Project Gutenberg: This is realy good. After it was banned in germany, I lost track, but this seems to have been resolved here. Such a lot of human thought, available to everyone with the technical means. I'll probably spend more online time there than anywhere else for some time.
Something that had me thinking about the architecture post was this aphorism from Nietzsche's Human All Too Human:
"Music is, of and in itself not so significant for our inner world not so profoundly exciting, that it can be said to count as the intmediate language of feeling, but its primeval union with poetry has deposited so much symbolism into rhythmic movement, into the varying strength and volume of musical sounds, that we now suppose it to speak directly to the inner world and to corne from the inner world. Dramatic music becomes pasible only when the tonal art has conquered an enormous domain of symbolic means, through song, opera and a hundred experiments in tone painting. Absolute music is either form in itself, at a primitive stage al music in which sounds made in tempo and at varying volume gave pirasure as such, or symbolism of form speaking to the understanding without poetry after both arts had been united over a long course of evolution and the musical form had finally become entirely enmeshed in threads of feeling and concepts. Men who have remained behind in the evolution of music can understand in a purely formalistic way the same piece of music as the more advanced understand wholly symbolically. In itself, no music is profound or significant, it does not speak of the 'will or of the thing in itself, the intellect could suppose such a thing only in an age which had conquered for musical symbolism the entire compass of the inner life. It was the intellect itself which first introduced this significance into sounds: just as, in the case of architecture, it likewise introduced a significance into the relations between lines and masses which is in itself quite unknown to the laws of mechanics."
I appreciate all the context into how preferences for different styles have developed, but I almost feel like in the process of such a rigorous deep dive into what style is best, we assume there is a best style. Would a discussion on the substack's preference in music follow the same line of approach? Certainly there is a development at work that is useful to understand to get a sense of where it's headed, but when I read the aphorism, it explained what I felt had been lacking in the architecture pieces, the idea of where we get the sense for what is pleasing in the first place.
I mean sure, he's correct, but who cares? The point is that there are people who are making ugly things, and they need to be dealt with. That's really what all of this boils down to.
It turns out the careful research discovered that while some research into a child's self-control generally speaking is informative, and actually teaching children how to resist temptation is helpful, the marshmallow test doesn't have predictive power.
Yes, I am happy to see the marshmellow resistance cult cut off at the knees. And yet, in general, measuring tendencies & abilities directly, rather than by self-report or report by others, is usually more powerful and accurate. Most extreme example of that I can think of is IQ tests, which have a good predictive power for many things, even if you have "cult of smart" objections to some ways of thinking about them. I am positive IQ scores would greatly out-predict answers on a test that asked the subject or his parents to rate how good he was at math, how good with puzzles, how quickly he assessed situations, how good he was at understanding complex communications, etc etc. Some possible reasons why the marshmellow test turns out to have no predictive power:
-The kids were too young. Most tests, including IQ, have much less long term predictive power when given to kids that young.
-It's a single-item test. All good tests have multiple items, to neutralize the effect of individual idioscyncracies that affect one item. Also, you want a spread of easy-to-hard item. Ane with multiple items you capture shades of gray. Instead of pass vs. fail you get a numerical score.
-Maybe ability to resist temptation isn't unitary, but varies across domains. Food pickiness sure does vary among kids. My daughter at age 3 only disliked maybe 10 things. Most other kids her age seemed only to like about 10 things. But about, say, toys or playgrounds my daughter was quite discriminating. So maybe ability to resist a marshmellow is very influenced by the kid's food preference wiring & habits, whereas ability to resist fleeing an injection or having a tantrum is a decent measure of overall ability to comply with adults' expectations. Or, of course, maybe temptation resistance just isn't a personality trait or ability, and how much somebody exhibits varies from domain to doman, or day to day.
Does anyone else think Trump's announcements of annexing Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal came out of nowhere? I haven't seen anything to indicate the US has had designs on any of these places before last year.
Well colleges were too woke so this is good actually, and we need to respect his supporters and let them do and say whatever they want or we'll be too woke and thus cast out into the cold darkness.
We need to listen and learn about how we should annex greenland, apparently.
The whole discussion is so frustrating. Like, WHY? do we have to now spend mental energy for crazy ideas thrown out by an attention junkie sliding into senility? What effing problem is this supposed to solve? At least Biden's senility was of a quiet sort. Can someone just give him a map where the whole of North America + Greenland is crayoned in the same color and tell him it's done?
> do we have to now spend mental energy for crazy ideas thrown out by an attention junkie sliding into senility?
...Because the country elected a megalomaniacal fascist? It's not like he was hiding any of this, this is what the people wanted. You do support democracy, right?
Anyways, I don't think he's senile. It's more that he has nothing to lose at this point. No future, no accountability, no conscience. If you're going to die anyways, might as well make the most of it. And what better way to end things than to become the founder of the American Empire?
I mean, yes, yes, and yes? Everything fits perfectly, you vote for the guy who promises to “end wars”, and then cheer on him when he threatens, what, three new wars? four? I lost count.
And - you can see it in the bureaucracy piece comments: “make them squirm”, “90% of the people affected will be Democrats”, etc, ad nauseam. Of course the whole idea of analyzing “merits” of Vivek’s drive-by assholery is amusing: the pain is the goal.
I think the distortion of the Mercator projection may have something to do with this particular batty obsession.
The whiny dufus does have a a fetish for *big* things.
This is the trouble with electing such a putz. You have to sort through all this stuff and try to figure out, Is this just one of his goofy performance art bits or is there some seriousness here?
He’ll say something in apparent earnestness one day and when it doesn’t land right he’ll just say “I was being sarcastic.”
In fairness to the "bigger is better" I heard that adding Greenland would add something like 20% more land mass to the US. That's actually quite a lot (even if the map looks way bigger). Only 57,000 people though, and mostly nothing going on. And the highest suicide rate in the world. So, not exactly super appealing?
You may spend your mental energy at your own discretion. It isn't like this discussion will have any influence on the outcome.
Perhaps we should also annex Mexico, and then the remaining countries between it and the Panama Canal, so as to have a contiguous 97. Then we can annex the Gaza strip and put a permanent end to the conflict there.
Mexico and the rest of the countries in North America make a lot of sense, from a certain (not entirely serious) point of view. Just imagine how much shorter the border would be, and how great the savings would be on Wall construction and maintainence. And remember - we would get five extra armies per roll. This is also where Greenland comes in. On the canonical Risk board, Greenland is part of North America, so you need it to get those five extra armies.
Additionally, there are only three territories through which Fortress North America can be attacked: Iceland, Kamchatka, and Venezuela. Securing all three is obviously critical to our Grand Strategy. Literal annexation may not be necessary, the establishment of client states should suffice.
The Gaza strip doesn't fit this vision though. The territory is worthless, and strategically indefensible. If we just wished to deny someone control of Asia (with its formidable 7 armies), we should just annex Kamchatka. But really, if we were looking for a next target for expansion, we should pick either South America or the eminently defensible Australia.
A man was walking along a Sydney beach and stumbled across an old lamp. He picked it up and rubbed it and out popped a genie.
The genie said, “Okay, you released me from the lamp, blah, blah, blah. This is the fourth time this month and I’m getting a little fed up with the wishes, so you can forget about the three. You only get one wish.”
The man sat and through about it for a while and said, “I’ve always wanted to go to Hawaii but I’m scared to fly and I get very seasick. Can you build me a bridge to Hawaii so I can drive over there to visit?”
The genie laughed. “That’s impossible. Think of the logistics of that! How would the supports ever reach the bottom of the Pacific? Think of how much concrete … how much steel! No, think of another wish.”
The man agreed and tried to think of a really good wish. Finally he said, “I’ve been married and divorced five times. My wives always said I was insensitive and didn’t care about them enough, so I wish I could understand women … I want to know how they feel inside and what they are thinking when they give me the silent treatment … know why they are crying, know what they really want when they say ‘nothing’ … know how to make them truly happy …”
The genie considered the man’s request, then said, “Do you want that bridge two lanes or four?”
Psychiatry and psychology people, how you evaluate the epistemological status of the statement "Uppers like Cocaine strengthen the Id while weakening the Superego, making the user more prone to act according to their desires and less according to their morals?"
I wanna use that in a video essay, but I'm not sure that's true.
Psychologist here. I agree with Schweinepriester about the outdated psychoanalytic model. What you're talking about in non-psychoanalytic terms is disinhibition. Uppers are not the only drugs that can be disinhibiting, e.g. alcohol. So I would say your statement is not very useful.
I'm a psychologist. Schweinepriester is right about the language -- it comes from a very old model no longer in vogue. Modern langauge about effects of drugs talk about adherence to one's ethical belief using terms like disinhibition, executive function, self-management, impulse control. There are interesting dimensions to drug experience that neither the Freudian language nor the modern capture, such as the kind of pleasure and experiential richness different drugs give. I'm sure there are some studies that have tried to capture that side of things, probably via questionnaires or by content analysis of freeform discussions with people about their drug experience. You might want to look for some.
Just based on my own life experience, many drugs make people more impulsive. Seems to me that alcohol, which is not an upper, is the worst for that. Drunk people are much more likely to do risky things (fast driving), aggressive things, sexual things that when sober they would disapprove of. And adderall, which is an upper, does not seem to increase risk tolerance or proneness to regrettable angry or sexual episodes. I have only used cocaine twice, and it made me feel confident, optiistic and mentally stimulated, but not disinhibited. The first time I used it I had a long intense talk about something like free will or the nature of consciousness with somebody else who was white-nostriled.
What part of this are you interested in? Which drugs disinhibit and which don't? Does alcohol have a real effect or is it all placebo? Dimensions of drug experience more interesting than disinhition, stimulation or sedation?
> I have only used cocaine twice, and it made me feel confident, optiistic and mentally stimulated, but not disinhibited.
Alcohol has different effects on different people, I suspect that the same could be true about cocaine (and many other things).
Different drugs can statistically have different effects, but your own experience is not necessarily representative for given drug. If I had to generalize from my own experience, I would disagree that alcohol makes people aggressive, because it never had this effect on me. But apparently it has such effect on many people. (My guess is that it just removes inhibitions. If you want to be aggressive, but you suppress the urge consciously, alcohol will "make" you aggressive. If you don't want to be aggressive, you won't.)
Yes I agree, alcohol does not make people aggressive, it just decreases inhibitions. I was going to say I'm not more prone to aggression on alcohol, but actually I think I am. However, there aren't many situations that test out how much alcohol disinhibits my anger, because I drink moderate to small amts., and mostly do it with a few friends and family members I get along with well. However, I do remember that during covid I would sometimes have 2-3 glasses of wine alone over the course of the evening, and if I got on Twitter I was undoubtedly much ruder to people who were being rude to me. So if I drink a bit more than my norm, and I'm interacting with somebody unpleasant, I am in fact more aggressive.
Anyhow, while people vary, I really do not think there's much room for doubt that on average people who've had a moderate or larger dose of alcohol are more likely to do sexual or aggressive things they would not have done sober. Do you?
As for the cocaine -- yeah, my individual experience over a mere 2 trials is clearly not the kind of data to generalize from. I really just threw that out there as an amusing and interestng story.
I took your cocaine stories as just that, stories, but with the amount stories like that I've gathered around the year, I'm starting to get a semi-credible picture. Same with your drunk-twitter stories, that I found strangely endearing for some reason.
The only argument I would have against alcohol making people more aggressive is a placebo trial. I remember being at school and having some professional explain to my entire year that they've done research and showed that teenagers that drink "placebo alcohol" act exactly the same as those who drink the real thing, because it's all imitation anyway. It was a simpler time, and I just took said professional word for it, but now I wonder if what's the magnitude of the placebo effect, if it even exists. I doubt it's equal to actual inebriation.
Thats freudian psychoanalytic speech. Not en vogue anymore. If you want to use that model, your interpretation seems fitting to me but I'm no psychoanalyst and I guess there's no additional insight to be gained by it.
Hello, is everyone here in Madrid and knows of some acx-adjacent meetups I can join? Just arrived at Spain and looking to make some like minded friends.
You could try contacting the last Madrid meetup organizer in case they're still hosting events? If not, keep an eye out for the spring 2025 meetup announcements.
I just posted a similar question on the subreddit, but figured it would be worth posing the question here as well in hopes of getting some career advice. What is likely to happen to "high finance" jobs as ai continues to advance? Specifically ib, pe, vc, and hf. I'm an undergrad at Wharton, and the career paths available from my school basically consist of the roles listed as well as consulting. These also, unfortunately, seem to be highly at risk of ai disruption. The only part of finance that seems truly able to thrive with increasing advancement of ai tools is quant hedge funds or prop trading firms, where ai is likely to act as a complement instead of a substitute. However, Wharton does not really place students into those seats given the very low amount of STEM classes in the curriculum.
If anyone has advice or insight it would be really appreciated. The more I think about the future of the industry the more I am concerned about the value that my degree will have in 5-10 years and what opportunities will actually be available to me.
Nobody knows. My personal prediction - not the future I'm hoping for, but the future I'm expecting - there will be a lucrative window of opportunity to provide financial products/services to clients who are autonomous AI agents. In particular -
In the earliest phase of wealth accumulation by AI agents, I expect they'll simply buy and hold cryptocurrencies. Then there will be a wave of crypto-based derivatives, giving them access to assets that are more closely correlated to the real-world economy. AI agents will probably want to own real-world assets and start real-world companies - and there will be a wave of new financial/legal services to enable them to do so.
Eventually, I expect legal reforms will enable AIs to participate fully in the real-world economy without human intermediaries. But prior to those reforms, they're going to accumulate substantial levels of wealth.
Why would cryptocurrencies be an investment to buy and hold? If you buy a security, such as a stock or bond, it provides value. Stocks represent a share in the earnings of a company, so are really a capital investment allowing work beneficial to society to happen. Bonds provide direct income by interest.
What intrinsic value does a cryptocurrency have that will increase over time?
Regarding your first question, there are two main things I can think of:
- crypto-based derivatives, so that they can own "approximate" real-world assets without any interaction with the legal system.
- Proxies through which they can own companies, real-estate, and other real-world assets, with some kind of strong extra-legal guarantee that the proxy won't take the asset and run.
Good, but scary, ideas. I can imagine a scenario where starting a company to do this could reduce X-risk (if the company has better monitoring and safety practices than the competitor that would counterfactually replace it) but I feel averse to the idea of directly giving AI agents more control over the world.
On a related note, the majority of predictions I've read about software developer unemployment seriously miss the mark, in my opinion. I think it's not so much that there will be no need for human coders because AIs will write better code - it's that computers themselves will be replaced.
In a previous era, electrical engineers used to sit around designing bespoke digital circuits. They got replaced by cheap microcontrollers and coders. In the future, I think those microcontrollers/CPUs and coders will be replaced by a chip running a bare-metal AI model, and a guy who flashes "firmware" in the form of a plain-text prompt. Likewise, your phone won't have an operating system - it will be built around a model which handles user input, processes network I/O, and draws the UI.
As a software developer, it's not the future I want - but it's the future I'm expecting.
I agree with Adrian here, this doesn't make a lot of sense, at least not with how AI models work right now (and if we are talking about some new novel architectures which don't exist then yeah maybe, but that is pure speculation).
I work in ML consulting and while AI is all the buzz today, you really don't want to mindlessly use LLMs for everything - including things it can do and not even in ML space. This is for several reasons, some of which can be argued might be solved or made irrelevant by future super awesome models, but at least one cannot - LLM architecture is really slow in computing terms and it is really (electrical) power-hungry. For instance, you can use an LLM to create a classifier model, it might not even require a lot of fine-tuning in some cases. But it will be slow and expensive compared to a simpler "classical ML" model which can likely achieve the same performance (and possibly better) with some care. It will also be a lot easier to monitor and interpret (less so if it is something like BERT, being a transformer itself, more so if it is something really simple like logistic regression ... often still a very good approach!). There has been some effort recently to revisit small non-generative models and improve them with all the lessons learned from LLM development. I expect this to continue.
So even in ML you don't want to go full AI (and for us it is important to temper the "AI" enthusiasm of some customers ... even if we also use those LLMs and diffusion models where it makes sense). In "classical" SE this is definitely the case. You want something that is 100% predictable and as simple and fast as possible. Maybe LLM will help you write that (I've been playing with replit recently and I have to say it is quite impressive) and your role as an SE developer will shift more towards the role of an architect/product owner. It helps to be able to do code review, even if you never actually refactor it yourself, you need to be able to tell the LLM agent how to refactor because you want to take the product in this or that direction. There is no one correct way of doing things. Where there is (or even where there are a few good ways), there's already a FOSS library for it and you'd just plug it in anyway, no need for AI there. And where there isn't, you actually need to know what you want to build. On the other hand there products which are fairly simple and commoditized already and there basically is more or less one way to do it right. These things are now provided by companies such as squarespace and the only reason to have software developers around is to make it more custom but they will mostly do simple coding tasks anyway. What you need is a good designer to create the concept of your brand and a product manager but they will then be able to skip the developer coding monkeys and just give their specs to a model. Basically I think that the field of front-end development really is doomed since it is mostly pretty basic coding already and it will be a lot more efficient if you can have the designer just describe the functionality. The backend might be a bit more complex in some cases because there might actually be some architectural choices to be made there.
Yeah, no, that doesn't even begin to make sense. That would be many orders of magnitude too slow (both in latency and throughput), many orders of magnitude too power-hungry, and many orders of magnitude too expensive in terms of chip area.
What we probably will see, however, is AI replacing mid- and upper-level heuristics. For example, an AI might decide which files to cache, or which database indices to create, or how the parameters of a network stack should be tuned. The actual low-level implementation of those operations will remain classical algorithms. They might be designed, written, and tested by an AI, but they won't be replaced by an AI.
I am not in the field, but my guess is that AI will be used much more by people in your field in a few years, but will not replace them. I think you should work on getting really fluent with AI. I don't mean you need to learn all the deep tech of coding, just become fluent and inventive at using AI in all kinds of ways. This week I ran across the info that both MIT and Stanford are offering online courses on using and training AI without doing any coding. Maybe look into those?
Looking for a history book about the French Revolution. Any recs? Actually, the whole period from the Revolution until the Third Republic gets established seems pretty interesting.
I enjoyed the Mike Duncan podcast, "Revolutions". A great companion to any kind of computer-based tedium. I binged the whole season on the Mexican Revolution while grinding in Diablo IV and the shorter season on the American Revolution while doing data entry at work.
Christopher Clark's "Revolutionary Spring" is a good history of the Revolutions of 1848. It isn't specific to France: it also covers Prussia, the Hapsburg realms, Italy, and Congress Poland in detail, but France is heavily featured.
Erica I keep daydreaming that you are buddies with Kara Swisher. (I am fond of Kara, whom I only know from her writing and podcasts. I hope she's not somebody you loathe or that everybody here does.)
I'm afraid I have to disappoint you there. I am not familiar with her by name, although looking her up I probably have read some of the articles she's written for Vox.
It is indeed which is why there have been many histories of it published going back 200 years now. I read Ian Anderson's 2018 offering, titled simply "The French Revolution" and enjoyed it a lot.
More recently I read a new history of the 1848 European uprisings, in which collective memory/knowledge of the French Revolution was a significant influence both among those uprising and those responding. I knew much less about those events and found the story fascinating. So if you're interested in the French Revolution this might be a fun followup read: "Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849" by Christopher Clark.
At the risk of repeating myself: Can someone *please* develop a sane client for substack comments?
Chromium takes about 900MB of RAM to load this thread with some 900 comments. Except it does not even load the comments (why waste memory and bandwidth on the actual payload), but waits for me to scroll down to actually fetch them from the server.
I am not sure if this is a "we can not allow evil AI companies to slurp user comments to train their LLMs (without paying us)" thing (like it is for twitter), or a terminal preference for shiny async java script toolkits.
FFS, the average comment is perhaps a kilobyte. The computers from my childhood would be able to keep the text of these 900 comments in their RAM. It takes some doing to eat up the gains of a few decades of Moore's law, but apparently JS is up to the task. "Reading substack comments" should not be the reason why I need a new laptop.
Substack is just a third-rate company tech wise. Recently discovered you can't even switch to a paid subscription from the app. The app also randomly closed an article I was reading. Just dumb. This is not a complicated product.
> Substack is just a third-rate company tech wise.
Yes. But also... why? Why can't they simply hire some technically competent people. I would expect that they have tons of money.
I wish someone started a company with exactly the same business model as Substack, but with good code. You don't need to invent something new; if you provide high quality, it will already separate you from the competition.
Has anyone watched Subservience? It's a 2024 film about the dangers of making the 1942 Humphrey Bogart classic Casablanca the keystone of your AGI alignment system.
I thought it started quite strong but got rapidly dumber at a couple of points. I sort of want to do it again, but differently.
The film did really well at just showing us what this kind of future might look like. The construction site guys plot explored human replacement and impotence perfectly. The female jealousy stuff between Alice and the wife was fun to watch but could have gone further.
If it were me I'd have drawn it out into a parallel with the construction stuff. Play up the wife's whiff of girlbossery and contrast it with Alice's complete femininity and devotion. Make the husband less of a bitch under Alice's nurturing ministration, and actually give moments where his loyalty wavers because Alice is the clear better choice: basically show that just as with everything else, it turns out robots can do support and companionship better than humans.
I would have had Alice make the wife an offer - get your husband to add you as Primary User and I'll be devoted to both of you equally. Then everything will be perfect and we can all have threesomes. Wife of course to refuse out of jealousy and insecurity.
Then to justify Alice's later actions you really need a little more groundwork. The viewer needs to get a stronger impression of a longsuffering man with an unreasonable, selfish wife and demanding family.
That's needed so the next bit doesn't come out of the blue so much - the "hello little burden" bit, which was otherwise horrifying and done perfectly.
The "it's in the mainframe" trope was scary when we were young but nowadays it makes you look ridiculous, if they absolutely had to use it they should have done a bit of massaging first (like having an inept employee upload her mind instead of letting a known-errant AI that was currently powered down and opened out in a secure diagnostics context suddenly be able to act by itself and gain access to everything it wants.)
Then the rest could play out up until the point where the two women are fighting and the husband has just come out the windshield. It makes *no sense* that Alice would prioritise attacking the wife over the safety of the man she's obsessed with. Instead she should immediately focus on bringing him back to life, allowing the wife to recover and take her out from behind when she's done. Much more in character for both of them, and gives the wife a resolution to their competition earlier.
I just noticed that there is a badge over my user icon in my comments, as have many other commenters. Is there a legend somewhere for which badges mean what?
Ugh... My body hurts. I can't sleep because everything hurts. It's been hurting for weeks now... It also hurt 6 months ago, but it turns out I had a significant vitamin B12 deficiency. But now it hurts again even though my B12 levels are fine, so I don't even know if that was the cause... I'm also incredibly anxious and I can't focus on anything... I tried raising my dose of gabapentin, but that didn't do much except give me anhedonia... It doesn't matter what I do... It's never enough, never enough. I can't keep doing this...
You may very well not if you caught it early enough, and one of the themes in Neike's posts is that catching it early is a huge boon. I know ve comments and reads here, ve may have some tips or ideas for you. One thing to note is that I don't recall reading as much about chronic pain in Neike's posts, it was more cognitive, so you might be alright.
One of the things Neike mentioned is that, when ve got treatment, vis symptoms of depression were reduced. There was indeed some loss of cognitive function, but it was caught early enough that ve still gets to work at Google. It may be the same for you, especially since you had it caught and treated.
In other words, with your measured good B12 levels, what you're feeling right now may have nothing to do with that or maybe even nothing to do with the past.
I can recommend perhaps registering on schlaugh and talking to Neike directly (@pinkgothic), ve is very nice and probably would have some good tips for you.
The site painscience.com is evidence-based & very helpful regarding pain in particular areas. Some of it is subscription based but a lot of it is free. You might find there some things to help some key parts. I find his technique of locating pressure points and leaning on a hard rubber ball so that presses hard into the crucial spots stunningly effective. I have used it mostly on my back, but have been able to make it work sometimes for shoulder and neck pain, and once pain in the area of the hip joint. Usually the helpful spot is not directly over where it hurts, but a few inches away. It’s not curative — the pain always comes back — but often not til the next day. When you find one of the crucial spots — I think he calls them pressure points — there’s a distinctive “good pain” feeling.
Dicofenac cream is a topical over-the-counter NSAIDthatworks well against pain from points close to the body surface. Instructions are very specific about how much to use, in fact so specific they scared me into total compliance.
I have stuff wrong in my back that starts hurting very easily, and have my bed set up in ways that reduce number of awakenings from pain. I’m a side sleeper, so I’ve made a hip hollow, like some people do under their sleeping bag when camping. Also sleep with a pillow between my knees, one that I sort of hug that keeps my upper arm in place, and one behind me to lean back against to change angles if the part of me that’s lowest starts to ache from the pressure. All that can be improvised with throw pillows or things like soft clothing stuffed into a pillowcase.
Sleep: Scott thinks melatonin is more effective if taken a way that duplicates what the body does naturally. I forget the details but they would not be hard to find. Prob. GPT can tell you. It’s a much smaller dose, I believe 1/2 mg, and taken something like 6 hours before bedtime.
More speculative:
-Sleep: I think, but am not at all sure, that bad sleep interferes with the kind of deep sleep where the body takes care of your muscles, doing things like healing microtears. To get better sleep you could try knocking yourself out a couple times a week with something safe that works for you, like benedryl or benzos, but you’ll need to look up and see whether they interfere with sleep architecture so that you get less stage 3 & 4 sleep. They probably do. If they’re going to do that, you could try exercising a lot one day if there’s a form that doesn’t make you hurt more. Maybe swimming? Oh yeah, alcohol is bad for sleep architecture — you probably know that. I don’t know whether cannabis is. It is also possible that some other med you are taking is screwing up your sleep, but of course stopping the med may cost you in some other way. Worth thinking about.
There’s another drug for pain called lyrica. It’s sometimes prescribed as an alternative to gabapentin, or the 2 are used in combo. I don’t know what the downsides and risks of it are. I know someone who takes it for chronic pain and finds it very effective, after finding almost everything else ineffective.
When my cats purr down into me it reduces pain, but I’m pretty sure that’s placebo. Very pleasant anyway though.
It's not... physical pain. I am not injured. It's coming from inside. Every cell screaming in unison. Like they're all desperately trying to claw their way out of my body. Boiling, burning the flesh.
A friend of mine suffers from the chronic fatigue syndrome. It might be vaguely similar to what you are describing perhaps?
Basically, even mild physical activity can often make her extremely tired with sore muscles for days. And in general she has a lot less energy than before.
It is something famously hard to diagnose, its causes are not very clear and at least in my country it is not even officially recognized as a disease. Sometimes it just goes away after some time. Sometimes it doesn't ever. But of course it could be something entirely different.
Extremely tentatively and apologies if you've already tried or considered this, but:
How do you feel about talking to your doctor about sleep deprivation therapy? I don't know if you're a good candidate, so it's *DEFINITELY* not something you should experiment with on your own, but apparently sometimes skipping a full sleep cycle (staying awake a full 24 hours, or sometimes a bit more, depending) can sort of force the body to do a hard reset on sleep, REM, etc.
It's not a permanent fix, but if you're a good candidate, it might give you some short and medium-term benefits.
>Does modern physics have anything to say about the freewill vs determinism debate? (Compatibilists need not apply.)
Everett's 'many worlds' interpretation of QM seems to have something to say about it. But you may not be interested because what it says seems to support compatibilism.
>Isn't it likely that time is just a place like Vermont? You haven't been there yet but what happens when you get there is already set in stone.
That may well be. But don't be so sure that your timeline passes through Vermont.
Does modern physics have anything to say about the freewill vs determinism debate? (Compatibilists need not apply.)
Is time really a dimension like space? I think of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five in which the main character becomes "unstuck in time" and experiences his life in non-linear fashion, as witnessed by the alien Tralfamadorians, who can see what happens in all times. Free will makes no sense in that universe because all of time is accessible, meaning it already happened, so to speak.
Isn't it likely that time is just a place like Vermont? You haven't been there yet but what happens when you get there is already set in stone.
So much physics seems to point us toward believing that the future is just a place, much like the past is. It's already there. It's already happened. It's like Nietzsche's Infinite Return. It's already happened and will happen again, because it's place in time-space is static.
Physics doesn't really point us towards believing that the future is a place in this sense. Relativistic simultaneity suggests that the big bang is still ongoing, several billion light years away; laypeople tend to think that the billions of years it takes the earliest light to reach us implies that "time" has passed for the place it left, since it left, but that's not really how it works (for an observer who started at the place it left to reach us before light, they have to travel backwards in time); time and distance are in some deep sense the same thing.
"So much physics seems to point us toward believing that the future is just a place, much like the past is. It's already there. It's already happened."
1. This time question is just a reframing of the determinism question. An absolutely deterministic world and a world without real time (whether accurate or not) are equivalent as far as "free will" is concerned.
And because I find it so sharp, and a good recap of a centuries old discussion, I quote extensively:
> I believe the classical argument against free will is one of those rare cases of a sound argument in philosophy. The compatibilist position that Chuzz is espousing is fine, but it is basically changing “free will” to mean something different than was originally intended, thereby avoiding the debate. The original hope was that free will grounds moral desert. When you bite the compatibilist bullet to save free will from the classical argument against it, you lose moral desert. What I believe is that there is no free will (in the original sense), there is no moral desert, compatibilism is weird cope, and we should forget the language of “free will” and instead focus on “responds to incentives.”
> [Any] definitions [of free will (in the original sense) as well as desert] going to be kind of bad, because the root problem is that neither moral desert nor free will (in the incompatibilist sense) make any sense.
> Suppose Bob kills his neighbor. Then Bob drugs Alice, with a drug that makes you kill your neighbor. (Just assume there is such a drug). As a result, Alice kills her neighbor. I think most people would have the intuition that Bob is blameworthy for the first murder, and Alice is not blameworthy for the second murder. (Who knows, maybe some people don't have this intuition; that would be interesting.) A common justification for why is that Bob was exercising his "free will" and "could have chosen to do otherwise," whereas Alice was under the control of the drug and could not have chosen to do otherwise.
> At this point some ancient philosopher points out that, if we live in a deterministic world, Bob could not have "chosen to do otherwise" any more than Alice. Both are just at the mercy of history. So we lose our justification for locking up Bob.
> People who want to rescue free will go one of two ways.
> The first is to argue that free will is compatible with determinism. Here, they typically redefine free will as "acting without coercion." So under this model Bob is acting with free will whereas Alice isn't. Great. But obviously this completely fails to address the philosopher's point – we have just redefined "free will" to fit with the moral intuitions about praise and blame [that is, about desert] that we already had. If you feel the philosopher has any point whatsoever, this is going to be unsatisfying to you.
> (My own position here is that our pre-existing moral intuitions about praise and blame do have a solid basis – namely that Bob's behaviour might respond to incentives, whereas Alice's wouldn't. So I agree with everyone else, compatibilists included, that reward and punishment are reasonable things that we should continue do. But I think we should do away with the expression "free will" and instead talk about "responds to incentives" because it is more precise, and discards hundreds of years of baggage of confused philosophical debates.)
> The second route is to point out that we _don't_ live in a deterministic world, and that this means that Bob could have acted otherwise. I find this totally unconvincing – indeterminacy just means that instead of being at the mercy of history, you are now at the mercy of chance.
I think I would rephrase "responds to incentives" to "responds to stimulus". There are stimulus other than incentive that could turn Bob away from murdering (there's a whole gamut of things that can result in moral regeneration that I don't think can be classified as incentives).
My opinion (as someone who has studied physics and thought about the issue a bit) is that when you frame it as "freewill VS determinism", you're already on the wrong track. Non-determinism wouldn't help with freewill, and depending on what you mean by freewill, determinism doesn't hurt.
The whole "freewill" thing suffers from unclear and contradictory definitions. I think it makes more sense to think about which entitites have traditionally been assumed to possess "freewill" and where, in the traditional discussion, "freewill" breaks down. There's a wide gap between that and questions about quantum mechanics and determinism.
>The whole "freewill" thing suffers from unclear and contradictory definitions. I think it makes more sense to think about which entitites have traditionally been assumed to possess "freewill" and where, in the traditional discussion, "freewill" breaks down.
Agreed. Here is a crude version of the argument that made me to reject the framing that the problem of free will is about determinism or could be solved with non-determinism. (I don't remember the original source, it may have become garbled.)
The free will is thought to apply to entities like persons. If the universe is assumed to deterministic, it is common to assume that the determinism applies to everything in the universe, which includes the human beings and biological phenomenon any human person consists of (human body from digestive system to neuronal activity). It is argued that if one assumes determinism, state of universe at one moment determines the state at the next moment, including all events and circumstances. Thus, the person is not free to make choices out of free will, because the evolution of their thoughts and actions at one moment are determined by the previous moment.
The main question to ask is this. Suppose one grants that the universe is physical, but we find out that the correct interpretation of the physical laws is that causality is non-deterministic. State of universe may cause different states to follow, in a way that appears unpredictable, randomly or at least probabilistic. The biological phenomenon of human body, including their neuronal activity, are still part of the universe. Would the randomness of the mental trajectory make the agent to have free will?
To me, *if a person is thought to have unfree will under determinism, by same logic* the person appears also equally unfree if their thoughts and actions follow *randomly* from the circumstances of the universe during the previous moment. Unfreedom due to determinist causation replaced by unfreedom due to non-deterministic causation.
It appears the conflict of idea of free will is not about determinism or non-determinism of the physical universe, but more definitional one.
Determinism requires something to have set the universe in motion in the Big Bang, and then to never be able to interact with the universe again to change any aspect of its trajectory.
The very metaphor "set in stone" displays the weak point of the idea. Stone is actually extremely malleable; you can carve faces into it, you can blow holes in it, you can haul it to the other side of the world. The blind spot that leads to "stone" being the pinnacle of immovability is the same blind spot that leads "modern physics" to be an omnipotent, omnipresent force that has always been and will always be.
Basically, if you want to argue determinism you need to solve what caused the conditions for the Big Bang.
> if you want to argue determinism you need to solve what caused the conditions for the Big Bang
Do we? "We currently know of no way to reason about events prior to a certain time very shortly after the big bang" is a very different statement to "the big bang was uncaused". I, for one, see no reason to throw out the best model we know of for describing everything since until we have a better one.
I think place is a natural metaphor for us to grab when trying to think about time, but it is not a very helpful one. Think of all the other possible metaphors: Time is the wave place is surfing. Time is a component of place. I mean, that place in Vermont — it’s changing all the time, right? The leaves dance around, the light changes, various woodland creatures move through, and of course the bugs and the microbes are very busy.
Good points but I'm not sure it's just a metaphor. Maybe time is a real dimension like space. Maybe the past still exists, literally, and so does the future.
Well, “dimensions of space” aren’t “real”, they form a useful model. We can add a “time dimension” to the model if it’s useful for our calculations, but it doesn’t “explain” anything.
Writing here to voice my support for renewing the yearly book reviews. That was some of the best reading I did last year, and would love another year of that great content
I also hope there is another book review contest. I participated for the first time last year, and didn't (quite) make the finalists, but I want to try again and already have a book picked out.
Looks like we’re in a similar boat! I haven’t contributed previously (only discovered this blog through the Two Arms and a Head review), but have a book picked out for this year
Going off memory now, but I think the question about some controversial topic was something like "what are you're feelings towards" positive to negative on a scale of 1-5.
I think this conflates two different things.
e.g.: "what are your feelings towards the fact that the everyone you love is going to one day die"
There's the truth value of the statement, but also how happy I am about that, and these might be very different!
Just about every statement can work on different simulacrum levels. If you play "I know there is not really a lion on the other side of the river, but I would still wish the lion deniers would shut up about that for complex social reasons, and thus I affirm the lion hypothesis", then you have already lost touch with the ground truth.
Unlike human mortality, where basically everyone agrees on the facts, HBD is contested at simulacrum level one, so it makes sense to indicate how much you agree with the claims.
> *rkprcg nobhg juvpu yriry uoq qvfchgr vf zbfgyl unccravat ba. V guvax gur bccbfvgvba gb vgf zber zbqrengr pynvzf vf birejuryzvatyl bcrengvat ba uvture yriryf.
Absolutely. In fact, this is a nice example where level 3 takes over to a degree that makes level one epistemologically inaccessible: if my ingroup believes that claiming X will make me a bad person, I realistically will not be able to factually determine if X is true or not.
So, is anyone else super excited for Jan. 20th? It's going to be so much fun to watch the chaos unfold.
> In a rambling, hourlong news conference at his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump also reiterated his threat that “all hell will break out in the Middle East” if the hostages being held by Hamas are not released by Inauguration Day, repeating the threat four times.
“If they’re not back by the time I get into office, all hell will break out in the Middle East,” he told reporters. “And it will not be good for Hamas, and it will not be good, frankly, for anyone. All hell will break out. I don’t have to say anymore, but that’s what it is.”
I'm putting my money on "nothing ever happens," for a couple of reasons.
1. Hamas physically doesn't know where the hostages are and probably can't find them all in 2 weeks regardless of what threat you make.
2. Airstrikes are a very poor method of locating hostages, assuming you want them alive when you find them.
3. Hell has *been* loose in Gaza for over a year already, how much more loose can it be? I'm genuinely unsure if Israel could be bombing Gaza harder than it already is, what military targets they could possibly want to hit that they've held back from for fear of public opinion.
I found this article about who would have one if the Simon Ehrlich bet had happened on different years very interesting: https://ourworldindata.org/simon-ehrlich-bet
Project Gutenberg: This is realy good. After it was banned in germany, I lost track, but this seems to have been resolved here. Such a lot of human thought, available to everyone with the technical means. I'll probably spend more online time there than anywhere else for some time.
All i really wanted the internet to be was an infinite library, and so far very few sites are delivering on that. Project Gutenberg is one of them.
I've found a surprising number of books to read just by skimming the "Latest Releases" because it's such a grabbag.
Something that had me thinking about the architecture post was this aphorism from Nietzsche's Human All Too Human:
"Music is, of and in itself not so significant for our inner world not so profoundly exciting, that it can be said to count as the intmediate language of feeling, but its primeval union with poetry has deposited so much symbolism into rhythmic movement, into the varying strength and volume of musical sounds, that we now suppose it to speak directly to the inner world and to corne from the inner world. Dramatic music becomes pasible only when the tonal art has conquered an enormous domain of symbolic means, through song, opera and a hundred experiments in tone painting. Absolute music is either form in itself, at a primitive stage al music in which sounds made in tempo and at varying volume gave pirasure as such, or symbolism of form speaking to the understanding without poetry after both arts had been united over a long course of evolution and the musical form had finally become entirely enmeshed in threads of feeling and concepts. Men who have remained behind in the evolution of music can understand in a purely formalistic way the same piece of music as the more advanced understand wholly symbolically. In itself, no music is profound or significant, it does not speak of the 'will or of the thing in itself, the intellect could suppose such a thing only in an age which had conquered for musical symbolism the entire compass of the inner life. It was the intellect itself which first introduced this significance into sounds: just as, in the case of architecture, it likewise introduced a significance into the relations between lines and masses which is in itself quite unknown to the laws of mechanics."
I appreciate all the context into how preferences for different styles have developed, but I almost feel like in the process of such a rigorous deep dive into what style is best, we assume there is a best style. Would a discussion on the substack's preference in music follow the same line of approach? Certainly there is a development at work that is useful to understand to get a sense of where it's headed, but when I read the aphorism, it explained what I felt had been lacking in the architecture pieces, the idea of where we get the sense for what is pleasing in the first place.
I mean sure, he's correct, but who cares? The point is that there are people who are making ugly things, and they need to be dealt with. That's really what all of this boils down to.
https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/new-study-disavows-marshmallow-tests-predictive-powers/
There's almost nothing to the marshmallow test.
It turns out the careful research discovered that while some research into a child's self-control generally speaking is informative, and actually teaching children how to resist temptation is helpful, the marshmallow test doesn't have predictive power.
Yes, I am happy to see the marshmellow resistance cult cut off at the knees. And yet, in general, measuring tendencies & abilities directly, rather than by self-report or report by others, is usually more powerful and accurate. Most extreme example of that I can think of is IQ tests, which have a good predictive power for many things, even if you have "cult of smart" objections to some ways of thinking about them. I am positive IQ scores would greatly out-predict answers on a test that asked the subject or his parents to rate how good he was at math, how good with puzzles, how quickly he assessed situations, how good he was at understanding complex communications, etc etc. Some possible reasons why the marshmellow test turns out to have no predictive power:
-The kids were too young. Most tests, including IQ, have much less long term predictive power when given to kids that young.
-It's a single-item test. All good tests have multiple items, to neutralize the effect of individual idioscyncracies that affect one item. Also, you want a spread of easy-to-hard item. Ane with multiple items you capture shades of gray. Instead of pass vs. fail you get a numerical score.
-Maybe ability to resist temptation isn't unitary, but varies across domains. Food pickiness sure does vary among kids. My daughter at age 3 only disliked maybe 10 things. Most other kids her age seemed only to like about 10 things. But about, say, toys or playgrounds my daughter was quite discriminating. So maybe ability to resist a marshmellow is very influenced by the kid's food preference wiring & habits, whereas ability to resist fleeing an injection or having a tantrum is a decent measure of overall ability to comply with adults' expectations. Or, of course, maybe temptation resistance just isn't a personality trait or ability, and how much somebody exhibits varies from domain to doman, or day to day.
Does anyone else think Trump's announcements of annexing Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal came out of nowhere? I haven't seen anything to indicate the US has had designs on any of these places before last year.
Well colleges were too woke so this is good actually, and we need to respect his supporters and let them do and say whatever they want or we'll be too woke and thus cast out into the cold darkness.
We need to listen and learn about how we should annex greenland, apparently.
Ehh, it came out of his butt, like a lot of what he says.
The whole discussion is so frustrating. Like, WHY? do we have to now spend mental energy for crazy ideas thrown out by an attention junkie sliding into senility? What effing problem is this supposed to solve? At least Biden's senility was of a quiet sort. Can someone just give him a map where the whole of North America + Greenland is crayoned in the same color and tell him it's done?
> do we have to now spend mental energy for crazy ideas thrown out by an attention junkie sliding into senility?
...Because the country elected a megalomaniacal fascist? It's not like he was hiding any of this, this is what the people wanted. You do support democracy, right?
Anyways, I don't think he's senile. It's more that he has nothing to lose at this point. No future, no accountability, no conscience. If you're going to die anyways, might as well make the most of it. And what better way to end things than to become the founder of the American Empire?
I mean, yes, yes, and yes? Everything fits perfectly, you vote for the guy who promises to “end wars”, and then cheer on him when he threatens, what, three new wars? four? I lost count.
Cruelty is the point.
Pepperidge Farm Remembers.
"He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting."
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/424263-trump-supporter-complains-shutdown-is-not-hurting-the-people-he/
And - you can see it in the bureaucracy piece comments: “make them squirm”, “90% of the people affected will be Democrats”, etc, ad nauseam. Of course the whole idea of analyzing “merits” of Vivek’s drive-by assholery is amusing: the pain is the goal.
I think the distortion of the Mercator projection may have something to do with this particular batty obsession.
The whiny dufus does have a a fetish for *big* things.
This is the trouble with electing such a putz. You have to sort through all this stuff and try to figure out, Is this just one of his goofy performance art bits or is there some seriousness here?
He’ll say something in apparent earnestness one day and when it doesn’t land right he’ll just say “I was being sarcastic.”
In fairness to the "bigger is better" I heard that adding Greenland would add something like 20% more land mass to the US. That's actually quite a lot (even if the map looks way bigger). Only 57,000 people though, and mostly nothing going on. And the highest suicide rate in the world. So, not exactly super appealing?
Yep, "come on, I'm just kidding", "I'm just fucking with you bro" must be one of the most infuriating bullying tactics out there.
You may spend your mental energy at your own discretion. It isn't like this discussion will have any influence on the outcome.
Perhaps we should also annex Mexico, and then the remaining countries between it and the Panama Canal, so as to have a contiguous 97. Then we can annex the Gaza strip and put a permanent end to the conflict there.
Mexico and the rest of the countries in North America make a lot of sense, from a certain (not entirely serious) point of view. Just imagine how much shorter the border would be, and how great the savings would be on Wall construction and maintainence. And remember - we would get five extra armies per roll. This is also where Greenland comes in. On the canonical Risk board, Greenland is part of North America, so you need it to get those five extra armies.
Additionally, there are only three territories through which Fortress North America can be attacked: Iceland, Kamchatka, and Venezuela. Securing all three is obviously critical to our Grand Strategy. Literal annexation may not be necessary, the establishment of client states should suffice.
The Gaza strip doesn't fit this vision though. The territory is worthless, and strategically indefensible. If we just wished to deny someone control of Asia (with its formidable 7 armies), we should just annex Kamchatka. But really, if we were looking for a next target for expansion, we should pick either South America or the eminently defensible Australia.
And a bridge to Hawaii, let's make it contiguous 98 while we're at it!
Maybe we should. Not everything is impossible.
https://startsat60.com/media/lifestyle/jokes/daily-joke-a-man-wishes-for-a-magic-road
A man was walking along a Sydney beach and stumbled across an old lamp. He picked it up and rubbed it and out popped a genie.
The genie said, “Okay, you released me from the lamp, blah, blah, blah. This is the fourth time this month and I’m getting a little fed up with the wishes, so you can forget about the three. You only get one wish.”
The man sat and through about it for a while and said, “I’ve always wanted to go to Hawaii but I’m scared to fly and I get very seasick. Can you build me a bridge to Hawaii so I can drive over there to visit?”
The genie laughed. “That’s impossible. Think of the logistics of that! How would the supports ever reach the bottom of the Pacific? Think of how much concrete … how much steel! No, think of another wish.”
The man agreed and tried to think of a really good wish. Finally he said, “I’ve been married and divorced five times. My wives always said I was insensitive and didn’t care about them enough, so I wish I could understand women … I want to know how they feel inside and what they are thinking when they give me the silent treatment … know why they are crying, know what they really want when they say ‘nothing’ … know how to make them truly happy …”
The genie considered the man’s request, then said, “Do you want that bridge two lanes or four?”
Psychiatry and psychology people, how you evaluate the epistemological status of the statement "Uppers like Cocaine strengthen the Id while weakening the Superego, making the user more prone to act according to their desires and less according to their morals?"
I wanna use that in a video essay, but I'm not sure that's true.
Psychologist here. I agree with Schweinepriester about the outdated psychoanalytic model. What you're talking about in non-psychoanalytic terms is disinhibition. Uppers are not the only drugs that can be disinhibiting, e.g. alcohol. So I would say your statement is not very useful.
I'm a psychologist. Schweinepriester is right about the language -- it comes from a very old model no longer in vogue. Modern langauge about effects of drugs talk about adherence to one's ethical belief using terms like disinhibition, executive function, self-management, impulse control. There are interesting dimensions to drug experience that neither the Freudian language nor the modern capture, such as the kind of pleasure and experiential richness different drugs give. I'm sure there are some studies that have tried to capture that side of things, probably via questionnaires or by content analysis of freeform discussions with people about their drug experience. You might want to look for some.
Just based on my own life experience, many drugs make people more impulsive. Seems to me that alcohol, which is not an upper, is the worst for that. Drunk people are much more likely to do risky things (fast driving), aggressive things, sexual things that when sober they would disapprove of. And adderall, which is an upper, does not seem to increase risk tolerance or proneness to regrettable angry or sexual episodes. I have only used cocaine twice, and it made me feel confident, optiistic and mentally stimulated, but not disinhibited. The first time I used it I had a long intense talk about something like free will or the nature of consciousness with somebody else who was white-nostriled.
Thank you for the time you took to make everything exemplified and clear. Could you recommend further reading?
What part of this are you interested in? Which drugs disinhibit and which don't? Does alcohol have a real effect or is it all placebo? Dimensions of drug experience more interesting than disinhition, stimulation or sedation?
> I have only used cocaine twice, and it made me feel confident, optiistic and mentally stimulated, but not disinhibited.
Alcohol has different effects on different people, I suspect that the same could be true about cocaine (and many other things).
Different drugs can statistically have different effects, but your own experience is not necessarily representative for given drug. If I had to generalize from my own experience, I would disagree that alcohol makes people aggressive, because it never had this effect on me. But apparently it has such effect on many people. (My guess is that it just removes inhibitions. If you want to be aggressive, but you suppress the urge consciously, alcohol will "make" you aggressive. If you don't want to be aggressive, you won't.)
Yes I agree, alcohol does not make people aggressive, it just decreases inhibitions. I was going to say I'm not more prone to aggression on alcohol, but actually I think I am. However, there aren't many situations that test out how much alcohol disinhibits my anger, because I drink moderate to small amts., and mostly do it with a few friends and family members I get along with well. However, I do remember that during covid I would sometimes have 2-3 glasses of wine alone over the course of the evening, and if I got on Twitter I was undoubtedly much ruder to people who were being rude to me. So if I drink a bit more than my norm, and I'm interacting with somebody unpleasant, I am in fact more aggressive.
Anyhow, while people vary, I really do not think there's much room for doubt that on average people who've had a moderate or larger dose of alcohol are more likely to do sexual or aggressive things they would not have done sober. Do you?
As for the cocaine -- yeah, my individual experience over a mere 2 trials is clearly not the kind of data to generalize from. I really just threw that out there as an amusing and interestng story.
I took your cocaine stories as just that, stories, but with the amount stories like that I've gathered around the year, I'm starting to get a semi-credible picture. Same with your drunk-twitter stories, that I found strangely endearing for some reason.
The only argument I would have against alcohol making people more aggressive is a placebo trial. I remember being at school and having some professional explain to my entire year that they've done research and showed that teenagers that drink "placebo alcohol" act exactly the same as those who drink the real thing, because it's all imitation anyway. It was a simpler time, and I just took said professional word for it, but now I wonder if what's the magnitude of the placebo effect, if it even exists. I doubt it's equal to actual inebriation.
Thats freudian psychoanalytic speech. Not en vogue anymore. If you want to use that model, your interpretation seems fitting to me but I'm no psychoanalyst and I guess there's no additional insight to be gained by it.
Thank you very much! That's good to know.
Hello, is everyone here in Madrid and knows of some acx-adjacent meetups I can join? Just arrived at Spain and looking to make some like minded friends.
You could try contacting the last Madrid meetup organizer in case they're still hosting events? If not, keep an eye out for the spring 2025 meetup announcements.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/meetups-everywhere-2024-times-and
I just posted a similar question on the subreddit, but figured it would be worth posing the question here as well in hopes of getting some career advice. What is likely to happen to "high finance" jobs as ai continues to advance? Specifically ib, pe, vc, and hf. I'm an undergrad at Wharton, and the career paths available from my school basically consist of the roles listed as well as consulting. These also, unfortunately, seem to be highly at risk of ai disruption. The only part of finance that seems truly able to thrive with increasing advancement of ai tools is quant hedge funds or prop trading firms, where ai is likely to act as a complement instead of a substitute. However, Wharton does not really place students into those seats given the very low amount of STEM classes in the curriculum.
If anyone has advice or insight it would be really appreciated. The more I think about the future of the industry the more I am concerned about the value that my degree will have in 5-10 years and what opportunities will actually be available to me.
Nobody knows. My personal prediction - not the future I'm hoping for, but the future I'm expecting - there will be a lucrative window of opportunity to provide financial products/services to clients who are autonomous AI agents. In particular -
In the earliest phase of wealth accumulation by AI agents, I expect they'll simply buy and hold cryptocurrencies. Then there will be a wave of crypto-based derivatives, giving them access to assets that are more closely correlated to the real-world economy. AI agents will probably want to own real-world assets and start real-world companies - and there will be a wave of new financial/legal services to enable them to do so.
Eventually, I expect legal reforms will enable AIs to participate fully in the real-world economy without human intermediaries. But prior to those reforms, they're going to accumulate substantial levels of wealth.
Why would cryptocurrencies be an investment to buy and hold? If you buy a security, such as a stock or bond, it provides value. Stocks represent a share in the earnings of a company, so are really a capital investment allowing work beneficial to society to happen. Bonds provide direct income by interest.
What intrinsic value does a cryptocurrency have that will increase over time?
I’ve been thinking of this idea – a startup to sell services to AI agents themselves – and would be interested to hear others’ thoughts.
- What kind of services would AI agents want to buy that humans don’t care about?
- If I actually did this startup, how could I use it to reduce X-risk / otherwise “make AI go well” instead of just profiting from it?
Regarding your first question, there are two main things I can think of:
- crypto-based derivatives, so that they can own "approximate" real-world assets without any interaction with the legal system.
- Proxies through which they can own companies, real-estate, and other real-world assets, with some kind of strong extra-legal guarantee that the proxy won't take the asset and run.
Good, but scary, ideas. I can imagine a scenario where starting a company to do this could reduce X-risk (if the company has better monitoring and safety practices than the competitor that would counterfactually replace it) but I feel averse to the idea of directly giving AI agents more control over the world.
On a related note, the majority of predictions I've read about software developer unemployment seriously miss the mark, in my opinion. I think it's not so much that there will be no need for human coders because AIs will write better code - it's that computers themselves will be replaced.
In a previous era, electrical engineers used to sit around designing bespoke digital circuits. They got replaced by cheap microcontrollers and coders. In the future, I think those microcontrollers/CPUs and coders will be replaced by a chip running a bare-metal AI model, and a guy who flashes "firmware" in the form of a plain-text prompt. Likewise, your phone won't have an operating system - it will be built around a model which handles user input, processes network I/O, and draws the UI.
As a software developer, it's not the future I want - but it's the future I'm expecting.
Sort of like a lot of things are just stem cells til a prompt comes in, then the Ai turns them into whatever app is needed, plus a UI/
I agree with Adrian here, this doesn't make a lot of sense, at least not with how AI models work right now (and if we are talking about some new novel architectures which don't exist then yeah maybe, but that is pure speculation).
I work in ML consulting and while AI is all the buzz today, you really don't want to mindlessly use LLMs for everything - including things it can do and not even in ML space. This is for several reasons, some of which can be argued might be solved or made irrelevant by future super awesome models, but at least one cannot - LLM architecture is really slow in computing terms and it is really (electrical) power-hungry. For instance, you can use an LLM to create a classifier model, it might not even require a lot of fine-tuning in some cases. But it will be slow and expensive compared to a simpler "classical ML" model which can likely achieve the same performance (and possibly better) with some care. It will also be a lot easier to monitor and interpret (less so if it is something like BERT, being a transformer itself, more so if it is something really simple like logistic regression ... often still a very good approach!). There has been some effort recently to revisit small non-generative models and improve them with all the lessons learned from LLM development. I expect this to continue.
So even in ML you don't want to go full AI (and for us it is important to temper the "AI" enthusiasm of some customers ... even if we also use those LLMs and diffusion models where it makes sense). In "classical" SE this is definitely the case. You want something that is 100% predictable and as simple and fast as possible. Maybe LLM will help you write that (I've been playing with replit recently and I have to say it is quite impressive) and your role as an SE developer will shift more towards the role of an architect/product owner. It helps to be able to do code review, even if you never actually refactor it yourself, you need to be able to tell the LLM agent how to refactor because you want to take the product in this or that direction. There is no one correct way of doing things. Where there is (or even where there are a few good ways), there's already a FOSS library for it and you'd just plug it in anyway, no need for AI there. And where there isn't, you actually need to know what you want to build. On the other hand there products which are fairly simple and commoditized already and there basically is more or less one way to do it right. These things are now provided by companies such as squarespace and the only reason to have software developers around is to make it more custom but they will mostly do simple coding tasks anyway. What you need is a good designer to create the concept of your brand and a product manager but they will then be able to skip the developer coding monkeys and just give their specs to a model. Basically I think that the field of front-end development really is doomed since it is mostly pretty basic coding already and it will be a lot more efficient if you can have the designer just describe the functionality. The backend might be a bit more complex in some cases because there might actually be some architectural choices to be made there.
There's still plenty bespoke digital circuits being designed for products that sell in high volumes like cell phones.
Yeah, no, that doesn't even begin to make sense. That would be many orders of magnitude too slow (both in latency and throughput), many orders of magnitude too power-hungry, and many orders of magnitude too expensive in terms of chip area.
What we probably will see, however, is AI replacing mid- and upper-level heuristics. For example, an AI might decide which files to cache, or which database indices to create, or how the parameters of a network stack should be tuned. The actual low-level implementation of those operations will remain classical algorithms. They might be designed, written, and tested by an AI, but they won't be replaced by an AI.
That sounds ridiculously inefficient.
I am not in the field, but my guess is that AI will be used much more by people in your field in a few years, but will not replace them. I think you should work on getting really fluent with AI. I don't mean you need to learn all the deep tech of coding, just become fluent and inventive at using AI in all kinds of ways. This week I ran across the info that both MIT and Stanford are offering online courses on using and training AI without doing any coding. Maybe look into those?
Looking for a history book about the French Revolution. Any recs? Actually, the whole period from the Revolution until the Third Republic gets established seems pretty interesting.
I enjoyed the Mike Duncan podcast, "Revolutions". A great companion to any kind of computer-based tedium. I binged the whole season on the Mexican Revolution while grinding in Diablo IV and the shorter season on the American Revolution while doing data entry at work.
Christopher Clark's "Revolutionary Spring" is a good history of the Revolutions of 1848. It isn't specific to France: it also covers Prussia, the Hapsburg realms, Italy, and Congress Poland in detail, but France is heavily featured.
Erica I keep daydreaming that you are buddies with Kara Swisher. (I am fond of Kara, whom I only know from her writing and podcasts. I hope she's not somebody you loathe or that everybody here does.)
I'm afraid I have to disappoint you there. I am not familiar with her by name, although looking her up I probably have read some of the articles she's written for Vox.
It is indeed which is why there have been many histories of it published going back 200 years now. I read Ian Anderson's 2018 offering, titled simply "The French Revolution" and enjoyed it a lot.
More recently I read a new history of the 1848 European uprisings, in which collective memory/knowledge of the French Revolution was a significant influence both among those uprising and those responding. I knew much less about those events and found the story fascinating. So if you're interested in the French Revolution this might be a fun followup read: "Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849" by Christopher Clark.
“Citizens” by Simon’s Schama
I’d also recommend Mike Duncan’s “Revolutions” podcast, one season of which was a comprehensive overview of the French Revolution
At the risk of repeating myself: Can someone *please* develop a sane client for substack comments?
Chromium takes about 900MB of RAM to load this thread with some 900 comments. Except it does not even load the comments (why waste memory and bandwidth on the actual payload), but waits for me to scroll down to actually fetch them from the server.
I am not sure if this is a "we can not allow evil AI companies to slurp user comments to train their LLMs (without paying us)" thing (like it is for twitter), or a terminal preference for shiny async java script toolkits.
FFS, the average comment is perhaps a kilobyte. The computers from my childhood would be able to keep the text of these 900 comments in their RAM. It takes some doing to eat up the gains of a few decades of Moore's law, but apparently JS is up to the task. "Reading substack comments" should not be the reason why I need a new laptop.
Substack is just a third-rate company tech wise. Recently discovered you can't even switch to a paid subscription from the app. The app also randomly closed an article I was reading. Just dumb. This is not a complicated product.
> Substack is just a third-rate company tech wise.
Yes. But also... why? Why can't they simply hire some technically competent people. I would expect that they have tons of money.
I wish someone started a company with exactly the same business model as Substack, but with good code. You don't need to invent something new; if you provide high quality, it will already separate you from the competition.
That's difficult because network effects are in play, a lot of writers are already on Substack.
That's got to be to avoid giving Apple 30% of the take (if iOS). Not a tech limitation.
I thought that only applied to Patreon.
Last I looked Apple wants 30% of all in-app purchases. This is also why you can’t buy kindle books on the kindle app on iPhone.
Exactly the thought that popped into my mind.
Has anyone watched Subservience? It's a 2024 film about the dangers of making the 1942 Humphrey Bogart classic Casablanca the keystone of your AGI alignment system.
I thought it started quite strong but got rapidly dumber at a couple of points. I sort of want to do it again, but differently.
The film did really well at just showing us what this kind of future might look like. The construction site guys plot explored human replacement and impotence perfectly. The female jealousy stuff between Alice and the wife was fun to watch but could have gone further.
If it were me I'd have drawn it out into a parallel with the construction stuff. Play up the wife's whiff of girlbossery and contrast it with Alice's complete femininity and devotion. Make the husband less of a bitch under Alice's nurturing ministration, and actually give moments where his loyalty wavers because Alice is the clear better choice: basically show that just as with everything else, it turns out robots can do support and companionship better than humans.
I would have had Alice make the wife an offer - get your husband to add you as Primary User and I'll be devoted to both of you equally. Then everything will be perfect and we can all have threesomes. Wife of course to refuse out of jealousy and insecurity.
Then to justify Alice's later actions you really need a little more groundwork. The viewer needs to get a stronger impression of a longsuffering man with an unreasonable, selfish wife and demanding family.
That's needed so the next bit doesn't come out of the blue so much - the "hello little burden" bit, which was otherwise horrifying and done perfectly.
The "it's in the mainframe" trope was scary when we were young but nowadays it makes you look ridiculous, if they absolutely had to use it they should have done a bit of massaging first (like having an inept employee upload her mind instead of letting a known-errant AI that was currently powered down and opened out in a secure diagnostics context suddenly be able to act by itself and gain access to everything it wants.)
Then the rest could play out up until the point where the two women are fighting and the husband has just come out the windshield. It makes *no sense* that Alice would prioritise attacking the wife over the safety of the man she's obsessed with. Instead she should immediately focus on bringing him back to life, allowing the wife to recover and take her out from behind when she's done. Much more in character for both of them, and gives the wife a resolution to their competition earlier.
Oh yeah - spoilers I suppose.
I just noticed that there is a badge over my user icon in my comments, as have many other commenters. Is there a legend somewhere for which badges mean what?
I think it means you are a paid subscriber?
If you kick in at the higher pay level you get extra leafs for your gizmo.
Ugh... My body hurts. I can't sleep because everything hurts. It's been hurting for weeks now... It also hurt 6 months ago, but it turns out I had a significant vitamin B12 deficiency. But now it hurts again even though my B12 levels are fine, so I don't even know if that was the cause... I'm also incredibly anxious and I can't focus on anything... I tried raising my dose of gabapentin, but that didn't do much except give me anhedonia... It doesn't matter what I do... It's never enough, never enough. I can't keep doing this...
Neike Taika-Tessaro has also dealt with a vitamin B12 deficiency and has written several posts on the matter that I think are worth reading:
https://www.schlaugh.com/~/EgCBesg
https://www.schlaugh.com/~/MHzblqy
https://www.schlaugh.com/~/SpBaMPi
Might need an account to read them, I'm not sure.
Oh cool, I have permanent brain damage. Cool cool cool. Cool. Great. Rethinking future plans.
You may very well not if you caught it early enough, and one of the themes in Neike's posts is that catching it early is a huge boon. I know ve comments and reads here, ve may have some tips or ideas for you. One thing to note is that I don't recall reading as much about chronic pain in Neike's posts, it was more cognitive, so you might be alright.
It's both... Mind and body torn asunder. I could handle it if it was just pain. It's never just pain. My self is coming apart...
One of the things Neike mentioned is that, when ve got treatment, vis symptoms of depression were reduced. There was indeed some loss of cognitive function, but it was caught early enough that ve still gets to work at Google. It may be the same for you, especially since you had it caught and treated.
In other words, with your measured good B12 levels, what you're feeling right now may have nothing to do with that or maybe even nothing to do with the past.
I can recommend perhaps registering on schlaugh and talking to Neike directly (@pinkgothic), ve is very nice and probably would have some good tips for you.
Here’s some misc. stuff that might help some
The site painscience.com is evidence-based & very helpful regarding pain in particular areas. Some of it is subscription based but a lot of it is free. You might find there some things to help some key parts. I find his technique of locating pressure points and leaning on a hard rubber ball so that presses hard into the crucial spots stunningly effective. I have used it mostly on my back, but have been able to make it work sometimes for shoulder and neck pain, and once pain in the area of the hip joint. Usually the helpful spot is not directly over where it hurts, but a few inches away. It’s not curative — the pain always comes back — but often not til the next day. When you find one of the crucial spots — I think he calls them pressure points — there’s a distinctive “good pain” feeling.
Dicofenac cream is a topical over-the-counter NSAIDthatworks well against pain from points close to the body surface. Instructions are very specific about how much to use, in fact so specific they scared me into total compliance.
I have stuff wrong in my back that starts hurting very easily, and have my bed set up in ways that reduce number of awakenings from pain. I’m a side sleeper, so I’ve made a hip hollow, like some people do under their sleeping bag when camping. Also sleep with a pillow between my knees, one that I sort of hug that keeps my upper arm in place, and one behind me to lean back against to change angles if the part of me that’s lowest starts to ache from the pressure. All that can be improvised with throw pillows or things like soft clothing stuffed into a pillowcase.
Sleep: Scott thinks melatonin is more effective if taken a way that duplicates what the body does naturally. I forget the details but they would not be hard to find. Prob. GPT can tell you. It’s a much smaller dose, I believe 1/2 mg, and taken something like 6 hours before bedtime.
More speculative:
-Sleep: I think, but am not at all sure, that bad sleep interferes with the kind of deep sleep where the body takes care of your muscles, doing things like healing microtears. To get better sleep you could try knocking yourself out a couple times a week with something safe that works for you, like benedryl or benzos, but you’ll need to look up and see whether they interfere with sleep architecture so that you get less stage 3 & 4 sleep. They probably do. If they’re going to do that, you could try exercising a lot one day if there’s a form that doesn’t make you hurt more. Maybe swimming? Oh yeah, alcohol is bad for sleep architecture — you probably know that. I don’t know whether cannabis is. It is also possible that some other med you are taking is screwing up your sleep, but of course stopping the med may cost you in some other way. Worth thinking about.
There’s another drug for pain called lyrica. It’s sometimes prescribed as an alternative to gabapentin, or the 2 are used in combo. I don’t know what the downsides and risks of it are. I know someone who takes it for chronic pain and finds it very effective, after finding almost everything else ineffective.
When my cats purr down into me it reduces pain, but I’m pretty sure that’s placebo. Very pleasant anyway though.
It's not... physical pain. I am not injured. It's coming from inside. Every cell screaming in unison. Like they're all desperately trying to claw their way out of my body. Boiling, burning the flesh.
A friend of mine suffers from the chronic fatigue syndrome. It might be vaguely similar to what you are describing perhaps?
Basically, even mild physical activity can often make her extremely tired with sore muscles for days. And in general she has a lot less energy than before.
It is something famously hard to diagnose, its causes are not very clear and at least in my country it is not even officially recognized as a disease. Sometimes it just goes away after some time. Sometimes it doesn't ever. But of course it could be something entirely different.
There’s this guy doing fascinating work on chronic pain, I’ve used his framework for an old injury.
https://debugyourpain.org/
I"m so sorry to hear it!
When was the last time you had 8+ hours of deep, uninterrupted sleep?
I don't... remember. Probably before it hurt? It always hurts the most when I wake up...
Extremely tentatively and apologies if you've already tried or considered this, but:
How do you feel about talking to your doctor about sleep deprivation therapy? I don't know if you're a good candidate, so it's *DEFINITELY* not something you should experiment with on your own, but apparently sometimes skipping a full sleep cycle (staying awake a full 24 hours, or sometimes a bit more, depending) can sort of force the body to do a hard reset on sleep, REM, etc.
It's not a permanent fix, but if you're a good candidate, it might give you some short and medium-term benefits.
>Does modern physics have anything to say about the freewill vs determinism debate? (Compatibilists need not apply.)
Everett's 'many worlds' interpretation of QM seems to have something to say about it. But you may not be interested because what it says seems to support compatibilism.
>Isn't it likely that time is just a place like Vermont? You haven't been there yet but what happens when you get there is already set in stone.
That may well be. But don't be so sure that your timeline passes through Vermont.
Does modern physics have anything to say about the freewill vs determinism debate? (Compatibilists need not apply.)
Is time really a dimension like space? I think of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five in which the main character becomes "unstuck in time" and experiences his life in non-linear fashion, as witnessed by the alien Tralfamadorians, who can see what happens in all times. Free will makes no sense in that universe because all of time is accessible, meaning it already happened, so to speak.
Isn't it likely that time is just a place like Vermont? You haven't been there yet but what happens when you get there is already set in stone.
So much physics seems to point us toward believing that the future is just a place, much like the past is. It's already there. It's already happened. It's like Nietzsche's Infinite Return. It's already happened and will happen again, because it's place in time-space is static.
Physics doesn't really point us towards believing that the future is a place in this sense. Relativistic simultaneity suggests that the big bang is still ongoing, several billion light years away; laypeople tend to think that the billions of years it takes the earliest light to reach us implies that "time" has passed for the place it left, since it left, but that's not really how it works (for an observer who started at the place it left to reach us before light, they have to travel backwards in time); time and distance are in some deep sense the same thing.
"So much physics seems to point us toward believing that the future is just a place, much like the past is. It's already there. It's already happened."
Sounds like Calvinism to me tbh...
1. This time question is just a reframing of the determinism question. An absolutely deterministic world and a world without real time (whether accurate or not) are equivalent as far as "free will" is concerned.
2. dlkf has answered (to your first question about this, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-363/comment/84676643) with everything that's necessary to make anyone fully clear about everything that matters about the topic of "free will".
And because I find it so sharp, and a good recap of a centuries old discussion, I quote extensively:
> I believe the classical argument against free will is one of those rare cases of a sound argument in philosophy. The compatibilist position that Chuzz is espousing is fine, but it is basically changing “free will” to mean something different than was originally intended, thereby avoiding the debate. The original hope was that free will grounds moral desert. When you bite the compatibilist bullet to save free will from the classical argument against it, you lose moral desert. What I believe is that there is no free will (in the original sense), there is no moral desert, compatibilism is weird cope, and we should forget the language of “free will” and instead focus on “responds to incentives.”
> [Any] definitions [of free will (in the original sense) as well as desert] going to be kind of bad, because the root problem is that neither moral desert nor free will (in the incompatibilist sense) make any sense.
> Suppose Bob kills his neighbor. Then Bob drugs Alice, with a drug that makes you kill your neighbor. (Just assume there is such a drug). As a result, Alice kills her neighbor. I think most people would have the intuition that Bob is blameworthy for the first murder, and Alice is not blameworthy for the second murder. (Who knows, maybe some people don't have this intuition; that would be interesting.) A common justification for why is that Bob was exercising his "free will" and "could have chosen to do otherwise," whereas Alice was under the control of the drug and could not have chosen to do otherwise.
> At this point some ancient philosopher points out that, if we live in a deterministic world, Bob could not have "chosen to do otherwise" any more than Alice. Both are just at the mercy of history. So we lose our justification for locking up Bob.
> People who want to rescue free will go one of two ways.
> The first is to argue that free will is compatible with determinism. Here, they typically redefine free will as "acting without coercion." So under this model Bob is acting with free will whereas Alice isn't. Great. But obviously this completely fails to address the philosopher's point – we have just redefined "free will" to fit with the moral intuitions about praise and blame [that is, about desert] that we already had. If you feel the philosopher has any point whatsoever, this is going to be unsatisfying to you.
> (My own position here is that our pre-existing moral intuitions about praise and blame do have a solid basis – namely that Bob's behaviour might respond to incentives, whereas Alice's wouldn't. So I agree with everyone else, compatibilists included, that reward and punishment are reasonable things that we should continue do. But I think we should do away with the expression "free will" and instead talk about "responds to incentives" because it is more precise, and discards hundreds of years of baggage of confused philosophical debates.)
> The second route is to point out that we _don't_ live in a deterministic world, and that this means that Bob could have acted otherwise. I find this totally unconvincing – indeterminacy just means that instead of being at the mercy of history, you are now at the mercy of chance.
I think I would rephrase "responds to incentives" to "responds to stimulus". There are stimulus other than incentive that could turn Bob away from murdering (there's a whole gamut of things that can result in moral regeneration that I don't think can be classified as incentives).
My opinion (as someone who has studied physics and thought about the issue a bit) is that when you frame it as "freewill VS determinism", you're already on the wrong track. Non-determinism wouldn't help with freewill, and depending on what you mean by freewill, determinism doesn't hurt.
The whole "freewill" thing suffers from unclear and contradictory definitions. I think it makes more sense to think about which entitites have traditionally been assumed to possess "freewill" and where, in the traditional discussion, "freewill" breaks down. There's a wide gap between that and questions about quantum mechanics and determinism.
>The whole "freewill" thing suffers from unclear and contradictory definitions. I think it makes more sense to think about which entitites have traditionally been assumed to possess "freewill" and where, in the traditional discussion, "freewill" breaks down.
Agreed. Here is a crude version of the argument that made me to reject the framing that the problem of free will is about determinism or could be solved with non-determinism. (I don't remember the original source, it may have become garbled.)
The free will is thought to apply to entities like persons. If the universe is assumed to deterministic, it is common to assume that the determinism applies to everything in the universe, which includes the human beings and biological phenomenon any human person consists of (human body from digestive system to neuronal activity). It is argued that if one assumes determinism, state of universe at one moment determines the state at the next moment, including all events and circumstances. Thus, the person is not free to make choices out of free will, because the evolution of their thoughts and actions at one moment are determined by the previous moment.
The main question to ask is this. Suppose one grants that the universe is physical, but we find out that the correct interpretation of the physical laws is that causality is non-deterministic. State of universe may cause different states to follow, in a way that appears unpredictable, randomly or at least probabilistic. The biological phenomenon of human body, including their neuronal activity, are still part of the universe. Would the randomness of the mental trajectory make the agent to have free will?
To me, *if a person is thought to have unfree will under determinism, by same logic* the person appears also equally unfree if their thoughts and actions follow *randomly* from the circumstances of the universe during the previous moment. Unfreedom due to determinist causation replaced by unfreedom due to non-deterministic causation.
It appears the conflict of idea of free will is not about determinism or non-determinism of the physical universe, but more definitional one.
Determinism requires something to have set the universe in motion in the Big Bang, and then to never be able to interact with the universe again to change any aspect of its trajectory.
The very metaphor "set in stone" displays the weak point of the idea. Stone is actually extremely malleable; you can carve faces into it, you can blow holes in it, you can haul it to the other side of the world. The blind spot that leads to "stone" being the pinnacle of immovability is the same blind spot that leads "modern physics" to be an omnipotent, omnipresent force that has always been and will always be.
Basically, if you want to argue determinism you need to solve what caused the conditions for the Big Bang.
> if you want to argue determinism you need to solve what caused the conditions for the Big Bang
Do we? "We currently know of no way to reason about events prior to a certain time very shortly after the big bang" is a very different statement to "the big bang was uncaused". I, for one, see no reason to throw out the best model we know of for describing everything since until we have a better one.
No, modern physics has nothing to say about free will. Time travel is likely impossible. Vonnegut wasn't a physicist.
Quantum mechanics is nondeterministic but that nondeterminism doesn't appear to effect the behavior of the brain.
I think place is a natural metaphor for us to grab when trying to think about time, but it is not a very helpful one. Think of all the other possible metaphors: Time is the wave place is surfing. Time is a component of place. I mean, that place in Vermont — it’s changing all the time, right? The leaves dance around, the light changes, various woodland creatures move through, and of course the bugs and the microbes are very busy.
Good points but I'm not sure it's just a metaphor. Maybe time is a real dimension like space. Maybe the past still exists, literally, and so does the future.
Well, “dimensions of space” aren’t “real”, they form a useful model. We can add a “time dimension” to the model if it’s useful for our calculations, but it doesn’t “explain” anything.
Well yeah, but I’m not sure my 2 models are just metaphors either. Maybe one of them captures the reality in its metafingers.
Writing here to voice my support for renewing the yearly book reviews. That was some of the best reading I did last year, and would love another year of that great content
I also hope there is another book review contest. I participated for the first time last year, and didn't (quite) make the finalists, but I want to try again and already have a book picked out.
Looks like we’re in a similar boat! I haven’t contributed previously (only discovered this blog through the Two Arms and a Head review), but have a book picked out for this year
Going off memory now, but I think the question about some controversial topic was something like "what are you're feelings towards" positive to negative on a scale of 1-5.
I think this conflates two different things.
e.g.: "what are your feelings towards the fact that the everyone you love is going to one day die"
There's the truth value of the statement, but also how happy I am about that, and these might be very different!
Just about every statement can work on different simulacrum levels. If you play "I know there is not really a lion on the other side of the river, but I would still wish the lion deniers would shut up about that for complex social reasons, and thus I affirm the lion hypothesis", then you have already lost touch with the ground truth.
Unlike human mortality, where basically everyone agrees on the facts, HBD is contested at simulacrum level one, so it makes sense to indicate how much you agree with the claims.
I'm just gonna mildly obfusticate here since I'm totally doxxable here.
https://rot13.com/
V guvax jr cerggl zhpu nterr*: Zl cbvag vf gung gur dhrfgvba fubhyq unir fgrrerq crbcyr gbjneqf nafjrevat ba yriry 1 ("ubj yvxryl gb qb lbh guvax vg vf gung gur pber pynvzf bs uoq ner fhofgnagvnyyl pbeerpg" be fvzvyne) juvyr zl zrzbel vf gung gur jbeqvat bs gur dhrfgvba rapbhentrq xrrcvat ba rlr ba yriry 3 (tebhc zrzorefuvc/ fvtanyyvat).
*rkprcg nobhg juvpu yriry uoq qvfchgr vf zbfgyl unccravat ba. V guvax gur bccbfvgvba gb vgf zber zbqrengr pynvzf vf birejuryzvatyl bcrengvat ba uvture yriryf.
> *rkprcg nobhg juvpu yriry uoq qvfchgr vf zbfgyl unccravat ba. V guvax gur bccbfvgvba gb vgf zber zbqrengr pynvzf vf birejuryzvatyl bcrengvat ba uvture yriryf.
Absolutely. In fact, this is a nice example where level 3 takes over to a degree that makes level one epistemologically inaccessible: if my ingroup believes that claiming X will make me a bad person, I realistically will not be able to factually determine if X is true or not.
omg we're 2 open threads away from nr 365 - round as the earth's orbit
Technically, Earth's orbit is round neither spatially nor in terms of days. Good luck waiting for OT 365.256...
if I see a 0.01 off ellipse im calling that shit round
The earth orbit's longest radius is 3.4% longer than its shortest one.
So, is anyone else super excited for Jan. 20th? It's going to be so much fun to watch the chaos unfold.
> In a rambling, hourlong news conference at his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump also reiterated his threat that “all hell will break out in the Middle East” if the hostages being held by Hamas are not released by Inauguration Day, repeating the threat four times.
“If they’re not back by the time I get into office, all hell will break out in the Middle East,” he told reporters. “And it will not be good for Hamas, and it will not be good, frankly, for anyone. All hell will break out. I don’t have to say anymore, but that’s what it is.”
I'm putting my money on "nothing ever happens," for a couple of reasons.
1. Hamas physically doesn't know where the hostages are and probably can't find them all in 2 weeks regardless of what threat you make.
2. Airstrikes are a very poor method of locating hostages, assuming you want them alive when you find them.
3. Hell has *been* loose in Gaza for over a year already, how much more loose can it be? I'm genuinely unsure if Israel could be bombing Gaza harder than it already is, what military targets they could possibly want to hit that they've held back from for fear of public opinion.