'm including the right subset of agents, but I'm not sure I believe you can really pin this down precisely enough to satisfy my intuition. It's hard both to identify relevant counterfactuals, and to identify agents across counterfactuals.
e.g. I would sort of accept the framing "don't needlessly hurt shrimp because if you were a shrimp, you wouldn't want people to arbitrarily torture you", but making this precise seems hopeless: what does it mean "if I were a shrimp"?
I think it's much simpler to say, my intuition is capturing that it's bad to cause a being capable of suffering to suffer, regardless of how agent-y it is, or how it would treat you. There are instrumental and practical reasons to care about those things, but it's not what I really care about.
>If I become a horror-movie zombie, and lose all sense of reason, but can still feel pain, I don't want you to torture me before killing me even though by hypothesis if you were the zombified one, you wouldn't feel any compunction about hurting me.
If you are talking about the kind of zombie that dies and goes braindead before reanimating, then I think you have no direct moral obligations to them whatsoever. At most you have an indirect weak obligation to treat the corpse certain ways based on your obligation to other moral agents (but the zombie here might as well be an inanimate heirloom)
The case where subjective experience is continuous is more interesting, and in that case I think the the relevant counterfactual is that you wouldn't want the torture happening to you: So if somebody else likely would respect that wish for you, then you should do the same for them (and you should generally give people some benefit of the doubt when there's no evidence to go off).
>e.g. I would sort of accept the framing "don't needlessly hurt shrimp because if you were a shrimp, you wouldn't want people to arbitrarily torture you", but making this precise seems hopeless: what does it mean "if I were a shrimp"?
In this case the counterfactual would be something like how a shrimp might treat you if it had human level intelligence and immense power, but the exact same absence of any social instincts underpinning our morality. Such a being would be frankly as terrifying as a paperclipper as far as a human is concerned. Consequently I think we have no moral obligations to most animals, and that uplifting most animals without also adding into them human moral/social instincts would be a grave mistake.
I think the principle is most compelling in the case of groups of say jews in nazi germany who few people would say had any obligation to refrain from killing committed nazis for instance. I think this example perfectly demonstrates that people's concern for suffering is predicated on whether the subject would show any sympathy for them if the situations were reversed in the morally relevant ways (which cannot logically include having radically different values for instance).
Another example would be having an understanding with other people to give each other a proper burial if one of the others died, because you know the others would in turn do the same for you. The logic here seems perfectly sound and doesn't require the moral agent involved still exist, and I'm sure I could come up with many similar sorts of examples where people care about things that may not directly impact current net pleasure.
Yes, the zombie case is meant to be the one where I retain some trace of identity.
I agree that the overriding intuition in all cases is something like, "what if our places were switched" but my point is, if I'm capable of imagining us in switched positions, I don't care at all about how they would treat me as a condition: if I wouldn't want them to torture me, then I no longer want to torture them.
The extra step of, "ok but I think they would torture me, so who cares" has no pull on my intuition.
I think the Nazi example is only compelling because you're imagining it _in response_ to Nazi atrocities, so you're playing on a desire for justice or vengeance. But the counterfactual reasoning is that Jews have no moral obligations to people who _would have been Nazis_ in the right conditions, even if they aren't now. This both raises the question of "which counterfactual"--if someone "would have been" a committed Nazi in certain circumstances, but isn't now, which set of circumstances matters?--but more importantly I think it takes all the oomph out of the example.
If Warsaw ghetto fighters had started torturing the young children of the most committed Nazis because, places switched the grown up children would have been happy to do it to them, I think that would have been a monstrous moral mistake, and I think most peoples' intuitions agree with mine on this.
>would have been Nazis in the right conditions, even if they aren't now
This misses the point of why it's important that they be Nazis in my example:
You aren't judging people based on the values that they might hypothetically have come to hold under the right circumstances, but based on their actual current values. The counterfactual version of somebody you're considering has to have the same moral values or it makes zero sense. Also importantly in order to be justified in making this judgement you need solid evidence about their values, killing some random person in Nazi Germany would not be the same as killing a party member who clearly endorses the ideology.
You don't think you have any obligation to help out your family (presuming your family doesn't suck) more than you would a stranger?
Similar if a friend has gone to great lengths to help you in the past do you not feel an obligation to return the favor (within reason) if they need your help?
Honestly I suspect that the feelings you describe just are what a lot of people are talking about when they talk about certain kinds of moral obligation.
There's basically two different types of "moral obligation" here which I think are psychologically totally distinct. Those being obligation out of a sense of duty (what you seem to be describing) and obligation out of personal loyalty/love.
I don't know much about how the US health insurance system works. If UnitedHealthcare were to shut down, why would that make things better?
It wouldn't make things better. A law called "Affordable Care Act" or Obamacare passed during Obama's tenure had the effect of degrading everyone's insurance (possibly on purpose, in order to break the system and force the country to go single-payer). As I recall it - for some reason, I can't find a link to this - one of the parts of the law was penalizing employers for offering really good insurance which, predictably, led to employers beginning to offer crappy plans instead. At the same time, cheap plans offering only catastrophic coverage, which young healthy people were buying, were legislated away, only to be replaced by the crappy plans that technically cover everything, but the deductibles are so high that you are always paying. I could go on and on - for example, the electronic medical record mandate that came with this law had as one of the effects major doctor burnout, with doctors quitting the field in droves (also it caused more healthcare spending, with money coming guess from where).
There's no point in going after an insurance company. We need a legislative change.
>At the same time, cheap plans offering only catastrophic coverage, which young healthy people were buying, were legislated away, only to be replaced by the crappy plans that technically cover everything, but the deductibles are so high that you are always paying.
"Covers everything with high deductibles" was the definition of pre-ACA catastrophic plans, so that part at least was not banned. But the plans stopped being cheap for young, healthy people because of community ratings and guaranteed issue, where insurers were required to offer plans at the same price to everyone within a broadly-defined risk pool regardless of health status. Older people can be charged higher premiums, but the difference in premiums was capped at a much lower level than the actuarial price difference.
This made insurance much more accessible and affordable to people who have expensive-to-manage chronic health issues, but at the cost of making it so that if insurance was cheap for you under the old system, it isn't anymore. It's equivalent to taxing healthy people to subsidize sick people, but with private insurance companies deputized to administer the taxes and subsidies.
I also find it hard to believe that people with expensive chronic health issues came out ahead. These people are consuming a lot of services that are not free and that became much more expensive, and the deductibles are now much higher almost everywhere.
The ACA sounds like the perfect solution for politicians. Politicians can brag about how they gave coverage to so many more people and leave the dirty work of redistribution to the insurance companies.
No kidding. Almost everyone around me lost insurance that worked for them and had to replace it with.a vastly inferior option. (The only exception I can think of was a couple that qualified for Medicaid, who I suspect qualified before as well but needed some help with the paperwork.)
But the politicians got their talking points and, by the time everyone forgot what they did, got the situation to deteriorate so much that people became a lot more sympathetic to single payer system and, as we now see, many started thinking that insurance executives should be shot. So from the politicians' point of view it was probably a huge win.
I might be wrong, but I distinctly recall pre-ACA my farmer friends buying coverage that didn't pay for regular doctor visits and such, but that would have rescued them if something really catastrophic happened.
ACA contains a lot of mandates, such as preventative care, that are supposed to make certain things free, so I don't think it can be considered a version of what I think I remember (if I understood them right, and if I remembered it right).
I asked Perplexity AI what is supposed to be free under ACA. Here's what it said (sorry about the formatting, don't know how to fix it):
"Preventive Services for All Adults
Screenings for various conditions, including:
Depression
Diabetes
Obesity
Various cancers
Sexually transmitted infections (STIs)
Counseling for:
Drug and tobacco use
Healthy eating
Other common health concerns
Immunizations for diseases such as influenza, tetanus, and COVID-19
Blood pressure, cholesterol, and diabetes tests
Preventive Services for Women
Well-woman visits
Contraception and contraceptive counseling
Breast and cervical cancer screenings
Prenatal care
Preventive Services for Children and Youth
Well-child visits from birth to age 21
Immunizations for childhood diseases
Behavioral and developmental assessments
Vision and hearing screenings
Autism screenings
Fluoride supplements
These services must be provided without any cost-sharing, meaning patients do not have to pay deductibles, copayments, or coinsurance when receiving these services from in-network providers."
Some of this stuff is cheap, but you'll notice there's some radiology and lab work there that's pretty expensive. I imagine it brings costs way up, raising both the insurance prices and the deductibles.
That's true: ACA did introduce some mandates for "diagnostic and preventative" care. This is the actual list (https://www.healthcare.gov/preventive-care-adults/), which is pretty close to the AI answer.
That said, I'm pretty sure it's the community ratings that did most of the work in raising the floor on prices. Pre-ACA, when I was in my early 20s, I bought an individual plan in California that cost about $50/month, or about $85 after adjusting for inflation. I also remember looking up similar plans from the same comparison-shopping website for a friend who lived in New Jersey, which had community ratings laws, and the cheapest plan was around $400/month (about $680 adjusted for inflation).
I did find some think tank data that claims that the ACA preventative care mandate costs about $204/person/year as of 2019 and accounts for about 3.5% of health care spending:
https://healthcostinstitute.org/hcci-originals-dropdown/all-hcci-reports/spending-on-preventive-services-represents-a-small-fraction-of-total-health-care-spending-but-costs-to-individuals-could-be-high-without-aca-protection
Thank you for educating me again (as you often do). I had to look up what "community ratings" were.
That said, I'm sure that, among other things, the EHR mandate also added to healthcare costs. A lot of studies claim that EHR systems are cost effective - but I've seen what they do, how much they cost, how people interact with them, and how they have to be managed, with my own eyes, and I'll never believe that the practices they were forced on got a good deal. Along with EHRs came useless time-sinks such as meaningful use - yes, that thing that forces every nurse to ask you weird questions with no obvious answers at the start of every visit. (On the scale of 1 to 10, how much pain are you in?)
I'm sure some cost increases weren't directly ACA's fault - I'm sure inflation contributed to healthcare costs just like to everything else. But ACA definitely was not a net positive for most people.
Step 1: Get employers out of the middle of health insurance purchasing by including the money spent as part of taxable income (the current arrangement is a tax arbitrage).
Step 2: Companies like UHC realize that patients, not HR ladies, are now the actual customer and their behavior changes for the better.
People seem to think things are genuinely better just because a Fat Cat was murdered. Like nothing else need happen - this has made their Christmas. It's especially pronounced on Reddit, of course, where I think anyone espousing a contrary view about murder would be slapped with a "Controversial" label.
I read about the Fat Cat. His father worked in a grain elevator.
Like so many of the fathers of Fat Cats.
This is a milestone in the Class Struggle.
These articles broadly undermine the assumption that it would:
https://policysphere.com/morning-briefing/big-ai-moves
https://www.vox.com/policy/390031/anthem-blue-cross-blue-shield-anesthesia-limits-insurance
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/insurance-companies-arent-the-main
Thread: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1866388501824262390.
That is not the point, my friend. You don't shut down a company by killing its CEO. This is not Lord of the Rings, where you kill Sauron and the evil goes away. Nobody is thinking like that.
The point is to reinternalize the costs—to change the boardroom calculus.
Health insurance companies—all companies, really—thrive on externalizing costs and internalizing profits. In health insurance, that's the whole business model: take in as much as you can in premiums, pay out as little as you can in coverage.
And Thompson's tenure at UnitedHealth was a years-long experiment in seeing just how low they could push that "payout" dial. When he took over as CEO two or three years ago, UHG was denying about 8% of prior authorization requests. As of this year, it's close to 24%.
(If you are truly unfamiliar with our ways: say you need a surgery that will cost $100,000. This is of course a ludicrous sum which the hospital knows you don't have, so the hospital won't do the surgery unless they have the insurance company's word—ahead of time—that they'll cover it. This is known as a "prior authorization". In practice, it means that an insurance company's AI-based claims adjuster can rule that your mother's valve replacement surgery is "not medically necessary", and then bounce you through appeals and arbitrations until she has a fatal heart attack, at which point, yeah, I guess she no longer needs a valve replacement.)
And yes, maybe someone could take them to court over this kind of thing, and win a huge penalty judgement. This is one way of re-internalizing the costs and changing the boardroom calculus. Say each additional 1% of claims they deny represents $50M in additional profit, but makes them 10% more likely to get slapped with a $1B penalty. The actuaries will tell the CEO that it's bad business, so they won't deny those additional claims! But court is a corporation's home turf, they have an army of lawyers who know every trick in the book, and if you're sick enough that you're racking up the kind of bills which would be worth going to court over, you probably won't even live long enough to find out whether or not you won.
So, absent recourse through the approved channels, this is how a consequentialist can change the calculus—can insert himself into the discussion between the actuary and the executive. "Each additional 1% of claims you deny represents $50M in additional profit, and a N% chance that your personal 15 minutes of fame begins with you bleeding out on the cold sidewalk, while your countrymen cheer for the assassin when they learn who you were and what you stood for. Solve for N. It's small but nonzero, and it's about 10 times what it was at Thanksgiving because they still haven't caught the last guy and frankly he made a pretty good show of it, what with the monopoly money and the words on the bullet casings and all."
The only thing worse than a consequentialist who thinks it's OK to murder someone because the math says so, is a consequentialist who thinks it's OK to murder someone because they got the math wrong. And this...
"Each additional 1% of claims you deny represents $50M in additional profit, and a N% chance that your personal 15 minutes of fame begins with you bleeding out on the cold sidewalk"
...shows that you have no understanding of how any of this works. Brian Thompson is the *CEO* of United Healthcare, not the owner. The owners, the people who actually get your hypothesized $50 million in extra profits, aren't the ones bleeding out on the sidewalk. They *hired* Brian Thompson to, among other things, take that risk for them while they live in heavily-guarded obscurity.
They paid him reasonably well, $10E6/year from what I hear. And he seems to have done a good job of running the company the way its owners wanted it to be run. Now they'll have to deal with the nuisance of hiring someone new, and maybe the new guy will demand twice the salary as a risk premium. That would still be less than 0.1% of United's annual profits.
So, they can get the $50 million (or whatever) in extra profits for each percent of extra claims they have their hired CEO deny for them, and have to pay out a tiny fraction of that as hazard pay for their new CEO, or they can give up all those nice profits for, why exactly would they do that again? The goodness of their hearts, and their sympathy for a community that cheers on the guy who murdered one of their employees?
And no, you can't just kill the stockholders instead. There are too many of them, and you don't know who they are, and the ones big enough that you could figure out who they are have much less exposure and much more security.
You want to be very very careful about deciding that murder is an acceptable to internalize the external costs of an entire organization/system/etc. I think that if you apply this consistently, you will end up with some results you don't like. You know what kills far _far_ more people than the most heinous of insurance companies? Every single politician, rule, and law that slows economic growth by even an iota, so I guess we should all encourage the murder of overly regulatory Democrats then!
Pick your own system. The point is, the quality of evidence that shows health care companies cause any deaths at all is exactly as good (or much worse in many cases) as the evidence that _dozens_ of other industries, organization, systems, etc. cause far _far_ more deaths and harm.
So the end result is murder of people participating in a whole host of systems across the board. Maybe you truly would be ok with this. But I don't have much to say to anyone who would honestly espouse this type of world, other than to finish with: I'm pretty sure that world would be worse than our own, so, according to your ethics, I'm allowed to kill you for advocating for it.
What are you talking about with this "economic growth" shit? When you say "pick your own system", I think you mean "that was a deliberately bad, deranged example, to demonstrate how—if you remove all the important context—the same logic could justify bad things".
And isn't that just the most classic lil strawman since Fiyero Tigelaar?
Look, you get merc'd like Thompson did when you have condemned enough people to infuriating, Kafkaesque deaths that one of their loved ones vows revenge. It is the purest example in our lifetimes of banal evil—its darkness softened by abstraction, distance, diffusion of responsibility—held to account by heroic righteousness: one of the countless individuals on the other end of those statistics, moved to act by the purely personal, inarguably solid reality of love and the grief that follows its loss.
So sure, you could theoretically kill me for saying "Assassinations can be good sometimes," but you won't, because I haven't actually done you any real harm in saying that. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, my friend.
So come kill me, or sit the fuck down and eat your pudding.
It was exactly as valid, I think actually a more valid, example than health care executives. The "Pick your system" was saying that the same level of justification that works for health insurance executives is met or exceeded in _dozens_ of other systems. Which I said explicitly.
And it's not "could" justify bad things.It DOES justify bad things. The EXACT SAME LEVEL OF EVIDENCE AND JUSTIFICATION for killing health care executives justifies killing people in dozens of industries and systems including politicians and executives of nearly every single company in the world. This is my entire point. Your argument is horrific and evil. And people like you arguing for it are making it more likely that it will happen, and you are providing justification and cover for more killings. Therefore, you are causing deaths. Therefore, according to your own logic, you deserve to die.
You are right, *I* won't kill you, because I oppose your morality with every fiber of my being. I find it disgusting.
Finally, I hope that people reading this thread can see the irony in someone celebrating and calling for even more murder calling anything else "deranged"
Oh, you were being serious! Oh boy, yeah if you genuinely think "slowing economic growth" is...like...akin to murder?
It's terminal, baby.
I don't. You do. Since you also think that "running a health insurance company is akin to murder". Remember, I'm not advocating for murder here, you are.
I find it somewhat telling that you keep ascribing your beliefs to me.
So were these denials truly willy-nilly? Based not on any science or statistics or actuarial evidence?
Bro did you delete all the stuff about your mom's UTIs?
I thought maybe it was UTI TMI for this particular audience, though in fact I do think it’s ridiculous that a doctor even needs to be involved. It should be a drugstore matter.
Was really hoping to find out more about the nature of these denials. Surely if a scandal, some outlet must have done a deep dive.
>Was really hoping to find out more about the nature of these denials. Surely if a scandal, some outlet must have done a deep dive.
CNN has an article ( https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/06/business/insurance-claim-denials-unitedhealthcare-ceo/index.html ) which includes:
>A class action lawsuit filed last year in US District Court in Minnesota argued that UnitedHealthcare uses AI “in place of real medical professionals to wrongfully deny elderly patients care,” according to the complaint. More than 90% of the denials are reversed through an internal appeal or proceedings before federal administrative law judges, the suit alleges.
Someone upthread linked to the plaintiffs' brief, which includes a fact CNN left out: more than 90% of denials *which are appealed* may be reversed... but only 0.2% of policyholders appeal their denials. The lawyers invite the court to assume that the remaining 99.8% would also appeal if only they could, but provide no evidence in support of this ambitious claim.
"This is not Lord of the Rings, where you kill Sauron and the evil goes away. Nobody is thinking like that."
Even Tolkien didn't think that. Sauron goes away, but Evil (and the problem of Evil) remains. You still have to fight it, day by day, until the end. Maybe it's not something big and obvious like a Dark Lord, but it's there and won't ever be fully conquered until the tares and wheat are both harvested together.
Rather like the Ballad of the White Horse.
"he made a pretty good show of it," - hah, good point. Is it consensus that the murder intentionally took place in full view of a security camera?
I think I read somewhere that he was crying in fear when arrested, so he hoped to get away with it. It is plausible, though, that he thought his face was hidden well enough. Honestly, I would not have clocked him a couple of days later. But somebody did.
Oh idk, I don't think it matters. The act itself is not the spectacle; the aftermath is.
Many, if not most, insurance companies are essentially not for profit. Essentially anything with "mutual" in its name. Mutual companies are owned by the shareholders, so rather than issuing a dividend, any profit they might make is given back to the shareholders through reduced rates.
Health insurance has nothing to do with health. Insurance in general is a way to make a cost relatively predictable, by spreading it out over the pool of people who may need to spend that cost. So, it's a financial arrangement. People who want health insurance that covers absolutely everything and have their employers pay for it don't realize the actual cost of that.
Insurance is supposed to cover unknowns. If you KNOW you have a certain condition, then you can predict how much it would cost you to treat it. Insurance isn't supposed to cover things like that. On the other hand, if you DEVELOP a certain condition, insurance ought to pay for treating that, based on the cost of treating it and the likelihood of you developing it. If you are one of the unfortunate few to develop the condition, then those fortunate enough NOT to develop it subsidize your cost.
So I'm saying insurance ought to be able to decline coverage (or charge appropriately) for pre-existing conditions, but NOT rescind coverage when people get sick. It's supposed to be a regulated industry, so making a profit by providing this service shouldn't be relevant.
>So I'm saying insurance ought to be able to decline coverage (or charge appropriately) for pre-existing conditions, but NOT rescind coverage when people get sick.
The trouble with this model is that you become "locked in" if you develop a chronic condition - you can't change insurers because nobody will cover your pre-existing conditions. If your health insurance comes from a job you hate (or god forbid, an abusive spouse), you're locked into that as well.
Heck, even if you never decide to change insurers voluntarily, you could still be forced out of coverage if your insurer goes out of business.
This is a reasonable criticism, but I think it can be overcome. When one first is evaluated for insurance, one's "properties" are assessed, including life expectancy and probability of developing various ailments. Those properties become fixed, so that insurance companies are all effectively re-insured, because some people will develop each ailment and most won't, so it just becomes luck of the draw whether a particular company is paying on a now chronic but previously missing condition. But those who decide to obtain insurance to cover their newly-discovered chronic conditions must pay for the certainty.
I'm not an expert in insurance, and think other ways to overcome changing insurance companies ought to be likely.
I've heard this argument before, and it always felt like a semantics debate to me.
When some people hear 'health insurance' they are NOT thinking of the kind of financial risk sharing you are describing. They are thinking of something much more closely approximating utilities like electricity and water, or services like roads and public transit. And this is also a reasonable thing to think, because (unlike, say, a car / car insurance / paying out for a car crash) you don't have the same ability to control health outcomes, ESPECIALLY in a world where we know genetics exists. If all health outcomes were entirely driven by personal choice, the risk model of health insurance maybe feels more reasonable, you could have people internalize the risks of their bad behavior by increasing their insurance premiums. In a world where you just get fucked if you have the wrong genes, idk, seems shitty?
And fwiw it seems like the broader healthcare industry also doesn't think of itself as the sort of risk sharing financial arrangement you describe. Both legally (thanks Obama!) and in practice (the standard denial of care practices in the industry are ridiculous in the model you're describing).
So every time you go into a discussion about health insurance and say 'well actually this is about spreading risk in a financially smart way', some subset of people are (in the best case) going to be very confused or (in the worst case) start yelling right past you.
I think that you're right that the _definition of insurance_ is what you describe. But unfortunately I think naming the US system 'health insurance' does everyone a disservice by conflating this risk sharing scheme with...well, whatever the fuck we have.
You may be right that it is semantics, which is to say, kind of the opposite of nominative determinism: choosing the wrong words to mean what you want. But it is also true that health insurance works like insurance. As JonF311 says, this may be the wrong model to cover health care costs.
"At the very least health insurers should be non-profit businesses and not answerable to Wall Street"
Do you think this is true even if for-profit insurance provides better coverage and service?
I'm not arguing that's the case: I'm trying to understand whether you think this is a moral question or an empirical one.
I suspect that a for-profit insurance (or "insurance") company will perform better, with a moderate degree of confidence (60-70%).
A couple reasons follow. The industry benefits from attracting investment like most others. That enable companies to embrace new technologies, compete for talent, expand to take advantage of economies of scale (when appropriate), adjust to changing circumstances, and etc.. Additionally, profits attract competition and so expose companies to at least some degree of market discipline.
I generally prefer non-profits when stability is a higher priority than functionality. (For example, when choosing long-term care for my parents.) That doesn't seem to apply here.
Help me out a little here: I think you're saying that warfare, policing, courts, and insurance belong in the same category. Why? And why aren't medical care or pharmaceuticals included in that category, per your earlier comment?
Somewhat related to the recent assassination of the CEO.
I've been thinking about it since the beginning of Russia-Ukraine war, and twice as much since the new round of escalation in Israel-Palestine. Where are all the noble assassins?
Wouldn't a world where huge conflicts between powerful entitues are resolved not by wars with tens and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civillians killed - all mostly regular people, sharing only tiny, if any part of the blame for the politics of their country, but by targeted assassination of the leaders, be a strictly better place?
Wouldn't politicians have more motivation not to escalate the conflicts when they know that they actually have a reasonable chance to die as a result of it?
Like, sure, I can see a bunch of potential issues with this source of approach, but none of then appears to be as bad as the current status quo.
There's an old Poul Anderson short story, "A Man to My Wounding," which takes place in a world where assassination has replaced war (due to a Cold War-ish fear of accidentally triggering nuclear war). The protagonist is tracking down an enemy assassin, and eventually realizes that they aren't targeting a bigwig politician. The President and all the other important politicians are too heavily guarded, so instead they're targeting a politically active university professor who *might* be President in 10 years or so, hoping to shape policy that way.
And his grim conclusion at the end of the story is that the "controlled" state of assassination is actually starting to escalate. In the same way that wars escalated from the premodern concept of "destroy the opposing army" to the total war concept of "destroy the enemy army, industry, workers, housing, and basically anything that the opposing country might benefit from," the war of assassins is going to escalate from "kill enemy leaders" to "kill enemy leaders, industrialists, scientists, and basically anyone who might influence anything."
Basically, there's no way to *force* people to stick to the norm of assassination. War is inherently escalatory - if sending an army would win you the war, why would you stick to just sending assassins?
There are very few "noble assassins" because assassination is very rarely a noble act. And assassination as a way of resolving international conflict without open warfare pretty much *never* works. Mostly, it anti-works as in the example of wannabe noble assassin Gavrilo Prinzip.
Or, at the other and more sensible end, consider all the very ignoble assassins who work for Vladimir Putin, killing Sergei and Yulia Kirpal, Alexander Litvinenko, and the scores of Russians who have exited high-rise windows in recent years. Neither moral scruples nor international norms will stay Putin's hand if he wants someone dead, and as a former FSB officer he almost certainly *prefers* assassination to e.g. military invasion.
Yet, three years ago, he decided to invade Ukraine. He does not seem to have even attempted just having Volodymyr Zelenskyy assassinated and telling his successor, "Surrender the Donbas or you're next". Why do you suppose that is?
I'm pretty sure that's because it wouldn't have worked, and the spymaster with the stable of assassins knew it wouldn't have worked.
First, because the sort of person who becomes a head of government is typically *very highly motivated* to do so, and they typically have specific goals when they do. Obtaining and taking that job requires extraordinary sacrifice, and risk of assassination is only a part of that sacrifice. They're not going to give it all up and become the puppet of some foreign potentate just because they are threatened with assassination. *You* presumably would, and so you assume others would, but you're not the sort of person who ever becomes a president or prime minister of anywhere.
Second, because if you *do* assassinate a head of government, their replacement will almost certainly be from the same party or faction and they will come into office with the strongest possible mandate to avenge their predecessor and continue in his path. They've made huge and highly-motivated sacrifices just to get to the point of being next in line, so all the above considerations apply, and now taking the final step will require the support of many powerful men who are upset that their chosen leader was killed and who want payback.
And third, because heads of government typically have very good security, and even more so if you've either threatened them with assassination or just assassinated their predecessor in hopes that they will take the hint. So if you try to assassinate them, you'll probably *fail* (see e.g. CIA vs Fidel Castro), and then you'll just be dealing with an even more pissed off head of government with stronger popular support.
There may be times when assassination can be reasonably expected to secure positive gains, by an assassin's standard of "positive" at least. But assassinating heads of government as a means of changing national policy, is rarely one of these.
I've often said that I thought Dune's War of Assassins would be preferable to normal war, with its greater collateral damage, but I don't think one could get elites to commit to the norm of only treating each other as fair game and not having their subjects used as meat shields.